This article examines Ottoman imperial and provincial relationships with Bedouin tribes living along the Hijaz Telegraph Line route. Using the construction of the Hijaz Telegraph Line as a case study, it demonstrates how anti-Bedouin rhetoric was strategi-cally employed to justify actions policies recommended by provincial powers deter-mined to block the imperial government’s plans to build a link between the Hijaz and Istanbul. It also shows how sabotage of the telegraph lines carried out by some Bedouin tribesmen was often instigated by oppressive measures put in place by the same provin-cial powers. Overall, it argues for the necessity of understanding the context in which rhetorical tools were employed when historians analyze rhetoric for the purpose of drawing conclusion about the nature of Ottoman imperial rule along the empire’s fron-tiers at the end of the nineteenth century.
With the blessings of the spirit of the noble Prophet and in the shadow of the blessings of His Majesty our great King, the construction of the col-umns between Biyār Nasif and Medina was completed. The work in this
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seventy-five kilometer long stretch was completed in three days and the lines were connected with Medina. Thus, this year started with prayers for the long life and lasting might and power of our greatest benefactor. I was joined in performing this duty by men in my entourage, the government workers, soldiers and the people of Medina, the best of blessings and the most perfect peace be upon its owner [the Prophet].1
With this telegram, sent in the first days of the year 1901, Sadık el-Müʾeyyed ʿAzmzade,2 supervisor of the telegraph-line extension appointed by the Yıldız Palace (the residence of the sultan and his court in Istanbul), announced the arrival of the telegraph line at Medina, from where he had the honor of send-ing the first dispatch to Istanbul. The British consul in Damascus, W. Richards, expressed his astonishment at the rapid progress of the construction consider-ing the team’s “inexperience” and the “hostilities” the Telegraph Commission (Telegraf Komisyonu) had faced along the way.3 What seemed like a success story, however, would soon change: as celebrations of this accomplishment were taking place in Damascus and Istanbul, reports of sabotage of the tele-graph line reached the capital, putting a damper on the joyous event. The cul-prits were reported to be Bedouins living in the region. Over the following few
1 Sadık el-Müʾeyyed ʿAzmzade, Suriye (Damascus, 10 October 1901): 1.2 The transliterations in this article follow the rules of this journal and do not necessarily
reflect choices I would have made that would have distinguished between late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish pronunciation and Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation. The transliteration of names in Ottoman history is a source of controversy. In this case, I spell the name following Turkish pronunciation as a way of highlighting the Turko-centric social and professional life that ʿAzmzade led: even though ʿAzmzade was born in Damascus, his social and career demands would have placed him in an Ottoman Turkish-speaking milieu in Istanbul. The Arabic transliteration of Sadık Pasha’s name is Ṣādiq al-Muʿayyad al-ʿAẓm. Sadık el-Müʿeyyed ʿAzmzade (d. 1911) was a member of one of the most influential families in Ottoman Syria. He was born and raised in Damascus, received his elementary education there and in Beirut, entered a military college in Istanbul, and then travelled to Germany to pursue his higher education. The center of power for the ʿAzmzades (referred to in Arab circles and by historians of the Arab successor states as al-ʿAzms) was Damascus. L. Schatkowski-Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1985): 142-143; P. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 36; Nūri al-Jarrāḥ, “Introduction.” In Riḥlat al-Ḥabasha: Min al-Āsitana ilā Addīs Abābā (Abu Dhabi: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr, 2002).
3 [British] National Archives (BNA hereafter), FO 195/2097, 10 January 1901.
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months, these acts of sabotage would increase in severity and number, while the Telegraph Commission attempted in vain to resume its work.4
How did Ottoman officials interpret these events? What recommendations were considered and how did they compare with the rhetoric used against the local inhabitants of the empire’s southern frontiers? How can we interpret this rhetoric and the actions taken by the imperial government in the context of policies, events, and personal interests of individuals involved in constructing stereotypical images of the Bedouin inhabitants of the frontiers? Perhaps most importantly, how does that fit into the growing scholarship on the Ottoman state’s relationship with the inhabitants of the empire’s frontiers?
This article aims to offer answers to these questions. The result is a reas-sessment of the traditional understanding of the relationships between the Ottoman state (in its various levels) and the Bedouin inhabitants of the Hijaz. The planning and construction of the Damascus-Hijaz telegraph line is treated as a case study through which to observe the multi-dimensional Ottoman-Bedouin relationship. It contends that melding the complex cacophony of actors involved in devising and implementing Ottoman imperial policies in a single entity—“the Ottoman government”—while treating the inhabitants of the frontier regions as a uniform group—“the tribes”—may risk our reducing a multitude of voices to fit a dichotomous model of nineteenth-century colo-nizer versus colonized. This interpretation could be gleaned through the work of historians such as Selim Deringil, for example, when he described Ottoman policies along the Libyan frontiers as being motivated by a “white man’s bur-den wearing a Fez,”5 and Ussama Makdisi, when he coined the now famous term “Ottoman Orientalism” to describe Ottoman imperial Tanzimat-era atti-tude towards inhabitants of the frontiers of Mount Lebanon.6 Key to the argu-ment of both of these historians was the proliferation of derogatory rhetoric in official documents describing the inhabitants of these regions, seemingly dis-tancing the “civilized” Ottoman official from the “not-yet-civilized” subject. The seminal work of these scholars has inspired me to look further into the rela-tionship between Istanbul and the populations living along the frontiers—in this case the Bedouins of the Hijaz—by juxtaposing the rhetoric that emerged in official correspondence with the political context in which these texts were written.
4 İkdam (Istanbul: 23 Mar 1901): 1.5 S. Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and
the Post-Colonial Debate.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45/2 (2003): 312.6 U. Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism.” American Historical Review 107/3 (2002): 768-796.
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This article argues that the derogatory references to the Bedouins were not a central animating force of the various Ottoman administrative branches but rather a rhetorical tool at their disposal to be used strategically towards specific ends, or, as Burbank and Cooper put it, a tool that was part of a “repertoire of forms in which imperial power was exerted.”7 It also contends that derogatory language was relatively uncommon in these documents. More importantly, it argues that the choice not to employ derogatory references was as much a stra-tegic choice as one to employ them.
By relying on mostly Ottoman and British archival sources, this article aims to understand individual stakeholders’ positions in relation to the Ottoman imperial and provincial governments, the personal motivations, and perhaps most importantly, the actions vis-à-vis the Bedouin inhabitants along the route of the telegraph line. It does that by shining a light on the incidents of sabotage reported during and after the construction of the telegraph line, showing how, in almost every case, acts of violence committed by Bedouins were actually in response to perceived acts of injustice or systematic oppression against them by the authorities in the Hijaz.
The term “frontiers,” as opposed to the periphery, Arab provinces, or bor-derlands, has a particular meaning in this article, which deals specifically with the southern frontier zones of the Ottoman Empire and adopts the definition detailed in historian Eugene Rogan’s ground-breaking monograph Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921. According to Rogan, frontiers “represented socio-political orders apart from the institutions of the Empire at large.”8 Rogan emphasizes the variety of frontier districts and the policies followed by the Ottoman government in each frontier zone. The three main factors that determined the characteristic of a frontier region and in turn the Ottoman government’s approach to it were: the power of the local elites, the level of European intervention in that region, and the local attitude towards Ottoman rule. In the case of the Hijaz, the Ottoman imperial govern-ment had to walk a fine line, balancing all three factors, which played a critical role in determining Ottoman policy there at the end of the nineteenth century.
