Arabs (10 page)

Budayri, the barber of Damascus, noted in his diary that in 1742 Sulayman Pasha led a large army from Damascus to put down Zahir. The government in Istanbul had sent men and heavy munitions, including artillery and mines, to destroy Zahir and his fortifications. Sulayman Pasha also recruited volunteers from Mount Lebanon, Nablus and Jerusalem, and neighboring Bedouin tribes, all of whom saw Zahir al-’Umar as a rival and welcomed the chance to bring him down.

Sulayman Pasha laid siege to Tiberias for over three months, but Zahir’s forces did not succumb. With help from his brother, who smuggled food and provisions across Ottoman lines, Zahir managed to hold out against far superior forces. The
governor of Damascus was not amused, and when he managed to intercept a number of Zaydani retainers smuggling food to Tiberias he sent their heads to Istanbul as trophies. Yet the big trophy eluded Sulayman Pasha, and after three months he was forced to return to Damascus to prepare for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Unwilling to admit defeat, Sulayman Pasha spread the rumor that he had lifted the siege of Tiberias out of compassion for the defenseless civilians of the town. He also claimed to have taken one of Zahir’s sons as hostage against a pledge to pay his back taxes to Damascus. The barber of Damascus duly reported these rumors, adding a disclaimer: “We have heard another version of the story,” he wrote, “and God knows the truth of the matter.”
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Once Sulayman Pasha returned from the pilgrimage in 1743, he resumed his war against Zahir al-‘Umar in Tiberias. Once again, he mobilized a great army with support from Istanbul and all of Zahir’s aggrieved neighbors in Palestine. Again the residents of Tiberias braced themselves for a terrible siege. But the second siege never came to pass. While traveling to Tiberias, Sulayman Pasha al-Azm stopped in the coastal town of Acre, where he succumbed to a fever and died. His body was brought back to Damascus for burial, and the siege army was disbanded. Zahir al-’Umar was left in peace to pursue his own ambitions.
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Between the 1740s and the 1760s, Zahir’s rule went unchallenged and his powers expanded enormously. The governor in Sidon could never match the strength of Zahir’s armed forces, and the new governor in Damascus, As’ad Pasha al-Azm, chose to leave the ruler of Tiberias to his own devices. In Istanbul, Zahir had cultivated influential supporters who protected him from the scrutiny of the Sublime Porte.

Zahir took advantage of his relative independence to extend his rule from Tiberias to the coastal city of Acre, which had emerged as the main port for the Levantine cotton trade. He petitioned the governor of Sidon repeatedly to be awarded the lucrative rights to collect the taxes of Acre, but was always refused. Finally, in 1746, he occupied the city and declared himself its tax-farmer. Over the course of the 1740s, he fortified Acre and established his base in the city. He now enjoyed control over the cotton trade from the field to the market. Letters from French cotton merchants in Damascus reveal their frustration with Zahir al-’Umar, who had grown “too powerful and too rich . . . at our expense.”
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By the 1750s Zahir was setting the price for the cotton he sold. When the French tried to force their terms on Zahir, he simply forbade the cotton farmers of the Galilee to sell to the French to force them back to the negotiating table and agree to his terms.

In spite of his many confrontations with the Ottoman state, Zahir al-’Umar was constantly trying to secure official recognition; he was a rebel who ultimately wanted to be a member of the establishment. He strove to achieve the same standing the
Azms had in Damascus: the ministerial rank of Pasha and the governorship of Sidon. To this end, his every act of rebellion was followed by a loyal payment of taxes. Yet throughout his years in power, Zahir never rose above the status of a tax-farmer subordinate to the governor in Sidon. It was a source of constant frustration for the strongman of the Galilee. The Ottomans, tied up in a devastating war with Russia between 1768 and 1774, tried to preserve Zahir’s loyalty and meet him halfway. In 1768 the Porte recognized him as the “
shaykh
of Acre,
amir
of Nazareth, Tiberias, Safed, and
shaykh
of all of Galilee.”
¹⁴
It was a title, but not enough to satisfy Zahir’s great ambitions.

After nearly two decades of relative peace, Zahir faced renewed threats from the Ottoman provincial government. In 1770 a new governor in Damascus sought to bring Zahir’s rule over northern Palestine to a close. ’Uthman Pasha had managed to get his own sons appointed as governors in Tripoli and Sidon and had entered into an alliance with the Druze community of Mount Lebanon against Zahir. The notables of Nablus were also keen to see the end of their belligerent neighbor to the north. Suddenly, Zahir found himself surrounded by hostile forces.

