The Ottomans and their Arab citizens experienced increased interaction with Europe throughout the nineteenth century, forcing the people of the Middle East to recognize that Europe had surpassed them in military and economic might. Although most Ottomans remained convinced of the cultural superiority of their world, their reformers argued that they needed to gain mastery over the ideas and technology of Europe if Europe was not to gain mastery over them. The Ottomans and their autonomous Arab vassals in Egypt and Tunisia began by reforming their armies. It soon became apparent that the revenue base of the state had to expand to support the expense of a modern army. Administrative and economic practices thus were changed along European lines with the hope that prosperity and increased tax revenues would follow. More and more European technology was imported, pushed by European capitalists looking for foreign markets for their manufactured goods and machinery. The sultan and his viceroys in Tunis and Cairo were keen to use the benefits of modern European technology—such as telegraphs, steamships, and railways—as visible signs of progress and development. This technology was expensive, however, and as the educated elite in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tunis grew concerned about their rulers’ extravagance, they began to call for constitutions and parliaments as the missing element in the reform agenda. Each phase of the reforms was intended to strengthen the institutions of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab vassal states and to protect them from European encroachment. In this, the reformers were to be disappointed, for the reform era left the Ottoman world increasingly vulnerable to European penetration. Informal European control through consular pressure, trade, and capital investment would be followed by formal European domination as first Tunisia, then the Ottoman government, and finally Egypt failed to meet their financial commitments to foreign creditors.

The era of Ottoman reforms began at the height of the Second Egyptian Crisis, in 1839. The death of Sultan Mahmud II and the accession of his teenage son Abdulmecid I was hardly an auspicious moment to announce a program of radical reform. Yet the Ottoman Empire, under imminent threat from Muhammad ’Ali’s Egyptian army, needed European goodwill more than ever. To secure Europe’s guarantees of its territory and sovereignty, the Ottoman government believed it needed to demonstrate to the European powers that it could adhere to European norms of statecraft as a responsible member of the community of modern states. Moreover, the reformers who had worked under Mahmud II were determined to consolidate the changes already undertaken under the late sultan’s reign, and to commit his successor to the reform process. These twin motives would characterize the era of Ottoman reforms: public relations gestures to win European support coupled with a genuine commitment to reform the empire in order to ensure its survival against both internal and external threats. On November 3, 1839, the Ottoman foreign minister, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, read a reform decree on behalf of Abdulmecid I to an invited group of Ottoman and foreign dignitaries in Istanbul. On that date the Ottomans entered a period of administrative reforms that, between 1839 and 1876, would transform their state into a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—a period known as the Tanzimat (literally, “reordering”). Three major milestones mark the Tanzimat: the 1839 Reform Decree; the 1856 Reform Decree, which restated and extended the agenda of 1839; and the Constitution of 1876. The decrees of 1839 and 1856 reveal the debt of Ottoman reformers to Western political thought. The first document set out a modest, three-point reform agenda: to ensure “perfect security for life, honour, and property” for all Ottoman subjects; to establish “a regular system of assessing taxes”; and to reform the terms of military service by regular conscription and fixed terms of service.⁶ The 1856 Decree reiterated the reforms set out in 1839 and expanded on the process to address reforms in the courts and penal system. Corporal punishment was to be curbed, and torture abolished. The decree sought to regularize the finances of the empire through annual budgets that would be open to public scrutiny. The decree also called for the modernization of the financial system and the establishment of a modern banking system “to create funds to be employed in augmenting the sources of wealth” in the empire through such public works as roads and canals. “To accomplish these objects,” the decree concluded, “means shall be sought to profit by the science, the art, and the funds of Europe, and thus gradually to execute them.”⁷ However, to view the Tanzimat in the light of the major decrees alone would be to overlook the full scope of reforms carried out between 1839 and 1876. The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a major transformation in the chief institutions of Ottoman state and society. In order to reform the tax base and ensure its future prosperity, the government began to conduct a regular census and introduced a new system of land records that replaced the tax farms of old with individual title, which was more in line with Western notions of private property. The provincial administration was completely overhauled to provide a regular system of government reaching from provincial capitals like Damascus and Baghdad down to the village level. These changes required thousands of new bureaucrats with a modern, technical education. To meet this need, the state established a network of new elementary, intermediate, and high schools styled on European curricula to train civil servants. Similarly, the laws of the empire were codified in an ambitious project to reconcile Islamic law with Western codes to make the Ottoman legal system more compatible with European legal norms. So long as the reforms applied to the higher echelons of government, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire took little interest in the Tanzimat. In the course of the 1850s and 1860s, however, the reforms began to touch the lives of individuals. Ever fearful of taxation and conscription, Ottoman subjects resisted all state efforts to inscribe their names in the government’s registers. Parents avoided sending their children to state schools, fearing that by registering their names for study they would end up in the army. Townsmen avoided census officials and farmers avoided land registration for as long as they could. Yet as the bureaucracy grew in size and efficiency, the people of the empire succumbed to one of the imperatives of modern government: to maintain accurate records on the state’s subjects and their property. The sultan was no less affected by the reform process than his subjects. The absolute power of the Ottoman sultan eroded as the center of political gravity shifted from the sultan’s palace to the offices of the Ottoman government in the Sublime Porte. The Council of Ministers took on the principal legislative and executive roles in government, and the grand vizier emerged as the head of government. The sultan was reduced to the ceremonial and symbolic role of head of state. This evolution was capped by the promulgation of the constitution in 1876, which, while leaving great powers in the sultan’s hands, broadened political participation through the establishment of a parliament. In the course of thirty-seven years, Ottoman absolutism had been replaced by a constitutional monarchy.

