Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

by Abdullah Browne

When at length, late in the evening, the sorely-troubled Sheikhs had recovered somewhat from the consternation into which they had been thrown by the General's treatment of them, and the extravagance of the demand he had made, they proceeded to draw up classified lists of the inhabitants of the town and fix the sums that each class was to contribute towards the payment of the indemnity. As a basis upon which to allot the debt householders were assessed at a year's rent, and every trade, business, and industry in the town, down to the street musicians, jesters, and jugglers, was called upon to pay its share. This done the Sheikhs were, with the exception of a few who were to be imprisoned until they had paid the special fines inflicted upon them, released, but under military guard. Among those imprisoned was the Sheikh el Sadat, the Chief of the Shereefs, or descendants of the Prophet, upon whom a fine of 500,000 dollars had been imposed.

Then began the darkest days in the history of the country. Thenceforth tyranny and torture of every kind was adopted to force the payment of the indemnity, and all that the superior civilisation of France had to offer the wretched people to whom they had accorded an "amnesty," and whom they termed "our people," was the introduction of refinements in the tortures inflicted upon them, such as the bringing of the wife of the Sheikh el Sadat to witness the tortures inflicted upon her husband.

Historians glide lightly over this part of their story, and being perforce compelled to mention some of these incidents, are not ashamed to stoop to the contemptible excuse that such things were "the custom of the East," that the French were only availing themselves of the means that would have been employed against themselves in like case. Indeed, this was the excuse the French offered at the time. "Living in the East," said Vigo Roussillon, one of those present at the massacre of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa, "we adopted the morals of the East."

There is an old chemical experiment in which the mixing of two coloured fluids produces a clear, transparent one, but no such experiment is possible in morality. Evil-doing is evil-doing, and neither the casuistry of the Jesuits nor the art of man can make it good or right doing. I myself believe that all evil eventually produces good—"That every cloud that spreads above and veileth love, itself is love;" but that affords no excuse for evil-doing. Nor could the French have found a falser or more barren excuse than this one. It is true that in the East, as in the West, tyranny and torture had been for ages the tools of tyrants, but those tyrants had in using those tools done so ignorantly and stupidly because they knew no better. They acted upon the natural impulse of men who knew no law but that of force, no right but that of the sword, no morality but their own pleasure, and as the circumstances and conditions of the times seemed to them to dictate. They had no sense of doing evil. To them there was no other way of influencing men against their wills save by physical or mental pain, and they acted accordingly. It was quite otherwise with the French. They, with a perfect knowledge of what they were doing, did this evil, knowing it to be evil, and they did it deliberately, not in a moment of anger but with cool, thoughtful determination, and all the sophistry in the world cannot free them from the degradation and dishonour of having done so. But we must remember that Europe in that day, greatly as it had advanced in civilisation, was still far behind the point it has since reached, and that if the French are to be censured for what they did in Egypt it is not because we in England were incapable of evil; nay, what, after all, was the torture inflicted upon the Sheikh el Sadat to that inflicted by the law of England on a mere boy sentenced to be flogged once a fortnight for two years? or to the flogging of a seaman "round the fleet" that was so often carried out long after? For sheer brutality and gross wanton inhumanity the world has scarcely any record that can approach that of the "Holy Office," but the records of England's prisons are not far behind, and leave us no room for anything but shame and humility on the score of our humanity in the past. It is not therefore to picture the French as monsters of iniquity that I have spoken of this matter, but as the natural reply of the Egyptian when he is accused, as he so often is, of ingratitude and want of appreciation of the blessings that we good, kind-hearted Europeans have so generously bestowed upon him. To the European critic of Egypt and its affairs the benefits conferred upon the country and its people by the introduction of European civilisation are so great and so many as to overshadow and hide all else. Unfortunately it is not so to the Egyptian. He knows only too well that there has been a reverse side to the picture that the European draws. The evils of which I have been speaking have long since passed away, but they have left a trail of bitter feeling that still survives. Some of the most prominent of the Egyptian citizens of Cairo to-day are the direct descendants of the men who suffered so severely under the French. Would it be human in them to forget that to the present day they are sufferers from the ills their immediate ancestors had to bear? And yet these men, true to the traditions of their families, are to-day as they were in the time of the French, the men most ready to give a cordial welcome to all real progress—men who, though they cannot forget the past, are content to bury its bitterness and who fully recognise that the Europe of to-day is not altogether the same thing as the Europe of a century ago.

