The contradictions should have been apparent. Rather than forcing the inhabitants of the empire to see themselves as “Ottomans,” the reforms instead led each group to become more conscious of its religious and ethnic distinctiveness. Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, and Jews became more attuned to their own identities, and in short order began to resent the attempts of the government in Istanbul to forge them into one Ottoman nation.
And yet, here as elsewhere, the picture is complicated. In the end, the Ottoman state did not successfully transform itself, but large numbers of
people within the empire found the notion of progress, equality, tolerance, and citizenship appealing. In cities such as Smyrna and Istanbul, the second half of the nineteenth century was a heady, exciting time. Greek, Jewish, and Armenian merchants were at the forefront of substantial social and political changes. Not only did they serve as economic and social middlemen connecting Europe and the empire, but they also saw a possible future when the last vestiges of discrimination against them would dissolve. In Egypt, Alexandria (which was staunchly independent but still part of the Ottoman ecosystem) grew into a cosmopolitan city that prized its diversity and prospered in a way it had not since the days of Cleopatra. In the Balkans, the city of Salonica continued to be a trading hub, and in the eastern Mediterranean the sleepy ports of Acre, Beirut, and Tripoli, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had bridged Europe and the Near East, once again became centers of trade and culture.
Throughout the Muslim world, there was a concerted effort to move closer to Europe. The sultans who succeeded Mahmud II worked tirelessly to establish themselves as respectable monarchs who would be welcome in the halls of Europe. The family of Muhammad Ali devoted themselves to transforming Egypt into a nation worthy of European respect. “Egypt,” said Khedive Ismail, Muhammad Ali’s grandson and ruler during the building of the Suez Canal, “must become part of Europe.” In order to show just how European he was and could be, Ismail built rail lines, palaces, military barracks, and roads. Not only did he underwrite the construction of the Suez Canal, but he also spent lavish sums of money to turn Cairo into the Paris of the Near East, complete with an opera house, a museum, wide tree-lined boulevards, and hulking overdecorated edifices to house the new bureaucracy he created. Unfortunately, in order to pay for these endeavors, he went heavily into debt to European banks, and soon found that his reach had exceeded his grasp.
In Istanbul, the sultans and their ministers did the same. A new imperial residence, the 250-room Dolmabahce Palace, was built along the water in the modern section of the city, at an extraordinary cost for what amounted to a knockoff of Versailles. Crystal chandeliers lit overly large formal dining halls and ballrooms, and almost every piece of furniture was imported from Europe. The Ottoman ruling class exchanged its traditional robes for the latest fashions from Paris and Vienna, and traded
divans and pillows for stiff-backed couches and armoires. They drank wine from German crystal goblets, dined with imported cutlery and imported ceramic plates, and dabbed their mouths with imported linens. They held balls where string quartets played the latest waltzes by Schumann, where the ladies danced in gowns that the empress Eugénie of France might have worn, and the men wore frock coats that would have suited any masquerade in Prague or Berlin.
In order to show the world that they were not the warriors of old, Sultan Abdul Aziz and Khedive Ismail of Egypt both went to Paris for the Exposition of 1867. To their delight and surprise, they were feted as celebrities. Prior to their arrival, they had underwritten the construction of sumptuous pavilions for the exposition in order to demonstrate the progress their societies had made, and to show that they belonged among the leading nations of the world. Though Ismail was still theoretically the sultan’s vassal, the two were in competition, and they eyed each other warily. They were not the only Muslim rulers to jockey for favor in Europe. Several years later, the shah of Iran, annoyed that the sultan had been so well received in Paris, set out on an official tour of his own, by way of Russia. He was also feted, but he insisted that his wives return early after he discovered that the Europeans allowed the sexes to mingle in public.
Had a poll been conducted surveying Muslim attitudes toward the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, with samples drawn from Morocco, Algeria (which was then mostly under French control), Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Persia, and northern India, the response would have been overwhelmingly positive. By and large, European nations were admired for the rigor and efficiency of their armies and for the way they organized their societies in support of the state. While a strong undercurrent of rivalry and distrust remained, many believed that the future would see less war, more commerce, and more peaceful coexistence.
