CHAPTER 13
The Problem of Reform
Since the Enlightenment, it had been well understood that, in order to survive, the Muslim state had to be reformed. That was the condition for its remaining within the framework of the European balance of powers, which had become global via the Indian route. Although the need for reforms was a European imperative, given the universalization of its norms, it also corresponded to the needs of the societies being transformed. We therefore need to discern, in the analysis of the processes under way, what was imposed collectively and forcibly by the great powers, what evolved in synchronism between Europe and the Muslim world (with the two finding similar solutions to similar problems), and what resulted from one side influencing or borrowing from the other.
What was specific to the classic Ottoman approach was that it prohibited, at least theoretically, transmitting by heredity the duties of the sultan’s servants, that is, those belonging to the ruling class. Paradoxically, the servile ideology of being a member of the imperial house and of the houses subordinate to it culminated in a sort of meritocracy that astonished aristocratic Europe. From the eighteenth century on, that definition of society was in large part belied by the constitution, at least in the provinces, of a vast class of notables related by marriage: Islamic religious officials, wealthy merchants, and members of the military and administrative classes. The cement for that social alliance was their common exploitation of urban and rural tax farms.
Nevertheless, the sultan had the power of life and death over his servants and complete latitude in confiscating their possessions. When a dynamic sovereign such as Mahmud II arose, he did not hesitate to use these instruments of terror against his close collaborators. So it was for the emergent dynasties, such as that of Muhammad Ali in Egypt.
The Muslim ruling class needed a political program that would ensure the security of their property and persons and the opportunity for their children to attain high public office. The upheaval caused by the emergence of the modern state offered them a historic opportunity to realize that program, using European liberalism as an ideological cover. That was the meaning of the famous Edict of Gülhane of November 3, 1839, proclaimed in the midst of the Syrian war, following the death of Mahmud II.
Security became the mainspring of the state:
If there is an absence of security with regard to wealth, everyone remains impervious to the voice of the prince and the nation; no one attends to the growth of public wealth, absorbed as he is by his own worries. If, on the contrary, the citizen is confident that he owns his property of every kind, then, full of eagerness about his own affairs, whose ken he seeks to broaden so as to extend that of his enjoyment, he feels his love for the prince and the nation, and his devotion to his country, increasing in his heart every day. These feelings become the source of his most laudable actions.1
Although that program protected the interests of the ruling class, it was expounded as if it benefited the population of the empire as a whole. All those falling under the jurisdiction of imperial authority, even non- Muslims, ceased to be subject to the diversity of statuses and became Ottomans equal before the sultan.
That departure from the ancient principles of the state and society was sanctioned both by reference to Islam, through the claim that it was merely an application of the true principles of that religion, and through the immediate communication of a French version of the edict, having legal weight, to the European embassies. The act of reform had to take into account simultaneously that dual audience, the Muslim community and the European powers.
The Ottoman reformers took their inspiration from Europe. For a long time, the empire had delegated to the Christian dragomans of the capital the responsibility for maintaining relations with the Europeans. Dynasties of translators lasting for centuries had thus been established. Some were of European origin, constituting the group of “Levantines” (in the sense of Europeans settled in the empire), while others were Phanariots. They would continue to play their role as go- betweens in the nineteenth century. With the establishment of permanent embassies in Europe in the late eighteenth century, Muslim elements joined them. Just as the French language was the universal language of diplomacy, so too the knowledge of Europe was filtered primarily through French culture. These Muslims, unlike the dragomans, could attain the highest positions in the empire. Through diplomacy and work in the translation bureaus, they came to constitute the first reformist elites, and slowly French became a second language in the administration, at least in its most modern sectors.
Knowledge of Europe expanded. Every European country seems to have had its specialty: the French were the best administrators; the Prussians had the best army; the British had the best navy, and especially, the most advanced mastery of industrial and economic modernity. It was tempting to take the best of each system, at the risk of producing complete incoherence. In addition, the group of reformers who ruled the state as the sultanate weakened after Mahmud II’s death had to come to terms on a permanent basis with the struggle for influence among the European powers. Camps, groups, or propensities, defined as pro- French, pro- English, or pro- Russian, came to the fore. The groups and personalities in question needed the support of one embassy or another in the struggle for power and had intellectual preferences for one or another European culture, which led them to lean toward that power. But the general orientation was certainly the survival of the empire through reform.
In suppressing social functions, the Edict of Gülhane did not borrow from Europe. That suppression was the result of the empire’s internal evolution over half a century. It corresponded to the ruling class’s needs and to the necessity of assuring the survival of the Ottoman state. It can therefore be viewed as a contemporary but independent development. Its mechanisms are perfectly obvious in the example of the emancipation of non- Muslims, which is intelligible only within the context of a comparative history of the Islamic world and Europe.
The Christian Image of Europe
We must first recognize that the emancipation of non- Christians in Europe was far from complete. Of course, the French Revolution had emancipated both non- Catholics (that is, Protestants) and non- Christians (Jews) on the principle of granting everything to individuals and refusing everything to groups. But the Napoleonic Concordat had also recognized Catholicism as the religion of the majority of French people, and it was not until the July Monarchy that Judaism became a Concordat religion.
The evolution had been slower in the rest of Europe. English Catholics had not been emancipated until 1820, and the emancipation of the Jews was far from complete in 1839. It was not until the 1850s and 1860s that the British, German, Austrian, and Italian Jews would possess full rights and be eligible for political office. And Russia, even more than the Ottoman Empire, remained the sanctuary of the European Old Regime, as indicated by the fact that serfdom persisted until the reforms of Alexander II and that the discriminatory status of the Jews was maintained and even exacerbated.
Since the emancipation of non- Christians was far from complete in Europe, the matter at hand in the colonial world was either to proclaim itself neutral in the matter of religion, like the British in India, or to respect the Muslim institutions, like the French in Algeria. In both cases, the policy drifted away from its stated intentions. Indian Muslims, who had ruled the subcontinent at the time of the Mogul Empire, were gradually dispossessed of their function as ruling class. The Persian culture of the Moguls was replaced by a more purely Indian culture, increasingly mixed with the contributions of the British. In Algeria, conquest was accompanied by the dispossession of the rural land and the urban wealth of Islamic institutions. Inexorably, and despite discourses to the contrary, Algerian Muslims, officially subjects and not French citizens, were reduced to the most humiliating status possible, protected minors subject to the most discriminatory regulations of the Native Code in the early days of the Third Republic.
The image of Europe that reached the Islamic world, particularly the Ottoman Empire as of 1840, was no longer truly that of triumphant liberalism stemming from the Enlightenment, as it had been in the previous period. Rather, that image was the result of Europe’s nonrecognition of the nationality principle vis- à- vis the Muslims following the Balkan, Algerian, Egyptian, and Syrian episodes. As the industrial revolution advanced, with its disenchantment of the world and its dynamic of creative destruction, it seemed to give rise in the Muslim world to the invention of tradition.
In Enlightenment thought, the process of civilization, or the history of progress, was defined in terms of a logic of gradual emancipation from religious authority, as attested by Condorcet’s writings. Even for the early Guizot, the conflict between religious and civil society was one of the dynamics in the history of European civilization; in his theory, the race struggle and then the class struggle were produced by invasions.
In the 1840s, conservative thought regained momentum by co- opting entire aspects of Enlightenment thought through an invention of tradition. Anglo- Saxon liberalism thus appropriated a dual genealogy, laying claim both to the Germanic and feudal freedoms and to the free inquiry of the Protestant Reformation. By finding new foundations in history, it was able to reject the absolute rationalism of the French Revolution, which had claimed to establish modern society on reason alone and which nascent socialism was in the process of reviving. The Catholicism of the first half of the nineteenth century, which condemned “modern civilization,” nevertheless posited that contemporary Europe was a Christian civilization, understood both as a state and as a dynamic process.
