CHAPTER 2

The Arab Challenge to Ottoman Rule

A barber comes to know everything that happens in his town. His day is taken up in conversations with people from all walks of life. Judging by the record of his diary, Ahmad al-Budayri “al-Hallaq” (“the Barber”) was a great conversationalist who was well informed on the politics and society of Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century. The issues covered in his diary are familiar subjects of barbershop conversations everywhere: local politics, the high cost of living, the weather, and general complaints about how things were no longer as they were in the good old days. Apart from what he wrote in his diary, we know very little about the life of Budayri, the barber of Damascus. He was too modest a man to feature in contemporary biographical dictionaries, the “who’s who” of Ottoman times. His diary is all the more remarkable for that. It was unusual for tradesmen to be literate in the eighteenth century, let alone to leave a written record of their thoughts. He told us little about himself, preferring to write about others. We do not know when he was born or died, though it is clear that the diary, spanning the years 1741–1762, was written when he was a mature man. A pious Muslim, Budayri belonged to a mystical Sufi order. He was married, with children, but had little to say of his family life. He was proud of his profession, spoke with admiration of the teacher who inducted him into the trade, and recalled the prominent men whose heads he had shaved. The barber of Damascus was a loyal Ottoman subject. In 1754 he noted the shock felt by the people of Damascus when they heard of the death of Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754). He recorded the public celebrations marking the ascension of the sultan’s successor, Osman III (r. 1754–1757), when Damascus “was decorated more beautifully than ever in public memory. May God preserve this Ottoman State,” he prayed, “until the end of time. Amen.”¹ The barber had good reason to pray for the preservation of the Ottoman state. According to Ottoman notions of statecraft, good government was a delicate balance of four interreliant elements conceived as a “circle of equity.” First, the state needed a large army to exercise its authority. It took great wealth to maintain a large army, and taxes were the state’s only regular source of wealth. To collect taxes, the state had to promote the prosperity of its subjects. For the people to be prosperous the state must uphold just laws, which brings us full circle—back to the responsibilities of the state. Most Ottoman political analysts of the day would have explained political disorder in terms of the neglect of one of these four elements. From all he saw going on in Damascus in the mid-eighteenth century, Budayri was convinced that the Ottoman Empire was in serious trouble. The governors were corrupt, the soldiers were unruly, prices were high, and public morality was undermined by the decline in the government’s authority. Arguably, the root of the problem lay with the governors of Damascus. In Budayri’s time, Damascus was ruled by a dynasty of local notables rather than by Ottoman Turks dispatched from Istanbul to govern on the sultan’s behalf, as was standard practice in the empire. The ruling Azm family had built their fortune in the seventeenth century by accumulating extensive agricultural lands around the Central Syrian town of Hama. They later settled in Damascus, where they established themselves among the rich and powerful of the city. Between 1724 and 1783, five members of the Azm family ruled Damascus—for a total of forty-five years. Several Azm family members were concurrently appointed to govern the provinces of Sidon, Tripoli, and Aleppo. Taken together, the Azm family’s rule over the Syrian provinces represents one of the more significant local leaderships to emerge in the Arab provinces in the eighteenth century. We might think today that Arabs would have preferred being governed by fellow Arabs rather than by Ottoman bureaucrats. However, Ottoman bureaucrats in the eighteenth century were still servants of the sultan who, at least in theory, owed their full loyalty to the state and ruled without self-interest. The Azms, in contrast, had clear personal and family interests at stake and used their time in high office to enrich themselves and to build their dynasty at the Ottoman state’s expense. The circle of equity was broken, and things were beginning to fall apart.

Budayri discussed at length the strengths and weaknesses of Azm rule in Damascus. As‘ad Pasha al-Azm ruled for most of the period covered by Budayri’s diary. His fourteen-year reign (1743–1757) was to prove the longest of any governor in Ottoman Damascus. The barber could be quite lavish in his praise of As’ad Pasha, but he found a lot to criticize. He condemned the Azm governors for their plunder of the city’s wealth and held them responsible for disorders among the military and the breakdown in public morality. Under Azm rule, the army had degenerated from a disciplined force upholding law and order to a disorderly rabble. The Janissaries in Damascus were split into two groups—the imperial troops dispatched from Istanbul (the kapikullari), and the local Janissaries of Damascus (the yerliyye). There were also a number of irregular forces of Kurds, Turcomans, and North Africans. The different corps were in constant conflict and posed a real challenge to peace in the city. In 1756 the residents of the ‘Amara quarter paid dearly for siding with the imperial Janissaries in their fight with the local Damascene Janissaries. The latter retaliated by putting the whole of the ’Amara quarter—homes and shops—to the torch.² Budayri recounts numerous instances of soldiers attacking and even killing residents of Damascus with complete impunity. In times of high anxiety, the townspeople responded by closing their shops and shutting themselves in their homes, bringing the economic life of the city to a standstill. The barber’s diary captures a real sense of the menace posed by the “security forces” to the average Damascene’s person and property.

