Arab Nationalism • 205lords were apt to be Turks, Circassians, or other non-Arabs. Since World
War I, the Arab nationalists and their sympathizers have denounced the
horrors of Ottoman rule, blaming the Turks for the Arabs' backwardness,
political ineptitude, disunity, or whatever else was amiss in their society.
What went wrong? Were the Arabs under Ottoman rule better or worse off
than they had been earlier? In fact, the Arabs' decline cannot be blamed on
Istanbul. You can even argue that early Ottoman rule had benefited the
Arabs by promoting local security and trade between their merchants and
those of Anatolia and the Balkans. If the eighteenth-century Ottoman de¬
cline and overly zealous nineteenth-century reforms hurt the Arabs, the
Turks within the empire suffered too. If Ottoman rule was so oppressive,
why did the Arabs not rebel?
Well, at times they did. We have mentioned the Wahhabi revolt in
eighteenth-century Arabia, but that group wanted to purify Islam, not to
create an Arab state. Peasant and military revolts sometimes broke out in
Egypt, but for economic rather than national reasons. Some historians have
found an anti-Ottoman angle in the policies of Mehmet Ali and Ibrahim.
The latter, as governor of Syria, supposedly said: "I am not a Turk. I came to
Egypt as a child, and since that time, the sun of Egypt has changed my blood
and made it all Arab." But Mehmet Ali and his heirs spoke Turkish, viewed
themselves as members of the Ottoman ruling class, and treated the Egyp¬
tians like servants. Urabi's name implied some Arab identity, and he did
rebel against Turkish and Circassian officers in the Egyptian army, but his
revolution was an Egyptian one directed mainly against the Anglo-French
Dual Control. Uprisings in Syria were frequent, but their cause was usually
religious. Tribes in Iraq and the Hijaz often revolted against Ottoman gover¬
nors, but over local—not national—grievances.
In weighing these facts, historians have concluded that Arab identity
played no great part in Middle East politics up to the twentieth century.
Muslim Arabs felt that any attempt to weaken the Ottoman Empire was
apt to harm Islam. Even under Sultan Abdulhamid, despite his faults, most
Arabs went on upholding the status quo. Many served in the army or civil
administration. A few were prominent advisers. They might have been
proud of belonging to the same "race" as Muhammad, but this did not in¬
spire them to rebel against the Turks, who were Muslims too.
Christian Arab Nationalists
Not all Arabs are Muslim. In the nineteenth century, as many as one-fourth
of the Arabs under Ottoman rule belonged to protected minorities. Most of
these were Christians, who were less likely than the Muslims to feel a strong