7 J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011): 305-306.
8 E.L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 6.
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1 Textual Analysis and Late Ottoman Imperial Policies
Historians such as Donald Quataert, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, and Olivier Bouquet have argued that the Ottoman imperial government during the Tanzimat and Hamidian periods worked tirelessly to reverse the eighteenth-century trend towards the decentralization of power.9 Particularly in the Arab provinces, the eighteenth century has been posited as the age of the rise of the local urban notables as a direct result of Istanbul’s diminishing control over the provinces.10 This emphasis on the centralization and decentralization of power as a lens through which to examine Ottoman history and as a measure of the health of the Ottoman Empire—the stronger the center, the stronger the empire—has led to the creation of a hard-to-shake model of center vs. periphery that has helped ossify a conceptual separation of an Ottoman (imperial) center and a (provincial) periphery.11 For even though historians have successfully chal-lenged this model, Ottoman historiography has not been able to provincialize it, having to engage with it whenever dealing with the history of the so-called peripheries.12
Cem Emrence provides a comprehensive overview of some recent trends in the field of late Ottoman history. He shows that Ottoman historiography is still confined to a “center-periphery model [that] sustains dualistic and
9 D. Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); O. Bouquet, Les pachas du Sultan: Essai sur les agents supérieurs de l’état Ottoman (1839-1909) (Paris: Peeters, 2007).
10 A pioneer in the study of Ottoman-provincial relations was Albert Hourani; see his seminal article “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of the Notables.” In The Beginning of Modernisation in the Middle East, ed. W. Polk and R. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
11 See M. Heper, “Center and Periphery in the Ottoman Empire, with Special Reference to the Nineteenth Century.” International Political Science Review 1 (1980): 81-105; Heper builds on another influential article that tackled Ottoman center-periphery relations in the telling of late-nineteenth-century Ottoman history: Ş. Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” Daedalus 102 (1973): 169–90. For a critique of Heper and Mardin, see J. Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber, “Introduction: Towards a New Urban Paradigm.” In The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. J. Hanssen, T. Philipp, and S. Weber (Beirut: Ergon in Kommission, 2002): 10-25.
12 For an examination of how “the politics of the notables” was appropriated and further developed over a period of four years, see James L. Gelvin, “The ‘Politics of Notables’ Forty Years After.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 40 (June 2006): 19-29.
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state- centered narratives.”13 In particular, he challenges the more recent manifestations of the “center-periphery” conceptualization of post-Tanzimat Ottoman history, the studies of “Ottoman colonialism.” These studies, which I will discuss next, assume the existence of a generally accepted imperial ideol-ogy that resonated with members of the Ottoman urban bureaucratic middle class. This imperial ideology is presented as “a socially elitist, politically cen-tralist, and culturally modernist project” aimed at civilizing an identified back-ward “other.” Emrence adds that this scholarship argues that “distant elements of Ottoman society such as tribes and progressively non-Turkish elements were viewed with an ‘orientalizing’ contempt.”14
This article agrees with Emrence’s critical view of work that has adopted a late-nineteenth-century European colonialism model and superimposed it upon the center-periphery paradigm. As some historians grappled with the Tanzimat-era Ottoman approach to frontier regions, in places such as Mount Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya, they looked to European models of colo-nialism for their influence on the Ottoman government and its policies. For example, Ussama Makdisi borrowed Edward Said’s terminology, referring to the actions of the Ottoman government in regions such as Mount Lebanon as “Ottoman Orientalism.”15 This understanding of the Ottoman imperial gov-ernment’s action as an adoption of European colonial conceptualizations of the civilized “self” vs. an uncivilized “other” was expertly woven into the well-established center-periphery model of Ottoman history. Makdisi argued that the Tanzimat period gave birth to a “distinctly modern Ottoman imperialism” that had at its heart a constant representation of the subject on the periphery of Ottoman imperial orbit as the “other” to an Ottoman civilizing ruler.16
Makdisi was not the only historian to probe the topic of Ottoman attitudes towards the frontiers with an eye to a European colonial model. Historian Selim Deringil, for example, has argued that, after the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury, the Ottoman Empire adopted quasi-European colonial attitudes towards its subjects on the Libyan and Arabian frontiers of the empire.17 Building on
13 C. Emrence, “Imperial Paths, Big Comparisons: The Late Ottoman Empire.” Journal of Global History 3 (2008): 289. For an expanded analysis of this question, see Cem Emrence’s recently published book: Remapping the Ottoman Middle East: Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).
14 Emrence, “Imperial Paths”: 296.15 Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”: 768-796.16 U. Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman Imperialism: Modernity, Violence and the Cultural
Logic of Ottoman Reform.” In The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire: 30.
17 Deringil, “ “They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery” ”: 311-342.
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these seminal works, other historians have developed this analysis further, leading to deeper understanding of Ottoman rule in the frontiers in the sec-ond half of the nineteenth century. For example, in his work on Baghdad, Christoph Herzog has offered a qualitative comparison between Ottoman and European natures of colonialism, calling Ottoman colonialism as an “interme-diate one,” which “received its standards from Europe but creatively modified their symbolism.”18 Similarly, Thomas Kühn, an historian of Ottoman Yemen, has discussed the specific nature of the Ottoman brand of colonial discourse and argued that it differed essentially from that of French and British colo-nialism, mainly because, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, emphasising the cultural differences of the Yemeni locals was used as an indicator of what should be down to bridge the gap between ruler and ruled, and not to maintain it.19 Also, Eugene Rogan has explained how the derogatory adjectives used to describe the Bedouin and Kurdish tribes in the Ottoman Empire did not, in fact, represent colonial differentiation but were meant to disguise fear of the danger these tribes posed to Ottoman sovereignty along its frontiers.20
The remainder of the article will demonstrate that the rhetoric of difference between the inhabitants of the center and the inhabitants of the frontier does not necessarily imply a colonial attitude. Representing Ottoman imperial rule in the frontier regions in the second half of the nineteenth century as a form of Ottoman “colonialism” might, unintentionally, disguise the complexity of fac-tors involved in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman context. The case study of the Hijaz telegraph line, which required a partnership between the Ottoman state and Bedouin actors, demonstrates how Ottoman rule along the frontiers worked through a multi-layered system that included imperial, provincial, and local powers. The focus here is on the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly post-1878 Ottoman Empire, when Ottomans had to deal with the
18 C. Herzog, “Nineteenth-Century Baghdad through Ottoman Eyes.” In The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire: 328.
19 T. Kühn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference, Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); see also T. Kühn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1919.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007); T. Kühn, “Ordering Urban Space in Ottoman Yemen 1872-1914.” In The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire.
20 E. Rogan, “Aşiret Mektebi: Abdülhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892-1907).” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 83–84.
