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

ALI BONAPARTE141volved what to them seemed like bizarre and barbarous rites. Of course, the formallytrained Muslim clergy, or ulema, would have denied that such practiceshad anything to do with Islam. Bilingual Egyptians of the middle strata wereprobably the chief interpreters to the French of the meaning of popular religiouspractices, and they probably transmitted some of their own disgust withthem to the Europeans. Far from being a sole creation of European Orientalism,this image of popular Islam was a joint production.Arab Muslim civilization as a cultural symbol had many meanings for theFrench of the Enlightenment and revolutionary eras. They sometimes usedMuslims and Islamic practices to stress how different the French were fromMiddle Easterners. The political philosopher of the mid-eighteenth century,Charles de Montesquieu had, when discussing the virtues of the separation ofexecutive, legislative, and judicial powers, explicitly said, “Among the Ottomans,where these three powers are united in the person of the sultan, afrightful despotism reigns.” 25 (Montesquieu overestimated the sultan’s abilityto dictate the rulings of the qadis, or Islamic court judges, and did not reckonwith how powerful the grand viziers and their ministers had become vis-à-visthe sultan, so that his picture of Oriental despotism is a caricature of the Ottomansystem.) Some French thinkers tried to show how close Europeanscould be to Islamic practice, without knowing it, as a way of critiquing religion.Voltaire’s play Mahomet depicted the Prophet of Islam in an unflattering light,but it was intended as a critique of institutionalized religion, not of Islam perse, and Voltaire openly admitted that he had done Muhammad an injustice.Bonaparte himself dismissed the play, saying that Voltaire had “prostituted thegreat character of Muhammad by the basest intrigues. He treated a great manwho changed the face of the earth as though he were an abject villain, worthyof being hanged.” 26 Elsewhere, Voltaire wrote that Muhammad was a greatman and had formed great men, and that if he had been defeated by his pagan,Meccan enemies at the Battle of Badr in 624, world history would have beendifferent.The writers of the vast eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, the first modern attemptto encompass all knowledge in a single work, also sometimes employedIslam as a code for criticisms of the popular superstition and the dogmatismthey saw in Catholicism. 27 Other writers of the articles in this encyclopedia, incontrast, saw the virtues of Arab Muslim science, and contrasted its achievementswith European religious obscurantism. Bonaparte himself admired thehistory of Arab science. 28 He contrasted urban Middle Eastern traditions of civilizationwith the traditions of the pastoral nomads of the Asian steppe and