wolf_brother
Banned
An earlier rise of the machine gun, though certainly not one we'd be familiar with, due to the successful use of the mitrailleuse opens up lots of possibilities in military affairs.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Indeed.
I'm also wondering how the Abacarist and Belloist influences in the Ottoman Empire might be felt during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. OTL, it was a close-run thing, with the Ottomans mainly losing because their competent war minister got killed on the eve of the conflict. With Belloism shaking up the Ottoman government, we may see an Ottoman victory, or at least a draw.
I'm also wondering how the Abacarist and Belloist influences in the Ottoman Empire might be felt during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. OTL, it was a close-run thing, with the Ottomans mainly losing because their competent war minister got killed on the eve of the conflict. With Belloism shaking up the Ottoman government, we may see an Ottoman victory, or at least a draw.
According to my current outline, which is admittedly rough that far in the future, France today will have either three or four DOMs/TOMs in Africa, not counting Ile Réunion. Their combined population will be about eleven million, although one of them will account for three quarters of that.
There’s at least one other reason: the Zollverein. By this time, the southern German economies, and many of their institutions, were synchronized with northern Germany, which would mean that Prussia is still the natural attractor even if Berlin and Munich are temporarily on opposite sides of a war.
I’m hardly an expert, but I’d argue that while the First Vatican Council was in part a reaction to the general drift of European politics, it also had a specific trigger: the conquest of the Papal States by Italy. And that conquest, in turn, was triggered by the Papal States’ erstwhile protector, Napoleon III, being otherwise occupied, along with a good deal of France. So a drawn Franco-Prussian War and a surviving Bonapartist empire means, at least for the moment, survival of the Papal States – Napoleon IV will be more anti-clerical than his predecessor, but it will take time for him to break with established foreign policy, especially since, by this time, foreign relations are mostly the legislature’s call.
So, maybe, no First Vatican Council, no proclamation of papal infallibility, and no immediate fear that the Pope will try to direct German politics through Prussia’s bishops. Domestic factors such as the rise of the Catholic Center would remain, though, and Bavaria’s betrayal would still fuel anti-Catholic sentiment in Prussia.
But let’s walk things back a little further. Pio Nono started out as a liberal, and became a reactionary only after the 1848 revolutions. It’s already been established that the 1848 uprisings happened in this timeline, in substantially the same way as OTL – they took place soon after the POD, and in a place relatively unaffected by it. But one of the people who was immediately affected by the POD was Garibaldi, who was a successful army commander for the Piratini Republic, and a member of its cabinet after it gained independence, as opposed to moving on to Uruguay. By 1848, this Garibaldi would have more experience in practical politics and compromise to temper his idealism.
So maybe, while 1848 is substantially the same elsewhere in Europe, it’s different in Rome? Maybe Garibaldi could prevail on Mazzini and the Roman liberals to approach the Pope and negotiate a reform package rather than chasing him out of the city? No doubt Pio Nono would still become more conservative later, as the 1848 tide recedes and the demands for reform become more than he’s willing to grant, but he might not be the reactionary we know. And while France would still be the guarantor of the Papal States’ independence, it would take on that role in the context of its general support for Italian unification, and would do so with at least grudging Italian consent.
Could there possibly be, in this setting, a First Vatican Council that’s more like our Second – one that seeks to incorporate the liberalism of the time into Church doctrine rather than reacting against it? I have my doubts – even if Pio Nono is more liberal, there wouldn’t be a clear majority of bishops to support such a step. But maybe, by 1870, there would be a definite tension between the ultramontane, deeply conservative wing of the Church and the more liberal elements, with the French “ultras” in Eugénie’s coterie being not only somewhat behind French public opinion but also behind Rome.
And how would all this feed back into the Kulturkampf? For one thing, the Prussian Catholics might not be as politically united – instead of a powerful Catholic Center, there might be a Catholic liberal party and a Catholic conservative party which form natural ideological alliances rather than carving out a distinct political space based on religion. They’d still try to influence liberalism and conservatism in Catholic directions, but that isn’t quite the same thing. So Bismarck won’t feel the need to neutralize a growing opposition bloc, because there won’t be any such bloc, which would leave the Bavarian Dolchstoss as the only source of an anti-Catholic backlash. Things might be nasty for a while, and as noted above I’d expect Prussian liberals to use the backlash as a platform to secularize the state, but I don’t think it would last long, because the anger against Bavaria would eventually recede and (unlike OTL) Bismarck wouldn’t be egging on the anti-Catholics.
Although, in Brazil, the Malê revolt was more the straw that broke the camel’s back during the Time of Troubles than a major local influence. The separatist republics weren’t Muslim or Muslim-influenced, and although the cult of the yamali spread among northern Brazilian slaves and played a part in the revolt of 1857-58, the cultists worshipped legendary Muslims rather than adopting actual Islam. And of course, the Abacarist doctrines weren’t developed until the Malê were already in Sokoto and Paulo Abacar was able to receive an orthodox Islamic education, although he was no doubt thinking about issues of God and liberty while he led a guerrilla fight in the mountains. So I’m far from sure the Church, much less its ultramontane wing, would make the connection between Abacarism and Brazil’s troubles.
I also doubt there will be much Abacarist influence in Cuba – Abacarism is taking root in places where there’s already an Afro-Islamic presence, and the Afro-Cubans were pretty thoroughly Christianized by that time. On the other hand, Spain will definitely come up against Abacarism in Morocco, and there may be indirect influences elsewhere. And as you say, “Abacarism combines the errors of Islam with the errors of liberalism in one devilish mix,” so Spanish and French ultras may indeed see Abacarism even where it isn’t, and I could definitely see this becoming a point of church-state contention. But that’s mostly in the future at this point.
Bismarck will want them to stay in the Zollverein, because (a) he’ll still want to use it as a platform for German unification, and (b) as noted above, the more integrated the southern German economies are with the NDB’s economy, the less likely it is that southern German nationalism will re-form around an alternate pole. And Bavaria will want to stay in, because it has no realistic alternative – what’s it going to do, use all those seaports in the Alps? A customs union with France won’t help (even assuming that France is interested), because only the Palatinate has a border with France, and goods from the rest of Bavaria would have to transit Zollverein states to reach French ports. Austrian seaports are far away and nowhere near as good as Hamburg, Bremen or Kiel. So I’m guessing that it will be a bad marriage that stays together for the sake of the exports.
According to Wikipedia (yeah, I know), the Cardwell reforms were already under way by 1870, and that the impetus was Prussia’s success against Austria in 1866. The main features appear to have been abolishing the sale of commissions, introducing short-service enlistments, reorganization of regiments, and devolving self-defense responsibilities to the “white dominions” – all of which, I think, were bound to happen sooner or later. So I think we still get something like the Cardwell reforms, at more or less the same time. On the other hand, the British army after the Cardwell reforms was still geared toward colonial warfare – it wasn’t until the Haldane reforms of 1906-12 that the army really became reoriented toward a large land war – so the British army in this timeline may still be substantially less prepared for the Great War than its OTL counterpart.
