Muhammad Ali Seizes Power in Egypt
The people of Cairo made an Albanian officer their governor in 1805 and the Ottoman sultan confirmed it because he had no choice. Egypt had been in chaos since the French left in 1801. Ottoman troops, Albanian irregulars sent to restore order, and the surviving Mamluk beys were fighting each other and living off the countryside, and the British had briefly intervened. Muhammad Ali had arrived as second in command of an Albanian contingent and spent four years playing every faction against the others. What made him governor was an urban revolt. In May 1805 the Cairo guilds, merchants and religious scholars, led by the shaykhs of al-Azhar and by the naqib al-ashraf Umar Makram, refused to pay any further exactions and demanded the removal of the Ottoman governor. They then did something without precedent: they chose a replacement themselves, invested Muhammad Ali with the office in the name of the people of Cairo, and required him to accept conditions — no taxation without consultation with the ulama. The sultan ratified it in July. He then removed everyone who had put him there. Umar Makram was exiled in 1809, the religious endowments that funded the scholars were confiscated, and the Mamluk leadership was massacred in the citadel in 1811. The state he built afterwards — conscript army, monopoly agriculture, schools, factories, an invasion of Syria — is why he is called the founder of modern Egypt, and the dynasty lasted until 1952. The episode is sometimes described as the first modern popular revolution in the Arab world, and the description needs the qualification that the popular movement got a governor and lost everything else. The precedent Egyptians have returned to is the demand rather than the outcome.
- Year: 1805 CE
- Category: Political
