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

188 NAPOLEON’S EGYPThowever, this discarding of the veil and growth of a public nightlife seemedmore a sign of debauchery than of cultural progress. Niqula Turk recalled, “TheFrench would bring out Muslim women and girls barefaced in the streets, and itbecame widely known that wine was being drunk and being sold to thetroops.” 14 He was implying a swelling outrage at these practices in the Cairopublic, which viewed them as meretricious. Even Zaynab, the sixteen-year-olddaughter of Sayyid Khalil al-Bakri, threw off her veil and began going out withFrench officers, though rumors that Bonaparte himself wooed her for a whileare probably little more than gossip. For the daughter of the chief of the Sayyidcaste, a scion of the House of the Prophet, and a member of an honored familyof clerics to behave this way would have provoked an honor killing if not a formalexecution under the Ottoman beylicate. The changing mores of Egyptianwomen also provoked fears among Egyptian men that the foreigners wouldchange the balance of power between the sexes and that they would be emasculated.Men no longer felt in control when they saw women walking unveiled inpublic with European men, riding horses and laughing out loud in the streets.Al-Jabarti, who reported these outrages, said that the French men attractedEgyptian women because they were “subservient to them.” A Frenchman, hesaid, sought to please his woman and avoided contradicting her even if shecursed or struck him. Such protected women openly walked in the street, singlyor in groups of friends, preceded by guards who wielded batons to clear thecrowd for them, “as though the governor were passing by.” Women, he said,“order and forbid, laying down the law.” It was not only a matter of the inexcusablebehavior and ideas of European men. He lamented that Egyptian womenthemselves adopted this new, independent point of view and way of life andbegan attempting to convert other women to it. 15 Al-Jabarti was expressing apatriarchal backlash against what he saw as an incipient women’s movement, butalso a sense of emasculation under conditions of colonial subjugation.Miot remembered the Egyptian paramours taken by the officers. 16 “Somewere beautiful, and all, in giving us Arabic lessons, learned to pronounce Frenchwords: it was not ordinarily the most decent that they retained. Of this sort themost bizarre societies and exchanges were formed.” He remembered livelysoirées with bootleg “punch” and much laughter, where talk of Paris drownedout the present reality of exile in Egypt. “Or one brought, in order to divert thegroup, the dancers of the country, whose lascivious movements pandered to ourimagination with gracious tableaus.” He reported the universal process of acculturation,whereby one becomes accustomed to a different style of life, saying,“Muslims look with different eyes than do we. It would be a mistake to say that