Whereas Enlightenment thought, in its absolute secularism, defined the relation between Western society and other societies as a game of catch- up, achieved through access to a common and future universalized modernity, the new European thought made the Christian heritage the discriminating element, which prevented other societies from elevating themselves to the same status as triumphant Europe, at least in the near future.
A twofold paradox arose at this point. First, the idea of catching up to Europe was more appealing the wider the gap to be bridged. As of 1840, the date of the establishment of the modern Muslim state, with its embryonic modern administration and the spread of the printed word, some began to claim that the gap was in fact unbridgeable. Second, the advent of industrial society was accompanied by ideologies embracing the past, whereas the previous, so- called protoindustrial stage of society had set forth a discourse of progress and rupture. It was as if the first discourse anticipated the future (as indicated by the Enlightenment of the French Revolution), while the second clashed with the reality of the society of the Other.
The Emancipation of Non- Muslims in Islamic Regions
The Christian self- image that Europe projected in the 1840s corresponded to the political tools it used in the Islamic world. Beginning in that decade, there were no longer zones prohibited to Europeans, with the exception of the holy cities of the Hejaz. The great powers had the right to open consulates anywhere, and freedom of movement was hindered only by the lack of security reigning in entire regions of the Islamic world. The central authority had a great deal of difficulty imposing obedience in some provinces, which were permanently under the sway of banditry by rural mountain dwellers, clan and village wars, depredation by Bedouins and nomads, and the local powers of notables with armed forces of various kinds at their disposal.
Very often, the European consulates could not hope for effective action from the civil police. They became actors on the local scene, incorporating elements from their society of residence. They would therefore grant consular protection to a tribal chief or a local notable who became part of their clientele. Taken in that sense, consular protection was no longer religious in nature, since it was directed toward both Muslims and non- Muslims. It was an instrument of power, and the conflicts between European powers also had repercussions for the conflicts between clienteles. In that new power system, the indigenous dragomans in the consulates played an essential role, since they had the advantage of an intimate knowledge of society and also held permanent positions, in contrast to European diplomats with their temporary appointments. Many influential Christian families in the Near East trace the origin of their wealth and influence to these posts held in the mid- nineteenth century.
At the same time, the great powers reasserted their religious protectorate, and their rivalries stirred up nascent religious conflict. Several different logics were at work. Non- Muslim communities, as distinct groups recognized by the state, had only recently come into being, even though they were supported by Islamic protective regulations. In the Ottoman Empire, they were in the first place fiscal entities, since they had to organize themselves to pay specific taxes. The only institutions that extended to the empire as a whole were the Orthodox and Armenian churches. In the nineteenth century, the empire was obliged to recognize the Uniate Catholic and Protestant churches (in 1831 and 1847, respectively). For centuries, these non- Muslim communities maintained privileged relations with Christian Europe, through which they very early on became familiar with European modernity and acquired a great cultural and educational advantage. They were also experiencing a high rate of population growth: the increase in their numbers was much greater than that of the Muslim population.
In the mid- nineteenth century, these communities benefited fully from the transformations under way. They were well situated in the new order of economic trade imposed by industrial Europe. The collapse of the traditional order changed their place in society, since they came to participate in the new institutions being set in place, such as the provincial councils. Finally, external religious protection became a concrete reality, with power relations now leaning overwhelmingly toward Europe.
Religious Protection and the Great Powers
In Jerusalem, at the request of the Protestant missions, eager to proselytize among the Jewish population beginning in 1839, British diplomats asked for British protection for the Jews of Palestine, then for those throughout the entire empire. The Porte responded by appealing to the principles of Gülhane, attributing to these principles a new meaning, the emancipation of non- Muslims. From the 1840s on, competition was keen between the principal European countries present in Palestine: an Anglo- Prussian Protestant bishopric was created in Jerusalem in 1841; the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem returned to his city of residence; a permanent Russian ecclesiastical mission was set in place; and the Catholic patriarchate was restored in 1847. A frontal battle began in the late 1840s between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, in other words, between France and Russia, regarding their respective rights to the holy sites, even as Europe was shaken by the revolutions of 1848, the “springtime of the peoples.”
After the suppression of the Mount Lebanon emirate in 1842, the Druzes and Maronites faced off in the region, drawing in the British and the French. Although the clienteles were fighting for their own reasons, they had the capacity to manipulate their protectors by exerting influence on their local agents and by spreading propaganda in the metropolises. Hence Abbot Nicolas Mourad finessed an excellent invention of tradition by creating the myth of a letter from Saint Louis to the Maronites.
In the Balkans, the Orthodox communities were differentiating themselves on the basis of ethnicity. But the Russians’ demand for a protectorate over all Orthodox Christians would have marked, quite simply, the end of what was called “European Turkey,” since the majority of the population belonged to these churches. Such a demand was unacceptable to the empire.
As a result, the attention to reforms focused not on institutional changes but on the status of the non- Muslim communities. The Jews, who were not asking for anything and who tended to be vulnerable to virulent anti- Semitism on the part of the Orthodox Christians, were included in the general movement.
Tsar Nicolas I wrote to the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg in January 1853. According to the tsar, “Turkey is completely disorganized. We need to agree on that. Look, we have a sick man, a gravely ill man on our hands. Let me tell you frankly that it would be a great misfortune if he were to slip away from us one of these days, especially before all the necessary measures are taken.”2
Russia thus unofficially proposed once again dividing up the empire among the European powers, along with granting Balkan independence. Since France and Great Britain did not seem interested, Russia publicly demanded recognition of its protectorate over the Orthodox Christians and the strengthening of their rights to the holy places. The Ottomans refused, and Russia went to war in 1853, provoking the joint intervention of France and Great Britain. This was the Crimean War of 1854 to 1856.
The aim of that war, like that of the war of 1798, was to prevent the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. The last war without hatred by the Europe of nations, it was also the first war of industrial Europe. The Franco- British military encroachment into the Black Sea occurred with the aid of steam navigation, whence the importance of coal supplies. The conflict could be followed in real time thanks to the expansion of the telegraph network. Like the war of Italian unification in 1858, it was accompanied by a growing awareness of the health risks to the wounded and of the need to provide them with proper care. From Florence Nightingale to Henry Dunant, the new humanitarian came into being, culminating in the creation of the Red Cross.
At stake was, first, the maintenance of the empire’s territorial integrity, and second, the status of non- Muslims. After the territorial question was settled by the taking of Sebastopol, and diplomatic discussions focused on the fate of the Principalities (present- day Romania), the second issue remained. Vaunting their Christian identity, many Europeans, such as William Gladstone, considered it a “political solecism” to see a Muslim sovereign ruling despotically over millions of Christians. For the victors, it was necessary to act in the matter: while they did not seek to call into question European protections, they also did not want to broaden them. In the end, the French and British had to save appearances by portraying emancipation as an act of pure will on the part of the Ottoman Empire prior to the Congress of Paris. Nevertheless, that act was accompanied by urgent advice from the two allies. Everyone agreed on the de jure equality and treatment of Christians and Muslims; the main point of disagreement had to do with the freedom to change religion, on which British diplomacy, at the request of the Protestant missionaries, insisted. The Ottomans flat- out refused because of the state’s Muslim identity and the prerogatives of the caliphate. After exhausting negotiations, a compromise was reached by which religious freedom was affirmed and a ban was placed on compelling a person to change religion. That implicitly meant that a former Muslim could not be compelled to return to his original religion.
