The Cloud-Catcher: Ali Bey the Great of Egypt
By occupying Syria and the Holy Places of the Hijaz, Ali Bey sought to make Egypt the dominant power in the 18th-century Arab world. P.M. Holt suggests that his policy of expansion, which included an alliance with Russia, has some interesting modern parallels.
When Bonaparte landed at Alexandria, he proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to punish the Mamluk beys. “For too long,” he said, “has this rabble of slaves, bought in the Caucasus and Georgia, tyrannized over the most beautiful part of the world; but God, on whom all depends, has ordained that their empire shall cease.”
In speaking of the Mamluk ruling class of eighteenth-century Egypt as slaves, Bonaparte shared a general misconception. The word “mamluk” is the passive participle of an Arabic verb meaning “to possess,” and it was characteristic of the Mamluk1 class that their members—who included Bosnians and Greeks as well as men of Caucasian origin—normally passed some years of their youth as possessions of their masters. But they were not common slaves, who were called by a different name.
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