Download PDF | The Arabs of the Ottoman Empire, 1516-1918_ A Social and Cultural History by Bruce Masters, Cambridge University Press 2013.
276 Pages
The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab world for four centuries. Bruce Masters’s work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: the Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the a°yan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the a‘yan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities through their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.
Bruce Masters is John Andrus Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press 2001) as well as other books, articles, and scholarly contributions.
Acknowledgments
Thirty-seven years ago, I began to study the history of the Arab lands in the Ottoman Empire in earnest as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I had already lived and studied for several years in the Middle East and found that many of the questions I had concerning the Ottoman centuries were unanswered in the literature that was available then. I set out to find answers and have been searching for them ever since. Along the way, I had the help of Professor Halil Inalcik, who introduced me to the intricacies of the language and scripts of the Ottoman chancelleries and provided me with an appreciation of the workings of the empire from the perspective of Istanbul. I was also fortunate to have the mentorship and friendship of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, who helped me both to understand how the empire functioned in Syria and, by using the court records, to approach questions of how ordinary people lived it. Both men have had a major impact on my subsequent career and I thank them as a grateful student.
This work represents my research and thoughts on the Ottoman Empire that have evolved over many years. I have had the benefit of knowing many remarkable scholars who have contributed to my knowledge and understanding of the past. I would like to thank in particular Virginia Aksan, Palmira Brummett, David Commins, Selim Deringil, Dick Douwes, Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, Tony Greenwood, Bernard Heyberger, Akram Khater, Dina Rizk Khoury, Najwa al-Qattan, and Madeline Zilfi for hours of good conversation. Much of the thought that went into this book is a product of having introduced Ottoman history and Arab culture to Wesleyan undergraduates for the past thirty years. I have learned from that truly remarkable group of young people and I hope they have learned from me. I would like to single out from among them Giancarlo Casale, Ussama Makdisi, and Timothy Parsons, who left Wesleyan to become scholars and colleagues. I take no credit for their professional success but I do value their continuing friendship. Ussama has read drafts of this work, and his patience and insights have often helped me to clarify a muddle of language and thought of my own making. This book is dedicated to those three friends and scholars for giving me hope for the future of the historians’ profession.
An earlier version of the discussions of the sultanate found in Chapter 2 and of the cult of ibn al--Arabi in Chapter 4 was presented as a paper, entitled “Arab Attitudes towards the Ottoman Sultanate, 1516-1798,” at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and was published in Istanbul as Seen from a Distance: Centre and Provinces in the Ottoman Empire, edited by Elisabeth Ozdalga, M. Sait Ozervarli, and Feryal Tansug (2010). Sections of Chapters 5 and 6 were presented as a part of a paper, entitled “The Political Economy of Aleppo in an Age of Modernity,” at a conference honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and was published in volume 53 (2010) of that journal.
I would like to thank Dr. Stefan Weber of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum for permission to use the photo that graces this book’s cover. Last, I would like to thank the editorial staff at Cambridge University Press, and especially Marigold Acland, who has recently retired, for their advice and assistance.
Note on Transliteration
I have employed a modified system of transliterating Arabic proper names and terms suggested by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. I have chosen not to use diacritical marks and only retained the “raised c” (°) to represent the “‘ayn” and the apostrophe to represent the “hamza.” Ottoman Turkish proper names and terms are spelled according to the rules of Modern Turkish, with the exception that I have maintained the final voiced consonant that corresponds to the Ottoman spelling, “Mehmed” rather than “Mehmet.” Place-names and terms that are more familiar to English-language speakers such as “qadi” and “pasha” are spelled according to common English usage.
Introduction
Two recent events illustrate the ambivalent space that the Ottoman Empire occupies in the historical imagination of Arabs living in the twenty-first century. In January 2002 Saudi developers razed Qasr Ajyad, an Ottoman-era fortress that had stood watch over Mecca for two centuries. They envisioned in its place a hotel with splendid views of the holy city that would provide luxurious surroundings for wealthier pilgrims and visitors. The decision to demolish the fortress was unproblematic from a Saudi perspective. Qasr Ajyad was of a recent vintage when compared to other Middle Eastern historical monuments, and there was no local outcry for its preservation. Nonetheless, Istemihan Talay, Turkey’s minister of culture, compared its leveling to the Taliban’s wanton destruction of the statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in the previous year.