The Hatt- ı Hümayun of February 18, 1856, was the major text of emancipation.3 Inasmuch as it applied to the Jews, it was an advance over what was happening in many countries of Christian Europe. Although the Europeans wanted the emancipation of the Christians, they did not intend to abandon their rights of protection, which would have been abolished by emancipation on an individual basis. The edict granted everything to the non- Muslim communities and only secondarily to individuals. Each community, in the name of its privileges and immunities granted ab antiquo, would enjoy a constitution befitting the progress and enlightenment of the time and would establish the respective powers of its clergy and laypeople. Personal status would be under the jurisdiction of the religious tribunals of each faith. The result was that, though all individuals were eligible for public employment and were equal in their tax status, representation in provincial and municipal councils would come about on the basis of religion.
The faith- based community, or “millet,” was a product of modernity, stemming both from the internal evolution of Ottoman society and from European intervention. It proceeded from the emancipation of collectivities, not individuals, and led to political sectarianism. The Treaty of Paris of March 30, 1856, recorded the “generous intentions” of the sultan “toward the Christian populations.” It was difficult for Europeans to acknowledge that the rights granted to the Jews in the Ottoman world were greater than those they possessed in much of Europe.
Incidentally in the Hatt- ı Hümayun, the Europeans imposed the right of foreigners to possess property in the Ottoman Empire. The reformers took the opportunity to push through their economic program: the abolition of tax farms in favor of direct taxation; incentives for public utility projects, particularly highways; the institution of a public budget that the state would pledge to respect; and the creation of banks and financial institutions. “To reach these goals,” they wrote, “we will seek the means to take best advantage of European science, art, and capital, and to put them into practice one by one.”
For some Europeans, the emancipation of the Christians was a step toward Islam’s disappearance, which would inexorably occur with historical progress. Curiously, this view can be seen as the counterpart to the discourse of freethinkers on the disappearance of religion in the modern world. It was supported by the steady decline of the independent Muslim powers and the higher rate of population growth of Christian societies, including those of Eastern Christians. Some clerical circles therefore imagined the Christian East rising up from the ruins of the Islamic world.
The Muslims had a related view, seeing the edict of emancipation, missionary work, and the various sorts of European interference as demonstrations of a vast conspiracy destined to destroy Islam, with the Eastern Christians representing its vanguard. Within that context, the Syrian provinces, which had lagged behind in reforms, constituted a realm where tensions between the different religious communities were likely to develop. The events of 1860 in Lebanon and Syria, where a social emancipation movement of Christian peasants sparked violence between Druzes and Maronites, and then a massacre of Orthodox Christians in Damascus, caused an enormous stir in Europe, where the image of Islam became inextricably linked to that of the massacre. In France, Napoleon III decided to intervene and obtained a European mandate for what we would now call the “right of intervention.” Closely overseen by the other European powers, the operation culminated in a conference of ambassadors, who decided to create a semiautonomous Mount Lebanon in the empire, with a Christian governor named by the Porte in agreement with the great powers, and a council elected by the community. The constitution of an autonomous Greater Syria on the model of Egypt was envisioned. Napoleon III sounded out Abd al- Qadir, who had distinguished himself in the defense of the Christians of Damascus, to learn whether he would consent to assume the leadership of an Arab kingdom of Syria, but the exiled emir refused. The British proposed handing over the leadership of that Syrian entity to a reformist Ottoman vizier, but the vizier’s circle was intent on defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
In Morocco, where the large Jewish community played an essential role in commercial transactions with Europe, the sultan attempted to ban consular protection for these traders, which would have removed them from his authority and tax system. France and Great Britain opposed him and did not hesitate to use naval demonstrations accompanied by the bombing of Moroccan ports, in 1851 especially. The Moroccan authorities were forced to give in and, at the same time, to accept a capitulary system similar to that which existed in the Ottoman Empire. The Anglo- Moroccan treaty of December 1856 enshrined that change, since it granted the Europeans freedom of commerce, set customs duties at 10 percent ad valorem, dispensed with all other taxes, and established a consular justice system.
As a result, the protected Jews (about three thousand of them, or 1 percent of the Jews of Morocco), benefiting from a sort of reverse discrimination, played the role of mediators between Europe and Morocco and became the agents for European penetration. The Spanish- Moroccan War over Tétouan in 1859– 1860 precipitated the shift, which produced strong tensions between communities, similar to those that existed in the Levant. The sultan of Morocco, without going so far as an edict of emancipation, pledged in a rescript of 1864 to treat the Jews fairly: “To apply to them, in the administration, the same scales of justice as to those who are not Jewish, so that none shall be a victim of the slightest injustice, so that no ill shall afflict them, and so that neither the agents of the Makhzen [administration] nor anyone else shall harm them in their persons or in their property.”
The European powers, soon joined by the United States, seized on the rescript and congratulated the sultan for having granted full equality to his Jewish subjects. At the same time, they made themselves its guarantors and thus granted themselves the right to protect the Moroccan Jews as a whole, a right of intervention avant la lettre. That protection was in turn limited by the powerlessness of the Moroccan state to impose its authority on part of its territory. Unlike the Ottoman Empire, which was undergoing recentralization, the Sharifian empire was weakened by its contact with Europe.
After the taking of Algiers, Tunisia found itself in a position of semivassaldom vis- à- vis France, which guaranteed its independence from the Ottoman Porte. The bey of Tunis took advantage of that situation, refusing to apply the Edict of Gülhane as well as the principal reforms of the Ottoman authority. He attempted to create a modern state and army, but the reforms, poorly planned, failed miserably. Taxes became even more burdensome as the agricultural economy declined. Following the execution of a Jew for blasphemy in 1857, France and Great Britain, by means of a naval demonstration, imposed reforms. The fundamental pact of September 9, 1857, reiterated the terms of Gülhane and of the Hatt of 1856, and proclaimed the security of the life and property of residents of the regency, equality before the law and with respect to taxes, and the abolition of the Muslims’ privileges, of restrictions on commerce, and of monopolies. Furthermore, it granted foreigners the right to own property and to practice any trade. A constitution founded on these principles was promulgated in 1861 with Europe’s boisterous approval. It was suspended in 1865 following an uprising of tribes, primarily against taxes. Although the revolt was harshly repressed, the Tunisian state found itself in debt for a long time. It declared bankruptcy in 1867, and a foreign financial commission (France, Great Britain, and Italy) was imposed the next year to manage the resources of the Tunisian state.
In Tunisia and Morocco, the semi- emancipation of the Jews came about thanks to the tireless actions of representatives of the Jews of Great Britain and France, Claude Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux in particular. In addition to the humanitarian aspect, which garnered them the support of the chancelleries in their home countries, the demand for reforms, backed by gunboat diplomacy, served to assure European economic penetration and to establish increased dependence on the Concert of Europe.
Perhaps the only person in Europe who understood the anomaly of emancipating non- Muslims while proceeding to subjugate Muslims within the colonial framework was Napoleon III. Aided by enlightened advisers such as Ismaïl Urbain, he attempted to alter the course of the process under way in Algeria, with his famous policy of an Arab kingdom. That kingdom was supposed to be associated with France more than subject to it. As shown by his famous letter to Marie- Edme MacMahon of June 20, 1865, he wanted to make treatment of the Muslims in Algeria the new mode of influence for French policy in the East:
France, which sympathizes everywhere with the ideas of nationhood, cannot, in the eyes of the world, justify the dependency in which it is obliged to hold the Arab people if it does not summon them to a better existence. When our manner of governing a defeated people is an object of envy for the 15 million Arabs spread throughout the other parts of Africa and Asia; the day our power, established at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, appears to them as an intervention of Providence to elevate a fallen race; on that day, the glory of France will ring out from Tunis to the Euphrates and will assure our country the kind of preponderance that cannot rouse anyone’s jealousy because it rests not on conquest but on the love of humanity and progress. An effective policy is the most powerful vehicle for commercial interests. And what more effective policy for France than to give the Muhammadan races, so numerous in the East and so unified with one another despite the distances, unimpeachable guarantees of tolerance, justice, and respect for the difference in mores, faiths, and races within its own states?4
That policy failed because of the resistance of administrative and military circles and the opposition of liberals and republicans to an enterprise too closely linked to personal power and dynastic activities. At the very end of Napoleon III’s reign, French policy turned toward supporting Ottoman reform measures with, in particular, the creation of the imperial secondary school of Galatasaray in Constantinople to train the new Ottoman elites.
Napoleon III’s discourse can be understood within the context of the transformations of space and identity proper to the 1860s.
Transformations of Space, Transformations of Identity
Ottoman reformers perfectly internalized the logic of development corresponding to the coming of age of the industrial revolution. The entire eastern Mediterranean space was being restructured. The old and new seaports became points of entry for the circulation of merchandise and raw materials. At first, the ports were linked to the interior by modern roads and no longer by caravan trails. Located at regular intervals, these ports thereby provided access to the inland regions. Later, a port hierarchy was set in place, with a vast hinterland that was soon defined by a network of railroads. It was the new urban areas such as Jaffa and Beirut, more than ancient cities such as Tripoli and Saida, that benefited from that change. These modern ports became stops on regular steamship lines and in the 1860s were linked to Europe by telegraph. The world of Jules Verne had come to pass.
The Mediterranean coasts experienced a true rebirth and, more than the cities of the interior, attracted the burgeoning population and the fruits of the rural exodus in its early stages. Modern roads supplanted the old caravan trade routes linking the cities of the interior and defined three different spaces: the interior, a space for the production of raw materials, usually agricultural; the port, a place of exchange; and Europe, which asserted its gravitational pull. Trade between Europe and the Muslim world largely prevailed over internal trade. A frontier of agricultural reconquest continuously pushed back the boundary between settled life and nomadism, because there was now a European market, a consumer of agricultural products, as well as a reformist state eager for development.
The Ottoman state, having learned its lesson from long experience and from its tax problems, now had the tools for recentralization. A combination army and police force allowed for concerted pacification of the internal space, which put an end to the old autonomy of local and tribal notables. The use of sea transport, roads, telegraphs, and soon railroads allowed for the rapid deployment of law- and- order forces. Public security became the order of the day; it too relied on involving the local elites in development, thanks to new land legislation. These laws permitted the constitution of large properties, thus integrating the local and the global and making it possible to channel investments toward agriculture. All hope of industrialization was abandoned because, given the capitulations and trade treaties, it was impossible to pass protective customs legislation.
The Egypt of Khedive Ismā‘īl was the best example of that evolution. The cotton famine caused by the U.S. Civil War considerably enriched the country, to the advantage both of its ruling elite, founded on the co- optation of members of Muhammad Ali’s dynasty and of local notables. The emerging large properties were primarily Muslim, whereas the bourgeoisie, the vast majority of them non- Muslim and even foreign, took their place within the circuit of trade with Europe. The modern state spent a great deal both on development and on prestige projects. It soon went into debt, the costs of which kept growing because its credit was not good, resulting in increasingly unfavorable lending conditions. The European investor proved fond of his high- yield Eastern bonds. The Ottoman state and Tunisia met the same fate, since the tax system did not allow them to meet the costs of defending their countries (the Crimean War), operating the modern state, and promoting development.
Beginning in 1880, the ports brought the eastern Mediterranean world fully into the first globalization ventures and promoted the major intercontinental migrations, made possible by the links between the railroad networks and the steam navigation lines. Inexorably, travel time was reduced, as symbolized by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which shortened the Indian route. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it took six months to go from Great Britain to India; at the end of the century, three weeks. The telegraph transmitted the most important information in real time.
In the port cities, a largely non- Muslim commercial bourgeoisie took advantage of that evolution. Its members acquired a modern education, thanks to the growing network of missionary institutions of learning, both Catholic and Protestant. As of 1860, the Jewish communities had the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which took on the task of emancipation through education, with an interest in placing these impoverished communities within the world of modern production. The reformed administration increasingly used French, which thus became the language of modernity among both Muslims and non- Muslims.
An unexpected consequence of the restoration of order and recentralization was the battle the Ottoman authorities waged against the abuses of consular protection. In practice, they allowed such protection for non- Muslims but rejected it for Muslims, who were supposed to recognize only the authority of the Islamic caliph. Since pacification forced the consulates to deal exclusively with the representatives of provincial authority on questions of public order, the consular protection of Muslims became much less important. A new implicit social contract took shape: non- Muslims went to the European consulates, Muslims to the Ottoman authorities. For reformers, that was only a temporary situation. The communalist solution was diametrically opposed to the spirit of modernity, and one day the entire population of the empire would be subject to uniform legislation, as was the case in western European countries.
The Ottoman Empire thus appeared to be engaged in a race where reforms, recentralization, and development were intended to restore its independence, even as they contributed in the first instance to its further subjection to the European order. By contrast, the Persia of the Qajars remained the sanctuary of archaic practices. The authorities were unable to secure recentralization and pacification, which meant that the foreign consulates maintained their power until a late date. The consulates even went so far as to keep armed forces at their disposal. Their protection networks could extend to large tribal groups once again within the context of the Great Game between the British and the Russians. The Persian state was caught between the two superpowers. It tried desperately to obtain British guarantees for its territorial integrity, which was threatened by Russian penetration into central Asia. What happened instead was a partitioning of the country into two zones of influence, the north to the Russians, the south to the British. Did not Shah Nasir al- Dīn (1848–1896) complain that he had to consult the Russians if he wanted to go north and the British if he sought to go south?
Intellectual life, particularly vibrant in religious circles, went more or less unnoticed by European observers, who knew only the accounts of Morier and Gobineau. But the messianic Babist movement attracted the attention of Europeans interested in how a new religion came into being. That religion, having become the Bahá’i faith, was persecuted in its native country, but in the West it fell under the category of Oriental received wisdom.
Morocco was an even more archaic society than Persia. It lacked a reformist elite versed in European ideas and seeking to establish a modern state. A few attempts were made, plans for public works projects in the ports, for example, but these were mere caprices. The financial means were lacking and the capitulary powers refused to authorize an increase in customs duties. The European advance, with its interplay of multiple consular protections and various interventions, weakened the traditional state’s authority. In Persia, this consisted for the most part of a tug- of- war between two powers, but in Morocco all the Western consulates (about a dozen) acquired clienteles and faced off in a complex play of influences. The consular malady (morbus consularis), even the consular furor (furor consularis), as the foreign affairs ministries called it, reached its paroxysm. England did try to limit abuses, holding an international conference on the subject in Madrid in 1880. The sultan obtained a few concessions, such as the recognition of the right to tax protected persons, but, by the very fact that a conference was held, the Moroccan question became internationalized.
Another consequence of the communications revolution was that the different Muslim populations became better acquainted with one another. Steamships, railroads, telegraphs, the press, and in general, the printed word suddenly put places in contact with one other that had previously had little communication because of geographical distance. The caliph of Constantinople began to worry about the fate of Indian or even Chinese Muslims. In symbolic terms, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 can be said to have given rise to a new and hazy reality, the “Muslim world.” The career of Jamal al- Dīn- Afghani, a Shiite Persian who took his battle to Afghanistan, British India, Constantinople, and Egypt, perfectly embodied that new situation.
