Race and Slavery in the Middle East

Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in 19th-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean

Terence Walz, Kenneth M. Cuno, Terence Walz, Kenneth M. Cuno

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781617973796
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly migrated northward to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean destinations, yet relatively little is known about them. Studies have focused mainly on the mamluk and harem slaves of elite households, who were mostly white, and on abolitionist efforts to end the slave trade, and most have relied heavily on western language sources. In the past forty years new sources have become available, ranging from Egyptian religious and civil court and police records to rediscovered archives and accounts in western archives and libraries. Along with new developments in the study of African slavery these sources provide a perspective on the lives of non-elite trans-Saharan Africans in nineteenth century Egypt and beyond. The nine essays in this volume examine the lives of slaves and freed men and women in Egypt and the region. Contributors: Kenneth M. Cuno, Y. Hakan Erdem, Michael Ferguson, Emad Ahmad Helal Shams al-Din, Liat Kozma, George Michael La Rue, Ahmad A. Sikainga, Eve M. Troutt Powell, and Terence Walz.

1

Muhammad Ali’s First Army: The Experiment in Building an Entirely Slave Army

Emad Ahmed Helal

Military slaves were used by Egypt’s rulers for ten centuries, from Ahmad Ibn Tulun (r. 868–84) to the late nineteenth century. The first slave armies were black, the result of Ibn Tulun having recruited forty thousand Sudanese slaves. In the Ikhshidid state (935–69) slaves formed an important sector too, especially in the age of Kafur al-Ikhshidi (905–68), a Sudanese slave who became the ruler. During the period of the Fatimid Caliphate (969–1171), black slaves continued to be used, especially during the reign of al-Mustansir (1029–94), whose Sudanese slave mother encouraged him to recruit them because of their reputation for bravery, toughness, and obedience. He recruited about fifty thousand Sudanese slaves in the army.¹ According to al-Maqrizi, they were the main reason for the decline and the fall of the Fatimid state, when they started a long conflict with the Turkish soldiers in the Fatimid army.² The Ayyubid era (1171–1250) witnessed a shift toward the recruitment of white slaves (mamluks), who grew so powerful in the army that they succeeded in toppling the ruler and establishing their own state, the Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517). Mamluks continued to be an important element in the military under Ottoman rule, and they had become the main power in Egypt by the arrival of the French in 1798.³ They spearheaded the resistance against them and later against the returning Ottoman authority. Muhammad Ali’s massacre of the mamluks in the Citadel in 1811 did not signal the end of the system of military slavery in Egypt.⁴ Rather, it signaled the beginning of a different form of military slavery—the recruitment of an army built entirely of slaves but trained according to European standards, known in the army of Sultan Selim III as the nizam-i jadid.

Muhammad Ali used both white and black slaves in this effort. Its officers were mamluks, and its soldiers were black slaves. In this chapter we will look at the steps taken by Muhammad Ali to form that army. Though his methods changed several times, his consistent goal was to form a modern and well-trained military force that owed loyalty to him alone. He began around 1810 by building up his own mamluk retinue. By 1815, his idea had evolved into a ‘mixed slave army’ whose soldiers were white and black slaves. Then in 1820, it evolved again into a ‘mixed but classificatory slave army,’ in which Muhammad Ali specifically designated mamluks as officers and black slaves as soldiers. This was the last phase of Muhammad Ali’s first nizam army. Historians have never studied that army, except to conclude that it quickly failed, and thus they begin with the second nizam army that Muhammad Ali started building in 1824. I call that stage the ‘complex army,’ whose officers were mamluks and free Turks, and soldiers were black slaves and free peasant conscripts. This last formulation characterized the structure of the Egyptian army until the end of the nineteenth century. During my review of these changes I will discuss some issues associated with the establishment of the army, including the role of the French officer Colonel Sève and the question of the failure of the experiment of recruiting black slaves.

Building Muhammad Ali’s First Army

Muhammad Ali’s Mamluk Household (1810–19)

Once Muhammad Ali lost all hope of obtaining the loyalty of the old mamluk households and the Albanian troops who came with him, he decided to get rid of both and to establish his own household of mamluks and beys that owed absolute allegiance to him. He started around 1810 to buy mamluks by every method, and allowed his family members, high-ranking officers, and government bureaucrats to purchase their own mamluks. At the same time, he succeeded in getting rid of the old mamluks in the so-called massacre of the Citadel in 1811. He also managed to disperse the Albanians by sending them to Arabia, Sudan, and the Egyptian provinces. In 1819 the number of his own mamluks was 500; Ibrahim Pasha owned about 300; Abbas Pasha, 150; Muhammad Bey al-Daftardar, 150; Muharram Bey, 100; and many other officers and bureaucrats owned several dozen.⁵ All of these high-ranking personages housed and fed their mamluks, and trained them in military tactics and maneuvers, just like the vanquished mamluk households. In the end, they were better trained than the old mamluks in equestrian arts and courage. The number of the new mamluk cavalry increased as a function of their proprietors’ wealth.⁶

