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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iraq
Index
Figure 4. The Ottoman Empire in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
Source: Based on information from Roderic H. Davidson,
Turkey, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1968, 51; and Philip K.
Hitti, The Near East in History, New York, 1961, 334.
From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the course of
Iraqi history was affected by the continuing conflicts between
the Safavid Empire in Iran and the Ottoman Turks. The Safavids,
who were the first to declare Shia Islam the official religion of
Iran, sought to control Iraq both because of the Shia holy places
at An Najaf and Karbala and because Baghdad, the seat of the old
Abbasid Empire, had great symbolic value. The Ottomans, fearing
that Shia Islam would spread to Anatolia (Asia Minor), sought to
maintain Iraq as a Sunni-controlled buffer state. In 1509 the
Safavids, led by Ismail Shah (1502-24), conquered Iraq, thereby
initiating a series of protracted battles with the Ottomans. In
1514 Sultan Selim the Grim attacked Ismail's forces and in 1535
the Ottomans, led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66),
conquered Baghdad from the Safavids. The Safavids reconquered
Baghdad in 1623 under the leadership of Shah Abbas (1587-1629),
but they were expelled in 1638 after a series of brilliant
military maneuvers by the dynamic Ottoman sultan, Murad IV
(see
fig. 4).
The major impact of the Safavid-Ottoman conflict on Iraqi
history was the deepening of the Shia-Sunni rift. Both the
Ottomans and the Safavids used Sunni and Shia Islam respectively
to mobilize domestic support. Thus, Iraq's Sunni population
suffered immeasurably during the brief Safavid reign (1623-38),
while Iraq's Shias were excluded from power altogether during the
longer period of Ottoman supremacy (1638-1916). During the
Ottoman period, the Sunnis gained the administrative experience
that would allow them to monopolize political power in the
twentieth century. The Sunnis were able to take advantage of new
economic and educational opportunities while the Shias, frozen
out of the political process, remained politically impotent and
economically depressed. The Shia-Sunni rift continued as an
important element of Iraqi social structure in the 1980s
(see Religious Life
, ch. 2).
By the seventeenth century, the frequent conflicts with the
Safavids had sapped the strength of the Ottoman Empire and had
weakened its control over its provinces. In Iraq, tribal
authority once again dominated; the history of nineteenth-century
Iraq is a chronicle of tribal migrations and of conflict. The
nomadic population swelled with the influx of beduins from Najd,
in the Arabian Peninsula. Beduin raids on settled areas became
impossible to curb. In the interior, the large and powerful
Muntafiq tribal confederation took shape under the leadership of
the Sunni Saadun family of Mecca. In the desert southwest, the
Shammar--one of the biggest tribal confederations of the Arabian
Peninsula--entered the Syrian desert and clashed with the Anayzah
confederation. On the lower Tigris near Al Amarah, a new tribal
confederation, the Bani Lam, took root. In the north, the Kurdish
Baban Dynasty emerged and organized Kurdish resistance. The
resistance made it impossible for the Ottomans to maintain even
nominal suzerainty over Iraqi Kurdistan (land of the Kurds).
Between 1625 and 1668, and from 1694 to 1701, local shaykhs ruled
Al Basrah and the marshlands, home of the Madan (Marsh Arabs).
The powerful shaykhs basically ignored the Ottoman governor of
Baghdad.
The cycle of tribal warfare and of deteriorating urban life
that began in the thirteenth century with the Mongol invasions
was temporarily reversed with the reemergence of the Mamluks. In
the early eighteenth century, the Mamluks began asserting
authority apart from the Ottomans. Extending their rule first
over Basra, the Mamluks eventually controlled the Tigris and
Euphrates river valleys from the Persian Gulf to the foothills of
Kurdistan. For the most part, the Mamluks were able
administrators, and their rule was marked by political stability
and by economic revival. The greatest of the Mamluk leaders,
Suleyman the II (1780-1802), made great strides in imposing the
rule of law. The last Mamluk leader, Daud (1816-31), initiated
important modernization programs that included clearing canals,
establishing industries, training a 20,000-man army, and starting
a printing press.
The Mamluk period ended in 1831, when a severe flood and
plague devastated Baghdad, enabling the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud
II, to reassert Ottoman sovereignty over Iraq. Ottoman rule was
unstable; Baghdad, for example, had more than ten governors
between 1831 and 1869. In 1869, however, the Ottomans regained
authority when the reform-minded Midhat Pasha was appointed
governor of Baghdad. Midhat immediately set out to modernize Iraq
on the Western model. The primary objectives of Midhat's reforms,
called the tanzimat, were to reorganize the army, to
create codes of criminal and commercial law, to secularize the
school system, and to improve provincial administration. He
created provincial representative assemblies to assist the
governor, and he set up elected municipal councils in the major
cities. Staffed largely by Iraqi notables with no strong ties to
the masses, the new offices nonetheless helped a group of Iraqis
gain administrative experience.
By establishing government agencies in the cities and by
attempting to settle the tribes, Midhat altered the tribal-urban
balance of power, which since the thirteenth century had been
largely in favor of the tribes. The most important element of
Midhat's plan to extend Ottoman authority into the countryside
was the 1858 TAPU land law (named after the initials of the
government office issuing it). The new land reform replaced the
feudal system of land holdings and tax farms with legally
sanctioned property rights. It was designed both to induce tribal
shaykhs to settle and to give them a stake in the existing
political order. In practice, the TAPU laws enabled the tribal
shaykhs to become large landowners; tribesmen, fearing that the
new law was an attempt to collect taxes more effectively or to
impose conscription, registered community-owned tribal lands in
their shaykhs' names or sold them outright to urban speculators.
