Bruce Masters

Power and society in Aleppo in the 18th and 19th centuries

In: Revue du monde musulman et de la Mditerrane, N62, 1991. pp. 151-158.

Citer ce document / Cite this document : Masters Bruce. Power and society in Aleppo in the 18th and 19th centuries. In: Revue du monde musulman et de la Mditerrane, N62, 1991. pp. 151-158. doi : 10.3406/remmm.1991.1529 http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/remmm_0997-1327_1991_num_62_1_1529

Bruce MASTERS

POWER AND SOCIETY IN ALEPPO IN THE 18th AND 19th CENTURIES

The Muslim empires of Asia experienced upheavals and crises in the eighteenth century. Whether in Istanbul, Isfahan or Delhi, the established political elites found it increasingly difficult to maintain hegemony over the peripheries of their realms as new centers of political and economic might emerged. That this process of political devolution occurred almost simultaneously across Muslim Asia from Java into the Balkans and North Africa has been ascribed by world system theorists to the changing relationships of the formerly autonomous Asian "world empires" to the West. In their view, the end of these older polities was an inevitable result of Asia's incorporation into a "world system" dominated by the economies of north western Europe. Unable to compete economically with capitalism, the Muslim states were doomed to fail politically as well (Wallerstein, 1989 ; Kasaba, 1988). Reversing the economic determinist explanation offered by the world system proponents, revisionist historians of European imperialism, led by Christopher Bayly, have offered an interpretation of the eighteenth century that sees the Muslim empires as beset by a number of internal contradictions which abetted the rise of indigenous political challengers on their peripheries. The struggle between the old and new orders created the opportunities for European expansion. In the absence of European intervention, new Muslim dynasties might have triumphed over the remnants of the old. This approach suggests that without the internal dynamics of the disintegration of the Asian empires, the Europeans might have remained trading diasporas on Asia's fringes and not empire builders. In short, the divide between the two historical explanations lies in where their proponents place the respective motor of change, in Asia or in Europe. Both views agree, however, that the eighteenth century saw unique opportunities for new indigenous actors to emerge and to confront the older dynasties, both economically and politically. In the lands controlled by the House of Osman, the period was marked by the rise of the derebeys, the growing strength of the "notables" (a cyn in the Arabic usage) in urban politics, RE.M.M.M. 62, 1991/4

152 /Bruce Masters and the emergence of dynasties which in many regional centers came close to holding provincial governorships as family fiefs. While the external circumstances that led to the success of these contending forces were the same throughout the empire, local conditions often determined which nexus of leadership would become dominant, as no region could support the simultaneous emergence of all three types of political elites. In addition to these local forces, the central government was not completely impotent and its representatives could, at times, wield considerable authority or, at the least, tip the balance to one faction or the other and so prevent the emergence of a single controlling political actor. Significantly, even such successful warlords as Ali Pasha of Ionnina, Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha in Ruse, the apanoghlus in Yozgat, or Ahmed Cezzar Pasha in Acre sought to obtain official recognition from the Porte. This ability to maintain at least minimal fealty in the provinces distinguishes the Ottomans from other Muslim empires in the eighteenth century. Employing that residual sense of legitimacy derived from centuries of rule, they were able to achieve a temporary reversal in the process of decline. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Istanbul had reestablished its authority over its Asian provinces even while it fought a losing battle to retain its dominion in Rumeli and North Africa. A process of devolution was at work in Aleppo in the eighteenth century as well, but the crucial difference between it and what was occurring in most other major Ottoman provincial centers was that no individual, dynasty, or party emerged to monopolize the political life of the city. Rather the period between 1760 and 1850 was marked by political turbulence as one group emerged momentarily decisive, only to be brought down by agents of the central government acting in concert with rival political factions. In Aleppo, the state managed to manipulate the political chaos of the city so as to deny the emergence of any effective, or long lived, challenge. The result was the emergence of two armed "populist" factions, the ashrf and the janissaries, who periodically battled each other and the representatives of the state under conditions that often seemed to totter precariously close to economic class warfare. While the city's underclass brawled in the streets for political power, the city's civilian elite remained either impotent or aloof. What has been obscured, however, by the attention of scholars to Aleppo's janissary-as/ira/ rivalry in this period, was the dramatic growth in economic power of two classes from among the city's civilian elite : the Muslim notables and the minority merchants. In his ground-breaking study, Bodman characterized these two groups as having had negligible political influence in the years between 1770 and 1826. This is undoubtedly true, but as Meri wether and Thieck have shown for the a cyn families, their acquisition of economic power in that period laid the foundations of their increased political role after the definitive restoration of central government control in 1850. The same could be said for some of the minority merchant dynasties which came to prominence contemporaneously with the Muslim notables. Both groups, often allied with one another, tied their fortunes to those of the central government rather than opposing it. As such, their survival through the end of the nineteenth century mirrored the resiliency of state authority in the city. The Ottoman state's ability to reassert its presence in Aleppo adds credence to those historians who look to Asia to understand the dynamics of the historical processes of the eighteenth century. Despite the setbacks it suffered, the Empire was still capable of acting to reverse the process of its own unravelling. Undoubtedly, Europe had a role in all of this, but it would seem that in the case of Aleppo, its influence was only secondary to that of the central government.

