I'm reading "Napoleon: A Political Life" by Steven Englund and he says:
Bonaparte was already at war with England, and now with the Turks, but he had no wish to make war on Islam. To the contrary, he proclaimed far and wide his good feeling for the religion of Mohammed. "The Roman legions had protected religion," he said, and the French army would do even more than that. The French dated their proclamations in both the Islamic and the Revolutionary (but not the Christian) calendars; they promulgated them in Arabic as well as French. The Arabic versions often contain more strongly phrased religious language than do the French.
Did any Revolutionaries share Napoleon's positive view of Muslims? Why did French Revolutionaries (or at least Napoleon) have good feelings towards Muslims in a time where (I would think) most of Europe would despise the Islamic world?
Different European states had different relationships with the Islam as a religion and Muslim states during the early modern period and eighteenth century. Edward Said's "Orientalism" which is based on nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism ends up getting projected onto earlier periods where it doesn't quite fit. European political writers like Niccolo Machiavelli (among others) believed that the Ottoman system of government was more efficient and more militarily capable. Some Protestants in England believed they shared common ground with Muslims that they did business with on the basis of their faiths being rooted in the Bible and Koran alone, respectively. There were religious divisions, certainly, but this didn't necessarily
The Enlightenment changed things as well. The philisophes reacted against religion because they believed it caused the bloodshed of 1500s and 1600s. This intellectual turn combined with increasing travel by Europeans to the Ottoman-Arab-Muslim world built up a perception of the East as being more sexually libertine and more religiously tolerant because of the diverse population. Rosseau also believed that the Arabic language was better suited to building community among people. Voltaire was more skeptical of the story of Muhammad and Islam like he was with Christianity. The image of Islam in Europe was mixed at this time, and was not helped by the fact that the Ottoman Empire was relatively weaker than it had been in past centuries.
Napoleon saw Arab Egyptians as a people he could liberate because the ruling class was still the Mamluks who had reasserted their power under the Ottoman system after their conquest in 1517. The Mamluks were the descendents of Circassian and Turkic mercenaries brought in to Egypt even earlier. Keeping with his revolutionary agenda, Napoleon appealed to the Arab people against the rule of these elites. Unlike the philisophes the emperor wanted to use Muslim religious sentiment to his own ends and apparently wished to publish a revised Koran to do this. He told his soldiers not to interfere with or disrespect Muslims as they had done with both Jews and Italian Catholics. Napoleon's interest during the Egypt campaign was emulating Alexander the Great and spreading his brand of French revolutionary ideology. It seems like attacking Muslims did not fit into his goals and his thinking was somewhat consistent with Enlightenment openness toward Islam and Islamicate culture.
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Fatih, Zakaria. "Peering into the Mosque: Enlightenment Views of Islam." The French Review 85, no. 6 (2012): 1070-082.
AlSayyad, Nezar. "Rosetta and the Discovery of Ancient Egypt: Where the Nile Meets the Sea." In Nile: Urban Histories on the Banks of a River, 195-210. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.