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The “Second Egypt”: Cretan Refugees, Agricultural Development, and Frontier Expansion in Ottoman Cyrenaica, 1897–1904

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2021

Fredrick Walter Lorenz Open the ORCID record for Fredrick Walter Lorenz [Opens in a new window]
Fredrick Walter Lorenz*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California Los Angeles, 315 Portola Plaza, Bunche Hall, 6th Floor, Los Angeles, California90095, USA.
*
Corresponding author. florenz@g.ucla.edu
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Abstract

This article investigates the Ottoman state's endeavor to create the “second Egypt” by consolidating its imperial authority along the coastline and hinterland of Cyrenaica from 1897 to 1904. It examines the strategic settlement of Cretan Muslim refugees in territories situated between Benghazi and Derna and in al-Jabal al-Akhdar following the Cretan insurrection of 1897–98. I argue that Cretan Muslim refugees-turned-settlers served as skilled agriculturalists and experienced armed sentries who were integral to the Ottoman state's plans for economic development and expansionism in Cyrenaica. Focusing particularly on ‘Ayn al-Shahhat and Marsa Susa, this article contends that the establishment of Cretan Muslim agricultural colonies served to undermine the political and economic position of the Sanusi order by appropriating the order's properties and access to resources. This work offers a new perspective on how the Ottoman state reasserted its sovereignty in its frontier territory in Cyrenaica by harnessing the power of migration.

Keywords

LibyamigrationOttoman EmpireSanusi ordersettler colonialism
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 89 - 105
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Although there is no consensus on the translation of muhacir because it varies from case to case, I translate muhacir in this article to mean migrant, refugee, and refugee-turned-settler. For an in-depth analysis of the term, see Fratantuono, Ella, “State Fears and Immigrant Tiers: Historical Analysis as a Method in Evaluating Migration Categories,” Middle East Journal of Refugee Studies 2, no. 1 (2017): 99–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archive), Istanbul, Turkey (hereafter BOA), Y.EE 8/27, 08 Zilkade 1303/7 September 1886. This study has made extensive use of Ottoman bureaucratic reports and correspondence, documents on financial and military matters, and refugee petitions found in the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archive in Istanbul. Records from the Foreign Office (FO) within the National Archives also provided this study with a wealth of information from the perspective of British consular agents in Benghazi and Derna.

3 The Sanusi order, also called the Sanusiyya, was a 19th-century religious order operating in the Hijaz, Ottoman Libya, and Chad. The practices and teachings of the Grand Sanusi, al-Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Ali al-Sanusi (1787–1859), were disseminated in the numerous lodges of the order. For instance, see Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Anderson, Lisa, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; al-Dajani, Ahmad Sidqi, al-Haraka al-Sanusiyya: Nash'atuha wa Numuwuha fi-l-Qarn al-Tasiʻ ʻAshr (Beirut: Dar Lubnan li-l-Tibaʻa wa-l-Nashr, 1988)Google Scholar; and Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 For instance, see Michel Le Gall, “Forging the Nation-State: Some Issues in the Historiography of Modern Libya,” in The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography, eds. Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), 95–108; and Eileen Ryan, Religion as Resistance (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23.

5 Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

6 I use the term Ottoman Libya to refer to the regions of Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica. Ottoman documents refer to northern Cyrenaica as Benghazi or Berke. This territory extended from Benghazi to Derna and encompassed al-Jabal al-Akhdar (the Green Mountain). Benghazi underwent multiple political transformations from 1860 to 1911. It was designated a sub-province (sancak) dependent on Istanbul in 1863, a region under Tripoli's supervision in 1871, a full-fledged province (vilayet) in 1879, and then a sancak under Istanbul after 1888. See Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 89.

7 Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble, 9.

8 Extending from Benghazi to Derna, al-Jabal al-Akhdar comprises three different types of geographies: a northern plateau with streams leading to the sea, a middle steep gradient with dry riverbeds, gorges, and basins, and a southern semi-steppe zone that leads to the desert. With abundant annual precipitation ranging between 450 and 500 mm, the seasonal rain of the northern green plateau fills underground cisterns and wells year-round. From May to September, during the wet fall season, the bedouin habitually planted barley, wheat, and other crops, whereas from October to April they moved their pastures to the desert steppes of Benghazi. See Viktor Lug, Kyrenaika in alter und neuer Zeit (Reichenberg, Germany: Reichenberger Handels-Akademie, 1908), 20; Douglas L. Johnson, The Nature of Nomadism: A Comparative Study of Pastoral Migrations in Southwestern Asia and Northern Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Papers, 1969), 92; H. A. Benzabih, “The Jabal al-Akhdar: A Half Century of Nomadic Livelihood,” in Social and Economic Development of Libya, eds. E. G. H. Joffé and K.S. McLachlan (Cambridgeshire, UK: Middle East North African Studies Press, 1982), 196–97; and Michel F. Le Gall, “Pashas, Bedouin and Notables: Ottoman Administration in Tripoli and Benghazi, 1881–1902” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1986), 184–85.