I wonder, though, if a Franco-Prussian War involving conscript armies on both sides, and the beginnings of industrial trench warfare, would affect British attitude toward conscription. The UK seems to have been substantially more resistant to conscription than the continental powers, but an earlier lesson in the demands of industrial warfare might change that to at least some extent. If Britain enacts some kind of limited conscription, with recruits serving for a year or so and then being liable to reserve call-up, that might go some way toward advancing its preparedness. But I honestly have no idea of what the politics of conscription would be in Britain at the time.
It was mentioned that they were using Gatling-style mitrailleuses – smaller, lighter weapons with rotating barrels that can fire continuously as opposed to being volley guns. These were introduced as part of the ATL French army reforms of the late 1860s, and were used as infantry support rather than light artillery. The more traditional mitrailleuses were also used, and both will be part of the French arsenal in the Great War. The lessons of trench warfare will push the other great powers toward developing continuous-fire and volley weapons of their own; I’d expect something like the Maxim to be in use well before the 1890s.
This timeline’s Great War seems like it will be World War I with machine guns and chemical agents but no armor, which in Europe would mean that there’s no alternative to positional warfare, that battles are likely to be inconclusive, and that political factors (such as internal revolutions) will have a key impact on the outcome. That won’t always be the case outside Europe, with different geographic and human terrain, but in the European theaters, we’re looking at a long, grinding war, with much blood spilled for little gain.
I don’t want to give too much away, because the next major update (probably this weekend) will focus on the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and Bornu between 1868 and 1874. I’ll just say that if you assume that the Russo-Turkish War will occur at all, you may be assuming too much – the reformist influences will be at least as much political and diplomatic as military.
wolf_brother
Banned
Pius IX's turn to reactionarism was chiefly caused by the assassination of his Interior Minister (and close friend), Pellegrino Rossi, by Italian radical nationalist republicans. However he'd always been an authoritarian figure, and one not likely to give into liberal reforms. That is, he 'liberalized' the Papal States to the extent that it modernized them and made them more efficient; anything that challenged his rule or that of the Church in any way he squashed quite viciously. So even with a tempered Garibaldi, you're unlikely to get a major change in the doctrine or direction of the Church in the mid-19th century.
This doesn't mean the Kulturkampf is unavoidable, but if you're looking to change the direction of Prussian domestic politics I'd suggest looking for something to change within Prussia.
This doesn't mean the Kulturkampf is unavoidable, but if you're looking to change the direction of Prussian domestic politics I'd suggest looking for something to change within Prussia.
There are several angles here. One, as has been said before, is that Bismarck won't want to turn the Catholics in the Southern states against unification of Gerrmany under Prussian hegemony. Then, ITTL, while still at the helm, he isn't the hero and maker of the new Empire as IOTL, he's just a powerful Prussian PM who has made the best out of a war that could have gone better. That may make him more insecure, depending more on those allies that fear the Catholics, or more cautious, trying to avoid fights he might lose. Third, if ultramontanism becomes tainted in Germany by association with French pro-papal politics, this may weaken political Catholicism substantially, by reducing or splitting it.
wolf_brother
Banned
Conversely, if Plon-Plon's anti-clericalism turns him against the Papal states and the church in general, Bismarck may be canny enough to attempt to co-opt the Catholic Center in Prussia and the ultramontanes in the southern German states.
Plon-Plon was of course anti-clerical, but he was a pragmatic diplomat as he proved it in 1859, by negociating successfully with Alexander II his neutrality and with Franz Joseph the armistice of Villafranca, despite his personal critical stand against them and their countries.
Anyway, the Papal states wouldn't be a problem if as IOTL, Napoleon III abandons them to secure the help of Italy.
What's more, if the regime is fully parliamentarian as Plon-Plon wanted it (indirect election of the Senators instead of imperial nominations and full responsibility of the ministers before the Corps Législatif instead of a vague and ambiguous responsibility, to quote his more important ideas), his control over foreign policy would be weak.
Is he still married to the very pious and catholic Princess Clothilde ITTL?
Anyway, the Papal states wouldn't be a problem if as IOTL, Napoleon III abandons them to secure the help of Italy.
What's more, if the regime is fully parliamentarian as Plon-Plon wanted it (indirect election of the Senators instead of imperial nominations and full responsibility of the ministers before the Corps Législatif instead of a vague and ambiguous responsibility, to quote his more important ideas), his control over foreign policy would be weak.
Is he still married to the very pious and catholic Princess Clothilde ITTL?
Are they imported from the USA?
The mitrailleuses used by the French army (one of the first armies, if not the first, to employ this new weapon) were Reffye mitrailleuses, based on the design of the Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse.
They proved to be very useful but suffered from an unadapted doctrine of use, being still attached to the artillery corps at the rear rather than to infantry.
wolf_brother
Banned
To be fair, they also had an range that more suited them to artillery use than to the infantry. I've covered this before in another thread, but comparing the mitrailleuse to the Gatling is like comparing a roman candle to a sparkler.
Hmmm. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Pius IX released political prisoners, opened up the Rome ghetto and created an advisory council after his accession. But yeah, these are pretty tepid reforms, and certainly don't involve giving up any real authority.
According to the same source, he agreed, under duress in the initial stages of the 1848 revolution, to grant a constitution and appoint a government of lay ministers. If Rossi isn't assassinated and if Garibaldi can calm down the riots at this point, would the Pope ride out the revolutionary period in Rome, and how much would he be able to take back after 1849?
Of course, if he gives up some of his power under duress, that could be what makes him convene a First Vatican-type council to reaffirm his authority over the Church, and to make sure that the temporal liberalism he's been forced to concede never affects the spiritual realm. So we'd still have a reactionary Church and an aggrandizement of papal authority, albeit by a somewhat different route, and possibly even an earlier growth of the Catholic Center.
In terms of changes within Prussia, I like your suggestion of Bismarck rallying the Catholics against Plon-Plon's secularism - even if Napoleon IV is an accomplished diplomat, he can still be portrayed as rabidly anti-Catholic by Bismarck's propaganda. This could be combined with wannis' observation that he may be more cautious about picking political fights (and my own observation that he won't want to scare Bavaria and Baden by persecuting Catholics).
So Plon-Plon's main impact would be to push through a few initial reforms and then oversee the drafting of a parliamentary constitution - maybe a fully parliamentary France by 1880, or even 1875?
It was a political marriage, and Napoleon III would still want to enter a dynastic alliance with Italy in this timeline, so yes, he would be married to Marie-Clotilde. I guess she would be his Eugénie, albeit one with much less power.
The Gatlings' design was adapted from the United States during the late 1860s' military reforms (presumably the inspiration came from a French military observer in the US during the Civil War). Both the Gatling-type mitrailleuses and the Reffye mitrailleuses were used during this timeline's Franco-Prussian war, with the two weapons playing different roles - the Gatlings were used as infantry squad weapons, and the Reffyes were used as light artillery. The combined use of the two was an element of the victory at Gravelotte, and was one of the reasons why one brigade of Senegalese managed to hold off three Prussian divisions for five hours.
I had a bit of a look around yesterday and the easy to find sources seem to focus on the reforms to the British Army as opposed to the push back to the self governing colonies, the latter of which is, naturally, of more interest to me
Aram Sakalian, The Young Ottomans from Tanzimat to Democracy (Stamboul: Abdülhamid University Press, 2011)
… It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the modern Ottoman Empire was formed between 1867 and 1880. The process of reform began long before and continued long after, and the conflicts created by that process have not been entirely resolved even now. But the ideological conflicts that define the Ottoman state as we know it, and the institutions through which those conflicts play out, all came into being during those thirteen formative years.