With popular outrage growing at home over what was portrayed in the Turkish media as a slight to the honor of the nation, Minister Talay requested that UNESCO condemn the Saudi action as it had the obliteration of the “world heritage” site in Afghanistan. Arab commentators, in contrast, were dismissive of the protests, which they ascribed to a residual bitterness on the part of the Turks that their ancestors had lost control of the Arabian Peninsula in 1918. In the end, UNESCO decided that as the fortress was not on its list of places that merited preservation, its fate was a matter solely within the purview of the Saudi authorities.
Eight years later, Israeli soldiers stormed the freighter Mavi Marmara in international waters on 31 May 2010. In the process, they killed eleven people, all of whom were Turkish nationals. A Muslim charity in Turkey had hired the boat as a part of a flotilla manned by Turkish, European, and North American activists to transport medical supplies and building materials to the blockaded Gaza Strip. Turkey’s tough verbal and political response to the killing of its citizens by the Israeli Defense Forces evoked an outpouring of pro-Turkish sentiment in the Arab media. With his public scolding of Israeli leaders on several occasions, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, emerged as the hero of the day on the “Arab Street.” Erdogan, buoyed by his newly found popularity among his neighbors to the south, was in the forefront of world leaders who urged the Arab regimes to listen to their people’s demand for political reform during the “Arab Spring” of 2011. Accompanying this flexing of Turkish political muscle in the region, some commentators in the Arab media remarked that the growing relationship between Arabs and Turks in the spheres of trade and international politics was positive. More than one noted that it marked a restoration of ties between the two peoples, who had drifted apart since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The differing responses to the two incidents arose out of the complex web of relationships that linked the Ottoman dynasty with its Arab subjects and how the empire’s historical legacy has been configured by successive generations of Arab intellectuals since its fall from the world stage.
Ottoman political and cultural influences were pervasive in the southern and eastern littoral regions of the Mediterranean Sea for four centuries from the start of the sixteenth century until World War I. Twentieth-century Arab historians, however, rarely presented the Ottoman period in a positive light. For most of that century, Arab nationalism was the dominant political discourse. Arab historians working within that rhetorical construct reduced the Arab peoples’ past to an uncomplicated equation: the Turks were the masters; the Arabs were their subjects. The Arabs’ struggle for independence from the European powers in the wake of World War I helped to conflate the defunct Ottoman regime with later European imperial interventions in the region. This created a persuasive narrative of foreign oppression that commenced with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258 and continued until the revolutionary era of Gamal Abdul-Nasser.'
Within that metahistory, the Ottomans were located in a continuum of conquerors, despoilers, and oppressors whom the Arab peoples had endured. As nationalist historians viewed the Ottoman Empire as an alien occupier in the Arab lands, it seemed obvious to them that their ancestors would have felt the same way.* Countering the nationalist narratives, Arab scholars and others began in the 1970s to reexamine the Ottoman centuries, using archival sources largely ignored by an earlier generation of historians. These include the records of the Islamic (sharia) courts in the Arab cities as well as the chancellery documents relating to the Arab provinces located in Istanbul. As a result, a more nuanced understanding of the history of Ottoman rule in the Arab lands is emerging.? The findings and arguments developed by those historians over the past four decades inform my analysis in this work.
EMPIRE: METROPOLE AND PERIPHERY
In the past decade, historians have expanded the definition of empire. Earlier generations of historians took the Roman Empire as an historical paradigm and posited that empires required a network of control extending from the center, or metropole, over a diverse population that was maintained by a bureaucratic state and enforced by an army. To qualify as an empire, the metropole had ideally to exercise power over multiple subject peoples, who were typically, but not always, culturally distinct from their rulers and from each other. No longer as interested in the “great men” of history who created empires, historians have more recently preferred to pursue the question of what mechanisms — political, ideological, cultural, and so on — maintained empires after the initial conquests. As the historian of Rome Clifford Ando asks in a series of related questions: “What made Roman power persuasive or even attractive to the population of the provinces? What rendered provincial cultures permeable to Roman paradigms for the legitimate exercise of government? In short, what induced quietude rather than rebellion?
Other scholars have focused their attention on related issues to understand the dynamics of control employed by “empires,” of varying complexities and definitions, to elicit their subjects’ acquiescence. It took more than power to maintain an empire; it also required some level of collaboration on the part of its subjects.’ This study contributes to that ongoing discussion by exploring how the Arab subjects of the Ottoman sultans viewed their relationship to the extraordinary metropole that was Istanbul.
