Causes and the Historical Debate

The 1860 massacre had no single cause. This file sets out, both-sides and soberly (§4), the tangled factors historians identify — the collapse of the feudal order and peasant revolt in Mount Lebanon, the destabilizing Ottoman reforms, socioeconomic resentment sharpened by European commercial penetration, the breakdown of Ottoman authority, and the spillover of the Druze–Maronite war — and records the pivotal role of Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, who sheltered thousands of Christians.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

Against a Single Cause

The temptation, in a martyr’s compendium, is to explain the massacre of 1860 in one word — “fanaticism,” “persecution,” “Islam” — and to leave it there. The serious scholarship of the events refuses every such reduction. Leila Fawaz’s standard monograph is titled, pointedly, An Occasion for War: the sectarian violence was the occasion, not the sufficient cause, of a catastrophe whose roots ran through the whole social, economic, and political order of Ottoman Syria and Lebanon (Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, London: I.B. Tauris, 1994). Ussama Makdisi’s influential study argues, more strongly still, that “sectarianism” itself was not an ancient, unchanging fact but a modern formation — a way of organizing communal identity and violence that emerged in the nineteenth century out of Ottoman reform, European intervention, and local competition (Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Eugene Rogan’s recent reconstruction likewise stresses the convergence of many factors and warns explicitly against reading the Damascus killing as a straightforward religious pogrom (Eugene Rogan, The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 2024). The both-sides task here is to lay out the factors these historians identify without collapsing them into one.

The Collapse of the Old Order in Mount Lebanon

The proximate origin lay in Mount Lebanon, where the traditional feudal society — Druze and Maronite, lords and peasants — was breaking down. The Shihab dynasty’s conversion to Christianity had shifted the old balance and cost the Druze much of their former political and feudal power; a Maronite peasant revolt (led by Tanyus Shahin in 1858–59) rose against the aristocratic order; and the “Double Qaimaqamate” of 1842, which partitioned the mountain into Christian and Druze administrative zones under European pressure, had hardened communal lines (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994; “1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus,” on the Shihab conversion, the Shahin revolt, and the Qaimaqamate). When war came in the spring of 1860, it was fought along these fault lines — a conflict at once feudal, agrarian, and sectarian — and the Druze victories left thousands of Christians dead and set a hundred thousand in flight (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994). It was this war, and its refugees, that carried the violence to Damascus.

The Ottoman Reforms — and Their Backlash

A second, deeper factor was the great Ottoman reform program, the Tanzimat. The reform edicts of 1839 and, especially, the Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856 promised legal equality to all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion — abolishing, in principle, the subordinate dhimmī status of Christians and Jews (on the Tanzimat and its promise of equality, Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, 2000; Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, Cambridge, 2001). This was, in intention, an emancipation. But its effect on the ground was destabilizing and, in places, incendiary. Many Muslims experienced the sudden legal elevation of Christians — and the visible confidence it gave a minority long accustomed to deference — as a humiliating inversion of the God-given order of things, and the resentment it bred was among the ingredients of 1860 (Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, 2000, on the reforms as a source of Muslim grievance; Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024). The reforms that were meant to bind the empire’s peoples together in equal citizenship instead, in the short run, sharpened the sense of communal difference and grievance.

Socioeconomic Resentment and European Penetration

Bound up with the reforms was an economic transformation. Through the nineteenth century, European commercial power penetrated the Ottoman economy under the Capitulations — the treaties granting European merchants, and their local Christian and Jewish protégés, extraterritorial privileges and commercial advantages (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024, on the Capitulations and European economic dominance; Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994). Christian merchants and artisans of cities like Damascus, tied into these expanding European trade networks (silk above all), often prospered — while many Muslims, and the older guild economy, felt themselves disadvantaged and displaced. The wealth of the Christian quarter of Damascus was thus not only a fact but a grievance, and when the mob fell on Bab Touma it fell on a quarter that was both Christian and visibly prosperous — plunder and resentment fused with religious hatred (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994, on the socioeconomic dimension; Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024). Historians differ on how much weight to give the economic versus the religious motive, but none omits either.

