A History of the Middle East (10 page)

Muhammad Ali therefore had both political and commercial motives in attempting to conquer the Sudan. An additional motive was the provision of suitable employment for his unruly Albanian troops. In 1821 he sent an army commanded by his third son, Ismail, followed in the next year by two more under Ibrahim, victor of the Hejaz, and his son-in-law Muhammad. Between them they conquered an area half the size of Europe, nominally on behalf of the Ottoman sultan but in greater reality to add to his Egyptian viceroy’s domains. In some ways the conquest was a disappointment. Muhammad Ali’s dream of creating his own army of black slaves failed because they were too few in number and their health deteriorated when they were brought to Egypt. The gold mines were poorer than anticipated, and there was no breakthrough to the fabled wealth of tropical Africa. When Ismail was ambushed and killed by a resentful local chieftain, Muhammad Ali ordered a massacre which left its memory in Sudanese minds.

However, Muhammad Ali’s conquest laid the foundations of the modern Sudan. The addition by his successors of the three Negro and tropical provinces in the south created the giant of Africa – part Arab and Muslim and part Christian and pagan and black. Even when, after sixty years, Turco-Egyptian rule came to an end, Egypt and Sudan remained inextricably linked.

The acquisition of Sudan had not been completed before the opportunity arose for expansion northwards, into the eastern Mediterranean. Sultan Mahmud invited Muhammad Ali to help put down the uprising in 1821 of his Greek subjects, who were demanding independence. The weakened and demoralized Ottoman troops were proving incapable of dealing with the rebels. Muhammad Ali’s troops landed first in Crete and then in Cyprus to quell the uprising. But the heart of the rebellion was in the Morea on the mainland. The sultan hesitated to order him there because he rightly feared that Muhammad Ali’s well-organized and disciplined forces might threaten his own authority. However, he finally had no alternative.
In 1825 Ibrahim moved with his fleet to the Morea, landed troops and two years later captured Athens.

When the Greek rebellion broke out, the powers of Europe paid little more than lip-service to the principle of Greek Christians breaking away from the Ottoman Empire to form an independent nation. They were deeply suspicious of each other’s intentions. Russia did not favour the birth of a new Christian state in the Levant unless it would be under tsarist control. The other powers, led by Britain, were equally determined to prevent such Russian domination; however, they would probably not have been spurred into action if the Greek nationalists, who engaged in piracy when they were not fighting the Turks, had not begun to interfere with the Levant trade. An equally alarming development was the appearance of Muhammad Ali’s forces to defeat the Greeks. With his control of the Morea, he would be able to dominate the region – raising the unwelcome possibility of the establishment of a new Muslim power in the eastern Mediterranean.

France had sympathetic ties with Muhammad Ali but was eventually induced to join Britain and Russia in the Treaty of London of 6 July 1827. Through this, the three powers aimed to mediate between the Ottoman government and the Greek patriots in order to bring about an armistice which would lead to the establishment of Greek autonomy under the suzerainty of the sultan. An additional purpose was to make Ibrahim’s presence unnecessary and bring about his withdrawal.

When the sultan prevaricated, the Russian and French fleets joined the British fleet at Navarino and on 20 October blew the combined Turkish and Egyptian fleets out of the water.

The sultan broke off relations with the three powers and summoned his Muslim subjects for a
jihad
or holy war. But there was little he could do. In the previous year he had destroyed the Janissaries, and the reconstruction of the Ottoman army had hardly begun. His best protection was that Britain and France wanted neither the dismemberment of his empire nor the aggrandizement of Russia. Five years later, on 7 May 1832, in accordance with a new
Treaty of London, Greece became an independent kingdom under the Bavarian prince Otho. All the powers of Europe could claim a share in this settlement, and it had not led, as the sultan had feared, to the disintegration of the empire.

