EXACTLY TWO CENTURIES ago to the year, one man was single-handedly shaping Egypt’s history as we know it. Simultaneously feared and admired by his subjects, the visionary viceroy set the wheels of modernity in motion. Travelers awed by his reputation came from the four corners of the globe to chronicle the extraordinary legends spun around him in an attempt to elucidate his formidable personality.

Called the Father of Modern Egypt, the Wali, the Pasha of Egypt and the Great Viceroy, Mohammed Ali ruled Egypt for almost five decades, from 1805 to 1849. This year, for the first time since the memory of the royal family he spawned was collectively declared persona non grata by the Free Officers’ Revolution, the Pasha is finally getting his due in bicentenary celebrations.

He who saw Egypt 40 years ago can only but marvel at the transformation that came to pass over [the country]; it is a new world that has appeared. To what cause should one attribute this transformation? As soon as one mentions modern Egypt, it is always to the Great Viceroy, Mohammed Ali that reference is made. He is the one who transformed [Egypt]; he opened wide the doors to Europe’s material progress and through these doors events have made their way, ideas have been introduced which have concluded the task [he] started.Nubar Pasha, Memoirs, Cannes, November 1890

“Mohammed Ali was a pragmatist,” says Raouf Abbas, a professor of modern history at Cairo University, “a pragmatist with qualities of genius and farsightedness.” Abbas, the ultimate Egyptian authority on Ali’s reign, explains that the nation was mired in the Middle Ages when Napoleon Bonaparte pointed out its strategic importance to Europe. The information was not lost on the young Ali, who soon realized how, on the other hand, Europe was important to Egypt. Europe then possessed the knowledge and technical know-how needed to turn Egypt into an international power to be reckoned with; it was therefore necessary to attract as many foreigners as possible to do the job, he decided, while promising young Egyptians were sent on missions abroad to learn the skills that would allow them to replace foreign experts in the future.

Mohammed Ali devoted his life to the grand oeuvre of dragging Egypt out of its state as a backward province of the Ottoman Empire. Though he fell short of his long-term dream to head the Ottoman Empire, while attempting this formidable conquest, he managed to turn Egypt into a self-sufficient, secular and modern country, active on the international scene and a beacon in the Middle East. Agriculture and irrigation, digging of canals and building of dams, education and healthcare, constructing factories and creating a military force were high on Mohammed Ali’s list of priorities.

His methods may have been ruthless, but he managed to perform a near miracle in less than half a century.

Was Mohammed Ali a poor boy raised by his paternal uncle as he himself always claimed? Or was he born in a well-to-do family of tobacco merchants? Did his father die when he was only six years old, as he often recounted? Or rather, when he was well into his 20s, did he join the family tobacco business as an already married man, as Afaf Lutfi Sayyid-Marsot contends in her renowned 1984 book Egypt in the Reign of Mohammed Ali?

Much confusion surrounds Mohammed Ali’s childhood, and different versions have been periodically circulated on the various episodes of his life as the ruler of Egypt.

According to Marsot, Ali’s exact date of birth is uncertain — he claimed he was born in 1769, although other sources suggest 1770 or 1771 — and so are the origins of his family. “Mohammed Ali was from lowly stock,” Marsot claims. “He was the son of Ibrahim Agha, who was the son of Uthman Agha, himself the son of Ibrahim Agha, engaged in military duties for three generations. Beyond that, little is known about the family or their roots.

“While historians have described his clan as being of Albanian origin, a family tradition maintains that they might have been of Kurdish stock and come from the village of Ilic in Eastern Anatolia, where they were horse traders,” Marsot notes. Apparently, Mohammed Ali’s father, Ibrahim Agha, moved first from his village to Konia, then to Kavala in Macedonia, this latter flight the consequence of a blood feud.

Little is known about this incident, except that the family had to leave in a hurry for fear of reprisals, a tradition that continues to this day in isolated pockets of neighboring Albania.

