A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is by John McHugo

Author:John McHugo [McHugo, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863561580
Publisher: Saqi
Published: 2017-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

IV

By the eighteenth century, it was obvious to any thoughtful observer that Ottoman Turkey was falling behind the European powers. It would not be until the 1850s that Turkey would be dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’, but Europe was now relentlessly moving ahead in terms of industry and technology. It was also the place where the exciting new ideas of the Enlightenment were emerging. For the time being, these had little if any impact on the Ottoman elite. The Ottomans studied the new European methods and sometimes adopted them, but they seem to have been painfully slow in benefiting from some of the innovations.

Printing is the obvious example. The Jews and some of the Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire such as the Greeks and Armenians had long since established printing presses for books in their own languages, although, as Ottoman specialist Caroline Finkel has put it, this was ‘not without problems’.21 It was late as 1727 that the first Arabic script printing press was established in the empire. Even then, only a few books with short print runs were produced. It would not be until the nineteenth century that printing really took off in Turkish (which was written in the Arabic script) and Arabic. One factor that slowed down the spread of printing was the respect felt for the art and skill of the copyists, and a perhaps praiseworthy concern that printing could lead to the loss of their livelihoods. It probably also indicated a feeling of awe and reverence for the written word in a society where literacy was rare and therefore prized.

As the empire weakened, it began to lose vast territories in Europe to Austria and Russia, while elsewhere its control over some of its provinces decayed. Strong local personalities such as Mamluk soldiers, provincial governors, tribal leaders, tax gatherers and other notables often saw an opportunity to increase their power at the expense of the centre. The empire frequently found itself forced into a policy of negotiation and compromise with powerful local figures, since it lacked the strength to enforce its will without their support.

Many of the rebellions that took place during the eighteenth century left no lasting impact, except to weaken the empire further. But one locally based movement, which appeared in the central Arabian region of Nejd in the middle of the century, would have consequences for the history of Islam and especially for relations between Sunnis and Shi‘is – consequences that are still very much with us today. This is the movement founded by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, who lived during the period 1702–93 and whose life therefore almost spans the eighteenth century.

Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab set out to purify and reform Islam from the remote, desert region where he was born and grew up. In some ways, he has something in common with certain Protestant reformers in the Europe of the Reformation. There are, for instance, eerie parallels with Protestants in the ways in which he sought to go back to the original

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