The French Savants and al-Azhar

After the French occupied Cairo in 1798, Napoleon's expedition to Egypt brought with it a corps of more than a hundred and fifty savants, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, naturalists and artists, who founded the Institut d'Egypte in the city in August 1798 and set to surveying the land, its monuments and its life, work that would eventually be published as the great Description de l'Egypte. Among the things they brought were printing presses furnished with Arabic as well as European type, the first presses to operate in Egypt, used at first to print the occupation's proclamations in Arabic. At the heart of Cairo stood al-Azhar, the venerable mosque and college that was the foremost seat of Sunni learning in the land and the centre of the city's scholarly and public life. The two learned worlds met: some of the French scholars engaged the shaykhs of al-Azhar and displayed their instruments, the telescope, the chemical apparatus, the press, and the Egyptian chronicler and scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (rahimahu Allah), a learned man himself, recorded these encounters with a mixture of genuine curiosity at the science and sharp judgement of the occupiers. It would be a mistake to read the meeting as simple enlightenment arriving in a backward land, for al-Azhar was a living and sophisticated centre of learning in its own right; it is better seen as an early and uneasy collision of two scholarly traditions. The encounter cannot be separated from its violent setting: in October 1798 a great revolt broke out in Cairo, and the French bombarded the city and rode their cavalry into al-Azhar itself to crush it, a desecration of the mosque that al-Jabarti recorded with grief and anger. This scene depicts the meeting of the savants' instruments with the teaching circle of al-Azhar, the printed page beside the manuscript, under the shadow of the occupation.