Revisiting Mohamed Ali Pasha's Origins

A few days ago, an Egyptian patriot and the grandson of Mohamed Ali Pasha and Ibrahim Pasha, Mehmet Mohammed Sarhan, shared a powerful thread, revisiting the origins of the man who laid the very foundations of modern Egypt. 

Kavala, a small coastal town, cradled the birth of the Ottoman general who would later become Egypt’s most ambitious ruler.

Mohamed Ali was born in Kavala in 1769 (1183 AH). But he always emphasized that his roots traced back to Konya. 

This wasn’t a passing claim; it was recorded by his trusted aide Mohamed Aref Pasha in ‘Ibar al-Bashar’, quoting both the Pasha himself and his son Ibrahim.

Dr. Mohamed Shafiq Ghorbal, one of Egypt’s most respected historians, clarified the truth plainly in his book “Mohamed Ali the Great”, published by the Egyptian Historical Society in 1944:

“In the city of Kavala — a small maritime town — Mohamed Ali was born. The commonly accepted date is 1183 AH / 1769 AD. He was a Muslim Ottoman Turk — with no lineage connecting him to the Albanians, the Slavs of Macedonia, or the Greeks.”

Despite serving in an Ottoman-European force where many officers were Albanian, Mohamed Ali wasn’t one of them. He climbed the military ranks, but he wasn’t of them, nor shaped by them. 

As Ghorbal explained, Albanians had their own tribal leaders and chiefs. Mohamed Ali had no political loyalty in those circles. He was Ottoman in blood, and language.

The book was published under the leadership of Dr. Mohamed Taher Pasha, a man of noble heritage, grandson of Grand Vizier Ahmed Arifi Pasha, cousin of King Farouk, and the first Egyptian to earn a doctorate in political sociology from the Sorbonne.

Kavala, known in Turkish by the same name, is part of the Drama region, which today lies within the borders of modern Greece. 

When the population exchange between Greece and Turkey took place in the early 20th century, Muslim families from Kavala moved east. 

And if Mohamed Ali Pasha had been alive during that time, given his deep devotion to Islam and loyalty to his Ottoman identity, it’s likely he would have returned to Konya, the ancestral home of his forebears.

The Turkishness of Mohamed Ali is not just a historical footnote. It's how Europe saw him too.

In 1834, Count Charles Joseph Edmond Sain de Boislecomte described him in his official report:

“He is keen to preserve the Ottoman character of his government, and he speaks only Turkish.”

This report was later published by the Royal Geographical Society of Egypt in 1927, and cited in the remarkable book “The Building of the Egyptian State: Mohamed Ali.”

Mohamed Ali was a reformer, a military genius, a controversial figure, and the architect of Egypt’s modern state. In addition, he was an Ottoman Turk.