By Charles Ough

Özavci, Ozan. Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant 1798–1864. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 432 pp. ISBN 978-0198852964.

Dominated by discussion of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and inclusion of new member states into the bloc, the NATO summit in Vilnius back in July nonetheless had high on its agenda the protection of Western interests in the Middle East. These interests date back to the Cold War, where the foundations of NATO lie. In the very words of this year’s agreed communiqué: “Strategic competition, pervasive instability and recurrent shocks define our broader security environment. Conflict, fragility and instability in Africa and the Middle East directly affect our security and the security of our partners. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values…” Although Western media was then dominated by news on Ukraine, “Conflict, fragility and instability” continue in the wider Middle East with ongoing (or “frozen”) civil wars in Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen. 

   However, Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza after the attacks by Hamas on October 7 have brought war in the Middle East back to Western headlines.  With near-unwavering support from the US, UK and most other NATO members, the Israeli army has killed over 20,000 civilians so far, sending Arab-Israeli relations probably to their lowest point since the wholesale expulsion of Palestinians by the new Zionist state in the Nakba of 1948. For good reason, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace believes that the war in Gaza has undermined the United States’ moral high ground vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine, signifying that “The Global South no longer trusts the West, and that means new opportunities for Moscow”. At the same time, shifting blocs and alliances appear to have resolved the Iran-Saudi Arabia confrontation, expanding China’s influence to the detriment of the West. Replace “People’s Republic of China” with Russia or the Soviet Union and this same communiqué could just as easily have been published in 1973 or 2013 as in 2023.

   Longer contemplation of the examples of “strategic competition, pervasive instability and recurrent shocks” given above, therefore, question the importance of European paradigms of “Cold War” and subsequent “unipolar” worlds in the context of the Middle East and the West’s interactions with it. Rigorous investigation instead recalls strikingly similar memories of past Western interventions in each time period and the apparent paradox between each instance’s attempt to bring peace and stability to the Middle East and the ensuing worsening of violence, persecution and confrontation. Note that in the short extract quoted above, the word “security” is used four times. At least since the the US-led invasion of Iraq aimed to destroy a key lynchpin in Bush’s “Axis of Evil” and secure the world from the threat of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, each and every Western intervention in the Middle East has been premised on the goal of providing security, either for the West or for the peoples of the region themselves. But even after the failure of the occupation which followed from Saddam Hussein’s fall and execution made European and North American leaders more hesitant to commit to lengthy involvement, interventions have become arguably even more solely focused on security: think of targeted strikes in Syria aimed to protect civilians from chemical weapons but not destroy Bashar al-Assad’s regime; Cameron and Sarkozy’s air strike campaign in Libya to remove Gaddafi with no thought of what might happen after his fall; or the West’s redeployment in Iraq to defeat ISIS but then leave Kurdish forces to their fates against emboldened, Iran-aligned Shia militias and the Turkish army’s invasion of northern Syria. 

   Of course, discussion of the destabilising effects of European and North American intervention in the Middle East, and indeed across the Global South, is nothing new. But an appreciation that each of these interventions began with regional actors and events and, ultimately, gave way to further conflict with local leaders at the helm, is something rather more lacking in media and scholarship. Security (or the lack of it) in the Middle East is still seen much more as a Western question with little room for even acknowledging or considering local causes or solutions. In his book Dangerous Gifts, Utrecht University’s Assistant Professor of Transimperial History, Dr Ozan Özavci, draws a direct theoretical and practical link between these recent interventions and those during the time of the so-called “Eastern Question” in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The modern “culture of security” (8) legitimising involvement stems from these older conflicts. In contrast to discussions in European scholarship on the Middle East post-2003, Özavci explains that they arose primarily from domestic factors and resulted in situations where European and local actors “grappled with a vicious and intricate paradox there: an ever-increasing demand for security despite its increasing supply” (3) in the form of military invasion.

—

Unsurprisingly, with discussion on the destabilising effects of Western intervention so well established in the media, scholarship of the so-called “Eastern Question” is one of the longest-standing and most successful fields of study for European and American historians working on the Middle East. However, many of the diplomats’, politicians’ and travel writers’ works which provided the primary material for these studies also formed the basis for Edward Said’s famous polemical critique of Western views of the “Orient”. It should thus come as little surprise that in recent years the traditional scholarship has been reevaluated by revisionist writers and the concept of the “Eastern Question” itself called into question, together with the motives and impact of its nineteenth-century Europeans promoters. More than that, though, the 2021 book Dangerous Gifts by Utrecht University’s Assistant Professor of Transimperial History, Dr Ozan Özavci, “goes beyond both Orientalism and its (corrective) rejection” for a paradigm based around a shared Levantine-Ottoman-European concern for security rather than just “another history of westernization, modernization, or secularization” (vii-viii) based solely on European ideas or violent upheaval serving only European interests. 

