Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0204/02040.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 34KB | 528 lines

$Unique_ID{COW02040}
$Pretitle{234}
$Title{Jordan
Chapter 1B.   Ottoman Rule}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{arab
british
palestine
jewish
ottoman
abdullah
arabs
jews
government
mandate}
$Date{1979}
$Log{Figure 4.*0204001.scf
}
Country:     Jordan
Book:        Jordan, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1979

Chapter 1B.   Ottoman Rule

     Mamluk Egypt and its possessions fell to the Ottoman sultan Selim I in
1517 and was annexed to the aggressive and dynamic Ottoman Empire. But the
Jordan region stagnated under Ottoman rule. Although the pilgrim caravans to
Mecca continued to be an important source of income, the East Bank was largely
forgotten by the outside world for more than 300 years until "rediscovered"
in the nineteenth century by European travelers.

     Ottoman domains were divided for administrative purposes into provinces,
each called a vilayet and presided over by a governor who bore the title pasha
and who ruled with absolute authority at the pleasure of the sultan in
Constantinople. Palestine was part of the vilayet of Beirut, and Jerusalem was
administered as a separate district (sanjak) reporting directly to the sultan.
The East Bank was included in the vilayet of Syria, and its capital was
Damascus.

     During the 1831-39 period Ottoman rule was displaced by that of Muhammad
Ali-pasha of Egypt and nominally subject to the sultan-when his troops
occupied the region during a revolt against the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman
government came to be known. Britain and Russia compelled Muhammad Ali to
withdraw, and the Ottoman governors were restored. The Ottomans enforced
sharia in the towns and settled countryside, but in the desert customary
tribal law was also recognized. Because of the unitary nature of Islamic
law-encompassing as it did all facets of life, religious and social as well as
civil and economic-it was inconceivable that it could be applied to
non-Muslims. The Ottoman regime used the millet (from the Arabic for "people")
system, which accorded non-Muslim communities the right to manage their
affairs according to their own laws. The European powers also concluded
separate treaties (capitulations) with the Porte whereby their consuls were
granted extraterritorial legal jurisdiction over their citizens and clients in
the Ottoman Empire. In addition, France claimed the special right to protect
the sultan's Catholic subjects and Russia, to protect the sultan's more
numerous Orthodox subjects.

     Administration at every level of the Ottoman system was essentially
military in character. Ottoman rule on the East Bank, however, was lax, and
garrisons were kept small. As long as order was preserved, military levies
provided when called for, and taxes paid, Ottoman officials were satisfied;
however, these goals were not easily achieved. In an effort to stabilize the
population, the Ottomans in the late 1800s established several small colonies
of Circassians-Sunni Muslims who had fled from the Caucasus region of Russia
in the 1860s and 1870s. Although the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople was the
caliph, the Ottoman officials and soldiers were despised by the Arabs as
foreign oppressors. Truculent shaykhs regularly disrupted the peace, and the
fiercely independent beduin revolted whenever the opportunity to do so arose.
Serious uprisings occurred in 1905 and again in 1910 that were suppressed only
with considerable difficulty.

     In 1900 the Porte, with German assistance, began construction of the
Hejaz Railway, which by 1908 linked Damascus with the holy city of Medina. Its
purpose was twofold: to transport Muslim pilgrims to Mecca and to facilitate
military control of the strategic Arabian Peninsula. To protect the railroad,
the Porte increased its Ottoman military presence along the route and, as it
had done earlier to safeguard caravan traffic, subsidized rival Arab tribal
shaykhs in the region.

Arab Nationalism, Zionism, and the British Mandate

     In the last two decades of the nineteenth century two separate movements
developed that were to have continuing effects for all of the Middle East-the
Arab revival and Zionism. Both movements aimed at uniting their peoples in a
national homeland. They were to converge and confront each other in Palestine
where, it was initially thought by some, they could each achieve their
aspirations in an atmosphere of mutual accommodation. They were, in fact, to
prove incompatible.

     By 1875 a small group of Western-oriented Muslim and Christian Arab
intellectuals in Beirut were urging the study of Arab history, literature, and
language to revive Arab identity. By means of secretly printed and circulated
publications they attempted to expose the harsh nature of Ottoman rule and to
arouse an Arab consciousness that would make greater autonomy or even
independence a possibility. The idea of independence was always expressed in
the context of a unified entity-"the Arab nation" as a whole. After only a
few years, however, Ottoman security operations had stifled the group's
activities.

     At about the same time a Jewish revival was finding expression in Europe
that called for the return of the Jews in the Diaspora to their historic
homeland. The impulse and development of Zionism were almost exclusively the
work of European Jews, i.e., the Ashkenazim. In the mid-1800s several Jewish
intellectuals-impressed by the spread of nationalism among the peoples of
Europe-began to write articles and books advocating Jewish nationalism. In
1882 Leo Pinsker, a Russian physician, published his work Auto-Emancipation in
which he expressed his doubt that the Jews would ever be able to identify with
the societies within which they lived because the societies were so thoroughly
anti-Semitic.

     The impetus to the founding of an organization with the specific goal of
a Jewish homeland was provided by Theodor Herzl in his book The Jewish State,
which was published in 1896. Herzl, in effect, took the arguments of the
anti-Semites and used them to support the notion of a Jewish homeland. In an
assessment of anti-Semitism and the Jews that was very close to Pinsker's,
Herzl argued that even if Jewish separateness in religion and social
custom were to disappear, the Jews would continue to be treated as unrespected
strangers. Other strangers, Italians residing in London, for example, were
regarded as individuals with a home and culture. Until a homeland-a nation-for
and of Jews had been created, Jews in the Diaspora would remain a people
apart. Herzl seemed to believe that after the establishment of a Jewish
state, which he envisaged as a new Switzerland, the Jews in the Diaspora
would be able to assimilate and would eventually disappear as a group.

     In 1897 Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland,
where the Zionist Organization (see Glossary) was founded with the stated aim
of creating "for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public
law." In 1907 the Zionists set up an office in Palestine to facilitate Jewish
immigration from Europe. Small Jewish agricultural settlements (kibbutzim)
evolved a distinctive system of communal living, and Jewish schools, press,
and labor movements came into existence. In 1909 the Jewish city of Tel Aviv
was founded on the coast near Jaffa. Under stimulus of this second wave of
immigration, the number of Jews in Palestine rose dramatically to about 85,000
by the start of World War I, or fully 12 percent of the total population.

     Meanwhile in Constantinople, reform-minded nationalist army officers,
known as the Young Turks, in 1908 had forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to restore
the 1876 Ottoman Constitution and the next year deposed him in favor of his
malleable brother, Mehmed V. Under the constitution Ottoman provinces were
represented by delegates elected to an imperial parliament. These developments
initially generated a wave of good feeling among the empire'