In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. This of course is too simple a way of describing a very complicated process, and the explanations of it can be too simple too.
One explanation which is commonly given would run like this: by the eighteenth century the ancient kingdoms of the Muslim world and the societies they ruled were in decline, while the strength of Europe was growing, and this made possible an expansion of goods, ideas and power which led to the imposition of European control, and then to a revival of the strength and vitality of Arab societies in a new form.
The idea of decline is a difficult one to use, however. Some Ottoman writers themselves used it. From the late sixteenth century onwards, those who compared what they saw around them with what they believed to have existed earlier often said that things were not what they had been in an earlier age of justice, and the institutions and code of social morality on which Ottoman strength had rested were in decay. Some of them read Ibn Khaldun; in the seventeenth century the historian Naima reflected some of his ideas, and in the eighteenth part of his Muqaddima was translated into Turkish.
For such writers, the remedy lay in a return to the institutions of the real or imagined golden age. For Sari Mehmed Pasha (d. I7I7), at one time treasurer or defterdar, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, what was important was that the old distinction between rulers and ruled should be restored and that the rulers should act justly:
"The entering of the reaya into the military class must be avoided carefully. Disorder is sure to come when those who are not sons or grandsons of sipahis are all at once made into sipahis . . . Let [the officials] neither oppress the poor reaya nor cause rhem to be vexed by the demand for new impositions in addition to the well-known yearly taxes which rhey are accustomed to give . . . The people of the provinces and dwellers in the towns should be protected and preserved by the removal of injustices and very great attention should be paid to making prosperous the condition of the subjects . . . Yet too much indulgence must not be shown to the reaya."
Rather than speaking of decline, it might be more correct to say that wha' had occurred was an adjustment of Ottoman methods of rule and the balance of power within the empire to changing circumstances. By the end of the eighteenth century the Ottoman dynasty had existed for 500 years and had been ruling most of the Arab countries for almost 300; it was only to be expected that its ways of government and the extent of its control would change from one place and time to another.
There were two kinds of change which were particularly important by the eighteenth century. In the central government of Istanbul, power had tended to move from the household of the sultan to an oligarchy of high civil officials in or around the offices of the grand vizir. Although different groups among them competed for power, they were linked with each other, and with the high dignitaries of the judicial and religious service, in more than one way. They had a common culture, in which there were Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish elements. They shared a concern for the strength and welfare of the empire and the society which it protected. They were not held aloof from society, as the household slaves had been, but were involved in its economic life through their control of religious endowments and tax-farms, and association with merchants for investment in trade and land.
The professional army also had been drawn into society; janissaries became merchants and artisans, and merchants and artisans acquired membership or affiliation with janissary corps. This process was connected, as cause and as effect, with the other important change: the emergence in the provincial capitals of local ruling groups, which were able to control the tax-resources of the provinces and use them to form their own local armies. Such groups existed in most provincial capitals, except those which could be easily controlled from Istanbul. They could be of different kinds. In some places there were ruling families, with their households and dependents; their members were able to obtain recognition from Istanbul from one generation to another. In others, there were self-perpetuating groups of mamiubs: these were men from the Balkans or Caucasus who had come to a city as military slaves or apprentices in the household of a governor or army commander, had risen to important positions in the local government or army, and been able to pass their power on to other members of the same group. Such local rulers were able to make alliances of interests with merchants, land-holders and 'ulama of the city. They maintained the order which was necessary for the prosperity of the city, and in return they profited from it.
This was the situation in most of the Ottoman provinces in Anatolia and Europe, except for those which could be easily reached from Istanbul, and in virtually all the Arab provinces. Aleppo in northern Syria, Iying as it did on a major imperial road, and with comparatively easy access from Istanbul, remained under direct control; but in Baghdad and at Acre on the coast of Palestine members of mamiuk groups held the post of governor; in Damascus and Mosul, families which had risen in the Ottoman service were able to fill the office of governor for several generations. In Hijaz, the sharifs of Mecca, a family claiming descent from the Prophet, ruled the holy cities, although there was an Ottoman governor at Jidda on the coast. In Yemen, there was no longer an Ottoman presence, and such central authority as did exist was in the hands of a family of imams recognized by the Zaydi inhabitants.
In Egypt the situation was more complicated. There was still a governor sent from Istanbul, and not allowed to remain too long in case he should acquire too much power; but most high offices, and control of the tax-farms, had fallen into the hands first of rival groups of mamiuks and army officers, and then of one of them. In the three Ottoman provinces in the Maghrib, leaders of the local armies had seized power in one way or another. In Tripoli and Tunis, military commanders created dynasties, recognized by Istanbul as governors but holding the local title of bey. In Algiers, the military corps appointed successive rulers (the deys); but in time the dey was able to create a group of high officials which was able to perpetuate itself and keep the office of dey in its hands. In all three, of ficials, army officers and merchants had been united at first by the common interest of equipping privateering ships (the 'Barbary pirates') to capture the ships of European states with which the Ottoman sultan was at war and sell their goods; but this practice had virtually come to an end by the late eighteenth century.
However great these changes, they should not be exaggerated. In Istanbul the sultan still had final power. Even the strongest of ficial could be deposed and executed, and his goods confiscated; the sultan's officials were still regarded as his 'slaves'. With some exceptions, even the strongest local rulers were content to remain within the Ottoman system; they were 'local Ottomans', not independent monarchs. The Ottoman state was not alien to them, it was still the embodiment of the Muslim community (or at least j; of a large part of it). Local rulers could have their own dealings with foreign powers, but they would use their strength to further the major interests and defend the frontiers of the empire. Moreover, the central government still had a residue of strength in most parts of the empire. It could give or withhold formal recognition; even the bey of Tunis and the dey of Algiers wished to be formally invested by the sultan as governor. It could make use of rivalries between different provinces, or different members of a family or a mamink group, or between the provincial ruler and local notables. Where it could use the great imperial roads or the sea-routes of the eastern Mediterranean, it could send an army to reassert its power; this happened in Egypt, briefly, in the I780s. The pilgrimage, organized by the governor of Damascus, carrying gifts from Istanbul to the inhabitants of the holy cities, guarded by an Ottoman force, moving down a road maintained by Ottoman garrisons, was still an annual assertion of Ottoman sovereignty all along the way from Istanbul through Syria and western Arabia to the heart of the Muslim world.
