CHAPTER 12
Egyptian Civilization
In Egypt, Muhammad Ali, leader of the Albanian contingent, took power in 1805, driving out the Ottoman governor with the support of the notables of Cairo. The Porte was obliged to recognize that coup d’état. The new governor, whom the Europeans called a “viceroy,” established his legitimacy in 1807 by driving out the English. He gradually reestablished order and definitively eliminated the Mamluks in 1811. In his heart of hearts, he was the founder of an Islamic empire, and his first actions moved in that direction: he established a state monopoly on land and imposed strict control over economic transactions. He put an end to the tendency of tax farms to gradually turn into actual private property. That policy can be interpreted as a resurrection of the authoritarian forms of the traditional Muslim state. Compared to the traditionalist reformers of the Ottoman Empire, Ali had the enormous advantage of beginning from scratch after a long period of troubles, and he had the support of the people of his house (Bayt), composed of Turks, Albanians, Circassians, and great Bedouin chiefs but also of Coptic and Armenian Christians. The men of the Bayt were primarily Ottomans in their language and culture, and though they supported their leader’s desire for autonomy, their aim was to establish an independent regency similar to those of Barbary.
Like all Muslim leaders of his time, Muhammad Ali was chiefly concerned with constituting a modern military force. He initially attempted to impose a new discipline on the traditional military units, but the results were unsatisfying, despite the use of European military advisers, Napoleonic army veterans in particular. After considering an army of black slaves, he resolved to use the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. Although collectively called fallah (peasants), they included urban populations. Here again, Muhammad Ali was merely following the example set by Selim III, but the specific situation of Egypt allowed him to have at his disposal a particularly effective force from the start.
Even though the Ottoman government distrusted him, it found itself compelled to ask him to fight Wahhabi expansion, which was very dangerous for the empire’s survival. The Ottoman- Saudi War, waged by Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha, turned out to be a series of victorious campaigns, ending in 1818 with the destruction of the first Wahhabi state. Now in charge of central Arabia and the holy cities of the Hejaz, Muhammad Ali turned toward Sudan, which he quickly conquered between 1820 and 1822. He thus controlled the banks of the Red Sea, which could only distress the British, who had considered him an enemy from the beginning. The existence of an entourage of French advisers only reinforced these fears.
Muhammad Ali increasingly used European advisers, French and Italian especially. He did not grant any positions of authority to them, with the exception of those who converted to Islam and became members of the Bayt, like the famous “Colonel” Sève, Süleyman Pasha. A profoundly pragmatic soul, the viceroy was aware of the importance of learning what was happening in Europe, and not only in the political arena. European consuls and travelers became his regular interlocutors. In conversing with them, he understood that he not only had to stay informed but also had to direct propaganda at European public opinion. He was the first Muslim chief of state to attempt to turn European discourse against itself and to make it a means of public action. In about 1821, he seized on the theme of civilization, declaring that he was called upon to lay the foundations for Egyptian civilization, to which the European nations could not remain indifferent. In the following years, his propagandists in France went so far as to compare him to Napoleon, whose accomplishments in the East he was supposedly continuing.
Cultural relations between Europe and the Muslim world were now on equal footing. Europe elaborated a certain discourse on the East, generally fed by preoccupations specific to Europe’s future. The East received that discourse, which at first it found relatively incomprehensible. Then the East turned that discourse to its own advantage, elaborating a version of its actions that would be compatible with the Western interpretation. The process did not end there. In the late 1820s, the viceroy sent the first Egyptian scholarly mission to France, composed of young people from the Bayt. The sole fallah participating was the imam, a young Azharian named Rifa‘at at- Tahtawi. The mission was well received by the veterans of the Egyptian expedition and the French Orientalists, the most illustrious of them Sylvestre de Sacy. The students witnessed the events of 1830 and the birth of the July Monarchy. Tahtawi, upon his return to Egypt in 1831, composed Paris Gold, a sort of portrait of France. In the first pages of the book, he seeks to translate the concept of “civilization” into Arabic. Having proposed several equivalents, he finally opts for tamaddun. That Arabic term refers to the idea of a settled and urban existence. In his later works, Tahtawi clarified the concept. For him, unlike the European thinkers, it did not entail the binarity of the individual and the collective, but rather the union between human reason, which produced science and technology, and divine revelation, which set the rules for life in society. He thus forged the concept of Islamic civilization that would become that of the later reformers of Islam. In wanting to save the essential, the Islamic commonwealth, these reformers exposed themselves to another danger, that of a pure instrumentalization of science and technology that did not take into account the underlying logic of these entities and did not really master them.
The restored French monarchy of 1815 launched a major Mediterranean policy, which was sometimes very muddled and contradictory. It sought to maintain France’s status after the disasters toward the end of the Napoleonic era and to bestow thereby a second form of legitimacy on itself. Since there could be no question of a military venture within Europe, the Mediterranean became the outlet. Within that context, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali seemed like a stroke of luck, given its desire to position itself within the legacy of the Egyptian expedition. France offered Ali diplomatic support, and made arrangements to send advisers to him (which also allowed the monarchy to rid itself of people suspected of Bonapartism).
