Hussein Rushdi Pasha

Hussein Rushdi Pasha (1863–1928) was an Egyptian politician who headed the Egyptian government four times between 1914 and 1919, serving under Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, Sultan Hussein Kamel and Sultan Fuad I. Trained as a lawyer in Paris, he held judicial office and the ministries of justice and foreign affairs before his premierships, and after them he chaired the committee that drafted Egypt's 1922 constitution and presided over the Senate from 1926 until his death. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article says he was the son of Mahmud Hamdi, a senior interior-ministry official and governor of Cairo, and that his family was an Albanian family that had come to Egypt with Muhammad Ali. The English article, citing Arthur Goldschmidt's Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, calls him of Turkish origin and traces the family to Kavala and to a janissary ancestor rewarded by Muhammad Ali after the British invasion of 1807. The two accounts are recorded here without choosing between them. He was educated in Paris at his family's expense, then joined the government mission in 1883, taking a law degree in 1885 and a doctorate and a diploma in political science in Paris. He returned to Egypt in 1892 at the summons of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II and helped prepare a report on the state of education in Egypt. ^{2 1}

He opened a law office, then entered government service in the finance litigation office in 1892 and taught at the law school. He served as inspector of foreign languages in education for six years, ran the Qubba school for the Khedive from 1896, sat as a judge of the Mixed Court of first instance (1899–1905) and of the Court of Appeal (1906–1907), directed the waqf administration (1904–1908), and became minister of justice under Boutros Ghali (1908–1910) and then minister of foreign affairs under Mohamed Said Pasha (1910–1913). ²

His first ministry ran from 5 April to 19 December 1914, the last of the Khedivate; when Abbas Hilmi II left Egypt for the last time in May 1914 he named Rushdi his deputy. After the British deposed the Khedive and proclaimed Hussein Kamel sultan, Rushdi formed a second ministry (19 December 1914 – 9 October 1917), under which his council of ministers issued the decision that in effect declared war on the Central Powers in the First World War. His third ministry ran from 10 October 1917 to 9 April 1919, under Fuad I. During the 1919 revolution he coordinated with Saad Zaghloul over sending both an official and a popular delegation to press Egypt's case; when the occupation authorities refused both, he resigned. A fourth ministry lasted only from 9 to 22 April 1919, falling over a strike of officials and workers he could not persuade to return. ^{1 2}

He was deputy prime minister in Adly Yakan's first ministry (1921) and a member of the official delegation that negotiated with Lord Curzon, rejecting the treaty draft offered. In 1922 he chaired the thirty-member committee that drafted the constitution; the Arabic article notes that King Fuad was in no hurry to issue it, since it limited his powers. He defended the independence of the Egyptian University from the government, and presided over the Senate from 23 May 1926 until his death on 14 March 1928. ^{2 3}