What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

This book was written prior to Sept 11 2003 but is still a fantastic read. It talks about the slow gradual decline (relative) of the Islamic world, where once it was the centre of human achievement - the foremost military and economic power in the world. Where (Christian) Europe was seen as a remote land filled barbarians. Everything changed over time however, and soon the Islamic world turned to the West for military equipment (when Europe wasn't beating upon them that is), and scientific knowledge.

Most Islamic modernizers - Bernard argues - concentrated their efforts on three main categories: military, economic and political with very little success. It will be interesting to see what happens in the near future (Iraq for example).

link: Bernard Lewis What Went Wrong Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.mp3

What Went Wrong?

What
Went
Wrong?
Western Impact and
Middle Eastern Response
Bernard Lewis
2002
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires
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Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid
Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo
Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 2002 by Bernard Lewis
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Bernard.
What went wrong? : western impact and Middle Eastern
response / Bernard Lewis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-514420-1
1. Middle East—History—1517- I. Title.
DS62.4 .L488 2000
956´.015—dc21 2001036214
Printing (last digit): 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface vii
Introduction 3
Chapter 1
The Lessons of the Battlefield 18
Chapter 2
The Quest for Wealth and Power 35
Chapter 3
Social and Cultural Barriers 64
Chapter 4
Modernization and Social Equality 82
Chapter 5
Secularism and the Civil Society 96
Chapter 6
Time, Space, and Modernity 117
Chapter 7
Aspects of Cultural Change 133
Conclusion 151
Afterword 161
Notes 163
Index 173
Contents

Preface
This book was already in page proof when the terrorist attacks in
New York and Washington took place on September 11, 2001. It
does not therefore deal with them, nor with their immediate causes
and after-effects. It is however related to these attacks, examining not
what happened and what followed, but what went before—the larger
sequence and larger pattern of events, ideas, and attitudes that preceded
and in some measure produced them.
B.L.
Princeton, N.J.
October 15, 2001

What Went Wrong?
WHAT WENT WRONG?
2
INTRODUCTION
3
Introduction
What went wrong? For a long time people in the Islamic world, especially
but not exclusively in the Middle East, have been asking this
question. The content and formulation of the question, provoked
primarily by their encounter with the West, vary greatly according to
the circumstances, extent, and duration of that encounter and the
events that first made them conscious, by comparison, that all was
not well in their own society. But whatever the form and manner of
the question and of the answers that it evokes, there is no mistaking
the growing anguish, the mounting urgency, and of late the seething
anger with which both question and answers are expressed.
There is indeed good reason for questioning and concern, even for
anger. For many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of
human civilization and achievement. In the Muslims’ own perception,
Islam itself was indeed coterminous with civilization, and beyond its
borders there were only barbarians and infidels. This perception of self
and other was enjoyed by most if not all other civilization—Greece,
Rome, India, China, and one could add more recent examples.
In the era between the decline of antiquity and the dawn of modernity,
that is, in the centuries designated in European history as medieval,
the Islamic claim was not without justification. Muslims were of
course aware that there were other, more or less civilized, societies
on earth, in China, in India, in Christendom. But China was remote
and little known; India was in process of subjugation and Islamization.
Christendom had a certain special importance, in that it constituted
the only serious rival to Islam as a world faith and a world power.
But in the Muslim view, the faith was superseded by the final Islamic
WHAT WENT WRONG?
4
revelation, and the power was being steadily overcome by the greater,
divinely guided power of Islam.
For most medieval Muslims, Christendom meant, primarily, the
Byzantine Empire, which gradually became smaller and weaker until
its final disappearance with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople
in 1453. The remoter lands of Europe were seen in much the same
light as the remoter lands of Africa—as an outer darkness of barbarism
and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn and little
even to be imported, except slaves and raw materials. For both the
northern and the southern barbarians, their best hope was to be incorporated
in the empire of the caliphs, and thus attain the benefits
of religion and civilization.
For the first thousand years or so after the advent of Islam, this seemed
not unlikely, and Muslims made repeated attempts to accomplish it. In
the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia
conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part
of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran
and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity. In the eighth century,
from their bases in North Africa, Arab Muslim forces, now joined
by Berber converts, conquered Spain and Portugal and invaded France;
in the ninth century they conquered Sicily and invaded the Italian mainland.
In 846 C.E. a naval expedition from Sicily even entered the River
Tiber, and Arab forces sacked Ostia and Rome. This provoked the first
attempts to organize an effective Christian counterattack. A subsequent
series of campaigns to recover the Holy Land, known as the Crusades,
ended in failure and expulsion.
In Europe, Christian arms were more successful. By the end of the
eleventh century the Muslims had been expelled from Sicily, and in
1492, almost eight centuries after the first Muslim landing in Spain,
the long struggle for the reconquest ended in victory, opening the
way to a Christian invasion of Africa and Asia. But meanwhile there
were other Muslim threats to European Christendom. In the East,
between 1237 and 1240 C.E., the Tatars of the Golden Horde conquered
Russia; in 1252 the Khan of the Golden Horde and his people
were converted to Islam. Russia, with much of Eastern Europe, was
subject to Muslim rule, and it was not until the late fifteenth century
that the Russians finally freed their country from what they called
INTRODUCTION
5
Fig. I-1 The Bosphorus with the Castles of Europe and Asia by Thomas Allum
WHAT WENT WRONG?
6
“the Tatar yoke.” In the meantime a third wave of Muslim attack had
begun, that of the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Anatolia, captured
the ancient Christian city of Constantinople, invaded and colonized
the Balkan peninsula, and threatened the very heart of Europe,
twice reaching as far as Vienna.
At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that
was comparable in the level, quality, and variety of achievement; that
was of course China. But Chinese civilization remained essentially
local, limited to one region, East Asia, and to one racial group. It was
exported to some degree, but only to neighboring and kindred peoples.
Islam in contrast created a world civilization, polyethnic, multiracial,
international, one might even say intercontinental.
For centuries the world view and self-view of Muslims seemed well
grounded. Islam represented the greatest military power on earth—
its armies, at the very same time, were invading Europe and Africa,
India and China. It was the foremost economic power in the world,
trading in a wide range of commodities through a far-flung network
of commerce and communications in Asia, Europe, and Africa; importing
slaves and gold from Africa, slaves and wool from Europe,
and exchanging a variety of foodstuffs, materials, and manufactures
with the civilized countries of Asia. It had achieved the highest level
so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. Inheriting
the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece
and of Persia,* it added to them new and important innovations from
outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and
decimal positional numbering from India. It is difficult to imagine
modern literature or science without the one or the other. It was in the
*The name Persia in its various classical and modern European forms comes from
Pars, the name of the southwestern province of Iran, along the shore of the Gulf.
The Arabs, whose alphabet contains no equivalent to the letter “p,” called it “Fars.”
In the way that Castilian became Spanish and Tuscan became Italian, so the dialect
of Fars, known as Farsi, came to be accepted as the literary, standard, and
ultimately national language. In the classical and Western world, the regional
name was also applied to the whole country, but this never happened among the
Persians, who have used the name Iran—the land of the Aryans—for millennia
and formally adopted it as the official name of the country in 1935. In speaking of
past centuries, I have retained the accepted Western name.
INTRODUCTION
7
Islamic Middle East that Indian numbers were for the first time incorporated
in the inherited body of mathematical learning. From the
Middle East they were transmitted to the West, where they are still
known as Arabic numerals, honoring not those who invented them but
those who first brought them to Europe. To this rich inheritance scholars
and scientists in the Islamic world added an immensely important
contribution through their own observations, experiments, and ideas.
In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a
pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world, relying on Arabic
versions even for many otherwise unknown Greek works.
And then, suddenly, the relationship changed. Even before the Renaissance,
Europeans were beginning to make significant progress in
the civilized arts. With the advent of the New Learning, they advanced
by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually
the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them.
The Muslims for a long time remained unaware of this. The great
translation movement that centuries earlier had brought many Greek,
Persian, and Syriac works within the purview of Muslim and other
Arabic readers had come to an end, and the new scientific literature
of Europe was almost totally unknown to them. Until the late eighteenth
century, only one medical book was translated into a Middle
Eastern language—a sixteenth-century treatise on syphilis, presented
to Sultan Mehmed IV in Turkish 1655.1 Both the choice and the date
are significant. This disease, reputedly of American origin, had come
to the Islamic world from Europe and is indeed is still known in Arabic,
Persian, Turkish, and other languages as “the Frankish disease.”
Obviously, it seemed both appropriate and legitimate to adopt a Frankish
remedy for a Frankish disease. Apart from that, the Renaissance,
the Reformation, the technological revolution passed virtually unnoticed
in the lands of Islam, where they were still inclined to dismiss
the denizens of the lands beyond the Western frontier as benighted
barbarians, much inferior even to the more sophisticated Asian infidels
to the east. These had useful skills and devices to impart; the
Europeans had neither. It was a judgment that had for long been reasonably
accurate. It was becoming dangerously out of date.
Usually the lessons of history are most perspicuously and unequivocally
taught on the battlefield, but there may be some delay before
WHAT WENT WRONG?
8
the lesson is understood and applied. In Christendom the final defeat
of the Moors in Spain in 1492 and the liberation of Russia from the
rule of the Islamized Tatars were understandably seen as decisive victories.
Like the Spaniards and Portuguese, the Russians too pursued
their former masters into their homelands, but with far greater and
more enduring success. With the conquest of Astrakhan in 1554, the
Russians reached the shores of the Caspian Sea; in the following century,
they reached the northern shore of the Black Sea, thus beginning
the long process of conquest and colonization that incorporated
vast Muslim lands in the Russian Empire.
But in the heartlands of Islam, these happenings on the remote
frontiers of civilization seemed less important and were in any case
overshadowed in Muslim eyes by such central and vastly more important
victories as the ignominious eviction of the Crusaders from
the Levant in the thirteenth century, the capture of Constantinople
in 1453, and the triumphant march of the Turkish forces through the
Balkans toward the surviving Christian imperial city of Vienna, in
what seemed to be an irresistible advance of Islam and defeat of
Christendom.
The Ottoman sultan, like his peer and rival the Holy Roman Emperor,
was not without political rivals and sectarian challengers within
his own religious world. Of the two, the sultan was the more successful
in dealing with these challenges. At the turn of the fifteenth–sixteenth
centuries, the Ottomans had two Muslim neighbors. The older
of the two was the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, with its capital in
Cairo, ruling over all Syria and Palestine and, more important, over
the holy places of Islam in western Arabia. The other was Persia,
newly united by a new dynasty, with a new religious militancy. The
founder of the dynasty, Sh
h Ism
‘
l Safav (reigned 1501–1524), a
Turkish-speaking Shi‘ite from Azerbaijan, brought all the lands of
Iran under a single ruler for the first time since the Arab conquest in
the seventh century. A religious leader as well as—perhaps more
than—a political and military ruler, he made Shi‘ism the official religion
of the state, and thus differentiated the Muslim realm of Iran
sharply from its Sunni neighbors on both sides; to the East, in Central
Asia and India, and to the West, in the Ottoman Empire.
INTRODUCTION
9
For a while, he and his successors, the shahs of the Safavid line,
challenged the claim of the Ottoman sultans to both political supremacy
and religious leadership. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I, known
as “the Grim,” who reigned from 1512 to 1520, launched military
campaigns against both neighbors. He achieved a substantial but incomplete
success against the Shah, a total and final victory over the
Mamluk sultan of Egypt. Egypt and its dependencies were incorporated
in the Ottoman realms; Persia remained a separate, rival, and
for the most part hostile state. Busbecq, the imperial ambassador in
Istanbul, went so far as to say that it was only the threat from Persia
that saved Europe from imminent conquest by the Turks. “On [the
Turks’] side are the resources of a mighty empire, strength unimpaired,
habituation to victory, endurance of toil, unity, discipline, frugality,
and watchfulness. On our side is public poverty, private luxury,
impaired strength, broken spirit, lack of endurance and training; the
soldiers are insubordinate, the officers avaricious; there is contempt
for discipline; licence, recklessness, drunkenness, and debauchery are
rife; and worst of all, the enemy is accustomed to victory, and we to
defeat. Can we doubt what the result will be? Persia alone interposes
in our favour; for the enemy, as he hastens to attack, must keep an eye
on this menace in his rear. But Persia is only delaying our fate; it
cannot save us. When the Turks have settled with Persia, they will fly
at our throats supported by the might of the whole East; how unprepared
we are I dare not say!”2 There have been more recent Western
observers who spoke of the Soviet Union and China in similar terms,
and proved equally mistaken.
Busbecq’s fears, as it turned out, were unjustified. The Ottomans
and the Persians continued to fight each other until the nineteenth
century, by which time they no longer constituted a threat to anyone
but their own subjects. At the time, the idea of a possible anti-Ottoman
alliance between Christendom and Persia was occasionally
mooted, but to little effect. In 1523, Sh
h Ism
‘
l, still smarting after
his defeat, sent a letter to the Emperor Charles V expressing surprise
that the European powers were fighting each other instead of joining
forces against the Ottomans. The appeal fell on deaf ears and the
emperor did not send a reply to Sh
h Ism
‘
l until 1529, by which
time the shah had been dead for five years.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
10
Figure I-2
Wall painting in Isfahan, showing European visitors.
From the Chihil Sutun (Forty Columns) pavilions in Isfahan,
late sixteenth century, rebuilt 1706.
INTRODUCTION
11
For the time being, Persia was immobilized, and under Selim’s successor,
Süleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–1566), the Ottomans
were able to embark on a new phase of expansion in Europe.
The great battle of Mohacs in Hungary, in August 1526, gave the
Turks a decisive victory, and opened the way to the first siege of Vienna
in 1529. The failure to capture Vienna on that occasion was seen on
both sides as a delay, not a defeat, and opened a long struggle for
mastery in the heart of Europe.
Here and there the Christian powers managed to achieve some successes,
and one notable victory, the great naval battle of Lepanto, in
the Gulf of Patras in Greece, in 1571. In Europe, indeed, this was acclaimed
as a major triumph. All Christendom exulted in this victory,
and King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was even
moved to compose a long and ecstatic poem in celebration.3 The Turkish
archives preserve the report of the Kapudan Pasha, the senior officer
commanding the fleet, whose account of the battle of Lepanto is
just two lines: “The fleet of the divinely guided Empire encountered
the fleet of the wretched infidels, and the will of Allah turned the other
way.”4 As a military report, this may be somewhat lacking in detail, but
not in frankness. In Ottoman histories, the battle is known simply as
S¹ng¹n, a Turkish word meaning a rout or crushing defeat.
But how much difference did Lepanto make? The answer must be
very little. If we look at the larger question of naval power, let alone
the far more important question of military power in the region,
Lepanto was no more than a minor setback for the Ottomans, quickly
made good. The situation is well-reflected in a conversation reported
by an Ottoman chronicler, who tells us that when Sultan Selim II
asked the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha about the cost of rebuilding
the fleet after its destruction at Lepanto, the Vizier replied:
“The might and wealth of our Empire are such, that if we desired to
equip the entire fleet with silver anchors, silken rigging, and satin
sails, we could do it.”5 This is obviously a poetic exaggeration, but a
fairly accurate reflection of the real significance of Lepanto—a great
shot in the arm in the West, a minor ripple in the East. The major
threat remained. In the seventeenth century, there was still Turkish
pashas ruling in Budapest and Belgrade, and Barbary Corsairs from
North Africa were raiding the coasts of England and Ireland and even,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
12
in 1627, Iceland, bringing back human booty for sale in the slavemarkets
of Algiers.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Persia once again
became a factor of importance in the struggle. Sh
h ‘Abb
s I, known as
the Great, was in many ways the most successful ruler of his line. In
1598, returning to his capital after a victory against the Uzbeks of Central
Asia, he was approached by a group of Europeans led by two English
brothers, Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Sherley. Probably at their
suggestion, he sent letters of friendship to the Pope, the Holy Roman
Emperor, and various European monarchs and rulers, including the
Queen of England and the Doge of Venice. These missives produced
little result. Of greater importance was a reorganization and reequipment
of his armed forces, undertaken with the Sherleys’ and other Europeans’
help. Between 1602 and 1612, and again between 1616 and 1627,
Persia and Turkey were at war, and the Persians won a number of
successes. Distracted by this struggle in the East, the Turks were obliged,
in 1606, to make peace with the Austrians.
The Treaty of Sitvatorok, signed in that year, is notable for a number
of reasons. All previous treaties had been dictated by the Turks in
their capital, Istanbul. This one was negotiated on neutral ground, on
an island in the Danube between the two sides. Perhaps even more
significant was the recognition of the Emperor as “Padishah.” Until
then it had been the normal practice of the Ottomans to designate
European rulers either by subordinate Ottoman titles such as bey, or
more commonly by what they thought to be European titles. Thus, for
example, Ottoman letters to Queen Elizabeth addressed her as “Queen
(K¹raliçe) of the Vilayet of England,” while the Emperor was addressed
as “King (K¹ral) of Vienna.”6 K¹ral and K¹raliçe are of course terms of
European, not Turkish origin, and were used by Ottomans in much
the same way as imperial Britain used native titles for native princes in
India. Addressing the emperor as “Padishah,” the title that the Ottoman
sultans themselves used, was a formal recognition of equality.7
While generally contemptuous of the infidel West, Muslims were
not unaware of Western skills in weaponry and warfare. The initial
successes of the Crusaders in the Levant impressed upon Muslim war
departments that in some areas at least Western arms were superior,
and the inference was quickly drawn and applied. Western prisoners
INTRODUCTION
13
of war were set to work building fortifications; Western mercenaries
and adventurers were employed, and a traffic in arms and other war
materials began that grew steadily in the course of the centuries. Even
when the Ottoman Turks were advancing into southeastern Europe,
they were always able to buy much needed equipment for their fleets
and armies from Christian European suppliers, to recruit European
experts, and even to obtain financial cover from Christian European
banks. What is nowadays known as “constructive engagement” has a
long history.
All this, however, had little or no influence on Muslim perceptions
and attitudes, as long as Muslim armies continued to be victorious in
the heartlands. The sultans bought war materials and military expertise
for cash, and saw in this no more than a business transaction. The
Turks in particular adopted such European inventions as handguns
and artillery and used them to great effect, without thereby modifying
their view of the barbarian infidels from whom they acquired these
weapons.
There were some dissenting voices. As early as the sixteenth century,
an Ottoman Grand Vizier in his retirement observed that while
the Muslim forces were supreme on the land, the infidels were getting
stronger on the sea. “We must overcome them.”8 His message
received little attention. In the early seventeenth century another
Ottoman official noted an alarming presence of Portuguese, Dutch,
and English merchant shipping in Asian waters, and warned of a possible
danger from that source.9
The danger was real, and growing. When the Portuguese navigator
Vasco da Gama sailed round Africa into the Indian Ocean at the
end of the fifteenth century, he opened a new sea route between Europe
and Asia, with far-reaching consequences for the Middle East,
first commercial, later also strategic. As early as 1502, the Republic
of Venice, the prime European beneficiary of the eastern spice trade,
sent an emissary to Cairo to warn the sultan of Egypt of the danger
that this new sea route presented to their commerce. At first, the
sultan paid little attention, but a sharp decline in his customs revenues
focused his attention more sharply on this new problem. Egyptian
naval expeditions against the Portuguese in eastern waters were
WHAT WENT WRONG?
14
however unsuccessful and no doubt contributed to the defeat of the
Egyptian sultanate in 1516–1517 and the incorporation of all its dominions
in the Ottoman realm.
The Ottomans now took over this task, but fared little better. Their
efforts to counter the Portuguese in the Horn of Africa and the Red
Sea were at best inconclusive. The lack of Ottoman interest in these
developments is best illustrated by the response to an appeal for help
from Atjeh, in Sumatra. In 1563 the Muslim ruler of Atjeh sent an
embassy to Istanbul asking for help against the Portuguese and adding,
as an inducement, that several of the non-Muslim rulers of the
region had agreed to turn Muslim if the Ottomans would come to
their aid. But the Ottomans were busy with more urgent matters—
the sieges of Malta and of Szigetvar in Hungary, the death of Sultan
Süleyman the Magnificent. After two years delay they finally assembled
a fleet of 19 galleys and some other ships carrying weapons and supplies,
to help the beleaguered Atjehnese.
Most of the ships, however, never got there. The greater part of
the expedition was diverted to the more urgent task of restoring and
extending Ottoman authority in the Yemen, and in fact only two ships,
carrying gun founders, gunners, and engineers as well as some guns
and other war material, actually reached Atjeh, where they were taken
into the service of the local ruler and used in his unsuccessful attempts
to expel the Portuguese. The incident seems to have passed unnoticed
at the time and is known only from documents in the Turkish archives.10
Whether through negligence or design, the Ottomans were probably
fortunate in not challenging the Portuguese naval power in the eastern
seas; their fleet of Mediterranean-style galleys would have fared badly
against the Portuguese carracks and galleons, built for the Atlantic,
and therefore bigger, heavier, better armed, and more maneuverable.
The impact of the new open ocean route between Europe and Asia
on the transit commerce of the Middle East was less than was at one
time thought. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Middle Eastern
transit trade in spices and other commodities between South and Southeast
Asia on the one hand and Mediterranean Europe on the other
continued to flourish. But in the seventeenth century a new and—for
the Middle East—far more dangerous situation arose. By that time
Portuguese, Dutch, and other Europeans in Asia were no longer there
INTRODUCTION
15
simply as merchants. They were establishing bases that in time became
colonial dependencies. As their power was extended from the sea to the
seaports and even to the interior, the new European empires in Asia,
controlling the points both of arrival and of departure in East–West
commerce, effectively outflanked the Middle East.
The danger was not confined to West European expansion into
South Asia. There was also the Russian expansion into North Asia
where, again, Muslim rulers turned to the greatest Muslim power of
the time, the Ottoman Empire, for help. There was some response.
In 1568, the Ottomans drew up a plan to dig a canal through the
isthmus of Suez from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea; the following
year they actually began to dig a canal between the Don and Volga
rivers. Their purpose, clearly, was to extend their naval power beyond
the Mediterranean, on the one hand to the Red Sea and Indian
Ocean, on the other to the Black Sea and the Caspian. But both operations,
so it seems, were seen by the Ottomans as sideshows, and
abandoned when they proved troublesome. By the end of the sixteenth
century, the Ottomans withdrew from active participation on
both fronts—against the Russians in North and Central Asia, against
the West Europeans in South and Southeast Asia. Instead, they concentrated
their main effort on the struggle in Europe that they saw,
not without reason, as the principal battleground between Islam and
Christendom, the rival faiths competing for the enlightenment—and
mastery—of the world.
Western successes on the battlefield and on the high seas were accompanied
by less resounding but more pervasive and ultimately more
dangerous victories in the marketplace. The discovery and exploitation
of the New World for the first time provided Christian Europe
with ample supplies of gold and silver. The fertile lands of their new
colonial possessions enabled them to grow new crops, including even
such previous imports from the Middle East as coffee and sugar, and
to export them to their former suppliers. The growing European presence
in South and Southeast Asia accelerated and expanded this process,
and old-established handicrafts faced the double challenge of
Asian cheap labor and European commercial skills. The Western trading
company, helped by its business-minded government, represented
WHAT WENT WRONG?
16
a new force in the Middle East. Here again an occasional voice expressed
some concern but was little heeded.
Yet these developments and the accompanying changes in both internal
and external affairs aggravated old problems and created new
ones of increasing range and complexity—monetary, fiscal, financial,
and eventually economic, social, and cultural.11
For most of the seventeenth century there were no major changes
in the balance of military forces. Until almost the midcentury, Europe
was absorbed in the Thirty Years War and its aftermath, while
the Ottomans were preoccupied with problems at home and on their
eastern frontier. A war with the Republic of Venice began in 1645,
and at first went rather badly for the Turks. In 1656 the Venetians,
who for some years had blockaded the Straits, were even able to send
their fleet into the Dardanelles, and win a naval victory.
In that same year Mehmed Köprülü, an Albanian pasha, was appointed
grand vizier. During his term of office (1656–1661) and that
of his son and successor Ahmed Köprülü (1661–1678) the Ottoman
state underwent a remarkable transformation. These skilled, energetic,
and ruthless rulers were able to reorganize the armed forces of
the Empire, stabilize its finances, and resume the struggle in Christian
Europe. An area of intensive activity was Poland and the Ukraine,
and it was here that, for the first time, the Ottomans came into conflict
with Russia. By the Treaty of Radzin of 1681, the Turks gave up
their claims on the Ukraine and agreed to give the Cossacks trading
rights in the Black Sea. It was a portentous change, marking the emergence
of a new and more dangerous enemy, and the beginning of a
long, hard, and bitter struggle.
Meanwhile a new grand vizier had been appointed. Kara Mustafa
Pasha was a brother-in-law of Mehmed Köprülü, and felt it his duty
to restore the glory of the Köprülü vizierial dynasty. In 1682 he
launched a new war against Austria, culminating in a second siege of
Vienna, between July 17 and September 12, 1683. This second unsuccessful
attempt to capture the city is best described in the words of
the contemporary Ottoman chronicler S¹l¹hdar: “This was a calamitous
defeat, so great that there has never been its like since the first
appearance of the Ottoman state.”12 One must admire the frankness
with which the Ottomans faced unpleasant realities.
INTRODUCTION
17
The failure before Vienna was followed by a series of further defeats.
In 1686, with the loss of Buda, a century and a half of Ottoman
rule in Hungary came to an end. The event is commemorated in a
Turkish lament of the time:
In the fountains they no longer wash
In the mosques they no longer pray
The places that prospered are now desolate
The Austrian has taken our beautiful Buda.13
The retreat from Vienna opened new opportunities. In March 1684
Austria, Venice, Poland, Tuscany, and Malta, with the blessing of the
Pope, formed a Holy League to fight the Ottoman Empire. Russia
joined the Catholic powers in this enterprise. Under Czar Peter, known
as the Great, they went to war against the Ottomans and achieved signal
successes. On August 6, 1696, Peter the Great captured Azov—the
first Russian stronghold on the shore of the Black Sea.
By now the Turks were ready to discuss peace. The peace process
began with secret negotiations between the Austrian chancellor and
the newly-appointed Ottoman grand vizier, who—significantly—was
accompanied by his grand dragoman, the Istanbul Greek Alexander
Mavrokordato. In October 1698, the diplomats met at Carlowitz in
the Voivodina, newly conquered by the Austrians from the Turks.
Finally on January 26, 1699, with the help of British and Dutch mediation,
a peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy
League was signed at Carlowitz. A little later a separate agreement
with the Russians confirmed the cession to them of Azov.
The Ottomans had suffered serious territorial losses. They had also
been obliged to abandon old concepts and old ways of dealing with the
outside world, and to learn a new science of diplomacy, negotiation,
and mediation. The war was not a total defeat and the Treaty was not a
total surrender. In the early eighteenth century they were even able to
make some recovery. But even so the military result was unequivocal—
the shattering defeat outside Vienna, the devastating loss of lives, stores,
and equipment, and of course the cession of territory. The lesson was
clear, and the Turks set to work to learn and apply it.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
18
The Treaty of Carlowitz has a special importance in the history of
the Ottoman Empire, and even, more broadly, in the history of the
Islamic world, as the first peace signed by a defeated Ottoman Empire
with victorious Christian adversaries.
In a global perspective, this was not entirely new. There had been
previous defeats of Islam by Christendom; the loss of Spain and Portugal,
the rise of Russia, the growing European presence in South
and Southeast Asia. But few observers at that time, Muslim or Western,
could command a global perspective. In the perspective of the
Muslim heartlands in the Middle East, these events were remote and
peripheral, barely affecting the balance of power between the Islamic
and Christian worlds in the long struggle that had been going on
between them since the advent of Islam in the seventh century and
the irruption of the Muslim armies from Arabia into the then Christian
lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and, for a while,
Southern Europe. The Crusaders had briefly halted the triumphal
march of Islam, but they had been held, defeated, and ejected. The
Muslim advance had continued with the extinction of Byzantium and
the Ottoman entry into Europe. The Empire of Constantinople had
fallen; the Holy Roman Empire was next. Ottoman and more broadly
Muslim consciousness of the world in which they lived is reflected in
the very copious historical literature that they produced and, in greater
detail, in the millions of documents preserved in the Ottoman archives,
illustrating the functioning of the Ottoman state year by year,
almost day by day, in its manifold activities. There are occasional
references to the loss of Spain, but it appears as a relatively minor
1
The Lessons of the Battlefield
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
19
issue—far away, not threatening. There is some mention of the arrival
of Muslim refugees and of Jewish refugees who came from Spain
to the Ottoman lands, but little more.
The peace signed at Carlowitz drove home two lessons. The first
was military, defeat by superior force. The second lesson, more complex,
was diplomatic, and was learnt in the process of negotiation. In
the early centuries of Ottoman experience, a treaty was a simple matter.
The Ottoman government dictated its terms, and the defeated enemy
accepted them. After the first siege of Vienna there was, for a
while, some sort of negotiation, and even—a startling innovation—a
concession to the kaiser of equal status with the sultan, but no conclusive
result one way or the other. In negotiating the Treaty of Carlowitz,
the Ottomans had, for the first time, to resort to that strange art we call
diplomacy, by which they tried, through political means, to modify, or
even to reduce the results of the military outcome. For the Ottoman
officials this was a new task, one in which they had no experience: how
to negotiate the best terms they could after a military defeat.
In this, they had some assistance, some guidance, from two foreign
embassies in Istanbul, those of Britain and of the Netherlands. The
Ottomans at first were unwilling to accept what they regarded as
Christian interference, but they soon learned to recognize and make
use of such help. The Western maritime and commercial states had
no interest in the consolidation and extension of Austrian power and
influence in Central and Eastern Europe, and thought it would be
more to their advantage to have a weakened but surviving Ottoman
Empire, in which their merchants could come and go at will. The
British and Dutch emissaries managed to provide the Ottomans with
some discreet help and advice, and were even able to take part in the
negotiation of the peace treaty.
Western help was not limited to diplomacy. Military help—the supply
of weapons, even the financing of purchases, were old and familiar,
going back beyond the beginnings of the Ottoman state to the time of
the Crusades. What was new was for the Ottomans to seek European
help in training and equipping their forces, and to form alliances with
European powers against other European powers.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
20
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the struggle was indecisive,
and even brought some gains for the Ottomans. In 1710 and
1711 they won a significant victory over the Russians who, by the
Treaty of the Pruth (1711), were obliged to return the peninsula of
Azov. But another war against Venice and then against Austria ended
with another defeat and further territorial losses, specified in the
Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718.
At about that time, we have an Ottoman document, recording, or to
be more accurate purporting to record, a conversation between two
officers, one a Christian, (not more precisely described), the other an
Ottoman Muslim.1 The purpose of the document is obviously propagandistic.
It is, to my knowledge, the first Muslim document in which
Muslim and Christian methods of warfare are compared, to the advantage
of the latter, and the previously unthinkable suggestion is advanced
that the true believers should follow the infidels in military organization
and the conduct of warfare. The document laid great stress in
particular on the Christian use of firepower, both cannon and muskets,
and on the training and reorganizations of their forces, to make the
most effective use of both. “The superior skill of the Austrian lies only
in the use of the musket. They cannot face the sword.”2 The thrust of
the argument was that it was no longer sufficient, as in the past, to
adopt Western weapons. It was also necessary to adopt Western training,
structures, and tactics for their effective use.
That was bad enough; even worse was that this adoption by the
Ottomans—and later the Persians and other Muslim armies—did not
produce the desired result. The military confrontation revealed in a
dramatic form the root cause of the new imbalance. The problem was
not, as was once argued, one of decline. The Ottoman state and armed
forces were as effective as they had ever been, in traditional terms. In
this as in much else, it was European invention and experiment that
changed the balance of power between the two sides.
The course of modernization even in this limited sense was by no
means easy. It was denounced, it was resisted, it was interrupted. The
case for modernization was considerably weakened by one of the many
wars between Turkey and Iran that ended in 1730 with a victory for
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
21
the even less modernized Persians. This did not strengthen the case
of the modernizers in Turkey.
For a while things went rather better in Europe. The growing rivalry
between their two main enemies in the north, Austria and Russia,
helped the Ottomans to recover some ground. But then a new
disaster struck. Between 1768 and 1774 the Ottomans suffered a series
of defeats at the hands of the Russians. The result was registered
in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca3 of 1774, which gave the Russians
rights of navigation and indirectly of intervention within the Ottoman
Empire. Of more immediate importance was the clause concerning
the Crimea, previously an Ottoman dependency inhabited
by Turkish-speaking Muslims. The sultan was now compelled to recognize
the “independence” of the khans of the Crimea. As it soon
became clear, this was a preliminary to the annexation of the Crimea
by Russia, in 1783.
This was a bitter blow. The loss of Ottoman territories in Europe
was hard but could be borne. These lands were relatively recent conquests,
with predominantly Christian native populations, ruled by a
minority of Ottoman soldiers and administrators. The Crimea was
another matter; it was old Turkish Muslim territory dating back to
the Middle Ages, and its loss was felt as part of the homeland. This
was the first—but by no means the last—loss of Muslim lands and
populations to Christian rule. It also marked the conclusive establishment
of Russia as a major Black Sea power, posing a threat to the
Ottoman and more broadly the Islamic lands, both on the European
and the Caucasian shores.
Clearly, new measures were needed to meet these new threats, and
some of them violated accepted Islamic norms. The leaders of the
ulema, the doctors of the Holy Law, were therefore asked, and agreed,
to authorize two basic changes. The first was to accept infidel teachers
and give them Muslim pupils, an innovation of staggering magnitude
in a civilization that for more than a millennium had been
accustomed to despise the outer infidels and barbarians as having
nothing of any value to contribute, except perhaps themselves as raw
material for incorporation in the domains of Islam and conversion to
the faith of Islam.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
22
The second change was to accept infidel allies in their wars against
other infidels. The Ottomans were used to employing locally recruited
Christian auxiliaries in their wars, and even contingents, whom they
could treat as auxiliaries, from Christian powers with which they
shared a common Christian enemy. The Ottoman records show that
in addition to those of their Balkan subjects who embraced Islam,
there were some who remained Christian and nevertheless served in
auxiliary units attached to the Ottoman forces.
There were even gestures toward sovereign Christian states, who
helped as what we would nowadays call allies, though neither side would
have used such a term at the time. For example, in the correspondence
between the Sultan of Turkey and Queen Elizabeth of England at the
end of the sixteenth century, the letters are mostly concerned with
commerce, but they do occasionally refer to the common Spanish
enemy, a shared concern of London and Istanbul at the time. It would
be an exaggeration to call this an alliance, and it was certainly not on
equal terms. In the documents, the sultan, addressing the queen, uses
language indicating that he expects her to be: “. . . loyal and firmfooted
in the path of vassalage and obedience . . . and to manifest
loyalty and subservience” to the Ottoman throne. The contemporary
translation into Italian, which served as the medium of communication
between Turks and Englishmen, simply renders this as sincera
amicizia.4 This kind of diplomatic mistranslation was for centuries
the norm.
But the new relationship between the Ottoman state and its European
friends as well as its European enemies was something quite
different. By now it was clear that something was going wrong, and
more and more people in the governing elite, and even outside the
governing elite, were becoming aware of it. Even worse, they were
beginning to be aware that Europe was doing better and that they
were consequently weaker and more endangered.
When things go wrong in a society, in a way and to a degree that
can no longer be denied or concealed, there are various questions
that one can ask. A common one, particularly in continental Europe
yesterday and in the Middle East today, is: “Who did this to us?” The
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
23
answer to a question thus formulated is usually to place the blame on
external or domestic scapegoats—foreigners abroad or minorities at
home. The Ottomans, faced with the major crisis in their history,
asked a different question: “What did we do wrong?” The debate on
these two questions began in Turkey immediately after the signing of
the Treaty of Carlowitz; it resumed with a new urgency after Küçük
Kaynarca. In a sense it is still going on today.
Debates about what is wrong were not new. There was a long tradition
of Ottoman memorialists, most of them members of the official
bureaucracy, discussing the various domestic problems of the
Ottoman state and society, suggesting causes, and proposing remedies.
One such was a little book written by Lûtfi Pasha, grand vizier
of Süleyman the Magnificent, after his dismissal from office in 1541.5
In it he offered some acute diagnoses of flaws in the Ottoman structure
and remedies that he thought should be adopted. Another was
by a civil servant of Balkan origin called Koçu Bey, who in 1630 drew
attention to weaknesses in both the civilian and the military services
of the state, and proposed reforms to deal with them.6 The basic fault,
according to most of these memoranda, was falling away from the
good old ways, Islamic and Ottoman; the basic remedy was a return
to them. This diagnosis and prescription still command wide acceptance
in the Middle East.
But these memoranda were relatively calm in tone and primarily
domestic in content. They do occasionally refer to the outside world.
Lûtfi Pasha, for example, drew attention to the importance of sea
power. The Ottomans, he says, are everywhere triumphant on the
land, but the infidels are superior at sea, and this could be dangerous.
