Arab Provinces Research Articles

Arab Perceptions of the Balkans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The opening decade of the last century witnessed dynamic political development in both the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the newly re-established independent Balkan states. The Arabs and their northern neighbours from the Balkans have inherited quite comprehensive patterns of perceptions vis-à-vis one another. In modern times, Arab attitudes towards the Balkans have very much in common with the shared experiences in modernisation. The paper aims to uncover these attitudes.

The repercussions of the British occupation of Egypt on Syria, 1882–83

Britain have been studied quite extensively from the Arab and British points of view, and considerable attention has focused on how the Ottoman State's reaction to the crisis and to Ottoman diplomacy during and after the crisis.' However, almost nothing has been written about the impact of the British occupation of Egypt on other Ottoman Arab provinces, especially Syria, one of the most important Arab provinces as far as the future of Ottoman presence in the area is concerned. In fact, it was only in the province of Syria that the impact of the crisis in Egypt was strongly felt. True, Colonel Ahmed Urabi, the leader of the mutiny in Egypt, made an abortive attempt to gain the sympathy of the Hijazis by sending letters to the provincial authorities in early August 1882, but Urabi's efforts produced no effect in the Hijaz.2 This article, therefore, focuses on the effects of the crisis on the Arab population of Syria and on the problems created by the arrival of thousands of Egyptian refugees in the coastal towns of that particular province. In addition, due attention will be paid to the Ottoman efforts to curb Urabi's influence in Syria and to the attitude of the Porte towards this group of Muslim refugees and exiles. Since the aim of this article is not to re-examine the developments in Egypt, there is no need to review the Egyptian crisis of 1881-82 here. Suffice it to say that it had its origins in a popular Egyptian movement, led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi, against Anglo-French political interference and financial domination and against the autocratic powers of the Sultan's representative, the Khedive Tevfik. These in turn led to Anglo-French military intervention from May 1882 onwards and ended in a British invasion and occupation of Egypt in September of the same year. Interestingly enough the available documents suggest that Syrians did not demonstrate any real interest in the developments in Egypt until the summer of 1882 when they were faced with a large number of refugees from Alexandria, the location of the first communal fighting that had

The Ottoman Conscription System, 1844–1914

The introduction of conscription in the Ottoman Empire of course was closely linked to the introduction of a European-style army, but it did not coincide with it.As is well known, the first attempt to create an army which was trained, equipped and dressed in the contemporary European fashion, was made by Sultan Selim III in 1792. His Nizam-i Cedid (New Order) army by all accounts was quite an impressive achievement in itself. Starting from a strength of about 2,500, the corps had 22,685 men and 1,590 officers in 1806, half of them stationed in the capital, the rest in provincial centres in Anatolia. When pressure against him and his new army on the part of the old army establishment, primarily the Janissaries, mounted, however, the Sultan succumbed without any attempt to use the considerable strength of his new army and disbanded the corps in 1808.The Nizam troops constituted a professional army. They were not recruited on the basis of universal conscription, but rather in a fashion which is reminiscent of the system introduced by Peter the Great in Russia or the Bunichah system in Persia. Governors and notables in Anatolia (not in the Balkans or the Arab provinces) were required to send contingents of peasant boys to Istanbul for training. Those enrolled in the corps remained under arms for an unspecified period.

Secrecy in early Arab nationalist organizations

It was in the period 1908-14, the years of Young Turk rule, that protonationalist and nationalist activity significantly increased in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Arab activists in Istanbul, in the Fertile Crescent, and also in the emigre communities outside the Empire established a series of nationalist societies in order to defend the rights of the Arabs in the Empire. Most of these organizations were considered illegal by the Ottoman authorities. It is the purpose of this article to investigate the modi operandi in which these societies tried to preserve their secrecy. The first element in preserving the secrecy of the societies was strict selection from among those who wanted to join them. Only those deemed appropriate, able to keep secrets, were accepted. The al-Fatat society's security measures were the most strict from this standpoint. Al-Fatat (the Young, or in full Jam'iyyat al-Umma al- 'Arabiyya al-Fatat, the Society of the Young Arab Nation) was the first of the secret Arab societies during the Young Turk period. It was established in 1909 in Paris by several Arab students studying there, for the purpose of protecting the 'natural rights' of the Arab nation and placing it within the 'ranks of living nations'.' Every new candidate to the society had to be recommended by a current member, and in most cases even this was not sufficient, and another member of the society was appointed to investigate him. After the investigation the candidate was given basic information about the society, but in such a way that retreat was still possible without affecting the secrecy of the society. Even after the member was already sworn into the society, he would only know the two members who had sworn him in (one of them the person who had recommended him), and he would receive the society's instructions through them. The programme of the society would only be revealed to him after a trial period of three months. Letters from the society's centre would reach the members from the address 'the Desert' (al-badiya). without their knowing who the senders or the members of the centre were. And as an additional security measure for preserving the secrecy of the members' identity, each member had a personal number.2 However, the fact that despite all these measures society member Mustafa al-Shihabi, who was not a senior member in the society, could relate that he knew almost all of the