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very real threat of European expansionist imperialism during “The Age of Empire.”21
2 The Istanbul-Damascus-Hijaz Telegraph Line
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the need for fast and reliable com-munication, coupled with worsening Ottoman–European relations, made the construction of an independent telegraph line connecting Istanbul, the nerve center of the empire, with Mecca, the spiritual center of the empire, a pressing necessity. As the so-called “Scramble for Africa” heated up, Istanbul found itself increasingly marginalized in international negotiations over territorial posses-sions in Africa, even concerning territories that had previously been recog-nized as falling under Ottoman suzerainty.22 The original telegraph line, which was completed in 1882, connected the Hijaz to the coast of Egyptian Sudan across the Red Sea. The telegraph network in Egypt was completed much ear-lier than that of the rest of the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in the early 1860s, Khedive Ismail Pasha (r. 1863-79), the grandson of Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Pasha (r. 1805-49), oversaw the building of the telegraph network in Egypt and Sudan, until every major city in Egypt was connected to Cairo, the seat of the provin-cial government.23 Cairo was connected to Alexandria, Egypt’s relay point to
21 See E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York, US: Pantheon Books, 1987). This is different from older interactions between Istanbul and the frontier that have been so skillfully explored for earlier periods. For studies on center-frontier relations from earlier periods, see D. Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, Mosul 1540-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); T. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany: State University of New York, 2001); R. Aharoni, The Pasha’s Bedouin: Tribes and State in Egypt of Mehmet Ali, 1805-1848 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); D. Zeʾevi, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996): 87-114; L. Schatkowski-Schilcher, “Railways in the Political Economy of Southern Syria 1890-1925.” In The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation, ed. T. Philipp and B. Schäebler (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998): 97-112.
22 See Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa (1882-1902): forthcoming.23 J. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s
Urabi Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 112. On the reign of Mehmet Ali Pasha and the beginning of the infrastructure development projects that were under-taken at the same time as the establishment of the first large Egyptian standing army, see K. Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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Europe and the rest of the empire via a submarine line, completed in 1872, that reached Istanbul via Malta.24
Thus, in 1882, the important Red Sea port city of Suakin, which was then under Ottoman suzerainty and administered by the governor (vali) of the prov-ince of Egypt (Mısır Eyaleti), Khedive Tevfik Pasha (r. 1879-92) and is almost directly across the sea from Jeddah, became the perfect location to connect the Hijaz. The summer residence of the governor of the province of Hijaz was in Jeddah, which housed all European consular missions.
However, the Jeddah-Suakin-Istanbul line became a liability to the Ottoman government, almost from the moment it entered service, in 1882.25 The geo-political reality was drastically altered when Britain invaded Egypt in July of 1882, before the construction of the Jeddah-Suakin line was finished, which meant that the British colonial administration established effective control of the province, putting the Egyptian telegraph network under British purview. This was reflected in what took place early in 1883, when initial reports of the Egyptian authorities’ mismanagement of operation of the line between Suakin and Cairo turned to accusations that the operators gave preferential treatment to Egyptian and British telegrams over those coming from Jeddah. This mani-fested itself in chronic delays and even the disappearance of some dispatched messages.26
Complicating matters further, in 1885, rapid developments in the race to colonize Africa reached Ottoman Sudan.27 It was then that the Italians negotiated their control of Massawa with the British, despite vocal Ottoman protests, while the army of the Mahdi of Sudan occupied most of Egyptian Sudan. This rendered the overland telegraph line connecting Suakin with the rest of the Egyptian network virtually unusable and necessitated the diver-sion of telegraphic traffic coming from the Hijaz, to the British-built and oper-ated Suakin-Suez submarine line.28 In other words, the Ottoman government became entirely dependent on an increasingly hostile foreign power for its communication with its southern frontiers. By the beginning of 1889, the line
24 For more on the development of the Sudanese infrastructure during the rule of Khedive Ismail, see G.H. Talhami, Suakin and Massawa under Egyptian Rule, 1865-1885 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979): 97-124.
25 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (hereafter BOA), I.DH-853/68401, 1 May 1882.26 BOA, Y.A.RES-17/59, 30 October 1882.27 İ. Bostan, “The Ottoman Empire and the Congo: The Crisis of 1893-95.” In Studies on
Ottoman Diplomatic History, pt. V, ed. S. Deringil and S. Kuneralp (Istanbul: ISIS, 1990): 103-106. On Khedive Ismail’s military expansion into East Africa south of Egypt, see J.P. Dunn, Khedive Ismail’s Army (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
28 Talhami, Suakin and Massawa: 195-216.
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had become so ineffective that telegrams from the Hijaz were being taken on horseback to Muzayrib in Hawran to be sent via the Damascus or Beirut tele-graph lines, or by using the slow, but more reliable, postal service.29
It was against this background that alternatives to the Jeddah-Suakin-Istanbul line were being discussed. After several years of debate, the Yıldız Palace decided on an independent, overland route, extending the telegraph line from Damascus to Mecca along the Sultani ḥajj caravan route, the best pro-tected and most frequently used route to Mecca. This was the only option that allowed for a telegraph line funded, built, and run entirely by the Ottomans. This was a controversial decision, made with the support of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Telegraph Commission but against the advice of many officials at the Sublime Porte (the administrative and judicial offices of the Ottoman government in Istanbul, outside of those in the Yıldız Palace) and the vocal protest of Ahmed Ratıb Pasha, the Ottoman governor of the province of Hijaz.30 The main point of contention concerned the perceived threat posed by the Bedouins to the success of an overland telegraph line passing through the desert frontier zone, and, subsequently, the approaches to dealing with the Bedouins in general.
Analysis of reports from the field related to the construction of the telegraph line and the actions of the Bedouins living in the area makes clear just how important the Bedouin question is for our understanding of late Ottoman his-tory. A careful examination of evidence has forced me to reformulate my initial assumption of a clash between an “urban Ottoman” and a “tribal Bedouin.” The clash was, in fact, a conflict of interests between the various stakeholders in the Ottoman government, disguised as a conflict of ideologies over the treatment of the Bedouins. The make-up of the Hamidian-era Ottoman government was diverse: even though the individuals involved in this project, at various lev-els of the government, often had a common educational background leading them through a well-structured system and into careers in the expanding mili-tary and bureaucracy, they had differing personal experiences and agendas.31
29 BOA, DH.MKT-1632/11, 27 June 1889. Diversion of the Jeddah-Suakin traffic to the Syrian telegraph network became a factor in the expansion of the network and an increase in the staffing of telegraph offices in Beirut and Damascus. BOA, DH.MKT-1588/96, 29 January 1889.
30 According to Aykut Kansu, Ratıb Pasha served as governor from 1893 until 1908. A. Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 145.