Muhammad Ali’s forces had suffered severe losses, and the financial strain on Egypt was heavy. But the disaster of Navarino had not dampened the ambitions of the
wali
or his son. Muhammad Ali believed he had been promised the pashalik of Syria as a reward for his help against the Greeks, but Sultan Mahmud said that he would have to be content with the pashalik of Crete. Muhammad Ali therefore decided to seize Syria for himself. While rebuilding his fleet, he dispatched Ibrahim at the head of an army which routed the Ottoman forces near Homs and again near Aleppo. Ibrahim then passed through the Taurus range into Anatolia and defeated the sultan’s army at Konya. When he reached Bursa, he was poised to take Istanbul and overthrow the Ottoman Empire.

A desperate Sultan Mahmud appealed to Britain to send the Royal Navy to the Dardanelles and Alexandria. Palmerston, the British prime minister, was in favour, but the majority in his cabinet refused. The sultan was therefore obliged to turn to Russia. (Palmerston later wrote that ‘No British cabinet at any period of the history of England ever made so great a mistake in foreign affairs.’) The Russians sent ships and landed troops; Ibrahim prudently agreed to negotiate. By now alerted to the danger of Russian ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean, Britain and France intervened to insist on a Russian withdrawal in return for the sultan’s agreement to make concessions to Muhammad Ali – the sultan granted him the pashalik of the whole of Syria. The Russians did withdraw, but the sultan was obliged to accept an agreement known as the Treaty of Hunkiar Iskelessi, which bound him to an alliance with Russia. This included a secret clause which allowed Russian warships to pass freely through the Dardanelles if Russia should be at war but made a similar concession to other powers conditional on Russian consent. Palmerston’s regrets are easy to understand.

Muhammad Ali’s ambition to build a predominantly Arabic-speaking
empire on the ruins of Ottoman power no longer seemed fanciful. He controlled the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. He even thought of making a bid for the caliphate.

However, his dream was a chimera. The pan-Arab idea did not exist in the consciousness of the people, and the Albanian Muhammad Ali could not be its inspiration. Ibrahim could conceivably have provided such an inspiration. Unlike his father, he spoke Arabic, regarded himself as Egyptian and was prouder of his Egyptian private soldiers than of their Ottoman officers. But he never challenged his father’s authority and, although he was more cultivated and civilized, he was not equal to Muhammad Ali’s formidable political abilities.

Ibrahim was placed in charge of Egypt’s new Syrian possessions. But, although he had a powerful army under his command, his task of imposing a strongly centralized and modernizing administration was not easy. The various sects of Syria – Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze and Maronites – had become accustomed to a high degree of autonomy, whether under local dynasties, such as the Azms in Damascus or the Shihabs in Lebanon, or Ottoman
walis
who remained only for periods too brief to establish their authority. Ibrahim was confronted by a variety of vested interests who had no desire to be incorporated into a centralized economy based on the type of government monopolies Muhammad Ali had instituted in Egypt. The Ottomans had had their monopolies, but the system was inefficient and could easily be subverted. In Syria and Lebanon there were flourishing cotton and silk textile industries, although they faced increasing competition from European imports, and the Levantine merchants prospered on the transit trade to the East. They resented Egyptian interference, as did the Druze landowners growing cereals on the Hauran plains of southern Syria.

Ibrahim was faced with various acts of rebellion, which he suppressed with his customary ruthlessness. Nevertheless his achievements during the decade of his governorship (1831–40) were considerable. He streamlined the administration, reformed the tax system and began the process of expanding and improving education.
His aims accorded with those of his father in Egypt, who guided and directed his actions: to lay the foundations of a strong state with a self-sustaining economy. Eventually he hoped that Syria’s manufacturing industries would compete with those of Europe.

His plans would have been over-ambitious even if he had had more time to realize them. The Syrian merchants and landowners could be dynamic and enterprising, but they were not ready to be moulded into an alien system. Ibrahim did succeed in expanding and improving trade with Europe and in increasing the area under cultivation, but this was through more efficient government rather than the encouragement of local initiative. For all Ibrahim’s attempts to identify with his subjects, he remained a foreign occupier. (Many of the same problems beset the next Egyptian attempt to rule Syria, 120 years later.)

