Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

The Egyptian menace had been contained, but the threat posed by the Second Egyptian Crisis to the survival of the Ottoman Empire required a formal settlement. In a deal brokered in London, the Ottomans conferred on Muhammad ‘Ali lifetime rule over Egypt and Sudan and established his family’s hereditary rule over Egypt. Muhammad’Ali, for his part, recognized the sultan as his suzerain and agreed to make an annual payment to the Porte as a token of his submission and loyalty to the Ottoman state. Britain also wanted assurance that troubles in the Eastern Mediterranean would never again threaten the peace of Europe. The best insurance against conflict among the European powers for strategic advantage in the Levant was to ensure the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire—long a preoccupation of Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister. In a secret appendix to the London Convention of 1840, the governments of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia gave a formal commitment to “seek no augmentation of territory, no exclusive influence, [and] no commercial advantage for their subjects, which those of every other nation may not equally obtain.” ²¹ This self-denying protocol provided the Ottoman Empire with nearly four decades of protection against European designs on its territory.

Between 1805 and 1841, Muhammad ‘Ali’s ambitions had gone full circle. He rose to rank of governor and made himself master of Egypt. Once he was secure in Egypt and had expanded the revenues of his province, he set about creating a modern military. He then expanded his territorial reach from Sudan and Hijaz in the Red Sea to include much of Greece for a while, and all of Syria. These gains were denied him by foreign intervention, and by 1841 he had been reduced to Egypt and Sudan. Egypt would have its own government and make its own laws, but it would remain bound by the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire. Though the Egyptians could strike their own coinage, their gold and silver coins would bear the sultan?s name, leaving the name of the Egyptian ruler for base copper. Egypt would have its own army, but its numbers were restricted to 18,000?a far cry from the massive army of 100,000?200,000 that Egypt formerly fielded. Muhammad ?Ali?s accomplishments were great, but his ambitions had been greater. Muhammad ‘Ali’s final years in office were marked by disappointment and ill health. The pasha was now an old man—seventy-one years old by the time his army had returned from Syria. He had grown alienated from his son Ibrahim. Over the course of the Syrian campaign, father and son communicated through palace officials. Both fought illness—Ibrahim was sent to Europe to combat tuberculosis, and Muhammad ’Ali was beginning to lose his mental faculties to silver nitrate treatments he was given to combat dysentery. In 1847 the sultan recognized that Muhammad ‘Ali was no longer sufficiently competent to rule and appointed Ibrahim Pasha to succeed him. Ibrahim died six months later. By that time, Muhammad ’Ali was too far gone to notice. The succession passed to Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, Abbas, who officiated at Muhammad ’Ali’s funeral after the pasha’s death on August 2, 1849.

The age of local leaders had come to an end. As the Egyptians were divested of Crete, the Syrian provinces, and the Hijaz, the Ottoman government was careful to dispatch its own men to serve as governors in these provinces. The Azm family in Damascus, like the Jalilis in Mosul, lost their grip over the cities they had ruled for much of the eighteenth century. The autonomous government of Mount Lebanon collapsed as the Shihab family was overthrown for collaborating with Egyptian rule. Here too the Ottomans sought to impose their own governors, though with explosive consequences that would send Lebanon down the road to sectarian conflict. The bid for local autonomy from the Ottoman government had come at a high price for the working people of the Arab lands, who suffered through wars, inflation, political instability, and countless injustices at the hands of ambitious local leaders. They now wanted peace and stability. The Ottomans too wanted to put an end to the internal challenges to their rule. While preoccupied by foreign threats and wars with Russia and Austria, they had seen the risks of leaving the Arab provinces unattended: the alliance between Ali Bey al-Kabir and Zahir al-Umar had threatened Ottoman rule in Syria and Egypt; the Wahhabis had ravaged southern Iraq and seized the Hijaz from Ottoman rule; and Muhammad ?Ali used the wealth of Egypt to create an army that gave him control of an empire in his own right and the means to threaten the very survival of the Ottomans themselves. But for the intervention of the European powers, Muhammad?Ali could have toppled the Ottomans in the Second Egyptian Crisis. These experiences had impressed on the Ottoman government the need for reform. It would require not just a gentle tinkering with the standing institutions of government but a complete overhaul of the ancient machinery of rule. The Ottomans recognized that they could not reform their empire on their own. They would need to draw on the ideas and technologies