9 Isa Blumi's analysis of Niš muhacir communities elucidates a clear example of refugee agency in destabilizing and reshaping local politics in Niš following the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78. See Ottoman Refugees, 1878–1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2, 48–51. Emphasis in the original.

10 Kenneth Pomeranz, “Empire & ‘Civilizing’ Missions, Past & Present,” Daedalus 134, no. 2 (2005): 41–42.

11 Steven Sabol, “The Touch of Civilization”: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 21.

12 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976).

13 For example, see Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311–42; Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011); Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble; and Ella Fratantuono, “Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement,” Journal of Genocide Research 21, no. 1 (2019): 1–24.

14 See Deringil, “They Live”; and Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–96.

15 Kuehn, Empire, 93.

16 Reşat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 104–6.

17 Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 65–75.

18 Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

19 For instance, see Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Sabri Ateş, The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

20 Nora Lafi, Une ville du Maghreb entre ancien régime et réformes ottomanes (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), 185.

21 E. G. H. Joffé, “Social and Political Structures in the Jafara Plain in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Joffé and McLachlan, Social and Economic Development, 31.

22 Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 72.

23 Jibril Muhammad al-Khufayfi, al-Nizam al-Daribi fi Wilayat Tarabulus al-Gharb 1835–1912 (Benghazi, Libya: Dar al-Kitab al-Wataniyya, 2000), 21.

24 For instance, see ‘Ali ‘Umar al-Hazil, al-Nizam al-Qada'i fi Wilayat Tarabulus al-Gharb fi-l-‘Ahd al-‘Uthmani al-Thani, 1835–1869 (Tripoli, Libya: Markaz Jihad al-Libiyyin li-l-Dirasat al-Tarikhiyya, 2009), 211; Ronald Bruce St. John, Libya: From Colony to Revolution (Oxford, UK: OneWorld, 2012); and Wafa' Kazim Madi al-Kandi, al-Waqiʻ al-Iqtiṣadi wa-l-Ijtimaʻi li-Wilayat Tarabulus al-Gharb fi-l-ʻAhd al-ʻUthmani al-Thani (1835–1911M) (Amman: Dar al-Ayyam li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʻ, 2017), 44.

25 Giambattista Biasutti, La politica indigena italiana in Libia: dall'occupazione al termine del governatorato di Italo Balbo: 1911–1940 (Pavia, Italy: Centro Studi Popoli Extraeuropei, 2004), 20.

26 Al-Khufayfi, al-Nizam, 22.

27 For instance, see Anthony J. Cachia, Libya Khilal al-Ihtilal al-‘Uthmani al-Thani 1835–1911 (Tripoli, Libya: Dar al-Farjani, 1975), 127–129; E. G. H. Joffé, “Trade and Migration between Malta and the Barbary States during the Second Ottoman Occupation Of Libya (1835–1911),” in Planning and Development in Modern Libya, eds. M. M. Buru, S. M. Ghanem, and K. S. McLachlan (London: Middle East North African Studies Press, 1985), 1–32; and Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 105.

28 ‘Abdallah ‘Ali Ibrahim, “Evolution of Government and Society in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (Libya) 1835–1911” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1982), 154.

29 Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, 91–92.

30 See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Italy and the Sanusiya Order in Cyrenaica,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11, no. 4 (1946): 846; and Dennis D. Cordell, “Eastern Libya, Wadai and the Sanusiya: A Tariqa and a Trade Route,” Journal of African History 18, no. 1 (1977): 33.

31 Nicola A. Ziadeh, Sanusiyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1958): 114.

32 Al-Dajani, al-Haraka, 83.

33 For instance, see al-Dajani, al-Haraka, 282–83; and Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi, 93.

34 Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble, 61.

35 Al-Dajani, al-Haraka, 254.

36 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 41–42.

37 Gotthold Hildebrand, Cyrenaïka als Gebiet künftiger Besiedelung (Bonn: Carl Georgi, 1904), 68.

38 Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 70.

39 “New Appointments,” The Leader, 16 February 1912 (Allahabad, India).

