The New Penguin History of the World (174 page)

Yet there was also a negative side to this. Aggression made it more and more imperative for Japan to seize the economic resources of south-east Asia and Indonesia. Yet it also slowly prepared the Americans psychologically for armed defence of their interest. It was clear by 1941 that the United States would have to decide before long whether it was to be an Asian power at all and what that might mean. In the background, though, lay something even more important. For all its aggression against China, it was with the window-dressing slogan of ‘Asia for the Asians’ that Japan advanced on the crumbling western position in Asia. Just as its defeat of Russia in 1905 marked an epoch in the psychological relations of Europe and Asia, so did the independence and power which Japan showed in
1938–41. When followed by the overthrow of the European empires, as it was to be, it would signal the beginning of the era of decolonialization, thus fittingly inaugurated by the one Asian power at that time successful in its ‘westernization’.

4
The Ottoman Heritage and the Western Islamic Lands

During the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire all but disappeared in Europe and Africa. In each continent, the basic causes were the same: the disintegrating effect of nationalism and the predatory activities of European powers. The Serbian revolt of 1804 and Mehemet Ali’s establishment of himself as the governor of Egypt in 1805 together opened the final, though long drawn-out, era of Turkish decline. In Europe the next milestone was the Greek revolt; from that time the story of the Ottoman empire in Europe can be told in the dates of the establishment of new nations, until in 1914 Turkey in Europe meant only eastern Thrace. In Islamic Africa the decline of Ottoman power had by then gone even further and faster; much of North Africa had already been virtually independent of the sultan’s rule early in the nineteenth century.

One result was that when nationalism began to appear in Islamic Africa it tended to be directed more against Europeans than against the Ottomans. It was also linked with cultural innovation. The story again begins with Mehemet Ali. Though he himself never went further west than his birthplace, Kavalla, in Rumelia, he admired European civilization and thought Egypt could learn from it. He imported technical instructors, employed foreign consuls in the direction of health and sanitation measures, printed translations of European books and papers on technical subjects, and sent boys to study in France and England. Yet he was working against the grain. His practical achievements disappointed him, though he opened Egypt to European (especially French) influence as never before. Much of it flowed through educational and technical institutions and reflected an old French interest in the trade and affairs of the Ottoman empire. French was soon the second language of educated Egyptians and a large French community grew up in Alexandria, one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.

Few modernizing statesmen in the non-European world have been able to confine their borrowings from the West to technical knowledge. Soon, young Egyptians began to pick up political ideas, too; there were plenty
of those available in French. A compost was forming which would in the end help to transform Europe’s relations with Egypt. Egyptians would draw the same lesson as Indians, Japanese and Chinese: the European disease had to be caught in order to generate the necessary antibodies against it. So, modernization and nationalism became inextricably intertwined. Here lay the origin of an enduring weakness in Middle Eastern nationalism. It was long to be the creed of advanced élites cut off from a society whose masses lived in an Islamic culture still largely uncorroded by western ideas. Paradoxically, the nationalists were usually the most Europeanized members of Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese societies, and this was true until well into the twentieth century. Yet their ideas were to come to have wider resonance. It was among Christian Arabs of Syria that there seems first to have appeared the idea of pan-Arabian or Arab nationalism (as opposed to Egyptian, Syrian or some other kind), an assertion that all Arabs, wherever they were, constituted a nation. Pan-Arabism was an idea distinct from that of the brotherhood of Islam, which not only embraced millions of non-Arabs, but also excluded many non-Muslim Arabs. The potential complications of this for any attempt actually to realize an Arab nation in practice were, like other weaknesses of pan-Arabist ideas, not to appear until well into the twentieth century.

