A History of the Middle East (9 page)

The Napoleonic episode had minimal direct effect on Egypt; but, through the defeat of the Mamluke beys and the weakening of their hold on the country, it had important indirect influence. When the French departed, the beys came out of hiding and attempted to reimpose their authority. At the same time, Sultan Selim III tried to oust them and restore direct control from Istanbul. But he failed, as the British who still occupied Alexandria took the side of the beys. When the British departed in 1803, they left a situation in which neither the Turkish governor nor the beys were strong enough to prevail, and two years of chaos and civil war ensued. The situation worsened when the Albanian Ottoman troops rebelled against the governor, and power shuttled between the sultan’s representatives, the uncontrollable soldiery and the beys (who were split into two factions).

In the midst of this anarchy Muhammad Ali, the commander of one of the Albanian contingents which had landed with the Anglo-Ottoman expeditionary force in 1801, came to prominence as an ally of some of the Mamluke leaders against the nominal Ottoman governors. On 13 May 1805 the
ulama
(Muslim scholars), leading merchants and other notables who were regarded by the people of Cairo as their spokesmen and representatives, asked Muhammad Ali to be their ruler.

Understandably, Sultan Selim was suspicious of Muhammad Ali’s intentions. There is little doubt that he helped to intensify the anarchy which led the Egyptians to appeal to him as their saviour. In an attempt to remove him from Egypt, the sultan had appointed him
wali
(governor-general) of Jeddah in Arabia. The Cairo notables, with the backing of the people, united to declare that they wanted Muhammad Ali to replace Khurshid Pasha, the existing Ottoman
governor. After a few more months of chaos, Sultan Selim bowed to reality and confirmed Muhammad Ali as
wali
of Egypt.

In this way one of the remarkable figures of the nineteenth century came to control Egypt. His dynasty was to rule, either in reality or nominally, for a century and a half, until his great-great-grandson Farouk was ousted from the throne in 1952.

Born on the Aegean coast of Macedonia, Muhammad Ali was the rare combination of a soldier and a political leader of genius. Although almost illiterate, he was no narrow-minded bigot. Having worked as a tobacco merchant in his youth, he was accustomed to dealing with non-Muslims and Europeans. His sharp intelligence was quick in absorbing new facts and analysing their importance. Ruthless, fiercely ambitious and capable of harsh cruelty, he could also charm, and foreign visitors, however exalted, would quail at his piercing gaze before remaining to admire.

Muhammad Ali did not regard himself as an Egyptian or an Arab and he never spoke Arabic. But in 1805 he had already decided to make Egypt the basis of his power, and to do this he had to turn the Ottoman province into the nation-state which in a sense it had been in the time of the Pharaohs. Having done this, he came close to overthrowing the Ottoman Empire itself.

His appointment as
wali
did not give him control of Egypt; the Mamluke beys still dominated the countryside outside Cairo, and Britain continued to intervene on their behalf. With a mixture of cunning and ruthlessness he set about the destruction of the Mamlukes; but first he had to deal with the British threat. In this he was helped by the fact that, while Britain and Russia were competing to force Selim into an alliance against France, the sultan had reconciled himself with Bonaparte. Selim still admired the heirs of the French Revolution, and French officers continued to train his artillery. No doubt he was also impressed by Bonaparte’s new victories over Austria. He recognized him as emperor of the French. Outraged, Britain and Russia stepped up their bullying pressure. In 1807 a British fleet under Admiral Duckworth sailed into the Sea of Marmara to demand the surrender of the Ottoman
fleet, failing which, he said, he would burn the fleet and bombard Istanbul. With the help of Sebastiani, a French soldier/ambassador, the sultan organized his capital’s defences and drove the British fleet away. Duckworth then sailed to Alexandria and landed an expeditionary force to forestall an expected new French offensive in the Mediterranean.

However, the British were rebuffed. Al-Jabarti records that Muhammad Ali’s officials told them that they had no interest in letting them land to protect Egypt from the French, for this was the sultan’s territory. The Mamlukes refused the British offer of support because they would not join Christians to fight Muslims. Popular resistance was aroused and inflicted a sharp defeat on the British at Rosetta. Muhammad Ali astutely avoided a full confrontation with the British at Alexandria and agreed on lenient terms for the withdrawal of their naval and military forces. He retained a permanent suspicion of British intentions towards Egypt, and ultimately Britain would be his nemesis – but that was many years in the future.

