In the century following Selim II’s conquest, a distinct political order developed in Egypt. Although their ruling dynasty had been destroyed, the Mamluks survived as a military caste to remain a central part of the ruling elite of Ottoman Egypt. They preserved their households, continued to import young slave recruits to renew their ranks, and upheld their military traditions. Unable to exterminate the Mamluks, the Ottomans had no choice but to draw them into the administration of Egypt. Already in the 1600s Mamluk beys had come to take leading administrative positions in Ottoman Egypt. Mamluks were placed in charge of the treasury, were given command of the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca, were appointed as governors of the Arabian province of the Hijaz, and exercised a virtual monopoly over provincial administration. These posts conferred prestige and, more important, gave their post holder control over significant sources of revenue. In the seventeenth century the Mamluk beys also came to hold some of the highest military positions in Egypt—putting them in direct rivalry with the Ottoman governors and military officers dispatched from Istanbul. The Porte, increasingly preoccupied with more pressing threats on its European frontiers, was more concerned to preserve order and to ensure a regular stream of tax revenues from its rich province than to redress the balance of power between Ottoman appointees and the Mamluks in Egypt. The governors were left to fend for themselves in the treacherous politics of Cairo. Rivalries between the leading Mamluk households gave rise to fierce factionalism that made the politics of Cairo treacherous to Ottomans and Mamluks alike. Two main factions emerged in the seventeenth century—the Faqari and the Qasimi. The Faqari faction had links to the Ottoman cavalry, their color was white, their symbol the pomegranate. The Qasimi faction was connected to the native Egyptian troops, took red for their color, and had a disc as their symbol. Each faction maintained its own Bedouin allies. The origins of the factions have been lost in mythology, though by the late seventeenth century the division was well established. Ottoman governors sought to neutralize the Mamluks by playing the factions against each other. This gave the disadvantaged Mamluk faction a real incentive to overthrow the Ottoman governor. Between 1688 and 1755, the years covered by the chronicler Ahmad Katkhuda al-Damurdashi (himself a Mamluk officer), Mamluk factions succeeded in deposing eight of the thirty-four Ottoman governors of Egypt.

The power of the Mamluks over the Ottoman governors is revealed in the factional intrigues of 1729. Zayn al-Faqar, leader of the Faqari faction, convened a group of his officers to plan a military campaign against their Qasimi enemies. “We’ll ask the governor to furnish 500 purses to pay for the expedition,” Zayn al-Faqar told his men. “If he gives them, he will remain our governor, but if he refuses, we will depose him.” The Faqari faction sent a delegation to the Ottoman governor, who refused to pay the expense of a military campaign against the Qasami faction. “We won’t accept a pimp as our governor,” the outraged Zayn al-Faqar told his followers. “Let’s go and depose him.? On their own initiative, without any other authority, the Faqari faction simply wrote to Istanbul to inform the Porte that the Ottoman governor had been deposed and that a deputy governor had been appointed to take his place. The Mamluks then strong-armed the deputy governor they had just installed to provide the funding for their campaign against the Qasami faction, drawn from the customs revenues of the port of Suez. The payment was justified in terms of the defense of Cairo.³² The Mamluks used extraordinary violence against their rivals. The Qasami faction knew all too well that the Faqaris were preparing for a major confrontation and took the initiative. In 1730 the Qasamis sent an assassin to kill the head of the rival faction, Zayn al-Faqar himself. The assassin was a turncoat who had fallen out with the Faqari faction and joined forces with the Qasimis. He disguised himself as a policeman and pretended to have arrested one of Zayn al-Faqar’s enemies. “Bring him here,” Zayn al-Faqar ordered, wanting to meet his enemy face to face. “Here he is,” the assassin replied, and discharged his pistol into the Mamluk’s heart, killing him instantly.