Egyptian Expedition on Acre: 1831-1832
Ameen Abu-Bakar, Department of History, An-Najah National University, Palestine.
Abstract
This paper examines the military expedition on Acre, in 1831 waged by the governor of Egypt Mohammad Ali Pasha. This expedition was the first confrontation between the then nascent Arab Egyptian army, in all its formations, namely ground and marine forces, regular and irregular, its Arab leaderships and Arabised ones on one hand, and the Ottoman state, heir of the Islamic caliphate and holder of legal custodianship in the Arab provinces, including Egypt, on the other hand. The expedition came two decades after Mohammed Ali sided with the Ottoman Empire and supported it both militarily and financially in the Arabian Peninsula and Greece. The research falls in six tracks. The first deals with the reasons behind Mohammad Ali Pasha’s change of stands towards the Ottoman state by rebelling against it. The second track is devoted to the different formations of the regular and irregular ground and marine forces. The third tackles the march and deployment of troops in the vicinity of Acre and other sites to secure defense lines for units stationed around Acre, Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, Nablus, Banat Ya’coub Bridge, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Tripoli, Ba’albeck and Zahle. The fourth track examined the flow of supplies, including regular and irregular reinforcement and food and weapon supplies. The fifth track examines the military operations during the siege of the city, starting from the deployment around its fortifications on Nov. 27, 1831 and ending with its storming on May 27, 1932, a lot of human and material losses. The last track is devoted to the findings of the study. The primary sources study used in this include published Egyptian documents, records of Islamic courts, consuls’ reports, diaries of eye- witnesses, surveys and field visits.