Arabs (17 page)

Muhammad ‘Ali’s final years in office were marked by disappointment and ill health. The pasha was now an old man—seventy-one years old by the time his army had returned from Syria. He had grown alienated from his son Ibrahim. Over the course of the Syrian campaign, father and son communicated through palace officials. Both fought illness—Ibrahim was sent to Europe to combat tuberculosis, and Muhammad ’Ali was beginning to lose his mental faculties to silver nitrate treatments he was given to combat dysentery. In 1847 the sultan recognized that Muhammad ‘Ali was no longer sufficiently competent to rule and appointed Ibrahim Pasha to succeed him. Ibrahim died six months later. By that time, Muhammad ’Ali was too far gone to notice. The succession passed to Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, Abbas, who officiated at Muhammad ’Ali’s funeral after the pasha’s death on August 2, 1849.

 

The age of local leaders had come to an end. As the Egyptians were divested of Crete, the Syrian provinces, and the Hijaz, the Ottoman government was careful to dispatch its own men to serve as governors in these provinces. The Azm family in Damascus, like the Jalilis in Mosul, lost their grip over the cities they had ruled for much of the eighteenth century. The autonomous government of Mount Lebanon collapsed as the Shihab family was overthrown for collaborating with Egyptian rule. Here too the Ottomans sought to impose their own governors, though with explosive consequences that would send Lebanon down the road to sectarian conflict. The bid for local autonomy from the Ottoman government had come at a high price for the working people of the Arab lands, who suffered through wars, inflation, political instability, and countless injustices at the hands of ambitious local leaders. They now wanted peace and stability.

The Ottomans too wanted to put an end to the internal challenges to their rule. While preoccupied by foreign threats and wars with Russia and Austria, they had seen the risks of leaving the Arab provinces unattended: the alliance between Ali Bey al-Kabir and Zahir al-Umar had threatened Ottoman rule in Syria and Egypt; the Wahhabis had ravaged southern Iraq and seized the Hijaz from Ottoman rule;
and Muhammad ‘Ali used the wealth of Egypt to create an army that gave him control of an empire in his own right and the means to threaten the very survival of the Ottomans themselves. But for the intervention of the European powers, Muhammad’Ali could have toppled the Ottomans in the Second Egyptian Crisis. These experiences had impressed on the Ottoman government the need for reform. It would require not just a gentle tinkering with the standing institutions of government but a complete overhaul of the ancient machinery of rule.

The Ottomans recognized that they could not reform their empire on their own. They would need to draw on the ideas and technologies that had made their European rivals strong. Ottoman statesmen had noted how Muhammad ‘Ali succeeded in harnessing modern European ideas and technologies in creating his dynamic state. The dispatch of Egyptian missions to Europe, the import of European industrial and military technology, and the contracting of European technical advisors at all levels of the military and bureaucracy had played a large role in Muhammad ’Ali’s achievements.

The Ottomans were entering a new and complex era in their relations with their European neighbors. Europe would serve as the role model, the ideal to be attained in military and technological terms. But Europe was also a threat to be kept at arm’s length, both as a belligerent that coveted Ottoman lands and the source of dangerous new ideologies. Ottoman reformers would struggle with the challenge of adopting European ideas and technology without compromising their own cultural integrity and values.

The one thing the Ottomans could not do was ignore Europe’s progress. Europe had emerged as the dominant world power in the nineteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire increasingly would be obliged to play by Europe’s rules.

CHAPTER 4

A
young Muslim cleric approached the French sailing vessel
La Truite
, moored in Alexandria’s harbor, on April 13, 1826. As he stepped onto the gangway to board, dressed in the robes and turban of a scholar of Cairo’s ancient mosque university of al-Azhar (founded 969), Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi’s feet left Egyptian soil for the first time in his life. He was bound for France, appointed chaplain to Muhammad’Ali’s first major education mission to Europe. He would not see his native land for another five years.

Once aboard, al-Tahtawi examined the faces of the other delegates. They made for a very diverse group: forty-four men in all, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-seven. Al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) was then twenty-four years old. Though ostensibly an Egyptian delegation, only eighteen of its envoys were actually native-born Arabic speakers. The rest of the group spoke Turkish and reflected the national diversity of the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was still a part—Turks, Circassians, Greeks, Georgians, and Armenians. These men had been chosen by the governor of Egypt to study European languages and sciences and, on their return, to apply what they learned in France to reforming their native land.

Born to a notable family of judges and theologians in a small village in Upper Egypt, al-Tahtawi had studied Arabic and Islamic theology since the age of sixteen. A gifted scholar, he was appointed to teach at al-Azhar before entering government service as a preacher in one of the new European-style Nizami infantry divisions in 1824. Through this post, and with the support of his patrons, al-Tahtawi was selected for this prestigious mission to Paris. It was the kind of posting that made a man’s career.

