Mehmed Ali’s army depended on bilingual intermediaries bridging Turkish-speaking officers and Arabic-speaking soldiers

Evidence

For Mehmed Ali’s army did not function only through the insightful command of its commanders or the heroic sacrifices of its soldiers; it also functioned with the help of hundreds of scribes and officials who manned the bureaucracy that supplied and fed it, through the efforts of the often bilingual non-commissioned officers who mediated between the officers and the men they commanded, of the hundreds of nurses who administered to the health of the sick and wounded and who translated the commands of their doctors to them, and finally of the numerous sentries who guarded the gates and fences of the barracks and camps to make sure that military discipline was enforced as intended by the senior officers. These people occupying the uneasy position at the often negotiated barriers and frontiers had been neglected from most of the accounts of the Pasha’s army and his reign in general, and this book attempts a closer look at the important roles they played in greasing Mehmed Ali’s war machine. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 111

Categorization

• SEED: Could angle an essay on how every organization that straddles an ethnic/linguistic divide runs on ‘social lubricators’ — scribes, interpreters, NCOs — not just commanders.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in Ottoman-Egyptian military history or multilingual frontier bureaucracies.