182 • 11 WESTERNIZING REFORM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYmanufacturing. The shah began selling these monopolies as concessions
to British and other European investors. He also hired Russian cossack of¬
ficers to train his army. Instead of using reform to protect Persia from for¬
eigners, the shah encouraged them to take over his country.
SOME AFTERTHOUGHTSWesternizing reforms seemed a cure-all for the ills of the nineteenth-
century Middle East, but seldom did they work as well in practice as they
had looked on paper. What went wrong? First, the reforms threatened Mus¬
lim culture and values. Second, they were costly. Modern armies and west¬
ernized bureaucracies could not subsist on the traditional Islamic taxes: the
kharaj paid on land and other fixed property, the jizya paid by Jewish and
Christian subjects, and the canonical zakat. Each of the countries we have
studied would, in later years, stub its toes on finance, having run up a for¬
eign debt so high (by nineteenth-century standards) that it had to accept
European control over its governmental receipts and expenditures.
A related problem for all reformers was a shortage of trained personnel
to run the westernized institutions they had set up. True, Europeans were
often there to do the work. Some were talented, dedicated to their jobs, and
cooperative with native officials. Others were incompetents who could not
have held a job back home, fugitives from an unhappy past, alcoholics, or
snobs who hated the local leaders. Turks, Arabs, and Persians could also be
trained to administer the reforms. If they were sent abroad for their train¬
ing, though, they often picked up some of the less admirable aspects of
Western civilization: drinking, gambling, dueling, and even worse habits.
Some resisted such temptations and came home well trained, only to be
stymied by conservative bureaucrats. If the native reformers attended the
newly formed local schools, subject to steadying influences from home and
mosque, they could turn into half-baked Europeans unable to grasp either
the values of the West or the real needs of their own societies. Such "Levan¬
tines" should have been a bridge between Europe and the Middle East.
Most were not.
The best members of the generation that got its education from the re¬
forms of Mehmet Ali, the Tanzimat, or Nasiruddin's vizier became imbued
with ideas that were in a sense opposed to those of the early reformers
themselves. Instead of hoping to centralize power in the hands of the ruler,
they called for constitutions that would protect the individual's rights
against a powerful government. Some rulers even encouraged this idea.
Mehmet Ali's grandson, Isma'il, the khédive (viceroy) of Egypt from 1863