Modern Things on Trial, by Leor Halevi (prologue)

MODERN THINGS ON TRIAL Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865–1935

LEOR HALEVI

Prologue The Parable of the Montgolfière and the Translation of Haleby’s Corpse

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t happened but a few hours before the great dog massacre that a crowd gathered around Birkat al-­Azbakiyya, a large pond in Cairo, to see a marvelous new French invention. The French had just ordered the evacuation of houses in the neighborhood to build their own separate quarter. They had seized precious household possessions, gem-­encrusted daggers, and other weapons from the homes of Mamluk officials; and at nighttime, according to a rumor that circulated in the city, a rabble of soldiers had broken into the shops by one of Cairo’s historic gates to pilfer processed sugar.1 For weeks the city had been in great turmoil. To put down a jihadi rebellion, French soldiers had stormed into al-­Azhar Mosque without bothering to remove their shoes. While they plundered from the mosque every material object that they considered valuable, they trampled upon copies of the Qurʾan and other Muslim books—­or so alleged an Azhari shaykh—­as if these sacred things had no value at all. Previously, ʿAbd al-­Raḥmān al-­Jabartī, the scholar who chronicled this event, had dismissed with incredulity Napoleon Bonaparte’s claim that the French were faithful Muslims.

Now he concluded that they were “the religion’s enemies.”2 To relieve the tense atmosphere and lift subdued spirits, the French decided to impress their new subjects with a demonstration of the latest technology.

They placed printed posters in the city’s marketplaces announcing that on the tenth day of Frimaire, year 7 of the Republican era, they would make “a craft fly . . . ​in the air by means of a strategic device that belongs to the French nation.” On that Friday afternoon, which coincided with November 30, 1798 CE, and Jumāda II, AH 1213, al-­Jabartī headed toward the pond together with the masses, whose enthusiasm for this “wondrous thing” he found beneath him.

Then he beheld the object. He noticed first a woven fabric suspended from a

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pole and bearing the colors of the French Republic. He noticed, too, precisely how this pole fit into a cylindrical vessel that also housed a bowl with a wick soaking in oil. Soldiers—­surely members of the Compagnie d’aérostiers, the first air force in the history of the world—­perched themselves on surrounding rooftops to hold the ropes that were tied to the vessel in order to assist and control its ascent upon ignition. It was of course a hot air balloon, a machine aérostatique.

Soon the machine swelled up and it began to fly—­without a pilot on board.

This happened, according to al-­Jabartī’s conception, because the smoke that filled the balloon wanted to rise higher but found no way to escape, propelling the vehicle skyward. Unfortunately, the balloon soared for only a short while.

With the wind blowing, a hoop that probably served to fasten the net of ropes knocked the wick down and the balloon collapsed, crashing like Icarus to the ground. “The French were ashamed at its fall,” gloated al-­Jabartī. They were unable to prove their claim that this was a craft upon which troops could sit to travel to various countries so as to gather intelligence or investigate reports.

Instead, their machines turned out to be “like the kites that carpet-­spreaders manufacture for festivals and celebrations.”3 Dejected, deflated, the French soldiers patrolling the streets that night grew irritated at all the barking dogs and gave them poisoned bread; the next morning Cairenes woke up to find scores of canine carcasses in the marketplace.

French troops had deeper reasons to be disappointed in the performance.

Before the invasion of Egypt, the Compagnie d’aérostiers had experimented and trained with hydrogen balloons (known as charlières) as vehicles for military reconnaissance. To observe and intimidate the enemy, their plan had been to move tethered balloons, directed by earth-­bound pilots, toward the battlefield.

Maybe they had entertained visions of a beautiful ascension and an orderly march upon Cairo: a triumphant parade resembling the 1796 movement of the aircraft L’Entreprenant toward Augsburg during the Revolutionary Wars.

But the translation of things rarely works out overseas in accordance with the schemes laid at home. No sooner had Napoleon’s troops disembarked in Alexandria than le Patriote, the ship that transported scientific instruments, iron filings for producing hydrogen, and other balloon-­making tools, foundered after striking a rock. A month later, set on curbing their rival’s ambitions for overseas expansion, the British Royal Navy attacked the French fleet anchored at Abū Qīr Bay; the warship l’Orient, which carried the rest of the air force’s supplies, exploded sensationally after catching fire. Once they installed themselves in Cairo under the direction of Nicolas-­Jacques Conté, the celebrated inventor of the aerostatic telegraph and an expert craftsman in the art of balloon making, French engineers were forced to improvise, to tinker like bricoleurs with the materials at hand.4 At Birkat al-­Azbakiyya that day, as well as on maybe two

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FIGURE 0.1 The French army’s captive balloon, deployed during the Rhine Campaign of