Budayri also held the Azms responsible for the chronic high food prices in Damascus. Not only did they fail to regulate the markets and ensure fair prices, but as large landholders, Budayri alleged, the Azm governors actually abused their position to hoard and create artificial grain shortages to maximize their personal profits. Once, when the price of bread had fallen, As’ad Pasha sent his retainers to pressure the bakers to raise their prices in order to protect the wheat market, which was the source of his family’s wealth.³ In his diary, Budayri railed against this accumulation of wealth by the Azm governors while the common folk of Damascus went hungry. As‘ad Pasha’s abuses of power were epitomized by the palace he built in central Damascus, which still stands in the city today. The project consumed all of the building materials and all of the trained masons and artisans of the city, driving up the cost of construction for common Damascenes. As’ad Pasha ordered his builders to strip precious building materials from older houses and buildings in the city, without regard for their owners or their historic value. The project was a testament to As‘ad Pasha’s greed. According to Budayri, As’ad Pasha constructed the palace with countless hiding places for his vast personal wealth “under the floors, in the walls, the ceilings, the water reservoirs and even the toilets.”⁴ The collapse in military discipline, combined with the cupidity of the Azm governors, Budayri believed, had led to a grievous deterioration in public morals. The legitimacy of the Ottoman state rested in large part on its ability to promote Islamic values and to maintain the institutions necessary for its subjects to live within the precepts of Sunni Islam. A breakdown in public morality was thus a clear sign of a breakdown in the state’s authority. In Budayri’s view, there was no greater proof of the decline of public morality than the brazen comportment of the prostitutes in his city. Damascus was a conservative town where respectable women covered their hair, dressed modestly, and had few opportunities to mix with men outside their own families. The prostitutes of Damascus observed none of these niceties. The barber frequently complained about drunken prostitutes, carousing with equally drunken soldiers, who strode through the streets and markets of Damascus with their faces unveiled and their hair uncovered. The governors of Damascus tried several times to ban prostitution in the city, with no effect. Emboldened by the support of the city?s soldiers, the prostitutes refused to comply. It would seem that the common people of Damascus came to accept, even admire, the city’s prostitutes. One beautiful young woman named Salmun completely captivated the people of Damascus in the 1740s, her name becoming a byword in the local slang for all that was trendy and beautiful. A particularly smart dress would be called a “Salmuni dress,” or a novel piece of jewelry a “Salmuni bauble.” Salmun was a reckless young woman defiant of authority. In a scene reminiscent of Bizet’s Carmen, Salmun crossed paths with a qadi (judge) in downtown Damascus one afternoon in 1744. She was drunk and carrying a knife. The judge’s retainers shouted at her to clear the path. Salmun only laughed at them and launched herself at the qadi with her knife. The judge’s men barely managed to restrain her. The qadi had her arrested by the authorities, who executed Salmun for the outrage. A town crier was then sent through the streets of Damascus ordering all prostitutes to be killed. Many women fled, and others went into hiding.⁵ The prohibition proved short-lived, and the prostitutes of Damascus were soon back on the streets, unveiled and uninhibited. “In those days,” the barber wrote in 1748, “corruption increased, the servants of God were oppressed, and prostitutes proliferated in the markets, day and night.” He described a parade of the prostitutes held in honor of a local saint with outrage at both the profanation of religious values and at the fact that the Damascene public seemed to accept it. A prostitute had fallen in love with a young Turkish soldier who had fallen ill. She vowed to hold a prayer session in homage to the saint if her lover regained his health. When the soldier recovered, she fulfilled her vow:She walked in a kind of procession with the other sinful girls of her kind. They went through the bazaars carrying candles and incense burners. The group was singing and beating on tambourines with their faces unveiled and their hair over their shoulders. The people looked on without objecting. Only the righteous raised their voices, shouting “allahu akbar” [“God is great”].⁶