Friday prayers continued in the Sultan’s name at Mehmed Ali’s command

Evidence

After the fall of Acre the Pasha might have felt more confident and it appears that he was harboring more negative views toward the Sultan and his viziers. (In a letter to Ibrahim Pasha, he described them as people who had been “tyrannical and treacherous for five hundred years.”) Yet even then he was still writing to senior officials in Istanbul asking for the Sultan’s forgiveness, saying that he was approaching seventy years of age and did not want anything except to act as a “humble servant to the Faith and the [Ottoman] State.” Furthermore, after his armies had defeated the Ottomans in these successive battles and when the imams of various city mosques asked whose name should be mentioned in the Friday prayers, Mehmed Ali’s or Sultan Mahmud’s, they were answered that they should continue to use the Sultan’s name. This caused Ibrahim to be so distressed that he wrote a strongly worded letter to his father urging him to order the use of his name in the prayers and to start minting coins in his name. Finally, after the battle of Bilan on 29 July 1832 when the Vekayi-i Mɩsɩriyye, which acted as a government bulletin and which was aimed at Ottoman officials as much as at his own employees, started to drop its cautious, conciliatory tone and to become more candid and less apologetic, Ibrahim was thrilled. He wrote to his father saying, “Egypt’s independence has now become evident, and I am more pleased with mentioning this matter in the Vekayi-i Mɩsɩriyye explicitly and without hypocrisy (riyasɩz) than with the victories themselves.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 260