Muhammad Ali of Egypt
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| Muhammad Ali of Egypt | |
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| Born | 1769 Kavala (in present day Greece) |
| Died | 1849 Cairo, Egypt |
- This article is about the viceroy of Egypt. For other people named Mehemet Ali, see Mehemet Ali (disambiguation) and Muhammad Ali (disambiguation)
Muhammad Ali Pasha ((Albanian: Mehmet Ali Pasha Arabic: محمد علي باشا) or Mehmet Ali Paşa (Kavalalı Mehmet Ali Pasha) in Turkish (c. 1769 - August 2, 1849), was a viceroy of Egypt and is often cited as the founder of modern Egypt. Muhammad Ali was born in the town of Kavala (in present day Greece) in an Albanian family. After working for a time in his youth as a tobacco merchant, Muhammad Ali took a commission in the Ottoman army.
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[edit] Rise to power
In 1798, Napoleon invaded the Ottoman province of Egypt and destroyed the army of the Mamluk rulers at the Battle of the Pyramids. The immediate military objective of the expedition was to strike at Britain's communication routes with India. The British destruction of the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile near Alexandria dealt a blow to Napoleon's ambitions. However, the rest of the expeditionary force occupied Egypt, with great difficulty, for three years. The occupation was officially brought to an end in 1801 by a joint British-Ottoman expedition. The ethnic and political divisions within Ottoman ranks prevented them from operating effectively for very long. When the troops had their salaries delayed, some of them mutinied, and many turned to banditry. With the Mamluks out of power and the French occupation over, Egypt was thrown into a power vacuum. Muhammad Ali, a young officer who had been second in command only to his rival Kadeem Muhad Rasheek, was sent by the Ottoman government to evacuate the French, stepped in to fill this vacuum by establishing a local power base of village leaders, clerics, and wealthy merchants in Cairo. With no one else able to hold the office in safety, he was recognized by Constantinople and appointed Ottoman viceroy (wali; Arabic: والي) of Egypt in 1805.
Ali spent the first years of his rule fighting off attempts to unseat him and extended his personal authority over all of Egypt. In one of the most infamous episodes of his reign, Ali definitively broke the power of the Mamluks by massacring their leaders. Having worn down the Mamluks for years with raids and skirmishes, he invited their amirs in 1811 to a feast to celebrate his son Tosun Paşa's appointment to lead the army being sent against the Wahhabi rebellion in Arabia. As the procession of Mamluk princes made its way through a narrow gated alley in the Citadel, Ali's men shut the gates, trapping all the Mamluks and his rival Kadeem, as the soldiers positioned in the buildings lining the alley opened fire from above. When the shooting ended, soldiers on the ground finished off any Mamluks still living with swords and axes. In the following days, he ordered his men to kill all other Mamluks they could catch. O.G
[edit] Industrialization and modernization
To keep up with the constant need for money that military reform created, Ali established extra long staple cotton as a cash crop and reoriented the Egyptian agricultural economy towards cotton production. Since British textile manufacturers were willing to pay good money for such cotton, Ali ordered the majority of Egyptian peasants to cultivate cotton. At harvest time, Ali bought the entire crop himself, which he then sold at a mark-up to textile manufacturers. In this way, he turned the whole of Egypt's cotton production into his personal monopoly. He also experimented with textile factories that might process cotton into cloth within Egypt, but these did not prove very successful.
The needs of the military likewise fueled other modernization projects, such as state educational institutions, a teaching hospital, roads and canals, factories to turn out uniforms and munitions, and a shipbuilding foundry at Alexandria, although all the wood for ships had to be imported from abroad. In the same way that he conscripted peasants to serve in the army, he frequently drafted peasants into labor corvées for his factories and industrial projects. The peasantry objected to these conscriptions and many ran away from their villages to avoid being taken, sometimes fleeing as far away as Syria. A number of them maimed themselves so as to be unsuitable for combat: common ways of self-maiming were blinding an eye with rat poison and cutting off a finger of the right hand, which usually worked the firing mechanism of a rifle.
[edit] Rebellion against the Sultan
Ali viewed the territory comprising Sudan as an extension of water, land, and resources, namely gold and slaves. He ordered a campaign to conquer and occupy Sudan in 1820. Ali's troops made headway into Sudan in 1821 and were met with fierce resistance. The supremacy of Egyptian troops and firearms ensured the conquest of Sudan. Ali now had an outpost from which he could expand to the source of the Nile in Ethiopia and Uganda. His administration captured slaves from the Nuba Mountains and west and south Sudan, all incorporated into a foot regiment known as the Jihadiya. Ali's reign in Sudan and that of his descendants is known in Sudan for its brutality and heavy-handedness.