Power and society in Aleppo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / 153 Aleppo as an ottoman provincial center Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Aleppo's political life in the Ottoman period was its administrative separation from its historically more dominant rival, Damascus. There is some ambiguity as to when this occurred, but it was a political fact when Sultan Siileyman visited the city in 1531. The removal of northern Syria from its political dependency on Damascus by imperial fiat meant that the inhabitants of Aleppo were largely free to evolve their own power relationship with the capital, unencumbered by developments to the south. While continuing to be linked culturally to Damascus, Cairo, and the Holy Cities of the Hijaz, the city formed important economic ties to southern Anatolia which outweighed those it enjoyed with southern Syria. The wealth that Aleppo generated in the first century of Ottoman rule was an attractive prize for aspirants to more global political ambitions. Ironically, given the relative fealty offered by Aleppo's political elite to the central government in the eighteenth century, the city served as the locus for two of the most formidable challenges the Ottoman state faced in the seventeenth century. Although both the revolts were labeled by Ottoman chroniclers as Cell, the earlier of the two, that of Canpulatoghlu Ali Pasha, seems rather to have prefigured the rise of the a cyn in Anatolia and Rumeli in the late eighteenth century. As they would later do, Ali Pasha based his strength on tribal levies, seemingly had visions of regional autonomy, if not independence, and sought to involve the Europeans in his scheme (Rafeq, 1983). The second revolt, that of Abaza Hasan Pasha which ended with his death in 1659, was one of a disgruntled Ottoman official and its venue in Aleppo had little to do with the city or its inhabitants. Both revolts indicate that the state was already experiencing the internal contradictions of its own imperial system. That they resembled so closely the more damaging revolts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seems to vindicate those who see the slow dissolution of the empire as having been based in the domestic and structural weaknesses of the Ottoman state rather than in its shifting external relations. But whatever the ultimate historical cause of either rebellion, neither had any lasting effect on society in Aleppo, or the pursuit of power in the city. Political control in Aleppo was vested in the first two centuries of Ottoman rule in the hands of the representatives of the state, the governor and his military entourage composed of professionals sent out from the capital. Economic power lay in a much more complicated layering of social groups : Muslim merchants, members of the culam, political office holders, and the European trading communities. With the exception of the Europeans, the other groups often overlapped and intermarried so that the indigenous economic and religious elites were not easily distinguished. By the middle of the eighteenth century, those patterns while maintaining the facade of the older order, had changed. One of the most important of these changes for the balance of political power in the city was that the military forces stationed in the province were increasingly of local origin. This transformation had come about gradually as the Empire suffered fiscal and military downturns that hindered the center from effectively exercising control over its periphery. For Aleppo, located as it was in close proximity to various tribal groups : bedouin, Kurds, and Turkmen, this meant the loss of effective control by the governor over his province. The breakdown in order in the countryside altered what the central government expected of the city's inhabitants in terms of their own defense. Thus in 1690, when a band of Sheyhlii Kurds, reportedly consisting of 900 musketeers, threatened the city, the professional garrison was dispatched along with that of the city Marash to repel the tribesmen while the inhabitants of Aleppo were required only to provide financial support (AS 1, p. 22). Thirty-five years later,