As always, there were exceptions: the Balkan provinces were anything but placid. The Serbs and the Bulgarians were seized with nationalist ambitions, supported by selective historical memory and overlaid with religious and ethnic grievances. The governing Turks viewed the Balkans with suspicion and disdain, and relations deteriorated as the century progressed, thanks in no small measure to the meddling of the Austro-Hungarians, the Russians, and the English. The Balkans eventually became the most contentious and unstable point of contact between
Muslims and Christians, which led to multiple small wars and eventually set off the conflagration of World War I.
Hindsight allows us to see what worked and what didn’t in the nineteenth century, but at the time, the Ottomans seemed to be succeeding in wrenching a moribund bureaucracy out of its stupor and making the empire competitive. The army was retrained and acquitted itself respectably alongside the French and the English in the Crimean War against the Russians. The administration of the empire was rationalized, and the new taxation regime made it possible for the treasury to collect a steady stream of income. Roads, railways, and irrigation systems boosted economic and agrarian activity. Istanbul joined London, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna as a leading European capital, and whenever the sultan toured Europe, he was greeted not just as a visiting dignitary but as a charismatic visionary responsible for bringing the empire into the concert of nations.
In private, European leaders were less respectful and scorned the empire for its weakness, but little was said about its religious makeup. Christianity and Judaism were in retreat from public life on the continent. There were exceptions, of course, Catholic Ireland being just one, but in general, religion in nineteenth-century Europe was less important than nationalism. The French and English looked down on the Ottomans as a backward race mired in ossified customs and traditions, and they certainly identified Islam as a factor contributing to the decadence of the empire. But they felt the same about the Indians and the Chinese and their religions and customs. In short, Western powers regarded all non-Western peoples as less civilized, and they tended to view traditional organized religion, including Christianity, as a source of weakness. Even with the missionary impulses of English and Scottish imperialists, religion as a spur to global expansion was never as potent as economic interests, political rivalries, and nationalist imperatives.
European expansion combined a passion for progress with pure power politics. The utopian impulse to create a better world, where human reason and ingenuity would invent technologies to make hunger, war, and disease obsolete, walked hand in hand with the ancient human desire to conquer and control. Until early in the twentieth century, the gloss on the nineteenth century was that it was a period of human progress, defined by the spread of liberalism emanating from Europe
and by the scientific advances of the age. Later it became fashionable to excoriate the Victorians and the French of the many republics as hypocrites barely more civilized than the people they conquered. But reality is never quite so binary, and the nineteenth century was no exception.
For most of the century, however, religion was rarely a primary cause of either conflict or concord between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The Ottoman Empire, along with other Muslim communities in Persia, India, and Indonesia, emulated the European powers, and that meant that Islam receded from public and political life. Though historians and polemicists have looked back at the nineteenth century and found the seeds of modern religious conflicts, at the time, few people thought of religious identity as an important factor propelling their societies. European expansion, science, technology, and ideas such as nationalism would have come to mind more readily, while religion would, more often than not, have been seen as a quaint anachronism.
Of course, religion as a source of tension had not been completely eliminated, but it was the supposedly secular Europeans who aggravated matters. While the French and the English, and in their own way the Russians, all moved away from the religious fervor of the Middle Ages and the Reformation, they still felt an affinity for their coreligionists. As a result, they developed bonds with those communities within the Ottoman Empire that shared their faith. French merchants needed partners in Lebanon and Syria, and found them in Catholics and Maronite Arabs. Russian diplomats and traders looked for bankers and translators and found them in Slavic communities in the Balkans that were still part of the Ottoman state.
