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

THE CONSTANT TRIUMPH OF REASON151facto coauthor, Laus de Boissy, was an admirer of Voltaire, and once received aletter from him.) In fact, as al-Jabarti’s account makes clear, the al-Azhar clericsviewed wearing the cockade as a distasteful compromise of their principles, andthey wore it as little as possible while still keeping on the good side of Bonaparte.Early modern Muslims had distinctive traditions of dress and fashion, andthey quoted with approval a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad thathe who imitates a people becomes one of them. They were terrified of doinganything that would rob them of their Muslim identity, and emulating Frenchsartorial practices was high on their list of dangerous behavior in this regard.Those who wore the cockade did so as a sort of white lie. Captain Say’s combinationof force and reason, which he would not be the last to advocate, producedhypocrisy more often than enlightenment in modern history.The loyalty of Egyptian Muslims that Bonaparte sought to displace onto theFrench Republic by compelling them to wear the cockade actually belonged tothe Ottoman sultan, who was determined to see that allegiance reasserted. TheSunni clerics of Egypt did not generally invest the emperor in Istanbul withany special religious status, saying that the caliphate or the Sunni equivalent ofthe papacy had lapsed centuries before. But they did value him as the practicaldefender of Sunni Muslim interests. Bonaparte had cited Volney’s insight thatany conquest of Egypt would require three wars, against the British, the Ottomans,and the local Muslims. At the Battle of the Nile, he had received theBritish response. Now he was about to discover how difficult it would be for afreebooter to overcome the vast authority and legitimacy of the sultan. Istanbullay 679 miles due north of Alexandria across the eastern Mediterranean. Thereglistened the Golden Horn. On its west lay the Blue Mosque and TopkapiPalace, where the foreign ministry talked to European ambassadors. On its eastlay Galata or Pera, where Europeans had made posh mercantile and diplomaticenclaves. The Ottoman Empire had suffered a century of reversals, after a seventeenth-centuryrun of victories. It had lost several major battles to a resurgentAustrian Empire, and the rise of Russian power threatened it with furthersetbacks. Its hold on peripheral provinces such as Algeria was tenuous, andslave-soldier regimes had become semiautonomous in Cairo and Baghdad.Local notables and chieftains staked claims to power over parts of Syria andAnatolia, and the Balkans were newly restive. Still, the Ottoman Empire wasnot without resources, and the minds of its leaders had been concentrated bythe sudden loss of a key province. Egypt’s fate lay not only in Paris and London