CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Road to Damascus

TURKISH EXILE HAD BEEN a sweet-and-sour experience for the emir. Bursa’s population, like its blue and yellow wooden houses, was a colorful mix of Turks, Jews, Armenians and Greeks nestled at the base of the snowcapped mountain the Turks called Uludag — meaning “exhalted,” “mighty” and “sublime.” The white minarets that lanced the air, the lush gardens, hot springs, plentiful streams and hills covered with vineyards and fruit trees reminded the emir of Tlemcen. Bursa was famous internationally for its textiles, but no less famous locally were its melons, strawberries, raisins, and above all, its peaches. To taste a large, succulent Bursa peach, they said, was to taste the divine.

Living again in a Muslim culture was a tonic for Abd el-Kader. On Fridays, he spent long hours in the red marble baths of Eskikaplica and Yenikaplica, cleaning five years of prison life from his system. He couldn’t deny the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire that once was, yet neither could he forgive the Porte for abandoning him in his struggle against France. His hostility toward the Turk was never overt — he was too polite for that, but their apostasy gnawed at him to the end of his days.

Money and lodgings for his Algerians were Abd el-Kader’s main preoccupations at first. A huge, dilapidated, two-story caravanserai with courtyards, gardens and baths had been put at the emir’s disposal by the sultan, but it required repairs and furniture, which the French government ultimately provided, as well as ten horses that the French had included in his generous exile package. There were more than 100 people following in the emir’s wake. In addition to his mother, children, three wives, a dozen nannies and domestic servants, were fourteen other relatives and loyalists and their servants.

Encouraged by Paris to help with the costs of supporting the emir, the Turkish government gave Abd el-Kader 133,000 francs to buy a farm near Bursa, where he exercised his horses and planted barley and fruit trees to provide work for his companions in arms and for other Algerians who might want to join him. His former caliph, Ben Salem, who had surrendered to Bugeaud in 1847 and his former secretary Haj al-Kharroubi, who had been captured during the raid on the emir’s smala, followed him to Bursa with their own family retinues. Eventually hundreds, then thousands of Algerians from around the Mediterranean flocked to their emir. Just as Abd el-Kader was considered by the Turks a protégé of the French emperor, so the Algerians became his protégés, forming a quasi-French subcolony within the Ottoman Empire.

In fact, the emir was constantly pressing the Turks or the French for money. Not for himself, but for others. He used no more than half of the allotted 100,000-franc annuity for his own family’s needs and distributed the rest to his followers. When the emir learned that hard times had forced the two daughters of the aging Dey Hussein of Algiers to take up a woman’s oldest trade, he insisted on taking them under his wing. Abd el-Kader was regularly pleading with French diplomats in Istanbul and in Bursa to arrange free transportation for Algerians stranded in Beirut, Cairo, France or somewhere else around the Mediterranean, who wanted to rejoin their families or to live with him in exile. Women, it seems, were the only exception to Abd el-Kader’s life of austere self-denial whose growing harem caused grumbling, and not a little envy, among the diplomats.

If not helping him to resolve various problems affecting his own family or followers, the harried consular staff might have been scurrying around trying to figure out how to pay for this or that request, such as shipping three pureblood Arabians back to Paris for the emperor. In 1853, Louis-Napoleon fulfilled a promise he had made when the emir travelled to Paris to congratulate him for his plebiscite victory. The emperor had delivered to Abd el-Kader a magnificent Damascene sword whose hilt and scabbard was inlaid with arabesque tendrils of lapis lazuli and dotted with emeralds, pearls and rubies. In the Arab world no gift can go unanswered.

A brown bay, a light bay and a chestnut had been carefully selected by Ben Salem after months of searching as far afield as Syria for appropriate specimens. Embroidered in gold thread on the headpiece of their bridles, were a few lines composed by the emir, according to the markings of each horse. “Honor and accept me, for I am a horse of distinction; the whiteness of my feet and face reflect the purity of the heart of him who sent me,” waxed the eloquent bay.

Abd el-Kader found the French diplomats in Turkey cool and suspicious compared with the attention and celebrity status he had experienced in Paris under the emperor’s patronage. To be sure, he had been treated with appropriate dignity upon his arrival: a twenty-one gun salute as the Labrador rounded The Golden Horn, a formal reception by the French ambassador, an audience with the sultan.

