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

30 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTcould think to do with the Egyptian power structure was to depend on the Muslimclergy and to bestow on it the right to bear arms! 12 Bonaparte attempted tocoopt the Muslim clerical class as allies from the indigenous middle stratumagainst the beys. On the other hand, according to the contemporary Ottomanhistorian Izzet Hasan Darendeli, Bonaparte employed the Muslim slaves he hadmanumitted in Malta and brought to Alexandria as ambassadors of good will forthe French when they reached Cairo, giving some Egyptians the impressionthat the French really had come as liberators. The French festooned the city intricolor banners and forced the townspeople to surrender all their weapons, asthey would everywhere they went in Egypt. They honored prominent citizenswith cockades (knots of tricolor ribbons). Finally, they demanded a substantialtribute from the inhabitants, making rather hollow Bonaparte’s boasts that hewould provide a less rapacious government than that of the slave soldiers. 13(Some of these details are from the Egyptian chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti and the Ottoman historian Izzet Hasan Darendeli; the French memoiriststend, unlike the local sources, to be silent on these coercive measures.)Bonaparte, having secured Alexandria, issued a proclamation setting forth to theEgyptians the reasons for the invasion and what the French government expectedfrom them. The French Orientalist Jean Michel de Venture de Paradis,perhaps with the help of Maltese aides, translated the document into verystrange and very bad Arabic. The Maltese, Catholic Christians, speak a dialectof Arabic distantly related to that of North Africa, but they were seldomschooled in writing classical Arabic, which differs with regard to grammar, vocabulary,and idiom from the various spoken forms. Venture de Paradis, whohad lived in Tunis, knew Arabic grammar and vocabulary but not how to usethem idiomatically. The French thus first appeared to the small elite of literateEgyptians through the filter of a barbarous accent and writing style, makingthem seem rather ridiculous, despite Bonaparte’s imperial pretensions. It wouldbe rather as though they had conquered England and sent forth their firstproclamation in Cockney. But ungrammaticality and awkward wording werenot the worst of the statement’s difficulties. Much of it simply could not be understoodby most Egyptians, since it sought to express concepts for which therewere no Arabic equivalents.Eighteenth-century France had witnessed many revolutions in thought andinstitutions, more than any other country in the world (with the possible exceptionof the United States of America). New discourses had grown up, with a new