Peasants and conscripts mutilated themselves or broke laws to evade military service.

Evidence

In addition to the above-mentioned cases those who were sent to the Liman of Alexandria included robbers and highwaymen, those peasants who dared to uproot their cotton fields and plant them with maize instead, those who engaged in counterfeiting coins, merchants who sold rat poison (which was banned because conscripts were using it to blind themselves to evade conscription), soldiers who maimed themselves to evade military service, and those who were accomplices in murder cases. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal of understanding conscription-based army origins: evasion tactics like self-blinding and self-maiming are strong evidence of conscription resistance that connects to earlier chapters on the nizam al-jadid’s labor demands.