In the summer of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. Druze militias sacked Maronite Christian villages, killing eleven thousand people. Muslim mobs killed more than a tenth of Damascus’s Christian population in a matter of days. Churches and monasteries were burned to the ground, monks and priests were slaughtered, Christian women were assaulted and raped. Thousands fled their homes to escape the bloodshed. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Greater Syria, a province of the Ottoman Empire that included modern-day Syria and Lebanon, was among the most ethnically and religiously diverse regions in the world. Muslims, Jews and Christians of various denominations lived in mixed towns and neighbourhoods. Conflict had flickered over the years but never caught flame. What happened? As Eugene Rogan writes in his new history, any answer to this question needs to consider the broader social, legal and economic transformations that had taken place in the preceding decades.
In the early 1800s, Damascus was one of the Ottoman Empire’s most important provincial centres. A prosperous city of around 150,000 inhabitants, it played a central role in the overland caravan trade linking Anatolia and the Middle East to the Hejaz, Persia and the Indian subcontinent. In 1833 the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine witnessed a dazzling procession of thousands of camels entering the city, bringing mocha coffee and Indian shawls from Baghdad. Damascene artisans were famous for their textiles, in particular silks and cottons, which traders sold around the Ottoman territories and beyond.
It was also a conservative city. Unlike Beirut, then a burgeoning port fifty miles to the west, it remained impermeable to European influence. By far the greatest share of its foreign visitors were Muslim pilgrims: thousands passed through Damascus every year on their way to Mecca and Medina. The pilgrimage was celebrated with great pomp and was a source of pride for Damascene Muslims, a testament to their city’s religious prestige. The Umayyad Mosque was a masterpiece of early Islamic architecture, built in the eighth century when Damascus was the capital of the first Muslim empire.
But although Damascus was a Muslim city, its Christian and Jewish populations – totalling perhaps 15 per cent – were significant. Among the city’s Christian residents was Mikhayil Mishaqa, the central figure in Rogan’s book and a survivor of the ‘Damascus events’. Born in 1800 to a Greek Catholic family from Mount Lebanon, an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, Mishaqa moved to Damascus aged 34. Rogan describes him as a ‘remarkable polymath’ who was, ‘by general consensus, the best-educated man in Damascus’. He enjoyed a varied career, working successively as a silk trader, a farm owner, a political adviser to the Shihabis (rulers over much of Mount Lebanon), a medical doctor trained in Cairo under a French physician and, by 1840, a dragoman for the British consulate in Damascus. Some years later, he renounced his native church and embraced Protestantism. His conversion drew the ire of the Greek Catholic patriarch, but it also caught the attention of J. Augustus Johnson, the American consul in Beirut, who had been looking to appoint a US vice-consul in Damascus to facilitate access for American companies. Mishaqa was an intelligent man, a respected citizen and a Protestant convert; he didn’t speak English, but his connections to the city’s elite made him an ideal candidate. He was appointed in 1859.
For the duration of his tenure, which lasted until 1870, Mishaqa provided Johnson with a steady flow of reports, including a detailed account of the massacre. His consular correspondence, which contains one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of events, had been thought lost. When, as a graduate student, Rogan discovered it on a forgotten shelf at the US National Archives, he went straight to the entry for July 1860. Mishaqa’s letter to Johnson opens as the massacre is underway: ‘Your Excellency no doubt has heard of the disaster which befell the Christian residents of this city last Monday morning. The arson and plunder and killing began eight hours after sunrise and continues still.’
The first violence had erupted a month earlier in Mount Lebanon, with the attack of Druze militias on several Maronite villages. Mount Lebanon had long been ruled by Druze dynasties, but its different populations had lived together peacefully. By the early 19th century, however, several Shihabi princes – practitioners of Sunni Islam but with close allies among the Druze – had converted to Maronite Christianity. As a result, political power moved to the Maronites. Christians began to outnumber the Druze; they also secured French consular protection, which increased their power. The erosion of Druze authority fostered anti-Maronite sentiment in the region. In 1838, at a time when Mount Lebanon was under Egyptian occupation, Druze sheikhs rebelled against their new overlords. The Shihabi ruler, Amir Bashir, had made an alliance with the Egyptians, and sent Maronite fighters to quell the rebellion. For the Druze sheikhs, this was a gross act of betrayal.
