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Cosmopolitan Ottomans
European colonisation put an abrupt end to
political experiments towards a more equal,
diverse and ecumenical Arab world
by Ussama Makdisi
Ussama Makdisi is professor of history and the first holder of the Arab-American
Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. His
latest book is Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the
Modern Arab World (2019).
Edited by Sam Haselby
T he Arab East was among the last regions in the world
to be colonised by Western powers. It was also the first
to be colonised in the name of self-determination. An
iconic photograph from September 1920 of the French
colonial general Henri Gouraud dressed in a splendid
white uniform and flanked by two ‘native’ religious
figures captures this moment. Seated to one side is the
Patriarch of the Maronite Church, an Eastern Christian
Catholic sect. On the other side is the Sunni Muslim
Mufti of Beirut. Gouraud’s proclamation of the state of
Greater Lebanon, or Grand Liban, which was carved out
of the lands of the defeated Ottoman empire, served as
the occasion. With Britain’s blessing, France had
occupied Syria two months earlier and overthrown the
short-lived, constitutional Arab Kingdom of Syria. #e
pretext offered for this late colonialism was one that
continues to be used today. #e alleged object of France
in the Orient was not to aggrandise itself, but to lead its
inhabitants, particularly its diverse and significant
minority populations of Lebanon, towards freedom and
independence.
Proclamation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. Photo by Photo12/Getty
France separated the Christian-dominated state of
Lebanon from the rest of geographic Syria, which itself
was parcelled out along sectarian Alawi, Druze and
Sunni polities under overarching French dominion. #is
late colonialism was allegedly meant to liberate the
peoples of the Arab world from the tyranny of the
Ottoman Muslim ‘Turk’ and from the depredations of
notionally age-old sectarian hatreds. #us General
Gouraud appeared in the photograph not as a
vanquisher of supposedly barbarous native tribes; he
was neither a modern Hernán Cortés toppling the Aztec
Montezuma nor a French reincarnation of Andrew
Jackson destroying the Seminoles of Florida. #e French
colonial general who had served in Niger, Chad and
Morocco was portrayed as an indispensable peacemaker
and benevolent arbiter between what the Europeans
claimed to be the antagonistic communities of the
Orient.
#e colonisation of the Arab East had come after that of
the Americas, South and Southeastern Asia, and Africa.
#is last great spurt of colonial conquest ostensibly
repudiated the brutal and rapacious rule of the kind that
King Leopold of Belgium had visited upon the Congo in
the late-19th century. Instead, after the First World War,
Europeans ruled through euphemism: a so-called
‘mandate’ system dominated by ‘advanced’ powers was
established by the new British-and-French-dominated
League of Nations to aid less-able nations. #e new
Lebanese and Syrian states blessed by the League were
‘provisionally’ independent, yet subject to mandatory
European tutelage. Drawing on the British experience of
‘indirect’ rule in Africa, the victorious powers cultivated
a native facade to obscure the coloniser’s hand. Perhaps
most importantly, this late colonialism claimed to
respect the new ideals of the US president Woodrow
Wilson, the presumptive father of so-called ‘selfdetermination’ of peoples around the world.
#roughout modern history, the weight of Western
colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty
has distorted the nature of the Middle East. It has
transformed the political geography of the region by
creating a series of small and dependent Middle Eastern
states and emirates where once stood a large
interconnected Ottoman sultanate. It introduced a new
– and still unresolved – conflict between ‘Arab’ and
‘Jew’ in Palestine just when a new Arab identity that
included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs appeared
most promising. #is late – last – Western colonialism
has obscured the fact that the shift from Ottoman
imperial rule to post-Ottoman Arab national rule was
neither natural nor inevitable. European colonialism
abruptly interrupted and reshaped a vital anti-sectarian
Arab cultural and political path that had begun to take
shape during the last century of Ottoman rule. Despite
European colonialism, the ecumenical ideal, and the
dream of creating sovereign societies greater than the
sum of their communal or sectarian parts, survived well
into the 20th-century Arab world.
