242 DESTINY DISRUPTED
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 de-
stroyed 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 Euro-
peans. 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 local 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 him-
self "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 in-
dependent 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-
hangers 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 taxes directly. So