$Unique_ID{COW03722} $Pretitle{289} $Title{Tunisia Chapter 1B. Islam and the Arabs} $Subtitle{} $Author{Robert Rinehart} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{arab tunisia tunis maghrib government ottoman ifriquiya islam political arabs} $Date{1986} $Log{Ancient Roman Capital*0372201.scf Figure 4.*0372202.scf } Country: Tunisia Book: Tunisia, A Country Study Author: Robert Rinehart Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1986 Chapter 1B. Islam and the Arabs By the time of his death in A.D. 632, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers had brought most of the tribes and towns of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of the new monotheistic religion of Islam (literally, submission), which was conceived of as uniting the individual believer, the state, and the society under the omnipotent will of God. Islamic rulers therefore exercised both temporal and religious authority. Adherents of Islam were called Muslims ("those who submit" to the will of God). Within a generation Arab armies had carried Islam north and east from Arabia in the wake of their rapid conquests and westward across North Africa as far as Tripoli. There, stiff Berber resistance slowed the Arab advance, and efforts at permanent conquest were resumed only when it became apparent that the Maghrib could be opened up as a theater of operations in the Muslim campaign against the Byzantine Empire. In 670 the Arabs surged into the Roman province of Africa (transliterated as Ifriquiya in Arabic), where their commander, Uqba ben Nafi, founded the city of Kairouan as a military base about 150 kilometers south of Byzantine-held Carthage. The selection of this encampment in the midst of a plain, separated from both the Roman cities on the coast and the mountains in Numidia, where the Berber tribes continued their stubborn resistance, was a deliberate act of policy by Uqba, who reportedly announced that he was founding a city that would serve "as a strong point for Islam until the end of time." The name chosen for the new Arab capital, derived from the Persian word karwan (caravan), also suggests that Uqba was aware of the commercial possibilities of the site located at a crossroads of the trade routes. Carthage fell in 693, but the last pockets of Byzantine resistance on the North African coast were wiped out only after the Arabs had obtained naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. The Arabs cautiously probed the western Maghrib, and in 710 the governor of Ifriquiya, Musa ibn Nusair, invaded Morocco and carried their conquests to the Atlantic. In 712 they mounted an invasion of Spain and in three years had subdued all but the mountainous regions in the extreme north. Muslim Spain (called Andalusia) and the Maghrib, which had been conquered within 50 years of the founding of Kairouan, were organized under the political and religious leadership of the Umayyad caliph of Damascus. Arab rule in Ifriquiya-as elsewhere in the Islamic world in the eighth century-had as its ideal the establishment of political and religious unity under a caliphate (the office of the Prophet's successor as supreme earthly leader of Islam) governed in accord with a legal system (sharia) administered by qadis (religious judges), to which all other considerations, including tribal loyalties, were subordinated. The sharia was based primarily on the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet and was derived in part from Arab tribal and market law. Arab rule was easily imposed on the towns, which prospered again under their new patronage, and in the coastal farming areas. People in the former valued the security that permitted them to practice their commerce and trade in peace, while the punicized farmers recognized an affinity with the Arabs to whom they looked to protect their lands against the nomadic Berber tribesmen. The Arabs abhorred the tribal Berbers as barbarians, while the Berbers often saw the Arabs only as an arrogant and brutal soldiery bent on collecting taxes. Communal and representative Berber institutions also contrasted sharply and frequently clashed with the personal and authoritarian government that the Arabs had adopted under Byzantine influence. The Arabs formed an urban elite in Ifriquiya, where they had come originally as conquerors and missionaries, not as colonists. Their armies had traveled without women and married among the indigenous population, transmitting Arab culture and Islamic religion over an extended period to the townsmen and farmers; but conversion to Islam was also rapid among the nomadic tribes of the hinterland that stoutly resisted Arab political domination. Many Berber converts were opportunists, however, and