The consulate in Bursa was to be “at his service.” In reality, this meant that it was to keep an eye on him — Abd el-Kader was not allowed to travel outside the region without the consulate’s approval. Some in the Ministry of War still considered him an enemy of France who was quite capable of breaking his word and making trouble. The restriction was an insulting aggravation, for he had imagined that by then he would have been trusted. After all, he was the emperor’s friend.

And there was the problem of communication with the local people. The emir spoke no Turkish and the Turks spoke little Arabic, on top of which, he detected an air of indifference on the part of the religious scholars. Or was it jealousy or fear of his influence? After all, the emir was not only a scholar of the law, he had actually wielded a sword in defense of the faith. He was thought to have Arab nationalist leanings and to not much like the Turks.

The emir was pleased, however, that his new interpreter and handler in Turkey was a familiar and welcome face. The twenty-five-year-old George Bullad had been an auxiliary translator for Daumas and Boissonnet during Abd el-Kader’s years of imprisonment, and earlier, had been a translator on the Duke of Aumale’s staff in 1847 when the emir laid down his arms. The young Bullad came from a branch of a Syrian Christian family of silk merchants who had migrated from Damascus to Cairo in the eighteenth century. The Bullads had offered their services to Bonaparte when he arrived in Egypt with his army and legion of scholars, but lacking in competent translators. When Bonaparte returned precipitously to France, his Syrian translators followed him, knowing they would be considered traitors by the local Arabs. Bullad was born in Marseille in 1827, but his father insisted that he learn Arabic.

Bullad sent daily reports to the war ministry detailing the emir’s comings and goings. His mail was read, as well. To Abd el-Kader’s great annoyance, his request to make a pilgrimage to Mecca with his mother was refused. Nevertheless, his relationship with George Bullad remained good, even though the emir was chafing under his prisoner-like status. Bullad, like Daumas and Boissonnet before him, was an admirer of the emir and trusted his loyalty to Napoleon. He had been an alternate translator in Toulon and Amboise. Short, a prim, black-goateed bachelor at the beginning of a promising career, Bullad wanted to be Abd el-Kader’s confident, which would also help him serve better his government. He began telling the emir about his numerous cousins and the cosmopolitan, intellectually sophisticated atmosphere that the emir would find in Arab-speaking Damascus. The Bullads were also a leading family that had once been masters of the art of making Damascene steel swords, and later, important silk producers. Bullad assured the emir his family was well positioned to introduce him to all the notables of the city.

In the summer of 1855, a massive earthquake struck Bursa, destroying much of the city, though not his own residence. The emir was not one to complain about his lot, but when nature lent a helping hand, he jumped on the opportunity to return to France. His excuse was the World Exhibition in Paris, but his real purpose was to seek permission from the emperor to move to Damascus.

France was in a state of frenzied celebration when Abd el-Kader arrived in Marseille on September 8, 1855. The Crimean War had taken a decisive turn. Sebastopol had fallen, thanks to a successful French assault on the Malakov Bastion that ended a year-long siege. France and Britain had played leading roles in a European coalition formed to prevent the Russian bear from taking more bites from the decaying body of the Ottoman Empire.

An emissary of Napoleon was among the first to seek out the emir after his arrival. Did Abd el-Kader wish to attend a victory Mass in Paris? Yes, if it would please the emperor for him to be present, not explaining that he was suffering from cholera — Marseille’s pestilential gift to the returning emir. Five days later, a pale and weakened emir moved slowly down the great nave of Notre-Dame Cathedral as heads turned to watch him leaning on the arm of a military officer accompanying him to the front row with the emperor. He stood when the Te Deum was chanted, and afterwards, he was enthusiastically applauded outside the cathedral as his calèche drove him away.

Accompanied by his old friend Boissonet, now a commander, and his brother-in-law, Abd el-Kader went twice to the freshly cleared Champs-Elysees to see the world’s newest technical marvels, where they were personally escorted by the exposition’s general manager, Monsieur Le Play. The new uses of steam power impressed him, as did the latest sewing and textile machines that did in minutes what had taken him hours and days to do as a young boy who had to make his own clothes. The scholar and book collector in the emir was captivated by the machines at the Imperial Printing House that could spit out texts in different languages. Always the connoisseur of horseflesh, the exhibit on equine anatomy was a favorite, where he engaged in a spirited discussion with the presiding veterinarian. On September 27, Abd el-Kader thanked the general manager for the last time. “This exhibition is a temple of reason and intelligence, animated by the breath of God. Only the Creation itself is superior to your works.”

