Historical Background

The interventions of Christian powers in Islamic lands, starting with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the British counter-attack of 1799–1802, had a profound psychological effect on Muslim states as far a field as Persia. Ottoman decline had been in evidence since the eighteenth century: military reverses and economic stagnation had reduced her territory and made her vulnerable to the expansive European powers, most importantly Russia. Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of this period had become for Europeans the problematic core of the ‘Eastern Question’ and would remain so for the rest of the nineteenth century. Attempts at reform by successive Ottoman Sultans seemed to most European outsiders only a staving of inevitable collapse. In 1807 Selim III was deposed and later murdered after the Janissaries – who with the ulama formed a bastion of reaction – rose to resist his military reorganization. Mahmud II eventually managed to destroy the Janissaries in 1826 and to institute wholesale reform of the army, but not before Serbia had won autonomy (1813) and Greece her independence (1830). Another potentially critical secession was forestalled in Albania by a massacre of dissident pashas and their supporters in 1830. Ottoman weaknesses had contributed to the rise of a rival power in Egypt, which the Albanian Muhammad Ali took over in 1805. Though nominally under Turkish suzerainty, the armies of the Egyptian pasha expanded into the Hijaz and Central Arabia, and under the command of Muhammad Ali's son Ibrahim completed the occupation of Syria in 1833.