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Muhammad Ali of Egypt
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Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas'ud ibn Agha , Muhamed Ali Pasha in Albanian or Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasa in Turkish, (born of Albanian parents, in 1769 in Kavala in the Ottoman territory of Macedonia (now in Greece) - died at Alexandria August 2, 1849), was Wali of Egypt and Sudan, and is regarded as the "founder of modern Egypt".
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Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas'ud ibn Agha , Muhamed Ali Pasha in Albanian or Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasa in Turkish, (born of Albanian parents, in 1769 in Kavala in the Ottoman territory of Macedonia (now in Greece) - died at Alexandria August 2, 1849), was Wali of Egypt and Sudan, and is regarded as the "founder of modern Egypt". The dynasty he established would rule Egypt until the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. His rule over Sudan was interrupted by the Mahdist liberation struggle which established a Sudanese state, the Mahdiyah from 1885-1899.
Muhammad or Mehmed
Current scholarship is divided on the proper spelling of his name. Its spelling in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish was consistent: ????. To those who consider him to be the father of a modern Egyptian nation, having modernized the military and infrastructure, he was Muhammad (Mohammed, etc), the way his name would have been pronounced in Arabic, the primary language of Egypt. To those who consider him to be an Ottoman Albanian military leader who used Egypt as his base, creating a dynasty that spanned far beyond Egypt, he was Mehmed (Mehmet, etc), the way his name would have been pronounced by him and the other Turkish-speaking leadership. Again, as his name is written only one way in Arabic, this distinction is not an issue for writings in Arabic, but only for those writing in a Roman alphabet.
Early life
Muhammad Ali was born in the town of Kavala to Albanian parents. According to the many French, English and other western journalists who interviewed him, and according to people who knew him, the only language he knew fluently was Albanian. He was also competent in Turkish. The son of a tobacco and shipping merchant named Ibrahim Agha, his mother Zainab Agha was his uncle Husain Agha's daughter. Muhammad Ali was the nephew of the "Ayan of Kavalla" (Çorbaci) Husain Agha. When his father died at a young age, Muhammad was taken and raised by his uncle with his cousins. As a reward for Muhammad Ali's hard working skills, his uncle Çorbaci gave him the rank of "Bolukbashi" for the collection of taxes in the town of Kavala. After his promising success in collecting taxes, he gained 2nd Commander rank under his cousin Sarechesme Halil Agha in the Kavala Volunteer Contingent that was sent to stop Napoleon's forces at Egypt. He married Ali Agha's daughter, Emine Nosratli, a wealthy widow of Ali Bey.
In 1801, the Albanian commander of the Ottoman army was sent to drive Napoleon's forces out of Egypt. He was second in command of an Albanian contingent sent against Bonaparte in Egypt, landing at Aboukir (the Spring of 1801). Depending on his Albanian force and other heterogeneous troops, his army invaded the Sudan.
Upon the French withdrawal, Muhammad Ali seized power himself and forced the Ottoman Sultan Selim III to recognize him as Wali, or Governor (Arabic: ????) of Egypt in 1805.
Muhammad Ali transformed Egypt into a regional power which he saw as the natural successor to the decaying Ottoman Empire. He summed up his vision for Egypt as follows:
"I am well aware that the (Ottoman) Empire is heading by the day toward destruction...On her ruins I will build a vast kingdom...up to the Euphrates and the Tigris."
At the height of his power, Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha's military strength did indeed threaten the very existence of the Ottoman Empire as he sought to supplant the Osman Dynasty with his own. Ultimately, the intervention of the Great Powers prevented Egyptian forces from marching on Constantinople, and henceforth, his dynasty's rule would be limited to Africa. Muhammad Ali had conquered Sudan in the first half of his reign and Egyptian control would be consolidated and expanded under his successors, most notably Ibrahim Pasha's son Ismai'l I.
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 2nd in command under his uncle's son Sarechesme Halil Agha, was sent by the Sublime Porte to eject the French. Muhammad Ali stepped in to fill the power 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 the Porte in 1805 as Wali of Egypt, owing fealty to the Ottoman Sultan.