7 He was right of course in this. It was European ships, built to
weather the Atlantic gales, that enabled the west Europeans to overcome
local resistance and establish naval supremacy in the Arabian
and Indian Seas. By the eighteenth century, even Muslim pilgrims
going from India and Indonesia to the holy cities in Arabia would
often book passage on English, Dutch, and Portuguese ships, because
it was quicker, cheaper, and safer.
But the rise of Europe was marginal to the concerns of Lûtfi Pasha
and the other early memorialists, primarily concerned with domestic
WHAT WENT WRONG?
24
Figure 1-1
Venetians bombard Tenedos. From a seventeenth-century
Turkish album, prepared for a European ambassador.
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
25
and, in the main, administrative and financial matters. The new memoranda,
after Carlowitz, are more specific, more practical, more urgent,
and more explicitly military. Also, for the first time, they make
comparisons between the Islamic Ottoman Empire and its Christian
enemies to the advantage of the latter. In other words, the question
now was not only “what are we doing wrong?” but also “what are
they doing right?” And of course, the essential question: “How do we
catch up with them, and resume our rightful primacy?”
An important factor in the development of these new perceptions
and in the literature in which they are expressed was travel—the reports
and recommendations of travelers between the two worlds of
Islam and Christendom. There had always been Western travelers in
the East. They came as pilgrims visiting the Christian holy places; as
merchants profiting, by permission of the Sultans, from the rich Eastern
trade; as diplomats, serving in the embassies and consulates established
by the European powers in Muslim capitals and provincial
cities. There were also captives taken on the battlefield or at sea. Some
of these Western visitors entered the service of Muslim governments.
In the Western perspective they were adventurers and renegades; for
the Muslims they were muhtadi, those who have found and followed
the true path.8
The eighteenth century brought an entirely new category of Western
visitors, whom we might describe in modern parlance as “experts.”
Some came as individuals to offer their services to Ottoman employers.
Later, some were even seconded by their governments, as part of
an increasingly popular type of arrangement between a Christian or
post-Christian country on the one hand and the Ottoman or some
other Muslim state on the other. Such arrangements continue to the
present day. For Muslims, first in Turkey and later elsewhere, this
brought a shocking new idea—that one might learn from the previously
despised infidel.
An even more shocking innovation was travel from East to West.
Previously only captives and a very limited number of special diplomatic
envoys had gone that way. Muslims had no holy places in Europe
to visit as pilgrims, as Christians visited the Holy Land. There
WHAT WENT WRONG?
26
was not much to attract merchants in a Europe that, for many centuries,
was still a relatively primitive place with little to offer. The most
valued commodity brought from Europe to the East was slaves, and
these were usually supplied by Muslim raiders or European merchants.
Muslims were no strangers to travel. The pilgrimage to Mecca was
one of the five basic obligations of the faith, and required Muslims, at
least once in a lifetime, to make the necessary journey however long
it might be. Muslims also traveled extensively in the countries to the
south and to the east of the realms of Islam, in search of merchandise
or knowledge. The lands and peoples beyond the northwestern frontier
of Islam had little to offer of either, and such travel was in fact
actively discouraged by the doctors of the Holy Law. Western captives
in the East who escaped or were ransomed and returned home
produced a considerable literature telling of their adventures, of the
lands they had seen and the people they had met in the mysterious
Orient. Middle Eastern captives in the West who found their way
home for the most part remained silent, nor was there any great interest
in the few accounts that survived. The Occident remained even
more mysterious than the Orient, and it aroused no equivalent curiosity.
The different mutual perceptions were vividly expressed in their
attitudes to each other’s languages. The study of Eastern languages
was intensively pursued in the European universities and elsewhere
by scholars who came to be known as Orientalists, on the analogy of
Hellenists and Latinists. Until a comparatively recent date, there were
no Occidentalists in the Orient.
The European powers had long followed the practice of maintaining
permanent resident embassies and consulates, in the Islamic lands as
elsewhere. The Islamic governments did not. It was the normal practice
of Muslim sovereigns to send an ambassador to a foreign ruler
when there was something to say, and to bring him home when he had
said it. This eminently sensible and economical practice was maintained
for centuries. Until the eighteenth century, there were very few such
missions, and very few indications survive of what they reported.
In the eighteenth century the situation changed dramatically. Great
numbers of such special envoys were now sent, with instructions to
observe and to learn and, more particularly, to report on anything
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
27
that might be useful to the Muslim state in coping with its difficulties
and confronting its enemies. Several of the Ottoman ambassadors
wrote reports, which clearly had a considerable impact at the time.9
Among them were Mehmet Efendi who went to Paris in 1721; Resmi
Efendi who went to Vienna in 1757 and to Berlin in 1773; Vasif Efendi
who was in Madrid from 1787 to 1789; Azmi Efendi who was in Berlin
from 1790 to 1792 and wrote an interesting memorandum on how
a well-ordered state is governed and administered; and in many ways
most important of all, Ebu Bekir Ratib Efendi,10 who was in Vienna
from 1791 to 1792 and described the system of civil and military government
in the Austrian Empire in great detail, with specific recommendations
concerning those practices that might usefully be copied.
The mission of Ratib Efendi differs from those of his predecessors
both in quantity and in quality. The staff who accompanied him to
Vienna consisted of more than one hundred military and civil officials;
he stayed in Vienna for 153 days; his report ran to 245 manuscript
folios, ten times or more than ten times those of his predecessors,
and it goes into immense detail, primarily on military matters, but
also, to quite a considerable extent, on civil affairs. Ratib Efendi also
took the trouble to provide himself with much needed help on the
language side. In his report he mentions two people who had been
particularly helpful to him. One was the son of “the Jewish financier
Camondo,” one of the small group of Ottoman sephardic Jews who
were living in Austria; the other was the famous Mouradgea d’Ohsson,
an Ottoman Armenian who had long served as translator to the Swedish
embassy in Istanbul. In his retirement he had gone to live in Paris,
but because of the Revolution had moved to Vienna. These two provided
much more than simple translation. Ratib Efendi, in his report,
tells of Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s visits and long conversations with him,
and notes that the Armenian’s zeal for the Ottoman state was at least
as great as his own.
The recourse to Vienna was less surprising than it might at first
appear. Events in France were bringing an important change. For
almost three centuries, the Ottoman sultans had seen the Hapsburgs
as their main enemies, and had looked to France and to a lesser extent
WHAT WENT WRONG?
28
to England for help against them. But the revolution in France created
a new situation. The new sultan, Selim III (reigned 1789–1807), was
clearly reluctant to drop the French connection, but the events in Paris
obliged him to explore other possibilities—even the traditional enemy.
As well as embassy reports, there were also military memoranda.
One of the earliest pieces of evidence, mentioned above, records an
imaginary conversation between an Ottoman officer and a Christian
officer, comparing their armies to the great disadvantage of the Ottomans.
The purpose clearly was to prepare the Ottoman governing
elite for drastic changes. This was bad enough in itself. That the
changes should take the form of following Western practice was even
more shocking. A major role in this process was played by European
experts. Some of these came as individuals and threw in their lot completely
with the Ottomans, to the point of embracing Islam and entering
the Ottoman service. One such was a French nobleman,
Claude-Alexandre, Comte de Bonneval, who arrived in about 1729,
reorganized the bombardier force, and founded a “mathematical
school” for the armed forces in 1734. He converted to Islam—allegedly
to escape extradition on certain charges pending against him at
home—and died in 1747. He is known in Turkish annals as Bombardier
Ahmed (Humbarac¹ Ahmed).
Another famous convert was a Hungarian seminarist, probably
Unitarian, known in Turkish annals as Ibrahim Müteferrika. Ibrahim’s
original family name is unknown; Müteferrika is a title, indicating
membership of a kind of elite guard corps attached to the sultan’s
person. He seems to have arrived in the late seventeenth century and
died in 1745. His major achievement was to establish a Turkish printing
press in 1729.11 One of the books he printed was a short treatise
of his own, in which he explains the successes of Christian arms against
the Ottomans in Europe and urges the need to reform Ottoman administrative
and military procedures along European lines.12
As well as converts to Islam, there were a number of refugees who
came from Europe, bringing useful skills. These included Christians
whose beliefs were deemed heretical or schismatic in their countries
of origin, and of course Jews. For a while in the late fifteenth and
more especially in the sixteenth centuries, Jewish refugees from Europe
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
29
played a minor but not unimportant role in Ottoman society—bringing
European economic, technical, and medical skills, and occasionally
serving in diplomatic missions. But with the cessation of Jewish
immigration from Europe this virtually came to an end. Those who
came from Europe had brought useful skills and knowledge; their
locally-born descendants lacked these advantages, and their role was
correspondingly diminished.
Of vastly greater importance were the Greeks. In the early years of
Ottoman rule in the former Byzantine lands there was great bitterness
among the orthodox Greeks at their treatment by the Catholic
West, and the patriarch of Constantinople was famously quoted as
saying: “Rather the turban of the Turk than the tiara of the Pope.”
But attitudes changed, and from the late seventeenth century it became
customary for wealthy Greek families in the Turkish lands to
send their sons to Europe, usually to Italy, for education. They particularly
favored medical studies but also began to play an influential
role as translators for the Ottoman government.
The office of interpreter to the Ottoman authorities was of course
important in dealings with Europe. In earlier times it was held mostly
by renegades and adventurers from the countries bordering the Ottoman
Empire; Germans, Hungarians, Italians, and others. Later it
was monopolized by Greek subjects of the Ottoman state who held
the office and title of Grand Dragoman. The role of the Grand Dragoman
Alexander Mavrokordato in the negotiation of the Treaty of
Carlowitz was an important but by no means exceptional example. At
this time, when the Ottomans sent an ambassador abroad he was invariably
accompanied by a dragoman who was almost invariably Greek.
By the late eighteenth century the Ottoman state no longer needed
to rely for its military reforms on renegades and adventurers, but could
request and obtain the seconding of experts from European countries.
One of the first and most important was the Baron de Tott, an
officer of Hungarian origin in the French service who spent some
time in Turkey in the 1770s, when he founded a new school of mathematics
and contributed significantly to the training of the Ottoman
forces in the new sciences of military engineering and artillery.13 On
his retirement in 1775, he was replaced as chief instructor by a BritWHAT
WENT WRONG?
30
Figure 1-2
Engraving of the Kuleli Military School by Thomas Allom.
From R. Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the
Seven Churches of Asia Minor, London, 1839.
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
31
ish officer, who later converted to Islam and who was known after his
conversion as Ingiliz Mustafa. Since his original name was Campbell,
his Turkish sobriquet seems doubly incongruous.
The dominant European influence however remained French, and
most of the foreign instructors were either French or taught in the
French language, the study of which was made compulsory for all students
in the new military and naval schools. In 1789—a year of some
significance in France—a new sultan, Selim III, ascended the throne of
Osman. He had long been interested in reform, and had even corresponded,
while still heir apparent, with the French King Louis XVI.
He now embarked on an extensive program of military and administrative
reform and reconstruction. At first the sultan, undeterred by
the changes in France, turned to Paris for help; the Committee of Public
Safety and later the Directoire responded. French-Ottoman cooperation
was briefly interrupted by the Franco-Ottoman War of 1798
to 1802, but was later resumed, only to be interrupted again when
Napoleon made peace with the czar at Turkish expense.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, involving the whole of
Europe, extended to Africa and more especially to Asia through the
encounters there between the European colonial powers.
The relative weakness of the major Islamic powers had already in a
sense been revealed by the first European expansion in Asia, when
even small countries like Portugal and the Netherlands were able to
establish themselves on the seas and on the coasts in defiance of the
Muslim powers. The impotence of the Islamic world confronted with
Europe was brought home in dramatic form in 1798, when a French
expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon
Bonaparte invaded, occupied, and governed Egypt. The lesson was
harsh and clear—even a small European force could invade one of
the heartlands of the Islamic empire and do so with impunity.
The second lesson came a few years later, when the French were
forced to leave—not by the Egyptians nor by their Turkish suzerains,
but by a squadron of the Royal Navy commanded by a young admiral
called Horatio Nelson. This lesson too was clear; not only could a
European power come and act at will, but only another European
power could get them out.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
32
Figure 1-3
Western-style costumes of the New Troops.
From Charles MacFarlane, Constantinople in 1828,
Vol. II, London, 1829, frontispiece.
THE LESSONS OF THE BATTLEFIELD
33
The message was repeated with new emphasis in 1807, and this
time nearer home. Between 1806 and 1812 Turkey fought a major
war against Russia. Britain was at first involved as an ally of Russia
against Napoleon, and in February 1807 a British naval squadron commanded
by Admiral Duckworth forced its way through the Dardanelles
and threatened Istanbul. In this campaign the boot was on the other
foot. While the sultan engaged the admiral in interminable negotiations,
his men, directed by the French ambassador Sébastiani, rebuilt
and strengthened the fortifications of the city so effectively that the
British admiral was obliged to withdraw.
But in July of the same year Napoleon, to free himself for his war
against England, made a deal with the czar at Tilsit, and was now
ready to sacrifice Turkey to his new policy. The two emperors’ plan
for the partition of European Turkey gave the eastern Balkan provinces
to Russia, the western Balkans to France, and assigned parts of
Bosnia and Serbia to appease the Austrians. In the ensuing campaign
the Russians crossed the Danube and by the Treaty of Bucharest of
1812 annexed Bessarabia, today known as Moldova, and acquired extensive
rights in the Danubian principalities. Turkey, painfully, was
learning the Great Game and, in time, gained some skill in playing
it—enough to delay, though not to prevent, the final collapse of the
Ottoman Empire.
Meanwhile a new force had arisen, which did much to accelerate
and finally accomplish that collapse—the rise of the subject peoples
within the Ottoman Empire. For many centuries, surprisingly to
Western eyes, this was not a problem. The confrontation between
Ottoman Islam and European Christendom has often been likened
to the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century. There
are indeed some similarities between the two confrontations, but also
significant differences. Perhaps most notable among these is the movement
of refugees. In the twentieth century this movement was, overwhelmingly,
from East to West; in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and even
in the seventeenth centuries, it was primarily from West to East.
Surely, the Ottomans did not offer equal rights to their subjects—a
meaningless anachronism in the context of that time and place. They
did however offer a degree of tolerance without precedent or parallel
WHAT WENT WRONG?
34
in Christian Europe. Each religious community—the Ottoman term
was millet—was allowed the free practice of its religion. More remarkably,
they had their own communal organizations, subject to the
authority of their own religious chiefs, controlling their own education
and social life, and enforcing their own laws, to the extent that
they did not conflict with the basic laws of the Empire. While ultimate
power—political and military—remained in Muslim hands, non-
Muslims controlled much of the economy, and were even able to play
a part of some importance in the political process.
The French Revolution, and the arrival of French troops and—
more dangerous—French ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean brought
a radical change. In February 1804, the Serbs launched their first
national rising against the Ottomans, who dealt with it partly by suppression,
partly by accommodation. In 1815, a second Serb rising
was more successful and won them recognition as an autonomous
principality under Ottoman suzerainty. The Greek uprising a few years
later evoked widespread European support and achieved a sovereign
independent Greek kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the Christian peoples of the Balkans, one
by one and step by step, freed themselves from Ottoman rule.
Iran, further from the main battlefields of Europe and lacking both
opportunity and skill, was at this stage less able than the Turks to
play the European powers against one another, and fared even worse.
Here, too, the British, the French, and the Russians operated more
or less at will, with the Russians taking the lion’s share. By the Treaty
of Gulistan of 1813, Iran ceded Derbent, Baku, Shirvan, Shaki,
Karabagh and adjoining territories to Russia and renounced all claim
to Georgia, Dagistan, and Mingrelia. A renewal of Russo-Turkish
hostilities in 1825 was ended by the Treaty of Turkmanchay of 1828,
by which Iran ceded the rest of Armenia to the Russians. The Russian
advance against Islam was well under way, at the expense of Turkey,
Iran, and the Central Asian states. It continued almost to our own day.
These wars starkly revealed the weakness of the Muslim states compared
with the European powers. Military remedies for military failures
were seen and understood to be inadequate. The quest for other
causes and other cures began.
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
35
Before the end of the eighteenth century Turks, Iranians, and other
Middle Easterners had had very little opportunity for direct observation
of the West—nothing remotely comparable with the opportunities
that Westerners had enjoyed in the East even in the period when
the West was inferior in every material and cultural respect. Contacts
occurred mainly in three areas—diplomacy, commerce, and war. But
while the European powers from relatively early times maintained
offices, then consulates, and eventually embassies in the East, the
Eastern powers did not follow this practice and sent only rare and
brief special missions.
A similar disparity may be seen in commerce. Western merchants
traveled extensively and, on the whole, freely in the Muslim lands.
Middle-Eastern merchants did not normally travel in the West. Muslims
had an extreme reluctance to venture into non-Muslim territory,
and the Westerners did not want them to come. When, for
example, it was proposed to establish an inn and warehouse for Turkish
merchants in Venice, there was a long and anguished debate in
the councils of the Venetian state, whether or not the Turks should
be allowed to build such a center.1 The importance of the Turkey
trade for Venice was obvious, and Venetian merchants were well ensconced
in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. But there were strong
objections before the proposal was approved. One of the arguments
was that this would be even worse than having Jews and Protestants,
because unlike the Jews, the Turks had an army and a navy, and were
therefore really dangerous. Sometimes, when the Turks sent one of
their emissaries to a European ruler, there would be anxious debates
2
The Quest for Wealth and Power
WHAT WENT WRONG?
36
in the country to which he was going, and even in the countries through
which he would pass, on whether or not such envoys should be permitted
to come or pass. This was by no means an easy or obvious
question.
On the Muslim side, there was an equal reluctance to go to Europe.
The Muslim jurists discuss at some length whether it is permissible
for a Muslim to live in a non-Muslim country. They consider
the case of the non-Muslim in his own country, or in their terms, the
infidel in the land of the infidels, who sees the light and is converted
to the true faith. May he stay where he is or may he not? The general
consensus of the classical jurists is no. It is not possible for a Muslim
to live a good Muslim life in an infidel land. He must leave home and
go to some Muslim country. An even harder case was posed by the
reconquest of Spain. If a Muslim land is conquered by the Christians,
may they stay under Christian rule? The answer of many jurists was
again no, they may not stay. The Moroccan al-Wanshar
s
,2 considering
the case of Spain, posed what turned out to be a purely hypothetical
question: if the Christian government is tolerant and allows
them to practice their religion, may they then stay? His answer was
that in that case it is all the more important for them to leave, because
under a tolerant government, the danger of apostasy is greater.
The Muslim attitude was different from that of other eastern civilizations
that suffered the impact of the expanding West. For Hindus,
Buddhists, Confucians, and others, Christianity and Christendom
were new and unknown. Those who came from there, and the things
they brought, could therefore be considered more or less on their
merits. For Muslims, Christianity, and therefore by implication everything
associated with it, was known, familiar, and discounted. Christianity
and Judaism were precursors of Islam, with holy books deriving
from authentic revelations, but incomplete and corrupted by their
unworthy custodians, and therefore superseded by the final and perfect
revelation of Islam. What was true in Christianity was incorporated
in Islam. What was not so incorporated was false.
On the Christian side there was a similar difference in attitude to
the three major Asian civilizations, and for obvious reasons. Neither
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
37
Indians nor Chinese ruled the Christian holy land, nor had they conquered
Spain, captured Constantinople, or besieged Vienna. Neither
Hindus nor Buddhists nor yet Confucians had ever dismissed the
Christian gospels as corrupt and outdated, and offered a later, better
version of God’s word to replace them. There were special difficulties
in the long encounter between Islam and Christendom that were
not present in the encounters between either of these civilizations
and the remoter civilizations of Asia.
Muslims in general had little desire or incentive to venture into
Christian Europe, and indeed the doctors of the Holy Law for the
most part prohibited such journeys, except for a specific and limited
purpose. The usual purpose—later the excuse—was to ransom captives.
Some, but not all juristic authorities also permitted travel in
infidel lands to purchase supplies in times of shortage.
Even among the very small number of people from Middle-Eastern
countries who ventured into the West for diplomacy or commerce, a
significant proportion were not Muslims but members of the minority
religious communities. These were occasionally Jews, more often non-
Catholic Christians, Greeks or Armenians, who were considered to be
fairly reliable from an Ottoman point of view. Certainly they could not
be suspected of sympathy with the Catholic powers.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that there was virtually
no knowledge of Western languages. Only Italian had some currency
in the Eastern Mediterranean, and served as a medium of communication
between East and West. But even this involved Eastern Christians
and Jews and rarely, if ever, Muslims. Minority doctors with
Western training also played an increasing role in the practice of medicine.
Arabic, Persian, and Turkish scientific writings of the period
show some limited acquaintance with Western medicine and Western
geography, both needed for practical reasons, but no awareness
of Western history or culture.
The discovery of the New World illustrates both points. A Turkish
version of Columbus’s own (now lost) map, prepared in 1513,
survives in the Topkap¹ Palace in Istanbul, where it remained, unconsulted
and unknown, until it was discovered by a German scholar
WHAT WENT WRONG?
38
Figure 2-1
Christopher Columbus at the Court of King Ferdinand.
Miniature from a Turkish manuscript of the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi
(History of the West Indies), 1583–1584. Beyazid Library, Istanbul.
Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture of the Turkish Republic.
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
39
in 1929.3 A Turkish book on the New World was written in the late
sixteenth century, and was apparently based on information from
European sources—oral rather than written. It describes the flora,
fauna, and inhabitants of the New World, and, of course, expresses
the hope that this blessed land would in due course be illuminated by
the light of Islam and added to the sultan’s realms. This too remained
unknown until it was printed in Istanbul in 1729. 4
An unwelcome import from the New World was syphilis, already
reported in a Persian medical work by an author who died circa 1510.5
This disease, which he calls “the Frankish pox,” came, he said, from
Europe, whence its name. It had already reached Azerbaijan before
the end of the fifteenth century. In the prevailing view, the corpus of
medical knowledge had reached perfection in the days of Avicenna,
and in principle no change or addition was needed. Indeed, any change
or addition was seen by some as impious. But syphilis was new, and
came from Europe. It was therefore acceptable to translate European
writings on the diagnosis and treatment of this disease. A collection
of European writings was duly translated and presented to the sultan.
Curiously, though the collection was presented in 1655, it consisted
entirely of sixteenth-century European works.6 Knowledge was something
to be acquired, stored, if necessary bought, rather than grown
or developed.
Middle Easterners, for practical purposes, had been willing to accept
and use such Western devices as cannon and muskets, telescopes
and eyeglasses. We have very good historical evidence about that.
Under Muslim law, a man or woman has very little discretionary power
to dispose of his or her property to heirs. Property had to be divided
according to certain rules, which in the classical Ottoman Empire
were strictly applied. There was a public official called a Kassam, whose
duty was to see to the proper distribution of legacies amongst the
heirs. For this purpose, the authorities had to prepare inventories
and valuations. The central and provincial archives preserve hundreds
of thousands of inventories of possessions of deceased persons, extending
all over the empire and continuing for hundreds of years.
These provide a priceless indication of the range and growth of what
WHAT WENT WRONG?
40
we might call practical Westernization, through the acquisition and
possession of such Western products as clocks and watches, firearms,
eyeglasses and telescopes, and even chairs. The figures of some eighteenth-
century listings are revealing:
Clocks and watches 147
Pistols and muskets 76
Textiles 62
Chairs 57
Binoculars and telescopes 39
Glassware and flatware 38
Mirrors 33
Chests and drawers 21
Eyeglasses 12
Beds 5
Books and maps 5
Miscellaneous goods 5
TOTAL 5007
The process of conscious and deliberate modernization required,
for the first time, closer and more sustained contact with Westerners,
and obliged Middle Easterners in increasing numbers to learn previously
despised European languages and even to endure periods of
residence in European cities.
These visitors were of several kinds. The first were diplomats. The
reforming Sultan Selim III decided, as part of his program of modernizing
reforms, to adopt the European practice of continuous diplomacy
through resident missions. His first was established in
London in 1793 and was followed by others in Vienna, Berlin, St.
Petersburg, and Paris.8
The problems and difficulties confronted by these first Middle-
Eastern diplomats in Europe were in many respects the mirror image
of those that had long faced their European counterparts in the East—
how to perform their duties in a strange and alien society, nurtured
on different scriptures and classics, inspired by different ideals and
aspirations, and, to encapsulate them all, speaking a different and for
most of them totally unknown language, written in an unknown script.
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
41
Figure 2-2
Mirza Abu’l Hassan Khan, Persian Ambassador to England,
painted by Thomas Lawrence in 1810. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum,
Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of William M. Chadbourne.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
42
Their position was much more difficult than that of the Europeans.
These, as already noted, had a tradition of learning languages—
scriptural, classical, and merely foreign. They had even been willing
to undertake the study of more exotic languages. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries chairs of Arabic were established in the major
European universities. Later Persian was added—but not Turkish.
This being a modern language, it was, like English, French, German,
et cetera, not seen as a subject for university study. But there were
ample opportunities for Europeans to study Turkish outside the academic
programs, and there was a considerable body of printed literature,
in European languages, dealing with the history, culture, religion,
and current conditions of the Islamic world. The European reader
even had at his disposal a selection of Middle-Eastern classical literature
in translation.9 European Christians had a further advantage;
they could also find help from the local communities of their Christian
co-religionists, of whom there were many in Turkey, Egypt, Syria,
and even as far east as Iraq and Iran. Except in North Africa, where
Judaism lived on but Christianity died out, these communities continued
to survive and even to flourish. An intense propaganda effort
from Rome even persuaded significant segments of the Eastern
churches to enter into communion with Rome, producing Uniate
communities of Greek, Armenian, and Arabic speech. Muslim visitors
had no comparable recourse in western Europe, where the Muslim
communities had been expelled after the reconquest and where
no contact or recruitment was permitted.
At first, Middle-Eastern diplomats in Europe found the same answer
as their Western colleagues; to make use of dragomans who,
initially employed as translators or interpreters, became far more than
that, serving as intermediaries and sometimes as principals in major
negotiations. The Turks in Europe, even more than the Europeans
in Turkey, at first relied on these intermediaries. Much faster than
their European colleagues, perhaps under far stronger compulsion,
they made a determined effort to learn new languages and master
new crafts.
They did so with astonishing speed and success. The first experiment
in regular diplomatic relations launched by Selim III ran into
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
43
difficulties and was abandoned. But a new start was made in the 1830s,
and thereafter first Turks, then Persians, and then other Middle-Eastern
governments, as these came into existence, attained a high level
of diplomatic skill and professionalism.
At first their numbers were very limited, and Middle-Eastern governments
soon became aware of the need for instruction in a variety
of subjects and, more immediately, in the languages that provided
access to these subjects. The practice therefore arose of sending students
to study in Western countries.
It is difficult for a Westerner to appreciate the magnitude of this
change, in a society accustomed to despise the infidel barbarians beyond
the frontiers of civilization. Even traveling abroad was suspect;
the idea of studying under infidel teachers was inconceivable.
The question of learning from infidels arose at a relatively early date
in connection with directly military matters. The story is told in the
Turkish chronicles of a Venetian war galley that was cast ashore in a
storm and abandoned by its crew. Ottoman naval specialists examined
the hulk, and found things that they thought it might be useful to adopt.
But the religio-legal question arose—is it permissible to imitate the
infidels? The answer of the religious authorities was that it is permissible
to imitate the infidels in order to more effectively fight against
them. The same argument was used in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, when the ulema were again consulted on the lawfulness
of the various Westernizing reforms in the armed forces and, more
especially, the establishment of schools with European (not always converted)
teachers and European (not always translated) textbooks. A
question often asked by the memorialists was: “Why is it that in the
past we were always able to catch up with the new devices of the infidels,
and now we are no longer able to do so?” Interestingly, for a long
time they did not ask why it was always the infidels who introduced the
new devices. When they did ask this question, something more than
modernization—catching up—was involved.
Adopting or copying infidel devices was one thing; learning from
infidel teachers was another. Actually going to infidel countries to
learn was an even more radical change. Nevertheless it had become
WHAT WENT WRONG?
44
necessary. First the pasha of Egypt, then the sultan of Turkey, then the
shah of Persia all sent selected groups of students to London, Paris,
and elsewhere. At first these student missions were overwhelmingly
military, and their purpose was to ferret out and master the secrets of
Western warfare. But this involved learning Western languages, and
these students found other, perhaps more interesting, reading matter
besides their military manuals. For the first time young Muslims from
the Middle East were directly exposed to the impact of Western ideas.
In the past, the barrier between the two civilizations was such that the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution had been
irrelevant and unknown in the Islamic Middle East. But the revolutions
in France offered new ideas and new models.
In earlier times, as a Turkish historian remarked, “the scientific
current had broken against the dikes of literature and jurisprudence.”10
The enthusiastic and optimistic liberalism of the nineteenth century
opened a sluice in the dike, through which first a trickle and then a
flood of new ideas penetrated the hitherto closed Muslim elites.
One unexpected result of the impact of these new ideas was the
appearance of a third category of Middle-Eastern visitors to the
West—political refugees, those who had observed some Western practices,
tried to apply them at home, and soon found it expedient to
leave and go back, usually to London or Paris. But these too, after a
period in exile, often returned home, sometimes as part of a change
of regime and, more broadly, of outlook.
The new approach to language study brought a major change in
communication and became a key factor in the relations between the
civilizations. Contact with the West was no longer filtered through
foreigners and minorities but was direct. This change became increasingly
effective as ever larger numbers of Middle-Eastern Muslims
were involved in the process. A turning point in the process of change
occurred in 1821, with the outbreak of the Greek insurrection, which
became the Greek War of Independence. The last of the Greek grand
dragomans, Stavraki Aristarchi, was charged—probably unjustly—with
complicity with the rebels, and executed. The Ottoman historians
tell us that for a while incoming correspondence piled up in the ofTHE
QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
45
fice, with no one to read it. Then the problem was solved by bringing
the chief instructor of the naval school, one Hoca Ishak Efendi, to
take charge. Hoca Ishak Efendi (d. 1834) was a Greek Jew who converted
to Islam and was a pioneer in the translation of Western scientific
literature into Turkish—a task for which he had to create an
entire new vocabulary.11 After him the grand dragomans and their
staffs were Muslims, and the Translation Office became a major ladder
to influence and power. What mattered now was knowing how to
talk to and deal with Europeans, knowing what was going on in Europe.
Most of the major Ottoman statesmen of the mid- and latenineteenth
century rose by that ladder and not by the older ladders of
the army, the bureaucracy, and the religious establishment.
The impact of the language revolution was not limited to classrooms
and chanceries. Translation made Western books accessible
to Middle-Eastern readers; another device of modernization, the printing
press, made them more readily available.
With the crumbling of the language barrier direct observation of
the West was now possible, and an increased recognition and more
intimate awareness of European wealth and strength. The question
now was more specific—what is the source of this wealth and strength,
the talisman of Western success? Traditional answers to such a question
would have been in religious terms. All problems are so to speak
ultimately religious, and all final answers are therefore religious. The
final answers given by traditional writers to the older formulation of
the question were always “let us go back to our roots, to the good old
ways, to the true faith, to the word of God.” With that of course
there was always the assumption that if things are going badly, we are
being punished by God for having abandoned the true path.12 That
argument loses cogency when it is the infidels who are benefiting
from the change.
Middle Easterners found it difficult to consider what we might call
civilizational or cultural answers to this question. To preach a return
to authentic, pristine Islam was one thing; to seek the answer in Christian
ways or ideas was another—and, according to the notions of the
time, self-evidently absurd. Muslims were accustomed to regard Christianity
as an earlier, corrupted version of the true faith of which Islam
WHAT WENT WRONG?
46
was the final perfection. One does not go forward by going backward.
There must therefore be some circumstance other than religion
or culture, which is part of religion, to account for the otherwise
unaccountable superiority achieved by the Western world. A Westerner
at the time—and many Muslims at the present day—might suggest
science and the philosophy that sustains it. This view would not
have occurred to those for whom philosophy was the handmaiden of
theology and science merely a collection of pieces of knowledge and
of devices. Muslims had their own philosophy that had retained and
perfected the heritage of the ancients under the aegis of Islam. They
had also their own science, handed down by their own great scientists
of the past.
Instead they looked for the secret of Western success in those features
of the West that were most distinctive, most different from anything
in their own experience—and not tainted with Christianity. The
French Revolution, the first major movement of ideas in Europe that
was not explicitly or implicitly Christian, and even projected itself in
the East as anti-Christian, had seemed for a while to offer such a
choice. But under the Empire and the Restoration it lost this appeal.
For the whole of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century
the search for the hidden talisman concentrated on two aspects of the
West—economics and politics, or to put it differently, wealth and
power.
The economy, and more especially industry, was seen as the prime
source of wealth and therefore ultimately of military effectiveness.
Halet Efendi, who was Ottoman ambassador in Paris from 1803 to
1806, observed: “If as an emergency measure once every three or
four years, twenty-five thousand purses of aspers [a silver coin] were
to be set aside and five factories for snuff, paper, crystal, cloth and
porcelain as well as a school for languages and geography set up, then
in the course of five years there will be as good as nothing left for
them to hold onto, since the basis of all their current trade is in these
five commodities.”13
Halet’s version is somewhat crude. Later rulers and ministers, first
in Egypt, then Turkey, then other countries in the region, adopted
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
47
more sophisticated versions of what was basically the same approach,
and tried to catch up with Europe by building factories, principally to
equip and clothe their armies. The effort failed, and most of the early
factories became derelict.
Later attempts to catch up with the Industrial Revolution fared
little better. Unlike the rising powers of Asia, most of which started
from a lower economic base than the Middle East, the countries in
the region still lag behind in investment, job creation, productivity,
and therefore in exports and incomes. According to a World Bank
estimate, the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels
amount to less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants.
Nor is much coming into the region by way of capital investment.
On the contrary, wealthy Middle Easterners prefer to invest
their capital abroad, in the developed world.
The other immediately visible difference between Islam and the
West was in politics and more particularly in administration. Already
in the eighteenth century ambassadors to Berlin and Vienna, later to
Paris and London, describe—with wonderment and sometimes with
admiration—the functioning of an efficient bureaucratic administration
in which appointment and promotion are by merit and qualification
rather than by patronage and favor, and recommend the adoption
of something similar.
The impact of Western example and Western ideas also brought
new definitions of identity and consequently new allegiances and aspirations.
Two ideas were especially important, both new in a culture
where identity was basically religious and allegiance normally dynastic.
The first was that of patriotism, coming from Western Europe, particularly
from France and England, and favored by the younger Ottoman
elites, who saw in an Ottoman patriotism a way of binding together
the heterogeneous populations of the empire in a common love of country
expressed in a common allegiance to its ruler. The second, from
Central and Eastern Europe, was nationalism, a more ethnic and linguistic
definition of identity, the effect of which in the Ottoman political
community was not to unify but to divide and disrupt.
The influence of Central- and East-European–style nationalism was
vastly greater than that of West-European–style patriotism, and even
WHAT WENT WRONG?
48
where patriotism was adopted, it was given a national rather than an
empire-wide content. European patterns of identity and allegiance
were alien to the peoples of the Middle East, but not equally so. The
situation in a fragmented Germany and Italy and in the polyglot Austrian
and Russian empires was much closer to Middle-Eastern conditions,
and the message that was brought—for example by Hungarian
and Polish refugees—was much more readily intelligible. After the
events of 1848 a number of Hungarian refugees went to Turkey, and
many of them stayed. Some learned Turkish, some became Muslims,
and their role in the development of these new ideas in Turkey is
considerable. The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of Poles
who also came to seek refuge.
These ideas had powerful and contradictory impacts on the attitudes
and expectations of the Ottoman population and particularly the non-
Muslim subject peoples. On the one hand, Ottoman patriotism and the
new reforms appeared to offer them legal and civic equality with the
previously dominant Muslims. At the same time nationalism inspired
the desire for separate national sovereignty, free from what they were
increasingly beginning to regard as the oppressive Ottoman yoke. Both
undermined the old consensus, which had enabled people of many different
faiths and nations to live together in reasonable harmony under
the supreme authority of the sultan.
All this happened at a time when the non-Muslim subjects and more
especially the Christians were thriving mightily. There were several
causes for this. One was better education. For obvious reasons, they
had better opportunities to learn languages, travel and receive Western
schooling—the non-Muslims more than the Muslims, the Christians
more than the Jews. For another, they enjoyed the patronage of
the European powers. These again preferred non-Muslims to Muslims
and Christians to Jews, in both respects reversing the traditional
situation.
And of course, arising from these, the Ottoman Christians and Jews
enjoyed the common minority advantage of their own networks of
kinsfolk and co-religionists, especially abroad.