Modern Egyptian renaissance man

The rise of political consciousness in the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century has long been referred to as an era of rebirth or resurrection (nahḍa), and from its earliest stages this period saw a dual process of aspirations to political emancipation and creative waves of cultural regeneration. Thus George Antonius was moved to attribute the beginnings of the Arab national movement to the foundation of a modest literary society in Beirut in 1847; the two figures who dominated the intellectual life of Syria in the mid nineteenth century—Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī and Buṭrus al-Bustānī—were ded icated to the resurrection of the lost world of classical Arabic literature, to the virtual re-creation of Arabic as one of the languages of the modern world, and to preaching the virtues of education based on inter-confessional tolerance and patriotic ideals. The most distinguished area of the early history of modern Arabic literature is neo-classical poetry, whose revival of the achievements of the golden age of the ‘Abbāsids provided the foundation on which the first tentative steps towards the renewal of the great tradition were to be based. Indeed the technical excellence of the neo-classical mode was such that it dominated poetry in Egypt at least until the late 1920s, and for even longer in Iraq and the rest of the Levant.

Ottoman Alexandria: The Paradox of Decline and the Reconfiguration of Power in Eighteenth-Century Arab Provinces

Ottoman Alexandria: The Paradox of Decline and the Reconfiguration of Power in Eighteenth-Century Arab Provinces

Ottoman Alexandria: the Paradox of Decline and the Reconfiguration of Power in Eighteenth-Century Arab Provinces

Plusieurs specialistes ont recemment remis en question la these selon laquelle l'Empire Ottoman a connu un irremediable declin de son activite economique et de son pouvoir politique. A cette occasion l'auteur propose une etude sociale economique et urbaine de la ville d'Alexandrie au 18eme siecle, puis la compare a d'autres cites de l'Empire Ottoman.

The Treaties of Erzurum (1823 and 1848) and the Changing Status of Iranians in the Ottoman Empire

Iranian merchants, artists, and scholars had an almost continuous presence in the Ottoman Empire from its very beginnings in the thirteenth century. After the Arab provinces were added to the empire in the sixteenth century, their numbers were further augmented by pilgrims on their way to the holy cities of the Hijaz and Iraq. As such, in terms of actual numbers, during any period of its history there were probably more Iranians resident in the Ottoman Empire than from any other foreign state. This assertion, however, cannot be proven empirically, for before the nineteenth century the Ottoman sultans did not recognize the Iranians as constituting a “nation” along the model they had established for the European communities resident in the empire.

La conquête ottomane et le développement des grandes villes arabes

A continuous decline of the Arab provinces of the Empire is generally regarded as the main feature of the Ottoman domination (XVIth to XlXth century). A careful study of the modern history of Syria and Egypt seems however to show that the integration of those provinces within the Ottoman Empire brought, in the XVIth century, a progress of trading due to the development of the currents of exchanges inside a political structure which stretched over 2 500 000 square kM. Of this growth the main cities of the Arab Near East, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo, bear testimony, first through the development of their commercial substructures expanding of the cantral districts where market places and caravansérails clustered), and then through the conspicuous spreading of the urbanized zone (about 50 % in Damascus and Aleppo). Then, the incontestable decline of these towns underwent in the XVIIIth and XlXth century is wrongly ascribed to the whole penod of the Ottoman domination, since the beginning of that period seems, on the contrary, to reveal a real urban growth.

Ottoman Subsidies to the Hijaz, 1877–1886

Students of nineteenth-century Ottoman political history have concentrated on the central provinces of the Empire. Students of Arab political history of the same period have concentrated on anti-Ottoman nationalism centered in Cairo and Beirut. Relatively little work has yet been done to illuminate the nature of Ottoman government in the Arab provinces. The picture that is presented by Western travelers, Arab nationalists reminiscing about their youth, and diplomatic reports has been incomplete, biased against the Imperial government, and sometimes factually inaccurate.

Mandates and Trusteeships with Particular Reference to Palestine

Under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Mandates System applied to two distinct sets of territories. It applied, first, to the former African and Asiatic colonies of Germany for which it was originally intended, but with which we are not here concerned. And it applied, secondly, to the Arab provinces which had been wrested from Turkey in the course of the First World War. These provinces had been divided for that purpose into three mandated areas: Syria and the Lebanon, which were placed under the guardianship of France; Mesopotamia, later called Iraq, and Palestine both of which were entrusted to Great Britain, whose forces had played a decisive part in their conquest or liberation from Ottoman rule. Today, after the accession to independence of Iraq before, and of Syria and of Lebanon during and after the Second World War, Palestine alone remains subject to foreign tutelage. The consideration of Mandates and Tusteeships in the Middle East today resolves itself, therefore, on the one hand into a comparative analysis of these two international regimes and, on the other, into a discussion of the past, present, and future of Palestine.