Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

by Abdullah Browne

VICTORS AND VANQUISHED

Bonaparte having thus accomplished the first and, though he did not think so, last step on the way towards the building of the great Eastern Empire that he had dreamed was to "take Europe in reverse," despatched a portion of the army in pursuit of the fugitive Mamaluks, and settled down in his new quarters to scheme and prepare for the future.

The troops remaining in Cairo, in the best of humour at the agreeable change the city gave them from the hardships of the advance, began with the rough good-humour of the soldier to fraternise with the people. At first, diffident and distrustful of the French, the lower classes seeing that these went about unarmed, and that not only were their own lives and property respected, but that even the common soldiers paid liberally and promptly for all they needed, were not slow in adapting themselves to the position. They were still depressed by the loss of kin and property that had resulted from the panic, but believing, as all Moslems do, in Pope's doctrine that "Whatever is, is right," they rapidly recovered their wonted cheerfulness, and wherever the French went in the town they, like Rasselas, "met gaiety and kindness, and heard the song of joy or the laugh of the careless," almost untinged by the dread of reflection Imlac so dolefully attributed to the merriest.

That the people should have thus readily accepted the rule of an alien army has often enough been the subject of cynical criticism on the part of authors compiling the history of the country from such documents as fell in their way, but from their ignorance of the people and of humanity in general, incapable of reading aright the true meaning of the records they perused. Let us avoid their error, and try to grasp the real meaning of this oft-condemned "levity" of the Egyptians, and let us do so with the more seriousness of purpose that, in learning what we can of the real attitude of the people towards the French in 1798, we shall be learning much that will help us to understand their attitude towards the English in more recent years. To begin with let us note that in fraternising with the French the Cairenes were true to their natural instinct, for they are and always have been a volatile, light-hearted people, fond of jest and pleasure, enjoying the present with no heed for the morrow, and the rank and file of the invaders being of the same temperament, these traits supplied a ready bond of good feeling between the two bodies. And in yielding to the spirit of fellowship thus engendered the Egyptians betrayed no trust, and were guilty of no treachery or disloyalty. To the Mamaluks they owed no more loyalty than did the Saxon English or the Celtic Irish to the Normans, and no more love than the French revolutionists had had for the aristocrats. Whatever of loyalty they had was given to the Sultan, and since Bonaparte professed to respect his authority and to be acting in his interest, this loyalty was not outraged by the presence of the French. Nor did the flight of Bekir Pacha, the Sultan's representative, impeach the good faith of the French, for it was no uncommon sight to see a Turkish governor in arms against, or fleeing from, his sovereign.

Two things only separated the victors from the vanquished, the want of a common language and the religion, or rather irreligion, of the French. The former was too trivial a matter to sway either the French or the Egyptians, and the latter, though it was an effectual barrier to any deep friendship between the two peoples, was scarcely any restraint upon such purely social intercourse as was possible between them. Finally, the Egyptians had but one of two courses open to them—they must either frankly accept friendly relations or offer a sullen and unavailing opposition. This was so because they were as little anxious for, as incapable of, self-government, or self-protection. Without some governing body to direct the affairs of the country they would have been like a flock without its bellwether. Of this they were conscious, and though it is not probable that they for a moment looked at the question before them with regard to this fact, it was chiefly this that prevented their seeing any alternative to the acceptance of the French. To the present day, many of the peoples of India are influenced by the same sense of their own incapacity, and it is there one of the strongest of the elements tending to the consolidation of the Empire under its British rulers. As this incapacity and the belief that it is an irradicable defect of the peoples concerned has largely affected public opinion in Europe as to the present and future of the Egyptians, it will be well for us to see here to what causes it is due.

Remembering how little we can see beyond the surface of the lives, not only of our own countrymen but even of our own most intimate friends, we need not wonder that in seeking to gauge the character of a people so altogether apart from us as are the Egyptians we are apt to wander widely from the truth in our efforts to understand the ideas by which they are guided, and to be misled by giving undue weight to some feature that seems to mark them out as different from ourselves. It is thus we find the Egyptians so commonly spoken of as "fatalists"—a term perhaps not unfairly applied as a reproach to them, but one that is too often most wrongly taken as a sufficient explanation of all their real or alleged incapacity. It is this, we are told, that has rendered them incapable of controlling their own affairs, this that has made them "the servile slaves of foreign masters." The truth is that the fatalism of the Egyptians not only plays a very small part in the framing of their characters or the guidance of their lives, but it is a fatalism of a kind not commonly understood or implied by the term. We must look elsewhere, therefore, for the explanation we need, and a slight knowledge of their history is enough to point us to the enervation caused by the system of government under which they have lived for so many centuries as at least a powerful factor in the limitation of their aptitudes. From generation to generation deprived of all right or power of initiative, wholly without voice or influence in the affairs of the country, and habitually treated as slaves, having no other duty and owning no other privilege than that of the most perfect submission to all representing the governing power of the moment, they were of necessity entirely unaccustomed to think of or discuss any other subjects than the paltry matters of their daily lives. Yet it must not be supposed that they were debarred the liberty of speech or of comment and criticism, or that they were in any sense wholly passive victims of the tyranny from which they suffered. Under the Beys they from time to time "demonstrated" as loudly, if not as effectively, as our own people are wont to do. Thus, as a protest against a new impost, or, as the Tudors and Stuarts would have termed it, "Benevolence," laid upon them in the year 1794, with common consent all the business of the town was suspended, and the people went in a mass to the Cadi, or Chief Justice, and the leading Ulema, and through their intermediation obtained the revocation of the impost—for the moment, but for the moment only, for the wily Beys, though they stormed and fumed, felt it wiser to submit and to annul the impost, but a little later substituted for it a whole series of imposts, which, being demanded at intervals and only from one or two sections of the people at a time, finally proved more profitable to the Beys and more burthensome to the people than it would have been in its first form. It is clear, however, from this incident that the people had a fair conception of the power of united action, but the mob that marched to the Cadi's, while it was like those of the French Revolution, leaderless, could not like those march in column, but pressed forward in a mass, a mere throng of men stirred by a common impulse. When the Beys, to adopt a military phrase, attacked them in detail this want of leadership was fatal to their cause, and this want of leaders was due to the conditions under which the people were living, for the man who had dared to act as leader would have paid the penalty of his folly with his life, and the people would have been helpless to avenge his death. Hence anything in the nature of effective organisation or combination was impossible. Unlike their critics, the Egyptians saw then, as they do now, that without the power and opportunity of arming themselves they were, and must remain, helpless to combat the tyranny of their rulers, otherwise than by such passive means as the suspension of all trade and business.

