Abdel Khalek Sarwat Pasha

Abdel Khalek Sarwat Pasha (1873–1928) was an Egyptian jurist and politician: the first Egyptian attorney general since the British occupation, minister of justice and of the interior, and prime minister twice — in 1922, when Britain issued its Unilateral Declaration of Egyptian Independence, and again in 1927–1928, when the draft treaty he brought back from London was rejected and he resigned. The English article contradicts itself on the day of his death in Paris, giving both 22 September and 22 November 1928; the September date, which Wikidata's day-precision value also carries, is followed and the date marked debated. ^{1 2}

He was born in Cairo in 1873 — the article's early-life text gives the fuller date of 31 March 1873 — into a family of Anatolian origin; his father, Ismail Abdel Khalek Pasha, was Egypt's finance director (roznamji). He graduated first of his class from the Khedival School of Law in 1893 and spent twenty-six years in the Ministry of Justice as district attorney, judge and secretary to two British judicial advisers, whose confidence, Mohamed Hussein Heikal wrote, let him stand as the ministry's main decision-maker before he was twenty-five. In 1912, on the recommendation of Saad Zaghloul, then minister of justice and later his political foe, he became the first Egyptian to hold the post of attorney general since the occupation, despite the objections of the Khedive, the British and his ministerial colleagues; pressed to prosecute the liberal newspaper al-Jarida, he refused, holding that no law justified the prosecution demanded. From 5 April 1914 to 22 April 1919 he was minister of justice in Hussein Roshdi's cabinets, introducing protections for the accused and rules for appeals. ¹

After the split in the Wafd he served as minister of the interior in Adly Yakan's 1921 cabinet, and when Adly resigned after the failed Curzon negotiations, Sarwat set his own conditions for forming a government. On 28 February 1922 Britain issued the Unilateral Declaration recognising Egypt as an independent sovereign state, with four matters reserved to London; on 1 March Sarwat formed his cabinet, keeping the interior and foreign affairs for himself, with a programme of a constitution, the end of martial law, elections and a restored foreign ministry. His government fell on 30 November 1922. He was among the founders of the Liberal Constitutional Party. Called again on 26 April 1927, after Saad Zaghloul's death had changed the Wafd's leadership, he negotiated in London with Austen Chamberlain over the reserved points; the draft treaty he brought home was rejected by the Wafd and by his own cabinet on 4 March 1928, and he resigned on 16 March 1928. He died in Paris later that year, on a personal visit, his wife and his son Mustapha with him, and was buried in Cairo after national funerals. The article's two death dates — 22 September in its narrative summary, 22 November in its death section — are both kept on his record; the sources do not settle between them. ¹

As with Adly Yakan, the record is silent. The English article has no religion field, and where its long narrative touches religion at all it is as politics — religious officials among the founders of committees, the religious establishment ranged against the liberals in the affair of Taha Hussein's book, which Hussein had dedicated to Sarwat. None of that names an affiliation for Sarwat himself. The Arabic article carries no religion field, and Wikidata has no religion value. A career spent in the judiciary and cabinets of a Muslim-majority state is office, not attestation; two independent sources naming a school for the man personally do not exist in anything consulted. His faith is recorded unknown. ^{1 3 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.