A History of the Middle East (20 page)

Still unresolved was the question of whether Egypt had become part of the British Empire and the Egyptians British subjects. Cromer, in retirement, considered that Egypt was now in the empire, but in fact the matter was left in abeyance. The protectorate declaration merely said that all Egyptian subjects ‘will be entitled to receive the protection of His Majesty’s government’. Egypt remained officially neutral, with Britain responsible for its defence, but Egyptians were expected to contribute to the war effort. Egyptian troops helped to defend the Suez Canal against the first and only Turkish attack. Over 20,000 Egyptians served in the camel transport and labour corps in Palestine and in France, and suffered heavy casualties.

The disadvantage of failing to annex Egypt was that Britain was unable to abolish the Capitulations and all the other international commitments. On the other hand, the fact that Britain never colonized Egypt as France colonized Algeria meant that the eventual Egyptian independence was not bought at the cost of a long and bloody war.

The British remained ambiguous about the concept of an Egyptian nation – as did many Egyptians, although for different reasons. Cromer had described Egypt as a ‘nondescript country’. Since a ‘true Egyptian’ was indefinable, an ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ policy was nonsense. When Egypt ever achieved a self-governing body, he said, all the communities should have to have representation, and since the Europeans and Levantines (Italians, Greeks, Maltese etc.) – those whom Cromer called the ‘Brahmins of Egypt’ – contributed by far the most to the country’s wealth, these should be represented out of proportion to their numbers. During the war, these ideas were codified by the British judicial adviser in a proposed constitution which would have given the British advisers and the foreign communities permanent control over all legislation. But by then such ideas were not only insensitive but quite unrealistic. The spirit of Egyptian nationalism, although forced underground during the war, emerged with renewed vigour when the war ended. The existence of an Egyptian nation became undeniable.

Greek independence followed by the enforced Turkish withdrawal from most of the Balkans during the nineteenth century, caused the centre of gravity of the Ottoman Empire to shift inexorably eastwards. Because the sultan/caliph no longer ruled over millions of Christian Europeans, he was no longer a threat and a challenge to the powers of Europe. But he could aspire to leadership in Asia.

The shift towards Asia was increased by the loss of control over Arab North Africa, which had already achieved a large degree of independence. Algeria and Tunisia went to the French in 1830 and 1881. The great prize of Egypt, whose al-Azhar mosque/university underpinned the caliph’s spiritual authority, was lost almost unnecessarily to the British in 1882. Tripoli, the last Ottoman foothold on the North African coast, was seized by the Italians in 1912, as Lord Kitchener in Cairo ensured Egypt’s neutrality in the Turkish-Italian war.

However, Sultan Abdul Hamid still controlled the Arab heartland and the first great centres of Arab/Muslim civilization, from Mecca and Medina to Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. Turkey controlled most of the hinterland of the Arabian peninsula – although the British had a colony in Aden, dominated the waters of the Persian Gulf and were establishing special treaty arrangements with the coastal shaikhdoms. Ironically, the opening of the Suez Canal had made it easier to send troops to re-establish the Ottoman Empire’s hold on Yemen.

The Ottoman hold over this vast territory, with its plains, mountain ranges and river systems, varied in form and intensity. In many areas hereditary local dynasties, strengthened by their geographical remoteness in mountains and valleys, were allowed substantial autonomy in return for maintaining adequate forces, pacifying the
surrounding countryside and collecting taxes. In some cases, as in northern Mesopotamia, they were needed to protect the empire’s frontiers against the rival Persian Empire. In others, as in Mount Lebanon where they were indigenous rather than a Mamluke military caste, they were the most effective rulers because they had the loyalty of their people. But there were also large areas of steppe and desert which were dominated by powerful groups of nomadic tribes, such as the Shammar or Bani Sakhr, who could not be prevented from plundering the traditional trade and pilgrimage routes.

