Gradually the authorities came to realize that what was needed was a system of control and surveillance that would be similar to that reached to circumvent the role of the village shaykhs reviewed in the last chapter. Rather than depending on sentry guards and bedouin patrols catching deserters, the aim was to imprint on the minds of the soldiers the idea of internment in the first place and to subject them to a regime of surveillance that would make obedience and discipline seem natural and be habitually practiced. That system, it was hoped, would target the minds of the recruits and not only their bodies; a system that would, in the words of an eighteenth-century French military thinker, bind them “by the chain of their own ideas” rather than “constrain them with iron chains.”

XREF: Connects to the earlier claim about conscription's resistance forcing Egypt's shift to subtle control techniques (loc 490) and to the Foucauldian theme of internalized discipline present throughout this chapter. DEFINE: Clarifies the shift in disciplinary philosophy from physical constraint to mental conditioning—imprinting obedience as habitual and natural. Builds on: "Conscription's resistance forced Egypt's shift to subtle control techniques."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 664