tribes that accepted Islam under Arab pressure often abandoned it once the intimidating Arab tax collectors and slave traders had moved on. Some tribes had records of repeated apostasy and reconversion. Once established as Muslims, however, the Berbers, with their characteristic love of independence and impassioned religious temperament, shaped Islam in their own image. They embraced schismatic Muslim sects-often traditional folk religion barely disguised as Islam-as a way of breaking from Arab control with the same enthusiasm that their Christian forebears had accepted Donatism in opposition to Rome. The heretical Kharidjite movement surfaced in Morocco as a revolt against the Arabs in 739. The Berber Kharidjites (seceders; literally, those who emerge from impropriety) proclaimed their belief that any suitable Muslim candidate could be elected caliph without regard to his race, station or descent from the Prophet. Taking a position directly paralleling that of the Donatists, the Kharidjites maintained that a sinner could no longer be a believer because faith was not possible without purity, and they thereby regarded all other Muslims as heretics. The attack on the Arab monopoly of the religious leadership of Islam was explicit in Kharidjite doctrine, and Berbers across the Maghrib rose in revolt in the name of religion against Arab domination. Kairouan was sacked and its mosques desecrated. In the wake of revolt, Kharidjite sectarians established a number of theocratic tribal kingdoms, most of which had short and troubled histories. The rise of the Kharidjites in the Maghrib coincided with a period of turmoil in the Arab world during which the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads and relocated the caliphate in Baghdad. In the countryside the ulama (Islamic scholars and teachers) of the mosques were replaced as the spiritual guides of the people by wandering holy men (al murabitun), or "those who have made a religious retreat" (transliterated as marabouts). The marabouts were mystics and seers, miracle workers endowed with a charisma (baraka), whose tradition antedated Islam in the Maghrib and was as old as religion itself among the Berbers. They were incorporated into intensely local cults of saints whose domed tombs dotted the countryside and who were venerated by Muslims and Jews alike. The marabouts had traditionally acted as arbiters in tribal disputes, and, whenever the authority of government waned in a particular locale, the people turned to them for political leadership as well as for spiritual guidance. Maghribi Islam thus took shape as a coexisting blend of the scrupulous intellectualism of the ulama and the sometimes frenzied emotionalism of the masses. In general, however, Ifriquiya was not as susceptible to the heterodoxy that characterized popular Islamic practices farther west. Two factors account for this: first, Ifriquiya came more directly under the orthodox influence of the mosques and schools of Tunis and Kairouan, and, second, its larger urban and sedentary population had been more thoroughly arabized than was the case elsewhere in the Maghrib. Aghlabids After the Arab conquest, Ifriquiya was governed by a succession of amirs (commanders) who were subordinate to the caliph in Damascus and, after 750, in Baghdad. In 800 the caliph appointed as amir Ibrahim ibn Aghlab, who established a hereditary dynasty and ruled Ifriquiya as an autonomous state that was subject to the caliph's spiritual jurisdiction and nominally recognized him as its political suzerain. The ninth century has been described as the region's "golden age," from which it developed as a politically and culturally distinct entity within the Islamic world. [See Ancient Roman Capital: Ruins of the ancient Roman capitol at Dougga, Tunisia's largest and best preserved archaeological site. Courtesy Embassy of Tunisia, Washington] In 827 the reigning amir, Ziyat Allah, diverted the energies of the restless Arab military caste to Sicily, where rebellious subjects of the Byzantine emperor had invited Aghlabid intervention. The Arabs seized part of the island and conquered the rest piece-meal over the next 75 years. For a time they held Sardinia and gained a foothold in southern Italy as well, and in 846 Arab raiders plundered the suburbs of Rome and sacked the basilica of Saint Peter. The Aghlabids contested control of the central Mediterranean with the Byzantine Empire and played an active role in the internal politics of Italy (see fig. 4). Palermo, noted for its wealth and cosmopolitan culture as the capital of Aghlabid Sicily, was one of Europe's largest cities. Meanwhile, in Ifriquiya the Aghlabid amirs repaired the neglected Roman