All the Pasha’s Men: Rethinking Modernity, Power, and the Egyptian State Under Muhammad Ali

Introduction: Challenging the Founding Myth of Modern Egypt

For decades, the figure of Muhammad Ali Pasha has been venerated in Egyptian nationalist historiography as the father of modern Egypt—a visionary leader who dragged a stagnant, Ottoman-ruled province into the modern world through military reform, educational expansion, and bureaucratic innovation. Schools, statues, and textbooks celebrate his reign (1805–1848) as the genesis of Egyptian modernity.

But in his seminal work, “All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt,” historian Khaled Fahmy offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of this foundational period. He does not merely dispute Muhammad Ali’s glorified status; he deconstructs the entire narrative of benevolent modernization, suggesting instead that the foundations of the modern Egyptian state were built not on the empowerment of its people, but on their surveillance, subjugation, and control.

Drawing from extensive Ottoman archival sources, especially in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Fahmy presents a “history from below”—a history not of grand plans and elite figures, but of the soldiers, doctors, clerks, and ordinary Egyptians who were affected, often painfully, by Muhammad Ali’s reforms.

Fahmy’s central thesis is bold: Muhammad Ali’s modernization project was not about national development or enlightenment, but about creating a powerful, centralized state apparatus capable of extracting resources, enforcing discipline, and maintaining control. Modernization, in this case, was an imperial, not national, enterprise.

The centerpiece of this new apparatus was the army—an institution designed not only to project power abroad but to reshape society at home. The army was the incubator of the new state: it required new forms of taxation, education, medicine, policing, and bureaucracy. To support the army, the state had to know its people: their bodies, their health, their productivity, their loyalty.

In doing so, Muhammad Ali’s state gave rise to a new kind of governance—one based on biopolitics before the term existed, in which the population became an object of management and intervention.

The Army: Engine of Transformation or Instrument of Oppression?

The modern Egyptian army is often regarded as Muhammad Ali’s crowning achievement. Fahmy, however, sees it as an instrument of state violence and social engineering.

Beginning in the 1820s, Muhammad Ali initiated a massive program of conscription. Young men, mostly peasants from the Nile Delta and Upper Egypt, were forcibly removed from their villages, often kidnapped by police or soldiers, and transported to training camps far from home. Families resisted; riots broke out; many conscripts died en route or escaped.

Those who survived faced brutal conditions. Disease was rampant. Training was harsh. Soldiers were treated as disposable bodies, as cogs in a larger machine meant to serve the Pasha’s imperial ambitions in the Levant, Sudan, and Anatolia.

But more than that, the army was a school of the state. It was here that peasants were transformed into disciplined, measurable, and governable subjects. They were counted, documented, healed, punished, vaccinated, and dissected. They learned new languages—Turkish, medical Arabic, military terminology. In short, they were made into “modern” not by liberation, but by compulsion.

Medical Reform: From Humanitarianism to Surveillance

One of the most compelling sections of All the Pasha’s Men concerns the introduction of modern medicine into Egypt—not as a humanitarian effort, but as part of the military-industrial complex.

The founding of the Qasr al-‘Ayni School of Medicine in 1827, led by French doctors such as Clot Bey, is often heralded as a beacon of scientific progress. Fahmy questions this narrative by asking: Who was medicine for?

The answer: the army. The goal of medical reform was not to improve public health, but to reduce mortality among conscripts and maintain a healthy labor force. Hospitals became sites of surveillance. Cadavers were dissected not to advance science, but to better manage the body as a machine of production. Vaccination campaigns were undertaken not out of concern for citizens, but to ensure a reliable military workforce.

Furthermore, the new medical elite became agents of the state. Egyptian doctors were trained not just in anatomy but in bureaucratic discipline—learning how to write reports, keep records, and apply state-sanctioned classifications to bodies and diseases.

Bureaucracy and Knowledge: Archiving the Nation

A theme running throughout the book is the rise of bureaucratic rationality. Fahmy demonstrates how the new state produced immense quantities of documentation: birth records, death certificates, military logs, hospital files, tax registries, and land surveys.

The point was not simply to gather information, but to transform society through knowledge. What mattered was not what the state knew, but how it knew it—and for what purpose.

This regime of documentation was not neutral. It turned subjects into legible, administrable objects. The individual disappeared into the archive, replaced by numbers, measurements, diagnoses, and ranks. Fahmy shows how this knowledge did not empower the people but alienated them from themselves, placing them within grids of state-defined identity and utility.

In this sense, the archive became both the engine and the evidence of modernity. It created a new kind of citizen: not free, but known.

Resistance and Complicity: Society’s Complex Responses

Importantly, Fahmy does not portray Egyptian society as a passive victim. His reading of the archives reveals moments of resistance, evasion, and negotiation. Families hid their sons from conscription. Villagers bribed officials. Doctors falsified medical records to help conscripts escape. Soldiers deserted. Patients refused treatment.

But resistance was limited and often futile. The state’s apparatus was too extensive, too invasive, too violent. Still, these moments reveal the fragile legitimacy of Muhammad Ali’s project. It was not a consensual modernization; it was a modernization under duress.

Yet at the same time, some segments of society embraced the new order. Urban elites found positions in the bureaucracy. Students in military and medical schools gained prestige. A new class of technocrats emerged, fluent in the languages of law, science, and administration. They became the new agents of power.

Deconstructing the Myth of Benevolent Modernization

Perhaps the most powerful contribution of All the Pasha’s Men is its deconstruction of the “myth of modernization.”

Where nationalist historians see a heroic state-builder, Fahmy sees an ambitious warlord who used modern techniques to consolidate authoritarian rule. Where others see a linear path toward progress, Fahmy shows how modernization was messy, violent, and deeply contested.

The tools of modernity—military drills, medical science, bureaucratic order—were not inherently liberating. They were just as easily turned into instruments of repression. And they were.

This forces us to rethink what we mean by “modern.” Is it enough to build railways, schools, and hospitals? Or must we ask: for whom, and at what cost?