EGYPT IN THE WORLD OF ISLAM 73tempered French bayonets could be bent into quite acceptable fishing
hooks and made his fortune fishing in the Nile for Mamluks.
The French went on to occupy Cairo. They failed, however, to subdue
the upper Nile and expeditions into that region found themselves chasing
the wind as the Mamluk cavalry simply danced away from the lumbering
French infantry. Napoleon even launched an attack into Palestine, but
fortune and the British navy destroyed his siege train, and the great fortress
of Acre proved beyond his ability to subdue. Beaten, he withdrew to Cairo.
Political events in France demanded that Napoleon return to his homeland
to begin the process that would make him emperor. He left General Kle ́ber
in command in Egypt. Kle ́ber was attacked and stabbed to death by a
fanatic Muslim named Suliman-el-Halepi on June 18, 1800. General
Menou assumed command. After the British victory over the French at
Alexandria by General Abercromby, a convention was negotiated and the
British agreed to remove the French from Egypt and transport them back
to France. With that, the French invasion of Egypt came to an end, and
with it the first major invasion of the Muslim heartlands since the
Crusades.
In 1805 Mehmet Ali, commander of the Albanian garrison sent to Egypt
by the Ottomans, seized power in his own name. The Turks, incapable of
removing him, pragmatically appointed him governor. He was not a Mam-
luk, and the Mamluks were by this time a spent force. In 1811 Mehmet
Ali invited the Mamluk leaders to the Cairo citadel, where he murdered
them and established an Albanian dynasty that ruled Egypt for the next
140 years. One of Mehmet’s most interesting campaigns was to be against
Wahabbi religious fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia. The Wahabbi Wars
have an influence still felt today.
MuhammadÛAbd al-Wahhab was born in the Najd town ofÛUyainah,
(in modern Saudi Arabia) about 1705. When he studied law in Medina
his teachers thought they detected signs of heresy in his views, but nothing
came of it. After a period of many years as a wandering scholar through
Iraq and Persia, he married a rich wife and embraced the mystic system
of the Sufis. In Qum (modern Iran) he returned to the orthodox teachings
of the Hanbali School of Law. Two decades later he began to preach a
return to the practice and beliefs of the time of Muhammad and the first
generation of his successors, that is, fundamentalism. He declared that all
knowledge not based on the Koran or the sunna—traditions of Muham-
mad—was suspect. He declared the veneration of saints forbidden because
he thought it detracted from the “oneness” of God. He forbade the faithful
to invoke the names of saints (associates of Muhammad during the
Prophet’s lifetime) in prayer, to make vows to them, or to visit their tombs.