A new balance of forces had been created in the empire. It was precarious, and each party to it tried to increase its power when it could; but it was able to maintain an alliance of interests between central government, provincial Ottomans, and the social groups which possessed wealth and prestige, the merchants and 'ulama. There is evidence that in some regions this combination of strong local governments and active urban elites maintained or increased agricultural production, the basis of urban prosperity and of the strength of governments. This seems to have happened in the European provinces; the growth of population in central Europe increased the demand for foodstuffs and raw materials, and the Balkan provinces were able to meet it. In Tunisia and Algeria grain and hides were produced for export to Marseille and Livorno; in northern Palestine and western Anatolia cotton production increased to meet the demand from France. In most provinces, however, control by the local government and its urban allies did not extend far from the cities. In the Maghrib, Ottoman power did not spread far inland into the high plateau. In the Fertile Crescent, some tribes of camel-breeding nomads had moved northwards from central Arabia; the area used for pasture expanded at the expense of that used for cultivation, and so did the area in which tribal leaders rather than urban officials controlled the cultivators who remained.
In lands beyond the frontier of the empire processes of the same kind had taken place. In Oman a new ruling family, which at first claimed the imamate of the Ibadis, established themselves at Masqat on the coast, and an alliance of rulers and merchants was able to spread Omani trade around the coasts of the Indian Ocean. In other ports of the Gulf, Kuwait, Bahrayn and some smaller ones, ruling families linked closely with merchant communities emerged. In the Sudan, to the south of Egypt, there were two longhved sultanates: one, that of the Funj, lay in the fertile land between the Blue and White Niles, where trade-routes running from Egypt to Ethiopia crossed those going from west Africa to the Red Sea, the other was that of Darfur, Iying west of the Nile, on a trade-route which went from west Africa to Egypt.
In Morocco, the extreme Maghrib, the 'Alawis had been ruling since the middle of the seventeenth century, but without the firmly based military or bureaucratic strength which even the local Ottoman rulers could rely on Like their predecessors, they could never wholly dominate the city of Fez with its powerful merchant families, its 'ulama clustered around the Qaraw~yym mosque, and its saintly families guarding the shrines of their ancestors; outside the cities they could at best manage to control parts of the countryside by political manipulation and the prestige of their descent. Being insecurely based, their strength fluctuated; great at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it then grew weaker, but was reviving in the second half of the century.
In the eighteenth century, the imprint of Ottoman power and culture upon the Arab provinces appears to have gone deeper. It took root in the cities by way of what have been called 'local Ottoman' families and groups. On the one hand, military commanders and civil officials settled in provincial capitals and founded families or households which were able to retain positions in the Ottoman service from one generation to another; the local ruling families and Mamluk groups were only the upper level of a phenomenon which also existed at other levels. Some of them held positions in the local administration, some acquired wealth through the acquisition of tax-farms, and some sent their sons to local religious schools and from there into the legal service. On the other hand, members of local families with a tradition of religious learning tended increasingly to obtain posts in the religious and legal service, and through this to acquire control over waqfs, including the most lucrative ones which had been established for the benefit of the holy cities or of institutions founded by the sultans; many of these were diverted from their original purpose to private use. It has been estimated that, while there were seventy-five official positions in the religio-legal system in Damascus in the early eighteenth century, by the middle of the century the number had risen to over three hundred. A concomitant of this was that many local families which by tradition adhered to the Shafi'i or Maliki madhhabs came to accept the Hanafi code, the one which was of ficially recognized by the Ottoman sultans. (This does not appear to have occurred in the Maghrib, however; there the bulk of the population, except for those of Turkish origin, remained Maliki.) By the late eighteenth century, therefore, there existed, at least in some of the great Arab cities, powerful and more or less permanent families of local 'notables', some of them more Turkish and others more Arab. An expression of their power and stability was the construction of elaborate houses and palaces in Algiers, Tunis, Damascus and elsewhere. One of the most magnificent was the 'Azm palace in Damascus, a group of rooms and suites built around two courtyards, one for the men of the family and their visitors, the other for women and domestic life. On a smaller scale, but still splendid, were the houses built in Judayda, a Christian quarter in Aleppo, by families enriched through the growing trade with Europe. In the mountains of south Lebanon the palace of the amir of Lebanon Bashir II, was built by artisans from Damascus: an unexpected urban palace on a distant hillside. Such houses were built by local architects and craftsmen, and architectural design and style were expressions of local traditions, but here too, as in the mosques, the influence of Ottoman decorative styles was to be seen, particularly in the use of tiles; mingled with this there was a certain imitation of European styles, as in wall-paintings, and the use of Bohemian glass and other goods manufactured in Europe for the Middle Eastern market. In Tunis, a French traveller in the early part of the century found that the ancient palace of the beys, the Bardo, had been provided with furniture in the Italian style.
The survival and social power of the families of notables were bound up with the local schools. A study of Cairo has suggested that a considerable part of the male population - perhaps as many as half - may have been literate, but few of the women. This implies that the elementary schools, The kuttabs were numerous. At a higher level, a historian of the time mentions about twenty madrasas and the same number of mosques where higher teaching was carried on. The central institution, the Azhar mosque, seems to have flourished at the expense of some of the smaller and less well-endowed mosques and madrasas; it drew students from Syria, Tunisia, Morocco and the regions of the upper Nile. In the same way, in Tunis the Zaytuna mosque grew in size and importance during the century; its library was enlarged, and its endowments were supplemented by the proceeds of the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims.
In such higher schools, the ancient curriculum was still followed. The most important studies were Qur'anic exegesis, Hadith and fiqh, for which collections of fatwas as well as formal treatises were used; linguistic subjects were studied as an introduction to them. The basic doctrines of religion were taught mainly in later compendia, and the works of Ibn 'Arabi and other Sufis seem to have been widely read. Such rational sciences as mathematics and astronomy were studied and taught for the most part outside the formal curriculum, but there seems to have been great interest in them.
Within the limits of a rather rigid and unchanging curriculum, there was still room for literary production of high quality. In Tunis, a family founded by a Turkish soldier who had come to the country with the Ottoman expeditionary force in the sixteenth century produced four men in successive generations, all of them called Muhammad Bayram, who were well-known scholars and Hanafi muftis. In Syria, the family founded by Murad, the Naqshbandi from central Asia, also held the office of Hanafi mufti for more than one generation. One of them, Muhammad Khalil al-Muradi (I760-9I), carried on a specifically Syrian tradition of collecting biographies of men of learning and renown; his biographical dictionary covers the twelfth Islamic century.
