It was one thing to be named governor of Egypt—scores of men had held the title since the Ottomans had conquered the territory in 1517—and quite another to actually govern Egypt. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha established his mastery over the province like no one before or after him. He succeeded in monopolizing the wealth of Egypt and used the revenues to establish a powerful army and a bureaucratic state. He used his army to expand the territory under his command, making Egypt the center of an empire in its own right. But unlike ’Ali Bey al-Kabir, who as a Mamluk had dreamed of rebuilding the Mamluk Empire, Muhammad ’Ali was an Ottoman, and he sought to dominate the Ottoman Empire. Muhammad ‘Ali also was an innovator who put Egypt on a path of reform, drawing on European ideas and technology in ways that the Ottomans themselves would later imitate. He created the first peasant mass army in the Middle East. He undertook one of the earliest industrialization programs outside Europe, applying the technology of the Industrial Revolution to produce weapons and textiles for his army. He dispatched education missions to European capitals and created a translation bureau to publish European books and technical manuals in Arabic editions. He enjoyed direct relations with the great powers of Europe, who treated him more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy of the Ottoman sultan. By the end of his reign, Muhammad ?Ali had succeeded in establishing his family?s hereditary rule over Egypt and the Sudan. His dynasty would rule Egypt until the 1952 revolution brought down the monarchy.

Though they had shifted Muhammad ’Ali’s appointment from the Hijaz to Cairo, the Sublime Porte still expected him to lead a campaign against the Wahhabis to restore Ottoman authority in Arabia. The new governor found many excuses to ignore Istanbul’s commands. He had come to power through disorder and knew that he too would fall unless he brought the Cairo public and the Ottoman soldiers to heel. Muhammad ‘Ali’s Albanian soldiers gave him an independent power base to help him achieve mastery in Cairo by force. The fragmented Mamluk households were his first target, and he pursued them to Upper Egypt. Such campaigns soon proved expensive, however, and the pasha realized that soldiers were not enough to control Egypt. He needed money too. Agriculture was the province’s primary source of revenues. Yet, one-fifth of Egypt’s agricultural land had been endowed to support Islamic institutions, and the other four-fifths were leased out in tax farms held by the Mamluk households and other large landholders that brought little benefit to the treasury in Cairo. To control the revenues of Egypt, Muhammad ’Ali would have to control its land. By putting the land of Egypt under a system of direct taxation, Muhammad ‘Ali gained the necessary resources to impose his control over Egypt. In the process, he undermined the financial bases of his Mamluk opponents and his supporters among the notables of Cairo alike. The religious scholars were divested of their autonomous revenues, and the landed elites found themselves dependent on the governor they had hoped to control. In all, it took six years for Muhammad ’Ali to consolidate his position in Egypt before he finally accepted the sultan’s commission to conduct a campaign against the Wahhabis in Arabia.

In March 1811, Muhammad ‘Ali sent his son Tussun Pasha to lead the military operation against the Wahhabis. This was to be Muhammad ’Ali’s first venture beyond the frontiers of Egypt. Before sending a large part of his army abroad, he wanted to ensure peace and stability in Egypt. He organized a ceremony of investiture for Tussun and invited all of the leading figures of Cairo to attend—including the most powerful Mamluk beys. The beys saw the invitation as a conciliatory gesture following several years of hostilities with Muhammad ’Ali’s government. Clearly, they reasoned, the governor would find it easier to rule with Mamluk support than to continue fighting against them. Nearly all of the beys accepted the invitation and arrived in Cairo’s Citadel dressed in their finery to take part in the ceremony. If any of the beys had misgivings, the fact that nearly all of the leading Mamluks were in attendance must have given them some sense of security. Besides, what sort of man would violate the laws of hospitality by committing treachery against his guests? After the ceremony of investiture, the Mamluks paraded in a formal procession through the Citadel. As they made their way through one of its gated passageways, the gates suddenly closed. Before the confused beys realized what was happening, soldiers appeared on the walls overhead and opened fire. After years of fighting, the soldiers had come to hate the Mamluks and went about their work with relish, leaping down from the walls to finish off the beys. “The soldiers went berserk butchering the amirs and looting their clothing,” al-Jabarti recorded. “Showing their hatred, they spared no one.” They killed Mamluks and the supernumeraries the beys had dressed up to accompany their procession—most of whom were common citizens of Cairo. “These people were shouting and calling for help. One would say, ‘I’m not a soldier or a Mamluk.’ Another would say ‘I’m not one of them.’ The soldiers, however, did not heed these screams and pleas.”⁹ Muhammad ‘Ali’s troops then went on a rampage through the city. They dragged out anyone suspected of being a Mamluk and took them back to the Citadel, where they were beheaded. In his report to Istanbul, Muhammad ’Ali claimed that twenty-four beys and forty of their men had been killed, and he dispatched their heads and ears to support the claim.¹⁰ Al-Jabarti’s account suggests the violence was far more extensive. The massacre in the Citadel was the final blow to the Mamluks of Cairo. They had survived Selim the Grim’s conquest and Napoleon’s invasion, but after nearly six centuries in Cairo they were practically exterminated by Muhammad ‘Ali. The few surviving Mamluk beys stayed in Upper Egypt, knowing that Cairo’s governor would stop at nothing to secure his power, and that they lacked the means to challenge him. Confident that he no longer faced any domestic challenge to his rule, Muhammad ’Ali could now send his army to Arabia to earn the gratitude of the Ottoman sultan.

