Egyptian army conscription made soldiers’ bodies objects of scientific study and control

Evidence

What we are witnessing here is more than simply an attempt to maintain a healthy sanitary environment; this is the first manifestation of a new kind of power that exhibited itself on the body of the conscript, not in the spectacular way of his being beaten in front of his battalion, but in a more subtle, diffuse and cynical way. This is what Foucault calls “disciplinary power,” disciplinary not only because it attempts to manage the body (of the citizen and the conscript alike), but also in the sense that it created disciplines, discourses, that took the body of the individual to be its primary concern, e.g. medicine, psychology, criminology, etc. Out of the need to train the new conscripts and to subject them to the new techniques of discipline as will be shown below, the body of the conscript became the object, not only of manipulation, surveillance and control, but also of analysis and study. In order to have a healthy body of troops capable of bearing arms and of performing the taxing tasks set out in the training drills, let alone in battle, Clot Bey, as chief physician of the army had to give specific instructions based on “scientific” data on the amount and quality of food the soldiers should be fed, the distance they could reasonably be expected to march every day and the kind of clothing that had to be handed to them to protect them from the hot sun of the summer as well as the cold winter. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 728

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Foucault’s ‘disciplinary power’ against the earlier spectacular/beating model of power.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the broader literature on the birth of the modern army and bio-power, relevant to the reader’s interest in the modern Egyptian army’s origins.