Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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In the century following Selim II’s conquest, a distinct political order developed in Egypt. Although their ruling dynasty had been destroyed, the Mamluks survived as a military caste to remain a central part of the ruling elite of Ottoman Egypt. They preserved their households, continued to import young slave recruits to renew their ranks, and upheld their military traditions. Unable to exterminate the Mamluks, the Ottomans had no choice but to draw them into the administration of Egypt. Already in the 1600s Mamluk beys had come to take leading administrative positions in Ottoman Egypt. Mamluks were placed in charge of the treasury, were given command of the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca, were appointed as governors of the Arabian province of the Hijaz, and exercised a virtual monopoly over provincial administration. These posts conferred prestige and, more important, gave their post holder control over significant sources of revenue. In the seventeenth century the Mamluk beys also came to hold some of the highest military positions in Egypt—putting them in direct rivalry with the Ottoman governors and military officers dispatched from Istanbul. The Porte, increasingly preoccupied with more pressing threats on its European frontiers, was more concerned to preserve order and to ensure a regular stream of tax revenues from its rich province than to redress the balance of power between Ottoman appointees and the Mamluks in Egypt. The governors were left to fend for themselves in the treacherous politics of Cairo. Rivalries between the leading Mamluk households gave rise to fierce factionalism that made the politics of Cairo treacherous to Ottomans and Mamluks alike. Two main factions emerged in the seventeenth century—the Faqari and the Qasimi. The Faqari faction had links to the Ottoman cavalry, their color was white, their symbol the pomegranate. The Qasimi faction was connected to the native Egyptian troops, took red for their color, and had a disc as their symbol. Each faction maintained its own Bedouin allies. The origins of the factions have been lost in mythology, though by the late seventeenth century the division was well established. Ottoman governors sought to neutralize the Mamluks by playing the factions against each other. This gave the disadvantaged Mamluk faction a real incentive to overthrow the Ottoman governor. Between 1688 and 1755, the years covered by the chronicler Ahmad Katkhuda al-Damurdashi (himself a Mamluk officer), Mamluk factions succeeded in deposing eight of the thirty-four Ottoman governors of Egypt.

The power of the Mamluks over the Ottoman governors is revealed in the factional intrigues of 1729. Zayn al-Faqar, leader of the Faqari faction, convened a group of his officers to plan a military campaign against their Qasimi enemies. “We’ll ask the governor to furnish 500 purses to pay for the expedition,” Zayn al-Faqar told his men. “If he gives them, he will remain our governor, but if he refuses, we will depose him.” The Faqari faction sent a delegation to the Ottoman governor, who refused to pay the expense of a military campaign against the Qasami faction. “We won’t accept a pimp as our governor,” the outraged Zayn al-Faqar told his followers. “Let’s go and depose him.? On their own initiative, without any other authority, the Faqari faction simply wrote to Istanbul to inform the Porte that the Ottoman governor had been deposed and that a deputy governor had been appointed to take his place. The Mamluks then strong-armed the deputy governor they had just installed to provide the funding for their campaign against the Qasami faction, drawn from the customs revenues of the port of Suez. The payment was justified in terms of the defense of Cairo.³² The Mamluks used extraordinary violence against their rivals. The Qasami faction knew all too well that the Faqaris were preparing for a major confrontation and took the initiative. In 1730 the Qasamis sent an assassin to kill the head of the rival faction, Zayn al-Faqar himself. The assassin was a turncoat who had fallen out with the Faqari faction and joined forces with the Qasimis. He disguised himself as a policeman and pretended to have arrested one of Zayn al-Faqar’s enemies. “Bring him here,” Zayn al-Faqar ordered, wanting to meet his enemy face to face. “Here he is,” the assassin replied, and discharged his pistol into the Mamluk’s heart, killing him instantly.