Arabs (8 page)

 

The power of the Mamluks over the Ottoman governors is revealed in the factional intrigues of 1729. Zayn al-Faqar, leader of the Faqari faction, convened a group of his officers to plan a military campaign against their Qasimi enemies. “We’ll ask the governor to furnish 500 purses to pay for the expedition,” Zayn al-Faqar told his men. “If he gives them, he will remain our governor, but if he refuses, we will depose him.” The Faqari faction sent a delegation to the Ottoman governor, who refused to pay the expense of a military campaign against the Qasami faction. “We won’t accept a pimp as our governor,” the outraged Zayn al-Faqar told his followers. “Let’s
go and depose him.” On their own initiative, without any other authority, the Faqari faction simply wrote to Istanbul to inform the Porte that the Ottoman governor had been deposed and that a deputy governor had been appointed to take his place. The Mamluks then strong-armed the deputy governor they had just installed to provide the funding for their campaign against the Qasami faction, drawn from the customs revenues of the port of Suez. The payment was justified in terms of the defense of Cairo.
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The Mamluks used extraordinary violence against their rivals. The Qasami faction knew all too well that the Faqaris were preparing for a major confrontation and took the initiative. In 1730 the Qasamis sent an assassin to kill the head of the rival faction, Zayn al-Faqar himself. The assassin was a turncoat who had fallen out with the Faqari faction and joined forces with the Qasimis. He disguised himself as a policeman and pretended to have arrested one of Zayn al-Faqar’s enemies. “Bring him here,” Zayn al-Faqar ordered, wanting to meet his enemy face to face. “Here he is,” the assassin replied, and discharged his pistol into the Mamluk’s heart, killing him instantly.
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The assassin and his accomplice then fought their way out of Faqari leader’s house and escaped, killing several men along the way. It was the beginning of a massive blood feud.

The Faqaris named Muhammad Bey Qatamish as their new leader. Muhammad Bey had risen to the top of the Mamluk hierarchy and held the title of
shaykh al-Balad
, or “commander of the city.” Muhammad Bey responded to the assassination of Zayn al-Faqar by ordering the extermination of all Mamluks associated with the Qasimi faction. “You have among you Qasimi spies,” Muhammad Bey warned, and pointed to an unfortunate man among his retainers. Before the man had a chance to defend himself, Muhammad Bey’s officers dragged him under a table and cut off his head—the first man to be killed in retaliation for Zayn al-Faqar’s murder. Many more would follow before the bloodletting of 1730 came to an end.

Muhammad Bey turned to the deputy governor appointed by Zayn al-Faqar and obtained a warrant to execute 373 persons he claimed were involved in the Faqari leader’s assassination. It was his license to wipe out the Qasimi faction. “Muhammad Bey Qatamish annihilated the Qasimi faction entirely, except for those . . . who had escaped to the countryside,” al-Damurdashi reports. “He even took the young Mamluks who hadn’t reached puberty from their houses, sent them to an island in the middle of the Nile where he killed them, then threw their bodies into the river.” Muhammad Bey closed all of the Qasimi households, swearing never to let the faction take hold in Cairo again.
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The Qasimi faction proved harder to eliminate than Muhammad Bey had imagined. In 1736 the Qasimis returned to settle scores with the Faqaris. They were assisted by Bakir Pasha, the Ottoman governor. Bakir Pasha’s previous term as governor of Egypt had been cut short by the Faqaris, who had deposed him. He thus proved
a natural ally to the Qasimi faction. Bakir Pasha invited Muhammad Bey and the other leading Mamluks of the Faqari faction to a meeting where a group of Qasimis lay in ambush, armed with pistols and swords. No sooner had Muhammad Bey arrived than the Qasimis emerged, shooting the leader of the Faqari faction in the stomach and butchering his leading commanders. In all, they killed ten of the most powerful men in Cairo and piled their severed heads in one of the main mosques of the city for public viewing.
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It was by all accounts one of the worst killings in the annals of Ottoman Egypt.
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Years of factional fighting left both the Faqaris and the Qasimis too weak to preserve a commanding position in Cairo. The rival factions were overtaken by a single Mamluk household known as the Qazdughlis, who came to dominate Ottoman Egypt for the rest of the eighteenth century. With the rise of the Qazdughlis, the extreme factional violence abated, bringing a measure of peace to the strife-torn city. The Ottomans, for their part, never managed to impose their full authority over the rich but unruly province of Egypt. Instead, a distinct political culture emerged in Ottoman Egypt in which the Mamluk households continued to exercise political primacy over Istanbul’s governor centuries after Selim the Grim had conquered the Mamluk Empire. In Egypt, as in Lebanon and Algeria, Ottoman rule adapted to local politics.

