As the example mentioned above shows, the language used both to incite the soldiers to fight and to describe their performance afterwards was often a religious language. Referring to the Egyptian fighters as the “believers,” to the enemy as the “infidels,” quoting from the Quran, and citing particular episodes from Islamic history, all show that defending the faith, rather than the patrie, was, in this case, the prime concern of officers and soldiers alike. In the Morean war, when the enemy was composed of the Christian Greek subjects who had rebelled against the authority of the Ottoman Sultan, this could very well have been the case. However, the situation was essentially different during the Syrian campaign, when the enemy was nothing other than the army of the Ottoman Sultan, the Defender of the Faith and Protector of the two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Using religious language to incite the soldiers to fight the Asakir-i Mansure-yi Muhammadiyye (The Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad), as the new Ottoman army was called after 1826, would not have been appropriate. How then did the men think when they were fighting not the Greek rebels but the Ottoman Sultan?

QUESTION: How did officers frame the war against the Ottoman Sultan — Islam's Defender of the Faith — without religious language, and what secular framing replaced it?

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 1313