A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  The reformers did attempt to develop the backward infrastructure of the Ottoman economy – roads, railways and ports. But every effort in this direction only increased the burden of government debt. Despite some improvement in the collection of taxes, expenditure always outran revenues. Soon the Ottoman government was forced to take the fatal step of using receipts from foreign loans to meet the growing deficits. Finally, in October 1875, the government issued a public declaration that only half the amount needed to service the foreign debt could be paid in cash; the remainder would be covered with a new issue of government bonds. This was equivalent to a declaration of bankruptcy. Although twentieth-century experience has shown how debtor nations can skilfully exploit their position with their creditors, this was an appalling position in which the proud Ottomans found themselves.

  Sultan Abdul Mejid had died in 1861, at the age of thirty-eight. If he had been a more forceful character and had given more support to Reshid Pasha and his successors, Ali and Fuad Pashas, it is possible that the reforms would have produced more concrete results. But this is extremely doubtful. There was a narrow limit to what decisions taken at the centre could achieve in trying to transform society in such a vast empire. Through the new schools and academies, the most lasting accomplishment was to further the process, begun much earlier in the century, of developing an Ottoman élite which for the first time in centuries was open to the outside world, could speak foreign languages and could absorb fresh ideas. By its very nature this process could only be gradual, but it was also difficult for reactionaries to reverse. Towards the end of the century the results were apparent in the emergence of a substantial class of educated young Turks with a real understanding of their country’s needs. The reformers were no longer a tiny band of lonely men.

  The changes at the heart of the empire had their negative aspect, however. Partly as a means of initiating reforms, Sultan Mahmud had greatly increased his autocratic powers. He had suppressed the Janissaries and reduced the power of the feudal dynasties and local magistrates in the provinces. The process was reinforced by the reduction of the authority of the ulama over matters of religion, education and law. Sultan Abdul Aziz, who succeeded his brother Abdul Mejid in 1861, emphasized his title as caliph, which hitherto had been purely nominal; he claimed to be the spiritual as well as the political head of the empire. One by one the various countervailing forces with which even the greatest of the earlier sultans had to contend had been removed. But it was inevitable that eventually the Western concepts of constitutional government and the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers which had penetrated the new Ottoman élite should be turned against the sultan’s despotism.

  Abdul Aziz had a more muscular personality than his brother but was of more limited mental capacity. Although initially declaring himself a reformist, he soon showed his sympathies with the reactionaries. However, he was incapable of reversing the process of reform. He was under constant pressure from the powers of Europe, led by France, and given the empire’s weak financial condition he was in no position to resist. Grudgingly, he allowed Ali and Fuad Pashas to pursue the legal and educational reforms.

  By 1871 Ali and Fuad Pashas were both dead. France, the inspiration of liberal reformist ideas, had been defeated by Prussia. External pressures were reduced and there were no men of standing to pursue the reforms. However, it was at this time that internal pressures began to emerge from a lower level.

  Until the nineteenth century, hardly any Ottoman Turks were even aware of the immense technical and material advances achieved by Christian Europe. They neither spoke foreign languages nor travelled abroad, and their education and upbringing helped to convince them of the inevitable superiority of the world of Islam. By the middle of the nineteenth century this situation had changed, however. It was not so much that Western concepts of freedom and equality derived from the Enlightenment and French Revolution had penetrated the empire through the reformed educational system and the new printing-presses; indeed, these concepts were enshrined in the imperial charters which were the basis of the Tanzimat. It was much more that the young Ottomans who were now familiar with these concepts were travelling abroad in increasing numbers and were able to see for themselves what had happened in the countries where such ideas flourished. They reacted with shame and anger that Ottoman society had become so backward and impoverished in comparison with the West. Some of them concluded that the first necessity was to introduce Western concepts of constitutional government, although they always maintained that these were compatible with the Islamic faith. For others the solution was to revive and restore the true principles of Islam, which had been allowed to decay. These opposing trends exist throughout the Muslim world in the present day. But in the 1860s the supporters of both approaches agreed on the urgent need to reduce the despotic powers of the sultan.