For the younger generation of romantics, the civilization process under way in the East prefigured great things, as Victor Hugo indicated in his preface to Les Orientales in January 1829: “The whole continent is tilting to the East. We will see great things. The old Asian barbarism may not be as lacking in superior men as our civilization wishes to believe. We must remember that it produced the only colossus that this century can compare to Bonaparte, if, all the same, Bonaparte can have a counterpart: that man of genius, in reality Turkish and Tatar, that Ali Pasha, who is to Napoleon what the tiger is to the lion, what the vulture is to the eagle.”
The Muslim East made its contribution to the vast “Oriental renaissance” characteristic of European literature and thought in the decades following Waterloo. Its principal component arose from the discovery of the kinship among the Indo- European languages, which seemed to provide the key to understanding the history of ancient Asia and hence the origins of Europe, as if the Orient were more than ever the origin (Oriens/Origo in Latin). The theory of invasions gained in strength, becoming, with the elaboration of the Aryan myth, the driving force of history. The discovery of the purity of Indian origins led thinkers to view the presence of Islam in India as the intrusion of a foreign element that had diverted its history. That interpretation, which ignored the degree to which Islam had been profoundly Hinduized in India, if only by becoming part of the caste system, would later be taken up by a radical Indian nationalism that rejected Islam as an attack on Indian purity.
The Europeans accepted the theory of invasions all the more easily in that it justified the entire colonial enterprise as consistent with the history of the Old World.
In the European world, which was entering the industrial revolution, the moral order of modern bourgeois civilization gave rise to the fantasy of escaping to the Orient, where unbridled passions could be satisfied. That fantasy can be found both in the Orientalist paintings of the early romantics, which constructed paradigms destined to last until our own era, and in the writings of novelists such as Alexandre Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. Alongside that oneiric literature, authors would develop genres of literary fiction derived from travel narratives, in which they sought greater authenticity by adopting the persona of the Oriental himself. Britons such as James Justinian Morier, or later, Richard Francis Burton, excelled in that register, as did the Gobineau of the Asian Stories.
In peacetime Europe, the appeal of the East was also that of the violence outlawed in Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was therefore a region where European adventurers could find individual fulfillment, either by seeking power or military action or by passing as a “native” in the aim of scientific exploration. From the British agents of the Great Game against the Russians in Asia to the discoverers of forbidden places— Burton traveled to Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, and Arminius Vambéry later visited central Asia in the guise of a dervish— a Western mythology of crossing the racial barrier came into being. That new figure of the transgressive adventurer became a powerful literary theme and culminated in the twentieth century with T. E. Lawrence’s sensational experiment.
The Uncertainties of the Nationality Principle: Greece
The Congress of Vienna had restored the notion of legitimacy as the principle governing international relations. States remained the property of the monarchies, and political representation by a voter base of citizens was accepted only for Great Britain and France, which were thereby defined as liberal powers, in contrast to the absolutism of the rest of Europe. But the French Revolution had defined the nation as the totality of citizens comprising the people. In its expansionist phase, the French republic had become the Great Nation, initiating a shift toward a more specifically ethnic definition. The discourse of the Egyptian expedition had marked that shift in its evocation of an “Arab patriotism.” Resistance to the Napoleonic Empire accelerated that transformation. In 1813, the German nation was urged to revolt against the Napoleonic system. The later coalitions used ethnicity as the touchstone to put an end to the Napoleonic adventure. In the wake of Waterloo, the conservative powers thus had to confront national movements that were taking up the demand for political representation or even calling into question the state structures in Poland, Italy, and Germany. Nineteenth- century political liberalism seemed to be resuming the fight of the defeated French Revolution.
The Ottoman Empire had not been invited to participate in the Congress of Vienna, but it was well understood that the principle of legitimacy, backed by that of the globalized European balance of power, applied to that empire as well and guaranteed that it would be maintained. The Holy Alliance was in charge of enforcement, authorizing military interventions against liberal uprisings. But the opposition of Great Britain and the United States kept the alliance from intervening in the wars of independence in Latin America. European liberals applauded, and in some cases even participated in, the American triumph of the nationality principle, which was antagonistic to the legitimacy principle and demonstrated its fragility.
The Ottoman Balkans were populated primarily by Orthodox Christians. In the successive Russo- Ottoman wars, the Russians supported the autonomist Christian movements, particularly among the Serbs and Romanians. But the Europeans had a simplified view of Balkan complexities. Muslim and Christian populations intermingled a great deal after the immigration of Muslims from other parts of the empire, and a large number of local Christians converted to Islam. Since the notables were the first to convert, in many regions Muslim city dwellers and tax farmers ruled over an overwhelmingly large Christian peasantry, creating a social cleavage parallel to the religious cleavage. Muslim Albanians and Bosnians regularly provided military and administrative cadres for the empire as a whole.
The autonomous great pashas were more worried about the recentralization policy conducted by Mahmud II than about a possible uprising of the Christians. Upon the death of a governor, the Porte refused to choose a successor from among his heirs and instead designated a government official from the capital. In general, descendants were given the opportunity to serve in the administration in another region of the empire. In the event of resistance, an armed expedition took the region by surprise and reestablished the central government’s direct authority. This same policy was carried out in Anatolia. Although the empire thereby acquired greater general cohesion, it lost the complex network of relations established among the different components of society at the local level.
