Dusty Bookshelf Review: An Occasion for War? Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860
Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War? Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 300 pp. Paperback $43.00.
Leila Tarazi Fawaz is so pre-eminent in the field of Middle Eastern studies that, rather than summarize her extensive c. v., I’ll simply link to it.
Her 1995 history of the 1860 Syrian Civil War, and the war’s aftermath in 1861 and 1864, is, I will argue, of relevance to Civil War buffs. The author doesn’t make this kind of argument about the U. S. Civil War, but I contend that the lessons are there.
News about conflict in a region with locations recognizable from the Bible – and from Sir Walter Scott if one were into his novels – would have been seen by American newspaper readers of 1860 as part of the exciting news of the wide world, like the wars of the Italian peninsula and the visit of Prince Albert. The sort of thing one reads about with interest at the dinner table, without immediately thinking about the relevance to one’s own country’s situation – even if things turned out later to be relevant.
The news was about trouble in Lebanon and Syria, areas which were part of the vast Ottoman Empire, a large stretch of imperial domain under the sovereignty of a Muslim Sultan in Constantinople (Istanbul). There were other empires interested in events in the Ottoman Empire: the European empires of France, Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia. A few years previously, the issue of exactly how much the European powers should intervene in the Ottoman Empire had sparked a war between the Russians on one side and the British and French on the other. This was the Crimean War, which had ended only in 1856, and now the European empires wanted to work together more closely so that their conflicting priorities in the Ottoman empire didn’t get them fighting each other again.
Each of the six empires had its own distinctive vision of dealing with Lebanon and Syria. The Ottoman Empire wanted to prevent the European empires from carving up their empire. The French (in the person of Emperor Napoleon III), wanted special influence in Ottoman-run Lebanon and Syria, with a focus on protecting the oppressed Christian minorities – specifically, the Catholic Maronites of the Mount Lebanon area. The British, in contrast, wanted to keep the French at bay while serving as patrons of the Druze, a Muslim sect which often clashed with the Maronites. The Maronites and Druze lived in the same mountainous areas in Lebanon, and these were the areas where the war and killing started in 1860 – and there would soon be bloodshed in Damascus in nearby Syria.
The Ottomans claimed they’d been minding their business when suddenly they learned of trouble in their Lebanese and Syrian provinces. The Maronites saw it differently: they’d started a purely defensive war in Mount Lebanon in response to the oppression which the Ottomans inflicted on them as a Christian minority. The Maronite forces were less militarily efficient than their Druze opponents, who were able to repulse the Maronites – just like the South, in the early stages of the U. S. Civil War, beat back inefficient Northern generals. The aftermath of the Maronite defeat made for a quicker finish to the Lebanon war than to the American Civil War: after conquering several Maronite villages, Druze forces perpetrated massacres of the Maronites in those villages.
Around this time, in the city of Damascus, many Muslims – perhaps stirred up by news of defeats suffered by the Lebanese Christians – perpetrated massacres among the Christian population. Hardest hit were the wealthy Greek Orthodox, who were killed while their houses were burned to the ground. The massacres would have been worse except for a Muslim version of Oskar Schindler: Abd al-Qadir, a prominent Muslim ex-warrior who had once fought against the French, and who now organized rescue parties to save Christian lives.
(Those who were massacred in Damascus included eight Franciscans and three lay Maronites who were offered their lives in exchange for converting to Islam. They refused, they were killed, and and in 2024 the Pope officially proclaimed them saints).
Unlike with the U. S. Civil War, the battles and massacres were over in a few months – though revenge killings, and a refugee crisis, persisted. The issue shifted: how would the European powers respond to the shocking events? The French wanted to intervene, and they brought the other European empires along – the other empires naturally didn’t want to be left out.
So the Ottomans and the five European empires worked out a deal. There would be an expeditionary force of French, British, Russian, Austrian and Prussian troops – but largely French. Napoleon’s men would be the tail wagging the dog, unless the Ottomans somehow managed to separate the rival powers from each other. The French-dominated troops would be welcomed into Lebanon and Syria with a mission of restoring order and then getting out after six months. Oh, and also, the matter of war guilt would be investigated (this was before Nuremberg but was probably based on old concepts of just and unjust war).
U. S. Civil War buffs should, at this point, be feeling some déjà vu. In the soon-to-come American Civil War, the Confederacy would press the British and French to initiate a so-called humanitarian intervention to stop the war. If the Lebanon/Syria precedent was anything to go by, humanitarian intervention might have entailed European occupation of the war-torn country and a forced peace or armistice. One important difference with the Ottoman situation would be that a European intervention in America would have involved prolonging African slavery. No wonder the Confederacy was a fan of European intervention and the Union wasn’t. In the end, Britain and France decided not to meddle in the American Civil War with an Ottoman-style “humanitarian” intervention.
Back in Syria/Lebanon: An Ottoman official named Fuad Pasha, an experienced diplomat to whom the Sultan gave command of large government forces, was made the Ottoman special commissioner responsible for working with the European troops. To show his cooperative spirit vis-a-vis the Europeans, Fuad was ready to punish many of those who committed massacres in Mount Lebanon and Damascus. If Fuad was effective enough at this, and if he played off the jealousies between the French and the other occupiers, he could isolate the French and limit their ambitions. It was helpful to Fuad’s cause that the French military commander was annoying and belligerent.
Fuad convened military commissions to deal with those accused of involvement in the Damascus riots. Numerous Muslims convicted of killing Christians were hanged or shot. Those who got the death penalty tended to be poor and lower-middle-class Muslims. Higher-ranking and wealthier Muslims involved in the massacres tended to earn imprisonment or banishment.
Justice was less vigorous when it came to the massacres on Mount Lebanon. Some Druze ringleaders were executed, but there was no Damascus-style massive retribution.
The issue of war guilt wasn’t settled. The French blamed the Ottomans for oppressing the Catholic Maronites. The British representative, as befitted a country whose people were prey to anti-Catholic conspiracy theories, thought the war had been prepared long in advance by Maronite seditionists based in Beirut, including high Maronite clerics. Such a deeply laid, long-term conspiracy was never proven, though the conspiracy theory helped divert attention from the crimes of Britain’s Druze allies.
Any French ambition for broader military objectives was blocked by the diplomatic skills and ruthless punitive efficiency of Fuad Pasha. In lieu of a military occupation, the Europeans pulled out after the agreed-upon six months, and the Ottomans agreed to a special deal (supplemented in 1864) for the government of Lebanon and Syria. Under the deal, the Ottomans would appoint a Christian provincial governor who would be assisted by a council consisting of four Maronites, three Druze, two Greek Orthodox, one Melkite (Byzantine Arab Catholic), one Shi’i, and one Sunni (sometimes a Protestant or Jew might sit with the council). This deal lasted for half a century – it was only broken up when the First World War started.
(The Civil War counterpart to the Damascus massacre was the New York “draft riots,” which actually represented an anti-Black pogrom. One wonders how many people an American version of Fuad Pasha would have executed for killing Blacks in the riots.)
