Peace Be Upon You (40 page)

Beirut was one melting pot, but perhaps the most extraordinary crossroads was Alexandria. This ancient capital of Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great and ruled by the Greek Ptolemies until their last descendant, Cleopatra, cuddled up with an asp and died, had dwindled to a cultural and economic backwater by the early nineteenth century. Then it began to stir under Muhammad Ali. As he looked to the West to reinvigorate his country, Alexandria connected Egypt to the ports of Europe. Foreigners flooded the districts just off the quays, and the city became a bustling hodgepodge of languages and cultures, home to a diverse assortment of Muslims, Christians, and Jews united by their common interest in lucre. Under the ambitious Khedive Ismail, Alexandria became even more central to the financial and economic life of the eastern Mediterranean, though its bombardment by the English navy in 1882 destroyed some of the gracious mansions lining the shore. The economy soon recovered, and Alexandria attracted bankers, merchants, artisans, archeologists, and wanderers who were drawn by the chaotic rhythms of a city planted partly in Europe, partly in Egypt, and fully in neither.

For a brief few decades, Alexandria was home to a permissive culture that winked and nodded at the offbeat sexual proclivities of many of its expatriate denizens. At the old century’s end and the new century’s beginning, it attracted a literary crowd that included most famously the Greek Constantine Cavafy, the American Lawrence Durrell, and the very British E. M. Forster. Like other cosmopolitan port cities, it was
both part of and separate from its hinterland. Arabic was spoken, but so were Greek, French, Armenian, English, Italian, and Turkish. The call to prayer could be heard from the mosques along the shore and inland, but so could the ringing of bells from the churches, and the blowing the ram’s horn on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah from one or more of the city’s synagogues.

The locals were no more homogeneous than the expatriates and themselves formed a crazy quilt of ethnicity and religion. The Muslims were mostly Sunni, but the Christians represented almost every denomination. There were Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Latin Uniates, Greek Catholics, Maronites, Armenian Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and even a few members of the Church of Scotland. These Christian sects were usually friendly or indifferent to Muslims and Jews but could be quite antagonistic toward one another. The Copts said—correctly—that they had been there the longest and so deserved some sort of respect and primacy, but few of the other sects cared about tenure. Meanwhile, there was also a wealthy Jewish community that could trace its roots back to the Hellenistic period and claimed, with some justification, to be one of the oldest continuous Jewish settlements in the world. And though the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of Alexandria were aware of their sects and subsects, they all worked to extract what they could from a world dominated by Europeans. They were intrepid and entrepreneurial, and looked to a future where people and nations would be judged on what they did and how much they earned rather than on what they believed or the god they worshiped.
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NATIONAL HOPES AND DREAMS

AS THE NINETEENTH
century came to a close, Europeans had exported not only technology but ideas, and the belief in progress had taken root almost everywhere. At times, it was an awkward graft, especially in Eastern societies that had a less linear sense of time and history. But in many parts of the Muslim world, it was an attractive formula. As Abduh understood, one of the strengths of classical Muslim states was their ability to evolve. The notion of “progress,” if not the word itself, was embedded in their culture. And so when most of the Muslim world
fell under the direct or indirect sway of Europe in the nineteenth century, there was no shortage of people who believed that change was possible.

When the reformers looked ahead, they envisioned a day when their countries would be able to stand with Europe when they wished, and against Europe if they had to. In the interim, they recognized that the playing field wasn’t level, and they sought European financial, intellectual, and military advice and assistance. But even as they learned from the West, they knew that there might be conflict before there could be genuine coexistence. Until Europe ceased to rule, there could be no meeting of independent equals. Preferably, conflict would be minimal or nonexistent. In the face of pressure, protests, and resistance movements, the British and French would do what was prudent and withdraw. After that, there would still be competition, of course, but it would not need to take the form of war. Instead, the Ottoman elite, the rulers of Egypt who worked with the English occupation, and others looked to a time when the Muslim world and the West would trade and exchange ideas as equals. The first step was internal reform; the next would be to reclaim full independence.

The dream of progress, therefore, did not mean a passive acceptance of European rule. Quite the opposite. Progress for the reformers meant the end of European hegemony and the restoration of full independence. The humiliations of imperial rule were real. Lord Cromer, who almost single-handedly controlled what went on in Egypt from 1882 until early in the twentieth century, was undisguised in his contempt for the country. He treated its inhabitants as wayward children in need of instruction. “What Egypt required most of all,” he said in 1883, “was order and good government. Perhaps … liberty would follow afterwards. No one but a dreamy theorist could imagine that the natural order of things could be reversed and that liberty could first be accorded to the poor ignorant representatives of the Egyptian people, and that the latter would then be able to evolve order out of chaos.”
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Even those who agonized about the problems in their societies were repelled by these patronizing attitudes. Educated, cultivated Egyptians chafed at being treated like errant children. Who were the British, they mused, to lecture us about religious tolerance and liberty when Copts, Muslims, and Jews had lived side by side for fourteen hundred years “in the greatest unity and harmony”? Who were they to tell Egypt about
civilization when the inhabitants of the Nile Valley had created a society thousands of years before the English had even learned to write? Admiration for what Europe could offer sat side by side with indignation about what Europeans often did offer.

