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

186 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTfanatical” and “spoke rather heatedly.” Bonaparte nevertheless gave them ahearing and blamed the engineers, whom he immediately ordered, he said, tostop their demolitions.The clerics who had led the crowd went out and boasted of their success, tocries of joy. The crowd then went through the streets, chanting holy verses, andended up at the al-Husayn Mosque. There, Bonaparte wrote, a preacher “gave asermon, praying for the Great Sultan and imploring the Prophet to maintainhim always in sentiments favorable to Islam.” Either Venture really did believethat the gathering of an angry mob at a Mamluk mansion would have been metwith anything but mass beheadings, or he feared that Bonaparte would overreactand turn a petitioning crowd into a violent mob. Bonaparte’s conviction thathe and Venture had handled the Muslim leaders and the Cairo crowd indicateda deadly overconfidence.All unawares, Bonaparte was violating Muslim social norms of some gravitywith his policies. In early September Bonaparte had Sayyid Muhammad Kurayyim,the former governor of Buhayra whom Kléber believed guilty of intriguingwith the enemies of the French around Alexandria, executed fortreason. 10 Kurayyim, however, was a sharif, that is, a putative descendant of theProphet, and ordinarily would have been punished in some other way even by aMuslim ruler. For an infidel French general to kill a “grandson” of the Prophetinflamed religious passions. Kurayyim was, moreover, a man of the people. Hehad been a weigher at the port of Alexandria, and had gained the trust of hiswealthy customers, both foreign Christians and local Muslims, because of hisprobity. Ultimately he had come to the attention of Murad Bey, who appointedhim head of the divan and of the customs office in the city, a position that al-Jabarti maintained gradually corrupted him. Nevertheless, as an Egyptian bornand bred he had many supporters. The clerics of al-Azhar, the putative governmentof Egypt at that point, “interceded repeatedly for” Kurayyim with theFrench. The Egyptian chronicler maintained that in early September, CharlesMagallon, who had been the French consul in Egypt, came to Kurayyim and informedhim that he could be freed for a price. It was a sum that was beyond him.Magallon is said to have given him twelve hours to raise it. Kurayyim sent pleasto the al-Azhar clerics and to Sayyid Ahmad al-Mahruqi, the great caravan merchant,asking them to raise the money: “Buy me, O Muslims!” But they did nothave those sums, or were in too much uncertainty about their own futures torisk parting with what capital they had left.At noon, time had run out. French soldiers came, swords unsheathed, forthe former governor of Buhayra and master of Alexandria and escorted him