A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The expansionist and colonizing empire of the first centuries was becoming an Islamic fortress under siege. The world of Islam did not face a frontal assault of the kind it had confronted seven hundred years earlier, in the First Crusade: it was being penetrated in a more subtle and insidious manner. The foreign non-Muslim trading communities had originally been granted their privileges and immunities, which came to be known as the Capitulations, in order to benefit the empire’s economy. The first were given to the Genoese in the Galata suburb of Constantinople immediately after the capture of the city in 1453. The most famous were probably those granted to Francis I of France by Sulaiman the Magnificent in 1535 as a reward for French co-operation with the sultan against the Christian Habsburgs. The Capitulations were not only commercial: they granted full religious liberty to the French in the Ottoman Empire and, more significantly, the right to guard the Christian holy places. What amounted to a French protectorate was established over all the Latin Catholics in the Levant. In the mid eighteenth century these privileges were confirmed and extended as a reward for French diplomatic support in negotiations with Austria. The extraterritorial privileges created by the Capitulations were remarkable. Special consular courts had complete jurisdiction over the nationals of the countries concerned. Non-Muslim foreign nationals living in Turkey were not subject to Ottoman law, however grave the crime they might have committed.

  France was ahead of its European rivals, but not by far. Russia claimed similar protective rights over Orthodox Christians in the empire. England’s special ties were only with the smaller religious minorities such as Jews and the Druze, but these were supported by England’s growing maritime and commercial dominance in the world.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, British sea-power and trading ambitions formed another threat to Ottoman sovereignty in the world of Islam, on the eastern fringes of the empire. The English were not the first Europeans to arrive in force in the Persian/Arabian Gulf: the Portuguese came some thirty years before the Ottomans and, to further their aim of building a great empire in India and the East, attempted to dominate the Red Sea and the Gulf. They attacked and pillaged the eastern Arabian coast from Muscat to Bahrain, leaving forts and garrisons to dominate the indigenous Arab trading and pearling communities. Throughout the sixteenth century the Portuguese controlled the waters of the Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz. Occasionally the Turks, with the help of local tribes, were able to challenge their supremacy and drive the Portuguese out of Bahrain and Muscat, but it was Portuguese naval supremacy which counted.

  The Portuguese presence was also a deep affront to the Persians on the northern side of the Gulf. Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty which ruled from 1501 to 1736, protested vigorously but, owing to his life-and-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, he could do little more. In fact, throughout the sixteenth century it was the presence of Persia as a hostile neighbour on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern border which reduced the power of the Turks to expand into Europe. In 1599 the English even attempted – unsuccessfully – to persuade the Persians to ally themselves with the Christian powers against the Turks.

  The real challenge to the Portuguese came from two rival powers: England and Holland. By the end of the sixteenth century, English and Dutch adventurers (or pirates) were competing with the Portuguese for the spice trade. Shah Abbas I of Persia (1571–1629), a great military leader and administrator, encouraged the English and Dutch East India companies to establish special branches in Persia, giving the fledgeling companies special privileges. In 1602 he was able to oust the Portuguese from their foothold on the Persian mainland north of the island of Hormuz, and twenty years later, with the aid of the fleet of the English East India Company, he ousted the Portuguese from Hormuz itself. In gratitude he gave the Company special privileges in the port which bears his name, Bandar Abbas. Although a powerful ruler and a passionate defender of the Shiite branch of Islam, Shah Abbas, like the Ottoman sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, set a precedent for the granting of concessions to non-Muslims which was to provide the opportunity for foreigners to gain control over a large share of the economic life of Islam.