For help in collecting biographies, Muradi turned to a famous scholar resident in Egypt, Murtada al-Zabidi (I732-9I). His letter expresses the self-consciousness of one who is aware that he stands at the end of a long tradition which must be preserved:
" When I was in Istanbul with one of its great men . . . there was talk of history, and its decline in our age, and the lack of concern for it among the men of this time, although it is the greatest of the arts; we lamented it sadly."
Of Indian origin, Zabidi had lived for a time in Zabid in Yemen, an important stopping-place on the route from south and south-east Asia to the holy cities, and a significant centre of learning at the time; he had moved to Cairo, and from there his influence radiated far and wide, because of his reputation for having the power of intercession, and through his writings. Among them were works on Hadith, a commentary on Ghazali's Ihya 'ulum al-din, and a great Arabic lexicon.
Murtada al-Zabidi in his turn asked a younger scholar, 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (I753-I8Z5) to help him in collecting biographical material and this was the impulse which turned his mind to the writing of history; in due course he was to produce the last great chronicle in the traditional style, covering not only political events but also the lives of scholars and famous men.
In the Shi'i world, too, the tradition of high learning continued, but scholars were sharply divided. Throughout most of the century the Akhbari school of thought was dominant among the scholars of the holy cities, but towards the end there was a revival of the Usuli school, under the influence of two important scholars, Muhammad Baqir al-Bihbihani (d. I79I) and Ja'far Kashif al-Ghita (c. I74I-I8I2); supported by the local rulers in Iraq and Iran, for whom the flexibility of the Usulis offered some advantages, this was to become once more the leading school. The Akhbariyya continued to be strong in some regions of the Gulf, however. Towards the end of the century both Usulis and Akhbaris were challenged by a new movement, the Shaykhiyya, which grew out of the mystical tradition, that of spiritual interpretation of the holy books, which was endemic in Shi'ism: this was condemned by both the other schools, and regarded as outside the bounds of imami Shiiism.
There is no indication that the thought either of Sunnis or of Shi'is was penetrated at this time by the new ideas which were emerging in Europe. Some of the Syrian and Lebanese priests who had acquired a knowledge of Latin, Italian or French were aware of the Catholic theology and the European scholarship of their time. A few of them taught in Europe, and became scholars of European reputation: the most famous was Yusuf al- Sim'ani (Joseph Assemani, I687-I768), a Maronite from Lebanon, a student of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts who became librarian of the Vatican Library.
Whether they lived within the Ottoman Empire or outside its frontiers, those who professed faith in Islam and lived through the medium of the Arabic language had something in common which was deeper than political allegiance or shared interests. Among them, and between them and those who spoke Turkish or Persian or the other languages of the Muslim world, there was the common sense of belonging to an enduring and unshaken world created by the final revelation of God through the Prophet Muhammad, and expressing itself in different forms of thought and social activity: the Qur'an, the Traditions of the Prophet, the system of law or ideal social behaviour, the Sufi orders oriented towards the tombs of their founders, the schools, the travels of scholars in search of learning, the circulation of books, the fast of Ramadan, observed at the same time and in the same way by Muslims everywhere, and the pilgrimage which brought many thousands from all over the Muslim world to Mecca at the same moment of the year. All these activities preserved the sense of belonging to a world which contained all that was necessary for welfare in this life and salvation in the next.
Once more, a structure which lasts for ages must be expected to change, and the Abode of Islam as it existed in the eighteenth century was different in many ways from what it had been earlier. One wave of change came from the far east of the Muslim world, from northern India, where the other great Sunni dynasty, the Mughals, ruled Muslims and Hindus. Here a number of thinkers, of whom the most famous was Shah Waliullah of Delhi (1703-61), were teaching that rulers should rule in accordance with the precepts of Islam, and that Islam should be purified by teachers using their ijtihad on the basis of the Qur'an and Hadith; the different madhhabs should be merged in a single system of morality and law, and the devotions of the Sufis should be kept within its bounds. Scholars and ideas moving westwards from India met and mingled with others in the great schools and in the holy cities at the time of pilgrimage, and from this mingling there came a strengthening of that kind of Sufism which laid its emphasis on strict observance of the shariia, no matter how far advanced a Muslim might be on the road which led to experience of God. The Naqshbandiyya had spread earlier from central Asia and India into the Ottoman countries, and its influence was growing. Another order, the Tijaniyya, was founded in Algeria and Morocco by a teacher returning from Mecca and Cairo, and spread into west Africa.
There was another movement which might have seemed of less importance at the time, but was to have wider significance later. It arose in central Arabia in the early eighteenth century, when a religious reformer, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (I703-92), began to preach the need for Muslims to return to the teaching of Islam as understood by the followers of Ibn Hanbal: strict obedience to the Qur'an and Hadith as they were interpreted by responsible scholars in each generation, and rejection of all that could be regarded as illegitimate innovations. Among these innovations was the reverence given to dead saints as intercessors with God, and the special devotions of the Sufi orders. The reformer made an alliance with Muhammad ibn Sa'ud, ruler of a small market town, Dir'iyya, and this led to the formation of a state which claimed to live under the guidance of the shari'a and tried to bring the pastoral tribes all around it under its guidance too. In so doing it asserted the interests of the frail urban society of the oases against the pastoral hinterland, but at the same time it rejected the claims of the Ottomans to be the protectors of the authentic Islam. By the first years of the nineteenth century the armies of the new state had expanded; they had sacked the Shi'i shrines in south-western Iraq and occupied the holy cities of Hijaz.
. Living, growing, self-sufficient and unchallenged as the world of Islam may have seemed to most of those who belonged to it, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century at least some members of the Ottoman elite knew that it was threatened by forces which were bringing about a change in its relations with the world around it. The Ottoman government had always been aware of a world beyond itself: to the east, the Shi'i Empire of Iran and beyond that the empire of the Mughals; to the north and west, the Christian states. From an early time it had been brought into contact with western and central Europe; it controlled the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, and its western frontier lay in the basin of the Danube. The contacts were not only those of enmity. That certainly existed, when the Ottoman fleet fought the Venetians and Spaniards for control of the Mediterranean, and the army came to the gates of Vienna; to that extent, the relationship could be expressed in terms of crusade on the one side and jihad on the other. There were other kinds of relationship, however. Trade was mainly carried on by European merchants, Venetians and Genoese in the earlier Ottoman centuries, British and French in the eighteenth. There were alliances with European kings who shared a common enemy with the sultan; in particular with France against the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain. In 1569 France was given concessions (Capitulations), regulating the activities of merchants and missionaries; these were modelled upon earlier privileges given to merchants of some of the Italian cities, and were later given to other European powers. The main states of Europe had permanent embassies and consulates in the empire, which became part of the states-system of Europe, although it did not itself send permanent missions to European capitals until much later. (In the same way, Morocco and England had good relations when both were hostile to Spain.)
