Mohammed Ali Pasha
(1805 ? 1848)

Mohammed Ali was born in 1770 A.D to a middle class family in the city of Kavala, Macedonia, which was then ? as was Egypt ? part of the Ottoman Empire. Today, Kavala is located in northeastern Greece. In 1801, when Mohammed Ali was 31, he joined an irregular troop of Albanian soldiers that had been created by order of Sultan Selim III and dispatched to Egypt to assist in the eviction of the French.

After the evacuation of the French, Mohammed Ali managed to take control of the unstable political situation in Egypt, winning the admiration of the ulama, merchants and men of influence who called on him to become the Wali. They sent a message to the Ottoman sultan demanding he appoint Mohammed Ali the wali the sultan recognized their request and Mohammed Ali assumed power in 1805. He remained in power for nearly 43 years

With the aim of solidifying his control over the country, Mohammed Ali exerted strenuous efforts, most importantly against the British occupying force led by General Fraser who had come to Egypt in 1807 to aid Mohammed Ali's Mamluk enemies. The sultan sent Mohammed Ali a firman thanking him for his efforts against the British. Mohammed Ali's second move was to get rid of the Egyptian popular leaders, which he did by bringing some of closer to him while exiling others; in 1809, Umar Makram was exiled. Two years later, in 1811, he moved against the Mamluk Amirs in what became to be known as the Massacre of the Citadel.

After conditions slowly stabilized on the domestic front,Mohammed Ali decided to comply with an order from the sultan to send a military force to Arabia to fight the Wahhabis, who had challenged the authority of the Ottomans in Mecca and Medina.Mohammed Ali entrusted the command of the force to his son Tusun Pasha, who had then not yet passed the age of 17. Unsurprisingly, Tusun failed to deal successfully with Wahabbi threat, so Mohammed Ali called upon his elder son, Ibrahim Pasha, to help. Ibrahim succeeded in defeating the Wahhabis at the Battle of Al-Dir'iyyah in 1818.

Mohammed Ali then tured his mind to an invasion of the Sudan, and placed his third son, Ismail Pasha, in command of that campaign. The goal was to draft Sudanese men into a new army. Ismail managed to conquer most of northern Sudan, the old kingdom of Sinnar, and Kordofan, but he went to extremes in arresting its people, taking them as prisoners of war and sending many thousands as slaves to Egypt to be enrolled in the new army. A reaction set in and one of the Sudanese amirs plotted against him. Nimr Muhammed Nimr, the leader of the Ja?alyyin, hosted Ismail at shendi in 1822, then burnt the place down, thus, bringing Ismail's life to an end. His death meant that Muhammed Bey Al-Daftardar, the son-in-law of Mohammed Ali, was left in charge, and he consolidated Egyptian control over the sudan. The period of Egytpian control of the Sudan during this period is richly recorded in the documents of the National Archives.

After this campaign, Mohammed Ali focused on his project to build up the army. The Sudan campaign allowed him to enlist almost twenty thousand Sudanese into his new military force. He divided the soldiers into six military units, and upon completion of their training in 1824, he distributed them among six regions. He sent the first unit to Sudan, the second to Hijaz and the remaining four to Greece. But soon Mohammed Ali found the number of soldiers to be insufficient for his plans; he had hoped to enlist more than one hundred thousand men. Since he was unable to persuade any more Sudanese men to join his force, he turned to mobilizing Egyptians; this was the first time in hundreds of years that Egyptians were mobilized in an army. With his new army, Mohammed Ali was able to help the Sultan Mahmoud II suppress the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule. Alarmed by his power, Britain, France and Russia united their naval fleets and inflicted A heavy defeat on the Egyptian fleet in Navarino Bay in October 1827.

Mohammed Ali nevertherless proceeded to rebuild his fleet and entered into a new stage of conflict with the Ottoman state over control of the Levant. The newly established and trained Egyptian army achieved great victories over the Turks in the battles of Konya (1832) and then Nezib (1839) but, the intervention of the European countries to assist the sultan forced Mohammed Ali to agree to the terms of the London Convention in 1840 and to the Settlement of 1841. In return for evacuating the levant and downsizing his army, the treaty confirmed Mohammed Ali as Wali of Egypt for what remained of his life and his descendants as hereditary rulers after him.

Mohammed Ali took great interest in establishing military schools for TRAINING HIS various army battalions and units. He SET UP established the Navy School, School of Medicine and School of Engineering (Al-Handaskhana). AT THE URGING OF Moreover, Rifa'ah At-Tahtawi managed to convince MOHAMMED Ali to establish ESTABLISHED Al-Alsun School; Ali, doing so, appointed WITH At-Tahtawi as principal. of the school after Previously AT-TAHTAWI HAD SERVED having appointed him as a translator at the School of Medicine .

During his period of rule, Mohammed Ali also focused on industry, be it the military industry (such as the manufacturing of rifles, cannon and ships) or the civil industry (such as cotton ginning (for an Arabic translation click here) and weaving as well as manufacturing ropes, textiles and fezzes (for an Arabic translation click here). Mohammed Ali also took an interest in knowing the size of the workforce, as he hoped to employ the available workforce to its fullest capacity. Consequently, he ordered the first country household census in 1845 which was completed during the years 1847-48. The census was never published but the NAE holds the original manuscript registers.

Did the attempt to draft Sudanese men fail and what were the logical reasons for its failure?
Was Mohammed Ali?s interest in establishing schools to educate the people or to have ready employees, engineers and doctors for his army?