It will be seen, then, that the condition of the Egyptians at the time of the French invasion was, in a broad way, similar to that of the Saxons under the Normans, but we need not go back to the time when Gurth bewailed the condition of his countrymen to find the masses of the English people but little better off in this respect than were the Egyptians under the Mamaluks. When in 1795 Bishop Horsley, speaking in the House of Lords, said he "did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them"; and the Chief Justice, in sentencing Muir, cried, "As for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them?" they might both have been speaking for the Mamaluk rulers of Egypt, and yet they spoke nothing more than the sentiment of their class. In many other ways the condition of the English people at the close of the eighteenth century was not only not better than that of the Egyptians, but absolutely worse. In Egypt the people suffered from the Corvée—that is to say, their liability to forced labour. In England the press-gangs dragged them from their homes for foreign service. In Egypt the people were liable to be flogged or executed on the least pretext at the whim of their rulers; in England they were subject to the same penalties by "just process of law," interpreted by such humane and benevolent persons as the two men whom I have just quoted. Let any one who will study the records of the time with regard to the condition of the people of England, those of France, and those of Egypt, and they cannot fail to see that the advantage lay with the Egyptians. I have elsewhere tried to show how the Egyptians looked upon the evils from which they suffered, and it must be obvious from what I have there said that this people had but little inducement to revolt. Could they have risen and annihilated the Mamaluks the only result would have been the immediate invasion of the country by a Turkish army that they could not possibly withstand and which would not fail to exact a terrible penalty from them for their temporary success.

In Egypt, then, the people had to endure much, but the ills that afflicted them were intermittent, coming upon them only now and then after longer or shorter intervals of at least comparative peace and comfort, reminding one, indeed, of the hurricanes that ravage the South Sea Islands with death and destruction, but, swiftly passing, leave the people once more to the enjoyment of the indolent, care-free life they ordinarily live.

How different had it been in France just before the Revolution! In Egypt the people always had the Ulema to plead their cause, and if these commonly urged them to the exercise of patience and submission, they did so with a sympathy that was real. In France priest and politician alike were aloof from the people, and the evils that were crushing these were growing steadily day by day with increasing force, with no intermission, and with no possibility for a hope of better days, no possibility but one—one that found its expression in the cry of "Down with the aristocrats!" There was no such agony of want and misery for the people of Cairo as there was for the people of Paris in those bitter days when the Revolution, unseen but with many warning mutterings, was gathering to itself the hearts of men that these might form its army of vengeance upon that "cream of civilisation" that had grown so exquisitely fine and sensitive that it had lost its natural sympathies and ceased to be conscious of its fellowship with any humanity not fitted to adorn its salons. To the Egyptian the cry of "Down with the Beys!" would but have meant "Up with the Turks!" To the French the cry of "Down with the aristocrats!" meant "Up with myself!" and so Justice, robed in the crimson garb of Vengeance, swept over the land and, like another Frankenstein, aristocratic brutality fled from its own creation.

In England, bad as was the condition of the people, the circumstances that determined their action were very different from those that controlled the French or the Egyptians. In Egypt everything tended to discourage the people from any attempt to permanently better their condition. In France everything drove them to desperate but victorious struggle. In England the people had every incentive to action of another type. There the principle of constitutional government was recognised, and if the laws were "the most savage that ever disgraced a statute book" it was within the bounds of possibility to hope for their improvement. The right of the people to govern themselves was not yet admitted, but their right to be heard was only denied by a class which was not beyond attack or defeat by legal means, and in the last resort rebellion was possible and by no means foredoomed to failure. The English were in the same position as the Egyptians in one respect, namely, that it was not a change in the form of government or the normal and proper condition of the people that they needed, but simply the abolition of evils that were accidental and not essential to that form or those conditions. To the French reform had become virtually impossible. No making or mending of laws or regulations will mend the hearts of men. The Beys of Egypt, the governing class in England, and the aristocrats in France were all heartlessly tyrannical, but the Beys were so through capricious selfishness, the English through distorted views of justice and right, and the French through callous, persistent inhumanity. The difference in character of the tyranny under which each of the three peoples were groaning was, therefore, not less than that of their hopes for its mitigation.