154 /Bruce Masters however, when the city's garrison was called to duty at the Iranian frontier, the city was ordered to provide 300 soldiers who could be used to defend the province from marauders (AS 2, p. 210). This pattern was to be repeated periodically in the city until the implementation of direct conscription, first during the city's occupation by Ibrahim Pasha and later by Istanbul in 1850 (AS 39, p. 145 ; AS 43, p. 21 ; AS 45, pp. 52-60). This need for extra levies led to an increasing militarization of the province with the proliferation of bands of armed men whose services could be bought. In the city of Aleppo, the reduction in troops that the capital could provide led to the swelling of the ranks of the janissaries with the enlistment of locals as well as rural migrants who had been drawn into the city. The janissaries quickly emerged as one of the two activist political factions in the city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The appearance of the other, the ashrf, seemingly came as a response to the growth of janissary influence. While they were numerous sharifs mentioned in the local sources from the preceding century and the office of the naqb alashrfv/as prominent in representing local interests, the ashrf had not functioned as a political party or interest group prior to the eighteenth century. Although the janissaries and ashrf were not "the Guelphs and Ghibellines of Aleppo" (Barker, 1876, v.l, p. 80), the composition of each group's membership and their mechanism for mobilization are far from clear. The geographical base of the janissaries was in the eastern quarters of the city and many of those identified with the corps in the local court records had Kurdish or Turkish names which hint of tribal origins. Nonetheless, in an order from 1814 listing those who had fled the city under charge of participating in the janissary revolt of the previous year, persons coming from the eastern suburbs predominated, but almost all of the city's quarters were represented and where it is possible to tell from family names, Arabic speakers were seemingly in the clear majority (AS 35, pp. 94-97). Similarly, while the power base of the ashrf was inside the city's walls and they were heavily represented in such established professions as weaving and dyeing, at least some of their membership were also recent migrants to the city (Thieck, 1985, p. 151). The dynamics of the struggle were not purely locational, ethnic, nor a case of urban interests versus rural newcomers, although elements of all of those categories can be identified as contributing to the perpetuation of solidarity within the two blocks. Furthermore, while economic rivalries added to the hostility vented in the streets as janissary pressure on the established guild structure was resented and resisted, their mutual antagonism and rivalry can not be explained away through a economic class analysis as the two group's membership seems to have been drawn from roughly comparable economic classes. The sharf status claimed by many of the a cyn only rarely led them to perceive a commonality of interests with the ashrf "of the street. Rather than monolithic factions, both identities appear to have been relatively fluid and while it is possible to generalize about the membership of each group, it must be remembered that there were many different degrees of clientage at work and that individual loyalties might shift with changes in the political climate. Similarly, it is dangerous to identify either group with nascent urban populism, although when contrasted with a cyn interests such an explanation is tempting, as each sought largely to advance its own membership's status without regard to the general welfare of the urban poor. That there was little, if any, proto-class consciousness at work was indicated by the infrequency of cooperation between the two. The existence of these two armed, querulous factions constituted a real test to the authority of both the state and of the a cyn, but it was a challenge that could only deliver disruption and not revolution. An equally important, though less dramatic, evolution in the power structure in the city during the eighteenth century was the emergence of a dozen or more prominent a cyn families

