Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  To combat this gumming up of the works, the state raised salaries, so that courtiers and bureaucrats wouldn’t feel the need to take bribes. But the state didn’t have any source of extra funds based in real productivity, especially since, with the empire no longer expanding, the state did not have the revenue that traditionally flowed into its coffers from conquest. In order to raise salaries, pensions, and soldiers’ wages, therefore, the empire had to simply print money.

  Printing money spurs inflation—which puts us back where we started! Everything the Ottoman government did to stem corruption and promote efficiency only aggravated the problem it was trying to solve. Eventually, government officials gave up and decided to hire some consultants to come in and help them set things in order. The advisers they hired were management consultants and technical experts from the continent that seemed to know how: western Europe.

  Perhaps some brilliant executive could have done something about the unraveling that led the Ottoman elite to this sorry state; but the very success of the empire, and the very might of its ruling family, had transformed its imperial culture and the life of its royal family in ways that pretty much precluded any new Mehmet the Conquerors or Suleiman the Magnificents from emerging. Specifically, the court had grown ever bigger, heavier, and less productive until it was like some giant deformity that the whole society was carrying on its back.

  The archetypal symbol of this deformity was, perhaps, the so-called Grand Seraglio, the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul. Earlier dynasties around the Muslim world had harems, of course, but in Ottoman society, this grim institution grew to proportions never seen before, except perhaps in China under the Ming dynasty.

  Thousands of women from every conquered population lived in the labyrinthine Grand Seraglio. Although steeped in an overall atmosphere of wealth and luxury, most of these women lived in cubicles within the maze. The women of the harem were supplied with cosmetics and all other supplies useful to enhancing their adornments and had no other occupation except for self-adornment: no useful work to do, no opportunity to study, no call to produce anything, nothing to rescue them from a life of meaningless boredom. They were prisoners in gem-crusted cells.

  The sequestration of women had been hundreds of years in the making in the Islamic world, but even at this point, it didn’t run through the whole society, only through the upper classes. In rural areas, the casual traveler might still see peasant women working in the fields or driving animals along the roads. In urban areas, lower class women went about their business in the public bazaars, shopping for their households or hawking their handicrafts. Among the middle classes, some women owned property, managed businesses, and directed employees. But the public visibility of these women denoted the humble status of their men.

  Privileged men showed off their status by keeping their womenfolk out of public life and hidden from view in the private quarters of their households. The psychology underlying this custom was (I think) the feeling that a man’s honor—which really means his ability to hold his head high among his fellow men—depended on his ability to keep any women associated with him from becoming the objects of other men’s sexual fantasies. In the end, this is what the sequestration of women boiled down to, and in such a cultural milieu, even men in the lower strata of society felt a pressure to keep their women out of sight, so they wouldn’t look bad to other men.

  In the sultan’s harem, this syndrome had magnified to a staggering level. In ordinary usage, especially among western Orientalists, the word harem has a lascivious connotation to it, as if everyday life in a harem consisted of sexual frolicking from dawn to dusk; but how could this possibly have been the case? The sultan was just one man, and no other man ever even saw the women of the imperial harem except the guards, and the guards were all eunuchs. And the sultan, some may be surprised to learn, didn’t spend his leisure hours hanging around the harem, playing around with the women. One of the eunuchs had the specific job of choosing one woman for the sultan to sleep with each night, and this eunuch would escort the chosen woman secretively and properly bundled, under cover of night, to the sultan’s chamber. Sexual license and sexual repression were weirdly intertwined in this institution.2

  Eunuchs could move freely between the harem and the world, and so acted as the women’s eyes and ears and hands, their means of learning about the outside world, their instruments for effecting changes out there. The sultan’s children, including his sons, grew up in the harem until they were twelve, never mingling with ordinary people or taking part in the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life until adolescence. By the time such a prince mounted the throne he was quite typically a socially dysfunctional creature whose main skill consisted of the ability to maneuver through the maze of harem intrigue.

  And very high-stakes, high-intensity intrigue it was, because even though one prince may have been the heir-designate, the mothers of the many other princes did not necessarily abandon hope that their own boy would somehow achieve the throne (which would make mother a power-figure in the empire.) So the women and their progeny plotted and conspired and attempted (and sometimes succeeded at) assassinations of potential rivals until the reigning sultan died, whereupon the struggle for power moved from back-room intrigue to front-room fisticuffs. The prince who came out victorious won the throne not just for himself but for some whole faction of women and eunuchs within the harem. An Ottoman princeling growing up in this environment knew he had some small chance of ending up as the supreme master of the universe and a much larger chance of ending up dead before he reached maturity.

  This system ended up producing a long line of weak, idiotic, and eccentric sultans. But this fact in itself did not account for the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, because by the time the system ripened into its corrupt maturity, the sultan no longer ran the state. The executive powers of his position had begun to decay shortly after Suleiman the Magnificent died. In the Ottoman system, grand vizier became the power position.

