Mehmed Ali used bodily spectacle to enact his juridical power over subjects.

Evidence

In other words, what informed the logic of the public punishment and its spectacle was not only the need to terrify the spectators into submission, nor the need to bring about an association of crime and punishment but also to remind them of the gulf that separates the vulnerable, expendable body of the culprit from the sanctified, central corpus of the Sovereign. This is why Foucault said that one should see public, spectacular punishments as making up one side of the equation of rituals of power; the other is made up of rituals in which the Sovereign spectacularly portrays his body in its magnificent glory in front of his subjects, e.g. coronations, submission of rebellious subjects, entering conquered cities, etc. Mehmed Ali was aware of the power that these rituals had and, as was shown in the manner he received European visitors, he used his own body as the focal point of these rituals to express the juridical aspect of his political power. That his body was the law and hence was central and essential for the maintenance of order in the realm, and, in contrast, that the body of the criminal was to be used to remind people not only of its redundancy and its expendability, but also of the central importance of Mehmed Ali’s body, is what lies behind a lot of the spectacular punishments that were carried out in the streets and squares of Cairo. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 676

Categorization

• XREF: This recapitulates Foucault’s sovereign-body analysis of punishment, which underpins the claimed purpose of the reader’s own death rituals material.
• DEFINE: Offers a twofold equation of power rituals: spectacular punishment of the criminal’s body versus spectacular display of the sovereign’s body.