As 1867 drew to a close, the Young Ottomans under the leadership of Ibrahim Şinasi and Nasir Kemal had formed the Constitutionalist Party, which favored a limited monarchy and entrenched civil liberties as the best way to carry forward the reforms of the Tanzimat. They almost immediately faced the dilemma of what a political party could do in a country which had no elected offices and where ideological battles were fought primarily among court factions. The answer, somewhat to Şinasi’s surprise, was a great deal. The party’s base consisted of middle-class reformists in the major cities, and particularly the capital: junior and mid-level military officers, civil servants, businessmen, journalists, modernizing imams, minor court functionaries. None of these people, individually, had any great power, but their collective influence was significant. The party provided these reformists with a place to share ideas and, by pooling their influence, affect the day-to-day policies of government departments. While none of these changes were revolutionary, they helped to change the culture within the civil service, the military and even the court to make them more hospitable to reform.
And the existence of a broad-based party favoring bottom-up reform (at least for certain values of “bottom”) also provided a fulcrum for collective action in a time of political crisis, such as occurred in the Year of the Three Sultans.
On March 27, 1870, the 40-year-old Sultan Abdulaziz fell in his bath, striking his head on a wall and dying ten hours later. His nephew, rumored to be mentally ill, succeeded to the throne as Murad V, but the combination of Abdulaziz’ unexpected death and Murad’s weakness precipitated a fierce factional battle for control of the court. Initially, the reactionary grand vizier, Mahmud Nedim Pasha, appeared to have the upper hand, but even as he consolidated his authority within the palace, the reformists reached outside the palace walls in preparation for a coup.
Midhat Pasha
The leader of the putschists was Midhat Pasha, a reformist senior official who had served as governor of several provinces and had a strong record of development and modernization. He was respected, even among the restive Bulgarians (who he had once governed), for his integrity and even-handedness, and was fiercely loyal to the state, but by 1870, he had come to the conclusion that Mahmud Nedim Pasha’s policies were a danger to the country and that a rollback of the Tanzimat reforms would spell doom for the Ottomans’ ability to compete with the European powers. Knowing he had to act quickly, he allied with Hussein Avni Pasha, a high military officer who had the respect of the army, as well as several other high court officials and provincial governors who were known to favor reform.
Midhat Pasha recognized, however, that his plans amounted to a revolution – a change in the governing system rather than simply a change of the people at the top – and that, to accomplish this, a palace coup carried out by high officials might not be enough. Instead, to multiply the forces available to support the coup, he brought in Şinasi and the Constitutionalists, recognizing that the support of the civil service and junior officers would smooth the transfer of power and paralyze any attempt at counterrevolution. The Young Ottomans’ leadership of a mass organization had bought them a place in the new government and a chance to shape the new order – assuming, of course, that the putsch succeeded.
In the event, it did. At midnight on July 15, a group of military officers recruited by Şinasi seized the palace and placed both Sultan Murad and Mahmud Nedim Pasha under arrest. The next morning, it was announced that Murad’s illness made him unable to continue in office, and that his brother – who had been approached by Midhat Pasha some weeks earlier – would succeed as Abdul Hamid II. By afternoon, the new Sultan had been installed, Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni Pasha named grand vizier and commander of the armies, and a commission, headed by Şinasi, empaneled to draw up a constitution.
Hussein Avni Pasha
Reshaping the empire, however, was easier said than done, as the cracks in the new order began to show almost immediately. Neither Midhat Pasha nor Hussein Avni Pasha were comfortable sharing power, and they had different ideas of where the empire needed to go; although both favored a continuation of the Tanzimat reforms, Hussein Avni Pasha saw no need for participatory government, while Midhat Pasha believed that some opening of the political process was necessary to avoid sliding into reaction. And, for his part, the grand vizier – who wanted a largely advisory parliament and centralized provincial administration – clashed with Şinasi, who supported a powerful legislature, and Şinasi clashed with the Constitutionalist back-benchers on the drafting commission who wanted to go farther still.
The process of drafting the Ottoman state’s first constitution would take six months, and the result would be an eclectic compromise that pleased nobody. There would be a two-house parliament, with half the upper house appointed by the Sultan and the other half selected to represent the provinces. The lower house would be elected, but by limited suffrage; the franchise in the cities and towns was restricted to those who could meet either a property or an educational qualification, while the rural vote would be exercised by village headmen, many of whom were agents for absentee landowners, as proxies for the villagers. This somewhat curious arrangement was a product of both the elitism of Şinasi, who believed that the educated classes should govern until the “backward” poor were enlightened, and the cynicism of Hussein Avni Pasha, who reasoned that it would be easier to buy the votes of thousands of headmen than millions of peasants.
The sultan would continue to have broad powers to initiate legislation as well as a veto over all acts of the legislature, and would remain the supreme religious authority. He would appoint the vizier and ministers, who the parliament could summon for questioning but not dismiss. He would also continue to appoint provincial governors, although each vilayet would now have an elected council. These councils would be advisory, but they rather than the governors would choose the vilayet’s representatives in the upper house, and, by majority vote, the council could appeal the governor’s rulings to the national parliament.
The one truly progressive aspect of the new charter was its bill of rights. Under the constitution, there would be a single Ottoman citizenship, with no distinctions made between nationalities or religions. Freedom of speech and worship were protected, and arbitrary punishment was prohibited; the sultan was stripped of judicial powers outside the religious sphere, and a citizen could only be condemned to imprisonment or death after a trial in a civil court. The parliament was directed, as soon as possible, to enact uniform criminal and civil codes in order to standardize the law throughout the empire.
In February 1872, Sultan Abdul Hamid promulgated the constitution with great fanfare, and announced that elections would be held in the summer. In the meantime, the political turmoil within and outside the palace was only intensifying. Midhat Pasha’s purge of the court was still incomplete; while several reactionary officials, including Mahmud Nedim Pasha, had been relegated to genteel confinement, others had escaped to the provinces where they had powerful allies among the local power structures, especially since the process of identifying and replacing untrustworthy governors was a slow one. Balkan separatists were divided about whether to compete in the elections or undermine them, radicals in the cities agitated for further reform and condemned the Constitutionalists as sellouts, and Hussein Avni Pasha – by now hardly speaking to the grand vizier, and flirting with some of the more moderate figures among the ousted conservatives – actively campaigned for support among the rural landholders while Şinasi did the same in the cities.
The results of the election were, as may be expected, inconclusive. The Constitutionalists, who had an organizational advantage, won a majority in the cities and towns. They also scored surprisingly well in the countryside: Hussein Avni Pasha had underestimated the influence of the rural imamate, who Şinasi had courted and who saw him as a sensible middle ground between reaction on the one hand and Abacarist or secularist radicalism on the other, and the religious leaders were able to sway many headmen to the Constitutionalist cause. However, Şinasi’s party failed to win an overall majority: several of the urban constituencies were taken by radicals and outright secularists (several of the latter being disciples of a rival Young Ottoman, Mustafa Fazil Pasha), and various conservative factions, independents, and regionalist parties captured the balance of the seats.