  However, this Western penetration of the material world had little effect on the minds and beliefs of Muslims in the empire. Secure in the knowledge of the superiority of Islam, they showed no interest in the ways of non-Muslim people. The contrast with the Golden Age of the first Islamic Empire, which had not hesitated to benefit from the wisdom and knowledge of other civilizations, was striking. Only a few individuals pondered on the reasons for the advances in Christian power. As might be expected, the most serious efforts to adopt Western innovations were in the military and naval fields, and these brought with them some revival of interest in mathematics, navigational sciences and cartography. In the early eighteenth century the mild and pleasure-loving sultan Ahmed III introduced some French manners and architecture into the capital, but the effect was entirely superficial. Almost incredibly, there was a total ban on printing in Turkish or Arabic. Printing was known because Jews, Armenians and Greeks began to introduce it from Europe from the late fifteenth century and to set up their own presses, but the religious authorities maintained the ban for Muslims. In 1727 reluctant permission was given for the first Turkish press to print books on subjects other than religion. By the time it was closed in 1742 it had printed seventeen books on language, history and geography. It was not allowed to reopen until 1784.

  The practice of employing non-Turkish converts as high officials had changed since the early days of the empire, and officials were now mainly Turkish. But they were usually illiterate and both unable and unwilling to learn foreign languages, having little interest in the rest of the world. The empire thus depended on Christians and Jews as interpreters. The Greek chief dragoman, or interpreter, was an individual of power and responsibility.

  Thus it was that the great movements of ideas in western Europe from the Renaissance through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation left the Ottoman world almost untouched. A fortiori the same applied to Safavid Persia.

  In the Arab-speaking provinces of the Middle East and North Africa, where Muslims were the great majority, Turkish leadership of the Muslim umma or nation was accepted. Where local dynasties achieved considerable autonomy, as in Egypt, Tunisia and Mesopotamia in the eighteenth century, they nevertheless stopped short of challenging Ottoman sovereignty or attempting to establish an independent nation on a territorial basis – a term which had no meaning at that time. Similarly the Christian minorities, organized in their self-governing millets, accepted the overall structure of the empire. Their loyalties were religious rather than political, but they were resigned to their subordinate status.

  The most notable exception to Muslim acceptance of Turkish leadership of Islam came from Arabia. In the middle of the eighteenth century in Nejd in the centre of the peninsula, a remarkable religious reformer named Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab appeared spreading the essential doctrine of Tawhid or the uniqueness of God, denouncing the prevalent backsliding and idolatry, and calling for a return to the purity of early Islam. Abd al-Wahhab formed a formidable alliance with an outstanding local tribal dynasty, the House of Saud (and thus planted the seed which nearly two centuries later grew into the kingdom of Saudi Arabia). In the second half of the eighteenth century the Wahhabi warriors spread northwards to the Gulf and into Mesopotamia, where they sacked the Shiite holy places of Kerbala and Nejaf. They then turned westwards and in 1806 took the Hejaz with the Islamic holy places of Mecca and Medina. They destroyed many of the saints’ tombs and stripped the Kaaba – Islam’s holiest shrine, in the Mecca Great Mosque – of its ornaments, which outraged their fierce puritanism. The emir Muhammad al-Saud had the public prayers read in his name instead of that of the Ottoman caliph/sultan – he did not regard the Ottoman Turks as worthy guardians of the holy places.

  However, all this still lay in the future; as the eighteenth century drew to its close, the caliph’s authority over Sunni
Islam was still largely intact. In 1789 two events occurred which helped to crack the Ottoman insulation – the outbreak of the French Revolution and the accession as sultan of the reforming Selim III. The French Revolution introduced the novel concepts of political liberty and equality. It also created the basis of nationalism as it has been known in the last two centuries – derived from dedication and loyalty to a nation-state. The most important element was that the movement was secular; it was not only non-Christian but, at least initially, anti-Christian. As such it did not provoke the immediate Muslim hostility which would have been aroused by anything in the nature of a crusade.

  More than any of his predecessors Selim III was interested in fresh external ideas and the possibilities of restoring the strength of the empire through reform. He had been conducting a secret correspondence with King Louis XVI before the Revolution, and he greatly admired French culture. He was not deterred by the regicide of the revolutionaries. Indeed the triumphant success of French arms against the Revolution’s adversaries encouraged him to import French instructors into his new military and naval schools, where French was made a compulsory subject. A whole new class of young Turkish officers began to emerge – familiar with Western ways and prepared to learn from Western technical superiority. As part of the opening to the West, Sultan Selim for the first time allowed the establishment of embassies in five leading European capitals on a reciprocal basis.

