Peace Be Upon You (33 page)

By the early nineteenth century, even the sultan, who would have been the last to be informed that he was not wearing any clothes, noticed that the comparative position of the empire was becoming untenable. It was one thing to observe that fact, but it was quite another to know what to do about it. Not surprisingly, successive sultans and their advisers tackled that portion of the problem that seemed amenable to a solution: the military. If the deficiencies of the empire were most apparent in battles with the powers of Europe, then it made sense to remake the military. If European guns and ships were overwhelming Ottoman forces, then it was obvious that the sultan needed new guns, new ships, and soldiers capable of using them. But no matter how much the Ottomans tried to revamp the army, they kept losing battles. Having suffered a series of humiliating defeats, the Ottoman elite in Istanbul finally recognized that the changes required were more extensive than buying new guns.

The pivotal figure was Mahmud II, who came to power in 1808 after Sultan Selim III had been overthrown in a plot concocted by enraged Janissaries who feared (rightly) that Selim meant to build a new army and make them obsolete. Having survived a tumultuous two years during which the Janissaries attempted to rule the empire through a puppet sultan, Mahmud vowed that he would respect the status quo, but he lied, and lied brilliantly. He had no intention of allowing the Janissaries to retain a monopoly on military affairs. The Balkans were beginning to exhibit disturbing signs of unrest. The Arabian Peninsula had recently seen the emergence of the religious puritan Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who in alliance with the Saudi tribe called for a return to the simple faith of Muhammad and was willing to eradicate anyone who did not agree. And Egypt and Palestine had fallen under the control of an Albanian mercenary appointed by Istanbul, who managed to fend off the Europeans while signaling to Istanbul that he would no longer heed the sultan’s orders.

Until the nineteenth century, most of the millions who lived under the Ottoman state would have been unaware of these large trends. The wars of Europe, the military innovations of the French, Germans, and English, and the changing patterns of world trade were so distant as to
be nonexistent. Before the sudden, unanticipated French invasion of Egypt in 1798, daily life in Cairo in the eighteenth century wasn’t markedly different from daily life in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The same could be said of Morocco and Syria and central Anatolia. The
millet
system continued much as it had, becoming more refined and more tightly organized as part of the modest reforms of Ottoman administrative system in the late seventeenth century, but not in ways that would have made a Christian in the Peloponnesus or a Jew in Smyrna perceive any radical shift in status.

What did change, inexorably, was the place of the Ottomans in the world, and that had much to do with events beyond their control. The reason for the sudden and dramatic rise of the West at the expense of the rest remains one of the great unsolved riddles of the modern world. There is no lack of theories, but there is no one settled answer. The countries of Europe had fought one another to a standstill for so long that they had been forced to innovate, and to find new sources of revenue and better technology. European nations were forged in a cauldron of war and hatred, and emerged on the world stage uniquely capable of fighting. They combined the ruthlessness of all great powers past and present with the means to enforce their will. The Ottoman Empire was only one of the many obstacles that stood between them and the world, and it withstood the onslaught better than most.

For the first time in the history of Muslim societies, however, the trajectory shifted from offense to defense. As we have seen, there had been earlier setbacks, during the Crusades, in Spain, and for the brief but devastating Mongol interregnum. But then the Ottomans had appeared and restored the narrative to its proper form, with Sunni Muslims ruling and the People of the Book ruled or on the defensive. Early in the nineteenth century, it became clear to both the Ottoman elite and to the Europeans that the empire could no longer resist the expansion of the West. The thousand-year history of Muslim dominance had come to an end.

Muslim societies spent more than a millennium accustomed to power. They have spent the past two hundred years dealing with the loss of it. They met the challenges of dominance; they are still struggling with the challenges of defeat.

T
HE SHIFT FROM
dominance to decline occurred gradually. There was no one pivotal military loss that marked the end, but the reversal was shocking all the same. From the early decades of the seventh century until the nineteenth century, states ruled by Muslims had validated the promise of the Quran and the early Arab conquests. They had vanquished or outlasted all rivals; they had carefully constructed social orders based on the preeminence of Islam relative to other religions; and for the most part, they had enjoyed the rewards of success. The ascendency of the West in the nineteenth century, therefore, was as revolutionary and disruptive as the rise of Islam had been twelve centuries before.

To reiterate, until the nineteenth century, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews had unfolded in the context of Muslim dominance. Even in those periods and places where that wasn’t the case, such as the twelfth-century Crusader states and Spain after the thirteenth century, the patterns that had been established under Muslim rule conditioned how the three different faiths interacted. Religion, as we have seen, was only one of many factors shaping these societies, but it did define boundaries and it did set limits. At no point was it a simple matter for a Christian to marry a Muslim, or a Jew to marry either, and that in itself guaranteed a degree of separateness. But over the centuries, under Muslim rule, Christians and Jews had been able to lead their lives and contribute in meaningful ways to the shape and success of their societies.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the states of Europe came to dominate the Muslim world. This included the Ottoman Empire, as well
as Persia, India, and Indonesia, each of which had substantial Muslim populations—and in the case of India, a Muslim emperor. The expansion of Europe was, as political scientists might say, “overdetermined.” There was no one reason; there were many, ranging from economic to political to religious and ideological. But insofar as most inhabitants of these European nations were Christian, it is fair to call them “Christian states.” Just as Islam was a central part of the identity of the Muslim world, Christianity was woven into European manners, mores, and attitudes. Granted, European nations had an ambivalent relationship to Christianity, at times bringing the gospel to the unconverted masses around the globe, at other time abjuring religion in the name of secular progress. But while it has been common to overstate the place of religion in both the Muslim world and in Europe, it would be a mistake to go too far in the other direction. Especially at times of head-to-head competition between states whose rulers were Muslim and states whose leaders were Christian, religion could be central. Just as Muslims had both implicitly and explicitly taken their worldly success as a sign of divine favor, Christian states in the nineteenth century attributed their strength not only to country but to God as well.

