Anatomy of a massacre

The Damascus Events is a fascinating narrative of the interplay between geopolitical, social, economic, and technological transformations that culminated in two catastrophic wars of the 20th century

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World

Author: Eugene Rogan

Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages: 400

Price:  Rs 1,999

The Ottoman Empire endured from the 14th to the 20th century covering a vast area including West Asia and North Africa, the Balkans and some parts of Central Europe. Its unusual longevity as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multicultural and multilingual entity, ruled from Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) has not been the subject of careful analysis. Western histories have focused on the extended period of its decline in the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was preyed upon by predatory imperial powers of the West, slicing away chunks of its sprawling territories and imposing unequal political and commercial arrangements upon it. This feeding frenzy came to be known, with beguiling delicacy, as the so-called Eastern Question. Eugene Rogan’s account traces this painful decline through a story centred on a part of the empire containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the old intellectual and cultural hubs of Damascus and Baghdad and the commercial hub of Beirut in Lebanon.

While the Ottomans identified themselves as Muslim rulers and treated their Muslim subjects as a privileged cohort, the Christian and Jewish minorities were protected but without equal rights or entitlements in law. The latter accepted this as the natural order of the times.  This familiar old order broke down in Syria, leading to a massacre of Christians in Damascus by their Muslim neighbours in 1860. These events, known as the Damascus Events, are the subject of the book. The story is drawn mostly from the eyewitness account left behind by Mikhayil Mishaqa, a Christian Arab intellectual and aristocrat who served as a Vice Consul of the United States in Damascus, while his superior, Johnson, was the US Consul in Beirut. The author had fortuitously chanced upon a collection of his dispatches to Johnson detailing the chain of events that led to the several days of bloodletting that engulfed the Christian community in Damascus. Mishaqa himself was attacked and suffered serious injuries. His house was ransacked and his considerable property looted. But through the horrific violence, we see glimpses of humanity. Mishaqa was given shelter by a notable Muslim merchant family.

An intriguing figure who features in the book is the Algerian freedom fighter, Abd al-Qadir, who had made peace with French colonialists and was allowed to go into exile. He chose Damascus and was protected by a retinue of 11,000 fully armed Algerian militia fiercely loyal to him. He was supported by a more than generous French pension. It is not clear what kind of relationship he maintained with his erstwhile adversary, but he was clearly a most useful source of information. He was in the forefront in rescuing and sheltering a very large number of Christian families, putting himself at considerable risk.

Fuad Pasha, the Ottoman Foreign Minister (and later the Grand Vizier or Prime Minister) was tasked by the ruling sultan in Istanbul to re-establish Ottoman authority in Damascus, restore confidence amongst the Christian and other minority residents uprooted in the violence and punish the chief Muslim perpetrators and instigators of violence and looting. He came with a substantial and disciplined military contingent into the city. He was ruthless in identifying and punishing, including through swift executions, those involved in the bloody riots including leading Muslim merchants. Christians were allotted Muslim houses to compensate for their properties that had been burnt or looted. This created mutual resentment but instilled a sense of law and justice and fairness among the traumatised population. But reconciliation did slowly return when investment in modern infrastructure, promotion of trade and industry generated prosperity for all communities, who were once again doing business side by side and with one another.

Dr Rogan puts these events in Damascus within the larger geopolitical drama playing out involving competing European  powers, the surging nationalism among ethnic groups trapped in imperial confines and the fallout from major technological developments, in particular steamships that cut down sailing times, the railways that revolutionised transportation, and the telegraph that made communications over vast distances virtually instantaneous. The Ottoman rulers were eventually unable to manage these multiple challenges, but in the 19th century they still had brilliant statesmen like Fuad Pasha who were able to deftly exploit European rivalries and initiate reforms that brought a measure of modernity to a feudal state, enough to delay the inevitable disintegration of the empire.

The Tanzimat reforms adopted in 1836, which turned Ottoman subjects into equal citizens before law, were aimed at forestalling European pressures on behalf of Christian and Jewish communities in Ottoman territories. It is these communities that were able to profit most from the trade preferences the Ottomans had to concede to the European powers. In Damascus as well as in other places within the empire, the Muslim communities faced both falling incomes and loss of their privileged status. It is this toxic mix that erupted into the bloody riots of 1860. The Damascus Events is a fascinating narrative, exploring the intersection of geopolitical, social and economic and technological transformations that blended into a powerful historical current, eventually leading inexorably to the two catastrophic wars of the 20th century.  There may be lessons to be learnt in managing a similar vortex of change that is beginning to engulf our 21st century.

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary