But the Patient Died.

• Author: Pryce-Jones, David
• Position: Review

Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 397 pp., $29.95.

IN ITS HEYDAY, for two full centuries after the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire was a superpower, complete with ideology. An absolute ruler the Ottoman sultan was also Caliph, and Muslims everywhere were supposed to acknowledge his spiritual as well as temporal supremacy. The Ottomans were then in the forefront of military technology. They conquered Muslims and Christians alike, enslaving some of the latter and, with a stroke of originality all their own, transforming them into an elite corps. Pioneers of bureaucracy, the Ottomans devised a centralized organization of their subjects according to religious community--a form of pluralism, however imperfect. Machiavelli thought that they were likely to overrun Europe. Writing in the 1530s when Ottoman expeditions were raiding Italian ports, the great historian Guicciardini feared the moment had finally come.

For reasons having to do with social structure and outlook, the Ottomans in fact failed to keep pace with Western innovation, particularly in the sciences. A number of envoys and courtiers fatally misreported to the sultan that the Age of Enlightenment had nothing to teach them. Amid general astonishment at his audacity; Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 invaded and occupied Egypt, hitherto an Ottoman backwater. The Ottoman order would never be the same. Its protracted decline throughout the nineteenth century came to be known as the Eastern Question, a delicate euphemism for a great power struggle that was the nineteenth century's equivalent of the Cold War. Territory was to be gained, boundaries redrawn, and commercial advantages enjoyed. The potential winners were the British, Habsburg and Russian empires, with France in the running, Germany at the rear, and Iran at the sidelines. If the powers could not obtain what they sought, they would nevertheless thwart the ambitions of others. Here was a laboratory illust ration of what used to be the central doctrine of international diplomacy, that a balance of forces best ensured the peace.

European encroachment on Muslim lands was in fact part of the normal historical process whereby the strong and the weak are continually adjusting their relationships. Muslim weakness was of course open to analysis and remedy; but it proved emotionally more satisfying to blame others rather than themselves. Thus, a myth was slowly to crystallize around the Eastern Question and eventually to deform reality altogether. Today it appears to more and more Muslims--the Islamist militants first and foremost--that the Europeans were in agreement and even conspiracy to take their resources, destroy their culture, and suppress Islam. Out to achieve such ends, Europeans of all occupations and nationalities--and by imaginative extension, Americans as well--appear malign and wanton by definition, an undifferentiated mass lumped under the single reductive word "imperialist." This is a choice term of abuse borrowed from the communist lexicon (which in turn had borrowed it from the liberal). It served to vilify the supposed intention of Western powers to impose their values everywhere and exploit the whole world.

IN EMPIRES of the Sand...