Free A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham

they sacked the Shiite holy places of Kerbala and Nejaf. They then turned westwards and in 1806 took the Hejaz with the Islamic holy places of Mecca and Medina. They destroyed many of the saints’ tombs and stripped the Kaaba – Islam’s holiest shrine, in the Mecca Great Mosque – of its ornaments, which outraged their fierce puritanism. The emir Muhammad al-Saud had the public prayers read in his name instead of that of the Ottoman caliph/sultan – he did not regard the Ottoman Turks as worthy guardians of the holy places.
    However, all this still lay in the future; as the eighteenth century drew to its close, the caliph’s authority over Sunni Islam was still largely intact. In 1789 two events occurred which helped to crack the Ottoman insulation – the outbreak of the French Revolution and the accession as sultan of the reforming Selim III. The French Revolution introduced the novel concepts of political liberty and equality. It also created the basis of nationalism as it has been knownin the last two centuries – derived from dedication and loyalty to a nation-state. The most important element was that the movement was secular; it was not only non-Christian but, at least initially, anti-Christian. As such it did not provoke the immediate Muslim hostility which would have been aroused by anything in the nature of a crusade.
    More than any of his predecessors Selim III was interested in fresh external ideas and the possibilities of restoring the strength of the empire through reform. He had been conducting a secret correspondence with King Louis XVI before the Revolution, and he greatly admired French culture. He was not deterred by the regicide of the revolutionaries. Indeed the triumphant success of French arms against the Revolution’s adversaries encouraged him to import French instructors into his new military and naval schools, where French was made a compulsory subject. A whole new class of young Turkish officers began to emerge – familiar with Western ways and prepared to learn from Western technical superiority. As part of the opening to the West, Sultan Selim for the first time allowed the establishment of embassies in five leading European capitals on a reciprocal basis.
    It was even more significant that Selim III tried to apply his reforms to the internal administration of the empire. When he heard of his army’s defeat by Catherine the Great of Russia, he called a council which enumerated the causes of defeat and disaster and proposed reform as the only remedy. He also insisted that the people should elect their own mayors and councillors without the interference of his governors, and he attempted to end illegal extortion and tax-farming (the practice of allowing local governors or tax-collectors to take a cut of the tax revenues).
    Sultan Selim’s reforms, however, did not extend to the Arab provinces of the empire, where power was largely in the hands of local rulers. Damascus for most of the eighteenth century was ruled by governors of the Azm family, who remained loyal to the sultan but independently managed the province’s affairs. Sidon district, on the Syrian coast, was governed on similar lines by a ruthless Bosnian, Ahmad al-Jazzar, and his band of Mamlukes. They controlled theJanissaries and kept the predatory beduin at bay. But while the cities prospered, the countryside was insecure and derelict. Squeezed for taxes, the peasant farmers flocked into the cities. Agriculture flourished only in the mountainous areas controlled by local Maronite and Druze emirs.
    The situation in Mesopotamia was similar. Here there was constant strife between a series of contenders for power, but the contrast was even greater than in Syria between the rich courts of the pashas of Baghdad and Basra and the backwardness and poverty of the ruined countryside. The great food-producing region of medieval times was on the brink of starvation.
    In the vital province of Egypt the situation was rather different.