Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (41 page)

To make matters worse, out of the revolution came Napoleon Bonaparte, whose leadership instantly vaulted France to world-conquering might. Great Britain led the forces arrayed against Napoleon, and one episode of the struggle between these two sides took place in Egypt.

Western histories report that Napoleon went to Egypt in 1798 with an army of thirty-four thousand, Lord Nelson followed him there, the French lost a naval battle to the British in the Nile, Napoleon abandoned his army and sneaked home to stage a coup d’etat that made him the sole ruler of France and stronger than ever; and the war went on.

But what about the Egyptians? Who were they? What part did they play? Did they welcome Napoleon? Help him? Did he have to conq
uer them? Did they play any part in the battle between France and Britain? Who did they side with? What happened after the Europeans left? Western histories don’t address these questions much, focusing mainly on the clash of Britain and France. It’s almost as if the Egyptians weren’t there.

But of course they
were
there. When Napoleon arrived, Egypt was nominally still a province of the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon, however, engaged the main Egyptian armies in the shadow of the pyramids and destroyed them in less than a day! All the rest was mop-up until the British arrived, whereupon the real battles began—and they were between Europeans. The British fleet sank most of Napoleon’s ships in the Nile. He held on as “ruler” of Egypt for a year, but the plague ravaged his troops and order dissolved in the country he ruled as rebels attacked not so much French troops as any loca
l authority. The British sent in more expeditions and convinced the Turks to attack Egypt too. Napoleon responded by sweeping into Syria and massacring thousands of people in the city of Jaffa. Finally he went back to Europe, but Egypt was a shambles by then. An Ottoman army officer soon took advantage of the turmoil to seize power. This man Mohammed Ali, a Turk born in Albania, declared himself “governor” of Egypt, as if he were acting only on behalf of the sultan in Istanbul. Everyone knew, however, that he was no governor but an independent power, a new king whom no one could deny.

Mohammed Ali saw how easily Napoleon cut his way into Egypt, and he was impressed. He decided he had better bring Egypt into line with whatever Europeans and especially the French were doing so that no new Napoleon and no new Lord Nelson could march in like a bunch of gang-bangers and treat Egypt like a grade-school playground.

But what was Napoleon’s secret? Well, Ali knew that Napoleon had stripped the French clergy of power, shut down church schools, and built a secular school system to replace it. Mohammed Ali decided to do the same thing in Egypt. He cut state funding for the ulama. He cut funding for the charitable foundations, the religious schools, and the mosques. He ordered all religious foundations to produce titles for the lands they owned, and of course they couldn’t do it, since their ownership went back to early medieval times, three or four empires ago. So Ali’s state took their lands. Egypt
still had a class of elite mamluks entrenched as the country’s tax farmers, but Ali saw that in Europe the state collected t
axes directly. So Mohammed Ali invited the leading tax-farming mamluks to dinner and had them massacred. Then he launched a crash program to build modern roads, modern schools, and the like. This was all a foretaste of a pattern that was to be repeated many times in the next century.

All this sudden development bankrupted Egypt, and Mohammed Ali had to borrow money to keep his government afloat. He borrowed it from European bankers, of course, who insisted that European financial advisers be allowed to monitor the various agencies of Mohammed Ali’s government, just to oversee the work and make sure the money was not being misused.

Meanwhile, the Ottomans were getting nervous about Mohammed Ali, who was asserting some claims to Syria. They were already too weak to curb him on their own, so they asked the British for help. The British said they would lend a hand if the Ottomans would only sign a treaty allowing Europeans certain privileges on Turkish soil. They organized a consortium of European nations to come in on the treaty, a coalition of the willing, so to speak, and when the dust settled, Mohammed Ali was safely confined to Egypt, but Europeans were powerful players throughout the Levant. Now, only “
the Eastern question” remained to resolve, the question being: which European nation would be responsible for “protecting” which part of the eastern Mediterranean?

Egypt was the richest prize, so both France and Britain cozied up to rulers here. Mohammed Ali legally established his family as dynastic rulers of Egypt, power passing to his sons, grandsons, and so on down, and in the next few decades, these governor-kings of Egypt, these
khedives
as they were called, gave Britain a concession to build a railroad in Egypt; then mollified France with a rich contract to build the Suez canal; then placated the indignant British by giving them the right to build and own the Egyptian national bank, squeezing kickbacks out of each transaction for themselves—
you see where this is going.

Meanwhile, Mohammed Ali’s descendants decided Egypt’s future lay in cotton. Textile manufacturing was the first enterprise to be industrialized in Europe, so the market for cotton became voracious, and the Nile Valley grew excellent cotton. Around 1860, the price of cotton on the world market suddenly soared. The khedive of that moment, a spend-thrift playboy of the Eastern world named Ismail, got starry-e
yed with dreams of wealth for himself and his country. He borrowed enormous sums of money from European bankers to industrialize Egypt’s cotton industry overnight: he bought cotton gins and other such machinery at enormous expense, money he figured Egypt could easily repay since it would be selling cotton forever.

But the rise in cotton prices was a mere blip caused by the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, which choked off cotton exports from the southern states there and forced English textile factories to look elsewhere for thread. As soon as the U.S. Civil War ended, the price of cotton dropped and Egypt was ruined. Now, the bankers and financial advisers flooded into the country in earnest. Every Egyptian government official ended up with a European adviser of his very own. The Eastern questions still remained—both France and Britain stood poised to achieve total dominance in Egypt.

