Jerusalem, Jerusalem by James Carroll

Author:James Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

3. The Peaceful Crusade

And so it went until 1798, the year that Europe made its long-in-coming countermove against the House of Islam with the invasion of Egypt by a French force led by Napoleon Bonaparte—the first shot in what would be a drawn-out colonial war. Included in the vast store of supplies that Napoleon brought with him, besides icons of the Enlightenment like a portable scientific laboratory and a library of recent political and philosophical books, was a printing press with type in Arabic script.33 Napoleon would not be the last European aiming to improve the culture and education of the “backward” Middle East.

But with Muslims throughout the region rallying to the Ottoman sultan, Napoleon’s expedition would fail. His infantry would reenact the Crusaders’ decisive defeat at the coastal city of Acre, in the far north of Palestine. The arrival of the French in the region sparked rage and fear in Jerusalem, with long-buried memories suddenly aroused. The city was ever more insecure, as well it might have been. Its decline matched the “decline of Faith and State”34 that, apart from defensive military prowess, marked the Ottoman regime through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Suleiman’s successors were most remarkable for their mediocrity. Where the population of Jerusalem had burgeoned after Suleiman, in the recent century it had fallen off to, by 1800, about nine thousand. Of that number, about half were Muslim, with Jews and Christians each making up about a quarter.35

The only notable religious violence to have occurred in Jerusalem for a long time had been violence among and between Christians. As if carrying on a Middle East version of the Protestant-Catholic wars that rent Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Christians had, in the same era, bloodied each other periodically in disputes over the Holy Sepulcher—clashes that climaxed in 1757 in all-out intra-Christian warfare in the streets of Jerusalem. The Ottoman sultan, Osman III, imposed an agreement on the Christians, a division of turf and responsibility for the holy sites that holds to this day.36 But the subsequent arrival of the French was taken by Muslims, accurately, to be a European avant-garde, and though Napoleon bypassed Jerusalem for the more strategic port city to the north, its riled Muslim citizens attacked churches and monasteries, and took monks as hostages.37 That violence was short-lived, however, as the Jerusalem Muslim authorities ordered such assaults to stop. In fact, Christian and Jewish minorities were consistently protected in Jerusalem, even as European pressures on the weakened Ottoman Empire increased.

In 1821, for example, rebels in the Greek provinces, centered in Peloponnese and Crete, launched their war of independence against the Ottomans. As the Greeks pushed the Turkish line back toward the Bosporus, the Greek Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem, however much they might have sympathized with their coreligionists, were protected by Muslim authorities. “Do you not disturb the subjects, for they are faithful,” the Jerusalem Islamic court decreed. “Evil done to them is a sin and an injustice against our God and our Prophet.

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