As part of Ibrahim’s policy of modernization, Christian missionaries were for the first time allowed to open schools. These missionaries were principally American Protestants and they founded several schools, including one for girls. They also established the first Arabic printing-press in Syria. Ibrahim went further to attempt to establish the principle of equality between Muslims and Christians. Within the Ottoman Empire this meant favouring Christians at Muslim expense. In Egypt Muhammad Ali had always made use of talent and expertise wherever he found it, and he did not hesitate to employ Europeans or to promote local non-Muslims when he deemed it necessary. In Syria this policy meant favouring the Christian merchants, who had the best contacts with Europe (and frequently held
berats
or patents granted by European consulates). Ibrahim imposed a special poll tax on the Muslims of the cities, which equated them with the non-Muslims who had always paid such a tax.

Not unnaturally, the Muslims were not in favour of this innovation. Their resentment greatly increased when Muhammad Ali insisted that Ibrahim begin conscripting Syrians into the Egyptian army. Ibrahim, who was much closer to identifying himself with
his Arab subjects than his father, protested that this was unwise; but Muhammad Ali insisted.

However, Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim might have been able to subdue opposition and hold on to their east-Mediterranean/Arabian empire if they had not incurred the implacable opposition of the European powers, led by Britain. Muhammad Ali could defy his nominal master the Ottoman sultan Mahmud – and indeed could contemplate his overthrow – but Britain preferred that a weakened Ottoman Empire should survive rather than be dismembered and swallowed by one of its rivals. Britain was still less enthusiastic that the empire should be replaced by a dynamic and expansionist Muslim power; but it was precisely this possibility which alarmed the powers of Europe.

This was the period in which the Palmerstonian doctrine of imperialism was developed. It was directed not towards the acquisition of colonies – that was to come later in the century – but to the instant protection of British interests wherever they were threatened. As the world’s leading industrial and commercial power, Britain saw these interests as largely economic. British manufactured goods were flooding eastwards to Asian markets by the Gulf and Red Sea routes. The era of the steamship had arrived, and Muhammad Ali had greatly eased the passage to India by developing the overland route between Alexandria and Suez. But although British trade was expanding throughout the eastern Mediterranean, it was severely obstructed by the system of monopolies in the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston directed all his powerful diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire towards having these removed. In 1838 he succeeded when an Anglo-Turkish treaty was signed giving Britain and the other European powers the right to trade throughout the Ottoman Empire in return for a tariff of only 3 per cent.

At one stroke Palmerston’s treaty had opened the way to foreign commercial domination of the Ottoman Empire. It had also removed a principal source of the sultan’s revenue from the state monopolies. Muhammad Ali rightly regarded the terms of the treaty as disastrous for his ambitions, and he refused to apply them to Egypt. He had done
everything in his power to protect and facilitate British trade across Egypt, but he could not allow Britain to destroy the sources of his independence. A few weeks before the signature of the treaty, he had announced his decision to declare Egypt and Syria an independent, hereditary kingdom and had offered to pay the sultan the high sum of 3 million pounds as the price for his acceptance of this. Palmerston immediately registered his strong disapproval and made it clear that, if war should ensue between Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman Empire, Britain would be on the side of the sultan.

Britain was determined to foil Muhammad Ali’s ambitions. It had become seriously alarmed by the spread of his power along the whole eastern coast of the Red Sea from Bab al-Mandab to Mecca. He had even seized the Tihama coast of Yemen, bought the city of Taez from its corrupt governor (an uncle of the imam of Yemen) and gained control over its valuable coffee trade. The vital route to India seemed to be threatened at a time when the importance of the Arabian coast had been increased by the arrival of steamships and the need for secure coaling-stations. ‘I think that it will be absolutely necessary to have a possession of our own on or near the Red Sea,’ wrote the Governor of Bombay, Sir Robert Grant, in 1837.

The opportunity to acquire such a possession soon arose. The sultan of Lahej, in whose territory on the south-eastern corner of Arabia lay the tiny port of Aden, was accused of permitting the molestation of British shipping. In January 1839 Commander Haines of the Bombay Marine landed with a small force and seized the town, inaugurating 130 years of British rule in Aden and increasing influence in the tribal hinterland. The Aden settlement was attached to the Bombay presidency, emphasizing its importance to India, and so remained until it became a Crown Colony.