In a number of places this insistence on drawing clear boundaries around “Egypt” and on seeing it as a clearly identifiable entity within the Ottoman Empire when none existed leads Marsot to interpret certain documents in a most peculiar way as when, for example, she translates a key letter that Mehmed Ali sent to his agent in Istanbul, Najib Efendi, in 1827 at the height of the Greek War. 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.” This particularly skewed reading of an important and telling document is partly due to the fact that Marsot seems to have been relying on an Arabic translation rather than the original Turkish text of the document. However, it is mostly due to a particular reading of Egyptian history and specifically of Mehmed Ali’s career, a reading that sees his reign as a chapter in the never-ending saga of Egypt’s struggle to express her true identity.

XREF: Builds on earlier claims that "Egypt" as a nation is a nineteenth-century construct (loc 41) and that historians frame the Pasha's reforms as a coherent master-plan (loc 77). This highlight exposes the same anachronistic projection operating at the level of translation. Builds on: "Historians frame the Pasha's reforms as a coherent master-plan."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 103