In 1859, a Maronite blacksmith called Tanyus Shahin led a popular uprising against the Khazins, who controlled the Kisrawan district of Mount Lebanon. There was nothing sectarian about Shahin’s revolt: the Khazins were Maronites too. It was their authoritarianism, not their religion, that provoked the rebellion. But Druze sheikhs, worried that the revolt might spread, fanned the flames of anti-Christian sentiment to contain it. They told their followers that the Maronites were coming for them. What started as a political rebellion with a class dimension quickly turned into a sectarian conflict. By the spring of 1860, Mount Lebanon had erupted into civil war. In May, Druze fighters attacked several Maronite strongholds, burning villages and killing Christians in Hasbayya, Zahleh and Dayr al-Qamar. More than a hundred thousand Christians were left homeless. In one of his letters to Johnson, Mishaqa reported that ‘rivers of blood’ were flowing through the streets.
For a time, it seemed as though the carnage in Mount Lebanon would not affect Damascene Muslims. After all, communal divisions between Druze and Maronites had a distinct political genealogy. And the Druze were far from ordinary Muslims: their faith, which originated as a schism from Shia Islam, had evolved over the centuries into a socially and theologically distinct community. But in late June 1860, when news of the massacres reached Damascus, local Muslims celebrated the killings in what Rogan describes as a danse macabre. In the following days, rumours began to spread: Christians had killed Muslims in Jerusalem while they were praying; Christians had slaughtered Muslims inside a mosque in Homs; Christians in Damascus were arming themselves to attack Muslims during Eid. The province’s Ottoman governor sent a town crier around the city to reassure residents: ‘There is security and safety … let no one fear anything.’ Damascene Christians were terrified. Survivors from the Lebanon massacre had arrived with stories of Christians struck down in broad daylight. Unlike the rumours of Muslims killed in Jerusalem or Homs, these stories were true.
On 7 July, a group of young Muslim men drew crosses on the dirt streets of Christian neighbourhoods and forced Christian bystanders to stamp on them – an act of profanation. Following orders from the governor, the police arrested a group of Muslim suspects and forced them to remove the crosses. For local Muslims, the sight of the men sweeping Christian quarters was intolerable. A crowd pressed the police to let them go, then descended on the Christian neighbourhoods. By 9 July, the violence had reached its peak. Thousands of Muslims roamed the city determined, as Mishaqa put it, to ‘rob, kill and burn’. More than five thousand Christians were killed in the first eight days; houses and shops were looted and set alight. Before long, all churches, convents and monasteries had been destroyed. Some Christians were threatened with death if they didn’t convert to Islam; those who complied were killed all the same. In the words of a local chronicler, ‘pens would not write’ what the Christian women of Damascus suffered.
Mishaqa narrowly survived the massacre. He was attacked and wounded by a group of men which included several of his neighbours, but was saved by al-Haj Muhammad al-Sawtari, a Muslim friend whose house became his refuge. Many Damascene Muslims sheltered Christians and, in doing so, saved them from death; the most prominent was Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi, known to Muslims around the world as ‘the amir’, the charismatic leader of the anti-colonial struggle against the French occupation of Algeria. After his capture by French troops, Abd al-Qadir was forced into exile, first in France, then in the Ottoman Empire. In 1855, he chose to settle in Damascus with a retinue of more than a thousand Algerian followers. His military prowess against the French had earned him global fame: in 1852, the New York Times compared him to Toussaint Louverture. When he arrived in Damascus, the city welcomed him like a war hero, prompting the British consular agent to declare that ‘no such Arab had entered Damascus since the days of Saladin.’
Rogan, who sheds light on Abd al-Qadir’s role during the events, describes the efforts of both the amir and his Algerian fighters to save Christians. As an anti-colonial leader, Abd al-Qadir had been the defender of Islam against an invading Christian power. In Damascus, however, Christians were the natives facing extermination. His men marched through the streets, escorting all the Christians they encountered to safety. Damascene Muslims were told that the amir had offered a bounty for every Christian delivered to his house alive. Up to four thousand Christians took refuge under his roof and in the homes of his supporters. Another ten thousand were escorted to the Damascus citadel, where they remained under Algerian protection until the end of the violence. At one point, a mob gathered in front of the amir’s house demanding that he surrender the Christians sheltering inside. He came out unarmed to address the crowd: ‘Have you reached the point where you believe you have the right to kill? How low have you fallen?’ The rioters grew impatient, and Abd al-Qadir, realising that he could not reason with them, asked for his weapons and mounted his horse, ready to launch into battle as a thousand Algerian fighters cheered him on. The sight of the amir preparing for combat was apparently enough to persuade the mob that a confrontation with the Algerians was a bad idea, and the rioters dispersed.