The Breakdown of Ottoman Authority

A fourth factor was the failure of the state. Whatever the underlying tensions, the massacre required the collapse of the authority that should have prevented it. The governor of Damascus, Ahmad Pasha, mishandled the crisis catastrophically — Rogan stresses his incompetence and panic, his provocative humiliation of young Muslim men, and his failure to deploy his forces — and the Ottoman garrison lost discipline, with soldiers abandoning their posts and, in some accounts, joining the rioters (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024; “1860 civil conflict,” on Ahmad Pasha and the soldiers).

[Disputed: whether the Ottoman authorities in Damascus were actively complicit in the massacre or merely culpably incompetent. (a) The complicity reading: soldiers joined or led rioters, the governor gave contradictory signals and withheld protection, and the Ottoman state's own subsequent execution of Ahmad Pasha for "negligence and complicity" implies official guilt (Fawaz, *An Occasion for War*, 1994; "1860 civil conflict"). (b) The incompetence reading: Eugene Rogan's recent reconstruction emphasizes panic, mismanagement, and loss of control rather than a deliberate state plan, noting that a conspiracy is not needed to explain a breakdown of this kind (Rogan, *The Damascus Events*, 2024). The two are not wholly exclusive — local complicity amid central incompetence is possible — and historians weigh them differently. This collection reports both and adjudicates neither.]

The Ottoman state’s own reckoning was severe: the special commissioner Fuad Pasha convened a tribunal, executed Ahmad Pasha, and put to death scores of others (with reports of over a hundred Druze executed for their role), while the Great Powers, led by France, sent an international expedition to Syria (Fawaz, An Occasion for War, 1994; “1860 civil conflict,” on Fuad Pasha’s tribunal and the French expedition under Beaufort d’Hautpoul). The state, that is, treated the massacre as a crime against its own order, not as its policy.

Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri: The Muslim Who Saved the Christians

No sober account of 1860 can omit its most important counter-fact: that thousands of Christians were saved by Muslims, and above all by the Algerian exile Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri (Emir Abdelkader). Al-Jaza’iri was a Sufi scholar and the famed leader of the Algerian resistance to the French conquest, living in exile in Damascus. When the massacre began, he and his Algerian followers — several hundred to a thousand armed men — went into the burning quarter to rescue Christians, brought thousands under the protection of his own house and his supporters’ homes, and escorted many more to the safety of the Damascus citadel; when the mob came to demand the Christians he was sheltering, he confronted it under arms and refused (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024, on al-Jaza’iri’s rescue; “1860 civil conflict” and “Emir Abdelkader,” Wikipedia, on the numbers — up to some four thousand under his roof, and thousands more escorted to the citadel — and the confrontation with the mob). His action won him honor across Europe and remains one of the most cited episodes of the whole affair (Rogan, The Damascus Events, 2024; on its meaning, see Not a Simple Story).

This must be verified and stated because it is both true and essential to the honesty of the telling: at the very moment the Christians of Damascus were being martyred, Muslims of Damascus were dying and risking death to save them. The martyrdom of the Damascus Christians and the heroism of their Muslim rescuers are parts of one history, and the Church that venerates the martyrs is not thereby licensed to indict a faith — for that same faith produced al-Jaza’iri.

References

Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The multi-causal account; the Mount Lebanon war; the socioeconomic dimension; the Ottoman failure; Fuad Pasha’s tribunal and the French expedition.)
Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Sectarianism as a modern formation; the Tanzimat as a source of grievance; the reordering of communal identity.)
Rogan, Eugene. The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Basic Books / London: Allen Lane, 2024. (The convergence of causes; the Capitulations and European economic dominance; Ahmad Pasha’s incompetence; the estimate of ~5,000 dead; al-Jaza’iri’s rescue of Christians.)
Masters, Bruce. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The Tanzimat, the dhimma, and the position of the Christian communities.)
“1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus.” Wikipedia. (The Shihab conversion, Shahin revolt, and Qaimaqamate; Ahmad Pasha and the soldiers; Fuad Pasha’s tribunal; the French expedition; al-Jaza’iri.)
“Emir Abdelkader.” Wikipedia. (Al-Jaza’iri’s biography and his protection of the Christians of Damascus in 1860.)