31 For more on the educational trajectory of high-ranking Ottoman officials during the Hamidian period, see S.A. Somel, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908: Islamization, Autocracy, and Discipline (Leiden: Brill, 2001) and Bouquet, Les pachas du sultan. For a more general study of educational reforms during
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The Bedouin question revealed two main conflicting camps in the Ottoman government. One worked to build a partnership with the Bedouins in order to ensure the success of Ottoman imperial strategies along the southern frontiers; the other secretly wanted to derail the Hijaz telegraph project and therefore vociferously opposed the imperial government’s plans to collaborate with the Hijazi Bedouin population. The first camp consisted of the Yıldız Palace and the Telegraph Commission, with supporters in Istanbul and the provinces. Its leader was ʿIzzet Pasha al-ʿĀbid (sometimes referred to pejoratively by his opponants as “Arap” [the Arab] Izzet Pasha), a close advisor of the sultan and the mastermind of the Hijaz telegraph and railway projects.32 They empha-sized the strategic advantage of ending the Ottoman government’s reliance on European telegraph networks through the building of an all-Ottoman overland telegraph line to the Hijaz. This necessitated the building of a stable partner-ship with the local tribes along the route. As will be seen below, their reports lacked any language differentiating a civilizing central state and the “uncivi-lized” Bedouins.
The other camp comprised Ahmed Ratıb Pasha, the Ottoman governor of the Hijaz, and ʿAwn al-Rāfiq Pasha, the emir of Mecca.33 Despite their claim to the contrary, both the governor and the emir were set on preventing the tele-graph line from reaching the provincial capital and their stronghold, the holy city of Mecca. It was in their reports to the authorities in Istanbul that deroga-tory language was used regularly, describing the local Bedouins as “ ignorant” (cahil ) and “savage” (vahşi) and predicting that violence would prevent the completion of the telegraph line. The governor’s war of words was so unre-lenting that O.P. Devey, the British consul in the Hijaz, regularly reported that “Turkish” officials not only regarded being sent to such a location as the Hijaz
the Hamidian period, see B. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, Education and the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2002).
32 For the most complete understanding of this influential character and his position in the Arab power block in Istanbul, see C. Farah, “Arab Supporters of Sultan Abdülhamid II: Izzet al-Abid.” Archivum Ottomanicum 15 (1997): 189-219.
33 The relationship between Ahmed Ratıb Pasha and Emir ʿAwn al-Rafiq and its detri-mental impact on the local population has been well documented; see K. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 248; W. Ochsenwald, Religion, Society and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840-1908 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984): 194, 205; Fāʾiq Bakr Ṣawwāf, al-ʿAlaqāt bayna l-dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya wa-iqlīm al-Ḥijāz fī fatrat mā bayna 1293-1334 H (1876-1915 M) (Mecca: King Abdulaziz University, 1978): 90.
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as belittling but also had no intention of working with the locals, considering them to be in a “state of savagery.”34
This was not a simple case of pro-Bedouin versus anti-Bedouin ideologi-cal conflict. The governor’s attitude was not limited to Ottoman officials in the Hijaz but permeated the ranks of the social elites in Istanbul and was a popular topic of discussion in newspapers and magazines that exoticized the “native” in distant places. For example, Servet-i Fünun, one of the most popular bi-monthly publications in Istanbul, ran several colorful series about exotic “natives,” which were mostly translations of European accounts complete with racially tinged descriptions of “exotic locals.”35 Even daily newspapers such as Sabah and İkdam ran serials following the travels of Ottomans in Africa, describing the habits and the characteristics of the natives, always contrasting the hardships of their lives with the “modern” life of residents of Istanbul.36 None other than the leader of the construction of the telegraph line, ʿAzmzade, wrote a populist account of a trip to Abyssinia that contains ethnocentric explanations of what he encountered in Africa.37 Considering the way in which ʿAzmzade’s education as a high-ranking military school graduate and his experience as a diplomat would have influenced him, it would be easy to jus-tify his constant references to an admired European modernity—the Ottoman modernity of Istanbul—in contrast to the remote and exotic natives he had met on his travels. In other words, the repertoire of often derogatory, racialized descriptions was readily available to members of both camps.
34 BNA, FO 195/2083, 21 April 1900.35 Articles introducing the reader to the “latest” in human sciences, which illustrate and
describe the “science of race” and their essential differences ran as a series titled “ʿUruk-u başariye” in Servet-i Funün, 2-14 (2 February 1910 to 10 August 1910).
36 There are several examples from this paper following the travelogue of an Ottoman who dared to explore such exotic locations. One of the earliest I have found is the account of a man from Izmir by the name of “Lenondaridimi,” who visited Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen, which was published in Sabah (12 March 1897): 2. Others were translations from English and French magazines, such as “Sahra-yi kebirede bir siyahat,” in which a British naturalist describes what he encountered in central Africa, along lines similar to what our ʿAzmzade wrote in his travelogue, which was presented to the sultan and can still be found in the archives of Istanbul University. İkdam (1 December 1901): 2. Among the most interesting is the account by a woman adventurer by the name of Hadice Hanım, who traveled throughout Africa, starting as early as 1885, Sabah 4 (3 June 1897).
37 Sadık el-Müeyyed, Habeş Seyahatnamesi, ed. Mustafa Baydemir (Istanbul: Kaknus Yayınevi, 1999): 19. This travelogue was subsequently translated into Arabic: Ṣādiq Basha al-Muʾayyad al-ʿAzm, Riḥlat al-Ḥabasha: Min al-Asitāna ilā Addīs Abābā (1896) (Abu Dhabi: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Dirasāt wa-l-Nashr, 2001).
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The Telegraph Commission seemed to take a partnership approach to deal-ing with the Bedouins, while the Hijaz camp seemed to place the Bedouins in the category of a “savage others.” Regardless of the attitudes expressed by the various players, however, an examination of the motivations behind their actions will shed light on how these ideas seemed to matter only when they were deliberately and strategically manipulated into explicit justifications for recommended policy. The absence of anti-Bedouin rhetoric, however, is also an intentional and strategic choice that must be accounted for in making a full assessment of Ottoman imperial policies along the frontiers.
3 The “Bedouin Question”
In the 1890s, while the decision was being made to build a telegraph line to Mecca, there was a flurry of input from various persons in the imperial and provincial governments. While most of the proposed alternatives offered to the Sublime Porte used fear-mongering in presenting their evidence for the so-called Bedouin threat, the voice that won out in the end was one that offered sober evidence and detailed, actionable solutions.
The proposal that eventually won the endorsement of the Yıldız Palace was a conservative one built on methods proven by interaction with Bedouins along the ḥajj routes and on the telegraph routes in Iraq.38 Some of the tribes along the route were considered allies and had done business with the imperial gov-ernment for several generations, most famously the Ghamids, who relied on the provision of services to the caravans for most of their livelihood. All the major tribes that lived in the Hijaz, however, benefited from the Ottoman gov-ernment’s subsidies, which were distributed in order to guarantee the safety of the trade and pilgrims passing through the Hijaz. The largest tribe that lived along the ḥajj route was Ḥarb, but Juhayna, Ḥuwayṭat, ʿUtayba, Thaqif, Ghamid, and Mutayr also roamed in the Hijaz.39 On the basis of this expe-rience and preliminary studies done in the region, Marshall Şakir Pasha, an
38 For a nuanced analysis of the measures implemented by the Ottoman state to appease the local tribesmen in Iraq and the complex responses that grew up during the period of construction and operation of the line, see Y. Bektaş, “The Sultan’s Messenger: Cultural Constructions of Ottoman Telegraphy, 1847-1880.” Technology and Culture 81 (2000): 660-696. For a British perspective on the construction of this line, see Soli Shahvar, “Tribes and Telegraphs in Lower Iraq: The Muntafiq and the Baghdad-Basrah Telegraph Line of 1863-65.” Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003): 89-116.