The regionalists posed yet another challenge to the reformist government. In Bulgaria, a majority of candidates favored autonomy within the empire, but the deputies from Serbia, Moldavia and Wallachia – which already had wide-ranging autonomy – were pledged to negotiate full independence. Şinasi, who had won a seat in the lower house and was trying to assemble a reformist coalition, faced a difficult choice as to which of these factions, if any, to bring in. He had little sympathy with the Bulgarian autonomists, but they were politically acceptable to the majority of Ottomans. He did sympathize with the outright separatists – he had argued previously that the Christian provinces should be allowed to leave the empire if they couldn’t find it in their hearts to accept equal citizenship – but there were many, even among the liberals, who viewed cession of territory as treason, and who were afraid that allowing Serbia and Romania to leave might set a dangerous precedent in Thrace and Macedonia, which the empire had to keep in order to maintain its contiguity.
For the time being, Şinasi chose what he believed to be the lesser evil and allied with the autonomists, brokering a deal between them and Midhat Pasha for local self-government in the Bulgarian vilayets. With their aid, he was able to cobble together ad hoc majorities to pass the civil and criminal code and to accelerate the modernization of the army and navy: the latter reform, critically, included changes to the curriculum at the military academy which, he hoped, would nurture a new generation of liberal officers. But many of his further-reaching initiatives died in the upper house, and at the same time, Hussein Avni Pasha was drifting even farther into the role of opposition within the government. By early 1873, he was fomenting widespread passive disobedience among the vilayet and sanjak governors, and there were rumors that he was organizing a countercoup to restore Murad V to the throne. In January, there was an abortive revolt by conservative officers at a barracks near the capital; the plot was betrayed by Constitutionalist sympathizers at the cantonment, and there was no proof that Hussein Avni Pasha was the instigator, but everyone involved took it as a warning sign.
It was during this precarious time that the Aceh crisis broke, and the fate of the Ottoman liberals was decided thousands of miles from the capital.
Aceh, a sultanate at the northern end of Sumatra, had avoided being incorporated into the Dutch East Indies, stubbornly maintaining its independence as a nominal Ottoman protectorate, and attempting to negotiate alliances with Britain and the United States. It was these negotiations, and the fear of Britain extending its Malay and Borneo holdings to gain a foothold on Sumatra, that led the Dutch to force the issue, sending an expeditionary force from Java to invade Aceh. The Dutch commander, however, underestimated his foe, and in the spring of 1873, was driven back by a well-organized army of 10,000 men.
The Acehnese realized that it was only a matter of time before the Dutch resumed the attack with a much larger force, and appealed to several foreign powers for aid, including Sultan Abdul Hamid. It was clear that if the Sultan failed to succor a long-time vassal - even a nominal one - both he and the government would be weakened, possibly fatally. But Şinasi and Midhat Pasha also saw the crisis as an opportunity. If they defeated a European power and protected a fellow Islamic ruler from foreign conquest, their government would gain enormous prestige – possibly even enough prestige to put the reactionaries on the defensive and negotiate an agreeable resolution to the Balkan separatist problem. And the responsibility of commanding the Ottoman army during wartime would temporarily distract Hussein Avni Pasha from his political machinations and enable the vizier to consolidate his hold on the provinces.
This was also a war that Midhat Pasha was sure the Ottomans could win. The empire had the world’s third-largest navy, and even though its ships were individually outclassed by the Dutch, they had an overwhelming numerical advantage. Although the logistics were daunting, it seemed likely that the Ottomans could break the naval blockade of Aceh and get enough troops there in time to stop the Dutch offensive. There was little that the Netherlands, which lacked a land border with the Ottoman Empire, could do to retaliate. The main obstacle was diplomatic rather than military: would Britain, whose navy controlled the Indian Ocean, consent to an Ottoman force’s passage?
At first, this obstacle seemed an insuperable one. Anglo-Dutch relations had cooled during the past fifteen years due to the acrimonious negotiations that had preceded the British buyout of the Dutch Gold Coast forts, and ongoing disputes over trading rights as the Netherlands pushed north through Sumatra. At the same time, Britain was reluctant to directly oppose another European power in colonial warfare or to compromise its most-favored-nation status in the Dutch empire.
But in May 1873, a revolt broke out among tribesmen in the Yemeni interior which threatened the strategic British naval station at Aden. The timing of this revolt has often been described as suspiciously convenient for the Ottomans, and recent examinations of the state archives show that Midhat Pasha did have a hand in it, but he hid his involvement well, and offered to help suppress it in return for a free hand in Aceh. After certain additional concessions were offered, including a guarantee of preferential rights for British merchants if Aceh were secured by Ottoman forces, Britain agreed, while maintaining its official disapproval of the relief expedition, to refrain from hindering it and to reaffirm the legal right of free passage over the high seas. In later years, as proxy warfare between colonial powers became more common, Britain would regret setting this precedent, but for the time being, it believed that matters had been resolved to its satisfaction.
The planning for the expedition had gone ahead even while the negotiations were in progress, and within days of securing the necessary assurances, a relief force of 20,000 troops supported by the Ottoman fleet - the most that could be sent, given the parlous state of Ottoman finances - was on its way to Sumatra. In October, the expedition landed at Banda Aceh, and the Dutch forces, which were assembling in preparation for a renewed invasion the following month, thought it the better part of valor to stand down.
The outcome was the best one possible for Midhat Pasha - a diplomatic rather than a military victory, which meant that all the glory accrued to him. Seizing the moment, he prevailed on the Sultan to dissolve the parliament and call a new election. This time, the Constitutionalists and their allies won an absolute majority in the lower house and, by seizing control of most provincial councils, secured their position in the senate.
In the spring of 1874, a greatly strengthened Midhat Pasha and Şinasi set themselves three tasks. The first: to reform the system of taxation and lift the Ottoman state out of its perennial near-bankruptcy. The second: to come to terms with the Serbs and Romanians. The third: to deal with Hussein Avni Pasha and the conservatives once and for all. They would be considerably more successful in the first two tasks than the last…
Ismet Yücel, Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
… For the first forty years of Belloism’s existence, its area of influence formed a rough triangle with corners at Aden, Sokoto and Stamboul. Within that zone, Belloist thought took different forms as it was affected by local conditions, its relationship with those in power, and the influence of other ideas along its periphery. And each of these forms, in turn, would reverberate through the region, until one could never be certain where any particular idea came from.
Bornu was, of course, the birthplace of Belloist doctrine, and it was there that Belloism was most common in its original, pure form: communities of families devoted to work, education and prayer, isolating themselves from politics so that the freedom of religious thought would not be impeded. But the sheer number of Belloists in Bornu, and their experiences during three decades of border warfare and state-building, had also changed Belloism into something else. The Belloists in the border settlements had reformed their absolute pacifism to allow for self-defense, and many communes - encouraged by the sultan - had taken on a symbiotic role with the state, receiving support and protection in return for educating a generation of administrators and military officers. With so many civil and military officials having been steeped in Belloist doctrine, and with the Belloists a key bulwark of the kingdom, it was only a matter of time before they had to rethink their very conception of themselves: one cannot isolate oneself from society when one is the society.
By 1870, Sultan Umar ibn Muhammad al-Amin, who had begun by viewing the Belloist communities as a resource to be used, had adopted Belloism himself, and Bornu began its transformation into a Belloist state. To be sure, the idea of a Belloist polity seemed a contradiction in terms, given that the foundation of Belloism was withdrawal from politics. If, as Ali bin Bello had taught, the unfreedom of political thought was in inherent contradiction with the freedom and openness that was required in religion, then how was Belloism to be reconciled with the governance of a state?
The answer, according to the Bornu imamate, was to conceive of the state itself as something apolitical: as a commune writ large, to be ruled by consensus and supported by mutual aid, and in which the sultan merely gave voice to the will of the people and of God. Ultimately, both government and justice would take the form of multiple tiers of assemblies, similar to the way the communes ruled themselves: at the first tier, each village or neighborhood would reach consensus on the issue or case at hand, and then elect representatives to debate at the district level, and so on upward. In practice, only issues of great national importance were decided this way; most local matters required only one level of assembly to determine, and day-to-day national administration was still undertaken by the sultan, although he held open audience before issuing any decree. And because politics could no more be eliminated from a Belloist state than any other, the consensuses reached by the assemblies were usually shaped by men deemed wise or important. Nevertheless, the growing tradition of public debate, and the ideal of government as an apolitical exercise, would influence Bornu profoundly in the decades to come.
Another feature of Belloist Bornu, which began during the 1870s although it didn’t become uniform until later, was the mutual-aid obligation or labor tax, for which all citizens were liable one day a week in exchange for a partial remission of their monetary or in-kind taxes. This, too, was an adaptation of the communal labor in the Belloist villages, and was typically performed on public works, on the farms established to feed the poor, or in education or medicine. Everyone not on active military service was liable - even the sultan, who performed his duties very publicly and with much religious ceremony.
Despite the egalitarian nature of the new obligations, they were widely resented, especially since a labor tax of one day in six amounted to a higher effective tax rate than had previously existed. Moreover, some of the Belloist communes had always been ambivalent about their relationship with the state, and as Belloism took hold in the court, the communes that maintained their purity found themselves in the paradoxical position of withdrawing from a state that affirmed their doctrines. To them, the sultan’s adoption of Belloism had brought matters full circle, to where the state was again identified with a religious community and where doctrines intended to preserve religious freedom had become instruments of political coercion. As the 1870s wore on and communal solidarity became more a part of state ideology, the purist villages - which were outside the consensus, and thus outside the state community - became subject to intermittent persecution, and some would become the founders of the Belloist diaspora.
In Egypt, too, a modified form of state Belloism, albeit more a secular modernization with a Belloist cast than the full adoption that occurred in Bornu, was taking hold. The government of Riyad Pasha had already steered Egyptian foreign policy away from aggressive warfare and recast the military for defense and internal peacekeeping; in 1872, influenced by Bornu’s conception of the apolitical state, he reformed the civil service and judiciary to eliminate political appointments at all but the highest level and fill most posts through competitive examination. Eventually, he argued, even governors, supreme judges and ministers should be civil servants, but for the time being - and for the foreseeable future - that would be one reform too far.
Muhammad Ahmad
In the early 1870s, though, Riyad Pasha’s cynical encouragement of pure Belloism among the rural peasantry, in the hope that quietism and communal labor would make them easier to control, suffered an unexpected setback. In Sudan, a young imam named Muhammad Ahmad, who lived in a district where the government was particularly oppressive, preached that withdrawal from politics did not require toleration of injustice, and that the degree of withdrawal should be directly proportional to how much the civil government violated the precepts of Islam. In a just society, Belloists could, and should, live as other citizens while maintaining the prohibition against political participation, but in an unjust one, their withdrawal should be complete, and all cooperation with the state, including payment of taxes, was proscribed.
In 1873, the peasants of Ahmad’s district went on strike, fleeing their villages in a re-creation of the ancient practice of anachoresis and establishing a subsistence lifestyle in the bush or in neighboring provinces. When the governor attempted to confiscate their lands, he found no one willing to work them; when he ordered the army to return the peasants to work, he learned that combating mass civil disobedience required a greater and more sustained commitment of troops than putting down a revolt; when he caught and executed a few of the ringleaders, he discovered that religious fanaticism made them quite willing to embrace martyrdom. By the end of the year, the governor had been recalled in disgrace, and peasant Belloism, which Riyad Pasha conceived as a tool, had become a force instead.
A similar development was taking place in the eastern Fulani jihadist states of Sokoto, Atikuwa and Adamawa. These countries had been profoundly affected by the Abacarist revolution and industrial development, but all of them were currently under conservative regimes. The dominant reformist influence here remained Abacarist, but by the end of the 1860s, some Belloist ideas were filtering from the north. Belloism’s emphasis on education and consensus meshed well with Abacarist notions of radical democracy, and its communalism and mutual-aid ideology answered to the needs of the labor movement, which was already rooted in local religious brotherhoods. The result was “Abacarist Belloism” or “Labor Belloism,” which redefined withdrawal from politics as solely a ban on holding office, and preached that Belloist communities could - and were indeed required to - organize to build a just society and oppose injustice. This tendency was particularly strong in the industrial cities of Atikuwa, where the manifesto of the Second Labor Shura in 1874 showed distinct Belloist influences.
And finally, in Yemen and the Levant, a tribal Belloism, under which each clan was conceived as a politically independent commune, was taking root among the Bedouins. The Belloist clan leaders paid homage to the Ottoman sultan as Caliph and affirmed his religious supremacy, but considered themselves subject to no temporal lord, recognizing only Islamic law and not civil law. They also took the educational role of Belloist communes very seriously, with their elders becoming itinerant teachers, much like the Malê jajis, who moved as the clan did and taught students who lived with the clan for a while in exchange for payment and work. During the 1870s and afterward, these elders would create a library of hymns and teaching songs in the rich tradition of Arabic poetry.
The Belloist Bedouins’ break with Ottoman civil authority was often more theory than practice; many local governors were willing to recast the customary tribute as a religious tax and negotiate a mutually acceptable relationship with the settled population. In other areas, however, the government and military were less tolerant and the Belloists were persecuted, leading many to retreat into the desert. There, in the Najd, they encountered the doctrines of the Salafis. This led to many clashes, as the Salafis’ distaste for innovation made them deeply suspicious of Belloism, but at the same time, the Salafi rejection of traditional jurisprudence, its condemnation of blind obedience to authority or custom, and its emphasis on an individual understanding of pure Islam, had their echoes in Belloist thought. In time, although the two would never be reconciled, ideas would begin to cross over…
… It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the modern Ottoman Empire was formed between 1867 and 1880. The process of reform began long before and continued long after, and the conflicts created by that process have not been entirely resolved even now. But the ideological conflicts that define the Ottoman state as we know it, and the institutions through which those conflicts play out, all came into being during those thirteen formative years.
