Tanzimat Centralization, Arabs, and Ottomanism

The Gülhane Decree of 1839 gave the empire’s non-Muslims legal status equal to Muslims, and Ottoman statesmen expected—in vain—that this concession would reinforce the loyalty of the traditionally autonomous non-Muslim communities to the state. Instead, the Western powers quickly made use of their newly strengthened extraterritorial rights, known as the capitulations, to promote Christian merchants as their protégés and secure for them tax exemptions and immunity from the due process of Ottoman law. In the predominantly Christian-populated Balkan Peninsula the centralizing measures of the Tanzimat, particularly in the sphere of taxation, contributed to social unrest and nationalist movements.^[4]

In the Muslim areas of the empire, including the Arab provinces, the political and economic dislocations that centralization and Western economic penetration caused did not have immediate nationalist or separatist implications. The Tanzimat policies expedited the integration of the provinces into the central administration. In the Asian provinces, as in the Balkans, the local notables who controlled the land resented the Tanzimat regulations. However, they found ways of promoting their interests in the newly founded provincial councils.^[5] The predominance of local power continued within a centralizing administrative system that in the beginning provided for the appointment of provincial governors with limited powers.^[6] Even as the 1838 treaty hurt Muslim trade, and secular Westernizing reforms (along with the enhanced status of non-Muslim groups) reflected negatively on the sultan’s image as the binding force of an Islamic empire, Muslims questioned neither the unity of the empire nor Islam as its source of legitimacy. In 1864 a more confident leadership in İstanbul reorganized the provincial administration to strengthen the provincial governors, and the notables lost some of their political prerogatives and autonomy. When in the 1880s Sultan Abdülhamid (r. 1876–1909) imposed his personal authority on the government and further reinforced centralization, many local notables were forced to seek new ways of preserving or recovering their power and prestige by linking it to the central administration.

In contrast to the gradual transformation in the provinces, the bureaucratic machinery in İstanbul underwent fundamental reorganization early in the Tanzimat. The balance of power within the ruling elite resolved itself in favor of a group of reformist high-level bureaucrats, who made use of resources at hand in staffing the expanding bureaucracy. The imperial capital had long been a cosmopolis where people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds intermingled and assimilated into the Ottoman imperial culture. Its population, educationally more advanced compared with the rest of the empire, was exposed to European political, economic, and cultural influences, and thus provided the human resources needed for an expanding bureaucracy committed to Westernization. Most Tanzimat men were İstanbul-born, and many were sons of prominent officials,^[7] even if the families derived from elsewhere. The more prominent statesmen started their careers in the Translation Bureau, a creation of Mahmud II and a breeding ground for reformers, where they received their language training and basic experience in government service.

Despite diminishing opportunities for mobility, it was theoretically possible for any Ottoman with some formal education to join and rise in the ranks of the civil service.^[8] Social position was helpful to the extent that it facilitated access to the dispensers of patronage, but those on the lower rungs of the social ladder were not categorically denied opportunities for advancement.^[9] A difference in education and training more than social background set the Tanzimat men apart from the members of the pre-Tanzimat ruling elite and distanced them further from the common people.^[10]

Arabs were conspicuously absent in top government positions throughout Ottoman history, and the processes of elite recruitment during the Tanzimat reproduced the preexisting trend. According to Danişmend, of 215 Ottoman grand viziers (prime ministers) none is known to be Arab, although 3 “may have been,” as compared to seventy-eight Turks and thirty-one Albanians. The roster of kaptan-ı deryas (admirals of the fleet) includes no Arabs, that of başdefterdars (chief finance officers) one, and that of reisülküttabs (chief secretary–foreign ministers) four.^[11] Although Muslim Arabs were traditionally prominent in the judicial administration of the empire,^[12] the upper echelons of this religious hierarchy, too, were occupied by those trained in İstanbul and connected to high offices.^[13] Moreover, the gradual secularization of the legal system starting with the Tanzimat undermined the role of the ulema, the religious scholars and officials, though many ulema proved to be resilient in the face of these changes, and those close to government gave their imprimatur to new laws.^[14]

It is impossible to appraise the degree of representation of the various Muslim ethnic groups in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Official sources do not indicate the ethnic background of Muslim government functionaries, as the ethnicity of a Muslim had no pertinence in the Ottoman polity. Reliable means of ascertaining ethnic roots of Muslim officials do not exist; and even where there is ample biographical information, the criteria used in classification tend to be subjective.^[15] Danişmend’s classification is no exception. For example, he apparently does not view the two grand viziers of the second constitutional period, Mahmud Shawkat Pasha and Sa‘id Halim Pasha, as Arabs. Both men were Ottomans with a principal Arab cultural affinity. Mahmud Shawkat was the scion of a Georgian family who had settled in Baghdad, and Sa‘id Halim was a grandson of the Egyptian khedive Muhammad ‘Ali. The ambiguity in the following authoritative description of as celebrated a personality in Arab history as Muhammad ‘Ali points to the extraneousness of queries pertaining to ethnicity: “an obscure Turk from the city of Kavala [in Albania] (although some believe he was a Kurd).”^[16]