As a result, tribal shaykhs gradually were transformed into
profit-seeking landlords while their tribesmen were relegated to
the role of impoverished sharecroppers.
Midhat also attempted to replace Iraq's clerically run
Islamic school system with a more secular educational system. The
new, secular schools provided a channel of upward social mobility
to children of all classes, and they led slowly to the growth of
an Iraqi intelligentsia. They also introduced students for the
first time to Western languages and disciplines.
The introduction of Western disciplines in the schools
accompanied a greater Western political and economic presence in
Iraq. The British had established a consulate at Baghdad in 1802,
and a French consulate followed shortly thereafter. European
interest in modernizing Iraq to facilitate Western commercial
interests coincided with the Ottoman reforms. Steamboats appeared
on the rivers in 1836, the telegraph was introduced in 1861, and
the Suez Canal was opened in 1869, providing Iraq with greater
access to European markets. The landowning tribal shaykhs began
to export cash crops to the capitalist markets of the West.
In 1908 a new ruling clique, the Young Turks, took power in
Istanbul. The Young Turks aimed at making the Ottoman Empire a
unified nation-state based on Western models. They stressed
secular politics and patriotism over the pan-Islamic ideology
preached by Sultan Abd al Hamid. They reintroduced the 1876
constitution (this Ottoman constitution set forth the rights of
the ruler and the ruled, but it derived from the ruler and has
been called as at best an "attenuated autocracy,"), held
elections throughout the empire, and reopened parliament.
Although the Iraqi delegates represented only the well-
established families of Baghdad, their parliamentary experience
in Istanbul proved to be an important introduction to self-
government.
Most important to the history of Iraq, the Young Turks
aggressively pursued a "Turkification" policy that alienated the
nascent Iraqi intelligentsia and set in motion a fledgling Arab
nationalist movement. Encouraged by the Young Turks' Revolution
of 1908, nationalists in Iraq stepped up their political
activity. Iraqi nationalists met in Cairo with the Ottoman
Decentralization Party, and some Iraqis joined the Young Arab
Society, which moved to Beirut in 1913. Because of its greater
exposure to Westerners who encouraged the nationalists, Basra
became the center from which Iraqi nationalists began to demand a
measure of autonomy. After nearly 400 years under Ottoman rule,
Iraq was ill-prepared to form a nation-state. The Ottomans had
failed to control Iraq's rebellious tribal domains, and even in
the cities their authority was tenuous. The Ottomans' inability
to provide security led to the growth of autonomous, self-
contained communities. As a result, Iraq entered the twentieth
century beset by a complex web of social conflicts that seriously
impeded the process of building a modern state.
The oldest and most deeply ingrained conflict was the
competition between the tribes and the cities for control over
the food-producing flatlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates
rivers. The centralization policies of the Sublime Porte (Ottoman
government), especially in the nineteenth century, constituted a
direct threat to the nomadic structure and the fierce fighting
spirit of the tribes. In addition to tribal-urban conflicts, the
tribes fought among themselves, and there was a fairly rigid
hierarchy between the most powerful tribes, the so-called "people
of the camel," and the weaker tribes that included the "people of
the sheep," marshdwellers, and peasants. The cities also were
sharply divided, both according to occupation and along religious
lines. The various guilds resided in distinct, autonomous areas,
and Shia and Sunni Muslims rarely intermingled. The territory
that eventually became the state of Iraq was beset, furthermore,
by regional differences in orientation; Mosul in the north had
historically looked to Syria and to Turkey, whereas Baghdad and
the Shia holy cities had maintained close ties with Iran and with
the people of the western and southwestern deserts.
Although Ottoman weakness had allowed Iraq's self-contained
communities to grow stronger, the modernization initiated by the
Sublime Porte tended to break down traditional autonomous
groupings and to create a new social order. Beginning with the
tanzimat reforms in 1869, Iraq's for the most part
subsistence economy slowly was transformed into a market economy
based on money and tied to the world capitalist market. Social
status traditionally had been determined by noble lineage, by
fighting prowess, and by knowledge of religion. With the advent
of capitalism, social status increasingly was determined by
property ownership and by the accumulation of wealth. Most
disruptive in this regard was the TAPU land reform of 1858.
Concomitantly, Western social and economic penetration increased;
for example, Iraq's traditional crafts and craftsmen gradually
were displaced by mass-produced British machine-made textiles.
The final Ottoman legacy in Iraq is related to the policies
of the Young Turks and to the creation of a small but vocal Iraqi
intelligentsia. Faced with the rapidly encroaching West, the
Young Turks attempted to centralize the empire by imposing upon
it the Turkish language and culture and by clamping down on newly
won political freedoms. These Turkification policies alienated
many of the Ottoman-trained intelligentsia who had originally
aligned themselves with the Young Turks in the hope of obtaining
greater Arab autonomy. Despite its relatively small size, the
nascent Iraqi intelligentsia formed several secret nationalist
societies. The most important of these societies was Al Ahd (the
Covenant), whose membership was drawn almost entirely from Iraqi
officers in the Ottoman army. Membership in Al Ahd spread rapidly
in Baghdad and in Mosul, growing to 4,000 by the outbreak of
World War I. Despite the existence of Al Ahd and of other,
smaller, nationalist societies, Iraqi nationalism was still
mainly the concern of educated Arabs from the upper and the
middle classes.
Data as of May 1988
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