Bonaparte in Egypt and the Egyptians of To-day

CHAPTER VIII
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.

The mere fact that the oppression from which he suffered was consistent with the laws of the land stirred the Englishman to hope for better things, for if he could by any means bring about a change of the laws he could not fail to benefit from it, and that such changes as he desired could be brought about he was convinced. French and Egyptians suffered not from the laws, but from the abuse of such legal authority as existed. The English, too, might, and did, hope to benefit from the mutual rivalries of the parties and classes that jointly oppressed them. The others had no such resource. And the Englishman's belief in his ability to rebel, and to rebel successfully, gave him a self-reliance and determination that everything denied to the Egyptian, and which the French could only employ in the extermination of their tyrants. Other influences were in favour of the peaceful realisation of the Englishman's hopes. He had friends in the classes above him. There were men like Howard and Wilberforce to plead the cause of the prisoner and the slave, like Cobbett, Paine, and Wilkes to stir the people up to effort, like Burke and Pitt to preach reform, and yet more potent than all these, like Lindsey and Raikes, the founders of Sunday Schools, who, by teaching the people the value of education, laid the real foundations of the England of to-day. In Egypt there were not, and could not be, such men as these. The Egyptians had, as we have seen, friends and protectors in the Ulema, but friends whose ability to aid them was altogether out of proportion to their willingness, and whose narrow training and insufficient culture unfitted them to cope with the evils they had to face, and which many of them would have honestly laboured to amend could they but have found a way to do so. Thus all the conditions and circumstances in the three countries tended in different directions – in one, to move the people to peaceful action; in another, to drive them to destructive wrath; and in the third, to lead them to patient submission. For the Englishman and the French, then, there were ways to progress – ways encumbered with difficulties and dangers, but with something more than a mere possibility of success to draw them onward – while the Egyptian was on all sides hemmed in by the impossible. Nor have we yet seen all the causes that have helped to determine the present character of the English and that of the Egyptians.

Then, as now, the Mahomedan peoples were taught by the Ulema, as were, and are, the people of England by the Church Catechism, that it is their bounden duty to submit themselves to all their governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, and to order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters. But the reception accorded to this teaching by the two peoples was, and is, vastly different, and that it was and is so is mainly due to the conditions under which they are placed. The blood of the English is largely tinged with that of the restless, adventurous peoples whose early invasions of their island fill so many pages of its early history, and by descent, the influence of climate, and the whole course of their history they have become possessed of a spirit of independence, energy, and self-reliance that instinctively leads them to a broad and healthy interpretation of this doctrine. But this spirit was altogether foreign and unknown to the Egyptian, and that it should be so was an almost inevitable result of the peculiar conditions affecting their country as contrasted with those prevailing in England. Thus in our sea-girt home, with its uncertain weather, the success of the farmer's labours was always in a great measure dependent upon his own skill and energy. Through all the changes of the seasons of the year each day brought to him its round of duties to be performed, duties exacting not only toilsome labour, but thoughtful care and wise foresight in adjusting that labour to the ever-varying conditions he had to meet. It was not so in Egypt. There the measure of the farmer's success was mainly the result of the operations of Nature, for the richness or poverty of his harvest was proportioned, not to his efforts, but to the abundance or scarcity of the inundation of the Nile. With a bountiful flood he had little to think of but the purely routine labours of his fields; with a scanty stream no labour, no energy of his could save him from the disaster of an impoverished harvest. In England, therefore, where constant foresight, thought, and well-arranged labour were needed to win subsistence from an ungenerous soil, the farmer learned to think and act for himself, whereas in Egypt, where he was at the mercy of the Nile, he drifted on from day to day undisturbed by aught but the mere mechanically performed labour of the fields. In both countries the bent thus given to the minds of the agricultural classes with respect to their daily labour naturally affected their manner of regarding other matters. Thus the Englishman brought to all matters that he had to deal with at least something of the care and thought he gave to his daily work, and weighed and balanced probabilities and possibilities in his political and social affairs just as he did in the choosing of a crop, while the Egyptian left almost all things to shape their own course, even as he of necessity accepted his harvest as it came. The character which the agricultural classes in the two countries thus acquired reacted upon the people generally, for it is the character of the great mass of the people that in general finally decides the character and fate of a nation.

And other causes contributed to increase the difference in the character of the two peoples. In England taxation was excessive and crushing in its effects upon all but the wealthy, but it was systematic and did not prohibit or prevent the accumulation of wealth, whereas in Egypt, while the nominal taxation was lighter it was in effect far worse, and the more so that its arbitrary assessment and irregular collection, coupled with the atrocious tyranny and cruelty by which these were accompanied, and the oft-recurring infliction of illegal taxes and impositions, effectually deprived the people of all opportunity of, or desire for, improving their position. In England, too, labour of some kind was indispensable. Life was a constant struggle, and he who did not work was ever in imminent danger of starving. It was quite otherwise in Egypt. The grinding, hopeless poverty that not only then but still exists, though happily we may hope in an ever-lessening degree in England, was and is unknown in the East. There so few and simple are the needs of the poor that the humblest can always afford to share the little he has, and the absolute destitution, but too common in England, is there practically impossible. Moreover, the Englishman, though enjoying the benefit of a temperate climate, if he would not perish from inanition from the inclemency of its winter, was compelled to find by some means or other food of a more nourishing and stimulating quality than that which the Egyptian needed. He had also to provide himself with an amount of clothing and artificial warmth which the genial though enervating air of his native land rendered altogether unnecessary to the Egyptian. Of necessity, therefore, the Englishman's needs stirred him to an activity and energy to which the conditions of life in Egypt supplied no inducement.

