Egypt’s army in Mehmed Ali’s era was not a national force.

Evidence

In short, the composition of the officer corps in the Pasha’s army was problematic, to say the least, and both father and son were well aware of its precarious nature. The officers, rather than thinking of themselves as serving in a national army, were behaving as mercenary officers who moved from one patron to the other depending on who paid better. Joining the “Egyptian” army for them meant joining the force of an Ottoman pasha who had a better organized and better paid army than the Sultan. It was an army that was fighting the Ottoman Sultan, it is true, but that fight was not an example of a national struggle of a people against their foreign oppressor. It could even be said that, as far as these officers were concerned, the “other” was more the fellah soldiers that they were commanding than the Ottoman army they were fighting. It was not completely unusual, for example, to find two brothers fighting in the two opposing armies. Having previously served in the Sultan’s army, or at least being familiar with the world that it represented, the Ottoman world, the officers in the Pasha’s army were closer to the officers and soldiers of the army they were fighting against than to the soldiers of the army they were fighting in, soldiers who spoke a different language, came from a completely different social and economic background and believed in a different set of cultural and moral values. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1336

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to interest in comparative military history and understanding forces whose loyalty is patron-based rather than national — parallels other case studies of mercenary-led armies.