Mehmed Ali punished civilians harshly to deter dissent

Evidence

In Mehmed Ali’s Egypt the different orders of the Pasha and the various laws that were issued during his reign also reveal that punishment, when applied in the civilian sector, was often characterized by an excessive, and probably unwarranted, use of force. Qānūn al-Filāḥa, for example, which was passed to deal with offenses relating mostly to damages to public property, land cultivation and the conduct of public employees, stipulated in twenty-six of its fifty-five articles the use of the kurbāj, the whip. As in military punishments the idea seems to have been to inflict pain on the body of the culprit as well as to humiliate him in public. More importantly, physical punishment was also used as a deterrent to others to show in a clear, unambiguous way the fate awaiting those who dared to transgress the boundaries of the permissible. The European consuls in Cairo and Alexandria were fond of recording such cases of public punishments. In one incident, for example, when the protracted siege of Acre caused disquiet in Cairo and rumors started spreading among the civilian population, Mehmed Ali ordered three people to be beheaded and their bodies to be hanged on one of the old gates of Cairo with labels on their breasts reading “This is the fate which awaits those who cannot govern their tongues.” During the Syrian uprising against Mehmed Ali’s rule in 1834 a man was hanged and left hanging for a long time for spreading rumors. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 672

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s article on sacrifice and ritual violence, and to later Foucault material in this chapter.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the author’s sacrifice piece: public punitive spectacle as a technology of rule in a stratified society.

Related

• Mehmed Ali executed civilians for spreading unruly rumors (similarity 0.85)