As 1867 drew to a close, the Young Ottomans under the leadership of Ibrahim Şinasi and Nasir Kemal had formed the Constitutionalist Party, which favored a limited monarchy and entrenched civil liberties as the best way to carry forward the reforms of the Tanzimat. They almost immediately faced the dilemma of what a political party could do in a country which had no elected offices and where ideological battles were fought primarily among court factions. The answer, somewhat to Şinasi’s surprise, was a great deal. The party’s base consisted of middle-class reformists in the major cities, and particularly the capital: junior and mid-level military officers, civil servants, businessmen, journalists, modernizing imams, minor court functionaries. None of these people, individually, had any great power, but their collective influence was significant. The party provided these reformists with a place to share ideas and, by pooling their influence, affect the day-to-day policies of government departments. While none of these changes were revolutionary, they helped to change the culture within the civil service, the military and even the court to make them more hospitable to reform.
And the existence of a broad-based party favoring bottom-up reform (at least for certain values of “bottom”) also provided a fulcrum for collective action in a time of political crisis, such as occurred in the Year of the Three Sultans.
On March 27, 1870, the 40-year-old Sultan Abdulaziz fell in his bath, striking his head on a wall and dying ten hours later. His nephew, rumored to be mentally ill, succeeded to the throne as Murad V, but the combination of Abdulaziz’ unexpected death and Murad’s weakness precipitated a fierce factional battle for control of the court. Initially, the reactionary grand vizier, Mahmud Nedim Pasha, appeared to have the upper hand, but even as he consolidated his authority within the palace, the reformists reached outside the palace walls in preparation for a coup.
Midhat Pasha
The leader of the putschists was Midhat Pasha, a reformist senior official who had served as governor of several provinces and had a strong record of development and modernization. He was respected, even among the restive Bulgarians (who he had once governed), for his integrity and even-handedness, and was fiercely loyal to the state, but by 1870, he had come to the conclusion that Mahmud Nedim Pasha’s policies were a danger to the country and that a rollback of the Tanzimat reforms would spell doom for the Ottomans’ ability to compete with the European powers. Knowing he had to act quickly, he allied with Hussein Avni Pasha, a high military officer who had the respect of the army, as well as several other high court officials and provincial governors who were known to favor reform.
Midhat Pasha recognized, however, that his plans amounted to a revolution – a change in the governing system rather than simply a change of the people at the top – and that, to accomplish this, a palace coup carried out by high officials might not be enough. Instead, to multiply the forces available to support the coup, he brought in Şinasi and the Constitutionalists, recognizing that the support of the civil service and junior officers would smooth the transfer of power and paralyze any attempt at counterrevolution. The Young Ottomans’ leadership of a mass organization had bought them a place in the new government and a chance to shape the new order – assuming, of course, that the putsch succeeded.
In the event, it did. At midnight on July 15, a group of military officers recruited by Şinasi seized the palace and placed both Sultan Murad and Mahmud Nedim Pasha under arrest. The next morning, it was announced that Murad’s illness made him unable to continue in office, and that his brother – who had been approached by Midhat Pasha some weeks earlier – would succeed as Abdul Hamid II. By afternoon, the new Sultan had been installed, Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni Pasha named grand vizier and commander of the armies, and a commission, headed by Şinasi, empaneled to draw up a constitution.
Hussein Avni Pasha
Reshaping the empire, however, was easier said than done, as the cracks in the new order began to show almost immediately. Neither Midhat Pasha nor Hussein Avni Pasha were comfortable sharing power, and they had different ideas of where the empire needed to go; although both favored a continuation of the Tanzimat reforms, Hussein Avni Pasha saw no need for participatory government, while Midhat Pasha believed that some opening of the political process was necessary to avoid sliding into reaction. And, for his part, the grand vizier – who wanted a largely advisory parliament and centralized provincial administration – clashed with Şinasi, who supported a powerful legislature, and Şinasi clashed with the Constitutionalist back-benchers on the drafting commission who wanted to go farther still.
The process of drafting the Ottoman state’s first constitution would take six months, and the result would be an eclectic compromise that pleased nobody. There would be a two-house parliament, with half the upper house appointed by the Sultan and the other half selected to represent the provinces. The lower house would be elected, but by limited suffrage; the franchise in the cities and towns was restricted to those who could meet either a property or an educational qualification, while the rural vote would be exercised by village headmen, many of whom were agents for absentee landowners, as proxies for the villagers. This somewhat curious arrangement was a product of both the elitism of Şinasi, who believed that the educated classes should govern until the “backward” poor were enlightened, and the cynicism of Hussein Avni Pasha, who reasoned that it would be easier to buy the votes of thousands of headmen than millions of peasants.
The sultan would continue to have broad powers to initiate legislation as well as a veto over all acts of the legislature, and would remain the supreme religious authority. He would appoint the vizier and ministers, who the parliament could summon for questioning but not dismiss. He would also continue to appoint provincial governors, although each vilayet would now have an elected council. These councils would be advisory, but they rather than the governors would choose the vilayet’s representatives in the upper house, and, by majority vote, the council could appeal the governor’s rulings to the national parliament.
The one truly progressive aspect of the new charter was its bill of rights. Under the constitution, there would be a single Ottoman citizenship, with no distinctions made between nationalities or religions. Freedom of speech and worship were protected, and arbitrary punishment was prohibited; the sultan was stripped of judicial powers outside the religious sphere, and a citizen could only be condemned to imprisonment or death after a trial in a civil court. The parliament was directed, as soon as possible, to enact uniform criminal and civil codes in order to standardize the law throughout the empire.
In February 1872, Sultan Abdul Hamid promulgated the constitution with great fanfare, and announced that elections would be held in the summer. In the meantime, the political turmoil within and outside the palace was only intensifying. Midhat Pasha’s purge of the court was still incomplete; while several reactionary officials, including Mahmud Nedim Pasha, had been relegated to genteel confinement, others had escaped to the provinces where they had powerful allies among the local power structures, especially since the process of identifying and replacing untrustworthy governors was a slow one. Balkan separatists were divided about whether to compete in the elections or undermine them, radicals in the cities agitated for further reform and condemned the Constitutionalists as sellouts, and Hussein Avni Pasha – by now hardly speaking to the grand vizier, and flirting with some of the more moderate figures among the ousted conservatives – actively campaigned for support among the rural landholders while Şinasi did the same in the cities.
The results of the election were, as may be expected, inconclusive. The Constitutionalists, who had an organizational advantage, won a majority in the cities and towns. They also scored surprisingly well in the countryside: Hussein Avni Pasha had underestimated the influence of the rural imamate, who Şinasi had courted and who saw him as a sensible middle ground between reaction on the one hand and Abacarist or secularist radicalism on the other, and the religious leaders were able to sway many headmen to the Constitutionalist cause. However, Şinasi’s party failed to win an overall majority: several of the urban constituencies were taken by radicals and outright secularists (several of the latter being disciples of a rival Young Ottoman, Mustafa Fazil Pasha), and various conservative factions, independents, and regionalist parties captured the balance of the seats.
The regionalists posed yet another challenge to the reformist government. In Bulgaria, a majority of candidates favored autonomy within the empire, but the deputies from Serbia, Moldavia and Wallachia – which already had wide-ranging autonomy – were pledged to negotiate full independence. Şinasi, who had won a seat in the lower house and was trying to assemble a reformist coalition, faced a difficult choice as to which of these factions, if any, to bring in. He had little sympathy with the Bulgarian autonomists, but they were politically acceptable to the majority of Ottomans. He did sympathize with the outright separatists – he had argued previously that the Christian provinces should be allowed to leave the empire if they couldn’t find it in their hearts to accept equal citizenship – but there were many, even among the liberals, who viewed cession of territory as treason, and who were afraid that allowing Serbia and Romania to leave might set a dangerous precedent in Thrace and Macedonia, which the empire had to keep in order to maintain its contiguity.
