Napoleon Reaches Egypt

What is seen to happen when Napoleon reaches Egypt is, interestingly enough, that he literally sends a letter to the Egyptians from off the shore, telling them that he has not come to destroy the Qurʾān or the Islamic teachings, but to honour them. It is kind of odd. But then he comes in, he invades Egypt, and the Mamluks put up an extraordinary fight, but they were grossly outnumbered in terms of technology. The weaponry was much more sophisticated. These were people who were still fighting with swords and such things, and they were coming up against very serious technological advancement. And Egypt feels that. Napoleon is eventually defeated in Palestine and moves back, but there is a very traumatic experience within the Muslim world: the idea of Egypt being attacked and actually, for a period — a short period of time — succumbing to the colonial power. And then the colonial incursion just starts increasing and increasing. North Africa begins to be defeated, in different places.

Now the Muslims were looking for a reason, to try to understand this, because for centuries in their psyche this was God's religion: we are the defenders of God's one true religion — and now we are actually being defeated. There were different responses. Some of them said: clearly a sign of the end of time. There is a hadith, which is a verifiable, sound hadith from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him): there will come a time in which the great nations of the West will attack my ummah and eat from them — in other words, devour their riches, like people eat from a plate of food. A sound hadith. Many Muslims started using this to say: well, this is the fulfilment of prophecy.

Other Muslims said this was too defeatist, and began to explain it in terms of technological superiority. What we did, they said, is that we abandoned our tradition of research, of trying to investigate the world. For the first three or four centuries of Islam there was a lot of scientific development and achievement. In the sixth century a theologian named Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī wrote a book which was an attack on the philosophers, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and it has a very strong impact in the Muslim world. And the philosophers were not simply as they are viewed now; the philosophers of those times were also scientists. There was natural philosophy. The book was a very strong attack on this tradition, saying, in a sense, that people were investigating things that they really had no purpose investigating, that there was too much speculation, and that there were also elements involved in philosophy, in the study of philosophy, that led to a type of — well, that could potentially lead to disbelief.

So there is a refutation within a hundred years by another great philosopher, theologian and jurist like al-Ghazālī, who himself was very well versed in the philosophy of his time: Ibn Rushd, who is called Averroes. And he wrote a book, the Tahāfut, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which was his attack on Imam al-Ghazālī. This book is rejected in the Muslim world. He is a very interesting character. And among the Europeans there was a very strong school in the Middle Ages, the Averroes school, and Thomas Aquinas's teacher, Albertus Magnus, is heavily influenced by Ibn Rushd, Averroes. Ibn Rushd wrote three commentaries on Aristotle — the small, or the lesser, the middle, and the greatest — for three levels of understanding, and these were translated into Latin and spread quite rapidly in Europe. So the Europeans began to take the rational model at the same time that the Muslims were rejecting it. It is a very interesting phenomenon.