That is very clear in the case of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, the powerful pasha of Albania and Greece. To hold on to his de facto autonomy, he maintained good relations with the Greek underground movements in the Balkans. For centuries, the Greeks of Constantinople, called Phanariots, from the name of the neighborhood where the ecumenical patriarchate was located, had been associated with the administration of the Balkans, particularly of the Romanian principalities. The loss of Crimea opened the Black Sea to international trade, and many Greek traders moved to the new Russian possession, since treaties allowed them to sail under the Russian flag. In the Mediterranean, the Greek navy, under the Ottoman flag, underwent an unprecedented expansion resulting from the eclipse of the European navies during the revolutionary and imperial wars. A very active Greek bourgeoisie was thereby created, one attuned to the new discourses coming from Europe, though it remained fundamentally Orthodox in its culture and identity. A Greek cultural renaissance, favored by the art of printing and by the Greek networks established in Italy, in the Ionian Islands— which had become British possessions— and in Russia, thus sought to wed references to the glories of antiquity to the Byzantine and Orthodox heritage. Bonaparte had already considered using that cultural renaissance in 1797 to stir uprisings in the Ottoman Balkans but had immediately given up the idea. In the following years, secret societies of liberal inspiration formed in these bourgeois circles, as well as attempted uprisings, which were rapidly aborted.
In 1820, the Porte decided to put an end to Ali Pasha’s government and to remove him and his sons from their positions of authority. The pasha concluded an alliance with the secret societies, having encouraged them to take root in his territories. The Ottoman army intervened and mounted a siege on his capital, Ioannina. After a year, Ali Pasha had to surrender, and, despite the promises made, he was executed. That adventure held Europe in thrall, as attested by the literary works of Balzac and especially Alexandre Dumas.
The siege of Ioannina gave the signal for Greek insurrection, which spread to the Morea (Peloponnesus), central Greece, and the islands of the Archipelago (the Aegean Sea). In the insurgent regions, insurrection immediately took on the aspect of an ethnic war between the Christian and the Muslim peasantries, with many massacres on both sides. In the rest of the empire, the Greeks, suspected of disloyalty, were removed from their posts in the administration, while the patriarch of Constantinople, accused of supporting the revolt, was hanged.
In Europe, liberal opinion took up the Greek cause. The Philhellenic movement saw it as the rebirth of ancient Greece and condemned the atrocities committed by the Muslims, passing over in silence those attributable to the insurgents. For the first time, various writers and personalities organized a powerful movement to influence governmental decisions. The cause was especially popular because half- pay officers in the imperial army and volunteers joined with the rebels. Lord Byron’s death caused a great stir. The governments of the Holy Alliance were caught between their Christian sympathies and the groundswell of opinion on one hand, and the need to preserve the principle of European legitimacy and stability on the other, which led them to delay intervening.
The Ottoman armies managed to retake central Greece but failed to reconquer Peloponnesus, a hotbed of insurrection. Mahmud II resolved to ask for aid from Muhammad Ali, who sent his son Ibrahim Pasha to reconquer Crete, then Peloponnesus, in 1825. The revolt seemed to be running out of steam. In 1826, the sultan forcibly suppressed the Janissary corps, the conservatives’ armed wing. The path was now clear for the reformers to establish a new unified army. The lack of qualified cadres called for the creation of modern military schools, which further delayed the emergence of a real armed force.
Tsar Alexander I’s death in late 1825 and the accession to power of his brother Nicholas I changed the international context. The new sovereign, while a proclaimed enemy of the liberals, wanted to resume Russian expansion at the expense of the Islamic world. He styled himself the defender of the Balkan Christians and prepared for a new advance in the Caucasus. Following many encroachments into Persian territories, war resumed in 1826. The Persian army could not match the veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. The Treaty of Turkmenchay of February 22, 1828, enshrined the power relations. Persia had to acknowledge the loss of the territories of Erivan and Nakhchivan and pay a heavy war indemnity. The new Russian ambassador, the writer Aleksandr Griboyedov, wanted to push Persia into war against the Ottoman Empire and demanded the return of Russian deserters and renegades. That set off a violent urban riot led by the clergy of Tehran, which ended with the massacre of the Russian legation. Preoccupied with Ottoman affairs, Nicholas I accepted the shah’s official apology.
Great Britain, which did not want to see a Russian intervention along the overland Indian route, asked France to join with it for a mediation between the belligerent parties in Greece. Mahmud II denied all legitimacy to the actions done in Europe’s name on behalf of those rebelling against his authority. France and Great Britain organized a naval demonstration with only a vague mission. The Franco- British fleet was supposed to set up a naval blockade of Peloponnesus and the Dardanelles, but without engaging in combat with the Egyptians and the Ottomans. On October 20, 1827, the European squadron attacked the Ottoman and Egyptian ships gathered in the Bay of Navarino. Declaring they were provoked by a shot from a Muslim ship, the Franco- British vessels unleashed a merciless barrage of artillery that destroyed fifty- seven ships and caused eight thousand deaths. The Europeans had demonstrated their overwhelming superiority, even over the most modern elements of the Muslim armies at the time.