In Europe , articles about the slaughter of Christians at the hands of Muslims appeared on the front page of every newspaper. The stories told of a bloodthirsty horde whose animosity towards Christians was instinctual and atavistic. An anonymously authored English ballad about the ‘Syria massacres’ described the way ‘uncivilised Mahometans’ killed Christians to ‘please their base desire’. In Paris and London there were calls for a military intervention. Most accounts ignored the history of peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims and had little interest in the contingency of events as they actually unfolded. The historical circumstances that led a tolerant and diverse society to descend into sectarian violence still need to be identified.
Rogan looks to the longue durée. The opening of Damascene markets to European trade, combined with the advent of steam navigation in the 19th-century Mediterranean, transformed the city’s economy. European manufacturers flooded the market with cheap cloth, and Damascene weavers could no longer compete on price. Trade agreements that secured preferential tariffs for European merchants meant that by the mid-19th century more than half the foreign goods sold in Damascus were textiles. The rise of steamships redirected trade from overland routes into maritime channels. Mediterranean ports such as Beirut prospered and towns inland became less relevant. Even pilgrims began to disdain the city, preferring steam-powered pilgrimages, which were faster and cheaper.
Damascene Christians were the main beneficiaries of Europe’s economic penetration. When French and British merchants took over the city’s economy, they relied on local Christians as intermediaries and trade partners. Their wealth grew considerably, often at the expense of Muslim traders who struggled to keep up with European competition. Western diplomats granted many local Christians the status of consular ‘protégé’, which gave them the same legal and commercial rights as European subjects, a status that came with substantial tax exemptions and immunity from Ottoman law. Resentment grew rapidly among the Muslim majority, who saw the new fortunes of the local Christian community, in Rogan’s words, as ‘an inversion of the natural order’. Damascus, after all, was part of a Muslim empire. The Ottoman sultan was not merely a temporal sovereign ruling over a secular polity: he was the caliph of Islam, ‘Commander of the Faithful’ and ‘God’s shadow on earth’. How could Christians take precedence over Muslims in the heart of the caliphate?
The difficulty was that the Ottoman Empire was vulnerable. In order to counter European imperialism, replenish its treasuries and overhaul the affairs of the state, the government in Istanbul devised a series of ‘re-orderings’, or ‘Tanzimat’. In 1856, legal equality was established among Ottoman subjects regardless of religious affiliation, threatening centuries of Muslim ascendancy. Muslims in Damascus saw the reforms as yet another attack on the traditional order. For Europeans to grant privileges to Christians was one thing, but this came from the sultan himself. Muhammad Sa’id al-Ustuwani, a Damascene Muslim scholar, wrote in his diary that the legal equality introduced by the Tanzimat brought ‘ashes upon all Muslims’.
For Rogan, these transformations – the advent of steam navigation, the opening of Damascene markets and the inversion of the social order – put ‘tremendous pressure’ on social cohesion. With their newfound wealth and enhanced status, Christians became scapegoats. They were seen as seditious subjects whose association with Europeans allowed them to evade local jurisdiction and disregard existing conventions. Even Mishaqa confessed to Johnson that some Christians went ‘too far in their interpretation of equality’. They no longer showed proper deference. Anti-Christian resentment turned into hostility.
Damascus had been consumed by violence for a week before Istanbul learned of the events. News of the massacre had already spread to Europe, giving Western powers an excuse to put boots on the ground. Napoleon III dispatched an army of six thousand soldiers, and they landed in Beirut on 16 August 1860. European diplomats set up an ‘international commission’ to reform local governance. In response, the alarmed Ottoman government sent its foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, to the region and gave him carte blanche to restore order and address the risk of colonisation.
