Arabs (13 page)

Al-Jabarti, who was a regular at the French Institute in Cairo, was once again in attendance. He wrote openly about his amazement at the feats of chemistry and physics he witnessed. “One of the strangest things I have seen in [the Institute] was the following,” he wrote. “One of the assistants took a bottle filled with a distilled liquid and poured a little of it into a cup. Then he poured something from another bottle. The two liquids boiled and coloured smoke rose from them until it ceased and the contents of the cup dried and became a yellow stone. He turned it out on the shelf. It was a dry stone which we took in our hand and examined.” This transformation of liquids to solids was followed by demonstrations of the flammable properties of gasses and the volatility of pure sodium, which, when struck “gently with a hammer,” made “a terrifying noise like the sound of a carbine.” Al-Jabarti resented the savants’ amusement when he and his Egyptian compatriots were startled by the bang.

The
pièce de resistance
was a demonstration of the properties of electricity using Leyden jars, first developed as electrostatic generators in 1746. “If one held its connections . . . and with his other hand touched the end of the revolving glass . . . his body would shake and his frame tremble. The bones of his shoulder would rattle and his forearms immediately tremble. Anyone who touched the person in contact, or any of his clothes, or anything connected to him, experienced the same thing—even if it were a thousand or more people.”

No doubt the Egyptians present at the demonstration were very impressed by what they had seen. However, they did their best not to show their amazement. One of Napoleon’s aides who witnessed the chemistry demonstration later wrote how “all of the miracles of the transformation of fluids, electrical commotions and experiments in galvanism caused them no surprise at all.” When the demonstration was over, he claimed one of the Muslim intellectuals asked a question through an interpreter. “This is all well and good, but can they make it so that I would be in Morocco and here at the same time?” Bertholet replied with a shrug of the shoulders. “Ah, well,” said the
shaykh, “he isn’t such a good sorcerer after all.”
⁵
Al-Jabarti, reflecting on the demonstration in the privacy of his own study, begged to differ: “They had strange things in [the Institute], devices and apparatus achieving results which minds like ours cannot comprehend.”
⁶

 

Napoleon’s real reasons for invading Egypt in 1798 were geostrategic, not cultural. France’s main rival in the second half of the eighteenth century was Great Britain. The two European maritime powers struggled for ascendancy in a number of theaters, including the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and India. British and French commercial companies had fought a bitter campaign for supremacy in India that was only resolved in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), when the British defeated the French and secured their hegemony over the subcontinent. France was never reconciled to its losses in India.

With the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, Britain and France resumed their hostilities. Napoleon, looking for ways to hurt British interests, turned back to India. By capturing Egypt, he hoped to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean and to close the strategic land-sea route to India that ran from the Mediterranean through Egypt to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean beyond. The British were aware that Napoleon was assembling a major expedition force in Toulon and suspected a move against Egypt. Admiral Horatio Nelson was put in command of a powerful squadron to intercept the French fleet. They actually beat the French to Egypt, where they had their brief and discouraging encounter with the governor of Alexandria. Nelson withdrew his ships to search for Napoleon elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The French succeeded in eluding the Royal Navy, and Napoleon’s army made a quick conquest of Egypt. However, Nelson’s squadron caught up with the French fleet one month later and succeeded in sinking or capturing all but two of the French warships in the Battle of the Nile, on August 1. Napoleon’s flagship,
l’Orient
, was set ablaze in the battle and exploded in a spectacular fireball that lit the night sky. The French lost more than 1,700 men in the Battle of the Nile.

The British victory over the French fleet condemned the Napoleonic expedition to failure. The 20,000-man French army was now trapped in Egypt with no line of communication to France. The defeat dealt a terrible blow to the morale of French troops in Egypt. Their sense of isolation was compounded when Napoleon abandoned his army without warning to return to France in August 1799, where he seized power in November of that year.

