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

112 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTit in the hearing of a Syrian Christian, who informed on him to the French. TheFrench summoned him and “confronted him with this report.” The soap magnatereplied that he was only passing on what he had heard from a Christian heknew. That man was also brought in. The French threatened to cut out thetongues of both al-Zarw and his Christian friend unless they each paid one hundredfrancs, an enormous sum. Muslim clerics attempted to intercede for them,but the French rebuffed them. At length Sheikh Mustafa al-Sawi, a member ofthe divan, proffered two hundred francs, and his intercession was accepted. TheRepublican officer told him to distribute the money to the poor. Thereafter, al-Jabarti reported, the people “refrained from talking about the affair.” Nevertheless,those who opposed the French took heart from the disaster that AdmiralNelson had inflicted on them. They included Murad Bey, who redoubled his resistanceto the invaders from his Upper Egyptian redoubt. The anecdote suggeststhe ways in which the gossip that circulated in the capital, and that theBedouin “telegraph” carried throughout the country, served as an instrument ofresistance to the French, provoking them to attempt to monitor and severelypunish it. The techniques for doing so would have been familiar to the agents ofLouis XVI, or for that matter, to the Ottoman sultans.Among Bonaparte’s chief difficulties in attempting to rule Egypt was his lack oflegitimacy: he was a foreign general of European, Catholic Christian extraction.Many Egyptians feared he would constrain them to convert. The biologistSaint-Hilaire wrote that August, “The women are much more afraid. Theynever stop weeping and crying that we will force them to change their religion.”14 Medieval Islamic law and traditions taught Muslims that they shouldattempt to avoid living under the rule of non-Muslims if at all possible, even if itmeant emigrating. Some jurists did allow an exception where the non-Muslimruler was not hostile to Islam and allowed the religion freely to be practiced.This loophole was Bonaparte’s one chance, and he pursued it as though he werea shyster lawyer with a make-or-break case.In order to underscore his position as pro-Islamic ruler of a Muslim country,Bonaparte presided in August over the festivals of the Nile and of the Prophet’sbirth. Despite the Egyptians’ having forsaken, millennia before, the pagan religionin which the swelling Nile was Hapi, a god, the great river still had a religiousaura for them. They called it “the blessed Nile.” 15 The quartermasterBernoyer observed, “The Egyptians consider the Nile their father and the earththeir mother, and it is all the same to them whether they are consigned at death