Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Although the Ottomans were quick to dismiss the Wahhabis as savage Bedouins of the desert, they knew it would be difficult to defeat the movement. As modern wars in Kuwait and Iraq have shown, great powers face huge logistical problems in fighting wars in Arabia. Troops would have to be sent on sailing ships and marched great distances overland, in terrible heat, with long and vulnerable supply lines. They would be forced to fight on the Wahhabis’ own terrain. And the Wahhabis were zealots, convinced that they were doing God’s work. There was always the risk that Ottoman soldiers might respond to the Wahhabis’ powerful message and cross over to the other side. There was no question of sending a campaign force all the way from Istanbul to the Hijaz. The Ottomans lacked both the financial and military resources for such an enterprise. Instead, they made repeated demands of their provincial governors in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. The governor in Baghdad was fighting continued Wahhabi attacks in his southern provinces and had yet to succeed in repelling the raiders. The Kurdish governor in Damascus, Kanj Yusuf Pasha, promised Istanbul to reopen the pilgrimage route. However, he lacked the resources to undertake such a campaign. As the Syrian chronicler Mikhayil Mishaqa observed, Kanj Yusuf Pasha “could neither send enough soldiers nor supply them with enough ammunition to drive the Wahhabi from the Hejaz, which was a forty-day march away [from Damascus] through burning sands without food or water along the way for themselves or their beasts.”²⁶

There was only one person who could mobilize the necessary forces and had demonstrated sufficient ability to defeat the Wahhabis and restore the Hijaz to the Ottoman Empire. Since 1805, Egypt had been ruled by a governor of extraordinary ability. Yet the talent and ambition that so recommended him to address the Wahhabi challenge would soon be turned against the Ottoman state. Indeed, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha proved the culmination of a dangerous trend, of provincial leaders challenging Istanbul’s rule in the Arab provinces. Muhammad ’Ali proved strong enough to threaten the overthrow of the Ottoman dynasty itself.

CHAPTER 3

The Egyptian Empire of Muhammad ’Ali

In June 1798, British ships appeared without warning off the coast of Egypt. A landing party rowed ashore to be received by the governor and notables of what was then the modest port town of Alexandria. The British warned of an impending French invasion and offered their assistance. The governor was indignant: “This is the sultan’s land. Neither the French nor anyone else has access to it. So leave us alone!”¹ The very suggestion that an inferior nation like France posed a threat to Ottoman domains, or that Ottoman subjects might turn to another inferior nation like Britain for assistance, clearly offended the notables of Alexandria. The British rowed back to their tall ships and withdrew. No one gave the matter any further thought—for the moment. The people of Alexandria awoke on the morning of July 1 to find their harbor filled with men-o’-war and their shores invaded. Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived at the head of a massive invasion force, the first European army to set foot in the Middle East since the Crusades. Outnumbered and outgunned, Alexandria surrendered in a matter of hours. The French secured their position and set off for Cairo. Mamluk horsemen engaged the French army at the southern outskirts of Cairo. In what seemed like a replay of the 1516 Mamluk battle against the Ottomans at Marj Dabiq, the gallant Mamluks drew their swords and charged the French invaders. They never even got within striking distance. The French moved in tight formations, with row upon row of infantrymen maintaining a rolling thunder of rifle fire that decimated the Mamluk cavalry. “The air darkened with gunpowder, smoke and dust from the wind,” a contemporary Egyptian chronicler recorded. “The uninterrupted shooting was ear-deafening. To the people it appeared as if the earth were shaking and the sky were falling in.”² According to Egyptian eyewitnesses, the fighting was over within three-quarters of an hour. Panic swept the streets as the army of Napoleon occupied the defenseless city of Cairo. Over the next three years, the people of Egypt came face to face with the customs and manners of the French, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon had intended to establish a permanent presence in Egypt, which meant winning her people over to the benefits of French rule. This was more than a military matter. Accompanying the French infantry was a smaller army of sixty-seven savants, or learned men, who came with the dual mission of studying Egypt and impressing the Egyptians with the superiority of French civilization. With a liberal sprinkling of the ideas of the French Revolution, the occupation of Egypt was the original French “civilizing mission.” A crucial eyewitness to the occupation was ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1824), an intellectual and theologian with access to the highest echelons of both French and Egyptian society. Al-Jabarti wrote extensively on the French occupation, detailing the Egyptian encounter with the French, their revolutionary ideas, and their astonishing technology. The gulf separating French Revolutionary thought from Egyptian Muslim values was unbridgeable. Enlightenment values that the French held to be universal were deeply offensive to many Egyptians, both as Ottoman subjects and observant Muslims. This gulf in worldview was apparent from Napoleon’s very first proclamation to the people of Egypt, when he asserted “that all men are equal before God; that wisdom, talents, and virtues alone make them different from one another.” Far from striking a chord of liberation, Napoleon’s pronouncement provoked deep dismay. Al-Jabarti wrote a line-by-line refutation of the proclamation that rejected most of the “universal” values Napoleon vaunted. He dismissed Napoleon’s claim that all men were equal as “a lie and stupidity” and concluded: “You see that they are materialists, who deny all God’s attributes. The creed they follow is to make human reason supreme and what people will approve in accordance with their whims.”³ Al-Jabarti’s statements reflected the beliefs of Egypt’s Muslim majority, who rejected the exercise of human reason over revealed religion. If the French failed to win the Egyptians over to the ideas of the Enlightenment, they were nevertheless confident that French technology would impress the natives. Napoleon’s savants brought quite a bag of tricks to Egypt. In November 1798, the French organized the launch of a Montgolfier hot-air balloon. They posted notices around Cairo inviting the townspeople to witness the marvel of flight. Al-Jabarti had heard the French make incredible claims about their airship, “that people would sit in it travelling to distant countries to gather information and to send messages,” and went to see the demonstration for himself. Looking at the limp balloon on its platform, decorated in the red, white, and blue of the French tricolor, al-Jabarti had his doubts. The Frenchmen lit the Montgolfier’s wick, filling the balloon with warm air until it took flight. The crowd gasped in amazement, and the French took evident pleasure in their reaction. All seemed to be going well until the balloon lost its wick. Without a source of hot air, the Montgolfier collapsed and fell to the ground. The crash of the balloon restored the Cairo audience?s contempt for French technology. Al-Jabarti wrote dismissively, ?It became apparent that it was like the kites which servants construct for holidays and weddings.?⁴ The natives were not impressed.

