Arabic-speaking officers were barred from senior army ranks spoken in Turkish

Evidence

The Qānūn al-Dākhiliyya that was referred to in the last chapter to depict the duties and responsibilities of the soldiers and officers in each battalion appears on paper as an impressive, consistent and, hence, powerful text. It is printed in a neat and tidy manner, giving detailed instructions for each man in the battalion regarding his daily tasks, whom to report to, and how to punctuate his daily life with these numerous tasks. However, there were two different versions of this manual, one in Arabic and the other in Turkish. Both were supposed to be exact translations of an original French manual; a crucial difference, though, was that the Arabic version was considerably shorter than the Turkish one: whereas the Turkish version starts on page 1 with Article 1 dealing with the duties and responsibilities of the colonel of the regiment, the Arabic version starts on page 1 with Article 147 specifying the duties and responsibilities of the adjutant-major. The reason for the different versions is that, as will be shown in chapter 6, senior ranks in the army as well as in the civilian bureaucracy were reserved for members of the Egyptian–Ottoman elite who spoke Turkish as a sine qua non of membership in that elite. Hence, there was no need to print a complete version of the manual for Arabic-speaking officers since there could be no hope for them to be promoted to these higher ranks, and therefore no need to spell out the duties of these higher ranks in the copies of the manuals handed to them. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 955

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the social stratification within Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian army — Turkish-speaking elite vs. Arabic-speaking rank and file.