The Ottomans persisted in rejecting European mediation. Russia took the opportunity to declare war on them in April 1828. Once again, Russian armies penetrated into the Romanian principalities and central Bulgaria. A new front opened in the Caucasus, where the Russians advanced as far as eastern Anatolia, taking Kars in July 1828. France sent an expeditionary corps to Peloponnesus to oversee the evacuation of Ibrahim Pasha’s army. The Treaty of London determined the fate of Greece, forming a small Greek state, theoretically under Ottoman suzerainty. In 1829, the Russians arrived in Adrianople, Thrace, and in Erzurum, Anatolia. The Treaty of Adrianople of September 14, 1829, limited Ottoman losses, however. The Russians returned most of their conquests, while the Ottomans had to demilitarize their Balkan borders; recognize the Russians’ previous acquisitions in the Caucasus as well as Serbian, Greek, and Romanian autonomy; pay a heavy war indemnity; and grant Russia the same capitulary rights as the other European powers.
The autonomy of the Serbs, Greeks, and Romanians seemed at first to be an instrument of Russian influence over the Orthodox monks in the Balkans; at the same time, however, it entailed an acknowledgment of the application of the nationality principle in the diminishing Ottoman space. The essential question remained: Could that principle be applied to the Muslim populations?
The Uncertainties of the Nationality Principle: Algeria
The Algiers expedition may appear to have been more accidental than the Egyptian expedition, in that it does not seem to have been the result of an intellectual and political debate of the same nature. The uncertainties of French policy, hesitating between several options and still dreaming of the left bank of the Rhine, are a good demonstration of this view. Although its execution may appear to have been relatively fortuitous, it partook in the general enthusiasm for European expansion and in the problematic of the Ottoman Empire’s dismemberment, a pressing issue for more than half a century.
The origin of the conflict went back to attempts by the regencies to reorganize their economies during a time of revolution and empire, and was linked to the dubious channels that commercial transactions were taking at that time and to the confusion about the respective functions of the consul and the merchants. The insult done to France by the dey of Algiers when he struck the French consul with a fan contributed to the rise of national pride, which also occurred in Palmerston’s England. For a time, the Restoration government offered to intervene in Muhammad Ali’s behalf. But Ali was more interested in Syrian affairs.
In the first place, then, this was a military expedition to enhance the prestige of a government lacking Napoleon’s panache. It was inspired by Bonaparte’s speech in Egypt evoking Arab liberation and the advance of civilization. The proclamation of June 8, 1830, drafted by Sylvestre de Sacy, was in large part an exact copy of the proclamation of July 1798. It mentions avoiding snubs and respecting the Muslim religion. Unlike Bonaparte, the French now hastened to celebrate mass in the conquered city and spoke of reopening the door to Christianity in Africa, with the mission of reviving civilization, which had been snuffed out there.
The first years of the conquest were a time of great incoherence in French policy, linked in part to the vicissitudes of its domestic policy. The “Turks,” that is, the representatives of the Ottoman ruling class, were expelled. The undeclared war against the Ottoman Empire lasted until the taking of Constantine in 1838.
The Algerian urban elite, represented by a certain Hamdam Khoja, who in 1843 published The Mirror, Historical Abstract and Statistics on the Regency of Algiers, attempted to make the French confront their own contradictions. The acts of violence committed against the populations, the destruction of Muslim institutions, particularly institutions of learning, ran counter to the project of civilization. The French could not defend Greek or Polish nationality while at the same time oppressing the inhabitants of Algeria. The price of conquest would not fail to be the extermination or expulsion of the native population. The only path open was to establish a local civilizing authority and friend of France on the model of Egypt.
Once they made the decision to remain for reasons of national prestige, the French attempted a “limited occupation,” which could be achieved only with the backing of a local power assuring control of the territories of the interior. An “Arab kingdom,” ally and partner of France, was needed. They seemed to have found that ally in the person of Emir Abd al- Qadir, who gathered the Arab tribes of the interior under his religious and political authority. The Treaty of Tafna was a step in that direction.
Within a few years, then, the French were led to define the population of Algeria as “Arab,” despite the great heterogeneity of social categories. The same dynamic was at work in that designation there as in Egypt. Once the French had spoken of the existence of an Arab “nation,” it began to appear in the discourse of the interested parties, who used it in their attempts to influence their adversaries. Thus the urban notable Bourderbah, addressing the French, presented the emir as the one who would regenerate the Arab race and defend civilization, a second Muhammad Ali.
The emir was the leader of a brotherhood who rallied his followers against the invaders in the name of jihad, and who imposed scrupulous respect for Islamic law in the territories under his control. At bottom, he was an adversary of the Ottomans, from whom he had received no investiture. He did not hesitate to apply the caliphal title of “commander of believers” to himself and had his followers call him “sultan,” a dual usurpation of the Ottoman or Moroccan sultan- caliphs. He tried to rally the Berbers behind him but failed in his attempts. His base was certainly the great tribes of Arab lineage and Arabic language, but that did not constitute a nationality in the modern sense of the term.