With few exceptions, the nineteenth century has gained a bad historical reputation. American historians may glory in the history of the United States during these years, and historians of science can point to discovery after discovery. On the whole, however, the century has been seen as the placid middle child between the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the transformations of the twentieth. Generations of writers and scholars in the second half of the twentieth century heaped scorn on the nineteenth century as a period of harsh industrialization marked by a rapacious West sweeping across the globe in a fit of nationalist, capitalist imperialism that despoiled the riches of countless societies and left them hobbled. That remains the prevailing thesis, and it is fair to say that the nineteenth century has a dowdy image in comparison to the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or (thankfully) the horrific drama of the first half of the twentieth century.

The rise of the West and its effects on the rest of the world also have their known history and their forgotten. A vocal minority defensively celebrate the civilizing mission of the West in spreading liberalism and democracy throughout the world, and they trumpet the Industrial Revolution as a vital step in the march of modern progress. But more prevalent
today is history that treats the West as a malign force and emphasizes the destructive effects of imperialism on the non-Western world. This perspective holds that Muslim societies suffered acutely from the rise of Europe, and that the roots of the present problems confronting states from Morocco to Afghanistan were planted in the 1800s.
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This vision of the nineteenth century and of relations between the West and the rest paints a dark picture of Western power and its effects on the globe.

To be fair, these debates are more active in academia than in popular culture, especially in the United States. In England, there is an audience for popular books about the Victorians and what they wrought, but few nonacademics in the United States pay attention to what happened in the mid-nineteenth century outside America. While textbooks in England try to give a sense of the pros and cons of empire, the tendency in the past decades on both sides of the Atlantic has been to decry the negative effects of empire. As for the Middle East and other parts of the world, the nineteenth century is seen as a sorry, sad period of setbacks and decline punctuated by Western imperialism. It is said that the humiliation of Muslim societies at the hands of Western states, and of the Arabs, Persians, and Turks in particular, produced a legacy of hatred and animosity that eventually led to the fundamentalism, violence, and terrorism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The nineteenth century, therefore, carries a heavy burden—even without including the forces of nationalism that originated in the later part of the 1800s and have been held responsible for the wars that not only eviscerated Europe but wreaked havoc on much of the world between 1914 and 1945.

The problem, once again, is not that this history is wrong, but that it is incomplete. Side by side with military defeats and Western expansion was a spectrum of coexistence and cooperation. While nationalism eventually proved to be a destructive force in the wars of the twentieth century, in its early forms it was closely linked to liberal, progressive ideals. While the imperial experiment ultimately left a sour aftertaste, it had redeeming features. Fueled by the Enlightenment and by the forces unleashed by the French Revolution, Europeans spread across the globe and exported a hodgepodge of ideals that included an unshakable belief in human progress. And while there was ever and always a racial component to European attitudes toward everyone else, there was also a willingness
to view all human beings as capable and able to attain the highest levels of civilization.

In the Muslim world, nineteenth-century European expansion triggered both resistance and accommodation. Unable to defeat the states of Europe on the battlefield, Muslim rulers from Istanbul to Cairo to Persia and India did what they could to adapt. It was more than a simple tale of European aggression. The notion of progress was appealing and infectious. It held out the possibility that with reform, any state and any society could join the ranks of the elite, and that the gap between Europe and the rest would be a temporary phenomenon.

The belief in progress was dealt a severe blow by the wars of the twentieth century, but on the whole, it remains deeply entrenched in both the United States and Western Europe. Even Communism was a utopian system based on the notion that a better world was within reach if only society could be reorganized. The American creed that everything is possible embraces progress as an essential component to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is difficult, therefore, to remember that the notion of progress is a recent phenomenon, a product mostly of the past few hundred years. Medieval Europe at best promised a better world in the hereafter. The idea that the future could and would be better than the present was alien. Few embraced change for its own sake, and most resisted it. In the nineteenth century, as Europeans distanced themselves from both organized religion and the divine rule of kings, the belief in progress filled the void.

There was something naive yet seductively universal about the cult of progress. It was critical of the old systems that had purportedly kept mankind from realizing its full potential. That meant disdain for established religion and for political systems that had governed people from time immemorial. The guiding spirit of the cult of progress was the French Revolution, which enshrined the notion that any state could reform and thereby unleash the full potential of its citizens. Imbued with the spirit of innovation, people could transform the material world using technology and remake society using the tools of philosophy and science.