Arabs (3 page)

The rules of the new age of American dominance are perhaps the hardest to define. Three U.S. presidents pursued very different policies in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. For George H. W. Bush, who was in office as the Soviet Union collapsed, the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a new world order. Under Bill Clinton, internationalism and engagement remained the hallmarks of U.S. policy. But with the advent of the neoconservatives to power following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the United States turned to unilateralism. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, these policies had a devastating impact on the region as a whole, leading to a war on terrorism that focused on the Muslim world, with the Arabs as prime suspects.

Arguably, the rules have never been more disadvantageous to the Arab world than they are today. Aside from the Arab Gulf states, which have negotiated the new era of American domination to achieve remarkable economic growth and political stability for their citizens, the post–Cold War era has been marked by violence and instability in the Middle East. Prospects for the future in the Arab world have never caused more pessimism—at home, in the region, or internationally. As Samir Kassir said with characteristic restraint: “It’s not pleasant being Arab these days.”

It would be wrong, however, to emphasize the tensions in Arab history to the detriment of all that makes the Arab world so fascinating. As a lifelong student of the Middle East, I was drawn to Arab history because it is so rich and diverse. Following my childhood in Beirut and Cairo, I took my interests in the Middle East to university in the United States, where I studied Arabic and Turkish to enable me to read the primary sources of Arab history. Reading court records and chronicles, archival documents and manuscripts, histories and memoirs, I was equally struck by the familiar and the exotic in Arab history.

So much of what the Arab world has undergone in the past five centuries is common to human experience around the globe. Nationalism, imperialism, revolution,
industrialization, rural urban migration, the struggle for women’s rights—all the great themes of human history in the modern age have played out in the Arab world. Yet, there are many things that make the Arabs distinct: the shape of their cities, their music and poetry, their special position as the chosen people of Islam (the Qur’an stresses no less than ten times that God bestowed His final revelation on humankind in Arabic), their notion of a national community stretching from Morocco through Arabia.

Bound by a common identity grounded in language and history, the Arabs are all the more fascinating for their diversity. They are one people and many peoples at the same time. As the traveler moves across North Africa from Morocco to Egypt, the dialect, calligraphy, landscape, architecture, and cuisine—as well as the form of government and types of economic activity—transform in a constantly changing kaleidoscope. If the traveler continues through the Sinai Peninsula into the Fertile Crescent, similar differences arise between Palestine and Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and Iraq. Moving south from Iraq to the Gulf States, the Arab world shows influences of nearby Iran. In Oman and Yemen, the influences of East Africa and South Asia are apparent. All of these peoples have their own, distinct history, but they all see themselves bound by a common Arab history.

In writing this book, I have tried to do justice to the diversity of Arab history by balancing the experiences of North Africa, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, and the Arabian Peninsula. At the same time, I have tried to show the linkages between the histories of these regions—for example, how French rule in Morocco influenced French rule in Syria, and how rebellion against French rule in Morocco influenced rebellion against French rule in Syria. Inevitably, some countries take up more than their fair share of the narrative, and others are woefully neglected, which I regret.

I have drawn on a wide range of Arab sources, using eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the tumultuous years of Arab history: chroniclers in the earlier periods give way to a wide range of intellectuals, journalists, politicians, poets, and novelists, men and women famous and infamous. It has seemed only natural to me to privilege Arab sources in writing a history of the Arabs, much as one might privilege Russian sources to write a history of the Russians. The authoritative foreigner—statesmen, diplomats, missionaries, and travelers—have valuable insights to share on Arab history. But I believe Western readers would view Arab history differently were they to see it through the eyes of Arab men and women who described the times through which they lived.

CHAPTER 1

T
he hot summer sun beat down upon al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, forty-ninth sultan of the Mamluk dynasty, as he reviewed his troops for battle. Since the founding of the dynasty in 1250, the Mamluks had ruled over the oldest and most powerful Islamic state of its day. The Cairo-based empire spanned Egypt, Syria, and Arabia. Qansuh, a man in his seventies, had ruled the empire for fifteen years. He was now in Marj Dabiq, a field outside the Syrian city of Aleppo, at the northernmost limits of his empire, to confront the greatest danger the Mamluks had ever faced. He would fail, and his failure would set in motion the demise of his empire, paving the way for the conquest of the Arab lands by the Ottoman Turks. The date was August 24, 1516.

Qansuh wore a light turban to protect his head from the burning sun of the Syrian desert. He wore a regal blue mantle over his shoulders, on which he rested a battle axe, as he rode his Arabian charger to review his forces. When a Mamluk sultan went to war, he personally led the troops in battle and took most of his government with him. It was as if an American president took half his cabinet, leaders of both houses of Congress, Supreme Court justices, and a synod of bishops and rabbis, all dressed for battle alongside the officers and soldiers.