#e ‘sick man of Europe’ – the condescending
European sobriquet for the sultanate – was not, in fact,
in terminal decline at all in the early 20th century.
Contrary to hoary stories of Turkish rapacity and
decline, or romanticised glorifications of Ottoman rule,
the truth is that the final Ottoman century saw a new
age of coexistence at the same time as it also ushered in
competing ethnoreligious nationalisms, war and
oppression in the shadow of Western domination. #e
violent part of the story is well-known; the far richer
ecumenical one, barely at all.
A long with almost every other non-Western polity in the
19th century, the Ottoman empire retreated in the face
of relentless European aggression. #e empire grappled
with how to maintain sovereignty and accommodate
itself to 19th-century ideas of equal citizenship. It was
hobbled by the rise of separatist Balkan nationalist
movements that enjoyed support from different
European powers. #e Ottomans were at war in virtually
every decade of the 19th century.
If the Ottomans fretted about how to preserve the
territorial integrity of their once-great empire, they also
invested in reforming and refashioning it in almost every
way, from its military and politics to its architecture and
society. #e empire had long discriminated between
Muslim and non-Muslim in the name of defending the
faith and honour of Islam. It also discriminated against
heterodox Muslims. Over centuries, it had built an
imperial system that enshrined Ottoman Muslim
primacy over all other groups. In the 19th century,
Ottoman sultans fitfully refashioned their empire as a
‘civilised’ and ecumenical Muslim sultanate that
professed equality of all subjects irrespective of their
religious affiliation. Muslim, Christian and Jewish
subjects adopted the red fez as a sign of their shared
modern Ottomanism. During the Tanzimat era (18391876), the Ottoman empire officially espoused a policy
of nondiscrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim.
#e idea of equality between Muslim and non-Muslim in
the empire acquired the force of social sanction and law
with the promulgation of the Ottoman constitution of
1876, which declared the equality of all Ottoman
citizens.
No matter how much the Ottomans secularised their
empire, Britain, France, Austria and Russia demanded
more concessions. Each European power claimed to
protect one or another native Christian or other
minority community, each coveted a part of the
Ottoman domains, and each jealously sought to negate
their rivals’ influence in the Orient. #is diplomatic
wrangle was referred to at the time as the ‘Eastern
Question’. #e breaking up of the ideological and legal
privileging of Muslims over non-Muslims in the empire
was not without controversy, especially because
European powers consistently intervened in the empire
along sectarian lines. #e Ottomans, for example,
abolished the medieval jizya tax on non-Muslims but
pledged to Europe in 1856 to respect the ‘privileges and
spiritual immunities’ of the Christian churches; while
they exempted non-Muslims from military service in
return for a tax, they conscripted Muslim subjects to
fight in seemingly endless wars; they opened Ottoman
markets to an influx of European goods and tolerated
Western missionary proselytisation of the empire’s nonMuslims.
A section of the 1851 Martin and Tallis map ‘Turkey in Asia’
showing the southern eyalets (administrative divisions) of
Ottoman Syria: Damascus, Tripoli, Acre and Gaza. Photo courtesy
Wikipedia
In July 1860, an anti-Christian riot erupted in Damascus.
Despite the edicts promulgating nondiscrimination, a
Muslim mob rampaged through the city, pillaging
churches and terrorising the city’s Christian inhabitants.
Newspapers in London and Paris and missionary
societies condemned what they saw as ‘Mohammedan’
fanaticism. #e French emperor Napoleon III sent a
French army to the Orient, allegedly to aid the sultan to
restore order in his Arab provinces. European powers
set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the
massacres of 1860. #eir humanitarian motives,
however, were conditional and political. No
corresponding commission, after all, was formed to
investigate the US oppression and persecution of people
of African descent or its extermination of Native
Americans, the decades of French colonial terror in
Algeria, or the British suppression of the anticolonial
uprising in India in 1857.
