Download PDF | The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule 1516-1800 by Jane Hathaway, Karl Barbir ,Routledge, 2015.
340 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been a very long time in preparation, and it seems that the more time passes, the more debts of gratitude I accrue. First and foremost, I owe a tremendous debt to Professor Peter Holt for recommending me for this project. One of my great regrets is that he did not live to see the publication of this book, which is dedicated to his memory. I sincerely hope that his confidence was not misplaced. I am also deeply grateful to the editors at Addison Wesley Longman/ Pearson Education for their patience and to my friend and colleague Professor Colin Heywood, who read the entire manuscript and made numerous valuable suggestions. Thanks, also, to Professor Karl K. Barbir, who read drafts of the Introduction and Chapters 1-6 and made a number of useful suggestions, many of which I have incorporated into the text.
Much of the book’s conceptualization, as well as a draft of the Introduction, was accomplished at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was a fellow of the School of Historical Studies during winter and spring 2000. I thank my fellow fellows and the permanent members of the School of Historical Studies for their comments on a presentation I gave based on the Introduction. I am likewise grateful to the M. Miinir Ertegiin Foundation for Turkish Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, and above all Professor M. Stikrii Hanioglu, for allowing me to serve as Ertegtin Visiting Professor of Turkish Studies in spring 2003; the course on the Ottoman Arab provinces which I taught in that capacity helped me to shape the main part of the book’s text.
Reaching back a bit farther in time, I should like to thank Professors Abraham Marcus and Cemal Kafadar, my MA and PhD advisors, respectively. During the lengthy process of revision, I turned again and again to notes and outlines from their courses. Naturally, responsibility for any errors is entirely mine, not least because too many years have passed since I took my postgraduate degrees to hold my advisors responsible for my own shortcomings! At Ohio State, my colleagues Cynthia Brokaw and Stephen F. Dale, as well as PhD candidate Lisa Balabanlilar, helpfully recommended secondary sources on the Qing and Mughal empires for comparative purposes. Mr Chris Aldridge and Mr Mitchell Shelton of the Harvey Goldberg Program for Excellence in Teaching in Ohio State’s History Department were instrumental in preparing the maps and illustrations for this book.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Beshir and Stella, and to my husband, Robert Simkins, for bearing with this project for all these years.
REWRITING ARAB HISTORY, 1516-1800
To every student of Arab history, Peter M. Holt’s magisterial survey Egypt and the Fertile Crescent: A Political History, 1516-1922 is indispensable. First published forty years ago, the book provides a straightforward political narrative of developments in Egypt, Greater Syria (including what are now Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority), Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and Yemen from the time of the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands to the end of World War I. For sheer factual completeness, it is still a valuable reference tool.
P.M. Holt was for many years professor in the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He started out in the civil service of Sudan’s British administration and in the 1950s prepared the ground for the study of modern Sudanese political history. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he moved on to lay the foundations for the study of Egypt during the Ottoman period. The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies during those years became a showcase for his work, publishing one pathbreaking article after another on Ottoman Egypt’s political elites. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent is, in many respects, the culmination of this phase of his scholarly career.
There is no escaping the fact, however, that Egypt and the Fertile Crescent is now forty years old. Longmans, Green and Company, the predecessor of Addison Wesley Longman, brought out the British edition in 1966, quickly followed by Cornell University Press’s paperback edition. In recent years, Addison Wesley Longman and its successor, Pearson Education, have begun publishing a new series surveying Middle Eastern, Ottoman and African history. The present work was conceived as an updated version of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent which would take its place alongside these recently published surveys. This book’s scope, however, is somewhat more modest than that of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, encompassing Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula and Yemen from 1516 only to 1800, the conventional dividing line between the early modern and modern periods in the region. Furthermore, as will soon become apparent, the book covers a somewhat different range of topics, including, in addition to political events, social, economic, religious and demographic issues. It attempts to do justice to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent while at the same time taking account of the innovative work that has been done in the past four decades on the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This introductory chapter furnishes some idea of the issues this book addresses and how it both builds upon and departs from its predecessor.
Why The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule?
The present work’s title, The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, stands in obvious contrast to that of Holt’s book, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, which, self-consciously or not, makes no reference to the Ottoman Empire or, on the other hand, to Arabs. While the author does not provide a rationale for this choice, the title is a modern-day geographical descriptor of the region surveyed. It may also aim to accommodate Egypt’s arguable separation from the empire in the nineteenth century, first as a semi-autonomous polity under Mehmed (or Muhammad) Ali Pasha and his descendants, then, after 1882, under British occupation and protectorate. Before the 1980s, historians did not conventionally regard nineteenth-century Egypt as Ottoman, although that viewpoint has become dominant in the years since.
The Arab lands and geography
Otherwise, neither title is unproblematic with regard to geographical scope and appropriateness to the period under study. ‘Fertile Crescent’, a term whose meanings will be explored in Chapter 1, stems from Biblical scholarship and thus might be construed as an Orientalist label. It was not, in any case, a term the Ottomans themselves employed to refer to the Arab provinces of their empire. On the other hand, they did not use ‘Arab provinces’ either. To be sure, Ottoman narrative sources convey a sense of Syria and Iraq as Asiatic provinces in contradistinction to the empire’s European provinces. In this context, they were closely linked to Anatolia, the peninsula that comprises the bulk of modernday Turkey. This consideration in turn makes the term ‘Arab lands’ problematic since it seems to incorporate the boundary demarcation between the current Republic of Turkey and the Arab nation-states to its south. This was not necessarily a boundary the Ottomans recognized. Likewise, various parts of what is now Iraq spent sizeable portions of the Ottoman era under the political control of the rulers of Iran; in this light, the Iran/Iraq border seems as artificial to a survey of the Ottoman provinces as the south-eastern border of Turkey. Egypt, for its part, enjoyed symbiotic commercial relationships with the North African provinces to its west and, to the south, with Sudan and Ethiopia; thus, despite its historical territorial integrity, its borders are equally questionable as limits to an historical survey. The same could be said even of southern Iraq and Yemen, both of which cultivated commercial ties to India.
