Aza Zhar

Al-Azhar, represented in Edward Said’s account through its sixty ulemas, is a Cairo center of Islamic learning that Napoleon sought to enlist during the French occupation of Egypt. The episode captures the double character of the institution’s encounter with the occupiers: its religious authority was courted as a practical political resource, while the larger French project translated occupation into a system of knowledge that could speak over Egyptian history. Al-Azhar’s role is brief in the narrative, but it makes visible how imperial power sought to operate through local religious leadership as well as military force.

The Invitation during the Occupation

When Napoleon’s army could not simply impose itself on the Egyptians, he tried to persuade local religious authorities to interpret the Koran in favor of the French Grande Armée. The sixty ulemas who taught at Al-Azhar were invited to his quarters and received with full military honors. Napoleon flattered them with his professed admiration for Islam and Muhammad and his apparent veneration for the Koran. Said presents the encounter as a calculated effort to make religious authority serve the occupation, not as evidence that the institution or its scholars had become part of a French scholarly body.

The invitation belonged to a wider strategy of addressing Egyptians in religiously legible terms. Napoleon’s communications were translated into Koranic Arabic, and the army was instructed to remember Islamic sensibilities. Said notes that this approach impressed Abd-al-Rahman al-Jabarti, the first Arab chronicler of the expedition, particularly because Napoleon used scholars to manage contact with local people. Al-Azhar’s ulemas thus appear within a campaign that treated learning and religious leadership as instruments of political access when military strength alone was insufficient.

Influence and the Limits of Accommodation

Said reports that Napoleon’s approach worked in the immediate circumstance: Cairo’s population seemed soon to have lost its distrust of the occupiers. That change marks a tactical consequence of the encounter, not a reversal of the underlying relation between invader and invaded. After leaving Egypt, Napoleon instructed his deputy, Kleber, to administer the country through Orientalists and Islamic religious leaders whom they could win over; he regarded other forms of politics as too expensive and foolish. The episode at Al-Azhar therefore prefigures an administrative method in which European expertise and selected local authorities were to mediate colonial rule.

The apparent accommodation sits beside the occupation’s larger coercive and intellectual project. Napoleon presented his campaign as serving Islam and the inhabitants, while French military power enabled the collection and organization of knowledge about Egypt. In Said’s account, the use of religious leaders did not displace that imperial structure; it helped the occupation pursue its purposes through institutions and authorities with local standing. Al-Azhar’s significance lies in this conjunction of negotiation and domination, rather than in any claim that the institution itself endorsed the occupation.

Al-Azhar and the Colonial Archive

Said’s later contrast between the French Description de l’Égypte and al-Jabarti’s three-volume account of the invasion clarifies what is at stake in the episode. The Description’s immense, ordered volumes were produced by a corps of French savants backed by a modern army. Al-Jabarti, by contrast, wrote from the point of view of the invaded, having paid the price of the occupation. Said argues that the French account cannot be treated as a neutral scientific description simply because it presents itself as objective: its standpoint belongs to a power trying to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit. In that comparison, the attempt to enlist Al-Azhar’s scholars is one scene within a broader contest over who may interpret Egypt and whose account becomes authoritative.

The Description, Said argues, displaced Egyptian and Oriental histories with a record that identified itself with world history understood as European history. It converted living reality into material for classification and textual possession, while Egyptians were treated as pretexts for knowledge made useful elsewhere. Al-Azhar’s appearance does not supply a full history of the institution or of its scholars’ responses; instead, it helps reveal how the occupation sought local religious mediation even as its principal archive asserted European authority over the country’s past. Read alongside al-Jabarti’s account, the episode underscores the difference between an imperial record made from the position of command and a chronicle written from the position of the conquered.