The killing of General Kléber and the trial of Sulayman al-Halabi (Muharram 1215 / June 1800)

Among the events of Muharram 1215 AH, al-Jabarti tells in Aja'ib al-athar of the killing of Kléber, commander of the French in Egypt after Bonaparte, by Sulayman al-Halabi, and then copies "letter for letter" the papers of the trial the French held for the killer and those he had told of his plan. It belongs to the French campaign in Egypt. ^{3 4}

On Saturday 21 Muharram — the day the French reinstated Shaykh Ahmad al-Arishi as qadi with a procession — Kléber was walking with the chief engineer along the passage of the garden of his house at al-Azbakiyya. A man from Aleppo came in; Kléber waved him back and said, "Mafish" (there is nothing), but he did not go back, pretending he had a pressing need. When he came close he held out his left hand as if to kiss Kléber's hand; when Kléber held out his hand, he seized it and struck him four times in quick succession with a dagger in his right hand, then struck the engineer several times and fled. ³

The soldiers rushed in at the engineer's cry and found their commander lying on the ground "with a little life left in him". They beat their drums and searched, thinking it the work of the people of Cairo; they surrounded the city and readied their guns, and "a great commotion" broke out among people who did not know what had happened. ³ The doctors' reports that al-Jabarti copied record four wounds, and six wounds on the engineer, "Protain". ⁵

They found the killer crouching in the neighbouring garden known as Ghayt Misbah beside a ruined wall. Questioned, he proved to be from Aleppo, named Sulayman, and said he slept at al-Azhar; they tortured him until he told them the truth, "and then they knew that the people of Cairo were innocent of it", and gave up their plan to attack the city. ⁴ They summoned Shaykh Abd Allah al-Sharqawi and the qadi al-Arishi, held them until midnight and made them bring in the men the killer had named; three of them were found at al-Azhar, the fourth was not. ⁴

Al-Jabarti says the French arranged "a form of trial according to their way in cases of retaliation", and wrote papers about it that they printed in French, Turkish and Arabic. He had meant to leave them out "because of their length and the clumsiness of their style", but seeing people eager to read them "for the lesson they contain and the exactness of the procedure", he copied them. ⁴ They include Sulayman's interrogation: he gave his age as twenty-four, said he was an Arabic scribe from Aleppo who had come with a caravan from Gaza, had lived in Cairo for three years before and in Mecca and Medina for three, and denied knowing the grand vizier. ⁶

The court sat in the house of General Reynier, with a number of French officers as members, by order of Kléber's successor Menou; the accused were brought "without chains or bonds", with the doors open, and questioned through the interpreter Bracevich. ⁷ It found Sulayman al-Halabi guilty, and likewise Abd al-Qadir al-Ghazzi, Muhammad al-Ghazzi, Abd Allah al-Ghazzi and Ahmad al-Wali — Qur'an reciters at al-Azhar from Gaza — because he had told them of his intent and they had not reported it; it acquitted Mustafa Efendi al-Bursali, an eighty-one-year-old schoolteacher. ^{7 8}

The sentence was that Sulayman's right hand be burned, that he then be impaled and left on the stake on the mound known as Tell al-Aqarib; that the three be beheaded and their bodies burned before him; that the absent Abd al-Qadir al-Ghazzi be condemned to death; and that the verdict be printed in five hundred copies in each language. ^{9 8}

Three days after the killing, on the eve of Tuesday 25 Muharram, they ordered the streets swept and watered, and in the morning came out in procession with their chiefs, their troops, and the Copts and Syrian Christians. Kléber lay in a lead coffin on a carriage bearing his hat, his sword and the dagger that had killed him, "still steeped in his blood", and the soldiers carried their muskets reversed. ¹⁰ At Tell al-Aqarib, where the French had built a fort, "they brought Sulayman al-Halabi and the three, and carried out on them what had been decreed"; then the procession went on to the gate of Qasr al-Ayni, where the coffin was placed in a wooden structure built for it. ¹⁰

Abd Allah Jacques Menou took over the command; al-Jabarti says he had professed Islam, taken the name Abd Allah and married a Muslim woman. The French searched al-Azhar, the students moved out their belongings and books, and then Shaykh al-Sharqawi, al-Mahdi and al-Sawi asked Menou's leave to close the mosque; it was shut and its doors nailed up. ¹¹

In Aja'ib al-athar al-Jabarti draws a lesson from the trial by a people who "judge by reason and follow no religion": when "a reckless vagrant" dared to strike down their chief, they arrested him and did not rush to kill him or those he named on his confession alone, but held a trial and freed the man against whom nothing was proven. He contrasts this with what he saw later of "the deeds of the rabble of soldiers who claim to be Muslims". ^{4 5} In Mazhar al-taqdis, the editor reports, al-Jabarti called him "the martyr Sulayman" and the three "the wronged"; and other manuscripts have him say he belonged to a band sworn to die who had received their blood-money from Yusuf Pasha the vizier, which does not appear in the interrogation copied in Aja'ib al-athar. ^{4 10}