Mahu Bey Urfali

Mahu Bey Urfali (; died 1826) was an Egyptian military officer of Kurdish origin who participated in the Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1820 and administered parts of the territory beginning in 1822. He served as the province governor of Berber, located north of the junction of the Nile and Atbara Rivers, from 1822 to 1825. In 1825 he was appointed acting commander of the Egyptian Army in the Sudan, and was sent to the junction of the Blue and White Nile at the emerging capital in Khartoum. He ruled for less than a year because he died from smallpox in 1826. His Arabic laqab, or toponymic nickname, "Urfali", suggests that he came from Urfa in what is now southeastern Turkey.

Career in Sudan

Mahu Bey was among the officers who joined Isma'il Kamil Pasha, the son of Mahammad Ali Pasha (Ottoman governor of Egypt), for the invasion and conquest of the Sudan in 1820. This Egyptian conquest (as historians of Sudan call the event) led to the overthrow of the remnants of the Funj Sultanate in Sudan and the suppression of resistance from local Arab tribes through military assault.

In 1822, Isma'il Kamil Pasha appointed Mahu Bey governor of the garrison at Berber. In his history of Turco-Egyptian rule in the Sudan (1820-1881), the historian Richard Leslie Hill described Mahu Bey as a level-headed administrator and a "tower of strength" in the province, who balanced Isma'il Pasha's demands for carrying out reprisals against local Sudanese Arab peoples (the Kababish, Hasaniyya, Shukriyya, and Ja'aliyyin) with the need for political and economic stability. meaning their Nile-irrigation-based farms. Mahu Bey resisted demands from Mahammad Ali Pasha himself, writing from Cairo, to crush the local Arab tribes completely, especially after locals killed Mahammad Ali's son Isma'il (leader of the conquest) by burning his hut, with him in it, during the night.