irrigation system, rebuilding the country's prosperity and restoring the vitality of its cities and towns with the agricultural surplus that was produced. At the top of Ifriquiya's political and social hierarchy were the court, the military caste, and an Arab urban elite that included merchants, scholars, and government officials who had come to Kairouan and Tunis from many parts of the Islamic world. Members of the large Jewish communities that also resided in those cities held office under the amirs and engaged in commerce and the crafts. Converts to Islam often retained the positions of authority held traditionally by their families or class in Roman Africa; but a Christian community, speaking the provincial Latin dialect of Africa, lingered on in the towns until the twelfth century. During the golden age Aghlabid patronage transformed Kairouan into the center of Maghribi religious and intellectual life. Kairouan was a great market for books in Arabic and Hebrew that had been copied by scribes. Its mosques and schools attracted pilgrims and scholars-Jewish and well as Muslim-from all parts of the Islamic world. So important was the reputation of Kairouan as a holy city that, according to custom, seven pilgrimages made there by a devout Muslim were the equivalent in merit of the required hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The most outstanding cultural figure of the golden age was the poet-scholar Ibn Rachiq, renowned for his literary commentaries and historical works. His contemporary at Kairouan, Ibn Zeid, codified the Malikite branch of Islamic law that applied throughout the Maghrib, and more than 40 volumes on jurisprudence are attributed to him. The Aghlabids established a tradition of intellectual excellence that survived the dynasty. In the tenth century Constantius Africanus, a Christian from Carthage knowledgeable in medicine, natural science, and astronomy, introduced Arab learning in those fields to Europe from the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy, where he translated works of Arabic scholarship into Latin. It was primarily through Arabic texts that classical Greek learning in science and philosophy was transmitted to the scholars of Europe over the next two centuries. The tension and interplay between the Islamic and Christian worlds-most evident on the frontiers in Sicily and Spain, where the two cultures were in constant conflict-was a major stimulus for Europe's twelfth-century renaissance. [See Figure 4.: Aghlabid Domains, Ninth Century A.D.] Fatimids Already in the seventh century a conflict had developed between supporters of rival claimants to the caliphate that would split Islam into two branches-the orthodox Sunni and the Shia-which continued thereafter as the basic division among Muslims. The Shia (from the so-called Shiat Ali, or Party of Ali) supported the claim of the direct descendants of Ali, the fourth caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whereas the Sunni favored that of Ali's rival, Muawiyah, leader of a collateral branch of Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh of Mecca, and the principle of election of the fittest from the ranks of the shurfa (descendants of the Prophet-literally, nobles; sing., sharif). The Shia had their greatest appeal among non-Arab Muslims, who were scorned by the aristocratic desert Arabs. In the closing decade of the ninth century, a missionary of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, Abu Abdullah al Hussein, converted the Kutama Berbers of the Kabylie region to that militant brand of Shiism and led them on a crusade against the Sunni Aghlabids. Kairouan fell in 909, and the next year the Kutama installed the Ismaili grand master from Syria, Ubaidalla Said, as imam (religious leader) of their movement and ruler over the territory they had conquered. Recognized by his Berber followers as the Mahdi (the divinely guided one), the imam founded the Shia dynasty of the Fatimids, (named for Fatima, daughter of Muhammad and wife of Ali, from whom he claimed descent) and moved the capital from Kairouan to a coastal stronghold renamed Mahdia in his honor. Merchants of the coastal towns were the backbone of the Fatimid state that had been founded by religious enthusiasts and imposed by Berber tribesmen. The slow but steady economic revival of Europe created a demand for goods from the East for which the ports of Ifriquiya and Fatimid Sicily were the ideal distribution centers. Trading houses in Ifriquiya opened branches in Egypt, and their merchants, some of whom ventured as far as India in search of trade goods, won a reputation for their daring. The warehouses in the ports of Ifriquiya stored and shipped out