that had made their European rivals strong. Ottoman statesmen had noted how Muhammad ‘Ali succeeded in harnessing modern European ideas and technologies in creating his dynamic state. The dispatch of Egyptian missions to Europe, the import of European industrial and military technology, and the contracting of European technical advisors at all levels of the military and bureaucracy had played a large role in Muhammad ’Ali’s achievements. The Ottomans were entering a new and complex era in their relations with their European neighbors. Europe would serve as the role model, the ideal to be attained in military and technological terms. But Europe was also a threat to be kept at arm’s length, both as a belligerent that coveted Ottoman lands and the source of dangerous new ideologies. Ottoman reformers would struggle with the challenge of adopting European ideas and technology without compromising their own cultural integrity and values. The one thing the Ottomans could not do was ignore Europe’s progress. Europe had emerged as the dominant world power in the nineteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire increasingly would be obliged to play by Europe’s rules.

CHAPTER 4

The Perils of Reform

A young Muslim cleric approached the French sailing vessel La Truite, moored in Alexandria’s harbor, on April 13, 1826. As he stepped onto the gangway to board, dressed in the robes and turban of a scholar of Cairo’s ancient mosque university of al-Azhar (founded 969), Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi’s feet left Egyptian soil for the first time in his life. He was bound for France, appointed chaplain to Muhammad’Ali’s first major education mission to Europe. He would not see his native land for another five years. Once aboard, al-Tahtawi examined the faces of the other delegates. They made for a very diverse group: forty-four men in all, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-seven. Al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) was then twenty-four years old. Though ostensibly an Egyptian delegation, only eighteen of its envoys were actually native-born Arabic speakers. The rest of the group spoke Turkish and reflected the national diversity of the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was still a part—Turks, Circassians, Greeks, Georgians, and Armenians. These men had been chosen by the governor of Egypt to study European languages and sciences and, on their return, to apply what they learned in France to reforming their native land. Born to a notable family of judges and theologians in a small village in Upper Egypt, al-Tahtawi had studied Arabic and Islamic theology since the age of sixteen. A gifted scholar, he was appointed to teach at al-Azhar before entering government service as a preacher in one of the new European-style Nizami infantry divisions in 1824. Through this post, and with the support of his patrons, al-Tahtawi was selected for this prestigious mission to Paris. It was the kind of posting that made a man’s career. Al-Tahtawi took with him a blank copybook in which to record his impressions of France. No detail seemed too trivial to interest him: the way the French built their houses, earned a living, observed their religion; their means of transport and the workings of their financial system; relations between men and women; how they dressed and danced; how they decorated their homes and set their tables. Al-Tahtawi wrote with curiosity and respect but also critical detachment. For centuries, Europeans had traveled to the Middle East and written books on the manners and customs of the exotic people they found there. Now, for the first time, an Egyptian had turned the tables and wrote on the strange and exotic country called France.¹ Al-Tahtawi’s reflections on France are full of contradictions. As a Muslim and an Egyptian Ottoman, he was confident of the superiority of his faith and culture. He saw France as a place of disbelief, where “not a single Muslim had settled” and where the French themselves were “Christians only in name.” Yet his firsthand observations left him in no doubt of Europe’s superiority in science and technology. “By God, during my stay in [France], I was grieved by the fact that it had enjoyed all those things that are lacking in Islamic kingdoms,” he recalled.² To give some sense of the gulf that al-Tahtawi believed separated his readers from Western science, he judged it necessary to explain that European astronomers had proven that the earth was round. He realized how much the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe in the sciences and believed that the Islamic world had a duty and a right to recover this knowledge, given that Western advances since the Renaissance had been built on medieval Islam’s progress in the sciences. He argued that the Ottomans were only calling due the West’s debts to Islamic science by borrowing European advances in modern technology.³ Although al-Tahtawi’s book is replete with fascinating reflections on what, in Egyptian eyes, made France of the 1820s tick, he made his most substantial contribution to political reform with his analysis of constitutional government. He translated all seventy-four articles of the 1814 French constitution, or Charte constitutionelle, and wrote a detailed analysis of its key points.