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The French Revolution, North Africa, and the Middle East
| Article
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16028 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
2,907 Words |
| Author
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Antony T. Sullivan
Antony T. Sullivan is an associate of the Center for Near
Eastern and North African Studies at the University of
Michigan. He is the author of Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, France
and Algeria, 1784-1849: Politics, Power and the Good Society
(Archon Books, 1983) and Palestinian Universities Under
Occupation (American University in Cairo Press, 1988). |
When French infantry shattered Egypt's Mamluk cavalry near the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, the French Revolution erupted into the world of Islam. Little would be the same thereafter. France, more than any other Western power, became the engine of modernization across a vast territory bordering the eastern and southern Mediterranean. Probably nowhere else in the Third World has the French Revolution had more impact than in the Middle East and North Africa. Certainly, nowhere else has the struggle between Western models and indigenous traditions become more acute. Today, the intense cultural debate opened by the French Revolution continues to agitate Arabs and Muslims, and its ultimate consequences remain uncertain.
Earlier major events in the West had no great influence on the Muslim world. For example, the cultural and other changes wrought by Christianity did not strongly impress Muslims. They believed that God's revelation to Christians had long since been superseded by His definitive revelation to Muhammad. Christian "truth" at best reflected imperfectly a truth that Muslims alone possessed in entirety. Almost two centuries of occupation of a portion of the Muslim heartland by Christian Crusaders failed to stimulate significant Muslim curiosity about the worldview of their opponents. Revolutionary France, with its aggressive secularism and anti-Christian ideology, combined with its success in mobilizing society through a new and fervent nationalism, persuaded Muslims that by following its example they might discover the key to Western power without compromising their own cultural authenticity. Today, the hopes of many have been disappointed. On the one hand Muslims perceive their societies as both powerless and dependent, and on the other as contaminated by an alien cultural incrustation.
In Egypt, revolutionary France arrived directly and in force. France's ruling Directory, determined to rid itself of the young Bonaparte, who had brought it to power and whom it had come to suspect of plotting a coup, dispatched Napoleon overseas with orders to occupy Egypt and threaten British links with its colony of India. Evading the British fleet commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson, Napoleon landed with some thirty thousand troops at Alexandria on July 1, 1798. During the next three years France ruled Egypt, and in 1799 even struck northeastward through the Levant as far as Acre, where some of the defeated mamluk governors of Egypt had taken refuge. There, Napoleon suffered his first military defeat and was forced to withdraw without subduing the city. In late August 1799, he secretly departed Egypt and returned to France, leaving behind an army that ruled the country for another year and a half. Less than three months
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