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 emirs in 1811 to a feast to celebrate his son Tusun Pasha's appointment to lead the army being sent against the Wahhabi rebellion in Arabia. The Mamluk emirs were ambushed and killed by the Pasha's gunmen in the Cairo Citadel, where the feast was to be held, in what was known as the Massacre of the Citadel. The corpse of Siam Bey, one of the leading Mamluks, was dragged around Cairo as an example to anyone who posed a threat to the Governor's rule.
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 monopsony. 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.
Rebellion against the Sultan
Ali viewed 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 Gihadiya (pronounced Jihadiya in non-Egyptian Arabic). Ali's reign in Sudan and that of his successors is known in that country for its brutality and heavy-handedness which led to the popular independence struggle of Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of Sudan in 1881.
In 1824 the Ottoman Sultan requested aid from Muhammed Ali. There was a serious rebellion in the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Muhammed Ali sent his fleet and 17,000 troops under Command of his son, Ibrahim Pasha. Britain, France and Russia intervened to protect the Greeks. On October 20, 1827 at Navarino, 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 Muhammad Ali asked the Porte for the territory of Syria. The Ottomans were indifferent to the request; the Sultan himself asked blandly what would happen if Syria was given over and Muhammad Ali later deposed. Could he not then use Syria and then attack the suddenly unprotected Egypt? But Muhammad Ali was no 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 Bilad al-Sham (the Levant), both for its strategic value and for its rich natural resources; nor was this a sudden, vindictive 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 Sultan.
A new fleet was built, a new army was raised and on October 31, 1831, under Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali's eldest son, the Egyptian invasion of Syria initiated the First Turko-Egyptian War. 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 Pasha of Acre. The Wali alleged that 6,000 fellahin had fled to Acre to escape the draft, corvée, and taxes, and he wanted them back.
The Egyptians overran Syria easily with little resistance. Acre was captured after a six-month siege, which lasted from November 3, 1831 to May 27, 1832. The Egyptian army marched north into Anatolia. At the Battle of Konya (December 21, 1832), Ibrahim Pasha soundly defeated the Ottoman army led by the sadr azam Grand Vizier Reshid Pasha. There were now no military obstacles between Ibrahim's forces and Constantinople itself. Muhammad Ali's goal was now the removal of the current Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and replacing him with his son, 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 Convention of Kutahya.. 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 Sultan's forces. When Mahmud II ordered his forces to advance on the Syrian frontier, Ibrahim attacked and destroyed them at the Battle of Nezib (June 24, 1839) near Urfa. Echoing the Battle of Konya, Constantinople was again left vulnerable to Ali's forces. Mahmud II died almost immediately after the battle took place and was succeeded by sixteen-year-old Abdülmecid. At this point, Ali and Ibrahim began to argue about which course to follow; Ibrahim favored conquering the Ottoman capital 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 July 15, 1840, Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia signed the Convention of London, 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 (September 11, 1840), and after Acre had capitulated (November 3, 1840), Ali agreed to the terms of the Convention on November 27, 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 and Sudan — an unheard-of status for an Ottoman viceroy.
Final years
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.Whether it was genuine senility or the effects of the silver nitrate he had been given years before to treat an attack of dysentery remains a subject of debate.
In 1844 the tax receipts were in and Sherif Pasha, 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) out of a total estimated tax of 75,227,500 pts. Timidly he approached Ibrahim Pasha with these facts, and together came up with a report and a plan. Suspecting his father's initial reaction, Ibrahim 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 Ibrahim, 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] Ibrahim is old and sick, [my grandson] Abbas is indolent (happa), and then children will rule Egypt. How will they keep Egypt?"
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 Ibrahim, had no choice but to travel to Constantinople and request the Sultan recognize him ruler of Egypt and Sudan even though his father was still alive. However, on the ship returning home Ibrahim, 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 I.
By this time Muhammad 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 Pasha 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 obsequies 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 inhabitants 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.
Honours
See also
Footnotes
External links
- Islamic Architecture review (IAORG)
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