Arabs (9 page)

In Budayri’s view, there was no greater proof of the decline of public morality than the brazen comportment of the prostitutes in his city. Damascus was a conservative
town where respectable women covered their hair, dressed modestly, and had few opportunities to mix with men outside their own families. The prostitutes of Damascus observed none of these niceties. The barber frequently complained about drunken prostitutes, carousing with equally drunken soldiers, who strode through the streets and markets of Damascus with their faces unveiled and their hair uncovered. The governors of Damascus tried several times to ban prostitution in the city, with no effect. Emboldened by the support of the city’s soldiers, the prostitutes refused to comply.

It would seem that the common people of Damascus came to accept, even admire, the city’s prostitutes. One beautiful young woman named Salmun completely captivated the people of Damascus in the 1740s, her name becoming a byword in the local slang for all that was trendy and beautiful. A particularly smart dress would be called a “Salmuni dress,” or a novel piece of jewelry a “Salmuni bauble.”

Salmun was a reckless young woman defiant of authority. In a scene reminiscent of Bizet’s
Carmen
, Salmun crossed paths with a
qadi
(judge) in downtown Damascus one afternoon in 1744. She was drunk and carrying a knife. The judge’s retainers shouted at her to clear the path. Salmun only laughed at them and launched herself at the qadi with her knife. The judge’s men barely managed to restrain her. The qadi had her arrested by the authorities, who executed Salmun for the outrage. A town crier was then sent through the streets of Damascus ordering all prostitutes to be killed. Many women fled, and others went into hiding.
⁵

The prohibition proved short-lived, and the prostitutes of Damascus were soon back on the streets, unveiled and uninhibited. “In those days,” the barber wrote in 1748, “corruption increased, the servants of God were oppressed, and prostitutes proliferated in the markets, day and night.” He described a parade of the prostitutes held in honor of a local saint with outrage at both the profanation of religious values and at the fact that the Damascene public seemed to accept it. A prostitute had fallen in love with a young Turkish soldier who had fallen ill. She vowed to hold a prayer session in homage to the saint if her lover regained his health. When the soldier recovered, she fulfilled her vow:

Soon after the parade, city authorities tried once again to ban prostitution. The heads of the town quarters were told to report anyone suspicious, and town criers were sent round to urge women to wear their veils properly. Yet within days of these
new orders, the barber claimed, “we saw the very same girls walking the alleys and markets as was their custom.” At that point, the governor, As’ad Pasha al-Azm, abandoned all efforts to expel the bold prostitutes and chose to tax them instead.

The Azm governors abused their powers of office to enrich themselves at the people’s expense, yet they could not curb vice or control the soldiers nominally under their command. The barber of Damascus was deeply dismayed. Could a state governed by such men long survive?

 

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans and the Arabs had come to a crossroads.

On the face of it, the Ottomans had succeeded in absorbing the Arab world into their empire. Over the course of two centuries the Ottomans had extended their rule from the southernmost tip of the Arabian peninsula to the frontiers of Morocco in northwestern Africa. The Ottoman sultan was universally accepted by the Arabs as their legitimate sovereign. They prayed in the sultan’s name each Friday, they contributed soldiers for the sultan’s wars, and they paid their taxes to the sultan’s agents. The great majority of Arab subjects, those who farmed the land in the countryside and the city-dwellers who worked as craftsmen and merchants, had accepted the Ottoman social contract. All they expected in return was safety for themselves, security for their property, and the preservation of Islamic values.

Yet, an important change was taking place in the Arab lands. Whereas in the early Ottoman centuries the Arabs, as free-born Muslims, were excluded from high offices reserved to the servile elites recruited through the
devshirme
, or “boy levy,” by the mid-eighteenth century local notables were rising to the highest ranks of provincial administration and awarded the title “pasha.” The Azms of Damascus were but one example of a broader phenomenon that extended from Egypt through Palestine and Mount Lebanon to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. The rise of local leaders came at the expense of Istanbul’s influence in the Arab lands, as more tax money was spent locally on the armed forces and the building projects of local governors. The phenomenon spread across a number of Arab provinces, with the cumulative effect being a growing threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the proliferation of local leaders led many Arab provinces to rebel against Istanbul’s rule.

