Village headmen were whipped and fined fifty piasters per deserter harbored

Evidence

Having succeeded in escaping from their units, where did these men go? One obvious place was to go back to their villages. After the registers had been checked and the villages of these deserters identified, however, an order would be issued to the governor of the province in which these villages lay. The order would give the names and descriptions of the deserters; the shaykh of the village would be fined fifty piasters for every deserter found in his village as well as receiving 100 stripes of the whip. Spies (baṣṣāṣṣīn) were also sent roaming the countryside searching for deserters. Otherwise, deserters left for Cairo in the hope that they would not be be found since it was supposedly more difficult to spot strangers there. To curb this practice, the Director of the War Department would write orders to quarter and street shaykhs to keep an eye open for all deserters who might have found refuge in the city. This was also one of the important functions of the Cairo Police (Zabtiyyat Miṣr). — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1346

Categorization

• XREF: The regime’s collective punishment of village headmen echoes the fiscal accountability systems described elsewhere in the book and matches reader’s knowledge of Ottoman/Egyptian coercive administration.