Even as communications transformed space, giving rise to a Muslim world, identities became territorialized. The loss of social functions, the emergence of the modern state, and the need to fall in line with European discourse were the essential components of that process, which belonged to the context of regional diversities. In Tunisia and in Egypt— an autonomous and almost independent province of the Ottoman Empire— the local state encouraged the phenomenon in order to mark its distance from the central power. Ottoman government elites took hold in the country and co- opted the notables who had been born there, a kind of nationalization from above. At the same time, the modern state in formation was obliged to use the country’s native language and to create a class of civil servants from the local areas, leading to nationalization from below. The process was more advanced in Egypt, where the constitution of the state entailed the recognition and definition of the territory. That did not prevent the highest elements of the ruling class from attaining high posts in the Ottoman administration.
In the empire itself, the state’s discourse tried to promote a common Ottoman identity transcending religious and ethnic cleavages. After the troubles of 1860, a vague consciousness, Syrian and Arab at once, emerged in the discourse of certain intellectuals, who reiterated European interpretations. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the Ottoman state did not encourage these regional identities, which therefore took some time to be defined. Nevertheless, as a consequence of the events of 1860, the new definitions of identity sought to move beyond the framework of religious communities. The result was an Arab- Syrian specificity within the Ottoman context, where, as in Egypt, Muslims and Christians participated in defining new frames of reference.
In the rest of the Ottoman Empire, however, religion prevailed in the definition of new identities. The Balkans were naturally in the forefront of the process. After the Crimean War, there was no longer a single Orthodoxy that could serve as the frame of reference for all Christians. On the contrary, every Orthodox church became the matrix for a new identity, leading to the assertion of Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian nationalities, which were able to claim allegiance to great states predating the Ottoman conquest. As a result, violence between Christian peoples became the corollary of the territorialization process. Similarly, the Balkan Muslims, even when they had the same native language as a Christian group, were defined as nonindigenous and alien, leading to strained relations between Christians and Muslims. The Muslims rightly feared that any progress toward national independence would translate into their repression or even expulsion.
Ottoman reformers were perfectly aware of the processes under way and, addressing European representatives, they pled the case for maintaining Ottoman authority, the only recourse possible in the face of an outburst of inexpiable violence. That is what Ali Pasha explained in 1862 to the French minister of foreign affairs:
The existence of the Ottoman Empire is important, it is said, for the maintenance of the European balance of powers. I believe it, and if you study thoroughly and without bias the spirit and state of the members of different nationalities that compose the population of Turkey, you will be convinced in the end that only the Turks can serve as the link between them, and that, to leave them to themselves, or to wish to subject them to the domination of one of them, or to consider creating something like a confederation would be chaos and civil war in perpetuity. In the East, therefore, nothing could replace that old empire, whose enemies enjoy saying that it is ill, and about which impartial observers can only affirm the opposite. . . .
Italy, which is inhabited by a single race speaking the same language and professing the same religion, is experiencing many difficulties in bringing about its unification. For the time being, its current state has achieved only anarchy and disorder. Judge what would happen in Turkey if you gave free rein to all the different national aspirations that the revolutionaries, and with them, certain governments, are seeking to promote there. It would take a century and torrents of blood to establish a somewhat stable state of affairs.5
The European chancelleries did not absolutely understand that message, at a time when Italian and German unity was being realized, and when a perfect correspondence between territory and nation was imaginable. As this letter shows, the Turkish frame of reference was beginning to replace the Ottoman in the French discourse of the authorities of the Porte. Very often the use of the European language made it possible to say things that could not yet be articulated in the original tongue. Already a distinction was being made between the Turks and the Arabs, though no political character was granted to that linguistic differentiation.
In Anatolia, the same evolution took place as in the Balkans, but with a certain delay. The kingdom of Greece, in the name of the “Great Idea,” conducted an irredentist policy toward all Christian Hellenophones, its ultimate plan being to restore the Byzantine Empire. The Armenian elites began to give voice to an Armenian nationalism, whose project could be realized only if Anatolia met the same fate as the Balkans. As a result, Anatolian Muslims, even those who originally spoke Greek or Armenian, were impelled to take refuge in an Ottoman, or already Turkish, Muslim identity. The influx of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the Balkans shored up that tendency. Although the coastal Mediterranean cities were marked by an intermingling of peoples, with some cities— including the largest of them— having a Christian majority, relations among communities in the Anatolian interior were increasingly strained. The advent of population growth added further factors of dissension, especially when a Christian peasantry was competing for the use of territories with seminomadic Turkoman or Kurdish herders.
Islamizing Reforms or Reforming Islam?
The Russian advance into central Asia, the new, short- lived efforts of the British in Afghanistan, and the struggle for influence between the French and the Italians in Tunisia made it clear that the Muslims faced a common fate, given the constant advance of Christian Europe at their expense. Abd al- Qadir’s and Shamil’s glorious resistance ended in appalling bloodbaths and the establishment of a particularly oppressive colonial order. By the tens of thousands, Caucasian and Algerian Muslims took refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where they were put to use guarding the fringes of the nomadic world and curbing nomadism in Anatolia and all along the Fertile Crescent.
In the early 1870s, the Ottoman reformers’ momentum seemed to have been broken, and the practice of authoritarian reformism was being contested. The sultan attempted to recover his powers vis- à- vis the Porte, but he did not have the means, which led to a growing ministerial instability. In the ruling class and within the framework of the struggle for power, the need for a new system of government took root.
Until that time, the platform of the Ottoman and Persian modernizers was primarily the security of property and persons, the rationalization of the administration, the creation of a modern military apparatus, and the development of the territory. In their minds, these elements were closely linked and would allow them to assure the collective interests of the ruling class vis- à- vis the ruling dynasty: the individual careers of high officials, their personal enrichment, and the survival of the state.
Despite the formation of administrative councils at various echelons of the state and territory, the chief weakness of the program was that it did not take into account the participation of the general population.
Persian bureaucratic reformers, anxious to win the favor of the British and to develop the country’s resources, in 1872 negotiated with Baron Julius von Reuter (founder of the agency by the same name) a concession encompassing the totality of unexploited mining resources as well as all the instruments of a modern economy (railroads, factories, irrigation, banks). The country’s abandonment of its resources, the most complete known to history, was justified by the need to begin again from scratch. That concession was opposed by a coalition of notables and clergy, some embracing an authentic national spirit, others rejecting Western innovations that threatened the religious purity of Persia, and still others, local clients of Russia, acting at thet encouragement of that country. Supported by the urban masses, the opposition movement compelled the shah, who had just visited Europe, to backtrack and to revoke the concession in 1873. For the first time, a public opinion movement, a mix of traditional and modern, had succeeded in blocking the actions of reformers.
In that third quarter of the nineteenth century, there were Muslim opinion makers, their opinions defined by their social stratum, who had access to the world of the printed word. Alongside the traditionally trained clergy participating in that world were ruling class literati and a bourgeoisie composed of civil servants and merchants. What was new was the emergence of a category of writing professionals: publicists, literary writers, and essayists. They could not generally earn a living by their pens, and if they had no other sources of revenue, they depended on the subsidies granted them by important individuals in the government, within the context of their own struggle for power.
By the 1860s, the new intellectuals were closely involved in reflections on the state’s future. Forming an opposition of sorts to the authoritarian reformers, they developed the theme of the indispensability of the people’s participation in— even approval of— the reforms, if these reforms were to achieve their full effect. The despotism of power and the absence of a scientific worldview were considered the principal reasons why the Islamic countries lagged behind Europe. Naïvely, these first liberals held ethnic and religious conflicts responsible for the nonexistence of participation in power, that is, for the absence of political representation. The establishment of a European- style parliamentary system would resolve everything and immediately put an end to European interference and protections.