 In particular, and as opposed to Said’s fixation on the Eastern Question as a “European Question” producing an image of the East or Ussama Makdisi’s twenty-first century identification of modern sectarianism in the Middle East originating through a fusion of European and Ottoman discourses of reform, Özavci aims to demonstrate Levantine actors’ views and agency in exploiting European interest in the long nineteenth century to pursue their own ends within existing societal conditions and changes. Dangerous Gifts represents an important contribution to the scholarship in embracing “the complexity of the historical reality through in-depth and multi-archival research to offer a more substantive and less impressionistic analysis of interventionism and violence in the Levant” (vii). 

 The book begins with the date of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, traditionally seen as the start of “modernity” in the Middle East, and ends with the fallout from the 1860 Mount Lebanon Civil War, once dismissed by Marx as the “atrocious outrages of wild tribes.”  It spans the period in which the Ottoman Empire earned the name “the sick man of Europe” just as the Powers themselves formed the “Concert of Europe” to ensure global security after the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars. But, unlike his predecessors, Özavci shows that it was the Ottomans themselves who first identified their empire as being in need of foreign “medicine” (13) while the beginning of coordinated action by the Great Powers post 1815 actually facilitated interventions on a “quasi-legal platform” abroad (9). To illuminate truly this complex historical reality, he weaves into the story the biographies of a whole cast of characters: from Albanian soldier turned Egyptian Pasha Mehmet (Muhammad) Ali and his archrival Ottoman statesman Husrev Pasha, to lesser-known British spy Richard Wood and the noble Druze family of the Lebanon mountains, the Jumblatts. In Özavci’s own words, these figures’ stories “serve as an analytical window to ‘see through life’ the connections between what may otherwise be considered as separate episodes of violence taking place in different historical epochs” (15). Overall, through these characters and episodes, the author strives to understand how and why European, Ottoman and Levantine interests became interwoven and how, though the facilitating conflicts were primarily domestic in inspiration, “eastern Mediterranean coasts were further destabilized and became vulnerable to civil wars” after each Great Power intervention (3).

 The confluence of Levantine, Ottoman and European interests personified by the key interactions of certain figures during the period is in evidence straight from the outset in the book’s first part, “Avant Le Mot.” This section studies in close detail the origins of modern security-focused interventions in the Middle East during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the Ottoman Porte’s reaction to it, and the ensuing civil war. Spending less time on the French occupation itself, Özavci opts to focus the impact it had on the wider Ottoman world and, in particular, how the civil war and rival French, British and Ottoman interest facilitated the rise of Mehmet Ali to rule Egypt and begin his rivalry with the Ottoman statesman Husrev Pasha. This early interaction begins a thread of competition and vengeance running through the first two parts of the book, the crisis in Greece (1821-32), the French invasion of Algiers (1830) and the empire-wide civil war of the 1830s and ‘40s which almost destroyed the Ottoman state and triggered a transimperial crisis. Through this, he illuminates the importance of Ottoman actors in the “Great Power” politics of the time and in decrypting the complexities of these interactions. 

 More than that, the case of Sultan Selim III writing to the British King George III to protest the support given by His Majesty’s Government to the troublesome Mamluks in Egypt (87) shows that older methods of diplomacy between hereditary monarchs continued despite the rise of new parvenu actors. This first part also accentuates Özavci’s precise appreciation of the historical realities of the time and importance of on-the-spot actors in shaping global events (83) whilst keeping an eye on the future and the continuities between these early interventions and those closer to our time, identifying how French Foreign Minister “Talleyrand became the first, but by no means the last, Western politician to overestimate the gratitude that would be generated among a Middle Eastern people by a foreign military occupation” (41). 

 In the second part, “The Invention of the Eastern Question”, Özavci analyses whether the traditional periodisation of 1815 marking a shift in the history of the long nineteenth century is as much of a useful analytic tool in the Levant as in post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna-era Europe (107). This point marks a shift in pace, sweeping deftly through over forty-five years of Levantine, Ottoman and Great Power politics picking up the thread of the rivalry between pashas Mehmet and Husrev. This is facilitated through internal conflict, transimperial machinations, growing Western influence and new actors on the stage of Middle Eastern history. One such character appearing for the first time in this part is Mustafa Reşid Pasha, shifting the emphasis from traditional accounts’ fascination with the Great Men of Europe – Metternich, Palmerston, Thiers et al. – to the experience of an Ottoman statesman who was the “first non-European figure to place an almost unwavering trust in the Vienna order.” Reşid advocated for collective European intervention for the benefit of the Porte (177) and proved the importance of 1815, albeit belatedly, in Middle Eastern affairs. This focus on Mustaf Reşid provides one of the book’s most notable contributions to – and deviations from – the existing revisionist literature on the topic. 