Inferences from scant data and educated guesses about the ethnic background of Muslim government officials in the Ottoman service run the risk of imputing to the Ottoman political elite a prejudice of which it was not conscious. If the Tanzimat leaders did at all address themselves to the concept of equality of opportunity, what they had in mind was equality in rights and duties between Muslims and non-Muslims only.^[17] Arab underrepresentation in the Ottoman central bureaucracy may be explained by historical factors such as the relatively late incorporation of the Arab provinces into the empire; the effective closure of one avenue of elite integration due to the gradual obsolescence of the tımar^[18] system by the time of the conquests of Arab lands;^[19] the distance of the Arab regions from the capital; and the continuation of autonomous rule, particularly in tribal areas.

While the Tanzimat created a central bureaucratic elite keenly aware of its interests as a group and increasingly more independent of royal power, the provinces felt the impact of the reorganization only gradually. Many regions of the empire, including wide areas inhabited by Arabs, were not touched by İstanbul’s reform measures until the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, it was not solely via İstanbul that the provinces opened up to Western influences and ideas of reform. European merchants had penetrated some Arab lands long before the Tanzimat reformers. Syria had already experienced a period of reform under Egyptian rule. The region’s early contacts with the West later affected the cultural and political life of the province. Trade, missionary activity, and emigration had exposed Mediterranean Arab towns to European culture and modern political ideals and brought about a climate of opinion sympathetic to what the Tanzimat stood for.

Cairo, autonomous under Muhammad ‘Ali since the first decade of the nineteenth century, had a head start on İstanbul in acquiring a firsthand knowledge of European ideas, administrative ways, and technological advances. It implemented its own version of Tanzimat, as thinkers like Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi gave ideological expression to political and social change brought about by Muhammad ‘Ali’s policies. Further west in Tunis, a semiautonomous province of the empire closely linked to Europe, a Tunisian high-level bureaucrat took a keen interest in modernization. Khayr al-Din Pasha, who was Circassian by origin but culturally an Arab, praised and emulated the Tanzimat policies and statesmen before actually entering the service of the central government.^[20]

The Tanzimat also had adherents in Arab provinces under the direct control of İstanbul. Yusuf al-Khalidi has been described as “a Palestinian representative of the Tanzimat.”^[21] He was born in 1842 to the Khalidi family, one of the oldest notable families in Palestine. Yusuf went to İstanbul to attend the medical school and the newly founded American Robert College before he returned to Jerusalem at the age of twenty-four. He secured a decree from the vali (governor) of Syria to set up a secular Tanzimat-style rüşdiye (middle school) in Jerusalem. After a nine-year career as president of the reorganized municipality of Jerusalem, he was appointed to the Translation Bureau. He served as consul in the Russian town of Poti before he returned to Jerusalem in 1875. In İstanbul, both Yusuf and his brother Yasin had close links with the Ottoman reformers, particularly Foreign Minister Raşid Pasha, who was born and raised in Egypt;^[22] and the Khalidi family acquired a reputation as adherents of the “reform party.”^[23] A contemporary of Yusuf al-Khalidi was Khalil Ghanem, a Maronite Christian Arab from Beirut. As an employee in Beirut’s provincial administration, Ghanem attracted Governor Esat Pasha’s attention. Esat’s patronage won Ghanem a job as translator at the grand vizierate, after Esat’s promotion to that office.^[24] He assisted Midhat Pasha in drafting the constitution.^[25] Like Yusuf al-Khalidi, Khalil Ghanem was elected to the First Parliament in 1877. He was later to play a crucial role in the incipient Young Turk movement.

Neither Khalidi nor Ghanem nor any other bureaucrats of Arab descent, however, could break into the inner circle of the Tanzimat leadership, which remained restricted to a small group of İstanbul officials of an older generation. Like most political aspirants of their generation in İstanbul, these Arab functionaries were relegated to secondary positions by high-level bureaucrats who had consolidated their power at the critical juncture after Sultan Mahmud’s death. Thus, it came as no surprise that Yusuf al-Khalidi and Khalil Ghanem later distinguished themselves in the Parliament of 1877–78 by their strong criticism of the government and opposition to senior statesmen.