⁴ Al-Tahtawi believed the constitution to hold the secret of French advancement. “We should like to include this,” he explained to his elite readership, “so that you may see how their intellect has decided that justice and equity are the causes for the civilization of kingdoms, the well-being of subjects, and how rulers and their subjects were led by this, to the extent that their country has prospered, their knowledge increased, their wealth accumulated and their hearts satisfied.” Al-Tahtawi’s praise for constitutional government was courageous for its time. These were dangerous new ideas with no roots in Islamic tradition. As he confessed, most of the principles of the French constitution “cannot be found in the Qur’an nor in the sunna [practices] of the Prophet.” He may have feared the reaction of his fellow Muslim clerics to these dangerous innovations, but he took the even greater risk of provoking the disfavor of his rulers. After all, the constitution applied to the king and his subjects alike, and it called for a division of powers between the monarch and an elected legislature. Muhammad ?Ali?s Egypt was a thoroughly autocratic state, and the Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy. The very notion of representative government or constraints on the powers of the monarch would have been seen as alien and subversive by most Ottoman elites. The reformist cleric was captivated by the way the French constitution promoted the rights of common citizens rather than reinforcing the dominance of elites. Among the articles of the constitution that most impressed al-Tahtawi were those asserting the equality of all citizens before the law and the eligibility of all citizens “to any office, irrespective of its rank.” The possibility of such upward mobility, he maintained, would encourage “people to study and learn” so that they might “reach a higher position than the one they occupy,” thereby keeping their civilization from stagnating. Here again, al-Tahtawi was treading a fine line. In a rigidly hierarchical society like Ottoman Egypt, ideas of social mobility would have struck the elites of his time as a dangerous notion. Al-Tahtawi went further, praising French rights of free expression. The constitution, he explained, encouraged “everybody freely to express his opinion, knowledge and feelings.” The medium by which the average Frenchman made his views known, Al-Tahtawi continued, was something called a “journal” or a “gazette.” This would have been the first time many of al-Tahtawi’s readers would have heard of newspapers, which were still unknown in the Arabic-speaking world. Both the powerful and the common people could publish their views in the newspapers, he explained. Indeed, he stressed the importance of commoners having access to the press “since even a lowly person may think of something that does not come to the mind of important people.” Yet it was the power of the press to hold people to account for their actions that struck the cleric as truly remarkable. “When someone does something great or despicable, the journalists write about it, so that it becomes known by both the notables and the common people—to encourage the person who did something good, or to make the person who has done a despicable thing forsake his ways.” In his most daring breach of Ottoman political conventions, al-Tahtawi gave a detailed and sympathetic account of the July 1830 revolution that overthrew the Bourbon king Charles X. Sunni Muslim political thought asserted the duty of subjects to submit to rulers, even despotic rulers, in the interest of public order. Al-Tahtawi, who had observed the political drama firsthand, clearly sided with the French people against their king when Charles X suspended the charter and “shamed the laws in which the rights of the French people were enshrined.” In his bid to restore the absolute power of the monarchy, Charles X ignored the deputies in the Chamber, forbade public criticism of the monarch and his cabinet, and introduced press censorship. When the people rose in armed rebellion against their ruler, the Egyptian cleric took their side. Al-Tahtawi?s extensive analysis of the July Revolution is all the more remarkable for its implicit endorsement of the people?s right to overturn a monarch to preserve their legal rights.⁵ After five captivating years in Paris, al-Tahtawi returned to Egypt in 1831, his impressions of France still confined to his copybook. Fluent in French, he was given a high-level appointment to establish a government translation bureau, primarily to provide Arabic editions of European technical manuals essential for Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms. While he was busy setting up the translation bureau, al-Tahtawi found time to revise his notes on Paris for publication. Perhaps to protect himself from retribution for the dangerous political ideas his book contained, he paid lavish tribute to Muhammad ’Ali in his preface. The results, published in Arabic in 1834 and subsequently translated into Turkish, were nothing short of a masterpiece. With its clear exposition of European advances in science and technology, and its analysis of Enlightenment political philosophy, al-Tahtawi’s book proved the opening shot in the nineteenth-century age of Ottoman—and Arab—reforms.