On 20 October 1827, while under the command of Muharram Bey, the Ottoman representative, the entire Egyptian navy was sunk by the European Allied fleet, under the command of Admiral Edward Codrington (1770-1851). If the Porte was not in the least prepared for this confrontation, Muhammad Ali was even less prepared for the loss of his highly competent, expensively assembled and maintained navy. In compensation for this loss the wali [1] asked the Porte for the territory of Syria. The Ottomans were indifferent to the request, the sultan himself asking blandly what would if Syria was granted and Muhammad Ali later deposted? Could he not then use Syria and then attack the suddenly unprotected Egypt? [2] But the wali was not longer willing to tolerate Ottoman indifference. To compensate for his, and Egypt's, losses the wheels for the conquest of Syria were set in motion.
Like other rulers of Egypt before him, Ali desired to control Greater Syria, both for its strategic value and for its rich natural resources; nor was this a sudden, vendictive decision on the part of the wali since he had this goal since his early years as Egypt's unofficial ruler. For not only had Syria abundant natural resources, it also had a thriving international trading community with well developed markets throughout the Levant; in addition, it would be a captive market for the goods now being produced in Egypt. Yet perhaps most of all Syria was desirable because it was a buffer state between Egypt and the Ottoman Caliph.
A new fleet was built, a new army was raised and on 31 October 1831, under İbrahim Paşa, Muhammad Ali's eldest son, the Egyptian invasion of Syria began. For the sake of appearance on the world stage, a pretext for the invasion was vital. Ultimately, excuse for the expedition was a quarrel with Abdullah Paşa of Acre. The wali alleged that 6,000 fallahin had fled to Acre to escape the draft, corvée, and taxes, and he wanted them back.[3]
The Egyptians overran Syria easily with little resistance. Acre was captured after a six-month siege, which lasted from 3 November 1831 to 27 May 1832. The Egyptian amry marched north into Anatolia. At the Battle of Konya (21 December 1832), İbrahim Paşa soundly defeated the Ottoman army led by the sadr azam Grand Vizier Reşid Paşa. There was now no military obstacles between İbrahim's forces and Constantinople itself. Muhamad Ali's goal was now the removal of the current Ottoman emperor Mahmud II and replacing him with his nephew, the infant Abdülmecid.
This possibility so alarmed Mahmud II that he accepted Russia's offer of military aid, much to the dismay of the British and French governments. From this position, Russia brokered a negotiated solution in 1833 known as the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi. The terms of the peace were that Ali would withdraw his forces from Anatolia and receive the territories of Crete (then known as Candia) and the Hijaz as compensation, and Ibrahim Pasha would be appointed wali of Syria.
In 1839, Muhammad Ali, dissatisfied with partial sovereignty over Syria, went to war again against the Caliph's forces. When Mahmud II ordered his forces to advance on the Syrian frontier, Ibrahim attacked and destroyed them at the Battle of Nizib (24 June 1839) near Urfa. Echoing the Battle of Konya, Istanbul was again left vulnerable to Ali's forces. Mahmud II died almost immediately after the battle took place and was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, Abdülmecid. At this point, Ali and Ibrahim began to argue about which course to follow; Ibrahim favored conquering Istanbul and demanding the imperial seat while Ali was inclined simply to demand numerous concessions of territory and political autonomy for himself and his family. On 15 July 1840, Great Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia signed the London Convention, which granted Ali hereditary rule over Egypt and the administration for life over the governatorate of Acre in exchange for the withdrawal of his troops from the Syrian hinterland and the coastal regions of Mount Lebanon. Ali refused these terms and, despite the opposition of France, a multilateral European military intervention took place a few weeks later.
After the British and Austrian navies blockaded the Nile delta coastline, shelled Beirut (11 September 1840), and after Acre had capitulated (3 November 1840), Ali agreed to the terms of the Convention on 27 November 1840, renouncing his claims over Crete and the Hijaz and downsizing his navy and his standing army to 18,000 men, provided that he and his descendants would enjoy hereditary rule over Egypt — an unheard-of status for an Ottoman viceroy.
[edit] Final years
Whether it was genuine senility or the effects of the silver nitrate he had been given years before to treat an attack of dysentery [4] after 1843, fast on the heels of the Syrian débâcle and the treaty of Balta Liman which forced Egypt to tear down its import barriers and the government to give up its monopolies, Muhammad Ali's mind became increasingly clouded and tended towards paranoia.