Later, at a reception in the glittering Tuileries Palace across from the Louvre, a well-briefed Napoleon helped the emir when they met.

“Bursa must not be a very agreeable place now. Where would you like to live?”

“That is for you to decide.”

“Would Damascus please you?”

“Yes.”

“I will arrange for you to go to Damascus and have my frigate, Tage, take you from Turkey to Lebanon.”

Before leaving Paris, Abd el-Kader wrote to Comte Waleski, minister of foreign affairs, to request that Bullad be assigned as his interpreter in Damascus, calling him a man “wise and intelligent, who speaks and translates Arabic in a very satisfactory way, while being a loyal and zealous servant to his government.” The emir knew that interpreters played a double role as ministry informants, yet if they were tactful and intelligent, this didn’t prevent him from liking them and forming genuine friendships that could help him in the behind-the-scenes debates over his future as a dependent of France. Bullad had agreed to also act as the emir’s personal secretary in Damascus, where he would not only translate for him in his official dealings with the French diplomats, but also translate his extensive personal correspondence with the likes of Eugene Daumas, Leon Roches, Ferdinand de Lesseps and dozens of others whom Abd el-Kader befriended in France or Algeria.

Negotiations began with the French ambassador as soon as the emir arrived back in Istanbul. Armed with the emperor’s offer to transport him to Beirut at the state’s expense, Abd el-Kader wanted to get as many of his people as possible onto the boat. Who were his people? It was the same question he had argued with Daumas when his entourage was transferred from Fort Lamalgue in Toulon to Pau. He could make no distinction between family and nonfamily. They were all his.

In the end, his extended family of 111 persons were allowed passage, of which twenty-seven were his immediate blood family. There was the touchy question of the women. They had to occupy quarters inside the ship so they would not be exposed to prying eyes. The men would sleep on the deck. On November 24, the emperor’s steamship disgorged Abd el-Kader’s retinue in Beirut. Scarcely off the boat and happy to breathe again the air of an Arab land, the emir received an invitation.

The English army officer who had visited him in Bursa two years earlier discovered that they had much in common. Colonel Charles Henry Churchill now wanted him to visit his own Howara estate in Mount Lebanon, as Syria’s coastal mountain range was known.

“The approach to Syria from the sea is most striking. The magnificent range of The Lebanon (White Mountain) which salutes the eye, inspires the spectator with astonishment and awe,” wrote the emir’s future biographer of the mountains that stretched a hundred miles between Sidon and Tripoli. “The lofty chain, rising to an elevation of upwards sixteen hundred fathoms, whether robed in snow or capped with clouds or mingling its clear, cold granite coloring with the deep azure of a summer sky, excites feelings of wonder and admiration. From its cedars, Solomon built his temple, and from its quarries was built the harem of Mecca. Christians glory in it as the land of prophets and saints…By degrees, the villages of the Maronites recede in successive gradations from the sea coast to the topmost acclivities over a range thirty miles wide, while the highest peaks are crowned with white and glittering convents.” The impression made on Churchill was of a “vast suburban city.”

But why were people living on the edges of rocky precipices struggling to hue out a living in calcareous rock when they had the rich Bekaa Valley to cultivate? The feudal lords who had ruled profitably in the valleys had fled to the mountains, Churchill tells us, because of the terrible Turk and other oppressors.

Churchill didn’t shy from casting stones. Biblically literate, and an ardent proponent of Christian civilization, he nevertheless wrote with the air of a skeptic with a keen eye for hogwash, masquerading as religion. “Though all traces of apostolic simplicity and evangelical truth have long been lost among the Christians who now possess it, The Lebanon was ever a resort to fugitives of that denomination that fled from the great Mohammedan invasion; and later for those sectarians exposed to the fury and persecution of the dominant faith and doctrine of Constantinople.”26

As for the Maronites, in their eyes “every authority, civil or otherwise, is merged and absorbed in the authority of the priests, and with lynx-eyed vigilance do their priests and bishops in the present day, as indeed of yore, watch every movement, every tendency which may menace their long established dominion.” For Turkish rule, Churchill had only naked contempt. “They returned (following an intermezzo of ten years, of which more later) like screeching vultures to their baffled prey. Every kind of appointment was up for auction. Places of trust were filled with men notorious for their cupidity and fanaticism. Justice, which had been purified of her defilements under Egyptian rule, was again contaminated with the offal of corruption.”

