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

134 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTclose personal relations with the Egyptians around them. The most dramatic instanceof wholehearted approval of the commander in chief’s warming to Islamwas that of Gen. Jacques Menou. Thereby hangs a tale.The presence of French troops in the towns of the Delta profoundly upsetordinary social arrangements in Egyptian society. In Rosetta, the middle-classwomen had been used to being allowed to go out of their homes during the dayand to gather at the communal bathhouse. Secluding females was a custom usuallypracticed only by the wealthiest Ottoman-Egyptian families and was rareamong middle-class or lower-middle-class Egyptians. Seclusion was designed toshow that the man of the house was so wealthy that he could afford servants toshop for everything the household needed and could maintain almost an entiresecond residence in the female quarters of his mansion. The wealthy had bathsin their homes, allowing their women to dispense with the city bathhouses.Niello Sargy said that, with French soldiers patrolling the streets, Egyptian husbandsin Rosetta began forbidding their wives to go out. The women organizedand sent a deputation to Menou, the commander of Rosetta, asking that he takemeasures that would allow them to recover their liberty of movement—presumablyby reining in the troop patrols around the bathhouse. They charged thetwo prettiest women as their spokespersons, including Zubayda, the daughter ofthe proprietor of the city’s communal hot bath (who had an economic interest inthe lifting of the informal ban on the circulation of housewives). Menou acquiescedin their request and issued a decree stating that women were an object ofrespect for the French and that the clan chieftains and clerics were to allowthem to circulate in the town as they had ordinarily done before. Menou musthave glimpsed enough of Zubayda to be smitten with her. He sought her hand,and would have been told by her father, Muhammad Ali al-Bawwab, that onlyby converting to Islam could he hope to marry her. Islamic law allows Muslimmen to marry non-Muslim women, but Muslim women may only marry Muslimmen, and the al-Bawwab family claimed descent on both sides from theProphet Muhammad, making them members of the sharif caste and even morefastidious about such matters. Menou therefore converted to Islam, adoptingthe name ‘Abdullah, or the “servant of God,” and in the spring of 1799 he marriedZubayda, the daughter of the bathhouse owner and divorced wife of SelimAga Nimatullah.Bonaparte tended to describe his army as unchurched, but in fact many believersserved under him. For a handful, disoriented by the Revolution’s anticlericalismand then by culture shock in the Middle East, adopting Islam was away of authorizing a pious sensibility and of connecting with their new home.