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[Catalog essay for thr Sony Gallery Show "King Fouad At Work and Play"
November 12, 2001-January 24, 2002]

This selection of black and white photographs is taken from the vast collection of Mohamed El Ghazouly, court photographer during the reign of King Fouad. He was associated with Hanselman, who was the great genius of court photography at the time according to Barry Iverson and very much the favorite, particularly in the late 1920s.

El Ghazouly was born in 1901, and graduated from law school but gravitated to journalism and photography, working first at Al Muqatam magazine and then as director of photography for Al Ahram. El Ghazouly acquired his collection from news agencies while he was editor of Kul Shay’ magazine. El Ghazouly’s collection is now in the possession of his son, Samir El Ghazouly, who is the editor of the Zakirat al Camera section in Al Ahram El Riyady magazine.

King Fouad was the first ruler of modern independent Egypt. During his reign (1917-1936) as the ninth sovereign of the line of Mohamed Ali, Egypt changed from its brief status as a sultanate under a British protectorate (and its earlier status, prior to World War I, as a khedivial state nominally subservient to the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul) to become a full-fledged and independent kingdom.

Dr. Maged Farag, the publisher who lectures frequently on modern Egyptian history, observes that when in 1923 King Fouad gave Egypt its first modern constitution, modern rulership in Egypt was for the first time bound by the limits of constitutional monarchy.

“Mohamed Ali and Ismail were strongly authoritarian rulers, due to the fact that a modern Egypt was being built up from scratch and there was no room for democracy at the time. As for King Fouad, despite his forceful nature, he was committed to constitutional rule based on democratic principles. This was true even in those occasional trying times when he was attempting to violate his own constitution and could not do so because of the very rules of the political game that he had instituted. Those rules prevailed.” Most historians including Dr. Maged share the assessment of King Fouad as intelligent, cunning, and well-educated. “Unfortunately his son, Farouk, could not follow in his footsteps,” says Dr. Maged. “If he had, life in Egypt today would be very different.”

Even before taking the throne (which he did on October 9, 1917, succeeding his brother Sultan Hussein I) he devoted himself to the task of establishing a national university in Egypt. In 1908 the Egyptian University was established with Prince Fouad as its first president-rector. After his death it would be renamed Fouad University in his honor.

First as a prince and then as king, Fouad encouraged and patronized the revival of the Royal Geographical Society of Egypt, founded the Institute of Hydrobiology and the Society of Political Economy, Statistics and Legislation, and was involved in the revival and reorganization of the Institut d’Egypte and the founding of the Institute of Oriental Music and the Arabic Academy of Letters, to mention but a few of the scientific and educational societies and institutes that he took an interest in helping to establish.

King Fouad would recover much of the prestige denied to Mohamed Ali and Ismail by the great powers. It was during his reign, having secured political independence and the end of the protectorate in 1922, that King Fouad began negotiations for the withdrawal of British forces, a negotiating process that took years but which resulted in the 1936 Anglo?Egyptian Treaty signed shortly after his death, and the evacuation of British forces from Egypt except for the Canal Zone.

These were the golden years of the 20th-century monarchy.