Napoleon in Egypt and Muhammad Ali (1798-1849)

Part oneThe French landing

In July 1798 a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte landed near Alexandria. Napoleon wanted to control the eastern Mediterranean and cut Britain's road to India. Egypt was an Ottoman province, but in practice it was ruled by the Mamluk beys, the heirs of the old Mamluk sultanate.

The Mamluks were sure their cavalry would trample the invaders, as their forebears had trampled the crusaders. Instead they were swept aside. At the Battle of the Pyramids the French infantry formed squares and broke the Mamluk charges with musket and cannon fire. The gap was not only in weapons. The French army was organised, flexible and well led, while the Mamluks charged with little plan. Within weeks Napoleon was in Cairo.

He told the Egyptians that he had come to free them from the Mamluks, praised the Prophet ﷺ and invited scholars of al-Azhar to sit on his councils. When the people of Cairo rose against the French in October 1798, the revolt was put down by force, and French troops entered al-Azhar on horseback. The British destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, Napoleon's march into Syria was stopped at Acre in 1799, and he slipped back to France. By 1801 British and Ottoman forces had driven the French out.

Part twoWhat the French left behind

The occupation lasted only three years, but it changed the way many Muslims saw the world. For centuries the Ottomans had seen themselves as stronger than Christian Europe. Now a European army had beaten the defenders of a great Muslim province with ease. Scholars and officials began to ask what had gone wrong.

Napoleon had brought scientists, engineers and artists with him. They studied Egypt from end to end and published a vast work, the Description de l'Egypte, and the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, opened the way to reading the ancient Egyptian script. The French also brought an Arabic printing press. Some Egyptians admired the French learning, others resented the occupiers, and many did both.

Part threeMuhammad Ali

After the French left, Egypt fell into disorder. An Albanian officer named Muhammad Ali, who had come with the Ottoman army, won the support of the Cairo notables, and in 1805 the sultan recognised him as governor. In 1811 he invited the leading Mamluks to a ceremony at the Citadel of Cairo and had them killed, ending their power for good.

Muhammad Ali set out to build a state as strong as any in Europe. He founded military schools with French instructors and built an army of Egyptian conscripts, with factories to make its muskets, cannon and uniforms and shipyards to build its fleet. To pay for it all he took control of the land and its crops, and made cotton Egypt's great export. He opened schools of medicine and engineering and sent students to study in Paris. One of them, the young al-Azhar scholar Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, came home to translate French books and write an account of Paris that was read across the Arab world.

His army served the sultan first. Between 1811 and 1818 it ended the first Saudi state in Arabia and returned Makkah and Madinah to Ottoman rule. In the 1820s it fought for the sultan against the Greek revolt, until a British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Egyptian and Ottoman ships at Navarino in 1827.

Then Muhammad Ali turned on his master. In 1831 his son Ibrahim invaded Syria and beat the Ottoman armies, and by 1832 he was deep in Anatolia. Only the intervention of the European powers saved the sultan. In a second war, in 1839 and 1840, Britain and Austria forced Egypt out of Syria. In return the sultan recognised Muhammad Ali's family as hereditary rulers of Egypt. He died in 1849, and his descendants ruled Egypt until 1952.

In three years a French army showed the Muslim world how far it had fallen behind.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture Hikma HistoryHow Napoleon Changed The Muslim World (opens on YouTube)

The mapWhere it happened

• Alexandria
• Aboukir Bay
• Cairo
• Acre
• Makkah
• Navarino
• Damascus
• Konya

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter