Someone pulls a Mohammed Ali and takes control of the Syria vilayet and basically becomes his own man?
Interesting idea...
1801-1806: Ahmed Hassan, the Bosnian commander of a detachment of Ottoman troops near Damascus, gradually begins to build up a local power base amid the chaos surrounding Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the subsequent French attempt to retake it. His position is helped by the loyalty of his Bosnian Muslim soldiers, and various alliances with (and backstabs of) the various warlords in Syria. Ahmed Hassan eventually secures a critial alliance with
Bashar Shihab II, who agrees to provide Hassan with resources and men in exchange for Hassan's recognition of Bashar's parimount position in Mount Lebanon. Gradually, the notables of Damascus, and eventually other cities, come to see Ahmad Hassan as a stabalizing force, and by 1806, he as control of virtually all of
Ottoman Syria.
Early 1800's: Ahmed Hassan, recognized as "Emir of Syria" by the Sublime Porte, rules his realm as a
de facto independent state. During his lifetime, he is able to keep good relations with the Shihab family, who, in exchange for his continued support, is allowed to run Mount Lebanon* as virtually an independent state. Towards the end of Ahmad Hassan's reign, relations begin to become strained, and Bashar III (son of Bashar III) begins seeking support from the French-readily given, as he's a Maronite Catholic. To counterbalance this, Ahmed Hassan tries to build relations with the British
1847: Ahmed Hassan dies, and his son Khalid takes over. The rift between him and the Shihabs continues to grow (and tensions start to develop with the Alawites in the northwest as well). To counterbalance the Shihabs, Emir Khalid begins supporting the Druze community of Mount Lebanon
1855: Construction begins on the Suez canal by a Franco-British company
April 1856: After years of rising tensions, a Maronite revolt breaks out in Mount Lebanon, followed shortly by an Alawite rebellion. The Druze side against the Maronites, and backed up by troops from Damascus, quickly come out on top. The affair degenerates into a sectarian war between Maronites/Alawites on one hand and Druze/Muslims on the other.
May-July: Europe is shocked by (much exagerated) reports of horrible massacres of Christians by bloodthirsty Muslims in Syria, and the French demand the right to intervene on behalf of the Maronites. The British at first resist, but reluctantly agree once European outrage makes s
omething inevitable.
July 20th: Franco-British invade Syria, and take control of the country by the end of September. Khalid flees to Constantinople, and the Franco-British install his young son Ismail, although real power is help by a Franco-British commission
1858: French and British sign the Treaty of Rome, in which France agrees to recognize Egypt as an exclusively British sphere of influence, and sell its shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British, in exchange for a complete British withdrawal from Syria and recognition of it as a French protectorate. Sinai is confirmed as part of Egypt.
After 1858, France opens Syria to European settlers, and about 200,000 (mostly French, Italians, Spanish, and Maltese) come over the course of the 19th century. In 1863, Ismael, still nominally Emir, becomes the focus of a largely Muslim revolt aimed at expelling the French. Said revolt is predictably put down, and in the aftermath, Ismael is deposed as Emir, and Syria is directly annexed by the French. France gives all Catholics in Syria French citizenship. Catholics, and especially Maronite Catholics, become noted for their embrace of French culture-happily learning French, giving their children French names, sending them off to French schools, and, in some cases, letting them intermarry with the European settler population (which itself contains plenty of non-Francophone elements). By the late 19th century, the Arab Catholic middle and upper classes have become almost as Francophone as the French settlers, and the distinction between the two groups begins to become somewhat blurry at the edges.
The French invest a great deal into "devoloping" Syria and improving its initially poor infrastructure. France plays up its
Mission Civilisatrice in Syria, and makes extensive parallels with the Roman rule in the area some two millenia before (in one of the most obvious instances of this, many French-founded and French-developed towns and cities are named after ancient Roman ruins they happen to be near-Caesaria, Philadelphia, Pella, Scythopolis, etc). However, French rule has a darker side-Syria's millions of Sunni Arabs, the majority of its population, remain mostly shut out of the benefits of French rule, and the situation of the Sunni community drops precipitously under French rule. Other minorities, like Alawites, Druze, and Shia Muslims, do somewhat better, and many are recruited into colonial mitary units and the lower echelons of the colonial bureaucracy. However, they still aren't citizens, and thus occupy a lower rung on the ladder than Christians. Jews have a somewhat mixed fortune-they are theoretically granted citizenship in 1870, however, in the 1890's, France begins to become suspicious of the ongoing Zionist movement, seeing it as a potential future threat to their control over Syria, and discourages Jewish immigration.
The position of the Ottoman Empire becomes even worse than OTL, as not having Syria throws Ottoman control over Iraq into question. The Russo-Turkish war occurs in the 1870's, and the Ottoman position continues to crumble, with Britain establishing a sphere influence in Iraq in the 1890's and 1910's. General European war breaks out in 1914, and it takes much the same alliances and same course as our WWI**. In 1933, a short monster in human shape becomes Chancellor of Germany, and the world is plunged back into war in 1939.
After the surrender of France in 1940, Britain immediately invades and occupies Syria to prevent German troops from being based there. Civil administration in Syria is handed over to De Gaulle, but the non-Catholic communities soon begin agitating for independence. The Catholic community splits on this matter-some favored continued union with France, but the other faction, led by Francios Shihab, had come to resent French control, and favored an independent Syria, governed by Catholics in alliance with Syria's other non-Sunni communities. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the growing war in Algeria led many Catholics to question the viablility of continued French control, and when Algeria was let go in 1962, so was Syria.
Citizenship in the new republic was technically universal, but control, in practice, was largely maintained by the Christians, with Alawites, Druze, and Shia along for ride, and Sunnis still shut out as before. The result, in the 1970's, was a growing insurgency by the Syrian Liberation Movement (Mouvement de Liberation Syrienne, MLS) a largely Sunni group. In 1982, most of the Syrian army's Sunni conscript units defected to the MLS, giving it the firepower to launch a full-scale civil war. Syria's capital Damascus, once known as the "Paris of the Middle East", became ripped apart by war, divided into different zones, and hundreds of thousands of Syrians, especially Christians (who tended to be both wealthier and more likely to know a European language) fled the country. The UN-brokered Baghdad Accords in 1995 ended the war and paved the way for Syria's first free elections, won by Hamid al-Hassani, who became Syria's first Sunni Muslim president. Since then, Syria has had something of an uncertain recovery, with further elections marred by violence, though UN peacekeepers were finally able to leave in 2007. Damascus has regained some of the old romantic charm it was once known for, and the economy has somewhat improved, though signs of the war are still noticable to even the most inattentive eyes.
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This is, as you may have guessed, an idea I've had for some time, though I've never been quite sure how to use it in a TL. What do you guys think?
*The central part of OTL Lebanon, excluding Beriut
**Butterflies, butterflies, I know, I know. But thing is, not having WWI and WWII requires me to write a whole new history of the 20th century, instead of just the Levant, and it screws up stuff like Decolonization.