The last of the MamluksPainting by William De Famars Testas

Yet, Prince Abbas Helmi, who is descended from Mohammed Ali through Viceroy Ibrahim, Khedive Ismail, Khedive Mohammed Tewfik, Khedive Abbas Helmi II and Prince Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, believes otherwise. Prince Abbas, who is also head of Concorde Investments in Cairo, contends that the family was very active in the tobacco business, which was extremely lucrative at the time, and therefore Mohammed Ali was not a poor boy of lowly extraction, as has been often alleged.

Although several historians claim that Mohammed Ali came to Egypt as a lieutenant with a small contingent of Albanian soldiers, Prince Helmi asserts that his forefather was sent at the head of an Albanian regiment. He was not an Albanian soldier himself, the prince points out, but an Ottoman subject whose family had moved from Konia to the tiny port of Kavala for reasons linked to the tobacco trade. In Kavala, Ibrahim Agha married into the family of the port’s governor and was appointed commander of a body of irregulars, famous for their restiveness, the prince adds.

Interestingly, the wording of the Ottoman Sultan’s firman (also referred to as faramaan, meaning ‘royal mandate’ or ‘royal decree’) that was to send Mohammed Ali on the warpath, which Prince Helmi has had the opportunity to study, mentioned an “authorization” rather than an “order” to levy a contingent of Albanians and sail to Egypt.

“It could mean, perhaps, that Mohammed Ali was a turbulent young man who made himself a bit of a nuisance with his fiery temperament and that the sultan was only too happy to grant him the request to go fight the French,” Prince Helmi suggests.

Actually, though it is not widely known, Mohammed Ali’s brother Ahmad accompanied him to Egypt, adds Prince Helmi. This fact is also recorded by Abdel-Rahman El-Jabarti, the famous chronicler of the period: “On Saturday, Ahmad Bey, Mohammed Ali’s brother, went to the Khan El-Khalili to conduct an investigation in the matter of the plunder taken from the Albanians by the Janissaries (members of the elite personal guard) and deposited for safe-keeping by the latter with their friends the Turks.”

Mohammed Ali’s mosque at Cairo’s Citadel

Helmi wonders whether Ahmad was sent along because he, too, was too boisterous for his own good, or whether he joined the expedition to keep an eye on his brother. His role at this point in time remains shrouded in mystery, but family tradition has it that once Mohammed Ali was established as Pasha of Egypt, he offered Ahmad a high-ranking position, a palace and a fortune in gold, but the latter refused, preferring to return to Kavala.

As Prince Helmi sees it, this is further proof that the family was not poor and that business was on the contrary thriving; otherwise Ahmad would have been happy to stay.

Ghislaine Alleaume, historian and researcher at France’s renowned Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), offers a slightly different version of the beginnings of the Great Pasha.

“Mohammed Ali was born in 1771 at Kavala.” she writes. “His family was Turkish from Anatolia and established in Macedonia for three generations. They were very representative of families of provincial notables who were hired to head small military or civil functions, were involved in international commerce as well as being tax farmers. Ibrahim Agha, Mohammed Ali’s father, headed a sort of local band of policemen in charge of road security. In parallel, he had investments in the tobacco business, the principal export product of Macedonia.”

Ibrahim Agha, she goes on, died rather young in 1791, but not before Mohammed Ali was married to Amina, who remained his only wife, although he later acquired several concubines. Alleaume also argues that although his younger brothers and sisters were placed under the guardianship of his paternal uncle Tussoun, if Mohammed Ali had a protector in Kavala, it would have been his maternal grandfather, who was governor of the city.

The massacre of the Mamluks at Cairo’s citadel Painting by Horace Vernet, 1819

Whichever account is closer to the truth is of little importance, as Mohammed Ali himself decided early on to rewrite his past, presenting himself as a poor orphan adopted by his paternal uncle. According to Marsot, he did so in order “to enhance himself as a self-made man who rose to fame against insuperable odds, including that disadvantage early in life.”

