A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  When the sultan prevaricated, the Russian and French fleets joined the British fleet at Navarino and on 20 October blew the combined Turkish and Egyptian fleets out of the water.

  The sultan broke off relations with the three powers and summoned his Muslim subjects for a jihad or holy war. But there was little he could do. In the previous year he had destroyed the Janissaries, and the reconstruction of the Ottoman army had hardly begun. His best protection was that Britain and France wanted neither the dismemberment of his empire nor the aggrandizement of Russia. Five years later, on 7 May 1832, in accordance with a new Treaty of London, Greece became an independent kingdom under the Bavarian prince Otho. All the powers of Europe could claim a share in this settlement, and it had not led, as the sultan had feared, to the disintegration of the empire.

  Muhammad Ali’s forces had suffered severe losses, and the financial strain on Egypt was heavy. But the disaster of Navarino had not dampened the ambitions of the wali or his son. Muhammad Ali believed he had been promised the pashalik of Syria as a reward for his help against the Greeks, but Sultan Mahmud said that he would have to be content with the pashalik of Crete. Muhammad Ali therefore decided to seize Syria for himself. While rebuilding his fleet, he dispatched Ibrahim at the head of an army which routed the Ottoman forces near Homs and again near Aleppo. Ibrahim then passed through the Taurus range into Anatolia and defeated the sultan’s army at Konya. When he reached Bursa, he was poised to take Istanbul and overthrow the Ottoman Empire.

  A desperate Sultan Mahmud appealed to Britain to send the Royal Navy to the Dardanelles and Alexandria. Palmerston, the British prime minister, was in favour, but the majority in his cabinet refused. The sultan was therefore obliged to turn to Russia. (Palmerston later wrote that ‘No British cabinet at any period of the history of England ever made so great a mistake in foreign affairs.’) The Russians sent ships and landed troops; Ibrahim prudently agreed to negotiate. By now alerted to the danger of Russian ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean, Britain and France intervened to insist on a Russian withdrawal in return for the sultan’s agreement to make concessions to Muhammad Ali – the sultan granted him the pashalik of the whole of Syria. The Russians did withdraw, but the sultan was obliged to accept an agreement known as the Treaty of Hunkiar Iskelessi, which bound him to an alliance with Russia. This included a secret clause which allowed Russian warships to pass freely through the Dardanelles if Russia should be at war but made a similar concession to other powers conditional on Russian consent. Palmerston’s regrets are easy to understand.

  Muhammad Ali’s ambition to build a predominantly Arabic-speaking empire on the ruins of Ottoman power no longer seemed fanciful. He controlled the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. He even thought of making a bid for the caliphate.

  However, his dream was a chimera. The pan-Arab idea did not exist in the consciousness of the people, and the Albanian Muhammad Ali could not be its inspiration. Ibrahim could conceivably have provided such an inspiration. Unlike his father, he spoke Arabic, regarded himself as Egyptian and was prouder of his Egyptian private soldiers than of their Ottoman officers. But he never challenged his father’s authority and, although he was more cultivated and civilized, he was not equal to Muhammad Ali’s formidable political abilities.

  Ibrahim was placed in charge of Egypt’s new Syrian possessions. But, although he had a powerful army under his command, his task of imposing a strongly centralized and modernizing administration was not easy. The various sects of Syria – Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze and Maronites – had become accustomed to a high degree of autonomy, whether under local dynasties, such as the Azms in Damascus or the Shihabs in Lebanon, or Ottoman walis who remained only for periods too brief to establish their authority. Ibrahim was confronted by a variety of vested interests who had no desire to be incorporated into a centralized economy based on the type of government monopolies Muhammad Ali had instituted in Egypt. The Ottomans had had their monopolies, but the system was inefficient and could easily be subverted. In Syria and Lebanon there were flourishing cotton and silk textile industries, although they faced increasing competition from European imports, and the Levantine merchants prospered on the transit trade to the East. They resented Egyptian interference, as did the Druze landowners growing cereals on the Hauran plains of southern Syria.

