A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham Page B

medicine and agriculture. In Egypt, where teaching until then had been confined to the Koranic schools, his French advisers helped to establish a system of state education which at least on paper was highly impressive. French doctors helped to found hospitals and a rudimentary system of public health.
    His ambitions went far beyond turning Egypt into the most advanced province of the Ottoman Empire in European terms. For Egypt to act beyond its borders required the creation of an independent army and navy, and the major part of his energies were devoted to this end. His concentrated drive to increase revenues served this purpose. One of his first actions had been to order a much needed cadastral survey of all land in Egypt, and within a few years he had settled about two million acres or one-third of the cultivated area on a small class of big landowners drawn from members of his family (he had thirty children), senior army officers, village shaikhs and beduin chiefs. But the greater part of the increased revenues accrued to the central government, so it has been said that he converted most of Egypt into a huge farm under the direct administration of the government.
    The new industries that he created were also directed mainly to providing the land and naval forces with weapons and equipment, although they also turned out non-military goods such as machine tools, pumps, clothing, paper and glass.
    The Egyptian
fellahin
or peasants had never been thought of as promising military material, but properly trained and led they proved that they could fight with discipline and courage. They were at their best in defensive positions; they lacked the panache in attack of the Sudanese. On the other hand, unlike the Sudanese, their health stood up remarkably well to campaigns in colder climates. Virtually all the officers and non-commissioned officers were non-Egyptian. Some of the Mamluke officers came over to Muhammad Ali’s side but, when the Ottoman sultan banned all further export of Mamluke recruits to Egypt, other officers were recruited from among local Turks and Albanians. After 1820 Muhammad Ali reorganized the armed forces entirely with a
nizam al-jadid
or ‘New Order’. His eldest son, Ibrahim (1789–1848), proved to be an outstanding general and leader of men. At its height in the 1830s, the Egyptian army amounted to a quarter of a million men and was the most formidable force in the Middle East.
    In consolidating his personal power and the independence ofEgypt, Muhammad Ali was helped by a weakening in authority at the centre of the empire. In 1807 the Janissaries, in rebellion against the reforms and European innovations introduced by the New Order of Selim III, deposed the sultan and replaced him with his cousin Mustafa, who promptly abolished all the reforms. Fourteen months later Mustafa was assassinated, and his brother – the last surviving male of the House of Osman – succeeded as Mahmud II. He was a reformer like Selim, and ultimately he went much further than Selim in his long reign of thirty-one years, but in the first decade he had to proceed cautiously in order to consolidate his own power. It was not until 1826 that he was able to confront the problem of the Janissaries and destroy them in a massacre.
    During this period Muhammad Ali was able not only to resist interference from Istanbul but also to make the new sultan dependent on him for holding the empire together. In 1807 he was asked to send an expeditionary force to the Hejaz to recover the holy places of Islam from the Saudi/Wahhabi invaders. He succeeded in procrastinating for four years while he was consolidating his hold on Egypt, but in 1811 he dispatched his second son, Tussun, with an army. Tussun was an indifferent general; he recovered Mecca and Medina but suffered heavy casualties and more than one defeat at the hands of the Wahhabi warriors. The indisciplined behaviour of the Albanian officers no doubt helped Muhammad Ali to decide on the