Juan Cole notes how the Deist French, under Napoleon, tried to convince the Arabs that they knew better what Muslims should believe about Islam than they did, and how Americans are falling in the same trap today. Cole comments an a letter written by correspondent Jaubert with the French army in Egypt:
Jaubert is referring to Bonaparte's broadsheet to the Egyptians in which he claims that the Deism of the French revolution, being non-Trinitarian and opposed to the Catholic hierarchy, is more or less a form of "Islam" (in the vague sense of a strictly monotheistic, non-Christian religion). Jaubert thought Bonaparte's stratagem brilliant, but knew it would be laughed at in worldly Paris. He compared it to the class war the French Revolutionaries unleashed in the early 1790s, when they tried to convince the working and poor strata that an attack on monarchy promised a better life for the disadvantaged.
In fact, the Egyptian Muslims do not appear to have believed that Deism looked anything like Islam, since they emphasized practice (prayers, fasting, etc.) over mere doctrine. The Chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti pointed out that if strict monotheism and rejection of the trinity made a belief "Islam," then Jews would be Muslims. Bonaparte's attempt to convince the Egyptian Muslims that he was one of them is reminiscent of American claims to be supporting "true" "moderate" Islam against Salafi fundamentalists who had "hijacked" the religion-- as if any Muslim thinks Washington can tell what true Islam is.
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