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

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION215and Ibrahim Effendi was accused of hiring and arming bands of ruffians for thepurposes of insurgency. On 3 November, Bonaparte publicly condemned todeath eleven men he considered ringleaders. 25 They included seven mostlyminor and otherwise unknown clerics, such as Sheikh al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Karim,Sheikh Badr al-Qudsi (or al-Maqdisi), and Sheikh ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Shubrawi.Al-Jabarti maintained that Sheikh Badr had in fact already successfully fled.Bonaparte wished to have someone explicitly punished for the uprising, but appearsto have feared he would ruin any chance of reconciliation with the city’selite if he publicly executed more than a handful of middle-ranking clergymenand merchants or guildsmen. He may have in fact executed thousands of insurgents,but did so in relative secrecy lest he make thousands of martyrs.The North Africans from the al-Fahhamin district also had amends tomake. The young men from this community agreed to join the French army,forming their own battalion. French officers trained them in drill, teachingthem to present arms, fire in unison, and march. Bonaparte then deployed themin the Delta against peasant rebels. They attacked and defeated Ibn Sha’ir, headmanof the village of Ashama, killing him, ransacking his mansion, and confiscatingall his considerable wealth and livestock. As the story of the NorthAfrican battalion demonstrates, in the aftermath of the revolt the two sides hadlittle choice but to reconcile, at least on the surface. The Egyptians, lackingheavy artillery or a disciplined infantry, had failed to throw off the better-armedand -trained French. Bonaparte wanted a subject population, not a graveyard,and so he had to be selective about retribution. The great clerics of al-Azharrode to his residence in Azbakiya and pleaded with him through his Arabic interpreterfor safe conduct. He pressed them to turn in the leaders of the revolt.They mentioned some names. “We know every single one of them!” he repliedtriumphantly. They begged him to remove the troops from the al-HusaynMosque, where they had been garrisoned and where their horses were beingstabled, according to outraged Abdullah al-Sharqawi. Bonaparte acquiesced,though he kept a force of seventy men in the area.Lieutenant Laval observed that “Bonaparte dissolved their divan (that is tosay, their government).” Some members of the General Council and the SpecialCouncil were suspected of having helped plot the insurrection all the while theywere planning out with the French how the new republic was to be governed.Laval said that Bonaparte, furious, “told them that the Muslims were no longeranything in Egypt, since the chiefs of the divan had wanted to slit the throats ofthe French. Their audience hall was closed.” 26 Bonaparte “wanted to turn thepeople against them using the same tools that they had employed to provoke the