Mehmed Ali rejected Napoleon’s army structure as unsuitable for his new force.

Evidence

It is not known for certain if Mehmed Ali did see for himself the performance of these new troops of the Sultan, although it is unlikely that they would have gone unnoticed by him given the fact that he was in Egypt at the same time. In any case, when he was devising an organizational structure for his army Mehmed Ali clearly preferred the one put down by Sultan Selim to that of Napoleon. 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

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly distinguished Sultan Selim’s nizam-i cedid organization from Napoleon’s that Mehmed Ali found more apt for a small, new army?