The Muslims on their side were still inhibited by their old disdain
for the infidels and more particularly for traditional infidel occupaTHE
QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
49
Figure 2-3
Cafes in Damascus. From Syria, the Holy Land, Asia Minor, etc. Illustrated by W.H. Bartlett, William Purse, etc., London, 1836.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
50
tions. Certain professions and occupation were regarded as Jewish,
Greek, or Armenian and therefore undignified for a Muslim or a Turk
to follow. This sort of choice is not unfamiliar in other societies and
other times. Perhaps for these reasons most of the state-sponsored
economic enterprises were unsuccessful, while the minorities and their
foreign patrons increasingly controlled the economy. At a certain stage
one must rather say foreigners and their minority proteges.14
The changed relationship may be seen in a simple example, that
traditional Middle-Eastern indulgence, a cup of coffee. Coffee originally
came from Ethiopia. It was brought up both shores of the Red
Sea, through Arabia and Egypt, to Syria and to Turkey, and then
exported to Europe. Sugar came from Persia and India. For a long
time, both coffee and sugar were imports to Europe, either through
or from the Middle East. But then the colonial powers found that
they could grow coffee and sugar more abundantly and more cheaply
in their new colonies. They did this so thoroughly and successfully
that they began to export coffee and sugar to the Ottoman lands. By
the end of the eighteenth century, if a Turk or Arab took the traditional
indulgence, a cup of sweetened coffee, in all probability the
coffee came from Dutch Java or Spanish America, the sugar from the
British or French West Indies; only the hot water was local. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even that ceased to be true,
as European concessionary companies took over the water supply and
gas supply in Middle Eastern cities.
In the meantime the process of modernization was accentuated and
accelerated by three major developments in communication:
1. Printing. The establishment and spread of printing presses.
2. Translation. At first this was limited; then increasing numbers
of books were translated, printed, and distributed in Turkish,
Arabic, and Persian. The earliest translations obviously were of
works deemed useful by the rulers and officials who commissioned
them. But in time works of literary content were also
translated and published.
3. Newspapers. The first were produced and distributed by foreigners.
The French Embassy in Istanbul brought the message
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
51
of the Revolution in the Gazette Française de Constantinople, established
in 1795 and addressed to the French-speaking community
and of course to those who had learned to read French.
Bonaparte in Egypt also established newspapers. Then came
business interests, and in 1824 the first business-sponsored newspaper
appeared in Izmir.
A significant contribution was made by Christian missions. Proselytizing
Muslims was a capital offense, but the Ottoman authorities
had no objection to Western Catholics and Protestants competing to
win over the Eastern Christians to their rites. Religious propaganda in
Greek and Armenian had little or no impact outside those communities.
But the Christians of the Arabic-speaking countries used Arabic,
and the newspapers and other literature produced for their benefit by
the Jesuits in Beirut, later by other groups, gained a wider readership.
The earliest locally sponsored newspapers were governmental—
the Egyptian Gazette, the Ottoman Monitor, and their equivalents elsewhere.
An editorial in the first issue of the Ottoman Monitor, dated
May 14, 1832, sets forth the purpose and functions of these early
official newspapers. The newspaper, it explains, is a natural development
of the old tradition of imperial historiography, with the same
function of “making known the true nature of events and the real
purport of the acts and commands of the government, in order to
prevent misunderstanding and forestall uninformed criticism.” This
conception of the role of the press has not entirely disappeared from
the region. “A further purpose,” the article explains, “is to provide
useful knowledge on commerce, science and the arts.”15
Eventually a significant nonofficial local press developed in local
languages—Turkish, Persian, Arabic. Its development was enormously
helped by the introduction of another Western device, the telegraph,
at the time of the Crimean War (1854–56). It is sadly appropriate
that the first telegraphic message sent from the Middle East to the
outside world was a military communiqué: “Sebastopol has fallen.” It
is also sadly appropriate in that it was inaccurate; it hadn’t yet fallen.
That didn’t happen until a little later.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
52
The telegraph brought enormous changes. It made possible the
supply and dissemination of news, and also intelligence—through
both public and private channels—in a manner unprecedented in
the region. This was of immense advantage both to official and private
reporting.
Along with the telegraph, the Crimean War brought another innovation—
the war correspondent. Now for the first time West European
journalists arrived in the Ottoman lands, with the task of
providing regular reports to avid readers of daily newspapers in London,
Paris, and elsewhere. Some of them also made arrangements to
provide reports to local newspapers, and some of these in turn, for
the first time, began to publish daily. It was a change of immense
significance, and transformed Middle-Eastern peoples’ perception
both of themselves and of the world of which they were a part.
One example may suffice to illustrate the magnitude of the resulting
change. One of the greatest of the Ottoman imperial historiographers,
Naima (1655–1716), was responsible for covering the period
from 1590 to 1660. The account of these 70 years occupies no less
than six volumes, and goes into great detail on events in Central Europe
and the different aspects of the struggle between the Austrian
and Ottoman forces. The Thirty Years War—which one might have
thought of some interest to the Turks—is dismissed in a couple of
pages consisting mostly of a transcript of an earlier chronicle, which
the imperial historiographer did not even bother to edit—for example,
referring to Philip IV as “still King of Spain at the present time.”16
King Philip died in 1665, when Naima was ten years old. The contrast
is all the more striking between this classical disdain of the outside
world and the Turkish newspapers of the 1860s, which cover and
discuss such matters as the American Civil War and the Polish insurrection
of 1863–64. Finally the introduction of steamships, railways,
and the building of a network of roads vastly accelerated communication,
both with the outside world and within the region.
The establishment of newspapers and magazines in Arabic, Persian,
and Turkish brought several significant changes—the opportunity,
for the first time, to follow events inside and outside the Islamic
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
53
world; the emergence of a new and more flexible language, with the
conceptual and lexical resources to discuss these developments; and,
in many ways most significant of all, the emergence of a new figure—
the journalist.
Together with the journalist came another newcomer, whose appearance
was equally portentous—the lawyer. In an Islamic state, there
is in principle no law other than the shar
‘a, the Holy Law of Islam.
The reforms of the nineteenth century and the needs of commercial
and other contacts with Europe led to the enactment of new laws,
modeled on those of Europe—commercial, civil, criminal, and finally
constitutional. In the traditional order the only lawyers were the ulema,
the doctors of the Holy Law, at once jurists and theologians. The
secular lawyer, pleading in courts administering secular law, represented
a new and influential element in society.
Education too, in the old order, had been largely the preserve of
the men of religion. This also was taken from them, as reforming and
imperial rulers alike found it necessary to establish schools and later
colleges and universities, to teach modern skills and dispense modern
knowledge. The new-style teacher, sometimes schoolmaster, sometimes
professor, joined the journalist and the lawyer as one of the
intellectual pillars of the new order.
The cumulative effect of reform and modernization was, paradoxically,
not to increase freedom but to reinforce autocracy:
1. By strengthening the central power through the new apparatus
of communication and enforcement that modern technology
placed at its disposal, and
2. By enfeebling or abrogating the limiting traditional intermediate
powers such as the provincial gentry and magistracy, the urban
patriciate, the ulema, and the old-established military bodies
such as the Corps of Janissaries. Their authority derived from
tradition and recognition rather than from the central government,
toward which they could therefore afford to adopt a more
independent attitude. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries their power, in the provinces and even in the capital,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
54
had grown steadily at the expense of an increasingly weak central
government. In the course of the nineteenth century these
intermediate powers were either abolished, like the Corps of
Janissaries, or brought under control.
Parenthetically it may be noted that the most recent effects of modernization,
especially in communication, have tended in the opposite
direction. Television and satellite, fax and internet, have brought and
imposed a new openness, and are beginning to undermine the closed
society and closed minds that sustain autocracy. Similarly the spread
of education or at least of literacy to much larger elements of the
population has again imposed new limits on the autocracy of rulers
and—may I add?—of teachers.
But that came much later, in our own day. At the time of the nineteenth
century reforms the effect of modernization was increased and
reinforced autocracy, at once more effective and more visible. This
focused the attention of Middle-Eastern seekers on another distinctively
European practice, that of constitutional and representative
democracy, sometimes called freedom.
These new perceptions brought about some changes in the traditional
system of political values. Muslims have always given considerable
attention to what in Western parlance might be classed as both
political science and constitutional law. For Muslims, it was that part
of the divinely ordained Holy Law that dealt with the role of the
ruler and the relationship between him and the body of believers who
constituted his subjects. Westerners have become accustomed to think
of good and bad government in terms of tyranny versus liberty. In
Middle-Eastern usage, liberty or freedom was a legal not a political
term. It meant one who was not a slave, and unlike the West, Muslims
did not use slavery and freedom as political metaphors. For traditional
Muslims, the converse of tyranny was not liberty but justice.
Justice in this context meant essentially two things, that the ruler was
there by right and not by usurpation, and that he governed according
to God’s law, or at least according to recognizable moral and legal
principles. The first of these raised important questions concerning
succession, which became increasingly urgent after the abolition of
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
55
most of the monarchies in the region. The second was sometimes
discussed in terms of a contrast between arbitrary and consultative
government. Both remain crucial issues at the present day.
In addition to the basic contrast between tyranny and justice there
was a second contrast, often though not always invoked, between arbitrary
and consultative government. The first denoted the capricious
ruler deciding and acting on his own; the second the wise and just
ruler who consulted others. While Muslim texts from the Qur’n
onward speak of “consultation,” no formal procedure of consultation
or definition of those to be consulted was ever worked out in theory,
let alone applied in practice.
Words meaning “free” and “freedom,” in a political sense, occur
occasionally in eighteenth-century Middle-Eastern writings, always
in a European context. An early-eighteenth-century Turkish treatise
on the states and governments of Europe speaks of Danzig as a free
city; a Turkish ambassador who went to France in 1720 was taken to
see the “free cities” of Toulouse and Bordeaux, and explains in his
report what this means. Each city, he says, was the seat of a parlement
and president. Both words are given in French, transcribed in the
Turco-Arabic script, and interpreted. The Ottoman Ambassador Azmi
Efendi, who passed through Hungary in 1790 on his way to Berlin,
noted that the previous Emperor Joseph had deprived the Hungarians
of their “ancient freedoms,” but that the Emperor Leopold had
restored them.17 Embassy reports from revolutionary Paris speak occasionally—
usually negatively—of freedom, and the Chief Secretary
Atif Efendi, in a memorandum written in 179818 to inform the Imperial
Council in Istanbul of the political situation created by the Revolution
in France and the propaganda conducted by the revolutionary
government, uses the word a number of times. In the same year General
Bonaparte, commanding the French expedition to Egypt, informed
the Egyptians on his arrival that he had come on behalf of the
French Republic, “founded on the basis of freedom and equality.”
Fraternity seems to have been lost in transit.
But the new ideas of freedom and participation, inspired by English
practice and French theory, gradually found their way into the
Middle East—first to the Christian subjects and minorities, more open
WHAT WENT WRONG?
56
to influences emanating from Christendom, eventually to the Muslim
majority. Already in 1807 and 1808 groups of Ottoman subjects
made two unprecedented attempts to define and demarcate the authority
of the sultan and the notables in contractual documents. The
Ottoman historian anizade, who died in 1826, makes some very significant
observations in his account of the events of the year 1236/
1820–21. In this passage he speaks with approval of the holding of
“consultative meetings.” He of course ascribes them to Islamic and
Ottoman precedents, but at the same time he observes that such consultations
are customary in “certain well-organized states,” clearly a
euphemism for the states of Europe. More remarkably, he attributes
to the persons attending these meetings a role new to Islamic political
thought and practice. The members of these councils, he notes,
consist of two groups, the “servants of the state” and the “representatives
of the subjects” (vükela-i raiyyet). They discuss and argue freely
(ber vech-i serbestiyet) and thus reach a decision. In this underemphasized,
almost imperceptible manner he introduces such new and
strange notions as popular representation, free debate, and corporate
decision.19
In the course of the nineteenth century the notion of political freedom
became familiar in a number of ways—through translations of
European books, reports and discussions of European affairs, and,
after a while, through the influence of diplomats, students, and, later,
refugees returning from Europe.
Before long, Middle-Eastern Muslims began to discuss the possible
relevance of these ideas to their own situation. At first, their
approach was cautious and conservative. Their concept of freedom
owed much to the German idea of the Rechtsstaat, and could easily be
presented as a development of the classical Islamic concept of justice.
Similar ideas are expressed by several writers of the time, and underlie
the great Ottoman Reform Edict of 1839 and its successors. They
also inspired the reforming minister Mustafa Reid Pasha, who stopped
in Vienna in 1834 on his way to take up his appointment as ambassador
in Paris. He is reported to have had a conversation with Prince
Metternich.
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
57
An important figure in the introduction and dissemination of these
ideas was Sad¹k R¹fat Pasha (1807–1856), who drafted a memorandum
on reform while he was Ottoman ambassador in Vienna in 1837
and in close touch with Prince Metternich. Like most other Middle-
Eastern visitors, Sad¹k R¹fat Pasha was greatly impressed by European
progress and prosperity and saw in the adoption and adaptation
of these the best means of regenerating his own country. European
wealth, industry, and science, he explains, are the result of certain
political conditions, ensuring stability and tranquillity. These in turn
depend on “the attainment of complete security for the life, property,
honor and reputation of each nation and people, that is to say, on the
proper application of the necessary rights of freedom.”20
But there were other more radical interpretations of freedom on
offer in Paris and London, and as the screws of the new autocracy
were tightened, these became increasingly attractive to young educated
Muslims. This attraction was if anything increased rather than
diminished by the spread of British and French domination in important
parts of the Muslim world. This was, after all, another indication
of the power that democracy gave them; moreover these new masters
were willing to share at least the idea of freedom with their new subjects.
Some, including such notable figures as Edmund Burke and
Lord Macaulay, were willing to go much further and demand the
extension of English freedom to England’s colonial subjects.
In the Middle East some autocratic rulers made gestures—hardly
more than that—in the direction of constitutional government. In 1861
the Bey of Tunis, an Ottoman dependency, proclaimed a constitution,
with a grand council of 60 members, some appointed, some co-opted.
It was suspended in 1864 with the establishment of the French Protectorate.
In 1866 the Khedive of Egypt, another Ottoman dependency,
convened a “consultative assembly of delegates,” consisting of 75 delegates
elected for a three-year term by a system of indirect, collegiate
elections. To a large extent, these measures were not so much imitation
as propitiation, not of their own subjects but of the European powers
whose political pressure they feared and whose financial support
they wanted. Unsurprisingly, these measures may have sharpened but
did not satisfy the desire for greater freedom and participation.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
58
In the mid-1860s a new movement was launched—the Young Ottomans.
Even the use of the word “Young” is interesting. We have
now become accustomed in the Western world to using “young” as a
positive political term. In the Middle East in the nineteenth century
this was new and strange. The connotation of “young” was inexperienced
and immature, and no group would have thought of putting
themselves forward for any kind of office on the basis of being young.
On the contrary, all the terms of respect mean old, senior. The primary
meaning of the Arabic shaykh and of the Persian pir is “old.”
Both carry a connotation of political or religious authority. The Turkish
aga has the primary meaning of “elder brother.” In some Turkic
languages it means “father,” “uncle,” and even “elder sister.” In Ottoman
usage it connoted command or authority, military or other.
The Aga of the Janissaries commanded that corps; the Aga of the
Girls (K¹zlar agas¹), the chief black eunuch of the imperial harem,
maintained order in that institution. A similar respect for age—for
seniority—appears in Western languages, in the common use of such
words as “elder” and “alderman,” “Senate,” ‘Senator,” and “senior.”
It is interesting that both the Young Ottomans and their later successors,
the Young Turks, avoided using the normal Turkish word for
“young” in their nomenclature. The Young Ottomans called themselves
Yeni, which literally means “new.” The Young Turks called
themselves Jöntürk, simply transliterating their French designation.
The Young Ottomans were obviously formed on the analogy of the
Italian liberal patriot Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy and Young Europe;
they agitated for a constitution and a parliament, with the inevitable
result that in 1867 their leaders went into exile, mostly to London
and Paris. They returned in 1870, and in 1876, with the help of some
pressure from the European powers, they were able to persuade the
sultan to proclaim a brand new constitution, providing for a parliament,
with a nominated senate and a popularly elected chamber.
This constitution, which owed much to the example of the Belgian
constitution and more to that of the Prussian constitutional enactment
of 1850, was far from libertarian. Even so, it was too much.
Two elections were held, the first in March 1877, the second, after a
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
59
Figure 2-4
Opening speech of the Ottoman Parliament at the Dolmabahçe Palace. From Die Heutige Türkei, Leipzig-Berlin, 1882.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
60
forced dissolution, in December of the same year. The first Ottoman
parliament sat for two sessions, of about five months in all. Nevertheless,
the elected members showed considerable vigor, and no doubt
for that reason on February 14, 1878 the sultan, exercising the imperial
prerogative, summarily dismissed parliament. It did not meet again
for 30 years.
In Egypt, the assembly first convened in 1866, met for its three
prescribed terms, and was followed by other similar assemblies. After
the British occupation in 1882, further steps were taken to provide a
form of constitutional and parliamentary government, naturally with
severely limited powers. But even these were greatly in excess of anything
existing anywhere else in the Middle East. This imperialistcontrolled
enclave became a haven of refuge for political refugees
from the independent lands, offering them a freedom of expression
and discussion available nowhere else in the region. For a long time,
“freedom” and “independence” were used as virtually synonymous
terms. More recent experience has demonstrated that they are very
different, and may even, in certain situations, be mutually exclusive.
A new phase began with the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and with
the Japanese victory, which was acclaimed all over Asia and Africa. At
last an Eastern country had successfully defied and even defeated a
European imperial power. There were some who drew a further lesson
from this victory. Japan was the only Eastern power that had
adopted a form of constitutional and parliamentary government. Russia
was the only European power that had rejected it. The Japanese
victory seemed to offer final proof of the proposition that constitutional
democracy makes a nation healthy, wealthy, and strong.
Even among the defeated Russians there were constitutional stirrings.
In the Middle East, two constitutional revolutions followed, first in
Persia in 1906, then in Turkey in 1908. Both began with hope and
enthusiasm. Both ended, after brief intervals, in even more despotic
regimes, ruling even more impoverished and enfeebled countries.
By 1920, it seemed that the triumph of Europe over Islam was complete.
In Afghanistan and inner Arabia and a few other places difficult
of access and offering no attraction, independent Muslim rulers mainTHE
QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
61
tained the old ways. Otherwise, new rulers and new ways, introduced
or imitated from Europe, prevailed everywhere. Even in the former
Russian empire, riven by revolution and civil war, Moscow was reasserting
its control over the former, briefly liberated, Muslim dominions
of the tsars.
The once great Ottoman Empire was defeated and occupied, its
Muslim provinces parceled out among the victorious powers. Persia,
though technically neutral, had been overrun by British and Russian
forces, sometimes as allies, sometimes as rivals, sometimes as both.
The rest of the Muslim world was incorporated in one or other of the
great European empires. It seemed that the long struggle between
Islam and Christendom, between the Islamic empires and Europe,
had ended in a decisive victory for the West.
But the victory was illusory and of brief duration. The West European
empires, by the very nature of the culture, the institutions, even
the languages that they brought with them and imposed on their colonial
subjects, demonstrated the ultimate incompatibility of democracy
and empire, and sealed the doom of their own domination. They
taught their subjects English, French, and Dutch because they needed
clerks in their offices and counting houses. But once these subjects
had mastered a Western European language, as did increasing numbers
of Muslims in Western-dominated Asia and Africa, they found a
new world open to them, full of new and dangerous ideas such as
political freedom and national sovereignty and responsible government
by the consent of the governed.
These ideas powerfully affected both the subjects and masters of
the Western empires, making the one unwilling to accept, the other,
to impose, an old-style autocratic domination. In the nineteenth century,
these ideas had encouraged the Christian subject peoples of the
Ottoman Empire to rebel and demand their independence. In the
twentieth century, the same ideas had the same effect on the Muslim
subject peoples of the European empires, and this time the imperial
masters were forced to recognize their own principles and ideals being
used against them.
Some of the movements of revolt against Western rule were inspired
by religion and fought in the name of Islam. But the most
WHAT WENT WRONG?
62
effective at that time—those that actually won political independence—
were led by Westernized intellectuals who fought the West
with its own intellectual weapons. Sometimes indeed they fought the
West with Western help and encouragement; Western sympathizers
played a significant and sometimes forgotten role in the development
of Turkish, Arab, Indian, and other nationalisms.
In the areas that they ruled, the British and the French created
constitutional and parliamentary regimes in their own image—British-
style constitutional monarchies and French-style republics. None
of them worked very well, and with independence, almost all of them
were discredited and overthrown. In the Russian Empire, revolution
and civil war for a while loosened the control of the central government
over its imperial territories. But the Soviets succeeded in restoring
it with greater authority than ever before, and were much
more successful than either the British or the French in establishing
Soviet republics in their own image in the Muslim lands that they
ruled. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, these former Soviet
republics have found it more difficult to extricate themselves from
the embrace of their former masters, than did the subjects of Britain
and France.
During the 1930s, Italy and then, far more, Germany offered new
ideological and political models, with the added attraction of being
opposed to the Western powers. These won widespread support, and
even after their military defeat in World War II, they continued to
serve as unavowed models in both ideology and statecraft.
But not for the economy. The victory of the Soviet Union in 1945
suggested a different solution—a return to the economic explanation
of Western success, but with a socialist shortcut. State control of the
economy was imposed in several countries. Various types of socialism,
sometimes called Arab socialism, sometimes called scientific socialism,
were adopted. They ended in disastrous failure, in ruination
maintained by tyranny. Most people in the region have by now decided
that socialism—or at least their experience of it—is neither Arab
nor scientific.
Socialism by that name has generally been abandoned, but the high
level of state involvement in the economy, which long preceded the
THE QUEST FOR WEALTH AND POWER
63
adoption of socialism, has long survived its abandonment; it continues
to inhibit economic growth. The difference between Middle Eastern
and Western economic approaches can be seen even in their
distinctive forms of corruption, from which neither society is exempt.
In the West, one makes money in the market, and uses it to buy or
influence power. In the East, one seizes power, and uses it to make
money. Morally there is no difference between the two, but their
impact on the economy and on the polity is very different.
The mystery of Western success was still not solved. Could there
be something more than modernizing the armed forces, the state that
commanded them, and the economy that fed, supplied, and equipped
them? In a word, something more than modernity?
WHAT WENT WRONG?
64
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a good part of
the twentieth, Middle-Eastern observers, increasingly aware of the
disparity in military power between Middle Eastern and Western
states, turned their attention primarily to weaponry and the conduct
of warfare and then to economic production and government administration,
seen as the primary sources of Western preponderance. In
looking at these, they tried to find what was most distinctive and different
about the Western way of dealing with these matters and
thereby to identify the source of Western superiority. In looking for
this mysterious source they naturally gave most attention to what was
visibly and palpably different from their own way of doing things,
and then tried to adopt, adapt, or simply buy it. They began with the
visible sources of power and prosperity—military, economic, political.
It was in these three areas that they concentrated their main effort—
with limited and sometimes indeed negative results.
But there were other differences between Islamic and Western society—
greater, more profound, yet somehow for long overlooked or
not seen as relevant. I shall try to illustrate three of these aspects by
quotations from Middle-Eastern visitors to the West. All three are
Turkish, since the Turks were the earliest and for some time the only
Muslim travelers in Europe. The first comes from Evliya Çelebi, a
famous Turkish writer of his time who visited Vienna in 1665 as part
of an Ottoman diplomatic mission. In the course of a long and detailed
account of the imperial capital and his adventures there, Evliya
describes a “most extraordinary spectacle” that he saw.
3
Social and Cultural Barriers
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
65
In this country I saw an extraordinary spectacle. Whenever the
emperor meets a woman in the street, if he is riding, he brings his
horse to a standstill and lets her pass. If the Emperor is on foot and
meets a woman, he stands in a posture of politeness. The woman
greets the emperor, who then takes his hat off his head to show
respect for the woman. After the woman has passed, the emperor
continues on his way. It is indeed an extraordinary spectacle. In
this country and in general in the lands of the unbelievers, women
have the main say. They are honored and respected out of love for
Mother Mary.1
My second example comes from another Ottoman diplomat in
Vienna, the ambassador Mustafa Hatti Efendi, who in a report dated
1748 describes a visit to the observatory as guest of the emperor
and speaks of some of the “strange devices and wonderful objects”
he saw there:
One of the contrivances shown to us was as follows. There were
two adjoining rooms. In one there was a wheel, and on that wheel
were two large, spherical, crystal balls. To these were attached a
hollow cylinder, narrower than a reed, from which a long chain
ran into the other room. When the wheel was turned, a fiery wind
ran along the chain into the other room, where it surged up from
the ground and, if any man touched it, that wind struck his finger
and jarred his whole body. What is still more wonderful is that if
the man who touched it held another man by the hand, and he
another, and so formed a ring of twenty or thirty persons, each of
them would feel the same shock in finger and body as the first one.
We tried this ourselves. Since they did not give any intelligible
reply to our questions, and since the whole thing is merely a plaything,
we did not think it worthwhile to seek further information
about it.
Another contrivance . . . consisted of small glass bottles which
we saw them strike against stone and wood without breaking them.
Then they put fragments of flint in the bottles, whereupon these
finger-thick bottles, which had withstood the impact of stone, dissolved
like flour. When we asked the meaning of this, they said
that when glass straight from the fire was cooled in cold water, it
became like this. We ascribe this preposterous answer to their
Frankish trickery.2
WHAT WENT WRONG?
66
My third example comes from an Ottoman ambassador, Vasif
Efendi, who was in Spain from 1787 to 1789. Describing his social
engagements, he remarks: “During meals . . . [the Spaniards] greatly
admired the musicians and singers who accompanied our mission. At
the king’s command, all the grandees, one after another, invited us to
dinner, and we suffered the tedium of their kind of music.”3
The topics of these three excerpts, women, science, and music, mark
three crucial differences in approach, in attitude, and in perception
between two neighboring civilizations. Let us look at them more closely.
The difference in the position of women was indeed one of the
most striking contrasts between Christian and Muslim practice, and
is mentioned by almost all travelers in both directions. Christianity,
of all churches and denominations, prohibits polygamy and concubinage.
Islam, like most other non-Christian communities, permits both.
European visitors to the Islamic lands were intrigued by what they
knew or, more accurately, what they heard concerning the harem system,
and some of them speak with ill-concealed and ill-informed envy
of what they imagine to be the rights and privileges of a Muslim husband
and master of the house. Muslim visitors to Europe speak with
astonishment, often with horror, of the immodesty and frowardness
of Western women, of the incredible freedom and absurd deference
accorded to them, and of the lack of manly jealousy of European males
confronted with the immorality and promiscuity in which their womenfolk
indulge. We find this observation even in the most unlikely
places. Thus, for example, a Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain
in 1766 speaks of the free and easy ways of Spanish ladies, and the
absence of a virile sense of honor among their husbands.4 If this was
his impression of the Court of Spain, one shudders to think of what
he would have written had he continued his journey into Europe to,
for example, the Court of Versailles.
Evliya Çelebi was expressing a fairly normal Middle-Eastern response
to the Austrian Emperor’s normal courtesy to a lady, and clearly
indicates that he himself would not have believed this improbable
story had he not seen it with his own eyes. His explanation of the
extraordinary deference given to women in Christendom—that “they
are honored and respected out of love for Mother Mary”—should
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
67
not be dismissed as absurd, especially if one bears in mind that, according
to the Islamic tradition, the Trinity, worship of which Islam
condemns as near-polytheistic blasphemy, consisted of God, Jesus,
and Mary.5
Some had even more extraordinary stories to tell. For example Vahid
Efendi, who traveled across Europe to Paris as Ottoman ambassador
in 1806, describes his journey and the places where he stayed in some
detail. Here is one of those details: “At European banquets many
women are present. The women sit at table while the men sit behind
them, watching like hungry animals as the women eat. If the women
take pity on them, they give them something to eat; if not, the men
go hungry.”6 I don’t know where he heard this story, but it is not
more improbable than some of the tales told by Western visitors about
what went on in Muslim harems.
The status of women, though probably the most profound single
difference between the two civilizations, attracted far less attention
than such matters as guns, factories and parliaments. Westerners did
not differ greatly from Middle Easterners in this astigmatism.*
According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of
people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal
and religious quality—unbelievers, slaves, and women. The woman
was obviously in one significant respect the worst-placed of the three.
*An interesting example is Verdi’s famous opera Aida. This opera, it will be recalled,
was commissioned by the Khedive Ismail of Egypt and first performed in
Cairo on Christmas Eve 1871. The setting was ancient Egypt, about which the
composer and his librettist had received guidance from the famous French Egyptologist
Auguste Mariette, usually known by his Egyptian title as Mariette Pasha.
One of the central problems of the story is the dilemma of the victorious Egyptian
general Radamès, torn between the loves of two women—Amneris, the daughter
of Pharaoh, and Aida the Ethiopian slave, the daughter of the Ethiopian king
with whom Egypt is at war. Caught between these two women, Radamès is driven
to treason and finally to death. For a nineteenth century European Christian, this
was indeed an agonizing dilemma. It would have been meaningless in Egypt, either
in the time of the pharaohs or in Verdi’s own day, and the hero could have
had both ladies; the princess by marriage as a wife, the slave by gift or purchase as
a concubine and perhaps later, as a secondary wife. Were Verdi and his librettist
trying to send a subtle message to their Egyptian patrons; or, more probably,
were they simply uninformed or unconcerned about the situation of women in
Egypt?
WHAT WENT WRONG?
68
Figure 3-1
Turkish lady and Slave in the Harem. From Samuel S. Cox,
Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey, New York, 1887.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
69
The slave could be freed by his master; the unbeliever could at any
time become a believer by his own choice, and thus end his inferiority.
Only the woman was doomed forever to remain what she was—
or so it seemed at the time.
The rise of Western power and the spread of Western influence
brought important changes to all three groups. The Christian powers
were naturally concerned with the status of the Christian subjects
of Muslim states, and used their great and growing influence to secure
for them a status of legal equality and—in fact though not in
principle—economic privilege. In this drive for emancipation, Christians
were the intended, Jews the incidental beneficiaries.
Slavery was also a concern of the Western powers and most particularly
of the United Kingdom, which had abolished slavery in its
own empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century and treated
slave-trading as an international crime, like piracy, to be suppressed
and punished wherever it was met on land or sea. By the late twentieth
century, chattel slavery in the Middle East, had, with rare local
exceptions, been abolished.
The struggle for women’s rights proved much more difficult, and
the outcome of that struggle is still far from clear. The European
powers, who used their influence and even their armed forces to impose
the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of non-Muslims,
showed no interest in ending the subjection of women. Nor is there
much evidence that either the Middle-Eastern reformers or their
European mentors were concerned about this issue. Even the imperial
powers, in this as in most other respects, pursued cautiously conservative
social policies, and took care to avoid any changes that would
mobilize Muslim opinion against them and bring them no advantage.
In some areas of intense colonization, such as French North Africa
and Soviet Central Asia, a small class of educated Muslims, culturally
assimilated to their imperial masters, followed their practice also in
the treatment of women. But these were in every sense limited and
marginal. In the heartlands of Islam, such progress as was made in
women’s rights was due entirely to internal forces and to the unaided
efforts of Muslim women and men.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
70
Nevertheless the struggle for the emancipation of women made
some progress in the socially and economically more advanced parts
of the region and has become a major target of different schools of
militant Islamic revival. The Ayatollah Khomeini, in particular, gave
it a prominent place in his indictment of the misdeeds of the shah and
the crimes of his regime. From a traditional point of view, the emancipation
of women—specifically, allowing them to reveal their faces,
their arms, and their legs, and to mingle socially in the school or the
workplace with men—is an incitement to immorality and promiscuity,
and a deadly blow to the very heart of Islamic society, the Muslim
family and home. The battle continues.
The earliest example that I have been able to find of a principled
argument for women’s rights occurs in an article by the great nineteenth-
century Ottoman writer Nam¹k Kemal, one of the leaders of
the Young Ottomans, published in the newspaper Tasvir-i Efkâr in 1867:
Our women are now seen as serving no useful purpose to mankind
other than having children; they are considered simply as serving
for pleasure, like musical instruments or jewels. But they
constitute half and perhaps more than half of our species. Preventing
them from contributing to the sustenance and improvement of
others by means of their efforts infringes the basic rules of public
cooperation to such a degree that our national society is stricken
like a human body that is paralyzed on one side. Yet women are
not inferior to men in their intellectual and physical capacities. In
ancient times women shared in all men’s activities, including even
war. In the countryside, women still share in the work of agriculture
and trade . . . The reason why women among us are thus deprived
is the perception that they are totally ignorant and know
nothing of right and duty, benefit and harm. Many evil consequences
result from this position of women, the first being that it
leads to a bad upbringing for their children.7
Nam¹k Kemal was a young radical when he wrote this article. Very
soon after he fled into exile in Paris, where he joined with others in
publishing seditious opposition journals. He returned to Turkey in
1870 and embarked on a highly significant career as writer and activist.
He did not however return to this particular theme, and devoted
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
71
most of his energies to the related topics of country and freedom—in
other words, of patriotism and liberalism. Nam¹k Kemal and others
after him changed, if not their minds, then certainly their priorities.
But not all. In 1899 a remarkable book appeared in Arabic, entitled
The Liberation of Woman, written by Q
sim Amn, a young Egyptian
lawyer who had studied in Paris and acquired a French girlfriend who
seems to have had some influence on him. While there, he became a
passionate advocate of women’s rights. The theme of his book was
the need to raise the condition of women by educating them, and
thus giving them access to social life and to the professions. In particular,
he proposed to abolish the veil and to reinterpret the Qur’anic
provisions that had usually been interpreted as authorizing polygamy,
concubinage, and divorce by repudiation. Only by freeing women, he
argued, could Muslim society itself be free, since a free society is one
in which all its members are free. Despite his attempts to justify these
revolutionary propositions in Islamic terms, his book evoked a very
strong reaction from the traditionalist establishment in Egypt and
elsewhere. But the book continued to be read; it was also translated
from Arabic into Turkish and other languages, and had a considerable
impact, more especially on the rising generation of women, some
of whom were learning to read, and therefore read this book.8
The practical changes in the status of women came in various ways
and were due to circumstances most of which can be attributed to the
ultimate Western example. The abolition of chattel slavery made concubinage
illegal, and though it lingered on for some time in remoter
areas, it ceased to be either common or accepted. In a few countries,
notably Turkey, Tunisia, and Iran under the late shah, even polygamy
was in effect outlawed; in many other Muslim states, while still lawful,
it has been hemmed in by legal restrictions, and has become socially
unacceptable in the urban middle and upper classes, as well as
economically impractical for the urban lower classes. Polygamy is now
very rare outside the Arabian peninsula, where men have both the
means and the opportunity.
The earliest and most extensive progress was in the economic position
of women. Even under the traditional dispensation this was relatively
good, and certainly far better than that of women in most
WHAT WENT WRONG?
72
Christian countries before the adoption of modern legislation. Muslim
women, as wives and as daughters, had very definite property
rights, which were recognized and enforced by law.
In recent changes economic needs were a major factor. As Nam¹k
Kemal pointed out, peasant women had from time immemorial been
part of the workforce; they had in consequence enjoyed certain social
freedoms denied to their sisters in the cities. Economic modernization
brought a need for female labor; this need was greatly increased
during the years of warfare in which the Ottoman Empire was involved
between 1911 and 1922, when much of the male population
was in the armed forces, and women were needed to carry on the
business of life. This also had some consequences for education, and
a steady increase in the numbers of women involved as students in
colleges and universities. We find, already in the late Ottoman period,
women’s magazines, written by women for women. Women
began in such “women’s professions” as nursing and teaching, traditional
in Europe and gradually becoming so in the lands of Islam, and
in time they began to penetrate into other professions.
But the reaction was growing. Even the enrollment of women in a
traditional profession like teaching was too much for some of the
militant Islamists. Khomeini, in his sermons and writing both before
and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, spoke with great anger of
the inevitable immorality that, he said, would result from women
teaching adolescent boys.9
Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, took exactly
the opposite view. In a series of speeches delivered in the early twenties,
he argued eloquently for the full emancipation of women in the
Turkish state and society. Our most urgent present task, he repeatedly
told his people, is to catch up with the modern world. We shall
not catch up with the modern world if we only modernize half the
population. This was a surprising line of argument in the early twenties,
and came from an unlikely source, an Ottoman pasha and general,
but also the founder of modern Turkey.
In the Turkish Republic women’s rights became part of the official
Kemalist ideology and women played an increasing role in public life.
Apart from Turkey, the question of political rights was relatively unSOCIAL
AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
73
important in a region where, with few exceptions, the precarious parliamentary
systems that once existed gave way to more or less autocratic
regimes, controlled by either the army or the party. The question
of political rights in any case was meaningless in such societies. In Turkey
it was not meaningless, and it has remained an important issue.
Westerners tend naturally to assume that the emancipation of
women is part of liberalization, and that women will consequently
fare better in liberal than in autocratic regimes. Such an assumption
would be false, and often the reverse is true. Among Arab countries,
the legal emancipation of women went farthest in Iraq and in the
former South Yemen, both ruled by notoriously repressive regimes.
It has lagged behind in Egypt, one of the more tolerant and open of
Arab societies. It is in such societies that public opinion, still mainly
male and mainly conservative, has the greatest influence. Women’s
rights have suffered the most serious reverses in countries where fundamentalists
of various types have influence or where, as in Iran and
most of Afghanistan, they rule. Indeed, as already noted, the emancipation
of women by modernizing rulers was one of the main grievances
of the radical fundamentalists, and the reversal of this trend is
in the forefront of their agenda.
The emancipation of women, more than any other single issue, is
the touchstone of difference between modernization and Westernization.
