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

A SKY AFLAME39Damanhur. “In five minutes, these wells were emptied; soldiers pressed in todescend on them in such great numbers that many were smothered. Otherswere crushed by the mob. More than thirty soldiers died around those wells.Many, not able to get water, committed suicide.” He revealed that on themarch south, many of the troops felt burdened by their heavy Europeanclothing and the provisions they had to carry. They discarded their coats andshirts and tossed away the biscuits they were given in Alexandria, confidentthat both clothing and food could easily be replaced later, “forgetting that wehad seen the inhabitants of Alexandria clothed in an altogether differentmanner than Europeans.” 21A young officer, Charles Antoine Morand, described how soldiers in searchof brush to make a fire discovered in the wilderness a woman with a child in herarms. Receiving their report, Morand, curious, went out to see her. “I found ayoung woman of sixteen to eighteen years, covered in tatters, who was nothingmore than a horrible skeleton. They had put out her eyes and the wounds werestill bloody. She was laid out on the burning sand, and some inarticulate wordsissued with effort from her dried-out throat. Her lips were a livid black.” Hernewborn was at her breast. He tried to revive her with water and a biscuit. Sherefused the biscuit but took the water, and they took her to a cistern. She neverthelesslater died there, and a mounted Bedouin used a rope to cart the carcass ahundred feet off into the wastelands. The interpreter for Gen. Louis Desaixmade inquiries in the local village and discovered that she was expiating a crimeof love. “Proven guilty of adultery, she had been condemned with the resultinginfant to that appalling torment. They had put out her eyes nine days before,and thus abandoned, she had only lived on roots, grains and wild grasses thatshe found in prowling through the desert.” 22The French soldiers were getting a quick introduction to a key value in theMiddle East, where the honor of males depended on their ability to protecttheir women from the unwanted attentions of outsiders and keep them chaste.Women kin who dishonored the band of brothers sometimes faced such clanretribution. Such gender-based honor societies were widespread in the easternMediterranean, among Christian populations as well as Muslim. The Qur’anmade adultery and fornication difficult to prove (requiring four witnesses!) andprescribed a punishment of whipping, though the influence on early Islamic jurisprudenceof Jewish converts and halacha, or Jewish religious law, caused someauthorities to favor stoning as a punishment. Putting out the woman’s eyes andexposing her in the desert, much less the killing of the newborn, are not in thelaw books. Muslim clerics would have been as appalled as the French at the illit-