In the introduction to All the Pasha’s Men (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Khaled Fahmi describes the meeting Mohammed Ali had with John Barker, the new British Consul in Alexandria, when he came to present his credentials at Ras El-Teen Palace. In a dispatch to his government, Barker reported that almost at once the Pasha launched into a monologue about his childhood, designed to impress upon the consul, his autobiographical adaptation of the awe he inspired in others.

The following is an excerpt: “I was born in a village in Albania, and my father had 10 children who are all dead; but while living, not one of them contradicted me. Although I left my native mountains before I attained manhood, the principal people in the place never took any step in the business of the commune, without previously inquiring what my pleasure was. I came to this country an obscure adventurer, and when I was yet a bimbashi (captain), it happened one day that the commissary had to give each of the bimbashis a tent. They were all my seniors and naturally pretended to a preference over me; but the officer said, ‘Stand ye all by; this youth Mohammed Ali, shall be served first.’ and now here I am. I never had a master.”

Alleaume believes this was all a fabrication, as was his claim that his parents died when he was young (the date on Ibrahim Agha’s tombstone reads 1205/1790 — in reference to the year of his death according to the Islamic lunar calendar and the corresponding year in the Gregorian calendar, which is approximately 20 years after Mohammed Ali was born).

“Behind such a fabrication, there may have been an unconscious desire to cut all links with his past and to invent a new one, more befitting his new life and social position.” In the same spirit of aggrandizing himself, he made up a new date of birth, 1769, so as to share the day with two men he admired: Napoleon Bonaparte and Admiral Nelson.

According to Prince Helmi, Mohammed Ali’s almost childish desire to have his personal accomplishments celebrated may also have led him to pretend being completely illiterate. However, as a merchant and the commander of a regiment, he was necessarily called upon to read and write, even if marginally. Furthermore, as a practicing Muslim, he must have been taught at least to read the Qur’an in his childhood. It is therefore reasonable to believe that he had a working knowledge of the Arabic script, as well as of the popular Turkish written language, which was different from literary Turkish.

Nubar Pasha, the Armenian minister who, starting in 1842, played a major role in the political life of Egypt — first under Mohammed Ali, and then under the five following khedives — confirms in his Memoirs that, “One could speak Turkish perfectly, read a document couched in ordinary Turkish without understanding a word of the literary language.”

It was probably this latter proficiency that Ali wanted to acquire. However, he chose to make a big show of learning basic literacy skills at the age of 40. If his aim was to foster admiration, he fully succeeded in attracting historians’ attention to this deed. Few studies of his reign fail to mention these unusual attempts at literacy, although no comment is ever offered as to how successful he ultimately was.

Early on, Mohammed Ali showed an uncanny capacity to take advantage of circumstances and people. The beginning of his reign is a case in point. He had come to a seething country where the Mamluks had turned on each other in a desperate attempt to seize the power that they thought the Ottoman Sultan would restore to them once the French had departed. This, however, was never the intention of the Sublime Porte, who wanted to get rid of the Mamluk troublemakers and rule the country from Istanbul.

Amid the confusion of the warring factions, Mohammed Ali found opportunities to consolidate his power base, relying on the Albanian soldiers he had come to head after his direct chief had been promoted to the command of the Turkish troops.

He entered into secret alliances, promised or withheld support. Depending on the situation, he either controlled his charges or encouraged them to create trouble over their unpaid wages. All the time, he was careful to remain in the shadows. In the course of one particular military insurrection, he got in touch with Omar Makram, head of the Ashraaf (direct descendants of the Prophet, PBUH) and de facto speaker for a civilian population exhausted by the soldiers’ conflicts and constant extortionist tactics. These followed Omar Makram in earnest when he incited them on May 13, 1805 to depose the last governor of Cairo named by the Porte and proclaim Mohammed Ali the new Pasha of Cairo.

