A VOYAGE TO EGYPT, perhaps intended to be just a matter of weeks or months, often turns into much more, and it can change a person’s life in many unexpected ways. Few, however, have experienced as great a transformation in their lifestyles as did Osman Effendi.
Osman was originally Donald Thomson, a boy from Perth in the north of Scotland, where he was born in the early 1790s. His father, a tradesman, died when Thomson was a child, and he passed into the care of relatives in Inverness. When he was 15, Thomson became involved in a dispute over the affections of a lass and stabbed his rival in a fit of jealous passion. Mistakenly thinking he had killed the lad, he ran away and joined the army, where he became an apothecary’s assistant in a Scottish regiment.
Thus it was that young Donald Thomson came to Egypt in 1807, when General Alexander Mackenzie Fraser’s expedition was dispatched to displace the regime that Mohammed Ali Pasha had recently established, while also securing Egypt’s grain supply for England and protecting the overland route to India. That expedition turned into a fiasco. Resistance was much greater than expected; the advance guard was cut off and soundly defeated at Rashid; and many were killed and many more taken prisoner. Thomson was among the captives. He and his fellow prisoners were forced to march in a procession in Cairo, carrying the severed heads of their slain comrades on platters. Wisely, the British decided to cut their losses and withdraw.
Most of the British prisoners were eventually repatriated, but not Thomson, because he had become the slave of a powerful Mamluk, a member of the military elite that was a formidable force within the land even in the early days of Mohammed Ali Pasha’s rule. Thomson tried to escape, but was easily recaptured. The attempt so enraged his master that he gave Thomson a simple choice: Embrace Islam or die.
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