Village shaykhs resisted enforcing conscription despite escalating penalties up to hanging

Evidence

Controlling the absconders, however, proved to be more difficult than initially imagined. A large number of the village shaykhs connived with the peasants instead of handing them to the authorities, and in some cases the shaykhs were accepting bribes from the fugitives in order not to turn them in. Article 36 of Qānūn al-Filāḥa which was passed in early 1830 stipulated that any such shaykh, if found guilty, would receive 200 stripes of the whip (kurbāj). … In spite of all these regulations to curb the desertion of the peasants from their villages, the phenomenon continued and the village shaykhs on whom the responsibility of catching fugitives squarely rested proved unreliable. … Article 118 of al-Qānūn al-Muntakhab passed in February 1844 stipulated that the village shaykhs should search for the fugitives in their villages and instead of catching them themselves, as the earlier law had stipulated, they were now asked to report to the mudīr of the district. If four days had passed since the fugitive had left his village without being found, and if during that time the shaykh failed to report him, the shaykh would then be considered an accomplice of the fugitive, and in this case he would be hanged. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 473

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of how Egypt’s conscription apparatus depended on unreliable local intermediaries, echoing coercive labor/corvee systems worldwide.