Whatever definition one might choose for empire, there is a consensus among historians that the Ottoman state was one. Although Europeans contemporary with the Ottoman Empire labeled it as such, those at the sultan’s court preferred to think of their state as “the well-protected domains” (diyar-1 mahrusa) or “the Ottoman kingdoms” (memalik-i osmaniye). Their ambition was for a political organization that transcended the petty notion of kingdom in a larger vision that they felt they shared with earlier states that had straddled the globe. The titles that some of the sultans took — Cihangir (World Grabber), Alampenah (Refuge of the Universe) — gave voice to that conceit. In their own estimation, they were world conquerors to be feared and obeyed.
In imagining their place in history, those at the sultan’s court invoked historical precedents. Kritovoulos, a Greek historian of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, explicitly compared Sultan Mehmed to Alexander the Great.° Others at court expanded the comparison of the sultans to great leaders of the past, including the pre-Islamic Persian shahs, Byzantine emperors, Chingiz Khan, and the Abbasid caliphs.” The Ottoman elite understood all but the last exemplar to have been secular, that is, not condoned by Islamic traditions, and therefore supportive of an absolutist ideology that posited the sultan as both the source of legislation and the sole arbiter of justice. The precedent of the caliphate was more problematic as an expression of absolutism, however, as it left open the possibility that the corporate body of Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, might ultimately decide the definition of justice, even as they acknowledged that it was the sultan’s prerogative to dispense it.
Such a limitation on sultanic authority was still a long way from being an early form of constitutionalism as the scholarly consensus among the empire’s religiously trained intellectuals agreed with the formula ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad that “forty years of tyranny is preferable to one night of anarchy.” Nonetheless, arguments by the leading ulama against policies that the sultan had decreed did at times create tension in the Ottoman court.’ Present in the model of the caliphate was an acknowledgment that the political legitimacy of the ruler rested on Islamic legal precedents and traditions. While that formulation created problems for a sultan wishing to exercise his will with unfettered restraint, the argument that the legitimacy of the House of Osman was vested in Islamic notions of sovereignty and justice could produce a positive response from the majority of his Arab subjects. Going back to the questions raised by Ando for the Romans, it was the state’s appeal to those traditions that helped secure Ottoman rule in the Arab lands.
Arab nationalist historians were correct to assert that their ancestors had been subjects of the Ottoman sultan, but they were less persuasive when it came to establishing the nature of that relationship. Ottoman armies conquered Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Hungarians, Albanians, Kurds, and Anatolian Turks, as well as Arabs, reducing all to being subject peoples. Few communities voluntarily chose to submit to Ottoman rule. After the conquests, all of the sultan’s subjects were ruled by an elite class of Ottoman officials who seldom had a deep concern for, or knowledge of, local conditions. The Ottoman regime equally exploited all of its subjects, the reaya (literally, the flock), for the revenues they might produce and considered them to be a largely undifferentiated mass of taxpayers. Exploitation and coercion went hand in hand to establish and maintain the Ottoman Empire, as was the case with other empires. At the same time, however, its survival over time required the cooptation and collaboration of at least some of the subject peoples. In that regard, the invocation of Islam as a political ideology was crucial as far as many Arabs were concerned.
The majority of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire were Sunni Muslims. That was also true for the Kurds, Albanians, Bosniaks, and Turks. In the early modern period, religious faith usually trumped an ethnic identity for most peoples’ collective self-definition. As such, the relationship of any of the Sunni Muslim peoples to the Ottoman state was presumably more complex than that of the empire’s Christian subjects in the Balkans. Christians could view the Ottomans as both conquerors and infidels. For many, there remained hope for a restoration of the Christian kingdoms that the Crescent had overturned. To feel a true sense of community with the Ottoman state, it has been suggested that a Christian in the Balkans had to convert to Islam.° Christine Philliou’s recent study of the Phanariot Greeks in the service of the House of Osman in the early nineteenth century has challenged that reading as a projection backward of later nationalist sentiments for at least some Ottoman Christians.*? Whether Balkan Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed the Ottomans solely as oppressors is yet to be established, however. What is certain is that their contemporaries among Sunni Muslim Arabs, or at least those who have left us with a written record, did not describe themselves as an occupied people.
