The Jidda massacre of 1858

Abstract

The history of the modern Middle East resembles an intricate Persian rug with almost as many patterns discernible as there are observers looking at it. Any given major event may be analysed differently by adherents of the different historiographical schools. Some would claim that Great Power manipulations were the determining factor in history while others opt for political structural changes, technological modernisation, or religious identity. In actuality, while the thread of any one of these factors may be traced through the whole it is necessary to examine all of them and their relationship to each other to reconstruct an event. The violence which broke out in Jidda in 1858 is an example of the interaction between religion, politics, and economic change. The tension that this mixture caused was released by violence but the violence was ultimately powerless to reverse the changes taking place in the 1850s. The Hijaz has been the focal point of Muslim religious feeling throughout the world but it has remained, after the first Hijri century, on the periphery of Islamic political power. Mecca and Madina are the two holiest Muslim cities. Events taking place there reverberated throughout the Muslim world. There existed the strong feeling among Muslims that the Hijaz should be entirely Muslim, i.e., the presence of non-Muslims was a desecration. By extension the geographical restriction which had applied originally only to Mecca and Madina came to embrace the whole Hijaz. Jidda however, was an anomaly since it was the port of Mecca and the major entrepot of commerce in the Red Sea. Christian merchants were tolerated there by order of the Ottoman Sultan, guardian of the two sacred cities since 1517. Despite a massacre of English merchants in 1727, a small foreign community resided in Jidda continuously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the trade, however, was either in the hands of Muslims, especially Indians, who were subjects of European states or with merchants from the Hadramawt settled in Jidda. The issue of Westernisation was seen in the Hijaz primarily in religious terms. The Muslim subjects of foreign powers provided in the Hijaz the crucial mediating role between East and West played elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks and other Ottoman Christians. Foreign consuls were restricted to Jidda. They had no authority whatever beyond the coast. The terribly hot climate, the high death rate, and the low prestige combined to ensure that the position of consul in Jidda would not be widely desired. The Hijaz lived on religion. Every year thousands of pilgrims came to Mecca and Madina in fulfillment of their religious obligation. The transport, housing, feeding and taxing of the pilgrims was the chief and nearly only business of the people and government of the Hijaz. Cairo and Istanbul annually sent gifts, subsidies, and grain to the Hijaz as religious acts of charity. In return protection of the Hijaz conferred upon the Sultan religious prestige and