History of Egypt Under The Muhammad Ali Dynasty - End of Muhammad Ali's Rule

End of Muhammad Ali's Rule

The end was reached early in 1841. New firmans were issued which confined the pashas authority to Egypt, the Sinai peninsula and certain places on the Arabian side of the Red Sea, and to the Sudan. The most important of these documents are dated February 13, 1841.

The government of the pashalik of Egypt was made hereditary in the family of Muhammad Ali. A map showing the boundaries of Egypt accompanied the firman granting Muhammad Ali the pashalik, a duplicate copy being retained by the Porte. The Egyptian copy is supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives. The Turkish copy has never been produced and its existence now appears doubtful. The point was of importance, as in 1892 and again in 1906 boundary disputes arose between Turkey and Egypt.

Various restrictions were laid upon Muhammad Ali, emphasizing his position as vassal. He was forbidden to maintain a fleet and his army was not to exceed 18,000 men. The pasha was no longer a figure in European politics, but he continued to occupy himself with his improvements in Egypt. The long wars combined with a murrain of cattle in 1842 and a destructive Nile flood. In 1843 there was a plague of locusts where whole villages were depopulated. Even the sequestered army was a strain enough for population unaccustomed to the rigidities of the subscription service. Florence Nightingale, the famous British nurse, recounts in her letters from Egypt written in 1849–50, that many an Egyptian family thought it be enough to "protect" their children from the inhumanities of the military service by blinding them in one eye or rendering them unfit by cutting off their limb. But Muhammad Ali was not to be confounded by such tricks of bodily uncompliance, and with that view he set up a special corps of disabled musketeers declaring that one can shoot well enough even with one eye.

Meantime the uttermost farthing was wrung from the wretched fellahin, while they were forced to the building of magnificent public works by unpaid labor. In 1844–45 there was some improvement in the condition of the country as a result of financial reforms the pasha executed. Muhammad Ali, who had been granted the honorary rank of grand vizier in 1842, paid a visit to Istanbul in 1846, where he became reconciled to his old enemy Khosrev Pasha, whom he had not seen since he spared his life at Cairo in 1803.

In 1847 Muhammad Ali laid the foundation stone of the great bridge across the Nile at the beginning of the Delta. Towards the end of 1847, the aged pasha's previously sharp mind began to give way, and by the following June he was no longer capable of administering the government. In September 1848 Ibrahim was acknowledged by the Porte as ruler of the pashalik, but he died in the November.

Muhammad Ali survived another eight months, dying on August 2, 1849. He had done a great work in Egypt; the most permanent being the weakening of the tie binding the country to Turkey, the starting of the great cotton industry, the recognition of the advantages of European science, and the conquest of the Sudan.