His project was incompatible with French domination, and the ambiguities were dispelled after the Eastern crisis of 1840–1841, a French humiliation recalling Waterloo. To restore the dignity of France, the July Monarchy launched a particularly destructive total conquest. French soldiers used every instrument of terror to destroy the system of Abd al- Qadir, who had to surrender in 1847. The government justified its behavior by pointing out that philanthropy was incompatible with conquest and that the only language the native populations, barbaric by nature, could understand was that of the most violent methods.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who as a politician did not want the native peoples to be exterminated but only repressed, could do no more than issue a warning for the future, which was lost in the parliamentary centrism of the July Monarchy:
If . . . ever we acted in such a manner— without saying so, since these things are sometimes done but never admitted— as to show that, in our eyes, the former inhabitants of Algeria were only an obstacle that had to be thrust aside or trampled underfoot; if we embraced their populations not to lift them up into our arms for their well- being and enlightenment but rather to crush and smother them, the question of life and death would arise between the two races. Believe it: sooner or later, Algeria would become a closed field, a walled- in arena, where the two peoples would have to do battle mercilessly, and where one of the two would have to die. God spare us such a fate, Gentlemen.1
In Algeria, France and Europe established settlement colonies in the Arab world for the first time, inaugurating a repressive colonialism, as the Russians were doing with equivalent methods in Crimea and the Caucasus. Nevertheless, the European discourse inherited from the Enlightenment on the role of the Arabs in the history of humanity predisposed the French to recognize Arab nationality. But the exclusion of the Arabs and Muslims from the nationality principle was confirmed in the European debate accompanying the Syrian wars of the 1830s.
The Uncertainties of the Nationality Principle: Syria
The Ottoman social contract inherited from classical Islam was now profoundly undermined. Some of the elites were aware of the frightening reversal in power relations vis- à- vis the European powers. In order to survive, they had to adopt the principles of the modern state, based on the elimination of social hierarchy and the establishment of equality. The first functional division of society to be suppressed was the specialized order of warriors. Modern armies relied on recruitment from a broad swath of society, usually through more or less selective conscription. The same was true in fiscal matters, which required that a universal and nondiscriminatory system be set in place for levying taxes. And finally, the Greek revolt dealt a mortal blow to the old distinction between Muslims and non- Muslims.
Anxiety ran deep in the Mediterranean Muslim societies: the traditional frames of reference were being called into question and the social order inherited from the previous generations was in a state of upheaval. The new order was coming into being at the expense of ancient and consecrated freedoms.
Even as anxiety took root in the consciousness of Muslims, Christian society was far from being at peace. While placing itself under the standard of Napoleonic modernity, France of the restored monarchy acted as the emperor had, reiterating the traditional demand for a French protectorate over the Catholics of the Ottoman Empire. That demand had formerly been based on a misinterpretation of the capitulation treaties and on the de facto reality that French protection was simply one more in the tangle of protections characteristic of all traditional societies. It changed meaning with the new social order being set in place. Now entire collectivities were placed under protection, with the progress of Uniatism (which embraced the authority of the Roman See), even as French protection became part of a competitive system: Russia made equivalent demands on behalf of the Orthodox communities, and the first so- called biblicist American and British Protestant missions, whose tone was often millenarianist, arrived on the scene.
According to a certain theological interpretation known as the “fulfillment of prophecies,” the advent of the millennium was conditioned on the gathering of the Jews in the Holy Land and their conversion to Christianity. Protestant proselytism did not limit itself to the Jews but extended as well to Eastern Christian communities of various obediences, who were considered ignorant and far from the true faith.
The Eastern ecclesiastical authorities were thus exposed to pressures and competition from many sides. After 1815, the great revival of European Catholic missionary zeal began. The Eastern Catholic religious leaders needed these missionaries to counter the worrisome proselytism of the Protestant missionaries and to give their communities access to modern knowledge. At the same time, they were wary of these newcomers’ encroachments on their authority and of their tendency to want to Latinize the Eastern rites. As for the temporal leaders, they used French protection in their political maneuvers with both the local powers and the central power. The Porte was leery of French claims and broke new ground by officially recognizing the Catholic faith in 1831, in the form of a certificate of investiture to the Armenian Catholic patriarch that definitively removed the Eastern Catholics from the ecclesiastical authority of the Orthodox and Armenian churches. During that period, the conflict between Uniates and Orthodox Christians focused on the “miter quarrel,” that is, on the question of whether Uniate priests could wear the same ecclesiastical costume as the Orthodox clergy, which facilitated their proselytism.
The Ottoman Empire of Mahmud II and the Egypt of Muhammad Ali were both projects for establishing the modern state, but they were antagonistic in nature. The ambitious viceroy had long had his sights on Syria and may have even considered overthrowing the Ottoman dynasty for his own benefit. While running a particularly oppressive and despotic regime in his own domains, to the outside world he touted his astounding successes, contrasting them to the Ottoman failures. He claimed to be the uniter of the community of Muslims (millat muhammadiyya) against the first Ottoman reforms, misleading people about the even more radical character of the measures taken in the territories under his authority. In a world where the art of printing was at best in its infancy, a secret propaganda war began, in the form of open letters and other handwritten documents, which circulated in the ruling circles of the provinces and in the capital.
In December 1831, on the pretext of a border dispute, the Egyptian armies, under the command of Ibrahim Pasha, son of Muhammad Ali, invaded Syria. Within a few months, they had conquered all the provinces. They moved on to Anatolia in autumn 1832. In December, Ibrahim Pasha’s victory in Konya left the path open to the Ottoman capital. During these early months of war with Syria, Ibrahim Pasha used the traditional rhetoric of Islam: he had come to remedy the injustices perpetrated by the bad local governors, and he accused the sultan of betraying Islam and of wanting to impose the practices of the Christians on Muslims. Mahmud II for his part used his capacity as caliph to have Muhammad Ali and his followers condemned as traitors and rebels, whose blood it was lawful for Muslims to spill.