Following Napoleon’s flight, the French army in Egypt was left without a mission. Napoleon’s successor entered into negotiations with the Ottomans for a full French evacuation from Egypt. The French and Ottomans struck agreement as early as January 1800, but their plans were scuttled by the British, who had no wish to see a
large and experienced French army rejoin Napoleon’s legions to fight the British on other fronts. In 1801 the British Parliament authorized a military expedition to secure a French surrender in Egypt. The expedition reached Alexandria in March 1801 and combined forces with the Ottomans in a pincer movement on Cairo. The French surrendered Cairo in June and Alexandria in August 1801. They then boarded British and Ottoman ships to be transported home to France, bringing the whole sorry episode to a close.

 

The French occupation of Egypt lasted just three years. It was a fascinating moment in human terms, where Egyptians and Frenchmen found points to admire and to condemn in each other. Both sides emerged wounded from the encounter. The French who withdrew from Cairo in the summer of 1801, driven out by an Anglo-Ottoman force, were no longer the self-confident agents of a new revolutionary order. Rather, their ranks were thinned by war and disease and their morale was low after years without relief in Egypt. Many Frenchmen had converted to Islam and taken Egyptian wives—hardly a sign of condescension toward the people under their occupation. But the Egyptians too had had their confidence shaken by the experience of occupation. Their sense of superiority had been upset by their confrontation with the French, their ideas, and their technology.

T
he departing French left a power vacuum in Egypt. Their three-year occupation had broken the Mamluks’ power base in Cairo and Lower Egypt. The Ottomans wanted to prevent the reestablishment of the Mamluk households at all costs—in the absence of the French, they had never faced a better opportunity to reassert their authority over the rebellious province of Egypt. The British feared Napoleon would attempt the reconquest of Egypt and were determined to leave a strong deterrent behind. They had more confidence in the Mamluks than in the Ottomans defending Egypt from future French attack, and so they worked to rehabilitate the most powerful Mamluks. They pressured the Ottomans to pardon key Mamluk beys, who began to reestablish their households and rebuild their influence. The Ottomans complied with British wishes against their better judgment.

No sooner had the British expeditionary force departed in 1803 than the Ottomans reverted to their own solutions for Egypt. The Sublime Porte ordered the governor in Cairo to exterminate the Mamluk beys and seize their wealth for the treasury.
⁷
The Mamluks, however, had regained enough of their former strength to withstand Ottoman attacks. What followed was a bitter power struggle between the Ottomans and the Mamluks that prolonged the misery of the war-weary civilians of Cairo. One
Ottoman commander emerged from the chaos to master the conflict with the Mamluks and to build public support for his bid to rule over Egypt. In fact, he would soon become one of the most influential figures in Egypt’s modern history. His name was Muhammad ’Ali.

An ethnic Albanian born in the Macedonian town of Kavala, Muhammad ‘Ali (1770–1849) rose to command a powerful and unruly 6,000-man Albanian contingent of the Ottoman army in Egypt. Between 1803 and 1805, through an ever-shifting set of alliances, Muhammad ’Ali enhanced his personal power at the expense of the Ottoman governor, the commanders of the other Ottoman regiments, and the leading Mamluk beys. He openly courted the support of the notables of Cairo, who had grown increasingly restive after five years of political and economic instability, first under the French and now under the Ottomans. By 1805 the commander of the Albanian detachment had emerged as a king-maker in Cairo. But Muhammad’Ali aspired to be king himself.

Muhammad ‘Ali’s activities had not escaped the attention of the Ottoman authorities. The commander of the Albanians was seen as a troublemaker, but he had talent and ambition that could be put to the empire’s advantage. The situation in Arabia remained critical. The Wahhabis had attacked Ottoman territory in Iraq in 1802 and took control of the holy city of Mecca in 1803. The Islamic reformers now imposed conditions on the Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from Cairo and Damascus and threatened to prohibit them entry to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina altogether (as they would do after 1806). This was an intolerable situation for the sultan, who claimed by imperial title to be the guardian of Islam’s holiest cities. When the notables of Cairo first petitioned Istanbul to appoint Muhammad ’Ali as governor of Egypt in 1805, the Porte decided to name him governor of the Arabian province of the Hijaz instead, and to entrust him with the dangerous mission of crushing the Wahhabi movement.