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the relationship could still be regarded by the Ottomans as being broadly one of equal strength. In the late fifteenth the disciplined professional army of the sultan, using firearms, had been a match for any in Europe. In the seventeenth the Ottomans made their last great conquest, the island of Crete, taken from the Venetians. By the early eighteenth, they were dealing with European states on a level of diplomatic equality, instead of the superiority which they had been able to maintain at an earlier time, and their army was regarded as having fallen behind others in organization, tactics and the use of weapons, although not so far behind that efforts could not be made to strengthen it within the existing system of institutions. Trade was still carried on within the bounds of the Capitulations.
In the last quarter of the century, however, the situation began to change rapidly and dramatically, as the gap between the technical skills of some western and northern European countries and those of the rest of the world grew wider. During the centuries of Ottoman rule there had been no advance in technology and a decline in the level of scientific knowledge and understanding. Apart from a few Greeks and others educated in Italy there was little knowledge of the languages of western Europe or of the scientific and technical advances being made there. The astronomical theories associated with the name of Copernicus were mentioned for the first time, and even then only briefly, in Turkish at the end of the seventeenth century, and the advances in European medicine were only slowly coming to be known in the eighteenth.
Some countries of Europe had now moved on to a different level of power. Plague had ceased to ravage the cities of Europe as quarantine systems took effect, and the introduction of maize and the extension of cultivated land ended the threat of famine and made it possible to feed a larger population. Improvements in the construction of ships and the art of navigation had taken European sailors and merchants into all the oceans of the world, and led to the establishment of trading points and colonies. Trade and the exploitation of the mines and fields of the colonies had given rise to an accumulation of capital, which was being used to produce manufactured goods in new ways and on a larger scale. The growth of population and wealth made it possible for governments to maintain larger armies and navies. Thus some of the countries of western Europe - England, France and The Netherlands in particular - had embarked on a process of continuous accumulation of resources, while the Ottoman countries, like other parts of Asia and Africa, were still living in a situation in which population was held down by plague and famine, and in some places had decreased, and production did not generate the capital necessary for fundamental changes in its methods or any increase in the organized power of the government.
The growth in the military power of western Europe was not yet felt directly. In the western Mediterranean, Spanish power had waned, and the dey of Algiers was able in 1791 to capture Oran, which had been in Spanish hands; in the eastern Mediterranean, Venetian power was in decline, and that of England and France was not yet felt. The danger seemed to come from the north and east. Russia, whose army and government had been reorganized on western lines, was advancing southwards. In a decisive war with the Ottomans (1768-74), a fleet under Russian command sailed the eastern Mediterranean, and a Russian army occupied the Crimea, which was annexed to the Russian Empire a few years later. From this time the Black Sea ceased to be an Ottoman lake; the new Russian port of Odessa became a centre of trade.
Far to the east, in India, something no less ominous was beginning. European ships had first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the late fifteenth century, and European trading posts had gradually been established on the coasts of India, in the Gulf and on the islands of south-east Asia, but for the next century or more their trade was limited. The Cape route was long and hazardous, and spices and other Asian goods were still sent by the Gulf or Red Sea to the cities of the Middle East, to be sold in the local markets or distributed further west and north. Europe wanted to buy spices but had little to offer in return, and its ships and merchants in the Indian Ocean were largely occupied in buying and selling between Asian ports. In the early seventeenth century the spice trade was diverted round the Cape by the Dutch; but to some extent the loss to Ottoman merchants was made up by the new trade in coffee, grown in Yemen and distributed over the western world by merchants in Cairo. Later, European trading companies began to expand beyond their ports and become tax-collectors and virtual rulers of wide areas. The Dutch East India Company extended its control in Indonesia, and the British company took over the administration of a large region of the Mughal Empire, Bengal, in the I760s.
By the last years of the eighteenth century, the nature of European trade with the Middle East and the Maghrib was clearly changing. Some groups of Arab merchants and sailors were still able to keep their position in the trade of the Indian Ocean, in particular those of Oman, whose activities and power spread on the east African coast. In general, however, exchanges between different regions of the world fell into the hands of European merchants and shipowners; English ships came to Mokha on the coast of Yemen to buy coffee; spices of Asia were brought to the Middle East by European merchants. Not only merchants but also producers felt the challenge. Goods produced in Europe, or under European control in the colonies of Asia and the New World, began to compete with those of the Middle East both in the European and in the Middle Eastern market. The coffee of Martinique was cheaper than that of Yemen, and the merchants who handled it had better commercial techniques than those of Cairo; they also had a monopoly of the European markets. By the late eighteenth century Mokha coffee had virtually lost the European trade, and was facing the competition of coffee from the Antilles in Cairo, Tunis and Istanbul. Sugar from the Antilles, refined in Marseille, was threatening the sugar industry of Egypt. French textiles of good quality were being bought by ordinary men and women as well as courts. In return, Europe was buying for the most part raw materials: silk of Lebanon and cotton of northern Palestine, grain of Algeria and Tunisia, hides of Morocco.
So far as trade with Europe was concerned, the countries of the Middle East and the Maghrib were moving into the position of being mainly suppliers of raw materials and buyers of finished products. The effects of this were still limited, however. Trade with Europe was less important for the economies of the Arab countries than that with the countries further east, or that which passed by the Nile or Saharan routes between the Mediterranean coastlands and Africa; the main effect may have been to lessen the trade between different parts of the Ottoman Empire in those goods in which Europe was becoming a competitor.
However limited, it was a sign of a displacement of power. If British ships came as far as Mokha, they might come further up the Red Sea and threaten the security of the holy cities and the revenues of Egypt; the expansion of British power in Bengal, a region with a large Muslim population and part of the Mughal Empire, was known at least to the Ottoman ruling group. The Russian occupation of the Crimea, a land of mainly Muslim population, ruled by a dynasty closely connected with the Ottomans, and the movements of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean were more widely known. By the end of the century there was a growing awareness of the dangers. Among ordinary people it found expression in Messianic prophecies, among the Ottoman elite in the idea that something must be done. Occasional embassies to the courts of Europe, meetings with European diplomats and travellers, had brought some knowledge of the changes taking place in western Europe. It became clear to some of the high Ottoman officials that the defences of the empire needed to be strengthened. Some attempts were made to introduce corps with a modern training and equipment into the army and navy, and in the I790S, on the initiative of a new sultan, Selim III (I789-I807), a more sustained effort was made to create a new model army; but in the end it came to nothing, because the creation of a new army, and the fiscal reforms which it involved, threatened too many powerful interests.