The Arab lands and nationalist historiographies
The adjective ‘Arab’ is equally problematic outside the realm of geography. As will be detailed in Chapter 1, ‘Arab’ during the period 1516-1800 usually referred to either a Bedouin nomad or a sub-Saharan African; it had few, if any, of its modern-day ethnic, regional or linguistic connotations. Even if we conform to the modern-day definition of the term, the population of the territories in question was by no means entirely Arab or even Arabic-speaking during the Ottoman period. As Chapter 1 will point out, sizeable populations of Kurds, Armenians, Turcomans and Persians inhabited these lands even before the Ottoman conquest, while Ottoman administrative practices resulted in an influx of Greeks, Bosnians, Hungarians, Albanians, Anatolians of various kinds, and members of various populations from East Africa and the Caucasus.
In this book, ‘Arab lands’ serves chiefly as a geographical term, to indicate in broad strokes the territory covered. Like Holt’s book, however, the present volume does not adhere strictly to these geographical limits at all times but acknowledges the territory’s indispensable links to surrounding regions. Admittedly, though, ‘the Arab lands’ is comprehensible to a general readership because it obviously corresponds to the present-day nation-states that identify themselves as Arab. This in turn reflects the inordinate influence modern nation-state boundaries have had on the historiography of the Ottoman provinces, to the extent that studies spanning the borders of more than one province are extremely rare. Until the last quarter century or so, it was the norm for even a scholarly history of a given province to proceed teleologically, as if the nation-state were the foreordained outcome of the historical process.
Similarly, old-school nationalist histories habitually presented the first three centuries of Ottoman rule in the Arab lands as a demoralizing prelude to the European-style reforms and nascent nationalisms of the nineteenth century, which eventually enabled the future nation-states to ‘throw off the Turkish yoke’. Perhaps in part for this reason, a disproportionate number of historians of the Ottoman Arab provinces are orientated towards the nineteenth century, and some of them frame the realities of the earlier period as preparation for nineteenth-century developments. This approach is, frankly, distorted. The developments of the preceding three centuries have importance in their own right; their study need not be justified by reference to the modern period, nor should they be evaluated in terms of nineteenth-century criteria.
By the same token, this book rejects the conventional nationalist portrayal of the nearly three hundred years between the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands and 1800 as little more than an oppressive occupation which contributed little to what was essentially an undiluted Arab culture. The Ottoman context is critical to an understanding of political, social and economic developments during this period. Holt was fully aware of this Ottoman context: both Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and his numerous micro-studies of Ottoman Egypt display a striking sensitivity to it, despite his unfamiliarity with Ottoman Turkish sources. In partial tribute to Holt’s example, acknowledgement of the Ottoman milieu in which these societies existed during the premodern period is now routine in scholarly publications. Notwithstanding, as will be pointed out below, more subtle threats have emerged to this rapprochement with the Ottoman reality.
The Arab lands and Islam
Readers will not have failed to notice that neither Egypt and the Fertile Crescent nor the title of the present book evokes Islam, even though many inhabitants of the Arab lands before 1800 would have identified more readily with the Muslim, or at least Sunni, community than they would have done with an ethnic or even a linguistic group. Holt published Egypt and the Fertile Crescent at the height of the Cold War and during the heyday of Arab nationalism, when the roots of nationalist movements and modern nation-states were much on the minds of policy-makers who dealt with the Middle East. Only a few years earlier, Bernard Lewis had published the first edition of The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Today, when extremist strains of Islam are regarded as a far more potent force than nationalism in the Middle East, one sees comparatively few general histories of the Arabs; the last major such work in English was the late Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples in 1991. In contrast, histories, or at least assessments, of Islam and of the Middle East have become far more common. Yet, as Chapter 1 will explain, ‘Middle East’ is a quite recent coinage which had no meaning for the Ottomans. And while the Ottoman Empire was officially Sunni Muslim, substantial numbers of Ottoman subjects, even in the Arab provinces, were non-Muslims who deserve space in the historical narrative. Moreover, while religion was extremely important in Ottoman provincial society, it took many more forms and served many more purposes, each shaped by the specific social context within which it emerged, than could be suggested by a single generic reference to ‘Islam’.
In summary, there is no wholly satisfying manner of framing the topic of the present book. However, The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule comes closest to reflecting the dramatic changes in scholarly approaches to these territories in the past four decades.
Sources for the study of the Ottoman Arab lands
One reason the historiographical landscape has changed so dramatically since the publication of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent is the much broader range of historical sources now available to scholars. Holt based his account of the Ottoman Arab lands almost entirely on narrative sources in Arabic, chiefly annalistic chronicles and biographical dictionaries. The political elites who dominate these sources likewise dominate the narrative of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. On the other hand, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent does not devote significant attention to high-ranking Muslim scholar-officials (ulema) or wealthy merchants, even though these figures are well represented in certain widely available chronicles. Clearly, then, sources alone do not determine the kind of history a scholar writes. However, they can impose limits to historical enquiry or, on the other hand, bolster pre-existing attitudes.
Holt did not exploit the wealth of Ottoman documents available in Turkey’s archives, which, at the time Egypt and the Fertile Crescent was published, had been open to scholars for just over a decade. These documents — sultanic orders, complaints to the sultan from provincial officials, tax registers, military pay registers — offer sometimes revelatory insights into the fiscal and institutional underpinnings of Ottoman provincial administration, as well as the relations of provincial personnel with the imperial government and with their counterparts in other provinces. They can prove critical to reconstruction of the Ottoman context of provincial societies.