  In 1865 a secret revolutionary society was formed which became known as the Young Ottomans. In effect this was the first political party in the Ottoman Empire. Its intellectual inspiration was provided by a new literary movement which was strongly influenced by French writing and ideas but also intensely patriotic. Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha were poets and dramatists of high quality. When exiled for their political agitation, they continued to publish opposition journals and pamphlets in European capitals and smuggled them into Turkey.

  The empire had suffered a series of new humiliations at the hands of the European powers. In 1861, following civil war in Lebanon between Maronite Christians and Druze, Napoleon III, as the protector of the Christians, landed troops in Beirut. The sultan had to accept autonomy for Lebanon under a Christian governor to be chosen by the European powers with the consent of the sultan. When the Serbs revolted in the 1860s, Western pressure forced Turkey to withdraw its troops from the area. Then the Cretans rebelled and declared their union with Greece. Although the Ottoman forces were able to quell the revolt, the Western powers convened a conference in Paris at which Turkey accepted Crete’s autonomy under Christian governors.

  Personally extravagant and capricious, Sultan Abdul Aziz helped the empire to sink further into debt. The situation was worsened by a world-wide economic depression. In 1876 a revolt by Bulgarian peasants was suppressed with outstanding ferocity. The atrocities committed by the Turks helped to turn public opinion in the West even further against the Ottomans.

  The sultan appointed and, after a few months, dismissed a series of grand viziers. One of these was to prove his undoing. Midhat Pasha, the greatest Turkish statesman of the late nineteenth century, was a closet constitutionalist who shared the opinions of the Young Ottomans. In 1873 he had told the British ambassador that the only way to avoid the imminent destruction of the empire lay in making the sultan’s ministers responsible, especially in matters of finances, to a national popular assembly which would have to be truly national by avoiding all distinctions of class and religion. The empire would also have to be decentralized by the establishment of local provincial control over the governors.

  As the political and economic crisis deepened, with Russia threatening war over the Balkans, a mass demonstration of theological students before the seat of government in Istanbul forced the sultan to recall the dismissed Midhat to office. He succeeded in persuading his fellow-ministers of the necessity for constitutional change, and they persuaded the chief mufti to issue a fetwa announcing the sultan’s deposition on the ground of his ‘mental derangement and ignorance of public affairs’. In the face of a show of force by troops and naval vessels, Abdul Aziz offered no resistance. But it was student power which had initiated the coup d’état – setting an ominous precedent.

  High hopes were placed in the new sultan, Abdul Aziz’s nephew Murad, who had a reputation for liberal constitutionalist sympathies. But Murad proved already to be suffering a nervous breakdown. He had to be instantly replaced by his younger brother, Abdul Hamid.

  Abdul Hamid II, whose thirty-three-year reign (1876–1909) led to the final stages of the Otto
man Empire, was the last sultan of consequence. In many respects his complex character was strikingly different from that of most of his predecessors. Austere and pious in his personal life, he was ferociously hard-working. Before his accession, which he had not expected, he managed a farm and learned something of finance by investing in the Istanbul stock exchange. He could be ruthless, but he was not gratuitously cruel or vindictive. His considerable energies were dedicated to the survival of the empire, and his method was to pursue those modernizing reforms which might strengthen its defences and restore its power while maintaining an archaic personal despotism.

