Mehmed Ali rejected Napoleon’s army model in favor of Sultan Selim’s organization for Egypt

Evidence

In 1822 he commissioned Süleyman Ağa (Colonel Sèves), Osman Efendi Nureddin (whom he had earlier sent to France on an educational mission) and Ahmed Efendi Mühendis (who was translating military and naval books from French) to draw up a plan for the organization of the army; it was turned down because it was blindly copying the structure of Napoleon’s army. “Although the plan that Süleyman Ağa had put down is a wonderful one,” Mehmed Ali told his son, Ibrahim Pasha, “it has been implemented by Napoleon to lead an army composed of several thousand troops. Our army, however, is a new one which we have only recently begun creating.” Two weeks later he ordered his son to have a meeting with the same officials who had drafted the original plan and ordered them to draft a new organizational scheme for the army which he explicitly said should be along the lines of Sultan Selim’s army. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 428

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how the modern Egyptian army was born and which external models shaped it.