The Ottomans were not the first Muslim rulers to decree equality between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Muhammad ‘Ali had done this in Egypt in the 1820s; however, this earlier decree had more to do with Muhammad ’Ali’s wish to tax and conscript all Egyptians on an equal basis, without distinction by religion, than with any concern to liberate minority communities. Although objections undoubtedly were raised among pious Muslims when the principle of equality was applied during the Egyptian occupation of Greater Syria in the 1830s, Muhammad ?Ali was sufficiently strong to face down his critics and impose his will. Having observed Muhammad?Ali?s reforms, the Ottomans likely believed they could follow his precedent without provoking civil strife. The Egyptian occupation had also opened the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to European commercial penetration. Beirut emerged as an important port in the Eastern Mediterranean, and merchants gained access to new markets in inland cities formerly closed to Western merchants, such as Damascus. European merchants came to rely on local Christians and Jews to serve as their intermediaries—as translators and agents. Individual Christians and Jews grew wealthy through these connections to European trade and consular activity, and many gained immunity from Ottoman law by accepting European citizenship. The Muslim community in Greater Syria was already growing dangerously resentful of the privileges enjoyed by some Arab Christians and Jews in the 1840s. The delicate communal balance was being upset by external forces. For the first time in generations, the Arab provinces witnessed sectarian violence. The Jews of Damascus were accused of the ritual murder of a Catholic priest in 1840 and were subsequently subject to violent repression by the authorities.⁹ In October 1850, communal violence broke out in Aleppo when a Muslim mob attacked the city’s prosperous Christian minority, leaving dozens killed and hundreds wounded. Such events were unprecedented in Aleppo’s history and reflected the resentment of Muslim merchants whose businesses had suffered while their Christian neighbors were enriched through their commercial contacts with Europe.¹⁰ Greater trouble was brewing in Mount Lebanon. The Egyptian occupation in the 1830s had led to the collapse of the local ruling order and drove a wedge between the Maronites, who had allied with the Egyptians, and the Druze, who had resisted them. The Druze returned to Mount Lebanon after the Egyptian withdrawal to find the Maronites had grown wealthy and powerful in their absence—and claimed lands the Druze had abandoned when they fled Egyptian rule. The differences between the communities led to an outbreak of communal fighting in 1841, which continued intermittently over the next two decades, fueled by British support for the Druze and French support for the Maronites. The Ottomans tried to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the retreating Egyptian forces to assert greater control over the administration of Mount Lebanon. They replaced the discredited Shihabi principality that had ruled since the end of the seventeenth century with a dual governorate, headed by a Maronite in the northern district and a Druze governor to the south of the Beirut-Damascus road. This sectarian split had no basis either in geography or in the demography of Mount Lebanon, as Maronites and Druze were to be found on both sides of the boundary. As a result, the dual governorate seemed only to exacerbate tensions between the two communities. To make matters worse, the Maronites suffered from internal cleavages, with deep divisions between the ruling families, the peasants, and the clergy erupting in peasant revolts that further heightened tensions. By 1860 Mount Lebanon had become a powder keg as the Druze and Maronites formed armed bands and prepared for war. On May 27, 1860, a Christian force of 3,000 men from the town of Zahleh marched toward the Druze heartland to avenge attacks on Christian villagers. They engaged a smaller force of some 600 Druze, who met them on the Beirut-Damascus road near the village of ‘Ayn Dara. The Druze dealt the Christians a decisive defeat and went on the offensive, sacking a number of Christian villages. The battle of ’Ayn Dara marked the beginning of a war of extermination. The Maronite Christians suffered one defeat after another, as their towns and villages were overrun by the victorious Druze in what today would be characterized as ethnic cleansing. Eyewitnesses spoke of rivers of blood flowing through the streets of the highland villages. Within three weeks the Druze had secured the south of Mount Lebanon and the whole of the Biqa’ Valley. The town of Zahleh, to the north of the Beirut-Damascus road, was the last Christian stronghold to fall. On June 18, the Druze attacked and overran Zahleh, killing the defenders and putting its residents to flight. The Christian forces of Lebanon had been utterly destroyed, leaving the Druze in full mastery. At least 200 villages had been sacked and thousands of Christians killed, wounded, or left homeless.