The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Muhammad ‘Ali (1769–1849)

Muhammad ‘Ali, or more formally Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (Mehmed Ali), was an energetic and ambitious Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 to 1848. During his long career, he augmented Egypt’s wealth, introduced long-lasting changes to its society, and embarked on an expansionist policy that gravely threatened the Ottoman Empire. Due to European opposition, however, the mini-empire he had founded had to be dismantled; in exchange, the Ottoman sultan granted him hereditary rule of Egypt.

Born in 1769 in the Macedonian town of Kavala, Muhammad ‘Ali was dabbling in the tobacco trade when, in 1801, he joined an irregular military force that the Ottoman sultan dispatched to Egypt to evict the French army that had occupied the country three years earlier. Following the French evacuation in 1801, Muhammad ‘Ali seized effective control of Cairo and forced the sultan in Istanbul to appoint him officially as governor of Egypt with the title of pasha in 1805.

Muhammad ‘Ali moved fast to consolidate his control over Egypt by inviting many friends and relatives to settle in his new country and appointing them in key positions within the provinces. Next, he moved to curtail the power of the merchants and the ‘ulama’ (religious scholars) by forcing some into exile and confiscating the property of others. He also put some of his opponents under house arrest. His decisive consolidation of power came in March 1811, when he invited rival warlords, Mamluks, to his citadel and had them massacred.

Gradually, Muhammad ‘Ali imposed a monopoly over the sale of a large number of locally produced agricultural commodities. He then entered into negotiations with European merchants who had to deal with him and him alone if they wanted to trade with Egypt. Furthermore, throughout his second decade in power, he undertook a complete overhaul of the agricultural sector: he raised new taxes, conducted a thorough land survey, and ordered huge infrastructural projects the scale of which had not been seen in Egypt for centuries.

Aware of Istanbul’s desire to dislodge him from power in Egypt, he attempted to raise troops from the Sudan in 1818. When these attempts proved unsuccessful, he started conscripting peasants from the Egyptian countryside in 1820 to 1821 and quickly appointed European officers to train the peasant soldiers. Conscription waves spread throughout the country, and within ten years the army reached the impressive figure of 130,000 troops. Numerous institutions were founded to supply this army with all its needs. Schools for infantry, cavalry, and artillery were opened to train army officers. These were followed by schools for metallurgy and agriculture. A number of “manufactories” were also founded to supply the army with uniforms, footwear, headgear, guns, and ammunition. A large educational hospital was opened that trained doctors and surgeons needed for the different regiments. A printing machine that had been founded in 1820 started printing military and medical books.

Using these well-trained troops, Muhammad ‘Ali grudgingly lent a helping hand to the sultan in his fight against his Greek subjects who had broken out in a nationalist revolt in 1820. After initial successes that his army had achieved against the Greek rebels, a naval force of the British, French, and Russian navies sank the combined Egyptian-Ottoman fleet in Navarino Bay in October 1827.

Following the Greek debacle, the pasha resolved not to get embroiled in the sultan’s struggles. In 1831, he even invaded Syria to establish a buffer area between his power base in Egypt and the sultan’s in Anatolia. His troops faced ineffective resistance and soon crossed into Anatolia and gravely threatened Istanbul itself. Alarmed at his vassal’s surprise advance, the Ottoman sultan sought help from Britain, and when this did not materialize, he turned to the Russians, who were only too eager to interfere in Ottoman affairs. In time, the British saw the pasha’s bid for independence and expansionist policies as undermining the peace in Europe and seriously threatening their interests in Asia. In 1840, they convened a European conference in London that forced the pasha to withdraw from Syria, southern Anatolia, Crete, and Arabia. Finally, in 1841, the Ottoman sultan further limited Muhammad ‘Ali’s power by issuing a rescript ordering him to reduce the size of his army, but in return the sultan bestowed on him the hereditary rule of Egypt and the Sudan.

Said to be illiterate till the age of 40, Muhammad ‘Ali was nonetheless a well-read man. He was in the habit of having his advisors read to him history books as well as European newspapers. He was a keen observer of the contemporary European scene, and despite not having ambassadors in any European capital, he was fairly well informed of the political situation in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg. Besides military training manuals and medical textbooks, the famous printing house he founded in Bulaq printed many Turkish and Arabic translations of European historical books and political biographies, most notably of Catherine the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte. He was also aware of Machiavelli’s The Prince, although he was not keen on having it published, saying that it had nothing to teach him; he preferred, instead, to read Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima (Prolegomena). Muhammad ‘Ali was also curious to learn about Egypt’s history and was particularly intrigued by the Pharaonic and the Ptolemaic periods, less so by the Mamluk and Ottoman ones. Above all, he was intimately familiar with Ottoman history and always looked at Istanbul to learn how to run his prized province. Specifically, he was keen to learn how the Ottomans attempted to use law (qānūn) in order to reinforce their rule by controlling members of the elite and by trading justice to the commoners in exchange for their production of the necessary surplus.

Dubbed as the “Founder of Modern Egypt,” Muhammad ‘Ali is often depicted as a strong man who stood up against Western imperialism. Having had imperial designs himself, however, it is probably more correct to see his legacy as changing Egypt’s relationship with the Ottoman Empire, posing the gravest threat that the Ottoman Empire had faced in its history, instituting long-lasting socioeconomic changes in Egypt, and establishing a dynasty that ruled over Egypt for a hundred years.