The Arab chroniclers who witnessed the actual conquests depicted the Ottomans as foreigners, but there was also much about them that was familiar. The first public act that Sultan Selim (1512-20) performed after conquering Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo was to lead the faithful in prayer in the Friday mosque of each city, and that action was noted by some of the chroniclers with approbation. It met, after all, their expectation of what a Muslim sovereign should do. The sultan whose name was mentioned in those prayers had changed, but the act of naming a ruler who pledged himself to uphold the political and religious dominance of Islam had not. The Ottoman conquest did not signal a radical overturn of the social order in the Arab lands as it simply replaced one reigning sultan with another. As such, there were few among the Arabic-speaking Sunni populations after 1516-17 who sought a restoration of the old regime or questioned the legitimacy of the Ottoman sultan to rule them.
The same claim could probably be made for the other Sunni Muslim populations that were the sultan’s subjects. There was, however, an important difference between the Arabs and other Muslims. The Arabs were heirs to a highly developed literary, political, and religious culture that did not always conform to the culture present at the Ottoman court. Ottoman Turkish would serve as the written language used by the Muslim elites throughout the Balkans and Anatolia, regardless of the language they spoke at home. In the Ottoman Arab lands, only a few apparently bothered to learn it in the first three centuries of Ottoman rule. Their cultural inheritance gave the Arabs a perspective on their rulers that was multilayered. The Ottoman sultans and their servants at court were undeniably fellow Muslims. Yet their interpretations of a shared religious heritage were not necessarily the same as those held by the Arab Sunni intellectual elite. The individuals who constituted that class had, therefore, to negotiate a place for themselves within the empire. They acknowledged the right of the Ottoman dynasty to their political allegiance, but they retained a supreme confidence in their role as guardians of a distinct cultural heritage that was, in their view, the equal of if not actually superior to that of the sultan and his court in Istanbul.
Depending on one’s historical perspective, the Arabs can be configured as a subject people of the empire, which they were, or as collaborators in the imperial project. It is the latter interpretation that this study advances. The degree of that collaboration, however, could vary. Many Muslim Bosniaks and Albanians played an active role in the governance of the empire and constituted a reservoir of manpower in the early modern period that Ottoman officials could rely on to supplement the janissary units for the empire’s armies both in the Balkans and in Asia. Furthermore, there were Muslim scholars who began their careers in the Balkans but who served the empire throughout its far-flung dominions, including in the Arab lands. With their service to “faith and state” (din ve devlet), these Balkan Muslims played an auxiliary role within the empire not unlike that of the Scots in the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.** In contrast, Arabs did not die for the empire in large numbers before 1877, the year in which Arab conscripts were pressed into the empire’s war with Russia. Yet most Arabic-speaking Sunni intellectuals acknowledged that the rule of the Ottoman sultan was legitimate in the earlier centuries, and they prayed for his victory over the empire’s enemies. They were the empire’s ideological cheerleaders, although admittedly their support was rarely tested. When the sultan did need their moral backing after the Wahhabi capture of the holy cities of Arabia in the early nineteenth century, however, their written responses were unanimously on the side of the House of Osman.
There were multiple reasons why Arabs might choose to acquiesce to Ottoman rule rather than seek to overturn it. In the Ottoman Empire as in all other state systems in the early modern period, the ruler had the capacity to apply coercive force to compel his subjects to accept his rule. The application of military force was, however, not a common occurrence in the Arab cities during the Ottoman centuries. While the Ottomans had to mobilize their garrisons in the Arab lands to combat the raids of tribal peoples or the insurrections of clans that enjoyed the protection of highland redoubts, there was little need to use those forces against urban populations. Most outbreaks of urban unrest that did occur were, in fact, mounted by the putative enforcers of the sultan’s rule, the janissaries.
The virtual absence of rebellion among urban Arabs can be explained by a number of factors. In the first century after the conquest, the merchant class prospered under the pax ottomana. In the nineteenth and early twentieth, the large landowners in the Arab provinces who were urban based had an economic interest in the continuity of the status quo, as the empire had created the opportunities for their acquisition of land, wealth, and status. The duration of Ottoman rule in the Arab lands also depended, however, upon the legitimacy extended to the sultan by the Sunni religious scholars and the willing collaboration of a relatively small group of elite local families, the a“yan, who mediated the political and social balance between the welfare of their fellow townsmen and the needs of the central state. The acknowledgment and acceptance of the House of Osman’s right to rule them by both sets of actors, who were often related by ties of blood or marriage, secured a large swath of territory for the empire in periods when the sultan did not have the resources to wield the blunt force necessary to do the job himself.