Muhammad Ali established a new and modern army during the period 1820–24, but he focused on infantry forces, not paying attention to the cavalry until 1829 because he depended on an irregular cavalry force of mamluks. By 1825 the irregular cavalry force owned by Muhammad Ali and his followers numbered 10,610 mamluks.⁷ Most of them were required to join the army in case of war, since they were considered the backbone of the cavalry force in the newly emerging Egyptian army. Despite individual competence and skill, their collective military capacity was still deemed insufficient because of differences in rank and employment, levels of training, and the weakness of the bonds between them.⁸ In 1829, he decided to establish a regular cavalry force. In 1831 he established a ‘cavalry school’ whose students were mamluks.⁹

From the beginning of his rule, Muhammad Ali paid close attention to the training of his private mamluks so that they could support him, when called upon, in the turbulent events in Egypt. He participated with them in the training and the equestrian racing that al-Jabarti called rimaha. He tells us about the rimaha the Pasha ordered up for his mamluks in a field in Giza on 4 June 1810, during which one of his mamluks was hit by a bullet and died. Al-Jabarti commented, “It is said that the shooter was meaning to hit the Pasha himself, but instead hit that mamluk.”¹⁰ Al-Jabarti also tells us about a training schedule that was set up for the Pasha’s mamluks. When one of his mamluks named Latif Pasha tried to lead Muhammad Ali’s mamluks in a rebellion against him while he was in Hijaz in December 1813, by planning for a rimaha on 12 December, which was not in the schedule, Muhammad Bey Lazughli, the katkhuda (deputy) of Muhammad Ali, got wind of it and ordered the leader of the mamluks not to go to the rimaha field and instead succeeded in murdering Latif Pasha.¹¹

Muhammad Ali was keen to keep his mamluks healthy. He even sent them to Asyut in April 1813 to keep them away from the plague that had spread to Cairo.¹² Later, after he had sent most of his mamluks to Colonel Sève for training in Aswan he continued to dispatch newly purchased mamluks to Asyut to avoid plague in Cairo. Al-Jabarti noted in 1822 that “the Pasha sent his mamluks and those whom he liked to Asyut because of the plague, like what happened last year.”¹³

In Cairo, Muhammad Ali’s mamluks lived in the Citadel, which was their training center and place of service, as is evident from the service file of one of them, Hamza Agha. It shows that he was registered as a member of the Pasha’s mamluks (ghilman al-basha) in 1816 and stayed in service with them in the Citadel until 1819, and that he was sent to the Military School in Aswan when Muhammad Ali established it in 1820. Later he became an officer in the army and occupied many military and administrative positions, eventually receiving the title pasha. His last position was as governor of Minufiyya province.¹⁴

In the Citadel, the Pasha established a civil school in 1815 to teach his mamluks reading and writing, mathematics, arithmetic, and astronomy. Al-Jabarti refers to that school in his biography of Hasan Efendi al-Dar-wish, who persuaded the Pasha to establish the school. After the Pasha agreed, Hasan Efendi was appointed its headmaster (nazir). After he died in May 1816, his assistant Ruh al-Din Efendi became the headmaster.¹⁵

In short, from the beginning Muhammad Ali was keen to purchase mamluks, and to educate them and prepare them for military service. Also, he permitted his family and those followers whose loyalty he trusted to own mamluks and train them as well, so that he could call them up to join his campaigns at any time. This was very similar to the way the defunct mamluk military system had worked.

The Mixed Slave Army

As a result of the overall scarcity of mamluks and the difficulty of obtaining them, and some time after the revolt of the Albanian soldiers in July 1815, Muhammad Ali decided to recruit black slaves in addition to mamluks into the army. He followed a gradual plan to form a ‘mixed slave army.’ He started by allowing his followers to buy and recruit black slaves for their own troops. Then he decided to form some black troops as an experiment, and finally he decided to form a complete slave army whose soldiers were black slaves and whose officers were white mamluks.

Burckhardt wrote about this plan in his book Travels in Nubia, after visiting Upper Egypt in 1816. Under the heading “Muhammad Ali and Sudanese soldiers,” he wrote:

Slavery in the East has little dread . . . and slaves are treated well. It is only by the Turkish soldiers that slaves are ill-treated. They purchase, in Upper Egypt, slave boys, whom they rear in their service, and who, after they have come to a certain age, and learned the Turkish language, are clothed and armed as soldiers, and enlisted into the company or corps of which their master is the chief. He then draws the monthly pay of his slave from the governor, as he does that of every other soldier; for, according to the regulations of the Turkish army, the captain, or Binbashy, receives the pay for the number of men whom h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration and Personal and Place Names
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowlogements
• Introdution: Introduction: The Study of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Mediterranean
• 1. Muhammad Ali’s First Army: The Experiment in Building an Entirely Slave Army
• 2. Sudanese, Habasha, Takarna, and Barabira: Trans-Saharan Africans in Cairo as Shown in the 1848 Census
• 3. African Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Rural Egypt: A Preliminary Assessment
• 4. “My Ninth Master was a European”: Enslaved Blacks in European Households in Egypt, 1798–1848
• 5. Magic, Theft, and Arson: The Life and Death of an Enslaved African Woman in Ottoman İzmit
• 6. Slavery and Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Turco-Egyptian Khartoum
• 7. Enslaved and Emancipated Africans on Crete
• 8. Black, Kinless, and Hungry: Manumitted Female Slaves in Khedival Egypt
• 9. Slaves or Siblings? Abdallah al-Nadim’s Dialogues about the Family
• Bibliography
• Index