Bilingual intermediaries mediated between Turkish-speaking officers and Arabic-speaking soldiers in Mehmed Ali’s army

Evidence

However, given the shorter period of time, one can still show how these two groups interacted with each other, not by highlighting the essential, legal and semantic differences between both groups, but by stressing the role played by intermediaries who occupied the crucial roles at the boundaries separating one group from the other. By concentrating on Mehmed Ali’s army what is offered below is an account of not only how its Turkish-speaking officers were ethnically, linguistically, legally and economically distinct from their Arabic-speaking soldiers, but also of how this essential conflictual relationship was often mediated by people occupying the uncomfortable positions separating the two groups. For Mehmed Ali’s army did not function only through the insightful command of its commanders or the heroic sacrifices of its soldiers; it also functioned with the help of hundreds of scribes and officials who manned the bureaucracy that supplied and fed it, through the efforts of the often bilingual non-commissioned officers who mediated between the officers and the men they commanded, of the hundreds of nurses who administered to the health of the sick and wounded and who translated the commands of their doctors to them, and finally of the numerous sentries who guarded the gates and fences of the barracks and camps to make sure that military discipline was enforced as intended by the senior officers. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to colonial-army intermediaries literature and to Fahmy’s broader argument about the birth of the modern Egyptian army; also parallels the reader’s interest in how the Egyptian army actually functioned internally.