In a life-or-death struggle with ‘Uthman Pasha, Zahir could only survive by entering into partnership with another local leader. The only regional power strong enough to offset the combined forces of Damascus and Sidon was the ruling Mamluk in Cairo, a remarkable leader named ’Ali Bey. When Zahir and Àli Bey combined forces, they mounted the greatest challenge the Arab provinces had yet posed to Istanbul’s rule.

 

The Mamluk leader ‘Ali Bey had a number of nicknames. Some of his contemporaries called him
Jinn
’Ali, or ‘Ali the Genie, as though he used magic to achieve the seemingly impossible. His Turkish nickname was
Bulut Kapan
, or “cloud-catcher,” for his repression of the Bedouin, whom the Ottomans believed to be harder to capture than clouds. He is best known as ’Ali Bey al-Kabir, or “the great,” and indeed between 1760 and 1775 he achieved more greatness than any Mamluk in the history of Ottoman Egypt.

‘Ali Bey came to Egypt in 1743 as a fifteen-year-old military slave in the leading Qazdughli Mamluk household. He rose through the ranks and gained his freedom and promotion to the rank of
bey
on the death of his master in 1755. The beys were the top of the Mamluk hierarchy, whose leader was the
shaykh al-Balad
, or “commander of the city.” ’Ali Bey first attained primacy in 1760, and he held the office with brief exceptions until his death in 1773.

’Ali Bey was a warlord who engendered respect through fear. His contemporary, the great Egyptian historian al-Jabarti, described him as “a man of great strength, obstinate and ambitious, and satisfied only with supremacy and sovereignty. He showed inclination only for the serious, never for the playful, a joke or fun.”
¹⁵
He
is said to have had a physical effect on those who met him: “He was so awe-inspiring that some people actually died in awe of him, and many men would tremble at his mere presence.”
¹⁶
He was utterly ruthless in the suppression of his rivals, and he showed loyalty to no one. Nor, as subsequent events would demonstrate, did he engender loyalty in others. He broke the bonds of collegiality and turned against fellow Mamluks of his own household, just as he eliminated rival Mamluk households.

‘Ali Bey was the first person to rule Egypt single-handedly since the fall of the Mamluk Empire. He literally monopolized the wealth of Egypt by seizing the land revenues, controlling all external trade, and demanding extraordinary sums from the European merchant community. He extorted the wealth from the local Christian and Jewish communities and withheld payment of all taxes to Istanbul. ’Ali Bey’s riches allowed him to expand his military power. Having broken the existing Mamluk factions in Egypt, ’Ali Bey set about establishing a new Mamluk household of his own. He bought and trained his own slaves, who were the only people he felt he could trust. His household numbered some 3,000 Mamluks at its height, many of them commanders of vast armies that numbered in the tens of thousands.

Having established paramount control over Egypt, ‘Ali Bey sought his independence from Ottoman rule altogether. Inspired by the Mamluks of old, he tried to re-create their empire in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz. According to Jabarti, ’Ali Bey was an avid reader of Islamic history who used to lecture his retainers on how Ottoman rule in Egypt was fundamentally illegitimate. “The kings of Egypt—Sultan Baybars and Sultan Qalawun and their children—were Mamluks like us,” he argued. “As for these Ottomans, they seized the country by force, taking advantage of the duplicity of the local people.”
¹⁷
The implication was that land taken by force could be redeemed legitimately by force.

‘Ali Bey’s first targets were the governors and troops sent by Istanbul to uphold the law in Egypt. The governors had long since given up trying to rule Egypt—the rival Mamluk households did that. Instead, they sought to uphold Istanbul’s nominal sovereignty by observing ceremonies of power and trying to collect the treasury’s due. Powerless in their own right, the governors tried to play the rival Mamluk households against each other. This was no longer possible under ’Ali Bey, who had eliminated his rivals and ruled unchallenged. Now ’Ali Bey deposed and, it was rumored, even poisoned governors and commanding officers with impunity. The threat to Ottoman interests in their rich but rebellious Egyptian province could not be more acute.

‘Ali Bey next deployed his military power against the Ottoman Empire in an open bid for territorial expansion. “He was not content with what God had granted him,” al-Jabarti wrote, “the rule over Lower and Upper Egypt, the kingdom of which kings and pharaohs had been proud. His greed pushed him to extend the territory of the kingdom.”
¹⁸
’Ali Bey first seized the Red Sea province of the Hijaz, formerly part of the Mamluk Empire, in 1769. Following this success, he began to strike coins bearing
his name rather than that of the reigning Ottoman sultan, signaling his rebellion against Ottoman sovereignty. ’Ali Bey had embarked on his project for the restoration of the Mamluk Empire of old. The Ottomans, tied up with their wars with Russia, were powerless to stop him.

