ABSTRACT
The rise of the Ottoman empire only postponed the ultimate fragmentation of the central Islamic lands. The Ottomans began as a border troop on the western reaches of the Seljuq state in Anatolia. Not only did the plague ravage the Arab world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there were deeper, systemic problems undermining the sultan’s centralized claims. Egypt entered the sixteenth century with a series of military rebellions against the Ottoman governors, while leftover or reconstituted Mamluk families competed with the military and the Ottoman governors for local dominance. Syria entered the eighteenth century suffering from the combined effects of tribal uprisings and the plague during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Formerly productive agricultural areas had been abandoned. At first a pejorative term, nationalism was used to describe the Calvinists and—interestingly enough—the “Mohammedans” in their insistence on independence; but in the mid-nineteenth century, nationalism quickly became normative.
