In the early 1860s, the Eyalet of Egypt, a province of the Ottoman Empire, ordered several ironclad warships for its fleet as part of a rearmament program to again challenge the power of the central government-the last having been the Second Egyptian-Ottoman War twenty years earlier.
Lüft-ü Celil and Hifz-ur Rahman were seagoing monitors armed with a battery of two muzzle loading Armstrong guns and two Armstrong guns, each pair mounted in a revolving gun turret, both of which were on the centerline.