grain, drugs, spices, lacquer, and dyes, as well as susiyyat, the cloth woven in Ifriquiya from Egyptian flax for export back to Egypt. Fatimid rule was harsh and intolerant, persecuting the Sunni ulama of Kairouan and the Kharidjite sectarians alike. For many years the Fatimids threatened Morocco with invasion, but eventually they turned their armies eastward toward Egypt, where in the name of religion the Berbers took their revenge on the Arabs. The Fatimids completed the conquest of Egypt from the Abbasids by 969 and moved their capital to the new city that they founded at Cairo, where they established a Shia caliphate to rival that of the Sunni caliph at Baghdad. The Fatimids left the Maghrib to their Berber vassals, the Zirids, but the Shia regime had already begun to crumble outside Ifriquiya as factions struggled indecisively for regional supremacy. The Zirids neglected the country's economy, except to pillage it for their personal gain. Agricultural production declined, and farmers and herdsmen took to brigandage. The depletion of the gold supply and the shifting of trade routes gradually depressed Ifriquiya's once thriving commerce. In an effort to hold the support of the urban Arabs, the Zirid amir, Al Moezz ibn Badis, defiantly rejected the Shia creed in 1049, broke with the Fatimids, and initiated a Berber return to Sunni orthodoxy. In Cairo the Fatimid caliph invited beduin tribes from Arabia (known collectively as the Hilalians, who had ravaged Egypt for years) to migrate to the Maghrib and punish his rebellious vassals. The Arab nomads spread over the region, in the words of the historian Ibn Khaldun, like a "swarm of locusts," impoverishing it, destroying towns, and turning farmland into steppe. In 1057 they looted and destroyed Kairouan. Over a long period they displaced Berber farmers from their land and converted it to pasturage. Many Berbers, driven from their traditional lands, joined the Hilalians as nomads. The Hilalian impact on the Maghrib was devastating in both economic and demographic terms, altering the face and culture of the region and completing the arabization of Ifriquiya. In the meantime, the Norman rulers of southern Italy took advantage of the Zirids' distress in North Africa to invade Sicily in 1060 and return it to Christian control. In 1134 Norman knights occupied the island of Jerba to use it as a base for attacks on the African mainland; by 1150 Roger II, Norman king of Sicily, held a string of ports and fortresses along the coast between Tunis and Tripoli and dominated the narrow straits of the central Mediterranean. Norman interests in North Africa, however, were essentially commercial rather than political, and no effort was made to extend their conquests inland. Hafsids The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed the rise in Morocco of two rival Berber tribal dynasties-the Almoravids and Almohads, both founded by religious reformers-that dominated the Maghrib and Muslim Spain for more than 200 years. The founder of the Almohad (literally, "one who proclaims" the oneness of God) movement was a Sunni alim, Ibn Tumart (d. 1130), who preached a doctrine of moral regeneration through the reaffirmation of monotheism. As judge and political leader as well as spiritual director, Ibn Tumart gave the Almohads a hierarchical and theocratic centralized government, respecting but transcending the old representative tribal structure. His successor, the sultan Abd al Mumin (1130-63), subdued Morocco, extended the Muslim frontier in Spain, and by 1160 had swept eastward across the Maghrib and forced the withdrawal of the Normans-with safe passage-from their strongholds in Ifriquiya, which he added to the Almohad empire. Abd al Mumin proclaimed a caliphate at Cordova, giving the Almohad sultan supreme religious as well as political authority within his domains, but religious reform gradually gave way to dynastic politics as the motivating force behind the movement. The Almohads had succeeded in unifying the Maghrib, but as its empire grew and the Almohad power base shifted to Spain, the dynasty became more remote from the Berber tribes that had launched it. By 1270 the Almohads in Morocco had succumbed to tribal warfare and in Spain to the steady advance to Castile. At the eastern end of the Almohad empire the sultan left an autonomous viceroy whose office became hereditary in the line of Mohamed ben Abu Hafs (1207-21), a descendant of one of Ibn Tumart's companions. With the demise of the Almohad dynasty in Morocco, the Hafsids adopted the titles of caliph and sultan and considered themselves the Almohads' legitimate successors, keeping alive the memory of Ibn Tumart and the ideal of Maghribi unity. Their