“ The French and the Arabs have in common, in terms of honour, their conception of value, their frank expression of the truth, as well as other traits of moral demand. » The author of these lines is Rifaa Tahtawi, an Egyptian chronicler of the French Revolution of 1830, who followed it hour by hour from Paris. This imam of the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most prestigious in the Islamic world, was then the companion of a delegation of scholarship holders from the Egyptian government, sent to the French capital to study there for many years.
From this experience he extracted material for “The gold of Paris », published in 1834 in Cairo, where “ insta » his coreligionists to “ research in science, arts and crafts » which, according to him, “ exist in a state of perfection “In France. But Tahtawi is only one of the many Arab personalities whose lives were literally changed on the banks of the Seine, as Coline Houssais recalls in her “ Paris in Arabic letters », recently published by Actes Sud (240 pages, 23.80 euros) and supported by impressive documentation.
From the “Arabian Nights” to the “Mamelukes”
The pioneer of these Paris Arabs is in many ways Gabriel Sionite, the French appellation of Jibril Al-Sahyuni, a Maronite monk from Lebanon who resided in the capital from 1614 to 1642. He contributed to a short-lived Arabic printing press, numerous translations into French and Latin, while giving Arabic classes to future representatives of France in the Levant. But he is also the first of these Arabic-speaking scholars to be rendered invisible by the French Orientalists, who take full credit for that work, reducing his Arab collaborators to being nothing more than ” correctors ” either ” typographers “. This is how Antoine Galland became famous in 1717 for his French version of “ The Thousand and One Nights », while some of the most famous tales, such as those of Ali Baba and Sindbad, were transmitted by the very polyglot Hanna Dyab, who came from Aleppo to Paris with Galland and then remained in his shadow.
The expedition led by General Bonaparte to Egypt in 1798 ended three years later with a defeat for the French army which, to protect its local supporters from reprisals, brought back several hundred of them on its ships. These ” refugees from egypt » are mentioned under the generic term “ Rompers », although most of them had no military function. Elias Pharaon, who had been Bonaparte’s interpreter in Egypt, was promoted to French consul in the Ionian Islands. Raphaël Zakhour trained a generation of French scholars in Arabic, including the Egyptologist Champollion. It was within the framework of these close relations between France and Egypt that Tahtawi’s stay in Paris took place, from 1826 to 1831, before 97 Boulevard Saint-Michel hosted, from 1844 to 1849, an “Egyptian Military School” for the care of future officers from Cairo.
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