Tahtawi quietly disregarded the pasha’s orders. He went out and about in Paris, made friends, attended dinner parties, and took in the social scene. But there was never any danger of him being seduced by
what he saw. In fact, the experience left him, as it left many subsequent generations of students from the Middle East, unsettled. To his eyes, the French were too liberal, too decadent, and too disorderly in their social lives. While he agreed that they had much to teach Egypt and the Ottomans about running a state and fielding an army, he returned to Egypt more loyal to the autocracy of Muhammad Ali than he had been before he had left.
Over the next decades, Tahtawi articulated a vision of a modern Egypt that was one part autocracy, one part Islam, and two parts Industrial Revolution. The result was a society that combined the unchallenged authority of a ruler like Muhammad Ali with cutting-edge techniques of farming, efficient organization of the state bureaucracy, and advanced technologies for communication and transportation. As for the place of religion, Tahtawi did not agree with the French example. The French believed that “national welfare and human progress [could] take the place of religion and that the intelligence of learned men is greater than that of the prophets,” and they had banished Christianity from the public sphere and affairs of state. That was unacceptable to Tahtawi, who insisted that Egypt could modernize without antagonism toward Islam, a religion that he believed was firmly compatible with science, technology, and progress.
4
As Albert Hourani noted in his studies of this period, Tahtawi “lived and worked in a happy interlude of history, when the religious tension between Islam and Christianity was being relaxed and had not yet been replaced by the new political tension of east and west.” That meant that forward-looking Egyptians could pick and choose those aspects of the West that fit their model of an emerging Egypt and reject the rest. Unburdened by a sense of civilizational clash, they looked on France and on Europe as challengers and competitors who had distinct strengths. They understood that it was important to learn from those strengths, and they dedicated their lives to modernizing Egypt using the European model as a guide. Muhammad Ali and much of the Egyptian ruling class took an à la carte approach, selecting those aspects that they liked while rejecting those they did not. Educational reform they approved of; democracy and secularism held little appeal. The same process was unfolding in Istanbul under the sultan, though the entrenched interests there made reform far more difficult. And that was why Muhammad Ali nearly replaced the sultan, not once but twice, in 1833 and again in 1839.
It wasn’t that the pasha intended to challenge the sultan, at least not at first. In fact, he had repeatedly come to the sultan’s aid, notably in Greece when the powers of Europe intervened to support the independence movement, and on the Arabian Peninsula when the followers of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab captured Mecca and Medina and massacred pilgrims making the hajj. But by the late 1820s, having nearly suppressed the Greek revolt before the English fleet sank Egypt’s navy in Navarino Bay, Muhammad Ali came to the conclusion that the real danger to his future and that of Egypt and the Near East wasn’t Europe. It was the ineffectual Ottoman sultan, who ruled in Istanbul while the empire disintegrated around him.
Convinced that the Europeans would destroy the empire if he did not prevent them, Muhammad Ali sent his son to invade Syria and Turkey. Between 1830 and 1833, Egyptian armies inflicted defeat after defeat on Ottoman garrisons and detachments. By the middle of 1833, the pasha’s forces had advanced to within 150 miles of Istanbul, and his recently rebuilt fleet was moored near the Bosphorus. Panicked, the sultan asked the Russians for help. The tsar had long nurtured a desire to establish Russian dominance in Istanbul, and he decided to save the sultan and thereby become the protector of the empire. In order to keep Russian influence in check, the English and the French then closed ranks and issued communiqués informing Muhammad Ali that they would not permit him to occupy the capital. Faced with the combined might of the European powers, Muhammad Ali negotiated terms. His armies departed, but he was now lord not just of Egypt but of Syria, Arabia, and the Sudan as well. Having suffered no setbacks on the field, he remained a formidable threat.
The sultan, Mahmud II, knew that, and it was intolerable. He had spent most of his decades in power one step behind Muhammad Ali, and the humiliation of 1833 made him determined to established his authority over the Egyptian upstart. However, he needed European support to succeed. By the end of the decade, Ottoman diplomats had successfully convinced the English that Muhammad Ali had to be humbled. The pasha himself had made no moves against the sultan, and had sought only to make his family hereditary rulers of Egypt and Syria. But in the summer of 1839, assured of English backing, Mahmud sent his new army to challenge Muhammad Ali in Syria, and the result was a disastrous defeat for the sultan. Soon after, the Ottoman fleet, whose commanders had been seduced by the promise of titles and gold, deserted to
the Egyptian side. Mahmud, suffering from tuberculosis, died before he learned of these disasters. In great pain and weary after thirty years in power, he drank himself into a fatal stupor just before messengers arrived in the capital bearing the grim news.
Once again, however, the states of Europe defended the sultanate against the Egyptian vassal. This time, Muhammad Ali did not blink. He refused to withdraw. But in his age and pride, he had forgotten just how strong the English were, and his fleet was destroyed in the harbors of Acre and Beirut. The pasha was forced to withdraw his army from Turkey and Syria, and while he was allowed the face-saving gesture of a decree establishing his sons and heirs as rulers of Egypt, the damage had been done. Egypt never again threatened the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, the Ottomans had to confront the fact that their continued existence now depended on the European countries that had rescued them.
THE OTTOMANS REFORM
THE CHALLENGE
posed by Muhammad Ali and the humiliation of needing to turn to Europe for survival precipitated the next wave of Ottoman reforms. While the Ottomans never ceased to identify themselves as a Muslim dynasty that was part of a long and noble tradition stretching back to the first four caliphs, religion was all but invisible as a factor during these decades of reform. The Ottomans wore their Islam lightly, especially when it came to governing. Their lack of dogmatism made them flexible and resilient, and even though the state had stagnated, that underlying strength remained. With Europe a critical threat to their power, the Ottomans tried to adapt, and their version of Islam did not stand in the way of change. As a result, the reforms of the nineteenth century owed more to Europe than to the Quran, and the Ottoman state became barely distinguishable from that of its European rivals.
