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The Albanian general, Mohammad Ali Pasha
On 24th of the Islamic month of Sha’ban in 1221 AH, the Ottoman state issued a decree confirming the Albanian general, Mohammed Ali Pasha, as governor of Egypt, a few years after his successful ending of the political and administrative crisis in the Land of the Nile. Later, following the sacrilegious Wahhabi attack on the shrine of Imam Husain (AS) in Karbala, Iraq, and the desecration of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina by Godless elements from the Najd, the Ottoman Sultan tasked Mohammad Ali to end the sedition. He successfully accomplished the mission by restoring order to the Hijaz and sending his sons to pursue the Wahhabis right into their heartland Najd, where he ordered the destruction of their capital, Diriyya, and sent the Wahhabi chieftain, Abdullah ibn Saud, in chains to Istanbul for execution for his unpardonable crimes. The dynasty founded by Mohammad Ali was known as "Khedive" from the old Persian word for prince or ruler and ruled Egypt for over a century and a half, till its overthrow in 1952 by Colonel Jamal Abdun-Nasser.
On May 17, in 1805 AD, the Albanian general, Mohammad Ali Pasha, who was dispatched to Egypt by the Ottoman Sultan, following the withdrawal of Napoleon Bonaparte and his occupying French forces in 1801, officially proclaimed himself the “Khedive” (Persian for Viceroy or Ruler) of Egypt and Sudan by eliminating all rivals. During his almost half-a-century rule he transformed Egypt into a regional power which he saw as the natural successor to the decaying Ottoman Empire. He initiated wide ranging reforms and established for the first time a professional bureaucracy.
In the 1820s, he sent the first educational mission of Egyptian students to Europe. This contact resulted in the birth of literature that is considered the dawn of the Arabic literary renaissance, known as the “an-Nahdha”. To support the modernization of the industry and the military, Mohammad Ali set up a number of schools in various fields where French texts were studied. Rifa'a at-Tahtawi supervised translations from French to Arabic on topics ranging from sociology and history to military technology.
On July 23, 1821 AD, Christian rebels stormed the Monemvasia Castle in the Ottoman Province of “Yunanistan” (as the land known as Greece today was called during almost four centuries of Turkish rule), and massacred over 3,000 Muslims. The rebels, taking weakness of the Ottoman Empire, resorted to organized killings of Muslims and destruction of mosques that made the Sultan in Istanbul call on the Egyptian governor, Mohammad Ali Pasha, to crush the rebellion. The Egyptian forces led by the governor’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, arrived in “Yunanistan” and quickly restored order to this Ottoman Province by crushing the rebels. This gave a pretext to Britain, France and Russia to intervene and internationalize the rebellion, which because of direct European military measures forced the Egyptians and Ottomans to retreat by 1830, when as per the London Protocol, a new country with the ancient name of Greece, was born. The Greeks immediately set about ethnic cleansing of Turks and Muslims through massacres and expulsion, as well as conversion of mosques into Churches, so that today hardly any trace of several centuries of Ottoman rule remains.
Egyptian forces captured Psara Island in the Aegean Sea
On June 21, 1824 AD, Egyptian forces, dispatched by Mohammad Ali Pasha to quell the West European-backed Greek sedition against Ottoman rule captured Psara island in the Aegean Sea.
In 1835, Mohammad Ali Pasha founded the first indigenous press in the Arab World, the Bulaq Press, which published the official gazette of the government. Bulaq also published rare old Arabic books, as well as Persian and Turkish. He pursued military campaigns initially on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmoud II, in Arabia and Greece (capturing Athens in 1827 before the combined attack of the British-French forced him to retreat). Later he came into open conflict with the Ottoman Empire, because of his personal ambitions, which brought Syria under his control for ten years and made him advance as far as Konya in 1832.
He launched the expedition into the Hijaz to liberate the holy cities of Mecca and Medina from desert brigands from the Najd led by Abdullah ibn Saud, who followed the heretical Wahhabi cult and had desecrated the holy shrines. After purging the Hijaz of the Wahhabis, Mohammad Ali Pasha sent his son, Ibrahim, in 1812, to completely destroy and rout out the Aal-e Saud from Najd itself. After a two-year campaign, the Aal-e Saud clan was crushed and most of them captured. The leader, Abdullah ibn Saud, was sent to Istanbul, and executed for having desecrated the holy shrine of Imam Husain (AS) in Karbala, before his sacrilegious attack on the Hijaz.
In short, Mohammad Ali established the dynasty that lasted till the military coup of 1952 and the ouster of King Farouq by General Mohammad Najib and Colonel Jamal Abd an-Nasser.
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