Muhammad Ali of Egypt

Biography

Muhammad Ali was born in 1769 in Ottoman Albania and grew up in Kavala, where his family were tobacco merchants and local commanders. In 1801 he went to Egypt as second-in-command of an Albanian contingent in the Ottoman force sent to retake the country after the French withdrawal.

In the struggle between Ottoman troops and the Mamluks that followed, he used his Albanian soldiers and the support of Cairo's notables and ulama to make himself indispensable, and in 1805 the sultan accepted him as governor (wāli). He then destroyed the Mamluk leadership, most famously by having its chiefs killed at the Cairo Citadel in March 1811.

He set out to make Egypt a modern regional power under his own dynasty. He took control of agricultural land and revenue, built an army on European lines, and founded new schools, among them a school of medicine for women. For the sultan he retook the holy cities of Arabia from the Wahhabis, and on his own account he conquered Sudan from 1820; his intervention in the Greek War of Independence ended with the destruction of his fleet at Navarino.

In 1831 and again in 1839 he went to war with the sultan himself, taking Syria and threatening Constantinople, but the European powers forced him back. Under the settlement that followed he withdrew from the Levant and received hereditary rule over Egypt and Sudan. His rule ended in 1848, when his son Ibrahim succeeded him, and he died in Alexandria in 1849; his descendants ruled Egypt until 1952.