Britain seemed to have the edge, however, which made France all the more determined not to lose the edge it had further west. In the period of France’s revolutionary turmoil, two Algerian Jewish families had sold 8 million francs’ worth of grain to France to feed its armies. When Napoleon fell and France reverted to monarchy, France disavowed that debt. The Ottoman governor of this province met with the French consul, Pierre Duval, to demand an explanation. Duval told him France did not discuss money with Arabs. The governor slapped Duval in the face with . . . a fly swatter. What a blow to
French honor!
L’Affaire de Mouche-Swatter
(the “affair of the fly swatter”) made it into the French press, and nobody laughed. More insults were exchanged and tensions went on rising. As it happened, there was a struggle under way in France just then between monarchists and liberals. The monarchists who held power saw domestic political advantage in a quick, successful military adventure. Napoleon had proven how easily Arabs could be defeated in Egypt, and so, in 1830, France invaded Algeria.
⁷

The venture proved as quick and successful as any Frenchman might have hoped. The governor fled to Naples, leaving his fortune behind and his country leaderless. France hauled about 100 million francs out of Algeria, about half of which made it to the French treasury. The rest disappeared into the pockets of the soldiers and officers who invaded the country.

With its government gone, Algeria was a power vacuum, and you know how nature abhors those things. Instead of setting up a proxy or puppet, France decided to incorporate Algeria into its national structure as three new provinces. In other words, the French treated Algeria not as a colony but as part of France. A “joint stock” company was set up to sell land to French citizens who would immigrate to these new provinces and help “develop” them.

Even here in Algeria, which France out and out invaded, the foreigners flooding in as immigrants didn’t fight a war with the natives. They just bought up 80 percent of the land, fair and square, and set up a whole new economy that didn’t compete with the native economy so much as ignore it. Algerian Arabs remained free to plant what they wanted on whatever land they retained, ship what they grew to Algerian ports if they could afford the freight charges, and sell their products in world market if they could find any buyers, which they couldn’t. Or if they preferred, they could leave the
land and move to the cities and start businesses, if they had the capital—which they didn’t—and if they could get a business license from French officials, which for various good and legal reasons, they often couldn’t.

So the Arabs of Algeria ended up buying and selling to each other in the old traditional ways while the bulk of the country, absorbed as it was into the European and world markets, did business in streamlined, super-productive modern ways.

If any Algerian had been asked whether he opposed or supported selling 80 percent of the country to French buyers, he would surely have said he opposed it. If anyone had been faced with
that
decision, he would almost certainly have decided no. But no one ever had a chance to decide whether to sell off 80 percent of the country. Each landowner who sold property to “the French” was only deciding whether to sell his one piece of land to this one buyer. It was quite possible to oppose selling 80 percent of the country to foreigners while seeing persuasive reasons to sell one particular bit of it
to one particular foreigner.

Over the next century, the French community in Algeria grew to seven hundred thousand French citizens. They came to own most of the land and considered themselves native Algerians, since they were born on Algerian soil and most were the children of parents born there. Inco
nveniently, some 5 million Arabs happened to be living there as well and no one could fathom where they had come from or what they were doing there. They didn’t seem to have any function, and whatever they subsisted on, it was an almost completely separate economy from the one the French Algerians were involved in.

By 1850, Europeans controlled every part of the world that had once called itself Dar al-Islam. They lived in these countries as an upper class, they ruled them directly or decided who would rule, they controlled the resources, they dictated the policies, and they circumscribed the daily lives of their people. In places such as Egypt, Iran, and India, there were clubs that the native people could not enter because they were Egyptian or Iranian or Indian. Europeans had achieved this dominance without any grand war or broadscale assault. The Europeans were scarcely even aware that th
ere had been a struggle and that they had won. But Muslims noticed, because it’s always harder to ignore a rock you’re under than a rock you’re on.

 

 

A
T THE SAME TIME as these political developments, a crucial story was unfolding in the intellectual arena as well. This story began before 1800 and continued long after, with consequences that shake the world to this very day: it consisted of revival and reform movements that surged up throughout the Muslim world at the same time that Europeans were overwhelming these lands.

The two stories are related, though not identical. Some sort of sweeping challenge to the Muslim status quo was going to take place around this time with or without the Europeans. Why? Because in the Muslim world, by 1700 or so, religious institutions had bureaucratized spirituality in much the same way that the Catholic Church had bureaucratized Christianity in late medieval Europe. The whole system of Muslim law had been worked out so fully that there was no creative work left for any new enthusiast to do. The application of shari’a to every dot and detail of personal and s
ocial life was a done deal. The power of the ulama had grown encrusted. The Sufi orders had been institutionalized, and authorities at every level agreed that “the gates of ijtihad were closed.”

Ijtihad
, remember, means “free and independent thinking based on reason.” It can’t depart from scripture, but it consists of thinking through the implications of scripture creatively. Muslim scholars had once allowed that ijtihad might be exercised on issues not explicitly settled by Qur’an; then by Qur’an and hadith; then by Qur’an, hadith, and the work of previous authoritative scholars. . . . And so by the eighteenth century, important scholars generally agreed that no unsettled issues existed. Everything had been covered, everything worked out; ordinary people no longer needed to ex
ercise free and independent thought. There was nothing left for them to do but follow the rules.