The true importance of these liberal reformers’ actions lay in their awareness of the need to consult public opinion and thus to adapt the European political vocabulary to that of Islam. They attributed new meanings to the traditional terms. Hence the classic notion of shura, “consultation,” originally referred to the prince’s advisers; then authoritarian reformers made it a descriptor of the central and local administrative councils of the modern state. With the liberals, it assumed the meaning of parliamentarianism, even constitutionalism. They understood that the great failure of the reforms was that they shocked religious consciences and looked like Europeanization. In order to move forward, it was necessary to Islamize the reforms.
The liberals elaborated these new ideas in the press and in books. The Masonic lodges, with their European- type sociability, became their propagators, and important personalities did not hesitate to draw up— or to have drawn up— programs of reforms under their names and in that spirit.
That first current, of liberal European inspiration, was complemented by another, religious in its inspiration, though it too was based on a reflection on the history of Europe, which was becoming increasingly well known. The political and material decline of the Muslim world was self- evident, given the apparently irreversible rise of European domination. It had not always been so, however, and Islam had once been the dominant power of the Old World, bearing the message of science and civilization. Something had happened; at a given moment in history, a deviation had occurred. In order to resist Europe, it was necessary to return to the sources of the original power. Europe provided a demonstration of that, since one of the secrets of its power was the return to its religious origins, in the form of the Protestant Reformation. Islam thus awaited its Luther or Calvin, and Jamal al- Dīn al- Afghani was a candidate ready- to- hand for that role.
The implicit assumption behind that approach was the primacy given to religion as the driving force of history. Religion was necessary in the first stages of civilization. European superiority did not consist in critical thought or scientific deduction but in the religious reformation from which all the rest stemmed. It is difficult to know how sincere the first “Salafites” were when they articulated that thesis. It is clear they all agreed that religion constituted a weapon, both of social transformation and of resistance to European aggression. Through religion, it was possible to have an impact on society without depending on action from above, that is, from the state. In the end, the Salafites were less interested in religion as such than in society modeled on its inspiration and teachings. Without saying so explicitly, they brought about a shift in religion, from a practice of worship to the defining element of a society. In that respect, they invented in an enduring way an Islamic nationalism that defended the community of believers, elaborating a utopian project of reinvented community.
In 1884, Afghani wrote in a propaganda text:
The times have become so cruel and life so painful, in such great upheaval, that some Muslims— rare in fact— are losing patience and have difficulty tolerating the fact that their leaders are oppressors who, in their conduct, have given up applying the principles of canonical justice. These Muslims then turn to the protection of a foreign power, but they are overcome with regret at the first step taken on that path. They are like those men who want to commit suicide but who turn back and give it up with the first sign of pain. In reality, the sources of the schisms and divisions that have occurred in the Muslim states are solely the breaches of leaders who depart from the solid principles on which the Islamic religion was built and who distance themselves from the paths taken by their early ancestors. In fact, acting counter to solidly established principles and distancing oneself from the usual paths are the things most prejudicial to supreme power. When those who hold power in Islam shall return to the rules of their Law and model their conduct on those of the earliest generations, it will not be long before God gives them broader authority and grants them power comparable to that which the orthodox caliphs, the imams of religion, enjoyed. May God bestow on us the ability to be upright in our actions, and may he lead us on the path of righteousness.6
These first Salafites styled themselves an elite in possession of a quasi- esoteric knowledge, partly inherited from the rationalist traditions of classical Islam, partly borrowed from modern European ideas, at least when they conformed to the Salafites’ views. The Salafites therefore culled from the European thought of their time everything that defined religion as a social phenomenon.
They had the ability to use the political language of Europe when they addressed European intellectuals and that of Islam when they were targeting the new public of the Muslim world. With equal sincerity, they could tell one audience that all religions were obstacles to reason, and, before the other audience, could condemn materialism, both ancient and modern (Darwinism, for example). Recalling the role of ancient Islam in the propagation of the sciences, they used it to explain the current superiority of Europe. They declared the reversibility of the European schema of historical progress, provided that Muslims would return to the study of science and philosophy. They posited the universality of science and philosophy, which belonged neither to Europe nor to the Islamic world. And they condemned the attitude of religious scholars of their time, who studied their texts by the light of an oil lamp, without wondering even once, “Why does the lamp smoke when it is covered?” Their scientism allowed them to assert that there was no incompatibility between the principles of Islam and knowledge and science.
Many conservative Muslims, condemned by these reformers for their ignorance of true knowledge, considered these themes heretical, especially the condemnation of popular religion— the cult of saints in particular— which came to include the majority of Sufi practices. Their rejection of superstition was certainly what linked the Salafites most to the Christian reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
For these reformers in the religious sense of the term, the matter at hand was no longer to Islamize reforms but to reform Islam. But the two currents ultimately produced fairly similar themes and tended to become indistinguishable. Arab Christians as well participated in these movements, as did a few European adventurers, convinced of the nobility of the cause, who became its defenders before European public opinion. Although the projects were articulated in a largely revised Islamic political language, the reformers refused to express themselves in terms of religious conflict. On the contrary, the most idealistic of them, such as the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh, declared that all the monotheistic religions converged toward the expression of the same truths.
Reread today, these texts seem to be of a great naïveté. But we must not underestimate the vast thought experiment represented by that desire to reframe Islamic culture within the new universal thinking defined by Europe, and the considerable task of naturalizing the new ideas, at times by finding the most reckless equivalents.
The importance of that mode of thought can also be measured by the resistance it encountered. For conservative circles, it was often a heresy that replicated tendencies already present in the medieval period.
Renan: From Fanaticism to Semitism
Discrediting Islam became a predominant feature of European thought. In 1862, in his inaugural lecture to the Collège de France, Joseph Ernest Renan openly called for Islam’s destruction:
The European genius is developing with a greatness beyond compare. Islamism, by contrast, is slowly decomposing; in our time, it has come crashing down. At present, the necessary condition for the spread of European civilization is the destruction of the Semitic par excellence, the destruction of the theocratic power of Islamism, and as a result, the destruction of Islamism. For Islamism can exist only as an official religion: when it is reduced to the state of a free and individual religion, it will perish. Islamism is not merely a state religion . . . it is a religion that excludes the state, an arrangement for which only the pontifical states in Europe provided the prototype. Therein lies eternal war: war will end only when the last son of Ishmael has died of desperation or been driven by terror into the heart of the desert. Islam is the most complete negation of Europe; Islam is a fanaticism the like of which Philip II’s Spain and Pius V’s Italy barely knew; Islam is contempt for science, the abolition of civil society. Islam is the appalling simplicity of Semitic thought, which shrinks the human brain, closing it off to any delicate idea, to any refined feeling, to any rational search, and placing it before an eternal tautology: God is god.
The future, Gentlemen, belongs to Europe and Europe alone. Europe will conquer the world and spread its religion, which is law, freedom, respect for men, the belief that there is something divine within humanity.7
Renan’s interpretive grid took hold in European thought for several decades, since it provided that thought with the backing of scientific methodology. The foremost objective of Renan’s work was not to determine the nature of Islam, even though he wrote his thesis on Averroes. His great intellectual construct, produced both by the personal quest of a man who had lost his faith and by the great question of his time, had to do with the nature of the religious phenomenon, and especially, with its historicization. Renan’s starting point was the discovery, more than half a century old at the time, of the kinship among the Indo- European languages. Philologists had not only constructed a grammar of Indo- European and inventoried the roots of its vocabulary but had also immediately attributed a set of civilizational values to the original Indo- Europeans.
