Peace Be Upon You (37 page)

The year 1860 in Damascus was an anomaly that had more to do with the encroaching West than with relations between Christians and Muslims. We know that it was an anomaly because Muslims and Christians had lived side by side in Damascus for centuries without violence. Even during the time of the Crusades, when Muslims of Syria looked on native Christians and Jews as a possible fifth column who would open the
gates (literally) to Western Christian armies, there were no comparable acts of retribution. What changed in 1860 was that the centuries-old balance between Muslims and Christians in Syria and Lebanon was disrupted by the presence of the West. After the Anglo-French intervention against Muhammad Ali, there was increased European involvement in the internal affairs of the Near East, which meant both more trade and a shift in the status quo. The eruption of violence in 1860 was one consequence.

Remarkably, within months after the riots, not only was order restored, but so too was something resembling the old harmony. Christians once again went about their lives as a flourishing minority in the midst of a Muslim majority. The
Tanzimat
reforms emanating from Istanbul promised equal rights and special privileges for religious communities in the empire, and the Christian sects of Syria and Lebanon were among the beneficiaries. Aided by Europe, Christians in the Near East enjoyed more rights and freedoms than they had before the deadly riots.

A casual observer in the years after 1860 would have been struck by the relative harmony that prevailed, and by the energy and hum of commercial and intellectual activity. But there were problems beneath the surface. The Ottoman reform movement established clear and nearly equal rights for religious minorities. That was supposed to make all citizens of the empire legally the same, but by building on the
millet
system, the
Tanzimat
created inadvertent problems. Loyalty to the
millet
community was almost always stronger than loyalty to the sultan or to the empire, and the concept of “Ottoman” citizenship was still unfamiliar. Though the
Tanzimat
reforms were designed to preserve, strengthen, and modernize the empire, they had the unintended consequence of sharpening religious and ethnic differences.
⁷

As the nineteenth century neared its end, ethnic nationalism became more evident. The Turks began to imagine a new, smaller empire defined by its Turkishness. There was a parallel development among the Arabs of the Near East, who contemplated a future separate from the Ottoman Empire. They started to think of themselves as Arabs first, Muslims or Christian second, and distinct and different from the Turks who ruled them. They turned to the distant memory of the early Arab dynasties, and to their days of past glory. Interestingly, Arab Christians were forceful proponents of the ideas and programs that evolved into
Arab nationalism, and they unequivocally asserted that Arab nationalism could not be detached from Islam.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, these ideas were in their infancy, and were part of a mix that included Ottoman nationalism, European notions of a global community of peoples and nations freed by technology from the cycles of the past, and a belief in religious coexistence that would lead to a dwindling of old traditions in the face ofthat strange force known as modernity. Many Arabs and Turks viewed the mosque as a quaint institution, prone to superstition and backwardness. Some educated Syrians or Egyptians, like their counterparts in England or Germany, believed that religion was retreating from the public sphere and would eventually be relegated to the home and family. The
ulama
were seen as ignorant, though earnest, individuals who could not grasp the demands of the modern world but could make it more difficult for the Arabs to become part of it. Others, however, were not so quick to dismiss religion and tried to blend it with reform. They recognized that their societies needed to evolve and modernize but believed that it was possible both to “Westernize” the “Muslim” world and to keep Islam central.

As in any period when the old order is breaking down, there was no lack of ideas. These decades were tumultuous and chaotic, swirling with conflicting visions. The Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was in profound flux. The only constant was that the old was evaporating. Uncertain but hopeful, Arabs, Turks, Christians, Muslims, and Jews looked to a future of working with the West to construct a new order.

I
N THE LAST DECADES
of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, European pressure intensified on all parts of the Muslim world, and more territory was conquered. Morocco, the rest of Algeria, and Tunisia fell under the direct rule of France. In 1882, Egypt was invaded and then governed by England. France became the de facto protector of Lebanon, and England extended its influence over both Persia and parts of the Balkans. Russia became more aggressive in its support for Bulgarian independence and came into conflict with the British in remote parts of Central Asia. Successive generations of British politicians jockeyed with the Russians for influence in Afghanistan and Persia because of Russian desires to expand south and England’s desire to provide an ever larger buffer for its prize possession, India. While Russia was England’s primary rival in Asia and the Balkans, France was its main rival in Africa. As the French moved south into the Sahara and toward West Africa, the British tried to create an unbroken line of control stretching from Egypt to South Africa. That led to friction with the French, which at several points in the late 1800s nearly escalated into war.

The societies of the Muslim world reacted to these developments with more reforms and more soul searching. What began as a trickle of changes in the early nineteenth century became a roaring current in the final decades. While Algeria was as different from Persia and India as England was from Argentina, the way these societies reacted to Western expansion was similar. In almost every part of the Muslim world, there were some who enthusiastically embraced the mores and manners of the
West, and others who resisted at all costs. There were some who ventured abroad, studied the fundamentals of Western science and philosophy, and returned home to lead a new wave of reform; and there were others who retreated more deeply into the comfortable lassitude of the past, clinging to dreams that the West would retreat as surely as the Crusaders had left Palestine centuries before.

Almost everywhere, however, reform movements became the driving force. Some looked to remake the Muslim world along Western lines, with constitutions that mimicked those of France and, to a lesser extent, the United States. In Istanbul in 1876 and Tehran in 1905, constitutionalists inaugurated a new era of government that limited the power of the sultan, shah, or khedive and granted judges and legislatures a measure of autonomy and independence. The constitutionalist movements were careful to incorporate the ancient Quranic protection of the rights of the People of the Book, and they were models of multicultural toleration for religious and ethnic minorities.

