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| ISBN-13: | 9780520947542 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Arab France
Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798â?"1831
By Ian Coller
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94754-2
CHAPTER 1
A Rough Crossing
In late August 1801, a fleet of British frigates set out from the port of Aboukir in Egypt. They were carrying the tattered remnants of the French Grande Armée, abandoned two years earlier by their commander, Napoleon Bonaparte, to fight on without much hope in Egypt, and at last given passage back to France by the treaty concluded with England and the Ottoman Porte. One night, just a few days into the crossing, a tragic scene unfolded on board one of these ships, a frigate named the Pallas. According to a letter conserved among the papers of the Commission d'Égypte, Ya'qub Hanna, an Egyptian Copt and the first non-French general in the French army, lay dying among the women of his family, watched by a grief-stricken crowd of men, women, and children. Although they had boarded the Pallas in Alexandria, they drew their origins from all over the Middle East, from Egypt, Syria, and even farther afield. They came from Georgia and the Caucasus, from Greece and Asia Minor, from southern Egypt and the Sudan, from Palestine and Mount Lebanon, from the Mediterranean cities of North Africa and from the great metropolis of Cairo. Their social origins were just as disparate: merchants and customs officials jumbled together with priests and artisans, soldiers and domestic servants. Most shared little beyond the Arabic language and an origin in the Islamicate society of the Ottoman lands. Their only other commonality was their decision to join the emigration to France led by General Ya'qub, now mortally ill.
"No scene could been more striking for an artist than this tragic tableau," wrote Nemir Effendi, the author of the letter. A painter, he continued,
would want to capture at once the group as a whole, and the details of the different moral sentiments that animated the onlookers. The variety of feelings can only be imagined—those of the English, the French, the Turks, the Copts, the Greeks, even a number of Italians. Their prayers opened the vault of the heavens for the dying man. Imagine then the despair of his mother, and his sisters, the tears of the beautiful Circassians and Georgians, the shouts of the Coptic and Turkish women, and the innocent composure of a child, his only daughter, still too young to comprehend her loss. Even heaven seemed to want to play its part in the mournful scene, with its far-off thunder and its flashes of lightning.
General Ya'qub died during the night. His final wish, Nemir wrote, was to be buried alongside his friend General Desaix. Ya'qub was a wealthy man and had contributed generously to Desaix's funeral monument in Paris; now he hoped to share it. Perhaps he hoped too that such a public recognition of French and Egyptian friendship would help assure a welcome in France for the people who had accompanied him. He had every reason to fear for their welfare. Most of them hardly spoke French, and they had little experience of life in Europe and no obvious means to support themselves and their families. But not all of them were unschooled in French manners, as Nemir's letter itself demonstrates. Nemir, who signed himself as the wakil, or agent, of the Légation d'Égypte, clearly understood the importance of sensibility and theatricality in postrevolutionary Europe, portraying a terrible and disruptive event as a moment of historic importance, redeeming loss or defeat through symbolism, much as contemporary history painters would do.
Nemir was writing from the lazaret of Marseille, where he and his companions were serving the compulsory forty days of their quarantine. Nemir insisted above all that arrangements should be made quickly for the "more than one hundred young men—Turks, Copts, Greeks, Abyssinians," and their families, who were about to enter the city of Marseille—several hundred people in all. But the political stakes were just as high. The self-styled "Egyptian Legation" on whose behalf Nemir addressed the minister expected an immediate invitation to Paris for discussions about their political project and their status in France. As we will see, they would wait for almost a decade for the permission to travel to the capital.
The "Egyptians" of General Ya'qub were poised to emerge into a different world. But we should take care not to indulge too readily the flights of imagination that this kind of "encounter" has tended to inspire. If French society was different in many ways from the Egypt these people had left behind, we should remember that the contrast between metropolitan and rural life in both France and Egypt was very stark in this period. Both societies contained a patchwork of regional cultures and dialects, with large cities still dependent for subsistence on the countryside, despite the beginnings of the industrial transformations that would have so great an impact later in the century. For an inhabitant of Cairo or Damascus, the city of Marseille would not have seemed so radically different, and, indeed, interconnections between Mediterranean ports had existed for centuries. Paris, to be sure, as both a major metropolis and a cultural capital could perhaps be compared only to Istanbul among the cities of the Ottoman world. But even in Paris, as we shall see later, a limited Arab milieu was already in existence, in addition to a network of French officials who had served in the occupation of Egypt.
