The story of the ruler of Egypt who shook the foundations of the Ottoman Empire
On June 18, 1805, Muhammad Ali assumed the position of governor of Egypt after the people and clergy revolted against the Ottoman governor, Khurshid Pasha. Muhammad Ali is the founder of the Alawite dynasty and the ruler of Egypt between 1805 and 1848, and is described as the "founder of modern Egypt."
The Encyclopedia Britannica says that Muhammad Ali was born in 1769 in Koula, in Macedonia, in the Ottoman Empire (in present-day Greece), and died on August 2, 1849, in Alexandria, Egypt. He was the deputy of the Ottoman Sultan in Egypt between 1805 and 1848 and the founder of the ruling family that ruled Egypt from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century.
His father, Ibrahim Agha, of Albanian origin, was the commander of a small regional military force maintained by the governor of Qala, as well as a tobacco trader. Muhammad Ali joined his father in the tobacco trade when he was ten years old. His father died when he was a boy, and he was raised by the governor of Qala. At the age of eighteen, Muhammad Ali married a relative of the governor, who bore him five of his 95 children.
Muhammad Ali succeeded his father as head of the Qula military force and showed great courage, according to the Egyptian presidency website.
rise to power
Drawing of Bonaparte at the Battle of the Pyramids (Imbaba) against the Mamluks on July 21, 1798
It was military service that set Muhammad Ali on the path to his political career, and it was Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 that launched that career.
In 1798, a French army led by Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Mamluks, a hereditary military caste originally made up of slaves who converted to Islam, who ruled Egypt, which was at the time a semi-independent province of the Ottoman Empire.
Muhammad Ali came to Egypt in 1799 as part of an Ottoman military unit to work to expel the French from it, but the Ottoman forces were defeated in the Battle of Abu Qir, and then he returned to his country.
He returned to Egypt again in 1801 as second-in-command of a 300-man Albanian regiment sent by the Ottoman government to expel the French from Egypt. After the French campaign was withdrawn, he was promoted to the rank of Sargeshme (major-general), and then nominated to the position of commander of the palace guard under the governor.
After the French were expelled from Egypt by British forces in 1801, a power vacuum emerged, as the Mamluks, the Sultan's forces, a group of Albanian forces under Muhammad Ali, and various local forces vied for control of the country.
Muhammad Ali was able to form an alliance with local merchants and clerics, and on June 18, 1805, Sultan Selim III appointed him governor of Egypt.
Obstacles and challenges
Drawing showing the massacre of the castle
In his book, All the Pasha's Men: Muhammad Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt, Khaled Fahmy writes: "In the first half of the nineteenth century, Muhammad Ali faced a series of obstacles in consolidating his power." He points out that "the history of Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century was largely shaped by Muhammad Ali's attempt to make his reign more secure and sustainable."
He was threatened by the Mamluks, the British, local chieftains and warlords from other parts of Egypt as he essentially controlled only Cairo at this point.
The first challenge came when the Sultan ordered the governor of Thessaloniki to go to Cairo and change positions with Muhammad Ali, but that governor backed out of the plan in the face of strong local support for Muhammad Ali.
The British at that time supported the Mamluks as a counterweight to the power of the Ottoman Sultan, and had their own interests in opening safe transport routes to their colonies in India. In 1807 the British attacked Alexandria and Rashid, but were repelled by the Pasha's army.
The most violent chapter in Muhammad Ali's consolidation of power came in 1811, when he invited a large group of Mamluk fighters to participate in a large military parade. As the Mamluks entered a large square, the Pasha's forces closed the gate in their face and opened fire from above the walls. The result was a massacre that ended the period of Mamluk influence in Egypt.
The show to which the Mamluks were invited was a celebration of the Pasha's sending of his son Tusun Pasha's forces to retake the cities of Mecca and Medina from the forces of the First Saudi State. Mecca and Medina were captured and placed once again under the rule of the new Sultan Mahmud II. The Pasha sent an envoy to the Sultan with the keys to the two cities, but the Sultan's response was to urge the envoy, Latif Agha, to carry out a coup against the Pasha. Muhammad Ali learned of the plot and ordered his deputy, Mehmet Lazoglu, to arrest Latif Agha and behead him.
