Napoleon And Islam: How The Emperor of Europe Saw The East

Napoleon brought law and civilization wherever he conquered, transforming the society as a whole. He killed with the sword, not banknotes.

In 1797, the youne general seized the republic of Venice and the Ionian Islands belonging to it. The French republic became a neighbor of the Ottoman Empire. Immediately, the great pashas of the Balkans sent letters of congratulation “to the commander in chief of the Great Nation’s army.” That Ottoman expression of courtesy, intended to make up for the absence of established protocol for addressing a republic, became the slogan of revolutionary France, which had entered a phase of territorial expansion. For a time, Bonaparte envisioned organizing an uprising of the Greeks in the Balkans, then began to consider a possible conquest of Egypt.

That undertaking was not the political maneuver of a regime in desperate straits wishing to rid itself of a troublesome general. Rather, it was the culmination of a century of reflection on the nature of Muslim society and on the ramifications of the geopolitical changes. The first justification was that this was an attack on England in the Indies, the supposed source of its commercial power. Once installed in Suez, the French army would be able to organize a naval expedition, whose arrival in the Indies would provoke a general uprising against British domination. If necessary, an expedition could be planned for the overland route, inciting to revolt a vast movement of people, who would surge over the Indus.

That frame of reference allows us to understand the use made of the call for liberation. Initially, the Egyptians were told that the expedition had occurred with the agreement of the Ottoman authorities, who wished to rid themselves of the rebel Mamluk regime. If the Ottomans went to war nonetheless, then the French would incite a general revolt of the Eastern peoples. That strategic view rested on general principles used in analyzing Eastern societies, but it was reinforced by cognizance of the rebel movements against the autonomous provincial powers, such as that of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar in Acre, and of the beginnings of Wahhabi expansion in central Arabia, which was poorly understood (European travelers interpreted it as a form of armed deism characteristic of desert culture.)

The innovation specific to Bonaparte, apart from his personal synthesis of the ideas of the age, was to argue that Islam had within it a revolutionary content that could be turned against the conquerors or, on the contrary, channeled to their advantage. The French would present themselves as the enemies of the Christians, particularly the Catholics, assuaging at every turn the Islamic religious authorities. Bonaparte himself would style himself a messenger of God, in accordance with the logic of his already romantic view of the East.

Everything would be done in the name of civilization, which became the key word of expeditionary discourse. In the first place, “civilization” meant the development of the conquered domain in accordance with the rules of individual and collective happiness. Economic success would make it possible to replace the Sugar Islands, whose fate appeared increasingly precarious, and would lead to a permanent colony founded on a Franco-Arab synthesis, an expression that appeared for the first time in history in 1799. The scientific expedition accompanying the military enterprise would mark the return of the sciences and arts to their land of origin. In addition to the natural sciences, that expedition would focus on rediscovering the secrets of the ancient wisdom of Egypt and would take stock of the modern state, preliminary to any civilizing enterprise.

The British immediately took the danger to the Indian route seriously. From the Deccan to the Indus, the men of the East India Company hastened to bring the “Eastern Jacobins” in line. Diplomats urged the sultan of Constantinople to go to war, to proclaim jihad against the atheistic French. They asked him, in the name of his supposed powers as caliph, to address the Muslims of India and warn them against the false promises of the French. The sultan would thereby engage unawares in pan-Islamism. Austrians and Russians joined that second coalition, which had become the union of the revealed religions against revolutionary atheism. Against that discourse of religious propaganda, Bonaparte in turn called on the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman yoke.

For the Eastern populations, that chaos was incomprehensible. To be sure, the ulemas of Cairo saw the French ideas as a resurgence of the ancient materialism of the zindiqs in the first centuries of Islam, but for the Egyptian masses it was primarily a foreign domination of Christian origin. In Constantinople, where Europe was better understood, the impious ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau were formally condemned, but the frame of reference for popular mobilization was the Balkan Wars against the Austrians, the Russians, and the loca Christian uprisings. Nevertheless, the three-year collaboration with the British army and navy would be a powerful vehicle for introducing modern forms of armaments.

