Arabs (19 page)

Greater trouble was brewing in Mount Lebanon. The Egyptian occupation in the 1830s had led to the collapse of the local ruling order and drove a wedge between the Maronites, who had allied with the Egyptians, and the Druze, who had resisted them. The Druze returned to Mount Lebanon after the Egyptian withdrawal to find the Maronites had grown wealthy and powerful in their absence—and claimed lands the Druze had abandoned when they fled Egyptian rule. The differences between the communities led to an outbreak of communal fighting in 1841, which continued intermittently over the next two decades, fueled by British support for the Druze and French support for the Maronites.

The Ottomans tried to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the retreating Egyptian forces to assert greater control over the administration of Mount Lebanon. They replaced the discredited Shihabi principality that had ruled since the end of the seventeenth century with a dual governorate, headed by a Maronite in the northern district and a Druze governor to the south of the Beirut-Damascus road. This sectarian split had no basis either in geography or in the demography of Mount Lebanon, as Maronites and Druze were to be found on both sides of the boundary.
As a result, the dual governorate seemed only to exacerbate tensions between the two communities. To make matters worse, the Maronites suffered from internal cleavages, with deep divisions between the ruling families, the peasants, and the clergy erupting in peasant revolts that further heightened tensions. By 1860 Mount Lebanon had become a powder keg as the Druze and Maronites formed armed bands and prepared for war.

On May 27, 1860, a Christian force of 3,000 men from the town of Zahleh marched toward the Druze heartland to avenge attacks on Christian villagers. They engaged a smaller force of some 600 Druze, who met them on the Beirut-Damascus road near the village of ‘Ayn Dara. The Druze dealt the Christians a decisive defeat and went on the offensive, sacking a number of Christian villages. The battle of ’Ayn Dara marked the beginning of a war of extermination. The Maronite Christians suffered one defeat after another, as their towns and villages were overrun by the victorious Druze in what today would be characterized as ethnic cleansing. Eyewitnesses spoke of rivers of blood flowing through the streets of the highland villages.

Within three weeks the Druze had secured the south of Mount Lebanon and the whole of the Biqa’ Valley. The town of Zahleh, to the north of the Beirut-Damascus road, was the last Christian stronghold to fall. On June 18, the Druze attacked and overran Zahleh, killing the defenders and putting its residents to flight. The Christian forces of Lebanon had been utterly destroyed, leaving the Druze in full mastery. At least 200 villages had been sacked and thousands of Christians killed, wounded, or left homeless.
¹¹

Events in Mount Lebanon heightened communal tensions throughout Greater Syria. Relations between Muslims and Christians had already been strained by the proclamation of the 1856 Reform Decree and the establishment of legal equality between Ottoman citizens of all faiths. Various Damascene chroniclers noted how the Christians had changed since gaining their legal rights. They no longer recognized the customary privileges of the Muslims, but began to wear the same colors and clothes that formerly had been reserved for Muslims. They grew increasingly assertive, too. “So it came about,” one outraged Muslim notable recorded, “that when a Christian quarrelled with a Muslim, the Christian would fling back at the Muslim any insults the latter used, and even add to them.”
¹²
The Muslims of Damascus found such behavior intolerable.

These views were echoed by a Christian notable. Mikhayil Mishaqa was a native of Mount Lebanon who had served the ruling Shihabi family at the time of the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s. He had since moved to Damascus, where he secured an appointment as the vice consul of a relatively minor power at the time, the United States of America. “As the Empire began to implement reforms and equality among its subjects regardless of their religious affiliation,” he wrote, “the ignorant
Christians went too far in their interpretation of equality and thought that the small did not have to submit to the great, and the low did not have to respect the high. Indeed they thought that humble Christians were on a par with exalted Muslims.”
¹³
By flaunting such age-old conventions, the Christians of Damascus unwittingly contributed to sectarian tensions that would prove their undoing.