 

Two centuries after conquering the Mamluk Empire, the Ottomans had succeeded in extending their empire from North Africa to South Arabia. It had not been a smooth process. Unwilling, or unable, to standardize government in the Arab provinces, the Ottomans in many cases chose to rule in partnership with local elites. The diverse Arab provinces might have had very different relations with Istanbul and wide variations of administrative structures, but they were all clearly part of the same empire. Such heterogeneity was common to the multiethnic and multisectarian empires of the day, such as the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

Until the mid-eighteenth century, the Ottomans managed this diversity with some success. They had faced challenges—most notably in Mount Lebanon and Egypt—but had succeeded by a variety of strategies in entrenching Ottoman rule, ensuring that no local leader posed an enduring threat to the Ottoman center. The dynamics between this center and the Arab periphery changed, however, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. New local leaders emerged who began to combine forces and pursue autonomy in defiance of the Ottoman system, often in concert with the empire’s European enemies. These new local leaders posed a real challenge to the Ottoman state that, by the nineteenth century, would put its very survival in jeopardy.

CHAPTER 2

A
barber comes to know everything that happens in his town. His day is taken up in conversations with people from all walks of life. Judging by the record of his diary, Ahmad al-Budayri “al-Hallaq” (“the Barber”) was a great conversationalist who was well informed on the politics and society of Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century. The issues covered in his diary are familiar subjects of barbershop conversations everywhere: local politics, the high cost of living, the weather, and general complaints about how things were no longer as they were in the good old days.

Apart from what he wrote in his diary, we know very little about the life of Budayri, the barber of Damascus. He was too modest a man to feature in contemporary biographical dictionaries, the “who’s who” of Ottoman times. His diary is all the more remarkable for that. It was unusual for tradesmen to be literate in the eighteenth century, let alone to leave a written record of their thoughts. He told us little about himself, preferring to write about others. We do not know when he was born or died, though it is clear that the diary, spanning the years 1741–1762, was written when he was a mature man. A pious Muslim, Budayri belonged to a mystical Sufi order. He was married, with children, but had little to say of his family life. He was proud of his profession, spoke with admiration of the teacher who inducted him into the trade, and recalled the prominent men whose heads he had shaved.

The barber of Damascus was a loyal Ottoman subject. In 1754 he noted the shock felt by the people of Damascus when they heard of the death of Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754). He recorded the public celebrations marking the ascension of the sultan’s successor, Osman III (r. 1754–1757), when Damascus “was decorated more beautifully than ever in public memory. May God preserve this Ottoman State,” he prayed, “until the end of time. Amen.”
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The barber had good reason to pray for the preservation of the Ottoman state. According to Ottoman notions of statecraft, good government was a delicate balance of four interreliant elements conceived as a “circle of equity.” First, the state needed a large army to exercise its authority. It took great wealth to maintain a large army, and taxes were the state’s only regular source of wealth. To collect taxes, the state had to promote the prosperity of its subjects. For the people to be prosperous the state must uphold just laws, which brings us full circle—back to the responsibilities of the state. Most Ottoman political analysts of the day would have explained political disorder in terms of the neglect of one of these four elements. From all he saw going on in Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century, Budayri was convinced that the Ottoman Empire was in serious trouble. The governors were corrupt, the soldiers were unruly, prices were high, and public morality was undermined by the decline in the government’s authority.

