Mehmed Rashid Pasha

The Syria Vilayet was formed in 1865, combining the eyalets of Damascus and Sidon.[5][10] The province extended from Tripoli and Hama in the north to Palestine and Transjordan in the south,[4] but excluded the autonomous Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate.[11] According to the historian John Spagnolo, Rashid Pasha was "intent on reinvigorating the Ottoman Empire" and was "as efficient and imaginative in the exercise of his functions as the prevailing state of the Empire permitted",[5] while the historian Butrous Abu-Manneh noted that he "worked indefatigably for the integration of the provinces".[4] By 1868, Syria was administratively divided into the eight sanjaks (first-level districts) of Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Tripoli, Acre, Hama, Hauran and Nablus.[12]

Rashid Pasha established a new municipal council in Damascus and a new administrative council for the province. To elicit local support for the reorganized administration, several Damascene notables were given posts in the councils or other provincial posts. He reformed the office of amir al-hajj (commander of the annual Hajj caravan to Mecca), increasing the post's salary and ensuring that only locals were appointed to the office.[13] Notables from Beirut (former capital of Sidon Eyalet), the city of Sidon and the subdistricts of Rashaya, Hasbaya and the eastern Beqaa Valley lodged complaints to the Sublime Porte in October 1867 alleging that their interests were being neglected by the administration in Damascus.[14] The petitions were penned by former employees of Daud Pasha, the governor of Mount Lebanon, who strove to annex the areas to his governorship and may have played a role in the petitions.[15] Rashid Pasha subsequently visited Sidon to hear local grievances and replace the city's qaimmaqam (governor of a qadaa or 'second-level district').[16] Rashid Pasha oversaw the first Syrian parliament (Majlis Suriye) in Beirut in December 1867 or January 1868, during which four representatives (two Muslims and two non-Muslims) from each sanjak convened to discuss new commercial and infrastructural projects and administrative reforms.[16][17] In 1868 he authorized the establishment of the Beirut Municipal Council.[18]

In line with the 1858 Land Code, large state-owned tracts in the Hauran plain and the Beqaa Valley were put up for auction. Rashid Pasha encouraged private investment in land and sought to speedily register deeds to bring order to the chaotic state of land ownership in Syria. In his pursuit of these goals, he often supported the interests of wealthy businessmen from the major cities against the interests of the peasantry. In general, many of the urban businessmen Rashid Pasha courted lacked adequate capital for mass land acquisition during his term, and investments in land did not accelerate until the trade depression and rural hardships of the 1870s, after he left office.[13]

Damascus, the capital of Syria Vilayet, in 1895

Rashid Pasha launched a campaign to upgrade Syria’s infrastructure.[17] Through the Damascus Administrative Council, these projects were commenced to facilitate access to the city's rural hinterland and encourage the expansion of agriculture.[13] In 1868, a resolution was passed by the parliament approving the construction of a carriage road from the northern town of Ma'arra, southward through Hama, Homs, Baalbek and Anjar to connect with the Beirut–Damascus highway.[19] Inland-to-coastal roads that connected Homs and Tripoli, Nablus and Sidon, Tibnin and Tyre, and Suq al-Khan and Acre were built as well. A carriage road between Damascus and Palestine was also opened to ease overland trade with Egypt.[17] Furthermore, the existing Jerusalem–Nablus route and the coastal routes that connected Gaza to Jaffa and Beirut with Sidon were repaired. Rashid Pasha attempted to build a road through the Syrian Desert connecting Damascus with Baghdad, but the project fell through.[17]

A major expansion of the telegraph network in Syria was initiated by Rashid Pasha and telegraph offices were set up in all of the province's major towns. He also directed that European languages were able to be transmitted through the network in addition to Turkish. The 19th-century Syrian historian Muhammad Husni asserts that Rashid Pasha was infatuated with the telegraph, spending hours in the telegraph office sending and receiving messages.[17] During Rashid Pasha's rule, Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri and other prominent Damascenes lobbied the British consul of Damascus, Richard Burton, to gain British financial backing for a large railroad network in Syria.[13]

The Nahda (Arabic literary renaissance) in Syria dates to Rashid Pasha's governorship.[2] According to Hudson, Rashid Pasha, as a modernist, took a "personal interest in spreading literacy and in building an educational infrastructure."[2] Primary schools were founded in Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem with his support. Under his governorship, a provincial newspaper, Suriyya, and provincial salnamas (yearbooks) were first published, while private literary journals also began to circulate.[2] In 1868 he authorized the reestablishment of the Syrian Scientific Society, a group composed of Syrian entrepreneurs and patrons of literature and the arts.[20]

Rashid Pasha viewed a prominent military presence as key to the success of his infrastructural, administrative and educational initiatives.[17] One of his key policies was extending actual administrative rule and law enforcement to Syria's hinterlands.[21] To that end, he launched campaigns to suppress the Bedouin tribes of the desert fringes.[17][21] Bedouin mobility and depredations against agricultural settlements were the main cause of instability in the Syrian countryside and fostered brigandage. Concerted efforts against the Bedouin began in 1863 under Governor Fuad Pasha, entailing a military campaign by a newly-conscripted army of urban Syrians equipped with modern rifles from the Crimean War and new fortifications between the settled countryside and the Syrian Desert.[22]

