Muhammad Ali Pasha

In preparation for the midterm examination, I read over a lot of course material from earlier in the curriculum. One of the more fascinating pieces was Roger Owen's article Muhammad Ali: A View from the New World. His work examined the life of Muhammad Ali Pasha and also analyzed the Egyptian population's opinion of him. I was pretty surprised about everything he had to say. I learned from class discussion and the Cleveland text book that Muhammad Ali was the one to essentially usher Egypt into the modern age. He was the first to successfully instate a modern military and to promote huge expenditures in order to keep up with European innovations. After reiterating all of this in his article, Owen continues on to explain that modern Egyptians still love him for all of this. I was surprised to hear him draw this conclusion because all of Muhammad Ali's reforms lead directly into Egypt falling into Bankruptcy, and consequently under British control. I understand that he was followed by a slew of significantly weaker leaders that were ultimately responsible for complete crash of the Egyptian economic system, but I find it hard to believe that modern Egyptians are pleased with the man that set the precedents that lead to the bankruptcy.


I was also surprised that Owen found it worthy to comment on how Muhammad Ali was not an Egyptian, but was still revered and respected. At that point in history, Egyptian nationalism was not a significant force. Napoleon had just attempted to convince the Egyptian population that the Ottomans were foreign, despotic leaders, and that it would be an insult to their "Egyptianness" not to rebel against them. Needless to say--his efforts went unheeded. Egyptians of the period considered themselves more Ottoman than Egyptian. Nationalism became a strong force later, after the Europeans had more time to infiltrate the Empire and introduce Western ideas.