On the other hand, the exploitation of provincial archival sources has revolutionized the study of provincial social history in the last forty years. The registers of the Muslim law courts have been particularly valuable in uncovering the history of non-elites, notably middling merchants, artisans and peasants. Such a register consists of transcriptions, often abbreviated, of cases involving a wide range of issues, including commercial partnerships, property disputes, the witnessing of various transactions, marriage and divorce, inheritance, and estate disposition, as well as criminal cases, such as theft of money or property, adjudicated according to Islamic law (sharia). In the Arab provinces, these registers were kept in Arabic rather than in Ottoman Turkish. A noteworthy feature of the court registers is their social inclusiveness; everyone from the provincial governor and the most powerful grandees and religious officials to humble craftsmen and farmers from the countryside had recourse to the Muslim courts, as did an astonishing number of nonMuslims. Court cases can shed light on issues as varied as the class composition of urban neighbourhoods, the rural economy, and the status of women and non-Muslims. Documents registered in the courts, notably estate inventories and the foundation deeds for pious endowments, can likewise reveal details of material culture, intellectual trends, and modes of religious observance.
In combination, these central and provincial archival sources, along with the considerably broader spectrum of local chronicles now available and judiciously chosen foreign observers’ accounts, can support a nuanced and multifaceted interpretation of provincial culture. Happily, the past twenty-five years have seen a steady proliferation of monographic studies of the Arab provinces employing both central and provincial sources and perspectives.
Ironically, however, the much greater array of locally produced Arabic sources has bolstered a resurgence of the old Arab nationalist historiography, albeit in more sophisticated theoretical trappings. Typical of this approach is an insistence on the ‘authenticity’ of purely Arabic sources as reflecting the reality of the ‘indigenous’ population; as a corollary, Ottoman Turkish sources originating with the central government are ignored, or in a few cases dismissed, as reflecting nothing more than the agenda of the administrative elite in a distant imperial capital. A closely related attitude holds that locally produced sources offer the only clues to non-elites whereas only the elite are represented in sources emanating from Istanbul. Since non-elites are implicitly equated with Arabs and elites with Turks, the effect of this mindset is to resurrect the old mutually exclusive nationalist categories of ‘Arab’ and “Turk in the name of authenticity and historiographical populism. In addition, the laudable goal of allowing non-elites a voice is too often used as an excuse for ignoring the Ottoman context of provincial societies. The result is sloppy scholarship which, ironically, denies these non-elites agency by portraying them as hermetically sealed within their provincial borders when, in fact, many of them could and did forge commercial and patronage links to populations in other provinces and in the imperial capital.
Nothing in the history of the Arab provinces themselves warrants this artificial polarization of the field between ‘Arabists’ and “Turcologists’, which seems to have far more to do with present-day nation-state and academic politics than it does with the provinces themselves. Furthermore, it is a disservice to the scholarship that Holt pioneered. Regardless of what sources historians of the Arab provinces are able to or choose to employ, they must take the Ottoman context into account. This, of course, implies having a thorough knowledge of the Ottoman context, including developments at the imperial centre and in other provinces.
Indeed, it is clearer today than ever before that we simply cannot understand the history of the Arab lands between 1516 and World War I without a thorough understanding of Ottoman history and institutions. This means more than just a parade of governors and judges imposed upon a supposedly supine indigenous population. It means acknowledgement and appreciation of the manner in which the Arab lands were incorporated into the Ottoman system politically, militarily, agriculturally, fiscally, commercially, socially and even artistically. Four hundred years is too lengthy a period to label an ‘occupation’. Although the Arab provinces were not settler colonies of the Ottoman centre — that is to say, they were not colonized by masses of immigrants from the central lands — they both absorbed and contributed to the population of Ottoman officials of various kinds. Soldiers dispatched to one or another province from Istanbul might remain there, for example, while families indigenous to the Arab provinces might join the ranks of Ottoman provincial governors. Nor did the Arab lands retain their previous administrative, fiscal, educational and architectural structures beneath a thin Ottoman veneer. In fact, a broad cultural synthesis emerged that we might call not simply Ottoman-Arab but Ottoman provincial, so as not to preclude comparison and exchange with the Ottoman Empire’s non-Arab — that is, Anatolian and Balkan — provinces. This book tries to reflect this synthesis by providing an account of the Arab provinces’ history which integrates central and provincial elements.
‘Decline’ and decentralization
Quite apart from the exploitation of an array of new sources, scholarship on the Ottoman Arab provinces has profited from several key reconceptualizations within the broader Ottoman field. At the same time, certain problematic concepts remain dominant in Ottoman studies, thus hindering the development of a truly integrative provincial historiography.
One of the most momentous changes to have occurred in Ottoman studies since the publication of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent is the deconstruction of the so-called ‘Ottoman decline thesis’ — that is, the notion that towards the end of the sixteenth century, following the reign of Sultan Siileyman I (1520-66), the empire entered a lengthy decline from which it never truly recovered, despite heroic attempts at westernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. Over the last twenty years or so, as Chapter 4 will point out, historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favour of one of crisis and adaptation: after weathering a wrenching economic and demographic crisis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire adjusted its character from that of a military conquest state to that of a territorially more stable, bureaucratic state whose chief concern was no longer conquering new territories but extracting revenue from the territories it already controlled while shoring up its image as the bastion of Sunni Islam.
