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

148 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTDetroye saw on the streets of Cairo during the Festival of the Nile “songstresseswho performed scenes with dialogue, women who chanted poetry.” The socialinteractions of the French with local Muslim women would also have suggestedthat their roles could radically change. The invaders posed as liberators ofEgyptian women and saw them, along with Copts and Greeks, as a potentialconstituency for their cultural revolution in the Nile Valley.The French still hoped to bring even the Egyptian Muslim clergy around torepublican values, and many believed in their ultimate reasonableness. NielloSargy was clearly impressed at how interested the principal members of thedivan—sheikhs al-Mahdi, al-Fayyumi, al-Sawi, al-Fasi, and al-Bakri—were inthe national printing press directed by M. Marcel. The French press was farfaster and more precise than the presses some of them had seen in Istanbul or atthe Maronite monastery at Kisrawan. “Sheikh al-Bakri came to see the printingpress. He asked if they were widespread in France and Europe generally. Thenhe asked about Russia.” Niello Sargy told him that Russia only began to advanceout of backwardness with its adoption of the printing press on a large scale(which dated from the early eighteenth century). He reported that Sheikh al-Bakri said that there were many fine Arabic works that should be printed. 12 AlthoughWestern Europe had begun printing from metal movable type around1450, the technology was not widely used in the rest of the world until muchlater. Only in China, Japan, and Korea, which used wood block printing, were afew thousand books published in the early modern period. In the Middle East,Africa, India, and even much of Eastern Europe and Russia, printing was aminor, specialized activity until the 1700s at least. From about 1720, the MütaferrikaPress in Istanbul did a good deal of printing, of which some of theEgyptian clerics were well aware. Since printing allowed the precise reproductionof scientific and technological diagrams in a way that hand copying of manuscriptsdid not, its widespread adoption in Western Europe gave that region anadvantage in scientific progress in the early modern period. Sheikh al-Bakri andother Cairo intellectuals, prepared by earlier encounters with printing in theOttoman Empire, were easily persuaded of its utility.Just as the French attempted to coopt the clergy into a more enlightened view ofthe world, grounded in modern science, so they sought to induct them into the cultof the Republic. The Republicans wore an important symbol of liberty, the tricolorcockade, or knotted ribbon. 13 It had often been worn in a hat, but could be appendedelsewhere, and had become mandatory under the revolutionaries. In