From then on, Mohammed Ali made a great show of his religiosity, sending his wife to the Hajj every year in style and providing extra camels and provisions for the pilgrims. At the same time, however, he was surrounding himself with “infidels” who, by all accounts, had never been better treated and were considered for the first time equal to Muslims in front of the law.

In his great project of modernizing Egypt, Mohammed Ali sucked knowledge out of his collaborators, showering them with honors and gifts while they remained useful, but did not hesitate to get rid of them in the most summary manner when he was through with them.

A consummate actor, it was hard even for those who knew him to decide whether he was totally bereft of feelings. Historians point out the fact that Amina remained his only wife and though he had many children from his concubines, he was only interested in the offspring that were born to her. He gave his daughters splendid weddings that are talked about to this day — and showed deep despair at the death of his sons Ismail and Tussoun.

Nubar Nubarian (later Nubar Pasha) was a young man freshly graduated from a British university when he came to Egypt to join his uncle Boghos Bey, then Mohammed Ali’s trusted Armenian adviser. On the evening of his arrival, his uncle took him to Ras El-Teen Palace to meet his future master.

In his Memoirs, Nubar recounts his first encounter with the Pasha of Egypt: “At the bottom of an immense hall lit by a white crystal chandelier and deriving grandeur from its austerity and its majestic proportions, a man was seated in the corner of a sofa covered with a rich length of material adorned with gold tassels: it was Mohammed Ali. Leaning on a pillow, his legs slightly bent, he was listening to one of his secretaries’ reading of the day’s dispatches Five or six young Mamluks attended the proceedings standing humbly at attention my uncle introduced me. ‘Work,’ the Pasha told me. ‘I want to see you at work.’ I then withdrew respectfully having kissed, as the etiquette required, the hem of the carpet he was sitting on.”

Lord A.W.C. Lindsay offers a similar description of the Pasha’s palace in his 1838 Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land. “We visited the old spider [Mohammed Ali] in his den, the citadel Ascending a broad marble passage on an inclined plane and traversing a lofty antechamber crowded with attendants, we found ourselves in the presence-chamber, a noble saloon but without an article of furniture, except a broad divan, or sofa, extending around three sides of the room, in a corner of which squatted his highness Mohammed Ali. Six wax candles stood in the center yet gave but little light.”

Oddly, neither Nubar nor Lindsay make mention of Mohammed Ali’s piercing eyes, a trait commented on by almost every traveler who happened to meet him, even briefly. As such, Mr. Ramsay, Lord Lindsay’s friend and companion on the visit, was more alert: “He [Mohammed Ali] did not address any of his subjects, but I observed his sharp, cunning eyes fixing on everyone.” Another traveler, Mr. Wilde, who visited the Shubra Palace in 1837 with his friends, came across the Pasha in the garden. Seeing a group of foreigners, Mohammed Ali stopped briefly to salute them. “He is a fine old man now,” wrote Wilde after this encounter, “upward of seventy with a very long silver beard Slight as was our view of him, it did not pass without making us feel the power of an eye of more brilliancy and penetration that I ever beheld.”

If so many travelers looked at Mohammed Ali in awe, it was because his reputation as a bloodthirsty Oriental potentate had been well established by the massacre of Mamluks at the Citadel in 1811, which he orchestrated to establish his power over Egypt once and for all. The awareness of the regime’s cruelty was perpetuated by the sight of tortured bodies floating down the Nile every so often, as the one observed by the count of Forbin in 1817: “His two hands were nailed and crushed between two planks. A thigh had been devoured by the fish.”

