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c h a p t e r f o u r Ali Bonaparte in Hermetic Egypt The Colonial Politics of Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir From hence, under the idea of the instrumentality of the French Revolution, in the fulfillment of prophecies, religion itself became accessary to deism and atheism! Prophecies, relative to the destruction of almost every kingdom and empire in the world, teemed from the British press, some of them in weekly numbers, till government, perfectly aware of the tendency of these inflammatory means, prudently transferred the prince of prophets to a mad-house. William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis, 1800 Infidelity is served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints; remote and oblique surmises . . . in a word, in any form, rather than the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition. William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 1786 One of most subversive moments in Walter Savage Landor’s epic poem Gebir (1798) occurs in book 6, when Tamar, a poor shepherd and Gebir’s brother, falls madly in love with an Egyptian nymph who takes him on a magical flight over Europe. In the middle of this episode, Landor inserts a provocative vision about the coming of an egalitarian social utopia: passing over the island of Corsica, the nymph prophetically announces the fall of all tyrannical monarchs—which includes the tragic lovers of this epic, Gebir, the king of Spain, and Charoba, the queen of Egypt—and the coming of a “mortal man above all mortal men” who will usher in a Golden Age of justice that spreads from Europe to the East.1 Landor’s footnote to the 1803 edition of Gebir identifies this passage as an allegory about the French Republic and Napoleon Bonaparte (Corsica being his Ali Bonaparte in Hermetic Egypt   127 birthplace) in which this charismatic general becomes the redeemer of world history (349).2 What is particularly subversive about this use of political allegory is the context of its articulation: the principles of the French Revolution are placed in the mouth of an Egyptian nymph, who is not only a symbolic figure of hermetic magic and enthusiastic prophecy but also, given the French occupation of Egypt in 1798–99, a champion of Bonaparte’s messianic promise to restore egalitarian justice in Ottoman Egypt under an Islamic republic based in Cairo. This chapter argues that the French revolutionary context undermines Landor’s repeated attempt to draw a political distinction between republican liberty and imperial tyranny in an Islamic-hermetic poem that, by 1800, had become ideologically compromised due to the failure of the French colonization of Egypt and Bonaparte’s rise to dictatorial power. Before the end of 1798,most Britons would have known about Bonaparte’s July proclamation to the Egyptians, in which he grants toleration to all religions, accepts Islamic beliefs and practices, repudiates Catholicism, and dubs republican Frenchmen “the friends of the true mussulmen.”3 It first appeared in England in Copies of Original Letters from the Army of General Bonaparte in Egypt, intercepted by the Fleet under the command of Admiral Nelson (London, 1798), a collection of French dispatches and correspondences that were confiscated by the British navy and published as antiradical propaganda by the government.In the English translation of the proclamation, originally published in Arabic, Bonaparte usurps the authority of the Mamluk Beys in Egypt by adopting an Ottoman-Islamic idiom that pays homage to the “Empire of the Sultan” and the egalitarian laws of “the Prophet and his holy Koran” (235). Inserted in a government-sponsored tract set against “opposition writers,” the proclamation would have confirmed British suspicions that“Jacobin”republicanism was founded on Islamic principles:“The French are true Mussulmen. Not long since they marched to Rome, and overthrew the Throne of the Pope, who excited the Christians against the professors of Islamicism (the Mahometan religion). Afterward they directed their course to Malta, and drove out the unbelievers, who make war on the Mussulmen. The French have at all times been the true and sincere friends of the Ottoman Emperors , and the enemies of their enemies” (236). In an effort to conciliate the Egyptian population while securing French colonial power in the region, Bonaparte tried to persuade the ulema, the Muslim clerical class, that his Italian campaign of 1796–97 and attack...

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