Yet one word more is necessary on this subject. Whatever truth there was in the French excuse that they were but "doing in the East what the Easterns did," this was not true of the Egyptians. All historians agree in one thing—that from the earliest days down to the French occupation (which, as we have seen, was the introduction of an era of "liberty, equality, and fraternity") the Egyptian people had always been the downtrodden slaves of the long string of foreign rulers who had exploited them in the most merciless manner. Yet in these same histories we find the people spoken of as if they had been the rulers, and all the vices and sins of the Mamaluks, their followers and their servants the Copts, are put down with a most generous impartiality to the unhappy people who had to bear the bitter burthen these sins and vices cast upon them. Tyranny, torture, bribery, corruption were rife in the country, therefore the Egyptians were tyrannical, corrupt, and so on. And the same writers, with a calm indifference to the claims of logic and common sense not altogether peculiar to them, tell us that the people were slothful, lacking in energy, content to live from hand to mouth, servile and, to cap the pyramid of their faults and follies, fatalists! How is it that these brilliant historians are unable to see that the centre and controlling feature of all the history of the country has been the utter irreconcilability of the characters of the ruled and their rulers? This was so in the days of the Ptolemies and of the Caliphs as in the days of the Mamaluks and of the French.

Crushing as was the indemnity imposed by the French upon the miserable citizens of Cairo, it was not in the eyes of the Egyptians the worst of the evils from which they had to suffer. We have seen that in their day of trouble the Christians, if they had found assailants among the Moslems, had also found very vigorous protectors. Now that the Christians had an opportunity of showing their gratitude they hastened to do so. The French, with a paltry spite that admits no excuse, forbade the Moslems to ride, commanded them, under pain of the bastinado, to stand up whenever a Frenchman passed, and in other ways sought to humiliate them as much as possible, not the least being the permission they tacitly, if not directly, accorded the native Christians to insult, abuse, and ill-treat the Moslems. And all this was done to "Our people" in virtue of the "Amnesty" that had been granted, not in the fiery heat of open hostility or wrath, or to crush opposition, but with deliberate vindictiveness when all excuse for such brutality had ceased. And the native Christians, following the good example set them and in gratitude for the protection they had received from Moslem defenders, availed themselves to the utmost of the privilege accorded them.

It has been said that this was but a recoil upon the Moslems of ill-treatment they had in times past inflicted upon the Christians. No falser excuse could be offered. It is true that, as I have before admitted, the lower classes of the Moslems had constantly insulted and ill-used the Christians, and under some of the Sultans these had been subjected to degrading and vexatious tyrannies; but, as we have seen, the better class of the people and the Moslem rulers in general always afforded them the full and ample protection to which they were entitled in accordance with Moslem law and religion, even when the granting of that protection necessitated the shedding of Moslem blood. Never once in the history of the country had the Christians been without some of the Moslems for their protectors, and never once had the Moslems, in cool blood or with deliberate malice, persecuted them as native and European Christians now persecuted the Moslems. In moments of wrath and of political excitement Christians had been massacred and their houses pillaged, the lower classes were habitually offensive to them, they had been subjected to humiliating conditions and restrictions by some of the rulers of the land as they had been petted and pampered by others, but with all this they had always been not worse but better off than the bulk of the Moslems. Nor must it be forgotten that it was not as Christians, but as the servants of the Government, that the Christians were hated by the people. Bigots and fanatics have existed, such as Nasooh Pacha, but they were and are regarded by all true Moslems as little better than heretics and infidels. Nowhere throughout Islam are Christians hated as Christians, or for the sake of their religion, but for their actions towards and treatment of Moslems.