The Ottomans and their Arab citizens experienced increased interaction with Europe throughout the nineteenth century, forcing the people of the Middle East to recognize that Europe had surpassed them in military and economic might. Although most Ottomans remained convinced of the cultural superiority of their world, their reformers argued that they needed to gain mastery over the ideas and technology of Europe if Europe was not to gain mastery over them. The Ottomans and their autonomous Arab vassals in Egypt and Tunisia began by reforming their armies. It soon became apparent that the revenue base of the state had to expand to support the expense of a modern army. Administrative and economic practices thus were changed along European lines with the hope that prosperity and increased tax revenues would follow. More and more European technology was imported, pushed by European capitalists looking for foreign markets for their manufactured goods and machinery. The sultan and his viceroys in Tunis and Cairo were keen to use the benefits of modern European technology—such as telegraphs, steamships, and railways—as visible signs of progress and development. This technology was expensive, however, and as the educated elite in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tunis grew concerned about their rulers’ extravagance, they began to call for constitutions and parliaments as the missing element in the reform agenda. Each phase of the reforms was intended to strengthen the institutions of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab vassal states and to protect them from European encroachment. In this, the reformers were to be disappointed, for the reform era left the Ottoman world increasingly vulnerable to European penetration. Informal European control through consular pressure, trade, and capital investment would be followed by formal European domination as first Tunisia, then the Ottoman government, and finally Egypt failed to meet their financial commitments to foreign creditors.

The era of Ottoman reforms began at the height of the Second Egyptian Crisis, in 1839. The death of Sultan Mahmud II and the accession of his teenage son Abdulmecid I was hardly an auspicious moment to announce a program of radical reform. Yet the Ottoman Empire, under imminent threat from Muhammad ’Ali’s Egyptian army, needed European goodwill more than ever. To secure Europe’s guarantees of its territory and sovereignty, the Ottoman government believed it needed to demonstrate to the European powers that it could adhere to European norms of statecraft as a responsible member of the community of modern states. Moreover, the reformers who had worked under Mahmud II were determined to consolidate the changes already undertaken under the late sultan’s reign, and to commit his successor to the reform process. These twin motives would characterize the era of Ottoman reforms: public relations gestures to win European support coupled with a genuine commitment to reform the empire in order to ensure its survival against both internal and external threats. On November 3, 1839, the Ottoman foreign minister, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, read a reform decree on behalf of Abdulmecid I to an invited group of Ottoman and foreign dignitaries in Istanbul. On that date the Ottomans entered a period of administrative reforms that, between 1839 and 1876, would transform their state into a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—a period known as the Tanzimat (literally, “reordering”). Three major milestones mark the Tanzimat: the 1839 Reform Decree; the 1856 Reform Decree, which restated and extended the agenda of 1839; and the Constitution of 1876. The decrees of 1839 and 1856 reveal the debt of Ottoman reformers to Western political thought. The first document set out a modest, three-point reform agenda: to ensure “perfect security for life, honour, and property” for all Ottoman subjects; to establish “a regular system of assessing taxes”; and to reform the terms of military service by regular conscription and fixed terms of service.⁶ The 1856 Decree reiterated the reforms set out in 1839 and expanded on the process to address reforms in the courts and penal system. Corporal punishment was to be curbed, and torture abolished. The decree sought to regularize the finances of the empire through annual budgets that would be open to public scrutiny. The decree also called for the modernization of the financial system and the establishment of a modern banking system “to create funds to be employed in augmenting the sources of wealth” in the empire through such public works as roads and canals. “To accomplish these objects,” the decree concluded, “means shall be sought to profit by the science, the art, and the funds of Europe, and thus gradually to execute them.”