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

104 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTknowledge of local conditions and practices, they could provide a ready-madecollaborating bureaucracy to the European occupiers. He was entirely willing todress down another officer if he felt he was endangering good relations with theCopts. By 22 August he was circularizing the generals that “it is expressly forbiddento interfere with the Coptic supply officials” charged with provisioningthe army. 23For the moment, Bonaparte decreed that civil justice would be administeredas in the past. Commercial transactions would also go on unaltered. Heconfirmed all the property owners in Egypt in their ownership and, at least tooutward appearances, preserved pious endowments (awqaf ) funding mosques,especially those in Mecca and Medina. 24 Endowment property was not taxablein Islamic law, and at this time an estimated one-fifth of Egyptian land had beendevoted to various family, charitable, and religious purposes (supposedly forever).There were good reasons for this rhetoric. The Muslim clerics he wishedto win over depended on the endowments for much of their income. Moreover,they were used by wealthy families to support public works and family monuments,and preserving them helped reassure the Arabic-speaking Muslim middlestrata.We get the flavor of this sort of thing in a letter Bonaparte wrote to GeneralHonoré Vial, governor of Damietta Province, on 22 August: “Since it isthe intention of the commander in chief that all the pious foundations be respectedand conserved, you will want to be sure to accord protection and securityto the villages of al-Busrat and of Kafr al-Jadid, with their dependencies,which are the pious foundations of ‘Ubaydullah al-Rumi in favor of his posterityand for the support of his mausoleum, a public fountain and a reservoir,which are in Cairo. You will want to give orders that no taxes be levied on thesetwo villages, of which the revenues are dedicated to these items of public utility.”25 In fact, al-Jabarti complains that the French made Copts and ChristianSyrians overseers of many of the pious endowments, and the latter embezzledfrom them. He recorded that in mid-October a large crowd of Egyptian Muslimsdependent on the endowments assembled at the mansion of Sheikh al-Bakri, the prominent clergyman, complaining bitterly that their pay and breadrations had been cut off. The colorful if pitiful crowd included blind men,callers to prayer, patients at the al-Mansuri hospital, children from madrasahsor Qur’an schools, and dependents of the endowment made by the great notableAbdurrahman Kethüda. 26Behind a façade of lawmaking and reasonableness visible in Bonaparte’s correspondencecrouched the grim realities of corruption, power, and terror. When