Another landmark in the history of the former Ottoman lands was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. This did more in the long run (though indirectly) than any other single fact to doom Egypt to intervention by foreigners. Yet the Canal was not the immediate cause of the start of nineteenth-century interference by Europeans in Egypt’s government. That came about because of the actions of Ismail (the first ruler of Egypt to obtain from the sultan the title of khedive, in recognition of his substantial
de facto
independence). Educated in France, Ismail liked Frenchmen and up-to-date ideas, and travelled much in Europe. He was very extravagant. When he became ruler in 1863, the price of cotton, Egypt’s main export, was high because of the American Civil War and Ismail’s financial prospects therefore looked good. Unhappily, his financial management was less than orthodox. The results were to be seen in the rise in the Egyptian national debt; £7 million at Ismail’s accession, it stood at nearly £100 million only thirteen years later. The interest charges amounted to £5 million a year, in an age when such sums mattered. In 1876 the Egyptian government was bankrupt and ceased to pay its debts, so foreign managers were sent in. Two controllers, one British, one French, were appointed to make sure that Egypt was governed by Ismail’s son with the priority of keeping up revenue and paying off the debt. They were soon blamed by nationalists for the huge burdens of taxation laid upon the Egyptian poor in order to
provide the revenue to pay debt interest as well as for economies, such as the reduction of government salaries. The European officials who worked in the name of the khedive were, in the nationalists’ eyes, simply the agents of foreign imperialism. There was growing resentment of the privileged legal position of the many foreigners in Egypt and their special courts.

These grievances led to nationalist conspiracy and eventually to revolution. As well as the westernizing xenophobes there were others now urging the reform of Islam, the unity of the Muslim world and a pan-Islamic movement adapted to modern life. Some were simply antagonized by the preponderance of Turks in the khedive’s entourage. But such divisions mattered less after a British intervention frustrating a revolution in 1882. This was not intervention for financial reasons. It took place because British policy, even under a Liberal prime minister who favoured nationalism in other parts of the Ottoman empire, could not accept the danger that the security of the Canal route to India might be jeopardized by an unfriendly government at Cairo. It was unthinkable at the time, but British soldiers were only at last to leave Egypt in 1956, tied down until then as they were by strategical dogma.

After 1882, therefore, the British became the prime targets of nationalist hatred in Egypt. They said they wanted to withdraw as soon as a dependable government was available, but could not do so because none was acceptable to them. Instead, British administrators took on more and more of the government of Egypt. This was not wholly deplorable; they reduced the debt and mounted irrigation schemes, which made it possible to feed a growing population (it doubled to about twelve million between 1880 and 1914). They antagonized Egyptians, though, by keeping them out of government service in the interests of economy, by imposing high taxes and by being foreign. After 1900 there was growing unrest and violence. The British and the puppet Egyptian government proceeded firmly against agitation, and also sought ways out through reform. At first administrative, this led in 1913 to a new constitution providing for more representative elections to a more powerful legislative assembly. Unfortunately, the assembly met only for a few months before it was suspended at the outbreak of war. The Egyptian government was pushed into war with Turkey, a khedive suspected of anti-British plotting was replaced, and at the end of the year the British proclaimed a protectorate. The khedive now took the title of sultan.

By then, the Ottoman government had also lost Tripolitania to the Italians, who had invaded it in 1911, partly because of another manifestation of reforming nationalism, this time in Turkey itself. In 1907 a successful rebellion had been started there by the ‘Young Turk’ movement,
which had a complicated history, but a simple purpose. As one Young Turk put it: ‘we follow the path traced by Europe… even in our refusal to accept foreign intervention’. The first part of this meant that they wished to end the despotic rule of Abdul Hamid and restore a liberal constitution granted in 1876 and subsequently withdrawn. But they wanted this less for its own sake than because they thought it would revive and reform the empire, making possible modernization and an end to the process of decay. Both this programme and the Young Turks’ methods of conspiracy owed much to Europe; they used, for example, masonic lodges as cover and organized secret societies such as those which had flourished among European liberals in the days of the Holy Alliance. But they much resented the increasing interference in Ottoman internal affairs by Europeans, notably in the management of finance, for, as in Egypt, the securing of interest on money lent for internal development had been followed by loss of independence. European bullying had also resulted (they felt) in the Ottoman government’s long and humiliating retreat from the Danube valley and the Balkans.