⁷ However, to view the Tanzimat in the light of the major decrees alone would be to overlook the full scope of reforms carried out between 1839 and 1876. The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a major transformation in the chief institutions of Ottoman state and society. In order to reform the tax base and ensure its future prosperity, the government began to conduct a regular census and introduced a new system of land records that replaced the tax farms of old with individual title, which was more in line with Western notions of private property. The provincial administration was completely overhauled to provide a regular system of government reaching from provincial capitals like Damascus and Baghdad down to the village level. These changes required thousands of new bureaucrats with a modern, technical education. To meet this need, the state established a network of new elementary, intermediate, and high schools styled on European curricula to train civil servants. Similarly, the laws of the empire were codified in an ambitious project to reconcile Islamic law with Western codes to make the Ottoman legal system more compatible with European legal norms. So long as the reforms applied to the higher echelons of government, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire took little interest in the Tanzimat. In the course of the 1850s and 1860s, however, the reforms began to touch the lives of individuals. Ever fearful of taxation and conscription, Ottoman subjects resisted all state efforts to inscribe their names in the government’s registers. Parents avoided sending their children to state schools, fearing that by registering their names for study they would end up in the army. Townsmen avoided census officials and farmers avoided land registration for as long as they could. Yet as the bureaucracy grew in size and efficiency, the people of the empire succumbed to one of the imperatives of modern government: to maintain accurate records on the state’s subjects and their property. The sultan was no less affected by the reform process than his subjects. The absolute power of the Ottoman sultan eroded as the center of political gravity shifted from the sultan’s palace to the offices of the Ottoman government in the Sublime Porte. The Council of Ministers took on the principal legislative and executive roles in government, and the grand vizier emerged as the head of government. The sultan was reduced to the ceremonial and symbolic role of head of state. This evolution was capped by the promulgation of the constitution in 1876, which, while leaving great powers in the sultan’s hands, broadened political participation through the establishment of a parliament. In the course of thirty-seven years, Ottoman absolutism had been replaced by a constitutional monarchy.

There are dangers inherent in any major reform program, particularly when foreign ideas are involved. Conservative Ottoman Muslims denounced the Tanzimat for introducing un-Islamic innovations into state and society. No issue proved more explosive than changes to the status of Christians and Jews as non-Muslim minority communities in Sunni Muslim Ottoman society. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European powers increasingly used minority rights as a pretext to intervene in Ottoman affairs. Russia extended its protection to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Ottoman Christian community. France had long enjoyed a special relationship with the Maronite church in Mount Lebanon and in the nineteenth century developed formal patronage of all Ottoman Catholic communities. The British had no historic ties to any church in the region. Nonetheless, Britain represented the interests of the Jews, the Druze, and the tiny communities of converts that gathered around Protestant missionaries in the Arab world. So long as the Ottoman Empire straddled areas of strategic importance, the European powers would exploit any means to meddle with Ottoman affairs. Issues of minority rights provided the powers with ample opportunity to impose their will on the Ottomans—sometimes with disastrous consequences for both Europeans and