Muhammad Ali still had to face the Mamluke challenge to his rule, and his campaign against the beys lasted several years. It was no simple matter as, despite their unpopularity, they were entrenched in Egyptian society and his own Ottoman troops were unruly and demanding. He persuaded some Mamluke beys to settle on the outskirts of Cairo, where he could supervise them. Some remained in Upper Egypt, which they tried to make their stronghold. Muhammad Ali then defeated them in a series of small engagements. There remained a rump of beys in Cairo of whose loyalty he was justifiably uncertain. On 11 March 1811 he invited them to a reception at the Citadel, where he had them massacred. Tradition has it that only one escaped – by leaping with his horse from the Citadel.

The way was now open for Muhammad Ali to realize his dream of turning Egypt into a powerful centralized state which, while nominally an Ottoman province, would in reality be independent. Several factors were favourable to his aims. Although the Egyptian people had become accustomed to instability after more than two centuries during which the Mamlukes had struggled for power both
among themselves and with a series of Ottoman governors, they longed for the security on which the country’s prosperity depended. Although the
ulama
and other notables had played an important role in bringing Muhammad Ali to power, few of them had any relish for official responsibility. Moreover, Egypt – ‘the gift of the Nile’, as Herodotus observed – lends itself to centralized rule: anyone who could control the river and its delta would dominate the country. All the aspiring despot needed was to dispose of his rivals.

Muhammad Ali made liberal use of the sword and the gallows to stamp out the lawlessness which had plagued the country for many decades. The natural commercial and agricultural wealth of the country was then at once displayed. He set up a highly centralized administrative bureaucracy with the aim of raising revenues and combating the corruption and tax-fraud which had become endemic. At the same time he tried both to modernize and to expand the economy. The growing of high-quality long-staple cotton and sugar was introduced during his reign. He was prepared to seek advice and technical expertise from any quarter, including Christian merchants in Egypt and Europeans. As an admirer of France he invited French engineers to Egypt and with their help built dams and canals and introduced in the Delta a system of perennial irrigation to replace the ancient basin irrigation using the Nile flood. One million new acres of land were brought under cultivation. Hitherto, Egyptian industry had been confined to the manufacture of textiles; he now established a range of factories, protected with heavy tariffs against imports. The factories were crude and primitive, but they were the first of their kind in Egypt.

Muhammad Ali learned to read only at the age of forty-seven, but he understood the importance of education. He sent several hundred young Egyptians to Paris (and a few to London) to study industry, engineering, medicine and agriculture. In Egypt, where teaching until then had been confined to the Koranic schools, his French advisers helped to establish a system of state education which at least on paper was highly impressive. French doctors helped to found hospitals and a rudimentary system of public health.

His ambitions went far beyond turning Egypt into the most advanced province of the Ottoman Empire in European terms. For Egypt to act beyond its borders required the creation of an independent army and navy, and the major part of his energies were devoted to this end. His concentrated drive to increase revenues served this purpose. One of his first actions had been to order a much needed cadastral survey of all land in Egypt, and within a few years he had settled about two million acres or one-third of the cultivated area on a small class of big landowners drawn from members of his family (he had thirty children), senior army officers, village shaikhs and beduin chiefs. But the greater part of the increased revenues accrued to the central government, so it has been said that he converted most of Egypt into a huge farm under the direct administration of the government.

The new industries that he created were also directed mainly to providing the land and naval forces with weapons and equipment, although they also turned out non-military goods such as machine tools, pumps, clothing, paper and glass.

The Egyptian
fellahin
or peasants had never been thought of as promising military material, but properly trained and led they proved that they could fight with discipline and courage. They were at their best in defensive positions; they lacked the panache in attack of the Sudanese. On the other hand, unlike the Sudanese, their health stood up remarkably well to campaigns in colder climates. Virtually all the officers and non-commissioned officers were non-Egyptian. Some of the Mamluke officers came over to Muhammad Ali’s side but, when the Ottoman sultan banned all further export of Mamluke recruits to Egypt, other officers were recruited from among local Turks and Albanians. After 1820 Muhammad Ali reorganized the armed forces entirely with a
nizam al-jadid
or ‘New Order’. His eldest son, Ibrahim (1789–1848), proved to be an outstanding general and leader of men. At its height in the 1830s, the Egyptian army amounted to a quarter of a million men and was the most formidable force in the Middle East.