So far as the Arab provinces were concerned, the chief hallmark of this ‘crisis and adaptation’ was increasingly decentralized rule. Decentralization, however, has its own paradigmatic narrative which is, in its own way, as problematic as that of decline. As younger and weaker sultans took the throne from the turn of the seventeenth century, according to this narrative, the Ottoman central authority’s hold on the provinces loosened. Meanwhile, with the waning of imperial expansion, provincial governors were less and less frequently seasoned warriors with solid provincial experience, and more and more the products of palace patronage networks. Their terms of office, furthermore, tended to shrink from several years to a year or even less. This resulted in a lack of continuity in provincial policies; at the same time, the short-term governor had little incentive to improve conditions within the province and every incentive to milk the province for maximum tax revenues. To fill the vacuum left by the central authority’s negligence and to counter the governors’ rapacity, powerful ‘local notable’ families and households emerged. These notables, or ayan, the subject of Chapter 5, would come to exercise near-hegemony in many Ottoman provinces by the late eighteenth century.
As Chapters 4 and 5 will attempt to demonstrate, the problem with the conventional narrative of decentralization is that it is too pat. It implies a neat dichotomy between Ottoman officials and local notables that did not, in fact, exist. Many ‘local notables’ cultivated strong ties to powerful figures within the palace, taking advantage of what we might call ‘decentralization at the centre’ — that is, the emergence of multiple competing interest groups within the palace itself — to acquire room to manoeuvre on the local scene. At the same time, figures in the central government continued to patronize provincial clients, often through specially commissioned agents (singular wakil in Arabic, veki/ in Turkish) on the spot. The Chief Eunuch of the imperial harem, for example, had a permanent agent stationed in Egypt long before the eunuch himself retired to that province. In short, exchanges between centre and province continued, if in somewhat altered form, after the sixteenth century, and the boundary between central and local jurisdiction remained fluid. Moreover, the degree of decentralization and the complexion of ‘local notables’ varied from one province to another, and even from one district to another. In the mountains of Lebanon, for instance, the Ottomans had employed locally entrenched tribal families as proxies since their conquest of these territories in 1516; several of these families are discussed in Chapters 4 and 8. The Ottomans were careful, however, to play competing families off against each other and to shift their patronage whenever a particular family threatened to amass a formidable power base. In regions with less intimidating geography, such as Egypt and southern Syria, in contrast, entrenched local notable families and households emerged only in the eighteenth century for reasons that will be discussed in Chapter 5.
The conventional historiography equates this decentralization with weakness at the centre, thus imputing an inherently negative character to decentralization, and holds that imperial weakness enabled the rise of local elites who would ultimately lead certain of the Arab provinces, notably Egypt, to virtual autonomy. What such an interpretation ignores, however, is the fact that decentralization proved a viable, although admittedly far from perfect, administrative strategy for the Ottomans for over two hundred years. Inability to conceive of decentralization as the end-product of a series of rational choices on the part of both central and provincial actors stems from the overarching perception of the process as an unstoppable force that somehow transcends both individual actions and societal factors. On the other hand, misapprehension of the utility of decentralization results in part from a misunderstanding of the political culture of the Ottoman Arab provinces. This book attempts to remedy this misunderstanding to the extent possible in a general survey.
State and society
The centre—provincial dichotomy discussed above can also be detected in the tension between state and society that looms large in current Ottomanist scholarship, both ‘central’ and ‘provincial’. The Ottoman government, large, unwieldy, dispersed and, above all, changeable as it was, is frequently referred to collectively in this scholarship as ‘the state’, while those subjects who were not somehow connected to the government are termed ‘society’. To some degree, this division is coloured by the classic Ottoman distinction between askeri (literally, ‘military’), meaning the tax-exempt elite, including all government officials, members of the armed forces, and high-ranking Muslim scholar-officials, or ulema; and reaya (literally, ‘flock’), including peasants, nomads, merchants and craftspeople. Otherwise, the ‘state’ and ‘society’ categories seem unmanageably broad, the divisions between them impossibly vague. By the late eighteenth century, the state could be understood to encompass the sultan and all palace pages, the approximately 1,000 scribes of the central bureaucracy, the grand vizier and his consultative council, 150,000 imperial Janissaries and, on the provincial scene, myriad scribes, clerks and judges. Limitations to the boundaries of the state can seem arbitrary. If we attribute all government policy to the grand vizier, for example, we are guilty of ignoring, at the very least, the sultan’s mother and the Chief Harem Eunuch, who may have been instrumental in choosing the grand vizier or, on the other hand, may have opposed him. If we attribute all policies to the decision-makers in Istanbul, we deny agency to governors, military commanders, judges and a host of others in the provinces.
In extreme, but by no means anomalous, cases, the scholarship reduces these individuals and interest groups to a monolithic entity with objectives, motivations and desires that somehow transcend the sum of its parts. In this scheme of things, ‘society’ is implicitly oppositional, if not antagonistic, to the state: the victim, the acted-upon, the taxed, the exploited. There is a natural temptation to identify the exploiting state anachronistically with ‘the Turk’ and to identify the exploited ‘society’ with the Arab, Armenian or Balkan populations — assuming, of course, that these ethno-linguistic labels are themselves self-explanatory and unproblematic.
These oppositional categories are highly misleading. To begin with, both state and society were in constant flux, absorbing and ejecting individuals and groups every day. Both were also inextricably intertwined, so that a government minister, or vizier, for example, operated within a web of relationships: to his household, neighbourhood, market, mosque, taxpayers and so on. This fluid reality has led a few scholars to employ the terminology of discourse theory when describing the state-society relationship: the demarcation line between state and society was discursively constructed and was constantly being contested and negotiated. For example, a case brought before a Muslim law court might constitute a form of discourse through which the dividing line was tested, called into question, reaffirmed or subtly altered. The plaintiff might be a peasant from a small rural village who sought to demonstrate that the official in, say, Cairo who farmed his village’s taxes — that is, who bought the revenue collection rights from the government, in a process to be described in Chapter 4 — extorted absurdly high taxes from the villagers. The tax-farmer was an agent of the state, but he might also be a regional figure whose various agents and clients mediated between him and the village population. Indeed, the peasant now bringing a case against him might have been one of his clients. The case would be presided over by another agent of the state, the judge, or gadz, in this case probably the judge in the neighbourhood of Cairo where the tax-farmer lived and where the peasant or his appointed representative would have been obliged to come. Yet the judge himself might have started out as a resident of the peasant’s village who came to Cairo, studied at al-Azhar university, then obtained an official judgeship. Ultimately, the case might result in a reallocation of state revenues — that is, the taxes paid by the peasant — or in the revocation and reassignment of the tax farmer’s collection rights. In short, while we cannot utterly abandon the notion of a boundary between state and society, we must admit that it was fluid and permeable.