  It was even more significant that Selim III tried to apply his reforms to the internal administration of the empire. When he heard of his army’s defeat by Catherine the Great of Russia, he called a council which enumerated the causes of defeat and disaster and proposed reform as the only remedy. He also insisted that the people should elect their own mayors and councillors without the interference of his governors, and he attempted to end illegal extortion and tax-farming (the practice of allowing local governors or tax-collectors to take a cut of the tax revenues).

  Sultan Selim’s reforms, however, did not extend to the Arab provinces of the empire, where power was largely in the hands of local rulers. Damascus for most of the eighteenth century was ruled by governors of the Azm family, who remained loyal to the sultan but independently managed the province’s affairs. Sidon district, on the Syrian coast, was governed on similar lines by a ruthless Bosnian, Ahmad al-Jazzar, and his band of Mamlukes. They controlled the Janissaries and kept the predatory beduin at bay. But while the cities prospered, the countryside was insecure and derelict. Squeezed for taxes, the peasant farmers flocked into the cities. Agriculture flourished only in the mountainous areas controlled by local Maronite and Druze emirs.

  The situation in Mesopotamia was similar. Here there was constant strife between a series of contenders for power, but the contrast was even greater than in Syria between the rich courts of the pashas of Baghdad and Basra and the backwardness and poverty of the ruined countryside. The great food-producing region of medieval times was on the brink of starvation.

  In the vital province of Egypt the situation was rather different. The productivity of the Nile Valley and Delta – perhaps the richest agricultural land on earth – could not be destroyed. With a minimum of secure and effective government, Egypt could export coffee, wheat and rice to the empire. The artisans of the towns produced fine textiles. For a few years (1768–72) an outstanding Mamluke, Ali Bey, provided the strong central government the country needed, but on his death the long-standing struggle between Ottoman officials and Mamluke beys was resumed. They competed to wrest more money from the unfortunate fellahin or peasants. The population had sunk to less than two million, compared with an estimated seven or eight million in Roman times, but the land of Egypt was still a glittering prize.

  Apart from its natural fertility, Egypt enjoyed a remarkable geo-strategic position at the hinge of the Asian and African continents, guarding the principal route to India and the East. In 1798 the 29-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte, the aspiring dictator of France who had defeated Austria in a series of brilliant campaigns, saw the occupation of Egypt as a means of striking at the source of wealth of France’s remaining arch-enemy, Britain, and of controlling the route to India. And his ambitions went further. Talleyrand represented his views to the Directory who then ruled France: ‘Our war with this Power [England] represents the most favourable opportunity for the invasion of Egypt. Threatened by an imminent landing on her shores she will not desert her coasts to prevent our enterprise. This further offers us a possible chance of driving the English out of India by sending thither 15,000 troops from Cairo via Suez.’ Such an achievement would have destroyed Britain’s nascent world empire.

  After landing near Alexandria in July 1798, Bonaparte marched up the Nile and defeated the Mamluke army at the battle of the Pyramids. The two Ottoman-appointed Mamluke beys fled to Upper Egypt, leaving Bonaparte to set up his own military government of occupation. This momentous event marked the first non-Muslim invasion of the heartlands of Islam since the time of the crusades. Bonaparte went out of his way to show his respect for Islam. He even told the shaikhs of the great Islamic university mosque of al-Azhar that he was a disciple of Muhammad and that he and his army were under the Prophet’s special protection. The shaikhs were not impressed and wondered why he and his soldiers did not become Muslims. Bonaparte also tried to convince the Egyptians that his quarrel was not with the Ottoman sultan but with the Mamlukes, from whose tyranny he had come to deliver them. He treated the Egyptian shaikhs and notables as political leaders, appointing them to diwans or councils to administer the large cities, with a French commissary as chairman and adviser. It was an enlightened form of indirect colonial rule. But he notably failed to win the hearts and minds of the Egyptians. Al-Jabarti, the shaikh of Al-Azhar and a historian who left an account of the French occupation, described it as the beginning of the reversal of the natural order. Like his fellow-Muslims, he was alarmed by the promotion of Christian Copts and Greeks as officials and tax-collectors, and at the training of Christians for the army. The French were still regarded as intruders, and their claim to be upholding the authority of the sultan was not believed.

