The Sudan served simultaneously as Egypt’s penal exile and its soldiers’ promotion ground

Evidence

For many in Egypt before the Mahdïya, the Sudan had long been a remote place of exile, a natural prison for the disgraced. For Egyptian soldiers however, the Sudan often represented chances for promotion, rare enough in the military establishment run by Ottoman Egyptians during the reign of Khedive Ismaïl. After the defeat of the Uräbï rebellion, many Egyptian soldiers who had been loyal to the colonel defected from the Egyptian army and joined the growing forces of the Mahdï. But few embodied the contradiction between colonizer and colonized as much as Ibrahïm Fawzï Pasha. Soldier, trader, police chief, `Urabist, and the most famous Egyptian prisoner of the Mahdï, Ibrahïm Fawzï Pasha became a living monument to Egypt’s attempts at empire in the Sudan, at a time when such monuments had become all too fragile. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 500

Categorization

• XREF: Bears directly on the reader’s Egypt-versus-Sudan comparative interest: the same territory read as prison and as career opportunity by different Egyptian classes previews divergent Egyptian stakes in colonizing Sudan.