East meets West
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We have been encouraged to give special space to Napoleon's campaign (1798) in this issue of our letters by the year-long debate on whether to celebrate with France this past year 1998, l'année de l'Egypte that has permeated Egyptian media. There is no doubt, nevertheless, that Napoleon's campaign is still capable of exciting many objective questions with regards modernist discourse in Egypt. Liberal thinkers have traditionally portrayed Napoleon's campaign as the decisive moment when Egypt stepped out of the cave of Ottoman darkness to meet, enthralled, the lights of Europe. Their staple proof in that are three to four facts: the printing press brought by Napoleon, the Description de l'Egypte written by
the savants who came with him, the setting up of a "diwan" in accordance to French notions in democratic representation; the last being the campaign's influence on the lives of women, who are depicted as having regarded the example of French women, in dress and behavior, an immutable model in matters emancipatory.
Regardless of whether such proof actually influenced life in Egypt after the campaign left, contemporary Islamists also regard Napoleon's campaign as the reason whereby an otherwise harmonious, homogenous culture has been severed forever. We are thus paradoxically face to face with the broader debate still rife, in intellectual circles that juxtaposes tradition and modernity and divides people between those who would prefer a return to a 'golden' past and those who refuse that orientation.
Napoleon's campaign has stayed little more than three years, from July 1798 to September 1801. The French did not leave the famous printing press behind and the muchcelebrated book was not translated into Arabic until 1976 as the result of the solitary efforts of Zuhair Al Shayeb. The women of Cairo who "went out" with the French were ostracized, married off to inferior ranks in the Ottoman army, or killed as Jabarti, the eyewitness historian of the campaign tells us. But despite that, Napoleon's campaign has retroactively become a watershed in the matter of modernity and modernization and hence the women question. Liberal, (renaissance) discourse, has related issues of modernity to women's issues in such a way that women have been put on the line of fire directly in confrontation between fundamentalist and progressive tren
Women's very bodies became a dress window, referable to a variety of frameworks: traditional, modernist, religious, secular, westernized etc. Since the beginning of the 20th century women have been of considerable interest to liberal discourse as part of its renaissance project. Very often they were singled out for responsibility when the nation as a whole was found lacking. Some nationalist voices saw in the conditions of women, the greatest danger to hoped for progress. Egyptian women were compared to the revolutionary, adventurous western women (when reference was to the eighteenth century) and to the educated, moral mother who was the staunch support to husband and children when referring to the "new woman" the latest twentieth century fashion in Europe. Comparisons followed an "instigatory" technique whereby the best in "them" was opposed to the worst in "us" without question as to how such value judgements were arrived at under colonial cultural conditions in the fields of representation. But it is easier to speak thus today. Hence, in many aspects renaissance liberal discourse came to resemble unwittingly colonial discourse when the metropolitan model was held up for emulation in matters cultural and social, side by side matters technical and scientific. A good example of the degree to which the western model came to be upheld as the ultimate good, is how women during Napoleon's campaign are portrayed in modernist discourse as having "revolted" publicly against conditions of the harem.
What complicates matters even further in the case of women is that orientalist discourse, now held as closely linked to colonialism, found in the appearance of oriental women a final proof of oriental backwardness and even barbarism. The renaissance discourse received that stigma with great confusion since the hijab or veiling had traditionally become accepted as a symbol of Muslim women's identity. Voices rose that accused the Ottomans of enforcing the harem and the hijab as a way to defend Islam. Those who spent their time defending Islam, forgot that the hijab as a loaded symbol highlit by orientalists, has not in and for itself hindered women from dealing in the market and influencing it, as was recently re-proven by Judith Tucker and Afaf Lutfi Elsayid; it has not stood in the way of their education, or even teaching men and certifying them in the sciences of sharia, out of all sciences, as is clear from the work of Nadia Al Sheikh and Hoda Lutfi on the Mamluki period, neither has it stopped them from expressing their rights to run their own estates as the chapter dedicated to Abu Takkia's family, in Nelly Hanna's Merchants of Cairo in the Ottoman Period demonstrates. Further, the pioneering work of Amira Sonbol on the history of the marriage contract, not to mention similar work undertaken by Mohamed Afifi, and Abdel Rahim to name but two, seem to point to an attitude where the baby was carried off with the bath water in the process of re-organizing the institution of marriage along "modern" uniformal lines. What then were the factors that allowed fundamentalists to first insist on hijab as a symbol of Muslim identity for women and then to use that symbol as needs may arise to curtail not only public freedom but also traditional rights, from education up to the rights of a woman to divorce a husband she no longer wishes to live with. Would the fundamentalists have felt the same degree of danger from women's issues and the woman question, if the discourse of the renaissance back then had dealt with orientalist discourse in a way more confident of itself and in the social solutions that society prescribed for itself? Or were those solutions proving nonfunctional and were only in need of some catalyst such as orientalism to encourage revision of practices and stances?
All of the above and many other issues go to highlight the importance of studying the history of the juxtaposition in cultural discourse between inherited traditions (read Islam) and importation of western models (read modernity) from a postcolonial perspective. Since liberal discourse has related modernity to the emancipation of women along a western ideal and since women are still made to carry the major bulk in transmitting culture not to say representing culture we thought to pose some of the questions which occurred to us in that respect here.

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