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

32 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTall, was a cosmic clockmaker who had set the universe in motion but did not anylonger intervene in its affairs. Most deists did not consider themselves Christiansany longer and looked down on Middle Eastern Christians as priest-riddenand backward. Jaubert recalled that the priest “was ordered to read it to them,and to comment on it as he proceeded. When you consider the proclamation,you will judge how well the part he played became him!” Jaubert thought it furtheramusing that the poor priest had had to tell the captured Alexandrians thatthe French, whom he had initially greeted as fellow Catholics loyal to the pope,were actually a kind of “muslim” who had attacked the pontiff! In a later letterto another correspondent, Jaubert observed, “You will laugh outright, perhaps,you witlings of Paris, at the Mahometan proclamation of the Commander inChief. He is proof, however, against all your raillery; and the thing itself willcertainly produce a most surprising effect.”When the great Sunni Muslim clerics of the al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo receivedthese pamphlets and they spread up the Nile, how did they react? TheCairene cleric and historian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, among the personsBonaparte’s proclamation was supposed to impress, reacted with a combinationof amusement, bewilderment, and outrage. 16 He penned a quick commentaryon it, the form of which suggests an element of satire, since learned men such asal-Jabarti normally penned glosses of the Qur’an, not of French pamphlets.Al-Jabarti began by eviscerating the broken Arabic grammar and the infelicitousstyle of the proclamation. He then observed that the opening phrasedemonstrated that the revolutionary French in some ways agreed with the threereligions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but in other ways disagreed with allof them. “They agree with the Muslims in employing the phrase ‘in the name ofGod, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ and in denying that God has any son orpartner.” But, he said, they also differed from the Muslims. They did not pronouncethe Muslim witness to faith, which affirmed the prophethood ofMuhammad, nor did they accept the very idea that messengers, whose sayingsand deeds have normative and legal force in Islam, are sent by God. TheFrench, he argued, agreed with the Christians in most of their words and deeds,but differed from them on the issue of the Trinity and, again, on the idea thatGod sends revelations to humankind. They rejected the church hierarchy, killedpriests, and razed churches.As for the term “republic,” he explained, the pamphlet represented itselfas coming from the French collective, since they did not have a grandee orsultan to whom they granted legitimacy and who spoke for them, unlike allother societies. He said that they had risen up against their king six years be-