Ever since the Arab conquest in 641 Egypt has been ruled by Mohammedans, and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race. Though now and again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy.

The people, of course, had no voice in the government. The Egyptians have never been a self-governing race, and such a dream as constitutional democracy was never heard of until a few years ago. By the Arab conquest in the seventh century the people merely changed masters. They were probably not indisposed to welcome the Moslems as their deliverers from the tyranny of the Orthodox Church of the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, invincibly intolerant of the native monophysite heresy; and when the conquest was complete they found themselves, on the whole, better off than before. They paid their taxes to officials with Arabic instead of Greek titles, but the taxes were lighter and the amount was strictly laid down by law.

The land-tax of about a pound per acre was not excessive on so fertile a soil, and the poll-tax on nonconformity, of the same amount, was a moderate price to pay for entire liberty of conscience and freedom in public worship guaranteed by solemn treaty. The other taxes were comparatively insignificant, and the total revenue in the eighth century was about £7,000,000. The surplus went to the caliph, the head of the vast Mohammedan empire, which then stretched from Seville to Samarkand, whose capital was first Damascus and afterwards Baghdad.

For over 200 years (till 868) Egypt was a mere province of this huge caliphate, and was governed, like other provinces, with a sole view to revenue. "Milk till the udder be dry and let blood to the last drop" was a caliph's instructions to a governor of Egypt. As these governors were constantly changed--there were sixty-seven in 118 years under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad--and as a governor's main object was to "make hay while the sun shines," the process of milking the Egyptian cow was often accelerated by illegal extortion, and the governor's harvest was reaped before it was due. Illegality was, however, checked to some extent by the generally wise and just influence of the chief justice, or kadi, whose probity often formed the best feature of the Arab government in Egypt.

Nor did the caliphs extort taxes without giving something in return. The development of irrigation works was always a main consideration with the early Mohammedan rules, from Spain to India, and in Egypt, where irrigation is the country's very life, it was specially cared for, with a corresponding increase in the yield. Moreover, the governors usually held to the agreement that the Christians should have liberty of conscience, and protected them from the Moslem soldiery. As time went on, this toleration abated, partly because the Moslems had gradually become the predominant population. At the beginning the caliphs had taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root, but be always free to join the caliph's standard. But it was inevitable that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land. Each governor brought a small army as his escort, and these Arab troops naturally intermarried with Egyptian women, who were constitutionally inclined to such alliances. A few Arab tribes also settled in Egypt.

This gradual and undesigned Arabising of the country would lead to oppression of the Christians, to the "squeezing" of wealthy natives, and occasionally to the institution of humiliating distinctions of dress and other vexations, and even to the spoiling of Coptic churches. Then sometimes the Copts, as the Egyptian Christians are called, would rebel. Their last and greatest rebellion, which occurred in the Delta in 830-832, was ruthlessly trampled out by Turkish troops under Mamun, the only Abbasid caliph who made a visit to Egypt. Many Copts now apostatised, and from this time dates the predominance of the Moslem population and the settling of Arabs in the villages and on the land, instead of as heretofore only in the two or three large towns.

The coming of the Turkish troops with the caliph Mamun was an ominous event for the country. Up to 846 all the successive governors had been Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves. With some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple habits--the Arabs were never luxurious--and usually of strict Mohammedan principles. They made money, honestly if possible, during their brief tenure; but they did not harass the people much by their personal interference, and left the local officials to manage matters in their own way, as had always been the custom. They lived at the new capital, Fustat, which grew up on the site of the conqueror's camp, and very near the modern Cairo; for Alexandria, the symbol of Roman domination, was dismantled in 645 after the Emperor Manuel's attempt at reconquest. If they did not do much active good, they did little harm, and Egypt pursued her immemorial ways.

The last Arab governor, Anbasa, was a man of fine character, and his term of office was distinguished by the building of the fort of Damietta, as a protection against Roman raids, and by a defeat of the tributary Sudanis near Dongola.

II.--Turkish Governors

The Arabs have neither the ferocity nor the luxuriousness, nor, it should be added, the courage and the genius for administration of the Turkish race. In the arrival of Turkish troops in 830 we see a symptom of what was going on all over the eastern caliphate. Turks were taking the place of Arabs in the army and the provincial governments, just as the Persians were filling up the civil appointments. The caliph's Turkish bodyguard was the beginning of the dismemberment of the caliphate. It became the habit of the caliphs to grant the government of Egypt, as a sort of fief, to a leading Turkish officer, who usually appointed a deputy to do his work and to pay him the surplus revenue. Such a deputy was Ahmad-ibn-Tulun (868-884), the first of the many Turkish despots of Egypt. Ibn-Tulun was the first ruler to raise Egypt from a mere tax-paying appendage of the caliphate to a kingdom, independent save for the recognition of the caliph on the coinage, and he was the first to found a Moslem dynasty there. A man of fair Mohammedan education, iron will, and ubiquitous personal attention to affairs, he added Syria to his dominions, defeated the East Romans with vast slaughter near Tarsus (883), kept an army of 30,000 Turkish slaves and a fleet of a hundred fighting ships.