Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian campaign founded modern Orientalism
Evidence
With the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798, the French embarked on a grand colonial project that, as one of its effects, established Orientalism as the colonial and scholarly movement that survives to this day. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 381
Although it was almost immediately preceded by at least two major Orientalist projects, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and his foray into Syria have had by far the greater consequence for the modern history of Orientalism. Before Napoleon only two efforts (both by scholars) had been made to invade the Orient by stripping it of its veils and also by going beyond the comparative shelter of the Biblical Orient. The first was by Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism, and who traveled to Asia in order to prove the actual primitive existence of a Chosen People and of the Biblical genealogies. Instead he overshot his early goal and traveled as far east as Surat, there to find a cache of Avestan texts, there also to complete his translation of the Avesta. Raymond Schwab has said of the mysterious Avestan fragment that set Anquetil off on his voyages that whereas “the scholars looked at the famous fragment of Oxford and then returned to their studies, Anquetil looked, and then went to India.” Schwab also remarks that Anquetil and Voltaire, though temperamentally and ideologically at hopeless odds with each other, had a similar interest in the Orient and the Bible, “the one to make the Bible more indisputable, the other to make it more unbelievable.” Ironically, Anquetil’s Avesta translations served Voltaire’s purposes, since Anquetil’s discoveries “soon led to criticism of the very [Biblical] texts which had hitherto been considered to be revealed texts.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 200
Categorization
- XREF: Gives a hard date and trigger for the colonial-manufacturing of the Orient; connects conceptually to Said and to the reader’s causal question of how the image was made. — connects to: Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt began serious European conquest of Muslim lands — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 172; Nineteenth-century Orientalism traded Enlightenment universalism for a hierarchy of civilizations. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 193; Academic study of Islam only began with Orientalism’s language training (+11 more)
- SEED: The Anquetil-fragment anecote — ‘the scholars looked and returned to their studies, Anquetil looked and went to India’ — is a compact illustration of scholarship vs. embodied research that could anchor an essay on philology versus field knowledge.
- corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 381; Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 200
Broader Connections
- Napoleon’s 1798 Egypt invasion made scholarly knowledge central to colonization
#corroborates(0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 105 - Napoleon inaugurated the systematic use of scholarship for empire
#expands(0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 106 - US post-war hegemony repurposed Orientalism and modernization theory to justify empire.
#expands(0.55) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 28 - American Orientalism is the living root system that drives Islamophobia.
#expands(0.50) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 168