  Despite his tendency towards Caesarism, Bonaparte was a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and he brought with him to Egypt a party of 165 scientists, artists and men of letters. This mission of savants set up Arabic and French printing-presses in Cairo and founded the Institut d’Égypte in imitation of the Institut National in Paris. Its members studied the antiquities and languages of ancient Egypt and laid the foundations of Egyptology. They also examined the economy and society of contemporary Egypt and made a survey for a future Suez Canal. The magnificent twenty-volume Description de l’Égypte which was the result of their work aroused Europe’s interest in both Pharaonic Egypt and the contemporary world of Islam, which was mysterious and unknown. Orientalism in the West received a wholly new impulse.

  Learned Egyptians, such as Shaikh al-Jabarti, visited the Institut and the printing-press and watched chemical and scientific experiments. Al-Jabarti saw a balloon launched at Cairo’s Ezbekiyah Square. But while the Egyptians were politely curious about these displays of Western technology, their fundamental beliefs were unshaken.

  With regard to its strategic objectives, Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt was a failure. Sultan Selim formed an alliance against him with France’s enemies England and Russia. The destruction of Bonaparte’s fleet in Abukir Bay by Nelson on 1 August 1798 placed his only line of communication with France at their mercy. When he advanced into Syria to forestall a Turkish invasion, he was turned back at Acre and forced into a disastrous retreat. In August 1799 he abandoned Egypt and with a handful of followers slipped back to Paris, where a crucial struggle for power was taking place. His successors in Egypt held on for another two years, facing sporadic insurrections in Cairo and attacks by Anglo-Turkish troops to enforce their withdrawal. Although they successfully repulsed these more than once, their weakening situation finally forced them to capitulate and evacuate Egypt.


  Bonaparte’s invasion was a brief episode in the long history of Egypt, but it had lasting significance. It not only aroused in the West a wave of interest in the Arab/Islamic regions of the Ottoman Empire; it also marked the opening of a prolonged struggle between the powers of Europe for influence and control over these territories. The struggle lasted a century and a half. It primarily involved England and France, but Russia was also concerned with the Middle East region on its southern borders, and in the latter part of the nineteenth century the newly united states of Germany and Italy also began to intervene.

  Britain responded to Bonaparte’s threat to its vital interests by helping the Ottoman sultan to expel the French from Egypt. Anglo-French rivalry also extended to the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. After the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, France sent various missions to Istanbul and Tehran to try to secure a friendly alliance between Turkey and Persia against Russia, and to revive French influence in Persia. French agents also appeared in the Gulf, studying the movements of British shipping between the Arabian waters and India. French intervention received a wholly new impulse with Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt. Attacks on British merchant shipping were stepped up by French war vessels and privateers based in Mauritius. A ‘Napoleonic era’ in the region lasted until the French were expelled from Mauritius in 1810.

  The first British reaction to Bonaparte’s arrival in Egypt was the East India Company’s signature of a treaty with the sultan of Muscat. In the 1820s, similar treaties were signed with other local rulers along the Gulf coast. These treaties developed into annually negotiated truces through which Britain endeavoured to establish a Pax Britannica over the waters of the Gulf. At this stage British ambitions in the region were maritime/commercial rather than imperial. There was still no question of challenging the authority either of the Ottoman and Persian empires or of the independent Arab rulers who were outside Ottoman control. Provided these rulers did not make concessions to Britain’s rivals, Britain’s concern was only that they should help to suppress piracy.