40 The Italians were specifically interested in the profits from apples, apricots, figs, olives, lemons, oranges, peaches, pears, pomegranates, quinces, and white mulberries of al-Jabal al-Akhdar. See Francesco Corò, Libiya athna' al-ʻAhd al-ʻUthmani al-Thani (Tripoli, Libya: Dar al-Farjani, n.d.), 113.

41 B. G. Martin, “Ahmad Rasim Pasha and the Suppression of the Fazzan Slave Trade, 1881–1896,” Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell'Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente 38, no. 4 (1983): 559; Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 105.

42 See A. Rainaud, La pentapole Cyrénéenne et la colonisation (Paris: Librarie Africaine et Coloniale, 1895), 32; and Domenico Tumiati, Nell'Africa romana: Tripolitania (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911), 104.

43 Ryan, Religion, 16.

44 Kasaba, A Moveable Empire, 93.

45 Sadık el-Müeyyed, Afrika Sahra-yı Kebiri'nde Seyahat (Istanbul: Çamlıca, 2018), 26–27.

46 Ussama Makdisi (“Ottoman Orientalism”) has integrated 19th-century Ottoman attitudes toward and representations of the Arab periphery within a theoretical framework he calls Ottoman Orientalism.

47 BOA, Y.MTV 53/71, 17 Muharrem 1309/23 August 1891.

48 Lisa Anderson, “Nineteenth-Century Reform in Ottoman Libya,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 3 (1984): 329–30.

49 BOA, Y.PRK.AZJ 19/22, 16 Şevval 1308/25 May 1891.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 BOA, DH.MKT 1874/73, 1 Rabiulevvel 1309/5 October 1891.

53 Surveyors calculated five individuals for each household, so it was estimated that five thousand migrants could be settled. See BOA, Y.PRK.KOM 8/4, 12 Muharrem 1309/18 August 1891.

54 Ömer Subhi, Trablusgarp ve Bingazi ile Sahra-yı Kebir ve Sudan-Merkezi (Istanbul: 1890), 48.

55 BOA, Y.PRK.KOM 8/4, 12 Muharrem 1309/18 August 1891.

56 BOA, Y.PRK.A 6/8, 2 Safer 1309/7 September 1891.

57 BOA, HR.ID 16/12, 9 Teşrinisani 1307/21 November 1891.

58 Rachel Simon, Libya between Ottomanism and Nationalism (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1987), 17.

59 Michel Le Gall, “The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 21, no. 1 (1989): 96.

60 Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 74.

61 Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi, 26.

62 Anderson, State and Social Transformation, 110.

63 Anderson, “Nineteenth-Century Reform,” 338.

64 St. John, Libya, 49.

65 Rüştü Çelik, Kandiye Olayları (Istanbul: Kitap, 2012), 26–27.

66 Pınar Şenışık, The Transformation of Ottoman Crete (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 169.

67 One work estimates the number of migrating Cretan Muslims at over fifty thousand. See Manos Perakis, “Muslim Exodus and Land Redistribution in Autonomous Crete (1898–1913),” Mediterranean Historical Review 26, no. 2 (2011): 137.

68 Pınar Şenışık, “Cretan Muslim Immigrants, Imperial Governance and the ‘Production of Locality’ in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 1 (2013): 96–98.

69 The National Archives, Kew, UK (hereafter TNA), FO 101/89, 9 August 1899.

70 Ülkü Özel Akagündüz, Suriye, Lübnan, Mısır, Libya, Tunus, Cezayir, Sudan, ve Yemen'de: Kayıp Türkler (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 2011), 73–74.

71 Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky has recently argued that Circassian refugees were one of the key players in the development of increased commercial and real estate activity in Amman during the late Ottoman period. See “Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 4 (2017): 605–23.

72 Kuehn, Empire, 79.

73 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/9, 16 July 1899.

74 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/29, 21 Cemazeyilevvel 1317/27 September 1899; BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/45, 25 Kanunusani 1315/6 February 1900.

75 TNA, FO 195/2054, 19 August 1899.

76 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/37, 20 Haziran 1315/2 July 1899.

77 BOA, Y.PRK.KOM 10/41, 28 Rabiulevvel 1317/6 August 1899.

78 J. W. Gregory, “Cyrenaica,” The Geographical Journal 47 (1916): 326.

79 For instance, see Andrea Pedretti, Un'escursione in Cirenaica (1901) (Rome: 1903), 916; and Jeannette Leonard Gilder and Joseph Benson Gilder, The Critic and the Literary World, vol. 46 (New Rochelle, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1905), 125–26.