Of all the reasons why the Arab elites might view the Ottoman state as serving their interests, none was more compelling than that of their shared religious identity. The perception that the fates of Islam as a community of believers and of the Ottoman Empire as a political state were unalterably linked is a thread that runs through the various works composed by Sunni Arab authors in the early modern period. That confidence was no longer universally shared by authors writing in Arabic in the late nineteenth century as the empire ceased to be synonymous with security and constructed political identities based on ethnicity rather than religious faith began to emerge in the public discourse.
Scholars have noted that those authors whose works have survived from the early Ottoman centuries constituted only a small community whose opinions did not necessarily reflect those of anyone outside their close-knit circle of friends and relatives.t3 That is probably true as the elites in any society speak only for themselves. There were, of course, exceptions — chronicles written by those outside that elite circle: a barber in one case, men in the military in both Cairo and Damascus, and even a few Christians.%4 The dominant voice that has survived from the early Ottoman centuries is nonetheless that of the Sunni learned class, and its representatives spoke largely in unison. All the authors consulted for this study were city dwellers who were extremely proud of their respective cities’ historical past and conscious of the place of the Ottoman sultans in a long line of Muslim rulers. If not wealthy themselves, they were in sympathy with those individuals whom they viewed as the khassa or the khawass, the social elite. They viewed their poorer neighbors as forming an indiscriminate rabble (awbash, ghawgha’, sifla) who were perhaps a step up the social ladder above tribal pastoralists and peasants, but just barely so. The authors were all males, who rarely mentioned women. They also seldom, if ever, took note of the non-Muslims who might share their urban space. Despite those obvious drawbacks, I have turned to their works as a major source for my understanding of the era. We are left with few alternatives to answer the crucial question of what Arabs, albeit a small sample of them, thought about the Ottomans, if indeed that question can ever be satisfactorily answered. A limited sample of opinion, heavily weighted in favor of the religious establishment, is still better than no sample at all.
Largely on the basis of those sources, this study highlights the historical experience of the Sunni Muslim populations in the Ottoman Arab provinces. The non-Muslims were the subject of an earlier volume in which I discussed how their collective identities changed over time.'s In writing that book, I was faced with the larger question of how Muslim Arabic speakers might have configured their place in the Ottoman Empire in which Islam was arguably the dominant political ideology. I could not help but notice that religion was in the forefront of the discourse that ran through the narratives composed by Arabic speakers, whether Muslim or Christian, in the Ottoman centuries.
I acknowledge that there was perhaps a cynical use of religion as a political ideology by both the Ottoman officials and the Arab Sunni intellectual elite. It made governing the Arab lands easier for the sultan as it gave him legitimacy in a society that was wedded to a belief in a social hierarchy that God had ordained. For the Arabic-speaking Sunni elite, Islam provided a crucial link to the state, with the unspoken possibility of financial and political patronage. It also provided a justification for their acquiescence to Ottoman rule. Nonetheless, I believe religious faith and solidarity were also present in the works. Furthermore, the authors’ commitment to Islam as their personal faith helps us to understand the political worldview that served as the bedrock of their relationship to those who ruled them.
THE ARABS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
P. M. Holt published his ground-breaking survey of Ottoman Arab history, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1616-1922: A Political History, in 1966.*° As suggested by the subtitle, it concentrated on the region’s political history and provided little discussion of economic or social developments. Holt based his narrative primarily on local chronicles in Arabic, supplemented by accounts written by European travelers and diplomats. Using many of those same sources, his student Abdul-Karim Rafeq published al-“Arab wa al-‘uthmaniyyun, 1516-1916 (The Arabs and the Ottomans) in 1974, the first work in Arabic to explore comprehensively the Arab experience in the Ottoman Empire without a strong ideological bias.!”? Both authors’ works have held up well over time and no subsequent study has significantly altered their complimentary narratives of the Ottoman past. I do not attempt to do so here. Since their publication, a number of scholars inspired by the pioneering work by Rafeq in the Islamic court records of Syria and by André Raymond in those of Cairo have explored the surviving sharia records of the various Arab cities to explore issues concerning the social and economic history of the region that were largely neglected in the sources used by Holt."® Research in those archives is still ongoing and there are undoubtedly numerous monographs yet to be produced from that extremely rich trove of documents. The Islamic court records can be problematic, however, and there is much they do not tell us for all the details they do offer up.”
