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

THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION217most secret feelings in his heart; for I know all, even what you have never toldanyone.” A day would come, he promised, when the whole world would seeproof that he was guided by higher orders, “and that human efforts can donothing against me.”It is tempting to conclude that the serial disasters Bonaparte had faced sinceNelson’s destruction of his fleet had slightly unbalanced him. It is possible, ofcourse, that the smug Jacobin secularism of the revolutionary era continued togive the French a paternalistic sense of superiority over the gullible, priestridden,superstitious Orientals. In that case, Bonaparte was simply attempting toplay on what he saw as the suggestibility and naïveté of the Egyptians when heclaimed to be some sort of invincible supernatural being. And after all, if theploy deterred even a few from further rebellion, it might be worth it, and hewould have lost nothing.It is also possible that Bonaparte was reproducing folk Muslim beliefs thathad been communicated to him by the common people and by the soothsayersto whom he sometimes spoke through his interpreters. Folk Islam in Egypt containeda millenarian element, a belief in the coming of the “Guided One,” orMahdi, at the end of days. Some of Bonaparte’s diction in this proclamation hasresonances with those beliefs, and he may have been intimating that he was theMahdi. He was well aware of these motifs.In his youth, Bonaparte had written a short story about a medieval “veiledprophet” of Khurasan in eastern Iran, who challenged the just, peaceful, and“scientific” rule of the Caliph al-Mahdi in Baghdad, and who used chicanery togather a mob, but who came to a bad end. 29 Then, he seemed to identify withthe caliph, but in this proclamation he sounded more like the veiled prophethimself. The beliefs also circulated in the Egypt of the time. Saint-Hilaire had,already in August, met with prophecies of Egyptian soothsayers about the inevitabilityof Bonaparte’s expedition: “a prophecy, they say written in a sacredbook, predicted that in 1305 of the Hegira, Christians will come to save Egyptand punish the government for its impiety toward the divine. All the Turks believethat we were sent by God and respect us for that reason.” 30 It is impossibleto know whether Bonaparte paid for these prophecies to be put around.Al-Jabarti copied the incredible proclamation into his journal, no doubtrendered into Arabic by Venture de Paradis, given its execrable style. He said heabsolutely had to do so “because of his prevarication and boasting to weakminds, and his grandiosity in claiming to be the Mahdi or a Prophet, and the useof a ‘proof by the opposite’ in making that claim.” 31 The severe logician andtheologian, trained by a father fascinated by Aristotelian philosophy, accused