Egyptian army conscription began with violent village seizures without medical or demographic screening

Evidence

In fulfilling their duties, the conscripting officers encountered problems that were much more serious than could be solved simply by appointing preachers to attract the minds of the fellahin to military service. In addition to lacking any detailed information about the population, the authorities also did not as yet have a reliable medical system to screen the conscripted. This is something that had to wait till 1830 after Clot Bey had managed to create the Abū Za‘bal medical school (later to be moved to Qaṣr al-‘Ainī) and to use its graduates to examine the conscripts. Moreover, unlike the recruiting officers of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, for example, the officers sent from Cairo to conscript the fellahin had no guidelines with regards to the age, marital status or number of brothers of the men they should conscript. Lacking this vital information, the conscripting officers, on receiving their orders, would descend upon any given village and seize as many men as could be found “without any order, arrangement, inscription, or lot-drawing.” These men would then be tied together with ropes around their necks in groups of six or eight. They would then be marched off to the training camps escorted by the “conscription gang.” leaving behind a “heart-stricken, sorrowful group” of wives, mothers and children wailing and screaming and hopelessly trying to prevent the soldiers from taking away their men. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 469

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to understanding the birth of the modern Egyptian army the reader explicitly asked about — raw conscription before Clot Bey’s 1830 medical system.