Napoleon’s Egyptian Girl

About the Book

Napoleon Bonaparte led forty thousand troops to Egypt in the French Revolutionary Wars against Britain. The French were in Egypt for three years in 1798–1801, during which time they associated with the Egyptian people and founded an academic institute called The Egyptian Institute. Zaynab, the daughter of a high religious shaykh of al-Azhar, visited the institute, learned French, and became close to the French. She became associated with Bonaparte through her father’s ambitions to use Bonaparte to further his religious career, quite as Bonaparte used the shaykh to give Muslim legitimacy to his position as ruler of Egypt “in sevice to the Ottoman Sultan.” Both were trying to use the other to their own advantage. The shaykh’s daughter, Zaynab, gets caught in the middle and will pay the price of “collaboration” when the French are forced to abandon Egypt.

About the Author

John W. Livingston earned his BS degree in engineering at MIT, and his PhD from Princeton. He is currently a professor of Islamic History and Civilization and Modern Middle East History at William Paterson University. He has published articles in leading Muslim Studies journals, penned a novel, and has written two books soon to be published by Ashgate Press. He works and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he continues to write.