For the time being, Şinasi chose what he believed to be the lesser evil and allied with the autonomists, brokering a deal between them and Midhat Pasha for local self-government in the Bulgarian vilayets. With their aid, he was able to cobble together ad hoc majorities to pass the civil and criminal code and to accelerate the modernization of the army and navy: the latter reform, critically, included changes to the curriculum at the military academy which, he hoped, would nurture a new generation of liberal officers. But many of his further-reaching initiatives died in the upper house, and at the same time, Hussein Avni Pasha was drifting even farther into the role of opposition within the government. By early 1873, he was fomenting widespread passive disobedience among the vilayet and sanjak governors, and there were rumors that he was organizing a countercoup to restore Murad V to the throne. In January, there was an abortive revolt by conservative officers at a barracks near the capital; the plot was betrayed by Constitutionalist sympathizers at the cantonment, and there was no proof that Hussein Avni Pasha was the instigator, but everyone involved took it as a warning sign.
It was during this precarious time that the Aceh crisis broke, and the fate of the Ottoman liberals was decided thousands of miles from the capital.
Aceh, a sultanate at the northern end of Sumatra, had avoided being incorporated into the Dutch East Indies, stubbornly maintaining its independence as a nominal Ottoman protectorate, and attempting to negotiate alliances with Britain and the United States. It was these negotiations, and the fear of Britain extending its Malay and Borneo holdings to gain a foothold on Sumatra, that led the Dutch to force the issue, sending an expeditionary force from Java to invade Aceh. The Dutch commander, however, underestimated his foe, and in the spring of 1873, was driven back by a well-organized army of 10,000 men.
The Acehnese realized that it was only a matter of time before the Dutch resumed the attack with a much larger force, and appealed to several foreign powers for aid, including Sultan Abdul Hamid. It was clear that if the Sultan failed to succor a long-time vassal - even a nominal one - both he and the government would be weakened, possibly fatally. But Şinasi and Midhat Pasha also saw the crisis as an opportunity. If they defeated a European power and protected a fellow Islamic ruler from foreign conquest, their government would gain enormous prestige – possibly even enough prestige to put the reactionaries on the defensive and negotiate an agreeable resolution to the Balkan separatist problem. And the responsibility of commanding the Ottoman army during wartime would temporarily distract Hussein Avni Pasha from his political machinations and enable the vizier to consolidate his hold on the provinces.
This was also a war that Midhat Pasha was sure the Ottomans could win. The empire had the world’s third-largest navy, and even though its ships were individually outclassed by the Dutch, they had an overwhelming numerical advantage. Although the logistics were daunting, it seemed likely that the Ottomans could break the naval blockade of Aceh and get enough troops there in time to stop the Dutch offensive. There was little that the Netherlands, which lacked a land border with the Ottoman Empire, could do to retaliate. The main obstacle was diplomatic rather than military: would Britain, whose navy controlled the Indian Ocean, consent to an Ottoman force’s passage?
At first, this obstacle seemed an insuperable one. Anglo-Dutch relations had cooled during the past fifteen years due to the acrimonious negotiations that had preceded the British buyout of the Dutch Gold Coast forts, and ongoing disputes over trading rights as the Netherlands pushed north through Sumatra. At the same time, Britain was reluctant to directly oppose another European power in colonial warfare or to compromise its most-favored-nation status in the Dutch empire.
But in May 1873, a revolt broke out among tribesmen in the Yemeni interior which threatened the strategic British naval station at Aden. The timing of this revolt has often been described as suspiciously convenient for the Ottomans, and recent examinations of the state archives show that Midhat Pasha did have a hand in it, but he hid his involvement well, and offered to help suppress it in return for a free hand in Aceh. After certain additional concessions were offered, including a guarantee of preferential rights for British merchants if Aceh were secured by Ottoman forces, Britain agreed, while maintaining its official disapproval of the relief expedition, to refrain from hindering it and to reaffirm the legal right of free passage over the high seas. In later years, as proxy warfare between colonial powers became more common, Britain would regret setting this precedent, but for the time being, it believed that matters had been resolved to its satisfaction.
The planning for the expedition had gone ahead even while the negotiations were in progress, and within days of securing the necessary assurances, a relief force of 20,000 troops supported by the Ottoman fleet - the most that could be sent, given the parlous state of Ottoman finances - was on its way to Sumatra. In October, the expedition landed at Banda Aceh, and the Dutch forces, which were assembling in preparation for a renewed invasion the following month, thought it the better part of valor to stand down.
The outcome was the best one possible for Midhat Pasha - a diplomatic rather than a military victory, which meant that all the glory accrued to him. Seizing the moment, he prevailed on the Sultan to dissolve the parliament and call a new election. This time, the Constitutionalists and their allies won an absolute majority in the lower house and, by seizing control of most provincial councils, secured their position in the senate.
In the spring of 1874, a greatly strengthened Midhat Pasha and Şinasi set themselves three tasks. The first: to reform the system of taxation and lift the Ottoman state out of its perennial near-bankruptcy. The second: to come to terms with the Serbs and Romanians. The third: to deal with Hussein Avni Pasha and the conservatives once and for all. They would be considerably more successful in the first two tasks than the last…
*******
Ismet Yücel, Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
… For the first forty years of Belloism’s existence, its area of influence formed a rough triangle with corners at Aden, Sokoto and Stamboul. Within that zone, Belloist thought took different forms as it was affected by local conditions, its relationship with those in power, and the influence of other ideas along its periphery. And each of these forms, in turn, would reverberate through the region, until one could never be certain where any particular idea came from.
Bornu was, of course, the birthplace of Belloist doctrine, and it was there that Belloism was most common in its original, pure form: communities of families devoted to work, education and prayer, isolating themselves from politics so that the freedom of religious thought would not be impeded. But the sheer number of Belloists in Bornu, and their experiences during three decades of border warfare and state-building, had also changed Belloism into something else. The Belloists in the border settlements had reformed their absolute pacifism to allow for self-defense, and many communes - encouraged by the sultan - had taken on a symbiotic role with the state, receiving support and protection in return for educating a generation of administrators and military officers. With so many civil and military officials having been steeped in Belloist doctrine, and with the Belloists a key bulwark of the kingdom, it was only a matter of time before they had to rethink their very conception of themselves: one cannot isolate oneself from society when one is the society.
By 1870, Sultan Umar ibn Muhammad al-Amin, who had begun by viewing the Belloist communities as a resource to be used, had adopted Belloism himself, and Bornu began its transformation into a Belloist state. To be sure, the idea of a Belloist polity seemed a contradiction in terms, given that the foundation of Belloism was withdrawal from politics. If, as Ali bin Bello had taught, the unfreedom of political thought was in inherent contradiction with the freedom and openness that was required in religion, then how was Belloism to be reconciled with the governance of a state?