The French failed to appreciate just how proud the Egyptians were and how humiliating they found the experience of alien occupation. Napoleon’s proclamations seem to cry out for gratitude from the Egyptians, but few Egyptian Muslims would concede their approval of the French or their institutions—at least not to their faces. The chemistry demonstration by Monsieur Bertholet (1748–1822), was a case in point. Al-Jabarti, who was a regular at the French Institute in Cairo, was once again in attendance. He wrote openly about his amazement at the feats of chemistry and physics he witnessed. “One of the strangest things I have seen in [the Institute] was the following,” he wrote. “One of the assistants took a bottle filled with a distilled liquid and poured a little of it into a cup. Then he poured something from another bottle. The two liquids boiled and coloured smoke rose from them until it ceased and the contents of the cup dried and became a yellow stone. He turned it out on the shelf. It was a dry stone which we took in our hand and examined.” This transformation of liquids to solids was followed by demonstrations of the flammable properties of gasses and the volatility of pure sodium, which, when struck “gently with a hammer,” made “a terrifying noise like the sound of a carbine.” Al-Jabarti resented the savants’ amusement when he and his Egyptian compatriots were startled by the bang. The piиce de resistance was a demonstration of the properties of electricity using Leyden jars, first developed as electrostatic generators in 1746. “If one held its connections . . . and with his other hand touched the end of the revolving glass . . . his body would shake and his frame tremble. The bones of his shoulder would rattle and his forearms immediately tremble. Anyone who touched the person in contact, or any of his clothes, or anything connected to him, experienced the same thing—even if it were a thousand or more people.” No doubt the Egyptians present at the demonstration were very impressed by what they had seen. However, they did their best not to show their amazement. One of Napoleon’s aides who witnessed the chemistry demonstration later wrote how “all of the miracles of the transformation of fluids, electrical commotions and experiments in galvanism caused them no surprise at all.” When the demonstration was over, he claimed one of the Muslim intellectuals asked a question through an interpreter. “This is all well and good, but can they make it so that I would be in Morocco and here at the same time?” Bertholet replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah, well,” said the shaykh, ?he isn?t such a good sorcerer after all.?⁵ Al-Jabarti, reflecting on the demonstration in the privacy of his own study, begged to differ: “They had strange things in [the Institute], devices and apparatus achieving results which minds like ours cannot comprehend.”⁶

