Britain and Her Rivals in the Middle East 77
A French colonel, who became a Muslim and Is commemorated as
Sulaiman Pasha by one of Cairo's principal streets, was engaged to
reorganize and train the Egyptian army on French lines. Another
Frenchman planned and organized the naval dockyards and others
came as doctors, engineers, surveyors, and as managers of the
numerous factories founded by Mohammed Ali in Ms attempt to
modernize and develop the whole productive economy of Egypt.
Anxious to build up a cadre of young Egyptians with a modern
technical training, it was natural that he should send them to France,
whose educational system had been entirely modernized since the
Revolution and now provided the finest scientific and teclinical
instruction in the world. In contrast, all that contemporary Eng-
land could offer was the unreformed medieval structure of Oxford
and Cambridge, the few great collegiate schools, and the country
grammar schools, all greatly mouldered by the neglect of two
centuries—a crumbling monumental ruin not unlike the Great
Pyramid, and of about as much utility to the ambitious Pasha. It
was therefore to Paris that his young men were sent to study.
French educational influence was predominant in the fifty ele-
mentary and secondary schools which were opened in Egypt from
1836 onwards, and French scientific and technical works were
translated into Arabic as text-books. A French military mission
and ten naval officers were lent to Mohammed Ali in 1824 to
accompany the forces with which he undertook to suppress the
revolt of the Greeks against the Ottoman Sultan; and when the
Great Powers had finally agreed on a joint intervention to end the
Revolt, lest it should provoke a general European war, the French
naval officers were withdrawn only two days before Ibrahim
Pasha's fleet was destroyed by a joint Anglo-French fleet at Navar-
ino. The French continued to intrigue with Mohammed Ah for
their own ends and, having set their minds on annexing Algeria
but not wishing to disturb the concert of Europe by a direct attack
on what was still nominally Ottoman territory, they suggested to
the Pasha in 1829 that he should conquer and annex the whole of
North Africa with French help. But the British government
won the ear of the Najdi noble Mohammed ibn Sa'ud about the middle of the
eighteenth century. The Wahhabi tribesmen, influenced by this puritan creed,
extended the domain of the Sa'udi rulers, and at the beginning of the nineteenth
century occupied and 'purified' Mecca and Madina and sacked the Shi'i shrine
of Husain at Karbala. These acts brought down upon them the vengeance of the
Ottoman Empire, with Mohammed Ali as its instrument.