 Özavci’s analysis of the statesman’s writings demonstrates that an Ottoman concept of “civilization” existed at least as early as the 1830s when Reşid constructed a “rhetorical bifurcation” between the “unsteady and untrustworthy politics” of Mehmet and the “unwavering but slow progress of the Porte” (187). Therefore, in turn, this dichotomy proves that Makdisi’s concept of “Ottoman Orientalism” existed far earlier than he argued and was not just a colonialist construction to control the aforementioned “wild tribes” of Lebanon. Instead, the concept “was a hybrid product of the propaganda battle between Cairo and Istanbul and his [Reşid’s] encounter with the French (Guizotian) idea of civilization in Paris” (187). 

 The continuing story of the intra-imperial conflict between Mehmet and the Porte then brings Özavci to Mount Lebanon and, ultimately, the third and final part of the book: “The Mountain”. Focusing on the story of the paramount Druze chiefs, the Jumblatt family, Özavci chronicles the rise of the discourse and practice of sectarianism in the autonomous region during the first half of the nineteenth century and how this interacted with the competing interests of the Powers and Istanbul. Most importantly, however, he shows that sectarianism grew out of local social changes from the 1820s, before the import of European ideas of civilizationism or Ottoman concepts of reform culminating with the 1839 Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane. Thus, he breaks from the revisionist scholarship of the likes of Makdisi who attribute the ideology’s rise to a fusion of the two imported discourses and the traditional scholarship blaming age-old feuding or Ottoman divide-and-rule. This highlights Özavci’s brilliant implementation of little-used Ottoman and Lebanese sources to switch the agency of the period to the Maronite, Druze, Greek Orthodox and other inhabitants of the Mountain.

 Of course, this is not to say that he ignores the clear instances when European and Ottoman policies failed to achieve the security they desired and actually proved catalysts for the most destructive of the sectarian conflicts in 1860 due to the ignorance and misconceptions of the men who made them. Most notable in this vein is his discussion of elder Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich’s 1842 plan for the division of the Mountain into separated Maronite and Druze cantons, the latter, however, with very significant Christian populations. Despite repeated complaints about the plan from Ottoman Foreign Minister Ibrahim Sarim Pasha and British agent Richard Wood, Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Istanbul, Stratford Canning, argued the plan should go ahead despite some “difficulties of detail”; “a tragic testament to how decisions over the future of people who lived their own realities in the distant (Levant) were made in the metropoles” (263). In the end, when Sarim finally agreed to the plan for diplomatic necessity, “It was all in the Porte’s hands to successfully implement a plan it had fervently opposed” (264). The ensuing sectarian conflicts that bred out of the problems with this plan, and its implementation, are then presented using sources from all the involved parties, European, Levantine and Ottoman, allowing the reader to see the fuller picture of how each was responsible in some way. “Discerning whose account was true(r) is an almost impossible task” (272), according to Özavci. 

 Perhaps the most personally interesting due to my own research on post-1860 reorganisation in the region, but also a significant shift in the historiography in general, comes in the epilogue as Özavci looks at the aftermath of the catastrophic 1860 Mount Lebanon War and the future of the country.  While most previous studies have completely ignored the 1864 revisions made to the new statue devised to govern the country after the war, Dangerous Gifts ends with a close analysis of how the new Ottoman governor, Daud Pasha, guided the amendments in consultation with local circumstances and significantly reduced the sectarianism of the mutasarrifiyya’s institutions, dictated by European interference in 1861 (350). Though he ends the book at this point rather than continuing with the story of Mount Lebanon, this analysis provides a much more convincing explanation for the ensuing fifty-year “Long Peace” in the country’s history than do previous studies stressing the institutionalisation of sectarianism. 

 This contribution to the scholarship, along with those mentioned above breaking from the revisionist histories, typifies his brilliant use of a wide range of source material to change and enrich our understanding of the period. This book is essential reading for students and general readers interested in imperial politics and Levantine history and certainly succeeds in meeting the goal Özavci sets out at the beginning: “to develop out of a fiendishly complex story a narrative that is both intelligible and captivating for readers” (ix). More than that, his achievement also explains continued conflict in the Middle East, debunking Western perceptions of the region as beset by primordial strife, division, and sectarianism. Most importantly, his study illuminates the role of local factors and actors in causing modern conflicts, and shifts the emphasis from a view placing the dangers of intervention on the consequences for Western parties to one stressing the ensuing aggravation and militarisation of opposing local and imperial interests and the ultimately devastating and enduring repercussions for the peoples of the Levant themselves.