The Modern Middle East (6 page)

One of the more significant side effects of the radical political shifts in the Middle East was the steady ascent to power of a small Turkic tribe known by the name of one of its earliest leaders. The Ottomans originated in northwestern Anatolia, not far from the city that most rulers had dreamt of conquering one day, the magnificent Constantinople. The Ottomans were the beneficiaries of the declining powers of the Saljuqs in Anatolia, where in 1281 a chieftain’s son named Osman conquered new territories and set out to defeat the Byzantine Empire. The Ottomans expanded quickly throughout Anatolia and by 1345 had crossed over the narrow Bosphorus Straits into Europe. In 1389 they scored a decisive victory in the Battle of Kosovo and established control over the western Balkans. Historical record indicates that the Ottoman advances into Europe, reinforced by the frequent settlement in major Balkan cities of Anatolians accompanying the troops, were not always deeply resented by the local populations. In fact, “The Balkan peasant soon came to appreciate that conquest by the Moslem invader spelled for him liberation from Christian feudal power, whose manifold exactions and abuses had worsened with the increase of monastic lands. Ottomanization was now conferring upon him unforseen benefits. Not the least of them were law and order. As a French traveller was to write, ‘The country is safe, and there are no reports of brigands or highwaymen’—more than could be said, at that time, of other realms in Christendom.”
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The grand prize remained elusive, however. Only in 1453, after a harrowing two-month siege, was Constantinople finally captured by the twenty-two-year-old Sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror (Fatih), who declared it his new capital. The city gradually came to be called Istanbul. The new name was a corruption of the original “Constantinople,” which was later pronounced Stinopol, Stinpol, Estanbul, and, eventually, Istanbul.

Had they not been separated in time from the Abbasids by some four centuries, the Ottomans, at least in their first century, would surely have deserved the esteemed designation of high caliphate as well. From the
plains of Anatolia the Ottomans rose to become a world empire, uniting the Middle East under their rule from the Balkans in the northwest to the Hijaz in the south, going as far in North Africa as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. The official government in Istanbul became known to Europeans as the Sublime Porte (first the Bab-i Homayun and then the Bab-i Ali in Ottoman Turkish, after one of the gates in the grand vizier’s residence), from where much of the Middle East and North Africa was administered. Only Iran remained outside the Ottomans’ control. There, in 1501, a militant Shiʿite Sufi named Ismail, at the time only thirteen years old, rose to prominence and established the Safavid dynasty.

The Ottoman centuries can generally be divided into three periods. The first period, from the early establishment of the dynasty around 1280 to the end of the reign of Suleyman I (r. 1520–66), was one of unprecedented growth in the power, prestige, and territorial size of the empire. This era coincides with the reign of the dynasty’s first ten sultans, all of whom were, on the whole, capable administrators, successful military commanders, and wise rulers. Also during this period the Ottomans emerged as a “gunpowder empire” par excellence because of their military tactics and their technology, conquering lands in Europe and in the Middle East.
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This military prowess was buttressed by a highly disciplined, well-trained corps of infantrymen called the janissaries, many of whom were drafted into the service of the empire at childhood and were raised as either future administrators or soldiers. The janissaries were provided with firearms and “used phalanx tactics to combine massed musket firepower with artillery.”
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The second period, beginning approximately after 1566 and lasting until the early 1800s, was in many ways the beginning of the end. This was a time of frequent military defeats, territorial retreat and retrenchment, administrative decay, and industrial underdevelopment. Most of the territorial and military reversals occurred in Europe: the failure to capture Vienna in 1683; the surrender of Hungary to the Hapsburgs and the Aegean coast to the Venetians in 1699; another massive territorial concession in a 1718 treaty; the loss of the Crimea to Russia in 1774; and the loss of Egypt to Napoléon in 1798.
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When Egypt was reclaimed in 1801, its military governor, the modernizing Muhammad Ali, grew so strong as to challenge Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt and Syria. Only with European help were the Ottomans able to regain Syria, but their loss of Egypt was permanent. Muhammad Ali was to establish an Egyptian dynasty that lasted until 1952.

There were, to be certain, occasional victories. In 1711, the Ottomans forced the surrender of the Russians at the river Pruth, and in 1715, the Greek provinces were recovered from Venice. But, in the words of the
historian Andrew Wheatcroft, “Whenever an Ottoman army met a European army on roughly equal terms the result was invariably a defeat for the Turks.”
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This was not a product of the Ottoman soldiers’ lack of bravery or, on occasion, the ingenuity of their commanders. More often, it was a product of the innate conservatism and lack of adaptability that permeated the whole Ottoman system of rule, including warfare and conquest. Toward the end of their rule, it seemed as if the Ottomans had turned their backs on innovation. “By the end of the eighteenth century,” Wheatcroft continues, “the sultan’s soldiers had not varied their equipment or method of war for more than two hundred years.”
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There were multiple causes for the steady decline of the once Mighty empire. Principally, however, decay began at the top, with the royal court and the janissaries. The janissaries increasingly lost their strict discipline, and the quality of their training deteriorated as many began using their positions for other, often personal pursuits. At one point they grew so powerful that they massacred most male members of the dynasty for fear of being disbanded, and it was not until 1826 that they were successfully attacked by the sultan and neutralized. The end came after the janissaries mutinied a second time against proposed reforms, when in a surprise move Sultan Mahmud ordered palace troops to open fire on the advancing janissary corps and then bombarded the barracks to which they had retreated. In the coming months, thousands of janissaries were killed, and the sultan proclaimed the formation of a new army, to be called “the Victorious Muhammaden Soldiery.”
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There was also an unfortunate string of incompetent sultans who ascended to the throne beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, many often far more interested in the pursuit of worldly pleasures than in attending to the affairs of the state. There were, of course, exceptions. Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), for example, implemented major reforms in the latter part of his reign. A number of reforming grand viziers also made their mark on the royal court, especially from the 1840s to the 1860s, and brought about significant improvements to the functions of the caliphate state. Nevertheless, on the whole, the overall quality of government saw a precipitous decline over time.
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Equally important was the gradual ascendancy of Russian imperial power and, to a lesser extent, that of Hapsburg Austria and later Britain. In relation to Europe, the pattern of declining Ottoman power is unmistakable: superiority in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, parity in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and steady decline thereafter, so that the Ottoman Empire eventually became the “sick man of Europe.”
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This growing imbalance of power between the Ottomans and the West was partly military and diplomatic and partly historical. Equally culpable was “the soft embrace of Ottoman traditionalism,” with military commanders and also rulers, including the few “modernizing sultans,” ultimately preferring the old ways.
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For whatever reasons, the Ottomans did not experience the profound, historic changes that were sweeping across western Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century—the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, they entered the eighteenth century economically, technologically, and militarily far weaker than most of their traditional European adversaries.

