Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

86 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTand General Leclerc therefore decided to retire that very evening toward al-Matariya.In recounting these battles, it would be wrong only to consider logistics,tactics, and generals’ orders. The debacle at al-Khanqa draws back the veil onthe centrality of the common people to these struggles. The peasant villagers ofal-Khanqa, emboldened by Ibrahim Bey’s stand, rose up against their new conquerors,executing not only sentinels but the food workers who provisionedthese foreign troops. It was as though they had decided to try to make a differenceat the level of their social class. Likewise, peasants poured onto the battlefieldfrom surrounding villages, fifteen percent of them armed with a gun.Those who could afford firearms were probably from the families of villageheadmen; that is, they were rich peasants who had a claim to more land andleadership prerogatives than ordinary farmers and laborers. 2 Villages were notisolated, and their inhabitants traveled for market days and to visit saints’ tombs.Many peasants had a Bedouin background and retained ties of kinship to thepastoralists, who had their own communication networks. Even the commonEgyptians were not the docile, isolated population that Bonaparte had expected.And Leclerc’s retreat was forced on him from below, by shaken French infantrymen(many of them conscripted peasants) who felt that they had nearly beenmassacred by Egyptians of their own social class.Also central to the battle against the French were the Bedouin tribesmen. Inthe marginal lands too far from the Nile to be well irrigated but having somepasture some of the time, the Bedouin tribes flourished. The great, politicallyimportant tribes were those that raised camels, while smaller clans raised onlysheep and goats. The French believed that the sixty tribes of such pastoral nomadscould provide 20,000 armed cavalrymen to the Ottoman Egyptian governmentwhen called upon, a vast underestimate given that they were actually tenpercent of the population. The Bedouin chieftains, or sheikhs, had been integratedinto the political structures of Ottoman Egypt and often served as provincialgovernors, overseers of economic enterprises such as mines, or holders ofestates where they were rewarded for providing security to the peasants so as toensure they could bring in their crops. The sheikhs were among the wealthiestindividuals in Egypt, though their tribespeople could be limited in wealth tosome livestock. No Bedouin was as poor as a landless or small peasant, however.The effectiveness of the tribesmen as fighting men provoked Bonaparte towrite bitterly about them to the Directory. “We were continually harassed byclouds of Arabs, who are the biggest thieves and the biggest wretches on earth.They murder Muslims just as they do the French, all those who fall into their