Faced with the many silences in the court records, scholars have also begun to examine the literally millions of documents found in the archives of the central Ottoman state. The result has been a number of important monographs and articles on various cities of the Ottoman Arab provinces that have incorporated documentation from both local and imperial archives.*° Despite the high quality of the work that has appeared over the past thirty years, there have been few attempts to replicate a broad, overarching survey of the region’s history in the Ottoman centuries from beginning to end in the style of Holt and Rafeq.*! Perhaps foolhardily, this volume is meant to update, but not to supplant those earlier works.
In choosing to focus on the Arab provinces, I have entered one of the potential minefields facing Ottoman historians. A central debate among them is whether the Arab provinces constitute a distinct subject of study from that of the history of the empire at large. Scholars such as Holt, Rafeq, and Raymond working with Arabic-language sources assumed that the Arab provinces had a unique trajectory in the Ottoman period that linked them both regionally and culturally, while distinguishing them from the provinces in the Balkans or Anatolia. The authors implicitly suggested an Arab “exceptionalism” from the general Ottoman narrative. In doing so, they followed the lead of the pioneering, if now somewhat discredited, Islamic Society and the West by Sir Hamilton Gibb and Harold Bowen.** The authors of that work divided almost every chapter into sections that highlighted the distinctiveness of the Arab experience of Ottoman rule from that of the inhabitants of Anatolia and the Balkans. In contrast to an “Arabist” approach, historians of the empire whose work is based primarily in the Prime Minister’s Archives in Istanbul have collapsed possible distinctive historical trajectories for different parts of the empire into one metanarrative with Istanbul at its center.*3
I will attempt to chart a middle course in this work. In my reading of the documents issued by the officials at the sultan’s court in Istanbul, the Arab provinces were politically indistinguishable for them from the concerns of governing the larger empire. There was neither a distinctive Arab policy at the Ottoman court nor a perception of an “Arab Question” that needed addressing in the early modern period. Yet their rulers knew the inhabitants of the Arab provinces were culturally distinct. The perception of cultural “alterity” was mutual. Arabic-speaking Sunni scholars sought to rationalize their place within the empire using a different political language from that employed by their non-Arab Muslim contemporaries or, for that matter, from that used by their Arabic-speaking, non-Muslim neighbors. If an “Arab exceptionalism” was largely absent from the political or economic experience of the inhabitants of the Arab provinces that would serve to distinguish them from others of the sultan’s subjects, it would be difficult to argue that it was not present in their culture. It is that difference that I seek to explore in this book.
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
There is the obvious question of whom do I include when I make the distinction between Ottomans and Arabs. To be an Ottoman (Osmanl1) in the early modern period was to be attached to the large extended dynasty founded by Osman Gazi (d. 1324) or in its service. That would include almost everyone who represented the sultan in some official capacity in his Arab provinces, whether in the military that governed and policed the provinces or in the judiciary that administered the religious courts.
The former were in the first two centuries of Ottoman rule often, but not exclusively, products of the devsirme, those conscripted through the “boy-tax” levied on many of the empire’s Christian households. In the eighteenth century, most were Muslims from either the Anatolian or Balkan provinces, although men of slave origin from Christian Europe or the Caucasus region were also present in the imperial ranks. Whether they were actually slaves or freeborn Muslims, all the men who served in the sultan’s military before the nineteenth century were technically his slaves and presumed to be personally loyal to his household.
In contrast, the chief judges who served in the Arab lands were freeborn Muslims who could be of any ethnic origin. Most were the graduates of the state-sponsored madrasa (religious school) system, which produced the empire’s Turkish-speaking intellectual elite. In their training and outlook, those in the judiciary were as much the results of an imperial design to create men loyal to the state as those taken by the devsirme. The Ottoman elite, consisting of both its military/bureaucratic and religious wings, was not large in size, comprising no more than a few thousand individuals and their families in any year before 1800. We can assume that most of its membership knew each other at least by reputation, and there were ties of marriage between the royal house and individual members of both the military elite and the leading ulama. To be an Ottoman in those centuries was to belong to one large, and often quarrelsome, extended family.
