Aqaba Incident
AQABA INCIDENT
Border crisis in 1906 in the Sinai peninsula, also known as the Taba incident.
In 1906, Ottoman troops occupied Taba, an Egyptian town in the Sinai peninsula west of Aqaba (in present-day Jordan), to enlarge Ottoman access to the Red Sea. The British, who occupied Egypt, forced them to withdraw. The two sides later agreed to cede to the Ottoman Empire a small area west of Aqaba, while retaining Taba in Egypt.
The Taba incident provoked a wave of secular nationalist agitation led by Mustafa Kamil and others who challenged Britain's right to negotiate Egyptian territory. Mustafa Kamil had started a newspaper, alLiwa, to encourage nationalism.
see also aqaba; kamil, mustafa; newspapers and print media: arab countries.
Bibliography
Holt, P. M. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1516–1922: A Political History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
Vatikiotis, P. J. The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, 4th edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Elizabeth Thompson