Imperial ‘liberation’ ideology genuinely motivated volunteers and was preached in Arabic

Evidence

It is likely that some of those who sponsored or accompanied the expedition were genuinely committed to a mission of liberation and civilization and they thought of themselves as going to wage war on the chateaux of the Mamluk beys in order to liberate the oppressed fellahin. Theirs was a mission civilisatrice enforced at the point of a gun. The expedition took with it a printing press that had an Arabic typeface. After his forces had landed in Egypt, Bonaparte issued a proclamation in Arabic that sought to win the support of the Egyptian people against their Mamluk Caucasian Turkish masters and declared among other things: ‘For too many years that gang of slaves, purchased in Georgia and the Caucasus, has tyrannized over the most beautiful region of the world. But almighty God, who rules the universe, has decreed that their reign shall come to an end.’ The French sought to present themselves as liberators rather than crusaders in the tradition of Louis IX, but though some of Bonaparte’s officers denounced Christianity and declared themselves to be atheists, the puzzled or sceptical Muslims took atheism to be merely another version of Christianity. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 246

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how conquest adopts the rhetorical apparatus of liberation and how the conquered read the invaders’ ideology through their own category (atheism as heresy).
• CANDY: The detail that Egyptians took the officers’ atheism to be just another sect of Christianity is a perfect dinner-table irony.