Hussein Kamel was the second son of
Khedive Ismail Pasha, who ruled Egypt from 1863 to 1879. He was declared
Sultan of Egypt on 19 December 1914, after the occupying British forces had deposed his nephew, Khedive
Abbas Hilmi II, on 5 November 1914. Though presented as the re-establishment of the pre-Ottoman Egyptian sultanate, the newly created
Sultanate of Egypt was to be a British
protectorate, with effective political and military power vested in British officials. This brought to an end the
de jure Ottoman sovereignty over
Egypt, which had been largely nominal since
Muhammad Ali's seizure of power in 1805. In 1915, Kamel was the target of two assassination attempts. The first occurred on 9 April 1915, when an assassin targeted the Sultan's carriage while in Cairo. A second attempt was made exactly 3 months later, on 9 July 1915, when a bomb was thrown at Hussein Kamel's carriage as he travelled to a mosque for Friday prayers. in Cairo Upon Hussein Kamel's death, his only son,
Prince Kamal el Dine Hussein, declined the succession, and Hussein Kamel's brother Ahmed Fuad ascended the throne as
Fuad I. At the beginning of
Naguib Mahfouz's novel
Palace Walk, Ahmad Abd al-Jawwad says "What a fine man Prince Kamal al-Din Husayn is! Do you know what he did? He refused to ascend the throne of his late father so long as the British are in charge." Stereoscope photographs of the coronation and burial processions of Sultan Hussein are available on the Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library of the American University in Cairo. ==Honours==