Despite being singled out by Western observers as a
peculiarly non-Western and even Muslim problem, the
massacres of 1860 reflected a global struggle to
reconcile equality, diversity and sovereignty that
manifested across the world in very different contexts.
So while the Ottomans were facing a genuine crisis
about how to reform and maintain their grip over a
heterogeneous multiethnic, multilinguistic and
multireligious population, halfway across the world, the
US was simultaneously fighting the deadliest war in the
19th-century Western world over slavery, racism and
citizenship. #e Damascus riot occurred just after the
last illegal cargo of enslaved and brutalised Africans was
unloaded from the schooner Clotilda on the Alabama
coast.
T he anti-Christian riots of 1860 in Damascus were
terrible, but they reflected only one aspect of the
contemporary Ottoman empire. Far less noted than the
episodes of violence sensationalised in Europe was a
noticeable and widespread accommodation, if not an
active embrace, by many Ottoman subjects of
secularisation and modernisation. #e empire
constituted a vital laboratory for modern coexistence
between Muslim and non-Muslim that had no parallel
anywhere else in the world. Nowhere was this
coexistence more evident than in the cities of the Arab
Mashriq. From Cairo to Beirut to Baghdad, Arabs of all
faiths shared a common language and showed little
inclination to separate politically from the Ottoman
empire.
A general view of Beirut c1890-1900. Photo courtesy the Library
of Congress
After the events of 1860, the Protestant Christian
convert Butrus al-Bustani opened a ‘national’ school in
Beirut. At a time when American missionaries in the
Levant still rejected the idea of genuinely secular
education, al-Bustani’s school was both antisectarian
and respectful of religious difference. During an era
when Africans and Asians were enduring gross racial
subordination in European empires, when Jews were
being subjected to pogroms in Russia, and when white
Americans were embracing racial segregation across the
US South, excluding Asians from US citizenship, and
herding the surviving Native Americans into pitiable
reservations, the Ottoman empire encouraged – or did
not stand in the way of – the opening of new inclusive
‘national’ schools, municipalities, journals, newspapers
and theatres. A new army was built in the name of
national unity and sovereignty. All these reforms were
made more urgent by successive Ottoman military
defeats against Russia and in the Balkans, and Ottoman
Sultan Abdulhamid II’s resistance to constitutional
change. In 1908, the Young Turk Revolution deposed
the sultan and promised a new constitutional period of
Ottoman liberty and fraternity among the various
Turkish, Armenian, Albanian, Jewish and Arab elements
of the Ottoman empire – not simply the absence of
discrimination.
Musical students at the Collège Saint Joseph in Antoura
photographed by André Salles in 1893. Photo courtesy Bibliothèque
nationale de France, Paris
Most of the secularising national reforms were far more
enthusiastically pronounced than practised. #ey were
implemented unevenly and piecemeal across the
empire. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the events of
1860, many Arab Muslims, Christians and Jews in the
Mashriq believed they were participating in an
ecumenical ‘renaissance’ or nahda that could be
expressed in different Ottoman, Arab, religious, secular,
political and cultural terms. #ey understood collectively
that they were heading into a potentially brighter, and
certainly more scientific, and more ‘civilised’ future. To
be sure, from Egypt to Iraq, this nahda was dominated
by urban and educated men who believed that they
spoke for their respective ‘nations’. It was a renaissance
in the making, not an accomplished goal or even a
unitary social or political project. #e nahda luminaries
did not necessarily agree on the precise contours of
their shared Ottoman nation any more than Americans
then – or now – agree on what constitutes ideal or
representative Americans.