The first attempts to recover the strength of the imperial government were given urgency by the wars between the France of the Revolution and then of Napoleon, and the other European powers, which convulsed Europe from I79Z to I8I5 and were carried on wherever European armies could march or navies sail. French, Russian and Austrian armies at different times occupied parts of the sultan's European provinces. For the first time, British and French naval power was shown in the eastern Mediterranean. At one point a British fleet tried to enter the straits leading to Istanbul. In 1798 a French expeditionary force commanded by Napoleon occupied Egypt as an incident in the war with England; the French ruled Egypt for three years, tried to move from there into Syria, but were compelled to withdraw by British and Ottoman intervention, after the first formal military alliance between the Ottomans and non-Muslim states.
This was a brief episode, and its importance has been disputed by some historians; others have thought of it as opening a new era in the Middle East. It was the first major incursion of a European power into a central country of the Muslim world, and the first exposure of its inhabitants to a new kind of military power, and to the rivalries of the great European states. The Islamic historian al-Jabarti was living in Cairo at the time and recorded the impact made by the invaders at length and in vivid detail, and with a sense of the discrepancy of strength between the two sides, and the inadequacy of the rulers of Egypt to meet the challenge. When the news of the French landing at Alexandria first came to the leaders of the Mamluks in Cairo, he tells us, they thought nothing of it: 'relying on their strength, and their claim that if all the Franks came they would not be able to stand against them, and they would crush them beneath their horses' hooves.' This was followed by defeat, panic, and attempts at revolt. Mingled with Jabarti's opposition to the new rulers, however, there was a certain admiration for the scholars and scientists who came with them:
"if any of the Muslims came to them in order to look round they did not prevent him entering their most cherished places. . . and if they found in him any appetite or desire for knowledge they showed their friendship and love for him, and they would bring out all kinds of pictures and maps, and animals and birds and plants, and histories of the ancients and of nations and tales of the prophets . . . I went to them often, and they showed me all that."
Such events disturbed the life of the Ottoman and Arab lands. The French armies in the Mediterranean bought grain from Algeria,- and the British army in Spain bought it from Egypt. British and French merchant ships could not move easily in the eastern Mediterranean, and this gave an opening for Greek merchants and ship-owners. The creation of republics by the French in parts of the Balkans did not go unnoticed by Greeks and Serbs; some echoes of the rhetoric of the Revolution were caught by Christian subjects of the sultan, although not to any significant extent by Turkish or Arab Muslims.
Once the Napoleonic wars were ended, European power and influence spread even further. The adoption of new techniques of manufacture and new methods of organization of industry had been given an impetus by the needs and energies which wars release. Now that the wars were over and merchants and goods could move freely, the world lay open to the new, cheap cotton and woollen cloths and metal goods which were being produced, first and mainly in England, but also in France; Belgium, Switzerland and western Germany. In the I830s and I840s there began a revolution in transport, with the coming of steamships and railways. Previously, transport, especially by land, had been costly, slow and risky. Now it became quick and reliable, and the proportion which it represented of the total price of goods was smaller; it became possible to move not only luxuries but bulky goods for a large market over long distances. Men and news could move quickly too, and this made possible the growth of an international money market: banks, stock exchanges, currencies linked with the pound sterling. The profits of trade could be invested to generate new productive activities. Behind the merchant and the sailor there stood the armed power of the European states. The Napoleonic wars had shown their superiority, not so much in weapons, for the great changes in military technology were to come rather later, as in the organization and use of armies.
Connected with these changes was the continuing growth in population. Between 1800 and 1850 the population of Great Britain increased from I6 to 27 millions, and that of Europe as a whole increased by about 50 per cent. London became the largest city in the world, with a population of 2 1/2 millions by 1850; other capital cities also grew, and there emerged a new kind of industrial city dominated by offices and factories. By the middle of the century more than half the population of England was urban. This concentration in cities provided manpower for industry and armies, and a growing domestic market for the products of the factories. It both required and made possible governments which would intervene more directly in the life of society. At the same time the spread of literacy and newspapers helped the expansion of ideas generated by the French Revolution and created a new kind of politics, which attempted to mobilize public opinion in active support of a government or in opposition to it. The repercussions of this vast expansion of European energy and powers were felt everywhere in the world. Between the I830s and I860s regular steamship lines connected the ports of the southern and eastern Mediterranean with London and Liverpool, Marseille and Trieste, and textiles and metal goods found a wide and growing market. British exports to the eastern Mediterranean countries increased 800 per cent in value between 1815 and 1850; by that time beduin in the Syrian desert were wearing shirts made of Lancashire cotton. At the same time, the need of Europe for raw materials for the factories and food for the population which worked in them encouraged the production of crops for sale and export: the export of grain continued, although it became less important as Russian grain exports grew; Tunisian olive oil was in demand for the making of soap, Lebanese silk for the factories of Lyon, above all Egyptian cotton for the mills of Lancashire. By I82O a French engineer, Louis Jumel, had begun to cultivate a long-staple cotton suitable for high-class textiles, which he had found in an Egyptian garden. From that time an increasing amount of Egypt's cultivable land was turned over to the production of cotton, almost all of it for export to England. In the forty years which followed Jumel's beginning, the value of exports of Egyptian cotton increased from almost nothing to approximately 1.5 million Egyptian pounds by 1861. (The Egyptian pound was roughly equivalent to the pound sterling.) Faced with this explosion of European energy, the Arab countries, like most of Asia and Africa, could generate no countervailing power of their own. The population did not change much during the first half of the nineteenth century. Plague was gradually controlled, at least in the coastal cities, as quarantine systems under European supervision were introduced, but cholera came in from India. The Arab countries had not yet entered the railway age, except for small beginnings in Egypt and Algeria; internal communications were bad and famine could still occur. While the population of Egypt increased, from 4 millions in 1800 to 5.5 in 1860, in most of the other countries it remained stationary, and in Algeria, for special reasons, it went down considerably, from 3 millions in 1830 to 2.5 in 1860. Some of the coastal ports grew in size, particularly Alexandria, the main port for the export of Egyptian cotton, which increased from some 10,000 in 1800 to 100,000 by 1850. Most of the cities, however, remained roughly the same size as before, and there had not grown those specifically modern cities which generated the power of modern states. Apart from areas which produced crops for export, agricultural production remained at subsistence level, and could not lead to an accumulation of capital for productive investment.
