and mixed courts to oversee a majority of cases involving Muslims and non-Muslims. It was a thoroughgoing programme of Westernization for the Ottoman Empire. The New Ottomans had supported the principles contained in the Hatt-i Sharif of 1839 as a necessary element of the Tanzimat reforms; unlike the decree of 1856, it had some domestic origins and had not threatened the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. But they saw the Hatt-i Humayun as a special dispensation for the non-Muslims conceded under pressure by the great powers, and they feared that it would compromise the interests of Islam and Turkish sovereignty.
The foreign origins and terminology of the Hatt-i Humayun stirred even greater resentment among Muslim clerics and conservatives. Even the old Tanzimat reformer Mustafa Reshid – who returned for a brief spell as Grand Vizier after Stratford had insisted on his reappointment in November 1856 – thought it went too far in its concessions to the Christians. Angered by the Hatt-i Humayun, a group of Muslim theologians and students plotted a conspiracy against the Sultan and his ministers, but they were arrested in 1859. Under interrogation their leaders claimed that the Hatt-i Humayun was a contravention of shariah law because it had granted Christians equal rights to Muslims. Sheikh Ahmet, one of the main conspirators, claimed that the Christians had obtained these rights only through the help of foreign powers, and that the concessions would mean the end of the privileged position of Islam in the Ottoman Empire.22
Their views were shared by many power-holders and beneficiaries of the old Muslim hierarchy – local pashas, governors, landowners and notables, clerics and officials, tax-farmers and moneylenders – who were all afraid that the better-educated and more active Christian minorities would soon come to dominate the political and social order, if they were granted civil and religious equality. For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860. In each case religious and economic divisions reinforced each other: the livelihood of Muslims engaged in agriculture and small trades was directly threatened by the import of European goods by Christian middlemen. Rioters attacked Christian shops and houses, foreign churches and missionary schools, even embassies, after they had been stirred up by Muslim clerics opposed to the Hatt-i Humayun.
In Nablus, to take just one example, the troubles began on 4 April, shortly after Muslim leaders had denounced the Hatt-i Humayun at Friday prayers. There were 5,000 Christians in Nablus, a town of 10,000 people, and before the Crimean War they had lived peacefully with the Muslims. But the war had increased tensions between them. The defeat of Russia was seen as a ‘Muslim victory’ by the local Palestinians, whose religious pride was offended by the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Humayun. Christians, for their part, saw it as an allied triumph. They raised French and British flags on their houses in Nablus and placed a new bell over the Protestant mission school. These were provocations to Islamic sentiment. At Friday prayers, the ulemas condemned these signs of Western domination, arguing that Muslims would soon be called to prayer by the English bell, unless they rose up to destroy the Christian churches, which, they said, would be ‘a proper form of prayer to God’. Calling for jihad, crowds spilled out onto the streets of Nablus, many of them gathering by the Protestant mission, where they tore down the British flag.
Amid these heightened tensions, violence was sparked by a bizarre incident involving the Reverend Mr Lyde, a Protestant missionary and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who had accidentally shot a beggar attempting to steal his coat. ‘The cup of fanaticism was full, and one drop more caused it to run over,’ wrote James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, who reported on the incident. Lyde had taken refuge from the mob in the house of the town governor, Mahmud Bek, who pacified the family of the dead man and proposed to bury him. But the ulemas were not satisfied with this. After a religious council, they forbade the burial and suspended public prayers in all the mosques ‘until the price of the blood of Islam should be paid’. Calling for ‘Vengeance on the Christians!’ a large crowd assembled outside the governor’s house and demanded to be given Lyde, who offered to sacrifice himself, but Mahmud Bek refused, whereupon the the mob began to rampage through the town, pillaging and destroying any property on which they could lay their hands. Christian houses, schools and churches were ransacked and burned. Several Prussian consular officials were murdered, along with a dozen Greeks, according to Finn, who also reported that ‘eleven women are known to have given premature birth to infants from the effect of fright’. Order was eventually restored by the intervention of the Sultan’s troops, and on 21 April Lyde was put on trial in a Turkish court in Jerusalem, where a mixed Muslim and Christian jury acquitted him of murder but ordered him to pay a large sum in compensation to the beggar’s family.bc Lyde returned to England in a deranged mental state: he had delusions of himself as Christ. The ringleaders of the Muslim riots were never brought to trial, and attacks on Christians in the area continued for many months. In August 1856 the violence spread from Nablus to Gaza. In February 1857 Finn reported that 300 Christians were ‘still living in a state of terror in Gaza’, for ‘no one could control the Muslim fanatics’, and the Christians would not testify for fear of reprisals.23
Faced with the prospect of this sort of violence almost anywhere, the Ottoman authorities dragged their heels over implementing the new laws of religious toleration in the Hatt-i Humayun. Stratford Canning was increasingly frustrated with the Porte. ‘Turkish ministers are very little disposed to meet the demands of Her Majesty’s Government on the subject of religious persecution,’ he wrote to Clarendon. ‘They pretend to entertain apprehensions of popular discontent among the Mussulmans, if they were to give way.’ Turkish participation in the Crimean War had led to a resurgence of ‘Muslim triumphalism’, Stratford reported. As a result of the war, the Turks had become more protective of their sovereignty, and more resentful of Western intervention into their affairs. There was a new generation of Tanzimat reformers at the head of the Turkish government who were more secure in their personal position and less dependent on the patronage of foreign powers and ambassadors than Reshid’s generation of reformers had been before the Crimean War; they could afford to be more cautious and more practical in their implementation of reforms, carrying out the economic and political requirements of the Western powers but not hurrying to fulfil the religious promises contained in the Hatt-i Humayun. Throughout his last year as ambassador, Stratford urged the Turkish leaders to be more serious about the protection of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire: it was the price, he told them, that Turkey had to pay for British and French help in the Crimean War. He was particularly exercised by the continued execution of Muslims for converting to Christianity, despite the Sultan’s promises to secure the Christians from religious persecution and abolish the ‘barbarous practice of putting seceders to death’. Citing numerous cases of Christian converts being driven from their homes and killed, Stratford wrote to the Porte on 23 December 1856:
The great European powers can never consent to perpetuate by the triumphs of their fleets and armies the enforcement in Turkey of a law [apostasy], which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their fellow Christians. They are entitled to demand, the British Government distinctly demands, that the Mohamedean who turns Christian shall be as free from every kind of punishment on that account as the Christian who embraces the Mohamodean faith.24
Yet by the time of his return to London the next year, very little had been done by the Porte to satisfy the demands of the European governments. ‘Among the Christians,’ Finn reported in July 1857, ‘a strong feeling of discontent is on the increase because of the slowness of the Turkish government to implement religious toleration.’
The Christians complain that they are insulted in the streets, that they are not placed in equal rank at public courts with Muslim fellow subjects, that they are ousted from almost every office of government employment, and that they are not allowed the honour of military service but instead of it have the old military tax doubled upon them.
In the rural areas of Palestine, according to Finn, the Hatt-i Humayun remained unobserved for many years. Local governors were corrupt, ill-disciplined and closely linked to the Muslim notables, clerics and officials, who kept the Christians in their place, while the Porte was too remote and weak to curb their excesses, let alone to force them to uphold the new laws of equality.25
But it was in the Balkans that the failure of the Porte to carry out reforms would have the most lasting consequences for the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the