39 Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State: 29-36.
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advisor to Abdülhamid II, submitted a report on his findings concerning the Hijazi Bedouins and recommendations for the Telegraph Commission.40
The proposal focused primarily on technical and scientific aspects of the proposed route, but Şakir Pasha emphasized the importance of one factor as fundamental to the project’s success. He believed that it was essential for the Ottoman government to have a consistent and predictable policy for dealing with tribes living along the route. While some of the letters of advice sent to the Sublime Porte and the Yıldız Palace during the consultation phase seemed to describe preparation for going through Bedouin territory as if in preparation for a state of war, Şakir Pasha took a completely different tone,41 advising that an understanding of the tribes’ traditions and internal power dynamics, cou-pled with respect for their cultural norms and societal boundaries, would avoid unnecessary conflict. His recommendations acknowledged and respected the formidable power of the Bedouin tribes on the frontiers. This quote from Şakir Pasha’s report demonstrates the level of sensitivity he advised:
In order to get the Bedouins that live next to the railway and telegraph line to work [on this project], they should always be treated well and should be paid daily, and on time. In addition, some of the chiefs (meşayih) should be wrapped with a red chogha (çoha) [a woolen ceremonial cloak given by the sultan as a gift of honor] and be assigned an appropriate position for each section of the railroad construction. Additionally, from that point on, they should be given a regular financial gift, as has been done in the past, for the services they would provide.42
This shows that the Ottoman commission had detailed experience in deal-ing with Bedouin populations. Two pieces of advice stand out. The first is to respect the traditions of the Bedouins in their own territory, and the second is to honor financial agreements in a consistent matter. The consistency—the payment on time of the agreed-upon amount—was necessary for the estab-lishment of lasting trust.
This seemingly simple approach also had a wider significance: in order for a plan of negotiation between the Ottoman imperial government and the Bedouins to be adopted, there had to be a belief in the existence of a common language, a common logic that could lead to a mutually beneficial conclusion.
40 BOA, Y.PRK.BŞK-62/60, 19 July 1900.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.
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Yet, despite the Ottoman adoption of a strategy of negotiations, almost seven months after ʿAzmzade’s announcement of the arrival of the telegraph at Medina, the telegraph project had made no further progress, due to the risk that potential attacks by local tribes posed to the construction team. ʿAzmzade wrote to the Ministry of Post and Telegraph, giving suggestions for how to deal with the impasse.43
ʿAzmzade’s request included suggestions of short- and long-term incentives to encourage local tribes to cooperate with the commission. One suggestion was for payments to ten Bedouin chiefs, not as a form of attiye—a financial “gift” traditionally given to tribes to allow the safe passage of caravans—but so that they might be recognized as government officials with a regular sal-ary of 2500 kuruş per month in posts from Maʿan to Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, a town on the Syrian-Hijazi provincial border.44 This is a substantial salary, consider-ing that, for example, the median salary of one of the highest-paid govern-ment employees, a modern-education official at the Foreign Ministry in Istanbul, was 2600 kuruş, while the median salary of a traditionally educated employee in the city there was only 1082 kuruş.45 The positions granted the chiefs acknowledged their help in transporting materials and protecting the workers along the telegraph line, in accord with the recommendations of Şakir Pasha. ʿAzmzade also requested that they be paid retroactively from June of that year and that members of the same friendly tribes be hired to transport and guarantee the safety of the pilgrims that year. This was a lucrative business opportunity, rewarding cooperative tribes and sidelining those that had not shown good will towards the state’s projects. In addition to the chiefs’ sala-ries mentioned above, the tribes would be paid ten thousand kuruş per month for their services.46 ʿAzmzade also named several chiefs from various Bedouin families, including al-Faqīr, Bin ʿAtiyya, Bin Rabīʿa, and Bin Hermas, requesting that they be awarded Mejidiyye47 medals of the fourth order for their excep-tional assistance. The importance of these measures was emphasized at the
43 BOA, I.PT-13/1319-C-2, 10 August 1901.44 In a document dated 2 March 1320, the boundary between the two provinces, Hijaz and
Syria, was drawn in order to determine what fees would be charged for in-province and out-of-province telegrams. BOA, DH.MKT-463/23, 31 March 1902.
45 C. Vaughn Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom Social: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 313.
46 As a point of reference, by the end of the 1880s, a pilgrim paid a total of seven hundred kuruş for transport between Mecca and Medina; Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State: 23.
47 A Mecidiye (also referred to as Mecidi Nişanı) is an imperial honorary medal incorporat-ing various precious stones and metals depending on the level of the honor awarded.
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end of the letter, in which he stated that this sum of money and its arrival in a timely fashion were of the utmost importance for the success of the project and so should be considered a budgetary priority.48 ʿAzmzade recommenda-tions demonstrate the Yıdlız camp’s continued commitment to a partnership approach in order to resolve the impasse.49 Despite Istanbul’s best efforts, however, the governor of Hijaz and the emir of Mecca had much more influ-ence on the outcome, once the construction of the telegraph line had entered the vicinity of the holy cities.
4 The View from the Meccan Camp
In spite of ʿAzmzade’s best efforts, the road between Medina and Mecca remained impassable, rendering resumption of work on the telegraph line nearly impossible.50 In addition, an escalation of attacks on telegraph lines north of Medina was reported. The area between Biyār Naṣīf (known also as Bir Nasīf, the last main station before Medina) and Medina witnessed some of the most daring attacks. ʿAzmzade, who remained in Medina attempting to find a way for the construction of the telegraph line to proceed, received news in April 1901 that forty telegraph poles and twenty-five runs of telegraph wire had been and stolen from this area.51 When the damage from this incident had been repaired, more acts of sabotage followed.52
Finally, the Ministry of Internal Affairs wrote to the provincial government of Hijaz, the emir of Mecca, and the municipality of Medina, inquiring about complaints from the Telegraph Commission regarding the inadequate level of support being provided by the various levels of government. In these scath-ing letters, the ministry described a dire situation in which Bedouins seemed to be left to damage and steal from the telegraph lines at will. In addition to demands that they provide security and transportation support, the ministry demanded that culprits in the Biyār Nāṣīf–Medina incidents described above
E. Eldem, Pride and Privilege: A History of Ottoman Orders, Medals and Decorations (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre, 2004): 176.
48 BOA, I.PT-13/1319-C-2, 10 August 1901.49 The government in Istanbul hired members of the tribes along the route of the telegraph
line in response to ʿAzmzade’s request, as announced in İkdam (20 October 1901): 1.50 BNA, FO 195/2105, 20 February 1901.51 İkdam (23 March 1901): 1.52 BOA, DH.MKT-463/23, 31 March 1902.
