I.

Introduction

Muhammad Ali or Mehmet Ali, also Mehemet Ali (1769-1849), Ottoman pasha (or viceroy) of Egypt (1805-1849), who reformed the country and founded a dynasty that ruled it until the mid-20th century.

II.

Early Life

Muhammad Ali was born in Kaválla, a port at the northern end of the Aegean Sea in what is today the Macedonian province of north-eastern Greece, but at that time was a province of the Ottoman Empire. He was born into a Greek-speaking Muslim family, often then referred to as Albanian. Orphaned as a child, he was adopted by the governor of Kaválla. As a young man his tax-collecting abilities so impressed his adoptive father that the governor offered him one of his relatives in marriage and appointed him an officer in the town’s militia.

At this time the Ottoman Empire was in retreat in eastern Europe and had lost all territory north of the Danube by 1792. In 1798 French forces led by Napoleon I invaded Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1799 Britain joined with the Ottomans in a war to expel the French from Egypt. The governor of Kaválla sent a Macedonian regiment to the war zone under the command of his son, with Muhammad Ali as lieutenant. The son soon returned home, leaving Muhammad Ali in command of the regiment. He distinguished himself during the war and earned such rapid promotion that by the time of the French expulsion in 1801, Muhammad Ali was the most powerful Ottoman commander in Egypt.

III.

Winning Control of Egypt

In the power-vacuum that followed the French expulsion, Muhammad Ali seized the opportunity to carve himself out a personal dynasty. For most of the previous century the Ottoman pashalic (viceroyalty) of Egypt had been little more than nominal, with real power reverting to the old Mameluke landed aristocracy. Over the next four years Muhammad Ali manipulated the warring Mameluke factions, while appealing to the Egyptian religious establishment, and gradually brought all of Lower Egypt under his military control. The Ottoman Sultan Selim III recognized his de facto power by conferring on him the title Pasha of all Egypt in 1805. Muhammad Ali then asserted control over his former allies, the religious establishment, by subjecting them to taxation, from which they had previously been exempt. In 1807 he astounded the European powers by defeating a British army that had been sent to occupy Alexandria.

IV.

Massacre of the Mamelukes

In 1811 Muhammad Ali learned that the Mamelukes, who still remained largely in control of Upper Egypt, were planning a rebellion and were only awaiting his departure on a military expedition to Arabia. He invited the heads of the Mameluke families to Cairo where he had an estimated 470 of them massacred in the narrow entrance to the citadel. Follow-up operations in Upper Egypt wiped out the remaining Mamelukes as a force in Egypt.

V.

Modernizing Egypt and Founding a Dynasty

In Egyptian history Muhammad Ali is seen as “the founder of modern Egypt”. He abolished the old Mameluke tax-farming system and developed a modern, salaried civil service. The fellahin (peasants), who comprised 90 per cent of the Egyptian population, suffered particularly heavily at the hands of Muhammad Ali’s tax collectors. They were also conscripted into the army. He remodelled the Egyptian army along European lines, and launched a number of expansionist wars, including the invasion of Sudan (1820-1822), partly to secure a source of Sudanese slaves to man his growing army. In 1823 he founded Khartoum as his administrative capital in Sudan.

He is usually credited with the commercialization of Egyptian agriculture, although in this he was building upon earlier Ottoman tendencies. He seized for himself the estates of the Mamelukes and introduced a new land survey. Irrigation was expanded and more land brought under cultivation. Cotton was introduced from Sudan and became a major Egyptian cash crop. The fellahin were taxed in cotton and in wheat and these were exported to Europe as an important source of foreign exchange for the state.

In Ottoman and European history Muhammad Ali is best known for his wars beyond Africa. In 1811 he launched a war against the Wahhabis of Arabia, a war that was successfully concluded by his son, Ibrahim, in 1818. This reassertion of Ottoman control over the holy lands of Arabia re-established Cairo as a major centre of pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1824 the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II, called on Muhammad Ali for aid in the war against the Greek rebels (see Greek War of Independence). His successes in the ensuing campaigns prompted the sultan to award him the island of Crete. The European powers, Britain, France, and Russia, however, sought to curb this growing power in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1827 they destroyed the Egyptian fleet at Navarino off the western coast of Greece, thereby preventing Muhammad Ali from pressing his victory over the Greeks. In 1831 Muhammad Ali’s forces conquered Ottoman Syria, which extended his dominions to the Persian Gulf. In 1839 he clashed directly with the Ottoman Sultan, defeating the Turkish army, and was on the brink of taking control of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean when the European powers threatened to intervene. He was forced to back down, but won from the Sultan the right to make the pashalic of Egypt hereditary within his own family. Muhammad Ali died in Alexandria on August 2, 1849.