For Egypt, those three years were a period of terrible destruction and misfortune. As during any occupation, some components of society found the means to accommodate themselves and even to collaborate with foreign domination. Some admired the new scientific methods and the art of printing, or took an interest in the administrative reorganization undertaken by the French, particularly in matters of taxation. But above all, the years 1798-1801 were the worst of a troubled time that had begun beforehand and would continue afterward.

The geopolitics of Islam emerged completely transformed by these Wars of the Second Coalition. The survival of the Ottoman Empire depended on its integration into a European balance of powers that now extended to India along the overland route. The policies of the European powers took into account every modification of local power relations. Local political leaders saw the need to adapt to this new state of affairs or to ask for European protections. Hence Bashir Shihab II, emir of the Lebanese Mountains, was allowed to keep his post as a reward for his refusal to join the French, enemies of the Christians—this despite the hostility of his traditional enemy, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (who, however, had been the comrade in arms of the British in the decisive battle of the siege of Acre in 1799). The Muslims’ political survival therefore depended on integration at a general level into the European political system and on European political penetration at the local level. Local chroniclers took note of that new political reality by recording in their accounts the arrival of news about the major Napoleonic battles, even as they ignored the European conflicts of the eighteenth century.

An excerpt from, “Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East” by Jonathan Parry, Princeton University Press, 2022, Pg. 22 – 23:

On May 9, 1798, the ambitious young general Napoleon Bonaparte stood before his soldiers at Toulon, France’s Mediterranean naval base, and told them that they were the heirs of the Roman legions whose discipline and prowess had subdued the African power of Carthage. Ten days later, his army sailed, like the Romans, across the Mediterranean—-not to Carthage but to Alexandria, the Egyptian port built, as he later reminded them, by Alexander the Great himself. Once reinforced from Corsica and Civitavecchia, this was an immense expedition: 31,000 men, seventeen warships and frigates, nearly four hundred transports, plus 167 men of letters who were to record its benefits for human civilisation. They landed at Alexandria on July 1, and had taken Cairo and the main arteries of Egypt by the end of the month.

British spies had observed the expedition assemble, but were unclear where it was headed. Was it Sicily, Syria, or, as the Russians believed, the Balkans? The British government was preoccupied with the risk of a French invasion of Ireland or Britain. Admiral Nelson had been sent into the Mediterranean to prevent this great fleet moving west and north. He failed to find it en route; he finally discovered the ships moored in Abukir Bay and destroved nearly all of them in early August. Even So, the greatest general of the age had succeeded in occupying the crucial strip of fertile land along the Nile that connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and to India. He had indicated that France was now fighting not just a European and Caribbean battle, but one for world domination. For the British, the French Wars had always been about colonies, trade, and wealth as much as about continental alliances, but mostly so far in the West Indies. Now, suddenly, the new British Empire in the East was at stake.

In invading Egypt and displacing the ruling regime of Mamluks, Napoleon was also invading the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1770s, the Mamluk leaders Murad and Ibrahim had consistently managed to resist Ottoman power in Egypt, as had their recent predecessors. Nonetheless, they recognised the sovereignty of the sultan, and the sultan was naturally horrified by a European invasion of his lands. The British government had to consider how far to ally with the Ottomans, as well as the Russians, in order to oppose him. Britain had not thought seriously about Ottoman territory previously. Most British policymakers assumed that a Eurocentric strategy was needed to defeat France’s military expansion. Diplomacy and subsidies would persuade Austria, Prussia, and others to do most of the fighting. This continued to be the approach of the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville. For Grenville, the East was relevant only insofar as it affected the European military balance. By 1800, his approach had failed. His cabinet rival Henry Dundas had an alternative strategy, which involved seeking military help from India rather than unreliable Europeans. It also involved cultivating local Arabs and Mamluks in order to build a coalition against France on the ground. In 1801, Dundas’s approach succeeded in getting the French out of Egypt. Their departure was followed by peace talks, but if the French resumed the war, it was easy to see how they might return. This was partly because British officers never trusted the Ottomans to fight effectively. The war of 1799-1801 revealed enormous tensions between the British and their supposed allies. Was it safe, or honourable, to hand Egypt back to them?

Maxim LVI:

A good general, a well-organized system, good instructions and severe discipline, aided by effective establishments, will always make good troops, independently of the cause for which they fight.

At the same time, a love of country, a spirit of enthusiasm, a sense of national honour and fanaticism will operate upon young soldiers with advantage.