At the same time, both state and society were diffuse and often driven by internal tensions. This is fairly obvious where society is concerned, far less so in the case of the state. But as the Ottoman Empire expanded, as the corps of palace personnel grew, as the state payrolls (particularly those of the military regiments) lengthened, competing interest groups formed within the state apparatus — again, the process of decentralization at the centre. By the seventeenth century, sultans competed with their mothers, concubines, daughters and sons-in-law, as well as with the palace eunuchs, the grand viziers and the commanders of the imperial Janissaries, for influence; any or all of these figures could interact separately or in concert with figures in the Ottoman provinces, many of whom had started their own careers in the palace or were the offspring or clients of people who had done so. The well-known Ottoman courtier and traveller Evliya Chelebi, writing in the late seventeenth century, sums it up nicely:
They say the fish stinks from the head; it is well-known that this is the root of rebellion. . . . In Sultan Selim’s time [Selim II, r. 1566-74],' when a vizier became governor of Egypt, he was given 3,000 gold pieces in travel money from the sultan’s treasury and was sent off with the injunction, ‘Egypt is God’s trust; administer it with justice and equity.’ That vizier would come to Egypt and govern it according to the law (kanun), sending the sultan a gift of 12,000 gold pieces every year, free of any other taxes. But nowadays, to be appointed to Egypt, the viziers have to pay 1,500 purses in bribes to the sultan, the grand vizier, his lieutenant, the sultan’s mother, the sultan’s favourite concubines, the princes and their lieutenants, the Chief Black Eunuch, the Chief White Eunuch, the other eunuchs, the chief jurisconsult, the chief judge, the molla (mufti, or chief jurisconsult) of Istanbul, the viziers of the sultan’s council, the financial officers, and 110 other people in charge of various affairs.’
One aim of this book is to show that Ottoman administration of the Arab provinces changed provincial society while provincial society changed the Ottoman ‘state’. A governor appointed to a province brought with him a large entourage of men and women from the palace and from his household in Istanbul or in the province where he had most recently served. Many of these officials joined or started households in this new province, injecting their own clients into the provincial economy and political culture, or forming ties with households and individuals already locally ensconced. True, the rate of this sort of ‘injection’ did not remain constant throughout the period covered in this book. Considerably more transplantations of personnel from the imperial centre occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than in the eighteenth. Still, the process never entirely ceased. By the same token, local military and political elites might attach themselves to the governor or to some other officer in the provincial administration and by this means acquire ties to the imperial palace, or to the administration of another province.
Local notables and localization
This revisionist view of ‘state and society’ can, in turn, lead to a revisionist appraisal of the social group labelled ayan in provincial chronicles and Muslim law court records. As Chapter 5 will explain, much scholarship, following the lead of Albert Hourani, has interpreted ayan to refer to local Arabophone military administrators who, along with ulema and certain other of the provincial sociopolitical elite, served as intermediaries between the provincial population at large and the Ottoman administration. Yet the sources cited above, to say nothing of Ottoman documents, are not necessarily consistent in their usage of the label ayan, leading one to suspect that it was a flexible term that could carry different meanings in different contexts, and that the boundaries of ayan membership, rather like those of askeri or reaya membership, were constantly contested.
As Chapter 5 will emphasize, this more flexible definition of ayan allows us to subsume a considerably larger group of people under this rubric: in particular, the problematic and diffuse category of localized elites. Someone in this category might be a member of a governor’s entourage who remained in the province when the governor departed, attracted clients, purchased military slaves (mamluks) and other slaves, built a mansion in a fashionable quarter of the provincial capital, and endowed pious foundations. He might be a soldier assigned from Istanbul to one of the provincial garrisons who worked his way up the regimental hierarchy, then established his own household. He might be a harem eunuch exiled from Istanbul to Cairo on his deposition, as became standard practice beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, who likewise built up a household and acquired enterprises in Cairo and throughout Egypt’s subprovinces. She might be a Georgian concubine purchased by one of the district governors within a province, who outlived her husband, married his senior client and joined his household, then built up her own parallel female household, consisting in large part of her own female slaves. And, of course, a notable could still be a member of the ulema or a military strongman native to the province.
Households
As the context within which provincial notables operated, the household, to be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, itself offers an alternative framework within which to view their activity while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of attempting a rigid definition of who were ayan and who were not. The household was, first and foremost, a social, economic, political and often military structure which served as an arena for patronage. It did not necessarily originate in a kinship group, although a family, even a nuclear family, could form the core of a household. Rather, the household consisted of a network of patron-client ties. In provincial political culture, being a patron or client was arguably more important than one’s ethnicity or one’s status as slave or free. The household might be centred in an actual house (dayt in Arabic, bane or kapz in Turkish), but it could also take shape in a military barracks or in a fairly modest dwelling. Such were the origins of some of the most influential provincial households, covered in Chapter 5.
