A History of the Middle East (11 page)

A
de facto
alliance against Muhammad Ali was now in existence between Palmerston and Sultan Mahmud. In the summer of 1839, the sultan declared war on his ambitious viceroy and sent an army across the Euphrates into northern Syria. In spite of the new training of the Ottoman forces by the German military mission headed by Moltke, at the battle of Nazib they were once again soundly
defeated by Ibrahim. (He successfully bribed some of the Ottoman troops to desert.) At the same time the admiral of the Ottoman navy, which had been ordered into action, decided to sail the entire fleet to Alexandria and surrender to Muhammad Ali.

Sultan Mahmud died suddenly, before the news of the Nazib disaster could reach him, and he was succeeded by his 16-year-old son Abdul Mejid. The boy sultan and his government were at Muhammad Ali’s mercy.

Ibrahim wanted to consolidate his victory by advancing into the Anatolian heartland. There was nothing to prevent him, but his father commanded restraint. He understood that the destruction of the Ottoman Empire would provoke the powers of Europe. He still hoped that they would accept his more limited ambition of holding on to his possessions in the Levant, North Africa and Arabia. However, this was no longer possible. Palmerston had come to regard him as a dangerous menace. ‘I hate Mehemet Ali,’ he wrote to the British ambassador in Paris, ‘whom I consider as nothing better than an ignorant barbarian who by cunning and boldness and mother wit has been successful in rebellion…I look upon his boasted civilization of Egypt as the arrantest humbug, and I believe that he is as great a tyrant and oppressor as ever made a people wretched.’

Palmerston had his own share of humbug. He knew that the Ottoman sultan was no less tyrannical than Muhammad Ali or Ibrahim and had a rather worse record for his treatment of minorities. The difference was that the Egyptian dictatorship was relatively effective while a weak sultan could be manipulated. Palmerston set about organizing the five powers of Europe (Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia) behind a move to expel Muhammad Ali from the Levant. France was his greatest problem, because it still regarded Muhammad Ali as a valuable ally whose naval power – particularly in combination with that of France – would act as a counterpoise to Britain in the eastern Mediterranean. Palmerston used a masterly combination of diplomacy and bullying to overcome French resistance. Although half his own cabinet was afraid that he
might be provoking a European war, Palmerston played on the fact that King Louis-Philippe of France was even more cautious because of his fears of an attempted
coup d’état
.

At the Conference of London in July 1840 the five powers, including a reluctant France, agreed to the ‘Pacification of the Levant’ under which Muhammad Ali would be obliged to withdraw all his troops from Syria and to restore the Turkish fleet to the sultan. His family would be recognized as hereditary viceroys of Egypt, but would not inherit his viceroyship of Syria.

When Muhammad Ali indignantly refused these terms, a British fleet under Admiral Napier appeared off the Syrian coast and sent out emissaries calling upon the population to revolt. All the resentment against conscription, high taxation and Ibrahim’s flouting of local traditions found expression in rebellions which broke out all over the country. After failing to bribe Ibrahim’s governor of Beirut to defect, the British fleet bombarded the city and an Anglo-Turkish force landed. When Napier sailed on to Alexandria, Muhammad Ali realized he was beaten. His French allies had deserted him and he could not fight the European powers alone.

Through the terms of the Treaty of London of 1841, the powers of Europe cut back Muhammad Ali’s ambitions and restored his vassal status within the Ottoman Empire. He was stripped of all his possessions except the Sudan, which meant that Crete, Syria and the Hejaz were restored to direct Ottoman rule. At the same time he was obliged to reduce his armed forces, which at one time had approached a quarter of a million men, to 18,000. The instrument of his expansionism was removed, and he no longer could threaten to seize Constantinople.

His consolation was that his position as hereditary pasha of Egypt was confirmed. Although this had been the limit of his original ambitions, his horizons had subsequently expanded. But now he could no longer hope to dominate the trade routes to Asia or challenge the growing hegemony of the European powers in the eastern Mediterranean.