³³ The assassin and his accomplice then fought their way out of Faqari leader’s house and escaped, killing several men along the way. It was the beginning of a massive blood feud. The Faqaris named Muhammad Bey Qatamish as their new leader. Muhammad Bey had risen to the top of the Mamluk hierarchy and held the title of shaykh al-Balad, or “commander of the city.” Muhammad Bey responded to the assassination of Zayn al-Faqar by ordering the extermination of all Mamluks associated with the Qasimi faction. “You have among you Qasimi spies,” Muhammad Bey warned, and pointed to an unfortunate man among his retainers. Before the man had a chance to defend himself, Muhammad Bey’s officers dragged him under a table and cut off his head—the first man to be killed in retaliation for Zayn al-Faqar’s murder. Many more would follow before the bloodletting of 1730 came to an end. Muhammad Bey turned to the deputy governor appointed by Zayn al-Faqar and obtained a warrant to execute 373 persons he claimed were involved in the Faqari leader’s assassination. It was his license to wipe out the Qasimi faction. “Muhammad Bey Qatamish annihilated the Qasimi faction entirely, except for those . . . who had escaped to the countryside,” al-Damurdashi reports. “He even took the young Mamluks who hadn’t reached puberty from their houses, sent them to an island in the middle of the Nile where he killed them, then threw their bodies into the river.” Muhammad Bey closed all of the Qasimi households, swearing never to let the faction take hold in Cairo again.³⁴ The Qasimi faction proved harder to eliminate than Muhammad Bey had imagined. In 1736 the Qasimis returned to settle scores with the Faqaris. They were assisted by Bakir Pasha, the Ottoman governor. Bakir Pasha’s previous term as governor of Egypt had been cut short by the Faqaris, who had deposed him. He thus proved a natural ally to the Qasimi faction. Bakir Pasha invited Muhammad Bey and the other leading Mamluks of the Faqari faction to a meeting where a group of Qasimis lay in ambush, armed with pistols and swords. No sooner had Muhammad Bey arrived than the Qasimis emerged, shooting the leader of the Faqari faction in the stomach and butchering his leading commanders. In all, they killed ten of the most powerful men in Cairo and piled their severed heads in one of the main mosques of the city for public viewing.³⁵ It was by all accounts one of the worst killings in the annals of Ottoman Egypt.³⁶ Years of factional fighting left both the Faqaris and the Qasimis too weak to preserve a commanding position in Cairo. The rival factions were overtaken by a single Mamluk household known as the Qazdughlis, who came to dominate Ottoman Egypt for the rest of the eighteenth century. With the rise of the Qazdughlis, the extreme factional violence abated, bringing a measure of peace to the strife-torn city. The Ottomans, for their part, never managed to impose their full authority over the rich but unruly province of Egypt. Instead, a distinct political culture emerged in Ottoman Egypt in which the Mamluk households continued to exercise political primacy over Istanbul’s governor centuries after Selim the Grim had conquered the Mamluk Empire. In Egypt, as in Lebanon and Algeria, Ottoman rule adapted to local politics.

Two centuries after conquering the Mamluk Empire, the Ottomans had succeeded in extending their empire from North Africa to South Arabia. It had not been a smooth process. Unwilling, or unable, to standardize government in the Arab provinces, the Ottomans in many cases chose to rule in partnership with local elites. The diverse Arab provinces might have had very different relations with Istanbul and wide variations of administrative structures, but they were all clearly part of the same empire. Such heterogeneity was common to the multiethnic and multisectarian empires of the day, such as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the Ottomans managed this diversity with some success. They had faced challenges—most notably in Mount Lebanon and Egypt—but had succeeded by a variety of strategies in entrenching Ottoman rule, ensuring that no local leader posed an enduring threat to the Ottoman center. The dynamics between this center and the Arab periphery changed, however, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. New local leaders emerged who began to combine forces and pursue autonomy in defiance of the Ottoman system, often in concert with the empire’s European enemies. These new local leaders posed a real challenge to the Ottoman state that, by the nineteenth century, would put its very survival in jeopardy.