Even as many leading voices argued for reform, attitudes toward the West remained ambivalent. It wasn’t as if millions in the Muslim world suddenly decided that it was time to change. Change was forced on them—not all at once, but with each passing decade, it became impossible for societies ruled by Muslim leaders to deny that the balance had shifted decidedly against them and in favor of the West. The challenge at the beginning of the century and at the end was similar—how to compete with the West and remain independent—but the stakes seemed higher as the century wore on. The heirs of Muhammad Ali in Egypt and the second generation of reformers in the Ottoman Empire asked the same question, but with the added knowledge that France, England, and Great Britain were more likely to invade and rule directly than they had been before.

As the nineteenth century ended, the idea of progress became more deeply embedded. Reformers have to believe that the future can be better, and that the right choices made by the right people will create a stable, prosperous, and successful society. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age of Muslim reform movements, and the outcome of these movements in turn shaped how Muslims, Christians, and Jews would interact in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

AN EGYPTIAN AFFAIR

THE DIPLOMATS
of the Ottoman Empire continued to hone their skills of playing one European power against another. Internally, Ottoman identity fought what was ultimately a losing battle against Turkish identity, but for a time, that made for a vibrant intellectual life in Istanbul. Poets, playwrights, philosophers, and writers debated the virtues of “Ottomanness” and “Turkishness” with the same vitality that French intellectuals argued socialism, democracy, and class in the Third Republic. But the brief success of the constitutional movement was ended by a coup from above. Sultan Abdul Hamid II abrogated the newly passed document and used the reforms of the previous decades to create a harsh autocratic government interested primarily in collecting revenue to fund armies and railroads.

The Ottomans were able to keep the Europeans at bay, but the Egyptians were not. The building of the Suez Canal ensured that Egypt would be drawn more closely into the orbit of Europe. At first, that had been one of the selling points that convinced Khedive Said and then Ismail to join with the French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps to fund the construction of the massive hundred-mile-long trench connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. With the completion of the canal in 1869, however, Ismail found himself heavily in debt to French and English bankers, who continued to extend his line of credit in the 1870s as he scrambled to remake his country. Soon, he was personally insolvent, as was the Egyptian treasury.

Forced by his creditors to hand control of Egypt’s finances to a consortium of European banks, Ismail was then deposed, and his ramshackle treasury and tottering government were left to his young, untested son. English and French officials installed themselves as advisers in the major ministries. This takeover of the government did not go unnoticed, and a resistance movement formed. It was led by a native Egyptian army officer, and its aims were straightforward: to restore sanity to Egypt’s finances, to make the government of Egypt less Turkish and more Egyptian, and to decrease the influence of England. It was, in short, the first major eruption of Egyptian nationalism.

Muhammad Ali and his heirs may have wanted to transform Egypt into a power to be respected, but they were an Albanian family surrounded by a Turkish elite governing an Arab-speaking populace. When
the country’s finances cracked under the weight of Ismail’s ambitions, some Egyptians began to consider an alternate Arab Egypt that would be independent of both Europe and of the Ottoman elite. The sultan in Istanbul disapproved, but he was consumed with unrest in the Balkans. The British, however, with the newly opened Suez Canal linking Europe to Asia, were not prepared to let a popular Egyptian army officer take control of the government. When riots broke out in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, the British fleet bombarded the port, and a British army quelled the uprising with its customary, not to mention lethal, efficiency.

British control of Egypt lasted, in one form or another, until the end of World War II. Though Egypt was declared independent by Great Britain in 1922, British troops remained in control of the Suez Canal zone, and British influence over Egypt’s foreign policy was close to total. In time, Egypt developed a robust nationalist movement that worked to end British rule, but in the immediate aftermath of the 1882 occupation, most Egyptian nationalists resigned themselves to the changed reality and looked for ways to reform the country. The soul searching produced at least one reformer who not only fused Islam with Western modernity but offered a template for dozens of other movements throughout the Muslim world in the twentieth century.

Muhammad Abduh was born in 1849 in a village in the Nile Delta. Life in that lush, fecund land was beginning to change, but it was still a world determined by the waxing and waning of the Nile floods, by peasants planting crops, by festivals full of music and noise and Sufi masters walking on coals and charming snakes, and by the village mosque with its imam preaching sermons that could have been heard a thousand years before. As a bright, precocious child, Abduh was sent to study at Al-Azhar, which was the oldest university in the Muslim world and still among the most prestigious. It was not, however, known for being forward-looking. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Abduh took his formal education, which would have included immersion in the Quran, the sharia, the hadith, and jurisprudence, and applied it to the pressing question of his day: what to do about the West?

The events of 1882 sharpened his answers, but even before, he had been intent on synthesizing the traditions of Islam with the philosophical and scientific innovations introduced by the West. While he excelled as a student and then as a teacher of the traditional curriculum of Al-Azhar,
he had been drawn into the orbit of progressive thinkers who congregated in Cairo in the 1870s. One of the leading lights ofthat circle was an itinerant teacher named Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. An Iranian who claimed to have been born in Afghanistan, he was in fact a Shi’ite who pretended to be a Sunni in order to broaden his appeal. Afghani spent most of his adult life in a peripatetic whirl. He was a decade older than Abduh, and by the time they met in the 1870s, he had become a minor celebrity, known for his lectures and his writings on science, Islam, and the West. He was charismatic and eccentric, and maintained an aura of mystery. He was part Pied Piper, part academic philosopher, and part agitator who gravitated toward the innermost circles of power and influence in both Europe and the Muslim world. At various points in his career, he was a confidant of the Ottoman sultan, a fixture at the court of the Qajar shah in Persia, a gadfly to the salon intellectuals of Paris, and a dinner guest of the Churchills in London. Like Socrates, he was known as much for the fame of his pupils as he was for his own teachings, and Abduh was his Plato.