Arab France by Coller Ian;

Author:Coller, Ian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

All the Egyptian refugees have the honor to present humbly to Your Excellence that they have sacrificed their tranquillity and their sometimes very substantial property in the service of the French government and are still ready to lay down their lives for it. If the small pension accorded to their widows is taken away, these women will no longer be able to live in France, not knowing the French language, and having no trade to support them.79

His opening phrase expressed the wishes of “all the Egyptian refugees.” But George, unlike Aïdé in 1811, used the third person—“they” rather than “us”—to describe those on whose behalf he spoke; he was not pleading on his own account, but on behalf of a group to which he did not belong. Why did he feel solidarity toward these unfortunates? It is unlikely that he was tied directly to the poor widows and their families by kinship or social connections. His life would have remained physically, socially, and culturally distinct from theirs. But he felt a commonality with these people strong enough for him to take the very significant risk of losing his own means of support. There are echoes here of the petitions of the Egyptian Legation in 1801 and Georges Aïdé in 1811. But the collective voice was different. It was not that of an individual or a small political elite, but of a single community whose concern was to “be able to live in France.”

Sakakini’s own voice demonstrated just how French he had become. Appealing to the notion of the lowest class of refugees as the “widows and children” of “men covered with glory, who devoted themselves to France, and are so strongly connected to its prosperity,” the petition made sophisticated use of French stereotypes about the devoted service of the “Egyptians.” But Sakakini went further to employ the conventional picture of Oriental cruelty. If the refugees returned to their countries, he insisted, “the zeal of their husbands for the French cause is enough to expose them to the fate of having their heads cut off.”80 The underlining of this sentence in the original document perhaps betrays a certain bad faith in exploiting a set of crude stereotypes that he had no reason to believe.

Sakakini would certainly know how many “Egyptians” had already returned to Egypt without any difficulty. His own cousin Auguste was one of them and was already a significant figure in the new translation movement emerging at Bulaq.81 The key Arab intellectual in Paris, Rufa’il Zakhur, as we saw in chapter 4, left for Egypt, where he was appointed as a personal translator to Muhammad ‘Ali, and as a teacher in the newly established technical school. If Rufa’il—who, we must recall, had served the diwan under the French occupation—could return so easily, it seems highly unlikely that the widows of ordinary soldiers would be immediately decapitated. But to define the refugees as the victims of “Oriental tyranny” was to remove them in some way from the category of “Oriental” in the eyes of the French bureaucrats, and thus to strengthen their rights.

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