Life in the great cities was fairly stable and secure, but in the countryside it changed considerably and frequently according to the competence and authority of the local governors. It was into this variegated system that, from 1820 onwards, an attempt was made to introduce the reforms of the
Tanzimat
in order to centralize and streamline the administration of the state. The overall aim was to modernize and strengthen the empire in the face of the European threat.

Being based on an ideal rather than on reason, these reforms inevitably had indifferent results. They changed much over fifty years and they also disrupted. Since they introduced modern secular ideas, such as citizenship and universal equality before the law, they were opposed by the powerful religious authorities. They undermined delicate relationships which had stood the test of time between the many minorities which composed the Asian empire. Moreover, the disruption allowed the European powers, which were steadily increasing their economic influence throughout the Levant and Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century, to extend their political influence too. Two processes were therefore at work which were ultimately bound to conflict – Ottoman centralization and European penetration.

Mount Lebanon, with its large Maronite Christian population, provided the most suitable theatre for European intervention. The local rulers – the Shihabi emirs – had converted from Sunni Islam to become Maronites at the end of the eighteenth century. The outstanding Emir Bashir II played off the Maronite peasantry against
the Druze peasantry and allied himself with the Egyptians during the period of Ibrahim Pasha’s rule (1831–40).

When Ottoman rule was restored, the Shihabi princes were removed and, in the face of open Maronite/Druze conflict, Mount Lebanon was divided by the Ottomans, with strong encouragement from the European powers, into two administrative units – one for the Maronites and one for the Druze. Lebanon had its first government on a confessional basis. But this did not work. For one thing, the Maronites formed a majority in the Druze ‘qaimaqamate’. Moreover, the whole region was in a state of disruption, as the traditional economy disintegrated under the invasion of Western products which began under Ibrahim Pasha.

The instability and tension increased until civil war broke out in 1860. The Druze landlords of Mount Lebanon wished to curb their Maronite tenants, who were increasing in numbers and wealth, and attacked and massacred them in thousands. This sparked off a wave of persecutions of Christians in other parts of Syria. France, which with varying degrees of encouragement from the Ottoman sultan had long regarded itself as the protector of its Maronite fellow-Catholics, landed troops in Beirut and invaded the Druze stronghold of the Shuf. A conference of European powers which had signed the Treaty of Paris following the Crimean War – which included the Ottoman Empire – met in Beirut to consider how Lebanon should be governed. The conclusion was the creation of the autonomous
sanjak
or province of Mount Lebanon, with a Christian governor chosen by the sultan from outside Lebanon and assisted by a Maronite-dominated council chosen on a confessional basis. This was to be under the protection of the six powers – Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Italy.

Autonomous Lebanon covered only part of the present-day Lebanese Republic. It excluded Beirut, Tyre and Sidon on the coast and the Bekaa Valley to the east, and it was heavily dominated by the Maronites, who formed 90 per cent of the population. Although it prospered for the next half century, its creation was a first step towards undermining the
millet
system – the ancient network of communities through which the religious minorities shared in the administration of the empire.

France was the chief patron of the Roman Catholics in the Arab Levant, and Russia of the Orthodox Christians. Britain was left as protector of the Druze and of the small community of Jews, who formed about 4 per cent of the people of Palestine. The unfortunate Armenians in the heartland of the empire lacked any effective outside patron. There were hardly any Protestant Christians in the empire, but American Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in the penetration of Western cultural influence. The founding in 1866 of the Syrian Protestant College – later the American University of Beirut – helped to stimulate alarmed French Catholics to found the Université Saint-Joseph in 1874. The two institutions would play a leading role in the cultural renaissance of the region.

In Palestine – the region known to the Christian West as the Holy Land, which in the twentieth century was to be given defined borders – European rivalries were peculiarly intense, as might be expected, but their effects tended to neutralize each other. Arab Christians were a minority, although a substantial one, and intercommunal relations between Muslims, Christians and Jews were generally harmonious. From the ending of Egyptian rule in Syria in 1840, the Ottomans were able to pursue their centralizing reforms of the
Tanzimat
. These meant reimposition of Turkish military control and the reduction of the powers of the local feudal lords, who had become virtually independent – levying their own taxes and fighting among themselves. The effects of the reforms were generally beneficial. Security improved, the population increased and the economy prospered. Jaffa became a household name in Europe through exports of oranges from the great plantations around it.