Even the most extreme and most anti-Western fundamentalists
nowadays accept the need to modernize and indeed to make the
fullest use of modern technology, especially the technologies of warfare
and propaganda. This is seen as modernization, and though the
methods and even the artifacts come from the West, it is accepted as
necessary and even as useful. The emancipation of women is Westernization;
both for traditional conservatives and radical fundamentalists
it is neither necessary nor useful but noxious, a betrayal of true
Islamic values. It must be kept from entering the body of Islam, and
where it has already entered, it must be ruthlessly excised.10
The difference between modernization and Westernization, particularly
but not exclusively in relation to men and women, can be
vividly seen in the dress reforms that began at the end of the eighteenth
century and have continued, with occasional interruptions, ever
WHAT WENT WRONG?
74
Figure 3-2
Moses Admonishing Korah (cf. Numbers, xvi). From a Persian religious
poem, seventeenth century, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 79–621.
Moses, representing divine religion, is wearing Persian dress;
Korah, the arrogant and doomed upstart, is in European costume.
Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
75
since. The process began when the sultan formed new-style regiments,
in Western formations, with Western weapons, commanded by Western-
style officers graded in Western-style ranks. It was natural that
the sultan should also dress his new army in Western-style uniforms—
indeed one of the early documents urging reform explicitly mentions
uniforms and their military, especially disciplinary, usefulness, for
example, in making it easy to recognize and arrest deserters.
From the military, the clothing reforms spread to the civil service,
and bureaucrats were now attired in frock coats and trousers, in place
of their previous more comfortable clothing. Only the headgear—
the fez, the turban, the kefiya—remained, to symbolize their difference
from the West. Anyone who has visited an Ottoman cemetery
will recall the headstones, topped with a carved representation of the
distinctive headgear of the person buried there, thus identifying the
grave of a Janissary officer, a qadi, or other. Headgear remained particularly
important in a symbolic, even a religious sense.
But even that has now changed. For a long time, Middle-Eastern
soldiers wore European uniforms with Muslim headgear, eschewing
Western-style hats and caps with brims and peaks that obstructed
Muslim worship and were thus seen as the symbol of the infidel. In
those days,
apka giymek, to put on a hat, was the Turkish equivalent
of to turn one’s coat (i.e. to become a renegade). Now that too has
gone. Today, the armed forces, the civil service, and a large part of
the urban male population have adopted Western styles of clothing.
Even the diplomats of the Islamic Republic of Iran wear Western
suits, with only the missing necktie to symbolize their rejection of
Western culture and its symbols. For some reason they have given
the necktie a symbolic significance, perhaps because of its vaguely
cruciform shape.
While the dividing line between Westernization and modernization
is sometimes difficult to establish in the attire of men, it is very
clear in that of women. Unlike soldiers and civil servants—in the past
both exclusively male occupations—women were never compelled to
adopt Western dress or to abandon traditional attire. Indeed, if the
matter arose at all in public regulations, it was in the form of a prohibition,
not a requirement. Nevertheless some women did adopt at
WHAT WENT WRONG?
76
least elements of Western dress, and in our own day some items of
clothing, notably the headscarf and the veil, have become powerful
emotive symbols of cultural choice. They are especially so in Turkey
and Iran, the two countries that most clearly formulate the alternative
choices and alternative futures that confront the Muslim—and
not only the Muslim—Middle East. For men to wear Western clothes,
it would seem, is modernization; for women to wear them is Westernization,
to be welcomed or punished accordingly.
The Middle-Eastern response to Western science shows interesting
similarities with the response to feminism. It also shows striking
differences. At first, the one, like the other, was negative, even contemptuous,
and Hatti Efendi’s comments were not untypical. But the
benefits of scientific education, unlike those of female emancipation,
were palpable, visible, and immediate, first in military matters, which
were the prime concern of the reformers, and then also in other aspects
of life. To teach gunnery and seamanship, it was necessary to
impart some knowledge of the sciences on which these were based.
With the growth and spread of modern military and naval instruction,
both teachers and pupils achieved insights and vision beyond
those that navigation could afford, with results more penetrating and
more explosive than gunfire.
Through the nineteenth century an increasing number of young
Muslims, most of them officers or civil servants, most of them Ottoman,
began to speak of how Europe, “the smallest of the continents,”
achieved paramountcy in the modern world through its mastery of
the sciences. Some speak more broadly of knowledge—the same word
designates both knowledge and science. In an essay published in 1840,
Mustafa Sami, a former chief secretary of the Ottoman embassy in
Paris, goes a step further and notes with astonishment: “Every European,
man and woman, can read and write. All of them, men and
women alike, get at least ten years of schooling. There are special
schools where even the deaf and dumb are taught to read and write.
Thanks to their science, Europeans have found ways of overcoming
plague and other illnesses, and have invented many mechanical devices
to mass-produce various items.”11 Another Ottoman with diplomatic
experience, Sad¹k R¹fat Pasha, speaks of the importance that
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
77
Figure 3-4
A lady in the dress worn in private.
Lane, p. 52.
Figure 3-3
Ladies attired for riding
or walking. From E. W. Lane,
Modern Egyptians, vol. i, p. 56.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
78
Europeans attach to “astronomy, music, medicine . . . and international
politics and military knowledge, plants, animals, minerals, and
anatomy.”12 He also notes that in Europe one cannot meet anybody
who is unable to read and write in his own language. This was probably
an exaggeration in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, but a minor
one compared with the difference between the conditions he described
and the conditions at home.
During the second half of the nineteenth century Ottoman intellectuals
placed ever greater emphasis on the importance of science.
Some of them went further, and spoke of a conflict between science
and what they cautiously called “fanaticism” or even, explicitly, between
science and religion. Increasing numbers of European scientific
books were translated, often with prefaces insisting on the
importance of science for progress.
Materialism and later positivism also found translators and disciples.
One popular author was the Anglo-American scientist and philosopher
John William Draper (1811–1882) whose history of the conflict
between religion and science, published in 1872 in the United States,
was published in Istanbul in Turkish translation in 1895. Another
much admired European materialist was Friedrich Karl Christian
Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899). He and more especially Auguste Comte
greatly influenced the political thinking of the Young Turks and their
imitators among other Muslim peoples.
And yet, despite all these efforts, and despite the foundation of
schools and faculties of sciences in almost all the new universities, the
incorporation of modern science—or should one say Western science?—
was lamentably slow.
The reluctance of the Islamic Middle East to accept European science
is the more remarkable if one considers the immense contribution
of the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages to the rise of modern
science. In the development and transmission of the various branches
of science, men in the medieval Middle East—some Christian, some
Jewish, most of them Muslim—played a vital role. They had inherited
the ancient wisdom of Egypt and Babylon. They had translated
and preserved much that would have otherwise been lost of the wisdom
and science of Persia and Greece. Their enterprise and their
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
79
openness enabled them to add much that was new from the science
and techniques of India and China.
Nor was the role of the medieval Islamic scientist purely one of
collection and preservation. In the medieval Middle East, scientists
developed an approach rarely used by the ancients—experiment.
Through this and other means they brought major advances in virtually
all the sciences.
Much of this was transmitted to the medieval West, whence eager
students went to study in what were then Muslim centers of learning
in Spain and Sicily, while others translated scientific texts from Arabic
into Latin, some original, some adapted from ancient Greek works.
Modern science owes an immense debt to these transmitters.
And then, approximately from the end of the Middle Ages, there
was a dramatic change. In Europe, the scientific movement advanced
enormously in the era of the Renaissance, the Discoveries, the technological
revolution, and the vast changes, both intellectual and material,
that preceded, accompanied, and followed them. In the Muslim
world, independent inquiry virtually came to an end, and science was
for the most part reduced to the veneration of a corpus of approved
knowledge. There were some practical innovations—thus, for example,
incubators were invented in Egypt, vaccination against smallpox
in Turkey. These were, however, not seen as belonging to the
realm of science, but as practical devices, and we know of them primarily
from Western travelers.
The changing attitudes of East and West in the development and
acceptance of scientific knowledge are dramatically exemplified in the
discovery of the circulation of the blood. In Western histories of science,
this is normally credited to the English physician William
Harvey, whose epoch-making Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood
was published in 1628 and transformed both the theory and practice
of medicine. His great discovery was preceded and helped by the work
of a Spanish physician and theologian, Miguel Serveto, usually known
as Michael Servetus (1511–1553), who owes his place in scientific
history to the discovery, published in 1553, of the lesser or pulmonary
circulation of the blood. This discovery was anticipated, in surprisingly
similar detail, by a thirteenth-century Syrian physician called
WHAT WENT WRONG?
80
Ibn al-Nafs. Among his writings was a medical treatise in which, in
defiance of the revered authority of Galen and Avicenna, he set forth
his theory of the circulation of the blood in terms very similar to
those later used by Servetus and adopted by Harvey, but unlike theirs,
based on abstract reasoning rather than experiment. Modern orientalist
scholarship has shown, with a high degree of probability, that
Servetus knew of the work of Ibn al-Naf s, thanks to a Renaissance
scholar called Andrea Alpago (died ca. 1520) who spent many years in
Syria collecting and translating Arabic medical manuscripts.
Ibn al-Nafs was a successful and wealthy physician, who died at
the age of about 80. A childless widower, he left his luxurious house,
his estate, and his library to a Cairo hospital. His book and his theory
remained unknown and had no effect on the practice of medicine.
Servetus was arrested in Geneva on August 14, 1553, and charged
with blasphemy and heresy. The Protestant authorities, and notably
Calvin, demanded that he retract his religious opinions or face the
consequences. Servetus refused; he was condemned on October 26,
1553, and burned next day as a heretic. His medical work remained,
and formed the basis of major scientific advances in the years that
followed.13
Another example of the widening gap may be seen in the fate of the
great observatory built in Galata, in Istanbul, in 1577. This was due
to the initiative of Taq al-Dn (ca. 1526–1585), a major figure in
Muslim scientific history and the author of several books on astronomy,
optics, and mechanical clocks. Born in Syria or Egypt (the
sources differ), he studied in Cairo, and after a career as jurist and
theologian he went to Istanbul, where in 1571 he was appointed
munejjim-bash¹, astronomer (and astrologer) in chief to the Sultan Selim
II. A few years later he persuaded the new Sultan Murad III to allow
him to build an observatory, comparable in its technical equipment
and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary,
the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. But there the comparison ends.
Tycho Brahe’s observatory and the work accomplished in it opened
the way to a vast new development of astronomical science. Taq al-
Dn’s observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries,
by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti.14
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BARRIERS
81
This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had
no successors until the age of modernization.
The relationship between Christendom and Islam in the sciences
was now reversed. Those who had been disciples now became teachers;
those who had been masters became pupils, often reluctant and
resentful pupils. They were willing enough to accept the products of
infidel science in warfare and medicine, where they could make the
difference between victory and defeat, between life and death. But the
underlying philosophy and the sociopolitical context of these scientific
achievements proved more difficult to accept or even to recognize.
This rejection is one of the more striking differences between the
Middle East and other parts of the non-Western world that have in
one way or another endured the impact of Western civilization. At
the present time scientists in many Asian countries make important
contributions to what is no longer a Western but a worldwide scientific
movement. Except for some Westernized enclaves in the Middle
East and some scientists of Middle Eastern origin working in the West,
the Middle-Eastern contribution—as reflected for example in the internationally
recognized journals that are at the cutting edge of scientific
progress—compares poorly with that of other non-Western
regions or, even more dramatically, with its own past record.
The response to Western music, and the larger question of cultural
change that it raises, deserve fuller treatment.15
WHAT WENT WRONG?
82
It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much
truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent
with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran
and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies
of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the West—the Islamic dispensation
does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does
Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly
and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet,
the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by
tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth,
by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor
are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.
The realities of conquest and empire, however, inevitably created
new elites and in the natural course of events these sought to perpetuate
for their descendants the advantages that they had gained.
From early until modern times there has been a recurring tendency
in Islamic states for aristocracies to emerge. These are differently
defined and arise from varying circumstances at different times and
in different places. What is significant is that the emergence of elites
or castes or aristocracies happens in spite of Islam and not as part of
it. Again and again through Islamic history the establishment of privilege
was seen and denounced by both severely traditional conservatives
and dubiously orthodox radicals as a non-Islamic or even an
anti-Islamic innovation.
The egalitarianism of traditional Islam is not however complete.
From the beginning Islam recognized certain social inequalities, which
4
Modernization and Social Equality
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
83
are sanctioned and indeed sanctified by holy writ. But even in the three
basic inequalities of master and slave, man and woman, believer and
unbeliever, the situation in the classical Islamic civilization was in some
respects better than elsewhere. The Muslim woman had property rights
unparalleled in the modern West until comparatively recent times. Even
for the slave, Islamic law recognized human rights—the term “civil
rights” has no meaning in the context of those times and places—
unknown in classical antiquity, in the Orient, or in the colonial and
postcolonial societies of the Americas. But these three basic inequalities
remained, established and unchallenged. In the course of the centuries,
a whole series of radical movements of social and religious
protest arose within the Islamic world, seeking to overthrow the barriers
that from time to time arose between highborn and lowborn,
rich and poor, Arab and non-Arab, white and black, all regarded as
contrary to the true spirit of Islamic brotherhood; none of these movements
ever questioned the three sacrosanct distinctions establishing
the subordinate status of the slave, the woman, and the unbeliever.
In the Islamic states from early until later times the free male Muslim
enjoyed a considerable measure of freedom of opportunity. The
Islamic revelation, when it was first carried by the conquerors to countries
previously incorporated in the ancient Middle-Eastern empires,
had brought immense and revolutionary social changes. Islamic doctrine
was strongly opposed to hereditary privileges of all kinds, even
including, in principle, the institution of monarchy. And though this
pristine egalitarianism was in many ways modified and diluted, it remained
strong enough to prevent the emergence of either Brahmans
or aristocrats and to preserve a society in which merit and ambition
might still hope to find their reward. In later times this egalitarianism
was somewhat restricted. The abolition of the Ottoman devshirme,
the levy of Christian boys to serve in the Janissaries, had closed the
main avenue of upward social mobility, while the formation and persistence
of such ensconced privileged groups as the urban and rural
notables and the ulema restricted the number of openings accessible
to newcomers. In spite of this, however, it is probably true that even
at the beginning of the nineteenth century a poor man of humble
origin had a better chance of attaining to wealth, power, and dignity
WHAT WENT WRONG?
84
in the Islamic lands than in any of the states of Christian Europe,
including post-Revolutionary France.
There was still opportunity for those who were free, male, and Muslim—
but there were severe restrictions on those who lacked any of
these three essential qualifications. The slave, the woman, and the unbeliever
were subject to strictly enforced legal, as well as social, disabilities,
affecting them in almost every aspect of their daily lives. These
disabilities were seen as an inherent part of the structure of Islam, buttressed
by revelation, by the precept and practice of the Prophet, and
by the classical and scriptural history of the Islamic community.
All three—the slave, the woman, and the unbeliever—were seen as
performing necessary functions, although there was occasional doubt
about the third. Islamic slavery—certainly by the nineteenth century—
was often domestic rather than economic, and slaves as well as women
thus had their place in family and home life. The rules regulating
their status were seen as part of the law of personal status, the inner
citadel of the Holy Law.
The position of the non-Muslim, on the other hand, was a public
rather than a personal matter, and was differently perceived. The
purpose of the restriction was not, as with the slave and the woman,
to preserve the sanctity of the Muslim home, but to maintain the
supremacy of Islam in the polity and society that the Muslims had
created. Any attempt to remove or even to modify the legal subordination
of these three groups would thus have challenged the free male
Muslim in two sensitive areas—his personal authority in the Muslim
home, his communal primacy in the Muslim state.
In the course of the nineteenth century, for the first time in Islamic
history, voices were raised in favor of all three groups of inferiors,
and suggestions were made for the abrogation or at least the alleviation
of their status of inferiority. These new trends were due in part
to influences and pressures—the two are far from identical—from
outside; they were also affected, and in an important sense made possible,
by changing attitudes among the Muslims themselves.
The foreign interest in reform was very different for the three categories.
The European powers were unanimous in demanding the
abolition of the position of legal inferiority assigned to Christians
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
85
and incidentally also to Jews in the Muslim states, and in using every
means at their disposal to persuade Muslim governments to grant
equality to all their subjects—meaning of course their free male subjects—
without discrimination by religion. Even the czars of Russia,
who in the nineteenth century had introduced for their Jewish subjects
a levy of male children similar in its recruitment though not in
its opportunities to the devshirme that the Ottomans had abandoned
in the seventeenth century, joined in the chorus. The interest in slaves
was far less widespread and was in effect confined to the British, whose
interventions were mainly concerned with black slaves from Africa.
There is no evidence that any of the powers showed any great interest
in improving the status of Muslim women.
The aim of domestic reform and, in the earlier stages, of foreign
intervention was not the abolition of slavery, which would have been
quite unrealistic, but its alleviation and more specifically the restriction
and ultimately the elimination of the slave trade. Islam, in contrast
to both ancient Rome and the modern colonial systems, accords
the slave a certain legal status and assigns obligations as well as rights
to the slaveowner. He is enjoined to treat his slave humanely and can
be compelled by a qadi to sell or even manumit his slave if he fails in
this duty. The manumission of slaves is recommended as a meritorious
act. It is not, however, required, and the institution of slavery is
not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Islamic law. Perhaps
for this very reason the position of the slave in Muslim society
was incomparably better than in either classical antiquity or nineteenth-
century North and South America. Western observers at the
time often comment on the relative mildness of Middle-Eastern slavery.
A notable example was the Swiss Henri Dunant, the founder of
the Red Cross, who visited North Africa in 1860.
But while the life of a slave in Muslim society was no worse, and in
many ways rather better, than that of the free poor, the processes by
which slaves were acquired and transported often imposed appalling
hardships. It was these that drew the main attention of European opponents
of the slave trade, and it was to the elimination of this traffic,
particularly in Africa, that their main efforts were devoted.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
86
From a traditional Muslim point of view, to abolish slavery would
hardly have been possible. To forbid what God permits is almost as
great an offense as to permit what God forbids. Slavery was authorized
and its regulation formed part of the shar¹‘a; more important,
of the central core of social laws, which remained intact and effective
even when other sections of the Holy Law, dealing with civil, criminal,
and similar matters, were tacitly or even openly modified and
replaced by modern codes. It is thus not surprising that the strongest
resistance to the proposed changes came from conservative religious
quarters and particularly from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
In their view they were upholding an institution sanctified by scripture
and law, and one moreover necessary for the maintenance of the
traditional structure of family life.
The reduction and effective abolition of the slave trade in the Ottoman
Empire was in the main accomplished in the course of the
nineteenth century. The process of emancipation seems to have begun
in 1830 when a ferman was issued ordering the emancipation of
slaves of Christian origin who had kept to their religion. This was, in
effect, an amnesty for Greek and other Christian subjects of the Ottoman
Empire who had been reduced to slavery as a punishment for
participating in the recent risings. Those who had become Muslims
were excluded from this emancipation, and remained the property of
their owners. Those who were still Christian were set free.1
In earlier times, white slaves were brought from Europe, either by
purchase or by capture. By the nineteenth century, the great majority
of white slaves, however, both Christian and Muslim, came not from
the suppression of rebellion but by purchase from the Caucasian lands.
Georgians and Circassians were greatly appreciated both in Persia
and in the Ottoman lands, the men for battle, the women for pleasure.
They arrived either overland or by sea from the Black Sea ports.
Their movement and their subsequent fate were beyond the range of
interest of the Western powers and were exclusively Ottoman and
Persian concerns. This is also true of the Ottoman attempt to deal
with this problem, undertaken without external pressure, by force of
internal circumstances, and by due process of law. The Ottoman authorities
were able to accomplish a substantial improvement in the
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
87
Figure 4-1
The Aurat Bazaar, or market, for female slaves in Istanbul.
By Thomas Allom, 1838.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
88
condition of these slaves, amounting ultimately to the effective, though
still not legal, abolition of their servile status.2
The restriction of the traffic in blacks in contrast seems to have
been due very largely to British pressure. A British request in 1846 to
Muh°
ammad Sh
h of Persia was rejected on the grounds that Islam
permitted slavery and he therefore could not forbid it. Eventually the
British and Persian governments reached a compromise agreement,
but efforts by the Royal Navy to enforce this agreement in the Persian
Gulf and Indian Ocean continued to cause friction. After several
limited and local measures, in 1857 the British succeeded in obtaining
a major Ottoman ferman prohibiting the traffic in black slaves
throughout the Empire, with the exception of the Hijaz.3 The circumstances
that led to this exception throw some light on traditionalist
attitudes to social equalization.
The movement against slavery in the Islamic lands was due only in
part to Western influence. The first Muslim ruler to emancipate the
black slaves was the Bey of Tunis, who in January 1846 decreed that a
deed of enfranchisement should be given to every black slave who
desired it. Among the reasons for this action he notes the uncertainty
among Muslim jurists concerning the legal basis for “the state of slavery
into which the black races have fallen” and the need to prevent
the black slaves “from seeking the protection of foreign authorities.”4
That the first of these was a genuine concern of conscientious Muslims
is shown by a striking passage in the nineteenth-century Moroccan
historian Ah°
mad Kh
lid al-N
s°
ir (1834–1897), discussing the
illegal enslavement of Muslim blacks. Al-N
s°
ir was writing entirely
within the context of traditional society but was clearly affected by
the new antislavery ideas current at the time. He recognizes the legality
of the institution of slavery in Muslim law, but is appalled by its
application. He complains in particular of “a manifest and shocking
calamity, widespread and established since of old in the lands of the
Maghrib—the unlimited enslavement of the blacks and the importation
of many droves of them every year, for sale in the town and country
markets of the Maghrib, where men traffic in them like beasts, or
worse.”5 While conceding that heathens may lawfully be enslaved,
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
89
al-N
s°
ir reminds his readers that Muslims may not; by now, he argues,
a majority or at least a substantial minority of the blacks are
Muslims, and since the natural condition of man is freedom, they
should be given the benefit of the doubt. The evidence of slave traders
is dismissed as interested and unreliable, and the traders themselves
are condemned as “men without morals, virtue or religion.”
In all those parts of the region that were subject to European rule
or dominance, slavery was in time abolished, in practice as well as in
law. It remained legal in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia until the
early twentieth century; it was finally abolished in Yemen and Saudi
Arabia in 1962. Today, in most of the Middle East as elsewhere, chattel
slavery is no longer morally and socially acceptable. Even those who
demand the restoration of Qur’anic law usually stop short of demanding
the application of those particular provisions. There are indeed
some places in or near the region where slavery has been restored,
but these are peripheral.6
The movement for the emancipation of non-Muslims began much
earlier, but unlike that for the emancipation of slaves appears initially
to have evoked no support in Islamic circles. The process began at
the end of the eighteenth century when Bonaparte’s expedition and
administration in Egypt drew extensively on the services of Coptic
and other local Christians. The French seem to have attached little
importance to modifying the institution of slavery and many of them
indeed bought concubines for their own use, sometimes with unfortunate
results.7 They could not, however, tolerate the continuance of
the numerous restrictions and disabilities imposed by Muslim law
and tradition on Christians. These were abolished, and through their
connections with the French the Christians of Egypt obtained a position
considerably better than equality.
This may help to explain the very sharp Muslim reaction against
them. Even the contemporary Egyptian historian al-Jabart, in general
an open-minded observer willing to recognize some of the positive
aspects of French rule, comments very negatively on the emancipation
and employment of Copts in what was tantamount to a termination
of the dhimma. He was particularly offended by their wearing
fine clothes and bearing arms, contrary to old established usage, by
WHAT WENT WRONG?
90
their exercising authority over the affairs and even the persons of the
Muslims, and generally acting in a way that in his eyes was a reversal
of the proper order of things as established by the law of God. While
al-Jabart shows only modified enthusiasm in welcoming the return
of Ottoman authority, he rejoices particularly in the restoration of
the dhimma and of the restrictions it imposed on his Coptic compatriots.
8
The brief French occupation of Egypt and of some of the Greek
islands and, still more, the permanent Russian annexation of
Transcaucasia posed entirely new problems for both the Muslims and
their dhimm
subjects. The appearance of Armenians in the service of
the advancing Russian power on the eastern frontier of Turkey, like
the employment of Christian and occasionally Jewish subjects of the
Ottoman Empire by the Western powers, created new tensions and
produced new reasons for Muslim resentment. A similar problem,
though on a smaller scale, arose in Persia, where the non-Muslim
minorities consisted of Armenians, both Orthodox and Catholic,
Nestorians, Zoroastrians, and Jews. They did not however form territorially
contiguous majority populations, and therefore did not raise
what became a major issue in the Ottoman lands.
The Christian subjects of the Porte now found themselves involved
in the pursuit of what were, in the last analysis, mutually exclusive
objectives deriving from incompatible philosophies. The status of
dhimm
or protected non-Muslim subject of the Muslim state was incompatible
with the acceptance of the protection or patronage, sometimes
even the citizenship, of a foreign power. Both were incompatible
with the quest for equality of rights before the law as equal Ottoman
citizens. And this in turn was undermined by the parallel trend toward
separation, autonomy, or independence in most of the predominantly
Christian provinces of the Empire.
Yet despite these and other difficulties, the new idea struck root,
and in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of equal citizenship
for Ottoman subjects of different religions gradually gained
strength. It drew its main support from the continuing and growing
pressure of the European powers for reform within the Empire. But
it also began to draw by the midcentury on a significant group of
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
91
reformers among the Muslim Turks themselves, trying to bring their
country into line with what they perceived as modern enlightenment.9
In Persia the movement for “enlightenment” thus interpreted was
later and slower, and encountered significant resistance.
The Ottoman Rescript of the Rose Bower, promulgated on November
3, 1839, took a first minor official step in this direction. Dealing
with such matters as the security of life, honor and property of
the subject, fiscal reform, regular and orderly recruitment into the
armed services, judicial reform, and the like, the edict goes on to say
that “these imperial concessions are extended to all our subjects, of
whatever religion or sect they may be. . . .”10
The edict of 1839 was in principle concerned with administering
existing laws and enforcing existing rights rather than creating new
ones. The notion, however, of the equality of persons of all religions
before the law and in the application of the law represented a
radical breach with the past and posed some problems of acceptance
for Muslims.
The issue became more urgent in a new phase of the reform that
began in 1854, and involved significant changes affecting the status
of both slaves and unbelievers. To the dismay of many, the Ottoman
government indicated its intention to abolish the two major forms of
discrimination against non-Muslims—the jizya, or poll-tax, which had
universally been imposed by Muslim governments on tolerated non-
Muslim subjects, and the ban on bearing arms, a restriction of almost
equal universality and duration. These reforms were embodied in the
new reform charter, the Imperial Rescript issued on February 18,
1856, in which the sultan laid down, in much more explicit terms
than previously, the full equality of all Ottomans irrespective of religion,
while at the same time reaffirming all the “privileges and immunities
accorded in former times by my ancestors to all the Christian
communities and other non-Muslim religions established in my empire.”
It took some time to perceive the inherent contradiction between
these two. The resolution of that contradiction came only with
the dissolution of the Empire.
These two major reforms, the equalization of non-Muslims and
the ban on the traffic in black slaves, came at approximately the same
WHAT WENT WRONG?
92
time. By early 1855 the impact of these changes was already affecting
the Hijaz, where there was special concern about the measures against
slavery. The reduction in the supply of white slaves from the Caucasus,
resulting from the Russian conquest, had already caused alarm; this
was heightened by the imposition of restrictions on the importation
of black slaves from Africa. On April 1, 1855, a group of prominent
merchants in Jedda addressed a letter to the leading members of the
ulema as well as to the sharf of Mecca expressing their concern.11
They referred, with disapproval, to the steps that already had been
taken and quoted a rumor that the impending reforms would include
a general ban on the slave trade, together with other pernicious and
Christian-inspired changes, such as the emancipation of women, permission
for unbelievers to live in Arabia, and the toleration of mixed
marriages. The ban, along with the whole program of reform of which
it was a part, was condemned by the writers of the letter as an offense
against Holy Law, the more so since all the black slaves imported
from Africa embraced the Muslim religion.
The letter caused some excitement. The sharf consulted the chief
of the Ulema of Mecca, Sheikh Jam
l, and a few months later, when
the governor of the Hijaz sent an order to the district governor of
Mecca prohibiting the trade in slaves, Sheikh Jam
l issued a fatwadenouncing
the ban and some other projected or rumored reforms:
The ban on slaves is contrary to the Holy shar
‘a. Furthermore
the abandonment of the noble call to prayer in favor of firing a
gun, permitting women to walk unveiled, placing divorce in the
hands of women, and such like are contrary to the pure Holy Law.
. . . With such proposals the Turks have become infidels. Their
blood is forfeit and it is lawful to make their children slaves.12
The fatwa- produced the desired effect. A holy war was proclaimed
against the Ottomans, and the revolt began. It did not succeed, and
by June of the following year it had been completely crushed. The
sultan’s government had, however, noted the warning, and took steps
to forestall a secession of the slave owning Ottoman south.
A letter from the Chief Mufti of Istanbul, ‘rif Efendi, to “the Qadi,
Mufti, Ulema, Sharfs, Imams and preachers of Mecca” answered the
“slanderous rumors”:
MODERNIZATION AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
93
It has come to our hearing and has been confirmed to us that
certain impudent persons lustful for the goods of this world have
fabricated strange lies and invented repulsive vanities to the effect
that the lofty Ottoman state was perpetrating—almighty God preserve
us—such things as the prohibition of the selling of male and
female slaves, the prohibition of the call to prayer from minarets ,
the prohibition of the veiling of women and the concealment of
their private parts, the putting of the right to divorce into the hands
of women, the seeking of the aid of people who are not of our
religion and the taking of enemies as intimates and friends, all of
which is nothing but libelous lies. . . .13
In the ban on the trade in black slaves promulgated in 1857 the
province of the Hijaz was exempted.
The equalization of the non-Muslims, like the restriction of the
slave trade, struck at powerful vested interests, not all of them on the
Muslim side. For the Muslims it meant the loss of the supremacy that
they had long regarded as their right. But for Christians too, or at
least for the Christian leadership, it involved the loss of entrenched
and recognized privileges. It also involved equalization downward as
well as upward, a change not entirely to the taste of some who regarded
themselves as standing on the higher rungs of the ladder. A
contemporary Ottoman source remarks:
In accordance with this ferman Muslim and non-Muslim subjects
were to be made equal in all rights. This had a very adverse
effect on the Muslims. Previously, one of the four points adopted
as basis for peace agreements (mus
°
a-lah
°
a) had been that certain privileges
were accorded to Christians on condition that these did not
infringe the sovereign authority of the government. Now the question
of specific privileges lost its significance; in the whole range of
government, the non-Muslims were forthwith to be deemed the
equals of the Muslims. Many Muslims began to grumble: ‘Today
we have lost our sacred national [milli] rights, won by the blood of
our fathers and forefathers. At a time when the Islamic millet is the
ruling millet􀀀
it has been deprived of this sacred right. This is a day
of weeping and mourning for the people of Islam.’
As for the non-Muslims, this day, when they left the status of
raya and gained equality with the ruling millet, was a day of rejoicing.
But the patriarchs and other religious chiefs were displeased,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
94
because their appointments were incorporated in the ferman. Another
point was that whereas in former times, in the Ottoman state,
the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the
Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were
put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: ‘The
government has put us together with the Jews. We were content
with the supremacy of Islam.’14
It is significant and in no way surprising that the conservatives in
the Hijaz, in their sharp reaction against the reforms of the midcentury,
lumped actions in favor of the three groups, slaves, women, and unbelievers,
together. It is also noteworthy that they are strikingly specific
in naming the aspects of female emancipation to which they
objected—the right to move around freely, the right to go unveiled,
the right to initiate divorce proceedings. No doubt these were the
changes mentioned in the rumors reaching their ears.
On the slave and the unbeliever their information was broadly correct,
and the changes were as they feared—though not to the extent
of admitting non-Muslims to Arabia or permitting mixed marriages
between Muslim women and non-Muslim men. Marriages between
Muslim men and non-Muslim women were of course permitted by
the shar‘a and were not uncommon. On women’s rights, however,
they seem to have been entirely mistaken. The powers of Europe, so
solicitous on behalf of Christians and slaves, remained unmoved by the
condition of the female population of the Empire, though it was no
doubt known to them, at least in its more picturesque aspects, from
an extensive and sometimes prurient literature. The position of women
does not seem to figure among the concerns of Western critics of
Ottoman and other Muslim institutions. Ottoman liberals and reformers
show slightly more concern, but this in the main found literary
rather than political or legislative expression. A long time was to
pass before the women of the Empire raised their own voices.15
In Persia, neither foreign critics nor Muslim liberals and reformers
showed much interest in women’s rights, but Persian women themselves
began the fight for emancipation. A notable figure was Qurrat
al-‘Ayn16 (1814–1852), the eldest daughter of an eminent Shi‘ite
Muslim theologian. She appears to have received a good Islamic eduMODERNIZATION
AND SOCIAL EQUALITY
95
cation, but became an active follower of the B
b, the famous Islamic
reformer who created what was virtually a new religion in nineteenthcentury
Persia. Among other offenses, she preached without a veil
and denounced polygamy. She was martyred, along with at least 27
other B
bis, and was put to death by torture. A very different figure
was the Princess T
j es-Saltana, the daughter of N
s°
ir ed-Dn Sh
h.
Educated in the royal household in French as well as in Persian literature,
she became keenly aware of the difference in status between
the women of the West and the women of Persia. In her writings,
principally memoirs and some poems, she denounced the bondage
and misery to which her female compatriots were subjected. These
seeds fell on fertile soil, and in the events that led to the constitutional
revolution in Persia, 1906–1911, women are said to have played
an important part. In the words of a contemporary American observer:
It is not too much to say that without the powerful moral force
of these so-called chattels of the Oriental lords of creation, the illstarred
and short-lived revolutionary movement, however wellconducted
by the Persian men, would have early paled into a mere
disorganized protest. The women did much to keep the spirit of
liberty alive. Having themselves suffered from a double form of
oppression, political and social, they were the more eager to foment
the great Nationalist movement for the adoption of constitutional
forms of government and the inculcation of Western political,
social, commercial and ethical codes. Equally strange is the fact
that this yearning by the people received the support of large numbers
of the Islamic priests—a class which stood to lose much of its
traditional influence and privilege by the contemplated changes.17
In this last respect, the situation has since changed radically.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
96
Secularism in the modern political meaning*—the idea that religion
and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should
be separated—is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be
traced in the teachings of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the
first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed
by the subsequent history of Christendom. The persecutions
endured by the early church made it clear that a separation between
the two was possible; the persecutions inflicted by later churches persuaded
many Christians that such a separation was necessary.
The older religions of mankind were all related to—were in a sense
a part of—authority, whether of the tribe, the city, or the king. The
cult provided a visible symbol of group identity and loyalty; the faith
provided sanction for the ruler and his laws. Something of this pre-
Christian function of religion survives, or reappears, in Christendom,
where from time to time priests exercised temporal power, and kings
claimed divine right even over the church. But these were aberrations
from Christian norms, seen and reciprocally denounced as such by
5
Secularism and the Civil Society
*The term “secularism” appears to have been first used in English toward the middle
of the nineteenth century, with a primarily ideological meaning. As first used, it
denoted the doctrine that morality should be based on rational considerations regarding
human well-being in this world, to the exclusion of considerations relating
to God or the afterlife. Later it was used more generally for the belief that public
institutions, especially general education, should be secular not religious. In the
twentieth century it has acquired a somewhat wider range of meaning, derived from
the older and wider connotations of the term “secular.” In particular it is frequently
used, along with “separation,” as an approximate equivalent of the French term
laicisme, also used in other languages, but not as yet in English.
SECULARISM AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
97
royal and clerical spokesmen. The authoritative Christian text on these
matters is the famous passage in Matthew 22:21, in which Christ is
quoted as saying, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Commentators
have differed as to the precise meaning and intention of this
phrase, but for most of Christian history it has been understood as
authorizing the separate coexistence of two authorities, the one
charged with matters of religion, the other with what we would nowadays
call politics.
In this, the practice of Christianity was in marked contrast with
both its precursors and its competitors. In imperial Rome Caesar was
God, reasserting a doctrine that goes back to the god-kings of remote
antiquity. Among the Jews, for whose beliefs Josephus coined the term
“theocracy,”1 God was Caesar. For the Muslims, too, God was the
supreme sovereign, and the caliph was his vice-gerent, “his shadow
on earth.” Only in Christendom did God and Caesar coexist in the
state, albeit with considerable development, variety, and sometimes
conflict in the relations between them.
The early Christian experience of defying or avoiding authority
was not without precedents. The Jews had offered numerous examples
of a religion surviving the persecution of a hostile sovereignty—of
perseverance as sojourners in the alien land of Egypt, of prophetic
protest against their own erring kings, and, in the struggle of the
Maccabees, of resistance to foreign—and pagan—conquest and domination.
In Persia, Zoroaster initiated a religious and moral change,
which in time took over the state. Still further away, in India, the
mission of the Buddha and the subsequent work of his missionaries
first brought the idea of a universal religion with a message to all
mankind. Even pagan Rome offers examples of religiously inspired
or religiously expressed opposition to the Roman state, both from
independent peoples resisting Roman conquest, and from provincial
subjects resisting Roman rule.