³³ The assassin and his accomplice then fought their way out of Faqari leader’s house and escaped, killing several men along the way. It was the beginning of a massive blood feud. The Faqaris named Muhammad Bey Qatamish as their new leader. Muhammad Bey had risen to the top of the Mamluk hierarchy and held the title of shaykh al-Balad, or “commander of the city.” Muhammad Bey responded to the assassination of Zayn al-Faqar by ordering the extermination of all Mamluks associated with the Qasimi faction. “You have among you Qasimi spies,” Muhammad Bey warned, and pointed to an unfortunate man among his retainers. Before the man had a chance to defend himself, Muhammad Bey’s officers dragged him under a table and cut off his head—the first man to be killed in retaliation for Zayn al-Faqar’s murder. Many more would follow before the bloodletting of 1730 came to an end. Muhammad Bey turned to the deputy governor appointed by Zayn al-Faqar and obtained a warrant to execute 373 persons he claimed were involved in the Faqari leader’s assassination. It was his license to wipe out the Qasimi faction. “Muhammad Bey Qatamish annihilated the Qasimi faction entirely, except for those . . . who had escaped to the countryside,” al-Damurdashi reports. “He even took the young Mamluks who hadn’t reached puberty from their houses, sent them to an island in the middle of the Nile where he killed them, then threw their bodies into the river.” Muhammad Bey closed all of the Qasimi households, swearing never to let the faction take hold in Cairo again.³⁴ The Qasimi faction proved harder to eliminate than Muhammad Bey had imagined. In 1736 the Qasimis returned to settle scores with the Faqaris. They were assisted by Bakir Pasha, the Ottoman governor. Bakir Pasha’s previous term as governor of Egypt had been cut short by the Faqaris, who had deposed him. He thus proved a natural ally to the Qasimi faction. Bakir Pasha invited Muhammad Bey and the other leading Mamluks of the Faqari faction to a meeting where a group of Qasimis lay in ambush, armed with pistols and swords. No sooner had Muhammad Bey arrived than the Qasimis emerged, shooting the leader of the Faqari faction in the stomach and butchering his leading commanders. In all, they killed ten of the most powerful men in Cairo and piled their severed heads in one of the main mosques of the city for public viewing.³⁵ It was by all accounts one of the worst killings in the annals of Ottoman Egypt.³⁶ Years of factional fighting left both the Faqaris and the Qasimis too weak to preserve a commanding position in Cairo. The rival factions were overtaken by a single Mamluk household known as the Qazdughlis, who came to dominate Ottoman Egypt for the rest of the eighteenth century. With the rise of the Qazdughlis, the extreme factional violence abated, bringing a measure of peace to the strife-torn city. The Ottomans, for their part, never managed to impose their full authority over the rich but unruly province of Egypt. Instead, a distinct political culture emerged in Ottoman Egypt in which the Mamluk households continued to exercise political primacy over Istanbul’s governor centuries after Selim the Grim had conquered the Mamluk Empire. In Egypt, as in Lebanon and Algeria, Ottoman rule adapted to local politics.

Two centuries after conquering the Mamluk Empire, the Ottomans had succeeded in extending their empire from North Africa to South Arabia. It had not been a smooth process. Unwilling, or unable, to standardize government in the Arab provinces, the Ottomans in many cases chose to rule in partnership with local elites. The diverse Arab provinces might have had very different relations with Istanbul and wide variations of administrative structures, but they were all clearly part of the same empire. Such heterogeneity was common to the multiethnic and multisectarian empires of the day, such as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the Ottomans managed this diversity with some success. They had faced challenges—most notably in Mount Lebanon and Egypt—but had succeeded by a variety of strategies in entrenching Ottoman rule, ensuring that no local leader posed an enduring threat to the Ottoman center. The dynamics between this center and the Arab periphery changed, however, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. New local leaders emerged who began to combine forces and pursue autonomy in defiance of the Ottoman system, often in concert with the empire’s European enemies. These new local leaders posed a real challenge to the Ottoman state that, by the nineteenth century, would put its very survival in jeopardy.

CHAPTER 2

The Arab Challenge to Ottoman Rule

A barber comes to know everything that happens in his town. His day is taken up in conversations with people from all walks of life. Judging by the record of his diary, Ahmad al-Budayri “al-Hallaq” (“the Barber”) was a great conversationalist who was well informed on the politics and society of Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century. The issues covered in his diary are familiar subjects of barbershop conversations everywhere: local politics, the high cost of living, the weather, and general complaints about how things were no longer as they were in the good old days. Apart from what he wrote in his diary, we know very little about the life of Budayri, the barber of Damascus. He was too modest a man to feature in contemporary biographical dictionaries, the “who’s who” of Ottoman times. His diary is all the more remarkable for that. It was unusual for tradesmen to be literate in the eighteenth century, let alone to leave a written record of their thoughts. He told us little about himself, preferring to write about others. We do not know when he was born or died, though it is clear that the diary, spanning the years 1741–1762, was written when he was a mature man. A pious Muslim, Budayri belonged to a mystical Sufi order. He was married, with children, but had little to say of his family life. He was proud of his profession, spoke with admiration of the teacher who inducted him into the trade, and recalled the prominent men whose heads he had shaved. The barber of Damascus was a loyal Ottoman subject. In 1754 he noted the shock felt by the people of Damascus when they heard of the death of Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754). He recorded the public celebrations marking the ascension of the sultan’s successor, Osman III (r. 1754–1757), when Damascus “was decorated more beautifully than ever in public memory. May God preserve this Ottoman State,” he prayed, “until the end of time. Amen.”¹ The barber had good reason to pray for the preservation of the Ottoman state. According to Ottoman notions of statecraft, good government was a delicate balance of four interreliant elements conceived as a “circle of equity.” First, the state needed a large army to exercise its authority. It took great wealth to maintain a large army, and taxes were the state’s only regular source of wealth. To collect taxes, the state had to promote the prosperity of its subjects. For the people to be prosperous the state must uphold just laws, which brings us full circle—back to the responsibilities of the state. Most Ottoman political analysts of the day would have explained political disorder in terms of the neglect of one of these four elements. From all he saw going on in Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century, Budayri was convinced that the Ottoman Empire was in serious trouble. The governors were corrupt, the soldiers were unruly, prices were high, and public morality was undermined by the decline in the government’s authority. Arguably, the root of the problem lay with the governors of Damascus. In Budayri’s time, Damascus was ruled by a dynasty of local notables rather than by Ottoman Turks dispatched from Istanbul to govern on the sultan’s behalf, as was standard practice in the empire. The ruling Azm family had built their fortune in the seventeenth century by accumulating extensive agricultural lands around the Central Syrian town of Hama. They later settled in Damascus, where they established themselves among the rich and powerful of the city. Between 1724 and 1783, five members of the Azm family ruled Damascus—for a total of forty-five years. Several Azm family members were concurrently appointed to govern the provinces of Sidon, Tripoli, and Aleppo. Taken together, the Azm family’s rule over the Syrian provinces represents one of the more significant local leaderships to emerge in the Arab provinces in the eighteenth century. We might think today that Arabs would have preferred being governed by fellow Arabs rather than by Ottoman bureaucrats. However, Ottoman bureaucrats in the eighteenth century were still servants of the sultan who, at least in theory, owed their full loyalty to the state and ruled without self-interest. The Azms, in contrast, had clear personal and family interests at stake and used their time in high office to enrich themselves and to build their dynasty at the Ottoman state’s expense. The circle of equity was broken, and things were beginning to fall apart.

