Free Napoleon in Egypt by Paul Strathern

taught them. Islam had originally instructed its followers: “To know the world is to know God”; now they had encountered a nation that knew the world but no longer knew God. Mutual incomprehension—from the most trivial scientific experiments and social practices to the most fundamental assumptions of their different civilizations—was perhaps inevitable.
    Despite this, the sheiks of Al-Azhar did in fact attend some of the first open meetings of the Institute, but what they made of the learned scientific papers read out by the members is difficult to assess. When Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire finished his paper describing the many new fish that he had discovered in the Nile, he was asked by a sheik in the audience why he bothered himself with such futility, when it was known that the Prophet had settled all these matters ten centuries previously—saying that God had created 30,000 different types of animal, 10,000 of them to live on the land and 20,000 of them to live in water. Unlike El-Djabarti, the leading sheik of the Cairo divan , El-Bekri, declared himself unimpressed by the things he had seen at the Institute, and assured the savants that such things were unlikely to impress any Egyptian. When asked why, he replied that Egyptians believed in sorcery: how could the accomplishments of the scientists and artists of the Institute be compared with the wondrous conceptions of any sorcerer, who could conjure up scenes from the heavens, or with the wizardry of even the most ordinary djinns?
    El-Bekri even challenged Berthollet on this matter, asking the great chemist if his science was able to make him be in two places at the same time—so that he could appear in both Cairo and Morocco simultaneously. Berthollet did not deign to answer, merely shrugging his shoulders. El-Bekri took this to be an admission of failure and mocked Berthollet, telling him that despite all his science he was still no sorcerer.
    Monge decided to adopt a more positive approach to this culture gap, and attempted to gain the sympathy of the Egyptians by charming them with music. He arranged for an orchestra, made up of musicians from amongst the savants and the regimental bands, to assemble at Ezbekiyah Square and play to the public. This soon attracted a vast crowd. First of all Monge asked the band to play a number of simple tunes, but the audience did not respond in the slightest. After this he tried them with some military marches, then a series of stirring fanfares, “but to no avail, during this magnificent concert the Egyptians all remained completely impassive, all as immobile as the mummies in their catacombs.” 12 Monge became exasperated, and turning to the musicians exclaimed: “They’re not worth the effort you’re making. Just play them ‘Marlborough,’ * that’s all they deserve.” According to Monge’s contemporary and biographer Arago, when the orchestra launched into “Marlborough,” “immediately thousands of people became animated and a wave of joy ran through the crowd. Within a moment young and old launched themselves into the spaces in the crowd and began dancing, filled with hectic gaiety.” Monge was intrigued by this result, and repeated the experiment several times, each time with the same result. He tried playing them pieces of Haydn, and pieces of Mozart, with no reaction; yet as soon as the orchestra struck up the sentimental strains of “Marlborough,” the crowd went wild. In the end, he concluded that this only showed the Egyptians’ complete lack of taste. They simply were not up to appreciating anything so civilized as Western music, except in its most debased popular form.
    Some years later the truth behind this peculiar episode would emerge, and Monge would be proved wrong. A nineteenth-century French musicologist discovered that the tune of “Marlborough” was in fact based upon an Arabic song dating from the Middle Ages. This had first arrived in Europe in the thirteenth century with the soldiers