ABSTRACT
At a certain point in the nineteenth century the Christian polemic against Islam, the material interests of the European powers in the Ottoman state, foreign religious interests in the affairs of Ottoman Christians and the claims of these communities themselves converged in one stream. The process begins with the Treaty of Paris (settling the Crimean War) and accelerates with the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Thereafter European interests – commercial, diplomatic, financial, strategic and religious – form a tangled skein and the atmosphere created by the congress encouraged greater regulation and intervention in Ottoman affairs. At the core of this intervention stood narrow interests of state, camouflaged behind the motive of ‘humanitarian’ involvement and buttressed by public opinion sympathetic to the ‘plight’ of Ottoman Christians. One has to go back no further than 1860 to see how deeply public opinion could be affected. The rhetoric is familiar. ‘When the news of these events, even in unperfect records, reached this country’, Lord Russell wrote of the great violence between Muslims and Christians in Syria that year,
men naturally said the blood and treasure of Great Britain and France were poured out freely to maintain the independence of the Sultan. They asked for no territory, no exclusive privileges in return; they asked only that the Christian subjects of the Porte might be treated with humanity, to the great advantage of the Sultan himself. An outbreak of fanatical Mohammedanism we could well understand. But this treachery, brutality and cruelty on the part of persons selected by the Sultan himself to govern his best provinces shows either some deep desire to exterminate the Christians or an unheard-of degree of weakness and apathy at Constantinople or an amount of venality and corruption which is difficult to credit. 1
