The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule

1516–1800

Jane Hathaway

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000034257
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule assesses the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq, and Yemen between 1516 and 1800.

Drawing attention to the important history of these regions, the book challenges outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing prelude to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As well as exploring political events and developments, it delves into the extensive social, cultural, and economic changes that helped to shape the foundations of today's modern Middle and Near East. In doing so, it provides a detailed view of society, incorporating all socio-economic classes, as well as women, religious minorities, and slaves. This second edition has been significantly revised and updated and reflects the developments in research and scholarship since the publication of the first edition.

Engaging with a wide range of primary sources and enhanced by a variety of maps and images to illustrate the text, The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule is a unique and essential resource for students of early modern Ottoman history and the early modern Middle East.

1 Land and peoples

Regions and nomenclature

The Ottoman Empire encompassed territories on three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. This book’s focus, the Arab provinces of the empire, occupied a region roughly half the size of the United States. Although these provinces were located in the region commonly known today as the Middle East, that term was not applied to these territories until relatively recently. Inhabitants of the provinces in question, like many residents of these same regions today, did recognize a distinction between the Arab “West” (Maghrib in Arabic)—that is, those parts of North Africa comprising present-day Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco but excluding Egypt—and the Arab “East” (Mashriq), encompassing Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, and present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, and Iraq.

In the nineteenth century, Western Europeans began to use the term Near East to refer to the eastern Mediterranean region and Anatolia (known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Asia Minor), the peninsula comprising most of present-day Turkey; these territories were “near” in relation to Europe and, of all the Ottoman lands, were most intensively in contact with Europe. The term Middle East, meanwhile, was coined in 1902 by the American admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to designate the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and India; this term, then, encompassed a substantially larger territory than that conventionally designated by “Near East.” The meaning of “Middle East” has broadened still further over the years, so that today it subsumes the original meanings of both Near and Middle East. Today, in fact, “Near East” is often used in an academic context to refer to Egypt, Anatolia, and the eastern Mediterranean only as they existed in antiquity. In some cases, “Middle East” can even include North Africa, although North Africa is usually regarded as falling outside the Middle East, strictly speaking.

Within the territory covered by the Ottoman Arab provinces, we can identify two major regions: Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, not coincidentally the title of P. M. Holt’s classic book. Egypt corresponds more or less exactly to the modern-day country of that name. Indeed, Egypt is the only country in the modern Middle East that has historically retained its territorial integrity. This is because Egypt is an almost completely flat land in which the vast majority of settlement occurs along the Nile River, which forms a long, fertile strip down the country. Accordingly, the flow of the Nile determines the chief territorial division within Egypt: between Lower Egypt—that is, the lower courses of the Nile—extending from Cairo to where the Nile empties into the Mediterranean Sea, and Upper Egypt, extending southward from Cairo to the borders of Sudan. In approximately 3100 BCE, the first Pharaoh united Lower and Upper Egypt, which have formed a single civilizational and political unit ever since. Agricultural cultivation in Egypt until the very recent past has depended on the annual Nile flood. Directing the Nile waters through irrigation channels is critical to successful agriculture. Maintaining these channels would prove a continual struggle for Ottoman governors of Egypt and various other provincial authorities.

The Fertile Crescent, a term coined in the nineteenth century by European scholars of the Bible, is essentially the crescent of land extending between the Nile and the Tigris–Euphrates river valleys although, strictly speaking, it does not include the Nile valley. The fertility in question is of two kinds. The eastern Fertile Crescent, roughly equivalent to modern Iraq, depends, like Egypt, on river floods: specifically, the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In contrast to the Nile flood, floods along the Tigris and Euphrates have historically proven irregular and unmanageable. Devastating floods pervade the history of Baghdad, constructed in 762 CE as the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty, which claimed leadership of the Muslim community as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Abbas. Some of these floods damaged the capital irreparably. To exploit the rivers, the various rulers of the region developed a complex system of irrigation canals that arguably required a highly centralized government to maintain them.

The western Fertile Crescent, roughly equivalent to Greater Syria, which includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, has historically relied not on river-fed irrigation but on rain for its water. This fact, plus the region’s relatively inaccessible terrain—hilly to mountainous, especially in Lebanon and Syria—helps to explain why the region has tended to resist complete incorporation into centralized empires.

Geographical features

Deserts

The image that many non-specialists have of the Middle East and North Africa is of a region that is predominantly desert. Although this impression is somewhat misleading, as will be explained below, the region does boast several very impressive deserts. Largest and grandest is the Sahara, which has historically separated the Muslim peoples of northern Africa, including Egypt, from the populations south of the desert, who before the rise of Islam consisted largely of Christians and animists, or worshippers of spirits in nature. (Islam did, however, penetrate to sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Ages, and substantial Muslim populations are found there.) More central to the territory covered by this book is the Arabian Desert, which covers most of the Arabian peninsula, with the notable exception of Yemen, and its extension, the Syrian Desert, which stretches north into southern Syria, eastern Jordan, and western Iraq. The Sinai Desert separates Egypt from the eastern Mediterranean littoral while serving as a continental divide between Africa and Asia.

