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

160 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTfollow regulations that actually derived from the exercise of reason. In essence,he viewed his appointment to the divan as a demotion from dealing with sublimematters to being consulted on mundane politics by foreign unbelievers.“The reason the people of Cairo and its surrounding villages were forced toobey them to some extent,” he said, “was their inability to resist them becausethe Mamluks had fled with the instruments of warfare.”On their arrival in Egypt, he continued, the French had written a pamphletand spread it around. It alleged that they were not Christians because they affirmedthe unity of God, whereas Christians believe in the Trinity, that theyhonored Muhammad and the Qur’an, and that they loved the Ottomans. Theyhad, the pamphlets said, only come to overthrow the Mamluks, since the latterhad expropriated the French merchants, and they would not disturb the ordinarysubjects. Al-Sharqawi complained bitterly, “But when they came in, theydid not confine themselves to pillaging the wealth of the Mamluks. Rather, theylooted the subjects and killed a large number of persons.”Al-Sharqawi’s description of the French deists is largely accurate, but he didsee them through a nativist lens. Medieval Arab Muslim thinkers had wagedculture wars over the place of reason, especially Greek reason, in Muslim learning.As Bonaparte recognized, during the Abbasid Caliphate of the eighththrough thirteenth centuries, Muslim scholars had eagerly adopted scientificand philosophical works from the ancient Greek world. Philosophy was stillcontroversial at the al-Azhar, and some of the split between clerics interested inFrench science and those who rejected it was rooted in their differing attitudesto the Greek tradition. 30Later that month, the young Lieutenant Desvernois, who had fought Ibrahim’sforces at Salahiya, heard the news of the 12 September 1798 Ottoman declarationof war on the French Republic with some despair. He felt Bonaparte hadbeen betrayed by the Directory and by Talleyrand, who clearly had failed intheir fantastical bid to maintain an alliance with the Porte while occupying anOttoman province. He knew the French army was now vulnerable to attack bythe Ottoman military, and perhaps by the British. From the end of September,Egypt was fermenting, he wrote, and the Bedouin were rising up, especially inthe Delta. 31