After a series of mutinies and revolts, the sultan gave way over the constitution in 1908. Liberals abroad smiled on constitutional Turkey; it seemed that misrule was at last to end. But an attempted counter-revolution led to a Young Turk coup, which deposed Abdul Hamid and installed a virtual dictatorship. From 1909 to 1914 the revolutionaries ruled with increasingly dictatorial means from behind the façade of constitutional monarchy. Ominously, one of them announced that ‘there are no longer Bulgars, Greeks, Romanians, Jews, Muslims… we glory in being Ottoman’. This was something quite new: the announcement of the end of the old multinational regime.

With hindsight, the Young Turks seem more comprehensible than they did at the time. They faced problems like those of many modernizers in non-European countries and their violent methods have been emulated by many since from necessity or imagined necessity. They threw themselves into reform of every branch of government (importing many European advisers). To seek (for instance) to improve the education of girls was a significant gesture in an Islamic country. But they took power in an empire displaying blatant signs of backwardness and during a shattering succession of diplomatic humiliations, which weakened their appeal and led them to rely on force. After the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia, the ruler of Bulgaria won an acknowledgement of Bulgarian independence, and the Cretans announced their union with Greece. A brief pause then was followed by the Italian attack on Tripoli, and then the Balkan Wars and further military defeat.

Under such strain, it was soon apparent that the post-reform harmony among the peoples to which liberals had looked forward was a chimera. Religion, language, social custom and nationality still fragmented even what was left of the empire. The Young Turks were driven back more and more upon the assertion of one nationalism among many, that of the Ottomans. This, of course, led to resentment among other peoples. The result was once more massacre, tyranny and assassination, the time-honoured instruments of rule at Constantinople; from 1913 they were deployed by a triumvirate of Young Turks who ruled as a collective dictatorship until the outbreak of the Great War.

Though they had disappointed many of their admirers, these men had the future on their side. They represented the ideas which would one day remake the Ottoman heritage: nationalism and modernization. They had even – willy-nilly – done something towards this by losing most of the little that was left of the Ottoman empire in Europe, thus releasing themselves from a burden. But their heritage was still too encumbering in 1914. Before them lay no better alternative as a vehicle for reform than nationalism. How little pan-Islamic ideas would mean was to be shown by what happened after 1914 in the largest remaining block of Ottoman territory, the largely Muslim provinces of Asia.

In 1914 these covered a large and strategically very important area. From the Caucasus the frontiers with Persia ran down to the Gulf near Basra, at the mouth of the Tigris. On the southern shore of the Gulf Ottoman rule ran around Kuwait (with an independent Sheikh and under British protection) and then back to the coast as far south as Qatar. From here the coasts of Arabia right around to the entrance of the Red Sea were in one way or another under British influence, but the whole interior and Red Sea coast were Ottoman. Under British pressure the Sinai desert had been surrendered to Egypt a few years before, but the ancient lands of Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia were still all Turkish. This was the heartland of historical Islam, and the sultan was still caliph, its spiritual leader.

This heritage was to crumble as the strategy and politics of world war played upon it. Even within the historic Islamic heartland, there had been signs before 1914 that new political forces were at work. In part, they stemmed from old-established European cultural influences, which operated in Syria and the Lebanon much more strongly than in Egypt. French influence had been joined in those countries by American missionary efforts and the foundation of schools and colleges to which there came Arab boys, both Muslim and Christian, from all over the Arab world. The Levant was culturally advanced and literate. On the eve of the world war over a
hundred Arabic newspapers were published in the Ottoman empire outside Egypt.

An important crystallization had followed the triumph of the Young Turks and their Ottomanizing tendencies. Secret societies and open groups of dissidents were formed among Arab exiles, notably in Paris and Cairo. In the background was another uncertain factor: the rulers of the Arabian peninsula, whose allegiance to the sultan was shaky. The most important of them was Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, in whom by 1914 the Turkish government had no confidence. A year earlier there had also been the ominous sign of a meeting of Arabs in Persia to consider the independence of Iraq. Against this, the Turks could only hope that the divisiveness of the different interests represented among the Arabs would preserve the status quo.