| The early years |
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It is common to refer to 1769 as the year in which Mehmed Ali was born in Kavala. The popularity of that year is due in no small part to the numerous interviews the future ruler of Egypt was in the habit of giving to his foreign visitors. In these interviews he would single out that year as the year of his birth, reminding his eager listeners that it was also the year of birth of Napoleon and Wellington, two statesmen he was fond of, and in whose company he obviously wanted to be included. Of these early years few facts can be established with any degree of certainty. However, no doubt surrounds the identity of his father, a man called Ibrahim Aga, the son of Osman Aga, the son of Ibrahim Aga. Family lore maintained that Ibrahim Aga was not originally from Kavala and that his parental grandfather had hailed from Konia in central Anatolia. Before then the family traced its origins to areas further east giving rise to an idea that they were originally Kurds. Be that as it may, by the time they settled in Kavala c. 1700, they had shorn whatever Kurdish identity they might have had and were now speaking Turkish, professing Sunni Islam and intermingling with Rumelia’s population of Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians who were all subjects of the Ottoman sultan. As for his mother, little is known about her beyond the fact that she was called Zeyneb Hatun, and that she was from a small village called Nusretli in the province of Drama to the north of Kavala. Zeyneb Hatum was the sister of Kavala’s governor. Mehmed Ali in 1787 married a rich heiress from the village of Nusretli near the city of Drama named Emine, who would remain his devoted wife for the next thirty seven years until she died in Alexandria in 1823. Together they had five children, all born in Nusretli while the family resided there: Tevhide (1787-1830), Ibrahim (1789-1848), Ahmed Tousson (1793-1816), Ismail (1795-1822) and Nazl? (a.k.a. Hatice, 1799-1860). The young Mehmed Ali supported his growing family by investing his wife’s wealth in the lucrative tobacco trade which brought him in contact with the West. From this period onward, his valuation for the French, Greeks and Armenians will be largely documented. In 1798 Napoleon invades Egypt and the Sublime Porte asks from the Governor of Kavala to collect 300 irregular troops for dispatch to Alexandria. In December of 1800 Mohamed Ali leaving behind his wife and children embarked on a trip that would change his life and alter the fate of Egypt and of the Ottoman world. |
Institute Mohamed Ali