Power and society in Aleppo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / 155 as active participants in the city's economic and political life. From at least the beginning of Ottoman rule, and presumably earlier, local notable culam families had acted as representatives of the city's population and had enjoyed prestige and economic well being. This status had sprang from their position as religious authorities and functionaries, and as administrators of many of the city religious endowments. Additionally, local Muslim families profited from Aleppo's location as a trade entrepot and had prospered. While both civilian groups could be wealthy as the estates registry for Mustafa Tahazdah, the naqb al-ashrf, and the merchant, Ahmad al-Ghazzl, from the late seventeenth century show (Sijill 33, pp. 129-131, 241-250), real economic power was vested in control of the revenues of Aleppo's agricultural hinterlands. Throughout the seventeenth century, those were largely in the hands Ottoman officials and soldiers in the form of credit relationships with the villagers. As the central government began to sell off its tax farms to life time tenants (malikne) at the end of the seventeenth century, however, new opportunities for wealth in Aleppo appeared. The first beneficiaries of the new fiscal system were Ottoman officials and their descendants who had earlier lent money to the same villages which they then received as malikne. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the process was well under way and much of the province's revenue was increasingly diverted into the hands of the tax farmers. This, in turn, forced the governors to levy even more of the extraordinary taxes on the city's population, creating economic and social hardships on almost everyone else. The Ottomans and their descendants were not the only ones to profit from these changes in revenue procurement. Local families, both of culam and merchant origins, began to invest the wealth they had accumulated in the acquisition of tax farms. By the middle of the century, this transferral of much of the fiscal system of the province into local hands was consolidated with the repeated appointment of Aleppines to the posts of mutesellim and muhassil of the province. Effective political power did not immediately accompany this increase in status, however. Rather, the a cyn like their poorer neighbors remained divided against themselves (Bodman, pp. 100-02). Rarely uniting out of class self interests, they could wield little political influence and were so limited to acting as mediators between the warring factions, or between those factions and the government. Divided and without their own military force, the only political opposition that could emerge at those times when the governor was either absent or oppressive were the armies of the street. As such, Aleppo did not experience the rise of a local political dynasty such as the ' Azms or the Jalilis, or even of a single strongman such as Ahmed Cezzar Pasha. Ibrahim Pasha Katiraghasi contended for such power during his term (1799-1804) as Aleppo's first local governor since anpulatoghlu Ali Pasha, but his reign was short-lived, in part due to his rapacity as taxcollector (Marcus, 1989, pp. 90-93). His son succeeded him, but he too was undone by janissary resistance. In the end, it was a scion of an Anatolian a cyn family, apanoghlu Celalettin Pasha, who temporarily crashed the janissaries in 1813 and restored Istanbul's authority in the city (Barker, v. 2, pp. 138-42). Parallel to the growing importance of the Muslim a cyn, a number of Christian Arab families were able to take advantage of changing economic and political conditions and attained economic, if not political, eminence in the eighteenth century. Their precipitous rise was all the more remarkable as western visitors to Aleppo in the previous century invariably described the local Christians as living in abject poverty. The initial boost to these families had come with their service as translators (dragomans) for the resident European merchants. Taking advantage of the protection offered their status by the capitulations, members of the Ghadbn, c'ida, Haww, Dallai, and Qassb families, among others, were able to develop their own trading

156 /Bruce Masters networks and built up commercial fortunes. This was frowned on by the European consuls and forbidden by the Porte, but as long as the European presence remained in Aleppo there was little that the Ottomans could effectively do to reign in the dragomans' commercial activities (Masters, 1988). Using foreign connections, these families had set the pattern that the protgs of the nineteenth century in commercial centers such as Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad would emulate on their rise to commercial prominence. Ironically, by the end of the eighteenth century, foreign protection had largely evaporated from Aleppo as most European nations either reduced, or eliminated, their operations in the city as the region's transit trade declined. With the general downturn in the city's commercial economy, members of some of the Christian Arab families who had earlier served the European consuls as dragomans expanded their operations to the capital where they engaged in trade and acted as agents for prominent a cyn families back in Aleppo. With their transfer to Istanbul, these individuals lost their patents as protgs. While initially damaging to their business operations, they were compensated for this in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when Sultan Mahmud created a category of imperial merchants (Avrupa tiiccarlari) who were to be granted many of the same trading privileges as the Europeans (Bagi, 1983). With their embrace of the new system of commercial patents offered by the Porte, the Aleppo Christian merchant families, like their Muslim a cyn compatriots and unlike Christian merchants elsewhere in Syria, had obtained a vested interest in the maintenance of the Ottoman state and its institutions. By 1816, the Avrupa tiiccarlari were well established in Aleppo and in 1818, they felt secure enough to challenge janissary interference in the city's commercial life (AS 42, p. 28). Although, they achieved success both in the local courts and at the Porte, this did not mean that centralized authority had returned to Aleppo unchallenged, as the city wide revolt against Hiirshit Pasha in 1819 demonstrated. In the wake of the suppression of the uprising, the city endured an uneasy decade as the central government seemed unable to capitalize on the severe blows it had dealt the street factions. It was obviously preoccupied elsewhere as the levy of extraordinary taxes in 1824, 1825, 1826, 1828, and 1829, all ostensibly to finance the war in the Balkans, attest (AS 39, p. 93, 145 ; AS 43, p. 21 ; AS 45, pp. 4, 134-7). The order abolishing the janissary corps in Istanbul was registered in Aleppo on 8 July 1826 and soon afterwards, an order was received warning the governor to be on the look out for escaped janissaries who had retreated into the mountains of Anatolia and were reportedly engaged in brigandage (AS 43, pp. 55-59, 102-05). There was, however, no purge of the corps in Aleppo. Nonetheless, members of some of the guilds that had been infiltrated by the janissaries sensed the change in political climate and, in 1827, forced the janissaries out of several of the monopolies they had enjoyed in the city's retail trade. They were supported in their legal actions by prominent members of the a cyn, a sign of the growing shift in the political balance in the city (AS 44, pp. 128-29). The janissaries had been bloodied, but not eliminated. Their rough style of factional politics enjoyed a brief resurgence during the occupation of the city by the forces of Ibrahim Pasha when members of the a cyn fled the city. Faced with hostility, or indifference, from the city's prominent families, the occupation forces favored the janissary faction, appointing their leader, 'Abdullah al-Bbins, as miitesellim. This was the first time in Aleppo's turbulent history that a janissary had been so favored. With the return of the Ottoman forces in 1841, however, 'Abdullah Bey was stripped of his lucrative tax farms and his fellow janissaries were once again voiceless. In the first decade of the Tanzimat, Aleppo became one of the test cities for Ottoman reform projects as earlier it had been singled out for the implementation of the institution of the Avrupa