No better evidence of the true relations between the two peoples or of their conduct to each other can be asked for than that afforded by Gabarty's history, with its perfect freedom from bigotry and fanaticism. So far from exonerating or condoning the faults of the Moslems, he speaks of and condemns these more frequently and more freely than those of the Christians, and the fact that he does so is the more noticeable, and by far the more significant, that he was writing, not for Christian or European readers, but solely for his countrymen and coreligionists. Nor can we forget in weighing its value that, plain-spoken as it is on the faults and failings of the Moslems, it is the most popular history written in their language. If the Moslems of Egypt were the bitter fanatics they are so commonly accused of being this could not be so. But that the Moslems never did oppress the Christians is proved by the simple historical fact, attested by all the Christian historians of the country, that, from the first introduction of Islam into the country down to the present day, the Moslem Egyptians have never had the power or means of oppressing or tyrannising over the Christians or any one else. Not only so, but they have never had the means or the power to protect themselves from the tyranny and oppression of the Christians. Under the Caliphs and their successors the Mamaluks whatever there was of tyranny and oppression fell with fullest weight upon the Moslems. Their grievances were real enough, and not, as were those of the Christians, little more than sentimental; the kurbag, the corvée, extortion and injustice of every kind, were the evils from which the Moslems had to suffer, while for the most part the Christians escaped these and had as their chief grievances the facts that they were treated socially as an inferior race, were not allowed to ride horses, or to hold land, and had to wear a distinctive dress. And as a set-off to these grievances they had no small share in the golden harvest extorted by cruelty and torture from the Moslems. What wonder if the Moslems felt bitterly against them, or that their bitterness was increased by their impotency to protect themselves. And yet, save for such wild outbursts as that incited by Nasooh Pacha, they were content to leave the Christians alone.

And when we recall the relative position of the Christians and the Moslem people in the country we cannot be surprised that the bitterness I have spoken of should develop into hatred. So far as the people were concerned, it was the Christians, and the Christians alone, who were mainly responsible for their sufferings. It was the Christians who were the real oppressors of the people. They constituted the one class in the country which, if it had willed to do so, could have softened the endless sufferings of the people—the one class that, without a complete change in the government, could have benefited them. But far from benefiting they were the one and only class that in season and out of season never ceased to pursue the miserable people day or night, grinding them in the dust from pure malicious hatred. It was they who carried on the atrocious tyranny that wrecked the commerce of the country and well-nigh desolated the land, for it was they who fixed and they who collected the assessments that crushed and starved the peasantry. They might, with little loss to themselves, have vastly bettered the condition of the people, but far from doing so they pushed their power for evil to the utmost. That is why the Moslems hated them. Ruthless, savage as were the Mamaluks, they were always under some restraint. As a mere matter of policy they could not wholly resist the intercessions of the Ulema, and so it was to their Coptic and other Christian clerks that the Beys turned for advice and counsel as to how much and how the people could be forced to pay. The Beys thought nothing of annihilating a village that would not or could not pay the sum demanded of it, but it was the Christian clerks of the Beys who fixed the amount to be paid and who persuaded the Beys that it was unwillingness and not inability that kept the people from paying. These are facts that cannot be denied or disputed. They are practically admitted by all historians, none of these failing to point out that the administrative branch of the government has always been in the hands of the Christians, though none of them seem to have ever cared to recognise the logical and inevitable consequence of this fact. It was not in the power of the Christians to have wholly averted the evils from which the people had to suffer, but they might have done much that would have vastly mitigated not only the outrageous extortion practised but also the cruelty and brutality with which it was enforced. It was, then, not as Christians but as their heartless oppressors that the Moslems hated the Christians, and the sole excuse that these could offer for their wanton inhumanity was the contempt and social ill-treatment they received, not from the people but from the men they served.

And as it was with the Christians of the country so it was with the French—whatever of hatred the people had for them was due not to religious fanaticism or bigotry but to the oppression they inflicted upon the people.