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

158 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTdistrict, but the latter had not yet received a copy. On his way out he passed thegrand mosque, which was full of congregants behaving excitedly. Bonaparte inquiredand was told that they were calling down blessings on him. He left. Al-Jabarti revealed that the sight of the commander in chief at that moment in thatplace had almost provoked a riot. One does not imagine that they were actuallycalling down blessings on the foreign general.In late September, Bonaparte had two persons executed for carrying lettersto and from the deposed grandees in Syria or Upper Egypt, and had their headsparaded through the streets in hopes of providing an object lesson to others.The Egyptian authorities now loyal to Bonaparte also called on the commonpeople of Cairo to stop showing curiosity and talking about “the affairs of state”and to cease making fun of or clapping for defeated or wounded French soldierswho trailed back into the capital, “as was their habit.” 27 Putting public discussionof the affairs of state off limits to ordinary subjects was an old Ottoman tacticof control, and its use by the French Republic, standard-bearer of the Rightsof Man, was jarringly incongruous.A firman calling on the Egyptians to oppose the French, under the signatureof conservative Ottoman grand vizier Yusuf Ziya Pasha, began circulating inEgypt. 28 He said that the Sublime Porte had been informed of the invasion ofEgypt by the French, and of their trickery and hanky-panky, spreading aroundcounterfeit decrees of the Ottoman sultan that seemed to authorize the operation.“Their intention was disguised beneath the cloak of lies and villainy.” He accusedthem of sowing poison among the inhabitants of the province of Egypt, declaring,“Today, they are unmasked.” He said that their perfidious intentions were revealedin the letters they sent back to their country, which had been intercepted and translated.(He did not say that it was the British that intercepted them and passed themto the Porte.) Their intention, he warned, “was not solely to rule Egypt, but toconquer Syria and Iran.” (Bonaparte sometimes toyed with attempting to challengethe British in India by a land campaign through Qajar Iran and Durrani Afghanistanto the Khyber Pass and thence to Delhi, in imitation of Alexander theGreat.) The grand vizier warned that the French would “seize the goods of the believers;their women and children will be reduced to slavery; and your blood will bespilled (may God preserve us)!” He called on Egyptians to sacrifice everything tofight the new conquerors and promised an Ottoman expeditionary force to rescuethe province from foreign rule, saying that the army was already at Damascus.(This assertion was not true, since it was taking the Ottomans some time to respondto the French attack.) He announced, “The Sublime Porte, founded on thepower of the King of Kings, the sovereign of the heroes and conquerors, king of