Napoleon’s real reasons for invading Egypt in 1798 were geostrategic, not cultural. France’s main rival in the second half of the eighteenth century was Great Britain. The two European maritime powers struggled for ascendancy in a number of theaters, including the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. British and French commercial companies had fought a bitter campaign for supremacy in India that was only resolved in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), when the British defeated the French and secured their hegemony over the subcontinent. France was never reconciled to its losses in India. With the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, Britain and France resumed their hostilities. Napoleon, looking for ways to hurt British interests, turned back to India. By capturing Egypt, he hoped to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean and to close the strategic land-sea route to India that ran from the Mediterranean through Egypt to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean beyond. The British were aware that Napoleon was assembling a major expedition force in Toulon and suspected a move against Egypt. Admiral Horatio Nelson was put in command of a powerful squadron to intercept the French fleet. They actually beat the French to Egypt, where they had their brief and discouraging encounter with the governor of Alexandria. Nelson withdrew his ships to search for Napoleon elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. The French succeeded in eluding the Royal Navy, and Napoleon’s army made a quick conquest of Egypt. However, Nelson’s squadron caught up with the French fleet one month later and succeeded in sinking or capturing all but two of the French warships in the Battle of the Nile, on August 1. Napoleon’s flagship, l’Orient, was set ablaze in the battle and exploded in a spectacular fireball that lit the night sky. The French lost more than 1,700 men in the Battle of the Nile. The British victory over the French fleet condemned the Napoleonic expedition to failure. The 20,000-man French army was now trapped in Egypt with no line of communication to France. The defeat dealt a terrible blow to the morale of French troops in Egypt. Their sense of isolation was compounded when Napoleon abandoned his army without warning to return to France in August 1799, where he seized power in November of that year. Following Napoleon’s flight, the French army in Egypt was left without a mission. Napoleon’s successor entered into negotiations with the Ottomans for a full French evacuation from Egypt. The French and Ottomans struck agreement as early as January 1800, but their plans were scuttled by the British, who had no wish to see a large and experienced French army rejoin Napoleon?s legions to fight the British on other fronts. In 1801 the British Parliament authorized a military expedition to secure a French surrender in Egypt. The expedition reached Alexandria in March 1801 and combined forces with the Ottomans in a pincer movement on Cairo. The French surrendered Cairo in June and Alexandria in August 1801. They then boarded British and Ottoman ships to be transported home to France, bringing the whole sorry episode to a close.

The French occupation of Egypt lasted just three years. It was a fascinating moment in human terms, where Egyptians and Frenchmen found points to admire and to condemn in each other. Both sides emerged wounded from the encounter. The French who withdrew from Cairo in the summer of 1801, driven out by an Anglo-Ottoman force, were no longer the self-confident agents of a new revolutionary order. Rather, their ranks were thinned by war and disease and their morale was low after years without relief in Egypt. Many Frenchmen had converted to Islam and taken Egyptian wives—hardly a sign of condescension toward the people under their occupation. But the Egyptians too had had their confidence shaken by the experience of occupation. Their sense of superiority had been upset by their confrontation with the French, their ideas, and their technology.