Lastly, the Englishman who could acquire wealth was assured of the peaceful enjoyment of it, whereas the Egyptian knew but too well that the merest rumour of his possessing aught more than the bare necessaries of life could but subject him to tyranny and torture, until he had surrendered his last coin or seizable pennyworth of value. From this diversity in the conditions and circumstances of the two people, we can see why to the one the instruction to be content with that state of life in which he found himself was as unpalatable as to the other, it was a mere summing-up of the whole philosophy of life. However hard the condition of the Englishman's lot might be he could always look to improve it; in fact for him the one hope of happiness lay in the possibility of bettering his condition, while that of the Egyptian lay in passive submission to the chains that bound him. That, of the two people, the Egyptian was in some respects, for the time, the happiest is at least possible. Like the Englishman, the Egyptian prizes more than all else his individual freedom: the mere liberty to come and go, to work or idle as the impulse of the moment dictates, and detests constraint and compulsion of every kind. This freedom he enjoyed with no other bar than the recurring fear of the tax-collector, the Corvée, or the Korbag, to which he was liable. These, however, were evils that afflicted him only at intervals, and the Corvée, one that he always hopefully looked to escape from, while as to the Korbag, the long strip of hippopotamus hide, which was the common instrument of punishment and extortion, ever in the hands of his oppressors, though too often used with the murderous brutality to which the negro slaves of America were then and long after subject, this would seem in general to have been to the fellaheen not much more terrible than was the cane of a flogging master to the boys of an English Dotheboys School of the time. Hence his personal wants being too few and too easily supplied to give him any serious thought, the Egyptian sauntered through life on the whole contentedly enough, while the Englishman was ever ceaselessly engaged in a struggle for the bare necessaries of life; and it was as natural, therefore, for the Egyptian to accept with passive acquiescence the submission taught him by his guides, as it was inevitable that the Englishman should criticise or ignore that preached to him. Thus it was the circumstances of their lives, and not, as has so often been said, their religion, or their "fatalism," that caused the Egyptians to lack so absolutely the energy and self-reliance so dominant in the character of the Englishman, and this lack that rendered them so incapable of self-government.

That this is a correct deduction from the facts, we may see by comparing the Egyptian Moslems with the Copts, for these are of the same race, inhabit the same country, and are subject to most of the conditions of life affecting the Moslem Egyptians, and yet are essentially different from them in character and aptitude. So great and so marked is this difference that it is referred to and commented upon by every one who has undertaken to write of Egypt and its peoples, although, apparently incapable of discovering the true origin of the contrast, those who have discussed it have either dismissed it as a problem admittedly beyond their comprehension, or have claimed that the Copt's superiority in intelligence and energy is the product of his religion. But save in matters of doctrine and dogma the religious teaching that the Copt receives is almost exactly the same as that given to the Egyptian Moslem, with this important difference, namely, that the Copts have always considered that obedience given to a non-Christian Government is but a duty of expediency, one exacted by force and not by right, and binding upon them only so far as submission is essential to their self-preservation. It was a matter of life and death to the Copt that he should court the forbearance and favour of his superiors. That he should do this he was bound to acquire all that he could of wealth and influence, and his relations with the rulers of the country as an indispensable servant enabled him to do this in a manner, and to an extent, wholly impossible to his Moslem countrymen.

Thus political conditions acted upon the Copt as climate and social conditions upon the Englishman, forcing him to bestir himself with energy on his own behalf, to cultivate and exercise his natural ingenuity, and trust solely in his own ability. The comparatively easy-going life of the peasant was not for him, inasmuch as he was not permitted to own land, and therefore, like the Englishman, he must either work or starve. And in doing this he had not only to compete against his fellows, but to make his way against the open hostility of the governing classes and of the people generally. Hence it is not to his religion but to the circumstances surrounding his profession of that religion that the Copt is indebted for both the good and bad characteristics by which he is distinguished, for it was these that gave him the energy, intelligence, and self-reliance he undoubtedly possesses, while at the same time they too often rendered him servile, false, bigoted, and fanatical.

It should now be clear that it is neither the "fatalism" nor the religion of the Egyptian Moslem that unfits him to govern his country. If any further evidence be wanted to justify this conclusion it is to be found in the Mamaluks and the Jews. The former, although they were Mahomedans, were by race, training, and all the circumstances of their lives, exactly opposed to the Egyptian Moslems in all their characteristics; their restless activity was strenuously employed in promoting their own interests, and in the acquisition of wealth, and in seeking these they were recklessly indifferent to the baseness of the treacheries and brutal tyranny that served their ends, and yet their religion and fatalism were the same as those of the Egyptians. As to the Jews, these were a people suffering graver political and social disabilities than those that burthened the Copts, and wholly foreign to the Egyptian Moslem or Copt in race, habits, and aptitudes; yet under the same conditions we see them developing, not in Egypt only, but in all parts of the world, the same qualities as those of the Copts and developing them in greater or less degree, precisely as the exigencies of their surroundings control them. And as the inhabitants of towns and cities in which the struggle for existence is always keener than it is in rural districts are invariably intellectually superior to the people of those districts, so it was in Cairo, the Moslem traders and artisans, who formed the bulk of the population there, approaching the Copts in the intelligence and energy so lacking in those employed in the cultivation of the land.

I have now, I hope, shown with sufficient clearness and detail how the character and actions of the Egyptians in 1798 corresponded to the circumstances of their lives. We have been told that men should rise above their surroundings, but as I have already said, the very existence of the Egyptian depended upon his submission. The swimmer, caught in the fierce rush of a cataract, has no hope of safety but in submitting to the current and devoting all his energies to guarding himself from the rocks and eddies that are the most pressing of the dangers of his position. Such was the case with the Egyptian. To have struggled against the stream would but have been to waste his strength in futile and fatal effort, and although it was probably unconsciously that he did so, he acted in the only way to ensure the continuance of his own existence.