78 ISLAM AT WAR
tempted to do so with the Treaty of London, July 6, 1827. However Ibrahim
refused to comply with Western demands without special instructions from
the sultan. This led to the movement of the combined British, French, and
Russian fleets into the Navarino harbor and the naval battle of Navarino,
fought on October 20, 1827. The Turkish-Egyptian fleet was destroyed.
This and the two campaigns of the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29
decided the issue and Greece became an independent nation. Some ob-
servations to be taken from this apply to today’s circumstances in the
Balkans. The Greeks have never forgotten how the Ottomans turned the
Muslim Albanians loose in Greece to slaughter and reinforce Ottoman
rule. Also, both the Greeks and the Ottomans ruthlessly slaughtered each
other, the Greeks because of the outrages the Ottomans had perpetrated
against them, and the Ottomans to attempt by terror to reestablish their
oppression of the Greeks. The fruits of these seeds would be seen again
in the Balkan Wars in 1912–13 and, the post–World War I invasion of
Turkey by the Greeks and the subsequent slaughter of thousands of Turks,
and the ongoing Greco-Turkish hostility over Cyprus.
The Egyptian Mamluks were not unique in the Muslim world. The
Ottomans raised a similar force known as the Janissaries. Mercenary
forces were a useful tool to the Egyptians, and other Muslim governments
as well. The drawback to both Egyptian Mamluk and Ottoman Janissary
is that they slowed the growth of a modern army in each nation.
There would be other Egyptian parallels with the Ottomans. The early
Mamluk sultans fought their way through the ranks and to the throne, and
the early Ottoman sultans were also battle-hardened veterans, though they
generally succeeded their fathers to the throne. However, both dynasties
also clearly demonstrated that the sons who ascended their respective
thrones were often poor rulers who were either marginalized or supplanted
by stronger men.
It is fortunate for the world that the Mamluk system existed and that
they had control of Egypt when they did, as the Mongol invasion of the
Middle East and West would have surely resulted had they not been de-
feated by the Mamluks at Ain Jaloot. The primitive western kingdoms
would have had no hope of stopping the Mongol invasion, and our history
would have been irreparably altered.
Similarly, it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened
had Mehmet Ali, successor to the Mamluks, not defeated the fundamen-
talist Wahhabis in 1817. The absence of a strong, fundamentalist group in
the Middle East facilitated the penetration of the Middle East by the im-
perial Western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also