Two months into his term, Rashid Pasha made campaign preparations against the Alawite clans in the coastal mountains east of Latakia and Tripoli, mainly for evading conscription. Operations occurred over months until government authority and conscription orders were enforced across the mountain range. In 1867, the Alawite mountaineers used the diversion of imperial troops from Syria to Crete, where a rebellion was raised against the Ottomans, as an opportunity to raid neighboring villages. Rashid Pasha consequently renewed the campaign and reimposed control over the mountains. Conscription orders were carried out successfully during that year and in August 1868. The Alawite sheikhs (chieftains) informed Rashid Pasha that the success was partly due to the releases issued by his deputy governor of Tripoli, Khurshid Pasha, for numerous conscripts who had been "unjustly recruited" in 1866.[9] The success was also attributed to the participation of local Alawite leaders in the supervision of conscription. In May 1870, the Alawite clans refused to provide army recruits and resumed raids against nearby villages, prompting a full scale campaign by Rashid Pasha, which resulted in the plunder and burning of several villages, the arrest and life imprisonment of thirteen Alawite sheikhs, the confiscation of 8,000 weapons and the conscription of 250 Alawite men.[23]

Also in 1866–1867, Rashid Pasha subdued the Bedouin tribes in the eastern countryside of Homs and Hama.[21] He commanded those military expeditions,[13] and was assisted by the governor of Aleppo Vilayet through the use of telegraph communication and surveillance. In 1868, he established army garrisons in Palmyra and other rural towns to deter Bedouin raiders, and compelled the tribes of northern Syria to fight alongside his forces in his campaigns against the southern tribes that year.[24]

In the Hauran, Rashid Pasha's modernization and centralization efforts partly consisted of winning the support of rural factions. The competing and often warring groups consisted of the Bedouin tribes, the Druze mountaineer sheikhs and the mostly Muslim peasant sheikhs of the plains, all of whom generally viewed the Ottoman government as an alien authority whose sole purpose was to tax and conscript their men. Rashid Pasha attempted to persuade the rural factions that the lands in which they lived possessed sufficient resources to share, and that it was mutually beneficial for the factions and the government to jointly exploit the land. He argued that a united front of the inhabitants and the state could effectively counter the increasing European interference in the region's affairs.[25] The British consul in Damascus, Richard Wood, wrote that Rashid Pasha's efforts sought to instill in the province's inhabitants "a sense of community of material, social, and political interests—a national spirit, in fact, of which the government will be regarded as the highest expression".[25]

Rashid Pasha extended direct rule to the plain of Hauran, which was Syria Vilayet's principal grain-producing region, designating it a sanjak under Kamil Pasha, a Turkish mutassarif (governor of a sanjak). He ended the peasants' withholding of grain supplies in protest at the government monopoly set up by As'ad Mukhlis Pasha and the presence of imperial troops in the Hauran by offering the peasants tax concessions; he refused to withdraw government troops, however.[25] In December 1866, Rashid Pasha met the powerful Druze sheikh Ismail al-Atrash in Damascus and appointed him mudir (subdistrict governor) of Jabal al-Druze, the mountainous area of the eastern Hauran.[26] He also allocated adequate grazing lands for the flocks of the Bedouin Ruwallah and Wuld Ali tribes, both major rivals of the Druze clans and the Hauran peasantry.[25] Al-Atrash's appointment upset his Druze rivals from the Bani Amer and Al Hamdan clans.[26] In June 1868, the latter two allied with the Bedouin Sulut tribe of the Lajat, a barren and lawless region north of Jabal al-Druze, against the Bani al-Atrash. To avert conflict, Rashid Pasha held a summit of the Druze sheikhs in which Ismail was dismissed in favor of his son Ibrahim. Soon after, Rashid Pasha reorganized Jabal al-Druze into a qadaa of Hauran administered by a council headed by a qaimmaqam.[27] The new qadaa was divided into four nahiyas (subdistricts) based on the boundaries of the existing Druze mashaykha (sheikhdoms).[27]

In 1867, Rashid Pasha oversaw plans to assert state control over the Balqa,[13] a region of Transjordan extending between Wadi Mujib in the south to the Zarqa River in the north.[21] Before Rashid Pasha's governorship, the Ottomans had not been able to tax the Balqa.[13] Despite the region's abundant fertile plains, it lacked permanent settlements, besides the fortress town of al-Salt, due to incessant Bedouin raids.[28] The peasantry cultivated the Balqa's plains through extortionate protection agreements, known as khuwwa, with the Bedouin tribes in which the latter would receive a share of the harvest in return for not disturbing the peasants.[28] Rashid Pasha sought to end this traditional arrangement and obtain tax arrears, set up an administrative body over the region and force the Bedouin tribes (the Adwan, Sardiyah, Bani Sakhr and Sirhan) to submit to state authority.[29]

