|
The Ottoman Iraq (1532-1918)
When the Ottoman Empire
was dismembered following World War I and the
boundaries of the 20th-century state of Iraq were drawn, they bore
little resemblance to those of the provinces of Ottoman Iraq. Nor
had the name Iraq been attached to any of those
provinces. Ottoman Iraq was roughly approximate to the Arabian Iraq
of the preceding era, but without clearly defined borders. The
Zagros Mountains, which separated Arabian Iraq from
Persian Iraq, now lay on the Ottoman-Iranian frontier, but that
frontier shifted with the fortunes of war. On the west and south,
Iraq faded out somewhere in the sands of the Syrian
and Arabian deserts.
The incorporation of Arabian Iraq
into the Ottoman Empire not only separated it from
Persian Iraq but also reoriented it toward the Ottoman lands in
Syria and Anatolia, with
especially close ties binding the province (vilayet) of Diyar
Bakr to the Iraqi provinces. For administrative purposes,
Ottoman Iraq was divided into the three central
eyalets of Mosul, Baghdad, and
Basra, with the northern eyalet of
Sharihzor, east of the Tigris, and the southern eyalet of
Al-Hasa, on the western coast of the Persian Gulf.
These provinces only roughly reflected the geographic, linguistic,
and religious divisions of Ottoman Iraq.
Most of the
inhabitants of Mosul and Shahrizor
in the north and northeast were Kurds, Turks (Turkmens) and other
non-Arabs. Pastures and cultivated fields benefited
from the plentiful rainfall and melting winter snows of this largely
mountainous region. The Tigris and
Euphrates rivers flowing through the central and southern
plains created an irregular belt of irrigated farmlands bounded by
desert and merging into the marshlands around the head of the
Persian Gulf.
The people of the plains, marshes,
and deserts were overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking.
Few Turkish speakers were to be found outside of
Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, and some other
towns. Centuries of political upheavals, invasions, wars, and
general insecurity had taken their toll on Iraq's population,
especially in the urban centres. Destruction and neglect of the
irrigation system had restricted settled agriculture to a few areas,
the most extensive of which were between the rivers north of
Baghdad and around Basra in the south. As
much as half of the Arab and Kurdish
population in the countryside was nomadic or seminomadic. Outside
the towns, social organization and personal allegiances were
primarily tribal, with many of the settled cultivators having
retained their tribal ties. Baghdad, situated near
the geographic centre, reflected within itself the division between
the predominantly Shi'ite south and the largely
Sunnite north. Unlike Anatolia and
Syria, Iraq's non-Muslim
communities were modest in size, but there was an active
Jewish commercial and financial element in Baghdad,
and Assyrian Christians were prominent in
Mosul.
Absorbed piecemeal by the Ottoman
sultans Selim I and Süleyman I in
the 16th century, this region on the empire's eastern periphery was
the battleground in recurrent struggles between the Sunnite Ottomans
and the Shi'ite rulers of Iran and was subject to frequent Arab and
Kurdish tribal disturbances. It was never as thoroughly integrated
into the empire or as directly administered by the Ottomans
as was the western half of the Fertile Crescent.
Nevertheless, bearing in mind the destruction, chaos, and
fragmentation that had beset the region in the preceding centuries,
the expansion of the vast Ottoman political and
economic sphere to include Iraq brought with it
certain advantages.
Under the watchful eye of
Süleyman I's government, local administration was
reorganized; trade increased; the economic and living conditions of
most of the inhabitants improved; and the towns, especially
Baghdad, experienced some growth and new building. The
Ottomans at first attempted to rule the Iraqi
provinces directly, but in the 17th and 18th centuries a weakened
government in Istanbul was obliged to concede
extensive autonomy to the governors, and some areas
were beyond the reach of Ottoman authority for
extended periods. This trend was reversed in the 19th century when
administrative centralization and reorganization, undertaken by the
Ottoman government as part of a comprehensive
reform and modernization program, were extended to Iraq.
The reassertion of direct rule by the sultan's government did not,
however, halt the increasing imperial exploiting penetration of Iraq by
British and other European
interests.
|
|