A semi-independent Egypt was still a country of some political
and economic importance. Although tired and elderly (he was seventy-two at the time of the Treaty of London) Muhammad Ali was not entirely broken in spirit. Maintaining his enormous army had imposed an impossible burden of taxation on the Egyptian people. (As Palmerston typically observed, ‘Like all countries Egypt has rich and poor. The rich is Muhammad Ali and the poor is everyone else.’) He had already been seeking ways of retrenchment before the Treaty of London, and the enforced reduction in military spending could have brought relief. The trouble was that the focus of his entire economic policy – the
raison d’être
of his industrialization programme – was the servicing of the needs of his military power. Without demand for their products, the military factories would collapse.

It could be argued that Muhammad Ali’s attempt to industrialize Egypt was already a failure. Unlike the European countries, led by Britain, which were achieving a rapid industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Egypt had no natural resources of coal or timber to produce steam power and no steel industry. The 40,000 industrial workers, helped by camels and donkeys, produced nearly all their own power. The imported machinery was badly serviced and continually broke down. It was even more of a disadvantage that no class of independent entrepreneurs or trained managers was developing under Muhammad Ali’s authoritarian regime. Although he sent some young Egyptians for training in Europe, it was mainly members of the Turco-Circassian officer class that he placed in charge of the factories. Crucial hydraulic and other engineering works were in the hands of foreign technicians, and commerce was increasingly controlled by European merchants.

It is possible, as some Egyptian economic historians have argued, that without European interference the mistakes could have been rectified and Egypt might have achieved a genuine industrial revolution in the wake of Europe. But the auguries were poor, and it would have required a successor to the aged Muhammad Ali of equal forcefulness and ability but greater enlightenment. Ibrahim might conceivably have filled the role and, with his health and reason failing,
Muhammad Ali delegated his powers to his son in 1847. But in little more than a year Ibrahim succumbed to a fever, and Muhammad Ali followed him within a few months, on 2 August 1849, without realizing that his son was dead.

In accordance with the terms of the Treaty of London, Muhammad Ali was succeeded by his eldest male descendant – his grandson Abbas, the son of Tussun. Abbas was a gloomy reactionary who repudiated the European influences introduced by his grandfather and uncle. He dismissed the foreign advisers and closed the secular schools. However, he was far from being an Egyptian patriot and had no love for the Egyptians. Because he detested the French, he showed some favour towards the British and allowed them to build the Cairo–Alexandria railway – the first in Africa or Asia – which greatly enhanced Britain’s imperial route to India. But Abbas was essentially a xenophobic Ottoman, loyal to the sultan. He had no imperial ambitions of his own. Moreover, a provision of the Treaty of London was that appointment of senior officers in his much diminished army must be approved by Istanbul. This ensured that the high command was in the hands of the Turco-Circassian ruling class rather than native-born Egyptians.

Abbas ruled only five years before he was murdered by two of his Albanian slaves. His uncle Said, who succeeded, was nine years younger than Abbas, corpulent, amiable and Francophile. His contrasting character did not, however, mean that he regarded himself as an Egyptian or cared for the interests of the Egyptians. His liberal attitude towards trade and enterprise resulted in the rapid growth in the size and importance of the foreign communities, and his friendship with the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps led to the building of the Suez Canal, which, under foreign ownership, was to be a prime cause and justification of Egypt’s subjection to European control.

In his classic work
The Arab Awakening
(first published in 1938) the Palestinian writer George Antonius describes the development of the concept of an Arab nation in modern times. His chapter on Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim is entitled ‘The False Start’. He quotes
one of their contemporaries as observing that Muhammad Ali’s genius ‘was of a kind to create empires, while Ibrahim had the wisdom that retains them’. The suggestion is that, if Ibrahim had survived his father and the Western powers led by Britain had not combined against him, a revived Arab empire controlling the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and the Levant could have replaced the Ottomans as the world’s leading Islamic power.