dynasty survived in Tunisia-as Ifriquiya came to be known-until the sixteenth century. The poet-prince Abu Zakariya al Hafs (1228-49) moved his capital from Kairouan, which had never recovered from its sacking by the Hilalians, to Tunis, which then became the cultural and political capital of the country. The Hafsids' political support and Tunisia's economy were rooted in the coastal towns, while the hinterland was effectively given up to the tribes that had made their nominal submission to Tunis. The Hafsid sultans encouraged trade with Europe, forged close links with Aragon and the Italian maritime states, and dispatched embassies as far afield as the court of King Haakon of Norway. The Maghrib and Spain, linked under the Almohads, shared a common culture-called Moorish-that transcended dynastic lines and political boundaries in creating new and unique forms of art, literature, and architecture. Its influence spread eastward from Spain as far as Tunisia, where the return of order and prosperity made possible a second flowering of Arab culture and scholarship. Under the Hafsids the school of the Zituna Mosque in Tunis was recognized as the leading center of Islamic learning in the Maghrib, but Hafsid Tunisia's culture was essentially a phenomenon of the court, dependent on the patronage of its sultans. One of the greatest intellectual figures of the Hafsid age was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the historian and critic, who attempted to formulate historical laws to explain the rise and fall of dynasties in the Islamic world in his encyclopedic Al Muqaddima, (Prolegomena or "Introduction" to universal history), a work that remains an important source of information about early Maghribi history. Despite commercial and diplomatic ties, Hafsid relations with the European powers eventually deteriorated. In 1270 Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) led the Eighth Crusade to Tunisia, where he died of the plague. The Aragonese intrigued in the dynasty's increasingly troubled and complex internal politics, backing rival claimants to the Hafsid throne. Marabout republics, tribal states, and the coastal enclaves seized by Andalusian and renegade Greek pirates defied the sultan's authority and by the fifteenth century had supplanted it in large parts of Tunisia. The Hafsids periodically attempted to revive the dynasty's fortunes, only to exhaust their resources in the effort; but during the Hafsid era, spanning more than 300 years, Tunisia acquired a distinctive character and defined its place within the Islamic world. Ottoman Regency Piracy lured adventurers from around the Mediterranean to the Maghribi coastal cities and islands. Among them were two brothers, Aruj and Khair al Din, the latter known as Barbarossa (Redbeard) to Europeans. Muslims from the Greek island of Lesbos, they reached Tunisia in 1504 and sailed from Jerba Island under Hafsid patronage. In 1510, however, the brothers were invited by the maritime republic of Algiers to defend it against the Spaniards. Instead they seized Algiers and used it as a base of operations not only for piracy but also for conquests in the interior. Khair al Din subsequently recognized the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan over the territory that he controlled and was in turn appointed the sultan's regent in the Maghrib, bearing the title beylerbey (commander in chief). He was forced to abandon Algiers temporarily (1519-25) to the Hafsids, who resisted Ottoman penetration in the Maghrib, but with Turkish troops Khair al Din was able to consolidate his position in the central Maghrib and in 1534 mounted a successful seaborne assault on Tunis. The Hafsid sultan, Hassan, took refuge in Spain, where he sought the aid of the Habsburg king-emperor, Charles V, to restore him to his throne. Spanish troops and ships recaptured Tunis in 1535 and reinstalled Hassan. Protected by a large Spanish garrison at La Goulette, the harbor of Tunis, the Hafsids became the Muslim ally of Catholic Spain in its struggle with the Turks for supremacy in the Mediterranean, making Tunisia and the waters around it the stage for repeated conflict between the two great powers. In 1569 a Turkish force operating out of Algiers retook Tunis, only to lose it again in 1573 to Don Juan of Austria. The next year, however, the Turks returned with a large armada and 40,000 troops, compelling the Spanish garrison to abandon Tunis. The last of the Hafsids was carried off to Constantinople, and Tunisia became a province of the Ottoman Empire, governed by the beylerbey in Algiers, with Turkish as the language of administration. Pashas, Deys, and Beys In 1587 the Ottoman Maghrib was divided into three