The desert was hard put to support any lifestyle but nomadic herding. We might immediately think romantically of camel caravans in the desert. These there were, certainly, but there were also nomadic herders of sheep, goats, donkeys, and mules. Nor did all nomads live in the desert; the Turkic nomads who would give rise to the Ottoman Empire originally inhabited the grassy steppes of Central Asia. Within the territory covered by this book, semi-nomadic Kurds and Turkic nomads commonly known as Turcomans lived in the mountainous regions of Lebanon, Syria, and northern Iraq, as well as southeastern Anatolia and western Iran. Mountainous Yemen, meanwhile, was home to semi-nomadic Arab tribesmen while a small population of Arabic-speaking nomads inhabited the only slightly less mountainous terrain of the Hadramawt, today the region encompassing southeastern Yemen and western Oman. The largest nomadic and semi-nomadic populations inhabiting this territory, however, were the Arab Bedouin who dwelt in the Arabian, Syrian, and Sinai deserts, as well as in various parts of Egypt, desert and otherwise. All these nomads were of necessity closely connected with the towns and the settled agriculturists who lived in and around the towns. On the other hand, a certain rivalry developed between the centers of settled civilization and the realm of the nomad, particularly in times of economic and political crisis. The boundary and the friction between “the desert and the sown” form a recurring theme in Middle Eastern history.

River systems

Notwithstanding the high visibility of deserts, the Middle East breaks down regionally according to its river systems, which supply the arid region with the bulk of its water and which historically have tended to attract its highest concentrations of population. The Middle East boasts two of the world’s greatest river systems, the Tigris–Euphrates and the Nile, two of the earliest sites of settled agriculture in the world and, consequently, seats of two of humankind’s most ancient civilizations.

The German Orientalist Bertold Spuler once wrote that from antiquity through the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, Mesopotamia and the Nile valley belonged, with only rare exceptions, to separate political entities.¹ The Ottoman Empire was one of the few empires in history to rule the lands of these two river valleys—that is, Egypt and Iraq—simultaneously. As we shall see, the Ottomans struggled to keep Iraq out of the hands of the rulers of Iran and to keep Egypt from acquiring too great a degree of autonomy from the Ottoman central authority.

Mountains

Many readers’ image of the Middle East will not include mountains. Notwithstanding, the region is home to several impressive ranges, three of which lie at least partially in the Arab lands that are the subject of this book. The largest of these are the Zagros Mountains, a major chain extending through western Iran and northern Iraq, and the Taurus Mountains, which run across southern Anatolia to what is now the border region of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Smaller ranges run through much of Syria and Lebanon. The Jabal al-Nusayriyya range runs north-south through western Syria, parallel to the coastal plain. The Jabal Druze range (renamed the Jabal Arab in the late twentieth century) and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains are located in southwestern Syria, the former near the border with Jordan, the latter near the Lebanese border. Across the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, the Lebanon Mountains provide much of that country’s dramatic landscape. To the south and east of Beirut lie the Shouf Mountains, technically a branch of the Lebanon chain.

Several of the nomadic populations noted above roamed these mountains during the Ottoman era. Kurds were—and are—found in both the Zagros and Taurus ranges, while Turcomans inhabited the eastern portions of the Taurus range. Mountains could also serve as refuges to members of religious and ethnic minorities. High in Iraq’s Zagros range lived members of the tiny Kurdish Yazidi sect. Nusayris, also known as Alawis, inhabited the Jabal al-Nusayriyya, while Druze lived in the Jabal Druze to the south, as well as in Lebanon’s Shouf Mountains, which were also home to Arab Christians of both the Orthodox and Maronite sects. (All these faiths are discussed below.)

Of the Turcomans living in the eastern Taurus Mountains, a number were Twelver, or Imami, Shia who provided military might for the Safavid dynasty, which conquered Iran at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Before their collapse in 1722, the Safavids waged numerous campaigns against the Ottomans; these had a profound effect on the Arab lands, above all Iraq, where much of the fighting took place.

Peoples

At the time of the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands, the Middle East was inhabited by peoples most of whom fall into one of four broad, modern ethno-linguistic categories: Arabs, Persians, Kurds, and Turks. These categories should not be regarded as absolute or definitive since they often conflate or obscure markers of religious, ethnic, linguistic, and biological identity. Nonetheless, they are useful as a means of description, though it is important to remain aware of variations in their meaning over time. Before the nineteenth century, people seldom identified themselves with any of these groups but rather defined themselves as members of a religious community, inhabitants of a city or region, or some combination of these.

Arabs

Before the advent of Islam in the early seventh century CE, Arabs lived in the Arabian peninsula and along the caravan routes that extended from the peninsula into Syria and Iraq. As a result of the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, their numbers in the region increased exponentially. During the Ottoman period, the word “Arab” did not have the ethno-national connotations it does today but instead was a somewhat derogatory term used by speakers of both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish to refer to a nomadic or semi-nomadic inhabitant of the desert or the rural hinterlands of towns. (In Ottoman Turkish, furthermore, “Arab” also frequently connoted a sub-Saharan African.) On the other hand, cities, towns, and villages in the Ottoman Arab provinces were inhabited by Arabic-speakers who tended to identify themselves by their places of residence and/or by the confessional communities to which they belonged.

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