24 Chapter One
This shift was again a result of Russia’s changing geopolitics in the wider
region—namely, its growing interest and involvement in neighboring Ottoman
Syria. This story of imperial meddling in Ottoman lands is often told as a chap-
ter of Russian foreign policy history, and as part of the narrative of the “Eastern
Question”—the phrase that nineteenth-century European powers used to refer
to the problems posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the
resulting European contest for control over former Ottoman territories. But it
was also closely connected to the history of Russian governance of Islam and
the integration of Muslim populations in the Caucasus.
Syria became a focus of Great Power rivalries in the Ottoman Empire in the
1830s. It was one of the largest of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces,
encompassing all of what we know today as Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine,
and Jordan, as well as small parts of Turkey. Political instability in Syria, result-
ing in the Ottomans’ temporary loss of control of the region, stoked European
fears of the collapse of Ottoman rule in the region, and with it the post-
Napoleonic “balance of power” in Europe.
Syria had been in turmoil since 1831, when troops loyal to Muhammad Ali,
the renegade Ottoman governor of Egypt, invaded and occupied the region.
Taking advantage of Ottoman weakness—the empire had just lost a large swath
of territory in the Balkans to the Greeks, who revolted and created their own
state—Muhammad Ali invaded Syria as part of his attempt to carve out his
own empire from the Ottoman Arab provinces.
Lasting through the 1830s, the Egyptian occupation of Syria opened the
region to unprecedented European penetration. Trying to court European sup-
port for his imperial project, Muhammad Ali encouraged European merchants
to expand their commercial activities in the region, and invited in Christian
missionaries. To protect their growing interests in Syria, European powers got
permission from Muhammad Ali to open a constellation of new consulates,
and moved into places that the Ottomans had long kept closed to them for reli-
gious reasons. During the Egyptian occupation, Europeans opened their first
consulates in Jerusalem and Damascus, both cities sacred to Muslims, and in
Jeddah, which lay within the Arabian Peninsula and close to the Holy Cities of
Mecca and Medina. Russia opened a new consulate in 1839 in Beirut, a busy
trade port and the emerging hub of European diplomatic activity in Syria.^23
The Ottomans ended the Egyptian occupation in 1840, through a protracted
war they fought with the help of British troops. But the European presence