Mehmed Ali punished shaykhs who dodged conscription duties by drafting their own relatives

Evidence

When Mehmed Ali was informed of this he wrote an open decree (buyrultu) to forty-two governors warning them of the consequences of their acts. He swore by God and His Prophet that when discovered he was going to “aim at their souls with the arrows of subjugation” and would mercilessly kill them with his own hands. More cunningly, the shaykhs would sometimes meet government demands for men by conscripting peasants not from their own villages but from neighboring ones. Mehmed Ali ordered this practice to be stopped at once. Any conscript sent in this way would be asked from which village he was taken and which shaykh conscripted him and if this was discovered not to be his own shaykh, this latter would then have either his own son or one of his relatives taken for the army instead. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 480

Categorization

• CANDY: The poetic threat and the reciprocal punishment by drafting the shaykh’s own son is a vivid, shareable historical anecdote.