A literary and political group that coalesced in the capital under the name of New Ottomans (better known as Young Ottomans) in 1867 embodied the main organized opposition to the Tanzimat regime. This group came into existence as the decline of Muslim trade and onerous foreign loans brought the Ottoman economy to the brink of collapse. Its grievances centered on the personal rule of a small bureaucratic elite, excessive foreign interference in the political and economic affairs of the empire, and European cultural domination. The Young Ottomans shared the Western orientation and social and professional background of the Tanzimat leaders. They criticized, however, the oligarchic Tanzimat elite for adopting only the superficial aspects of Western culture instead of its political institutions and principles.

The Young Ottomans insisted that reforms had to be consistent with the precepts of Islamic law (şeriat or sharia).^[26] They advocated the establishment of constitutional government in the Ottoman Empire and argued that Islam, with its emphasis on consultation (meşveret), not only justified but called for parliamentary government. The Young Ottomans wrote profusely on constitutionalism, freedom, and patriotism, both in İstanbul and in European exile, where the London-based newspaper Hürriyet (Liberty) was their principal organ. While their liberal ideas reached only few in the provinces, sympathetic provincial officials assigned from İstanbul gradually transmitted and promoted their teachings.^[27] Due to the absence of a cohesive political organization, the potential of the Young Ottoman movement remained unfulfilled until its ideas found sympathizers among a new generation of statesmen in the Tanzimat tradition.

Later in the nineteenth century, some Arab intellectuals stressed Islamic ideas in a different modernist vein. Their forerunner Muhammad ‘Abduh and his disciples, many from the ulema (unlike the prominent Young Ottomans), addressed more systematically the compatibility of liberal ideas with Islam. ‘Abduh’s Islamic modernism (salafiyya) developed in response to similar social, economic, and political grievances that had nourished Young Ottoman thought (though Young Ottoman influences on this Arab movement have not been established). The salafiyya modernism flourished in Egypt and Syria in the post-Tanzimat period, thus also addressing the political and social malaise of the Ha midian period and intersecting with the later phase of the liberal movement against Abdülhamid.^[28]

In addition to the Islamic modernist trend, the Tanzimat engendered the growth of a secular movement in Syria led by Christian intellectuals under the auspices of the Syrian Scientific Society, founded in 1857, and hailed by Antonius as “the first outward manifestation of a collective national consciousness” and “the cradle of a new political movement.”^[29] The society exalted the Arab race and language, possibly inspired by the romantic nationalist current in Europe. One of its Christian leaders, Butrus Bustani,^[30] gave expression to the notion of a Syrian fatherland, but the society did not seek to rally the Syrian people around a sociopolitical platform, nor did it espouse secessionist aims, despite its criticism of the government. It remained as a secular literary society until the civil conflict of 1860 brought an end to its activities.^[31]

Antonius also suggests that missionary schools, which many Christian leaders of the Syrian Scientific Society attended, promoted an interest in the Arabic language and thus helped kindle the flame of Arab nationalism. Arabic was emphasized in the missionary curriculum in order to attract students from different segments of Syrian society, but this effort had little success in attracting Muslims until later in the century.^[32] Muslims preferred to send their children to new government schools that competed with the missionary secondary schools and offered instruction in Ottoman.^[33]

The state schools represented a social institution that contributed to the beginnings of a civic allegiance. The Tanzimat principle of political equality begot the concept of Ottomanism, a common allegiance of all subjects in equal status to the Ottoman dynasty. Tanzimat Ottomanism was premised on a reciprocity between the subject and the state but was not upheld by integrative political institutions. Nevertheless, formal equality before the law, coupled with secular restructuring of social institutions and centralization, provided the framework upon which an identification with country and people that transcended the immediate corporate group could be built by stressing the powerful symbol of the dynasty of a historical political entity.

The Young Ottomans infused the Tanzimat notion of Ottomanism with an ideological component that was intended to strengthen the relationship of the subject to the state.^[34] Indeed, in 1869 a citizenship law was passed that posited Ottoman subjects as Ottoman citizens. The Young Ottomans also promoted the concepts of legal representation and popular sovereignty that would erode the intercommunal divisions within the empire and focus the loyalty of Muslim and Christian alike on a geographical fatherland comprising Ottoman territories as well as on the ruling Ottoman dynasty. Having provided an Islamic basis to their ideas, the Young Ottomans believed that their vision of the Ottoman state would be readily acceptable to Turks and Arabs, while non-Muslim groups would be “bound by common interests to the common fatherland.”^[35] The constitution of 1876 was a consummation, as well as a test, of the Young Ottomans’ notion of Ottomanism.