Mehmed Ali was illiterate until around age fifty and learned via reading aloud

Evidence

It is fairly certain that Mehmed Ali did not learn to read and write until he was aged about fifty; accordingly his letters were dictated to scribes and written down on the spot (a fact that explains the very spontaneous and immediate nature of many of them), and the books with which he was familiar and to which he often referred had been read to him. … 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…, 492

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

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