Initially, Arab authors in Syria and Egypt used the word Atrak (Turks) to distinguish the Ottomans from the Mamluks who had previously ruled them and who were for them the Jarkasiyya, or alternatively Shirakasa (Circassians). But the Arab authors quickly adopted the term Rumi (plural Arwam) to mean an Ottoman and Rum to mean both Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkan provinces. Rumi was, however, a term loaded with ambiguity. Authors writing in Arabic employed it to mean Turkish-speaking Muslims in Anatolia outside the royal household, as well as those who were in the sultan’s service, whether they were native Turkish speakers or non-Turkish Muslims from the Balkans or the Caucasus. To add further confusion, Rumi could also mean an Orthodox Christian generally, or more specifically one who spoke Greek. The less ambiguous Arabic term ‘Uthmani for Ottoman officials came into general use only in the eighteenth century, although Arab authors employed it before that with reference to the ruling family or more abstractly the Ottoman state (al-dawla al-“uthmaniyya). The term “Turk” for members of the Ottoman officer and bureaucratic classes only began to make a return to narratives composed by Arabic-speaking authors in the nineteenth century as ethnic identities began to supplement religious ones, although even then ambiguities remained. The father of the early nineteenth century Lebanese poet and chronicler Niqula al-Turk, who presumably was the source of the author’s nickname (laqab), was actually a Greek Orthodox Christian from Istanbul.
If the definition of Ottoman could be linked to the ruling dynasty and those who served it, what did it mean to be an Arab before the twentieth century? Today, most people accept at face value the assertion first advanced by Arab nationalist writers in the 1920s that all those who speak Arabic as their mother tongue are Arabs (‘Arabi, with its plural “Arab). That is how I use the term in this book. The modern usage of the word is, however, much more inclusive than it would have been during most of the Ottoman period. For the authors consulted in writing this work, ‘Arabi, literally meant a Bedouin or an inhabitant of Arabia generally. But even that was not foolproof as an ethnic identifier. The other possible plural of ‘Arabi, ‘Urban, could be used by Arabic speakers to mean pastoralists generically, regardless of the language they spoke, and was applied by Arab authors to Turkmens, Kurds, and Bedouins.
Both Muslim and Christian chroniclers in Syria’s cities used the phrase awlad al-‘Arab (sons of the Arabs/Bedouins) to describe themselves and others as Arabic speakers. It is not as clear, however, what authors in Egypt meant when they employed that phrase.*4 Its use in Syria points to ambiguity about the authors’ understanding of their collective identity; they were the descendants of the Arabs and speakers of the Arabic language, but not “proper” Arabs, that is, Bedouins. There was nonetheless a pride evident in that self-designation among the Arabic-speaking Muslim elites who understood themselves to be the guardians of the language in which the Holy Qur’an was delivered and that, they were confident, was the language of paradise. Even so, pride and a sense of cultural identity did not constitute the basis of resistance to the empire.
On the Ottoman side of the linguistic divide, the defining characteristics of an Arab were also not transparent. Ottoman officials were not exactly sure of who besides the Bedouins were Arabs. For those writing in Ottoman Turkish, Arap meant a Bedouin or an inhabitant of the Arabian Peninsula generally. But the word could also mean for them an African as most African slaves arrived in the empire by way of the markets of Cairo. Whatever the term Arap meant for the Ottomans, it was not solely vested in an individual’s mother tongue. The inveterate seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi (d. 1682?) was genuinely surprised that the Greek Orthodox (Rum) inhabitants of the Lebanese port of Sidon spoke Arabic (Arap¢a) rather than Greek (Rumca).*5 Even so, they remained for him Rum and not Arap, as it would be inconceivable to him that the identification of Arab could be applied to a non-Muslim.
Ottoman authors employed the term Arabistan, “the country of the Arabs,” as a geographical designation, but it was not a place that was easily delineated in their mental geography. Arabistan was definitely to the east of Istanbul and began somewhere south of the Taurus Mountains that separate the Anatolian plateau from the steppe lands, which in turn quickly fade into the Syrian Desert. In regard to its vagueness, it was akin to Kurdistan (Country of the Kurds), whose exact location and ethnic makeup were also often inexact in the Ottoman imperial imagination.*¢ In its most generous application, Arabistan encompassed the Arabic-speaking regions of Arabia and the western Fertile Crescent (Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan) with the occasional addition of the province of Mosul, today northern Iraq. Ottoman officials never applied Arabistan to the rest of Iraq, which Ottoman sources sometimes labeled Trak-1 Arap (Iraq of the Arabs), using its medieval designation. Yemen, Egypt, and the various provinces of North Africa each had their own distinct topographical designation that did not carry any association with an ethnicity. The inhabitants of Yemen were definitely Arap in the Ottoman construction of their identity, but those of Egypt were more often simply labeled as fellahin, “peasants,” using the colloquial Arabic plural for the agricultural class. The Ottomans posted in Cairo were cognizant of the fact that Egyptians spoke Arabic, but as was the case with the Arabic-speaking Christians whom Evliya encountered, that did not necessarily make them Arabs.
