Mehmed Ali’s conscripted soldiers resisted his modernizing project

Evidence

It argues that it is true that the Pasha and his authorities managed to capture the bodies of tens of thousands of Egyptian men and that it is correct that they succeeded in training them and in aggregating their efforts to form a modern, disciplined army. As a result, the Pasha was capable in his old age of achieving what he had always aspired to, namely, to secure for himself and for his children after his death rule over the rich lands of Egypt, and for the hundred years after his death Egypt was, indeed, ruled by his descendants. Yet the soldiers, by resisting him and his authorities and by undermining his impressive, powerful structure, proved that they were not part of this project, that they were implicated in it against their will, and that they attempted to resist it by all means possible and imaginable. Only if one uncritically believes nationalist accounts of the Pasha and his military machine, could one accept that these soldiers were indeed all the Pasha’s men. I have no doubt, however, that he was not their man. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1702

Categorization

• SEED: Angles for an essay or piece challenging the top-down modernization narrative: the conscripts’ quiet resistance as the real story of the Egyptian army’s founding.