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

GRAND CAIRO75ment, and received for his services up to ten percent of the proceeds generatedby the property.Captain Say reported of the commander in chief, “He employed these momentsto organize, in this city, a government similar to that of the new republicsin Europe. He named a Directory . . . and administrations were installed in variousprovinces.” 13 At the meeting with the clerics on 27 July, al-Jabarti wrote, adeputy of Bonaparte’s consulted on the appointment of ten leading Muslim menof the cloth to the divan and, in consultation with them, then made appointmentsto other branches of the government. The members of the divan were thecream of the country’s theologians and religious jurists. They included SheikhAbdullah al-Sharqawi, Sayyid Khalil al-Bakri, Sheikh Mustafa al-Damanhuri,Sheikh Mustafa al-Sawi, Sheikh Shams al-Din al-Sadat, and other highly respectedteachers and writers, though the exact composition is controversial.The next step was to appoint military and administrative leaders. TheFrench initially objected to filling any such posts with persons of Georgian orCircassian ethnicity. They aimed at a “de-Mamlukization” of the Egyptian elite.The Muslim clerics, however, insisted to them that the common people ofCairo feared no one but the Ottoman Egyptians, and that no one else couldcontrol them. The French therefore relented and allowed appointments fromold houses of emirs that had “not ventured tyrannical rule like the others.” 14Thus, Hasan Aga Muharrem, who had a reputation for honesty, became head ofthe market police (in charge of preventing price gouging and maintaining publicmorals in the market).To have Egyptian, Arabic-speaking clerics appointing Circassians andGeorgians to high office was a novelty, to say the least. It is something of a mysterywhy the French did not instead appoint great merchants to fill positions onthe Divan, given their wealth and honor in the capital. Most likely, Bonapartefelt that the chief obstacle to the acceptance of French authority in Egypt wouldbe Islam and that only a government of the clerics could plausibly lend their authorityto his contention that French deists were as acceptable as Muslims whenit came to rule. Of course, the prominent clerics often were themselves alsogreat merchants or had intermarried with those families. It is ironic, in any case,that only four times in modern history have Muslim clerics come to power inthe Middle East: under the republican French in Egypt, under Khomeini andhis successors in Iran, under the Taliban in Afghanistan, and, it could be argued,with the victory of the United Iraqi Alliance in the Iraq elections of 30 January2005 (the UIA was led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim). The first andfourth times both took place with Western, Enlightenment backing.