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be prosecuted by the local authorities in order to prevent similar actions in the future.53
Ratıb Pasha responded to the accusations that the Hijaz had not been liv-ing up to their responsibilities with a letter to the Yıldız Palace defending the actions the local authorities had taken in support of the construction of the telegraph line. In his letter, Ratıb Pasha expressed his frustration, insisting that describing his efforts as anything but “zealous” would be a lie. He used the rest of the letter to enumerate the services that he and the emir of Mecca had provided, above and beyond the call of duty. He gave the example of the emir of Mecca even paying for the transportation of equipment from the port of Yanbuʿ because the local authorities there could not afford to do so.54
In another telegram, to the grand vizier, Ratıb Pasha was much less defen-sive, going on the attack against the Telegraph Commission. With work on the Medina-Mecca telegraph line stalled, he criticized all those responsible for the way the Hijaz plan had so far been envisioned and implemented. In particular, he expressed his frustration at the way the Telegraph Commission had treated the Bedouins and his surprise that, despite the “ignorance of the Bedouins” (cehalet-i ʿurban) and their attacks on the telegraph line, they were being given “regular” salaries and awarded positions and even honors as though they were Ottoman soldiers. He complained that, although the province under his com-mand had the largest number of members of “the Bedouin world” (bedeviyet ʿaleminde), the army regiment in the Hijaz remained starved of funds. Ratıb Pasha accused the Ministry of Post and Telegraph of wasting money by hir-ing and paying handsome salaries to inspectors who “wander around” the region and, according to him, “never do anything useful.” He had a special dis-like of ʿAzmzade, whom he referred to as “the Damascene (Şamlı)” ʿAzmzade and accused him of mismanaging money and complaining unfairly about the support he, Ratıb Pasha, was giving him. Reference to one’s birth place—Damascus, in this case—was not uncommon for some Ottoman officials, even-tually becoming part of their title, distinguishing them other officials with the same name. This case, however, was different, for this was not part of the ʿAzmzade’s title, and it was one of the few times that the documents showed Ratıb Pasha using the birth place of an Ottoman official as part of his title. The intent behind using this term becomes more obvious when we see that Ratıb Pasha gave the same signifying origin—Damascene—to ʿ Izzet Pasha al-ʿĀbid.55
53 BOA, DH.MKT-2490/58, 28 May 1901.54 BOA, Y.PRK.UM-52/103, 30 January 1901.55 BOA, Y.A.HUS-423/5, 15 December 1901.
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Ratıb Pasha’s harshest criticism was reserved for his arch nemesis, ʿIzzet Pasha al-ʿĀbid, whom he accused of intentionally and “for no reason” ver-bally attacking the provincial government and sending baseless complaints about it to Istanbul.56 Ratıb Pasha accused ʿIzzet Pasha of taking the side of the Bedouins, rewarding them with high salaries. This was, according to him, despite the Bedouins’ attempts to sabotage the province’s efforts to provide support for the construction of the telegraph line. Ratıb Pasha claimed that ʿIzzet Pasha had, instead of punishing those Bedouin tribes, falsely accused him of dragging his feet. He ended this report on a sarcastic note, stating that, if the Bedouins ultimately caused the entire telegraph project to fail, he him-self might be blamed and sent back home to Istanbul.57
This letter may seem as expression of the Ottoman governor’s ideologically based contempt for Bedouins, but, reading between the lines and against the background of events taking place on the ground, one can see that this rhetoric thinly disguises a fear that Yıdlız Palace and its men would interfere in local affairs. As will become clear, the governor was purposely diverting attention from the actions that he and the emir of Mecca were engaged in, with the goal of preventing any further extension of the telegraph line. The emir of Mecca and the governor understood that a direct connection between Istanbul and Mecca would spell the end of their hold on power. We now return to Medina, the site of the last telegraph station constructed, in order to investigate what was behind the shutdown of the telegraph-line construction project.
5 Frontier (In)Justice
A year after the telegraph line had reached Medina, no further progress had been made.58 The Bedouin leaders seemed unwilling, and the governor and the emir of Mecca seemed utterly incapable of providing the kind of assistance that Istanbul requested from them, whether in terms of resources or security. To add to the troubles the Hijaz telegraph line project was facing, the powers in Istanbul began to turn their attention and resources to the Hijaz railway
56 Ibid.57 Ibid.58 A decision was made late in 1900 to build a second line and that that work, along with
other maintenance work, should proceed as scheduled while the security situation was being resolved (BNA, 195/2097, 29 May 1901). By 11 July 1901, Richardson was reporting that this had proceeded rapidly, and there was only 247 miles left to they reached Medina with the second line (BNA, 195/2097, 11 July 1901).
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project, which meant diverting some of the central government’s attention from the telegraph line.59 In this discouraging situation, ʿAzmzade was uncer-emoniously reassigned as an assistant to Kazım Pasha, the leader of the railway project.60
Were the Bedouins in the Hijaz simply impossible to negotiate with? Were they a special case, living in a different era so that, as the British consul put it, “no comparison can be instituted in respect of the sons of Ishmael, who have changed not since the days of Abraham?”61
In the final section of this article, it will become clear that the troubles expe-rienced by the telegraph were not the result of the “ignorance” of the Bedouins, as the authorities in the Hijaz alleged, but rather that this portrayal of the Bedouins was both conscious and purposeful. By portraying the Bedouins as an unreasonable and superstitious people, the local authorities were attempt-ing to explain away their seeming inability to control the local population. This portrayal was a face-saving measure to cover their unwillingness to provide effective security and logistical support for the construction of the telegraph line, services that were usually contracted from local Bedouin tribes.
As early as the 1890s, there were signs that the emir of Mecca was trying to assert his own brand of authority over the local tribes. He imposed his own laws, and severe punishments were meted out against those who challenged his authority.62 This assertion of authority resulted in a monopolization of business associated with the ḥajj caravans, including the levying of additional fees on unsuspecting pilgrims for allowing them to disembark from ships at the port of Jeddah. The legal recourse would have been to complain on behalf of the foreign pilgrims to the Ottoman representative in the province, Ratıb Pasha, but, as the British vice consul Mohammad Houssein explained, the Pasha got a cut of the profits himself and was unwilling to entertain complaints that might harm the position of the emir of Mecca.63
Unfortunately, even though the Bedouin tribes lie at the heart of this story, we have no written records addressing these incidents from their perspective,
59 BNA, FO 195/2122, 8 January 1902.60 Suriye (8 November 1902): 1. Kazım Pasha would replace Ratıb Pasha as the Governor of
Hijaz in 1908: H. Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997): 245 n. 17.