#e balance between the ecumenism of Ottoman
reforms and the harsh imperative to maintain effective
sovereignty was delicate. #e ‘Eastern Question’
politicised the future of non-Muslim communities –
eventually called ‘minorities’ – because they became
simultaneously objects of European solicitude and
pretexts for political and military aggression against the
Ottomans. #e emergence of ethnoreligious
nationalisms in the Balkans exacerbated the problem
when Christian Greek, Serbian, Macedonian and
Bulgarian nationalists appealed to Russian, Austrian or
British support seeking to break away from Ottoman
control. Ottoman leaders, in turn, regarded the Turkishspeaking Muslim population as the essential core of
their empire. In the last quarter of the 19th century,
Armenian revolutionaries sought to emulate Balkan
Christian nationalists. #ey appealed for European
support to achieve autonomy; the Ottoman state
responded with persecution.
Ottoman modernity in the shadow of Western
colonialism could be both powerfully ecumenical and
uncompromisingly violent. It promised both a
multiethnic and multireligious sovereign future and a
xenophobic world without minorities. In the Balkans
and Anatolia, the imperative of sovereignty clearly
trumped the commitment to ecumenism, while in the
Arab Mashriq ecumenical Ottomanism flourished more
easily. In the Balkans, Christians often became
implacably opposed to Muslims (and other Christians)
amid clashing ethnoreligious nationalisms, while in the
Mashriq the Arab Christians and Muslims and Jews
more easily made common cause.
One key difference was the absence of separatist
nationalisms in the Mashriq. Although Britain occupied
Egypt in 1882, in the rest of the Mashriq Ottoman rule
remained viable. #e shared Arabic language helped
Arab Christians and Jews play important roles in the
Arabic press, theatre, professional and women’s
associations and municipalities. #e leading Egyptian
daily Al-Ahram, for example, was founded by a Syrian
Christian émigré. Nor was it out of place that the Jewish
journalist Esther Moyal would advocate for an
ecumenical ‘Eastern Arab’ identity. #e gradual
alienation and decimation of the Armenian Christian
community of Anatolia unfolded at the same time when
Arab Christians and Jews coexisted with their Muslim
brethren in cities such as Beirut, Haifa, Aleppo,
Baghdad, as well as in British-occupied Cairo and
Alexandria.
T he Ottoman era ended with the calamity of the First
World War. Wartime Ottoman Turkish rulers callously
turned their back on the ecumenical spirit of
Ottomanism at the same time as they embraced its
darker statist side. In the name of national survival,
these Ottomans commenced genocidal policies against
Armenians. #ey also hanged those they considered
Arab traitors in Beirut and Damascus. While a famine
ravaged Mount Lebanon, Ottoman forces retreated
before a British military invasion of Palestine. Jerusalem
fell in December 1917. Almost a year later, the empire
surrendered ignominiously.
When the victorious Allied statesmen of Britain, France
and the US assembled in Paris in 1919 to decide the
future of the defeated Ottoman empire, they intervened
in an empire that had been substantially transformed
over the preceding century. #e victors of the First
World War ignored the ecumenical heritage of the late
Ottoman empire. Instead, they sensationalised the
empire’s obvious defects and were determined to divide
it up. In 1919, President Wilson blessed the partition of
the Ottoman empire. #e Greek invasion of Izmir set off
a bloody war that led eventually to the victory of a new
Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, later
known as Atatürk. #is new Turkey secularised itself
dramatically but was also draconian in its rejection of its
own ecumenical Ottoman heritage. In 1923, Turkey
concluded an agreement with Greece to forcibly evict –
‘exchange’ was the euphemism used – more than a
million Greeks from the new Turkey. In turn, Greece
evicted hundreds of thousands of Greek-speaking
Muslims. #e new Turkish republic then suppressed
dissenting Kurds.
#e Allies, in the meantime, decided the future of the
Arab Mashriq. As early as 1915, Britain had pledged to
support expansive Arab Hashemite ambitions to rule an
independent Arab kingdom across much of the Arab
East in return for their revolt against Ottoman rule. A
year later in 1916, Britain and France then secretly
agreed to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
empire between them in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
And in 1917, prompted by Zionist lobbying, the British
government pledged to support the creation of a Jewish
‘national home’ in Palestine that was overwhelmingly
Arab in its demographic, social and linguistic
composition.
