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

132 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTwith a legitimate religion. This attitude of Muslims, that it was allowed forother religions to be practiced in their midst, was somewhat unusual. ChristianEurope under the Inquisition had had virtually no resident Muslims, and thehundreds of thousands who elected to remain in Spain after the Reconquista ofthe late 1400s were forced to convert to Catholicism. For some centuries someChristian countries forbade Jews to live there as well. In contrast, as long as theypaid a poll tax and showed themselves loyal, Jews and Christians were allowedby Muslim states to dwell under their shadow and practice their faiths, thoughwith some restrictions. There were, of course, episodes in which particularly fanaticalor vicious rulers or clerics attacked these minorities, but they were notthe rule, and the contrast with medieval and early modern Europe remainsstark. Bonaparte’s rhetoric, here put into the mouths of the clerics of al-Azhar,actually exhibited less toleration than was typical in Islamic law.Bonaparte’s Islam policy provoked a lively debate among his officers and troops.Some officers were unfazed by the hypocrisy of it all. General Dupuis in Cairowrote a merchant of Toulouse, “We celebrate here with enthusiasm the festivalsof Muhammad. We fool the Egyptians with our affected attachment to their religion,in which Bonaparte and we no more believe than we do in that of Piusthe Defunct.” 15 The dismissive reference to the pope and Roman Catholicismbetrays a lively anticlericalism and militant secularism. Incredibly, they producedin Egypt not open disdain for an alien religion but a calculated and cynicalwillingness to pretend respect for it as a means of deceiving the Egyptianpublic. “You won’t believe it,” he continued, “but I assure you that we are as ferventas the most fanatical pilgrims. In the end, it is the third pantomime that wewill have played, since the solemn entry of the Meccan caravan that we presidedover here is no small thing. You would have smiled to see me with our musiciansat the head of the pilgrims.” Dupuis here revealed that Bonaparte had ordered apositively pious French welcome be given the pilgrims, still covered in the dustof the holy city of Mecca.Two months after the festival of the Prophet’s birth, Captain Moiret reportedthat soothsayers began being paid to proclaim that Bonaparte was on adivine mission to destroy the enemies of Islam, which had been predicted “inmore than twenty passages” of the Qur’an. 16 They predicted that the Frenchsultan would soon have himself circumcised, take the turban, follow the religionof Muhammad, and bring along by his example his entire army. Moiret recalled