Local leaders in the Arab provinces came from diverse backgrounds, ranging from heads of Mamluk households to tribal shaykhs and urban notables. They were driven by ambition more than any specific grievance with the Ottoman way of doing things. They did have wealth in common: they were, without exception, large landholders who had taken advantage of changes in Ottoman land practices to build up huge estates, which they held for life and in some cases passed on to their children. They diverted the revenues of their estates away from the government’s treasury to meet
their own needs. They built lavish palaces and maintained their own armies to reinforce their power. Istanbul’s loss was a real gain to the local economy in the Arab provinces, and the authority to extend patronage to artisans and militiamen only enhanced the power of local lords.

Though such local notables were not unique to the Arab provinces—similar leaders emerged in the Balkans and Turkish Anatolia—the Arab lands were less central to Istanbul, in every sense of the word. The Ottomans relied less on revenues and troops from the Arab provinces than they did from the Balkans and Anatolia. Moreover, the Arab lands were much farther from Istanbul, and the central government was unwilling to spare the troops and resources to put down minor rebellions. Istanbul was more concerned with challenges from Vienna and Moscow than troubles posed by local leaders in Damascus and Cairo.

By the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was facing far greater threats from its European neighbors than anything the Arab provinces might produce. The Habsburgs in Austria were rolling back the Ottoman conquests in Europe. Until 1683 the Ottomans were pressing at the gates of Vienna. By 1699 the Austrians had defeated the Ottomans and were awarded Hungary, Transylvania, and parts of Poland in the Treaty of Karlowitz—the first territorial losses the Ottomans had ever suffered. Peter the Great of Russia was pressing the Ottomans in the Black Sea region and in the Caucasus. Local notables in Baghdad or Damascus were of no consideration compared to threats of this order of magnitude.

Ottoman defeats by European armies emboldened local challengers inside Ottoman domains. As local leaders grew more powerful, the Ottoman officials that were sent to the Arab provinces gradually lost the respect and obedience of their Arab subjects. Government officials also lost authority over the sultan’s soldiers, who grew lawless and engaged in scuffles with local soldiers and the militias of local leaders. Insubordination in military ranks in turn undermined the authority of the Islamic judges and scholars, who traditionally served as the guardians of public order. Where the Ottomans were seen to be ineffectual, the people turned increasingly to local leaders to provide for their security instead. In Basra, a local Christian merchant wrote, “Respect and fear were given to the chiefs of the Arabs, and as for the Ottoman, nobody goes in awe of him.”
⁷

A state that loses the respect of its subjects is in trouble. The chronicler ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, analyzing the breakdown of Ottoman authority over the Mamluks in eighteenth-century Egypt, reflected: “If this age should urinate in a bottle, time’s physician would know its ailment.”
⁸
The emergence of local leaders lay at the heart of the Ottoman illness and could only be redressed by a strong reassertion of the state’s authority. The Porte’s dilemma was to secure enough stability on its European frontiers to free the necessary resources to address the challenges within its Arab provinces.

The nature of local rule differed from one region to the next and posed a variable threat to Istanbul’s authority. Roughly speaking, those provinces closest to the Ottoman center were the most benign, with prominent families like the Shihabs in Mount Lebanon, the Azms in Damascus, and the Jalilis in Mosul establishing dynasties loyal to Ottoman rule but pressing for the greatest possible autonomy within those limits.
⁹
Further to the south, in Baghdad, Palestine, and Egypt, Mamluk leaders emerged who sought to expand the territory under their control in direct challenge to the Ottoman state. The emergence of the Sa’udi-Wahabi confederation in Central Arabia posed the gravest threat to the Ottoman government when it seized control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and prevented the annual Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from reaching the holy cities. In contrast, more remote provinces, such as Algiers, Tunis, and Yemen, were happy to remain vassals of the Ottoman sultan, paying an annual tribute in return for extensive autonomy.

