Denshawai Incident

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Denshawai (AR: دنشواي) is an Egyptian village that witnessed the Denshawai Incident of 1906.

[edit] The Denshawai Incident, 1906

On 13 June 1906 five officers of the occupying British army, with their interpreter and a police official, visited Denshawai to go pigeon shooting. They shot pigeons belonging to villagers who kept them as domestic animals, angering the owners. The British officers opened fire on the villagers, wounding five, and set fire to the grain of Abd-el-Nebi.

Abd-el-Nebi, whose wife had been seriously injured, struck one of the officers with a stick. He was joined by the elderly Hassan Mahfouz, whose pigeons had been killed. Other villagers threw stones at them. The officers, two Irishmen and three Englishmen, surrendered their weapons, along with their watches and money, but this failed to appease the angry villagers. Two officers escaped, one of whom managed to contact the British Army, but the other died of heat stroke some distance from the village. An Egyptian peasant who tried to help the sick man was killed by soldiers who came across them.

Meanwhile, in the village the elders had intervened, saving the remaining soldiers and allowing them to return to their base. Concerned about a growing nationalist movement, Egyptian officials used the Denshawai incident as a pretext to harshly punish any resistance to British rule. The next day, the British army arrived, arresting fifty-two villagers, including Abd-el-Nebi, Hassan Mahfouz, a man called Darweesh and Zahran. At a summary trial, where the judges were mostly British, Hassan, Darweesh, Zahran and one other man were convicted of murdering the officer who had died of sunstroke, and were sentenced to death. One of the judges was Boutros Boutros Ghali’s grandfather^[1]. Abd-el-Nebi and another villager were given a life sentence of penal servitude and twenty-six villagers were given various terms of hard labour and ordered to be flogged. The officers stated that they had been "guests" of the villagers and had done nothing wrong.

Hassan was hanged in front of his own house. Darweesh said from the gallows:

“May God compensate us well for this world of meanness, for this world of injustice, for this world of cruelty.”

The Egyptian police official accompanying the soldiers to the village did not confirm their story. He testified in court that after Abd-el’s wife had been shot, the officers fired twice more on the mob. For his testimony, he was stood down, and a court of discipline sentenced him to two years imprisonment and fifty lashes.

This decision inflamed public opinion in both Great Britain and Egypt. Those who called the tribunal and its legality into question were accused of being unpatriotic and supporting the “the venal agitators” in Egypt.

Guy Aldred, who in 1907 compared the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra with the immunity given to the British officers in this incident, was sentenced to twelve months hard labour for publishing "The Indian Sociologist".

George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play "John Bull’s Other Island", says that because “they had room for only one man on the gallows, and had to leave him hanging half an hour to make sure [he was dead] and give his family plenty of time to watch him swinging, thus having two hours to kill as well as four men, they kept the entertainment going by flogging eight men with fifty lashes each.”

Shaw commented: “If her [England’s] empire means ruling the world as Denshawai has been ruled in 1906 – and that, I am afraid, is what the Empire does mean to the main body of our aristocratic-military caste and to our Jingo plutocrats – then there can be no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters…”

Fifty years later, the Egyptian journalist Muhammed Hassanein Heikal said “the pigeons of Denshawai have come home to roost”, to describe the eventual defeat of the Anglo-French strikes in Egypt in 1956.

"The Hanging of Zahran" is a poem by Salah Abdel-Sabour about the incident, and Nagui Riad made the film "Friend of Life", based on the poem.