Forbin, a writer and a painter, wanted to meet Mohammed Ali and approached Bernardino Drovetti — who would later become the French Consul in Egypt and had the ear of the Pasha — for an introduction. He was welcomed at the Palace of Ras El-Teen: “Mohammed Ali received me very graciously, and expressed his regrets not to have been in Cairo when I was visiting the city,” wrote Forbin. “His features are lively and his eyes very expressive. He was smoking: his gold narghile [referred to as shisha today] is covered in precious stones Conversation with Mohammed Ali is often interrupted by a sort of convulsive hiccup. I was assured that this infirmity befell him after he had been given a violent poison, which effects, caught in time, left only that sequel. Many great European doctors were consulted to provide a remedy, but until now this has been to no avail.”

Forbin was allowed to paint Mohammed Ali a portrait for which the Pasha posed with evident pleasure. This painting and Forbin’s account of his visit inspired the painter Horace Vernet in his tableau of the Pasha half-reclining on his cushions, gazing fixedly ahead. Next to him is a small lion symbolizing might. He is making a fist with his right hand, the only indication that he is aware of the massacre of the Mamluks taking place in the courtyard beyond.

Nubar Pasha had many opportunities to learn of Mohammed Ali’s callousness. Tales of the bloody events that had brought him to power were reaching the young man’s ears and it did not take him long to discover that his uncle had at one time been victim of the ruler’s ruthlessness: Soon after Ali came to power, he called Boghos, who was then director of the customs, to Damietta. They had a slight disagreement over the accounts, which enraged the master, who shouted, “Drag him by his feet.” This was tantamount to a death sentence. One of the Turkish attendants got hold of Boghos and dragged him out, but since he owed him a favor, instead of taking of him to the Nile where his body should have been thrown after the execution, he hid him in a safe house. A few days later Mohammed Ali had trouble collecting the taxes in Rosetta and, finding himself short of cash, exclaimed: “If only Boghos were here, he would have solved the problem!”

The attendant, believing that Mohammed Ali had found him out, confessed to the hiding of the customs director. “Boghos is alive,” cried the Pasha. “Bring him to me at once and if you don’t, you won’t live long enough to regret it.”

It seems that, from that day on, Boghos earned more and more esteem in the Pasha’s eyes, but the poor man could never relax enough to enjoy the favors bestowed on him. Years later, after Boghos had retired, an incident occurred which left him feeling slighted by one of the Pasha’s administrators. He was hurt so deeply that he took to his bed and refused to take any nourishment. Alerted, Mohammed Ali sent one of his secretaries to inform Boghos that the Pasha was ordering him to get well.

“If my master has ordered,” Boghos told his physician, “then I must. See what you can do.”

But it was too late, however, and Boghos died soon after his master’s command. His funeral was a little-publicized, discreet affair until the Pasha, who was residing in Alexandria at the time, found out that the old man was not buried with military honors, as he deserved. He dispatched at once the following letter to the commander in chief of his armies:

“To my honored son, the mighty Osman Pasha: You are an ass and a brute. The man who bought you and raised you dies, and you and the troops under your orders do not accompany him to his grave! As soon as you receive this letter, you and the Alexandrian regiment will go to the Armenian church, dig out Boghos and bury him again with the military honors due to him. Don’t you dare disobey me.”

The body was not disinterred, but a new mass was said, attended by Osman Pasha and the regiment, the commander and high-ranking officers, while soldiers stood at attention in the courtyard.

In 1844, Mohammed Ali began to suffer episodes of mental collapse. The fits were of a passing nature and, after periods where he was prone to hallucinations, the Pasha recovered without a trace. The origins of his illness have never been fully ascertained, although Alleaume suggests that some of the symptoms were indicative of Alzheimer’s. Ali’s private physician ordered small doses of mercury to be administered to the Pasha to control the bouts; historian Mohammed Hakim argues that the treatment was severe and the physician had ordered that the patient abstain from sexual activity. However, according to Hakim, one of the Pasha’s daughters, wanting to please her sick father, surreptitiously allowed women into his room, thus unwittingly hastening his demise.

