The Egyptian satirist who inspired a revolution — in the nineteenth century: Anna Della Subin and Hussein Omar write for The New Yorker suggesting that satire might have led to an uprising in Egypt in the 1800s. “Then, just as now, Egypt’s economy was in chaos, and the country was being kept afloat by hefty loans from foreign benefactors. The extravagant Khedive Ismail … had gone wild with ambitious building projects, for which he had borrowed huge sums from British and French banks. The Khedive’s European creditors in turn installed themselves in his cabinet, and began to buy up large swaths of Egypt’s land and infrastructure, while Ismail imposed steep taxes on the poor.”

Subin and Omar point to a satirical newspaper called Abou Naddara Zarqa that has only recently been digitized by German academics, “yet in Egypt today the paper remains largely forgotten, and, like so many of the documents relating to Egypt’s own past, it is nearly impossible to find physical copies inside the country.” Cue all the conspiracy theories: Abou Naddara was created by James Sanua, an Egyptian-Italian Jew born in Cairo in 1839, who was also a freemason who spoke a dozen languages. Subin and Omar said Abou Naddara Zarqa inspired Ahmed Urabi to lead “led thousands of peasants and soldiers in protests at Tawfiq’s palace, and for a brief three months the revolutionaries dethroned the Khedive and ruled in his place.”