In consolidating his personal power and the independence of
Egypt, Muhammad Ali was helped by a weakening in authority at the centre of the empire. In 1807 the Janissaries, in rebellion against the reforms and European innovations introduced by the New Order of Selim III, deposed the sultan and replaced him with his cousin Mustafa, who promptly abolished all the reforms. Fourteen months later Mustafa was assassinated, and his brother – the last surviving male of the House of Osman – succeeded as Mahmud II. He was a reformer like Selim, and ultimately he went much further than Selim in his long reign of thirty-one years, but in the first decade he had to proceed cautiously in order to consolidate his own power. It was not until 1826 that he was able to confront the problem of the Janissaries and destroy them in a massacre.

During this period Muhammad Ali was able not only to resist interference from Istanbul but also to make the new sultan dependent on him for holding the empire together. In 1807 he was asked to send an expeditionary force to the Hejaz to recover the holy places of Islam from the Saudi/Wahhabi invaders. He succeeded in procrastinating for four years while he was consolidating his hold on Egypt, but in 1811 he dispatched his second son, Tussun, with an army. Tussun was an indifferent general; he recovered Mecca and Medina but suffered heavy casualties and more than one defeat at the hands of the Wahhabi warriors. The indisciplined behaviour of the Albanian officers no doubt helped Muhammad Ali to decide on the subsequent remodelling of his armed forces. He went personally to the Hejaz to share the command with Tussun, and on his return to Cairo to deal with pressing domestic problems he replaced Tussun with the much more able Ibrahim as commander-in-chief.

Making full use of his cavalry and artillery, Ibrahim carried the campaign against the Saudis into their Nejd homeland. In May 1818 the Saudi capital Daraiyya (twelve miles from Riyadh) fell after a six-month siege in which the Turco-Egyptian army suffered heavy losses. Abdullah Ibn Saud, the Saudi ruler, was sent to Egypt where he was treated with honour and then to Istanbul where he was summarily executed. The first Saudi state had come to an end. However, the Egyptian garrisons remained only a few years in Nejd.
In 1824 the Saudis established their second state with their new capital in Riyadh and successfully resisted further attempts to conquer them. However, Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim had their prize in the Hejaz. This enabled them not only to reopen the sea-routes from Egypt to the Indian Ocean but also to monopolize the entire Red Sea trade. The
wali
even exacted an annual tribute from the imam of Yemen. He brushed aside a British proposal for Anglo-Egyptian co-operation in pacifying southern Arabia to protect the sea-routes to India against attacks by local tribesmen; instead he sent his own ships to occupy all the western Arabian seaports as far as Aden. Britain was obliged to concentrate on the Gulf region, where in 1820 it succeeded in concluding a General Treaty of Maritime Peace in perpetuity with the small shaikhdoms of the Trucial Coast (the United Arab Emirates of today). The British did not occupy Aden and found a colony there until 1839.

Sultan Mahmud was duly grateful to Ibrahim for the recovery of the Islamic Holy Land and promoted him to the rank of pasha with three tails as well as governor. This in theory made him superior in rank to his father, and it is probable that the sultan – by now alarmed at Muhammad Ali’s ambitions – hoped to estrange him from his son. But Ibrahim remained loyal and continued to defer to his father throughout his life.

Sultan Mahmud sharply rebuffed Muhammad Ali’s suggestion that he should be given the permanent governorship of Syria, but the
wali
of Egypt was not yet ready for a direct challenge to Istanbul.

The vast lands lying to the south of Egypt, known to medieval Arab writers as Bilad as-Sudan or the ‘country of the blacks’, provided a different opportunity. Islam and the Arabic language had advanced more slowly than in the Middle East and North Africa, but by
AD
1500 the great majority of the inhabitants of the north and centre of today’s republic of Sudan were Muslim and Arabic-speaking. For the past three centuries these lands had been dominated by the kingdom of the Fur – a people of uncertain origins – but there had been frequent incursions by Mamlukes from Egypt in search of slaves and gold. A group of them in flight from Muhammad
Ali’s repression had set up their own state in Dongola, on the west bank of the Nile, and were interfering with the river trade.