80 Abdallah A. Ibrahim, Government & Society in Tripolitania & Cyrenaica (Libya) 1835–1911: The Ottoman Impact (Tripoli, Libya: Markaz Jihad al-Libyin, 1989), 71–72.

81 Evans-Pritchard, “Italy,” 846n6.

82 These acts of appropriation and dispossession resemble aspects of settler colonialism and what Lorenzo Veracini calls a “settler colonial sovereignty”; see Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 66.

83 Hugh Chisholm, “Cyrenaica,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 7 (New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910), 703.

84 Selami Şimşek, “Doğu Akdeniz'de Tahrip olan bir Kültür Mirası: Girit'te Tarîkatlar ve Tekkeler,” Atatürk Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Dergisi 32 (2007): 215–44.

85 See F. W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 535; and Melike Kara, Girit Kandiye'de Müslüman Cemaati: 1913–1923 (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2008), 80.

86 Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 145–46.

87 See Hasluck, Christianity, 536n1; and F. W. Hasluck, Bektaşilik Tetkikler (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1928), 38n1.

88 For instance, see B. Abu-Manneh, “Sultan Abdulhamid II and Shaikh Abulhuda Al-Sayyadi,” Middle Eastern Studies 15 (1979): 138–40; Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990), 52–54, 83; Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 194; and Rashed Chowdhury, “Pan-Islamism and Modernisation during the Reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, 1876–1909” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011), 159.

89 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Future of Islam (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), 87–88.

90 Kamal Soleimani, Islam and Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East, 1876–1926 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 96.

91 BOA, Y.MTV 191/35, 22 Zilhicce 1316/3 May 1899.

92 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/25, 20 Ağustos 1315/1 September 1899.

93 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/1–4, 5 Haziran 1315/17 June 1899.

94 TNA, FO 101/89, 18 September 1899.

95 Jasim Muḥammad Shaṭb ʻUbaydi, Iqlim Barqah bayna al-Hukm al-ʻUthmani al-Thani wa-al-Daʻwah al-Sanusiyya, 1835–1911 (Amman: Dar al-Ayyam li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʻ, 2018), 169.

96 BOA, A.MKT.MHM 506/11/18, 25 Ağustos 1317/7 September 1901.

97 Nadalini, Gianpaolo, “Da Marsa Susa ad Apollonia, fra neo-ellenismo e neo-colonizzazione,” in L'hellénisme, d'une rive à l'autre de la Méditerranée: Mélanges offerts à André Laronde, eds. Couvenhes, Jean-Christophe et al. (Paris: De Boccard, 2012), 83–84Google Scholar.

98 TNA, FO 101/89, 18 September 1899.

99 Ibid.

100 David George Hogarth, “A Visit to Cyrene,” Times, 16 August 1904.

101 Two Danish archaeologists were not given permission to conduct field work in ‘Ayn al-Shahhat because Cretan Muslims were settled there. See BOA, HR.TH 239/46, 7 Zilkade 1317/9 March 1900.

102 Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi, 43.

103 TNA, FO 195/2054, 22 January 1899.

104 TNA, FO 195/2054, 26 March 1899.

105 al-Dajani, Ahmad Ṣidqi, Libiya qubayla al-Ihtilal al-Itali, aw, Tarabulus al-Gharb fi Akhir al-‘Ahd al-‘Uthmani al-Thani, 1882–1911 (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-Fanniyya al-Haditha, 1971), 90Google Scholar.

106 See Bérard, Victor, Les affaires de Créte (Paris: A. Colin et cie, 1900), 308Google Scholar; and “The Situation in Crete,” Times, 2 June 1896.

107 TNA, FO 195/1983, 30–31 October 1897.

108 M.İ.C.İ., Girit Hailesi (Chania, Greece: Yusuf Kenan Matbaası, 1312 Rumi, 1897), 49.

109 Ibid, 100.

110 Furlong, Charles Wellington, The Gateway to the Sahara: Observations and Experiences in Tripoli (New York: C. Scribner, 1909), 11Google Scholar.

111 Al-Dajani, Libiya, 90.

112 ʻUbaydi, Iqlim, 182.

113 Henri Maximilien Poisson de la Martinière, La Marine française en Crète (Paris: R. Chapelot, 1911), 87.

114 For instance, see BOA.Y.MTV 261/140, 26 Rabiulahir 1322/10 July 1904; and Gilder and Gilder, Critic, 123.

115 For instance, see Hogarth, “Visit”; Gilder and Gilder, Critic, 123; and Martino, Giacomo de, Cirene e Cartagine (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1908), 46–47Google Scholar.