Budayri discussed at length the strengths and weaknesses of Azm rule in Damascus. As‘ad Pasha al-Azm ruled for most of the period covered by Budayri’s diary. His fourteen-year reign (1743–1757) was to prove the longest of any governor in Ottoman Damascus. The barber could be quite lavish in his praise of As’ad Pasha, but he found a lot to criticize. He condemned the Azm governors for their plunder of the city’s wealth and held them responsible for disorders among the military and the breakdown in public morality. Under Azm rule, the army had degenerated from a disciplined force upholding law and order to a disorderly rabble. The Janissaries in Damascus were split into two groups—the imperial troops dispatched from Istanbul (the kapikullari), and the local Janissaries of Damascus (the yerliyye). There were also a number of irregular forces of Kurds, Turcomans, and North Africans. The different corps were in constant conflict and posed a real challenge to peace in the city. In 1756 the residents of the ‘Amara quarter paid dearly for siding with the imperial Janissaries in their fight with the local Damascene Janissaries. The latter retaliated by putting the whole of the ’Amara quarter—homes and shops—to the torch.² Budayri recounts numerous instances of soldiers attacking and even killing residents of Damascus with complete impunity. In times of high anxiety, the townspeople responded by closing their shops and shutting themselves in their homes, bringing the economic life of the city to a standstill. The barber’s diary captures a real sense of the menace posed by the “security forces” to the average Damascene’s person and property.

Budayri also held the Azms responsible for the chronic high food prices in Damascus. Not only did they fail to regulate the markets and ensure fair prices, but as large landholders, Budayri alleged, the Azm governors actually abused their position to hoard and create artificial grain shortages to maximize their personal profits. Once, when the price of bread had fallen, As’ad Pasha sent his retainers to pressure the bakers to raise their prices in order to protect the wheat market, which was the source of his family’s wealth.³ In his diary, Budayri railed against this accumulation of wealth by the Azm governors while the common folk of Damascus went hungry. As‘ad Pasha’s abuses of power were epitomized by the palace he built in central Damascus, which still stands in the city today. The project consumed all of the building materials and all of the trained masons and artisans of the city, driving up the cost of construction for common Damascenes. As’ad Pasha ordered his builders to strip precious building materials from older houses and buildings in the city, without regard for their owners or their historic value. The project was a testament to As‘ad Pasha’s greed. According to Budayri, As’ad Pasha constructed the palace with countless hiding places for his vast personal wealth “under the floors, in the walls, the ceilings, the water reservoirs and even the toilets.”⁴ The collapse in military discipline, combined with the cupidity of the Azm governors, Budayri believed, had led to a grievous deterioration in public morals. The legitimacy of the Ottoman state rested in large part on its ability to promote Islamic values and to maintain the institutions necessary for its subjects to live within the precepts of Sunni Islam. A breakdown in public morality was thus a clear sign of a breakdown in the state’s authority. In Budayri’s view, there was no greater proof of the decline of public morality than the brazen comportment of the prostitutes in his city. Damascus was a conservative town where respectable women covered their hair, dressed modestly, and had few opportunities to mix with men outside their own families. The prostitutes of Damascus observed none of these niceties. The barber frequently complained about drunken prostitutes, carousing with equally drunken soldiers, who strode through the streets and markets of Damascus with their faces unveiled and their hair uncovered. The governors of Damascus tried several times to ban prostitution in the city, with no effect. Emboldened by the support of the city?s soldiers, the prostitutes refused to comply. It would seem that the common people of Damascus came to accept, even admire, the city’s prostitutes. One beautiful young woman named Salmun completely captivated the people of Damascus in the 1740s, her name becoming a byword in the local slang for all that was trendy and beautiful. A particularly smart dress would be called a “Salmuni dress,” or a novel piece of jewelry a “Salmuni bauble.” Salmun was a reckless young woman defiant of authority. In a scene reminiscent of Bizet’s Carmen, Salmun crossed paths with a qadi (judge) in downtown Damascus one afternoon in 1744. She was drunk and carrying a knife. The judge’s retainers shouted at her to clear the path. Salmun only laughed at them and launched herself at the qadi with her knife. The judge’s men barely managed to restrain her. The qadi had her arrested by the authorities, who executed Salmun for the outrage. A town crier was then sent through the streets of Damascus ordering all prostitutes to be killed. Many women fled, and others went into hiding.