The Muslim community within Damascus followed the bloody events of Mount Lebanon with grim satisfaction. They believed, with some justification, that the Christians of Lebanon had behaved arrogantly and had provoked the Druze. The Damascene Muslims were pleased to see the Christians defeated, and they showed no remorse over the bloodletting. When they heard of the fall of Zahleh, “there was such rejoicing and celebration in Damascus,” Mishaqa recorded, that “you would have thought the Empire had conquered Russia.” Faced with the growing hostility of the Muslims of the city, the Christians of Damascus began to fear for their own safety.

Following the fall of Zahleh, Druze bands began to raid Christian villages in the hinterlands of Damascus. The Christian peasants fled their exposed villages for the relative safety of Damascus’s walls. The streets of the Christian quarters of Damascus began to fill with these Christian refugees, who, Mishaqa claimed, “slept in the lanes around the churches, with no bed save the ground and no cover save the sky.” These defenseless people became the target of growing anti-Christian sentiment, their vulnerability and poverty diminishing their very humanity to those who were increasingly hostile to the Christian community. They looked to their fellow Christians and to the Ottoman governor to shelter them from harm.

Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Damascus, was no friend to the city’s Christian community. Mishaqa, who as a consular official had many interactions with the governor, became convinced that Ahmad Pasha was actively promoting intercommunal tensions. Ahmad Pasha believed the Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 reforms, Mishaqa explained, and that they had deliberately tried to elude the duties—particularly tax obligations—that accompanied their newfound rights. Though the Muslim community of Damascus outnumbered the Christians by a margin of five to one, Ahmad Pasha exacerbated Muslim fears by posting cannons to “protect” mosques from Christian attack. By such measures, Ahmad Pasha encouraged Damascene Muslims to believe they were threatened by attack from the town’s Christians.

At the very height of the tensions Ahmad Pasha ordered a demonstration designed to provoke a riot. On July 10, 1860, he paraded a group of Muslim prisoners jailed for crimes against Christians through the streets of central Damascus—ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Predictably, a Muslim mob gathered around the men to break their chains and set them free. The spectacle of Muslims being gratuitously humiliated in this way only reinforced public views that Christians had risen above their
station since the 1856 decree. The mob turned to the Christian quarters determined to teach them a lesson. With the recent events in Mount Lebanon still fresh in everyone’s minds, extermination seemed a reasonable solution to the merciless mob.

Mishaqa found himself caught up in the violence he had long predicted. He described how the mob beat down his gates and flooded into his home. Mishaqa and his youngest children fled through a back door hoping to take refuge in the house of a Muslim neighbor. At each turn of the road, their path was blocked by rioters. To divert them, Mishaqa threw handfuls of coins and fled with his children while the crowd scrambled after his money. Three times he eluded the mob by this ruse, but eventually he found his way blocked by a frenzied crowd.

Mishaqa was now the prisoner of the crowd. He was separated from his family and taken through the back streets to an official’s house. Mishaqa was, after all, the consul of a foreign state. One of Mishaqa’s Muslim neighbors gave his battered Christian friend sanctuary and reunited him with his family, all of whom—including his young daughter struck down by the crowd—miraculously survived the massacre.

Only those Christians who found such safe refuge escaped the carnage. Some were rescued by Muslim notables, headed by the exiled hero of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism, the amir Abd al-Qadir. He and others risked their own lives to rescue and give shelter to fleeing Christians. Other Christians took refuge in the limited space of the British and Prussian consulates, whose guards succeeded in holding back the mob. The majority of those who survived took precarious shelter in the citadel of Damascus, fearful that the soldiers might let the mob through at any moment. While the majority of the city’s Christians did find safe refuge, thousands did not and suffered terrible violence at the hands of the mob in three days of carnage.