The hegemony of households in provincial political culture is an observable phenomenon throughout the Ottoman Empire beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The ultimate model for these households was, of course, the sultan’s household in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace. Viziers who had risen through the ranks of the palace pages often received governorships of provinces; once installed in the provincial capitals, they attracted clients and emulated the sultan’s household on a smaller scale. Eventually, this trend spread throughout the Ottoman provinces; in the Arab provinces, it was facilitated by the pre-existing example of the elite households of pre-Ottoman regimes. The households of the Mamluk sultanate, which had ruled Egypt, Syria, the western Arabian peninsula, and parts of south-eastern Anatolia before the Ottoman conquest, were one such model — but only one. In Syria and Iraq, as well as south-eastern Anatolia, households also drew on the legacies of smaller regional potentates, some of which retained elements of household paradigms going back to Tamerlane, the Mongols and earlier Turkic regimes. In summary, the political culture of households ultimately drew on the collective political traditions of the Turco-Iranian military patronage states that had dominated the Middle East throughout the Middle Ages. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to sort out exactly which influences came from which regimes. At the same time, the influence of the imperial palace as a model should not be underestimated. The provincial elites were constantly reminded of the palace by officials appointed to the provinces from Istanbul and by their own trips to Istanbul to present petitions or deliver revenues.
Yet the household was by no means limited to the military and administrative echelons. High-ranking Muslim scholar-officials, or ulema, and long-distance merchants might also establish households; through commerce and marriage, furthermore, they often cultivated links with military-administrative households. Indeed, an attractive historiographical feature of the household is that it accommodates both the military and administrative cadres, including those transplanted from Istanbul and other locales, and indigenous elements, including merchants and ulema. Non-elites could also participate in household-based political culture, either by becoming clients of elite household heads or by heading their own rudimentary households, as the example of soldiers forming households in the barracks and in modest dwellings suggests. In short, the household served as a bridge between elites and non-elites. Nor was founding or joining a household the only mode of participation. A household was an intricate economic operation which distributed food, clothing, cash and luxury goods to its members, who in turn might redistribute them to their own nascent households, to their neighbourhoods or even, through charitable foundations, to the poor.
Households and localization
In fact, the household provided a conduit for acculturation and localization of the disparate collection of men and women from outside the Arab provinces who participated in provincial political culture. Although we know little about specific training programmes along the lines of the Mamluk sultanate’s barracks schools, we find occasional hints in chronicles and Muslim court records of the sorts of cultural stimuli to which recruits to Ottoman-era households were exposed. The highest military and administrative grandees, as well as ascendant merchants, appear to have had access to a solid Sunni Muslim education, as indicated by the libraries which some of them endowed containing classic works of Muslim jurisprudence (figh) and commentaries thereon; works on mysticism, grammar, logic, medicine and history can also occasionally be found in such collections. Some of these libraries are discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. Certain grandees commissioned poetry extolling their own courtly and/or military virtues; in this, they were unquestionably taking a cue from palace culture. In such a milieu, a raw recruit from the Caucasus or a devshirme boy — that is, a recruit from among the Christian peasants of Anatolia and the Balkans — who had arrived with the previous governor’s entourage could construct a new Ottoman provincial identity predicated on his membership of his patron’s household and ties to other members of that household.
The role of popular folklore in this process of acculturation and identity formation is a subject scholars have only recently begun to explore; it seems likely, however, that provincial history, as reimagined by household members themselves, was transmitted through popular epics such as the tales of the herculean hero of Arabic literature, Antar, or the epic of Sultan Baybars, founder of the Mamluk sultanate and victor over Mongol invaders during the thirteenth century; these are considered in Chapter 7 in connection with the culture of the coffeehouse. Male household members would have heard such tales either in the coffeehouses, which many of them frequented, or within the house or barracks itself; women would conceivably have heard such tales in the harem.
Localization was not necessarily equivalent to Arabization, however. If, for example, a mamluk, or elite military slave, from the Caucasus steeped himself in Muslim doctrine, participated in a mystical brotherhood, memorized tales of Antar, and perhaps opened a shop in the bazaar, he was presumably localized. But what if he never learned to speak fluent Arabic, as did most of the artisans and merchants in the bazaar? What if, as was the case with certain Janissaries in Cairo during the seventeenth century, he purchased a small house and opened a shop in a quarter dominated by Anatolian soldiers, where only Turkish was spoken? Was learning Ottoman Turkish, a language radically different from those of the Caucasus, part of a Caucasian mamluk’s localization, even in an Arab province? Such considerations suggest that localization, too, was a fluid and contested process; at any given time, large numbers of people would be at different stages in different processes of localization.
The loyalties resulting from localization would likewise differ. This was a pre-nationalist era; still, various forms of territorial or regional loyalty to a certain province, district or city are easily discernible among a wide array of Ottoman subjects. Loyalty to a particular household, faction or regiment was arguably equally common. Membership of the Janissary corps provided entrée to a military and commercial culture with an extraordinarily long institutional memory and entrenched institutional traditions. Bonds and identification between Janissaries in Istanbul and those in the provinces, despite differences in composition and function, have been underestimated in secondary scholarship. Meanwhile, Janissary infiltration of the artisan guilds, and the purchase by artisans of places in the regiment so as to avoid taxes, provided a bond between the military and civilian populations, and arguably a link between the elite and the non-elite.
Artisans
As a consideration of the household makes clear, individuals are most effectively studied in the social frameworks within which they operated. For members of the elite, this approach is useful; for artisans, peasants and tribespeople, it is almost unavoidable since the individual at these levels of society is very difficult to access in the available sources. To some degree, even these decidedly non-elite groups could be incorporated into households. The lower-ranking Janissaries who opened shops in Cairo, as noted above, may well have grouped themselves in rudimentary households modelled on the regimental hierarchies with which they were familiar. Likewise, as Chapter 8 will point out, a network of financial and commercial obligations could tie a rural population to an urban notable household. Nevertheless, other kinds of structures played a larger role in the social experiences of these groups.
