Egypt's recent past is indeed provocative. Mohamed Ali, the Ottoman adventurer who took control in 1805 after France's withdrawal, began to modernise Egypt by introducing effective administration, industrialisation, exposure to Europe, and a standing army. The Mohamed Ali dynasty's first six decades in power created an Egyptian empire that stretched from the sources of the Nile in east Africa to the eastern parts of Turkey, including the entire eastern Mediterranean and two-thirds of what is today Saudi Arabia. But the empire fell when the dreams of the Pasha's descendants exceeded their state's resources and capacities.
The early-twentieth-century liberal experiment, when Egypt adopted the Arab world's first comprehensive constitution (in 1923), took the state away from Ali's family and (at least in theory) gave it to the people. Egypt enjoyed the beginnings of democracy, true representation, constitutionalism, and, crucially, the notion - central to modern citizenship - of equal rights and obligations.