The corruption that had seeped into the pores of daily life in Lebanon could easily have been forgotten by anyone winding through the painstakingly terraced mountains that led stepwise up to Churchill’s domain. In the spring, tulips, lupins, sweet peas, anemones and hyacinth “filled the air with their fragrant exhalations.” Mulberry trees and vineyards, fig and olive orchards competed with wild oak and fir for their share of the meager soil that covered sharp, limestone rocks that formed The Lebanon.

When his string of mules, camels and horses approached the vicinity of Howara, the emir broke away with a few companions and a guide to catch up with his cavalcade later as it descended toward the Litani River. The effect of the visit on Abd el-Kader is not known directly, but the outcome was what Churchill wanted. The emir agreed in principle to cooperate with Churchill who wanted to prevent the emir’s life from becoming “alms for oblivion.” The two men became friends, and four years later, Churchill began his daily, hour-long interviews with the emir that lasted for six months.

They were like celestial twins. They shared the same passions: for horses, love of the hunt, contempt of danger, appreciation for the opposite sex, love of learning and noblesse oblige towards the less fortunate. Like, Abd el-Kader, Churchill was conscious of his genealogy. He was descended from the dukes of Marlborough, one of the most distinguished tribes among England’s own Nobility of the Sword. His grandfather, General Henry Churchill, was the nephew of John, the first Duke of Marlborough. His father made his military career in India, married well and left Charles Henry a comfortable fortune.

At nineteen, Churchill entered the 60th Rifle Regiment. No ordinary regiment, the 60th Rifles had its origins in the French and Indian Wars and was later used to fight the colonial militias of their day, skilled at shooting brightly colored “Lobsterbacks” from behind rocks and trees. This ungentlemanly American way of fighting produced a British regiment of “special forces” whose uniforms were dull green. They were lightly equipped, fast-moving sharpshooters who operated semi-independently from mainline units. Not surprisingly, the 60th attracted the unorthodox and the independent-minded. And so it seems was Charles Henry Churchill. Coincidently, both men were born in 1808.

When the thirty-two-year-old Commander of the Faithful was raising the banner of jihad against France in 1840, Churchill was disembarking in Lebanon as a staff officer to General Charles Napier. Napier was commanding a European expeditionary force that had been organized to protect the Ottoman Empire following a crushing Turkish defeat the previous year by Egyptian troops — a defeat that led to aggressive demands on the Porte by the assertive Mehmet Ali. The modernizing Egyptian viceroy whom Abd el-Kader admired as a young man, and emulated as emir, had become powerful enough to rival the sultan for control of the empire.

The man considered the founder of modern Egypt was nominally a subject of the Porte, but he had his own agenda. It included carving out of the Ottoman Empire an Arab kingdom ruled from Cairo, an idea that was obviously threatening to the Turks, but also to the British. Napier’s mission, to which Churchill had been attached as a budding Arabist, was to send the Egyptians packing to prevent a premature dismemberment of the Sick Man by Egyptian hands — hands too easily guided by their French rivals.

Greater Syria, the predominately Arab pashalik that had come under Mehmet Ali’s control, was strategic real estate. Today, it would include Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and parts of Iraq. While Mehmet Ali was an enlightened, western-minded reformer in French eyes, the apostolic successor to Napoleon Bonaparte in the Middle East, to the British he was merely a cunning and savage brute who had coldly massacred those who brought him to power. France also had historic ties to Syria.

During the crusades, French knights won kingdoms and built castles there. France maintained close ties with catholic Maronites along the coast who had been under its nominal protection since the sixteenth century when Francis I negotiated with Sultan Suleiman “capitulations” that gave French merchants special rights within the Ottoman empire. Stretching from the north southward, the ports of Latakia, Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre linked Europe with China, Damascus, Baghdad and India. Syria’s silk producers became closely connected with weavers in Lyon who enjoyed their cheap alternative sources of raw material. France could exercise influence either directly or through its friendly relations with Egypt — a legacy of Bonaparte’s respectful attitude toward Islam, even acquiring a Muslim bodyguard as he destroyed Mameluke armies.