They began with the idea that the expansion of Indo- European in eras immediately prior to the dawn of history could have occurred only on the model of the well- known Germanic invasions, the root of political discourses for several centuries. It followed almost automatically that feudalism was not a phenomenon unique to European history but had been reproduced every time there was an Indo- European invasion. According to the same interpretation, modern freedoms were derived from the feudal system. Nevertheless, the first Indo- European peoples were polytheists.
On that basis, Renan split the historical discipline in two by piecing together the existence of a group complementary to that of the Indo- Europeans: the Semites. He produced a linguistic and ethnographic inventory of them. From the start, the Semites thought in terms of the unique, which inexorably led them to monotheism and, in politics, to theocracy, despotism, or anarchy. Indo- European mythology was an original way of thinking the multiple, which in politics led to freedom and to an understanding of the state.
Christianity was both a conquest of that world of multiplicity by that of the unique and, at the same time, its transformation into a relatively harmonious synthesis. It culminated in the constitution of an intellectual tradition uniting the culture of science to that of freedom. The victory of modern Europe was therefore that of Indo- European thought, which developed in the purest peoples (Germanic, Nordic, Anglo- Saxon) or among the Latin peoples, who were produced by a fusion of races called “civilization.” Adopting Guizot’s interpretation of history, Renan made the struggle between a Semitic- style religious society and an Aryan- style civil society the driving force of human progress. In both cases, aristocracies in the strict sense of the term, not the masses, were at issue.
Renan replaced the Mediterranean origins of reason prized by Enlightenment thought with a genealogy going back to a deduced protohistory in central Asia. That made it possible to understand the definitive victory of the European genius in the nineteenth century: if the East was the origin, the West was the future.
The term “race” is extremely ambiguous in Renan’s writings. It can mean either a quasi- biological reality or an intellectual heritage. Race is a primary phenomenon linked to the creation of language, an all- encompassing and immediate description of the universe. Within that context, and as a Frenchman, Renan immediately felt in a position of inferiority to the Germanic peoples, who had preserved the original bloodlines. Hence his insistence, in the case of France, on evoking the historical process of civilization and fusion, which gave rise to the nation as antagonistic to race. Judaism as a religion, moreover, had lost most of its original Semitism.
In the case of the Muslim world, the opposition between the Semitic and the Indo- European was inadequate. Renan therefore developed a tripartite scheme. Linguistic ethnography defined three population groups: the Arabs, who with the birth of Islam had restored the original Semitic genius; the Persians and other Indo- Europeans, who were able to hold on to the spirit of scientific inquiry (“there is nothing Arab about Arab science”); and the Turks and other Mongols, a dull- witted race lacking any intuition for philosophy and science.
Islam was now contributing to global civilization by converting the black races of the African continent to monotheism.
In 1883 Paris, Renan became involved in a courteous polemic with Afghani. On the whole, they were actually accomplices. The Orientalist saw Afghani as “the finest case of ethnic protest against religious conquest that can be cited.” On that occasion, he defined his viewpoint one last time:
I believe, in fact, that the regeneration of the Muslim countries will not come about through Islam; it will come about through the weakening of Islam, just as the great burst of energy in the so- called Christian countries began with the destruction of the tyrannical medieval church. . . . The Muslims are the first victims of Islam. Several times in my travels to the East, I have been able to observe that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men, who compel religious practice in others through terror. The emancipation of the Muslim from his religion is the best service that can be rendered him.8
The Eastern Crisis of 1875– 1883
The Eastern crisis began in Bosnia- Herzegovina in 1875 with an uprising of Christian peasants against the Muslim masters, in the aftermath of changes regarding the status of land in the Ottoman legal code on real property. From there, the movement spread to Bulgaria, where it assumed a specifically national character, based, in spite of everything, on the opposition between Christians and Muslims. The harsh Ottoman repression, conducted primarily by irregular troops, outraged European public opinion. The great British statesman William Gladstone, then the head of the opposition party, conducted one of the largest publicity campaigns in history, on the theme of “Bulgarian atrocities.” Muslim public opinion, by contrast, no longer tolerated European interference. On May 6, 1876, a raging mob massacred the consuls of France and Germany in Salonika.
The Ottoman liberals, with as their leader Midhat Pasha, hero of the second generation of reformers, took the opportunity to stage a coup d’état on May 30 and to depose the sultan, who died a few days later under murky circumstances. His successor quickly displayed signs of mental instability and was in turn deposed on August 31, 1876, in favor of Abdülhamid. As the war against Serbia was getting under way, the reformers drafted a parliamentary constitution, which was promulgated on December 23, 1876. Its aim was to assure the participation of all elements of the Ottoman population, that is, to assure them a growing autonomy, the prelude to complete independence, thus rendering moot European demands for reforms on behalf of the Christians in the Balkans. When the new Parliament met in February 1877, Abdülhamid exiled Midhat, who seemed too dangerous a rival. Midhat would be recalled a few months later to assume the duties of governor of Syria.
In April 1877, Russia declared war on the Ottomans. Fighting occurred in the Balkans and the Caucasus. After initial defeats, the Ottomans succeeded in blocking the Russian advance into Bulgaria during the siege of Plevna. In January 1878, the stronghold fell and the Russian armies arrived within proximity of Constantinople. The Russians imposed the Treaty of San Stefano, which in practical terms put an end to the Ottoman Balkans, and they imposed Russian rule over what remained of the empire. That was too much for the British, who resumed their naval demonstration and threatened Russia with war, to save the Ottoman Empire and the Indian route. Germany then proposed that a congress be convened in Berlin. The final act of that congress, on July 3, 1878, reorganized all the Balkans, with heavy territorial losses for the Ottomans. It marked the confirmation of Christian independence movements and the occupation of Bosnia- Herzegovina by Austria. All that remained of the former Rumelia was a strip running from the Adriatic to Thrace, which would be called Ottoman Macedonia. Invoking the permanence of the Russian threat, Great Britain had the island of Cyprus ceded to itself, so that it could intervene quickly to assist the Ottomans.
In February 1878, Abdülhamid suspended the constitution of 1876, though it remained part of the Ottoman law code. His power was far from assured. The war effort had struck a terrible blow to the empire’s economy. Only the Muslims provided conscripted troops (the non- Muslims paid a compensatory tax), and the human cost was tremendous. In Anatolia and in the Arab provinces, a very large number of adult men died on the battlefields of the Balkans and the Caucasus. With the loss of the majority Christian regions, the proportion of Muslims grew considerably. In addition, tens of thousands of Balkan and Caucasian Muslim refugees flowed into what remained of the empire. Religious tensions ran high, but outbreaks of violence were averted.
Clearly, the liberal reformers had failed in their political project. They had placed themselves under European intellectual patronage, but Europe did not intervene on their behalf. For a long time, the “Bulgarian atrocities” brought disrepute to the Ottoman cause. Only the exigencies of geopolitics led Great Britain to intervene, and the nation exacted a high cost for its aid. France was still “regrouping” after its defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870–1871, and it drew back from defending its positions acquired in the Islamic world in the previous decades. Germany took advantage of the situation to style itself the European arbiter and honest broker of Ottoman affairs, since it was not directly involved in them.