The departing French left a power vacuum in Egypt. Their three-year occupation had broken the Mamluks’ power base in Cairo and Lower Egypt. The Ottomans wanted to prevent the reestablishment of the Mamluk households at all costs—in the absence of the French, they had never faced a better opportunity to reassert their authority over the rebellious province of Egypt. The British feared Napoleon would attempt the reconquest of Egypt and were determined to leave a strong deterrent behind. They had more confidence in the Mamluks than in the Ottomans defending Egypt from future French attack, and so they worked to rehabilitate the most powerful Mamluks. They pressured the Ottomans to pardon key Mamluk beys, who began to reestablish their households and rebuild their influence. The Ottomans complied with British wishes against their better judgment. No sooner had the British expeditionary force departed in 1803 than the Ottomans reverted to their own solutions for Egypt. The Sublime Porte ordered the governor in Cairo to exterminate the Mamluk beys and seize their wealth for the treasury.⁷ The Mamluks, however, had regained enough of their former strength to withstand Ottoman attacks. What followed was a bitter power struggle between the Ottomans and the Mamluks that prolonged the misery of the war-weary civilians of Cairo. One Ottoman commander emerged from the chaos to master the conflict with the Mamluks and to build public support for his bid to rule over Egypt. In fact, he would soon become one of the most influential figures in Egypt?s modern history. His name was Muhammad ?Ali. An ethnic Albanian born in the Macedonian town of Kavala, Muhammad ‘Ali (1770–1849) rose to command a powerful and unruly 6,000-man Albanian contingent of the Ottoman army in Egypt. Between 1803 and 1805, through an ever-shifting set of alliances, Muhammad ’Ali enhanced his personal power at the expense of the Ottoman governor, the commanders of the other Ottoman regiments, and the leading Mamluk beys. He openly courted the support of the notables of Cairo, who had grown increasingly restive after five years of political and economic instability, first under the French and now under the Ottomans. By 1805 the commander of the Albanian detachment had emerged as a king-maker in Cairo. But Muhammad’Ali aspired to be king himself. Muhammad ‘Ali’s activities had not escaped the attention of the Ottoman authorities. The commander of the Albanians was seen as a troublemaker, but he had talent and ambition that could be put to the empire’s advantage. The situation in Arabia remained critical. The Wahhabis had attacked Ottoman territory in Iraq in 1802 and took control of the holy city of Mecca in 1803. The Islamic reformers now imposed conditions on the Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from Cairo and Damascus and threatened to prohibit them entry to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina altogether (as they would do after 1806). This was an intolerable situation for the sultan, who claimed by imperial title to be the guardian of Islam’s holiest cities. When the notables of Cairo first petitioned Istanbul to appoint Muhammad ’Ali as governor of Egypt in 1805, the Porte decided to name him governor of the Arabian province of the Hijaz instead, and to entrust him with the dangerous mission of crushing the Wahhabi movement. As governor-designate of the Hijaz, Muhammad ‘Ali was promoted to the rank of pasha, which made him eligible to serve as governor in any Ottoman province. Muhammad ’Ali accepted the appointment to the Hijaz for the title alone. He showed no interest in moving to the Red Sea province to take up his new post. Instead, he conspired with his allies among the civilian notables of Cairo to put pressure on the Ottomans to appoint him governor of Egypt. The notables had confidence that Muhammad ‘Ali and his Albanian soldiers could impose order on Cairo. They also suffered from the illusion that Muhammad ’Ali would be beholden to them for their support and would allow the notables to exercise control over the governor they’d appointed. They hoped in this way to lessen the government’s tax burden on the merchants and artisans of Cairo and to regenerate the economic vitality of the province to their benefit. But Muhammad ’Ali had other plans. In May 1805 the townspeople of Cairo rose in protest against Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor. The common people of Cairo had reached a breaking point after years of instability, violence, overtaxation, and injustice. They closed their shops in protest and demanded the Ottomans appoint a governor of their choosing. Al-Jabarti, who lived through these troubled times, describes large demonstrations led by beturbaned shaykhs in the mosques of Cairo where young men chanted slogans against their tyrannical pasha and Ottoman injustice. The mob made its way to Muhammad ’Ali’s house. “And whom do you want to be governor?” asked Muhammad ’Ali. “We will accept only you,” the people replied. “You will be governor over us according to our conditions, for we know you as a just and good man.” Muhammad ’Ali modestly declined the offer. The mob insisted. In a show of reluctance, the crafty Albanian allowed himself to be persuaded. The leading notables then brought him a fur pelisse and a ceremonial gown in an improvised ceremony of investiture. It was an unprecedented event: the people of Cairo had imposed their own choice of governor on the Ottoman Empire. The incumbent governor, Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, was not impressed. “I was appointed by the sultan and I will not be removed at the command of the peasants,” he retorted. “I will leave the Citadel only on the orders of the imperial government.”⁸ The civilians of Cairo laid siege to the deposed governor in the Citadel for over a month, until orders came from Istanbul confirming the people’s choice of governor, on June 18, 1805. Muhammad ’Ali was now master of Egypt.

It was one thing to be named governor of Egypt—scores of men had held the title since the Ottomans had conquered the territory in 1517—and quite another to actually govern Egypt. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha established his mastery over the province like no one before or after him. He succeeded in monopolizing the wealth of Egypt and used the revenues to establish a powerful army and a bureaucratic state. He used his army to expand the territory under his command, making Egypt the center of an empire in its own right. But unlike ’Ali Bey al-Kabir, who as a Mamluk had dreamed of rebuilding the Mamluk Empire, Muhammad ’Ali was an Ottoman, and he sought to dominate the Ottoman Empire. Muhammad ‘Ali also was an innovator who put Egypt on a path of reform, drawing on European ideas and technology in ways that the Ottomans themselves would later imitate. He created the first peasant mass army in the Middle East. He undertook one of the earliest industrialization programs outside Europe, applying the technology of the Industrial Revolution to produce weapons and textiles for his army. He dispatched education missions to European capitals and created a translation bureau to publish European books and technical manuals in Arabic editions. He enjoyed direct relations with the great powers of Europe, who treated him more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy of the Ottoman sultan. By the end of his reign, Muhammad ?Ali had succeeded in establishing his family?s hereditary rule over Egypt and the Sudan. His dynasty would rule Egypt until the 1952 revolution brought down the monarchy.