regencies-at Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. In Tunisia the authority of the beylerbey as regent gave way to that of a pasha (governor) appointed by the sultan for a one-year term. The regency was provided with a corps of janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants who were committed to a lifetime of service in Tunisia. The corps numbered 4,000 infantrymen and was organized into 40 companies, each commanded by a junior officer with the rank of dey (literally, maternal uncle). It formed a self-governing military guild, subject to its own laws, whose interests were protected by the Divan, a council of senior officers. Real power came to rest with the army, and the pasha's role was reduced to that of ceremonial head of state and figurehead representative of Ottoman suzerainty. While the mission of the janissaries in Tunisia was to maintain order and collect taxes, the Barbary corsairs supplied the regency's treasury with a steady income from piracy and waged war at sea against Spain. Piracy was a highly disciplined business, calculated as an extension of overall Turkish naval strategy in the Mediterranean. Operations were conducted by the rais (pirate captains), who preyed on shipping and raided the European coasts of the western Mediterranean to capture and carry away hostages to be held for ransom or as merchandise for the slave markets of North Africa. The rais-many of them European renegades who had apostatized and become "Turks by profession"-were banded together in a self-regulating taifa (guild) to further the corporate interests in their trade and to counter the influence of the Turkish military garrison in the affairs of the regency. Mutinies and coups were frequent, and generally the janissaries were loyal to whomever paid and fed them most regularly. In 1591 the deys staged a successful coup against their superior officers in the divan and forced the pasha, acting as regent for the sultan, to appoint their chosen leader as head of government-in which capacity he continued to bear the title of dey. The deys, their Turkish infantry reinforced by spahis (locally recruited cavalry), were secure in their control of the cities and the coastal region but relied on a civilian official, the bey, to oversee the government of the tribes and to collect taxes in the hinterland with his private army of Tunisian auxiliaries. Such was the strength in the countryside of one of these officials, the Corsican renegade Murad Bey (d. 1631), that he secured a hereditary title for his family both to the beylicate and also to the office of pasha. The political history of seventeenth-century Tunisia thus became one of the struggle between the dey, backed by the janissaries and the Turkish bureaucracy, and the bey-pasha, who increasingly came to be identified with the interests of the old Arab elite for control of the apparatus of government. After 1666 the bey-pasha dictated the choice of the dey and gradually relieved him of his duties as head of government. The beylicate, in the meantime, has established itself as the representative of order and stability against tribal anarchy and military indiscipline. Tunisian naval units were dispatched to reinforce the Turkish navy in time of war, and the sultan as caliph was recognized as the spiritual leader of Islam; but, although it remained nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Tunisia had in fact become an autonomous state governed by a hereditary ruling house. By the late seventeenth century, trade had become a more important source of income than piracy. Commercial agreements were entered into with European trading partners, particularly France, and concessions for the development of trade were granted to foreign interests. Tunisia imported finished manufactured goods in exchange for a variety of commodities-grain, olive oil, dates, hides, textiles, and sponges. Tunisian hatters enjoyed a monopoly on the sale of the shashiya, the red fez worn throughout the Ottoman world, which they made of Spanish wool imported by Jewish merchants in Tunis. Husseinids Continually troubled by the truculence of the janissaries and beset by unrest in the tribal areas, Tunisia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was also threatened by armed intervention from Algiers, whose dey claimed hegemony over the other autonomous Ottoman regencies in the Maghrib. In 1702 a janissary officer, Ibrahim al Sharif, murdered the bey-pasha, Murad III, together with his family, and seized control of the government in Tunis, but his regime was short-lived. Janissaries from Algeria invaded Tunisia in 1705 on the pretext of restoring legitimate government and took Ibrahim prisoner. Hussein