  Inclination and necessity made him supremely devious in his dealings both with his own people and with overbearing foreign powers. He began his reign by deceiving both. The Balkans were in a state of acute crisis as a warlike Russia continued to support Serbian and Montenegran rebels against the sultan and to claim the right to protect Ottoman Christian subjects. In an effort to avert war, the British government led by Disraeli, and as anxious as its predecessors to prevent the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, called a conference in Istanbul to discuss the outstanding problems. As the conference made slow but real progress during December 1876, the young sultan promulgated a new constitution. Devised by Midhat Pasha and based on the Belgian constitution of 1831, this provided for an elected parliament and embodied the principle that men of all creeds should be treated as equals. It was the first of its kind in any Muslim state. As was intended, it deflated the Istanbul conference because it seemed to provide for the kind of reforms for which the European powers had been calling. The parliament assembled in March 1877 and promptly passed a resolution declaring that there was no need for Russian protection of Ottoman Christians. Frustrated and exasperated, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, having arranged Austria’s neutrality by means of a secret agreement which divided the Balkans into their respective spheres of influence.

  Initially the Ottoman forces gave a good account of themselves, winning several victories against vastly superior numbers. But over-confident tactics led to disaster. An army surrounded in Plerna was forced to surrender. Slav troops rose in rebellion in all parts of the Balkans. One Russian army occupied the Armenian areas of eastern Anatolia, and another advanced on Istanbul. Abdul Hamid was obliged to sign the humiliating Treaty of San Stefano, which specified the virtual dismemberment of his empire in Europe through the creation of two enlarged and independent Slav states of Bulgaria and Montenegro.

  Disraeli was appalled. As he saw it, the sultan had been ‘reduced to a state of absolute subjugation to Russia’. He contended that all the powers had rights and interests in the Balkans under the terms of earlier treaties. However, Disraeli had to act carefully. He had the support of the Russophobe Queen Victoria (who regarded the Russians as ‘the retarders of all liberty and civilization that exists’), but half his cabinet was opposed to any war on Turkey’s behalf. British public opinion, which had been aroused by the oratorical denunciations of Turkish atrocities by the Liberal opposition leader William Gladstone, was also generally anti-Turkish. But, the British public was fickle. As the Russians continued to advance on Istanbul despite the armistice, Disraeli succeeded in rallying his cabinet and the nation behind a threat to intervene.

  The Congress of Berlin, which in 1878 brought the powers together under the chairmanship of the German chancellor Bismarck, effectively annulled the Treaty of San Stefano and repartitioned the Balkans to take account of the interests of the powers of Europe other than Russia. The independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro were recognized, but the large Bulgarian state which Russia had provided for in the Treaty of San Stefano was reduced and divided into two provinces, one of which became a Turkish self-governing province called Eastern Rumelia. Bismarck commented, ‘There is once again a Turkey in Europe.’

  It was the persistence of Disraeli (now ennobled by Queen Victoria as Lord Beaconsfield) which enforced this Russian retreat. He also enabled the sultan to regain large Armenian territories in eastern Anatolia which had been occupied by the Russians, in return for clear undertakings made to the Congress of Berlin of reforms in the interests of the Armenian population and guarantees of their security from attack by Muslim Circassians and Kurds. The quid pro quo for Britain’s assistance in protecting substantial parts of the Ottoman Empire from Russia was a secret Anglo-Turkish agreement two months earlier by which Britain was allowed to occupy and administer the island of Cyprus – ‘the key to western Asia’ in Disraeli’s imperial conception. To allay France’s fears that this gave Britain too much hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, France was allowed to understand that it could have a free hand in Tunisia, where Britain had hitherto entertained strong ambitions. Three years later France took Britain at its word by invading Tunisia and declaring it a French Protectorate, but this made it more difficult for France to protest when Britain invaded and occupied Egypt in the following year.

  Abdul Hamid pursued with some skill his diplomatic policy of playing off the mutually suspicious European powers against each other, and he prevaricated over the implementation of the terms of the Treaty of Berlin as much as he could. But there was a limit to what he could do. In 1885 the Bulgars of Eastern Rumelia rose in rebellion. The two Bulgarian provinces were united, and the sultan appointed Prince Alexander of Battenburg, the prince of Bulgaria, as governor of Eastern Rumelia as a diplomatic way of accepting the annexation. Abdul Hamid was more successful with Greece. He resisted ceding to Greece the area of Epirus inhabited by Muslims, and he succeeded in holding on to Crete. Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire in Europe had virtually ceased to exist.

