Arabs (27 page)

Britain was to prove more of a challenge. The British wished to preserve their commercial interests in Morocco and were unwilling to allow any maritime power to challenge the Royal Navy’s domination of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, Britain had a genuine interest in settling its colonial differences with France. In April 1904, Britain and France came to an agreement—the
Entente Cordiale
—that served as a fresh start for their diplomatic relations. According to the terms of the agreement, France recognized Britain’s position in Egypt and would not ask “that a limit of time be fixed for the British occupation.” Britain, for its part, recognized France’s strategic position “as a Power whose dominions are conterminous for a great distance with those of Morocco” and pledged not to obstruct French actions “to preserve order in that country, and to provide assistance for the purpose of all administrative, economic, financial, and military reforms which it may require.”
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France moved swiftly to secure Spain’s agreement to a future French occupation of Morocco. The French satisfied both British and Spanish concerns by conceding Morocco’s Mediterranean coastline to Spain’s sphere of influence. This provided the basis for a Franco-Spanish agreement on Morocco, concluded in October 1904.
The French had very nearly solved the “international question,” paving the way to colonizing Morocco. All the European powers had now given their consent—except Germany. Delcassé had hoped to move on Morocco without involving Germany. After all, the German Empire had never extended to the Mediterranean. Moreover, Delcassé knew that Germany would demand French recognition of their annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, seized in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, in return for German recognition of France’s ambitions in Morocco. This was more than France was willing to give for Germany’s consent. However, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II refused to be bypassed. Germany was emerging as an imperial power in its own right, with possessions in Africa and the South Pacific, and Morocco proved a point of competition between Germany and France.

The Germans began to assert their interests in Morocco to force France to the negotiating table. In March 1905 the German foreign minister, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, arranged for Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit the Moroccan sultan, Moulay Abd al-Aziz, in Tangier. Throughout his visit, the German emperor upheld respect for both Moroccan sovereignty and German interests in the sultan’s domains, thereby raising the first obstacle to French ambitions in Morocco. The German demarche forced the French into negotiations with Germany, and the “Moroccan question” was reopened with the convening of the Algeciras Conference in January 1906.

The conference, in which eleven countries took part, was ostensibly aimed at helping the Moroccan sultan establish a reform program for his government. In reality, France hoped to use the meeting to bring broader European support to bear on Germany to overcome the kaiser’s resistance to French ambitions in Morocco. Despite Germany’s best efforts to turn the conference attendees against France, three of the states taking part—Italy, Britain, and Spain—had already given their consent to France’s claims to Morocco, and the kaiser’s government was forced to give ground. In 1909 Germany finally recognized France’s special role in Morocco’s security.

 

Having secured the consent of the other European powers to colonize Morocco, the French shifted their focus to French-Moroccan relations. The sharifs of Morocco had ruled independently of both the Ottoman Empire and the states of Europe in an uninterrupted line since 1511. From 1860 onward, however, the European powers increasingly interfered with the politics and economy of the ancient sultanate. Morocco had also undergone a series of state-led reforms during the reign of Moulay Hasan (r. 1873–1894), in a now-familiar bid to check European penetration by adopting European technology and ideas. Predictably, the results were greater European penetration and a weakening of the national treasury through expensive military and infrastructural projects.

The reforming sultan, Moulay Hasan, was succeeded by the fourteen-year-old Moulay Abd al-Aziz (r. 1894–1908), who lacked the maturity and experience to steer Morocco through rival European ambitions to preserve its sovereignty and independence. France was now actively exploiting the ill-defined boundary between Algeria and Morocco to send soldiers into Moroccan territory on the pretext of halting tribal incursions. While encroaching on the territory of Morocco, the French entangled the sultan’s government in public loans. In 1904 the French government negotiated a 62.5 million francs loan ($12.5 million) from Parisian banks, furthering France’s economic penetration of Morocco.

Moroccans resented the expanding French presence in their country, and they began to attack foreign commercial ventures. The French retaliated by occupying Moroccan towns—most notoriously, Casablanca was bombarded from the sea and occupied by 5,000 troops in 1907 after a violent attack on a French-owned factory. As the French encroached deeper into Morocco, the people began to lose confidence in their sultan. His own brother, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz, launched a rebellion against him, forcing him to abdicate and seek French protection in 1908.

Following his successful rebellion, Moulay Abd al-Hafiz (r. 1907–1912) succeeded his brother to the throne. However, Abd al-Hafiz was no more effective at staving off European encroachment than his brother had been. The sultan’s last ally in Europe was Germany, which sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir in July 1911 in a last bid to halt French expansion in Morocco. But the Agadir crisis was ultimately resolved at Morocco’s expense. In return for France’s agreement to cede territory in the French Congo to Germany, the kaiser’s government acquiesced to French ambitions in Morocco.

