When an atheist army protected Islam...

My current bedtime reading is "Napoleon In Egypt" by Paul Strathern, published in 2009. Amazon has it, for those interested.

What a fascinating book. Given some of our recent discussions in here about ancient history and Darwin, especially fascinating.

When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along many prominent French scientists, engineers, historians, etc. - known as "the savants."

One of those savants was the artist Vivant Denon, who sort-of unwittingly became the first Egyptologist. Denon's fantastically detailed drawings of ancient Egyptian temples and ruins were a hit all over Europe.

And more than fifty years before Darwin, the French archeological discoveries in Egypt pissed off the Church by showing that the world had to be a lot more than 6000 years old.

The French army in Egypt, as Strathern points out, was officially atheist. It had no chaplains and conducted no church services of any kind.

Napoleon soft-pedaled that to the powerful Egyptian imams, claiming he had invaded Egypt to protect Islam from the Evil Xian British, among other things. (In private Napoleon made it clear that this was strictly political and he thought Islam the same as all other religions - useful for social control.)

The imams weren't buying. Neither were most of the Egyptian people. But apparently even devoutly Islamic Egypt had some liberals in it.

In Rosetta, the French General Jacques Menou fell head over heels in love for a young Egyptian woman (she was only 16, according to some accounts. Menou was a 48-yr-old lifelong bachelor). She made it clear that he had to convert to Islam before she would marry him. He did, publicly.

Here is Menou's letter to another French General, who asked about his new wife:

My wife, of whom you speak so kindly, is large, strong and good enough in all respects. She has very beautiful eyes, the complexion of an Egyptian, with long and extremely black hair; she has a fine temperament. I find that she has much less repugnance than I expected for my French habits, and above all she has little or no superstition. Although she sticks very punctiliously to her religious observances, she believes that all other religions are also good.

(Gen. Menou's house still stands in Rosetta and is a big tourist attraction. Along with the site where they found that What-You-Call-It Stone...)