After the Congress of Berlin, posters appeared in Damascus and Beirut criticizing Ottoman power and calling for Syrian autonomy, even independence. The whole affair has remained a mystery. Several series of posters surfaced, at intervals of a few months, and each series developed themes that were clearly different from the others. Contemporaries saw their appearance as a plot spearheaded either by Midhat Pasha, who had become governor of Syria and was supposedly pro- British, or by Abd al- Qadir, who was said to have finally agreed to carry out a plan for an Arab kingdom. Others interpreted it as the action of secret societies of Christian or Muslim inspiration. The general tone of the posters was pro- Syrian, but later historians would see them, no doubt wrongly, as the first manifestation of Arab nationalism. By contrast, diplomatic correspondence made multiple references to a vast “Arab” conspiracy, whose profile remained imprecise. These letters spoke of the constitution of an Arab caliphate, whose religious legitimacy would be greater than that of the Ottomans.
After the disasters of the war against Russia, disaffection with the Ottoman authority ran deep. It was exploited by a series of major figures in the empire, who opposed Abdülhamid’s personal accession to power. In that political battle, all involved turned to the publicists and intellectuals developing liberal and Islamic themes. They also appealed to the diplomatic representatives of the great powers, in order to demonstrate to them that they were the best candidates for political office and would act in the interests of the European power in question. France and Great Britain had a tendency to take opposing sides, and the sultan was therefore in a position to take action if he obtained the support of one or the other of the two powers. But he was paralyzed if the Europeans formed a bloc.
In July 1880, Abdülhamid obtained France’s support when he deposed Midhat Pasha, who was accused of wanting to promote a Jewish colonization project in Transjordan under British patronage. In Egypt, by contrast, France and Great Britain made common cause on the question of the country’s debt. They imposed a “European” ministry (that is, a ministry comprising European ministers), and then a European condominium on Egyptian finances. Khedive Ismā‘īl, who attempted to counter the intervention by appealing to Egyptian nationalist feeling, was deposed in 1879.
Within that general context, in January 1880 the Europeans posited the existence of Muslim religious unrest. The French at first attributed it to the British, who were suspected of playing both the Arab and the Muslim card against a sultan who was proving resistant to their influence. The supposed leader of that movement was the sharif of Mecca, the only Islamic religious authority capable of opposing the authority of the caliph of Constantinople. In March 1880, the notion of Muslim unrest came into sharper relief. There was talk of a vast conspiracy affecting the Muslim world as a whole and entailing an uprising of the Arabs against the Turks. For a long time, the prospect of an Arab revolt led by a sharif of Mecca and supported by Great Britain was one of the possible stratagems of European policy in the Muslim East.
From August 1880 on, diplomatic correspondence spoke rather of an Ottoman conspiracy seeking to foment, from Tunisia, the Muslims of Algeria against the French and to incite the Indian Muslims against the British. Abdülhamid supposedly wanted to assemble under his caliphal authority all the Muslims of the world and to neutralize the action of the European powers through colonial revolts. In 1881, the diplomats began to use the term “pan- Islamism.” Gabriel Charmes, a French publicist close to diplomatic circles, adopted the term and was later credited with inventing it.
A new specter began to haunt Europe, that of pan- Islamism, which in the twentieth century would become Islamism. The threat was put to good use: French proponents of the conquest of Tunisia systematically invoked it. Great Britain agreed to that conquest as compensation for its acquisition of Cyprus. Germany and Austria- Hungary pressed for it to incite a quarrel between France and Italy.
Tunisia was defined as the rear base of an Algerian uprising, and the French republic could not allow itself to lose Algeria the way the Second Empire had lost Alsace- Lorraine. The incipient colonial camp justified the enterprise as a preemptive operation intended to suppress an immediate threat. The Third Republic’s resumption of French colonial expansion can be understood in terms of the desire to build a “Greater France” after the disaster of 1870– 1871. Those who opposed it, on both the right and the left, saw it as a dangerous diversion, in view of the German threat and revanchism. In fact, the German empire encouraged the undertaking, which had the further appeal of estranging France from Italy in a lasting manner. It was within that context that France imposed its protectorate in Tunisia on May 12, 1881.
Attention then turned to Egypt, where the military was challenging the authority of the khedive and of European control, in the name of “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The European debate was in need of clarification, both in a France governed by the republicans, and in Great Britain, which now had a liberal government. Would Europe embrace the national and constitutional movement that had taken power in Egypt in February 1882, or would its economic and geopolitical interests prevail? That was the subject of the great French parliamentary debate of July 1882,9 during which Léon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau in particular faced off. For Gambetta, there was no “national party” in Egypt, only Muslim fanaticism, the chimera of revolution, and the exploits of the army rabble. Conversely, Clemenceau evoked a “democratic policy” more intent on moral than material conquests.
The debate focused less on the need for European intervention than on the modality of the European presence. According to Clemenceau, “Yes, the national party calls on the Europeans, not to hand over the country to them at will so that they can develop it, but to bring European ideas, education, European culture, and a sense of justice, which are lacking in the East.”10 The opposition coalition rejected the French intervention, and Great Britain intervened on its own, occupying Egypt in 1883.
The French protectorate over Tunisia and the British occupation of Egypt demonstrated the futility of applying the nationality principle to Muslim peoples. Separation from the Ottoman Empire entailed falling inexorably under direct European domination, which explains why autonomy movements in the Muslim- majority provinces came to a halt. Constitutionalism did not eliminate religious tensions and was discredited by the war with Russia. The resurgence of Muslim feeling would serve to cement the Hamidian regime.
Reformists and constitutionalists had now returned to the ranks or been exiled to Europe, where they would voice their opinions in newspapers published there and clandestinely imported into the Ottoman Empire. The same was true for certain Persian reformers, disappointed at the powerlessness of the regime in place. Some of these protesters, exasperated by the resistance to their plans, even went so far as to speak publicly in favor of a direct European takeover of their country, the only thing capable of imposing true modernization. For most, this was a temporary reaction of spite, with the exception of a few people who came to serve French or British policies directly.
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the freedom of expression existing in Europe made it possible to canonize the ideology of modernization in Muslim political thought, against the authoritarianism of bureaucratic reforms and the conservatism of traditional social structures. Such was the case for Abduh’s and Afghani’s Salafism, which found its most radical expression during their European exile. These Muslims benefited from the receptiveness and support of radical leftist circles in Europe with a somewhat freethinking or atheistic orientation, an odd convergence that would not be the last of its kind.
Within the context of the Russo- Ottoman War, the Anglo- Indians, having once again seen the danger of collusion between the Afghans and Russians, in autumn 1878 launched a new invasion of Afghanistan. Thanks to their modern armaments, they quickly seized most of the country. The following autumn, the country rebelled once again, in the form of a jihad. Without encountering a true disaster as in 1842, the British troops had to face an exhausting succession of military operations, without the possibility of decisive success. In 1884, they evacuated the country.
In the following years, the Russians and British agreed to make Afghanistan a buffer zone between the two empires. In 1893, Sir Mortimer Durand drew the border (it would be redrawn in 1895), creating a long corridor extending to China, so that there would be no point of contact between the Indian empire and Russian central Asia.
That success of the Afghan tribal forces had its counterpart in the Sudanese Mahdist movement. That politico- religious uprising targeted Egyptian domination, but the British were now in charge of the country. In 1883, they sent the mystic adventurer Gordon Pasha to organize the evacuation of Khartoum, but once in place he refused to carry out his instructions and persisted in defending the city. He died during the capture of the city by the Mahdists. That affair caused an enormous stir in Europe.
For a time, the expansion of direct European domination was halted. The costs of conquest and administration, which greatly exceeded the benefits of colonial expansion, and the fear of pan- Islamism and its repercussions were essential factors. Nevertheless, struggles for influence and a nibbling away by European powers continued in the Muslim world until the end of the century, which marked the introduction of the logic of empire.