61 BNA, FO 195/2126, 238, 14 October 1902.62 BNA FO 195/2061, 33, February 1899.63 BNA, FO 195/2061, 167, May 1899. For the latest scholarship on the experience of Muslim
Dutch subjects from South East Asia who made the pilgrimage during this period, see E. Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey, Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
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although we are fortunate to have an alternative version of events recorded by a member of the British diplomatic corps in the Hijaz. British vice consul Houssein took an interest in the relationship between the governor and the emir of Mecca because of the way it affected his duty of caring for Muslim British subjects in the Hijaz. This responsibility fell squarely on Houssein’s shoulders as a Muslim subject of the British Empire stationed in Mecca, while his superior, Consul Devey, was interested solely in maintaining British strate-gic and diplomatic interests, and was, as a non-Muslim, barred from entering the holy city. Vice Consul Houssein was thus often involved in negotiations to collect indemnity payments and compensation for incidents that took place under the protection of the local authorities.64 As records show, however, Consul Devey and Vice Consul Houssein did not see eye to eye on local issues and often complained about one another in letters to London and to the British representatives in Istanbul. This was the impetus for Hussein to ignore Consul Devey’s orders and send his reports directly to the British embassy in Istanbul, allowing, in the process, two different versions of events to be presented. This has, fortunately, left historians with both official and unofficial accounts of what was taking place in and around Mecca. Consul Devey’s accounts revealed that he was explicitly interested in maintaining a good relationship with the local powers so as not to harm the strategic interests of the British Empire, while Vice Consul Houssein’s accounts reported the ugly details and politics of the daily incidents that indirectly affected Muslim British subjects. His accounts of the background to the stories and the chain of events leading to Bedouin attacks challenge predetermined conclusions as to the Bedouin actors’ motivation. A couple of examples will provide a new perspective on the events that had a direct impact on progress of the telegraph line.
6 Controlling the Message
On 24 May 1899, Houssein gave an account of events leading up to an attack by members of the Ḥarb tribal chieftaincy,65 the largest chieftaincy that was almost entirely contained in the Mecca-Medina region, against a caravan car-rying pilgrims.66 A few days before the attack, a chief from the Ḥarb chief-
64 BNA, FO 195/2198, 40-8, 12 February 1905.65 I borrow the term “chieftaincy” from historian Joshua Teitelbaum to describe a large tribe
that includes several subtribes; J. Teitelbaum, The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia (New York: New York University Press, 2001): 5.
66 Oschenwald, Religion, Society, and the State: 31.
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taincy visited ʿAwn al-Rāfiq Pasha, the emir of Mecca, to demand payment of the tribe’s allowances, which were in arrears. The emir, in his capacity as the local representative of the Ottoman authority, responded by insulting the chief publicly and refusing his request. This grave action was avenged by the attack on a caravan that was supposed to be under the protection of the Ottoman government. This also allowed the tribe to collect booty in lieu of what they believed was owed them by the government. In addition, several British sub-jects were taken hostage in order to exert pressure on the emir of Mecca to release the allowance that had been withheld. Instead of giving the tribe what they demanded, the emir imposed a punitive “tax” on the inhabitants of the area around Mecca in order to pay the tribe, causing more discontent and sow-ing the seeds of more conflict.67
Let us take a closer look at the local dimension of this cycle of violence. As in the case of the Ḥarb tribes, many of the tribespeople in that region who had been accustomed to subsidies from Istanbul for their survival had not received them for more than four years. Since 1895, their subsidies, usually given as grain rations, had been withheld by the emir of Mecca. Over the years, they had grown to consider these subsidies from Istanbul a right on which they depended and part of a time-honored, unspoken contract between the Ottomans and the Bedouins living along major trade routes in Arabia. This withholding of subsidies provoked tribesmen to attack what they considered government interests as a form of protest and as a way to seize what they believed was rightfully theirs.68
As in the example given above, the violent attacks on telegraph lines were always in response to specific triggers, actions by the local government that were seen as oppressive. For example, special forces sent by the emir of Mecca for the protection of the caravans often got into major altercations with local Bedouins that resulted in violence inflicted by the emir’s men, who often reported it as just punishment. These actions frequently led to further violent acts of revenge by the affected tribesmen and demands for blood money.69
For example, in another dispatch, dated 7 August 1899, the British vice consul described another incident that threatened violent ramifications. The
67 BNA, FO 195/2061, 205, May 1899.68 BNA, FO 195/2061, 205, May 1899; for a discussion of the importance of these subsidies and
the way they were regularly manipulated by the Emir of Mecca, see Oschenwald, Religion, society, and the state: 32-3.
69 BNA, FO 195/2061, 235, June 1899.
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emir of Mecca had sent three ashrāf 70 from Ta’if to collect taxes from some members of the ʿ Utayba, the most powerful tribe in central Arabia at the time.71 According to the report, the ashrāf showed disrespect to the tribesmen, which led to violence and the ashrāf ’s eventual murder. In a show of overwhelming force, the emir of Mecca hastily assembled six thousand Bedouins from the town of Mecca and the surrounding areas. He also collected special taxes from the local population to provision the expedition. According to Vice Consul Houssein, this show of force had the potential to lead to a full-scale revolt, because the emir of Mecca was already hated by the tribes for withholding their government subsidies to build his personal fortune. The British vice con-sul said that, despite the fact that some tribespeople were on the verge of star-vation, they would have maintained their commitment to ensure the safety of travelers, had they received the pay they were promised.72 When the emir’s men attacked the ʿUtayba tribe, they killed only a few men and were unable to inflict more damage or seize booty. In their frustration, this poorly trained and hastily assembled militia took out their anger on surrounding villages, pro-voking more acts of revenge by the tribes they attacked. The cycle of violence continued, when members of these tribes took their revenge by stealing an expensive telescope ordered specially from London for the personal use of the emir of Mecca. The battle that ensued between the emir’s men and the tribes-men resulted in the head of one of the chiefs being delivered to Mecca instead of the telescope. This act, the vice consul predicted, would lead to more acts of revenge in response to the cruel actions of the emir of Mecca.73
All these incidents took place just before the arrival of the Telegraph Commission. It seems that the only way that the local tribes were able to show their dissatisfaction with the status quo and to recover some of what they believed was owed to them was to attack government personnel and equip-ment that passed through their domains, that is, in the areas beyond the town limits. The emir of Mecca’s policy of starvation and oppressive rule continued
70 Ar. ashrāf (sg. sharīf, Tu. şerif ): one of noble heritage, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. In Mecca, the ashrāf were mostly descendants of Hasan, the son of Fatima and ʿAli. D. Hogarth, Hejaz before World War I: A Handbook, 2d ed. (London: Falcon-Oleander Press, 1978): 42.
71 E. Abdella Doumato, “Tribes and Tribalism: Utayba Tribe.” In Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, ed. Philip Mattar, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004): 4: 2214.
and was used by the local authorities to impede further the progress of the Telegraph Commission.