Though they had shifted Muhammad ’Ali’s appointment from the Hijaz to Cairo, the Sublime Porte still expected him to lead a campaign against the Wahhabis to restore Ottoman authority in Arabia. The new governor found many excuses to ignore Istanbul’s commands. He had come to power through disorder and knew that he too would fall unless he brought the Cairo public and the Ottoman soldiers to heel. Muhammad ‘Ali’s Albanian soldiers gave him an independent power base to help him achieve mastery in Cairo by force. The fragmented Mamluk households were his first target, and he pursued them to Upper Egypt. Such campaigns soon proved expensive, however, and the pasha realized that soldiers were not enough to control Egypt. He needed money too. Agriculture was the province’s primary source of revenues. Yet, one-fifth of Egypt’s agricultural land had been endowed to support Islamic institutions, and the other four-fifths were leased out in tax farms held by the Mamluk households and other large landholders that brought little benefit to the treasury in Cairo. To control the revenues of Egypt, Muhammad ’Ali would have to control its land. By putting the land of Egypt under a system of direct taxation, Muhammad ‘Ali gained the necessary resources to impose his control over Egypt. In the process, he undermined the financial bases of his Mamluk opponents and his supporters among the notables of Cairo alike. The religious scholars were divested of their autonomous revenues, and the landed elites found themselves dependent on the governor they had hoped to control. In all, it took six years for Muhammad ’Ali to consolidate his position in Egypt before he finally accepted the sultan’s commission to conduct a campaign against the Wahhabis in Arabia.

In March 1811, Muhammad ‘Ali sent his son Tussun Pasha to lead the military operation against the Wahhabis. This was to be Muhammad ’Ali’s first venture beyond the frontiers of Egypt. Before sending a large part of his army abroad, he wanted to ensure peace and stability in Egypt. He organized a ceremony of investiture for Tussun and invited all of the leading figures of Cairo to attend—including the most powerful Mamluk beys. The beys saw the invitation as a conciliatory gesture following several years of hostilities with Muhammad ’Ali’s government. Clearly, they reasoned, the governor would find it easier to rule with Mamluk support than to continue fighting against them. Nearly all of the beys accepted the invitation and arrived in Cairo’s Citadel dressed in their finery to take part in the ceremony. If any of the beys had misgivings, the fact that nearly all of the leading Mamluks were in attendance must have given them some sense of security. Besides, what sort of man would violate the laws of hospitality by committing treachery against his guests? After the ceremony of investiture, the Mamluks paraded in a formal procession through the Citadel. As they made their way through one of its gated passageways, the gates suddenly closed. Before the confused beys realized what was happening, soldiers appeared on the walls overhead and opened fire. After years of fighting, the soldiers had come to hate the Mamluks and went about their work with relish, leaping down from the walls to finish off the beys. “The soldiers went berserk butchering the amirs and looting their clothing,” al-Jabarti recorded. “Showing their hatred, they spared no one.” They killed Mamluks and the supernumeraries the beys had dressed up to accompany their procession—most of whom were common citizens of Cairo. “These people were shouting and calling for help. One would say, ‘I’m not a soldier or a Mamluk.’ Another would say ‘I’m not one of them.’ The soldiers, however, did not heed these screams and pleas.”⁹ Muhammad ‘Ali’s troops then went on a rampage through the city. They dragged out anyone suspected of being a Mamluk and took them back to the Citadel, where they were beheaded. In his report to Istanbul, Muhammad ’Ali claimed that twenty-four beys and forty of their men had been killed, and he dispatched their heads and ears to support the claim.¹⁰ Al-Jabarti’s account suggests the violence was far more extensive. The massacre in the Citadel was the final blow to the Mamluks of Cairo. They had survived Selim the Grim’s conquest and Napoleon’s invasion, but after nearly six centuries in Cairo they were practically exterminated by Muhammad ‘Ali. The few surviving Mamluk beys stayed in Upper Egypt, knowing that Cairo’s governor would stop at nothing to secure his power, and that they lacked the means to challenge him. Confident that he no longer faced any domestic challenge to his rule, Muhammad ’Ali could now send his army to Arabia to earn the gratitude of the Ottoman sultan.