None of this is remotely comparable, in extent or in duration, with
the long struggle of the early Christians against authority. For three
centuries, Christianity was a persecuted religion—different from,
sometimes opposed to, and often oppressed by the state authority. In
WHAT WENT WRONG?
98
the course of their long struggle, Christians developed a distinctive
institution—the church, with its own laws and courts, its own hierarchy
and chain of authority. Christians sometimes speak of “The Synagogue”
and “The Mosque” to denote the religious institutions of the
Jewish and Muslim faiths. But these are inappropriate terms, the projection
of Christian notions onto non-Christian religions. For the
Jew or the Muslim, the synagogue or the mosque is a building, a place
of worship and study, no more. Until modern times and the spread of
Christian norms and influence, neither ever had, for its own worshipers,
the institutional sense of the Christian term. The same may
be said of the temples of other religions.
The conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century and the
establishment of Christianity as the state religion initiated a double
change; the Christianization of Rome and—some would add—the
Romanization of Christ. For the first time, Christians now held authority
and had access to the coercive power of the state, which they
promptly used to impose the newly formulated Roman orthodoxy on
the older churches of the East. But by this time the Christian faith
and the Christian church were centuries old, with their character
sharply defined and indelibly marked by the experience of the founding
generations. The eastern churches had triumphed over pagan
persecution. They endured Christian intolerance, and more easily
survived the later, milder disabilities imposed on them by Islam.
Throughout Christian history, and in almost all Christian lands,
church and state continued to exist side by side as different institutions,
each with its own laws and jurisdictions, its own hierarchy and
chain of authority. The two may be joined, or, in modern times, separated.
Their relationship may be one of cooperation, of confrontation,
or of conflict. Sometimes they may be coequal, more often one
or the other may prevail in a struggle for the domination of the polity.
In the course of the centuries, Christian jurists and theologians
devised or adapted pairs of terms to denote this dichotomy of jurisdiction:
sacred and profane, spiritual and temporal, religious and secular,
ecclesiastical and lay.
Muhammad was, so to speak, his own Constantine. In the religiously
conceived polity that he founded and headed in Medina, the Prophet
SECULARISM AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
99
and his successors confronted the realities of the state and, before
very long, of a vast and expanding empire. At no time did they create
any institution corresponding to, or even remotely resembling, the
church in Christendom. But the tension between religious concerns
and political needs was often felt, and the resulting polemics and conflicts
are a recurring theme in Muslim history.
The first three major civil wars in Islam, as narrated by Muslim
chroniclers, appear as a series of unsuccessful attempts to steer the
new Islamic state and community in a religiously defined direction.
Pious ideals clashed with the needs of government, and soon of empire;
religious aspirations were sometimes seen as threatening the stability
and continuity of the political society.
The attempts to impose what one might call ecclesiastical constraints
on political and military authority failed, causing the retreat of the
pietists into either radical opposition or quietist withdrawal, accompanied
by a certain disdain for public service. It is for example a topos
of Islamic biography of men of religion in the Middle Ages that the
pious hero of the narrative was offered an appointment by the ruler
and refused it.2 The offer establishes his reputation, the refusal his
piety. Connection with the state was somehow seen as demeaning,
and the qadi, appointed by the state, became a figure of ridicule in
Islamic folklore.
Less frequently, the attempt was also made the other way, when an
Islamic ruler attempted to impose the rule of the state on religion, to
choose a particular doctrine and enforce it. The best-known example
was the Caliph Ma’m
n (reigned 813–833 C.E.), who tried to create a
sort of Erastian Islam. He and his successors failed and the attempt
was abandoned. Later, attempts were made by some Ottoman sultans
and Persian shahs, but these were rare and atypical.
Such terms as clergy or ecclesiastic cannot properly be applied to
Muslim men of religion. These were in time, and in defiance of early
tradition and precept, professionalized, and thus became a clergy in a
sociological sense. They did not become a clergy in the theological
sense. Islam recognizes no ordination, no sacraments, no priestly
mediation between the believer and God. The so-called clergyman is
perceived as a teacher, a guide, a scholar in theology and law, but not
as a priest.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
100
If one may admit, in a limited professional sense, the existence of a
clergy, there is no sense at all in which one can speak of a laity among
Muslims. The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities,
any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious
law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought. There is, for example,
no distinction between canon law and civil law, between the law of
the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history. There
is only a single law, the shar‘a, accepted by Muslims as of divine
origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal,
constitutional, as well as matters more specifically concerned with
religion in the limited, Christian sense of that word.
In the upper house of the traditional British parliament sat the lords
spiritual and temporal, the former being the bishops. In classical Islam
there are no lords spiritual—no bishops, cardinals, popes, no councils,
synods, or ecclesiastical courts. Nor do we find in Islamic history
political churchmen like Cardinal Richelieu in France, Cardinal
Wolsey in England, or Cardinal Alberoni in Spain. For the same reason,
there was in classical Islam no hierarchy, though something of
the sort has developed in more recent times, under unavowed and no
doubt unperceived Christian influence. One may even say that there
is no orthodoxy and heresy, if one understands these terms in the
Christian sense, as correct or incorrect belief defined as such by duly
constituted religious authority. There has never been any such authority
in Islam, and consequently no such definition. Where there
are differences, they are between the mainstream and the fringes,
between orthopraxy and deviation. Even the major division within
Islam, between Sunnis and Sh‘a, arose over an historical conflict about
the political leadership of the community, not over any question of
doctrine.3
The absence of a native secularism in Islam, and the widespread
Muslim rejection of an imported secularism inspired by Christian
example, may be attributed to certain profound differences of belief
and experience in the two religious cultures.
The first and in many ways the most profound difference, from
which all the others follow, can be seen in the contrasting foundation
myths—I use this expression without intending any disrespect—of
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101
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The children of Israel fled from
bondage, and wandered for 40 years in the wilderness before they
were permitted to enter the Promised Land. Their leader Moses had
only a glimpse, and was not himself permitted to enter. Jesus was
humiliated and crucified, and his followers suffered persecution and
martyrdom for centuries, before they were finally able to win over
the ruler, and to adapt the state, its language, and its institutions to
their purpose. Muhammad achieved victory and triumph in his own
lifetime. He conquered his promised land, and created his own state,
of which he himself was supreme sovereign. As such, he promulgated
laws, dispensed justice, levied taxes, raised armies, made war, and made
peace. In a word, he ruled, and the story of his decisions and actions
as ruler is sanctified in Muslim scripture and amplified in Muslim
tradition.
When the Arab Muslims conquered a number of Roman provinces
in the Levant and North Africa and Europe, they did not act like the
Christianized barbarians from the north, who struggled to preserve
something of the Roman state and its laws and made use of the Latin
and Greek languages in which their laws and scriptures were written.
The Muslims brought their own scripture, in their own language,
and created their own state, with their own sovereign institution and
their own holy law. Since the state was Islamic, and was indeed created
as an instrument of Islam by its founder, there was no need for
any separate religious institution. The state was the church and the
church was the state, and God was head of both, with the Prophet as
his representative on earth. In the words of an ancient and much cited
tradition: “Islam, the ruler, and the people are like the tent, the pole,
the ropes and the pegs. The tent is Islam, the pole is the ruler, the
ropes and pegs are the people. None can thrive without the others.”4
After Muhammad’s death, his spiritual mission was at an end, but
his function of leadership, alike in its religious, its political and its
military aspects, was assumed by his successors or deputies, the caliphs.
5 In the Muslim perception, there is no human legislative power,
and there is only one law for the believers—the Holy Law of God,
promulgated by revelation. This law could be amplified and interpreted
by tradition and reasoning. It could not be changed, and no
WHAT WENT WRONG?
102
Muslim ruler could, in theory, either add or subtract a single rule. In
fact of course they frequently did both, but their action in so doing
was always suitably disguised. In time, with the growing complexity
of Muslim law and doctrine, and the example of the older religions
before them, the Muslims evolved a class of professional men of religion,
the so-called Ulama-, those who possess ‘ilm, religious knowledge.
These were both jurists and theologians, the two being, in
essence, branches of the same profession.
At first sight, the classical Islamic order might seem to resemble the
so-called Cesaro-Papism of Eastern Orthodox Christendom. The resemblance
is more apparent than real. True, the Byzantine basileus
autokrator or the Russian czar dominated the religious as well as the
political establishments. But there was a patriarch, and under the patriarch
a hierarchy of metropolitans and bishops and lesser ecclesiastical
authorities, each with a delimited territorial and functional jurisdiction.
There was no such hierarchy or delimitation of function in classical
Islam, and when a semblance of such an order began to appear in
the Ottoman Empire, it was clearly a response to the influences of a
predominantly Christian environment.
Another relevant difference between Islamic and Christian political
notions is the survival, and latterly revival, in the Islamic world, of
the religious basis of identity which, in Christian Europe, was to a
large extent replaced by the territorial or ethnic nation-state. Nations
and countries of course existed in the Islamic world, and there is
much evidence, in the literature, of a sense of ethnic, cultural, and
occasionally regional identity. But at no time were these seen as forming
the basis of statehood or of political identity and allegiance. In
the vast and rich historiographic literature of Islam, there are basically
three kinds of historical topic. There are universal histories,
meaning, with few exceptions, the history of the Islamic oecumene and
the caliphs and sultans who ruled over it. There are dynastic histories,
focused on a ruling family and covering the often extremely variable
territories over which it ruled. There are local or regional histories,
most commonly of a city and the immediately surrounding district.
These last are primarily topographical and biographical. There are
no histories however of the Arabs or of Arabia, of the Turks or of
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103
Turkey, of the Iranians or of Iran. These are very ancient entities,
but very modern notions. And in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
when, under the impact of new ideas and pressures from abroad,
Muslims began to define themselves and their loyalties in national
and patriotic terms, it is surely significant that in Arabic, Persian, and
Turkish alike, the words used to designate “the nation” are words
that had previously been used to designate the religious polity of Islam—
and this, despite the available choice of a number of words of
primarily ethnic or territorial content.
The reasons why Muslims developed no secularist movement of
their own, and reacted sharply against attempts to introduce one from
abroad, will thus be clear from the contrasts between Christian and
Muslim history and experience. From the beginning, Christians were
taught both by precept and practice to distinguish between God and
Caesar and between the different duties owed to each of the two.
Muslims received no such instruction.
The history of Christianity is much concerned with schism and
heresy, and with the conflicts in which the proponents of competing
doctrines and the wielders of rival authorities struggled to overcome
each other—by persecution when this was feasible, by war when it
was not. The story begins almost immediately after the conversion of
Constantine, with the christological and jurisdictional conflicts between
the churches of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. It
continued with the struggle between Constantinople and Rome, the
later struggle between the Papacy and the Protestants, and the further
conflicts between different groups of the latter—until, after centuries
of bloody strife and persecution, growing numbers of Christians
finally concluded that only by depriving the churches of access to the
coercive and repressive powers of the state, and by depriving the state
of the power to intervene in the affairs of the church, could they achieve
any tolerable coexistence between people of differing faiths and creeds.
The Muslim experience was very different. Muslims had of course
their religious disagreements, and these on occasion led to strife and
repression. But there is nothing remotely comparable with such epoch-
making Christian events as the Schism of Photius, the Reformation,
the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the bloody religious wars
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104
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which almost compelled
Christians to secularize their states and societies in order to escape
from the vicious circle of persecution and conflict. Muslims encountered
no such problem, and therefore required no such answer.
The first Muslim encounter with secularism was in the French
Revolution,6 which they saw, not as secular (a word and concept equally
meaningless to them at that time), but as de-Christianized, and therefore
deserving of some consideration. All previous movements of ideas
in Europe had been, to a greater or lesser extent, Christian, at least in
their expression, and were accordingly discounted in advance from a
Muslim point of view. The French Revolution was the first movement
of ideas in Europe that was seen as non-Christian or even anti-
Christian, and some Muslims therefore looked to France in the hope
of finding, in these ideas, the motors of Western science and progress,
freed from Christian encumbrances. These ideas provided the main
ideological inspiration of many of the modernizing and reforming
movements in the Islamic world in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
From the beginning, there were a few who saw that these ideas
could threaten not only Christianity but also Islam, and who gave
warning against them. For a long time they had little influence. The
minority who were at all aware of European ideas were for the most
part profoundly attracted by them. Among the vast majority, the challenge
of Western secular ideas was not so much opposed as ignored.
It is only in comparatively recent times that Muslim religious thinkers
of stature have looked at secularism, understood its threat to what
they regard as the highest values of religion, and responded with a
decisive rejection.
The strangeness of these ideas to Muslims can be seen in the struggle
to find appropriate terms to designate them. The Turks were the
first Muslim people to attempt some study of the West and to devise
or adapt terms for Western notions and artifacts. The earliest Turkish
discussions of secularism use the term ladini, literally “non-religious.”
This is easily confused with irreligious, and Turkish secularists
soon realized that the term they had chosen was unnecessarily provocative.
They therefore replaced it with a loan word from French—
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105
laique, which in its Turkish form lâik remains in use to the present
time. The same word is now used in Persian.
But not in Arabic. The Arabs had a rather easier task since Arabic,
unlike Turkish and Persian, is a Christian as well as a Muslim language.
In several Middle-Eastern countries there are or were sizable
Arabic-speaking Christian communities, who produced a substantial
Christian-Arabic literature, and devised the necessary Arabic vocabulary
to render Christian terms. For a long time, the Christians of the
Fertile Crescent wrote the Arabic language in the Syriac script, just
as the Jews wrote it in the Hebrew script, and both Judaeo-Arabic
and Judaeo-Christian literatures were unknown to the Muslims. Even
after the Christians began to use the common Arabic script, their
literature for a while remained a largely internal affair. But with the
spread of European influence from the nineteenth century, Arabicspeaking
Christians, often educated in Western schools and more
open to Western ideas, played a key role in their transmission, and
the Christian-Arab lexicon provided a significant part of the new vocabulary
that went to make up modern Arabic.
One of these Christian terms that passed into common usage was
‘a-lama-n
, later also ‘alama-n
, literally meaning “worldly,” from ‘a-lam,
world. This word served as the equivalent of temporal, secular, and
lay alike. A later loan-translation, rh°
a-n
, from rh°
, spirit, served as its
counterpart. More recently, its Christian origin and etymology forgotten,
‘a-lama-n
has been revocalized ‘ilma-n
, derived from ‘ilm, science,
and misunderstood to denote the doctrine of those who presume
to pit human science against divine revelation. It has become a favorite
blanket term used by both radical and traditional religious writers,
to denote what they see as foreign, neo-pagan, and generally anti-
Islamic ideas, imported by Western propagandists and missionaries
and their local dupes and agents, to subvert Islamic society and end
the rule of the shar‘a. The source of this evil is variously located in
Europe or America, in Judaism, Christianity, and communism. The
solution is the same for all of these—to remove the alien and pagan
laws and customs imposed by foreign imperialists and native reformers,
and restore the only true law, the all-embracing law of God. The
proponents of this doctrine won power in Iran in 1979. They are,
increasingly, a force to be reckoned with in other Muslim countries.
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106
In the secularization of the West, God was twice dethroned and
replaced—as the source of sovereignty by the people, as the object of
worship by the nation. Both of these ideas were alien to Islam, but in
the course of the nineteenth century they became more familiar, and
in the twentieth they became dominant among the Westernized intelligentsia
who, for a while, ruled many if not most Muslim states. In
a nation-state defined by the country over which it ruled or the nation
that constituted its population, a secular state was in principle
possible. Only one Muslim state, the Turkish Republic, formally
adopted secularism as a principle, and enacted the removal of Islam
from the constitution and the abrogation of the shar‘a, which ceased
to be part of the law of the land. The six former Soviet republics of
predominantly Muslim population inherited a rigorously secular system,
except in the sense that communism was an established faith. So
far most of them show little inclination to Islamize their laws and
institutions. One or two other Muslim countries went some of the
way toward separation, and several more restricted shar‘a law to
marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and adopted modern, mostly West
European, laws in other matters.
More recently, there has been a strong reaction against these
changes. A whole series of Islamic radical and militant movements,
loosely and inaccurately designated as “fundamentalist,” share the
objective of undoing the secularizing reforms of the last century, abolishing
the imported codes of law and the social customs that came
with them, and returning to the Holy Law of Islam and an Islamic
political order. In three countries, Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan, these
forces have gained power. In several others they exercise growing
influence, and a number of governments have begun to reintroduce
shar‘a law, whether from conviction or—among the more conservative
regimes—as a precaution. Even nationalism and patriotism, which
after some initial opposition from pious Muslims had begun to be
generally accepted, are now once again questioned and sometimes
even denounced as anti-Islamic. In some Arab countries, defenders
of what has by now become the old-style secular nationalism accuse
the Islamic fundamentalists of dividing the Arab nation and setting
Muslim against Christian. The fundamentalists reply that it is the
SECULARISM AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
107
nationalists who are divisive, by setting Turk against Persian against
Arab within the larger community of Islam, and that theirs is the
greater and more heinous offense.
In the literature of the Muslim radicals and militants the enemy has
been variously defined. Sometimes he is the Jew or Zionist, sometimes
the Christian or missionary, sometimes the Western imperialist,
sometimes—less frequently—the Russian or other communist.7
But their primary enemies, and the most immediate object of their
campaigns and attacks, are the native secularizers—those who have
tried to weaken or modify the Islamic basis of the state by introducing
secular schools and universities, secular laws and courts, and thus
excluding Islam and its professional exponents from the two major
areas of education and justice. The arch-enemy for most of them is
Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic and the first
great secularizing reformer in the Muslim world. Characters as diverse
as King Faruq and Presidents Nasser and Sadat in Egypt, Hafiz
al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Shah of Persia and
the kings and princes of Arabia, were denounced as the most dangerous
enemies of Islam, the enemies from within.
The issue was defined with striking clarity in a widely circulated
booklet by Muh
°
ammad ‘Abd al-Salm Faraj, the ideological guide of
the group that murdered President Sadat of Egypt:8
Fighting the near enemy is more important than fighting the
distant enemy. In jiha-d the blood of the Muslims must flow until
victory is achieved. But the question now arises: is this victory for
the benefit of an existing Islamic state, or is it for the benefit of the
existing infidel regime? And is it a strengthening of the foundations
of this regime which deviates from the law of God? These
rulers only exploit the opportunity offered to them by the nationalist
ideas of some Muslims, in order to accomplish purposes which
are not Islamic, despite their outward appearance of Islam. The
struggle of a jiha-d must be under Muslim auspices and under Muslim
leadership, and concerning this there is no dispute.
The cause of the existence of imperialism in the lands of Islam
lies in these self-same rulers. To begin the struggle against imperialism
would be a work that is neither glorious nor useful, but only
a waste of time. It is our duty to concentrate on our Islamic cause,
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108
which means first and foremost establishing God’s law in our own
country, and causing the word of God to prevail. There can be no
doubt that the first battlefield of the jiha-d is the extirpation of these
infidel leaderships and their replacement by a perfect Islamic order.
From this will come release.
At the present time secularism is in a bad way in the Middle East.
Of those Middle Eastern states that have written constitutions, only
two have no established religion. One is Lebanon, no longer an encouraging
example of religious tolerance or secularization. The other,
as already noted, is the Turkish Republic, where, while the general
principle of separation is maintained, there has been some erosion.
The ex-Soviet republics are still struggling with these problems.
Of the remaining Middle-Eastern countries, those that possess
written constitutions all give some constitutional status to Islam, ranging
from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which gives religion a central
position, to the rather minimal reference in the Syrian constitution,
which says the laws of the state shall be inspired by the shar‘a. Of the
states without written constitutions, principally Israel and the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, both accord a very considerable place to religion
in the definition of identity and of loyalty. If one may briefly compare
the two, Saudi Arabia gives a greater place to the application of religious
law, Israel allows a far greater political role to the clergy.
I have used the word “clergy.” It is of course a Christian word,
alien to both the Muslim and Jewish traditions but very much part of
present-day Muslim and Jewish realities. This is the result of a long
development, the beginnings of which one can see in the Ottoman
ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the Ottoman state there was what is sometimes
called the religious institution, a hierarchy of religious authorities
with territorial jurisdictions, almost equivalent to the see or diocese
of a Christian bishop. The appointment of a mufti of a place, with
jurisdiction over a territorially defined entity, dates from Ottoman
times and almost certainly follows Christian example or responds to
Christian influence. Not only were there muftis of places but there
was a hierarchy of muftis culminating in the Chief Mufti of Istanbul
whom one might reasonably describe as the primate of the Ottoman
Empire, the Muslim archbishop of the capital.
SECULARISM AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
109
Even after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the practice continued
in the Ottoman successor states in the Middle East, where governments
appointed functionaries with the title Chief Mufti, exercising
religious, one might even say ecclesiastical, jurisdiction over a city, a
province, or a country, and playing a political role unknown in classical
Islam. One sees it even more dramatically in the ayatollahs of
Iran, a title dating from quite modern times and unknown to classical
Islamic history. If the rulers of the Islamic Republic but knew it, what
they are doing is Christianizing Islam in an institutional sense, though
not of course in any religious sense. They have already endowed Iran
with the functional equivalents of a pontificate, a college of cardinals,
a bench of bishops, and, especially, an inquisition,9 all previously alien
to Islam. They may in time provoke a Reformation.
For more than a thousand years, Islam provided the only universally
acceptable set of rules and principles for the regulation of public
and social life. Even during the period of maximum European influence,
in the countries ruled or dominated by European imperial powers
as well as in those that remained independent, Islamic political notions
and attitudes remained a profound and pervasive influence. In
recent years there have been many signs that these notions and attitudes
may be returning, albeit in much modified forms, to their previous
dominance.
The term “civil society” has become very popular in recent years, and
is used in a number of different—sometimes overlapping, sometimes
conflicting—senses. It may therefore be useful to examine Islamic perceptions
of civility, according to various definitions of that term.
Perhaps the primary meaning of civil, in the Middle East today, is
as the converse of military. This has a special relevance in a place and
at a time when the professional officer corps is often both the source
and the instrument of power. In this sense, Islamic society, in its inception
and in its early formative years, was unequivocally civil. The
Prophet and the early caliphs employed no professional soldiers, but
relied for military duties on a kind of armed, mostly voluntary militia.
It is not until the second century of the Islamic era (eighth century
C.E.) that one can speak, with certitude, of a professional army. The
caliph, who in early though not in later times occasionally commanded
WHAT WENT WRONG?
110
his armies, was nevertheless a civilian. So too was the wazir, who,
under the caliph’s authority, was in charge of all branches of the government,
both civil and military. The wazir’s emblem of office was an
inkpot, which was carried before him on ceremonial public occasions.
In the later Middle Ages, internal upheavals and external invasions
brought changes, which resulted in the militarization of most Islamic
regimes. This has persisted to modern times. During the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, there was an interlude of civilian,
more or less constitutional government, mostly on Western
models. During the 1950s and after, these regimes, for the most part,
came to an end, and were replaced by authoritarian governments under
ultimate military control.
This is however by no means universal. In some countries, as for
example Saudi Arabia, traditional monarchies still maintain a traditional
civilian order; in others, like Turkey and, later, Egypt, the military
themselves prepared the way for a return to civilian government.
On the whole, the prospects for civilianization at the present time
seem to be reasonably good.
In the more generally accepted interpretation of the term “civil
society,” civil is opposed, not to religious or to military authority, but
to authority as such. In this sense, the civil society is that part of society,
between the family and the state, in which the mainsprings of
association, initiative, and action are voluntary, determined by opinion
or interest or other personal choice, and distinct from—though
they may be influenced by—the loyalty owed by birth and the obedience
imposed by force. Obvious modern examples are the business
corporation, the trade union, the professional association, the learned
society, the club or lodge, the sports team and the political party.
Islamic precept, as presented by the jurists and theologians, and
Islamic practice, as reflected by the historians, offer a variety of sometimes
contradictory precedents. The tradition of private charity is
old and deep rooted in Islam, and is given legal expression in the
institution of waqf. A waqf is a pious endowment in mortmain, consisting
of some income-producing asset, the proceeds of which are
dedicated to a pious purpose—the upkeep of a place of worship, a
school, a bathhouse, a soup kitchen, a water fountain, and the like.
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111
The donor might be a ruler or government official; he might equally
be, and very often was, a private person. Women, who in Islamic law
have the right to own and dispose of property, figure prominently
among founders of waqfs, sometimes reaching almost half the number.
This is perhaps the only area in the traditional Muslim society,
in which they approach equality with men. By means of the institution
of waqf, many services, which in other systems are the principal
or sole responsibility of the state, were provided by private initiative.
One of the major changes brought by modernizing autocrats in the
nineteenth century was to bring the waqfs under state control.
In this and other ways modernization in the Middle East has reduced,
not increased, the scope for independent and self-supporting
associations, and the encroachment of the reinforced modern state
has inhibited the development of a real civil society. In the cultural
sphere, the state disposes of new and stronger instruments to control
the schools, the media, and in general the printed word. This control
will no doubt in time be undermined by the electronic media revolution,
but for the time being at least it remains effective. In the economy,
even after the collapse and abandonment of socialism, state involvement
in economic life continues. In most countries in the region, a
very large proportion of the population depends, directly or indirectly,
on the state for its income. Many of the remainder eke out a
precarious and inadequate livelihood from smuggling and other illicit
transactions—all part of a extensive black-market economy in
which members of the state apparatus may in various ways be gainfully
involved.
Islamic law, unlike Roman law and its derivatives, does not recognize
corporate legal persons, and there are therefore no Islamic equivalents
to such Western corporate entities as the city, the monastery, or
the college. Cities were mostly governed by royal officers, while convents
and colleges relied on royal or private waqfs. There were however
other groupings, of considerable vitality and importance in
traditional Muslim society. Such, for example are the kin group—
family, clan, tribe; the faith group, often linked together by common
membership of a sufi fraternity; the craft group, joined in a guild; the
ward or neighborhood within a city. Very often these groups overWHAT
WENT WRONG?
112
lapped or even coincided, and much of the life of a Muslim city was
determined by their interaction.
In the Islamic context, the independence and initiative of the civil
society may best be measured not in relation to the state, but in relation
to religion, of which, in the Muslim perception, the state itself is
a manifestation and an instrument. In this sense, the primary meaning
of civil is non-religious, and the civil society is one in which the
organizing principle is something other than religion, that being a
private affair of the individual. The first European country that actually
accorded civil rights to non-Christians was Holland, followed
within a short time by England and the English colonies in North
America, where extensive, though not as yet equal rights were granted
to nonconformist Christians and to Jews. These examples were followed
by others, and the libertarian ideas they expressed contributed
significantly to the ideologies of both the American and French Revolutions.
In time, these ideas were almost universally accepted in Western
Christendom. Though few states, other than France and the
United States, accepted a formal constitutional separation of religion
and the state, most of them observe it in practice.
In the Islamic world, the dethronement of religion as the organizing
principle of society was not attempted until much later, and the
attempt was due entirely to European influences. It was never really
completed, and is perhaps now being reversed. Certainly in Iran, organized
religion has returned to something like the status that it enjoyed
in the medieval world, both Christian and Islamic.
During the 14 centuries of Islamic history, there have been many
changes. In particular, the long association, sometimes in coexistence,
more often in confrontation, with Christendom, led to the acceptance,
in the later Islamic monarchies in Iran and Turkey and their
successor states, of patterns of religious organization that might suggest
a probably unconscious imitation of Christian ecclesiastical usage.
These Western influences became more powerful and more
important after the French Revolution.
The dissemination of French revolutionary ideas in the Islamic
world was not left to chance, but was actively promoted by successive
French regimes, both by force of arms, and, much more effectively,
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113
by translation and publication. The penetration of Western ideas into
the Islamic world was greatly accelerated when, from the early nineteenth
century, Muslim students in increasing numbers were sent to
institutions of higher education in France, Italy, and Britain, and later
also in other countries. Many of these, on their return home, became
carriers of infectious new ideas.
Until the impact of these ideas, the notion of a non-religious society
as something desirable or even permissible was totally alien to Islam.
Other religious dispensations, namely Christianity and Judaism, were
tolerable because they were earlier and superseded versions of God’s
revelation, of which Islam itself was the final and perfect version, and
therefore lived by a form—albeit incomplete and perhaps debased—of
God’s law. Those who lacked even this measure of religious guidance
were pagans and idolaters, and their society or polity was evil. Any
Muslim who sought to join them or imitate them was an apostate.
One of the tests of civility is surely tolerance—a willingness to coexist
with those who hold and practice other beliefs. John Locke, and
most other Westerners, believed that the best way to ensure this was
to sever or at least to weaken the bonds between religion and the
state power. In the past, Muslims never professed any such belief.
They did however see a certain form of tolerance as an obligation of
the dominant Islamic religion. “There is no compulsion in religion”
runs a much quoted verse in the Qur’an (2:256), and this was generally
interpreted by Muslim jurists and rulers to authorize a limited
measure of tolerance for certain specified other religious beliefs, without
of course in any way questioning or compromising the primacy
of Islam and the supremacy of the Muslims.
Does this mean that the classical Islamic state was a theocracy? In
the sense that Britain today is a monarchy, the answer is certainly yes.
That is to say, that, in the Muslim conception, God is the true sovereign
of the community, the ultimate source of authority, the sole source
of legislation. In the first extant Muslim account of the British House
of Commons, written by a visitor who went to England at the end of
the eighteenth century, the writer expresses his astonishment at the
fate of a people who, unlike the Muslims, did not have a divine revealed
law, and were therefore reduced to the pitiable expedient of
WHAT WENT WRONG?
114
enacting their own laws.10 But in the sense of a state ruled by the
church or by priests, Islam was not and indeed could not be a theocracy.
In this sense, classical Islam had no priesthood, no prelates who
might rule or even decisively influence those who did. The caliph,
who was head of a governing institution that was state and church in
one, was himself neither a jurist nor a theologian, but a practitioner
of the arts of politics and sometimes of war. The office of ayatollah is
a creation of the nineteenth century; the rule of Khomeini and of his
successor as “supreme jurist” an innovation of the twentieth.
In most tests of tolerance, Islam, both in theory and in practice,
compares unfavorably with the Western democracies as they have
developed during the last two or three centuries, but very favorably
with most other Christian and post-Christian societies and regimes.
There is nothing in Islamic history to compare with the emancipation,
acceptance, and integration of other-believers and non-believers
in the West; but equally, there is nothing in Islamic history to
compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition,
the Auto da fé’s, the wars of religion, not to speak of more
recent crimes of commission and acquiescence. There were occasional
persecutions, but they were rare, and usually of brief duration, related
to local and specific circumstances. Within certain limits and
subject to certain restrictions, Islamic governments were willing to
tolerate the practice, though not the dissemination, of other revealed,
monotheistic religions. They were able to pass an even severer test,
by tolerating divergent forms of their own. Even polytheists, though
condemned by the strict letter of the law to a choice between conversion
and enslavement, were in fact tolerated, as Islamic rule spread to
most of India. Only the total unbeliever—the agnostic or atheist—
was beyond the pale of tolerance, and even this exclusion was usually
only enforced when the offence became public and scandalous. The
same standard was applied in the tolerance of deviant forms of Islam.
In modern times, Islamic tolerance has been somewhat diminished.
After the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam was a retreating,
not an advancing force in the world, and Muslims began to
feel threatened by the rise and expansion of the great Christian empires
of Eastern and Western Europe. The old easy-going tolerance,
SECULARISM AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY
115
resting on an assumption not only of superior religion but also of
superior power, was becoming difficult to maintain. The threat that
Christendom now seemed to be offering to Islam was no longer merely
military and political; it was beginning to shake the very structure of
Muslim society. Western rulers, and, to a far greater extent, their
enthusiastic Muslim disciples and imitators, brought in a whole series
of reforms, almost all of them of Western origin or inspiration,
which increasingly affected the way Muslims lived in their countries,
their cities and villages, and finally in their own homes.
These changes were rightly seen as being of Western origin or
inspiration; the non-Muslim minorities, mostly Christian but also
Jewish, were often seen, sometimes also rightly—as agents or instruments
of these changes. The old pluralistic order, multidenominational
and polyethnic, was breaking down, and the tacit social contract on
which it was based was violated on both sides. The Christian minorities,
inspired by Western ideas of self-determination, were no longer
prepared to accept the tolerated but inferior status accorded to them
by the old order, and made new demands—sometimes for equal rights
within the nation, sometimes for separate nationhood, sometimes for
both at the same time. Muslim majorities, feeling mortally threatened,
became unwilling to accord even the traditional measure of tolerance.
By a sad paradox, in some of the semi-secularized nation-states
of modern times, the non-Muslim minorities, while enjoying complete
equality on paper, in fact have fewer opportunities and face
greater dangers than under the old Islamic yet pluralistic order. The
present regime in Iran, with its ruling clerics, its executions for blasphemy,
its consecrated assassins, represents a new departure in Islamic
history. In the present mood, a triumph of militant Islam would
be unlikely to bring a return to traditional Islamic tolerance—and
even that would no longer be acceptable to minority elements schooled
on modern ideas of human, civil, and political rights. The emergence
of some form of civil society would therefore seem to offer the best
hope for decent coexistence based on mutual respect.
Secularism in the Christian world was an attempt to resolve the
long and destructive struggle of church and state. Separation, adopted
in the American and French Revolutions and elsewhere after that,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
116
was designed to prevent two things: the use of religion by the state to
reinforce and extend its authority; and the use of the state power by
the clergy to impose their doctrines and rules on others. This is a
problem long seen as purely Christian, not relevant to Muslims or
for that matter to Jews, for whom a similar problem has arisen in
Israel. Looking at the contemporary Middle East, both Muslim and
Jewish, one must ask whether this is still true—or whether Muslims
and Jews may perhaps have caught a Christian disease and might therefore
consider a Christian remedy.
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
117
In a letter written in 1554, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador
from the Emperor to the Sultan, describes a problem he encountered
on his journey to the Ottoman capital:
There remained one annoyance, which was almost worse than a
lack of wine, namely, that our sleep used to be interrupted in a
most distressing manner. We often had to rise early, sometimes
even before it was light, in order to arrive in good time at more
convenient halting-places. The result was that our Turkish guides
were sometimes deceived by the brightness of the moon and waked
us with a loud clamour soon after midnight; for the Turks have no
hours to mark the time, just as they have no milestones to mark
distances. They have, it is true, a class of men called talismans, attached
to the service of their mosques, who make use of waterclocks.
When they judge from these that dawn is at hand, they
raise a shout from a high tower erected for the purpose, in order to
exhort and invite men to say their prayers. They repeat the performance
half-way between sunrise and midday, again at midday, and
half-way between midday and sunset, and finally at sunset, uttering,
in a tremulous voice, shrill but not unpleasing cries, which are
audible at a greater distance than one would imagine possible. Thus
the Turkish day is divided into four periods, which are longer or
shorter, according to the time of year; but at night there is nothing
to mark the time. Our guides, as I have said, misled by the brightness
of the moon, would give the signal for packing-up long before
sunrise. We would then hastily get up, so that we might not be late
or be blamed for any untoward incident that might occur; our baggage
would be collected, my bed and the tents hurled into the carriage,
our horses harnessed, and we ourselves girt up and ready
awaiting the signal for departure. Meanwhile the Turks, having
6
Time, Space, and Modernity
WHAT WENT WRONG?
118
realized their mistake, had returned to their beds and their slumbers.
. . . I dealt with this annoyance by forbidding the Turks to
disturb me in future, and undertaking to wake the party at the proper
time, if they would warn me overnight of the hour at which we
must start. I explained to them that I had clocks which never failed
me, and would arrange matters, taking the responsibility of letting
them sleep on; they could, I said, safely trust me to get up. They
assented, but were still not quite at their ease; they arrived in the
early morning, and, waking my valet, begged him to go and ask me
‘what the fingers of my timepiece said’. He did this, and then indicated
as best he could whether a long or a short time remained
before the sun would rise. When they had tested us once or twice
and found that they were not deceived, they relied on us henceforward
and expressed their admiration of the trustworthiness of our
clocks. Thus we could enjoy our sleep undisturbed by their
clamour.1
In a later letter, written in 1560, Busbecq noted: “. . . no nation has
shown less reluctance to adopt the useful inventions of others; for
example, they have appropriated to their own use large and small cannons
and many other of our discoveries. They have, however, never
been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks.
They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no
longer be scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public
clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their
ancient rites would suffer diminution.”2
Another European traveller, Jean Chardin, who visited Persia in
1674, is quoted in 1683 by the English diarist John Evelyn as saying
that the Persians “had neither clocks nor watches.”3
Busbecq’s characterization of Turkish, and more generally, of the
Middle-Eastern attitudes to the measurement of time and space was
no doubt exaggerated, but not entirely false. A characteristic noticed
by many travellers was the extreme variability of the weights and
measures in common use. The English Arabist Edward William Lane,
who spent a good deal of time in Egypt between 1833 and 1835 and
wrote extensively on the country and its people, noted: “Of the measures
and weights used in Egypt I am not able to give an exact account;
for, after diligent search, I have not succeeded in finding any
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
119
two specimens of the same denomination perfectly agreeing with each
other, and generally the difference has been very considerable.”4
There was indeed wide variation. The rat
°
l, the commonest measure
of weight in the marketplace, roughly the equivalent of the European
pound, could differ considerably according to the commodity that
was being weighed and the place where this was done. The same applied
to measures of capacity. To confuse matters further, the same
names were used with different values. Similar difficulties arise in dealing
with the linear measurements used to indicate length and distance.
