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

THE FERMENT OF THE MIND61shown the greatest interest, named Desnanots. He then returned the ransom,saying he did not think he should keep it, since it had become useless. Ventureleft without the prisoners, whose fate remained unknown. 24 The most likely explanationof this story is there were not enough discrete coins to go around, andthe sheikh knew the tribesmen would each want a share. If he could not makechange, some would inevitably feel slighted and it would turn into infightingand feuds (disgruntled tribe members often split off if they felt badly treated).The anecdote says something about the way some Bedouin chieftains valued socialpeace within the tribe more than they did mere symbolic wealth.Many French troops spent 18 July at the palm-grove oasis of Wardan. Bonapartehad taken the precaution of sending envoys ahead to reassure the inhabitants,who therefore did not flee in the customary numbers. From them, thetroops were able to procure some provisions. They were able to mill some wheatinto flour and bake their own bread, and they were refreshed by watermelon andcoconut juice, available in enormous quantities. They also had a feast for theeyes. Moiret, observed, “In all the villages one commonly sees girls of fromtwelve to fourteen years going entirely nude. It is poverty that reduces them tothis indecent state that so strongly shocks our mores and usages.” 25 Moiret’s Orientwas clearly not the Middle East of today. Village mores in late eighteenthcenturyEgypt about prepubescent nudity (children of neither sex wore muchclothing in June) seem not so different from those in parts of sub-Saharan Africainto the twentieth century. Even in urban literate society, prepubescent girls werenot required in Islamic law to veil their faces, prompting puzzled Muslims to asktheir medieval jurists why a precociously attractive thirteen-year-old need notveil but an eighty-year old woman did have to. Formal Muslim law and custom,of course, did view public nudity with horror. The remote, illiterate villagersclearly were untouched by such strictures coming out of the great mosques of thecapital. It may well be that the increasing attention in subsequent times to veilingwomen and even girls in modern Muslim societies is intimately linked to feelingsof humiliation caused by having foreign colonial administrators, troops, andother non-Muslims around in positions of local power. 26In Wardan, some of the troops received a boon when they rediscovered thelocal villagers’ preference for the buttons off their uniforms instead of coins.Bernoyer, with his tailor’s eye, noted that the soldiers thenceforth tore off theirbuttons to use for money but that many were disappointed to find that it wasonly the uniforms of the artillerymen that yielded acceptable currency, sincethese were entirely copper, while the others’ buttons had wood in them.Bernoyer’s observation suggests that they trusted and wanted pure copper