undertaking I would have combined the experience of two worlds,
exploiting for my own benefit the theatre of all history, attacking the
power of England in India ... the time I spent in Egypt was the most
delightful of my life because it was the most ideal.Napoleon's ease with Islamic culture is worth stressing. He understood
the mind-set of the Arabs extremely well. When the Bedouin raided a
village friendly to the French and killed a fellah, he sent 300 horsemen
and 200 dromedaries to apprehend and punish the culprits. The Sheikh
B Modi, who witnessed Napoleon's anger and heard his orders, said with
a laugh: 'Was this fellah thy cousin, that his death excites so much anger
in thee?' 'Yes,' replied Bonaparte. 'All whom I command are my
children.' 'Taib [it is well],' said the sheikh. 'That is spoken like the
Prophet himself.'
We may discount Freud's fanciful notion that Napoleon, with a
brother complex, revelled in Egypt because it was, in a Biblical sense, the
land of Joseph. But that he had a genuine 'Oriental complex' is hard to
deny. However, it must be understood that this was a purely romantic
fantasy. Some incautious biographers have speculated that on this
campaign he imbibed the spirit of Oriental despotism from the soil, so to
speak, and that this explains a 'new' Napoleon, as evinced by the
massacre at Jaffa, the judicial murders in Cairo, the plan to pois on the
sick with opiates and the dubious Machiavellian justification of his return
to France. But it is a misreading of Bonaparte to speculate that the man
who returned from Egypt was not the man who set out. Probably as early
as the initial victories in Italy, Napoleon harboured a yearning for
supreme power. Nothing experienced in Egypt affected the lust for
power, but Napoleon returned from the East even more clearheaded
about how to achieve it.