Ottomans alike. The “Holy Places Dispute” of 1851–1852 demonstrated the dangers of great-power intervention on all parties. Differences arose between Catholic and Greek Orthodox monks over their respective rights and privileges to Christian holy places in Palestine. France and Russia responded by putting pressure on Istanbul to confer privileges on their respective client communities. The Ottomans first conceded to French pressures, giving the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the Catholics. The Russians were determined to secure a bigger trophy for the Greek Orthodox Church so as not to lose face to the French. But after the Ottomans made similar concessions to the Russians, the French emperor Napoleon III dispatched a state-of-the-art propeller-driven warship up the Dardanelles to deliver his ambassador to Istanbul and threatened to bombard Ottoman positions in North Africa if the Porte did not rescind the concessions to Russia’s Orthodox clients. When the Ottomans caved in to the French, the Russians threatened war. What began as an Ottoman-Russian war in the autumn of 1853 degenerated into the Crimean War of 1854–1855, pitting Britain and France against Tsarist Russia in a violent conflict that claimed over 300,000 lives and left many more wounded. The consequences of European intervention on behalf of Ottoman minority communities were too serious for the Porte to allow the practice to continue. The Ottomans had made a half-hearted attempt to reclaim the initiative over non-Muslim minority communities in the 1839 Reform Decree. “The Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall, without exception, enjoy our imperial concessions,” the sultan declared in his firman, or rescript. Clearly he and his administrators needed to make a stronger statement of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims if they were to persuade the European powers that their interventions were no longer needed to ensure the welfare of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The problem for the Ottoman government was to gain the consent of its own Muslim majority for a policy of equality between different faiths. The Qur?an draws clear distinctions between Muslims and the other two monotheistic faiths, and these distinctions had been enshrined in Islamic law. For the Ottoman government to disregard such distinctions would, in the view of many believers, go against God?s book and God?s law. In the aftermath of the Crimean War the Ottoman government decided to risk public outrage at home to prevent further European interventions on behalf of the non-Muslim minority communities of the empire. The 1856 Reform Decree was timed to coincide with the Peace of Paris, concluding the Crimean War. Most of the provisions of the 1856 Reform Decree were concerned with the rights and responsibilities of Ottoman Christians and Jews. The decree established for the first time complete equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of their religion: “Every distinction or designation pending to make any class whatever of the subjects of my empire inferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be forever effaced from administrative protocol.” The decree went on to promise all Ottoman subjects access to schools and government jobs, as well as to military conscription, without distinction by religion or nationality. The reform process had already been controversial for its European leanings. But nothing in the reforms prior to the 1856 Decree had directly contravened the Qur’an—revered by Muslims as the literal and eternal Word of God. To contradict the Qur’an was to contradict God, and not surprisingly the decree provoked outrage among pious Muslims when it was read in the cities of the empire. An Ottoman judge in Damascus recorded in his diary in 1856, “The decree conferring complete equality on Christians was read in Court, granting equality and freedom and other such violations of the eternal Islamic law. . . . It was ashes on [the heads of] all Muslims. We ask Him to strengthen the religion and make the Muslims victorious.”⁸ Ottoman subjects understood immediately the significance of this particular reform. The reforms of the Tanzimat were taking the Ottoman Empire into dangerous territory. With the government promulgating reforms that contravened the religion and values of the majority of the population, the reform process risked provoking rebellion against the authority of the government and violence between its subjects.