That so- called Egyptian enterprise, in calling into question the fate of the Ottoman Empire and in positioning itself on the overland route to India, could only incite European intervention. Aggravating the situation was the fact that this venture, coming less than twenty years after Waterloo, may have appeared to have the support of France and even to have been inspired by the French. In February 1833, a joint Russian and British intervention halted the march of Ibrahim Pasha’s army, now halfway between Konya and Constantinople.
The question still had to be resolved politically. In Europe, many publicists, writers, and politicians believed that the solution was to constitute an Arab empire under the leadership of Muhammad Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha. The viceroy of Egypt vaguely perceived the need to address a discourse to Europe portraying his enterprise as the equivalent of Belgian and Greek independence. But though he may have been credible as a hero of civilization, he was not so as a spokesman for the Arab “race.” He seemed too “Turkish” and too representative of the “alien” elements ruling the Egyptian population. The same was not true of Ibrahim Pasha.
That remarkable general was close to his men and, unlike his father, he spoke fluent Arabic. He also had a better sense of the rift that was occurring between Egyptian domination and the Ottoman Empire. It was civil war, and the members of the viceroy’s house constituting the ruling class were divided between loyalty toward their master and allegiance to the Ottoman sultanate, with all its religious legitimacy. Within that context, Ibrahim Pasha had a tendency to rely on the youngest elements, trained from the beginning in the Bayt, whose most brilliant members were those who had just returned from academic study in France. Through them, he had firsthand knowledge of the most recent European, particularly Saint- Simonian, ideas, though he was primarily interested in translating them into concrete realities. At the same time, facing the risk of defection by senior officers of Ottoman origin, he sought out the support and friendship of the rank and file, whom the Europeans considered universally “Arabs.”
For European observers, Ibrahim Pasha’s general behavior made him the defender of the Arab cause. In spring 1833, he became cognizant of that view and elaborated an Arabist discourse addressed to European envoys, evoking the rebirth of the Arab nation. He did not express himself in the same terms with his Syrian interlocutors, who did not have the intellectual tools to follow him. But what he described in ethnic and national terms to the Europeans, he put into practice in Syria, by putting an end to the traditional distinctions among the functional groups of Arab- Ottoman society.
Above all, the European chancelleries supported the European balance of power and the Indian route. They refused to acknowledge the application of the nationality principle in the dubious case of Muhammad Ali’s Arab empire. For the time being, they were satisfied with a shaky state of affairs that put Muhammad Ali in charge of the majority of the Arab provinces in the Ottoman Empire after the evacuation of Egyptian troops from Anatolia. An uneasy truce, though one guaranteed by Europe, was set in place, but it did not resolve any of the fundamental questions.
European opinion was divided about the undertaking by Muhammad Ali and his son. The romantics saw them as civilizing heroes bearing within themselves the regeneration of the Arab race. The realists and defenders of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire portrayed them as the restorers of a despotic and oppressive order, but one much more efficient than the old systems. Neither was wrong, since the establishment of the modern reformist state relied on an authoritarianism incommensurate with that of the traditional order. As in Europe, the Old Regime in the Islamic world was a realm of liberties recognized by specific entities and of rights granted to constituted groups. Iniquities or snubs were violations of that social contract sanctioned by religion, and could entail a right to rebellion acknowledged and approved by the religious authorities. Modernity entailed the suppression of these traditional freedoms, which were invoked by those advocating the rejection of the transformations under way.
This was clear in Syria under the administration of Ibrahim Pasha, who vigorously set in place a centralized system imposing tax equality, disarmament of the population, conscription, and the de facto emancipation of non- Muslims. That administrative modernity, based on the leveling of distinctions, was all the more intolerable for being effective and translated into a sharp increase in fiscal pressure. In 1834, it gave rise to a major revolt by the Palestinian populations, which was brutally quashed. In 1838, it was the Druzes’s turn to revolt and to be repressed.
In 1839, the Ottomans, encouraged by the British, resumed hostilities. They were again beaten, but that merely served as a pretext for London to impose a European settlement that would isolate France. The Treaty of London, concluded on July 15, 1840, between Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, required that the Egyptian forces withdraw from Syria; in exchange, it granted Ibrahim Pasha the governorship of Egypt as a family inheritance and the province of Acre (twentieth- century Palestine) for life. France attempted to oppose the treaty provoking the Eastern crisis, which nearly caused a European war against France, once again cast as the troublemaker in the European system.
The British incited a vast insurrection from Lebanon, where the mountain dwellers did not accept the disarmament imposed by Ibrahim Pasha’s ally, Emir Bashir. The revolt, perpetuated and supported by the British fleet, rapidly extended to all the Syrian territories. In late 1840, Ibrahim Pasha was obliged to return with his forces to Egypt.
France displayed a warmongering spirit. Tocqueville aptly expressed the general opinion when he addressed the Chamber of Deputies on November 30, 1840:
Do you know what is happening in the East? An entire world is being transformed. From the banks of the Indus to the edge of the Black Sea, within that enormous space, every society is teetering on the brink, every religion weakening, every nationality disappearing, every light being snuffed out, the ancient Asian world disappearing: and in its place, the European world is gradually rising up. The Europe of our time is not approaching Asia only from one corner, as Europe did in the time of the Crusades: it is attacking it in the north, the center, the east, the west, from every side; it is piercing it, enveloping it, subduing it.