The Ottoman officials in the Arabic-speaking provinces were acutely aware that they were no longer in Istanbul. Such a reaction would undoubtedly have been similar in any provincial posting, as no place could quite equal for them the power, grandeur, and opportunity for advancement that were present in the capital. In Anatolia or the Balkans, however, Ottoman Turkish served as the language of command in the provincial sarays (palaces) and religious courts. In the Arab lands, commands in that language issued by the governor were necessarily mediated through an interpreter. Both Ottomans and Arabic speakers alike recognized that language separated them, even if Sunni Islam served to create a community that united the two.
The arrival of Ottoman armies in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad ushered in a time of potential change for the Muslim elites of those cities. Where they had once been both the guardians of the law and the producers of the literate “high” culture, they now faced competition from authorities who spoke a different language and had developed a different interpretation of that law and of Islamic “high” culture generally. The Arab ulama held an ambiguous position within the empire. The empire was “theirs” in that it was Muslim, but it was also administered and articulated in a language that most of them did not understand. As a result, the role Arabs played in supporting or administering the empire was largely confined to their own home provinces. That fact meant that the Arab intellectual elite often seemed provincial from the perspective of those going to the Arab lands from Istanbul. They were, however, not to be dismissed entirely as country bumpkins if the sultan’s writ were to continue to hold sway in the provinces below the Taurus Mountains and along the littoral of the eastern and southern Mediterranean Sea. Whether or not the Ottoman governors felt there was a need for collaborators to maintain the sultan’s authority is unknown as the strategies of dominance in the empire are yet to be explored by scholars. Even if that were not the case, however, the Arabic-speaking urban Sunni elite willingly served in that role.
PERIODIZATION
In plotting the outline of this book, I faced another potential pitfall for the Ottoman historian: the question of historical periodization. Most twentieth-century historians initially divided the empire’s history into five broad periods: (1) origins (1300?-1453), (2) empire at its height (14531566), (3) empire in decline (1566-1808 or 1839), (4) empire revived sorts in that by the century’s end most of the sultan’s Arab subjects could not imagine a political future other than remaining within his empire.
The final chapter deals with the end of the relationship between the sultans and their Arab subjects. With historical hindsight, it ended not because most Arabs critically questioned their four-century-old relationship to the sultanate, but rather that the sultanate itself had changed in what it expected of them. The era of Sultan Abdiilhamid II (1876-1909) was remarkably peaceful for the Arab provinces, in contrast to what had occurred there in the preceding decades as well as to contemporary developments in the Balkans and southeastern Anatolia. The currents of nationalisms with competing visions and ambitions that undermined the foundations of empire, however, also had an impact in the Arab lands. Even so, most Arabs did not question the ideology of a political Ottomanism, as articulated by the Tanzimat reformers, as the bond that tied them to their sultan.
Rather, the embrace of an ethnically defined ideology of Turkish nationalism, as well as a desire for a strong, centralized imperial government, by those ruling in Istanbul after 1908 began to undermine the long-established political alliance between Turks and Arabs as fellow Muslims. Increasingly, Muslim Arab intellectuals felt that they were no longer partners in an Islamic imperial enterprise, as they were being marginalized by, and subordinated to, Turkish national ambitions.
Most Arabs did not take up arms to end their relationship to the empire, but neither did they do so voluntarily to preserve it. Conscription rather than a spirit of patriotic volunteerism installed the sultan’s Arab subjects in the ranks of his army during the Great War. Ambivalence and not rage was the dominant attitude among them toward the sultanate in its dying days. The empire came to an end in the Arab lands in 1918 with a long, painful sigh of a military retreat and not in an explosion of nationalist sentiment.
There were clearly those among the Arabs who were not sorry to see the Ottoman army withdraw back into Anatolia from which it had originally come, but there were still others who preferred that it might stay. In the empire’s absence, the sultan’s former subjects in the Arab provinces were left with a political void that was not easily filled and faced a future for which few had prepared or even imagined would happen except in their worst dreams.
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