Egypt in TDO pt2
A road covered in blood
The world of the new order has not been kind to its Misr. The Second World War would see the British empire force Egyptians into a devastating war that most didn't understand or feel affected them. Thousands would be conscripted only to die to the guns of the axis under incompetent British officers while people rioted in the streets as the British "requisitioned" more and more food, supplies, and anything of value to the war effort which only served to stretch their forces even further as they battled not just the Axis on the field but all manner of nationalists and socialists in the streets.
Eventually, the British and their allies were routed from every stronghold in Misr as the armies of il Duce marched triumphantly through Alexandria and Cairo before completing their conquest of West Asia. Surprisingly the Italians were initially received warmly by many elements of Misri society, partially out of anti-British sentiment and partially because some believed that Italian imperialism may at least be more constructive and progressive than its English counterpart.
They were sorely disappointed.
For the most part, the Italians kept the previous mechanisms that allowed British rule in the region merely replacing British colonial bureaucrats with their own, in addition to half-hearted efforts at indoctrinating the populace into fascist doctrine, even attempting to formulate an "Islamic fascism" to appeal to the strong religious sentiment at the time. These attempts were quickly abandoned after many homegrown fascists started publicly agitating against Italian rule and their attempts at rioting had to be put down (once again proving that a fascist's greatest obstacle is often other fascists).
Misr for the most part was a neglected backwater in the Italian empire of the new order timeline, compared to settled Libya, the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, and the volatile but vital levant. Egypt meanwhile was little more than a source of cotton, wheat, and other agricultural goods with its relatively professional army providing support for colonial policing action on occasion and its history making it a popular tourist site for the Italian middle class. Attempts to modernize agriculture were met with extreme resistance by the landowners who benefited immensely from the system of Iqtaa and were also crucial for allowing Italian rule in the region, furthermore, the empire had little appetite for industrial development given its own economic hardships following the cooling of relations with the Reich.
Economic misery, crackdowns by the police or blackshirts, and the utter lack of faith in the remains of the nascent Egyptian parliamentary system (with wafd seamlessly switching from being pro-British to pro-Italian) would fuel more populist politics on the left and right throughout the late 40s and 50s. The Young Egypt movement under the leadership of Ahmed Hussein was initially supportive and even imitative of Italian fascism and Nazism and were at first eager collaborators, only for the Italians to turn on them when their escalating demands became more dangerous for the status quo the colonials had established.
Young Egypt would be the face of the more secular far-right street politics, opposed by the similarly far-right but outright religious Al Ikhwan al Muslimeen (the Muslim brotherhood) who themselves oscillated between opposition and cooperation with the Italians and were too split between the various personality cults that sprung up among local imams, sheiks, and even national party leaders and their often contradictory doctrines and strategies with radicals engaging in terror attacks on the Italians, the puppet kingdom and rival groups while moderates led by Hussein el-Hudaybi argued for working within the colonial state apparatus to achieve the goal of an Islamic state. These divisions would only grow with the assassination of Hassan al-Banna in 1949.
Joining the two was the Egyptian Communist Party, bolstered by the arrival of many socialist exiles from Europe and its ranks swelled by working-class Egyptians disillusioned with both center and right but somewhat wary of Italian anarchism and syndicalism (already prevalent before WW2). However, ECP's influence would remain limited to Alexandria and lower Egypt while Pan-Arabist socialism would become far more widespread in Cairo and its surrounding peripheries though the movement lacked a single uniting organization even as it enjoyed growing popularity within the ranks of the Misri royal/colonial army. The two leftist strains of thought despite their differences maintained a tense but cordial relationship with each other and even the anarchists knew full well that the royal administration, colonial state, and the right were all arrayed against them and any wrong step could result in all three uniting against them if only temporarily.
This the left in Egypt kept to mostly low-key operations like smuggling dissidents, spreading leaflets in secret, and aiding small-scale strikes to garner support among the small Egyptian working class while trying to win over the much larger peasants by starting night classes and helping organize them against the callous often feudal like landowners. They were aided in their task by a small but influential cabal of socialist sympathetic officers in the Misri colonial army (Nasser being only the most famous), who found in the writings of Marx and Bukharin (as well as those of pan-arab thinkers) a template to lift the arab nation up to freedom and prosperity. The "Free Officers" as they came to be known would help their street comrades by misdirecting policing actions and leaking out crackdown plans though they often had to participate in such actions themselves to avoid suspicions.
Sudan, much as Misr, similarly saw few changes from the outcome of WW2 save that now it was an Italian-Egyptian co-dominion rather than an Anglo-Egyptian one; de-facto slave labor and colonial domination remained a fact of life which served to fuel the resentment of the Sudanese people, especially after several brutal crackdowns on "suspicious" ethnic groups like the Nubians.
The Sudanese communist party would rise in the late 1940s and though relatively small in number would prove a dynamic force in organizing the peasantry in the anti-imperialist struggle under the leadership of Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim. Much like its northern sister, Sudan would also see the rise of a socialist officer clique under the leadership of Gafaar Nimiery who acted in much the same way as their Misri counterparts and often in coordination with them though with considerably less leeway given the Italians greater security focus on Sudan owing to its proximity to Italian East Africa and the Nazi African possessions.
The course of Egyptian-Sudanese history would be forever changed however by the coming of the worldmerge.
Initially, the Italian possession remained rather untouched by the momentous event with most of the focus of Italy being on the now potentially threatened African Horn, which thanks to the effects of the glide, was now a potential bridgehead for the comintern east African members to supply weapons and supplies to their besieged brethren. With the Levant facing similar issues and even more inter-ethnic chaos (especially with the subsequent appearance of the Red Order's Israel) made Egypt relatively less of a priority which led to the Italians drawing more forces from the area and delegating more and more duties to their arab auxiliaries.