The answer, according to the Bornu imamate, was to conceive of the state itself as something apolitical: as a commune writ large, to be ruled by consensus and supported by mutual aid, and in which the sultan merely gave voice to the will of the people and of God. Ultimately, both government and justice would take the form of multiple tiers of assemblies, similar to the way the communes ruled themselves: at the first tier, each village or neighborhood would reach consensus on the issue or case at hand, and then elect representatives to debate at the district level, and so on upward. In practice, only issues of great national importance were decided this way; most local matters required only one level of assembly to determine, and day-to-day national administration was still undertaken by the sultan, although he held open audience before issuing any decree. And because politics could no more be eliminated from a Belloist state than any other, the consensuses reached by the assemblies were usually shaped by men deemed wise or important. Nevertheless, the growing tradition of public debate, and the ideal of government as an apolitical exercise, would influence Bornu profoundly in the decades to come.
Another feature of Belloist Bornu, which began during the 1870s although it didn’t become uniform until later, was the mutual-aid obligation or labor tax, for which all citizens were liable one day a week in exchange for a partial remission of their monetary or in-kind taxes. This, too, was an adaptation of the communal labor in the Belloist villages, and was typically performed on public works, on the farms established to feed the poor, or in education or medicine. Everyone not on active military service was liable - even the sultan, who performed his duties very publicly and with much religious ceremony.
Despite the egalitarian nature of the new obligations, they were widely resented, especially since a labor tax of one day in six amounted to a higher effective tax rate than had previously existed. Moreover, some of the Belloist communes had always been ambivalent about their relationship with the state, and as Belloism took hold in the court, the communes that maintained their purity found themselves in the paradoxical position of withdrawing from a state that affirmed their doctrines. To them, the sultan’s adoption of Belloism had brought matters full circle, to where the state was again identified with a religious community and where doctrines intended to preserve religious freedom had become instruments of political coercion. As the 1870s wore on and communal solidarity became more a part of state ideology, the purist villages - which were outside the consensus, and thus outside the state community - became subject to intermittent persecution, and some would become the founders of the Belloist diaspora.
In Egypt, too, a modified form of state Belloism, albeit more a secular modernization with a Belloist cast than the full adoption that occurred in Bornu, was taking hold. The government of Riyad Pasha had already steered Egyptian foreign policy away from aggressive warfare and recast the military for defense and internal peacekeeping; in 1872, influenced by Bornu’s conception of the apolitical state, he reformed the civil service and judiciary to eliminate political appointments at all but the highest level and fill most posts through competitive examination. Eventually, he argued, even governors, supreme judges and ministers should be civil servants, but for the time being - and for the foreseeable future - that would be one reform too far.
Muhammad Ahmad
In the early 1870s, though, Riyad Pasha’s cynical encouragement of pure Belloism among the rural peasantry, in the hope that quietism and communal labor would make them easier to control, suffered an unexpected setback. In Sudan, a young imam named Muhammad Ahmad, who lived in a district where the government was particularly oppressive, preached that withdrawal from politics did not require toleration of injustice, and that the degree of withdrawal should be directly proportional to how much the civil government violated the precepts of Islam. In a just society, Belloists could, and should, live as other citizens while maintaining the prohibition against political participation, but in an unjust one, their withdrawal should be complete, and all cooperation with the state, including payment of taxes, was proscribed.
In 1873, the peasants of Ahmad’s district went on strike, fleeing their villages in a re-creation of the ancient practice of anachoresis and establishing a subsistence lifestyle in the bush or in neighboring provinces. When the governor attempted to confiscate their lands, he found no one willing to work them; when he ordered the army to return the peasants to work, he learned that combating mass civil disobedience required a greater and more sustained commitment of troops than putting down a revolt; when he caught and executed a few of the ringleaders, he discovered that religious fanaticism made them quite willing to embrace martyrdom. By the end of the year, the governor had been recalled in disgrace, and peasant Belloism, which Riyad Pasha conceived as a tool, had become a force instead.
A similar development was taking place in the eastern Fulani jihadist states of Sokoto, Atikuwa and Adamawa. These countries had been profoundly affected by the Abacarist revolution and industrial development, but all of them were currently under conservative regimes. The dominant reformist influence here remained Abacarist, but by the end of the 1860s, some Belloist ideas were filtering from the north. Belloism’s emphasis on education and consensus meshed well with Abacarist notions of radical democracy, and its communalism and mutual-aid ideology answered to the needs of the labor movement, which was already rooted in local religious brotherhoods. The result was “Abacarist Belloism” or “Labor Belloism,” which redefined withdrawal from politics as solely a ban on holding office, and preached that Belloist communities could - and were indeed required to - organize to build a just society and oppose injustice. This tendency was particularly strong in the industrial cities of Atikuwa, where the manifesto of the Second Labor Shura in 1874 showed distinct Belloist influences.
And finally, in Yemen and the Levant, a tribal Belloism, under which each clan was conceived as a politically independent commune, was taking root among the Bedouins. The Belloist clan leaders paid homage to the Ottoman sultan as Caliph and affirmed his religious supremacy, but considered themselves subject to no temporal lord, recognizing only Islamic law and not civil law. They also took the educational role of Belloist communes very seriously, with their elders becoming itinerant teachers, much like the Malê jajis, who moved as the clan did and taught students who lived with the clan for a while in exchange for payment and work. During the 1870s and afterward, these elders would create a library of hymns and teaching songs in the rich tradition of Arabic poetry.
The Belloist Bedouins’ break with Ottoman civil authority was often more theory than practice; many local governors were willing to recast the customary tribute as a religious tax and negotiate a mutually acceptable relationship with the settled population. In other areas, however, the government and military were less tolerant and the Belloists were persecuted, leading many to retreat into the desert. There, in the Najd, they encountered the doctrines of the Salafis. This led to many clashes, as the Salafis’ distaste for innovation made them deeply suspicious of Belloism, but at the same time, the Salafi rejection of traditional jurisprudence, its condemnation of blind obedience to authority or custom, and its emphasis on an individual understanding of pure Islam, had their echoes in Belloist thought. In time, although the two would never be reconciled, ideas would begin to cross over…
I had to open a lot of wikipedia pages I had to open up to follow how this was deviating from OTL. I'm now sure whether to be embarrassed at my own ignorance or pleased at how much this is timeline is teaching me.
Belloism seems to have spread very widely very quickly, I suppose having its leader established in Mecca early preaching to pilgrims helped with that...
Belloism seems to have spread very widely very quickly, I suppose having its leader established in Mecca early preaching to pilgrims helped with that...
A great update as per usual.
The only real thing I'm wondering about is Moldavia, Serbia and Wallachia; unlike the rest of Rumelia, they were'nt full parts of the Empire, but rather Tributary States, so I'm not really sure why they'd even be represented in the Ottoman Parliament anymore than say the Marshall Islands would've been represented in the U.S. Congress.
Also, what exactly is anachoresis, a search of Wiktionary and Wikipedia did'nt bring-up anything except some species of Butterflys.
The only real thing I'm wondering about is Moldavia, Serbia and Wallachia; unlike the rest of Rumelia, they were'nt full parts of the Empire, but rather Tributary States, so I'm not really sure why they'd even be represented in the Ottoman Parliament anymore than say the Marshall Islands would've been represented in the U.S. Congress.
Also, what exactly is anachoresis, a search of Wiktionary and Wikipedia did'nt bring-up anything except some species of Butterflys.