The links between these groups and the European powers then became an excuse for intervention in the internal affairs of the Ottoman state. The old system of capitulations mutated into a series of laws that allowed Europeans to act with near impunity within the empire, untouchable by the Ottoman authorities, and European diplomats and merchants extended their protection to those who had helped them. That created tension between the Christians and Jews who worked for and with the Europeans and the Muslims who did not. What began as convenient relationships grounded in religious affinity became an irritant and then a wedge that jeopardized not only the Ottoman effort at reform but the internal stability and integrity of the entire state.
THE DARKEST HOUR AND THEN A NEW DAWN
DAMASCUS IN 1860
was a mélange of Christian sects, Muslims, Druze, and Jews, along with a powerful group of European merchants and envoys. The city had become a conduit for Mediterranean trade with the inland regions of central Anatolia and Iraq. As Lebanon was drawn into the orbit of France and its ambitious emperor, Napoleon III, the Maronite Christians grew not only wealthier but more independent. They formed tight networks with Catholics in Damascus, who also benefited from the increased economic activity.
These developments did not go unnoticed, especially by those who did not have the same advantages. In 1856, the
Hatt-i Humayun
granted the Christians in the Ottoman Empire full legal equality with Muslims. While theoretically this made Christian subjects eligible for military service, it was relatively easy for them to pay a fee instead of actually serving in the army. Furthermore, in Syria and in Lebanon especially, Christians enjoyed the protection of European consuls. Each of the major European powers in effect sponsored one of the Christian denominations. In addition to the French interest in the Catholics and the Maronites, the Russians became patrons of the Greek Orthodox, and the English extended their hand to Protestant communities as well as to the non-Christian Druze.
It was one thing not to have to serve in the army; even most Muslims did not begrudge that. But under the capitulations, Europeans and their clients were exempt from taxation and were outside the Ottoman legal system. Local businessmen took advantage of the capitulations by becoming affiliated with a consulate and thereby making their ventures essentially tax-free. That struck established Muslim merchants as cheating, because it gave the Christians a distinct advantage. The new relationships with the Western powers also disrupted the delicate equilibrium that had existed in the region for centuries. The average Muslim had no recourse to consular protection; he had no easy way of avoiding taxes; and it was only with great difficulty that he could avoid conscription. And as in any situation where the status quo changes dramatically and rapidly, there was resentment, and there was a backlash.
It began in 1858 in Lebanon. The Druze had been losing ground to the Maronites, and they struck back. The local civil war led to refugees, most of them Christians, fleeing over the mountains to what they
thought was the safety of Damascus and Aleppo. But the influx proved to be a fatal spark for the simmering animosities of the Muslims of Damascus. Bitter after years of watching their relative status slip and that of the Christians, with their European protectors, increase, they retaliated. On July 9, 1860, Muslims massacred five thousand Christians in Damascus. There were also riots in Aleppo and nearby towns, and there might have been further violence but for the efforts of both Muslims and Christians to contain it. Hearing the news, Napoleon III of France threatened to send an army to restore order.
For their part, the Ottoman authorities responded forcefully. They understood the stakes. The Francophone foreign minister, Fu’ad Pasha, was dispatched to settle matters in both Syria and Lebanon. Druze and Muslim leaders who had incited the murderous mobs were sentenced to exile or execution. The government and the administrative districts of Lebanon were reorganized along denominational lines in order to give the Maronite Christian community more buffers. These measures placated the Europeans, and also reassured the Christians of Syria and Lebanon. Justice had been done, and life returned to normal.
6
Much like the violence in Andalusia that culminated in the massacre of Cordoban Jews in 1066, the civil war between Muslims, Christians, and Druze from 1858 to 1860 has been taken as another exhibit in the case against Islam. But to indict Islam for this violence is the equivalent of condemning Anglicanism for the occasional depredations of the British army in its many wars of conquest in the nineteenth century, or to excoriate Catholicism because of French massacres of Algerians during the same period, or to charge American Protestantism for the slaughter of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. Religious identity and affiliation in all of these cases did contribute to “group cohesion,” as Ibn Khaldun might have said. And religion was one way that groups differentiated themselves and distinguished “us” from “them.” But in none of these cases, including what happened in Damascus, was religion the cause of the violence.