Arabs (12 page)

In the 1790s the Ottomans took notice of the new threat to their Arab provinces and urged their governor in Baghdad to take action. The pasha of Baghdad delayed sending his troops into the hostile terrain of the Arabian peninsula for as long as he could. It was not until 1798 that he finally mustered a 10,000-man army to fight the Wahhabis. The Ottoman forces did not fare well in Wahhabi territory; they soon were surrounded and forced to negotiate a truce with Sa‘ud ibn ’Abd al-’Aziz, the Saudi commander. In agreeing to the truce, the Wahhabis made no promises to respect the towns and villages of Ottoman Iraq in the future. The pasha of Baghdad had serious grounds for concern.

The Wahhabis pursued their crusade into Ottoman territory for the first time in 1802, when they attacked the southern Iraqi shrine city of Karbala. Karbala holds a special position in Shiite Islam, for it was here that Husayn ibn ’Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed by the forces of the Umayyad caliph in 680 AD. The martyred Husayn is venerated as the third of twelve infallible leaders, or imams, of Shi’ite Islam, and the mosque built on the site of his tomb was lavishly decorated with a gilt dome. Thousands of pilgrims would come each year to lay precious
gifts on the tomb of the imam and undertake acts of devotion in his honour—just the sort of saint veneration that the Wahhabis found most abhorrent.

The Wahhabi attack on Karbala was chillingly brutal. The chronicler Ibn Bishr gives a contemporary description of the carnage:

The slaughter, the desecration of Husayn’s tomb and mosque, and the plundering of the town established the Wahhabis’ violent reputation in Arab public opinion. The brutality of the attack and the killing of so many unarmed men, women, and children in a place of worship provoked widespread revulsion across the Ottoman world. The residents of towns and villages in southern Iraq, eastern Syria, and the Hijaz turned to the Ottoman government to shield them from this grave threat.

The Ottomans faced great difficulty in confronting the Wahhabi challenge. The reform movement was based in Central Arabia, beyond some of the most remote Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman troops had to march for months from Anatolia to reach the borderlands of the Najd. As the governor of Baghdad had already discovered, it was very difficult to fight the Wahhabis on their own terrain. Just keeping large armies supplied with food and water proved a tremendous challenge for the Ottomans in such a hostile environment. The Ottoman government found itself powerless to contain the Wahhabi menace.

The Wahhabis next struck at the very heart of Ottoman legitimacy by attacking the holy cities of Islam—Mecca and Medina. In March 1803, the Saudi commander Sa‘ud ibn ’Abd al-’Aziz advanced on the Hijaz; by April, he entered the city of Mecca. His army met no resistance and promised no violence. They first explained their beliefs to the residents of Mecca and then imposed their new laws: silk clothes and smoking were banned, shrines were destroyed, domes on buildings were knocked down. After holding the holy cities for a number of months, the Wahhabis withdrew to the Najd. It was not until 1806 that the Wahhabis decided to strip the Hijaz from Ottoman domains and annex the province to their rapidly expanding state.

Once the Wahhabis were in control of Mecca and Medina, pilgrims from the Ottoman Empire were no longer admitted to Islam’s holy cities to perform their religious duty of pilgrimage. Both of the official Ottoman pilgrimage caravans, from
Damascus and Cairo, were accompanied by a
mahmal
, a richly decorated litter carried by a camel. The mahmal contained a cover for the shrine holding the holy black stone known as the Ka‘ba, at the center of the mosque in Mecca, as well as copies of the Qur’an and rich treasures. The mahmal was surrounded by musicians playing drums and blaring horns. The use of music, the decoration of the Ka’ba shrine, and the association of opulence with worship all offended Wahhabi strictures, and they refused to admit the mahmal to Mecca, breaking with centuries of Sunni Muslim veneration for Mecca’s holiest shrine.

One of the officers accompanying the Egyptian caravan in 1806 related his experiences with the Wahhabis to the chronicler al-Jabarti:

In 1807 a Syrian caravan without the mahmal and musicians sought entry to Mecca and was nevertheless denied. With or without the mahmal, the Wahhabis believed Ottoman Muslims to be no better than polytheists and denied them entry to Islam’s holiest places.

The most important of the sultan’s imperial titles emphasized his role as the defender of the faith and protector of the holy cities of the Hijaz. The Wahhabis’ annexation of the Hijaz and ban on the Ottoman pilgrimage caravans defied the temporal powers of the Ottoman state in securing its territories as well as the sultan’s religious legitimacy as the guardian of Islam’s holiest cities. The gravity of this threat could not be more severe. The Ottomans would not survive if they failed to respond to this challenge and reassert their authority.

 

Although the Ottomans were quick to dismiss the Wahhabis as savage Bedouins of the desert, they knew it would be difficult to defeat the movement. As modern wars in Kuwait and Iraq have shown, great powers face huge logistical problems in fighting wars in Arabia. Troops would have to be sent on sailing ships and marched great distances overland, in terrible heat, with long and vulnerable supply lines. They would be forced to fight on the Wahhabis’ own terrain. And the Wahhabis were zealots, convinced that they were doing God’s work. There was always the risk that Ottoman soldiers might respond to the Wahhabis’ powerful message and cross over to the other side.