The Ottomans were not the first Muslim rulers to decree equality between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Muhammad ‘Ali had done this in Egypt in the 1820s; however, this earlier decree had more to do with Muhammad ’Ali’s wish to tax and conscript all Egyptians on an equal basis, without distinction by religion, than with any concern to liberate minority communities. Although objections undoubtedly were raised among pious Muslims when the principle of equality was applied during the Egyptian occupation of Greater Syria in the 1830s, Muhammad ?Ali was sufficiently strong to face down his critics and impose his will. Having observed Muhammad?Ali?s reforms, the Ottomans likely believed they could follow his precedent without provoking civil strife. The Egyptian occupation had also opened the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to European commercial penetration. Beirut emerged as an important port in the Eastern Mediterranean, and merchants gained access to new markets in inland cities formerly closed to Western merchants, such as Damascus. European merchants came to rely on local Christians and Jews to serve as their intermediaries—as translators and agents. Individual Christians and Jews grew wealthy through these connections to European trade and consular activity, and many gained immunity from Ottoman law by accepting European citizenship. The Muslim community in Greater Syria was already growing dangerously resentful of the privileges enjoyed by some Arab Christians and Jews in the 1840s. The delicate communal balance was being upset by external forces. For the first time in generations, the Arab provinces witnessed sectarian violence. The Jews of Damascus were accused of the ritual murder of a Catholic priest in 1840 and were subsequently subject to violent repression by the authorities.⁹ In October 1850, communal violence broke out in Aleppo when a Muslim mob attacked the city’s prosperous Christian minority, leaving dozens killed and hundreds wounded. Such events were unprecedented in Aleppo’s history and reflected the resentment of Muslim merchants whose businesses had suffered while their Christian neighbors were enriched through their commercial contacts with Europe.¹⁰ Greater trouble was brewing in Mount Lebanon. The Egyptian occupation in the 1830s had led to the collapse of the local ruling order and drove a wedge between the Maronites, who had allied with the Egyptians, and the Druze, who had resisted them. The Druze returned to Mount Lebanon after the Egyptian withdrawal to find the Maronites had grown wealthy and powerful in their absence—and claimed lands the Druze had abandoned when they fled Egyptian rule. The differences between the communities led to an outbreak of communal fighting in 1841, which continued intermittently over the next two decades, fueled by British support for the Druze and French support for the Maronites. The Ottomans tried to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the retreating Egyptian forces to assert greater control over the administration of Mount Lebanon. They replaced the discredited Shihabi principality that had ruled since the end of the seventeenth century with a dual governorate, headed by a Maronite in the northern district and a Druze governor to the south of the Beirut-Damascus road. This sectarian split had no basis either in geography or in the demography of Mount Lebanon, as Maronites and Druze were to be found on both sides of the boundary. As a result, the dual governorate seemed only to exacerbate tensions between the two communities. To make matters worse, the Maronites suffered from internal cleavages, with deep divisions between the ruling families, the peasants, and the clergy erupting in peasant revolts that further heightened tensions. By 1860 Mount Lebanon had become a powder keg as the Druze and Maronites formed armed bands and prepared for war. On May 27, 1860, a Christian force of 3,000 men from the town of Zahleh marched toward the Druze heartland to avenge attacks on Christian villagers. They engaged a smaller force of some 600 Druze, who met them on the Beirut-Damascus road near the village of ‘Ayn Dara. The Druze dealt the Christians a decisive defeat and went on the offensive, sacking a number of Christian villages. The battle of ’Ayn Dara marked the beginning of a war of extermination. The Maronite Christians suffered one defeat after another, as their towns and villages were overrun by the victorious Druze in what today would be characterized as ethnic cleansing. Eyewitnesses spoke of rivers of blood flowing through the streets of the highland villages. Within three weeks the Druze had secured the south of Mount Lebanon and the whole of the Biqa’ Valley. The town of Zahleh, to the north of the Beirut-Damascus road, was the last Christian stronghold to fall. On June 18, the Druze attacked and overran Zahleh, killing the defenders and putting its residents to flight. The Christian forces of Lebanon had been utterly destroyed, leaving the Druze in full mastery. At least 200 villages had been sacked and thousands of Christians killed, wounded, or left homeless.