⁵ The prohibition proved short-lived, and the prostitutes of Damascus were soon back on the streets, unveiled and uninhibited. “In those days,” the barber wrote in 1748, “corruption increased, the servants of God were oppressed, and prostitutes proliferated in the markets, day and night.” He described a parade of the prostitutes held in honor of a local saint with outrage at both the profanation of religious values and at the fact that the Damascene public seemed to accept it. A prostitute had fallen in love with a young Turkish soldier who had fallen ill. She vowed to hold a prayer session in homage to the saint if her lover regained his health. When the soldier recovered, she fulfilled her vow:She walked in a kind of procession with the other sinful girls of her kind. They went through the bazaars carrying candles and incense burners. The group was singing and beating on tambourines with their faces unveiled and their hair over their shoulders. The people looked on without objecting. Only the righteous raised their voices, shouting “allahu akbar” [“God is great”].⁶

Soon after the parade, city authorities tried once again to ban prostitution. The heads of the town quarters were told to report anyone suspicious, and town criers were sent round to urge women to wear their veils properly. Yet within days of these new orders, the barber claimed, ?we saw the very same girls walking the alleys and markets as was their custom.? At that point, the governor, As?ad Pasha al-Azm, abandoned all efforts to expel the bold prostitutes and chose to tax them instead. The Azm governors abused their powers of office to enrich themselves at the people’s expense, yet they could not curb vice or control the soldiers nominally under their command. The barber of Damascus was deeply dismayed. Could a state governed by such men long survive?

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans and the Arabs had come to a crossroads. On the face of it, the Ottomans had succeeded in absorbing the Arab world into their empire. Over the course of two centuries the Ottomans had extended their rule from the southernmost tip of the Arabian peninsula to the frontiers of Morocco in northwestern Africa. The Ottoman sultan was universally accepted by the Arabs as their legitimate sovereign. They prayed in the sultan’s name each Friday, they contributed soldiers for the sultan’s wars, and they paid their taxes to the sultan’s agents. The great majority of Arab subjects, those who farmed the land in the countryside and the city-dwellers who worked as craftsmen and merchants, had accepted the Ottoman social contract. All they expected in return was safety for themselves, security for their property, and the preservation of Islamic values. Yet, an important change was taking place in the Arab lands. Whereas in the early Ottoman centuries the Arabs, as free-born Muslims, were excluded from high offices reserved to the servile elites recruited through the devshirme, or “boy levy,” by the mid-eighteenth century local notables were rising to the highest ranks of provincial administration and awarded the title “pasha.” The Azms of Damascus were but one example of a broader phenomenon that extended from Egypt through Palestine and Mount Lebanon to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. The rise of local leaders came at the expense of Istanbul’s influence in the Arab lands, as more tax money was spent locally on the armed forces and the building projects of local governors. The phenomenon spread across a number of Arab provinces, with the cumulative effect being a growing threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the proliferation of local leaders led many Arab provinces to rebel against Istanbul’s rule. Local leaders in the Arab provinces came from diverse backgrounds, ranging from heads of Mamluk households to tribal shaykhs and urban notables. They were driven by ambition more than any specific grievance with the Ottoman way of doing things. They did have wealth in common: they were, without exception, large landholders who had taken advantage of changes in Ottoman land practices to build up huge estates, which they held for life and in some cases passed on to their children. They diverted the revenues of their estates