For artisans, discussed in Chapter 7, craft organizations, not unlike guilds, were the key source of group solidarity. Quasi-mystical artisanal brotherhoods had existed in Islamic societies since the Middle Ages, even if corporate guilds in the European sense, with a rigid hierarchy and well-defined collective legal rights and interests, did not exist. Known as futuwwa (literally, ‘young manhood’) organizations, these bodies produced manuals laying down rules of craft organization and describing initiation rites and communal lore; such manuals as have survived can thus serve as valuable guides to artisanal culture. Meanwhile, Muslim court records, including estate inventories registered in the courts, have shed much-needed light on artisans’ fiscal arrangements, material wealth and general lifestyle, as the seminal work of André Raymond has shown. The Ottoman government, much more than its medieval predecessors, used these professional structures as a means of controlling the marketplace. In some cities, the judge of the local Muslim law court took an active role in setting prices and choosing guild leaders, as the Muslim court registers demonstrate. Market inspectors’ manuals likewise contain detailed guidelines on quality control.
Rural populations
The vast majority of the Ottoman Empire’s subjects, in the Arab provinces as in Anatolia and the Balkans, lived in the countryside, outside cities and towns. Yet Arab provincial history still tends to be dominated by the provincial and/or regional capitals, where, after all, the bulk of the chronicles were composed and where the major administrative and religious functionaries, including Muslim court judges, were based. Since the publication of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, notwithstanding, judicious exploitation of the kinds of material discussed in the section on sources above has helped to add rural populations to the historical narrative. (The fruits of some of these efforts will be explored in Chapter 8.) Ottoman tax registers detail the number of family-based households and the economic resources in particular villages, as well as the grandees, often urban-based, who controlled village tax farms. Individual peasants and their concerns and grievances, however, are to be found almost solely in the Muslim court registers. Truly integrative scholarship, showing the links between land tenure and urban enterprises, between urban and rural elites, and between urban-based notable households and the peasantry, is still in its infancy. Still, promising recent studies have analysed networks of towns and villages in Ottoman Palestine, as well as the phenomenon of urban-based military officers purchasing tax farms in the countryside around Damascus.
Even more difficult to access than the peasantry are the Bedouin, Turcoman and Kurdish tribal populations, some of them nomadic or seminomadic, even though they played major roles in premodern Ottoman provincial history. For obvious reasons, they tend to be underrepresented in Muslim court records; chronicles mention them, but sometimes almost formulaically. As a result, the influence of these tribes on provincial economies and political culture has been systematically underrated. Over the past four decades, a number of more general works on individual Arab provinces have included discussions of key tribal elements, while a few scholars have contributed detailed micro-analyses of specific tribes; their results will inform the section of Chapter 8 dealing with tribes. Turcoman and Kurdish tribes have received considerably less attention than Arab Bedouin, despite the important economic and military functions they fulfilled in the Ottoman Arab provinces during the premodern era. Turcoman tribesmen, for example, were a key element in the armies of the rebellious emir Fakhr al-Din Ma‘n in early seventeenth-century Lebanon, to be discussed in Chapter 4.
Movement of tribal populations had an enormous impact on provincial economies and political culture, as certain tribes displaced others and took advantage of new sources of wealth, notably life-tenure tax farms. Tracing these changes, however, requires moving beyond the conventional nation-state boundaries that still circumscribe most scholarship on the Ottoman Arab provinces; thus, studies of this topic are still rare. Nonetheless, even single-province studies which take into account the annual pilgrimage to Mecca devote attention to tribal shifts that affected the transport of pilgrims and goods, for example the eighteenth-century paramountcy in the Syrian Desert of the Anaza Bedouin, who received a stipend from the Ottoman treasury in return for escorting the Damascus pilgrimage caravan. In Upper Egypt, meanwhile, the enormous Hawwara confederation, originally a Berber population from North Africa, became regional power brokers by acquiring the tax farms of villages that produced grain for Mecca and Medina. These tribal shifts did not occur in isolation but involved a whole network of patronage ties between the various tribes and provincial administrators at various levels. In short, the activities of the tribes cannot be separated from the overall political and economic circumstances of the Arab provinces.
Marginal populations
It will be obvious how much more inclusive Ottoman historiography has become in the past forty years, even though the activities of some social groups are difficult to document. Of all the various groups covered in the present work, doubtless the most challenging to include are what we might call marginal groups, such as members of religious minorities, women, slaves and the floating population of unemployed beggars, thieves, prostitutes and assorted other ‘street people’. Yet the past few decades have seen valiant attempts to uncover their experiences, which will be reviewed in Chapter 9.
Women
The explosion of interest in women’s history which began in the 1970s quickly spawned a series of pioneering works on women in various Muslim societies. Recent years have seen a steady flow of publications on women in the Ottoman Empire, including the Arab provinces. In addition to studies focusing specifically on women, more general histories are beginning to incorporate women as integral players in the making of Ottoman Arab history. Like elite men, elite women are much more visible in narrative and archival sources than their lower-class counterparts; however, the registers of the Muslim law courts provide an invaluable window onto the lives of lower-class women, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Even so, the premodern period is woefully under-represented among historical studies of Ottoman women relative to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for by the latter period women had become dramatically more visible and audible through the advent of print journalism, including a healthy corpus of women’s magazines, to say nothing of the invention of photography and a fledgling movement for women’s education and rights. As in the case of merchants and artisans, furthermore, a hazard of this type of historical writing is the neglect of the Ottoman — and to some extent even the provincial political — context in the rush to bring women’s roles and experiences in the Arab provinces to light.