¹¹ Events in Mount Lebanon heightened communal tensions throughout Greater Syria. Relations between Muslims and Christians had already been strained by the proclamation of the 1856 Reform Decree and the establishment of legal equality between Ottoman citizens of all faiths. Various Damascene chroniclers noted how the Christians had changed since gaining their legal rights. They no longer recognized the customary privileges of the Muslims, but began to wear the same colors and clothes that formerly had been reserved for Muslims. They grew increasingly assertive, too. “So it came about,” one outraged Muslim notable recorded, “that when a Christian quarrelled with a Muslim, the Christian would fling back at the Muslim any insults the latter used, and even add to them.”¹² The Muslims of Damascus found such behavior intolerable. These views were echoed by a Christian notable. Mikhayil Mishaqa was a native of Mount Lebanon who had served the ruling Shihabi family at the time of the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s. He had since moved to Damascus, where he secured an appointment as the vice consul of a relatively minor power at the time, the United States of America. “As the Empire began to implement reforms and equality among its subjects regardless of their religious affiliation,” he wrote, “the ignorant Christians went too far in their interpretation of equality and thought that the small did not have to submit to the great, and the low did not have to respect the high. Indeed they thought that humble Christians were on a par with exalted Muslims.?¹³ By flaunting such age-old conventions, the Christians of Damascus unwittingly contributed to sectarian tensions that would prove their undoing. The Muslim community within Damascus followed the bloody events of Mount Lebanon with grim satisfaction. They believed, with some justification, that the Christians of Lebanon had behaved arrogantly and had provoked the Druze. The Damascene Muslims were pleased to see the Christians defeated, and they showed no remorse over the bloodletting. When they heard of the fall of Zahleh, “there was such rejoicing and celebration in Damascus,” Mishaqa recorded, that “you would have thought the Empire had conquered Russia.” Faced with the growing hostility of the Muslims of the city, the Christians of Damascus began to fear for their own safety. Following the fall of Zahleh, Druze bands began to raid Christian villages in the hinterlands of Damascus. The Christian peasants fled their exposed villages for the relative safety of Damascus’s walls. The streets of the Christian quarters of Damascus began to fill with these Christian refugees, who, Mishaqa claimed, “slept in the lanes around the churches, with no bed save the ground and no cover save the sky.” These defenseless people became the target of growing anti-Christian sentiment, their vulnerability and poverty diminishing their very humanity to those who were increasingly hostile to the Christian community. They looked to their fellow Christians and to the Ottoman governor to shelter them from harm. Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Damascus, was no friend to the city’s Christian community. Mishaqa, who as a consular official had many interactions with the governor, became convinced that Ahmad Pasha was actively promoting intercommunal tensions. Ahmad Pasha believed the Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 reforms, Mishaqa explained, and that they had deliberately tried to elude the duties—particularly tax obligations—that accompanied their newfound rights. Though the Muslim community of Damascus outnumbered the Christians by a margin of five to one, Ahmad Pasha exacerbated Muslim fears by posting cannons to “protect” mosques from Christian attack. By such measures, Ahmad Pasha encouraged Damascene Muslims to believe they were threatened by attack from the town’s Christians. At the very height of the tensions Ahmad Pasha ordered a demonstration designed to provoke a riot. On July 10, 1860, he paraded a group of Muslim prisoners jailed for crimes against Christians through the streets of central Damascus—ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Predictably, a Muslim mob gathered around the men to break their chains and set them free. The spectacle of Muslims being gratuitously humiliated in this way only reinforced public views that Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 decree. The mob turned to the Christian quarters determined to teach them a lesson. With the recent events in Mount Lebanon still fresh in everyone?s minds, extermination seemed a reasonable solution to the merciless mob. Mishaqa found himself caught up in the violence he had long predicted. He described how the mob beat down his gates and flooded into his home. Mishaqa and his youngest children fled through a back door hoping to take refuge in the house of a Muslim neighbor. At each turn of the road, their path was blocked by rioters. To divert them, Mishaqa threw handfuls of coins and fled with his children while the crowd scrambled after his money. Three times he eluded the mob by this ruse, but eventually he found his way blocked by a frenzied crowd. I had nowhere to run. They surrounded me to strip and kill me. My son and daughter were screaming, “Kill us instead of our father!” One of these wretches struck my daughter on the head with an ax, and he will answer for her blood. Another fired at me from a distance of six paces and missed, but I was wounded on my right temple by a blow with an ax, and my right side, face and arm were crushed by a blow with a cudgel. There were so many crowding around me that it was impossible to fire without hitting others.