In early February 1902, there was another report of violence on the road from Medina to Mecca: a small group of soldiers was attacked a few miles out-side Mecca, and a pilgrimage caravan was attacked the following day. A three-hour battle left scores of dead and injured. Consul Devey speculated,
The present outrages are no doubt in large measure, the outcome of the affair . . . when the Jeedaan branch of Harb tribe prevented the laying of the telegraph to Medina. Some Sheiks were imprisoned at Mecca on this ground, which appears to have roused a violent animosity. But how far this is the main cause cannot yet be ascertained.74
In a different report, however, Devey presented a detailed accounting of money sent by the sultan as part of the annual sürre (gifts sent to Mecca during the ḥajj season), of which 100,000 kuruş was supposed to be distributed to the vari-ous tribes that lived along the route of the ḥajj. However, he withheld payment from the tribes, including the Jidʿān branch of the Ḥarb tribe, which he blamed for sabotaging the telegraph line.75 Proof that the money was sent by Istanbul comes in a much earlier report, in which the same amount of money was quoted as being sent to appease the tribes along the telegraph route, where Consul Devey also predicted that local authorities would be putting obstacles in the way of ʿAzmzade’s progress with the telegraph line.76
Interesting here is what we read between the lines. Consul Devey makes no explicit connection between the sending of the money by Istanbul, the with-holding of the money stated in one report, and the sabotage of the telegraph line expressed in another, but if the reports are read side by side, a clearer pic-ture emerges. Istanbul had sent the money, but the local authorities withheld the money from the tribes; the tribes attacked the telegraph and caravans they were supposed to protect because they had not received their promised gift, and the emir of Mecca imprisoned members of the tribes for these attacks. From Istanbul’s perspective, it seemed that the Bedouins had attacked the line despite the promised money having been sent and that the emir had stepped in to punish the local tribes for their transgression. Indeed, the governor sent yet another report to Istanbul blaming the “ignorant” tribesmen for failing to honor their agreements with the Ottoman government. In reality, the progress
74 BNA, FO 195/2126 (10 February 1902): 28; BNA, FO 195/2126 (3 March 1902): 48.75 BNA, FO 195/2144, 19 February 1903.76 BNA, FO 195/2122, 29 January 1902.
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of the telegraph line was indirectly sabotaged by the emir through his calcu-lated oppression of the local tribes and the governor’s filtering, to suit his own objectives of the news sent to Istanbul. In the end, the tribes would be blamed, and the emir of Mecca and the governor would achieve what they ultimately wanted, the delay of the central government’s reach towards Mecca by block-ing the progress of the telegraph line.
The attacks were not against the existence of a telegraph line as such but were part of a cycle of violence instigated in almost every case by the local authorities, who were supported and aided by Istanbul’s representative, the governor, Ratıb Pasha, and the destruction of the telegraph poles was an easy way of pressuring the local authorities and sending a message to Istanbul, but that message was filtered by Ratıb Pasha and misrepresented the situation to an audience in Istanbul that was prone to accept the stereotype of the “uncivi-lized native.”
Finally, the question remains, why was this situation allowed to continue? The following example will help shed some light on this. Vice Consul Houssein reported that, after a major attack on a caravan, the decision by the emir of Mecca’s to send a force of five thousand men chosen from several tribes in his area to attack the offending tribe would only lead to more attacks.
[T]he tribes against whom the expedition is being sent applied to the Vali (governor) and informed him that they were quite discontented with the treatment they were receiving from the Grand Sharif (the Sharif of Mecca) and his Kaymakams (local representatives) that they were being plundered by the Kaymakams of the Grand Sharif, and their men were being imprisoned for the sake of extortion, their allowances of grain appointed by the Government were misappropriated, the inter-tribal excesses were allowed to pass unnoticed and unpunished by the Sharifian authorities and that their grievances were not attended to and redressed and therefore they were obliged to apply to His Excellency as the highest representative of the Government of Hijaz, and that if their grievances will receive due consideration at the hand of the authorities and will be redressed, there shall be no more troubles on the roads, as these distur-bances were as a protest to draw the attention of the authorities.77
British vice consul Mohammad Houssein explained how this unusual alli-ance between the governor and the emir of Mecca came about. According to Houssein, Ratıb Pasha had long ago made a deal with the emir of Mecca. This
77 BNA, FO 195/2174 (15 October 1904): 329-31; BNA, FO 195/2174 (23 October 1904): 334.
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took place after the local notables of Mecca sent a petition to the sultan com-plaining of the unjust behavior of the emir of Mecca. In the usual Ottoman fashion, a commission was formed to investigate. Because of Ratıb Pasha’s for-mer experience of the region, he was assigned to the commission. It was then that the emir was able to bribe the commission, including Ratıb Pasha, who ruled in favor of the emir. A few months later, Ratıb Pasha was reassigned to the post of commander and governor of the Hijaz, no doubt due, in part, to his apparent ability to relate well to the local authorities represented by the emir of Mecca, something that traditionally had been the exception rather than the rule.78 Thus, a mixture of opportune circumstances and a mutually beneficial agreement between the two representatives of the Ottoman authority, the gov-ernor of the province, and the emir of Mecca, upset the balance of power, to the detriment of the local population.
Conclusion
At first glance, Governor Ratıb Pasha’s lamenting “the hopelessly backward state of this country and the presumptive all but impossibility of the Bedouins entering even upon a phase of semi-civilization”79 might seem like proof of an Ottoman “colonial attitude” towards the Bedouins. However, the self-serv-ing nature of the rhetoric of the “uncivilized other” becomes clear once Ratıb Pasha’s personal motives and the ways he was positioning himself between Istanbul and the emir of Mecca are taken into consideration.
Similarly, the Telegraph Commission’s language of accommodation with the Bedouins was evidence neither for or against the argument that a colo-nial mindset was influential along the Arabian frontiers. However, building a partnership in this volatile frontier region of the empire required a careful bal-ance between appeasement and cooperation, so the records of the Telegraph Commission and the Yıldız Palace communications were free of any rhetoric of “civilizing” the Bedouins. Members of the Hamidian regime were thinking strategically about maintaining their hold on the western Arabian frontiers, while the emir and governor in the Hijaz were masking personal ambitions and their struggle to retain their hold on power. In other words, pushing such a world view—a “colonial” world view in which the “nature” of “natives” was given as a self-evident reason for vandalism the telegraph lines—to an urban
audience primed to blame the Bedouins was employed selectively. It was nei-ther ideologically driven nor a mindset that motivated the state, but a tool at the state’s disposal.
This article has argued that at the root of Bedouin discontent was the fail-ure of the Ottoman government to protect the Bedouin tribes from the local authorities’ abuses of power, which the governor and the emir manipulated in order to hinder the progress of the telegraph line. The balance of power between the local, provincial, and imperial levels was upset by the meeting of minds between the emir of Mecca and the governor against the local Bedouin population. The Bedouins evidently lived under constant threat of persecu-tion and calculated oppression, and their sabotage of the telegraph line was an expression of rebellion against perceived injustice, not irrational behavior driven by superstition or ignorance. The local tribes’ “deep-rooted notions of their right to discuss and argue with their rulers”80 was manipulated by the governor and the emir of Mecca to block the extension of Istanbul’s control to Mecca. The policy of partnership-building, which was favored by the sultan to serve imperial strategic objectives, was sabotaged by local powers in the Hijaz to maintain local control. The Yıldız Palace, driven by a wider strategic goal of maintaining Ottoman independence along the southern frontiers, adopted a strategy of building a delicate partnership with the Bedouin population, while Ottoman government representatives in Mecca did their utmost to maintain their hold on power, using a constant barrage of oppressive tactics against the Bedouin tribes and deliberately halting the telegraph line’s progress. The language of containment versus negotiation and imperial partner versus sav-age enemy were practical tools and rhetorical justifications for the strategies adopted and not an existing, determinative mindset among Ottoman decision-makers on the frontiers.
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