  Yet the ungainly court with its enormous harem did hamper the Ottoman Empire, because it cost so much and produced so little—produced in fact nothing, not even decisions. The vizier and other officials had to run the empire while carrying this court on their shoulders and keeping the damn thing fed, which made the whole operation ungainly and slow.

  Between 1600 and 1800, Safavid Persia was unraveling too. The Europeans were on hand to exploit what happened, but it was the kingdom’s own internal contradictions that pulled it apart. First of all, the usual dynastic rot set in. Princes raised in too much luxury were coming to the throne dissolute and lazy. Every time one of these flawed kings died, a power struggle erupted among his survivors; whoever won the throne took over a realm debilitated by war and was generally too idle or incompetent to repair the damage, so the golden age turned to silver, the silver to bronze, and the bronze to mud.

  When the Safavids first came to power they had created a distinctly Persian Islam by making Shi’ism the state religion. This was useful to the state at first, because it promoted a national coherence that made Persia strong for its size. But it alienated Sunnis within the borders, and as the throne weakened, these Sunnis turned rebellious and began to pull away.

  Making Shi’ism the official state religion had another downside, as well. It gave the Shi’i religious scholars a dangerous sense of self-importance, especially the mujtahids, a title that meant “scholars so learned they have a right to make original judgments” (later these worthies were called ayatollahs). These Shi’i ulama began to claim that if Persia was really a Shi’i state, kings could rule only with their approval, because only they spoke for the Hidden Imam. Ominously, the ulama had strong links among peasants and among the merchants who made up the urban middle class. Safavid kings therefore found themselves facing a Hobson’s choice. If they sought the approval of the ulama they would be conceding ultimate authority to the ayatollahs; if they asserted their own authority as supreme, they would have to forego the ulama’s approval and in th
at case rule without popular legitimacy.

  They opted for the latter; but kings who lack legitimacy need some other source of power to give them authority, and what could the Safavids tap? They had nothing to turn to but their armies—and by this time their armies were armed and trained and “advised” by European military experts. In short, Persia ended up with European Christians helping Safavid kings clamp down on Muslim religious scholars who were closely tied to the masses: obviously a formula for trouble.

  As the eighteenth century waned, succession struggles over the throne grew ever more ferocious. Contending factions began recruiting more European military consultants and importing more European arms to gain the edge on their rivals. A time came when the power struggles failed to produce single winners. Different contenders took possession of different areas. And as Persia came apart, Sunni provinces broke away from the kingdom, and Sunni neighbors such as the Uzbeks and the Afghans broke into the kingdom to wreak terrible havoc.

  When the smoke cleared the Safavids were gone. In their place, stood a new family monarchy. Nominally, this so-called Qajar dynasty ruled the shrinking country of Iran for the next 131 years. (It was still “Persia” to Europeans, but locals generally were calling the country Iran by this point, although the name did not switch at any one moment: both names go back to ancient times.) Under the Qajar kings, the disturbing trends of Safavid times became the ordinary, accepted order of things. The national armies were riddled with European advisers and officers. The ulama were chronically at odds with the throne. Repelled by foreign influences at court, these ulama set themselves up as guardians of traditional Islamic culture, to which the lower and middle classes were still wedded. The kings were generally lazy, rapacious, shortsighted, and weak. Europeans pulled the strings that made these puppets jerk and squeak in a most lifelike manner.

  Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They just came to sell, to buy, to work, to “help.” But there they were when things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body unnoticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down, the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last they were in command.

  Europeans pretty much failed to notice they were taking over Persia; and that’s partly because there was no “they.” Westerners came to Persia from various European countries, and Persians were not the enemy to them but the backdrop. The enemy, for each group of Europeans, was another group of Europeans. The British, the French, the Russians, the Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia. The rivalry eventually boiled down to Russia versus Great Britain, and to understand this competition, one must factor in the thunderous events happening further east, in the last of those three big Islamic Empires, the land of the Moghuls.

  In the Moghul empire the core contradiction had always been Hindus versus Muslims. Akbar the Great had worked out a sort of accommodation, but his great-grandson Aurangzeb reversed all his policies, enforcing orthodox Islam rigidly, restoring discrimination against Hindus, squashing smaller religious groups such as the Sikhs, and generally replacing tolerance with repression. And yet, say what you will about the man’s narrow-minded zealotry, Aurangzeb was a titanic talent, so he not only held his empire together but extended it. The whole time, however, he was sowing the discord and tension that would erupt to ruin the empire as soon as a less capable ruler took charge.

  This less capable ruler was the very next one after Aurangzeb—and the next one after him and the next one after that and so on down. In its first two hundred years, the Moghul empire had just six emperors; in its next fifty years it had eight. Of the first six, five were world historical geniuses; of the last eight, all were midgets.

  During the fifty-year era of those midgets, Hindu kings called the Marathas surged again in the south. The Sikhs became a militant force. Nawabs, Muslim provincial governors, began to ignore orders from the capital and rule as independent princes. In fact, India broke up into smaller states and each state dissolved into turmoil as clashes broke out between Hindus and Muslims and others, making life uncertain for all.