By 1848, Mohammed Ali’s spells had turned into comas, and he was unconscious at the time of his son Ibrahim’s death in November of that year. Luckily, he was thus unaware of what this favorite son had done: In the spring of that same year, Ibrahim had convened a group of 12 physicians who had unanimously declared the Pasha unfit to govern. He had taken this report to Istanbul, where he claimed the Sultan’s investiture.

Mohammed Ali was deposed in September 1848, and with that his dreams of grandeur for the country came to a crashing end. Ibrahim became viceroy for a period of two months whereupon, after his untimely death, power passed on to Abbas, the son of Tussoun and the oldest male member of the family, as prescribed by the law governing the succession in Egypt.

From then on, Mohammed Ali’s descendants saw their power decline until 1952, when King Farouk was finally ousted from the throne.

Today, Princess Nimet Amr lives in a Zamalek flat in sober gentility. In her living room, cluttered with pictures of her family and children, is a portrait of Mohammed Ali gazing sternly from a side table, perhaps looking on at the trials and tribulations of his descendants. Princess Nimet Amr is his great granddaughter.

The princess, however, does not remember the founder of the dynasty particularly overshadowing her childhood, except in so far as she was submitted to a stricter discipline than children her age, “Because of who I was,” she says. “But that was more related to the present, to the fact that we belonged to the royal family and had to appear as examples of good behavior,” she reflects.

Of Mohammed Ali, she was told that he was Albanian and that she should be proud of his achievements because he had introduced modernity to Egypt. It was very theoretical however, like being proud to be Egyptian or Muslim, something really shared with the rest of the population. It did not amount to personal pride in a special relationship.

That, she says, is why the princess does not normally dwell on the past and would rather talk about her work in an arts and crafts boutique. Yet when the conversation turns to Mohammed Ali’s military successes, suddenly she blurts, “Mohammed Ali would not have lost Palestine, I can tell you that!” Suddenly, pride in the achievements of her ancestor is there for all to see. Gamal Abdel Nasser may have abolished the privileges of the royal family, but he did not succeed in belittling its founder.

Battered like all the members of the royal family by the Free Officers’ revolution, the princess’ first loyalties are to the country her ancestor adopted and proudly built. She suffers much less from the unfair treatment that was meted to his memory and his family during the past half century than from the defeat of 1948, in which King Farouk played an active and determining role.

But how binding is memory? The princess’ daughter Magda, born after the revolution, today has no interest in the glorious past of her august ancestor. She is resolutely modern. She is steeped in Egyptian life, embracing the fashions and customs of the day. If her great, great grandfather brought about some of the progress she is enjoying now, so be it, but she is more worried about her 20-year-old son threatening to quit his job or her daughter’s intention to celebrate her best friend’s henna night in their flat.

A distressed Princess Nimet expresses how the world has changed so much. She wonders where the manners she was once taught have gone. In her days, weddings were a most civilized affair, certainly not preceded by a folkloric carnival.

One can, however, imagine that in his frame the Pasha of Egypt will look kindly tonight upon the frolicking girls. The sumptuous wedding including a henna night that he organized for his daughter Zeinab was a historic event lasting many days; he wanted modernity for Egypt, but knew better than to reject its people’s lore, which he obviously did not consider incompatible with progress.

Mohammed Ali is not a primary concern in the life of Fouad Sadek either. The son of Princess Faika, sister of King Farouk, he is a partner in a well-known fabric shop in Zamalek. He is surprised that Egyptian intellectuals have chosen to honor his ancestor on the 200th anniversary of his ascent to power, but he is nevertheless delighted. With his friend and expert in Mohammed Ali’s history Mahmoud Sabet (another descendant of Mohammed Ali — the son of a cousin of Queen Nazli, King Fouad’s wife), they are happy to evoke the Pasha’s military acumen and his numerous victories.

“He was one of those rare men who appear every few centuries and who have natural gifts that propel them to power. Mohammed Ali knew how to use them well,” concludes Sabet.  et