Book Description

Long portrayed in the west, and throughout the Arab world, as an Albanian soldier who emerged from obscurity to become the founder of the modern Egyptian state, Mehmed Ali Pasa (aka: Muhammad Ali Pasha) was in fact an Ottoman Turk from his birth in the Macedonian port of Kavala (1770 -1771) until his death in Alexandria, Egypt (1849). The present work is an attempt to illustrate this all to often overlooked historical reality. It seeks to evaluate his career, not on the basis of the stories he regaled European visitors with in his waning years, but rather on the basis of an overlooked but important aspect of his life: the lifelong attachment he maintained with the town of his birth, Kavala (then in Ottoman Macedonia, today in northeastern Greece).