  Ibrahim was faced with various acts of rebellion, which he suppressed with his customary ruthlessness. Nevertheless his achievements during the decade of his governorship (1831–40) were considerable. He streamlined the administration, reformed the tax system and began the process of expanding and improving education. His aims accorded with those of his father in Egypt, who guided and directed his actions: to lay the foundations of a strong state with a self-sustaining economy. Eventually he hoped that Syria’s manufacturing industries would compete with those of Europe.

  His plans would have been over-ambitious even if he had had more time to realize them. The Syrian merchants and landowners could be dynamic and enterprising, but they were not ready to be moulded into an alien system. Ibrahim did succeed in expanding and improving trade with Europe and in increasing the area under cultivation, but this was through more efficient government rather than the encouragement of local initiative. For all Ibrahim’s attempts to identify with his subjects, he remained a foreign occupier. (Many of the same problems beset the next Egyptian attempt to rule Syria, 120 years later.)

  As part of Ibrahim’s policy of modernization, Christian missionaries were for the first time allowed to open schools. These missionaries were principally American Protestants and they founded several schools, including one for girls. They also established the first Arabic printing-press in Syria. Ibrahim went further to attempt to establish the principle of equality between Muslims and Christians. Within the Ottoman Empire this meant favouring Christians at Muslim expense. In Egypt Muhammad Ali had always made use of talent and expertise wherever he found it, and he did not hesitate to employ Europeans or to promote local non-Muslims when he deemed it necessary. In Syria this policy meant favouring the Christian merchants, who had the best contacts with Europe (and frequently held berats or patents granted by European consulates). Ibrahim imposed a special poll tax on the Muslims of the cities, which equated them with the non-Muslims who had always paid such a tax.

  Not unnaturally, the Muslims were not in favour of this innovation. Their resentment greatly increased when Muhammad Ali insisted that Ibrahim begin conscripting Syrians into the Egyptian army. Ibrahim, who was much closer to identifying himself with his Arab subjects than his father, protested that this was unwise; but Muhammad Ali insisted.

  However, Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim might have been able to subdue opposition and hold on to their east-Mediterranean/Arabian empire if they had not incurred the implacable opposition of the European powers, led by Britain. Muhammad Ali could defy his nominal master the Ottoman sultan Mahmud – and indeed could contemplate his overthrow – but Britain preferred that a weakened Ottoman Empire should survive rather than be dismembered and swallowed by one of its rivals. Britain was still less enthusiastic that the empire should be replaced by a dynamic and expansionist Muslim power; but it was precisely this possibility which alarmed the powers of Europe.

  This was the period in which the Palmerstonian doctrine of imperialism was developed. It was directed not towards the acquisition of colonies – that was to come later in the century – but to the instant protection of British interests wherever they were threatened. As the world’s leading industrial and commercial power, Britain saw these interests as largely economic. British manufactured goods were flooding eastwards to Asian markets by the Gulf and Red Sea routes. The era of the steamship had arrived, and Muhammad Ali had greatly eased the passage to India by developing the overland route between Alexandria and Suez. But although British trade was expanding throughout the eastern Mediterranean, it was severely obstructed by the system of monopolies in the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston directed all his po
werful diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire towards having these removed. In 1838 he succeeded when an Anglo-Turkish treaty was signed giving Britain and the other European powers the right to trade throughout the Ottoman Empire in return for a tariff of only 3 per cent.

  At one stroke Palmerston’s treaty had opened the way to foreign commercial domination of the Ottoman Empire. It had also removed a principal source of the sultan’s revenue from the state monopolies. Muhammad Ali rightly regarded the terms of the treaty as disastrous for his ambitions, and he refused to apply them to Egypt. He had done everything in his power to protect and facilitate British trade across Egypt, but he could not allow Britain to destroy the sources of his independence. A few weeks before the signature of the treaty, he had announced his decision to declare Egypt and Syria an independent, hereditary kingdom and had offered to pay the sultan the high sum of 3 million pounds as the price for his acceptance of this. Palmerston immediately registered his strong disapproval and made it clear that, if war should ensue between Muhammad Ali and the Ottoman Empire, Britain would be on the side of the sultan.

