Suez Canal

The Suez Canal joins the Mediterranean to the Red Sea across the Isthmus of Suez. The Encyclopaedia of Islam treats it inside its article on the town of al-Suways (Suez), the seaport at the northern end of the Red Sea, which became the southern port of entry to the canal. ^{1 2} This record follows that account; it does not rely on any other source.

The article says that in the early 1840s Ferdinand de Lesseps made further investigations into digging a new canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. He worked from earlier plans published by Le Pere (1808) and Linant de Bellefonds (1821), and from an earlier measurement, later corrected, that put the Red Sea about 9 m higher than the Mediterranean. De Lesseps then submitted a proposal to the governor of Egypt, Sa'id Pasha, who was supported by the opinion of Bellefonds' Saint-Simonist study group and of an Egyptian-European commission set up in 1846 that a canal through the Isthmus of Suez was possible. ¹

On 5 January 1856 Sa'id signed the concession, hoping, the article says, that the canal would strengthen his ambition of making Egypt more independent of the Ottoman Empire. ¹ After three years of fund-raising and political quarrels, which included the question of Ottoman sovereignty, the Suez Canal Company was founded in Paris in 1858 with the support of Napoleon III. French entrepreneurs in time bought more than half of the shares, and Sa'id, who had originally taken 21 per cent, had to sell some of his already in 1860. ¹

Digging began on 22 April 1859, and the Egyptian government recruited 25,000 peasants to work in the canal region. ¹ At the same time a fresh-water canal was dug from Cairo to the region of Isma'iliyya, following the old canal that had linked the Red Sea with the Nile in late Pharaonic times and had been restored several times until the 2nd/8th century; it took five years. ¹ After 1863 and the introduction of machines, the infrastructure and working conditions improved considerably. ¹

The canal was opened on 16 November 1869. By then the construction costs had reached about 19 million pounds sterling, one third of which the Egyptian government had paid. The canal was now owned by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, which also controlled further property along it. ¹ Because of severe financial problems the Egyptian khedive Ismail Pasha was forced to sell his shares in the company to the British government. ¹ After the digging, two permanent artificial harbours, formerly called Port Ibrahim and Port Tawfiq, were built about 3 km south of Suez at the entry into the canal. ¹

When opened, the canal was 164 km long and 52 m wide; in 1982 its length was 195 km and its breadth 164 m, allowing tankers of up to 150,000 registered tons in 1980 to pass. ¹

The Convention of Constantinople of 29 October 1888 guaranteed freedom of shipping through the canal even in time of war, and the Egyptian government recognised it again on 24 April 1952. ¹ From 1882 to 1954 the Canal Zone remained a British military deployment area. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 10 October 1954 the British were to leave the zone within 20 months, and on 26 July 1956 the Egyptian government nationalised the canal. ¹ The article adds that during the Suez Crisis of 1956 the town of Suez was not occupied and only a few bombing attacks hit it, but the Egyptian-Israeli wars of 1967 and, in particular, 1973 devastated it. From 1967 to 1975 the canal was blocked and Suez was almost a dead city. ²

The article gives its figures in passing and without a separate treatment of the canal: it states, for example, that the canal opened with a width of 52 m and does not say how the width was measured. The names of the engineers other than Linant de Bellefonds, the number of workers who died, and the details of the nationalisation are not given in the passages used. The bibliography of the article lists several full-length studies of the canal, among them works by Charles-Roux, Farnie and Boutros-Ghali. ²