Power and society in Aleppo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / 157 tiiccarlari. Both an early census and the imposition of the ferde were undertaken there before anywhere else in the Arab provinces. These innovations, in turn, sparked the riots of 1850 and Aleppo served again as a precursor of trends that were to occur later elsewhere in Syria. The events of 1850 mark the definitive end to the period of militant factionalism in Aleppo and with it, the return of direct Ottoman control of the city. The storming of the city's eastern suburbs by the newly organized Arabistan Ordusu, destroyed the power of the street mobs and city's poorer classes lost their ability to influence politics for the rest of the Ottoman period. The same could not be said for either the a cyn or, despite the trauma of the riots, the leading Christian families. Significantly, while several prominent members of the a cyn families were exiled for alleged complicity in the rising, Muhammad al-Jbir was the only non-Ottoman to sit on the commission formed to assess the damages caused by the rioters and several of those exiled returned soon after and later held high government posts. Their rehabilitation points to the last significant development in the city's political life in the Ottoman period. The power structure of this reasserted central government control, as envisioned by the Tanzimat reformers, was different from what it had been in the first two centuries of Ottoman rule. While the governors continued to be Ottoman bureaucrats, the administration of city government, courts, and even taxation were increasingly in the hands of local residents who were fast becoming an "aristocracy of service" (Khoury, 1987, 103). As ascertained from the provincial salnames, these included representatives of the Muslim a cyn families and the Melkite Catholic merchant families who had begun their rise to political eminence in the city with their acquisition of economic power in the eighteenth century. Neither group had remained static in terms of composition over the course of a century and a half. Some families faded from prominence and others emerged to take their place, but all had benefitted from cooperation with the state. Their recognition of the symbiotic relationship they shared with the authorities in Istanbul undoubtedly helps to explain Aleppo's relative indifference to the cause of Arabism until confronted with Amr Faysal's state (Khoury, 1978, 101-05). What is far from clear, however, is the depth of loyalty of Aleppo's elites to the Ottoman state. In both the diaries of Ysuf al-Halab and Nacm Bakhkhsh, mention of a sultan's name is followed by the obligatory prayers for his long life and prosperity, but it is hard to infer any degree of political commitment to the idea of the sultanate beyond that. Rather, it would seem that as the leading families of Aleppo were unable to form a political base to challenge the Porte, they acquiesced to its legitimacy. It served their interests and the alternative was rule by the street mobs. The divisiveness of the local elites meant that state could, in turn, selectively co-opt their individual members to enhance its own political objectives. While the Ottomans were on the defensive throughout so much of their territories, Aleppo, thanks to a myriad of local conditions and political currents, had been reclaimed for the empire by the end of the nineteenth century.

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