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The house of Muḥammad ‘Alī

1220–1372/1805–1953

Egypt

Muḥammad ‘Alī (b. c. 1180/late 1760s) was a commander from Kavalla in Macedonia who went with local forces as part of the Ottoman-Albanian army sent by the Porte to dislodge the occupying French from Egypt. With great adeptness he contrived to stay there as de facto ruler, forcing the sultan to recognise him as governor or pasha and bloodily disposing of the old ruling class of the Circassian Mamlūks (see above, no. 31, 2). Muḥammad ‘Alī was thus one of a type which had been not uncommon in the eighteenth-century Ottoman empire, that is, a governor who tried to establish the hereditary rule of his family in his governorship; but he was unusual in successfully founding an autonomous and hereditary dynasty, with an increasingly centralised administration, in a century when the Porte was successfully reasserting its authority in many other parts of the Turkish and Arab lands of the empire. Once firmly in power, Muḥammad ‘Alī realised that Egypt could best flourish and progress if the military and technical advances of the West, and its educational practices, could be emulated; he therefore ranks with his contemporaries the Ottoman sultans Sellm III and Maḥmūd II as a pioneer westerniser in the Middle East. A newly-raised conscript army was raised to subjugate the Sudan and tap the rich slave markets there; higher educational institutions were set up, with European staff and advisers; fiscal policy was reformed and modified to meet the increased revenue needs. Externally, Muḥammad ‘Alī and his capable son Ibrāhīm intervened on the Ottoman side in the Greek War of Independence and carried on successful campaigns against the Wahhābī rulers in eastern and central Arabia, overthrowing the first Su‘ūdī state and almost annihilating the Su‘ūd dynasty (see below, no. 55) there.

But by the end of Muḥammad ‘Alī’s reign, Egypt was already acquiring a burden of indebtedness, despite his immediate successors’ abandonment of attempts to maintain the pace of reform. This burden was accentuated by extravagance and the desire of rulers in the mid-nineteenth century to imitate European royal standards. Ismā‘īl was the first of his family to secure from the sultan the title of khedive, one of ancient Iranian origin, and also the promise of his descendants’ hereditary succession in Egypt. It was under Ismā‘īl also that work on the Suez Canal was completed, but imperialist Egyptian ventures in Ethiopia and the Sudan shattered Egypt’s financial stability. Like Turkey itself, Egypt now came under the financial control of European creditor nations. After the proto-nationalist revolt of ‘Urābī Pasha in 1299/1882, Britain assumed control of Egyptian finances and installed a permanent garrison there; not until 1340/1922 did the British Protectorate end.

The reigns of the last two significant members of the dynasty, Fu’ād I and Fārūq, were dominated internally by struggles with the majority political party of the Wafd and, externally, by the struggle to throw off the remaining vestiges of British control. Just before the end of the monarchy, Naḥḥās Pasha abrogated the Condominium Agreement over the Sudan and proclaimed Fārūq ‘King of Egypt and the Sudan’. Nevertheless, discontent mounted, especially after the Arab-Israeli débâcle of 1947, widely attributed to royal corruption and incompetence. The monarch had always been felt as more Turkish than truly Arab, and in 1952 Fārūq was forced by the Free Officers’ movement under Muḥammad Najib (Neguib) and Jamāl ‘Abd al-Nāṣir (Nasser) to abdicate. His infant son remained nominally on the throne under a regency, until the monarchy was finally abolished in June 1953.

Muḥammad ‘Alī and his descendants minted Ottoman coins in Egypt, with the names on them of their suzerains the sultans alone, right up to the First World War and the final severing of all constitutional links with Istanbul, after which Husayn Kāmil and his successors placed their own names on the Egyptian coinage.

Lane-Poole, 84–5; Zambaur, 107.

EI² ‘Muḥammad ‘Alī Pasha’ (E. R. Toledano).

P. M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1516–1922: A Political History, with a genealogical table at p. 312.

P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt from Muhammad Ali to Sadat, London 1980.