ben Ali, an officer of Greek origin who had organized the defense of Tunis against the Algerian janissaries, assumed the title of bey with the army's backing and subsequently secured the sultan's appointment as pasha. Hussein then defied the dey of Algiers, who plotted to reinstate Ibrahim in Tunis as his puppet, and named a member of his own family to succeed him as bey-pasha. A move by the Porte (Ottoman government) to install a regent in Tunis of its own picking when Hussein died in 1715 was thwarted when religious and military leaders rallied behind the Husseinid Dynasty and the concept of Tunisian autonomy it represented. The bey-pasha was an absolute monarch who directed the government in Tunis with the aid of a small cabinet. It was clear that he governed Tunisia for, and in the name of, the Turkish elite, who with officials recruited from the class of Mamluks (literally, slaves; non-Turkish subjects of the sultan conscripted for life into the service of the Ottoman Empire), to which Hussein belonged, monopolized positions of authority in the central government. After Hussein, title to the beylicate remained within the ruling house according to a system by which the Husseinid prince regarded best qualified to rule was designated heir apparent during the lifetime of the reigning bey. The choice of a successor was determined by the janissary officer corps, whose periodic coups in support of one or another rival Husseinid claimant were routinely legitimized in decrees issued by the Porte. A relatively strong ruler like Ali Bey (1759-82) assured the stability of his regime by acceding to the demands of the janissaries, but he also courted Arab support to counterbalance their power. Increasingly, the dynasty's policies came to reflect concern for the interests of the Arab urban elite in Tunis and the towns of the north and the Sahil. Local government devolved on about 60 qaids (governors), appointed by the bey from Arab notables. Working beneath the qaids were approximately 2,000 sheikhs who were responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining order in tribal areas and provincial towns with the aid of Arab spahis put at the qaid's disposal. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, tribal leaders commanding the loyalty of more than one-third of the bey's subjects in the highlands, steppes, and far south acted quite independently of his government's authority. Neglected as a fighting force, the army refrained from venturing into these areas to collect taxes; as state finances deteriorated, the beylicate was forced to look abroad for loans. Whatever internal problems may have afflicted the Husseinid regime, European travelers reported that the Tunisians were the "most civilized people who inhabit the coast of the Mediterranean," superior in their politics and culture to the Algerians and given to commerce rather than to piracy. Although piracy was discouraged by the Husseinids, corsairs armed and sheltered in Tunisian ports continued to threaten trade and the security of seamen, and European maritime powers regularly paid tribute to the bey of Tunis and rulers of the other Barbary States (Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli) to purchase immunity from attacks on their shipping. American merchant ships, no longer covered by British protection, were seized by Barbary pirates in the years that followed United States independence, and American crews were enslaved in North Africa. In 1800 the United States ratified a treaty with the bey, guaranteeing him payment of tribute in return for a promise that Tunisian-based corsairs would not molest American shipping. In 1805, however, a Tunisian mission visited Washington to modify the treaty, and the annual tribute was eliminated in return for a trade agreement. An Anglo-French fleet imposed acceptance of a protocol on Tunisia in 1818 that prohibited further arming of corsairs and the enslavement of Christians. Ahmed Bey The French occupation of neighboring Algeria in 1830, displacing the Ottoman regency there, was not a cause for alarm in Tunisia. It was considered a temporary measure and for a time held out the promise that Husseinid princes would be called on to rule in Oran and Constantine. French annexation of Algeria four years later, coupled with the reassertion of Turkish sovereignty in Tripoli in 1837, discouraged Tunisian optimism, however. The overriding concern of Ahmed Bey (1837-55) was to avoid giving an excuse for foreign intervention in Tunisia. Slavery was completely abolished and privateering suppressed in response to European objections, while steps were taken to put the beylicate's sovereignty and Tunisian autonomy beyond challenge. The