These were the dominant themes, but, of course, some followed their own muses and approached these encounters from a different perspective. There were the voices crying in the wilderness like Blunt and Pick-thall who believed that the hypocrisy of the West was a more damning weakness than any of the problems in the Muslim world. There were merchants on both sides who had no interest in these larger ideas. And there were missionaries who worked not to convert Muslims but to improve relations between faiths and cultures and who spent decades trying to build bridges.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, nationalism complicated matters even further. In his book
Imagined Communities
, Benedict Anderson defines nationalism as a collective act of imagination. A nation “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” The concept of nation is a product of European history. With the development of mass printing in the sixteenth century, individuals slowly began to imagine nations that were distinct from the religious community and the ruling dynasty
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As nationalism gathered momentum in the nineteenth century, organized religion in Europe declined. As God and the church faded, or were banished, from public life in Europe, the cult of the nation took their place.

Nationalism became a pivotal force in Europe and throughout the world. Bulgarian and Serbian nationalism led to independence from the Ottoman Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and in turn helped launch a wave of Turkish nationalism that resulted in a cycle of violence in the Balkans. Inside the Ottoman Empire, Turkish nationalism became increasingly prominent at the end of the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. As the Ottoman reforms failed to make the empire an equal competitor, and as North Africa, Egypt, and Lebanon became provinces of the West, a new generation of Turks distinguished Turkishness from Ottomanness. Disillusioned by Abdul Hamid, a group calling themselves the “Young Turks,” many of whom were in exile in Paris, dedicated themselves to the cause of the Turkish nation. In their
reading, Ottoman greatness was Turkish greatness, and the Arab provinces were simply areas that had been ruled and acquired by Turkish rulers. This revision of the Ottoman past, though it erased the rich legacy of multiethnic and multireligious cooperation, took root in Istanbul and in Turkey itself. The Turkish nationalists did what all nationalists do: they defined an “us” based on language, ethnicity, a shared past, and a common religion. And they defined a “them” who spoke different languages, had a different past, and were not only distinct but lesser and even inferior.

Nationalism accelerated the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The old
millets
began to think of themselves as independent nations, as did many of the provinces. Armenians demanded Armenian autonomy; Egyptians fought for Egyptian independence; and the Arabs of Syria agitated for an Arab nation. These ideas did not develop simultaneously. Egyptian nationalism emerged before the Arab nationalism of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the concept of nationalism took root almost everywhere, from Morocco and Algeria in the west to Iran in the east.

The process was not linear, and for many years, nationalism was a phenomenon confined to the elite. A fellah working the fields in Upper Egypt would not have spoken of an Egyptian nation any more than a Turkish farmer in central Anatolia would have thought of himself as a citizen of a place called Turkey. To confuse matters further, there were competing nationalisms. There were Ottoman nationalists, who argued that the empire, with its shared history, actually constituted a nation-state. They had limited success convincing others of that, but their campaign was no more or less futile than that of elites in the Austro-Hungarian Empire trying to do the same. There was also a group of Islamic nationalists who combined the modern European idea of a nation-state with the Islamic ideal of the
umma
to argue that there was a transnational Muslim community that had been fragmented for centuries but that should be reconstituted under the leadership of a new caliph.

Later on, nationalism would reveal its darker side, of ethnic purity and state control of what citizens said and thought. At first, however, nationalism was allied to the ideals of progress and linked to the sense that Muslim societies were changing for the better. An independent, sovereign nation was hailed as the fulfillment of Muslim hopes and dreams,
and independent states would be the reward for the arduous work of reform. The beginning of the twentieth century was heralded in Europe as the dawn of a better age of mankind, and that sentiment permeated the Muslim world. Just as the prevailing attitude in Europe was that war and disease would disappear in the twentieth century, it was widely believed in the Muslim world that the twentieth century would see an end to imperialism and the revival of Muslim societies. That would require effort and would not come about without a struggle, but there was optimism that everything would eventually work out.

The dream of a renaissance after reform was secular. Educated, elite Muslims did not see a prominent role for religion in public life. Nonetheless, their dreams were grounded in a past that had demonstrated the power of a covenant and the promise that if the word of God was heeded, earthly rewards would follow. The promise of the new century was similar, except that the terms were different. Instead of listening to the word of God, Muslims had to embrace the tenets of the modern world— science, innovation, education—in order to reap earthly rewards. The first decades of the century seemed to offer proof that with reform would come a rebirth. For a while, the vision of the reformers was vindicated— but only for a while.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the twentieth century, religion as a central force in the fate of nations was almost nonexistent. It was commonly believed, at least by the educated and the elite, that religion would soon fade away, to survive perhaps as a quaint tradition kept alive out of sentimentality and habit but no more part of the modern world than magic and witchcraft. Insofar as Muslims embraced the attitudes and manners of the West, they shared similar sentiments.

As we now know, the death of religion was prematurely announced, and the story of the twentieth century is one of retreat followed by a regrouping and an advance, not so much in Europe, but in many parts of the world. Just as the rise of nationalism went hand in hand with the decline in organized religion, the failures of nationalism contributed to a new religious revival.