British interests were above all commercial. Exports to the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the Crimean War had increased eightfold over the previous twenty-five years, giving the United Kingdom a six million pound annual surplus — and a turnover greater than its trade with Russia, Italy, France and Austria together. Of even greater importance was protecting future trade routes that could reduce by as much as a third the time to move goods from the homeland to India and back, goods which otherwise had to sail around Cape Horn. Whether a canal through the Suez, or railroad from Baghdad to Beirut, a Greater Syria under French influence was unwelcome to England. Russian interests centered on the Balkans and control of the Black Sea. British diplomacy favored keeping the Ottoman Empire intact, at least until it was properly positioned to get its proper share of the Sick Man’s estate.

Possessing, perhaps, a whiff of Byronic romanticism, Churchill developed strong affections for the Bedouins, and especially the Druze, in their struggle to maintain their cultural identity in the face of Turkish, Egyptian or Christian pressures. He was not merely sympathetic. Churchill had committed the most scandalous sin of all in the eyes of the European community in Damascus. He had gone native.

Identifying with, even liking, those one is trying to dominate was considered apostasy. Such fraternization, it was widely believed, would compromise the representation of one’s own national interests, as the Victorian mind was convinced that carrying the White Man’s Burden required aloofness and separation from those in need of civilization. Real knowledge of the culture was less important than an air of indomitable superiority.²⁷

Churchill married the daughter of a well-connected Muslim family after serving as British vice-consul in Damascus in 1841. He dressed like a native, spoke Arabic and was known to consistently sympathize with minorities against the decadent Turk. Above all, he admired the Druze. When the Druze and Maronites were slaughtering each other in 1845, Churchill reported to his commanding officer: “Though always inferior to the Maronites in numbers, they are infinitely superior in courage, prudence and judgment both in military as well as political matters.”

Churchill was the bête noire of the French diplomats in Syria. His intrigues and plotting were met by French counterplotting that resulted in his forced resignation over a trumped-up scandal that accused him of misbehaving with Muslim women. In fact, no one was sure for whom he really worked. Was it the colonial office, the foreign office, or was he simply motivated by his genuine admiration for the Druze and their Bedouin cousins? It was known that he acted as a military advisor to the various local potentates who populated the region and that he had become a potentate in his own right.

His true colors may have been reflected in his works — investments on the hill slopes of Howara and surrounding areas. Churchill created agricultural enterprises on his own estate using the latest irrigation methods and terracing techniques. He planted mulberry forests — the feedstock of the silkworm — for supplying silk to the local textile producers, and built roads and bridges to strengthen the economy and promote the movement of goods. Like Abd el-Kader, he wanted to uplift and regenerate the Arabs. He differed with the emir about the means. Churchill could only imagine uplifting occurring through British benevolence, but with Lebanon as part of a British sphere of influence following the Ottoman collapse. Egypt and Syria, he was sure, would follow. His job was to help assure that outcome by cultivating the Druze to offset French influence among the Maronites.

From Churchill’s palatial manor in The Lebanon the emir descended into the Bekaa valley and back up through the Anti-Lebanon, a parallel range only fifteen miles from Damascus. Midway, his caravan was greeted by the sounds of gunfire, and then from the surrounding heights, by the sight of hundreds of Druze cavalry galloping in tight formation to welcome their Islamic hero, Abd el-Kader. His reputation had preceded him. Now, there were effusive salutations, kissing of his hands and robes, and excitement at seeing the man who had been so long admired from afar; another invitation to be feted and sheltered as their guest for a night by fellow Arabs. For hours, the Druze chieftains interrogated the emir about the one topic that most interested them — his campaigns against the French. The next day the sheiks escorted the emir to the edges of their territory. “May God keep us always united,” Abd el-Kader called out to his hosts. “May God grant it and may we see you again,” they replied.

“Not since the days of Saladin had anyone received such a triumphal welcome,” wrote Churchill. A few miles from Damascus, government and religious dignitaries greeted the emir and escorted him into the city at the head of a Turkish military band that marched smartly in embroidered blue vests, baggy red pantaloons and white spats. Closer to the city, the route was lined with men, women and children of all ranks, festively turned out to welcome their Islamic hero, a welcome that may not have been entirely spontaneous.

