Yet in modern times, Salibi asked, “what traditional civilisation could continue to stand on its feet once the
west Europeans – partly as a result of their special genius, partly as a result of their geographical location,
partly as a result of their guts and their luck – found a way of going around Africa, crossing the Atlantic and
reaching the Americas, tapping wealth beyond the dreams of avarice all over the world...reducing the whole
world to relative poverty and to increasing poverty. Well, from that moment on, the Muslim world and
other legitimate civilisations ... could no longer stand in the face of the west. And this is the situation which
continues to the present day.”
Muslim clerics at a mass held by the Syriac
Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius
Aphrem II, at the heavily damaged church of
St Mary in Syria’s eastern city of Deir Ezzor
(AFP/Getty)Salibi’s heroes included Mohamed Ali Pasha, the modernising Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, along with the
Ottomans whom Mohamed Ali Pasha served with ever less enthusiasm. Both were trying to emulate
western education and training, even to learn western music and art. “You have the last Sultans, all of them
being pianists and playing Mozart and trying to paint and reading western books,” Salibi said. “Now
normally this is forgotten. And what Mohamed Ali Pasha did to Egypt was little short of a miracle. What the
Ottomans did in reforming the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was nothing short of a miracle. Except
that, of course, what they were faced with was western admiration on the one side [but] the western fear
that this was going to result in a resurgence of a militant Islam on the other.”
Over Salibi’s lecture to me, needless to say, there hung the canopy of a very dark history; the 1860 mutual
slaughter of Christians and Druze in Lebanon which the Ottomans were powerless – or unwilling – to
control. Muslims descended on the Christians of Damascus in an even worse blood-letting – the “largest
single massacre of Christians in the Arab world”, as one historian was to call it – which was suppressed
with extreme brutality by the Ottoman Turks. We shall return to this later.
For Salibi, it was necessary for us to think like 19th-century Ottoman leaders. “They said, ‘Well, we also
have our own way of life which we like to preserve, but we have to modernise. We [will try] the middle way
... for we have to be like Europeans, Perhaps, if we do so, [the Europeans] will become our friends.’ Instead
of that, they became more and more ... their enemies. Mohamed Ali Pasha was trying to become European.
Europeans came and suppressed him. The Ottomans, while they were trying to become like Europeans, the
Europeans called them ‘the sick man of Europe’ and began to make plans for the partition of their
territories.”
You have the last Sultans, all of them being pianists and playing Mozart and trying to paint and reading
western books