Medieval Islam inherited a considerable body of scientific knowledge
from classical antiquity and, more remotely, from the ancient
civilizations of the Middle East. To this they added new knowledge
achieved by their own experiments and researches, notably in cartography,
geography, geometry, and astronomy. The last-named in particular
involved delicate and precise calculations of both time and
space. But all this seems to have had little effect on the everyday calculation
of time and distance for practical purposes, for which simpler
and more basic methods were used.
Linear measurements were basically of three categories. The first,
on a small scale, was commercial and practical in purpose, for measuring
cloth and similar commodities, and in building. It was normally
expressed in terms of parts of the human body: the finger, the
fist, the span, the cubit or ell, the forearm, the fathom (i.e., the distance
from fingertip to fingertip of outstretched arms).
A second use of linear measurement, requiring somewhat larger
units, was to define enclosed areas. Such measures were required for
cadastral and fiscal purposes, and to delimit land held in freehold or,
more commonly, under some kind of grant. For the collection of taxes
and the allocation of responsibility, somewhat more precise measures
were needed than for either trade or travel. Measures in use in earlier
times were based mainly on agriculture—some on the amount of land
that could be sown with a given quantity of seed, others, more commonly,
on the area that could be plowed in a given period of time.
The same use of time spent to indicate distance covered dominates
the discussion of what one might call geographic distance. Geographers
and cartographers had their systems, mostly derived from clasWHAT
WENT WRONG?
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sical antiquity, but these were too arcane and too uncertain for most
practical purposes. In the literature of travel, in the histories, in public
and private correspondence, distance between places is almost invariably
measured in terms of time, the basic units being the hour
and the day. But days vary in length according to season; the hour, an
arbitrary, man-made division, has different meanings; and the distance
travelled in even a fixed hour or day will be affected—indeed
determined—by the terrain and the traveler.
Measures of distance for travel drew on the human body in movement;
thus the old Persian farsakh, which appears in Greek as parasang,
was defined as the distance a man could cover on foot in an hour,
while the Arabic marh
°
ala (Turkish konak) was the distance a traveler
could cover in a day. In the former Byzantine provinces the Muslim
government for a while retained the Roman mile, in Arabic called m
l.
In these too there was an attempt to establish relationships—the farsakh
was said to be three miles, the mile a hundred fathoms.
The habit of measuring distances in time and motion has survived to
the present day. It is not unusual, if one asks a peasant how far it is to
the next village, to be told “one cigarette”—meaning that if you light a
cigarette now, by the time you finish it you will be in the village.
Busbecq was mistaken in thinking that there were no milestones.
The earliest Islamic milestones are dated 86 A.H. (705 C.E.) and were
erected by the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik in the district of Jerusalem. Two
of them point to Jerusalem, one at seven miles, the other at eight
miles from the city. The other two point to Damascus, at 107 and
109 miles.5 These represent a relic of the past, and the use of miles
and of milestones had in general little impact in the Islamic Middle
East. The word “mile,” Arabic m
l, remained in use but was, so to
speak assimilated. Arabic lexicographers define it as the distance to
which the eye can reach along land. Some assess this at 3,000 cubits,
others at 4,000 cubits. Using different cubits, they agree that its extent
is 96,000 fingers. Even if Busbecq was technically in error, his
exasperation is understandable.
The situation regarding the measurement of time is not much better.
The day, the month, and the year are of course fixed by nature,
though it may be noted in passing that for Muslims as for Jews, the
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
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day begins at sunset: “and the evening and the morning were the first
day” (Genesis 1:5). For measuring anything less than a day or more
than a year, human ingenuity provided answers—at one end the clock
to divide the day, at the other the calendar to count the years. The
subdivisions of the day are thus conventional, and considerable differences
arise.
The principal subdivision of the day, the hour (Arab sa-‘a, Aramaic
sha‘ta, Hebrew sha‘a) was already known in antiquity. In the Hebrew
Bible the word only occurs five times, all of them in the Book of
Daniel—that is to say, after the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews
came under the influence of Babylonian culture. Of the five, four
(Chapter 3:6;15; 4:30; 5:5) all refer to something happening at the
same moment as something else. Only in one occurrence (Daniel 4:16)
does the word appear to indicate a unit of time.
In Talmudic literature, the word is already extensively used to mean
one of a sequence of numbered subdivisions of the day or of the night—
but how many, and of what length, is not always clear.
In the Qur’
n, the word sa-‘a occurs no less than 47 times, 33 of
them referring to the “last hour” and therefore retaining the earlier
meaning of a moment or instant.
At some unspecified but almost certainly early date, the Arabs
adopted the notion that the day was divided into 24 hours. These
hours were of two kinds: temporal, i.e., varying according to the season,
or fixed and equal. In a civilization comparatively close to the
equator, the temporal discrepancies were less important than in the
remoter lands of Europe. By Ottoman times a compromise was in
use, whereby the day was divided into 24 equal hours, but the reckoning,
in accordance with old tradition, started at sunset. This meant
that in principle clocks had to be reset every day. This arrangement is
sometimes referred to by travellers as “Turkish time” or “Arab time.”
The two systems of reckoning time remained in use to the present
day, but the increasingly general adoption of clocks and watches is
gradually eliminating the variable clock.
Apart from the natural, usually observable, demarcation of the day
by dawn, noon, and sunset, one other subdivision was of crucial importance
for Muslims, and that was the fixing of the times of prayer.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
122
In the same way, one of the most basic purposes of the geographical
sciences was to determine the direction of prayer, i.e., of Mecca. This
was especially important in newly Islamized countries, where there
was no established tradition.
The five daily prayers toward Mecca are one of the basic religious
obligations of every Muslim. Communal prayer takes place once a
week, on Friday. On the other days the individual prays, if necessary
alone, wherever he may be. The time is stated as a band rather than a
moment, and is determined by observation. The times of the five
prayers are 1: the predawn prayer, before the sun appears; 2: the noon
prayer, when the sun passes the zenith; 3: the afternoon prayer, when
the shadows cast by objects are equal to their height; 4: the sunset
prayer, after the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon, and 5: the
evening or night prayer, after the disappearance of the last light. The
exact observation of these phenomena is therefore of paramount importance,
and will obviously be much affected by regional and seasonal
differences. From early times, Muslim scholars and scientists
devoted considerable efforts to determining and tabulating the correct
times and direction of prayer. At one level, this was done by simple
observation; at another by the devising of instruments and the preparation
of tables.
Apart from prayer, there were few other activities that required even
approximate timing. This was a society in which there were no parliaments,
councils, or municipalities, and the conduct of public business
required no kind of schedule. The nearest approach to a council, the
Ottoman Imperial Divan, met four days a week, on Saturday, Sunday,
Monday, and Tuesday. According to contemporary descriptions, it
began its proceedings at daybreak and continued until about noon, when
the petitioners and other outsiders withdrew, and lunch was served to
the members of the Divan, who then went on to discuss what business
remained. In schools and colleges, the teaching day was of course punctuated
and regulated by the prayers. Travel, for caravans or for individuals,
was again structured around the prayers and, ultimately, the
three points of the day—sunrise, noon, and sunset.
An important figure at the courts of some Middle-Eastern rulers
was the Munajjim, who combined the functions of astrologer and asTIME,
SPACE, AND MODERNITY
123
tronomer. In the first capacity he was concerned with fixing astrological
times—that is to say, he had to choose auspicious times for
starting a new venture—a wedding, a military campaign, a journey,
and the like. In his capacity as astronomer, he was responsible for
keeping and, where necessary, correcting the astronomical tables and
establishing some sort of relationship between astronomical and practical
time.
The use of devices to measure the passage of time was by no means
new in the Middle East. The ancient Greeks used two devices for
measuring time, the sundial and the water clock. Both of them were
invented in the Middle East—the sundial, according to Herodotus,
by the Babylonians, the water clock by the Egyptians. The sundial
tells the time by the changing length and direction of the shadow and
varies therefore according to the season and the place. Greek mathematicians
devised several ways of coping with these two problems.
The sundial was of course useless between sunset and sunrise, or when
the sun was hidden, and there was no remedy for that. The water
clock—a place or a device where water leaks at a regular pace—had
the advantage that it also worked in the dark, but it posed problems
of care and maintenance. Here, too, the Greek mathematicians devoted
considerable ingenuity in inventing automata to tell the time
by water, some of them with musical accompaniment. Medieval Muslim
scientists added some new, rather elaborate, devices of their own.
Some of these even found their way to Europe, where they were treasured
more as works of art than as objects for everyday use.
The mechanical clock was a product of Europe, where it was first
attested at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The spread of
European clocks to the Middle East was a slow process. The Ottoman
Sultan Mehmed II is alleged to have shown some interest; the
same is said of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, to whom, in 1547,
the French king sent a “great clock made in Lyons where there was a
fountain which in the space of twelve hours drew the water that had
been put there, and was a masterpiece of high price.”6
By the sixteenth century, European clocks and watches were widely
used in the Middle East. They were found particularly useful in
mosques, to fix the times of the five daily prayers. Taq al-Dn, the
WHAT WENT WRONG?
124
creator of the Istanbul observatory, even wrote a treatise on clocks
operated by weights and springs. In the mid- and late- seventeenth
centuries there was a guild of clockmakers and watchmakers in
Istanbul. They were however emigrés from Europe, not local, and by
the end of the seventeenth century they were no longer able to compete
with imports from Europe, where manufacturers were designing
special clocks and watches for the Middle-Eastern market, and
were steadily improving the quality of pendulum clocks and springdriven
watches, with which local clockmakers could not compete.
Voltaire, in his correspondence, has some interesting references to
watchmakers living on his estate at Ferney, who with his help exported
their products to Turkey.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clocks figure with
increasing frequency, first among the gifts presented by European
embassies and companies to Middle-Eastern monarchs and notables,
and then as articles of commerce. Maintenance and repair of these
unfamiliar devices were of course a problem, and all too often, when
clocks for one reason or another ceased to function, they were neglected
and abandoned. The practice arose of sending craftsmen along
with the gift of clocks, to demonstrate their use and to repair them
when necessary. Some even established residence in Turkey and, to a
much lesser extent, in Persia. In some of the commercial agreements
and treaties between European and Middle-Eastern governments, the
European parties undertook to send clockmakers and watchmakers
as well as clocks and watches.
In the eighteenth century, if not earlier, there were many clocks
and watches in private possession, as is attested by the inventories of
the estates of deceased persons. A tabulation of Western-made articles
in these inventories in Istanbul puts clocks and watches in first
place, almost double the number of pistols and muskets, which come
second. Binoculars, telescopes, and eyeglasses come later in the list,
in much smaller quantities.7
By the nineteenth century European clocks and watches were in
general use—but all were in government or private possession. The
practice of establishing public clocks in towers or other structures
remained alien. A few are reported in some of the Balkan provinces
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
125
of the Ottoman Empire, where most of the inhabitants were Christian—
some of them indeed dating from before the Ottoman conquest.
But these were local and without impact elsewhere.
A public clock, set up in the market of Isfahan, constructed by an
Englishman by order of Sh
h ‘Abb
s (1587–1629) was apparently of
brief duration. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century
that the first public clock in Istanbul—perhaps indeed in any Islamic
country—was installed in the grounds of the Dolmabahçe Palace. And
at about the same time, in 1854, a clock tower was built in the citadel of
Cairo equipped with a clock received some time earlier, as a gift from
the French King Louis Philippe to the Egyptian ruler Muh°
ammad ‘Al
Pasha.
As always with a borrowed technology and its culture, there was a
time lag in the measurement of time. This problem was aggravated by
the general change in the Islamic world. Some centuries earlier, the
Islamic Middle East had led the world in science and technology, including
devices for measuring time. But Middle-Eastern technology
and science ceased to develop, precisely at the moment when Europe
and more specifically Western Europe was advancing to new heights.
The disparity was gradual, but progressive. By the late eighteenth
century, watchmakers in Istanbul were able to produce clocks and
watches of the type made in Europe in the early seventeenth century.
In this as in much else they were unable to keep pace with the rapidly
advancing West.
The week, like the hour, is unrelated to natural phenomena. For
Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it is defined by scripture, and its concluding
day of rest and/or public prayer is differently determined—
Saturday for Jews, Sunday for Christians, Fridays for Muslims. Even
the measurement of the passing of months and years still leaves some
scope for religious regulation and human ingenuity. Already in antiquity,
astronomers noted the discrepancy between the lunar and solar
years, and devised a number of ways of bridging it, of which the best
known is the leap year. For religious purposes, Islam, unlike Judaism
and Christianity, established a purely lunar calendar, with the result
that all the Islamic festivals rotate through the entire solar year three
times a century. This calendar is reckoned from the beginning of the
WHAT WENT WRONG?
126
Arabian year in which the Hijra, the migration of the Prophet from
Mecca to Medina, took place.
Being purely lunar, the Hijra calendar caused some practical difficulties
in public administration, particularly at a time when taxation
depended mainly on agriculture, which in turn is determined by the
rotation of the seasons. Muslim governments therefore, from early
times, adopted a number of different solar calendars, which were used
for administrative purposes, alongside the religious lunar calendar.
Some were pre-Islamic, such as the solar calendars in use at the time
of the conquest in Egypt and Iran. Others were post-Islamic. The
Ottoman maliye or financial year was a solar adaptation of the Muslim
era, using Muslim dates with Eastern Christian months. Dating
from 1790 C.E., it remained in use almost until the end of the Empire.
A Persian compromise, combining the Muslim year with old Persian
months, remains in use in Iran to the present day. In both of these,
discrepancies inevitably arose between the true Muslim lunar reckoning
and the adapted solar Muslim year. Thus, for example, the
Young Turk revolution of 1908 occurred in 1326 of the Hijra and
1324 of the maliye era; the Iranian revolution of 1979, in 1399 of the
Hijra, and 1358 of the Iranian solar calendar.
Private and business correspondence, as far as one can ascertain,
were dated according to the Muslim calendar, but fiscal records were
kept according to one or more solar calendars. Until the nineteenth
century, diplomatic documents carried Muslim lunar dates—but these
sometimes show a curious imprecision. Ottoman royal letters and
other missives indicate the year by number and the month by name.
The day however is normally indicated as the first of the month, the
last of the month, or the first, middle, or last decade of the month.
With such difficulties and their equivalents elsewhere, it is hardly
surprising that the Christian calendar, in its Gregorian version, is
now generally accepted for almost all public and governmental functions—
by Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, and by non-Christians
everywhere else in the world. The universalization of this era is
symbolized by the replacement of A.D. and B.C. by C.E. (Common Era)
and B.C.E. in international usage.
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
127
As well as time, Western influence also affected the measurement,
perception, and use of space. This difference can be seen immediately
in the contrast between European and Islamic art, notably in
the artist’s perception and use of perspective. In this respect, European
influence can be discerned at an early date in Turkish and Persian
painting, both miniature and mural.
The perception of space was much affected by the introduction of
two European devices for improving vision—reading glasses and telescopes.
The first are attested as early as the fifteenth century and as
far east as Iran, where the poet J
m, lamenting the infirmities of old
age, remarks that his eyes were now useless “unless, with the aid of
Frankish glasses, the two become four.”8 Middle-Eastern soldiers and
officials were quick to appreciate the value of telescopes for military
purposes and later, in combination with other devices, for demarcation.
This made it possible to introduce what was previously a purely
European idea—that of a precisely demarcated frontier.
Medieval states did not have frontiers in the modern sense. On
land as in time, there was no precise line of demarcation, but rather a
zone, a band, or interval. This was sufficient for all practical purposes.
Islamic laws regulating relations within and between states deal
with people, not places. A ruler ruled as far as he could collect taxes
and maintain order. Where there were no taxes to collect, the precise
boundary didn’t matter. Deserts were regarded in much the same
way as the sea. The notion of a frontier and the possibility of precise
demarcation came from Europe, along with the idea that such demarcation
was both possible and necessary. The Ottoman and Persian
Empires were in a state of intermittent conflict for some 400
years, but it was not until 1914 that, with the help of a joint Anglo-
Russian commission of experts, they finally demarcated a frontier
between them. That frontier still marks the western borders of Iran,
with Turkey in the north and with Iraq in the south, where it gave
rise to some frontier disputes.
Western perceptions—and measurement—of time and space also
had an impact on art and music. We can see the influences of European
art on the miniature at quite an early date, even as far east as
Iran. One of the attractions of Western art and particularly of WestWHAT
WENT WRONG?
128
ern portraiture must surely have been the use of perspective, which
made possible a degree of realism and accuracy unattainable in the
stylized and rather formal art of the traditional miniature. Pictures of
the Ka‘ba in Mecca, the holiest shrine of Islam, were widely disseminated
in the Ottoman lands and elsewhere. These were of course schematic
representations. Sometime in the early eighteenth century a
European artist, presumably having obtained one of these pictures,
redrew it in the European style, that is, in perspective. It appears on a
musical clock, made in England for the Turkish market.9
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Western influence
becomes very clear, both in the structure of buildings and in
their interior decoration. By the nineteenth century it is almost universal,
to such a degree that the older artistic traditions were dying
and being replaced by this new art from Europe.
As the perception and measurement of space affected the visual
arts, so too did the perception and measurement of time affect music—
though to a much lesser extent. At first sight, this selective rejection
of Western music in the general process of Westernization is
the reverse of what one would expect. Verbal culture, after all, would
appear to be the most difficult, since in all its forms it requires either
knowledge of a foreign language or the mediation of a translator. Yet
in many ways it is precisely the literary and more generally verbal
culture that has been the most accepted, and the best assimilated.
Even among nonverbal cultural influences, we find the same contrast
between the visual—artistic and architectural—influence, which on
the whole has been very extensive, and the musical, which has been
slow and limited. And in this we may perhaps discern an essential
feature of Western civilization.
A distinguishing characteristic of Western music is polyphony, by
harmony or counterpoint. This begins in its simplest form with the
choir, in which matched voices sing different notes in a planned sequence
to produce a combined effect; then comes the keyboard instrument,
matching the ten fingers of the two hands, following
different routes in a common purpose; and finally, the musical ensemble,
from duets and trios to the full orchestra. Different performTIME,
SPACE, AND MODERNITY
129
ers play together, from different scores, producing a result that is
greater than the sum of its parts.
With a little imagination one may discern the same feature in other
aspects of Western culture—in democratic politics and in team games,
both of which require the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of
different performers playing different parts in a common purpose. In
parliamentary politics and team games, there is a further cooperation
in conflict—rival parties or teams, striving to defeat their opponents,
but nevertheless acting under an agreed set of rules, and in an agreed
interval of time. One may also detect the same feature in two distinctly
Western literary creations—the novel, and still more, the theater. Both
of these involve the combined activities of a number of different individuals—
in the novel in imagination, in the theater in person—whose
characters and interrelationships are seen to develop and change in the
course of time. Such are the differences between the tale and the novel,
the recitation and the theater, and—one might perhaps add—the autocrat
and the assembly. The same qualities may be seen, in a more obvious
form, in the work of the historian, and indeed distinguishes his
writing from that of the chronicler or annalist.
All these involve some degree of harmonization—by the novelist
or playwright, the party leader or team captain, the composer and
conductor. The same applies, perhaps with even greater force, to
modern scientific research, which is no longer the preserve of the
lone genius, but has come to rely increasingly on teamwork and organization.
Modern science has extended our capacity to observe and to
measure both time and space to a previously inconceivable degree,
extending the scale from the nanosecond to the light year.
Polyphony, in whatever form, requires exact synchronization. The
ability to synchronize, to match times exactly, and for this purpose to
measure times exactly, is an essential feature of modernity and therefore
a requirement of modernization.
The precise measurement of passing time is of course a prerequisite
of modern science and technology—both scientific research and
working technology. It is also an essential characteristic, so obvious
as usually to be taken for granted, of both private and public life in a
modern society. The timetable—the tabulation of a sequence of events
WHAT WENT WRONG?
130
taking place at predetermined intervals, defined and demarcated with
meticulous exactitude—is basic. In many ways the least dramatic and
most powerful instrument of change in the whole process of modernization,
it seems to have begun with the railway—the earliest form of
organized public transport covering fixed distances at fixed times, and
available to all who buy a ticket. The railway was followed by numerous
other forms of public transport, covering ever greater distances at
ever greater speeds. Before long, the Western world was crisscrossed
by such lines of communication, and the timetable, indicating times of
departure and arrival, became a feature of everyday life. The railway
brought the timetable to the Middle East, and was followed by all the
other modalities of modern transport and hence of modern life. Today
the whole apparatus of modern communication, from telegraph through
telephone to television, with more recent additions such as fax and
Internet, is at the disposal of Middle-Eastern governments, and, increasingly,
of those who oppose and seek to overthrow them.
Without timetables of one sort or another, neither society nor the
economy could function, and the state would rapidly decline through
confusion to chaos. Even such essential features of modern life as
parades and demonstrations, political parties and business corporations,
school curricula and the armed forces at all levels, from vast
armies to simple infantry platoons, would be impossible.
The modern history of the Middle East, according to a convention
accepted by most historians of the region, begins in 1798, when the
French Revolution, in the persons of General Napoleon Bonaparte
and his expedition, arrived in Egypt, and for the first time subjected
one of the heartlands of Islam to the rule of a Western power and the
direct impact of Western attitudes and ideas. Interestingly, this aspect
of the French occupation was seen immediately in Istanbul, where
the sultan, as suzerain of Egypt, was much concerned about the seditious
effect of these ideas on his subjects. A proclamation was therefore
prepared and distributed both in Turkish and in Arabic throughout
the Ottoman lands, refuting the doctrines of revolutionary France. It
begins: “. . . In the name of God, the merciful and the compassionate.
O you who believe in the oneness of God, community of Muslims,
know that the French nation (may God devastate their dwellings and
TIME, SPACE, AND MODERNITY
131
abase their banners) are rebellious infidels and dissident evildoers.
They do not believe in the oneness of the Lord of Heaven and Earth,
nor in the mission of the intercessor on the Day of Judgement, but
have abandoned all religions and denied the afterworld and its penalties.
They do not believe in the Day of Resurrection and pretend that
only the passage of time destroys us and that beyond this there is no
resurrection and no reckoning, no examination and no retribution,
no question and no answer.”10
“The passage of time” is an allusion to the Qur’
n 45:23/24, which
reads: “They [the unbelievers] say ‘there is nothing in our life but this
world. We die and we live and only time destroys us.’ Of this they have
no knowledge; they only guess.” The word translated “time” is the
Arabic dahr, one of many different Arabic words for time. It is usually
used in the sense of passage or, often, duration of time. The term,
dahriyya, followers of dahr, is the classical term used by Muslim theologians
for materialism in its various forms. There is indeed an extensive
philosophical and theological literature discussing the nature of time.
Such discussions are of little relevance at the present day.
The clock and the timetable, the calendar and the program—these
are the instruments by which modernity, itself a new and modern
concept, is being introduced. By now, the whole world, including the
Middle East, has so thoroughly accepted them that they are no longer
recognized as of Western origin. The transformation of life through
the introduction of the 24-hour day, and of devices to monitor and
even to plan its passing, is enormous. In addition to timetables, it has
made possible such things as schedules, agendas, programs, intervals,
recesses, and, perhaps most difficult of all to assimilate, the making
and keeping of appointments.
The last word on this may be left to a distinguished French writer
who toured the Middle East in 1947: “I have made and I still make
the most sincere efforts, during my travels in the East, to arrive late
at the appointments which they were kind enough to give me and the
time of which was always carefully discussed and finally agreed. I must
admit that these virtuous attempts remain unsuccessful.
Wise and experienced men . . . sometimes said to me: ‘Here the
sky is too blue, the sun too hot. Why hurry? Why do injury to the
WHAT WENT WRONG?
132
sweetness of living? Here, everybody is late. The only thing is to join
them. He who arrives at the appointed hour risks wasting his time,
and that, after all, is not funny. Therefore, not too much precision.
Strict exactitude has minor advantages, but is very inconvenient. It
lacks suppleness, it lacks fantasy, it lacks cheerfulness, even dignity.’”11
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133
In about 1830, a young British naval officer called Adolphus Slade
was dining with friends on the shore of the Bosphorus and was rather
surprised to hear the strains of a military band playing Rossini, coming
from the direction of the Topkap¹ Palace. His interest aroused,
he undertook some enquiries and made an interesting discovery: The
band was formed, trained, and conducted by, as he said in the language
of the time, a Sardinian.1
This alien presence in the palace was not as startling as might at
first appear. The sultan at the time, Mahmud II, was engaged in a
large-scale reform of the Ottoman armed forces, a necessity in order
to survive in the modern world. The army was being reorganized,
reequipped, more particularly rearmed. But that was not all. In addition
to their new weaponry, the sultan provided his new-style army
with Western-type uniforms and even with a brass band. Music, including
military music, was of course old established, and Islamic civilization
has a rich musical tradition of its own. Military bands are
attested in the high Middle Ages, and figure prominently in the armies
of the Ottoman Empire, both on parade and in battle. They consisted
of drums and trumpets, sometimes in large numbers. By the
eighteenth century the Turkish military music had become known in
Europe, and even inspired some notable European imitations. But
along with his new weapons and his new uniforms, Sultan Mahmud
felt it appropriate to introduce new music. In all his reforms, he sought
help from abroad—from the Prussians for the army, from the British
for the navy, from the French for the bureaucracy. In the same spirit,
7
Aspects of Cultural Change
WHAT WENT WRONG?
134
Figure 7-1
A Naval Battalion and Band. From the Library of Congress,
Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums.
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
135
he asked the Sardinian embassy in Istanbul to provide a bandmaster,
to train and conduct—or should one say command?—his brass band.
In due course a bandmaster arrived. His name was Donizetti—
Giuseppe Donizetti, the brother of the more famous Gaetano Donizetti,
the composer. Signor Donizetti set to work and formed what
was officially designated as the Musiki-i Humayun-i Osmani, the Imperial
Ottoman Music—a military band in the Western style, playing
Western instruments and of course Western music.2
This was different from all the other reforms, or at least from most
of the other reforms. The primary purpose of the modernization was
military. Defeat had made it clear even to the most conservatively
reluctant that something was wrong and needed to be put right, and
the sultan and his advisors set to work to create a new army. This
meant, of course, a new officer corps, with new training and new weapons,
and the infrastructure that was needed to support, train, equip
and move this army.
All these were military choices, inevitably leading to political, economic,
and social choices. They did not in themselves require cultural
change. One could perhaps describe the introduction of
Western-style uniforms as a cultural choice. The sultan had to reequip
and reorganize his army, but he didn’t have to dress them in
slacks and tunics and Sam Browne belts. But this had, one might argue,
a military, perhaps a disciplinary, usefulness. A band playing
Rossini, in contrast, is an unequivocally cultural choice; it is also the
point where we can unhesitatingly speak of Westernization rather
than modernization—two terms the content and meaning of which
have been the subject of much argument.
Cultural change is Westernization; part of modernization, no doubt,
but not, according to a widely held view, an essential part of it. It was
possible, according to this view, to modernize without Westernizing;
it was possible to have a modern army without Signor Donizetti and
his brass band, to accept the weaponry and gadgetry of the West without
being infected by its pernicious and corrupting culture.
It didn’t seem to take very well—this musical Westernization. If
one looks back to earlier times, there is practically no trace of any
European cultural influence in the area of music, in spite of many
WHAT WENT WRONG?
136
centuries of contact between the Middle Eastern and Western worlds.
We have a few, mostly negative, comments from Muslim visitors to
Europe. One of the earliest comes from the tenth century: A certain
envoy from Muslim Spain, Ibr
hm ibn Ya‘qb, speaks of singing which
he heard in Schleswig. He describes it as a “quite horrible sound,
resembling the barking of dogs but more beast-like. . . . ”3
We have occasional references by other visitors, most of them diplomats
(who else would have taken the trouble to visit Europe?). Some
of them make fleeting references to European musical performances—
the Vienna Boys’ Choir, the Paris Opera, but their comments relate
to the spectacle and to the audience rather than to the actual music.4
There wasn’t then much of a past for Signor Donizetti’s brass band.
What sort of a future did it have? Donizetti remained in Turkey, and
we hear of him from time to time. He was of course given an officer’s
commission in the Ottoman forces; for a bandmaster that was necessary.
Later he was promoted to Miralay (brigadier-general), and eventually,
by a later sultan, made a pasha. Donizetti Pasha still appears
from time to time in the records and at the end of the century we hear
of him, by this time no doubt an old man, conducting an orchestra of
harem ladies, escorted by eunuchs, for the entertainment of the sultan.
He started apparently with quartets and quintets, and then with
their help developed an orchestra in the palace.5
We hear some occasional references to Western music. During
World War I, Turkey’s German and Austrian allies brought musicians
to perform, presumably for their own people there, but some
performances were also given for Turkish Muslim audiences in or
near the palace.6
Generally the reception of Western music in the Middle East has
been remarkably limited. To this very day the Middle East—with the
exception of some Westernized enclaves—remains a blank on the itinerary
of the great international virtuosos as they go on their world
tours. They go to Western and Eastern Europe, to North and South
America, and now increasingly to South Asia and the Far East. Western
art music is now listened to, performed, and composed in Japan,
in China, and in India. It remains profoundly alien in most of the
Middle East.
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
137
The visual impact is incomparably greater. Anyone who has been to
Istanbul must at one time or another have visited the Great Bazaar. In
the courtyard of the entrance to the Bazaar, there is a mosque—the
Nuruosmaniye Mosque, completed in 1755. It is an Ottoman imperial
mosque in the grand tradition—a single dome over a wide lateral extension
of space, at first sight much resembling its predecessors, the
great mosques of Sultans Mehmed, Süleyman, Selim, and the rest. But
there is one rather interesting difference, and that is the Italian Baroque
exterior decoration.
When a foreign influence appears in something as central to a culture
as an imperial foundation and a cathedral-mosque, there is clearly
some faltering of cultural self-confidence. Something is happening;
something important. If we compare the cultural changes in music
and in art, we must be struck by the fact that the second is far older,
goes on for far longer, and is in every way more successful. A prized
possession of National Gallery in London is a portrait of the Ottoman
Sultan Mehmed II, the Conqueror of Constantinople, by the
Italian artist Gentile Bellini. The painting is in London, not in
Istanbul, because Sultan Mehmed’s successor, the more pious Beyazid,
disapproved of portraits and disposed of his father’s collection. But
Mehmed the Conqueror was neither the first nor the last Muslim
ruler to indulge himself in this way. The Mamluk Sultan Q
’it Bay is
reported to have had his portrait painted by a European artist. Later
it became quite usual among Middle-Eastern monarchs to bring in
Western, mostly Italian, artists. In time we find local artists, sometimes
trained in Europe, painting portraits. Painting a portrait was
obviously a new and radical departure in the cultural traditions of a
region that has a very rich and distinctive artistic tradition of its own.
Donizetti, it would seem, was the first to try and introduce Western
music. The Italian artist who helped build the Nuruosmaniye
Mosque more than half a century earlier was not by any means the
first. He and his employers had already some experience on which to
build. Western influences can be seen at quite an early date even as
far east as Iran, where miniature art shows awareness of European
ideas and practices.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
138
Architectural influence becomes very clear both in the structure
and in the interior decoration of buildings. By the nineteenth century
it is almost universal; the older artistic and architectural traditions
were dying and being replaced by this new art from Europe.
Visual Westernization can be seen in a number of other ways. We
see it for example in practical matters: coins and postage stamps. There
had been coins in the Middle East for a very long time; now they
looked different. European usage in the form of royal portraits—an
outrage according to traditional Muslim ideas—shows the degree of
cultural penetration. Stamps were of course entirely new; the stamp
was in itself a Western innovation, but still more so the form of the
stamp—whom it portrays, what it depicts.
One of the attractions of European art, and especially of portraiture,
must have been a kind of realism and accuracy very different
from the formal, stylized art of the traditional miniature. Portraits
that were realistic likenesses had an obvious attraction; before very
long they also proved useful for monarchs and others who could afford
to pay for them and knew how to use them. The same attraction
explains the rapid acceptance and widespread use of photography,
again in spite of the Muslim ban on human images.
Clothes also show the influence of Western visual conceptions.
Clothes of course serve a double purpose; on the one hand to keep
out the cold and the damp, on the other as a recognition signal to
indicate identity. When people change the clothes that they wear and
adopt the clothes of another society, this represents a significant cultural
choice, and was both adopted and resisted as such. The clothing
reform began with the armies, almost all of which now wear uniforms
of Western pattern. Even the armies of Libya and the Islamic Republic
of Iran still wear Western-type uniforms just as they use Westerntype
weapons. Weapons are a military necessity; uniforms are, at least
in some degree, a cultural choice; one might almost say a cultural
submission.
Shoes and hats are particularly important. Shoes were seen by many
Western travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as one
of the key distinctions between Middle-Eastern and Western habits.
When somebody is being Westernized or, in Middle-Eastern terms,
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
139
is becoming Frankish in his habits, the wearing of leather shoes or
boots acquires an almost emblematic quality. The supreme emblem
is of course the headgear, which can indicate religion, allegiance, and
sometimes occupation, and crowns the wearer even in death, as the
carved headstones in an old-style cemetery attest.
In many ways the most important vehicle of cultural influence is of
course the word—language and more particularly translation. The
three major cultural groups in the Middle East, the users of Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish, had a vast and rich literature at their disposal in
all three languages. The rise of Western power was followed at first
very tentatively and in a very exploratory way, by the beginnings of
translation of Western books.
It is interesting and instructive to compare the modern translation
movement of European books, which we may date from its small beginnings
in the sixteenth century, with its medieval precursor, the
great movement of translation from Greek, and to a lesser extent from
Persian, into classical Arabic in the Middle Ages. In the medieval
movement, the criterion of choice was usefulness; they translated what
was useful, that is to say primarily medicine, astronomy, chemistry,
physics, mathematics, and also philosophy, which at that time was
considered useful.
And that’s all. They did not translate literature of any kind. In the
vast bibliography of works translated in the Middle Ages from Greek
into Arabic, we find no poets, no dramatists, not even historians. These
were not useful and they were of no interest; they did not figure in
the translation programs. This was clearly a cultural rejection: you
take what is useful from the infidel; but you don’t need to look at his
absurd ideas or to try and understand his inferior literature, or to
study his meaningless history.
A comparison with the Ottoman translation movement shows some
resemblances, some differences. As before, the major criterion was
usefulness. But their definition of what is useful was more strictly
practical than was that of their medieval predecessors. We find no
philosophy among the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century
translations; philosophy was no longer regarded as useful. Everything
that was worth having had already been translated, from the
WHAT WENT WRONG?
140
writings of Plato and Aristotle; the subsequent thoughts of infidels
could not possibly have any value. The Ottomans translated some
works on geography, which was of obvious practical importance to
them; a certain amount of military literature, especially useful when
one is modernizing one’s army along Western lines; and one thing
that was new and did not figure among the medieval translations, and
that is history. For the Ottomans, philosophy was not useful, but history
was. In this they show a marked difference from some modern
trends in our own society.
Medieval Islam was an intensely historical-minded society, and produced
a vast, rich, and varied historical literature. But medieval Muslims
were not interested in non-Muslim history, nor in pre-Muslim
history apart from some limited attention to the historical references
in the Qur’
n. Until the Mongol conquests, they have virtually nothing
to say about their neighbors in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and very
little even about their own pagan ancestors. The inclusion of the Islamic
lands in the vast Mongol Empire brought some awareness of
other civilizations, but it was of limited effect and duration. The Ottoman
Turks did show some mild interest in the history of their neighbors.
We find for example a history of France from the mythical
Faramond to the year 1572, translated into Turkish.7 It could be useful
to know something about the history of France. But the subject, it
seems, was not very highly regarded. This translation survives in a
single manuscript preserved in Leipzig; obviously it was not a runaway
success in Ottoman reading circles. But it was one of a number,
and later we find other books being translated, dealing with the history
and also the geography of European countries. These become
more numerous and more important as time goes on. The first Turkish
printing press, which flourished in Istanbul in the first half of the
eighteenth century, printed in all 17 books, of which a fair number
were books on history.
The nineteenth century brought a considerable development in the
movement of translation from Western languages into Turkish in
Turkey and Egypt, then into Arabic in Egypt and Syria, finally into
Persian in Persia and India. Egypt of course is an Arabic-speaking
country, but its first modernizing ruler, Muh
°
ammad ‘Al Pasha (ruled
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
141
1805–1848), was an Ottoman of Albanian origin, and he and his top
military and other officials were all Turkish-speaking. The printing
press that he set up in Bulaq published the first important series of
printed translations of European books into both Turkish and Arabic.
Between 1822 and 1842, 243 books were printed in Cairo, the
great majority translations, more than half of them into Turkish.