  In the empire’s Anatolian heartland the situation was different. In Armenia there was agitation for the reforms promised in the Treaty of Berlin to be carried out. But, inspired by the series of independent non-Muslim governments which had been founded in succession to the empire in Europe, Armenian nationalists went much further and demanded national independence.

  Abdul Hamid had no intention of allowing the Christian powers to dictate the way in which he ruled what was left of his empire. As soon as the 1876 Constantinople Conference had ended he had dismissed Midhat Pasha – the prime force behind the liberal constitution which he had accepted – and had sent him into exile. (In 1878 he was appointed governor of Syria, but in 1881 he was again banished. Allowed back into Turkey after British pressure, he was put on trial on a charge of plotting against the sultan. He was sentenced to life banishment and was later quietly murdered in prison in Arabia.)

  As we have seen, Abdul Hamid allowed the Ottoman parliament to meet in March 1877. Despite the limits to its powers, the parliament showed worrying signs of independence – to the extent of demanding that some of the sultan’s ministers should appear before it to answer charges. Abdul Hamid responded by dissolving the assembly after a session of three months. Six months later he recalled it, hoping that in the continuing international crisis created by the Russian menace it would be more docile. But, once the Treaty of Berlin was concluded in January 1878, parliament renewed both its accusations against certain ministers and its demands that they should answer them. This time Abdul Hamid felt strong enough to dissolve parliament and suspend the constitution indefinitely. The suspension was to last for thirty years. The reform movement of the Young Ottomans was crushed and destroyed.

  The young sultan built up his own remarkable system of autocracy. Gradually he reduced the powers that had been delegated to the grand vizier and reinforced his personal bureaucracy, which reported directly to him. His deeply mistrustful nature caused him to rely on an elaborate system of espionage with Istanbul as the heart of the spider’s web of imperial intrigue. He had no friends and trusted no one. His fears of abduction or assassination became paranoid to the extent that he always extracted his own teeth and prepared his own medicines. His emissaries not only reported on individuals or groups in the provinces who showed signs of becoming too powerful or ambitious but also acted on the sultan’s orders to pr
omote local rivalries and antagonisms. He preferred the use of the silken cord to the sword.

  While Abdul Hamid had no sympathy for constitutionalism or democracy, he was not a hidebound reactionary. In contemporary terms he was a modernizer rather than a westernizer. Like certain of his predecessors, he accepted the need to learn from Europe in order to stand up to its power. In the early years of his reign he was prepared to fulfil the Tanzimat reforms and went some way towards carrying them through.

  His first grand vizier, Mehmed Said Pasha – known as ‘Ingiliz Said’ because of his Anglophile tendencies – declared in a lengthy memorandum on the subject of reform that ‘the advancement of a state can only be secured through knowledge and uprightness.’ The people must be better educated; the state must be more just and less corrupt.

  Public education was the field in which reform was most successful – especially at the higher level. The Mulkiye, or civil-service training-college, and the Harbiye, or war college, were greatly expanded and improved and some eighteen new higher and professional schools were established. The long-delayed project for the University of Istanbul – described as ‘the first truly indigenous modern university in the Muslim world’ – was carried through, although it was not until 1900 that it opened its doors.

  Elementary and secondary education were also expanded. New schools were needed to supply the training-colleges with pupils. They still served only a small minority of the population, and a truly public education system was still a distant goal; nevertheless, the new Turkish élite, trained in modern languages and disciplines, had become much more numerous by the end of the century. The spread of literacy, the growth of higher education and the expansion of printing transformed the intellectual and cultural life of the cities. However, under Abdul Hamid the censorship which already existed was tightened to an absurd degree. Although newspapers multiplied, they were emasculated by the censor. Because the sultan was terrified of assassination, no report of the violent death of a head of state could be published. When the King and Queen of Serbia were murdered in 1903, Turkish newspaper-readers were informed that they had died of indigestion.