Mehmed Ali rejected Machiavelli’s Prince as having nothing to teach him.

Evidence

Mehmed Ali was also interested in Machiavelli, although he did not give the final approval for publishing an already finished MS of The Prince since, as he said, “it had nothing to teach us”; see Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl, Tārīkh al-Tarjama wa’l-Ḥaraka al-Thaqāfiyya fī ‘Aṣr Muḥammad ‘Alī [History of Translation and the Cultural Movement During the Reign of Mehmed Ali] (Cairo, n. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 496

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s interest in how Mehmed Ali justified his expansion; the claim that a manual of statecraft had nothing to teach him signals his self-conception as already a master practitioner.