Abd el-Kader’s unofficial advance man and former caliph, the loyal Ben Salem, had also received permission to move to Damascus along with hundreds of other Algerians previously in Bursa. To an Arab population already restless under the Turk, the Algerians’ stories of Abd el-Kader’s resistance to the most powerful army in the world (so it was widely thought) aroused a ready enthusiasm and would become a symbol many would try to use for their various agendas, agendas that were either anti-Turkish or pro-Arab nationalism.

The true direction of the emir’s mind was revealed when he surprised the Turkish dignitaries by his first request after entering Damascus. It was not to see the famous Omayed Mosque or to pay a courtesy call on the Turkish governor, but rather to visit the Ibn Arabi Mosque and pay homage to the great teacher whose writings had shaped his own Islam. Muhi al-Din Abu Bakr Muhammed ibn ‘Ali ibn al ‘Arabi had not always been honored with a tomb inside a mosque built in his honor.

The man whose teachings left deep traces on the emir’s own spirit was born in Muslim Andalusia in 1165 in the town of Murcia. Like Abd el-Kader, Ibn Arabi was a prodigy whose potential was soon recognized by his father who gave his son both a religious and worldly education. By the age of eight, Ibn Arabi had begun the study of the Hadith, Koranic commentary and recitation. In Seville, he studied literature, poetry, the physical sciences and associated with Sufi masters as well as distinguished female spiritual figures. At age thirty-six, after both his parents had died, Ibn Arabi began a peripatetic life of prayer, study and seeking wisdom throughout the Arab world until he finally was persuaded by the governor of Damascus to make that city his home.

But in Damascus he made enemies among the religious elite — notably, theologians and scholars jealous of the good graces he enjoyed with the ruling class and upset because of his very public condemnation of their love of money. He could not abide religious scholars who sold their knowledge and lived in luxury.

Ibn Arabi died in 1240, beaten to death, it was said, by an angry mob whose imam he had berated during a sermon for his money-loving ways. He was respectfully buried in the Kurdish hill town of Salihiyyah, outside the walled Damascus, but the slighted scholars later got their revenge. His gravesite was used as a garbage dump. Three hundred years later, the Ottoman warrior-sultan, Selim The Resolute, conquered Damascus. His first act was to find the master’s burial site. It is said he wept when he saw it; then he ordered a tomb to be built on it and a mosque to be built around the tomb.

Known to his followers as the master of love, Ibn Arabi left posterity these telltale lines:

My heart is capable of wearing all forms
It is pasture for gazelles and a monastery for monks,
A temple for idols and the Kaaba for the pilgrim.
It is the tablets of the Torah and it is the book of the Koran
I profess the religion of love, wherever the destination of its
caravans may be.
Love is my law and my faith.

Just as there is no place where God is not, Ibn Arabi believed there is no place where saintliness cannot be found. He is with you wherever you are. “Perfection,” the master wrote, “does not come from withdrawal, but through living together in society…The best do not flee their condition, rather their condition flees them.” Seclusion, he taught, was like a hospital for the sick at heart, useful for treating a temporary condition. Perfecting one’s humanity comes through living with others. “The lesser war against the enemy without does not divert them from the more important struggle against the enemy within. Their lives unite the affairs of this world with those of eternity.” So it was with the emir, though few European diplomats understood.

With time and help from the French government, Abd el-Kader acquired farms to earn money that would support his Algerians. He came to own large agricultural enterprises as far west as the Sea of Galilee, promoted road construction between Damascus and Beirut, and built a toll bridge in partnership with James Rothschild. His worldly activity notwithstanding, the emir’s heart was with his books, his students and his pious devotions. To the Arabs he wore a triple crown: descendant of the Prophet, religious scholar and warrior-prince.

Turkish officialdom viewed him suspiciously. He and his Algerians lived under the protective wing of mighty France and their official status wasn’t even clear. Were they to be treated as French nationals, Ottoman subjects or simply privileged guests of state? The emir had quietly transformed himself into a political eunuch, yet Arab admiration for him still carried a political message to the insecure Turkish government wary of a brewing Arab nationalism.

