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

198 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTalong major thoroughfares as though it was good news. Then they started sendingaround appraisers to determine property and business values. The guildsmenerupted in rage. Captain Say recalled that the Muslims “in the city said that thediscontent occasioned by the imposts was the sole cause” of a gathering uprising. 30Within Muslim Egyptian culture, the principle had long been establishedthat non-Muslims paid a per-head poll tax to the Muslim state. Since non-Muslims did not serve in most Muslim armies, the poll tax was felt by the majorityto have bought out their military service and to have helped pay for the costof protection from marauding enemy armies. But since Christians and Jews,who paid the tax, had less status in Muslim-majority societies, the practice becametainted with that association. Egyptian Muslims read the personal propertytax as a form of poll tax. From the point of view of proud Egyptian Muslimfamilies, paying a poll tax to a European conqueror, especially via a Coptic orSyrian Christian tax collector, was a humiliation of the first order. There was, inaddition, no tradition in Egypt of such a graduated urban property tax or of thestate prying so closely into and measuring exact assets. Some of the more militantclerics gathered crowds at the mosque on Saturday and preached, “Muslims,holy war is a duty for you. How can you free men agree to pay the poll taxto the unbelievers? Have you no pride? Has the call not reached you?” 31 Thecommon people formed discussion groups, not only in the al-Husayn quarternear the Great Mosque but also in surrounding districts, and worked themselvesinto a rage against their European masters.On the morning of Sunday, 21 October, the well-known cleric and sometimecaravan merchant, Sayyid Badr al-Maqdisi, mounted on a caparisoned steed, ledcrowds from the al-Husayn Quarter, who were joined by the little people (al-Jabarti called them “ruffians”) from outlying districts. 32 They chanted, “Godgive Victory to Islam!” About a thousand persons gathered that morning beforethe mansion of the Ottoman-appointed chief justice. Alarmed, he had his gateslocked and ended up a prisoner in his home, which the demonstrators peltedwith stones when they discovered he was unsympathetic. “So he pleaded withthem in a polite manner, promising them the impossible. The people gatheredin his courtyard demanding war and an encounter with the enemy.” Merchantsclosed up their shops. Other huge crowds gathered in front of the al-HusaynMosque and the nearby al-Azhar Seminary. The cleric addressed the crowds,saying “All true monotheists should come to al-Azhar Seminary, for today is theraid on the infidels, in which we shall remove this dishonor and take our re-