Mahmud had wanted to modernize the army but tried to keep the traditional structure of the empire unchanged. Though the Ottoman elites dabbled with the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution, they had no appetite for liberal reform. But with the death of Mahmud and the near death of the Ottoman state, a new generation came to power.
Many of these young men had spent a few years in Paris along with the Egyptian students sent by Muhammad Ali. They had studied the success not just of European armies but of European bureaucracies. With the passing of Mahmud, they engineered a stunning new wave of reform.
The
Hatt-i Serif of Gulhane
(Noble Edict of the Rose Chamber) was issued on November 4, 1839. It was read out loud by the dynamic foreign minister, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, in front of the assembled nobles of the court, including the sultan and the grand vizier, in a formal garden beneath the Topkapi Palace. No one who listened that day failed to appreciate its significance. Along with the 1856
Hatt-i Humayun
, these edicts were to the Ottoman state what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were to the American republic. These decrees set the empire on a path of reform that simultaneously centralized the state and granted specific and unalienable rights to its citizens.
The Rose Chamber decree began with the simple, uncontroversial statement that all law in the empire flowed from the Quran and the sharia, and that those two pillars were the foundation of the state. “But in the last 150 years,” it continued, “former power and welfare turned into weakness and poverty. It is absolutely impossible for a country not ruled
by shariah rules to survive [As a result], we decided to issue some
new laws to govern our sublime state and our country through the mercy of God and guidance of our Prophet.” Having established the reasons for the decree, Mustafa Reshid then described the new laws. First, the life and property of all citizens of the empire, whether they were Muslims, Christians, or Jews, were to be treated with the utmost respect and no punishment was to be meted out without due process in courts of law. The old system of tax farming, often abused by capricious officials, was abolished and replaced with a new tax code; and military conscription was ended.
The subsequent edict of 1856 built on these foundations The sultan, basking in his semi-victory over the Russians during the Crimean War, declared that all subjects of the empire, Muslim and non-Muslim, were equal, and that henceforth the
millets
would be integrated into the bureaucracy. In essence, each religious community would retain its self-government for certain matters and also become part of a centralized system based in Istanbul. In addition, every inhabitant of the empire, regardless of religion or ethnicity, was considered a citizen, and all citizens
had rights and obligations. Some of these would be protected and enforced by the
millet
, while others would be guaranteed by the government in Istanbul.
Collectively, these reforms were known as
Tanzimat
, the reordering of Ottoman society. For most of its history, the empire had been, as one English writer cleverly put it, “less like a country than a block of flats inhabited by a number of families that met only on the stairs.” The families were the various religious and ethnic communities, and the flats were the
millets.
As a result of the decrees of 1839 and 1856, however, some of the walls separating the families came down, and the sultan became a more active presence. Having lived semiautonomously for centuries, the citizens of the empire were now told they were members of a single political community with the sultan at the top and Istanbul at the center. While this change temporarily strengthened the Ottoman state, it also led to its demise.
5
The
Tanzimat
was nothing if not contradictory. The reforms were initiated by a ruler who had rarely been answerable to anyone but God and by ministers who borrowed from the secular French Revolution to enshrine notions of individual rights and civil law. While increasing the power of the
millets
, the reforms were designed to strengthen the central bureaucracy and allow the government in Istanbul to collect more revenue so that it could outfit a larger, more modern army and navy. And while the movement declared its respect for ethnic and religious diversity, it unleashed the same forces of nationalism that ultimately pushed both the empire and the states of Europe away from inclusiveness and toward arrogant intolerance.
The official language of the Rose Chamber decree invoked God, the sharia, and the Quran, yet the actual reforms steered the state away from its traditional pillars. In fact, the entire history of these decades highlights just how minimal a role religion played in the evolution of the Ottoman Empire and the Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ruling elites of the empire were culturally Muslim, yet there was nothing about their Islam that precluded turning to the Russian tsar, who was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, for help against an Albanian Muslim ruler of the mostly Muslim but partly Coptic province of Egypt. Nothing in their Islam precluded alliances with the thoroughly Protestant England or with the adamantly secular
French state. And their Islam fluidly accommodated the melting-pot nationalism in vogue in Europe.
On the borders of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by a Catholic monarch, was a mix of Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. The Catholicism of the ruling class was the top layer of a multiconfessional society, and while the emperor demanded the loyalty of his subjects, he did not insist that they worship as he did. That was the model that the sultan emulated.
It was an easy shift. Centuries of Ottoman jurisprudence and practice supported the live-and-let-live approach that the decrees of 1839 and 1856 enshrined. The ancient Quranic prescription that the People of the Book should be allowed to practice their religion and should not be subject to coercion was in harmony with liberal notions of freedom and equality. And the
dhimmi
framework that had been established in the early centuries of Islam, which required Christians and Jews to pay the state a tax in return for living peacefully under Muslim rule, fit neatly with the nineteenth-century efforts by the Ottomans to rationalize and modernize the tax collection system.
In essence, the reforms of the
Tanzimat
era were less of a departure than they seemed; they made explicit what had been implicit. The decrees announced that all religions would be tolerated and that the
millets
would form the basis of administrative units, but this was more a change in form than substance. The goal of the reformers was to replace the traditional hidebound Ottoman bureaucracy with a modern state apparatus capable of raising revenue and defending the borders in the face of aggressive European competitors. But in doing so, the reformers built on a framework that had divided the empire into ethnic and religious communities for centuries.