The third period began in the nineteenth century, when it became increasingly clear that the empire as a whole and the dynasty in particular were inflicted with a systemic malaise, one whose cure necessitated fundamental reforms. This was the era of reforms and, eventually, demise. Increasingly aware of the empire’s industrial and technological backwardness in relation to Europe, a succession of Ottoman sultans and their viziers, or chief ministers, sought to revamp the empire’s central administration, reinvigorate the army, give order to the chaotic and inefficient tax collection system, and introduce modern industrial machinery (such as printing presses). This was the gist of the Nizam-i Jedid (New Order) as instituted by Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the inspiration for which was a similar set of reforms implemented in France after the French Revolution.
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A second attempt at reforming the empire occurred during the reign of Sultan Abdulmejid from 1839 to 1876, the era of Tanzimat, or reorganization. Among other changes, the Tanzimat saw the introduction of a postal system (1834), the telegraph (1855), steamships, and the beginning of railway construction in 1866.
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Not surprisingly, such changes were often viewed with suspicion and angst by the established political and economic hierarchy, not the least of whom were courtiers and the
ulama
(Muslim clerics). In fact, it was the
ulama
that instigated Selim’s deposition in 1807 and the end of his New Order. The sentiments underlying these fears were articulated in an unattributed text circulating in Istanbul that is estimated to have been written sometime between 1880 and 1900. The anonymous author lamented the fact that because of inventions such as the steam engine and the telegraph, “one’s soul becomes conceited, . . . one relies upon created beings and ceases to put one’s trust anymore in the Powerful, the Creator, and . . . ignores him. . . . One’s recompense is diminished. [And] one’s soul becomes insolent, because the soul is inclined to wicked deeds and most wicked deeds are generally [committed] for money and valuables.”
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Figure 1.
Turkish women in a late-nineteenth-century harem. Corbis.

Such sentiments notwithstanding, those changes that had crept into Ottoman society had slowly engendered the rise of new classes of articulate modernists. By far the most important of these were two generations of Ottoman subjects, the so-called “Young Ottomans,” who came to prominence around 1867, and the “Young Turks,” who in July 1908 spearheaded a revolution of sorts by forcing the sultan to reinstate the long-suspended constitution of 1876. Inspired by the political ideals prevalent in Europe and dazzled by the industrial accomplishments of Britain, yet remaining committed to their Islamic religion and Ottoman heritage, both groups sought to reform the system from within. With their attempts at turning the dynasty into a constitutional parliamentary system, presumably along the Westminster model, they gave rise to a number of different, competing factions. By the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of a multinational, multireligious empire had become increasingly untenable, and the birth of local national identities and loyalties was tearing the empire apart. This problem was not unique to the Ottoman Empire. At about roughly the same time, the two other dynasties bordering the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs to the west and the Qajars to the east, also faced crises that threatened their very survival, eventually leading to their collapse. Though the specific causes of the crises facing the imperial households were different in each case, the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs shared similar challenges in ruling over vast, multinational territories.
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Within less than two decades, those who still hoped to retain the empire in its sixteenth-and seventeenth-century form had all hopes dashed by the advent of the Great War in 1914. The Young Turk movement, meanwhile, had given rise to the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), which was resolutely secular and a firm believer in the idea of “Turkish nationalism” as compared to “Ottomanism.” Backed by modernist elements within the military, the CUP assumed power in 1912, keeping the sultan as a titular head. Until the end of its rule in 1918, the CUP governed by decree, embarking, among other things, on a rapid program of secularizing schools and the judicial system, repressing Christian minorities and the Muslim
ulama,
and seeking to Turkify the various (Arab) provinces.
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Millions of Armenians were expelled, and one and a half million of them were massacred because they were suspected of collaboration with the Russians and because their large-scale, historic presence in the Turkish heartland was now seen as inimical to the project of Turkish state building.
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The powers and responsibilities of the
ulama
were also severely curtailed, and the idea of Turkish nationalism was constantly propagated. Despite their tumultuous involvement in politics, however, by 1918 the Young Turks’ ideal of a
constitutional government was no closer to reality than when they had first come into power.
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The death of the Ottomans took a few painful years. The empire reluctantly entered the war on Germany’s side at the beginning of the Great War. Britain and its allies in turn decided to chip away at the Ottomans’ Middle Eastern provinces. Russian advances in Anatolia were halted only after the 1917 communist revolution. That same year Britain captured Baghdad, and Jerusalem fell a year later. A rebellion calling for independence also broke out among the Arab population of the Hijaz. The Ottoman Empire was being systematically dismembered.