All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt.

• Author: ENER, MINE
• Position: Review

All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. By KHALED FAHMY. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIV. PRESS, 1997. Pp. xvii + 334.

All the Pasha's Men is one of the few scholarly texts that succeed in gracefully weaving together a close reading with an analysis of diplomatic, political, and social history. Using as his vantage point Egypt's conscripted peasant army, Fahmy's study works on a number of levels: he engages previous scholarship that has posited Muhammed Ali as the founder of modem Egypt and identified his army as being a prime vehicle through which nationalist sentiment was disseminated and experienced; he presents a detailed analysis of the very personages, personal enmities, struggles for survival, and goals of geopolitical supremacy that guided the decisions and actions of Muhammad Ali, Sultan Mahmud II, and Lord Palmerston; he explores the concepts of discipline and disciplinary power and how they were applied (albeit in many cases unsuccessfully) to the geography of Egypt and, most minutely, to the bodies of Egypt's soldiers; and he examines conscription's impact on the lives of Egypt's peasants. Having negotiated astut ely through European and Egyptian sources and deployed fine theoretical insights, a careful and extensive use of Ottoman and Arabic archival materials available in the Egyptian National Archives, and a fresh perspective on scholarship on Egypt and the region as a whole during the first half of the nineteenth century, Fahmy has ensured that this monograph will have a broad scholarly appeal and will serve as an important study upon which future scholars will build.

Most forcefully, Fahmy argues against scholarship (identified as "nationalist") that has recognized Muhammad Ali as the "founder of modem Egypt" and which contended that his struggles with the Ottoman Porte were directed toward the sole purpose of achieving independence on behalf of the Egyptian nation. Drawing extensively from the personal letters exchanged between Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim (the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army), the symbols utilized in the army (such as medals and flags, pp. 241, 283), and the evidence of the contempt that Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim Pasha showed toward the Egyptian populace and most specifically its peasantry (pp. 245, 282), he beautifully demonstrates how Muhammad Ali used this army for his own dynastic ends, not with the intention of securing an independent Egyptian nation (p. 311)...