The French occupation of Morocco was completed in March 1912, when Moulay Abd al-Hafiz signed the Fez Convention establishing a French protectorate over Morocco. Though the sharifs remained on the throne—indeed, the current king, Mohammad VI, is their lineal descendant—formal control over Morocco devolved to the French Empire for the next forty-four years. And France could finally forgive Britain for its occupation of Egypt.

L
ibya was the last territory in North Africa still under direct Ottoman rule, and by the time France had secured its protectorate over Morocco, Italy was already at war with the Ottoman Empire for its possession. While nominally part of the Ottoman Empire since the sixteenth century, the two Libyan provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica had been under direct Ottoman control only since the 1840s—and the Porte ruled Libya with a very light touch. The two provincial capitals, Tripoli
and Benghazi, were garrison towns in which the Ottoman presence was limited to a handful of officials and the soldiers needed to keep the peace.

After the French occupation of Tunisia and the British occupation of Egypt, however, the Ottomans placed growing strategic value on their Libyan provinces. Following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which brought a new group of nationalists to power in the Ottoman Empire, the government in Istanbul began to take active measures to limit Italian encroachment in Libya, blocking Italians from buying land or owning factories in Tripoli and Cyrenaica. The Ottomans sought by all means to avoid losing their last grip on North Africa to European imperial ambition.

For decades, the other European powers had been promising Libya to Italy—the British in 1878, the Germans in 1888, and the French in 1902. Clearly the other European states expected Italy to find a peaceful means of adding Libya to its possessions. Instead, the Italians chose to enter Libya with all guns blazing. They declared war on the Ottomans on September 29, 1911, on the pretext of alleged abuse of Italian subjects in the Libyan provinces. The Ottomans in Libya mounted a stiff resistance to the invaders, so the Italians decided to take their war to the Ottoman heartlands. Italian ships bombarded Beirut in February 1912, attacked Ottoman positions in the Straits of the Dardanelles in April, and occupied Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in April–May 1912, wreaking havoc with the strategic balance in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The other European powers leaped into diplomatic action to contain the damage, fearing the Italians might set off a war in the volatile Balkans (indeed, they had been fanning the flames of the Albanian nationalist movement against the Ottomans). Italy was only too willing to allow the European conference system to settle the Libyan question. Its troops had been tied down by intense resistance from both the small Turkish garrisons and the local population in Libya and had not extended their control from the coastline to the inland regions.

Peace was restored at the price of the Ottomans’ final North African territory. The European states served as mediators between the Ottomans and Italians, and a formal peace treaty was concluded in October 1912, conceding Libya to Italian imperial rule. Yet even after the Ottoman troops withdrew, the Italians faced sustained resistance from the Libyans themselves, who continued their fight against foreign rule into the 1930s.

B
y the end of 1912 the entire coast of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal, was under European colonial domination. Two of the states—Algeria and Libya—were under direct colonial rule. Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco
were protectorates ruled by France and Britain through their own local dynasties. European rules came to replace Ottoman rules, with significant consequences for the societies of North Africa. So much of imperial history is written from the perspective of high politics and international diplomacy. Yet for the people of North Africa, imperialism changed their lives in very important ways. One person’s experiences can shed light on what these changes meant for his society at large.

The intellectual Ahmad Amin (1886–1954) was born in Cairo four years after the British began their occupation of Egypt and died two years before the British withdrew. Colonial Egypt was all he ever knew. In the course of his education at al-Azhar and his early career as a school teacher, Ahmad Amin encountered many of the leading intellectual figures of his age. He met some of the most influential Islamic reformers of the day and witnessed the emergence of nationalist movements and political parties in Egypt. He saw the women of Egypt emerge from seclusion of veils and harems to enter public life. And he reflected on these tumultuous changes in his autobiography, written at the end of a successful life as a university professor and literary figure.
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Young Ahmad grew up in a rapidly changing world, and the generation gap separating him from his father, an Islamic scholar, was striking. His father, who passed between the academic life of al-Azhar and the demands of leading prayers in Imam al-Shafi’i mosque, lived in an age of Islamic certainties. Ahmad’s generation was shaped by new ideas and innovations, including newspapers, for which journalists played a key role in shaping public opinion.

Ahmad Amin began reading newspapers as a young school teacher, frequenting a café that provided newspapers for its clientele. As Amin explained, each newspaper was known for its political orientation. Amin usually chose a conservative, Islamic-oriented paper in keeping with his own personal values, though he was familiar with both the nationalist and the pro-imperialist papers of his day.

 

Introduced to Egypt in the 1820s, printing presses were among the first industrial goods imported into the Middle East. Muhammad ‘Ali sent one of his earliest technical missions to Milan, Italy, to acquire both the knowledge and technology of printing presses. Soon after, the Egyptian government began to publish an official gazette, which was the first periodical published in Arabic. Its primary objective was “to improve the performance of the honourable governors and other distinguished officials in charge of [public] affairs and interests.”
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Between 1842 and 1850, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, author of the celebrated study of Paris, served as editor of this official newspaper, the Arabic title of which meant “Egyptian Events.”