McFarland & Co. $45
In the Middle East, some things never change.
“I’d always had an interest in Mehemet Ali because he had an idea of how to modernize Egypt and how to enable the Middle East to compete with the West,” said Middle Eastern scholar and author Letitia Ufford of the historical character who drove her to spend ten years researching and writing The Pasha.
“When the First Gulf War took place, and I saw the parallels between that and this particular period in his life,” she said she knew she had her subject. In her preface, Ufford wrote: “Western judgments varied as to the quality and morale of Mehemet Ali’s forces in 1840, just as they varied in 1990, attempting to assess those of Saddam Hussein. Lord Palmerston … believed that in 1840 Egyptians stood no chance against the West just as those in Washington, D.C., one hundred and fifty years later expected the conquest of Iraq to be a cakewalk.”
Ufford offers the reader the results of a lifetime of scholarship and travel in the Middle East as well as interest in our country’s foreign policy, issues of de-colonization, third world economic development, and troop morale. In her reading she’d noticed instances of Egyptians cutting off their trigger fingers in the first and second world wars and wrote, “What, I wondered, had been the earlier military experience of Egyptians in the modern age that had so discouraged military ardor? Why had the victories of Mehemet Ali throughout much of the Middle East left no noticeable traces of triumphalism?” She soon found that, unsurprisingly, most Egyptians, “hated to be taken from their villages and sent for undefined years to fight against enemies who were often co-religionists.” She wrote me, “This book confirms Sir Michael Howard’s [a military historian] belief in the importance of `the reluctant soldier’ in military history.”
In writing her account of this two-year period of land and naval battles, advances and retreats in various places between Cairo and Istanbul: in “The Lebanon” mountains, Syria, and the valley of the Euphrates, and of diplomacy in Paris, London, Vienna and Istanbul between a coalition of British, Prussians, and Russians against French and various Middle Eastern factions, she borrowed the method Garrett Mattingly had used effectively in his 1950s The Armada. As Mattingly made each chapter a complete episode in the overall story of the Spanish Armada, so Ufford did for her fascinating and engagingly told story of a nineteenth-century Albanian governor of the Ottoman province of Egypt who was, as she writes, “A pasha among pashas,” (a pasha, under the Ottomans, being the highest official honorary, rather than hereditary, title).
The Pasha, a single-name celebrity back then, fascinated all who knew him with his brilliance and bravado, despite having only learned to read and write at 47. This governor or wali of Egypt threatened, charmed, or overpaid people to follow his orders, and all who knew him either admired or loathed him. The British Lord Palmerston wrote, “For my part I hate Mehemet Ali, whom I consider as nothing by an ignorant barbarian ….” French foreign minister Adolphe Thiers, on the other hand, wrote that Mehemet Ali — Ufford uses the Turkish spelling of his name, which in Arabic would be Muhammed Ali — “founded a vassal state with genius and consistency. He has known how to govern Egypt and even Syria, which the Sultans never have been able to govern. The Muslims … see in him a glorious prince who returns to them the feeling of their power….”
The book takes us from Mehemet Ali’s defeat of the Sultan’s army in June of 1839 to the end of his life and the effects of his achievements. Ufford tells each story clearly, with no jargon, no affectation. Each scene has knowledgeable asides on its history, terrain and local vegetation; evidence that the author visited each area of action rather than merely using well-researched material, to which she adds helpful maps and illustrations from period portraits and prints. She writes of shoes lasting only a month in the sharp, rocky terrain being fought over and quotes an English officer begging for 20,000 pairs for his Ottoman troops, suggesting that “Even the Albanian-type, pieces of ox hide tied on to the foot with hemp” would do, and stating that for lack of hospitals, sick troops “lay on the ground in their cloaks.”
In one of my favorite descriptions after the new young sultan offers much to Mehemet Ali, but only if he “be docile to the supreme will.” Ufford writes, “The Pasha chose to be highly offended,” and continues: “The attentions of the consuls did not improve matters. They descended upon him now every day demanding that Ibrahim [his son, a general] withdraw his army from beyond the Euphrates, urging him to give up Arabia, give up Crete, give up Adana, give up Syria, do this, do that. Only his exquisite manners and self-control kept him polite as they paraded their gold braid and ostrich plumes out of his reception room.”
Another scene: that of a heated debate in the French parliament was as immediate as if I had been reading a discussion of a particularly sharp recent Congressional debate. I could hardly believe I was reading about outbursts that took place over 150 years ago. Now, that’s the kind of writing you want to read.