Colonial conquerors deployed Orientalist scholars to disguise conquest as religious affinity.

Evidence

From the first moment that the Armée d’Égypte appeared on the Egyptian horizon, every effort was made to convince the Muslims that “nous sommes les vrais musulmans,” as Bonaparte’s proclamation of July 2, 1798, put it to the people of Alexandria. Equipped with a team of Orientalists (and sitting on board a flagship called the Orient), Napoleon used Egyptian enmity towards the Mamelukes and appeals to the revolutionary idea of equal opportunity for all to wage a uniquely benign and selective war against Islam. What more than anything impressed the first Arab chronicler of the expedition, Abd-al-Rahman al-Jabarti, was Napoleon’s use of scholars to manage his contacts with the natives—that and the impact of watching a modern European intellectual establishment at close quarters. Napoleon tried everywhere to prove that he was fighting for Islam; everything he said was translated into Koranic Arabic, just as the French army was urged by its command always to remember the Islamic sensibility. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the machinery of ‘othering’ and colonial psychology this scaffolding module is assembling; also parallels the Requerimiento text Said juxtaposes against Napoleon, and foreshadows how Orientalism’s practical-institutional branch operates in later Islamophobia readings.
• ADDENDUM: The use of local religious leaders (imams, cadis, ulemas) to legitimate an occupier parallels the mechanism by which class/religious authority gets co-opted — an adjacent case to sacrificial/grief legitimation dynamics explored in the sacrifice article, though at the level of political co-optation rather than ritual.
• QUESTION: Al-Jabarti’s account as a counter-gaze — an Egyptian chronicler watching the Europeans watch him — is worth chasing: does it prefigure the ‘reverse ethnography’ move later writers make?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 209