 

‘Ali Bey’s revolt against the Ottomans was in full swing when Zahir al-’Umar first approached him in 1770 with the offer of an alliance against the governor of Damascus. His timing could not have been better. “When ‘Ali Bey received this news,” a contemporary chronicler noted, “he viewed it as the fulfillment of his greatest aspirations. He resolved to rebel against the Ottoman state, and to extend his rule over the lands from ’Arish in Egypt to Baghdad.”
¹⁹
‘Ali Bey concluded an alliance with Zahir al-’Umar and agreed to unseat the Ottoman governor in Damascus.

‘Ali Bey escalated the crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean when he wrote to the sultan’s nemesis, the empress Catherine the Great of Russia, to seek her assistance in his war against the Ottomans. He asked Catherine for Russian ships and cavalry to drive the Ottomans out of Greater Syria, in return promising to help the Russians conquer territory in southern Persia. Although the empress refused to provide cavalry, she agreed to the assistance of the Russian fleet, which was then roaming the Eastern Mediterranean. ’Ali Bey’s treason had not escaped the notice of the Ottoman government. However, pinned down by Russian forces in the Black Sea and Eastern Europe, the Ottomans were in no position to stop him.

Encouraged by his alliances with Catherine and Zahir, ‘Ali Bey began to mobilize his forces. He raised an army of some 20,000 men to invade Syria under the command of one of his most trusted generals, a Mamluk named Isma’il Bey. In November 1770 the Mamluk force swept through Gaza; following a four-month siege, it occupied the port of Jaffa. Zahir and his men joined forces with Isma’il Bey and accompanied the Mamluk army on its march through Palestine. They crossed the Jordan Valley and headed east to the Pilgrimage Road along the desert’s edge. The rebel army then made haste toward Damascus, intent on seizing the city from its Ottoman governor. They got as far as the village of Muzayrib, one day’s march south of Damascus.

When Isma‘il Bey entered Muzayrib he came face to face with the governor of Damascus—and he completely lost the will to fight. It was then the pilgrimage season, when pious Muslims were fulfilling one of the pillars of Islam and making the perilous journey through the desert from Damascus to Mecca. ’Uthman Pasha, the governor, was carrying out his duties as commander of the pilgrimage. Isma‘il Bey was a pious man who had received more religious education than most Mamluks. To attack the governor at that moment would have been a crime against religion. Without warning or explanation, Isma’il Bey ordered his soldiers to withdraw from Muzayrib and return to Jaffa. The astonished Zahir al-‘Umar protested in vain, and the rebel campaign came to a complete halt for the rest of the winter of 1770–1771.
’Ali Bey must have been furious with Isma‘il Bey. In May 1771 he sent a second force to Syria, headed by Muhammad Bey, nicknamed “Abu al-Dhahab,” or “the father of gold.” He had earned his nickname through a flamboyant gesture: when’Ali Bey promoted Muhammad to the rank of bey and gave him his freedom, Muhammad Bey threw gold coins to the crowds that lined the street between the Citadel and the center of town. It was a public relations coup that made Muhammad Bey a household name.

Muhammad Bey set off at the head of 35,000 troops. They swept through southern Palestine and in Jaffa united with the army commanded by Isma‘il Bey. The combined Mamluk forces of Isma’il Bey and Muhammad Bey were unstoppable. They marched through Palestine and, after a minor engagement, drove the Ottoman governor out of Damascus in June. The Mamluks were now in control of Egypt, the Hijaz, and Damascus—’Ali Bey had nearly fulfilled his life’s ambition to reconstruct the Mamluk Empire.

Then the unthinkable happened: without warning or explanation, Muhammad Bey abandoned Damascus and set course for Cairo at the head of his army. Once again it was the pious Mamluk general Isma‘il who was to blame. No sooner did the Mamluk commanders find themselves in control of Damascus than Isma’il Bey confronted Muhammad Bey with the enormity of their crime—not just against the sultan but against their religion as well. Isma‘il Bey had spent some time in Istanbul before entering ’Ali Bey’s service, which instilled in him reverence for the sultan’s position as head of the greatest Islamic empire of his day. He warned Muhammad Bey that the Ottomans would not allow such a major rebellion go unpunished in this life and that God would hold them accountable in the afterlife. “For truly rebellion against the Sultan is one of the schemes of the Devil,” Isma’il Bey warned Muhammad Bey.