  Britain was determined to foil Muhammad Ali’s ambitions. It had become seriously alarmed by the spread of his power along the whole eastern coast of the Red Sea from Bab al-Mandab to Mecca. He had even seized the Tihama coast of Yemen, bought the city of Taez from its corrupt governor (an uncle of the imam of Yemen) and gained control over its valuable coffee trade. The vital route to India seemed to be threatened at a time when the importance of the Arabian coast had been increased by the arrival of steamships and the need for secure coaling-stations. ‘I think that it will be absolutely necessary to have a possession of our own on or near the Red Sea,’ wrote the Governor of Bombay, Sir Robert Grant, in 1837.

  The opportunity to acquire such a possession soon arose. The sultan of Lahej, in whose territory on the south-eastern corner of Arabia lay the tiny port of Aden, was accused of permitting the molestation of British shipping. In January 1839 Commander Haines of the Bombay Marine landed with a small force and seized the town, inaugurating 130 years of British rule in Aden and increasing influence in the tribal hinterland. The Aden settlement was attached to the Bombay presidency, emphasizing its importance to India, and so remained until it became a Crown Colony.

  A de facto alliance against Muhammad Ali was now in existence between Palmerston and Sultan Mahmud. In the summer of 1839, the sultan declared war on his ambitious viceroy and sent an army across the Euphrates into northern Syria. In spite of the new training of the Ottoman forces by the German military mission headed by Moltke, at the battle of Nazib they were once again soundly defeated by Ibrahim. (He successfully bribed some of the Ottoman troops to desert.) At the same time the admiral of the Ottoman navy, which had been ordered into action, decided to sail the entire fleet to Alexandria and surrender to Muhammad Ali.

  Sultan Mahmud died suddenly, before the news of the Nazib disaster could reach him, and he was succeeded by his 16-year-old son Abdul Mejid. The boy sultan and his government were at Muhammad Ali’s mercy.

  Ibrahim wanted to consolidate his victory by advancing into the Anatolian heartland. There was nothing to prevent him, but his father commanded restraint. He understood that the destruction of the Ottoman Empire would provoke the powers of Europe. He still hoped that they would accept his more limited ambition of holding on to his possessions in the Levant, North Africa and Arabia. However, this was no longer possible. Palmerston had come to regard him as a dangerous menace. ‘I hate Mehemet Ali,’ he wrote to the British ambassador in Paris, ‘whom I consider as nothing better than an ignorant barbarian who by cunning and boldness and mother wit has been successful in rebellion…I look upon his boasted civilization of Egypt as the arrantest humbug, and I believe that he is as great a tyrant and oppressor as ever made a people wretched.’

  Palmerston had his own share of humbug. He knew that the Ottoman sultan was no less tyrannical than Muhammad Ali or Ibrahim and had a rather worse record for his treatment of minorities. The difference was that the Egyptian dictatorship was relatively effective while a weak sultan could be manipulated. Palmerston set about organizing the five powers of Europe (Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia) behind a move to expel Muhammad Ali from the Levant. France was his greatest problem, because it still regarded Muhammad Ali as a valuable ally whose naval power – particularly in combination with that of France – would act as a counterpoise to Britain in the eastern Mediterranean. Palmerston used a masterly combination of diplomacy and bullying to overcome French resistance. Although half his own cabinet was afraid that he might be provoking a European war, Palmerston played on the fact that King Louis-Philippe of France was even more cautious because of his fears of an attempted coup d’état.

  At the Conference of London in July 1840 the five powers, including a reluctant France, agreed to the ‘Pacification of the Levant’ under which Muhammad Ali would be obliged to withdraw all his troops from Syria and to restore the Turkish fleet to the sultan. His family would be recognized as hereditary viceroys of Egypt, but would not inherit his viceroyship of Syria.

