The Cairo demonstrations and riots in Egypt on November 2, 1945, are examined by Edward Said as a case study in how historical narration can reshape political action into evidence for a stereotype. Comparing two accounts by Bernard Lewis, published in 1964 and 1976, Said traces changes in agency, scale, and interpretation: a demonstration called by political leaders against the Balfour Declaration becomes, in the later version, an outbreak attributed to instinctive communal loyalties. For Said, the differences expose not simply imprecise retelling but a polemical method that makes Muslims appear governed by unchanging religious passions.

Background and Political Occasion

The demonstrations took place on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. In Lewis’s 1964 account, Egyptian political leaders called for demonstrations on that date. Said’s description identifies the occasion as anti-imperialist and stresses that the first version explicitly assigns responsibility for calling the demonstrations to political leaders. The event therefore enters the discussion as a political action with a stated anniversary and organizers, not merely as an eruption of communal feeling.

Lewis’s 1976 version, published in Commentary, changes the presentation. It says that demonstrations were held in Egypt on the anniversary of the British Government’s issue of the Balfour Declaration, without naming the political leaders who sponsored them. Said draws attention to that grammatical shift: removing the agents makes the demonstrations seem less like an organized political response and more like the spontaneous expression of communal loyalty. The date and occasion remain, but the account’s framing of who acted has changed.

Two Accounts and Their Revisions

In the 1964 version, Lewis says the demonstrations rapidly developed into anti-Jewish riots. He then names a Catholic, an Armenian, and a Greek Orthodox church as having been attacked and damaged. Said asks what these churches had to do with the Balfour Declaration, pointing to a gap between the asserted anti-Jewish character of the riot and the evidence Lewis supplies to support that description. The specific list does not, in Said’s reading, establish the characterization attached to it.

The 1976 account elaborates the sequence differently. It says that the demonstration soon developed into an anti-Jewish riot and that the riot then became a more general outbreak in which several churches—Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox—were attacked and damaged. Lewis also adds that the demonstration’s sponsors had not intended an anti-Jewish outcome. Said notes two consequential revisions: political leaders disappear as the stated actors who called the demonstration, and the earlier account’s three specifically identified churches become “several churches” of three denominations. The alterations expand the reported scale of damage while blurring the distinction between the political organizers and the alleged course of the riot.

The two versions thus preserve a shared outline but produce different impressions. In 1964, leaders call a demonstration, which rapidly becomes an anti-Jewish riot; the churches are listed as the apparent evidence. In 1976, demonstrations simply occur, an anti-Jewish riot follows, and the event broadens into a general outbreak. For Said, these shifts are interpretively loaded: they recast organized political action as a manifestation of religious or communal instinct, while making the account sound more broadly representative of such instinct.

Said’s Critique of the Interpretation

Said argues that Lewis’s purpose is polemical rather than scholarly: the episode is used to portray Islam as an anti-Semitic ideology, not merely as a religion. Yet Said identifies a logical tension in Lewis’s broader account. Lewis presents Islam as a frightening mass phenomenon while also describing the nationalist movement as not genuinely popular; the difficulty does not, in Said’s view, interrupt the argument. The riot is instead made to exemplify a population ruled by passions and unreflective hatreds.

In this interpretation, the reported event is made to carry a much wider claim: that Muslims do not change, and that political or historical accounts of them must begin and end with their religious identity. Said emphasizes how the altered anecdote helps support this claim without stating its most inflammatory implications outright. He presents the movement from “Revolt” to “Return”—the titles of Lewis’s 1964 chapter and its substantially reused 1976 version—as part of the same effort to explain continued Muslim resistance to Israeli hegemony over the Near East.

Said’s objection is not that religion should be excluded from accounts of Muslim political life. He recognizes that the role of religion matters in current affairs. His criticism is that Lewis uses the episode to essentialize Muslims, treating a historically situated action as proof of a fixed collective character. The changes in wording, agency, and reported number of churches therefore matter because they guide the reader toward a conclusion about an entire society that the cited details do not establish.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The episode exemplifies Said’s larger argument that each political phase produces its own representations of the other. A demonstration held on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration is not presented in isolation: in Lewis’s versions, the account becomes a way to characterize Islam and Muslim political behavior across time. Said’s close comparison restores attention to how the narrative is made—who is named as acting, what damage is described, and what conclusions are drawn from it.

That scrutiny also fits Said’s broader demand that injustice and suffering be discussed in a context grounded in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality, rather than through reductive formulas. His account of the 1945 episode contests the conversion of a political demonstration and subsequent violence into a self-sufficient anecdote about religious hatred. By setting the two tellings against each other, he shows how a repeated event can acquire a more sweeping and hostile meaning through small but consequential revisions in its narration.