Egyptian drill manuals reduced soldiers to interchangeable functioning cogs.

Evidence

Training manuals, nevertheless, were the tools by which this goal was finally reached. By specifying the detailed manner in which the most basic acts were to be performed, these texts brought about a much stricter way of disciplining the soldiers. Through observing and controlling the most simple act (the glance) of the soldiers, and by manipulating their actions, breaking them down to their constituent units, and then ordering them to be executed according to the signals issued by the officers in the form of the command shouts, the body of the soldier was finally reduced to performing a function similar to that of a cog in a machine. The soldier ceased to be an individual, an integral human being and instead he came to occupy a unified slot, a standard position that did not, in fact, should not differ from that of any other soldier. All were soldiers in a row, numbers within a line, units that could be manipulated, moved around and articulated with each other. It was the spectacle that was aimed for, not the spectacle of the gallows, though, but the spectacle of order, regularity and intervals. The training manual, by fragmenting the soldiers and moving them around in the mobile space it created, was the most effective way of imposing discipline, exhibiting power and displaying order. The modern army became order, nizam, par excellence. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 743

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Explains the Arabic term nizam (order) as the defining principle of the modern Egyptian army.

Related

• Training manuals reduced the Egyptian soldier to a machinelike interchangeable component. (similarity 0.93)
• Training manuals reduced soldiers to interchangeable standardized cogs (similarity 0.88)
• Egyptian drill built complex maneuvers from tiny standardized unit movements (similarity 0.85)
• Egyptian infantry replaced individual valor with drill-based unitary action (similarity 0.84)
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• Egyptian soldiers obeyed battle commands because drill made signals meaningful amid chaos (similarity 0.81)
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• Egyptian army discipline combined drills, medicine, rations, and law (similarity 0.80)
• The Egyptian army’s disciplinary system made soldiers interchangeable across units. (similarity 0.80)
• The Egyptian army shifted from terror-based coercion to non-physical disciplinary methods (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian drill deliberately trained soldiers to obey commands without reflection (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian army discipline shifted from brutal force to abstract internalized controls (similarity 0.79)
• Egypt’s military regulations diverged systematically from their actual daily implementation. (similarity 0.79)