A leading architect of the Tanzimat, Fuad had no sympathy for Damascene Muslims, whom he saw as unruly subjects resisting reform and exposing the empire to the threat of foreign occupation. If he was going to prevent European interference, he needed to prove to Western audiences that the post-Tanzimat Ottoman Empire could protect its religious minorities. The historian Ussama Makdisi describes Fuad’s attitude as a kind of Ottoman Orientalism, with the ‘West’ a vision of civilisation and the ‘East’ a ‘theatre of backwardness’. As Fuad saw it, only a forceful demonstration of Ottoman imperial power could bring order – and modernity – to the city.
Fuad travelled via Beirut, where he met with European consuls to offer reassurances. He then negotiated a truce between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon before heading to Damascus. There he met Christian survivors and began to gather the names of those who had taken part in the massacre. The list was long, but Fuad was determined to impose the ‘full force of the law’. Arrests began within days and, following swift hearings before an extraordinary tribunal, 167 Muslim pillagers were executed along with Druze leaders, whom Fuad accused of failing to protect Christians. The hangings took place in public and the bodies remained in plain sight, earning Fuad the nickname ‘father of the rope’. Those who escaped execution were sentenced to life imprisonment, forced labour or exile.
Fuad was more concerned with imposing sovereignty than justice, and Rogan lists his successes: he was able to restore Ottoman authority, punish the guilty and contain the European colonial threat. French troops left Mount Lebanon without making waves and the international commission reformed governance in a way that benefited Istanbul. He was even able to re-establish some sense of security among Christian survivors in Damascus. Restoring peace, Rogan argues, was ‘all about money’. Christian survivors needed to be compensated. Most had either fled to Beirut or were homeless. Fuad imposed a new tax on Damascene Muslims to fund compensation and reconstruction. Indemnities filed by Christians were reviewed by a commission made up of members of both communities, and while reimbursements rarely covered the full amount (Mishaqa received only half), the funds allowed Christians to start rebuilding their homes. In 1865, a new Ottoman legal code rearranged Syria into a ‘super-province’ with Damascus as its capital, giving it a disproportionate share of the provincial budget. With the money, the Ottomans built markets, roads, schools, telegraph lines and government offices. This created jobs and brought new revenue to the city – including to Muslims, who felt they had paid more than their fair share. Christians returned. By the end of the 1880s, Damascus had been restored to something like its former glory.
In 1994, Leila Fawaz published An Occasion for War, one of the first systematic accounts of what she called the ‘civil conflict’ in 19th-century Lebanon and Damascus, and her detailed narrative has largely remained unchallenged. Makdisi’s The Culture of Sectarianism (2000) offered a more analytical interpretation of the violence, with a focus on the events in Mount Lebanon. His argument, which stressed the historical conditions, is echoed in Rogan’s book. Makdisi rejected the view that sectarian resentment was merely the result of socio-economic disparities, arguing that the emergence of sectarianism registered a more fundamental transformation in the meaning of religious affiliation, one that ‘emphasised sectarian identity as … the only authentic basis for political claims’.
Rogan contributes new, first-hand sources. Historians of the massacre have often made use of Mishaqa’s memoir, written a decade after the events. Despite their catastrophic handling of the violence when it first erupted, it is at times even reverential to the Ottomans. At the time he composed it, Mishaqa and other Christian notables supported the investment in reconstruction and the reconciliation efforts. By contrast, his consular reports, from which Rogan draws frequently, offer a spontaneous and unvarnished portrayal of events, one that is much less charitable to the Sublime Porte.
Rogan argues that it was new-found prosperity, fuelled by state-backed investment and infrastructural development, that allowed Damascus to recover from the ‘brink of genocide’. The relationship between prosperity and peace, he argues, is no less relevant to contemporary Syria. Understanding the events in Damascus, he writes, can help Syrians ‘confront the magnitude of the challenges’ they currently face. Fawaz drew similar lessons from 1860 for contemporary Lebanon, which at the time of her book had just emerged from civil war. But I’m not sure anything that simple can be learned from the massacre. Sectarianism in the Middle East, which is still so often presumed to emerge from ancient cultural, religious and ethnic divides, operates in a particular context. The lesson, if there is one, is that war is always a product of its historical moment.
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