4 ideas
When Napoleon issued an Arabic proclamation claiming the French were true Muslims who respected Islam, al-Jabarti answered it line by line, cataloguing its grammatical errors, colloquialisms and broken syntax. He treated the bad Arabic as proof of bad faith: an occupier who could not master the language of the faith he claimed to honor had exposed its claim of religious kinship as a manipulation.
In the same pages it condemns the invaders' irreligion, looting and humiliation of Cairenes. Recording both without folding them into a single verdict lets the observer separate a system's techniques from its legitimacy.
Al-Jabarti argues that the French invasion showed how hollow Mamluk military power was and turned Cairo's social hierarchy upside down. People of low standing, collaborators and Christians rose to prominence while established notables lost rank. He reads this upending of accustomed order as a sign of moral and cosmic disorder, not merely a political change.
The French governed through a diwan of senior al-Azhar scholars. This made the ulama intermediaries who conveyed foreign orders to the population and petitioned for leniency in return. The role gave them influence but drained their legitimacy, because the crowd blamed them for collaborating and the occupier blamed them for failing to keep order, as the Cairo revolt showed.