Muhammad Ali Pasha

One person among the many who have lead Egypt through its 5000 hears of history is Muhammad Ali Pasha. An unusual visionary who new how to use the talent and advice of his advisors, his leadership expanded Egypt’s influence and its agricultural technology into the surrounding countries. The Founder of Modern Egypt Muhammad Ali Pasha (Arabic: اشاب يلع دمحم ) or Mehmet Ali Paşa (Kavalalı Mehmet Ali Pasha in Turkish) (c. 1769 – August 2, 1848), was a viceroy of Egypt and is often cited as the founder of modern Egypt. Muhammad Ali was born in the town of Kavala (in present day Greece) in an Albanian family. After working for a time in his youth as a tobacco merchant, Muhammad Ali took a commission in the Ottoman army. Ali spent the first years of his rule fighting off attempts to unseat him and extended his personal authority over all of Egypt. In one of the most infamous episodes of his reign, Ali definitively broke the power of the Mamluks by massacring their leaders. Having worn down the Mamluks for years with raids and skirmishes, he invited their amis in 1811 to a feast to celebrate his son Tosu Paşa’s appointment to lead the army being sent against the Wahhabi rebellion in Arabia. As the procession of Mamluk princes made its way through a narrow gated alley in the Citadel, Ali’s men shut the gates, trapping all the Mamluks and his rival Kadeem, as the soldiers positioned in the buildings facing the alley opened fire from above. When the shooting ended, soldiers on the ground finished off any Mamluks still living with swords and axes. In the following days, he ordered his men to kill any other Mamluks they could catch. Industrialization and modernization The reign of Muhammad Ali and his successors over Egypt was a period of rapid reform and modernization that led to Egypt becoming one of the most developed states outside of Europe. It also led to massive government expenditures, that ended up bankrupting Egypt and eventually led to it 65 falling under control of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Muhammad Ali executed one of the greatest land grabes in history. He confiscated the feudal farms of the Mameluk grandees and stripped Cairo’s religious institutions of their 600,000 prime acres of landholdings. Thus decapitating Cairo’s medieval order and Egypt was now the viceroy’s private plantation. With the help of the French, Muhammed Ali set about making changes. He ordered wide-scale planting of a new strain of cotton, which was to be the cash crop that would finance the economic revival. Since British textile manufacturers were willing to pay good money for such cotton, Ali ordered the majority of Egyptian peasants to cultivate cotton at the exclusion of all other crops. At harvest time, Ali bought the entire crop himself, which he then sold at a mark-up to textile manufacturers. In this way, he turned the whole of Egypt’s cotton production into his personal monopoly. He also experimented with textile factories that might process cotton into cloth within Egypt, but these did not prove very successful. He created state monopolies over the chief products of the country. He set up a number of factories and began digging in 1819 a new canal to Alexandria, called the Mahmudiya (after the reigning sultan of Turkey). The old canal had long fallen into decay, and the necessity of a safe channel between Alexandria and the Nile was much felt. The conclusion in 1838 of a commercial treaty with Turkey, negotiated by Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Darling), struck a deathblow to the system of monopolies, though the application of the treaty to Egypt was delayed for some years. Efforts were made to promote education and the study of medicine. To European merchants, on whom he was dependent for the sale of his exports, Muhammad Ali 66 showed much favor, and under his influence the port of Alexandria again rose into importance. It was also under Mehemet Ali’s encouragement that the overland transit of goods from Europe to India via Egypt was resumed. The needs of the military likewise fueled other modernization projects, such as state educational institutions, a teaching hospital, roads and canals, factories to turn out uniforms and munitions, and a shipbuilding foundry at Alexandria, although all the wood for ships had to be imported from abroad. In the same way that he conscripted peasants to serve in the army, he frequently drafted peasants into labor corvées for his factories and industrial projects. The peasantry objected to these conscriptions and many ran away from their villages to avoid being taken, sometimes fleeing as far away as Syria. A number of them maimed themselves so as to be unsuitable for combat: common ways of self-maiming were blinding an eye with rat poison and cutting off a finger of the right hand, which usually worked the firing mechanism of a rifle. He died in August 2, 1849. He had done a great work in Egypt; the most permanent being the weakening of the tie binding the country to Turkey, the starting of the great cotton industry, the recognition of the advantages of European science, and the conquest of the Sudan.