Behind the merchants and ship-owners of Europe stood the ambassadors and consuls of the great powers, supported in the last resort by the armed might of their governments. During the first half of the nineteenth century they were able to work in a way which had been impossible before, acquiring influence with governments and officials, and using it in order to further the commercial interests of their citizens and the major political interests of their countries, and also to extend help and protection to communities with which their governments had a special connection. France had a special relationship, going back to the seventeenth century, with the Uniate Christians, those parts of the eastern Churches which accepted the primacy of the Pope, and more specifically with the Maronites in Lebanon; by the end of the eighteenth century, Russia was putting forward a similar claim to protect the Eastern Orthodox Churches. With their new power, not only France and Russia but the European states in general now began to intervene collectively in the relations between the sultan and his Christian subjects. In 1808 the Serbs in what is now Yugoslavia revolted against the local Ottoman government, and the outcome, after many vicissitudes, was the establishment, with European help, of an autonomous Serbian state in 1830. In 1821 something of more general importance occurred: an uprising among the Greeks, who had long held a comparatively favcured position among the subject peoples, and whose wealth and contacts with Europe had been expanding. In part this was a series of risings against local rulers, in part a religious movement against Muslim domination, but it was also moved by the new spirit of nationalism. The idea that those who spoke the same language and shared the same collective memories should live together in an independent political society had been spread by the French Revolution, and among Greeks it was connected with a revival of interest in ancient Greece. Here too the outcome was European intervention, both military and diplomatic, and the creation of an independent kingdom in 1833, In some places, European states were able to impose their own direct rule. This took place not in the central parts of the Ottoman world, but on the margins where one European state was able to act without deference to the interests of others. In the Caucasus, Russia expanded southwards into lands inhabited largely by Muslims and ruled by local dynasties which had lived within the Ottoman sphere of influence. In the Arabian peninsula, the port of Aden was occupied by the British from India in 1839, and was to become a staging-post on the steamship route to India; in the Gulf, there was a growing British presence based upon naval power and embodied in some places in formal agreements with the small rulers of the ports, by which they bound themselves to maintain truces with each other at sea (hence the term by which some of them were known, the 'Trucial States': these included Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharja).
What happened in the Maghrib was more important than this. In 1830 a French army landed on the Algerian coast and occupied Algiers. There had been a number of European naval expeditions to check a revival of privateering during and after the Napoleonic wars, but this was to be an event of a different kind. Its origins lay partly in the internal politics of France under the restored monarchy, partly in an obscure question of debts arising from the supply of grain to France during the wars, but more deeply in the new expansive dynamism created by economic growth: the merchants of Marseille wanted a strong trading position on the Algerian coast. Once installed in Algiers, and soon afterwards in some other coastal towns, the French did not at first know what to do. They could scarcely withdraw, because a position of strength could not be surrendered lightly, and because they had dismantled the local Ottoman administration. Soon they were led inexorably to expand into the interior. Officials and merchants saw prospects of gain through acquisition of land; military men wished to make their position more secure and safeguard the food supply and trade with the interior; and the removal of the local Ottoman government had weakened the traditional system of relationships among local authorities. The dey's government had stood at the apex of that system, regulating as far as it could the extent to which each local authority could extend his power; once it was removed, the various leaders had to find their own balance with each other, and this led to a struggle for supremacy. The most successful contestant was 'Abd al-Qadir (1808-83) in the western region. Deriving prestige from belonging to a family with a religious position, connected with the Qadiri order, he became the point around which local forces could gather. For a time he ruled a virtually independent state, with its centre Iying in the interior, and extending from the west into the eastern part of the country. This inevitably brought him into conflict with French power expanding from the coast. The symbols of his resistance to the French were traditional ones - his war was a jihad, he justified his authority by the choice of the 'ulama and respect for the shari'a - but there were modern aspects of his organization of government. 'Abd al-Qadir was finally defeated and sent into exile in 1847; he spent his later years in Damascus, much respected by the population and on good terms with the representatives of France and other European powers. In the process of defeating him, French rule had extended southwards across the high plateau to the edge of the Sahara, and its nature had changed. French and other immigrants had begun to come in and take over land, made available by confiscation, the sale of state domain, and in other ways. In the I840s the government began more systematically to take part of what was regarded as the collective land of a village for settlement by immigrants (colons). This went largely to those who had the capital to cultivate it, using either immigrant peasants from Spain or Italy or Arab labour. What remained was assumed to be sufficient for the needs of the villagers, but the partition in fact destroyed ancient modes of land-use and led to the dispossession of small cultivators, who became sharecroppers or landless labourers on the new estates.
By 1860 the European population of Algeria was almost 200,000, among a Muslim population of approximately 2.5 millions (less than before, because of losses sustained in the war of conquest, epidemics, and famine in years of bad harvests). Algiers and other coastal towns had become largely European, and agricultural settlement had spread southwards beyond the coastal plain and into the high plateaux. Economic life had come to be dominated by an alliance of interests between officials, those landowners with the capital to practice commercial agriculture, and merchants who managed the exchanges between Algeria and France, some of them Europeans, some indigenous Jews. This economic process had a political dimension. The growth of colonization raised in an urgent form the question of what France should do in Algeria. The fully conquered and intensively settled districts were assimilated into the French administrative system in the I840S; they were ruled directly by officials, with local government in the hands of the immigrant population, and the indigenous notables, who had previously acted as intermediaries between the government and the Muslim population, were reduced to the position of subordinate officials. Areas where settlement was not so far advanced remained under military rule, but these grew smaller in size as colonization expanded. The immigrants wanted this situation to continue, and the country to become fully French: 'there is no longer an Arab people, there are men who talk another language than ours'. They were becoming numerous enough, and sufficiently well-connected with French politicians, to form an effective lobby.
This policy posed a problem, that of the future of the Muslim population, Arab and Berber, and by the beginning of the I860S the ruler of France, the Emperor Napoleon III, was beginning to look with favour on another policy. In his view, Algeria was an Arab kingdom, a European colony and a French camp; there were three separate interests to be reconciled: those of the French state, the colons, and the Muslim majority. This idea found expression in a decree of 1863 (the senatus consultus), which laid down that the policy of dividing village lands should end, the rights of the cultivators to the land be recognized, and the social position of the local leaders be strengthened in order to win them over to support of French authority.