  Throughout this fragmentation, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English were hovering on the edges, doing business from their trading posts along the coast. At first the Portuguese had dominated this trade. Then the Dutch had outflanked them, planting forts and trading posts in both Southeast Asia and Persia, and beating the Portuguese at sea with better ships and bigger guns. Then the French came in and held their own, and so did the English, who built a fort at Madras in 1639, acquired Bombay (now called Mumbai) a bit later when their king married a Portuguese princess (Bombay came with her as part of her dowry) and then planting a colony on the Bay of Bengal, which grew into Calcutta.

  The Europeans who came to East Asia in this era represented something new and unprecedented in world history. They weren’t generals or soldiers, they didn’t come as the envoys of kings, they didn’t represent governments. They were employees of private companies, but companies of a new kind: joint stock-holding companies or, as we now call them, corporations.

  The first such company was born in 1553, when forty English merchants ponied up twenty-five pounds apiece to finance a search for a sea route to India. The expedition they funded found Moscow instead of India (don’t ask), but it brought home a tidy profit and when this news spread, other people clamored to buy into “the Russia Company.” Those who paid the subscription fee got slips of paper entitling them to a proportional cut of any profits the company’s future ventures earned, slips of paper they could sell to speculators if they wished (and thus the institution of the stock market was born).

  Around 1600, three gigantic national versions of that first corporation were created in Europe: they were the English, the Dutch, and the French “East India Companies.” Each was a limited liability corporation with private shareholders. Each was founded for the sole aim of turning a profit on trade in East Asia in order to enrich its shareholders. Each was run by a board of directors. Each was chartered by its national government, and in each case the government in question gave its company a national monopoly on doing business in the Islamic east. The actual entities jockeying for advantage in Persia, India, and Southeast Asia, then, were these corporations.

  Over the course of two centuries in India, these European corporations altered the texture of the Indian economy in ways reminiscent of what was happening in the Ottoman world. In Bengal, where the British elbowed out all other Europeans, the East India Company pretty much destroyed the Bengali crafts industry, but hardly noticed itself doing so. It was simply buying up lots of raw material at very good prices. People found more profit in selling raw material to the British than in using those materials to make their own goods. As the native economy went bust, indigenous Bengalis became ever more dependant on the British and finally subservient to them.

  When the corporations first arrived in India, they competed to earn the favor of the Moghul emperor, but as the empire broke down, the favor of the central government mattered less and less. The Europeans came to realize they had better align themselves with various local rulers rising up. But they had to pick the right ones of these, because some turned out to be losers and got churned under. Guessing wrong about the subcontinent’s internal politics would cost the company money. It was tempting, therefore, to take the guesswork out of it and try to control the outcomes of local power struggles. To this end, the companies brought in private armies to help their allies. Here, as in Persia, the enemy, for each group of Europeans, was not the local population but other Europeans. In supporting their Indian allies, the European corporations were actually fighting proxy wars against one another. The Portuguese lost out early, the Dutch were eliminated next (from India, anyway—they remained dominant in Southeast Asia) and the contest for India finally cam
e down to the British versus the French.

  As it happened, the French and the British were also the finalists in the contest for North America, halfway around the world. There, a skirmish between a few dozen Europeans kicked off a chain of events that ended up making all of India a British colony. It started in the spring of 1754, when a British army major named George Washington was leading a surveying party up the Ohio River and stumbled across a French scouting party. Shots were fired, one Virginian and ten Frenchmen died, and a global conflict erupted between Great Britain and France, with most of the other European powers jumping in quickly. In North America the conflict was called the French and Indian War, in Europe the Seven Years’ War, and in India the Third Carnatic War. 3

  As the name implies, the European rivals in India had already fought two proxy wars in the Carnatic region north of modern-day Madras, trying to seat their respective allies on minor thrones. The fighting, in each case, was conducted by the East India Companies of Britain and France. In 1756, the nawab of Bengal, Siraj al-Dawlah, overran the British fort at Calcutta. On a sweltering June night, someone (not the nawab; he knew nothing about it) locked up sixty-four British citizens in an airless underground prison cell. “Someone” was supposed to process them out that night and send them home, but signals got crossed and the prisoners were left in the dungeon overnight. By morning, forty-three of them were dead.

  The report swiftly made its way to England. The press went crazy. They titled the nawab’s dungeon “the black hole of Calcutta.” In each retelling of the story, the dimensions of the cell shrank and the number of prisoners burgeoned, finally reaching 146, while the number of dead rose to 123. The story outraged the British public. In India, a one-time company clerk named Robert Clive, now a captain in the company’s private army, marched to Calcutta to extract revenge. He deposed the nawab, and installed the nawab’s uncle in his place. (The so-called battle of Plassey, which effected this change, consisted of Clive bribing the nawab’s bodyguards to go home and then arresting and executing the abandoned nawab.)