Arguably, the root of the problem lay with the governors of Damascus. In Budayri’s time, Damascus was ruled by a dynasty of local notables rather than by Ottoman Turks dispatched from Istanbul to govern on the sultan’s behalf, as was standard practice in the empire. The ruling Azm family had built their fortune in the seventeenth century by accumulating extensive agricultural lands around the Central Syrian town of Hama. They later settled in Damascus, where they established themselves among the rich and powerful of the city. Between 1724 and 1783, five members of the Azm family ruled Damascus—for a total of forty-five years. Several Azm family members were concurrently appointed to govern the provinces of Sidon, Tripoli, and Aleppo. Taken together, the Azm family’s rule over the Syrian provinces represents one of the more significant local leaderships to emerge in the Arab provinces in the eighteenth century.

We might think today that Arabs would have preferred being governed by fellow Arabs rather than by Ottoman bureaucrats. However, Ottoman bureaucrats in the eighteenth century were still servants of the sultan who, at least in theory, owed their full loyalty to the state and ruled without self-interest. The Azms, in contrast, had clear personal and family interests at stake and used their time in high office to enrich themselves and to build their dynasty at the Ottoman state’s expense. The circle of equity was broken, and things were beginning to fall apart.

 

Budayri discussed at length the strengths and weaknesses of Azm rule in Damascus. As‘ad Pasha al-Azm ruled for most of the period covered by Budayri’s diary. His fourteen-year reign (1743–1757) was to prove the longest of any governor in Ottoman Damascus. The barber could be quite lavish in his praise of As’ad Pasha, but he found a lot to criticize. He condemned the Azm governors for their plunder of the city’s wealth and held them responsible for disorders among the military and the breakdown in public morality.

Under Azm rule, the army had degenerated from a disciplined force upholding law and order to a disorderly rabble. The Janissaries in Damascus were split into two groups—the imperial troops dispatched from Istanbul (the
kapikullari
), and the local Janissaries of Damascus (the
yerliyye
). There were also a number of irregular forces of Kurds, Turcomans, and North Africans. The different corps were in constant conflict and posed a real challenge to peace in the city. In 1756 the residents of the ‘Amara quarter paid dearly for siding with the imperial Janissaries in their fight with the local Damascene Janissaries. The latter retaliated by putting the whole of the ’Amara quarter—homes and shops—to the torch.
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Budayri recounts numerous instances of soldiers attacking and even killing residents of Damascus with complete impunity. In times of high anxiety, the townspeople responded by closing their shops and shutting themselves in their homes, bringing the economic life of the city to a standstill. The barber’s diary captures a real sense of the menace posed by the “security forces” to the average Damascene’s person and property.

 

Budayri also held the Azms responsible for the chronic high food prices in Damascus. Not only did they fail to regulate the markets and ensure fair prices, but as large landholders, Budayri alleged, the Azm governors actually abused their position to hoard and create artificial grain shortages to maximize their personal profits. Once, when the price of bread had fallen, As’ad Pasha sent his retainers to pressure the bakers to raise their prices in order to protect the wheat market, which was the source of his family’s wealth.
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In his diary, Budayri railed against this accumulation of wealth by the Azm governors while the common folk of Damascus went hungry. As‘ad Pasha’s abuses of power were epitomized by the palace he built in central Damascus, which still stands in the city today. The project consumed all of the building materials and all of the trained masons and artisans of the city, driving up the cost of construction for common Damascenes. As’ad Pasha ordered his builders to strip precious building materials from older houses and buildings in the city, without regard for their owners or their historic value. The project was a testament to As‘ad Pasha’s greed. According to Budayri, As’ad Pasha constructed the palace with countless hiding places for his vast personal wealth “under the floors, in the walls, the ceilings, the water reservoirs and even the toilets.”
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The collapse in military discipline, combined with the cupidity of the Azm governors, Budayri believed, had led to a grievous deterioration in public morals. The legitimacy of the Ottoman state rested in large part on its ability to promote Islamic values and to maintain the institutions necessary for its subjects to live within the precepts of Sunni Islam. A breakdown in public morality was thus a clear sign of a breakdown in the state’s authority.