Early Egyptian military law lacked provisions for sodomy

Evidence

In 1824 Mehmed Bey, the colonel of one of the first six regiments of Mehmed Ali’s new army, wrote to the Pasha telling him he had a problem with those who committed sodomy: should he treat them as adulterers (and thus apply the punishment for adultery on them) or should he apply a different law? Mehmed Ali responded by saying that the colonel had to consult the military regulations and apply what they said. The problem was that by that time the military regulations and laws that had been translated and published in the Būlāq Press made no mention of sodomy or how to deal with it. What Mehmed Bey had at his disposal was either to apply the sharī‘a with its punishment of either death or ta‘zīr, i.e. chastisement, or the Old Ottoman Criminal Code which stipulated in its different versions either chastisement or castration. The shift from this kind of punishment in which the body of the sodomite was made to bear the sign of his transgression to another kind of punishment in which he was punished in a manner that was supposed to represent the idea of law, of transgression and “outlawedness” is expressed in the law regulating the Infantry School referred to above. Although homosexual offenses were dealt with in this law in a physical manner using the whip as the main kind of punishment, the law, nevertheless, by making distinctions between students, NCOs, officers and teachers gives the impression of the gradation of punishment, its predictability and its appropriateness to the crime being punished. This, as said above, was also brought about through the very form the law assumed, the table, helping to draw connections between crime and punishment. It was gradation and predictability, this connection between crime and punishment, that was aimed for and which the legal code was supposed to express and represent. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 730