In this letter the Pasha was contemplating the efforts he had made so far in helping his Sultan and was gloomily thinking of the prospect of fighting a combined European naval force that he would have little chance of defeating. "Here I am at a loss," he said: "shall I be grieved at the calamity of the Sublime State (devlet-i aliyye) or at my own lost effort?" Instead of translating devlet-i aliyye as "the Sublime State," the conventional term for the Ottoman Empire, Marsot in her citation of that letter translates it as "my country." … Rather than viewing Mehmed Ali as a national or proto-national hero, the present book argues that the Pasha did have ambivalent feelings towards both his Egyptian subjects and his Ottoman Sultan not because he was suffering from an identity crisis caused by the fact that he was an Albanian who "had no cultural identity other than the Ottoman one," causing him to have a "love-hate relationship with the Ottomans and [to fear] a loss of identity," but because of his untenable position within the Ottoman Empire. For it was the Pasha's desire to carve out an empire for himself at the expense of the Sultan's own empire, an act that could only be seen as one of rebellion and aggression, and at the same time his desire to be forgiven by the Sultan that caused the Pasha's conflicting "psychological" problems.

Builds on: "Egyptian context explains the gap between plan and execution."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 41