The factors that led to the Urabi Revolution

02The factors that led to the Urabi Revolution

• The growth of foreign intervention and the Khedive's subservience to foreigners.
• The absolute, tyrannical rule of the Khedive and Riad Pasha.
• The worsening of economic conditions and the collapse of services, because more than half of the budget's resources were assigned to the debts — that is, the people were deprived of the fruit of their effort.
• The grievance of landholders over the abolition of the Muaraza Law: they had borrowed to pay six times the tax in the hope of exemption from half of it.
• The retirement of many officers to save expenditure, without offering them civilian posts — they joined the ranks of the discontented.
• The policy of the war minister Othman Rifqi, who confined promotion to graduates of the military schools, leaving most Egyptian servicemen no chance of rise.
• The military were the best qualified to make the revolution because of their organisational capacity, and they suffered the arbitrariness of the Turkish–Circassian leadership and their own exclusion from command.
• The servicemen were influenced by the general revolutionary atmosphere, which gave the Urabi Revolution, led by military men, a civilian character.