away from the government’s treasury to meet their own needs. They built lavish palaces and maintained their own armies to reinforce their power. Istanbul?s loss was a real gain to the local economy in the Arab provinces, and the authority to extend patronage to artisans and militiamen only enhanced the power of local lords. Though such local notables were not unique to the Arab provinces—similar leaders emerged in the Balkans and Turkish Anatolia—the Arab lands were less central to Istanbul, in every sense of the word. The Ottomans relied less on revenues and troops from the Arab provinces than they did from the Balkans and Anatolia. Moreover, the Arab lands were much farther from Istanbul, and the central government was unwilling to spare the troops and resources to put down minor rebellions. Istanbul was more concerned with challenges from Vienna and Moscow than troubles posed by local leaders in Damascus and Cairo. By the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was facing far greater threats from its European neighbors than anything the Arab provinces might produce. The Habsburgs in Austria were rolling back the Ottoman conquests in Europe. Until 1683 the Ottomans were pressing at the gates of Vienna. By 1699 the Austrians had defeated the Ottomans and were awarded Hungary, Transylvania, and parts of Poland in the Treaty of Karlowitz—the first territorial losses the Ottomans had ever suffered. Peter the Great of Russia was pressing the Ottomans in the Black Sea region and in the Caucasus. Local notables in Baghdad or Damascus were of no consideration compared to threats of this order of magnitude. Ottoman defeats by European armies emboldened local challengers inside Ottoman domains. As local leaders grew more powerful, the Ottoman officials that were sent to the Arab provinces gradually lost the respect and obedience of their Arab subjects. Government officials also lost authority over the sultan’s soldiers, who grew lawless and engaged in scuffles with local soldiers and the militias of local leaders. Insubordination in military ranks in turn undermined the authority of the Islamic judges and scholars, who traditionally served as the guardians of public order. Where the Ottomans were seen to be ineffectual, the people turned increasingly to local leaders to provide for their security instead. In Basra, a local Christian merchant wrote, “Respect and fear were given to the chiefs of the Arabs, and as for the Ottoman, nobody goes in awe of him.”⁷ A state that loses the respect of its subjects is in trouble. The chronicler ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, analyzing the breakdown of Ottoman authority over the Mamluks in eighteenth-century Egypt, reflected: “If this age should urinate in a bottle, time’s physician would know its ailment.”⁸ The emergence of local leaders lay at the heart of the Ottoman illness and could only be redressed by a strong reassertion of the state’s authority. The Porte’s dilemma was to secure enough stability on its European frontiers to free the necessary resources to address the challenges within its Arab provinces. The nature of local rule differed from one region to the next and posed a variable threat to Istanbul’s authority. Roughly speaking, those provinces closest to the Ottoman center were the most benign, with prominent families like the Shihabs in Mount Lebanon, the Azms in Damascus, and the Jalilis in Mosul establishing dynasties loyal to Ottoman rule but pressing for the greatest possible autonomy within those limits.⁹ Further to the south, in Baghdad, Palestine, and Egypt, Mamluk leaders emerged who sought to expand the territory under their control in direct challenge to the Ottoman state. The emergence of the Sa’udi-Wahabi confederation in Central Arabia posed the gravest threat to the Ottoman government when it seized control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and prevented the annual Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from reaching the holy cities. In contrast, more remote provinces, such as Algiers, Tunis, and Yemen, were happy to remain vassals of the Ottoman sultan, paying an annual tribute in return for extensive autonomy. These local leaders in no way comprised an Arab movement. Many were not ethnic Arabs, and several did not even speak Arabic. The challengers to Ottoman rule in the second half of the eighteenth century were instead ambitious individuals acting in their own interests with little concern for the Arab people under their rule. In isolation, they posed little threat to the Ottoman center. When they worked together, however—as when the Mamluks in Egypt entered an alliance with a local leader in Northern Palestine—they were capable of conquering whole Ottoman provinces.