From more than one direction European political and economic power was drawing nearer to the heartlands of the Arab Muslim world, but in those lands there was still some freedom of reaction, partly because the conflicting interests of the European states would not permit any of them to move too far. It was therefore possible for a number of indigenous governments to try to create their own framework, within which Europe could pursue its interests but its interventions would be limited, and their subjects, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, would continue to accept their rule.
After the tentative attempts of Selim III had come to nothing, it was not until the I820s that another sultan, Mahmud II (1808-39), and a small group of high officials convinced of the need for change were strong enough to take decisive action Their new policy involved the dissolution of the old army and the creation of a new one raised by conscription and trained by European instructors. With this army it was possible gradually to establish direct control over some of the provinces in Europe and Anatolia, Iraq and Syria, and Tripoli in Africa. The plan of reform went further than that, however. The intention was not only to restore the strength of the government but to organize it in a new way. This intention was proclaimed in a royal decree (the Hatt-i serif of Gulhane), issued in 1839, shortly after the death of Mahmud:
"All the world knows that since the first days of the Ottoman state, the lofty principles of the Qur'an and the rules of the shari'a were always perfectly preserved. Our mighty sultanate reached the highest degree of strength and power, and all its subjects of ease and prosperity. But in the last one hundred and fifty years, because of a succession of difficult and diverse causes, the sacred shari'a was not obeyed nor were the beneficent regulations followed; consequently, its former strength and prosperity have changed into weakness and poverty. It is evident rhat countries not governed by the shari'a cannot survive. . . Full of confidence in the help of the Most High, and certain of rhe support of our Prophet, we deem it necessary and important from now on to introduce new legislation in order to achieve effective administration of the Ottoman government and provinces."
Officials should be free from the fear of arbitrary execution and seizure of property; they should govern in accordance with regulations drafted by high officials meeting in council. The subjects should live under laws derived from principles of justice, and which enabled them to pursue their economic interests freely; the laws should recognize no difference between Muslims, Christian and Jewish Ottomans. New commercial laws would enable foreign merchants to trade and travel freely. (The reorganization which followed this decree was known as the Tanzimat, from the Arabic and Turkish word for order.)
Central control, conciliar bureaucracy, the rule of law, equality behind these guiding ideas there lay another one, that of Europe as the exemplar of modern civilization and of the Ottoman Empire as its partner. When the reformers issued the Gulhane decree, it was communicated to the ambassadors of friendly powers.
In two of the Arab provinces, rather similar policies were started by local Ottoman rulers. In Cairo, the disturbance of the local balance of power brought about by the French invasion led to the seizure of power by Muhammad 'Ali (1805-48), a Turk from Macedonia who had come to Egypt with the Ottoman forces sent against the French; he rallied support among the townspeople, outwitted his rivals, and virtually imposed himself on the Ottoman government as governor. Around him he formed his own local Ottoman ruling group of Turks and mamluks, a modern army and an elite of educated officials, and he used them to impose his control over the administration and tax-collection of the whole country, and to expand beyond it into the Sudan, Syria and Arabia. Egyptian rule in Syria and Arabia did not last long; he was forced to withdraw by a combined effort of the European powers, which did not wish to see a virtually independent Egyptian state weakening that of the Ottomans. In return for withdrawal, however, he obtained recognition of his family's right to rule Egypt under Ottoman suzerainty (the special title his successors took was that of khedive). Egyptian rule continued, however, in the Sudan, which for the first time constituted a single political unit.
In some ways, what Muhammad 'Ali tried to do was simpler than what the statesmen of Istanbul were attempting. There was no explicit idea of citizenship or change in the moral basis of government. In other respects, however, the changes introduced in Egypt went beyond those in the rest of the empire, and from this time Egypt was to follow a separate line of development. There was a sustained attempt to train a group of officers, doctors, engineers and officials in new schools and by missions to Europe. In a smaller and simpler society than that of the main body of the empire, the ruler was able to bring all agricultural land under his control, by confiscating tax-farms and religious endowments, and to use his power to extend the cultivation of cotton, buy the produce at a fixed price and sell it to exporters in Alexandria; this involved a new kind of irrigation, the building of dams to divert water from the river into canals which would carry it where and when it was needed. At first he tried to manufacture textiles and other goods in factories, but the smallness of the internal market, the scarcity of power, and the lack of technical skill made these ineffective, although there was some export of textiles for a time. In the later years of his reign, pressure from Europe obliged him to give up his monopoly over the sale of cotton and other products, and Egypt moved into the position of a plantation economy supplying raw materials and importing finished products at prices fixed in the world market. By this time also land was being granted by the ruler to members of his family and entourage, or others who would bring it into cultivation and pay the landtax, and so a new class of landowners was being created.
In Tunis there were the beginnings of change in the reign of Ahmad Bey (1837-55), who belonged to the family which had held power since the early eighteenth century. Some members of the ruling group of Turks and Mamluks were given a modern training, the nucleus of a new army was formed, direct administration and taxation were extended, some new laws were issued, and the ruler tried to create a monopoly of certain goods. Under his successor, in 1857, a proclamation of reform was issued: security, civil liberty, regular taxation and conscription, the right of Jews and foreigners to own land and carry out all kinds of economic activity. In 1861 a kind of constitution was enacted, the first in the Muslim world: there would be a council of sixty members whose approval would be necessary for laws, and the bey pledged himself to govern within its limits.
Beyond the frontiers of the empire, in the Arabian peninsula, the impact of European power was scarcely felt. In central Arabia, the Wahhabi state was destroyed for a time by the expansion of Egyptian power, but soon revived, on a smaller scale; in Oman the ruling family which had established itself in Masqat was able to extend its rule to Zanzibar and the east African coast. In Morocco, an expansion of European trade did take place, consulates were opened and regular steamship services began. The power of the government remained too limited to control these changes. Sultan 'Abd al-Rahman (I822-59) tried to create a monopoly of imports and exports, but under foreign pressure the country was opened to free trade. Even at best, the indigenous governments which tried to adopt new methods of rule and preserve their independence could act only within narrow limits. The limits were imposed first of all by the European states. Whatever their rivalries, they had certain common interests and could unite to further them. They were concerned first of all to widen the field in which their merchants could work. They all opposed the attempts of rulers to maintain monopolies over trade. By a series of commercial conventions, they brought about a change in customs regulations: in the Ottoman Empire the first of these was the Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1838; in Morocco a similar one was made in 1856. They obtained the right of merchants to travel and trade freely, to maintain direct contacts with producers, and to have commercial disputes decided in special tribunals, not in Islamic courts under Islamic law. Because of the influence of ambassadors and consuls, the Capitulations were turning into a system by which foreign residents were virtually outside the law.
