Damascus 1860: anatomy of a massacre
Over three days in July 1860, Muslim citizens of Damascus attacked their Christian neighbours, killing around 2,500, plundering and burning their houses. The authorities, especially the Ottoman Turkish governor, did little to stop the slaughter. The previous month, a much larger number of Christians had been murdered by the Druzes on Mount Lebanon, over the border to the west of Damascus. The background to these horrors, and their unexpected sequel, is the subject of The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Allen Lane) by Eugene Rogan, professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University.
Rogan’s key source for this fascinating book is the correspondence and diaries of Mikhayil Mishaqa (1800-88), the first US consul in Damascus. Rogan discovered the papers in the US National Archive, where they had been misfiled for a century.
Born to a Greek Catholic family on Mount Lebanon, Mishaqa was a highly educated polymath who became a Protestant, and therefore congenial to the US consular service. Multilingual and well-connected, he is a superb witness to the dreadful events, which he and his family barely survived.
Syria, including Damascus, was part of the far-flung Ottoman empire, but since the late 18th century Turkish rule had been crumbling. First there was Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, eventually defeated with Austrian and British assistance; then the strongman Muhammad Ali established himself as de facto ruler of Egypt before seizing Syria and parts of Arabia. He was forced to retreat to Egypt by further European intervention, and there established a hereditary khedivate which lasted, under nominal Turkish control, until the British took over in 1882. In 1830 the French invaded Algeria, where for many years the resistance was led by the emir Abd al-Qadir, who, exiled to Syria, went on to play an honourable role in the Damascus events.
The Ottoman Empire was not as supine as sometimes portrayed. From the 1830’s onwards it modernised in order to cope with growing nationalist movements and the economic threat of rapidly industrialising Europe. Extensive legal and administrative reforms under the heading Tamzimat (reorganisation) included the Edict of Gülhane of 1839, which declared equality before the law for Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman citizens. This was shocking for traditional Muslim sensibilities, especially in conservative Arab provinces of the empire like Syria. Furthermore, the main European powers aggressively negotiated favourable trade agreements with the Ottomans, and, once they had obtained them, pressed for more.
The European powers were also alive to persecution of Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews, who were the particular concern of the British. In Syria, as in most predominantly Muslim countries, members of religious minorities – Dhimmi – were tolerated only as long as they paid a poll tax and accepted fewer legal rights than Muslims. Real life for minorities ranged from peaceful coexistence to ever-present peril.
By 1860, the proud and ancient city of Damascus had been severely affected by these developments. Traditionally it had manufactured high quality silks and other cloth for export to Europe as well as the empire. Now that business was in a state of near collapse. Damascus was also one of the traditional jumping off points for the Haj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. For centuries this had been a major part of the civic calendar, as important for business as for devotion, with 20,000 or more pilgrims gathering each year. But the arrival of European steam ships undercut the business model, as more and more pilgrims travelled by ship rather than camel or carriage. In some years fewer than 3,000 pilgrims now took the road south from Damascus.
Beirut in the Lebanon, by contrast, was booming, especially for European, i.e. Christian businesses. Lebanon was much more diverse than Syria, with a large Christian population and other non-Muslim peoples, including the Druzes. However, Mount Lebanon, the high country that stretches 170 km along the border with Syria, was essentially autonomous. Maronite Christians shared Mount Lebanon with the Druzes, both groups living as they had done for centuries under hereditary sheikhs. But that social structure was disintegrating because of the Ottoman legal reforms, and disputes between Maronites and Druzes which previously would have been settled by their sheikhs now had the potential to explode into violence.
Matters came to a head in May/June 1860, when the outnumbered Druzes pre-empted a planned Christian assault and seized several Christian towns, slaughtering many of their inhabitants. The Christian death toll may have exceeded 10,000. Druze militia then spread eastwards from Mount Lebanon into Syria in search of more Christians to kill and rob. Many rural Christians fled to Damascus, seeking shelter with their co-religionists.
The atmosphere in Damascus was poisonous, with a widely believed rumour that Christians were slaughtering Muslims in Jerusalem. Despite attempts by some of the city’s more prominent citizens to quash this story, violence broke out on 9 th July. By 11 th July at least 2,500 Christians were dead, the entire Christian quarter was looted and in flames, and many thousands more were sheltering in the Citadel, under the lukewarm protection of the governor, Ahmad Agha Pasha. The redoubtable Algerian resistance hero Abd al-Qadir, who commanded a small private army of Algerian veterans, sheltered many more Christians in his compound. The US Consul Mikhayil Mishaqa was separated from his wife and children and was badly injured by the mob before being rescued by a wealthy Muslim neighbour.
News of the “Damascus Events” soon reached European capitals and the USA, with predictable results. The Time s published a letter from “A Beyroutine”:
“It may certainly be called a popular rising, but it never could have taken place had the opinion not prevailed that the Government would see it with satisfaction, and had not an intense hatred of the Christian faith been deeply rooted in all the different non-Christian sects – Moslems, Metawalies, Kurds, Ansaries, Arabs, Druses – who, although disagreeing among themselves, are united by the bond of hatred to the Christians, whom they will scarcely tolerate as their slaves.”
To protect the Maronites, the French despatched 6,000 soldiers, under a fighting general thirsty for glory. Other countries sent naval forces and all applied pressure on the Ottomans to act. The Sublime Porte (as the Empire’s central government was known) knew that if the situation was left unaddressed the European nations would very likely dismember the Empire’s Arab provinces.
The Turks sent their best man, the foreign minister and political reformer Mehmed Fuad Pasha, who went straight to work reassuring the Christians and punishing the guilty in Damascus. Several hundred were hanged, including the former governor Ahmad Agha (no longer a Pasha) and other leading citizens deemed to have not tried hard enough to stop the slaughter. This risked further unrest among the Muslim majority, but Fuad didn’t waver. He struck a skilful balance between encouraging the Christians to return to Damascus (many had fled to Beirut), harshly disciplining the Muslim majority and calming the European representatives. It was a remarkable campaign of governance by a remarkable man, and it worked.
All this was chronicled by Mishaqa as he slowly recovered from his injuries. He lived a long life, dying in 1888, and saw the eventual triumph of Ottoman policy in Syria. Having compensated the Christians as well as they could afford to, the Ottomans then oversaw a flourishing of Christian business and education which exposed the poverty of Muslim education and aspirations. Finally, they established a high-quality modern state education system, which gave real opportunities for the Muslim majority as well.
The later history of the region is beyond the scope of this excellent and very readable book. But it is worth remembering that from the later 1860’s until the outbreak of civil war in 2011, Syria was religiously tolerant, except of course for Jews after the creation of Israel in 1948. This contrasted with the reality for minorities in many other Muslim regions. At present most religious killings around the world are of Christians in places like Pakistan or Muslim areas of Nigeria. More progressive Muslim countries, especially in the Gulf, have quietly allowed the building of churches to cater primarily for expatriates. But the growth of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East is obviously a retrograde step for religious toleration. The effects of this have been evident in Syria and Iraq in the last twenty years.
In 2013, a year or two after the Syrian civil war had led to severe economic persecution of Christians in parts of the country, the Melkite (Byzantine Rite Catholic) Patriarch of Damascus, Gregorios III, spoke to concerned audiences in London. He surprised them by pointing out that for many centuries all the various confessional groups had more or less got on together. And that in modern times, the otherwise villainous Assad family had kept the lid on any Muslim tendency to persecute minorities. In so doing, they had maintained the policies of the Ottomans, and in particular of Fuad Pasha, the hero of 1860.
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