Ottomanism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Chapter five of Tariq Ali's "The Clash of Fundamentalisms")

The Crusades had disrupted a world already in slow decline. Saladin's
victories had halted the process temporarily, but the internal
structures of the caliphate were damaged beyond repair and new
invasions were on the way. A Mongol army led by Hulagu Khan laid
siege to Baghdad in 1258. The Mongol leader called on the caliph to
surrender, promising that if he did so the city would be spared.
Foolish and vain till the last, the caliph refused. The Mongol armies
carried out their threat, sacked the city and executed the last
Abbasid caliph. The caliphate made an inglorious exit. A whole
culture perished as libraries were put to the torch. The Mongols
often showed their resentment of a more advanced civilisation by
destroying its treasury of knowledge. Baghdad was never to regain its
pre-eminence as the capital of Islamic civilisation.

Elsewhere in the region power diversified as regional potentates
recovered their dominion, but the centre of Islam was moving in the
direction of the Bosphorus. By the middle of the fifteenth century
Islam had spread across three continents. The pincer movement of
military force and trade was not the result of some great
master-plan, but its effect was the same.

Muslim armies had began to enter India via Afghanistan and the Indus
during the eighth and ninth centuries, while the populations on the
southern coast of the subcontinent were simultaneously coming under
the sway of Arab traders. Mass conversions began to take place.
Disaffection with local religions and the simplicity of Islam must
have played an equal part in this process. Muhammad's combination of
a monotheist universalism and the equality of all believers before
God was an attractive formula to those burdened with caste systems
and religious hierarchies.

In the centuries that followed, the same pattern was followed at the
confluence of the three major land trade-routes in the region of
Xinjiang in northwest China, while Muslim merchant fleets reached the
Indonesian archipelago and southern China as well as the western and
eastern coasts of Africa. By the fourteenth century, Islam's centre
of gravity was moving in the direction of the Bosphorus. Rome had
been saved. Constantinople fell. On four previous occasions the
armies of the caliphate from Damascus and Baghdad had laid siege to
the capital of Eastern Christianity. On each occasion the city had
survived. From 1300 onwards, the frontier emirate of Anatolia had
been expanding slowly as it steadily ate into Byzantine territory. In
1453, old dreams were realised and the ancient city of Byzantium,
later Constantinople, now acquired a new name: Istanbul. And a new
ruler: Mehmet II, whose forebear, Uthman, had founded the dynasty
that bore his name over a hundred years before.

On the eve of the total collapse of Islamic civilisation in the
Iberian peninsula, the Ottoman dynasty inaugurated its reign by
opening a new Islamic front in southeastern Europe. Within the next
century, the Ottomans took Hungary, swallowed the Balkans, nibbled
away at parts of the Ukraine and Poland and threatened Vienna. The
Spanish Catholics feared and Andalusian Muslims hoped that the
victorious Ottomans plight dispatch their navy to Andalusian seaports
and relieve their co-religionists, but a continental jihad was not
part of the Ottoman plans any more than it had been of Saladin s,
though on one occasion at the height of the Crusades, Saladin had
visited the Mediterranean shore and confided to an adviser that the
only way to defeat the Franj plague decisively might be to conquer
and civilise their homelands. Jerusalem had sufficed for him.
Constantinople satisfied Mehmet II.

Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a majority of
Muslims lived under the rule of the Ottoman, Safavid (Persia) and
Mughal (India) empires. The sultan in Istanbul was recognised as the
caliph by the majority of Muslims and became the caretaker of the
holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Istanbul became the new centre of
this world. The overwhelming majority of Arabs became the subjects of
the sultan. While Arabic remained the divine language, Turkish became
the court vernacular, used by the ruling family and administrative
and military elites throughout the empire, even though most of the
religious, scientific, literary and legal vocabulary was lifted
wholesale from Persian and Arabic. The original Turkish contribution
was poetry, statecraft and architecture. The Ottoman state, which
lasted five hundred years, was a remarkable enterprise on many
levels. It was a multi-religious state with the rights of Christians
and Jews recognised and protected. Many of the Jews expelled from
Spain and Portugal were granted refuge in the Ottoman lands and,
strange irony, that is how a large number returned to the Arab world,
settling not just in Istanbul, but serving the empire in Baghdad,
Cairo and Damascus.

Jews were not the only privileged refugees. German, French and Czech
Protestants fleeing Catholic revenge-squads during the wars of the
Reformation were also given protection by the Ottoman sultans. In the
latter case there was an additional political motive. The Ottoman
state closely followed developments in the rest of Europe and
vigorously defended its interests via a set of diplomatic, trade and
cultural alliances with some of the major European powers. The Pope,
however, was not regarded as a neutral observer and revolts against
Catholicism were viewed kindly by the Porte.

The Ottoman sultan in turn became a major figure in European
folklore, often demonised and vulgarised, but himself always aware of
his place in geography and history, as evidenced in this modest
letter of introduction by Suleiman the Magnificent, who reigned from
1520 to 1566, to the French king:

"I who am the Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the
dispenser of crowns to the monarchs on the face of the earth, the
shadow of God on earth, the Sultan and sovereign lord of the White
Sea and of the Black Sea, of Rumelia and of Anatolia, of Karamania,
of the land of Rum, of Zulkadria, of Diyarbekir, of Kurdistan, of
Aizerbaijan, of Persia, of Damascus, of Aleppo, of Cairo, of Mecca,
of Medina, of Jerusalem, of all Arabia, of Yemen and of many other
lands which my noble forefathers and my glorious ancestors (may Allah
light up their tombs!) conquered by the force of their arms and which
my August Majesty has made subject to my flaming sword and my
victorious blade, I, Sultan Suleiman Khan, son of Sultan Selim, son
of Sultan Bayezid: To thee, who art Francis, King of the land of
France."

The tolerance shown to Jews and Protestants was rarely, if ever,
extended to heretics within Islam. The mullahs of the empire ensured
that in all such cases punishment was brutal and swift. 'Remember
Martin Luther,' the kadi warned the sultan. The Reformation could be
supported because it served to divide Christianity, but the very idea
of a Muslim Luther was unacceptable. From the viewpoint of a majority
of Muslims, however, the Ottomans had preserved the heritage of their
religion, extended its frontiers, and in the Arab East created a new
universalist synthesis: an Ottoman Arab culture that united the
entire region via a state bureaucracy that presided over a common
administration and financial system. Even where the Ottoman
bureaucrats usurped power, as in the case of the Albanian-born
Muhammad Ali in Egypt, the basic structures of the state remained
unchanged.

But what was this state? And given its flaws, how did it manage to
delay its disintegration for so long? Three basic features marked the
Ottoman and, to varying degrees, other Muslim empires of the period:
the absence of private property in the countryside, where the
cultivator did not own and the owner (i.e. the state) did not
cultivate; the existence of a powerful non-hereditary bureaucratic
elite in the centres of administration; and a professional trained
army with a slave component. The first civil service academies in
Europe were created by the Ottomans. They had abolished the
traditional tribal aristocracy, forbidden the ownership of landed
estates and, in this fashion, preserved themselves as the only
dynasty in the empire and as the only repository of semi-divine
power. This was the theory, and though in practice many skilful
bureaucrats found ways to circumvent the rules, the basic structure
was never challenged. In combating dynastic threats, the Ottomans
created a civil service cadre recruited from the whole empire. The
devshirme system forced Christian families in the Balkans and
elsewhere to part with a son, who became the property of the Ottoman
state. He was sheltered, fed and educated till old enough to train in
the academy as a soldier or a bureaucrat. Thus Circassians,
Albanians, Slavs, Greeks, Armenians and even Italians often rose to
occupy the highest offices of the empire. (One such figure inspired
Ivo Andric's anti-Ottoman masterpiece, The Bridge on the Drina. An
example of Greek integration into the Ottoman empire is provided by
the epic figure of Khaireddin Barbarossa, the admiral of Greek
origin, who conquered Algeria for the Ottomans. Stories of his
exploits inspired versions of Red Beard the Pirate.)

Traditional Islamo-nomadic hostility to the ploughshare undoubtedly
determined the urban bias of the dynasties who ruled large tracts of
the world, but how far was it also the cause of the absence of landed
property within the Muslim domain? Was this simply the result of
local conditions? History would suggest otherwise. Despite the
current vogue for micro-narratives and national specificities, the
fact remains that in very different local conditions, the caliphates
in Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul, and later the Mughal empire
in India, did not favour the creation of a landed gentry or
peasant-ownership or village communities. Either would have aided
capital-formation, which might later have led to industrialisation.

Someone in search of a micro-narrative could discover the richness of
the agricultural techniques employed by the Arabs in Spain to prove
that working on the land was not taboo. But the Spanish example is
generally confined to the land surrounding the towns, where
cultivation was intense and carried out by the townsfolk. Land in the
countryside was rented from the state by middlemen who then hired
peasants to work on it. Some of the middlemen did become wealthy, but
they lived in the towns and that is where the surplus was spent. A
rigidly dynastic political structure, dependent on a turbulent
military caste, combined with the social subordination of the
countryside could not sustain the political and economic challenge
posed by Western Europe.

The main reason that the Ottomans staggered on till the First World
War is that none of the three vultures eyeing the prey - the British
empire, Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Habsburgs - could agree on a
division of the spoils. The only solution appeared to be to keep the
empire on its knees. The prolonged death-agony encouraged an insecure
Turkish nationalism, the epilogue of what had once been a model
multinational empire. The worst atrocities took place during the
First World War, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were
slaughtered and their properties confiscated, but the process had
begun much earlier. (The Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal depicts the
social decay and the anarchy of this threatening world in several
novels. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and
Lineages of the Absolutist State remain among the most insightful
explanations of the reasons for the rise of capitalism in Western
Europe and not in the Muslim lands.)

The end had already been visible since the middle of the nineteenth
century. Radical nationalist impulses had begun to develop in the
heart and the periphery of the Ottoman lands as early as the
eighteenth century. Modernist Turkish officers, influenced by the
French Revolution and Comte, began to plot against the regime in
Istanbul, while an altogether more retrograde influence was at work
in the Arab peninsula, inflamed by the teachings of a puritanical
preacher named Ibn Wahhab.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/08/2002

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