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Building military strength: officers and soldiers

Building military strength: officers and soldiers

Point 5 of 6 — Lesson 14: Building the Modern State – Education, Administration and Army under Muhammad AliQuestion bank: 0 questions (0 with pictures)

05Building military strength: officers and soldiers

Training the officers

  • Muhammad Ali was a military man who understood the importance of military power, so he turned to building an organised national force in place of the irregular, mercenary and mutinous troops.
  • He founded military schools to train officers and founded the Muhanfasakhana (school of engineering) to prepare experts for the industries connected with the army — so the army was an instrument of the advance of civilisation besides its military role.
  • His first attempt at regular officers: he ordered the training of a corps of Turkish soldiers who had taken part in the Wahhabi wars, but they refused modern training, and matters went as far as a plot to depose him.
  • He returned to his idea in 1820 and opened a school at Aswan to graduate officers on the modern system, relying on the French colonel Sève, who took the name Suleiman Pasha al-Faransawi after embracing Islam.

Recruiting the soldiers

  • He decided to avoid recruiting Turks and Arnauts because of their mutinous nature, and to avoid Egyptians for fear of their revolt; so he turned to recruiting Sudanese.
  • The Sudanese experiment failed: most of them died because the climate did not suit them.
  • He decided to rely on Egyptians, and the experiment succeeded in the war of Greece (1824).
  • When conscription widened, he brought a group of senior French officers to help organise the army, and sent young men to Europe to complete their military studies; they replaced the foreign instructors on their return.

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