To add insult to injury, at the Paris peace conference in
1919, Britain and France blocked native Arab and
Egyptian nationalists from presenting their cases for
independence directly. #ey permitted, however, the
Hashemite Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein, to plead
with the Allies to fulfil their wartime pledges to his
father. #ey also allowed European Zionists to present
their vision for colonising Palestine and transforming it
into a Jewish state led by settlers from eastern and
central Europe. And they heard from Howard Bliss, the
son of an American missionary and the president of the
Syrian Protestant College (today, the American
University of Beirut). Bliss was allowed to speak on
behalf of the inhabitants of Syria. While paternalistic to
the Syrians, he was sensitive to the political mood in the
former provinces of the Ottoman empire and
recommended an impartial fact-finding inquiry be
dispatched to the Middle East to document the political
aspirations of its inhabitants by self-determination. #e
French were horrified by the idea of an impartial
commission, and the British embarrassed, because
neither had any intention of granting independence to
the Arabs. Wilson himself, however, was the key
interlocutor between the old and new forms of
colonialism. He was deeply sympathetic to the American
missionary enterprise. He also endorsed the idea of a
commission.
#e resulting American Section of the 1919 Inter-Allied
Commission on Mandates in Turkey was known simply
as the King-Crane Commission after the two Americans
who led it: Henry King, the president of Oberlin College
in Ohio, and the philanthropist Charles Crane. Unlike
the 1860 international commission that was established
in the Ottoman empire, this one actually polled people
in the region – and the commission collected numerous
telegrams, petitions and letters from the inhabitants of
the erstwhile Ottoman provinces and held hundreds of
meetings with them. Neither King nor Crane were
anticolonial in any revolutionary sense, but they also
both genuinely believed that it was important to record
accurately the wishes of the indigenous peoples of the
region. #ey appeared to take Wilson’s commitment to
self-determination as self-evident.
After a gruelling tour through Palestine, Lebanon and
Syria in July 1919, King and Crane reached several bold
conclusions regarding the Arab East. #ey recognised
that most of the inhabitants of the region spoke a
common language and shared a rich ecumenical culture.
#ey admitted that the political desire of most of the
native population was overwhelmingly for
independence. #ey recommended strongly that a
single Syrian state that included Palestine and Lebanon
be created under an American mandate (and failing
that, a British one), with robust protection for
minorities. Most importantly, they said that if the
Wilsonian principle of self-determination was to be
taken seriously, and the voice of the native Arab majority
was to be heard, the project of colonial Zionism in
Palestine had to be curtailed. ‘Decisions, requiring
armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary,’ they
wrote, ‘but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in
the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim,
often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they
have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of
2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.’
#e commissioners submitted their final report to
President Wilson in August 1919, but their
recommendations were ignored. #eir predictions about
Palestine, however, proved prophetic. #e US
repudiated any emancipatory anticolonial interpretation
of self-determination, for Wilson himself never believed
in the idea that all peoples were equal or immediately
deserving sovereignty. Britain and France proceeded to
partition the region as if the King-Crane commission
had never been sent. #e British foreign minister Arthur
Balfour was, at least, candid on this point. #e
inhabitants of Syria, he said, ‘may freely choose, but it is
Hobson’s choice after all’. France was going to rule Syria
and Lebanon. And Britain was going to open Palestine
to colonial Zionism. ‘For in Palestine,’ Balfour wrote in
August 1919, ‘we do not propose even to go through the
form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants
of the country, though the American [King-Crane]
Commission has been going through the form of asking
what they are.’
No matter how intently the last colonialism of the world
sold itself as a purveyor of self-determination, its
Western proponents knew better. #e real tragedy,
however, lay not in deceit but in the divisions that this
deceit exacerbated and engendered. Colonial Europe
claimed to arbitrate age-old religious difference in the
Middle East. In reality, it encouraged sectarian politics.
#e consequences of this last colonialism reverberate
until today.
aeon.co
17 October 2019
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