Soon after the parade, city authorities tried once again to ban prostitution. The heads of the town quarters were told to report anyone suspicious, and town criers were sent round to urge women to wear their veils properly. Yet within days of these new orders, the barber claimed, ?we saw the very same girls walking the alleys and markets as was their custom.? At that point, the governor, As?ad Pasha al-Azm, abandoned all efforts to expel the bold prostitutes and chose to tax them instead. The Azm governors abused their powers of office to enrich themselves at the people’s expense, yet they could not curb vice or control the soldiers nominally under their command. The barber of Damascus was deeply dismayed. Could a state governed by such men long survive?

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Ottomans and the Arabs had come to a crossroads. On the face of it, the Ottomans had succeeded in absorbing the Arab world into their empire. Over the course of two centuries the Ottomans had extended their rule from the southernmost tip of the Arabian peninsula to the frontiers of Morocco in northwestern Africa. The Ottoman sultan was universally accepted by the Arabs as their legitimate sovereign. They prayed in the sultan’s name each Friday, they contributed soldiers for the sultan’s wars, and they paid their taxes to the sultan’s agents. The great majority of Arab subjects, those who farmed the land in the countryside and the city-dwellers who worked as craftsmen and merchants, had accepted the Ottoman social contract. All they expected in return was safety for themselves, security for their property, and the preservation of Islamic values. Yet, an important change was taking place in the Arab lands. Whereas in the early Ottoman centuries the Arabs, as free-born Muslims, were excluded from high offices reserved to the servile elites recruited through the devshirme, or “boy levy,” by the mid-eighteenth century local notables were rising to the highest ranks of provincial administration and awarded the title “pasha.” The Azms of Damascus were but one example of a broader phenomenon that extended from Egypt through Palestine and Mount Lebanon to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula. The rise of local leaders came at the expense of Istanbul’s influence in the Arab lands, as more tax money was spent locally on the armed forces and the building projects of local governors. The phenomenon spread across a number of Arab provinces, with the cumulative effect being a growing threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the proliferation of local leaders led many Arab provinces to rebel against Istanbul’s rule. Local leaders in the Arab provinces came from diverse backgrounds, ranging from heads of Mamluk households to tribal shaykhs and urban notables. They were driven by ambition more than any specific grievance with the Ottoman way of doing things. They did have wealth in common: they were, without exception, large landholders who had taken advantage of changes in Ottoman land practices to build up huge estates, which they held for life and in some cases passed on to their children. They diverted the revenues of their estates away from the government’s treasury to meet their own needs. They built lavish palaces and maintained their own armies to reinforce their power. Istanbul?s loss was a real gain to the local economy in the Arab provinces, and the authority to extend patronage to artisans and militiamen only enhanced the power of local lords. Though such local notables were not unique to the Arab provinces—similar leaders emerged in the Balkans and Turkish Anatolia—the Arab lands were less central to Istanbul, in every sense of the word. The Ottomans relied less on revenues and troops from the Arab provinces than they did from the Balkans and Anatolia. Moreover, the Arab lands were much farther from Istanbul, and the central government was unwilling to spare the troops and resources to put down minor rebellions. Istanbul was more concerned with challenges from Vienna and Moscow than troubles posed by local leaders in Damascus and Cairo. By the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was facing far greater threats from its European neighbors than anything the Arab provinces might produce. The Habsburgs in Austria were rolling back the Ottoman conquests in Europe. Until 1683 the Ottomans were pressing at the gates of Vienna. By 1699 the Austrians had defeated the Ottomans and were awarded Hungary, Transylvania, and parts of Poland in the Treaty of Karlowitz—the first territorial losses the Ottomans had ever suffered. Peter the Great of Russia was pressing the Ottomans in the Black Sea region and in the Caucasus. Local notables in Baghdad or Damascus were of no consideration compared to threats of this order of magnitude. Ottoman defeats by European armies emboldened local challengers inside Ottoman domains. As local leaders grew more powerful, the Ottoman officials that were sent to the Arab provinces gradually lost the respect and obedience of their Arab subjects. Government officials also lost authority over the sultan’s soldiers, who grew lawless and engaged in scuffles with local soldiers and the militias of local leaders. Insubordination in military ranks in turn undermined the authority of the Islamic judges and scholars, who traditionally served as the guardians of public order. Where the Ottomans were seen to be ineffectual, the people turned increasingly to local leaders to provide for their security instead. In Basra, a local Christian merchant wrote, “Respect and fear were given to the chiefs of the Arabs, and as for the Ottoman, nobody goes in awe of him.”⁷ A state that loses the respect of its subjects is in trouble. The chronicler ’Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, analyzing the breakdown of Ottoman authority over the Mamluks in eighteenth-century Egypt, reflected: “If this age should urinate in a bottle, time’s physician would know its ailment.”⁸ The emergence of local leaders lay at the heart of the Ottoman illness and could only be redressed by a strong reassertion of the state’s authority. The Porte’s dilemma was to secure enough stability on its European frontiers to free the necessary resources to address the challenges within its Arab provinces. The nature of local rule differed from one region to the next and posed a variable threat to Istanbul’s authority. Roughly speaking, those provinces closest to the Ottoman center were the most benign, with prominent families like the Shihabs in Mount Lebanon, the Azms in Damascus, and the Jalilis in Mosul establishing dynasties loyal to Ottoman rule but pressing for the greatest possible autonomy within those limits.⁹ Further to the south, in Baghdad, Palestine, and Egypt, Mamluk leaders emerged who sought to expand the territory under their control in direct challenge to the Ottoman state. The emergence of the Sa’udi-Wahabi confederation in Central Arabia posed the gravest threat to the Ottoman government when it seized control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and prevented the annual Ottoman pilgrimage caravans from reaching the holy cities. In contrast, more remote provinces, such as Algiers, Tunis, and Yemen, were happy to remain vassals of the Ottoman sultan, paying an annual tribute in return for extensive autonomy. These local leaders in no way comprised an Arab movement. Many were not ethnic Arabs, and several did not even speak Arabic. The challengers to Ottoman rule in the second half of the eighteenth century were instead ambitious individuals acting in their own interests with little concern for the Arab people under their rule. In isolation, they posed little threat to the Ottoman center. When they worked together, however—as when the Mamluks in Egypt entered an alliance with a local leader in Northern Palestine—they were capable of conquering whole Ottoman provinces.