The commanders of the Mamluk army and the four chief justices stood beneath the sultan’s red banner. To their right stood the spiritual head of the empire, the caliph al-Mutawakkil III, under his own banner. He too was dressed in a light turban and mantle, with a battle axe resting on his shoulder. Qansuh was surrounded by forty descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, who wore copies of the Qur’an enveloped in yellow silk cases wrapped around their heads. The descendents were joined by the leaders of the mystical Sufi orders under green, red, and black banners.

 

THE ARAB WORLD IN THE OTTOMAN ERA, 1516-1830

Qansuh and his retinue would have been impressed and reassured by the spectacle of 20,000 Mamluk soldiers massed in the plains around them. The Mamluks—the word in Arabic means “one possessed” or “slave”—were a caste of elite slave soldiers. Young men were brought from Christian lands in the Eurasian steppe and the Caucasus to Cairo, where they were converted to Islam and trained in the martial arts. Separated from their families and homelands, they owed their total loyalty to their masters—both those who physically owned them and those who taught them. Trained to the highest standard in warfare and indoctrinated into total devotion to religion and state, the mature Mamluk was then given his freedom and entered the ranks of the ruling elite. They were the ultimate warriors in hand-to-hand combat and had overpowered the greatest armies of the Middle Ages: in 1249 the Mamluks defeated the Crusader army of the French king Louis IX, in 1260 they drove the Mongol hordes out of Arab lands, and in 1291 they expelled the last of the Crusaders from Islamic lands.

The Mamluk army was a magnificent sight. Its warriors wore silk robes of brilliant colors, their helmets and armor were of the highest craftsmanship, and their weapons were made of hardened steel inlaid with gold. The show of finery was part of an ethos of chivalry and a mark of confidence of men who expected to carry the day.

Facing the Mamluks across the battlefield were the seasoned veterans of the Ottoman sultan. The Ottoman Empire had emerged at the end of the thirteenth century as a minor Turkish Muslim principality engaged in holy war against the Christian Byzantine Empire in Anatolia (the Asian lands of modern Turkey). Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Ottomans had integrated the other Turkish principalities and conquered Byzantine territory in both Anatolia and the Balkans. In 1453 the seventh Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II, succeeded where all previous Muslim attempts had failed when he seized Constantinople and completed the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Henceforth Mehmed II would be known as “the Conqueror.” Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, became the Ottoman capital. Mehmed II’s successors proved no less ambitious in expanding the territorial reach of their empire. On this day in 1516, Qansuh was about to engage in battle with the ninth Ottoman sultan, Selim I (r. 1512–1520), nicknamed “the Grim.”

Paradoxically, Qansuh had hoped to avoid going to war by making a show of strength on his northern frontier. The Ottomans were engaged in hostilities with the Persian Safavid Empire. Ruling in what is now modern Iran, the Safavids spoke Turkish like the Ottomans and were probably of Kurdish ethnic origins. Their charismatic leader, Shah Ismail (r. 1501–1524), had decreed Shiite Islam the official religion of his state, which put him on an ideological collision course with the Sunni Ottoman Empire.
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The Ottomans and Safavids had fought over Eastern Anatolia in 1514–1515, and the Ottomans had emerged victorious. The Safavids urgently sought an alliance with the Mamluks to contain the Ottoman threat. Qansuh had no particular
sympathy for the Safavids, but he wanted to preserve the balance of power in the region and hoped that a strong Mamluk military presence in northern Syria would confine Ottoman ambitions to Anatolia, leaving Persia to the Safavids and the Arab world to the Mamluks. Instead, the Mamluk deployment posed a strategic threat to the Ottoman flank. Rather than run the risk of a two-front war, the Ottoman sultan suspended hostilities with the Safavids to deal with the Mamluks.

The Mamluks fielded a great army, but the Ottoman force was greater by far. Its disciplined ranks of cavalry and infantry outnumbered the Mamluks by as much as three to one. Contemporary chroniclers estimated Selim’s army to number 60,000 men in all. The Ottomans also enjoyed a significant technological advantage over their adversaries. Whereas the Mamluks were an old-fashioned army that placed much emphasis on individual swordsmanship, the Ottomans fielded a modern gunpowder infantry armed with muskets. The Mamluks upheld medieval military values while the Ottomans represented the modern face of sixteenth-century warfare. Battle-hardened soldiers with extensive combat experience, the Ottomans were more interested in the spoils of victory than in gaining personal honor through hand-to-hand combat.

 

As the two armies engaged in battle at Marj Dabiq, Ottoman firearms decimated the ranks of the Mamluk knights. The Mamluk right wing crumbled under the Ottoman offensive, and the left wing took flight. The commander of the left wing was the governor of the city of Aleppo, a Mamluk named Khair Bey who, it transpired, had been in league with the Ottomans before the battle and had transferred his allegiance to Selim the Grim. Khair Bey’s treachery delivered victory to the Ottomans shortly after the start of battle.