But this brings us to a major difference that these people would have to negotiate: not so much between France and Egypt as between the France they had imagined and the France that greeted them. It was only three years after the revolutionary settlement of when the Directory sent an army into Egypt to install the French Republic and its radical principles on the farther shore of the Mediterranean. In the same year, they sent an army to Ireland: its failure was immediate, whereas that in Egypt—and largely, to be sure, as a result of its talented commander—took three years to disintegrate. But the principles with which they set out were nonetheless the same: a radical conception of liberty, equality, and fraternity whose echoes had already been felt across the region. In Egypt, and to a lesser extent in Palestine, brought a great rupture with the deeply corporate and traditional nature of Ottoman society, just as had done in France. Just as in Europe, these ideas attracted some and repelled others. At least some part of the emigration of must be attributed to the effects of these ideas. And those who saw France through such a lens must have received a very sharp shock when they arrived in Marseille in . The Revolution was over. Napoleon, it seemed, had departed Egypt eager to seize in France the kind of absolute power he had exercised in Cairo. The "refugees from Egypt" would have to make a swift and radical change of mentality from one system of power to another, just as they had done when the French took power in Cairo in 1798.
The loss of Egypt that gave rise to this emigration was quite a serious shock to the confidence of postrevolutionary France. It was extremely reassuring, then, to insist that France had snatched a cultural and intellectual victory from the jaws of defeat. The principal repository of this national vindication was the nineteen-volume Description de l'Égypte, the grand ouvrage of scholarship on ancient and modern Egypt published after the French defeat and evacuation: it is as much a substitute for as a description of a lost territory. The images contained in the work themselves filled several volumes in elephant folio: maps, vast panoramas, encyclopedic depictions of dress and ornament, and some individual portraits of important figures and types. One of these portraits shows a young man designated only as "an inhabitant of Damascus" (fig. ): the revolutionary cockade displayed defiantly on his turban gives us a hint of what these political transformations may have meant for those who chose to join the French. The young man's dark headwear distinguishes him, probably as a Christian, from the exclusively white-turbaned Muslims. His Ottoman clothing is modest and unornamented, yet elegant and voluminous enough to denote at least a middling degree of wealth. The nargileh, or water pipe, he is smoking also draws a certain contrast with the cheaper clay chibouk pipe of most Egyptians: its use was strongly associated with the coffeehouses, places of public sociability. He is beardless, in contrast to the other figures appearing in vignettes collected on the same page—ranging from a street violin player to a Muslim shaykh—but his bushy moustache nonetheless distinguishes him from the largely clean-shaven French.
The caption informs us that his young man is an "inhabitant of Damascus," so his presence in Egypt is already a matter of change and mobility. In the picture, his raised right knee and left hand suggest a certain tension, a latent movement despite his attitude of repose. His wide gaze is directed at a point in the distance, with the slightly furrowed brow giving a pensiveness to his expression. Whether this portrait was sketched in Egypt, or in the later period when the Description was prepared for publication in Paris, it seems probable that the sitter was among those who joined the emigration of . But the meaning of that tricolor cockade is more difficult to gauge—was it merely a marker of opportunistic partisanship, or does it indicate some more substantial ideological connection? Was it imposed, chosen, or merely an invention of the artist? Whatever the case, there is little doubt that the meaning of such symbols had been transformed in the brief span of the French occupation: three years that saw the devastating military defeat of the Mamluks, followed by the first great failure of the French army under Napoleon; two bloody uprisings, and the assassination of Napoleon's successor, General Kléber. These convulsions of violence not only embittered the relationships between French and Egyptian but rent great holes in the fabric of a religious coexistence that had endured over many centuries.
On 1 July 1801, exactly three years after the first arrival of the French army in Alexandria, the Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti watched the preparations of the French army evacuating Cairo. Among the crowds of soldiers, he described the "Egyptian" men, women, and children who joined the exodus, leaving behind them homes, possessions, and family:
There were many Copts, European merchants, interpreters, and some Muslims who had cooperated with the French and were afraid to remain; there were also many Christians—Syrians and Greeks, such as Yanni, Bartholomew, Yusuf al-Hamawi; also 'Abd al-'Al, the agha.
Behind Jabarti's remarks we can detect the complexity of motives implied by the denomination of different factions according to their sectarian belonging, their occupation, or their history of collaboration. Despite the brevity of the occupation, its dynamics transformed the relations of power in Egyptian society, if not at the popular base, then certainly among certain elements of the elite, and above all for the minorities. Jabarti was careful not to suggest that all of these people were traitors and collaborators, an undifferentiated mass of people forced to flee because of their association with the French. It is important to recognize that the end of the French occupation of 1801 did not constitute a "national liberation" but rather the reestablishment of Ottoman imperial authority. In this context, some scores would certainly be settled, but the Ottoman government was anxious above all to ensure an orderly transition of power. In this regard, a general purge of collaborators would be entirely counterproductive, and the loss of important functionaries would only make the new government's task more difficult. Thus, as Jabarti's words suggest, if there were a few individuals among this crowd of emigrants who feared retribution for their acts under the French, the great majority chose this path for quite other motives. We may recognize two major frames for their choices: the changes wrought by the occupation itself, and the larger dynamics of change in the Mediterranean region, of which the French occupation was itself a part. In order to understand this moment of , we must look back to the three years that preceded it, and the situation of people such as this young Damascene in 1798, when the French Grande Armée, the largest land army in the world, disembarked on the shores of Alexandria.