Do you believe, therefore, that any nation that wants to remain great can witness such a spectacle without participating in it? Do you believe that we should let two European peoples seize that vast inheritance with impunity? And rather than suffer it, I will say to my country, with energy and conviction: Let us rather have war! (Very good!).2
Wisely, Guizot’s new government avoided war and obtained for Muhammad Ali the right to the succession of Egypt and Sudan.
The Eastern crisis of 1840– 1841 definitively set in place a political culture of European interference, based on a dual manipulation, that of Eastern actors by Western actors and that of Westerners by Easterners. The logic of self- interest was transformed into effective policies through twin propaganda discourses. A century later, Egyptian historians would use Ibrahim Pasha’s texts to define retrospectively Egypt’s vocation as unifier of the Arab world; among the Palestinians, by contrast, the insurrection of 1834 would become the expression of an emergent Palestinian identity.
In about 1840, however, the question raised in the late eighteenth century still remained a pressing issue: Would the ancient Asian world vanish in favor of direct European domination, or would that world be regenerated through its confrontation with Europe?
But what did conquest mean when the movement of history, both for those who celebrated it and for those who deplored it, was toward the democratization of societies?
The Issue of Conquest
After 1840, the Islamic world split in two: one came under direct European domination, while the other was subject to indirect control exerted through the state apparatus and the protection systems.
European military superiority was assured, thanks to increasingly efficient armaments and improved modes of organization. Yet things were no easier. The Muslim societies being conquered resisted with a desperate energy, which turned the colonial wars into wars of terror. The final phase of the conquest of Algeria, which French painters illustrated with fiery canvases, was therefore a war of destruction. To destroy Abd al- Qadir’s emerging state, the French army ruthlessly ravaged the Algerian countryside, destroying villages, setting fire to crops and granaries, and making multiple exactions, which were denounced in vain by European, especially British, philanthropists. The French authorities denied these accusations while acknowledging sotto voce that it was not possible to be both a conqueror and a philanthropist. The human cost of the conquest was particularly high, confirming the enduring difference between European wars— which became civilized by adopting customary laws seeking to limit the toll of violence to combatants— and colonial wars, which no longer had any limits because the enemy was defined as uncivilized by nature and hence unprotected by the mechanisms limiting the effects of violence. The native peoples became the guilty party in the violence perpetrated against them, since their resistance required that they be treated in a regrettable manner.
The same was true for the Russian penetration into the Caucasus, where the Russian armies met with the fierce resistance of the Muslim mountain dwellers, assembled into Sufi brotherhoods. The Muslims acquired a brilliant war chief, Imam Shamil, who led the fight for several decades. Russian military losses were terribly high, while in many of the episodes Russian violence veered toward extermination pure and simple. Nineteenth- century Russian literature, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, bears witness to these Caucasian Wars. Muslim Caucasians by the thousands found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the Russian advance into Siberia made the tsarist empire the close neighbor of the central Asian khanates. Encroachments immediately turned into conquests. But the Asians fought off the Russians in 1840 during their attempts to seize Khiva.
In India, the British, grown confident by the easy conquest of the majority of the subcontinent, underestimated the force of resistance of the mountain- dwelling Muslim populations in the northwest. Obsessed with the Russian threat that had materialized in central Asia, they decided to fend it off by taking control of Afghanistan. In 1838, a naval demonstration in the Gulf forced Persia to abandon any attempt at conquering (or recovering) the province of Herat. Great Britain sent in an invasion force in 1839 and seized Kabul without great difficulty, installing a sovereign under the British protectorate. It quickly became apparent that the British garrison of Kabul was isolated in a hostile region, which sank into rebellion in autumn 1840. In November 1841, the insurrection reached the capital, where the garrison became trapped. After futile and complicated negotiations, the British army evacuated the city under the worst possible conditions in early January 1842. The retreat turned into a rout, leading to thousands of dead among the British and Indian soldiers, and among the civilians accompanying them. After that disaster, the other British forces of Afghanistan engaged in terrible reprisals on the Afghan population before retreating to India.
The disaster of the first Anglo- Afghan war was partly offset in the following years by the conquest of Punjab and Sind. The last independent Indian states had managed to establish military discipline equivalent to that of the Europeans, but the British now possessed the technology for greatly superior armaments. As a result, the notorious northwestern border was established, with practically independent tribal territories and the policing operations of the Indian army. The Russian threat remained a permanent concern and influenced Afghanistan’s fate. Again in 1856, the British prevented the Persians from seizing the region of Herat.
The tsarist armies, in possession of superior means, continued their advance into central Asia. The conquest took another quarter century, but Tashkent fell on June 7, 1865. Planning to create a vassal state of Russia, the tsar decided to annex the region in 1866. The following year, it became the government- general of Turkestan. The khanate of Bukhara became a vassal state in 1868, Khiva in 1873, and the khanate of Kokand was annexed in 1876, becoming the province of Fergana. Turkmenistan was the next milestone, and the conquest was completed in 1884.
Unlike those of the Caucasus, the wars in central Asia were not very bloody. The Muslim states, weakened by internal conflicts, did not have significant military means, and the Russians had the intelligence to respect local mores and customs. At least initially, they did not seek to interfere in the internal affairs of the population.