This would give the Free Officers, now decisively under Nasser's leadership, far more leeway in their plan to subvert the colonial administration, despite initial fears that the socialist rule of Red Order Nasser and other officers would expose them. This was all thanks to the efforts of the new Duce Muti, who as part of his Fiumist reforms would attempt to integrate the Italian colonies as sister nations under Italian leadership in imitation of the Cold Revolution Japanese GCPS which led to more investment in Misr and Sudan and a renewed effort at creating an Egyptian fascism only this time under a "Pharaonic" aesthetic in imitation of the Canaanite accelerationism in TCR Palestine.
This was not at all completely out of sincere belief mind you as these efforts were an attempt to hold back the influences of the May Revolution and Red Order Misrs who eagerly supported national liberal and Islamist subversive elements respectively.
Of course in his focus on those external enemies, the Duce missed the internal enemy right under his nose….
…The Great Arab revolution did not achieve its maximum goals, with large areas of the Arab world remaining under imperialist or reactionary control in the Red Order and Red May worlds but it had nonetheless achieved its goal of a multi-world Arab homeland which only expanded with the addition of pre-established Comintern members leading to the establishment of the Socialist United Arab Republic as a union of all Arab nations united against imperialism and capitalism. Of course, as the cradle and leader of the pan-arab spring, the Misr of the new order would enjoy a great level of influence in the new super-nation…
The new SUAR would have a long task of rebuilding ahead of it as it healed from the scars of decades of foreign rule and mismanagement, in Misr proper, this would take the form of an ambitious land reform and nationalization program to break the power of the landowner/industrialist class that has long dominated Egyptian politics. A new industrialization program was announced and would proceed at breakneck speed with Comintern assistance with a unique result of creating "specialist industrial cities" which each focused on producing a particular product like heavy machinery, furniture, and chemicals, which, while allowing for efficient and rapid industrialization was criticized as vulnerable to attack.
Alongside it was a large-scale expansion and modernization of the decrepit infrastructure of the nation, railways were built to reach every corner of the nation, roads were rebuilt and improved on and amenities of modern life like electricity and clean water arrived for the first time for the majority of Misri citizens. Healthcare for the average citizen would also improve drastically as modern hospitals made their way to every city and town while traveling corps of doctors made their way through the often isolated villages of the Egyptian ariaf* of Upper Egypt as part of a campaign to eradicate parasitic worms in the nation, most infamously Bilharzia.
The Electrification of Misr and Sudan would be aided by the construction of a series of dams on the Nile, most famously the High Dam in Aswan. Urbanization would also proceed more or less smoothly as public housing was constructed in the existing cities to combat the flood of slums that sprung up in the colonial period while new urban areas were constructed to prevent overcrowding. Sudan would follow a more or less similar path to Misr in its reconstruction efforts. More ambitious plans like desert reclamation and expansion of arable land would be proposed but postponed until more critical projects have been achieved.
Though the SUAR would accept a great deal of aid from the Comintern and were grateful for it there was a great emphasis in the newly born nation on the need to be able to stand on their own two feet and be able to continue the path towards communism by their own efforts as equals to their comrades rather than dependents and to that end, the SUAR invested heavily into the education with the construction of universities, research facilities, and even artistic institutions in the hopes of a raising new generation of engineers, artists, doctors, and scientists to light the way to the future.
The military was not neglected either, in fact building up the Arab Red army was seen as a priority given that the colonial armies inherited by the republic were plagued by incompetence, nepotism and often far behind in terms of technology. Massive sweeping reforms were introduced to modernize the army structure with the help of RIVA instructors with an emphasis on revolutionary education as well given how vital the army proved in the initial revolution. Native arms production was also encouraged with the crowning achievement being the production of a locally made Supersonic interceptor jet, the Helwan HA-300…
The SUAR is currently a rising star in the Comintern with hopes of following the PAASR as the next member of the VOSCOM security council, with rumors circulating that the fledgling nation is even working on its own nuclear program to that end. The SUAR is currently pursuing closer relationships with the PAASR, the people's republic of Turkyie, and the people's republic of Iran, as well as the Yugoslav republic, owing to their relative proximity and the PAASR similar commitment to fighting imperialism. Relations with the Socintern remain cordial but distant at the moment though there have been surprising diplomatic overtures between it and the pluralistic socialist Israel of the Crimson Typhoon timeline. Relations with the Khemetic people's global republics are….weird but friendly enough despite the SUAR finding Egypt in the eve of terror timeline to be rather extreme in its beliefs while the KPGR sees the SUAR as being too cautious and conservative. Relations are lukewarm with all other versions of Egypt with the exception of the Ikhwan-dominated Misr of the Red Order which sees the SUAR as an abomination of Zionist-atheistic communism that wants to see the light of Islam destroyed with the SUAR likewise seeing it as a reactionary abomination and a puppet of Franco-British interests.
The SUAR is generally hostile to all the fascist and liberal power blocs as all claim and colonize Arab lands and peoples in some capacity.
Misr and Sudan of the New Order have been through tumultuous times and great hardships but the peoples of the ancient lands of the Nile can now look to a bright future built by their own hands as they once again stand as a proud people on the world stage.
*colloquial for rural areas
A/N: This one took me a while, wanted to go more into the specifics of SUAR structure and ideology but realized it would make this update too long and was probably better off as a separate update on its own; hope this is enjoyable nonetheless
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