  When Muhammad Ali indignantly refused these terms, a British fleet under Admiral Napier appeared off the Syrian coast and sent out emissaries calling upon the population to revolt. All the resentment against conscription, high taxation and Ibrahim’s flouting of local traditions found expression in rebellions which broke out all over the country. After failing to bribe Ibrahim’s governor of Beirut to defect, the British fleet bombarded the city and an Anglo-Turkish force landed. When Napier sailed on to Alexandria, Muhammad Ali realized he was beaten. His French allies had deserted him and he could not fight the European powers alone.

  Through the terms of the Treaty of London of 1841, the powers of Europe cut back Muhammad Ali’s ambitions and restored his vassal status within the Ottoman Empire. He was stripped of all his possessions except the Sudan, which meant that Crete, Syria and the Hejaz were restored to direct Ottoman rule. At the same time he was obliged to reduce his armed forces, which at one time had approached a quarter of a million men, to 18,000. The instrument of his expansionism was removed, and he no longer could threaten to seize Constantinople.

  His consolation was that his position as hereditary pasha of Egypt was confirmed. Although this had been the limit of his original ambitions, his horizons had subsequently expanded. But now he could no longer hope to dominate the trade routes to Asia or challenge the growing hegemony of the European powers in the eastern Mediterranean.

  A semi-independent Egypt was still a country of some political and economic importance. Although tired and elderly (he was seventy-two at the time of the Treaty of London) Muhammad Ali was not entirely broken in spirit. Maintaining his enormous army had imposed an impossible burden of taxation on the Egyptian people. (As Palmerston typically observed, ‘Like all countries Egypt has rich and poor. The rich is Muhammad Ali and the poor is everyone else.’) He had already been seeking ways of retrenchment before the Treaty of London, and the enforced reduction in military spending could have brought relief. The trouble was that the focus of his entire economic policy – the raison d’être of his industrialization programme – was the servicing of the needs of his military power. Without demand for their products, the military factories would collapse.

  It could be argued that Muhammad Ali’s attempt to industrialize Egypt was already a failure. Unlike the European countries, led by Britain, which were achieving a rapid industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Egypt had no natural resources of coal or timber to produce steam power and no steel industry. The 40,000 industrial workers, helped by camels and donkeys, produced nearly all their own power. The imported machinery was badly serviced and continually broke down. It was even more of a disadvantage that no class of independent entrepreneurs or trained managers was developing under Muhammad Ali’s authoritarian regime. Although he sent some young Egyptians for training in Europe, it was mainly members of the Turco-Circassian officer class
that he placed in charge of the factories. Crucial hydraulic and other engineering works were in the hands of foreign technicians, and commerce was increasingly controlled by European merchants.

  It is possible, as some Egyptian economic historians have argued, that without European interference the mistakes could have been rectified and Egypt might have achieved a genuine industrial revolution in the wake of Europe. But the auguries were poor, and it would have required a successor to the aged Muhammad Ali of equal forcefulness and ability but greater enlightenment. Ibrahim might conceivably have filled the role and, with his health and reason failing, Muhammad Ali delegated his powers to his son in 1847. But in little more than a year Ibrahim succumbed to a fever, and Muhammad Ali followed him within a few months, on 2 August 1849, without realizing that his son was dead.

  In accordance with the terms of the Treaty of London, Muhammad Ali was succeeded by his eldest male descendant – his grandson Abbas, the son of Tussun. Abbas was a gloomy reactionary who repudiated the European influences introduced by his grandfather and uncle. He dismissed the foreign advisers and closed the secular schools. However, he was far from being an Egyptian patriot and had no love for the Egyptians. Because he detested the French, he showed some favour towards the British and allowed them to build the Cairo–Alexandria railway – the first in Africa or Asia – which greatly enhanced Britain’s imperial route to India. But Abbas was essentially a xenophobic Ottoman, loyal to the sultan. He had no imperial ambitions of his own. Moreover, a provision of the Treaty of London was that appointment of senior officers in his much diminished army must be approved by Istanbul. This ensured that the high command was in the hands of the Turco-Circassian ruling class rather than native-born Egyptians.