There was no question of sending a campaign force all the way from Istanbul to the Hijaz. The Ottomans lacked both the financial and military resources for such an enterprise. Instead, they made repeated demands of their provincial governors in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. The governor in Baghdad was fighting continued Wahhabi attacks in his southern provinces and had yet to succeed in repelling the raiders. The Kurdish governor in Damascus, Kanj Yusuf Pasha, promised Istanbul to reopen the pilgrimage route. However, he lacked the resources to undertake such a campaign. As the Syrian chronicler Mikhayil Mishaqa observed, Kanj Yusuf Pasha “could neither send enough soldiers nor supply them with enough ammunition to drive the Wahhabi from the Hejaz, which was a forty-day march away [from Damascus] through burning sands without food or water along the way for themselves or their beasts.”
²⁶

 

There was only one person who could mobilize the necessary forces and had demonstrated sufficient ability to defeat the Wahhabis and restore the Hijaz to the Ottoman Empire. Since 1805, Egypt had been ruled by a governor of extraordinary ability. Yet the talent and ambition that so recommended him to address the Wahhabi challenge would soon be turned against the Ottoman state. Indeed, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha proved the culmination of a dangerous trend, of provincial leaders challenging Istanbul’s rule in the Arab provinces. Muhammad ’Ali proved strong enough to threaten the overthrow of the Ottoman dynasty itself.

CHAPTER 3

I
n June 1798, British ships appeared without warning off the coast of Egypt. A landing party rowed ashore to be received by the governor and notables of what was then the modest port town of Alexandria. The British warned of an impending French invasion and offered their assistance. The governor was indignant: “This is the sultan’s land. Neither the French nor anyone else has access to it. So leave us alone!”
¹
The very suggestion that an inferior nation like France posed a threat to Ottoman domains, or that Ottoman subjects might turn to another inferior nation like Britain for assistance, clearly offended the notables of Alexandria. The British rowed back to their tall ships and withdrew. No one gave the matter any further thought—for the moment.

The people of Alexandria awoke on the morning of July 1 to find their harbor filled with men-o’-war and their shores invaded. Napoleon Bonaparte had arrived at the head of a massive invasion force, the first European army to set foot in the Middle East since the Crusades. Outnumbered and outgunned, Alexandria surrendered in a matter of hours. The French secured their position and set off for Cairo.

Mamluk horsemen engaged the French army at the southern outskirts of Cairo. In what seemed like a replay of the 1516 Mamluk battle against the Ottomans at Marj Dabiq, the gallant Mamluks drew their swords and charged the French invaders. They never even got within striking distance. The French moved in tight formations, with row upon row of infantrymen maintaining a rolling thunder of rifle fire that decimated the Mamluk cavalry. “The air darkened with gunpowder, smoke and dust from the wind,” a contemporary Egyptian chronicler recorded. “The uninterrupted shooting was ear-deafening. To the people it appeared as if the earth were shaking and the sky were falling in.”
²
According to Egyptian eyewitnesses, the
fighting was over within three-quarters of an hour. Panic swept the streets as the army of Napoleon occupied the defenseless city of Cairo.

Over the next three years, the people of Egypt came face to face with the customs and manners of the French, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Napoleon had intended to establish a permanent presence in Egypt, which meant winning her people over to the benefits of French rule. This was more than a military matter. Accompanying the French infantry was a smaller army of sixty-seven
savants
, or learned men, who came with the dual mission of studying Egypt and impressing the Egyptians with the superiority of French civilization. With a liberal sprinkling of the ideas of the French Revolution, the occupation of Egypt was the original French “civilizing mission.”

A crucial eyewitness to the occupation was ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1754–1824), an intellectual and theologian with access to the highest echelons of both French and Egyptian society. Al-Jabarti wrote extensively on the French occupation, detailing the Egyptian encounter with the French, their revolutionary ideas, and their astonishing technology.

The gulf separating French Revolutionary thought from Egyptian Muslim values was unbridgeable. Enlightenment values that the French held to be universal were deeply offensive to many Egyptians, both as Ottoman subjects and observant Muslims. This gulf in worldview was apparent from Napoleon’s very first proclamation to the people of Egypt, when he asserted “that all men are equal before God; that wisdom, talents, and virtues alone make them different from one another.”

Far from striking a chord of liberation, Napoleon’s pronouncement provoked deep dismay. Al-Jabarti wrote a line-by-line refutation of the proclamation that rejected most of the “universal” values Napoleon vaunted. He dismissed Napoleon’s claim that all men were equal as “a lie and stupidity” and concluded: “You see that they are materialists, who deny all God’s attributes. The creed they follow is to make human reason supreme and what people will approve in accordance with their whims.”
³
Al-Jabarti’s statements reflected the beliefs of Egypt’s Muslim majority, who rejected the exercise of human reason over revealed religion.

If the French failed to win the Egyptians over to the ideas of the Enlightenment, they were nevertheless confident that French technology would impress the natives. Napoleon’s savants brought quite a bag of tricks to Egypt. In November 1798, the French organized the launch of a Montgolfier hot-air balloon. They posted notices around Cairo inviting the townspeople to witness the marvel of flight. Al-Jabarti had heard the French make incredible claims about their airship, “that people would sit in it travelling to distant countries to gather information and to send messages,” and went to see the demonstration for himself.

Looking at the limp balloon on its platform, decorated in the red, white, and blue of the French tricolor, al-Jabarti had his doubts. The Frenchmen lit the Montgolfier’s
wick, filling the balloon with warm air until it took flight. The crowd gasped in amazement, and the French took evident pleasure in their reaction. All seemed to be going well until the balloon lost its wick. Without a source of hot air, the Montgolfier collapsed and fell to the ground. The crash of the balloon restored the Cairo audience’s contempt for French technology. Al-Jabarti wrote dismissively, “It became apparent that it was like the kites which servants construct for holidays and weddings.”
⁴
The natives were not impressed.

 

The French failed to appreciate just how proud the Egyptians were and how humiliating they found the experience of alien occupation. Napoleon’s proclamations seem to cry out for gratitude from the Egyptians, but few Egyptian Muslims would concede their approval of the French or their institutions—at least not to their faces. The chemistry demonstration by Monsieur Bertholet (1748–1822), was a case in point.