Non- Muslims
Much the same situation prevails in the case of non-Muslim populations in the Ottoman provinces. These consisted primarily of Rabbinic Jews and various Christian sects; the different groups will be enumerated in Chapter 1 while their circumstances under Ottoman rule will be discussed in Chapter 9. An additional challenge specific to non-Muslim populations, however, is the vexing question of tolerance versus persecution. Until quite recently, an entire non-Muslim community’s status during a particular period was commonly summed up according to how many times the group was violently attacked or how often the standard catalogue of sartorial and behavioural restrictions was imposed. By these standards, most non-Muslims enjoyed a fair degree of tolerance throughout the Ottoman era in comparison with the experiences of religious minorities in other Muslim empires and in Christian Europe. Yet historians of Ottoman Jewish communities in particular feel a growing dissatisfaction with the habit of reducing a minority religious group’s experience to the presence or absence of persecution, preferring instead to analyse these populations in the context of other collectivities — class, neighbourhood, profession, city or town — of which they were a part. Once again, Muslim court records provide evidence of both minority activity — for non-Muslims frequented the Muslim courts for a wide variety of transactions — and a broader social context. They are, however, complemented by popular literature, sultanic decrees, and decrees of provincial governors.
Critical changes occurred both within and among the non-Muslim communities of the Arab provinces during the period covered by this book. In the early sixteenth century, the Jewish communities of the Arab lands were still absorbing the wave of Sephardic immigrants who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. By the end of that century, the deepening economic and demographic crisis had contributed to a hardening of attitudes towards non-Muslims throughout Ottoman society. In the late seventeenth century, Jewish communities throughout the Ottoman Empire were profoundly shaken by the appearance and conversion to Islam of the messianic figure Sabbatai Sevi, whose influence has until recently been severely downplayed in the scholarly literature. In the eighteenth century, finally, the European powers began to use non-Muslim merchants, particularly Orthodox Christians, in the Arab provinces as intermediaries with local markets, often granting honorary citizenship to these agents. Largely as a result of French and Vatican pressure, many Orthodox agents recognized the Pope, spawning a new Syrian Catholic sect. As will be noted in Chapter 9, Syrian Catholic merchants became a highly visible presence throughout the ports of the eastern Mediterranean during this period, arguably contributing to European commercial penetration of the region.
Shiites
In addition to the non-Muslim populations, we should not forget the large Twelver Shite populations of Iraq and Lebanon or the Zaydi and Ismaili Shiites of Yemen. Research on Shiites under Sunni Ottoman rule has been extremely sparse, apart from studies of Twelver Shiite elements in eastern Anatolia who supported the emergent Safavid empire in Iran in the early sixteenth century. The Zaydis of Yemen have received attention because they rebelled against Ottoman rule almost continuously, ultimately forcing the Ottomans out of Yemen entirely in the 1630s, as will be noted in Chapter 4. Yet virtually no studies exist of Ottoman attempts to co-opt Zaydi and, even more so, Ismaili populations during their near-century of rule over Yemen. Equally scarce are works dealing with Twelver Shiite populations co-existing with Sunnis in Greater Syria and Iraq. Twelvers are not well represented in conventional sources, including Muslim law court registers, in part because of their own policy of public dissimulation, in part because of official Ottoman refusal to recognize non-Sunni Muslims as separate communities. Nonetheless, a few studies have recently appeared that attempt to show how Twelver Shiites were integrated into provincial commercial life, rather than treating them as oppositional figures.
‘People without history’
Doubtless the most marginal of these marginal populations are the social outcasts or ‘misfits’ mentioned at the beginning of this section: beggars, prostitutes, thieves, the physically and mentally disabled. Apart from the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Chelebi’s rather fanciful depictions of certain of them processing as ‘guilds’, noted in Chapter 7, these groups are virtually unrepresented in the sources at our disposal. And yet even these ‘people without history’* have become a focus of historical enquiry. Even if the voices of these people cannot always be recovered, the careful study of court records, along with the application of architectural history and archaeology, has contributed to a new appreciation of the residential milieus and material culture of these elements. Meanwhile, a growing body of work on charity and poor relief, exploiting the deeds of pious foundations for soup kitchens and hospitals, is bringing increased visibility to the institutions set up to accommodate them, which will be surveyed towards the end of Chapter 9.
Non-elite slaves
If there is a population more marginal, or at least more poorly represented, than the populations just discussed, it would be the substantial number of non-elite slaves, most of them from East Africa, most female, and most employed as domestic servants of one kind or another. Regrettably, although they were part of virtually every substantial household in the Ottoman Arab provinces and many less substantial ones as well, there is next to no trace of these people, apart from a rare mention here and there in provincial chronicles and Muslim law court records, before the nineteenth century, when the bureaucracy of the modernizing state kept more efficient records on runaways, illegitimate children born to slaves, and the like. The most the historian can do, as Chapter 9 will attest, is to compile information on the African slave trade and slave trade routes, and extrapolate from nineteenth-century conditions.
Conclusion
Clearly, writing a history of the Ottoman Arab provinces is a far different proposition today from what it was in 1966. A far broader spectrum of social groups must be included; meanwhile, new conceptualizations of Ottoman history and of the Arab provinces’ place in that history must be taken into account. On the other hand, we cannot hope to equal Holt’s attention to political detail.
In addition, the Ottoman Empire’s interactions with the rest of the world deserve attention. The period from 1516-1800 was one of steadily increasing contact with Europe: regular warfare with the Habsburg Empire, Venice and Russia combined with burgeoning commercial and diplomatic exchanges with France and England above all. In the spirit of anti-declinism, these contacts must be presented as two-way encounters rather than as a litany of Ottoman inadequacy in the face of a rising West. One way to balance these highly charged encounters with Europe is to consider the Arab provinces’ encounters with polities outside Europe, notably with India, sub-Saharan Africa and China.
In pursuing this agenda, notwithstanding, the present study hopes to build on the remarkably solid foundations laid by Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. Ultimately, it aims to reflect the changing face of Ottoman provincial historiography while serving as a complement to its illustrious predecessor.
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