There are dangers inherent in any major reform program, particularly when foreign ideas are involved. Conservative Ottoman Muslims denounced the Tanzimat for introducing un-Islamic innovations into state and society. No issue proved more explosive than changes to the status of Christians and Jews as non-Muslim minority communities in Sunni Muslim Ottoman society. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European powers increasingly used minority rights as a pretext to intervene in Ottoman affairs. Russia extended its protection to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Ottoman Christian community. France had long enjoyed a special relationship with the Maronite church in Mount Lebanon and in the nineteenth century developed formal patronage of all Ottoman Catholic communities. The British had no historic ties to any church in the region. Nonetheless, Britain represented the interests of the Jews, the Druze, and the tiny communities of converts that gathered around Protestant missionaries in the Arab world. So long as the Ottoman Empire straddled areas of strategic importance, the European powers would exploit any means to meddle with Ottoman affairs. Issues of minority rights provided the powers with ample opportunity to impose their will on the Ottomans—sometimes with disastrous consequences for both Europeans and Ottomans alike. The “Holy Places Dispute” of 1851–1852 demonstrated the dangers of great-power intervention on all parties. Differences arose between Catholic and Greek Orthodox monks over their respective rights and privileges to Christian holy places in Palestine. France and Russia responded by putting pressure on Istanbul to confer privileges on their respective client communities. The Ottomans first conceded to French pressures, giving the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the Catholics. The Russians were determined to secure a bigger trophy for the Greek Orthodox Church so as not to lose face to the French. But after the Ottomans made similar concessions to the Russians, the French emperor Napoleon III dispatched a state-of-the-art propeller-driven warship up the Dardanelles to deliver his ambassador to Istanbul and threatened to bombard Ottoman positions in North Africa if the Porte did not rescind the concessions to Russia’s Orthodox clients. When the Ottomans caved in to the French, the Russians threatened war. What began as an Ottoman-Russian war in the autumn of 1853 degenerated into the Crimean War of 1854–1855, pitting Britain and France against Tsarist Russia in a violent conflict that claimed over 300,000 lives and left many more wounded. The consequences of European intervention on behalf of Ottoman minority communities were too serious for the Porte to allow the practice to continue. The Ottomans had made a half-hearted attempt to reclaim the initiative over non-Muslim minority communities in the 1839 Reform Decree. “The Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall, without exception, enjoy our imperial concessions,” the sultan declared in his firman, or rescript. Clearly he and his administrators needed to make a stronger statement of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims if they were to persuade the European powers that their interventions were no longer needed to ensure the welfare of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The problem for the Ottoman government was to gain the consent of its own Muslim majority for a policy of equality between different faiths. The Qur?an draws clear distinctions between Muslims and the other two monotheistic faiths, and these distinctions had been enshrined in Islamic law. For the Ottoman government to disregard such distinctions would, in the view of many believers, go against God?s book and God?s law. In the aftermath of the Crimean War the Ottoman government decided to risk public outrage at home to prevent further European interventions on behalf of the non-Muslim minority communities of the empire. The 1856 Reform Decree was timed to coincide with the Peace of Paris, concluding the Crimean War. Most of the provisions of the 1856 Reform Decree were concerned with the rights and responsibilities of Ottoman Christians and Jews. The decree established for the first time complete equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of their religion: “Every distinction or designation pending to make any class whatever of the subjects of my empire inferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be forever effaced from administrative protocol.” The decree went on to promise all Ottoman subjects access to schools and government jobs, as well as to military conscription, without distinction by religion or nationality. The reform process had already been controversial for its European leanings. But nothing in the reforms prior to the 1856 Decree had directly contravened the Qur’an—revered by Muslims as the literal and eternal Word of God. To contradict the Qur’an was to contradict God, and not surprisingly the decree provoked outrage among pious Muslims when it was read in the cities of the empire. An Ottoman judge in Damascus recorded in his diary in 1856, “The decree conferring complete equality on Christians was read in Court, granting equality and freedom and other such violations of the eternal Islamic law. . . . It was ashes on [the heads of] all Muslims. We ask Him to strengthen the religion and make the Muslims victorious.”⁸ Ottoman subjects understood immediately the significance of this particular reform. The reforms of the Tanzimat were taking the Ottoman Empire into dangerous territory. With the government promulgating reforms that contravened the religion and values of the majority of the population, the reform process risked provoking rebellion against the authority of the government and violence between its subjects.