Oil put the Middle East on the map in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, it was cotton that generated extreme wealth in the Eastern Mediterranean. European demand for cotton dates back to the seventeenth century. Whereas the British Lancashire mills drew primarily on cotton from the West Indies and the American colonies, the French relied on Ottoman markets for the bulk of their cotton imports. As spinning and weaving technology improved in the course of the eighteenth century, leading to the Industrial Revolution, European demand for cotton spiked. French cotton imports from the Eastern Mediterranean increased more than fivefold, rising from 2.1 million kg in 1700 to nearly 11 million kg by 1789.¹⁰ The cotton most prized by European markets was produced in the Galilee region in Northern Palestine. The wealth generated by Galilee cotton was sufficient to feed the ambitions of a local dynast who grew powerful enough to challenge Ottoman rule in Syria. The strongman of the Galilee was Zahir al-’Umar (c.1690–1775). Zahir was a leader of the Zaydanis, a Bedouin tribe that had settled in the Galilee in the seventeenth century and secured control of extensive agricultural lands between the towns of Safad and Tiberias. They enjoyed strong trade connections with Damascus and began to build a respectable family fortune through their control of cotton plantations in the Galilee. Zahir represented the third generation of Zaydani shaykhs in the Galilee. Though not particularly well known in the West, Zahir has been a celebrity in the Arab world for centuries. He is often?anachronistically?described as something of an Arab or Palestinian nationalist due to his history of confrontation with Ottoman governors. By the time of his death he was already the stuff of legend?and the subject of two near-contemporary biographies. Zahir’s long and remarkable career began in the 1730s when he entered into an alliance with a Bedouin tribe to seize the town of Tiberias, which was hardly more than a village at the time. He consolidated his gains by securing a formal appointment as tax collector for the Galilee region from the governor of Sidon. Zahir then set about fortifying Tiberias and built up a small militia of some 200 horsemen. From his base in Tiberias, Zahir and his family began to extend their control across the fertile plains and highlands of northern Palestine, ordering the tenant farmers to plant their lands in cotton. He gave his brothers and cousins territories to run on his behalf. As Zahir began to carve out a small principality for himself, he grew increasingly powerful. The more territory he controlled, the more cotton revenues he accrued, allowing him to expand his army, which in turn made further territorial expansion possible. By 1740 Zahir had emerged as the most powerful leader in northern Palestine. He had defeated the warlords of Nablus, he had taken control of Nazareth, and now he dominated the trade between Palestine and Damascus, which further contributed to his wealth and resources. The rapid growth of the Zaydani principality put Zahir al-’Umar on a collision course with the governor of Damascus. One of the governor’s primary duties was to provide for the needs and expenses of the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca. Zahir now controlled lands whose tax revenues traditionally were earmarked to pay the expenses of the pilgrimage caravan. By beating the governor of Damascus to the taxes of northern Transjordan and Palestine, Zahir was putting the finances of the pilgrimage caravan in jeopardy. When the government in Istanbul learned of the situation, the sultan sent orders to his governor in Damascus, Sulayman Pasha al-Azm, to capture and execute Zahir and destroy his fortifications around Tiberias. Budayri, the barber of Damascus, noted in his diary that in 1742 Sulayman Pasha led a large army from Damascus to put down Zahir. The government in Istanbul had sent men and heavy munitions, including artillery and mines, to destroy Zahir and his fortifications. Sulayman Pasha also recruited volunteers from Mount Lebanon, Nablus and Jerusalem, and neighboring Bedouin tribes, all of whom saw Zahir al-’Umar as a rival and welcomed the chance to bring him down. Sulayman Pasha laid siege to Tiberias for over three months, but Zahir’s forces did not succumb. With help from his brother, who smuggled food and provisions across Ottoman lines, Zahir managed to hold out against far superior forces. The governor of Damascus was not amused, and when he managed to intercept a number of Zaydani retainers smuggling food to Tiberias he sent their heads to Istanbul as trophies. Yet the big trophy eluded Sulayman Pasha, and after three months he was forced to return to Damascus to prepare for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Unwilling to admit defeat, Sulayman Pasha spread the rumor that he had lifted the siege of Tiberias out of compassion for the defenseless civilians of the town. He also claimed to have taken one of Zahir?s sons as hostage against a pledge to pay his back taxes to Damascus. The barber of Damascus duly reported these rumors, adding a disclaimer: ?We have heard another version of the story,? he wrote, ?and God knows the truth of the matter.?