In December of 1885, Ahmed Muhtar Paşa, the decorated military commander and Ottoman high official was dispatched to Cairo in order to negotiate the withdrawal of British troops from Egypt. Though negotiations collapsed, Muhtar Paşa remained in Cairo until 1909 as the Ottoman High Commissioner to Egypt. With few exceptions, Muhtar Paşa’s stint in Egypt has been written about as period of exile, having ostensibly fallen out of favor with the Sultan, or otherwise unimportant to his early military and later political career. Yet by the time Muhtar Paşa arrived in Cairo he had extensive administrative experience throughout the empire as a military commander and governor. He was dispatched almost exclusively to provincial hotspots with the mission to extend the reach of the state or prevent European intervention in Ottoman affairs. Between the late 1860s and 1886, he was on the ground during critical moments in Yemen, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Erzurum, Crete and Monastir. Muhtar Paşa also knew and “was known” by European diplomats and high officials and was characterized by Europeans as a strong and effective governor – British officials often compared Muhtar to Mehmed Fuad Paşa, one of the key reformers of the Tanzimat. Rather than treat Muhtar Paşa’s time in Egypt separate from his earlier administrative experiences, this paper contends that he was sent to Egypt precisely because it was a problem spot within the empire. During his thirty-year plus tenure in Cairo, Muhtar Paşa generated an extensive body of policy recommendations for Sultan Abdülhamid II. Experiencing the ‘Scramble for Africa’ first hand, he advised the Sultan to engage European powers directly and to lay claim to Ottoman territorial rights in North Africa and along the Red Sea coast in order to reinforce the Empire against Europe. I show that these recommendations led in part to Ottoman efforts to assert more direct control over provinces bordering Egypt, especially Libya. This paper argues that Muhtar Paşa’s experience at the edges of the empire profoundly shaped his imperial and administrative ideas as well as his policy recommendations once in Egypt. This paper reconsiders the Ottoman involvement in the European Scramble for Africa as well as the importance of Egypt as an Ottoman province after the British occupation in 1882.