Abbas Helmi I was born on the first day of July 1812 (or perhaps 1813 — the records are never quite sure), in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. His father, Tusun Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, was in the nearby Hejaz, locked in a brutal campaign against the Wahhabi movement. Abbas Helmi I was heir to a bloodline of ambition, destined to rule Egypt and Sudan, and fated to die, violently and alone, in the palace he rarely left.
Abbas Helmi was brought up in Cairo, under the looming shadow of his grandfather, the indomitable Muhammad Ali Pasha — founder of the dynasty, modernizer, warrior, reformer. But while Muhammad Ali’s mind burned with ideas of state-building and military reform, Abbas grew into a quieter, more withdrawn figure. Morose, even as a child. Cautious. Watchful.
In his youth, Abbas served in the Syrian campaigns under his uncle, Ibrahim Pasha — another titan of Egypt’s modern history. But when Muhammad Ali began to slip into mental decline in 1848, it was Ibrahim who briefly assumed the reins of power, ruling from September to November that year. Ibrahim’s death on November 10, 1848, changed everything. Abbas, only 36 years old, suddenly found himself Regent of Egypt and Sudan. With Muhammad Ali’s death less than a year later, Abbas I became Wāli in full — ruler of the Egyptian realm his grandfather had carved from Ottoman neglect.
A Reactionary’s Crown
Unlike Muhammad Ali or Ibrahim, Abbas Helmi had little desire for grand reforms or the applause of foreign powers. Where they had built schools, factories, and fleets, Abbas saw waste, corruption, and danger. He reversed much of his grandfather’s work — shuttering technical schools, closing factories, abolishing trade monopolies, and reducing the once-mighty Egyptian army to just 9,000 men. He also cancelled the construction of the Delta Dam and fiercely resisted the idea of a canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean (the Suez Canal).
To many Europeans, Abbas seemed a throwback — a reactionary prince of limited vision. They portrayed him as cruel, uneducated, even debauched. But the truth is always more complicated.
Nubar Pasha, one of the most influential Egyptian statesmen of the 19th century, remembered Abbas not as a tyrant, but as a man of principle — “a true gentleman of the old school,” he said. Not jovial or approachable, perhaps, but not the monster some made him out to be.
He was, above all, inaccessible. Abbas rarely left his palaces. He surrounded himself with silence, layers of privacy, and loyal servants. Some said he feared assassination. Others believed he simply found the outside world intolerable — too noisy, too corrupt, too full of foreign meddlers.
And perhaps they were right. Abbas loathed European influence in Egypt. While his grandfather had welcomed engineers, bankers, and military advisors, Abbas expelled many of them. But pragmatism sometimes won: when the British pushed for a railway between Cairo and Alexandria, Abbas agreed — in return for their help resolving a dispute with the Ottoman Sultan.
Yet the tide he tried to resist rolled on. In 1850, there were 3,000 Europeans in Egypt. By 1882, there would be 90,000. By 1900 — over 200,000. His death, and the changes that followed, made Abbas I the last ruler of Egypt to seriously resist European economic and political encroachment.
The Horse Breeder of Benha
And yet, there was one area where Abbas’ soul stirred with passion — one place where his precision, patience, and pride came to life – Horses.
At the age of just 23, he had been entrusted with the breeding stables of Muhammad Ali himself. But Abbas went further. Horse breeding became the consuming obsession of his life. His love was not for pageantry, but for purity — the bloodlines of the Arabian horse, which he traced with almost clerical devotion. He built three great stables, including a stud farm said to have cost £1,000,000 — an astronomical sum. He kept 300 camels, just to supply milk for the foals. He brought in Bedouin caretakers and scholars of bloodline tradition, and he recorded every pedigree in painstaking Arabic.
He secured horses from the Najd — some of the finest Arabian lines in the world. He paid high prices to the Anazeh tribes for mares of rare descent. In this, he was not a ruler but a priest — a keeper of something sacred and enduring. These horses would later become the foundation of much of the world’s Arabian horse breeding.
And yet the man who showed such reverence to his horses showed far less mercy to those who served him.
Darkness Behind the Palace Walls
Abbas Helmi was cruel. There is no need to obscure that truth. The most chilling story — told years later to the famed horse breeder and traveler, Lady Anne Blunt — speaks of Abbas ordering a red-hot horseshoe nailed to the foot of a groom who had neglected a horse. Whether apocryphal or true, the story captures the climate of fear that surrounded him.
He ruled from behind high walls. Those closest to him were not ministers, but servants and slaves — men and women who had no voice, and no recourse. While the official cause was listed as apoplexy (stroke) on 13 July 1854, it is rumored that two of those slaves killed him. In his palace at Benha, north of Cairo, Abbas Helmi I may have been strangled to death. He was 41 years old.
The Aftermath
His body was returned to Cairo and laid to rest in the royal tombs of Hosh al-Basha — the same burial ground where his grandfather and other members of the dynasty lay. He was succeeded by his uncle, Said Pasha — younger than Abbas, and in many ways, his opposite.
Abbas’ beloved horses were inherited by his 18-year-old son, Prince Ibrahim Ilhami. But the son shared none of the father’s passion. Some horses were gifted to dignitaries. Others were sold. The records, so meticulously kept by Abbas, were scattered. It seemed the dynasty of horses would vanish with the man who bred them.
But a distant kinsman, Ali Pasha Sherif, bought back nearly 40 of the original Abbas horses in 1861. He resurrected the stud — and in so doing, rescued a legacy that might have died with Abbas in that quiet, suffocating room in Benha.
He remains one of the most enigmatic rulers of Egypt’s modern era — a man of immense control and calculation, of silence and severity, who loved horses more than men. Abbas Helmi I did not want to transform Egypt. He wanted to protect it — from the foreigners, from change, perhaps even from itself. But in the end, he could not protect himself. Not from history. Not from betrayal. Not even from the quiet rage of the men he thought he owned.