¹¹ Once Sulayman Pasha returned from the pilgrimage in 1743, he resumed his war against Zahir al-‘Umar in Tiberias. Once again, he mobilized a great army with support from Istanbul and all of Zahir’s aggrieved neighbors in Palestine. Again the residents of Tiberias braced themselves for a terrible siege. But the second siege never came to pass. While traveling to Tiberias, Sulayman Pasha al-Azm stopped in the coastal town of Acre, where he succumbed to a fever and died. His body was brought back to Damascus for burial, and the siege army was disbanded. Zahir al-’Umar was left in peace to pursue his own ambitions.¹² Between the 1740s and the 1760s, Zahir’s rule went unchallenged and his powers expanded enormously. The governor in Sidon could never match the strength of Zahir’s armed forces, and the new governor in Damascus, As’ad Pasha al-Azm, chose to leave the ruler of Tiberias to his own devices. In Istanbul, Zahir had cultivated influential supporters who protected him from the scrutiny of the Sublime Porte. Zahir took advantage of his relative independence to extend his rule from Tiberias to the coastal city of Acre, which had emerged as the main port for the Levantine cotton trade. He petitioned the governor of Sidon repeatedly to be awarded the lucrative rights to collect the taxes of Acre, but was always refused. Finally, in 1746, he occupied the city and declared himself its tax-farmer. Over the course of the 1740s, he fortified Acre and established his base in the city. He now enjoyed control over the cotton trade from the field to the market. Letters from French cotton merchants in Damascus reveal their frustration with Zahir al-’Umar, who had grown “too powerful and too rich . . . at our expense.”¹³ By the 1750s Zahir was setting the price for the cotton he sold. When the French tried to force their terms on Zahir, he simply forbade the cotton farmers of the Galilee to sell to the French to force them back to the negotiating table and agree to his terms. In spite of his many confrontations with the Ottoman state, Zahir al-’Umar was constantly trying to secure official recognition; he was a rebel who ultimately wanted to be a member of the establishment. He strove to achieve the same standing the Azms had in Damascus: the ministerial rank of Pasha and the governorship of Sidon. To this end, his every act of rebellion was followed by a loyal payment of taxes. Yet throughout his years in power, Zahir never rose above the status of a tax-farmer subordinate to the governor in Sidon. It was a source of constant frustration for the strongman of the Galilee. The Ottomans, tied up in a devastating war with Russia between 1768 and 1774, tried to preserve Zahir?s loyalty and meet him halfway. In 1768 the Porte recognized him as the ?shaykh of Acre, amir of Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, and shaykh of all of Galilee.”¹⁴ It was a title, but not enough to satisfy Zahir’s great ambitions. After nearly two decades of relative peace, Zahir faced renewed threats from the Ottoman provincial government. In 1770 a new governor in Damascus sought to bring Zahir’s rule over northern Palestine to a close. ’Uthman Pasha had managed to get his own sons appointed as governors in Tripoli and Sidon and had entered into an alliance with the Druze community of Mount Lebanon against Zahir. The notables of Nablus were also keen to see the end of their belligerent neighbor to the north. Suddenly, Zahir found himself surrounded by hostile forces. In a life-or-death struggle with ‘Uthman Pasha, Zahir could only survive by entering into partnership with another local leader. The only regional power strong enough to offset the combined forces of Damascus and Sidon was the ruling Mamluk in Cairo, a remarkable leader named ’Ali Bey. When Zahir and Аli Bey combined forces, they mounted the greatest challenge the Arab provinces had yet posed to Istanbul’s rule.