Works on military and naval subjects, including both pure and applied
mathematics, were translated into Turkish; works on medicine,
veterinary science, and agriculture were mostly translated into Arabic—
an interesting indication of the division of functions between
the Turkish-speaking Ottoman elite from outside and the Arabicspeaking
natives of Egypt. Significantly, the few historical books translated
and printed at the Cairo press in this early period are all in
Turkish. History, it seems, was seen either as useful, or elitist, or
both. Of four historical books printed between 1829 and 1834, one is
on Catherine the Great of Russia, the other three on Napoleon and
his time. The publication of historical translations was not resumed
in Cairo until 1841, when a translation—this time in Arabic—appeared,
of Voltaire’s history of Charles XII of Sweden. This concentration
on biography is the more remarkable if one contrasts it with
the almost complete lack of book-length royal biography in the very
rich historiographic literature in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. A translation
of Machiavelli’s The Prince into Arabic was made in 1825. According
to a note on the manuscript, it was translated by a Christian
priest by order of the Pasha.8 For reasons at which one can only guess,
it was not printed.
There is one important exception to the general lack of interest in
belles lettres or literature of any kind; the theater. The theater had of
course flourished in the Middle East in antiquity, but it disappeared
after the Islamic expansion. Greek theater was associated with pagan
rites and rituals, and had no place in an Islamic society.
After a long absence, the theater reappeared with the arrival of the
Spanish Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They had had
some experience of the theater in Spain, and they staged performances
which their new Turkish compatriots, more particularly their Turkish
rulers, found interesting. The beginnings of the return of theater,
WHAT WENT WRONG?
142
of theatrical performances in this part of the world, can be dated precisely
from the their coming, and they soon found disciples and imitators,
gypsies for example, who were better able to perform in Turkish
than they were. Later, Greeks and more especially Armenians became
involved in the theater. Eventually there was a development of
a Turkish equivalent of the Italian commedia dell’arte—the Orta oyunu,
a kind of impromptu play—which became extremely popular all over
Turkey. One of the themes was a version of Othello, a subject which
had obvious resonance and immediate comprehensibility.
The theater spread further east from Turkey toward Persia, where
the famous Shi‘ite passion theater first appears at the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth century. There is a common,
but probably erroneous impression that the ta‘ziye, the passion play
on the martyrdom of Hussein, goes back to the roots of Shi‘ism. If it
does, those roots are well concealed. We do not hear of these performances
until the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and it seems not unreasonable to connect it to the
revival of the theater by refugees from Europe and their various local
imitators.
A major innovation in the technology of culture, particularly the
technology of communication in words, was the introduction of printing.
9 Printing had been known in Turkey since the fifteenth century.
Gutenberg’s work in Europe was duly recorded in the Turkish annals,
and presses were introduced to the Ottoman realms at an early
date, with the authorization of the sultan, but only by minority communities.
The first were the Jews, followed later by the Greeks and
Armenians. They were allowed to print in their own languages and
scripts but were strictly forbidden to print in the Arabic script. The
argument put forward at the time was that this, being the script in
which the Qur’
n was written, was sacred, and therefore printing it
would be a kind of desecration. Another possible factor was the vested
interest of the guild of calligraphers.
Ibrahim Müteferrika, helped by the son of a former Ottoman ambassador
to France, was able to persuade the authorities to permit the
establishment of a press for the printing of books in Turkish and Arabic,
in Arabic characters. Between 1729 when it was established, and
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
143
1742, when it was closed, this first Turkish printing press issued 17
books, most of them dealing with history, geography, and language.
After several abortive attempts by Ibrahim’s staff to restart the press,
two secretaries of the Sublime Porte bought it from Ibrahim
Müteferrika’s heirs and, with a ferman from the sultan, resumed printing
in 1784. Significantly, they began production with a succession of
Ottoman histories. These were followed by a work on grammar, and
by three books on military topics. In 1796, with the death of its new
owner, the press again closed down. Meanwhile printing had been resumed
in 1795 in a state-sponsored printing press at the School of
Engineering and Artillery. Thereafter, many printing presses were established
in the Ottoman lands, printing in both Turkish and Arabic.
The development of Persian printing vividly illustrates the diverse
influences shaping the cultural history of Iran. Woodblock printing
was introduced into Iran as early as the thirteenth century by the
Mongol rulers who used it, Chinese-style, to print paper money.
Despite the threat of capital punishment for refusing to accept it, the
mass of the population would have nothing to do with the paper
money, and the attempt was abandoned. The first book printed in the
Persian language was probably a Judaeo-Persian Pentateuch, in Hebrew
characters, printed in Istanbul in 1594 and presumably intended
for use by Persian-speaking Jews. The earliest printing presses actually
in Iran were due to Christians—first Carmelite friars who brought
a printing press with Arabic type from Rome, and later Armenians,
who set up a press in Julfa, an Armenian suburb of Isfahan. Both of
these were of short duration, and for the rest of the seventeenth, eighteenth
and early-nineteenth centuries, such printed Persian books as
existed were imported both from Europe, where books in the Persian
language and script were printed in Leiden from 1639 onward, and
from British-controlled India. The conventional date for the first book
printed in Iran is 1817. As in Turkey, there was some resistance to
this infidel device, but in the course of the nineteenth and still more
the twentieth century the printing press became very much a part of
life. An interesting comment on this process was made by Kemal
Atatürk in his speech at the opening of the new law school in Ankara
on November 5, 1925:
WHAT WENT WRONG?
144
Think of the Turkish victory of 1453, the conquest of
Constantinople, and its place in the course of world history. That
same might and power which, in defiance of a whole world, made
Istanbul forever the property of the Turkish people, was too weak
to overcome the ill-omened resistance of the men of law and to
receive in Turkey the printing press, which had been invented at
about the same time. Three centuries of observation and hesitation
were needed, of effort and energy expended for and against,
before antiquated laws and their exponents would permit the entry
of printing into our country.10
The role of Jews and Christians in the introduction and establishment
of printing illustrates the growing importance of another category
of intermediaries, the non-Muslim minorities in the Muslim
states. In the Ottoman Empire this meant principally, in order of
their emergence in this role, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians; in Iran,
mostly Armenians.
With printing came cheap and accessible books and, in due course,
newspapers, the most important agent of cultural influence until the
introduction, in the present century, of radio, television, fax, the
Internet, E-mail, and all the modern electronic apparatus, the full
effects of which are yet to be seen.
All these are channels of verbal communication and verbal influence;
the principal instrument of verbal communication is of course
language. We see interesting changes, first in Turkish, then in other
languages. The most obvious, the most easily recognizable indicators
of cultural change are the loanwords borrowed from Europe along
with the notions and objects that they designate. Thus for example
the Turkish words for parliament and senate are parlamento and senato,
both obviously Italian. It is significant that while the Turkish word
for senate is senato, the Turkish word for senator is senatör. They heard
about senates, in Venice and elsewhere, long before they encountered
a senator, and by then French had replaced Italian as the most
widely used European language in the Middle East. Similarly, the
Arabic term for parliament is barlama-n, clearly from the French
parlement.
One could add a number of other cultural terms. Some are
loanwords, recognizable from the language of origin; others are calque,
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
145
loan translation, that is to say using an original indigenous word but
giving that word a new meaning in imitation of another language. An
obvious instance is the word for electricity—not a cultural term, but
it will serve as an example. Our word electricity comes from the Greek
word for amber, e-lektron; the Arabic word for electricity, kahraba-’,
comes from the Arabic word for amber, simply following the same
pattern of semantic evolution as the Western term.
Less obvious but more relevant are the loan translations of such words
as “freedom,” “country,” “nation,” “government,” and “revolution.”
In most of the languages of Islam, this last has shed its former negative
connotation of sedition, upheaval, disturbance, and has become
the most acceptable title to legitimacy.
For a long time, works of literature were almost entirely missing
from the translation programs from European into Middle-Eastern
languages, but this began to change at the turn of the eighteenth/
nineteenth centuries. By that time, readers of virtually any European
language had access, through translations, to a considerable body of
Arabic and Persian and, to a lesser extent, Turkish literature; to works
of history, poetry, belles lettres, and many other things. In contrast,
literally nothing of European literature was available in Arabic, Persian,
or Turkish: not Shakespeare, not Dante, nor any other European
writer apart, as noted, from some historical works—and even
those were few and limited. History primarily meant political and
military history, much of it in the form of biography. There was no
great interest in that, and none in anything else. Middle-Eastern readers
knew for example nothing of the Renaissance and precious little
even of the Reformation, despite its obvious relevance to the conduct
of Ottoman foreign policy. A seventeenth-century Ottoman Muslim
scholar, who wrote a treatise explaining Christianity to his Ottoman
Muslim readers, knew far more about the Christological controversies
of the early Byzantine church than he did about the Reformation
or even about the schism between Constantinople and Rome. These
were of no interest to scholars and readers, though the later divisions
within Christendom were known and sometimes used by those responsible
for Ottoman dealings with European states.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
146
The first literary translation, or rather adaptation, was based on a
work by a French orientalist called Pétis de la Croix. His book, Les
mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days), first published in 1710–
1712, is a collection of pseudo-oriental tales, a pastiche of The Thousand
and One Nights. This is a European book, but it was obviously
more accessible to Middle-Eastern readers than others. A Turkish
version was made in the late eighteenth century by a certain Ali Aziz
(d. 1798), an Ottoman official who had served in more than one European
capital and had acquired a knowledge of French. Ali Aziz’s
version is very free and includes some new stories situated in eighteenth-
century Istanbul.
After that there is nothing for a while, and then we find the first
translations. An early favorite was Robinson Crusoe, translated in 1812
and printed in Malta in 1835. Again, the attraction was the book’s
relative familiarity. Robinson Crusoe was influenced by an Arabic model,
H°
ayy ibn Yaqz
°
a-n, by the medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl. An
English translation by Simon Ockley was published in London in
1708, only a few years before the first publication of Robinson Crusoe.
A second Arabic translation, by But
°
rus al-Bust
n, was published in
the late 1850s. In 1864, a Turkish version of Robinson Crusoe appeared,
translated from the Arabic. Another work that seems to have had special
appeal was Télémaque (1699) by the French author Fénélon, in
the familiar form of a guide for the education of a young prince. An
Arabic translation by a Christian from Aleppo was prepared in Istanbul
in 1812, and is preserved in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
It was never printed. A Turkish translation was published in 1862,
followed by Arabic and Persian.
In the course of the nineteenth century, there was a gradual increase
in translations. Naturally, books with an Arab or Islamic theme were
more acceptable. Chateaubriand’s The Adventures of the Last of the
Abencérages was translated or adapted in Arabic at least five times, the
earliest in 1864. Historical novels seem to have been popular; in particular
Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas found both translators
and imitators. The Talisman has a Middle-Eastern setting and paints an
admiring picture of Saladin; The Count of Monte Cristo brings an Arabian
Nights flavor to a Western tale of treasure, love, and vengeance.
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
147
A translation requires a translator, and a translator has to know
both languages, the language from which he is translating and the
language into which he is translating. Such knowledge, strange as it
may seem, was extremely rare in the Middle East until comparatively
late. There were very few Muslims who knew any Christian language;
it was considered unnecessary, even to some extent demeaning. For
interpreters, when needed for commerce, diplomacy, or war, they
relied first on refugees and renegades from Europe and then, when
the supply of these dried up, on Levantines. Both groups lacked either
the interest or the capacity to do literary translations into Middle-
Eastern languages. It was not until Middle-Easterners, first Christians,
then others, attended Western schools in the region and studied in
Western universities that we find people with both the desire and the
ability to translate books from English or French or, much later, other
languages, into Arabic or Persian or Turkish.
Of the three forms of cultural influence, the visual, the musical,
and the literary, the third is by now the most thoroughly assimilated.
The European forms of literature—the novel, the short story, the
play, and the rest—are now completely adopted and absorbed. Great
numbers of original writings of this type are being produced in all
these countries and, more than that, have become the normal forms
of literary self-expression. Even the very texture of language has been
affected, and some modern writing in Middle-Eastern languages, especially
in newspapers, reads like a literal translation from English or
French.
One might also refer to cultural influence in pastimes. Board games,
notably backgammon and chess, are of course very old in this part of
the world, and probably came to the West either from or via the
Middle East. Cards would be a Western contribution, but they are
just another vice, not a significant cultural change. A really significant
cultural change may be seen in the arena of sport. Sport was not
unknown of course; there were large-scale enterprises like hunting,
and individual competitions like wrestling. There appears to have been
only one team sport: polo, and that was rare and aristocratic. The
practice of team sports like football and basketball and the rest is
purely Western, mostly English in origin. It was the English who
WHAT WENT WRONG?
148
invented football and its analogue—parliamentary politics. There are
remarkable resemblances between the two and both obviously come
from the same national genius. The adoption of competitive team
games has so far been more successful in the Middle East than the
adoption of parliamentary government.
Dining—as distinct from merely eating—is another Western “cultural”
influence. We have fascinating descriptions of dinner parties
at various stages in the process of acculturation; dining and partying
and of course the very shocking business of gentlemen and ladies dining
together, even dancing together. This brings expressions of shock
and outrage from many nineteenth century and early twentieth century
travelers from East to West.
During the centuries of Western impact on the Middle East, Western
verbal culture was completely accepted and internalized. One
would have thought that the verbal culture would be the most difficult
since it requires either knowledge of a language or the mediation
of a translator. Yet for some reason, it has been the most successful
and the most accepted.
The nonverbal cultural influences show a contrast between the visual,
including physical, which have been on the whole successful;
and the musical, which has been remarkably unsuccessful, and indeed
to this day Western musical influence is minimal in this region. It
seems that science and music remain the last citadels of Western civilization
that some non-Westerners have managed to penetrate but
others, particularly in the Middle East, have not.
Many regions have undergone the impact of the West, and suffered
a similar loss of economic self-sufficiency, of cultural authenticity, and
in some parts also of political independence. But some time has passed
since Western domination ended in all these regions, including the
Middle East. In some of them, notably in East and South Asia, the
resurgent peoples of the region have begun to meet and beat the West
on its own terms—in commerce and industry, in the projection of political
and even military power, and, in many ways most remarkable of
all, in the acceptance and internalization of Western achievement, notably
in science. The Middle East still lags behind.
ASPECTS OF CULTURAL CHANGE
149
We find an even more dramatic contrast in the arts—not just between
the Middle East and other regions, but even between different
arts within the Middle East. The impact of European painting and
architecture (though not of course sculpture, which is excluded for
religious reasons) goes back a long way. In the course of the eighteenth
century, and even more in the nineteenth century, European
visual culture, architecture, and interior decoration, even painting,
became not only accepted but even dominant. In the late nineteenth
and still more in the twentieth century even sculpture was sometimes
used for the glorification of rulers.11 The more traditional forms have
virtually disappeared, except for an occasional rather self-conscious
burst of neoclassicism.12
European literary influence, facing the barrier of language and the
interposition of translators, took somewhat longer to penetrate. Yet
by now Western literary forms and fashions are thoroughly assimilated.
Such distinctively European vehicles as the novel and the play
have become normal forms of literary self-expression in all the literary
languages of the Middle East.
The ready acceptance of the visual and verbal arts makes the rejection
of music the more remarkable. It was not for lack of trying. Sultan
Mahmud II was not alone in his experiment with a brass band.
Other rulers saw the relevance of Western music to Western drill,
and hence to Western warfare. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini, who in
general fiercely denounced the sinfulness and corruption of all kinds
of music and of Western music in particular, was willing to make an
exception for marches and anthems.
In Turkey, where Westernization as distinct from modernization
has made most progress, Western music has won the widest acceptance
and there are Turkish soloists, orchestras, and even composers
in the Western style. But these address only a minority of the population,
and elsewhere in the Middle East—except Israel—Western
music, that is of course Western art music, falls on deaf ears. Latterly
there has been some interest in pop music and rock music. It is too
early to say what this may portend.
The contrast between visual and verbal acceptance and musical rejection
is paralleled in other areas, as for example in the widespread
WHAT WENT WRONG?
150
cult, without the exercise, of freedom, and the almost universal holdings
of elections, without choice.
It may help to understand these matters if we view them in a broader
historical perspective. In such a perspective, cultural innovation is
not and never has been the monopoly of any one region or people;
the same is true of resistance to it. There has been much borrowing
both ways, and disciples have not always been faithful to their models.
Medieval Europe took its religion from the Middle East, as the
modern Middle East took its politics from Europe. And just as some
Europeans managed to create a Christianity without compassion, so
did some Middle Easterners create a democracy without freedom.
In every era of human history, modernity, or some equivalent term
has meant the ways, norms, and standards of the dominant and expanding
civilization. Every dominant civilization has imposed its own
modernity in its prime. The Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman Empire,
the medieval Christendoms, and Islam, as well as the ancient
civilizations of India and China, all imposed their norms over a wide
area and radiated their influence over a much broader one, far beyond
their imperial frontiers. Islam was the first to make significant
progress toward what it perceived as its universal mission, but modern
Western civilization is the first to embrace the whole planet.
Today, for the time being, as Atatürk recognized and as Indian computer
scientists and Japanese high-tech companies appreciate, the
dominant civilization is Western, and Western standards therefore
define modernity.
There have been other dominant civilizations in the past; there will
no doubt be others in the future. Western civilization incorporates
many previous modernities—that is to say, it is enriched by the contributions
and influences of other cultures that preceded it in leadership.
It will itself bequeath a Western cultural legacy to other cultures
yet to come.
CONCLUSION
151
In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in
the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had
indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival,
Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant.
In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy
and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to
see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and—more
painfully—even his private life.
Modernizers—by reform or revolution—concentrated their efforts
in three main areas: military, economic, and political. The results
achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest for victory by
updated armies brought a series of humiliating defeats. The quest for
prosperity through development brought, in some countries, impoverished
and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid, in others
an unhealthy dependence on a single resource—fossil fuels. And
even these were discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity
and industry, and doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted or
superseded—probably superseded, as the international community
grows weary of a fuel that pollutes the land, the sea, and the air wherever
it is used or transported, and puts the world economy at the mercy
of a clique of capricious autocrats. Worst of all is the political result:
The long quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging
from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only
in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.
Many remedies have been tried—weapons and factories, schools
and parliaments—but none achieved the desired result. Here and there
Conclusion
WHAT WENT WRONG?
152
they brought some alleviation, and even—to limited elements of the
population—some benefit. But they failed to remedy or even to halt
the deteriorating imbalance between Islam and the Western world.
There was worse to come. It was bad enough for Muslims to feel
weak and poor after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose the
leadership that they had come to regard as their right, and to be reduced
to the role of followers of the West. The twentieth century,
particularly the second half, brought further humiliations—the awareness
that they were no longer even the first among the followers, but
were falling ever further back in the lengthening line of eager and
more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The rise of Japan
had been an encouragement, but also a reproach. The later rise of the
other new Asian economic powers brought only reproach. The proud
heirs of ancient civilizations had got used to hiring Western firms to
carry out tasks that their own contractors and technicians were apparently
not capable of doing. Now they found themselves inviting
contractors and technicians from Korea—only recently emerged from
Japanese colonial rule—to perform these same tasks. Following is bad
enough; limping in the rear is far worse. By all the standards that
matter in the modern world—economic development and job creation,
literacy and educational and scientific achievement, political
freedom and respect for human rights—what was once a mighty civilization
has indeed fallen low.
“Who did this to us?” is of course a common human response when
things are going badly, and there have been indeed many in the Middle
East, past and present, who have asked this question. They found
several different answers. It is usually easier and always more satisfying
to blame others for one’s misfortunes. For a long time, the
Mongols were the favorite villains, and the Mongol invasions of the
thirteenth century were blamed for the destruction of both Muslim
power and Islamic civilization, and for what was seen as the ensuing
weakness and stagnation. But after a while historians, Muslims and
others, pointed to two flaws in this argument. The first was that some
of the greatest cultural achievements of the Muslim peoples, notably
in Iran, came after, not before, the Mongol invasions. The second,
more difficult to accept but nevertheless undeniable, was that the
CONCLUSION
153
Mongols overthrew an empire that was already fatally weakened—
indeed, it is difficult to see how the once mighty empire of the caliphs
would otherwise have succumbed to a horde of nomadic horsemen
riding across the steppes from East Asia.
The rise of nationalism—itself an import from Europe—produced
new perceptions. Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on the
Turks who had ruled them for many centuries.1 Turks could blame
the stagnation of their civilization on the dead weight of the Arab
past in which the creative energies of the Turkish people were caught
and immobilized. Persians could blame the loss of their ancient glories
on Arabs, Turks, and Mongols impartially.
The period of French and British paramountcy in much of the Arab
world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a new and
more plausible scapegoat—Western imperialism. In the Middle East,
there have been good reasons for such blame. Western political domination,
economic penetration, and—longest, deepest, and most insidious
of all—cultural influence, had changed the face of the region
and transformed the lives of its people, turning them in new directions,
arousing new hopes and fears, creating new dangers and new
expectations equally without precedent in their own cultural past.
But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief and ended
half a century ago; the change for the worse began long before their
arrival and continued unabated after their departure. Inevitably, their
role as villains was taken over by the United States, along with other
aspects of the leadership of the West. The attempt to transfer the guilt
to America has won considerable support, but for similar reasons remains
unconvincing. Anglo-French rule and American influence, like
the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner
weakness of Middle-Eastern states and societies. Some observers, both
inside and outside the region, have pointed to the differences in the
postimperial development of former British possessions—for example,
between Aden in the Middle East and such places as Singapore and
Hong Kong; or between the various lands that once made up the British
Empire in India.
Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism, and
blaming “the Jews” for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic
WHAT WENT WRONG?
154
societies experienced the normal constraints and occasional hazards of
minority status. In most significant respects, they were better off under
Muslim than under Christian rule, until the rise and spread of Western
tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
With rare exceptions, where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed
in the Islamic tradition, they tended to be contemptuous and dismissive
rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of
1948—the failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent half a million
Jews from establishing a state in the debris of the British Mandate
for Palestine—all the more of a shock. As some writers at the
time observed, it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial
powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible
gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism
and its demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided
a soothing answer.
The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East
occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced
back to European originals. They had limited impact, and at the time
for example of the Dreyfus trial in France, when a Jewish officer was
unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments
usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors.
But the poison continued to spread, and from 1933 Nazi
Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on the whole
remarkably successful effort to promote and disseminate European
style anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine
greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-Semitic interpretation of
history, and led some to blame all evil in the Middle East and indeed
in the world on secret Jewish plots. This interpretation has pervaded
much of the public discourse in the region, including education, the
media, and even entertainment.
Another view of the Jewish component, based in reality rather than
fantasy, may be more instructive. The modern Israeli state and society
were built by Jews who came from Christendom and Islam; that
is, on the one hand from Europe and the Americas, on the other from
the Middle East and North Africa. Judaism, or more broadly
Jewishness, is a religion in the fullest sense—a system of belief and
CONCLUSION
155
worship, a morality and a way of life, a complex of social and cultural
values and habits. But until comparatively recent times Jews had no
political role, and even in recent times that role is limited to a few
countries. There is therefore no specifically Jewish political and societal
culture or tradition. Ancient memories are too remote, recent
experience too brief, to provide them. Between the destruction of the
ancient Jewish kingdom and the creation of the modern Jewish republic,
Jews were a part—one might say a subculture—of the larger
societies in which they live, and even their communal organizations
and usages inevitably reflected the structures and usages of those societies.
For the last 14 centuries, the overwhelming majority of Jews
lived in either the Christian or Islamic world, and were in many respects
a component in both civilizations. Inevitably, the Jews who
created Israel brought with them many of the political and societal
standards and values, the habits and attitudes of the countries from
which they came: on the one hand, what we have become accustomed
to call the Judaeo-Christian tradition, on the other, what we may with
equal justification call the Judaeo-Islamic tradition.
In present-day Israel these two traditions meet and, with increasing
frequency, collide. Their collisions are variously expressed, in
communal, religious, ethnic, even party-political terms. But in many
of their encounters what we see is a clash between Christendom and
Islam, oddly represented by their former Jewish minorities, who reflect,
as it were in miniature, both the strengths and the weaknesses
of the two civilizations of which they had been part. The conflict,
coexistence, or combination of these two traditions within a single
small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance,
should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an
existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded,
outnumbered and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right
to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
An argument sometimes adduced is that the cause of the changed
relationship between East and West is not a Middle-Eastern decline
but a Western upsurge—the Discoveries, the scientific movement,
the technological, industrial, and political revolutions that transformed
the West and vastly increased its wealth and power. But these comWHAT
WENT WRONG?
156
parisons do not answer the questions; they merely restate it—Why
did the discoverers of America sail from Spain and not a Muslim Atlantic
port, where such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier
times?2 Why did the great scientific breakthrough occur in Europe
and not, as one might reasonably have expected, in the richer, more
advanced, and in most respects more enlightened realm of Islam?
A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside,
rather than outside the society. One such target is religion, for
some specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous,
and rarely attempted. Nor is it very plausible. For most of the
Middle Ages, it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the
newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization
and progress, but the world of Islam in the middle. It was there that
old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences created;
there that new industries were born and manufactures and commerce
expanded to a level previously without precedent. It was there, too,
that governments and societies achieved a degree of freedom of
thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident
Christians to flee for refuge from Christendom to Islam. The medieval
Islamic world offered only limited freedom in comparison with
modern ideals and even with modern practice in the more advanced
democracies, but it offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors,
its contemporaries and most of its successors.
The point has often been made—if Islam is an obstacle to freedom,
to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society
in the past was a pioneer in all three, and this when Muslims were
much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than
they are now? Some have indeed posed the question in a different
form—not “What has Islam done to the Muslims?” but “What have
the Muslims done to Islam?,” and have answered by laying the blame
on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.
For those nowadays known as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures
and shortcomings of the modern Islamic lands afflicted them
because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell away from
authentic Islam, and thus lost their former greatness. Those known
as modernists or reformers take the opposite view, and see the cause
CONCLUSION
157
of this loss not in the abandonment but in the retention of old ways,
and especially in the inflexibility and ubiquity of the Islamic clergy.
These, they say, are responsible for the persistence of beliefs and practices
that might have been creative and progressive a thousand years
ago, but are neither today. Their usual tactic is not to denounce religion
as such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism
against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism, and more particularly to fanatical
religious authorities, that they attribute the stifling of the once
great Islamic scientific movement, and, more generally, of freedom
of thought and expression.3
A more usual approach to this theme is to discuss not religion in
general, but a specific problem: the place of religion and of its professional
exponents in the political order. For these, a principal cause of
Western progress is the separation of church and state and the creation
of a civil society governed by secular laws. For others, the main
culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior
position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents
and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years
of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden
mothers. The products of such an education, it was said, are likely to
grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society.
However one evaluates their views, the success or failure of secularists
and feminists will be a major factor in shaping the Middle-Eastern
future.
Some have sought the causes of this painful asymmetry in a variety
of factors—the exhaustion of precious metals, coinciding with the
discovery and exploitation by Europe of the resources of the new
world; inbreeding, due to the prevalence of cousin marriage, especially
in the countryside; the depredations of the goat that, by stripping
the bark off trees and tearing up grass by the roots, turned once
fertile lands into deserts. Others point to the disuse of wheeled vehicles
in the pre-modern Middle East, variously explained as a cause
or as a symptom of what went wrong.4 Familiar in antiquity, they
became rare in the medieval centuries, and remained so until they
were reintroduced under European influence or rule. Western travWHAT
WENT WRONG?
158
elers in the Middle East note their absence; Middle-Eastern travelers
in the West note their presence.
In a sense, this was a symptom of a bigger problem. A cart is large
and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy
to requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted
the powers of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets
were a poor investment.5 The same fear of predatory authority—or
neighbors—may be seen in the structure of traditional houses and
quarters: the high, windowless walls, the almost hidden entrances in
narrow alleyways, the careful avoidance of any visible sign of wealth.
This much is clear—the advent of paved roads and wheeled vehicles
in modern times brought no alleviation of the larger problems.
Some of the solutions that once commanded passionate support
have been discarded. The two dominant movements in the twentieth
century were socialism and nationalism. Both have been discredited,
the first by its failure, the second by its success and consequent exposure
as ineffective. Freedom, interpreted to mean independence, was
seen as the great talisman that would bring all other benefits. The
overwhelming majority of Muslims now live in independent states,
which have brought no solutions to their problems. The bastard offspring
of both ideologies, national socialism, still survives in a few
states that have preserved the Nazi Fascist style of dictatorial government
and indoctrination, the one through a vast and ubiquitous security
apparatus, the other through a single all-powerful party. These
regimes too have failed every test except survival, and have brought
none of the promised benefits. If anything, their infrastructures are
even more antiquated than the others, their armed forces designed
primarily for terror and repression.
At the present day two answers to this question command widespread
support in the region, each with its own diagnosis of what is
wrong, and the corresponding prescription for its cure. The one, attributing
all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam,
advocates a return to a real or imagined past. That is the way of the
Iranian Revolution and of the so-called fundamentalist movements
and regimes in other Muslim countries. The other way is that of secular
CONCLUSION
159
democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic founded by Kemal
Atatürk.
Meanwhile the blame game—the Turks, the Mongols, the imperialists,
the Jews, the Americans—continues, and shows little sign of
abating. For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that
rule much of the Middle East, this game serves a useful, indeed an
essential purpose—to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate
and to justify the tyranny that they have intensified. In this
way they seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects
against other, outer targets.
But for growing numbers of Middle Easterners it is giving way to a
more self-critical approach. The question “Who did this to us?” has
led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—“
What did we do wrong?”—has led naturally to a second question:
“How do we put it right?” In that question, and in the various
answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the future.
If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path,
the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region,
and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later
in yet another alien domination; perhaps from a new Europe reverting
to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some
new, expanding superpower in the East. If they can abandon grievance
and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents,
energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, then they
can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in
antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For
the time being, the choice is their own.

CONCLUSION
161
Afterword
The core of this book was a series of three public lectures given at the
Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna in September
1999 and published by them, in German translation, under the
title Kultur and Modernisierung im Nahen Osten, in 2001. The Vienna
lectures, extensively recast and re-written, constitute the basis of
Chapters 1–3. Later chapters include passages from other previous
publications: an article published in the Revue de Métaphysique, 1995,
and three contributions—the first to the International Congress of
Historical Sciences, Madrid (1992), the second and third to colloquia
held in Strasbourg (1980) and Castel Gandolfo (1998). All three were
published in the proceedings of these meetings. My thanks are due to
the organizers of these various events for giving me the opportunity
to formulate my views and put them before an informed audience. I
would also like to express my thanks to my editor, Ms. Susan Ferber,
for many constructive suggestions; to Mr. Eli Alshech, a graduate
student at Princeton, for help of various kinds in the processes of
research and exposition, and, once again, to my assistant Ms. Annamarie
Cerminaro, for the care and skill with which she tended my
manuscript from the first drafts to the final published version.
Bernard Lewis,
2001

163
INTRODUCTION
1. See Abdulhak Adnan, La Science chez les Turcs ottomans (Paris: 1939),
pp. 87, 98–9.
2. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at
Constantinople 1554–1562, translated from the Latin by Edward Seymour
Forster (Oxford: 1927), p. 112.
3. The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. J. Craigie, vol. i (Edinburgh: 1955),
pp. 197 ff.
4. Cited in Michel Lesure, Lépante: la crise de l’empire ottoman (Paris: 1972),
p. 180.
5. Ibrahim Peçevi, Tarih [History], vol. 1, Istanbul 1281/1864, pp. 498–
9. See Andrew C. Hess, “The Battle of Lepanto,” Past and Present, vol. 57
(November 1972): 53–73.
6. This word occurs in Hungarian and several Slavic languages, and apparently
derived from Charlemagne in the same way that “Czar” and “Kaiser”
derive from Caesar.
7. On the tradition that this title was conceded to the French King Francis
I by the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, see Bernard Lewis, The
Political Language of Islam (Chicago: 1988), pp. 98, 153–4.
8. Lûtfi Pasha, Asafname, edited with a German translation by Rudolf
Tschudi (Berlin: 1910), pp. 32–3; translation, pp. 26–7.
9. The observations of Ömer Talib, written on the margins of a manuscript
of the Tarih al-Hind al-Garbi, (see pp. 37–39 and note 4) in Ankara (Maarif
Library 10024), were published by A. Zeki Velidi Togan, Bugünkü Türkeli
(Turkistan’ ve Yak¹n Tarihi, vol. i (1947), p. 127, translated in B. Lewis, The
Emergence of Modern Turkey, new edition (New York: 2001), p. 28, note 11.
10. On this episode see Saffet, “Bir Osmanl¹ filosunun Sumatra seferi,” in
Tarih-i Osmani Encümeni Mecmuas¹, vol. 10 (1327 A.H.), Istanbul, 1329 A.H.,
pp. 604–614, 678–683; Halil Inalcik with Donald Quatert (eds.), An Eco-
Notes
164
NOTES TO PAGES 14–23
nomic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1306–1914 (Cambridge: 1994),
pp. 327–31 and 345–7. See further Salih Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and
the Portuguese,” Journal of Asian History, vol. vi/i (1972): 48–87.
11. For a recent study, see
evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman
Empire (Cambridge: 1999), especially chapters 7 and after.
12. S¹l¹hdar F¹nd¹kl¹ Mehmed, Tarih (Istanbul: 1928), vol. II, p. 87.
13. Cited in Ahmed Refik: Hayat¹, Seçme
iir ve Yaz¹lar¹, ed. Read Ekrem
Koçu (Istanbul: 1938), p. 101. “Wash” refers of course to the ritual ablution
before prayer.
CHAPTER 1
1. Faik Reit Unat, “Ahmet III devrine ait bir islahat takriri: Muhayyel
bir mülâkat¹n zab¹tlar¹,” Tarih Vesikalar¹, vol. i (1941): 107–121.
2. Cited in V. J. Parry, “La Manière de Combattre,” in War, Technology
and Society in the Middle East, V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds. (London:
1975), p. 252, note 2.
3. In Article XIII, the Sublime Porte promises to use “the sacred title
Empress of all the Russias in all documents and public letters, and to do so in
all cases in the Turkish language.” The text of the treaty then spells out the
Turkish form, rendering “Empress” by “Padishah”—a title already conceded
to the Holy Roman Emperor. The treaty was written in Italian, the diplomatic
language of the time, at least in the eastern Mediterranean area. In the
Italian text, the ruler of the Ottomans, whose title was Padishah, is called
“Padischag.” Only a Russian—certainly neither an Italian nor a Turk—would
replace “h” by “g.” The Italian text of the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca is found
in G. G. de Martens, Recueil de Traités, vol. IV (1761–1790 supplement)
(Göttingen: 1798), no. 71, pp. 606–638; 2nd ed., vol. IV (1771–1779)
(Göttingen: 1817), pp. 287–322.
4. See Bernard Lewis, “From Babel to Dragomans,” in Proceedings of the
British Academy, vol. 101 (1999): 37–54.
5. Lûtfi Pasha, Asafname, edited with a German translation by Rudolf
Tschudi, Berlin 1910.
6. Risale-i Koçu Bey (Istanbul: 1277/1860), and several subsequent editions.
German translation by W. F. A. Behrnauer, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, vol. XI (1861): 272–332. On these and other
similar works see Virginia H. Aksan, “Ottoman Political Writing, 1768–1808,”
International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 25 (1993): 53–69; and Bernard
Lewis, “Ottoman Observers of Ottoman decline,” Islamic Studies
(Karachi), vol. I, (1962): 71–87; reprinted in idem, Islam in History: Ideas,
People and Events in the Middle East, rev. ed. (Chicago: 1993), pp. 209–222.
165
NOTES TO PAGES 23–39
7. Lûtfi Pasha, pp. 32–3; translation, pp. 26–7.
8. For two studies of these, the one in an Islamic, the other in a European
context, see Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les chrétiens d’Allah:
l’histoíre extraordinaire des renégats, XVIe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: 1989); and Lucetta
Scaraffia, Rinnegati: per una storia dell’identità occidentale (Rome-Bari: 1993).
9. On these and other Muslim envoys to Europe, see B. Lewis, The Muslim
Discovery of Europe (New York: 1982), rev. 1994, s.vv.*; Carter Vaughn
Findley, “État et droit dans la pensée politique ottomane: droits de l’homme
o Rechtsstaat? À propos de deux relations d’ambassade,” in Études Turques et
Ottomanes, vol. IV (Paris: December 1995), 39–50; Virginia H. Aksan, An
Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (Leiden:
1995).
10. On Ratib Efendi see Carter Vaughn Findley, “Ebu Bekir Ratib’s Vienna
Embassy Narrative: Discovering Austria or Propagandizing for Reform in
Istanbul?” in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 85 (Vienna:
1995), pp. 41–80; and J. M.Stein, “An Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Ambassador
Observes the West: Ebu Bekir Ratip Efendi Reports on the Habsburg
System of Roads and Posts,” in Archivum Ottomanicum, vol. X (Wiesbaden:
1985) [1987]: 219–312.
11. On the introduction and history of printing in the Middle East, see pp.
142–144.
12. Us
°
l al-h
°
ikam f niz
°
a-m al-umam, Istanbul 1145/1732. A French translation
by Baron Reviczki, Traité de la tactique, was published in Vienna in 1769.
