Anarchism in Egypt

Anarchism in Egypt refers both to the historical Egyptian anarchist movement which emerged in the 1860s and lasted until the 1940s, and to the anarchist movement as it has re-emerged in the early 2000s.

Anarchism was first introduced to Egypt by Italian immigrant workers and political exiles in the 1860s. The Italian community in Egypt was one of numerous such communities of expatriate workers whose presence in Egypt dated to the modernisation programme of Muhammad Ali, Wāli (or Governor) of Egypt from 1805 to 1849, as part of which the immigration of foreigners with useful skills was encouraged. This process was accelerated under Ali's successors, in particular with the construction of the Suez Canal in the 1850s.

The Italian Workers Society (Italian: Società Operaio Italiana), established in Alexandria in the early 1860s, was the first organisation among the Italian expatriate community which began to move towards anarchism. By the middle of the 1870s, the arrival of veterans of Giuseppe Garibaldi's campaigns and other radicals lead to the establishment of Thought and Action (Italian: Pensiero ed Azione), a political association along Mazzinian lines. In 1876, a more radical grouping split from this and was recognised as the official Alexandrine section of the anarchist First International. Additional sections were formed in Cairo, Port Said and Ismailia over the next year, and the Egyptian sections presented their first report to the International at its Verviers Congress in September 1877. Although at this early stage the movement was strongly Italian in character, the published proceedings of the Verviers Congress demonstrate that the Alexandrine section, with the support of the one in Cairo, and the Greek Federation, successfully sponsored a proposal calling for the dissemination throughout the eastern Mediterranean of anarchist literature "in Italian, Illyrian, Greek, Turkish and Arabic". The International dissolved shortly after and the resolution came to nothing, but it clearly demonstrated the aspiration of the fledgling Egyptian anarchist movement to expand beyond its initial exclusively Italian base.

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