Muhammad Ali, Pasha (c.1769-1849), ruler in Egypt 1805-48. Originally from Macedonia, he became nominally governor of Egypt for the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul but in practice an autonomous ruler, styling himself khedive, and founded a hereditary line which was to endure until 1952. He embarked on an independent, expansionist policy, humbling the Wahhabis of Arabia, aiding the sultan against the Greek rebels, occupying Syria and the Levant for ten years, and moving southwards into the Sudan. Such ambitions required a modern army. He first formed an army of Sudanese slave soldiers and then one of conscripted Egyptian peasants trained by Col Sèves, an ex-Napoleonic army officer, and training schools for the navy and the army, plus their technical arms, were established on European lines. Agricultural reforms, heavier taxation, and pioneer industrial enterprises, including munitions factories, supplied the material backing. Student missions were sent to western Europe. Not all his enterprises endured, but Muhammad Ali ranks as a pioneer westernizer and centralizer in the Near East and his policies brought Egypt into the spheres of international diplomacy and markets.
Bibliography
- Dodwell, Henry, The Founder of Modern Egypt: A Study of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge, 1931).
- al-Sayyid Marsot, Affaf Lutfi, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge, 1984)
— C. E. Bosworth
