OTTOMAN AND FORMER

OTTOMAN TERRITORIES

Historical Background
European involvement in the Muslim world, which accumulated as the
century progressed, came to a head with the French invasion of Tunisia in
1881 and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Colonel Urabi, leader of
the revolt of 1881–1882 against foreign interference in Egypt that took his
name, ‘came to be seen in some quarters as representing the authentic voice
of the Egyptian people’ (Cleveland 2000: 99). Muslims were not forward in
staging coherent resistance to imperialism, though the earliest articulations
of opposition frequently combined Islamic and nationalist loyalties, as was
the case in Egypt in the first decade of the twentieth century. A European
invention, nationalism had been invoked earlier in the century against the last
Muslim empire, the Ottoman, by its Christian subject peoples: Greeks, Serbs,
Bulgarians, Romanians and Armenians. As these achieved autonomy or,
backed by the force and diplomacy of the Christian powers, split away, the
largest non-Turkish population left in the Ottoman Empire was the Arabs.
Preponderantly Muslims, with the exception of a small politically conscious
group from among the Christian minority, hardly any contemplated let
alone actively pursued the break up of the Ottoman Empire. But the Syrian
reformer Abdul Rahman Kawakibi ‘suggested that the Ottomans were
responsible for the corruption of Islam, [and thus] introduced a nationalist
argument that had profound implications for the Ottoman-Islamic order in
the Arab provinces’ (Cleveland: 125). Arabs and Turks briefly joined together
to celebrate the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that forced the despotic Sultan
Abdul Hamid to revive the 1876 Constitution he had revoked in 1878. Once
in power, however, the radical Committee of Union and Progress alienated
the other nationalities in the empire. Their repression of an Arab leadership
in Beirut and Damascus during the Great War, together with the British
sponsored Arab Revolt in the Hijaz that broke out in 1916, resulted in the
defection of many Arabs from the Turkish side. Turkey’s defeat along with the

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 140 TRAVELLERS TO THE MIDDLE EAST

Axis Powers in 1918 finished off the Ottoman Empire for good, while the
sultanate and Islamic caliphate were ended by the parliament of the new
Turkish Republic under Ataturk in 1924.
Egypt, after more than thirty years of undeclared British rule, most of it
under Lord Cromer, was made a Protectorate on the outbreak of war in 1914.
Under Cromer’s rule foreign tentacles continued to spread over her commercial
life, taking un-Islamic practices such as the selling of alcohol beyond the city
and deep into countryside. The arrival of cinema and in the both World Wars
large numbers of British and Australian soldiers further exposed Egyptians to
Western influences. Politically, the country emerged in the early 1920s with
a viable nationalist party, the Wafd led by Saad Zaghlul, poised to form an
independent government. The constitution granted by the British in 1923 in
reality represented only a form of ‘semi-independence’ (Mansfield 1971). Nor
did the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 secure the removal of British forces,
which remained in occupation of the Canal Zone until 1956. But nowhere was
the unraveling of Britain’s brief imperialist ‘moment’ in the Middle East more
marked than in Palestine. Having in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 pledged
to create a ‘national home’ for the Jews, at the same time as they had raised the
hopes of self-determination for the Arabs by backing the Arab Revolt, the
British steered their League of Nations mandate for the country from crisis to
crisis until peremptorily laying it down in 1948, so assisting a disaster for the
Palestinian Arabs.

Travellers and their Narratives

The 1882 occupation of Egypt, with all that this meant for future British
relations with the Ottoman Empire and the wider Muslim world, is
encapsulated in Blunt’s Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (1907),
which while containing reminiscences of travel is more a political memoir than
a piece of travel literature. By the time of its publication, travellers had been
engaging with political and social changes in the Ottoman Empire for some
while. The Turks’ advance toward modernity is plotted in diverse ways in
travel narratives of the period. In A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1896), David
Hogarth implied that any reform of the Ottoman Empire could only be
superficial and was doomed to fail. Influential head of the Cairo Arab Bureau
during the Great War and mentor to T.E. Lawrence, Hogarth’s sceptical levity
(which recalls that of Kinglake and Robert Curzon but is better informed) is
not very dissimilar to the conservative desire to preserve an imagined Ottoman
authenticity to be found in Mark Sykes’ Dar al-Islam and The Caliphs’ Last
Heritage. Though they did not get on, Sykes and Gertrude Bell both used their
travels to prepare themselves for a role in determining the Middle East’s

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 OTTOMAN AND FORMER OTTOMAN TERRITORIES 141

destiny. If Bell’s expeditions in Syria and Asia Minor in the decade before the
Great War made her less of a Turkophile than Sykes and more an admirer of
the desert hierarchy of the Arab Bedouin, she avoided the latter’s volte-face of
planning the break up of the Ottoman Empire in the East during the war.
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, an event which was generally seen at
the time as representing a radical break with the East’s despotic past, naturally
enough drew to Istanbul both admirers and more sceptical critics of Turkey.
Among these were political figures like Charles Roden Buxton, author of Turkey
in Revolution, and the sympathetic journalists and Turkophiles, Grace Ellison and
Marmaduke Pickthall. The patronizing note that runs through much Victorian
and Edwardian travel writing on the Middle East is not entirely absent from
Buxton’s observations on the honeymoon period that followed the Young Turk
takeover. However, Ellison wrote more sympathetically of Turkey’s embrace of
modernity, at least as far as the position of women was concerned. Nearly two
hundred years after Lady Wortley Montagu, and at the precise moment that
women were campaigning for the vote in Britain, Ellison challenged (and at the
same time indulged) Western stereotypes of the seclusion of women in the East.
Like Marmaduke Pickthall, who in 1917 declared himself a Muslim, Ellison’s
sketches of life in Istanbul were printed in the press before being published
as An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915). She also disparaged, though in a
milder form than Pickthall, Britain’s ‘betrayal’ of her former ally.
As far as Egypt and the Egyptians are concerned it may be correct to say that
the standard colonial attitude towards them was ‘at best patronizing affection and
at worst contemptuous dislike’ (Mansfield 1971: xii). European travel writing
on Egypt, that appears so definitive in the succession of canonical tomes penned
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, falls away quite drastically after 1918.
C.S. Jarvis’ publications on Egypt between the two world wars now seem a
parody of the attitude Peter Mansfield describes, employing a comical colonialist
discourse on ‘the Arab’ as a supercilious counterpoint to the strange, fast
evaporating ‘English romance’ with the Bedouin. In Palestine, Thomas Hodgkin,
a young British graduate from an impeccable elite background, treading
uncertainly in T.E. Lawrence’s footsteps as a would-be archaeological research
student, stumbled into the contradictions of the British mandate. The engaging
product of his stay, Letters from Palestine, alludes to Kinglake and Gertrude Bell
as well as Lawrence whilst responding to modern complexities with a self-
consciousness and self-irony that recall his contemporary Robert Byron.

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