1796, as represented by a commemorative postcard. Source: Louis Liebmann and Gustav Wahl, Katalog der historischen Abteilung der ersten Internationalen Luftschiffahrts-­Ausstellung (ILA) zu Frankfurt A.M. 1909 (Frankfurt A.M.: Wüsten & Co., 1912), p. 142, Abb. 31.

other occasions during the occupation of Egypt, they floated hot air balloons (known as montgolfières) merely for show during festivals and parades. They never succeeded in launching a hydrogen balloon in Egypt. On his return to France, no longer so excited by the dream of this military technology’s potential, Napoleon disbanded the balloon corps.5 Masking their own disappointment with signs of hubris, the French began to reflect on local perceptions of their modern invention. A week after the event in their official newspaper, the Courier de l’Égypte, they related that the local inhabitants had gazed at the vehicle with incredulity, refusing to “believe in the possibility” of flight, until French engineers produced a spectacle that filled them with admiration. Made of paper, this tricolor balloon caught fire, and as it

4 . Prologue

started to descend in flames the Egyptian spectators grew terrified. Fleeing from the scene, they concluded that it was a new “instrument of war, which we would know how to direct at will and which we use to burn our enemies’ cities.”6 A few weeks later, in commemoration of a key battle, the French celebrated by inflating a large canvas montgolfière, which flew successfully and landed gently.

But the Courier de l’Égypte now found striking that “the natives” appeared absolutely incurious. To find examples of such “extraordinary indifference,” the newspaper’s editor indulged in a bit of cross-­cultural anthropology. He compared apathetic Egyptians to the Chinese fishermen and the Maori tribesmen who showed no reaction whatsoever—­perplexingly—­upon first encountering the things that European explorers considered so very impressive: the sight of Lord Anson’s flagship, the sound of Capt. James Cook’s firing cannon.7 The image of terrified Egyptians, desperate to escape from the French machine, became the standard description of the event.8 Other members of the expedition also contributed their own hazy remembrances. From the confines of Saint Helena, Napoleon reminisced about the flight of Conté’s balloon, launched to celebrate the New Year of the Republic with muftis and shaykhs. Forgetting to mention that the festival had been postponed by many weeks due to material difficulties, Napoleon described how the aircraft flew toward Libya’s desert and disappeared. He then mused about a popular rumor, which held that the balloon functioned as a medium for the Sultan El-­Kébir (Bonaparte himself) to communicate with Mahomet.9 The army’s chief surgeon, Dominique-­Jean Larrey, claimed that Muslims imagined a causal link between the balloon’s ascension and the dog massacre. Too many dogs, he explained, disturbed the French cavalry as it tried to march through the city’s streets. Yet, because these beasts were “the object of the inhabitants’ veneration,” the French decided to feed them meat laced with poison nut, under the cover of night. When the townspeople woke up to the sight of dead dogs, they did not complain. They believed that, by God’s will, the flammable gas that they had observed entering the balloon as it sailed westward had caused the death of the revered creatures.10 The famous Egyptologist Edme-­François Jomard devoted a few pages of his biography of Conté to Cairo’s balloons. “We are familiar,” he reflected, “with the astonishing apathy of Oriental men.” Never have they shown any surprise at witnessing mechanical miracles. When the most learned Muslim scholars observed the physical and chemical experiments that French scientists conducted in Egypt—­the metamorphosis of things, chemical changes in color, the effects of electricity—­they argued that “all of that,” even the methods for manufacturing cannons and gunpowder, had already been written in the Qurʾan.

Hence, every local resident, from grave scholars to common subjects, greeted

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the “majestic ascension” of Conté’s second montgolfière “with absolute insouciance.”11 If it surprised the expedition’s savants that ordinary Egyptians had not lingered, with breathless curiosity, to witness the astonishing spectacle of a balloon taking off, it bothered them even more that their counterparts, the ʿulamāʾ, affected the greatest indifference. Even after successful flights, learned Muslim scholars reportedly remained phlegmatic, impassive.12 It was as if the French expected al-­Jabartī and other Egyptian intellectuals to dream enthusiastically about the grand possibilities of flight, like Benjamin Franklin in the Bois de Boulogne, and to join that fin-­de-­siècle craze, la ballomanie, when as a matter of fact they encountered balloons amid a foreign invasion and a military occupation as strange, new, menacing things that flew the colors of the Republican flag.13