In 1844 the tax receipts were in. And Şerif Paşa, the head of the diwan al-maliyya (financial ministry), was too fearful for his life to tell the wali the news that Egyptian debt now stood at 80 million francs (£2,400,000). Tax arrears came to 14,081,500 pts. (pts. = piastre) [5] out of a total estimated tax of 75,227,500 pts.[6] Timidly he approached İbrahim Paşa with these facts, and together came up with a report and a plan. Suspecting his father's initial reaction, İbrahim arranged for Muhammad Ali's favorite daughter to break the news. It did little, if any, good. The resulting rage was far beyond what any had expected, and took six full days for a thin peace to take hold.
A year later while İbrahim, progressively crippled by rheumatic pains and tuberculosis (he was beginning to cough up blood), was sent to Italy to take the waters Muhammad Ali, in the year 1846, traveled to Constantinople. There he approached the sultan, expressed his fears, and made his peace, explaining: "[My son] İbrahim is old and sick, [my grandson] Abbas is indolent (happa), and then children will rule Egypt. How will they keep Egypt?"[7] After he secured hereditary rule for his family, the wali ruled until 1848, when senility made further governance by him impossible.
It soon came to the point where his son and heir, the mortally ailing İbrahim, had no choice but to travel to Constantinople and request the sultan create him ruler of Egypt even though his father was still alive. However, on the ship returning home İbrahim gripped by fever and guilt succumbed to seizures and hallucinations. He survived the journey but within six months was dead. He was succeeded by his nephew (Tosun's son) Abbas.
By this time Mohamed Ali had become so ill and senile that he was not informed of his son's death. Lingering a few months more, Muhammad Ali died on the 2nd of August 1849, and, ultimately, was buried in the imposing mosque he had commissioned in the Citadel of Cairo. But the immediate reaction to his death was noticeably low key, thanks in no small part to the contempt the new wali Abbas Paşa had always felt towards his grandfather.
Eye-witness British council John Murray wrote:
... the ceremonial of the funeral was a most meagre, miserable affair; the [diplomatic] Consular was not invited to attend, and neither the shops nor the Public offices were closed -- in short, a general impression prevails that Abbas Pasha has shown a culpable lack of respect for the memory of his illustrious grandfather, in allowing his obsequis to be conducted in so paltry a manner, and in neglecting at attend them in Person.
...[the] attachment and veneration of all classes in Egypt for the name of Muhammad Ali are prouder obsequies than any of which it was in power of his successor to confer. The old in habitants remember and talk of the chaos and anarchy from which he rescued this country; the younger compare his energetic rule with the capricious, vacillating government of his successor; all classes whether Turk, or Arab, not only feel, but do not hesitate to say openly that the prosperity of Egypt has died with Muhammad Ali...In truth my Lord, it cannot be denied, that Muhammad Ali, notwithstanding all his faults was a great man. [8]
[edit] Note on Muhammad Ali's ethnicity
During Ali's lifetime, religious affiliation was the most important marker of identity in the Ottoman Empire. A precise ethnic identification of an Ottoman subject is difficult to ascertain, especially in cities with diverse ethnic populations. The historical record suggests that he likely had Albanian origins or was perhaps of Kurdish stock [1]; he may have also had Macedonian, Turkish, or Greek ancestry. However, all speculations on his ethnic designation are difficult to prove beyond doubt. Moreover, Egyptian historical records variably refer to Muhammad Ali as a Turk and an Albanian, depending on the historian's perspective. It is, in fact, difficult to state definitively anything more than that Muhammad Ali was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire.
[edit] See also
- Muhammad Ali's seizure of power
- Egypt under Muhammad Ali and his successors
- History of Ottoman Egypt
- List of Rulers of Modern Egypt
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Fahmy, Khaled. 1997. All The Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, his army and the making of modern Egypt. New York: American University in Cairo Press. ISBN 977-424-696-9
- Fahmy, Khaled. 1998. "The era of Muhammad 'Ali Pasha, 1805-1848" in The Cambridge History of Egypt: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century. M.W. Daly, ed. Pp. 139-179, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47211-3
- Hourani, Albert. 2002. A History of the Arab Peoples. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-446-39392-4
- al-Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman. 1994. 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti's History of Egypt. 4 vols. T. Philipp and M. Perlmann, translators. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. ISBN 3-515-05756-0
- Vatikiotis, P.J. 1991. The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4215-8
[edit] External links
- Muhammad Ali Al-Pasha Mosque Islamic Architecture review (IAORG)
- Al Ahram special on Muhammad Ali
| Muhammad 'Ali Dynasty Born: 1769 Died: 2 August 1849 |
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| Preceded by uncertain due to war |
Governor of Egypt 1805–1848 |
Succeeded by Ibrahim |
| Preceded by Ibrahim |
Governor of Egypt 1848–1849 |
Succeeded by Abbas I |