Mishaqa later detailed the human and material costs of the massacres in a report to the American consul in Beirut. He claimed that no less than 5,000 Christians had been killed in the violence, one-quarter of a community that originally numbered 20,000. Some 400 women were abducted and raped, and many were left pregnant, including one of Mishaqa’s own house servants. The material damages were very extensive. More than 1,500 houses lay in ruins, all Christian-owned shops had
been looted, and some 200 shops in the Christian quarters were put to the torch. Churches, schools, and monasteries were plundered and destroyed.
¹⁴
The Christian quarters had been gutted by theft, vandalism, and fire in an irruption of communal violence unprecedented in the city’s modern history.

 

The Ottoman government had established legal equality between its Muslim and non-Muslim citizens largely to prevent the European powers from intervening in its domestic affairs. The ensuing violence against Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus engendered the prospect of a massive European intervention. Upon learning of the massacre, the French government of Napoleon III immediately dispatched a military expedition headed by General Charles de Beaufort d’Hautpoul, a French aristocrat who had advised the Egyptian army during its occupation of Syria in the 1830s. De Beaufort was charged with the mission of preventing further bloodshed and bringing to justice the perpetrators of violence against the region’s Christians.

The Ottomans had to act quickly. They dispatched one of their highest-ranking government officials, an architect of the Ottoman reforms named Fuad Pasha, to take all necessary measures to restore order before the French expedition reached the Syrian coast. Fuad fulfilled his mission with remarkable efficiency. He set in motion a military tribunal to mete out severe punishments to all responsible for the breakdown in order. The governor of Damascus was sentenced to death for his failure to prevent the massacre. Dozens of Muslims, from the nobility down to the poorest urban workers, were publicly hanged in the streets of Damascus. Scores of Ottoman soldiers faced the firing squad for having broken ranks and participated in the murder and looting. Hundreds of Damascenes were exiled or marched away in chains to serve long prison sentences with heavy labor.

The government set up commissions to address Christian claims for compensation for damaged and stolen property. Muslim quarters were emptied to provide temporary housing for homeless Christians while state-funded masons rebuilt the devastated Christian quarters. Basically, the Ottoman officials anticipated every grievance the European powers might raise and acted upon it before the Europeans had a chance to intervene. By the time General de Beaufort reached the Lebanese coast, Fuad had the situation under control. He thanked the French profusely for their services and provided them with a campsite on the Lebanese coast, far from any population center, where the soldiers would be on hand in case they were needed. The need never arose, and within a year the French withdrew their forces. The Ottomans had weathered the crisis, their sovereignty intact.

 

The Ottomans learned some important lessons from the experience of 1860. Never again would they pursue a reform measure that openly contravened Islamic doctrine. Thus, in the decades that followed, when the abolitionist movement and the British
government combined forces to pressure the Ottoman Empire to abolish slavery, the Porte demurred. Verses of the Qur’an encourage owners to treat slaves well, to allow them to marry, and to give them their manumission, but slavery is in no way forbidden. How could the sultan outlaw that which God’s book permits? In an effort to accommodate British pressure, the Porte agreed to work instead toward the abolition of the slave
trade
, on which the Qur’an is silent. In 1880 the Porte signed the Anglo-Ottoman Convention for the suppression of the black slave trade. It was a compromise intended to preserve peace within the empire rather than to curb the institution of slavery.
¹⁵

The Ottomans also recognized the need to balance reforms with benefits to win public support for the Tanzimat. The population at large did not gain from an expanded bureaucracy designed to tax them better or conscript them more efficiently into Western-style military service. All of the legal changes designed to make the Ottoman Empire more compatible with European political thought and practice were alien to the average Ottoman. To encourage its subjects to accept such alien changes, the Ottoman government needed to invest more in the local economy and in promoting social welfare. Large-scale projects that gave the public pride and confidence in the sultan’s government—such as gas lighting, steam-powered ferry boats, and electric trams—could generate support for the reformist government. The Porte needed to make such tangible, visible contributions to Ottoman society and the economy if the reform process were not to produce more disturbances.