In our own era, dominated by a similarly ill-fated Middle Eastern incursion by a world power at the height of its self-confidence, it is perhaps hardly surprising that "Napoleon's Egypt" has reemerged as a favorite subject for historians of many stripes. The year 1798 has been identified by historians as an event of peculiar significance in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, even to the point of marking for some the "watershed" of modernity in the region. The presumption underlying this view is twofold: first, that the society that the French under Napoleon Bonaparte encountered in Egypt was stagnant, characterized by intellectual immobility, social rigidity, and economic paralysis; and second, that the French brought with them previously unknown ideas and social forms drawn from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, laying the foundations for the transformation that took place in Egypt under the dynasty of Muhammad 'Ali in the 1820s.
This claim regarding 1798 has come to look increasingly threadbare. In Darrell Dykstra's words, "The orientalist image of an unchanging Islamic society being galvanized by western secular energies has lost its persuasive power, and only the staunchest Bonapartist would cling to the old orthodoxy." The benefit of the historiographical shift away from this outdated and profoundly Eurocentric conception of the "civilizational encounter" is that more attention has been paid to the experiences of the occupied Egyptians and their concrete relations with the French occupiers, as well as to the larger historical transformations taking place in Egypt and the region, within both the dominant Muslim culture and those of religious and ethnic minorities. Henry Laurens has examined the origins of the French "expedition" in detail, connecting it more carefully to the currents of intellectual development from the Enlightenment to the Revolution. His comprehensive volume on the expedition has demonstrated very clearly the complexities of the French occupation, as a project that attempted to put in place many of the "modernizing" ideas drawn from the Revolution. Among historians of early nineteenth-century Egypt, Khaled Fahmy has provided the most salient riposte to the myth of Muhammad 'Ali as an "Egyptian Bonaparte' taking up where Napoleon left off. Fahmy's work, along with that of other historians, has restored the properly Ottoman and Islamic context of nineteenth-century Egyptian reform.
But the significance of 1798 needs to be revised, not negated. It is the larger narrative frame of the analysis, with the separations and divisions it has imposed, and the corollary fixation on the exoticism of difference, that has been most obfuscating to the historical account of this particular Euro-Ottoman encounter. Fortunately, more recent scholarship has helped dismantle these Manichaean "civilizational" conceptions of the relationship between European and Ottoman societies, investigating in much greater complexity the worlds that were profoundly interconnected by trade, politics, and cultural exchange, and even by political geography, throughout the early modern period. The ease with which Napoleon's army arrived in Egypt was a marker, not of a European miracle of progress, but of a Mediterranean proximity that must have seemed even more immediate to a young general from Corsica. But that very proximity, and its transformation into a perception of cultural distance, are constitutive elements of the story that would unfold from this point—key factors both in the origins of the Egyptian emigration and in its occlusion from the history of the Franco-Egyptian encounter.
In 1798, Egypt was a province of an empire that, over seven centuries, had expanded into a vast domain stretching from Anatolia to the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa and deep into eastern Europe. Ottoman power fascinated and frightened Europeans: in 1517, and again in 1683, the Ottoman army reached the gates of Vienna and was only narrowly defeated on each occasion. After 1700, however, it became clear that Ottoman expansion in Europe had halted; and indeed the Ottoman Empire seemed to be faltering on several fronts. Its population had doubled in the course of two centuries, and the Sublime Porte in Istanbul—both the seat of the Islamic caliphate and the center of Ottoman political power—faced significant challenges in governing by the traditional means that had held the empire together for more than half a millennium. The fundamental role of Islam in cementing the legitimacy of Ottoman rule had provided a constant pressure to expand into the non-Muslim world, but it also served to constrain change within a powerfully theocentric vision of the world. Despite the frequent characterization of the Ottoman regime as despotic and arbitrary, the sultan could by no means ignore the will of his people, and above all the opinions of the religious intellectuals. In the early part of the century, several sultans were deposed in revolts led by populist figures who accused the Porte of neglecting the tasks imposed by Islam, or failing to deliver prosperity to the people. Karen Barkey has compared these political contestations from below to revolutionary events in nineteenth-century Europe: "Set in a different imperial context, 1703 and 1730 were the 1848 of the Ottoman Empire." This instability at the center created new dynamics in the outlying provinces of Syria, Greece, and North Africa.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Arab France by Ian Coller. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction
1. A Rough Crossing
2. Ports of Call
3. The Making of Arab Paris
4. Policing Orientalism
5. Massacre and Restoration
6. Cosmopolitanism and Confusion
7. Remaking Arab France
8. The Cathedral and the Mosque
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Recommended."—Choice
"An important and original book that will be of interest to scholars as well as to curious, nonspecialist readers."—French Studies
"An ambitious book. . . . Engaging and important."—Journal of Modern History