In the winter of 1897, the celebrated English traveller and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt undertook a private journey across the Egyptian Western Desert to the oasis of Siwa. Shortly after his arrival, Blunt's camp was besieged by a large force of around three hundred Siwans, commanded by Osman [‘Uthman] Habun, a powerful Siwan notable and the local agent of the Sanusiyya Brotherhood. Blunt's entire camp was pillaged, and he narrowly made it out of Siwa alive.

Upon his return to Cairo, Blunt appealed to British Consul-General Lord Cromer in hopes of mobilising the full force of the Egyptian Government to bring the Siwan attackers to justice. Cromer replied, however, that it would be impossible to prosecute the orchestrators of the attack, given that such legal action might ‘incur a possible quarrel with the Senussia brotherhood’. A few months later, Blunt sent another scathing letter to Cromer arguing that, as a British subject, he had a basic right to demand government intervention in the pursuit of justice, which Cromer had flouted. After all, Blunt chided Cromer: ‘Siwah is an Egyptian town, paying its taxes to the Government, and the Egyptian Government is responsible there as elsewhere for law and order. These may be difficult to enforce, but the responsibility remains.’

Cromer's unsympathetic response is extremely illuminating:

At the same time, Cromer suggested that Siwa was hardly the secure ‘Government town’ Blunt claimed it was:

This little-known correspondence over Blunt's hostile treatment in Siwa offers a crucial window into the tentative nature of Egyptian authority and jurisdiction in the western domains of the state towards the end of the nineteenth century.