The Wahhabi campaign proved a tremendous drain on the resources of Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt. The battlefield was far from home, communication and supply lines were long and vulnerable, and Tussun Pasha was forced to fight in a harsh environment on the enemy’s terrain. In 1812, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the countryside, the Wahhabis drew the Egyptian force into a narrow pass and dealt the 8,000-man army a serious defeat. Many of the demoralized Albanian commanders quit the battlefield and returned to Cairo, leaving Tussun short-handed. Muhammad ’Ali sent reinforcements to Jidda, and over the next year Tussun managed to secure Mecca and Medina. Muhammad ’Ali accompanied the pilgrimage caravan in 1813 and dispatched the keys of the holy city to the sultan in Istanbul as a token of the restoration of his sovereignty over the birthplace of Islam. These victories had come at a high price: the Egyptian force had lost 8,000 men and the Egyptian treasury had spent the enormous sum of 170,000 purses (approximately $6.7 million in 1820 U.S. dollars).¹¹ Nor had the Wahhabis been fully defeated. They had merely withdrawn before the Egyptian army’s advance and were bound to return. Fighting continued between Tussun’s Egyptian army and the Wahhabi force, commanded by Abdullah ibn Saud, until the two sides struck a truce in 1815. Tussun returned home to Cairo, where he contracted plague and died within days of his return. When word of Tussun’s death filtered back to Arabia, Abdullah ibn Saud broke his truce and attacked Egyptian positions. Muhammad ‘Ali appointed his eldest son, Ibrahim, as commander in chief of Egyptian forces. It was the beginning of a brilliant military career, for Ibrahim Pasha emerged as Muhammad ’Ali’s generalissimo. Ibrahim Pasha took up his command in Arabia early in 1817 and pursued a relentless campaign against the Wahhabis. He secured Egyptian control over the Red Sea province of the Hijaz before driving the Wahhabis back into the central Arabian region of the Najd. Even though the Najd lay outside Ottoman territory, Ibrahim Pasha was determined to eliminate the Wahhabi threat once and for all, and he drove his adversaries back to their capital of Dir’iyya. For six months the two sides fought a terrible war of attrition. The Wahhabis, trapped within the walls of their city, were slowly starved of food and water by the Egyptian siege. Egyptian forces suffered heavy losses to disease and exposure in the lethal summer heat of Central Arabia. In the end the Egyptians prevailed, and in September 1818 the Wahhabis surrendered, knowing they faced total destruction. On Muhammad ‘Ali’s orders, the Egyptian forces destroyed the town of Dir’iyya and sent all of the leaders of the Wahhabi movement to Cairo as prisoners. Muhammad’Ali knew he had earned Sultan Mahmud II’s favor by suppressing a movement that had brought the very legitimacy of the Ottoman sultanate into question for over sixteen years. Moreover, he had succeeded where no other Ottoman governor or commander could, in prosecuting a successful campaign in Central Arabia. From Cairo, Abdullah ibn Saud and the leaders of the Wahhabi state were sent on to Istanbul to face the sultan’s justice. Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) turned the execution of the Wahhabi leaders into a state occasion. He summoned the top government officials, the ambassadors of foreign states, and the leading notables of his empire to the Topkapi Palace to witness the ceremony. The three condemned men—the military commander, Abdullah ibn Saud, the chief minister, and the spiritual leader of the Wahhabi movement—were brought in heavy chains and publicly tried for their crimes against religion and state. The sultan concluded the hearings by sentencing all three to death. Abdullah ibn Saud was beheaded before the main gate of the Aya Sofia Mosque, the chief minister was executed before the main entrance to the palace, and the spiritual leader was beheaded in one of the main markets of the city. Their bodies were left on display, heads tucked under arms, for three days before their corpses were cast into the sea.¹² With the expulsion of French forces from Egypt and the defeat of the Wahhabi movement, Sultan Mahmud II might be excused for believing the Ottoman Empire had withstood the most serious challenges to its position in the Arab world. Yet the governor in Egypt who delivered victory in Arabia would himself prove a far graver threat to Mahmud II. For while the Wahhabis attacked the fringes of his state—very important fringes on spiritual grounds, but fringes nonetheless—Muhammad’Ali would pose a challenge to the very center of the Ottoman Empire and the ruling dynasty itself.