¹¹ Events in Mount Lebanon heightened communal tensions throughout Greater Syria. Relations between Muslims and Christians had already been strained by the proclamation of the 1856 Reform Decree and the establishment of legal equality between Ottoman citizens of all faiths. Various Damascene chroniclers noted how the Christians had changed since gaining their legal rights. They no longer recognized the customary privileges of the Muslims, but began to wear the same colors and clothes that formerly had been reserved for Muslims. They grew increasingly assertive, too. “So it came about,” one outraged Muslim notable recorded, “that when a Christian quarrelled with a Muslim, the Christian would fling back at the Muslim any insults the latter used, and even add to them.”¹² The Muslims of Damascus found such behavior intolerable. These views were echoed by a Christian notable. Mikhayil Mishaqa was a native of Mount Lebanon who had served the ruling Shihabi family at the time of the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s. He had since moved to Damascus, where he secured an appointment as the vice consul of a relatively minor power at the time, the United States of America. “As the Empire began to implement reforms and equality among its subjects regardless of their religious affiliation,” he wrote, “the ignorant Christians went too far in their interpretation of equality and thought that the small did not have to submit to the great, and the low did not have to respect the high. Indeed they thought that humble Christians were on a par with exalted Muslims.?¹³ By flaunting such age-old conventions, the Christians of Damascus unwittingly contributed to sectarian tensions that would prove their undoing. The Muslim community within Damascus followed the bloody events of Mount Lebanon with grim satisfaction. They believed, with some justification, that the Christians of Lebanon had behaved arrogantly and had provoked the Druze. The Damascene Muslims were pleased to see the Christians defeated, and they showed no remorse over the bloodletting. When they heard of the fall of Zahleh, “there was such rejoicing and celebration in Damascus,” Mishaqa recorded, that “you would have thought the Empire had conquered Russia.” Faced with the growing hostility of the Muslims of the city, the Christians of Damascus began to fear for their own safety. Following the fall of Zahleh, Druze bands began to raid Christian villages in the hinterlands of Damascus. The Christian peasants fled their exposed villages for the relative safety of Damascus’s walls. The streets of the Christian quarters of Damascus began to fill with these Christian refugees, who, Mishaqa claimed, “slept in the lanes around the churches, with no bed save the ground and no cover save the sky.” These defenseless people became the target of growing anti-Christian sentiment, their vulnerability and poverty diminishing their very humanity to those who were increasingly hostile to the Christian community. They looked to their fellow Christians and to the Ottoman governor to shelter them from harm. Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Damascus, was no friend to the city’s Christian community. Mishaqa, who as a consular official had many interactions with the governor, became convinced that Ahmad Pasha was actively promoting intercommunal tensions. Ahmad Pasha believed the Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 reforms, Mishaqa explained, and that they had deliberately tried to elude the duties—particularly tax obligations—that accompanied their newfound rights. Though the Muslim community of Damascus outnumbered the Christians by a margin of five to one, Ahmad Pasha exacerbated Muslim fears by posting cannons to “protect” mosques from Christian attack. By such measures, Ahmad Pasha encouraged Damascene Muslims to believe they were threatened by attack from the town’s Christians. At the very height of the tensions Ahmad Pasha ordered a demonstration designed to provoke a riot. On July 10, 1860, he paraded a group of Muslim prisoners jailed for crimes against Christians through the streets of central Damascus—ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Predictably, a Muslim mob gathered around the men to break their chains and set them free. The spectacle of Muslims being gratuitously humiliated in this way only reinforced public views that Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 decree. The mob turned to the Christian quarters determined to teach them a lesson. With the recent events in Mount Lebanon still fresh in everyone?s minds, extermination seemed a reasonable solution to the merciless mob. Mishaqa found himself caught up in the violence he had long predicted. He described how the mob beat down his gates and flooded into his home. Mishaqa and his youngest children fled through a back door hoping to take refuge in the house of a Muslim neighbor. At each turn of the road, their path was blocked by rioters. To divert them, Mishaqa threw handfuls of coins and fled with his children while the crowd scrambled after his money. Three times he eluded the mob by this ruse, but eventually he found his way blocked by a frenzied crowd. I had nowhere to run. They surrounded me to strip and kill me. My son and daughter were screaming, “Kill us instead of our father!” One of these wretches struck my daughter on the head with an ax, and he will answer for her blood. Another fired at me from a distance of six paces and missed, but I was wounded on my right temple by a blow with an ax, and my right side, face and arm were crushed by a blow with a cudgel. There were so many crowding around me that it was impossible to fire without hitting others.