Beyond this, the powers were concerned with the situation of the sultan's Christian subjects. In the years after the Gulhane decree, they intervened collectively more than once to ensure that his undertakings to the non-Muslims were carried out. Running counter to this sense of the 'Concert of Europe', however, were the struggles of the various powers to secure paramount influence. In 1853 these led to the Crimean War, in which the Ottomans received help from England and France against Russia; but it ended in a reassertion of the 'Concert of Europe'. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 included a further statement by the sultan reaffirming his guarantees to his subjects. In a sense, then, the relationship of ruler and ruled was placed under the official notice of Europe. From this time the sultan was treated formally as a member of the community of European monarchs, but with overtones of doubt: while England and France thought it might be possible for the Ottoman Empire to become a modern state on European lines, Russia was more doubtful and believed the future would lie in the grant of broad self-government to the Christian provinces of Europe. No power, however, wished actively to encourage the break-up of the empire, with its consequences for the peace of Europe; memories of the Napoleonic wars were still alive.
Even within the limits imposed by Europe, the reforms could have only a limited success. They were the acts of individual rulers with small groups of advisers, encouraged by some of the foreign ambassadors and consuls. A change of rulers, a shift in the balance between different groups of officials, the conflicting ideas and interests of European states could bring about a change in the direction of policy. In Istanbul, the elite of high officials was strong and stable enough, and sufficiently devoted to the interests of the empire, to ensure a certain continuity in policy, but in Cairo, Tunis and Morocco everything depended on the ruler; when Muhammad 'All died, some lines of policy were reversed by his successor, 'Abbas I (1849-54), but then restored by the next ruler, Sa'id (1854-63).
In so far as the reforms were carried out, they might have unexpected results. Some changes did take place in the methods by which governments worked: offices were organized in new ways, and officials were supposed to act in accordance with new regulations; some new laws were issued; armies were trained in different ways, and raised by conscription; taxes were supposed to be collected directly. Such measures were intended to make for greater strength and justice, but in the first phase they tended also to weaken the relationship between governments and societies. The new methods and policies, carried out by officials trained in a new way, were less comprehensible to the subjects, and had no roots in a moral system hallowed by long acceptance. They also disturbed an ancient relationship between governments and certain elements in society.
Who profited from the new ways of government? Clearly the ruling families and their higher officials did so. Greater security of life and property made it possible to accumulate wealth and hand it on to their families. Stronger armies and administrations enabled them to extend the power of the government over the land. In Egypt and Tunisia this led to the formation of large estates by members of ruling families or those close to them. In the central Ottoman countries, an analogous process took place. The new administration and army needed to be paid for, but it was not yet strong enough to collect taxes directly; the old system of tax-farming continued, and tax-farmers could take their share of the rural surplus.
Beyond the ruling elites, the new policies favoured merchants engaged in trade with Europe. Import and export trade was growing, and merchants engaged in it were playing an increasingly large part not only in trade but in the organization of production, advancing capital to landowners or cultivators, deciding what they should produce, buying it, processing it - ginning cotton and winding silk - and then exporting it. The largest merchants were Europeans, who had a clear advantage because they knew the European market and had access to credit from banks. Others were local Christians and Jews: Greeks and Armenians, Syrian Christians, Jews of Baghdad, Tunis and Fez. They knew the local markets and were well placed to act as intermediaries with foreign merchants. By the middle of the nineteenth century many of them had a knowledge of foreign languages, acquired in schools of a new kind, and some also had foreign nationality or protection, by an extension of the right of embassies and consulates to appoint a number of local subjects as agents or translators; a few had established their own offices in centres of European business, Manchester or Marseille. In some places long-established groups of Muslim merchants were able to make the change to the new kind of trade: Arabs from southern Arabia were active in south-east Asia; Muslim merchants from Damascus and Fez had settled in Manchester by 1860; some Moroccan Muslims had even become proteges of foreign consulates.
On the other hand, groups on which governments had formerly depended, and with which their interests had been linked, now found themselves to an increasing extent excluded from a share of power. The 'ulama who had controlled the legal system were challenged by the creation of new legal codes and courts. The notable families of the cities, who had served as intermediaries between government and urban population, saw their influence waning. Even if those who retained possession of land might in some places make profits by growing crops for sale and export, their position, and their hold over the cultivators, were threatened by the extension of direct government and the expanding activities of the merchants in the ports. Old-established industries, like textile weaving in Syria, sugar refining in Egypt, and the making of the headgear shashiya in Tunisia, suffered from the competition of European goods, although in some cases they were able to adjust themselves to the new conditions and even to expand. Little is known about the condition of the rural population, but it does not seem to have improved, and in some places may have grown worse. The production of food probably increased in general, but bad harvests and poor communications could still cause famine, although less often than before. In two ways their condition may have worsened: conscription took a proportion of their young men for armies; taxes were heavier and were more effectively raised.
The dislocation of the economy, the loss of power and influence, the sense of the political world of Islam being threatened from outside: all these expressed themselves in the middle of the century in a number of violent movements directed against the new policies, against the growing influence of Europe, and in some places against the local Christians who profited from it. In Syria, these came to a head in 1860. In the mountain valleys of Lebanon there was an ancient symbiosis between the main religious communities, the Maronite Christians and Druzes. A member of a local family, that of Shihab, was recognized by the Ottomans as chief tax-farmer, and the Shihabs had become in effect hereditary princes of the mountain, and heads of a hierarchy of land-holding families, both Christian and Druze, between whom there were common interests, alliances and formal relationships. From the 1830s onwards, however, the symbiosis broke down, because of shifts in population and local power, the discontent of peasants with their lords, Ottoman attempts to introduce direct control, and British and French interference. In 1860 there was a civil war in Lebanon, and this touched off a massacre of Christians in Damascus, an expression of opposition to the Ottoman reforms and the European interests linked with them, at a moment of commercial depression. This in turn led to intervention by the European powers, and the creation of a special regime for Mount Lebanon.
In Tunisia in 1864, in a period of bad harvests and epidemics, there was a violent revolt against the rule of the bey and the classes which profited from it, the mamiubs and foreign merchants, and against the increase of taxation necessary to pay for the reforms. Beginning among the tribes, it spread to the towns of the olive-growing coastal plain, the Sahil; the rebels demanded a decrease in taxation, an end to mamink rule, and justice according to the shari'a. The bey's power was threatened for a moment, but the unity of interests between government and foreign communities held, and he was able to wait until the alliance of rebels fell apart and then suppress it.