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Perhaps a faint echo of this story of France’s failed experiment in Egypt sounded in the grand amphitheater of the Sorbonne in 1883—­a year after a French flotilla desisted from participating in the fateful British bombardment of Alexandria. The famous Semiticist Ernest Renan delivered in this venue an infamous lecture, where he argued that Islam had turned Arabs into the enemies of scientific innovation. By way of illustration, he presented Rifāʿa al-­Ṭahṭāwī, an Egyptian shaykh who had written a book “full of the most curious observations about French society” based on his sojourn in Paris between 1826 and 1831. This shaykh had the “fixed idea that European science, with its principle about the immutability of nature’s laws, was from one end to another a heresy.”14 Yet the book—­an early and critical contribution to the discourse on reforming Egypt and Islam in the era of European dominance—­was more of a testament to the enlightened wonderment that al-­Ṭahṭāwī learned to express about strange new things.15 With more cultured astonishment than jealous scorn, he remarked on everything that struck him as different and foreign and meaningful: from the paid advertisements for useful commodities of “outstanding craftsmanship” that shopkeepers placed in newspapers to the experiments that scientists performed to discover “the secrets of machines.” Through such illustrations, the Egyptian traveler showed how French merchants were devising ingenious methods to pursue wealth, and how French scientists were acquiring the fundamental knowledge to further technological progress.16 Still, on display in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy of the Jardin des Plantes, surrounding the skulls of Asian elephants, by the buttocks of the Hottentot Venus and the hunchbacked skeleton of Bébé the court dwarf, al-­Ṭahṭāwī observed the embalmed cadaver of a French general’s assassin. Still bearing

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signs of physical torture, for his dagger-­wielding hand had been burnt to the bone before his punishment onto death, Haleby’s corpse was exported from Egypt to France by surgeon Larrey, the very man who narrated that story about the balloon and the dogs. Al-­Ṭahṭāwī’s contemporary Alexandre Dumas remarked that the stake on which Haleby had been impaled broke two thoracic vertebrae; the taxidermist replaced them with wooden ones that imitated perfectly, or almost perfectly, the natural kinds. For science’s sake, phrenologists could there inspect the cranial protuberances of what an English guidebook to Paris’s “most remarkable objects” would simply label “the Mussulman fanatic.”

This and other exhibits of lifelike exotic animals, including the artfully mounted skins of orangutans and chimpanzees misidentified as “species of monkeys,” were shown in cabinets of curiosities that al-­Ṭahṭāwī called “storerooms of strange things.” However scandalous and irreligious he found the transformation of an Islamic corpse into a scientific object, he nevertheless maintained a broader perspective. For he explained to his Arabic readers one advantage that French natural scientists had over their Muslim counterparts: they could now directly examine things that in the past scholars could encounter only in books.17

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This book analyzes representations of modern things made by a journal that a Syrian mufti, an expert on Islamic law, established in Cairo a hundred years after the flight of the montgolfière. Most of these things were manufactured abroad, in Europe and North America, but they did not seem altogether foreign.

Nor did they seem as dangerous as an aerostatic machine or as disturbing as Haleby’s corpse. By and large, they were things that some Muslims already possessed or wanted to possess, but that provoked, for one or another reason, the deepest religious and legal questions.

Praise for

MODERN THINGS

ON

TRIAL

“Leor Halevi’s original study o ers important perspectives on turn of the twentieth century Islamic reformist thought in the context of changing relations between law and material history. He matches up instructive readings in legal opinions delivered in Cairo by Rashid Rida with innovative background research on the new products and technologies that prompted questions to him from around the Muslim world.”

BRINKLEY MESSICK , author of Shar a Scripts A Historical Anthropology “This nuanced, meticulously researched, yet accessible study illuminates how signi cant early twentieth-century debates on Islamic law often revolved around some surprisingly ordinary objects and how local anxieties and input shaped a reformist Islam with transregional appeal.

Halevi’s focus on the material dimensions of modern Islamic thought adds a very welcome and promising dimension to the scholarship in this eld.”

MUHAMMAD QASIM ZAMAN , author of Islam in Pakistan A History “By tracing the evolution of ‘laissez-faire Sala sm’ in response to consumer concerns about the religious status of new commodities and technologies, Halevi positions Islam’s modern reformation as driven more by materialist than ideational forces. This is a highly original rethinking of the old question of religion and modernity by looking at the material transformations—the ‘modern things’—that Muslims acquired from the industrializing West.”

NILE GREEN , Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History, University of California, Los Angeles

“This is a remarkable intervention by a pioneering scholar of Islamic law and material culture.

Focusing on Rashid Rida, a leading light of modern Islamic reform, it highlights the material entanglements that catalyzed his legal rulings on novel commodities, technologies, and nancial instruments. In place of dogmatism and idealism, what emerges is a riveting narrative of pragmatic and materialist accommodations in a period marked by the impact of capitalism, consumerism, and colonialism. This is revisionist history in the best sense.”

FINBARR BARRY FLOOD , director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, New York University

ISBN: 978-0-231-18866-1

9 780231 188661

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

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