The Arab Lands Under Ottoman Rule Pdf
Regino Meriweather
In this seminal study, Jane Hathaway presents a wide-ranging reassessment of the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq and Yemen - the first of its kind in over forty years.
Challenging 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, Hathaway depicts an era of immense social, cultural, economic and political change which helped to shape the foundations of today's modern Middle and Near East. Taking full advantage of a wide range of Arabic and Ottoman primary sources, she examines the changing fortunes of not only the political elite but also the broader population of merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, tribal populations, religious scholars, women, and ethnic and religious minorities who inhabited this diverse and volatile region.
With masterly concision and clarity, Hathaway guides the reader through all the key current approaches to and debates surrounding Arab society during this period. This is far more than just another political history; it is a global study which offers an entirely new perspective on the era and region as a whole.
Introduction: Rewriting Arab history, 1516-1800 1. Lands and peoples 2. The Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands 3. The organization of the Ottoman provincial administration 4. Crisis and change in the seventeenth century 5. Provincial notables in the eighteenth century 6. Religious and intellectual life 7. Urban life and trade 8. Rural life 9. Marginal groups and minority populations 10. Ideological and political changes in the late eighteenth century 11. Transformations under Ottoman rule
On May 16, 1916, representatives of Great Britain and France secretly reach an accord, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, by which most of the Arab lands under the rule of the Ottoman Empire are to be divided into British and French spheres of influence with the conclusion of World War I.
More than a year after the agreement with Russia, British and French representatives, Sir Mark Sykes and Francois Georges Picot, authored another secret agreement regarding the future spoils of the Great War. Picot represented a small group determined to secure control of Syria for France; for his part, Sykes raised British demands to balance out influence in the region. The agreement largely neglected to allow for the future growth of Arab nationalism, which at that same moment the British government and military were working to use to their advantage against the Turks.
Imperialism is a difficult subject to tackle in the Arab world. The word conjures up associations with the days of French and British colonialism and the present-day settler colony of Israel. Yet the more indigenous and long-lasting form of imperial rule, Ottoman imperialism, is often left out of contemporary historical debates.
A substantial number of the members of the imperial ruling class were in fact Arab Ottomans, who hailed from the Arabic-speaking-majority parts of the empire, like the Malhams of Beirut and al-Azms of Damascus.
Many Arab Ottomans fought until the very end to introduce a more inclusive notion of citizenship and representative political participation into the empire. This was particularly true for the generation who grew up after the sweeping centralisation reforms in the first half of the 19th century, part of the so-called Tanzimat period of modernisation.
Some of them held positions that ranged from diplomats negotiating on behalf of the sultan with imperial counterparts in Europe, Russia, and Africa to advisers who planned and executed major imperial projects, such as the implementation of public health measures in Istanbul and the construction of a railway linking the Hijaz region in the Arabian Peninsula with Syria and the capital.
These are also stories of better-known families like some of al-Khalidis and al-Abids, notable Arab-Ottoman political families who called Istanbul home, but maintained households and familial connections in Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Their stories and the stories of their communities that existed for centuries within an imperial imaginary and a wider regional cosmology were often summed up in a reductionist and dismissive official narrative.
As a historian of the Ottoman Empire with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, I truly believe it is no less than a crime to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past, from the stories of their ancestors, villages, town, and cities in the name of protecting an unstable conglomeration of nation-state formations. The people of the region have been uprooted from their historical reality and left vulnerable to the false narratives of politicians and nationalist historians.
We need to reclaim Ottoman history as a local history of the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking-majority lands because if we do not claim and unpack the recent past, it would be impossible to truly understand the problems that we are facing today, in all their temporal and regional dimensions.
The call for local students of history to research, write, and analyse the recent Ottoman reality is in no way a nostalgic call to return to some imagined days of a glorious or harmonious imperial past. In fact, it is the complete opposite.
It is a call to uncover and come to terms with the good, the bad, and, indeed, the very ugly imperial past that people in the Arabic-speaking-majority parts of the Middle East were also the makers of. The long and storied histories of the people of cities that flourished during the Ottoman period, like Tripoli, Aleppo, and Basra, have yet to be (re)written.
It is also important to understand why, more than 100 years since the end of the empire, the erasure of the deeply rooted and intimate connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe continues, and who benefits from this erasure. We must ask ourselves why is it that researchers from Arabic-speaking-majority countries frequent French and English imperial archives, but do not spend the time or the resources to learn Ottoman-Turkish in order to take advantage of four centuries worth of records readily available at the Ottoman imperial archives in Istanbul or local archives in former provincial capitals?
Millions of records in Ottoman-Turkish await students from across the Arabic-speaking-majority world to take the plunge into serious research that uses the full range of sources, both on the local and imperial levels.
Finally, the number of local historians and students with Ottoman history-related disciplinary and linguistic training, in cities such as Doha, Cairo, and Beirut, which have a concentration of excellent institutions of higher education, is alarmingly low; some universities do not even have such cadres.
It is high time that the institutions of higher learning in the region begin to claim Ottoman history as local history and to support scholars and students who want to uncover and analyse this neglected past.
The Ottoman era in the history of Arabia lasted from 1517 to 1918. The Ottoman degree of control over these lands varied over these four centuries, with the fluctuating strength or weakness of the Empire's central authority.[1][2]
In the 16th century, the Ottomans added the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coast (the Hejaz, Asir and al-Hasa) to the Empire and claimed suzerainty over the interior. The main reason was to thwart Portuguese attempts to attack the Red Sea (hence the Hejaz) and the Indian Ocean.[3] As early as 1578, the Sharifs of Mecca launched forays into the desert to punish the Najdi tribes who mounted raids on oases and tribes in the Hejaz.[4]
The emergence of what was to become the Saudi royal family, known as the Al Saud, began in Nejd in central Arabia in 1744, when Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the dynasty, joined forces with the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab who was from the Hanbali school of thought.[5][6] This alliance formed in the 18th century provided the ideological impetus to Saudi expansion and remains the basis of Saudi Arabian dynastic rule today.[7]
When the Ottomans conquered Mamluk territory in 1517,[8] the role of the Ottoman sultan in the Hijaz was first and foremost to take care of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina and provide safe passage for the many Muslims from various regions who traveled to Mecca to perform the Hajj.[9] The Sultan was sometimes referred to as "Servant of the Holy Places" but since the Ottoman rulers could not claim lineage from the Islamic Prophet Muhammad,[10] it was important to maintain an image of power and piety through construction projects, financial support and caretaking.
There is no record of a ruling Sultan visiting Mecca during the Hajj[11] but according to primary records, Ottoman princes and princesses were sent to make the pilgrimage or visit the Holy Cities during the year.[12] The distance from the center of the empire in Istanbul, as well as the length and danger of the journey, was likely the main factor that prevented Sultans from traveling to the Hijaz.[12]
Regional administration of Mecca and Medina was left in the hands of the Sharifs, or the stewards of Mecca since the Abbasid caliphate. The Sharifs maintained a level of local autonomy under the rule of the Sultan; however to balance the local influences, the Sultan appointed the kadis and lesser officials in the region.[13] At first, being appointed the kadi in the region was considered a low position, but as religion grew more important within the culture of the Ottoman Empire, the role of the kadis in the Mecca and Medina grew in prominence.[14]
Aside from customs collected in Jeddah, the inhabitants of the Hijaz did not pay taxes to the empire[15] and the finances of the city were taken care of through various waqf properties across the rest of the empire, dedicated to support the people of Mecca and Medina as an act of charity with religious significance because of the holy status of the two cities.[16]
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