Such a development is hard to conceive. Muhammad Ali had no vision of Arab national regeneration. When he considered claiming the caliphate from the sultan it was not to restore it to Arab hands. He remained an Albanian/Turk who never learned to speak Arabic. Ibrahim, it is true, chose to regard himself as an Egyptian – much to his father’s disgust. He spoke Arabic and could identify with his Arab soldiers. He dreamed of a revived Arab empire and sometimes rallied his troops with references to Arab historical glory. But none of this amounted to much. Centuries of Turkish political and military dominance in the Muslim world could not be erased. Neither Muhammad Ali nor Ibrahim had time to create new institutions which would last. Their dynasty survived, but their descendants were much lesser men.

When 16-year-old Sultan Abdul Mejid I (1839–61) succeeded, his empire was in mortal danger. The reforms of his father, Mahmud II, had disrupted the old order while their benefits were still to be realized. The Janissaries, the core of the armed forces, had been repressed, but the training and weaponry provided by Moltke’s military mission had yet to prove effective, as the ignominious defeats by Ibrahim’s
fellahin
army had proved. The reforms in education – the new medical, engineering, naval and military schools staffed by foreign instructors; the student missions to European universities; and the creation of the first basis for compulsory primary education – were only beginning to produce a new generation of young Ottomans who could understand and cope with the great technical and scientific advances of the nineteenth century.

The young sultan lacked his father’s force of character, although for a time he was backed by his formidable mother, but he decided to continue and extend the reforms. Mustafa Reshid Pasha, the outstandingly able foreign minister who was on a mission to London when Mahmud II’s death was announced, was brought back to the capital to take charge of the reform programme and on 3 November 1839 the historic Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber was promulgated – the first of a series of edicts which are known collectively as the
Tanzimat
or Reorganization. More than once, Mustafa Reshid fell from power, only to be restored again. Others carried on his work after his death in 1858. Conservative opposition was powerful, because the reforms were revolutionary in purpose and content. Although their achievements fell well short of their intentions, they initiated notable changes in the way the empire was governed and administered.

Two of the changes were truly revolutionary, in that they broke with the Islamic principles by which the empire had always been
governed. The mere declaration of these changes, which were closely related, was shocking to traditional opinion. One was that all Ottoman citizens were to be perfectly equal before the law, regardless of race or creed. The other was the introduction of a new legal code which was distinct from that of the Islamic
sharia
administered by the
qadis
or Islamic judges.

Equality of all citizens before the law was a secular non-Islamic principle derived from the European Enlightenment and the nationalist ideals of the French Revolution. Islamic tradition and law prescribed tolerance and protection for non-Muslim subjects of the state, and it was according to these principles that non-Muslims were allowed a substantial degree of autonomy under the
millet
system. But this did not mean that the members of these minorities were equal to the Muslim majority.

The new concept of equality inevitably affected the supremacy of the Islamic
sharia
. Once again it was a principle which was at stake. Muslim rulers since the earliest days had in practice encouraged or allowed the creation of tribunals in which their own administrative decisions or customary law was applied. But these were on the fringes; the
sharia
courts were dominant, and nowhere more so than in the Ottoman Empire. Now the first steps were being taken towards the demotion of the
sharia
by creating a new body with powers of drafting legislation. The change was not immediate. The religious authorities fought against it and they were able for a time to prevent the introduction of a new commercial code outside the
sharia
. Nevertheless the process of secularization of the world’s leading Islamic power had begun.

Because the sultan and his reformist advisers always claimed that the changes were in accordance with Islam, the mass of the population was not aware of their importance. They were none the less revolutionary. Turks and Arabs of today, depending on their point of view, would regard them as either milestones on the road to catastrophe or as steps towards the modernization of the Islamic world which were essential if it were to resist the encroaching power of Christian Europe.

The other reforms of the
Tanzimat
were aimed at this central purpose of regenerating the empire’s strength. Sultan Mahmud’s policy of opening new military schools with foreign instructors was greatly extended. Of greater importance was the new recruiting law, reducing military service from its hitherto indefinite period to a fixed term of five years followed by seven in the reserves. A body of civil police, or gendarmerie, was also instituted.