key to nationbuilding was the modernization of Tunisian institutions. Reformism, however, was an elite movement, totally lacking in popular support. Lacking as well the resources to finance reform or the machinery to manage it, the political elite had no clear idea of what its goals ought to be. Without considerable success, administration was strengthened in an effort to bring all areas of the country under the control of the government in Tunis and to provide a more efficient tax collection system. Building a modern army was seen as an appropriate and realizable starting point for the reform movement. A military academy was established at the beylical palace at Bardo to provide officers, still predominantly of Turkish background, for a 26,000-man army that was intended to stand as a symbol of Tunisia's sovereignty. The new army was modeled on the recently re-organized Turkish army and was trained by French officers. The bey's government took out large loans from French banks to pay for the military buildup. Ahmed Bey's mentor was his prime minister and treasurer, Mustafa Khaznader, who survived the bey and served continuously as head of the Tunisian government from 1837 to 1873. A Greek by origin, he had been carried off as a small child from Khios by the Turks when they ravaged that island during the Greek war for independence. Raised as a Muslim, Mustafa Khaznader had been Ahmed Bey's companion since their boyhood together and encouraged his master in debilitating debauchery. Occupying a position of trust in the beylicate, Khaznader was an embezzler on a large scale who ultimately led Tunisia into bankruptcy and opened the door for French economic and political penetration. Encouraged by the French, he promoted an ambitious public works program and accumulated an immense personal fortune by arranging loans to pay for it at exorbitant rates of interest in collusion with French banking houses. Despite the bolstered armed forces and reformed administration that his regime offered as evidence of its modernity, Ahmed Bey's fear that Tunisia would be swallowed up by France or Turkey dictated the content of his foreign policy. The greater the threat from France was perceived to be, the closer Tunisia drew toward its nominal suzerain, the Ottoman sultan. The more persistent Turkey's pressure on Tunisia for formal recognition of the sultan's suzerainty, the more avidly French support was cultivated. Foreign policy was an issue that divided Turkish and Arab elites within the reform movement. France encouraged Tunisia's assertion of its independence from the Ottoman Empire, a policy favored by the Turks in Tunis because it assured the continuance of the bey's authoritarian regime and their privileged position with it. During the same period, however, Britain backed the formal restoration of Ottoman sovereignty in Tunisia. Committed to propping up the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against Russian expansion, the British not only guaranteed its territorial integrity but also looked for opportunities to draw parts of the diffuse empire toward Constantinople and away from the influence of other European powers. Tunisia's Arab elite preferred the British approach, believing that the connection with a reformed and revitalized Ottoman Empire would promote internal reform in their own country that would extend to them greater participation in government. Ahmed Bey pawned the family jewels to send 4,000 Tunisian troops to the Crimean War (1854-56) and to become in one stroke an ally of all the contenders for influence in his country. Tunisia was represented at the peace conference in Paris, where the Ottoman Empire agreed to further constitutional and legal reforms proposed by its European allies, Britain and France, whose consuls in Tunis picked up the theme by recommending extension of similar reforms to Tunisia "so as to be"-in the words of the British consul-"as modern as Turkey." Tunisian reformers were receptive and saw in suggestions for the constitutional restructuring of the government a means for achieving rapid modernization and economic development. Unquestionably, however, the immediate purpose of the European consuls in proposing specific legal reforms was to make it easier for European commercial interests to function in a country where Islamic codes prohibited equal application of the law to non-Muslims engaged in business there. In this divergence of interests lay the essential contradiction in the reform movement. For the Tunisian elite, reform was necessary to maintain the country's independence. But reform and modernization also led inevitably to greater European participation in Tunisia's political and economic affairs.