In this respect there was nothing unique or strange in such corporal and spectacular “liturgies of power” in Mehmed Ali’s army. Indeed, a lot of army and naval laws passed in Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were characterized by this emphasis on brutal force in the application of punishment. The 1652 Articles of War, for example, which were applied to the British navy and which formed the basis of all subsequent naval laws, “sound exceedingly fierce in the reading, for of the thirty-nine articles one-third carry the death penalty without alternative, and in another third of them death looms as a possibility.”

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 671