In addition to the difficulties encountered by the conquest when it faced an unyielding population, there was the permanent risk of revolt, the most representative of these being the revolt of the sepoys of 1857, the “Great Rebellion.” The immediate pretext was the introduction of modern weapons that required their users to come in contact with fats considered to be of impure origin (beef fat for the Hindus, pork fat for the Muslims). The movement was a vast protest against the impact of colonialism, experienced as a threat to their religion and mode of life, especially since the colonial government had entered a phase of technocratic reforms. The European presence was seen primarily as a form of pollution. The movement, which began in Bengal, extended to northern India and sought to rally behind it the traditional authorities, including the last representative of the Mogul dynasty. It did not manage to find true leaders or a centralized leadership. Muslims and Hindus participated equally in the insurrection. A large part of the urban and rural world joined in. The rebels systematically massacred Europeans, including women and children. The repression was terrible. In addition to engaging in battles in which they took no prisoners, the British columns systematically burned villages and massacred the male population, to instill lasting fear. The British army made rape a regular practice. (For the rebels, rape was a sin for the one committing it and not for the victim.) The human losses counted in the hundreds of thousands. The use of terror followed the logic of deterrence, revenge, and a sense of racial superiority to be reestablished.
The British victory can be attributed first and foremost to tools emerging from the industrial revolution: steam- powered riverboats, the electric telegraph, the beginnings of a railroad network. The central years of the nineteenth century (1840–1860) witnessed the establishment of European domination, now founded on the technological progress under way and no longer merely on the capacity to mobilize resources, as in the late eighteenth century. Without that transformation, it is likely that the British would have been expelled from India.
From that time on, they isolated themselves even more from Indian society. All- white troops were maintained permanently, with a monopoly on artillery. The British preserved the princely Indian states to earn their goodwill. The East India Company was abolished in 1857, along with the fiction of continuity with the Mogul Empire.
Beyond their impact on literature and art, the violence that characterized the wars in Algeria, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan would leave lasting marks. A century and a half later, these fractures and wounds can still be found in relations between the Muslim world and Europe.
The combined role of archaic social structures (tribes, brotherhoods)— which the social transformations under way in the great Muslim states did not destroy— the bellicose traditions of peoples who refused to be subjected to a tax- imposing and oppressive state, and the terrain and climate, inhospitable to the European invaders, allows us to better understand the scope of that resistance. It took the form of a local jihad conducted by war chiefs, who emerged during the first battles. The modern Muslim state seemed much more vulnerable and yet, in bowing to indirect control, it managed to endure by learning to change. The resistance of the archaic societies facilitated that task, since, by virtue of its costs, that resistance tended to deter adventures of conquest.
War favored the acquisition of knowledge. The military needed interpreters, the first mediators with the conquered population, but these intermediaries sometimes proved inadequate. In the Algeria of the conquest, “Arab bureaus” were established, instruments for administering and learning about the indigenous society, whose structures had to be identified and the legal rules governing it defined. A culture of officers and administrators of “native affairs” was thus set in place. Orientalists were called on to assist in translating the classics of Muslim law or the discourse that Muslim societies elaborated about themselves. Ibn Khaldūn was therefore translated into the European languages, since he provided an explanation for the tribal and clan system and its role in history.
The constitution of a colonial science followed. It had practical and concrete aims but tended to archaize the societies, both by referring to bodies of law several centuries old, which were once again applied, and by projecting a European medieval image on the conquered peoples. In the imaginations of the conquerors, tribal and brotherhood chiefs from Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and the Maghreb were the counterparts of the feudal grandees of Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Until the end of colonization, the colonials paradoxically aspired to be the bearers of civilization and progress, yet at the same time they were resistant to that progress, rediscovering with pleasure, in the conquered East, the world that no longer existed in Europe.
Even as European society became more democratic, increasingly leveling social conditions and continuously expanding political participation, the colonizers’ values became more regressive. In the colonial world as in the vanishing Old Regimes, everyone had to know his place: the colonial master had to be just and the native loyal, touchstone values that were no longer current in the Europe of the industrial revolution. Victorian England, where the medieval frame of reference became omnipresent precisely because that society had become urban and industrial, moved the furthest in that direction. France, more bourgeois and more rural, identified to a greater extent with Rome. The ideologues of the French Revolution had had the Germanic invasions in mind, whereas those of the conquest of Algeria saw it as a new Gaul, which French civilization would Romanize.
By the 1850s, the medieval frame of reference proposing ethnic separation had become dominant in English policy, with a vindication of the archaic rebels’ premodern authenticity. The French, by contrast, were oriented toward a notion of Romanization, that is, of assimilation. But they did not have the capacity to realize their program fully, creating instead the monstrosity that was colonial Algeria, both a part of the metropolis and a realm where the laws of conquest were applied with extraordinary severity. With the formation of a European settlement colony and the concerted repression of the native population, the old schema of the struggle between the races, beloved of European historiography in the previous centuries, found its most absolute realization, just as the British presence in India perfectly expressed the concept of military despotism.
The fate of the Muslim Mediterranean was thus clearly defined in the mid- nineteenth century. It consisted, first, of a Balkan peninsula, where the nationality principle took root to the benefit of the Christian populations; second, of North Africa, destined to fall completely under the yoke of direct colonial domination; and third, of a central Arab- Anatolian entity that would preserve its nominal independence but that it would be imperative to reform.