The Wahhabi campaign proved a tremendous drain on the resources of Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt. The battlefield was far from home, communication and supply lines were long and vulnerable, and Tussun Pasha was forced to fight in a harsh environment on the enemy’s terrain. In 1812, taking advantage of their superior knowledge of the countryside, the Wahhabis drew the Egyptian force into a narrow pass and dealt the 8,000-man army a serious defeat. Many of the demoralized Albanian commanders quit the battlefield and returned to Cairo, leaving Tussun short-handed. Muhammad ’Ali sent reinforcements to Jidda, and over the next year Tussun managed to secure Mecca and Medina. Muhammad ’Ali accompanied the pilgrimage caravan in 1813 and dispatched the keys of the holy city to the sultan in Istanbul as a token of the restoration of his sovereignty over the birthplace of Islam. These victories had come at a high price: the Egyptian force had lost 8,000 men and the Egyptian treasury had spent the enormous sum of 170,000 purses (approximately $6.7 million in 1820 U.S. dollars).¹¹ Nor had the Wahhabis been fully defeated. They had merely withdrawn before the Egyptian army’s advance and were bound to return. Fighting continued between Tussun’s Egyptian army and the Wahhabi force, commanded by Abdullah ibn Saud, until the two sides struck a truce in 1815. Tussun returned home to Cairo, where he contracted plague and died within days of his return. When word of Tussun’s death filtered back to Arabia, Abdullah ibn Saud broke his truce and attacked Egyptian positions. Muhammad ‘Ali appointed his eldest son, Ibrahim, as commander in chief of Egyptian forces. It was the beginning of a brilliant military career, for Ibrahim Pasha emerged as Muhammad ’Ali’s generalissimo. Ibrahim Pasha took up his command in Arabia early in 1817 and pursued a relentless campaign against the Wahhabis. He secured Egyptian control over the Red Sea province of the Hijaz before driving the Wahhabis back into the central Arabian region of the Najd. Even though the Najd lay outside Ottoman territory, Ibrahim Pasha was determined to eliminate the Wahhabi threat once and for all, and he drove his adversaries back to their capital of Dir’iyya. For six months the two sides fought a terrible war of attrition. The Wahhabis, trapped within the walls of their city, were slowly starved of food and water by the Egyptian siege. Egyptian forces suffered heavy losses to disease and exposure in the lethal summer heat of Central Arabia. In the end the Egyptians prevailed, and in September 1818 the Wahhabis surrendered, knowing they faced total destruction. On Muhammad ‘Ali’s orders, the Egyptian forces destroyed the town of Dir’iyya and sent all of the leaders of the Wahhabi movement to Cairo as prisoners. Muhammad’Ali knew he had earned Sultan Mahmud II’s favor by suppressing a movement that had brought the very legitimacy of the Ottoman sultanate into question for over sixteen years. Moreover, he had succeeded where no other Ottoman governor or commander could, in prosecuting a successful campaign in Central Arabia. From Cairo, Abdullah ibn Saud and the leaders of the Wahhabi state were sent on to Istanbul to face the sultan’s justice. Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) turned the execution of the Wahhabi leaders into a state occasion. He summoned the top government officials, the ambassadors of foreign states, and the leading notables of his empire to the Topkapi Palace to witness the ceremony. The three condemned men—the military commander, Abdullah ibn Saud, the chief minister, and the spiritual leader of the Wahhabi movement—were brought in heavy chains and publicly tried for their crimes against religion and state. The sultan concluded the hearings by sentencing all three to death. Abdullah ibn Saud was beheaded before the main gate of the Aya Sofia Mosque, the chief minister was executed before the main entrance to the palace, and the spiritual leader was beheaded in one of the main markets of the city. Their bodies were left on display, heads tucked under arms, for three days before their corpses were cast into the sea.¹² With the expulsion of French forces from Egypt and the defeat of the Wahhabi movement, Sultan Mahmud II might be excused for believing the Ottoman Empire had withstood the most serious challenges to its position in the Arab world. Yet the governor in Egypt who delivered victory in Arabia would himself prove a far graver threat to Mahmud II. For while the Wahhabis attacked the fringes of his state—very important fringes on spiritual grounds, but fringes nonetheless—Muhammad’Ali would pose a challenge to the very center of the Ottoman Empire and the ruling dynasty itself.