WEST COMES EAST 241Afghanistan. Afghan kings, who might have conquered widely in the past,
now focused on conquering deeply instead-conquering each tribe, each
little valley, until this no-man's-land gradually came under the tenuous
control of a central government headquartered in Kabul.
But of course, the Russians never really abandoned their hope of push-
ing on down to a port on the warm waters of the Indian Ocean; and the
British never dropped their suspicion of Russian intentions; so the "Great
Game" went on.
West of the Great Game, another drama unfolded throughout the nine-
teenth century, another extension of European politics playing out in the
Muslim world. Here, the major players were Great Britain and France and
the tokens they fought over were the provinces of the crumbling Ottoman
Empire. To the Europeans, the core narrative was the struggle for power in
Europe among the developed nation-states there. What happened in
Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa was just the
relatively unimportant eastern part of the greater drama-just ... "the
Eastern question."
The Eastern question gained particular urgency in the wake of the
French Revolution, a revolution that frightened all the royal families of
Europe, since its ideas denied the legitimacy of them all. The monarchies
therefore united to crush the revolutionaries. They assumed this would be
easy since the revolution had thrown France into such turmoil, but to the
shock of all concerned, revolutionary France proved about as easy to con-
quer as a nest of angry hornets.
To make matters worse, out of the revolution came Napoleon Bona-
parte, 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 conquer