Although the direct power of the feudal families had been reduced, many of them were allowed to retain considerable influence. With economic progress and expansion, the trend was to increase the importance of the towns, and town councils were dominated by representatives of these families – Nimrs, Tuqans, Khalidis
and Husseinis. Despite the centralizing policies of Istanbul, the Palestinian notables retained considerable freedom to manage their affairs. Jerusalem, because of its crucial importance, was in 1874 made an ‘independent’
sanjak
, with the result that the governor of Jerusalem was directly answerable to the sultan in Istanbul.

It was not only in Palestine that improved security helped the economy to prosper as the population increased. In the vast plains of western and northern Syria, European late nineteenth-century travellers reported seeing limitless fields of golden corn where only a few years earlier had been barren waste.

The progress was not without setbacks, however. Even the lands of the ancient Fertile Crescent were dependent on an uncertain rainfall, and the 1870s saw a series of disastrous harvests. Ottoman bankruptcy affected the ability of the wealthier classes to invest. Finally, many able-bodied young Syrians and Palestinians were forcibly recruited into the Ottoman armies during the Russian and Balkan wars. However, by the 1880s the situation had improved. The Ottoman Empire had turned eastwards from the Balkans, and the coming of the railways vastly improved communications. Exports of silk, fruit and wool from Syrian ports steadily increased at the turn of the century.

Mesopotamia, or Iraq, remained the most backward and illgoverned of the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Turkish Empire. Its vast resources were left untapped. After 1831, when direct rule from Istanbul was reimposed under the
Tanzimat
reforms, the Ottoman
walis
or governors were unable to make much headway in pacifying the rebellious tribes and Kurdish hill-chiefs to settle the countryside and improve communication. The most was achieved by the enlightened Midhat Pasha, who arrived in 1869. He enforced conscription, founded municipal authorities and established schools and hospitals. He attempted to dredge the Shatt al-Arab waterway – the joint outlet of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Gulf – and to open the Tigris and Euphrates to regular steamer navigation. But there was a limit to what he could do in the three years of his governorship. Baghdad, once the glory of the Golden Age of Islam, remained
a squalid and impoverished city compared with Cairo, Aleppo or Damascus, which retained much of their former greatness.

In spite of Mesopotamia’s poverty and backwardness, however, the powers of Europe were fully aware of its potential importance. In particular, Britain – which already dominated the waters of the Persian Gulf – saw it as the gateway to India and helped to establish telegraph and postal services linking Baghdad with Istanbul, the Gulf and India. Gradually it came to regard central and southern Mesopotamia as a British sphere of influence. But other powers were probing the region. France had an interest in Mosul in northern Mesopotamia; Russia looked towards the warm waters of the Persian Gulf; and, by the end of the century, imperial Germany, the sultan’s new ally, had appeared on the scene.

Britain already controlled the waters of the Gulf and in 1861 it established a land base when it signed a treaty with the ruler of Bahrain to protect his island from external claims (from Persia and Turkey) in return for British suzerainty and the exclusion of all other powers. But from the mid nineteenth century the Ottomans set out to absorb into the empire and its reformed administrative system all the independent Arab principalities of Nejd (central Arabia) and the Gulf coast. Ottoman suzerainty had lapsed in this region since the withdrawal of the Turkish fleets in the seventeenth century. In 1819 the Egyptian forces of Muhammad Ali had conquered the Saudi/Wahhabi state in Nejd on behalf of the sultan, and Turco-Egyptian authority was extended to the coastal region of al-Hasa. But the Egyptian forces remained only until 1840, when Muhammad Ali’s own quasi-imperial ambitions were cut short. The Saudi state, based on its new capital, Riyadh, revived.