Building the modern state
Drawing of the gardens of Muhammad Ali Pasha in Shubra in 1839
Nowhere in the Ottoman Empire was there a greater opportunity for a more complete restructuring of society than in Egypt. The three-year French occupation (1798-1801) had disrupted the country’s traditional political and economic structure, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Completing the task begun by the French, Muhammad Ali put an end to traditional Egyptian society. He eliminated the Mamluks, the former ruling oligarchy, confiscated large tracts of land from the landowners, retired the religious leaders, restricted the activities of local merchants and artisans, neutralized the Bedouins, and his forces crushed all peasant rebellions.
By 1815, most of Egypt's agricultural land had been converted into state land, and the profits from agriculture were available to the ruler.
He improved Egypt's irrigation system, introduced new crops such as cotton, and reorganized the administrative structure of the government to ensure strict control over the economy. He also tried to build a modern industrial system for processing raw materials in Egypt.
His infrastructure projects were ambitious and far-reaching, and his most impressive achievement was the reconstruction of the ancient canal that connected Alexandria to the Nile River.
During the Pasha's reign, the total length of irrigation canals in Egypt doubled, and the area of cultivated land increased by about 18 percent between 1813 and 1830.
The main aim of the Pasha's modernization plans was to finance his growing army (by the 1830s the force numbered about 130,000 soldiers) by increasing tax revenues, and for this he created an efficient tax bureaucracy.
He created a fleet and an army of Egyptians recruited from the peasant class but with non-Egyptian leadership. The Pasha employed a French officer, Joseph Anthelme Saïf, to train the new recruits, who later became Suleiman Pasha the Frenchman.
To provide services to his troops and army, he established Western-style schools to train doctors, engineers, veterinarians and other specialists. He also began sending educational missions to European countries to train in modern techniques.
The initial result of Muhammad Ali's growing military power was that Sultan Mahmud II tried to weaken it by sending forces led by the Pasha's son Ibrahim Pasha to fight the fighters fighting for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.
As the Pasha himself had predicted, the campaign was unsuccessful, and European intervention in Greece caused the destruction of his fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827. The result of the failure of that campaign was Greek independence.
Expansion attempts
Drawing of Ibrahim Pasha (eldest son of Muhammad Ali) walking with a dying soldier in Arabia 1818
Muhammad Ali initially supported the Ottoman Sultan in suppressing rebellions in both Arabia and Greece, and also invaded Sudan in search of recruits for his army and gold for his treasury.
The 1830s were the height of Muhammad Ali's expansionist ambitions. His first war against the Sultan (1831–33) gained him control of Syria as far north as Adana.
After initially considering heading west towards Tripoli, he launched an invasion of Syria in 1831, on the pretext that he was merely trying to arrest a group of 6,000 Egyptians who were evading military service.
A force of 30,000 fighters led by his son Ibrahim Pasha captured the city of Acre (now in northern Israel) after a six-month siege, swept through the rest of Syria, and advanced into Anatolia in present-day Turkey in 1832. In a battle on the Anatolian plains north of Konya, Turkey, the Pasha's forces defeated Ottoman forces led by Grand Vizier Mehmed Reshid Pasha, and the road to Istanbul and the imperial palaces was open.
The Turkish Sultan rushed to seek help from the European powers and the result was the Treaty of Kutahya in 1833, which recognized the legitimacy of Muhammad Ali Kaval over Egypt, the Hejaz and Crete, and granted Ibrahim Pasha the same status in large areas of Syrian territory. The Pasha's powers in collecting taxes were also expanded.
In the second war between Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman Sultan (1838–41), the decisive defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Nizip (1839) and the flight of the Ottoman fleet led to the intervention of the European powers. In July 1840, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia agreed to end Egyptian rule in Syria, dashing Muhammad Ali's hopes for greater independence from the Ottoman Empire.
In 1841 he and his family were granted the hereditary right to rule Egypt and Sudan, but his authority was still subject to restrictions, and the rights of the Sultan remained.
In the late 1840s, Muhammad Ali retired from office due to poor health. In 1848, power officially passed to Muhammad Ali's son Ibrahim, who died shortly thereafter, and Muhammad Ali himself died the following year.
Source: websites