The Crimean War officially ended in the spring of 1856. Abd el-Kader was settling into his thirty room, two-story residence in the Armara district, once occupied by his master, Ibn Arabi. Its façade — three homes that had been made one — was the length of a soccer field, with three entrances on the narrow Nekib Allée. The guest entrance had its own mounting block recessed into the outer wall next to the door, and led into an airy, marble-floored reception room lined with divans and surrounded by walls painted with blue and green arabesques, which, in turn, opened onto a courtyard echoing with the murmur of splashing water from an alabaster fountain. Here the emir would receive visitors from all walks of life for almost thirty more years.

The location was well chosen. It was a short walk to the Christian quarter where the French, American and other consulates were located, but also close by the great Omayed Mosque where the body of Saladin was buried, and, it is said, the head of John the Baptist. There he taught every day, holding classes following midday prayer and often attended by prominent local scholars, which made him unpopular with the dimmer lights among the religious teachers and imams who were losing students to the popular Algerian.

While the great power doctors were absorbed in the diplomatic wrestling match that produced the Treaty of Paris on March 30, the emir was wrestling with his students’ questions about the teachings of his Sufi master, questions that ultimately produced fifteen hundred pages of commentary on the works of Ibn Arabi. Like the great powers, Ibn Arabi was concerned with order — only his order began within.

To encounter Ibn Arabi is to begin to know Abd el-Kader. The Andalusian master writes in his Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom that a human being has an interior city and this interior city must itself be properly ordered to bring order to the exterior world. “As man is created central to the universe as God’s deputy on earth and is the microcosm of the macrocosm, so the soul is central to the human being and is the deputy of the Lord within us.” The soul is not created, rather it is a direct extension of God, a divine influence within to guide His deputy toward the truth.

And where does the soul reside? Ibn Arabi is confident it is in the heart, though he admits the location of the soul is disputed. The Lord looks neither at your face or your riches but at your heart and your deeds. He likens the heart to a small piece of meat in the body of man — if it is clean and righteous, the whole being is clean; if it is rotten, the whole being is rotten.

There is another precinct in the human realm where the daughter of God’s deputy lives. Her name is Personality and her address is Selfhood or Ego. Here we find contradictions. Here, both God’s commands and His prohibitions are kept. Selfhood is a place of order and enlightenment when it heeds the soul’s prime minister, intellect. However, the self is a Jekyll and Hyde, easily tempted into disobedience by the Evil-Commanding Hyde-Self. Transformed by succumbing to temptations, self becomes impure. When intellect and self start fighting the whole human kingdom is disturbed. If in a single nation men swear allegiance to two rulers, eliminate one of them. But there is a rub. Ibn Arabi wisely notes that in the country of our warring self, one is liable to mistakenly eliminate the intellect, leaving the kingdom in the hands of the Evil-Commanding Self.

Only obedience to a benevolent influence from without can save the human realm from self-inflicted wounds. That influence is Divine Law, transmitted through the prophets. The reason God gives man Divine Law is to reduce disorder and promote harmony. Yet, acknowledges Ibn Arabi, no government is ready to rule by it.

Certainly not the diplomats negotiating in Paris in the spring of 1856. Their worldly selves were in full control as they sought to do what their essential nature required — to seek advantage for their nations, clothed in noble rhetoric. The war had been waged as a European crusade to check despotism, more specifically Russian despotism. To Britain, especially, it seemed that Tsar Nicolas was pushing to the head of the queue in dismembering the Ottoman Empire.

The dispute that produced the war that nobody wanted had a nimbus of religiosity about it. Ostensibly, it was over control of the keys to shrines in the Holy Land: the Church of Bethlehem, the tomb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Sepluchre and the Grotto of the Nativity, among others. Napoleon III did not give a wit about such things, but wanted to buttress the legitimacy of his 1852 coup d’état by currying favor with the Catholic church.

Like his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon was pragmatic about religion. Both believed in its utility as a foundation for moral order in society, and viewed the church as a useful political ally. The Porte yielded to French pressure to restore rights to the Latin monks that had been ceded over time (from simple neglect by a distracted France) to the Orthodox monks. Russia responded to this turnaround in the fortunes of its Orthodox guardians by sending an overbearing diplomat to Istanbul to demand recognition of the Tsar’s protectorate over all the sultan’s orthodox subjects. With British advisors at his elbow, the sultan repeatedly rejected the Russian demands until an exasperated Tsar Nicholas finally sent troops into the Turkish Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.

