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

72 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTwitnessed how French soldiers glided through the city atop swift-footed donkeys,shouting and laughing as they jogged up and down. Their fun was interruptedlate on 27 July, François said, when they were forbidden to go into thecity as a result of “a plot in which they were going to slit our throats. The principalconspirators were arrested and had their heads cut off. It was again recommendedthat we not go out, even inside our quarters, without arms.”Some local Coptic Christians appear to have been ecstatic about the arrivalof their French coreligionists, though the close links of many Copts to the deposedbeys made their situation ambiguous. Captain Say reported that on 24July, a high Coptic religious authority, whom incorrectly he calls a “mufti” (aterm for a Muslim legal authority), sang a hymn of praise in “the grand mosqueof Cairo” in Coptic to celebrate the entry of Bonaparte into Cairo, leading the“warriors of the Occident.” If this event actually took place in one of the capital’sgreat mosques, it was a symbolic humiliation of the conquered Muslims ona grand scale. It is far more likely that the sermon was given by a priest in aCoptic cathedral in Arabic, and that a garbled account of the event reached Say.He gave a transcript of the Copt’s speech, in which the priest sighed in reliefthat “God is no longer angered toward us! He has forgotten our faults, punishedsufficiently by the long oppression of the Mamluks!” He lamented the exactionsand pitilessness of the Ottoman Egyptians (and it is certainly true that theGeorgian faction had severely overtaxed the cities in particular in the lastdecades of the eighteenth century).Say described him as praising the French, saying that they “worship thegreat God (Allah), they respect the laws of his prophet; they love the people andsuccor the oppressed.” For a Coptic priest to refer to Muhammad as God’sprophet seems a little unlikely unless the speech was scripted for him by Bonaparte,who had already used such language in his proclamations, for the purposeof mollifying the Muslims. He continued, “And we, only a little while ago a degeneraterace; are placed today on the level of free (libres) peoples, by the arm ofthe Western warriors.” Say reported that the sermon was “spread through thearmy.” 11 Some Egyptians, Christians as well as Muslims, were in close touchwith the small French mercantile community in Egypt, and so knew somethingabout the revolutionary events since 1789. Unlike al-Jabarti, who initially assumedthat when the French said they were “free,” it meant they were not slavesoldiers, the Coptic priest was able to find meaningful ways to speak of the newidea of political liberty to an Egyptian audience—according to Say’s admittedlygarbled account (which, however, is supported also by another young officer,Desvernois).