As governor-designate of the Hijaz, Muhammad ‘Ali was promoted to the rank of pasha, which made him eligible to serve as governor in any Ottoman province. Muhammad ’Ali accepted the appointment to the Hijaz for the title alone. He showed no interest in moving to the Red Sea province to take up his new post. Instead, he conspired with his allies among the civilian notables of Cairo to put pressure on the Ottomans to appoint him governor of Egypt. The notables had confidence that Muhammad ‘Ali and his Albanian soldiers could impose order on Cairo. They also suffered from the illusion that Muhammad ’Ali would be beholden to them for their support and would allow the notables to exercise control over the governor they’d appointed. They hoped in this way to lessen the government’s tax burden on the merchants and artisans of Cairo and to regenerate the economic vitality of the province to
their
benefit. But Muhammad ’Ali had other plans.

In May 1805 the townspeople of Cairo rose in protest against Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor. The common people of Cairo had reached a breaking point after years of instability, violence, overtaxation, and injustice. They closed their shops in protest and demanded the Ottomans appoint a governor of their choosing. Al-Jabarti, who lived through these troubled times, describes large demonstrations led by beturbaned shaykhs in the mosques of Cairo where young men chanted slogans against their tyrannical pasha and Ottoman injustice. The mob made its way to Muhammad ’Ali’s house.

“And whom do you want to be governor?” asked Muhammad ’Ali.

“We will accept only you,” the people replied. “You will be governor over us according to our conditions, for we know you as a just and good man.”

Muhammad ’Ali modestly declined the offer. The mob insisted. In a show of reluctance, the crafty Albanian allowed himself to be persuaded. The leading notables then brought him a fur pelisse and a ceremonial gown in an improvised ceremony of investiture. It was an unprecedented event: the people of Cairo had imposed their own choice of governor on the Ottoman Empire.

The incumbent governor, Khurshid Ahmad Pasha, was not impressed. “I was appointed by the sultan and I will not be removed at the command of the peasants,” he retorted. “I will leave the Citadel only on the orders of the imperial government.”
⁸
The civilians of Cairo laid siege to the deposed governor in the Citadel for over a month, until orders came from Istanbul confirming the people’s choice of governor, on June 18, 1805. Muhammad ’Ali was now master of Egypt.

 

It was one thing to be named governor of Egypt—scores of men had held the title since the Ottomans had conquered the territory in 1517—and quite another to actually govern Egypt. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha established his mastery over the province like no one before or after him. He succeeded in monopolizing the wealth of Egypt and used the revenues to establish a powerful army and a bureaucratic state. He used his army to expand the territory under his command, making Egypt the center of an empire in its own right. But unlike ’Ali Bey al-Kabir, who as a Mamluk had dreamed of rebuilding the Mamluk Empire, Muhammad ’Ali was an Ottoman, and he sought to dominate the Ottoman Empire.

Muhammad ‘Ali also was an innovator who put Egypt on a path of reform, drawing on European ideas and technology in ways that the Ottomans themselves would later imitate. He created the first peasant mass army in the Middle East. He undertook one of the earliest industrialization programs outside Europe, applying the technology of the Industrial Revolution to produce weapons and textiles for his army. He dispatched education missions to European capitals and created a translation bureau to publish European books and technical manuals in Arabic editions.
He enjoyed direct relations with the great powers of Europe, who treated him more like an independent sovereign than a viceroy of the Ottoman sultan. By the end of his reign, Muhammad ’Ali had succeeded in establishing his family’s hereditary rule over Egypt and the Sudan. His dynasty would rule Egypt until the 1952 revolution brought down the monarchy.