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

228 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTdefeated and Bonaparte had him arrested, stripped of property and harem,and brought to the Citadel as a hostage for the good behavior of his people.Later, the commander in chief released him from captivity, keeping his eldestson as hostage in Cairo, and returned to him his estates, provided he livedunder surveillance at Damietta. Tubar, however, insisted that the French restorehis women to him as well. Bonaparte had not made any stipulations inthis regard, since they had been given to others and he did not want to bestowtoo much prestige on the newly released magnate. Later on, Kléber did returnTubar’s women to him, assured of his loyalty and desiring to create him as amodel for other foes of the French, such as the Ottoman-Egyptian beyMurad, whom he wished to “turn” in the same way. Niello Sargy told thestory of how the oversexed Tubar would “pass the night one after another inthe arms of the many women in his harem.” One of them, Ziftiya, he wrote,was “excited to the highest degree of jealousy” and put a deadly poison in acup of his coffee. 13Women of the notable class thus became pawns in colonial power struggles.The French officers thought nothing of “bestowing” the women of a defeatedenemy on loyal compradors, as though they were inanimate spoils, and then returningthem to him later when he showed loyalty to them. In this anecdote,Ziftiya’s murder of her husband is configured in Orientalist terms as the resultof hothouse harem passions, of an oversexed Egyptian magnate’s transgressionof his wives’ sense of personal self-worth. Niello Sargy probably did not knowenough Arabic to realize that the concubine’s name (“black as pitch”) indicatedthat she was a Sudanese slave, which might complicate the narrative further.The story that he told about Tubar’s end makes no sense. Harem women in apolygamous society did not kill their husbands out of jealousy of the otherwomen. A jealous woman would be more likely to poison a cowife or favoriteslave girl, and Ziftiya’s motive in killing her master must have been a responseeither to mistreatment or to his dishonorable capitulation to foreign, Christianrulers. The story is typical of eighteenth-century French pornography in functioningas a critique of the lasciviousness of the powerful, though in its Egyptiansetting it does double duty in raising alarums about the dangers of overactiveMuslim male sexuality.Andréossi thereafter built up a flotilla of armed skiffs “to pursue the fishermanwho were masters there.” The engineers were assigned to survey the vastlagoon that abutted Damietta, a task they often found onerous and unpleasant;it required them to work in the water with mud up to their knees. Meanwhile,the French continued the project of building fortifications to secure the Delta.