13. See Mémoires du Baron de Tott sur les Turcs et les Tartares, 4 vols.
(Maestricht:1785).
CHAPTER 2
1. Paolo Preto, Venezia e i Turchi (Florence: 1975), p. 132.
2. Abu’l ‘Abbs Ah
°
mad ibn Yah°
y al-Wanshars, “Asn al-matjir fi bayn
ah
°
km man ghalaba ‘ala wat
°
anihi al-Nas
°
r wa-lam yuhjir,” ed. H
°
usayn
Mu’nis, Revista del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islamicos en Madrid, vol. V (1957),
129–191; see further B. Lewis, “Legal and Historical Reflections on the Position
of Muslim Populations under non-Muslim Rule,” Journal: Institute of
Muslim Minority Affairs, vol. 13:1 (January 1992): 1–16, reprinted in idem,
Islam and the West (New York-Oxford: 1993), pp. 43–57.
3. On this map see Svat Soucek in The History of Cartography, II, 1, Cartography
in the traditional Islamic and South Asian societies, J. B. Harley and
David Woodward, eds. (Chicago: 1992), pp. 269–272. See also Andrew C.
Hess, “Piri Reis and the Ottoman response to the voyages of discovery,”
Terrae Incognitae, vol. 6 (1974): 19–37.
166
NOTES TO PAGES 39–55
4. An edition in 500 copies was one of the first books printed at the
Müteferrika press. (See p. 142) On this book see Thomas D. Goodrich, The
Ottoman Turks and the New World: a study of “Tarih-i Hind-i garbi” and Sixteenth
century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: 1990).
5. Haskell Isaacs, “European influences in Islamic medicine, “ in Mashriq:
Proceedings of the Eastern Mediterranean Seminar, University of Manchester 1977–
1978 (Manchester: 1980).
6. Abdülhak Adnan [Ad¹var], La Science chez les Turcs Ottomans (Paris:
1939), pp. 112–3.
7. See Fatma Müge Göcek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman
Westernization and Social Change (New York-Oxford: 1996), p. 106.
8. On traditional and modern diplomacy in the Middle East, see
Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd edition, svv. “Elçi” and “Saf r,” where further references
are given.
9. J. Th. Zenker, Bibliotheca Orientalis: Manual de Bibliographie orientale
(Leipzig: 1846), lists 1859 printed books, including 201 volumes devoted to
poets and poetry (65 Arabic, 102 Persian, 34 Turkish), most of them editions
and translations of texts.
10. Adnan, La Science chez les Turcs Ottomans, p. 57.
11. On Hoca Ishak Efendi, see Ekmeleddin Ihsanolu, Bahoca Ishak Efendi:
Türkiyede modern bilimin öncüsü (Ankara: 1989).
12. For an example, see V. J. Parry, “La Manière de Combattre,” p. 250.
13. Enver Ziya Karal, Halet Efendinin Paris Büyük Elçilii 1802–6 (Istanbul:
1940), pp. 32–3.
14. Perhaps because of the relative accessibility of the documentation, the
economic aspect of Western impact has received far more attention than the
social, cultural, and to a lesser extent even the political aspects. See Donald
Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire,
1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: 1983); and

evket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913;
Trade, Investment and Production (Cambridge: 1987).
15. Takvim-i Vekayi (Moniteur Ottoman), vol. 1 Jumada I 1247/14 May 1832.
16. Tarih-i Naima (Istanbul n.d.), vol. III, pp. 69–70 and vol. IV, p. 94.
17. On these, see B. Lewis, “Serbestiyet,” Journal of the Faculty of Economics
of the University of Istanbul, vol. 41 (1983): 47–52; idem. Islam in History, pp.
323–36.
18. Cited in Ahmed Jevdet Pasha, Tarih, vol. VI (Istanbul: 1309 A.H.), pp.
394–401: English translation in B. Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution
on Turkey,” Journal of World History, vol. i, (1953): 121–2, revised
167
NOTES TO PAGES 55–73
version in G. S. Métraux and F. Crouzet (eds.), The New Asia: Readings in the
History of Mankind (New York: 1965), pp. 47–50.
19.
anizade, Tarih, vol. iv (Istanbul: 1291/1874), pp. 2–3.
20. Sad¹k R¹fat Pasha, Muntehabat-i Asar (Istanbul: n.d.), p. 4; another version
in Abdurrahman
eref, Tarih Musahebeleri (Istanbul: 1340/1922), p. 125.
CHAPTER 3
1. Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname (Istanbul: 1928), vol. VII, pp. 318–9; German
translation by R. F. Kreutel, Im Reiche des goldenen Apfels (Graz: 1957),
pp. 194–5.
2. Mustafa Hatti Efendi, Viyana Sefaretnamesi, ed. Ali Ibrahim Sava (Ankara:
1999), pp. 37–8. The text of Hatti’s report was first published in the
chronicle of Izzi, Tarih-i Izzi (Istanbul: 1199/1784), p. 190 ff.
3. Cited in Tarih-i Cevdet (Istanbul: 1309/1892) vol. IV, p. 355.
4. Ah°
mad ibn al-Mahd, Nat jat al-Ijtiha-d f ‘l-Muha-dana wa’l-jiha-d, ed.
Alfredo Bustani (Larache [Morocco]: 1941), p. 12.
5. See for example Qur’n V:119, where Jesus himself rejects this idea, in
answer to a question from God: “Did you tell people: ‘Worship me and my
mother as gods apart from God?’” To this Jesus replied with an unequivocal
denial.
6. Cited by M.
ükrü Haniolu, “Transformation of the Ottoman Intelligentsia
and the idea of Science,” in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie si Arheologie
“A.D. Xenopol,” vol. XXIV/2 (Jassy: 1987), pp. 29–34.
7. English translation in B. Lewis, A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of
Life, Letters and History (New York: 2000), p. 192.
8. See EI2, s.v., “K°
sim Amn.” His first book, Tah°
r r al-mar’a (Liberation
of Woman) was published in Cairo in 1899; his second, Al-Mar’a al-
Jadda (The New Woman) in 1901. An English translation by Samiha Sidhom
Peterson was published in Cairo in 2000.
9. For some examples see Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations
of Imam Khomeini, translated and annotated by Hamid Algar (Berkeley: 1981).
10. Long neglected, the position of women in Islam has in recent years
formed the topic of an extensive literature, both scholarly and polemical,
much of it by Muslim women. The following is a very short selection, excluding
books dealing with only one country: Lois Beck and Nikkie Keddie,
eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, Mass.: 1978); Juliette Minces,
La femme dans le monde arabe (Paris: 1980); Fatma Mernissi, Beyond the Veil:
Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, rev. ed. (Bloomington: 1988);
Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: a Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society
168
NOTES TO PAGES 73–89
(New York-Oxford: 1988); Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, eds., Opening
the Gates: a Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington: 1990); Nikki
Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries
in Sex and Gender (New Haven: 1991); Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right
and Left Handed: Arab Women talk about their lives (Bloomington: 1991);
Wiebke Walther, Women in Islam (Princeton: 1993); Fatma Müge Göçek
and Shiva Balaghi, eds., Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: tradition,
identity and power (New York: 1994); Madeline C. Zilfi, ed., Women in the
Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: 1997).
11. Mustafa Sami, Avrupa Risalesi (Istanbul: 1256 A.H.), pp. 26, 35–36; translation
in Haniolu, p. 30.
12. Âsâr-i R¹fat Paa (Istanbul: 1275 A.H.), pp. 10–11; translation in
Haniolu, p. 31.
13. On Ibn al-Naf s see Max Meyerhof, Ibn al-Nafs und seine Theorie des
Lungenkreislaufs, in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften,
vol. iv (Berlin: 1933); Gaston Wiet, “Ibn al-Naf s et la circulation pulmonaire,”
Journal Asiatique (1956): 95–100; J. Schacht, “Ibn al-Naf s, Servetus
and Colombo,” al-Andalus, vol. xxii (1937): 317–36; EI2, s.v.
14. See Ayd¹n Say¹l¹, The Observatory in Islam and its Place in the General
History of the Observatory (Ankara: 1960), pp. 289 ff.
15. See pp. 128–129 and 133–136.
CHAPTER 4
1. G. Young, Corps de droit ottoman, vol. II (Oxford: 1903), pp. 171–172.
2. Young, vol. II, pp. 172–174 and 180–181.
3. Young, vol. II, pp. 175ff.
4. M. Bompard, Législation de Tunisie (Paris: 1888), p. 398.
5. Ahmad ibn Khlid al-Ns°
ir, Kita - b al-Istiqs
°
a-’, vol. V (Casablanca: 1955),
pp. 131ff. On an earlier discussion of the illegal enslavement of black Muslims,
by an African jurist, see Mi ‘ra-j al-S
°
u‘u - d: Ahmad Baba’s replies on slavery,
annotated and translated by John Hunwick and Fatima Karrak (Rabat: 2000),
and Mahmoud A. Zouber, Ahmad Baba de Timboktou (1556–1627): sa vie et
son oeuvre (Paris: 1977), pp. 129–146.
6. On slavery, see the article “‘Abd” by R. Brunschvig, in Encyclopaedia of
Islam, 2nd edition (EI2) and Hans Müller, “Sklaven” in Handbuch der
Orientalistik, ed. B. Spuler, Part I, Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten, vol. VI,
Geschichte der Islamischen Länder, Section 551, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Vorderen
Orients in Islamischer Zeit, Part I (Leiden and Cologne: 1977), pp. 54–83,
with an extensive bibliography. See also B. Lewis, Race and Slavery in the
169
NOTES TO PAGES 89–95
Middle East (New York: 1990); Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade
and its Suppression (Princeton, New Jersey: 1982). For a remarkable debate
on slavery and the slave trade in Africa and Arabia in the mid-twentieth century,
see The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) Fifth Series—Volume CCXXV
House of Lords Official Report: Seventh Volume . . . from Monday, 11th July, 1960
to Thursday, 27th October, 1960, Cols. 333–356.
7. Louis Frank, Mémoire sur le commerce des nègres au Kaire (Paris: 1802),
pp. 32–35. English translation by Michel Le Gall in Princeton Papers, vol.
VII, “Slavery in the Islamic Middle East,” edited by Shaun E. Marmon (1999),
pp. 69 ff.
8. Harold Motzki, Dimma und Egalité, Die nichtmuslimischen Minderheiten
Ägyptens in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Expedition Bonapartes
(1798–1801), Studien zum Minderheitenproblem im Islam 5 (Bonn: 1979), pp.
263ff. and 324ff.
9. R. H. Davison, “Turkish attitudes concerning Christian-Muslim equality
in the nineteenth century,” American Historical Review, vol. LIX (1953–
1954): 844–864.
10. The text of these and other Ottoman reform edicts may be found in G.
Aristarchi, Legislation ottomane (Istanbul: 1873–88); G. Young, Corps de droit
Ottoman (Oxford: 1905–6).
11. A detailed account of these events, with some documents, is given in
Cevdet Paa, Tezakir 1–12, ed. Cavid Baysun (Ankara: 1953), pp. 101–152.
Additional information may be found in the contemporary reports of the
British acting vice-consul in Jedda, Stephen Page (F.O. 195/375). For a discussion,
see William Ochsenwald, “Muslim European conflict in the Hijaz:
the Slave Trade controversy, 1840–1859,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 16
(1980): 115–126; and idem, Religion, Society and the State in Arabia: the Hijaz
under Ottoman control, 1840–1908 (Columbus, Ohio: 1984), pp. 117–127 and
138–141.
12. Cevdet, Tezakir, p. 111.
13. Cevdet, Tezakir, p. 133.
14. Cevdet, Tezakir, pp. 67–68.
15. See pp. 64–65 and 66–76.
16. See EI2, s.v. “K
°
urrat al-‘Ayn. See also Farah Azari, ed., Women of Iran:
The Conflict with Fundamentalist Islam (London: 1983), Chapter 5, by Sima
Bahar; and Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, eds., Women in the Muslim World
(Cambridge, Mass.: 1978), especially Chapter 15, “Women and the Revolution
in Iran, 1905–1911,” by Mangol Bayat-Philipp.
17. W. Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York: 1912), [reprinted
Washington, D.C., 1987], pp. 191–2.
170
NOTES TO PAGES 97–118
CHAPTER 5
1. Josephus, Contra Apionem, II, 165.
2. On this see by A. K. Wensinck, “The Refused Dignity,” in A Volume of
Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne, on his Sixtieth Birthday, edited
by T.W. Arnold and R.A. Nicholson (Cambridge: 1922), pp. 491–499.
3. On this point see B. Lewis, “The Significance of Heresy in Islam,” Studia
Islamica (1952): 43–63; reprinted in idem, Islam in History, pp. 275–294.
4. Ibn Qutayba, ‘Uyu-n al-Akhba-r, vol. 1 (Cairo: 1963), p. 2. English translation
by Josef Horovitz, Islamic Culture (April: 1930), p. 185.
5. By a portentous ambiguity, the Arabic word Khal fa, from which Caliph
is derived, combines the two meanings.
6. See B. Lewis, “The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey: Some
Notes on the Transmission of Ideas,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale, vol. 1 (July
1953): 105–125. For discussions of secularism in the modern Islamic world
see Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: 1964);
Bassam Tibi, “Islam and Secularization,” Proceedings of the First International
Islamic Philosophy Conference 19–22 November 1979: Cairo (Egypt) (Cairo:1982),
65–79; and Fouad Zakariya, Laïcité ou Islamisme: Les Arabes à l’heure du choix
(Paris-Cairo: 1991).
7. For a discussion of this literature, see Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual
Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism (London: 1997).
8. Al-Jiha-d: al-Fard°
a al-Gha-’iba, n.p., n.d. (ca. 1982?) On this work and
its author, see Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s
Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York and London:
1986), especially Chapter 1.
9. From time to time attempts were made by religious or political authorities
to identify and extirpate incorrect beliefs and practices. But these
are rare and atypical, and never amounted to an organized and established
institution like the Holy Office. For examples, see EI2 s.v. “Mih
°
na.” Probably
the closest approximation in Islamic history occurred in the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth century. See Halil Inalc¹k, The Ottoman Empire: The
Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: 1973), Chapter 18, “The Triumph of Fanaticism,”
pp. 179 ff.
10. Mas r-i T
°
a-lib ya- Sefarna-ma-i M rza- Abu- T
°
a-lib Kha-n, ed. H. Khadv-
Jam (Tehran: 1974), pp. 250–1; cf. English trans. C. Stewart, Travels of Mirza
Abu Talib Khan . . . (London: 1814), vol. 2, p. 81.
CHAPTER 6
1. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, translated by E. S. Forster
(Oxford: 1927), pp. 19–21.
171
NOTES TO PAGES 118–136
2. Ibid, p. 135.
3. John Evelyn, The Diary, vol. IV, ed. E.S. de Beer (London: 1955), p.
358; cit. Otto Kurz, European Clocks and Watches in the Near East (London-
Leiden: 1975), p. 63.
4. Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the
Modern Egyptians, 5th ed., vol. II (London: 1871), p. 325.
5. Inscriptions in Répertoire Chronologìque d’Epigraphie arabe, vol. I (Cairo:
1931), pp. 13–16. Significantly, Jerusalem is still designated on these milestones
by its Roman name, Aelia.
6. Jean Chesneau, Le voyage de Monsieur d’Aramon, ed. Ch. Schefer (Paris:
1887), pp. 17, 202; cit. Kurz, p. 24, note 2.
7. Fatima Müge Göçek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman
Westernization and Social Change, p. 106. On the export of clocks from Europe,
see David E. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern
World (Cambridge, Mass.: 1983), especially pp. 99ff.
8. Jm, Sala-ma-n va-Absa-l (Tehran: 1306 solar), p. 36; English translation
in A. J. Arberry, Fitzgerald’s Salaman and Absal (Cambridge: 1956), p. 146.
9. Kurz, pp. 86–86.
10. The Turkish text, from a document in the Istanbul archives, is given
by E. Z. Karal, Fransa-M¹s¹r ve Osmanl¹ Imparatorluu (1797–180) (Istanbul:
1940), p. 108; the Arabic text as brought to Acre by Sir Sidney Smith, is
given in an Arabic biography of Jazzar Pasha, (British Museum manuscript
Oriental 3033, folio 48a) cf. Ta’r kh Ah
°
mad Ba-sha- (Beirut: 1055), p. 125.
There is some variation between the two.
11. Georges Duhamel, Consultation au Pays d’Islam (Paris: 1947), pp. 27–28.
CHAPTER 7
1. Adolphus Slade, Record of Travels in Turkey, Greece &c. and of a Cruise in
the Black Sea, with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1820, and 1831, vol. i
(London: 1833), pp. 135–6.
2. See E. de Leone, L’Impero Ottomano nel primo periodo delle riforme
(Tanzimat) secondo fonti italiani (Milan: 1967), pp. 58–59, citing Cesare
Vimercati, Constantinopoli e l’Egitto (Parato: 1849), p. 65.
3. Qazvn, Kita-b A
-
tha-r al-Bila-d, ed. F. Wüstenfeld (Göttingen: 1848),
h. 404.
4. For a fuller discussion, see B. Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe
(New York: 1982), pp. 262–274.
5. Princess Musbah Haidar, Arabesque, rev. ed. (London: 1968), p. 61.
6. Idem., pp. 178–9.
172
NOTES TO PAGES 140–158
7. See La première histoire de France en ture ottoman: Chronique des padichahs
de France, 1572, edit. and trans. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont (Paris-Istanbul:
1997).
8. Manuscript in Egyptian National Library, History, no. 435.
9. See Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd edition, s.v. “Mat
°
ba‘a,” where further references
are given. For studies on some special aspects see The Introduction of the
Printing Press in the Middle East; Culture and History, vol. 16 (Oslo: 1997).
10. Kemal Atatürk, Milli E
itim Söylevleri, Ankara I, pp. 29–30. English
translation in B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p. 274.
11. For a remarkable example see Samir al-Khalil, The Monument: Art,
Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley-Los Angeles: 1991).
12. On artistic and architectural Westernization see Günsel Renda, “Europe
and the Ottomans,” in Europa und die Kunst des Islam 15. bis 18.
Jahrhundert, XXV. Internationaler Kongress für Kunstgeschichte (Vienna:
1983), pp. 9–32.
CONCLUSION
1. This view was not shared by Ibn Khaldn (1332–1406), generally recognized
as the greatest of Arab historians. For him, the coming of the Turks
was a manifestation of God’s beneficent concern for the Muslims, and brought
them strength and renewal at a time of weakness and decadence. Ibn Khaldn,
Kitab al-‘Ibar, vol. v, (Bulaq: 1284/1867), p. 371; translation in B. Lewis, ed.,
Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, vol. I (New
York: 1974), pp. 96–99.
2. Ahmed Zéki Pacha, “Une seconde tentative des Musulmans pour
découvrir l’Amérique,” Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte, vol. 2 (Cairo: 1920), pp.
57–9.
3. On a pioneer group of ideological Westernizers in Turkey see M.
ükrü
Haniolu, “Garbc¹lar: their attitudes towards religion and their impact on the
official ideology of the Turkish Republic,” Studia Islamica (1997/2): 133–158.
4. See EI2 svv “‘Adjala” and “Araba” (on carts) and “Brd” (on firearms
and artillery); for fuller discussions, see Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare:
1500–1700 (London: 1999); and Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel
(Cambridge, Mass.: 1975). For an example of the modern impact of wheels,
see Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman
Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York:
1983), Chapter 4, “Working on the Anatolian Railway.”
5. For some observations by one of the most perceptive of Western travelers,
see Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie, ed. Jean Gaulmier (Paris-The
Hague: 1959), especially p. 382.
INDEX
173
Index
A
‘Abb
s I, Sh
h of Persia, 12
‘Abd al-Malik, 120
agriculture, 126
Ali Aziz, 146
allegiances, 47–48
alliances, 19–20, 22
Alpago, Andrea, 80
ambassadors, 26–28. See also
diplomacy
American Revolution, 112, 115
Am
n, see Q
sim
anti-Semitism, 153–154
apostasy, 36
architecture, 137–138, 149
‘rif Efendi, 92–93
Aristarchi, Stavraki, 44
aristocracies, 82
army, 109–110, 151. See also
military; warfare
art(s), 6–7, 127–128, 137–138, 149
Asia, 15, 36–37
astrology, 122–123
astronomy, 80, 119–120, 122–123
Atatürk, Kemal, 72, 107, 143–144
Atif Efendi, 55
Atjeh (Sumatra), 14
Austria, 16, 20, 21
authority, 96–98, 103, 110, 113,
116; fear of, 158
autocracy, 53–54, 57
ayatollahs, 109, 114
Azmi Efendi, 27, 55
Azov, 17
B
B
b, the (Islamic reformer), 95
Babylon, 121
Balkans, 34
battle(s). See warfare
Bellini, Gentile, 137
Beyazid (Ottoman sultan), 137
Black Sea, 8, 17
black slavery, 85, 88, 93
blame, 23, 153, 156–159
Bombadier Ahmed. See Bonneval
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 31, 33, 55,
89, 130; books on, 141
Bonneval, Comte de, Claude-
Alexandre, 28
books, 118, 141, 144. See also
literature; printing press
Brahe, Tycho, 80
Britain, 19, 33
British Mandate for Palestine, 154
Bucharest, Treaty of (1812), 33
Büchner, Friedrich Karl Christian
Ludwig, 78
Buddha, 97
INDEX
174
Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de, 9,
117–118, 120
Byzantine Empire, 4, 18
C
Caesar as God, 97
calendar, 121, 125–126
caliphs, 101, 114
Campbell, 31
capital investment, 47
Carlowitz, Treaty of (1699), 17,
18–19, 23, 29
cartographers, 119–120
Caspian Sea, 8
Chardin, Jean, 118
charity, 110–111
Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, 9
China, 3, 6
choice, cultural, 76
church, 98, 99
citizenship, 90
civilization, 6–7, 36–37
civil rights, 112
civil society, 96, 111–116, 157;
defined, 109–110
civil war. See war
clergy, 99–100, 108, 157
clocks, 117–118, 121, 123–125
clothing, 73–76, 138–139
coffee, 50
coins, 138
Columbus, Christopher, 37
commerce, 6, 14, 15–16, 35, 37;
and clocks, 124
Common Era, 126
communication, 50–54, 111, 130,
142, 144. See also language;
translation
communism, 106
community, 34, 36, 42, 100
Comte, Auguste, 78
concubines, 71, 89
Constantinople, 4, 6, 8, 18. See also
Istanbul
constitution, 57, 58, 108
constitutional law, 54
consulates, 26. See also diplomacy
consultation, 55–56
conversion, 21, 28, 31, 98, 103
corruption, 63
Cossacks. See Russia
craftsmen, 124
Crimea, 21
Crimean War, 51–52
Croix, Pétis de la, 146
Crusades, 4, 18
cubits, 120
cultural change, 140–141, 145–150,
153; and clothing, 138–139; and
music, 133–137; and printing,
142–144
culture, verbal, 128, 148
D
Daniel, Book of, 121
demarcation, 127
democracy, 54, 57, 60–61, 150
devices, 39–40, 65
dining, 148
diplomacy, 17, 19, 35, 37, 40–43;
and mistranslation, 22
diplomats, 56
discrimination, 85, 91
distance, 119–120
Donizetti, Giuseppe, 135, 136, 137
dragoman(s), 29, 42, 44–45
Draper, John William, 78
dress reforms, 73–76, 138–139. See
also reform(s)
Duckworth, John Thomas, 33
INDEX
175
E
ecclesiastical constraints, 99
economy, 46, 50, 62–63, 64; black
market, 111
education, 29, 43, 48, 113, 157;
modernization of, 53, 54; of
women, 72
Egypt, 8–9, 13–14, 31, 60, 123; and
emancipation, 89–90
elections, 57, 58–60, 150
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 22
emancipation, 69, 86, 88–90, 94–95
embassies, 26–28. See also
diplomacy
emissaries, 35–36. See also
ambassadors
enlightenment, 91
equality, 82, 86–90, 92–93, 115;
and religion, 48, 84–85, 91; of
women, 69, 83, 94–95
equal rights, 33
Essay on the Motion of the Heart and
Blood (Harvey), 79
Evliya Çelebi, 64–65, 66
experiment, 79
experts, 25, 28, 29
F
Faraj, Muh°
ammad ‘Abd al-Sal
m,
107–108
fatwa-, 92
feminism. See women
fossil fuels, 151
France, 27–28, 31, 130–131, 140
Franco-Ottoman War, 31
freedom, 54–57, 60, 61, 150, 158;
and abolition of slavery, 89; and
women, 71
French Revolution, 31, 34, 44, 46,
55; and civil rights, 112–113; and
modern history, 130; and
secularism, 104, 115
frontiers, 127
fundamentalists, 73, 106–107, 156–
157
G
Gama, Vasco da, 13
games, 147
geographers, 119–120
geography, 140
glasses, reading, 127
government, 54–55, 57–63, 64, 99,
110. See also state
Great Bazaar, 137
Greece, 6, 11
Greeks, 29, 34
Greek War of Independence, 44
Gulf of Patras, 11
Gulistan, Treaty of (1813), 34
H
Halet Efendi, 46
harem system, 66
harmony, 128
Harvey, William, 79
hats, 138–139
Hatti Efendi, Mustafa, 65
H°ayy ibn Yaqz°
a-n (Tufayl), 146
headgear, 75
heresy, 103
hierarchy, 100, 102, 108–109
Hijaz, 92–94
Hijra (migration of the Prophet), 126
histories, 18, 102–103, 140–141,
143, 145
historiographers, 52
history, modern, 130
Holy Land, 4, 25
Holy Law, 21, 26, 37, 54, 101–102.
See also shar‘a; ulema
Holy League, 17
Holy Roman Empire, 18
INDEX
176
human rights, 83
Hungary, 11, 17
I
Ibn al-Naf s, 80
Ibn T
°
ufayl, 146
Ibr
hm ibn Ya’qb, 136
Ibrahim Müteferrika, 28, 142–143
identity, 47–48, 96, 102, 138
‘ilm (religious knowledge), 102
imperialism, 153
Imperial Divan ‘Ottoman,’ 122
Imperial Rescript (1856), 91
income, 111
independence, 60, 62, 148, 158
India, 3, 6–7, 97
Industrial Revolution, 47
industry, 57
inferiority, 84
infidels, 13, 20, 22, 36, 48–50;
cultural rejection of, 139; naval
superiority of, 23; as teachers, 21,
25, 43–44; and time, 131
intellectuals, 62
interpreter(s), 29, 42. See also
translation and dragoman(s)
Iran, 20–21, 34, 109, 115; cultural
history of, 143. See also Persia
Ishak Efendi, Hoca, 45
Islamic Revolution (1979), 72
Israel, 101, 154–155
Istanbul, 33, 37–39, 124, 125, 130;
and westernization, 137. See also
Constantinople
J
Al-Jabart, 89–90
James I, King of England, 11
J
m, 127
Japan, 152
Jesus, 101
Jews, 27, 28–29, 97–98, 141, 143–
144; and anti-Semitism, 153–
154; political role of, 155
jizya (poll tax), 91
journalists, 52–53
Judaism, 36
jurists, 36
justice, 54–55, 56
K
Kara Mustafa Pasha, 16
Kassam (public official), 39
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 70, 72, 114,
149
kin groups, 111–112
knowledge, 39
Koçu Bey, 23
Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, 16
Küçük Kaynarca, Treaty of (1774),
21, 23
L
Lane, Edward William, 118–119
language, 27, 29, 37, 40–45, 48; and
cultural change, 53, 139, 144–
145, 149; and freedom, 61;
Muslim, 101; and secularism,
104–105; and verbal culture, 128
law, 100, 106, 113–114. See also
Holy Law
lawyer(s), 52
leadership, 100
Lebanon, 108
Lepanto, battle of, 11
Les mille et un jours (A Thousand and
One Days) (Pétis de la Croix), 146
lexicon, 105
liberalism, 44, 71
liberalization, 73
INDEX
177
Liberation of Women, The (Q
sim
Amn), 71
literature, 42, 45, 105, 139, 145–147
Locke, John, 113
Louis XVI, King of France, 31
Lûtfi Pasha, 23–25
M
Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan, 133–
135
maliye (financial year), 126
Ma’mn, Caliph, 99
martyrdom, 101
materialism, 78, 131
mathematics, 7, 29, 141
Matthew, Book of, 97
Mavrokordato, Alexander, 17, 29
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 58
measurements, 119
Mecca (Saudi Arabia), 26, 122, 128
media, 111. See also newspapers
medicine, 37, 39, 80
Medina (Saudi Arabia), 98–99
Mehmed II, Ottoman sultan, 123,
137
Mehmed IV, Ottoman sultan, 7
memorialists, 23, 43
merchants, 25–26, 35, 92
milestones, 120
military forces, 16
military memoranda, 28
military power, 6, 11, 19, 64, 109.
See also warfare
militia, 109
minorities, 50, 144
missions, 44, 51
modernists, 156–157
modernity, 3
modernization, 20–21, 40, 45, 63,
75–76; and communication, 50–
54, 111; and the French
Revolution, 104; and music, 135;
and time, 129–132; and women’s
rights, 72–73. See also cultural
change; Westernization
Mohacs, battle of, 11
monarchy, 83, 110
Mongol Empire, 140
Mongol invasions, 152–153
Moors, 8
Moses, 101
mosque, 98, 123
mufti, 108–109
Muh°
ammad, ‘Al Pasha, 140–141
Muhammad (prophet), 98–99, 101
munajim (astrologer/astronomer),
122–123
music, 66, 127–129, 133–137, 149
Mustafa, Ingiliz. See Campbell
Mustafa Sami, 76
myth, 100–101
N
Naima, Mustafa, 52
Nam¹k, Kemal, 70–71, 72
Al-N
s°
ir, Ah
°
mad Kh
lid, 88–89
nationalism, 47–48, 106, 152, 158
naval power, 15, 23
Nazi Germany, 154
necktie, 75
negotiation, 17, 19, 33
Nelson, Horatio, 31
Netherlands, 19, 31
New Learning, 7
newspapers, 50–53, 144. See also
media; printing press
New World, 37–39
novel, 129, 149. See also literature
Nuruosmaniye Mosque, 137
INDEX
178
O
Occident, 26
occupations (professional), 48–50
ocean route, 14–15
d’Ohsson, Mouradgea, 27
Orient, 26
Orientalists, 26
Ottoman Empire, 15, 23, 86, 102;
collapse of, 33, 61; Russian
intervention in, 21; and Treaty of
Carlowitz, 18
Ottomans, 8–12, 14, 16–17
P
Palestine, 154
parliament, 55, 58–60, 100, 129, 148
Passarowitz, Treaty of (1718), 20
patriarch, 102
patriotism, 47–48, 71, 106
persecution, religious, 97–98, 101,
104, 114
Persia, 6, 8–12, 95, 97, 142. See also
Iran
perspective, 128
Peter (the Great), Czar of Russia, 17
philosophy, 46, 139–140
photography, 138
Poland, 16
political science, 54
politics, 47, 97, 129
polygamy, 66, 71
polyphony, 128–129
polytheists, 114
portraiture, 138
Portugual, 14, 31
positivism, 78
postage stamps, 138
power, 34, 46–49, 55–56, 63, 83;
balance of, 20; and communication,
45, 50–54; and constitutional
government, 57–62; imperial,
109; of the state, 98, 103, 116
powers, Christian, 11
powers, Islamic, 31
prayer, 121–122
Prince, The (Machiavelli), 141
printing press, 28, 45, 50–53, 140–
144
privilege, 82–83, 93
Promised Land, 101
propaganda, 20, 42, 51, 55
property, 39, 72
prosperity. See wealth
Pruth, Treaty of the (1711), 20
public opinion, 73
public transport, 130
Q
Q
’it Bay, 137
Q
sim Amn, 71
Qur’
n, 55, 71, 113, 121, 131; and
the printing press, 142
Qurrat al-‘Ayn, 94–95
R
Radzin, Treaty of (1681), 16
railway, 130
Ratib Efendi, Ebu Bekir, 27
realism, 138
Reformation, the, 7
reformers, 156–157
Reform Edict of 1839, Ottoman, 56
reform(s), 29, 31, 40, 85, 151;
clothing, 73–76, 138–139; and
equality, 48, 90–92; and music,
133–137; secularizing, 106;
Westernizing, 43
refugees, 19, 28–31, 33, 48;
political, 44, 60
INDEX
179
religion, 34, 36, 85. See also
persecution, religious
religious organization, 112
Rescript of the Rose Bower (1839),
Ottoman, 91
research, 129
Reid Pasha, Mustafa, 56
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 146
Rome, 97, 98
Royal Navy, 31, 33
Russia, 4–6, 8, 15, 16, 17; and
defeat of Ottomans, 21; and the
Treaty of the Pruth, 20; and war
with Turkey, 33, 34. See also
Soviet Union
Russian Empire, 62
Russo-Japanese War (1905), 60
S
Sad¹k R¹fat Pasha, 57, 76–78
Safavi, Isma‘il, 8–9
anizade (Ottoman historian), 56
scapegoats, 23. See also blame
schism, 103
School of Engineering and
Artillery, 143
schools. See education; universities
science, 6–7, 45, 46, 57, 66; and
education, 76; Islamic contributions
to, 78–81; and research,
129; and secularism, 104
secularism, 106–112, 116, 157; and
Christianity, 96–99; and
difference of belief, 100–105; and
tolerance, 113–115
self-determination, 115
Selim I, Ottoman sultan, 9
Selim II, Ottoman sultan, 11
Selim III, Ottoman sultan, 28, 31,
40, 42–43
Servetus, Michael, 79
shar‘a (Holy Law), 53, 86, 100,
106; constitutional status of, 108
Sherley, Anthony and Robert, 12
Sh‘a, 100
Shi‘ism, 8
shoes, 138–139
S¹l¹hdar, 16
Sitvatorok, Treaty of (1606), 12
Slade, Aldophus, 133
slavery, 11–12, 26, 54, 69; abolition
of, 71, 85–87, 92
slaves, 67–69, 83, 84; black, 85, 88,
93
socialism, 62, 158
Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, 11
sovereignty, national, 48, 61
Soviet Union, 62. See also Russia
space, measurements of, 117, 119–
120, 127
spice trade, 13, 14
sports, 147–148
state, 99, 101, 103, 111, 116
status, 84
students, 56
Sublime Porte, 143
sugar, 50
Süleyman, Ottoman sultan, 11, 14,
123
sundial, 123
Sunnis, 100
supremacy, 84, 93
synagogue, 98
syphilis, 7, 39
T
T
j es-Saltana, 95
Taq al-Dn, 80, 123–124
Tasvir-i Efka-r (newspaper), 70
Tatars, 4–6, 8
taxation, 91, 126–127
teacher(s), 53, 54, 99
INDEX
180
technology, 125, 142–144
telegraph, 51–52
Télémaque (Fénélon), 146
telescopes, 127
theater, 129, 141–142, 149
theocracy, 97, 113–114
Thirty Years War, 16, 52
time, 117–118, 120–126; and
modernization, 129–132; and
music, 127–129
tolerance, 33–34, 36, 113–115, 154
Tott, Baron de, 29
translation, 39, 42, 50, 56, 113; and
cultural change, 139–140, 145–
147, 149
Translation Office, 45
travel, 25–29, 35–39, 48, 120, 122
Treaty of Bucharest (1812), 33
Treaty of Carlowitz (1699), 17, 18–
19, 23, 29
Treaty of Gulistan (1813), 34
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774),
21, 23
Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), 20
Treaty of Radzin (1681), 16
Treaty of Sitvatorok (1606), 12
Treaty of the Pruth (1711), 20
Treaty of Turkmanchay (1828), 34
Trinity, Holy, 67
Tunis, 57, 88
Turkey, 12, 20–21, 33, 48; and
alliance with England, 22; and
cultural change, 141–142, 149
Turkish republic, 72, 106, 108
Turkmanchay, Treaty of (1828), 34
Turks, 6, 16, 35–36, 104–105
U
Ukraine, 16
ulema (doctors of Holy Law), 21,
43, 53, 92, 102
unbelievers, 67–69, 83, 84, 114. See
also infidels
uniforms, 75, 138. See also reform(s)
United States, 153
universities, 42, 53, 147
V
Vahid Efendi, 67
Vasif Efendi, 27, 66
vehicles, 157–158
Venice, Republic of, 13, 16, 20, 35
Vienna, 6, 8, 11, 16–17; Muslim
ambassador to, 27
Voltaire, 124, 141
W
Al-Wanshars, 36
waqf (pious endowment), 110–111
warfare, 12–13, 29–34, 44, 64, 72;
and diplomacy, 18–19, 26–28;
and modernization, 20–25
war(s), 31, 35, 99, 103–104
wazir, 110
wealth, 35, 45–47, 57, 83, 151
weaponry, 12–14, 19; Christian, 20
weights and measures, 118–120
Westerners, 12–13
Westernization, 40, 62, 73, 75–76,
138; and music, 135–137, 149
Western trading company, 15–16
women, 65, 66–67, 75–76, 84, 157;
and charity, 111; emancipation
of, 94–95; rights of, 69–73, 83
Y
Young Ottomans, 58, 70
INDEX
181