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

THE CONSTANT TRIUMPH OF REASON159the two seas and two land masses, our master of the world, the glory of which Godincreases through the intercession of his Prophet and his Elect, putting his hope inGod, has declared war on these enemies.”Bonaparte’s hope that he could wean the al-Azhar clerics away from theirloyalty to the sultan, or convince them that he was a viceroy sent from Istanbul,was entirely in vain, whatever the coerced and frightened clerics told him to hisface. Sheikh Abdullah al-Sharqawi, the president of the Cairo divan, whomBonaparte had alternately honored and humiliated, bribed and snubbed, laterdescribed the French in a book on Egyptian history, and it likely reveals what hereally thought of Bonaparte’s Islam policy. 29 He wrote, “The reality of theFrench who came to Egypt is that they were materialist, libertine philosophers.”He said that outwardly they were said to be Catholic Christians following Jesus.But, he contended, in fact “they deny the Resurrection, and the afterlife, andGod’s dispatching of prophets of messengers.” They were monotheists, assertingthat God is one, but, he complained, they arrived at that belief “by means ofargumentation” (i.e., rather than faith). They “make reason the ruler and makesome among them managers of the regulations that they legislate by using theirreason, which they call ‘laws.’” That is, in Islam there is a difference betweenthe law (sharia), which is revealed, and the mere civic regulations (al-ahkam)promulgated by sultans and governors. The French, al-Sharqawi was saying,confused the two or, rather, substituted the latter for the former. They assert, hecontinued, that God’s envoys, such as Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses, “were agroup of sages, and that the codes of religious law attributed to them are indirectexpressions of civil law that they legislated by virtue of their reason, whichwas appropriate to their contemporaries.”For this reason, he concluded, the French established divans in Cairo andits larger villages that managed affairs in accordance with their reason, “and thatwas a mercy to the people of Egypt.” To one of the Divans they appointed agroup of clerics “and began to consult them on some matters not appropriate tothe holy law.” Although he seems to have rather liked the idea of municipalcouncils, al-Sharqawi was complaining that since the al-Azhar clerics were specialistsin the revealed law derived from the Qur’an and the inspired sayings anddoings of the Prophet Muhammad, they should not have had to bother themselveswith civil regulations. Typically, a Muslim government would have consultedthem in order to determine what the Islamic law was in a particularinstance through their expert interpretation of the divine texts. The French deniedthat God had sent any prophets, and they interpreted the sharia, or Islamiccanon law, as merely a roundabout way of convincing the common people to