Rashid Pasha had already secured the state's authority in the Hauran and enlisted support for the planned Balqa expedition from the Hauran plainsmen, Druze sheikhs and Bedouin tribes, namely the Ruwallah, Wuld Ali and Bani Hasan.[29] Rashid Pasha personally led government expeditions in the Balqa.[13] He set off to subdue the region at the head of three infantry battalions, nine regular and irregular cavalry squadrons and light artillery. The size of this force compelled the Muslims and Christians of al-Salt to abandon their alliance with the Adwan leader, Dhiyab al-Humud, and submit to Rashid Pasha; he peacefully entered the city on 17 August and forced the Bedouin to withdraw southward to Hisban.[29] In al-Salt, Rashid Pasha established the qadaa of Balqa with an elected council of local notables headed by an appointed Kurdish qaimmaqam from Damascus, Faris Agha Kudru.[30] He repaired the city's fortress, which had been heavily damaged during the 1834 peasants' revolt, and turned it into an army barracks.[29] He seized massive quantities of grain and livestock from al-Salt and its vicinity in lieu of tax arrears; the value of this confiscation amounted to three million piasters.[31]

On 30 August, he pursued the Adwan tribesmen, and in the ensuing four-hour battle the Adwan lost fifty men and retreated south toward al-Karak. Dhiyab surrendered to Rashid Pasha in Nablus in October 1867.[31] According to historian Eugene Rogan, Rashid Pasha's "campaign represented an unprecedented Ottoman intrusion into Jordan".[31] By 1868, the Irbid-based qadaa of Ajlun, part of Hauran Sanjak, and the as-Salt-based qadaa of Balqa, part of Nablus Sanjak, were formally recorded as administrative units.[31] Later in 1868, Rashid Pasha began efforts to establish a qadaa centered in Ma'an, a fortified oasis town south of the Balqa. He petitioned the Sublime Porte to approve the measure, which they did, but it was not implemented until 1872 during the rule of his successor, Abdülletif Subhi Pasha.[32]

In the summer of 1869, the Adwan and Bani Sakhr, traditional rivals, joined forces to challenge Rashid Pasha's assertion of state rule.[31] They raided the village of al-Ramtha in Hauran, prompting Rashid Pasha to launch a large-scale campaign against them out of concern that a lesser response to the Bedouin affront to state authority would threaten his administrative reforms in the Syrian hinterlands.[33] Rashid Pasha brought along the British and French consuls to witness his two-column expedition, which manifested as several pincer assaults on the tribes. Among the latter, the Bani Sakhr and Bani Hamida were pinned down in the deep gorge of Wadi Wala, surrendered, and were fined 225,000 piasters in compensation for the expedition's expenses. Rogan has stated that "if the first Balqa expedition introduced direct Ottoman rule, the second campaign confirmed that the Ottomans were in Jordan to stay".[32]

Rashid Pasha attempted to force the nomadic Bedouin of southern Palestine to sedentarize. To that end, he issued orders to the Bedouin in the desert around Gaza to replace their tents with huts, which the Bedouin considered an existential threat to their way of life. The fifteen soldiers sent to enforce the order were killed by Tiyaha tribesmen upon arrival, prompting Rashid Pasha to send a punitive expedition against the tribe, which seized its entire sheep flocks and camel herds and sold them to the peasantry in Jerusalem. Afterward, the Bedouin gained the protection of Isma'il Pasha, Egypt's autonomous khedive (viceroy), who prevented further attempts by Rashid Pasha to settle the tribes.[34]

One of Rashid Pasha's first acts as governor was the arrest of Muhammad Sa'id Agha (son of Shamdin Agha), a powerful Kurdish Damascene agha (commander of irregulars; pl. aghawat).[25] The aghawat wielded significant influence in Damascus and dominated relations between the city and its hinterland.[35] Rashid Pasha's imprisonment of Muhammad Sa'id was a manifestation of his centralization efforts.[25] However, he ultimately decided to co-opt the aghawat by employing them to assist in the centralization of the province's hinterlands. Accordingly, in 1867, he released Muhammad Sa'id and assigned him to help direct the expedition in the Balqa. In addition to Muhammad Sa'id, other Kurdish aghawat, namely Mahmud Agha Ajilyaqin and Ahmad Agha Buzu, were also appointed roles in the Balqa expedition and were each appointed to the office of amir al-hajj at some point during Rashid Pasha's governorship. Another agha of Damascus, Haulu Agha al-Abid was appointed the qaimmaqam of Hauran in the latter half of Rashid Pasha's term.[13]

Rashid Pasha was recalled from Damascus immediately after the death of his mentor Grand Vizier Ali Pasha in September 1871.[36] The new grand vizier, Mahmud Nedim Pasha,[36] appointed the more conservative Abdullatif Subhi Pasha in Rashid's place.[37] According to Spagnolo, Rashid Pasha's "administration and integrity made him to be remembered as one of the best Ottoman governors of Syria".[5]