It is not, I believe, sufficiently understood how vast a scheme was overthrown by the Battle of the Nile.  Napoleon’s mind was formed for dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have infallibly succeeded in Asia.  There little policies are useless, and great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed with an idea which must have flourished.  His English opponents, judging him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme.  When he publicly pronounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to him.  Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in 1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in 1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman.  With Napoleon’s genius for war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might have been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in reverse by a great Moslem multitude, might have suffered worse disasters than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine.  As it was, it was an episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to admire and understand.[11]

Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored it to the Porte.  Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it.  He was within an ace of succeeding.  In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople.  There, without doubt, he would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all the essential elements of the Sultan’s admitted right on which to found a new claim.

Nor is it probable that he would have found much religious opposition to the realization of his scheme from the Turkish Ulema.  These, already alarmed by Sultan Murad’s administrative reforms, would hardly have espoused the Sultan’s defence with any vigour; and though Mehemet Ali himself was open to a charge of latitudinarianism, he had the one great claim upon orthodox Islam of having delivered the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabis.  The house of Othman, indeed, at this time had begun to stink—­not only in the nostrils of the outside world, but in that of the Hanefite school itself; and as these had formerly accepted Selim, so they might very well, in 1839, have accepted Mehemet Ali.  But this attempt, too, was stopped by England in pursuance of a policy which it is difficult now not to regret.  The too venturous Arnaout was sent back to his vice-royalty in Egypt, and the House of Othman was entrusted with a new lease of spiritual sovereignty, if not yet of spiritual power.