Ibrahim actively engineered his family’s historical reputation for posterity

Evidence

When he thought that the Ottomans were spreading rumors about him and his father in their Vekayi, he ordered a scribe to write down his version of events and to send it to Acre to be translated there into French so as to dispatch it to Europe. On receiving these orders, Vehid Efendi, Ibrahim Yeğen’s scribe, suggested that it might not be the right moment to do so considering that fighting was at its peak; Ibrahim answered angrily, “These matters will be written in history books, and a hundred years from now it will be said that Mehmed Ali did this and that. Is this not so, you animal?” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1318

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: A historical figure deliberately shaping how historians will write about him a century later is a vivid scene — the vanity of legacy-building written into an angry outburst at a scribe.