Al-Tahtawi took with him a blank copybook in which to record his impressions of France. No detail seemed too trivial to interest him: the way the French built their
houses, earned a living, observed their religion; their means of transport and the workings of their financial system; relations between men and women; how they dressed and danced; how they decorated their homes and set their tables. Al-Tahtawi wrote with curiosity and respect but also critical detachment. For centuries, Europeans had traveled to the Middle East and written books on the manners and customs of the exotic people they found there. Now, for the first time, an Egyptian had turned the tables and wrote on the strange and exotic country called France.
¹

Al-Tahtawi’s reflections on France are full of contradictions. As a Muslim and an Egyptian Ottoman, he was confident of the superiority of his faith and culture. He saw France as a place of disbelief, where “not a single Muslim had settled” and where the French themselves were “Christians only in name.” Yet his firsthand observations left him in no doubt of Europe’s superiority in science and technology. “By God, during my stay in [France], I was grieved by the fact that it had enjoyed all those things that are lacking in Islamic kingdoms,” he recalled.
²
To give some sense of the gulf that al-Tahtawi believed separated his readers from Western science, he judged it necessary to explain that European astronomers had proven that the earth was round. He realized how much the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe in the sciences and believed that the Islamic world had a duty and a right to recover this knowledge, given that Western advances since the Renaissance had been built on medieval Islam’s progress in the sciences. He argued that the Ottomans were only calling due the West’s debts to Islamic science by borrowing European advances in modern technology.
³

Although al-Tahtawi’s book is replete with fascinating reflections on what, in Egyptian eyes, made France of the 1820s tick, he made his most substantial contribution to political reform with his analysis of constitutional government. He translated all seventy-four articles of the 1814 French constitution, or
Charte constitutionelle
, and wrote a detailed analysis of its key points.
⁴
Al-Tahtawi believed the constitution to hold the secret of French advancement. “We should like to include this,” he explained to his elite readership, “so that you may see how their intellect has decided that justice and equity are the causes for the civilization of kingdoms, the well-being of subjects, and how rulers and their subjects were led by this, to the extent that their country has prospered, their knowledge increased, their wealth accumulated and their hearts satisfied.”

Al-Tahtawi’s praise for constitutional government was courageous for its time. These were dangerous new ideas with no roots in Islamic tradition. As he confessed, most of the principles of the French constitution “cannot be found in the Qur’an nor in the
sunna
[practices] of the Prophet.” He may have feared the reaction of his fellow Muslim clerics to these dangerous innovations, but he took the even greater risk of provoking the disfavor of his rulers. After all, the constitution applied to the
king and his subjects alike, and it called for a division of powers between the monarch and an elected legislature. Muhammad ’Ali’s Egypt was a thoroughly autocratic state, and the Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy. The very notion of representative government or constraints on the powers of the monarch would have been seen as alien and subversive by most Ottoman elites.

The reformist cleric was captivated by the way the French constitution promoted the rights of common citizens rather than reinforcing the dominance of elites. Among the articles of the constitution that most impressed al-Tahtawi were those asserting the equality of all citizens before the law and the eligibility of all citizens “to any office, irrespective of its rank.” The possibility of such upward mobility, he maintained, would encourage “people to study and learn” so that they might “reach a higher position than the one they occupy,” thereby keeping their civilization from stagnating. Here again, al-Tahtawi was treading a fine line. In a rigidly hierarchical society like Ottoman Egypt, ideas of social mobility would have struck the elites of his time as a dangerous notion.

Al-Tahtawi went further, praising French rights of free expression. The constitution, he explained, encouraged “everybody freely to express his opinion, knowledge and feelings.” The medium by which the average Frenchman made his views known, Al-Tahtawi continued, was something called a “journal” or a “gazette.” This would have been the first time many of al-Tahtawi’s readers would have heard of newspapers, which were still unknown in the Arabic-speaking world. Both the powerful and the common people could publish their views in the newspapers, he explained. Indeed, he stressed the importance of commoners having access to the press “since even a lowly person may think of something that does not come to the mind of important people.” Yet it was the power of the press to hold people to account for their actions that struck the cleric as truly remarkable. “When someone does something great or despicable, the journalists write about it, so that it becomes known by both the notables and the common people—to encourage the person who did something good, or to make the person who has done a despicable thing forsake his ways.”

In his most daring breach of Ottoman political conventions, al-Tahtawi gave a detailed and sympathetic account of the July 1830 revolution that overthrew the Bourbon king Charles X. Sunni Muslim political thought asserted the duty of subjects to submit to rulers, even despotic rulers, in the interest of public order. Al-Tahtawi, who had observed the political drama firsthand, clearly sided with the French people against their king when Charles X suspended the charter and “shamed the laws in which the rights of the French people were enshrined.” In his bid to restore the absolute power of the monarchy, Charles X ignored the deputies in the Chamber, forbade public criticism of the monarch and his cabinet, and introduced press censorship. When the people rose in armed rebellion against their ruler, the Egyptian
cleric took their side. Al-Tahtawi’s extensive analysis of the July Revolution is all the more remarkable for its implicit endorsement of the people’s right to overturn a monarch to preserve their legal rights.
⁵

After five captivating years in Paris, al-Tahtawi returned to Egypt in 1831, his impressions of France still confined to his copybook. Fluent in French, he was given a high-level appointment to establish a government translation bureau, primarily to provide Arabic editions of European technical manuals essential for Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms. While he was busy setting up the translation bureau, al-Tahtawi found time to revise his notes on Paris for publication. Perhaps to protect himself from retribution for the dangerous political ideas his book contained, he paid lavish tribute to Muhammad ’Ali in his preface. The results, published in Arabic in 1834 and subsequently translated into Turkish, were nothing short of a masterpiece. With its clear exposition of European advances in science and technology, and its analysis of Enlightenment political philosophy, al-Tahtawi’s book proved the opening shot in the nineteenth-century age of Ottoman—and Arab—reforms.

T
he Ottomans and their Arab citizens experienced increased interaction with Europe throughout the nineteenth century, forcing the people of the Middle East to recognize that Europe had surpassed them in military and economic might. Although most Ottomans remained convinced of the cultural superiority of their world, their reformers argued that they needed to gain mastery over the ideas and technology of Europe if Europe was not to gain mastery over them.