Egyptian conscripts remained emotionally autonomous despite drill

Evidence

As tightly as the authorities wanted to control the activities of the soldiers, reality spoke differently. The training manual might have portrayed the soldier as a robot with every gesture, every glance meticulously controlled and vigilantly manipulated. Judging from the accounts of the battles, however, it appears that soldiers were full of the all-too-human emotions of love, hate, jealousy, pride and fear of death. And reading the accounts of their daily lives on the camps, it does appear that the authorities failed in capturing their bodies, let alone in imprinting on their minds that this was indeed their army. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1183

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Contrasts with the standard total-institution reading of conscript armies elsewhere; connects to debates about discipline and subject formation.

Related

• Conscripted Egyptian soldiers saw the army as hated brutal coercion (similarity 0.82)
• Conscription aimed to drastically reshape the peasant soldier’s body and daily habits (similarity 0.82)
• Mehmed Ali’s army failed to command its soldiers’ inner loyalties (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian army conscription made soldiers’ bodies objects of scientific study and control (similarity 0.82)
• Conscripts experienced military discipline’s physical intrusion more than its conceptual control (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian peasant conscripts hated the army so much they deserted and maimed themselves. (similarity 0.81)
• Military drill and surveillance failed to overwrite Egyptian soldiers’ civilian loyalties and thinking. (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt’s army conscription manifested a new disciplinary power over bodies (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian infantry replaced individual valor with drill-based unitary action (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian conscripts resisted the Pasha’s army through desertion and self-mutilation (similarity 0.80)
• The Egyptian army replaced spectacular punishment with rehabilitative discipline (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian soldiers obeyed orders because desertion and retreat both meant court martial (similarity 0.80)
• The conscript army founded Egyptian nationalism through surveillance and control, not enlightenment. (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian conscripts saw their own officers as the enemy rather than the Ottomans (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian army discipline adopted Foucault’s disciplinary power over retribution (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Egyptian conscripts experienced the army as a hated, lifelong ordeal #qualifies (0.65) — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1394
• Egyptian army discipline shifted from brutal force to abstract internalized controls #complicates (0.50) — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 704