Mehemet Ali

Muhammad Ali Pasha ( Mehmet Ali (Kavalalı Mehmet Ali Paşa), are encountered) (c. 1769 - August 2 , 1849 ), was a Viceroy of Egypt , and is often cited as the founder of modern Egypt. Muhammad Ali was born in the town of Kavala , in the Ottoman Empire . After working for a time in his youth as a tobacco merchant, Muhammad Ali took a commission in the Ottoman army.

RISE TO POWER

In .

Muhammad Ali spent the first years of his rule fighting off attempts to unseat him, and extending his personal authority over the whole of the province of Egypt. In one of the most infamous episodes of his reign, Muhammad Ali definitively broke the power of the Mamluks by massacring their leaders. Having worn down the Mamluks for years with raids and skirmishes, in 1811 he invited their '' Amirs '' to a feast to celebrate his son Tusun Pasha 's appointment to lead the army being sent against the Wahhabi Rebellion in Arabia. As the procession of Mamluk princes made its way through a narrow Gated Alley in the Citadel , Muhammad Ali's men shut the gates, trapping all the Mamluks inside, and soldiers positioned in the buildings facing the alley opened fire from above. When the shooting ended, soldiers on the ground finished off any Mamluks still living with swords and axes. In the following days, he ordered his men to kill any other Mamluks they could catch, plunder their homes, and rape their women.

THE MODERN ARMY

Muhammad Ali recognized that the sort of military force from which he had arisen — expeditionary recruits assigned to units based on shared ethnic or regional identity — was not a reliable force in the long term. Moreover, Muhammad Ali knew from personal experience fighting the French in 1799 that there was a superior style of combat in the field. Close-order, well-drilled musketry combined with artillery and judicious cavalry support had proved devastating against less disciplined, more individuated forces such as the Mamluks. An additional advantage, Muhammad Ali knew, was that a modern army in the European guise could provide an alternative to raising entire military castes, such as the , Muhammad Ali began to conscript peasants from Upper Egypt to train in the Napoleonic fighting style under a French officer, Colonel Sèves ( Suleyman Pasha ). Muhammad Ali called his new troops the ''nizam jadid'' ( Arabic : نظام جديد) (literally, 'new system'). These troops performed very well in battle, putting down insurrections in various parts of Egypt, including one in the vicinity of their home districts. This was important: the ''nizami'' troops were demonstrably loyal to the viceroy, and not to their village affiliations, as most troops at the time were.

In 1827 , at the request of Sultan Mahmud II , Muhammad Ali sent his ''nizami'' troops against the Greeks in the Greek War Of Independence , under the command of Muhammad Ali's son, Ibrahim Pasha . He also raised a navy, at a huge cost, since all the ships had to be purchased abroad. This engagement led to a falling-out between Mahmud II and Muhammad Ali. Great Britain , France , and Russia had all taken the side of the Greek rebels, and an enormous fleet of their combined naval forces lay anchored in Navarino Bay , awaiting the Ottoman navy. Muhammad Ali recognized that his naval forces could not hope to defeat the combined European fleet, and he pleaded with the Sultan to recognize Greek independence and allow the Austrian Empire to mediate a negotiated peace. The Sultan, though, refused to consider giving up so much imperial territory, and insisted that the opposing fleet was just an empty bluffing tactic. Muhammad Ali reluctantly followed orders and sent his navy against the European fleet, and in the Battle Of Navarino on 20 October 1827 almost the whole of the Ottoman navy was destroyed in only a few hours of fighting. This marked the last time that Muhammad Ali undertook a major military engagement on behalf of the Sultan.

In the aftermath of the Greek War of Independence, Muhammad Ali had the chance to review the strengths and weaknesses of his troops in a major engagement. The land troops had performed well, but the campaign revealed that many of the Ottoman officers were inadequate to the job of commanding the new infantry forces in the field. Moreover, the ''nizam jadid'' did not yet extend to naval forces; the viceroy had had to rely on a far less disciplined navy during the campaign in Greece.

Muhammad Ali dealt with these issues programatically. To remedy the problem of officer training, he founded a Staff College and hired French officers to train Ottoman personnel in the newly requisite military science. Convinced of the efficacy of the ''nizam jadid'', he dissolved all his old regiments of Albanians and Mamluks, and set about building an entire army of ''nizami'' troops. To supply the men for the troops, he instituted Conscription of Egyptian peasants.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND MODERNIZATION

To keep up with the constant need for money that military reformation created, Muhammad Ali established Long-staple Cotton as a cash crop, and re-shaped Egyptian agricultural economy to orient toward cotton production. Since British textile manufacturers were willing to pay good money for such cotton, Muhammad Ali ordered the majority of Egyptian peasants to cultivate cotton to the exclusion of all other crops. At harvest time, Muhammad Ali bought the entire crop himself, which he then sold at a mark-up to textile manufacturers; by this means, he turned the whole of Egypt's cotton production into his personal Monopoly . He also experimented with textile factories that might process cotton into cloth within Egypt, but these did not prove very fruitful.

The needs of the military likewise fueled other modernization projects, such as state educational institutions, a 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

Like many rulers of Egypt before him, Muhammad Ali desired to control (then known as Candia ) and the Hijaz as compensation, and c) Ibrahim Pasha would be appointed ''wali'' of Syria.

In near Urfa . Echoing the Battle of Konya, Istanbul was again left vulnerable to Muhammad Ali's forces. What is more, Mahmud II died almost immediately after the battle took place, to be succeeded by his sixteen-year-old son, Abd-ul-Mejid . At this point, Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim began to argue which course to follow; Ibrahim favored conquering Istanbul and demanding the imperial seat, while Muhammad Ali was more inclined simply to demand numerous concessions of territory and political autonomy for himself and his family. While they argued, the Sultan and his advisors begged the Great Powers for help, and were rewarded with multilateral European intervention (including the British Navy blockading the Nile delta coastline). After the British landed in Syria and defeated Ibrahim's forces at Beirut , Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim were forced to give up Syria. In 1841 , a final treaty was signed "Treaty of London" , with a great deal of influence from Europe. The treaty dictated that a) Muhammad Ali would give up his territories in Crete and the Hijaz, b) he would give up his navy and limit the size of his standing army to 18,000 men, and c) he and his descendants would enjoy hereditary rule over the province of Egypt — an unheard-of status for an Ottoman viceroy. A paternal right of inheritance to leadership in Egypt had been taboo since the time of the early Mamluk sultans in the 1200s.

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Mehemet Ali