March 30, 1856, after two years of carnage and the allies’ logistical incompetence on the Crimean Peninsula, a peace treaty was signed in Paris. The treaty left the Black Sea closed to the warships of all countries, the Danubian Principalities restored to the Turk and offered noble declarations by France, Britain, Prussia and Austria to guarantee and respect the independence and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire that became officially a member of the Concert of Europe. The emir’s new friend Churchill considered the Paris treaty the equivalent of getting the Turks to put a knife to their own throat. The knife was the package of reforms the Porte promulgated a month before the Treaty of Paris was concluded.

The sultan’s reform edict of February18, known as Hatti Humayun, was hailed in Britain as a “Magna Carta” for the eastern Christians. The final treaty language approvingly took note of the edict while repudiating the “right to interfere either collectively or separately” in the internal affairs of Turkey. Yet, this was precisely what the European powers wanted to do and Hatti Humayun was their tool.

The different Christians minorities used the European powers to promote their interests against the Turk, but were also used by the powers as constituents to advance their agendas and justify their interventions. The French saw themselves as protectors of the Christians in Syria, especially the Latin Maronites and Greek Melkites, who followed Rome; Russia was the long-standing protector of Orthodox Christians, especially in the neighboring Balkans; Johnny-come-lately Great Britain, low and behold, had become protector of the Turks and Druze, if only to hold off its competitors. To the increasingly insecure Turks, these client relationships between the Christians and their European protectors gave the Christian communities the odor of a fifth column.

The reforms would give new rights to non-Muslim minorities and reinforce old reforms that had affected all subjects. Arbitrary confiscation of property, the use of torture to force confessions, killing and robbing with impunity by pashas were past malpractices already addressed with some good effect by earlier reforms. The newer ones in 1856 focused attention on minorities and promised them equality before the law. Yet, the proposed change of the legal status of Christians and Jews was in itself an affront to Muslims. The dhimma, derived from the Prophet words, already held them by faith to respect and protect minorities, especially, the People of the Book.

What did Abd el-Kader think about the reforms? His apolitical persona didn’t allow him to pronounce his views publicly about the reforms. Nevertheless, one may surmise that his respect for tradition and his natural Islamic instincts made him protective of Islamic law. Yet, Bullad’s report to the ministry in March of 1856 implied that the emir begrudgingly recognized the need for change. “It’s not possible to know exactly what he thinks,” Bullad wrote, “but I presume that if in his heart he is against putting Christians and Jews on the same legal footing as the Muslims, he also understands that necessity is what makes law. Knowing his religious sensibilities, I suppose he sighs when he thinks about the future of Islamism so long as it insists on remaining as in the seventh century. He often says ‘Islam is dying from a lack of Muslims, true Muslims.’”

The proposed reforms would allow Christians and Jews to testify in Muslim courts and give them equal access to all government positions, including, and especially, the army. Having the right to serve in the army would relieve Jews and Christians of the special tax paid in lieu of military service, about which they often complained to their respective European sponsors, even when there was no real desire to serve. Announcing edicts was one thing. In the decentralized Ottoman Empire, enforcement was another.

Unrest in Lebanon had become acute by the spring of 1860. The Porte had announced its reforms in 1856, but little had been done in the four years that had lapsed. The Turkish government was caught between European pressure to modernize its laws to conform with their new status as a member of the Concert of Europe, and the hostility of local notables to abolishing the dhimma, and with it, a source of revenue. European badgering and superciliousness only fueled the anger. Istanbul left the whole business to the notables who were traditionally responsible for governing the pashaliks, and whose behavior could be disavowed if the Europeans protested. The emirs, aghas and pashas in Lebanon acted no differently than in other parts of the empire — they ignored the edict.

Emboldened by the reform edict of February 1856 and the allied victory in defense of Turkey, the Maronites in Lebanon stopped paying the poll tax. They began demanding jobs once off limits. Confident of their European sponsors support, the Christians showed an unseemly arrogance. They loudly proclaimed during the Crimean War that the empire was finished and would soon be carved into pieces by the great powers. Their idea was right, only the timing was wrong.

Angry Turkish authorities didn’t appreciate that the uppity Christians were not paying their taxes. They had no need for Christians in the army. They wanted their annual ten shillings per head. The Christians would have to be “corrected.” The Christians knew well the meaning of this Oriental euphemism, one that applied to Christians and Muslims alike.

In Lebanon, the Turks used the Druze to do their “correcting.”