These local leaders in no way comprised an Arab
movement
. Many were not ethnic Arabs, and several did not even speak Arabic. The challengers to Ottoman rule in the second half of the eighteenth century were instead ambitious individuals acting in their own interests with little concern for the Arab people under their rule. In isolation, they posed little threat to the Ottoman center. When they worked together, however—as when the Mamluks in Egypt entered an alliance with a local leader in Northern Palestine—they were capable of conquering whole Ottoman provinces.

 

Oil put the Middle East on the map in the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, it was cotton that generated extreme wealth in the Eastern Mediterranean. European demand for cotton dates back to the seventeenth century. Whereas the British Lancashire mills drew primarily on cotton from the West Indies and the American colonies, the French relied on Ottoman markets for the bulk of their cotton imports. As spinning and weaving technology improved in the course of the eighteenth century, leading to the Industrial Revolution, European demand for cotton spiked. French cotton imports from the Eastern Mediterranean increased more than fivefold, rising from 2.1 million kg in 1700 to nearly 11 million kg by 1789.
¹⁰
The cotton most prized by European markets was produced in the Galilee region in Northern Palestine. The wealth generated by Galilee cotton was sufficient to feed the ambitions of a local dynast who grew powerful enough to challenge Ottoman rule in Syria.

The strongman of the Galilee was Zahir al-’Umar (c.1690–1775). Zahir was a leader of the Zaydanis, a Bedouin tribe that had settled in the Galilee in the seventeenth century and secured control of extensive agricultural lands between the towns of Safad and Tiberias. They enjoyed strong trade connections with Damascus and began to build a respectable family fortune through their control of cotton plantations in the Galilee. Zahir represented the third generation of Zaydani shaykhs in
the Galilee. Though not particularly well known in the West, Zahir has been a celebrity in the Arab world for centuries. He is often—anachronistically—described as something of an Arab or Palestinian nationalist due to his history of confrontation with Ottoman governors. By the time of his death he was already the stuff of legend—and the subject of two near-contemporary biographies.

Zahir’s long and remarkable career began in the 1730s when he entered into an alliance with a Bedouin tribe to seize the town of Tiberias, which was hardly more than a village at the time. He consolidated his gains by securing a formal appointment as tax collector for the Galilee region from the governor of Sidon. Zahir then set about fortifying Tiberias and built up a small militia of some 200 horsemen.

From his base in Tiberias, Zahir and his family began to extend their control across the fertile plains and highlands of northern Palestine, ordering the tenant farmers to plant their lands in cotton. He gave his brothers and cousins territories to run on his behalf. As Zahir began to carve out a small principality for himself, he grew increasingly powerful. The more territory he controlled, the more cotton revenues he accrued, allowing him to expand his army, which in turn made further territorial expansion possible.

By 1740 Zahir had emerged as the most powerful leader in northern Palestine. He had defeated the warlords of Nablus, he had taken control of Nazareth, and now he dominated the trade between Palestine and Damascus, which further contributed to his wealth and resources.

The rapid growth of the Zaydani principality put Zahir al-’Umar on a collision course with the governor of Damascus. One of the governor’s primary duties was to provide for the needs and expenses of the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca. Zahir now controlled lands whose tax revenues traditionally were earmarked to pay the expenses of the pilgrimage caravan. By beating the governor of Damascus to the taxes of northern Transjordan and Palestine, Zahir was putting the finances of the pilgrimage caravan in jeopardy. When the government in Istanbul learned of the situation, the sultan sent orders to his governor in Damascus, Sulayman Pasha al-Azm, to capture and execute Zahir and destroy his fortifications around Tiberias.