How far the decree was motivated by a desire to enlist British support for the Ottoman Empire at a time of crisis is a matter of controversy. There was certainly an element of English window dressing in the liberal language of the Hatt-i Sharif, whose final wording also owed much to Ponsonby, the British ambassador. But this does not mean that the Hatt-i Sharif was insincere, reluctantly conceded as a tactical device to secure British support. At the heart of the decree was a genuine belief in the need to modernize the Ottoman Empire. Reshid and his followers were convinced that to rescue the empire they ultimately needed to create a new secular concept of imperial unity (Ottomanism) based on the equality of all the Sultan’s subjects, regardless of their faith. It was a mark of the seriousness with which the reformers took their task, as well as a sign of their concern to pacify the potential opposition of conservatives, that the concessions of the Hatt-i Sharif were couched in terms of the defence of Islamic traditions and the precepts of the ‘glorious Koran’. Indeed, the Sultan and many of his most prominent reformist ministers, including Mustafa Reshid and Mehmet Hüsrev, the Grand Vizier in 1839–41, had close connections to the Naqshbandi lodges (tekkes), where a strict emphasis on the teachings of Islamic law was preached. In many ways the Tanzimat reforms were an attempt to create a more centralized but more tolerant Islamic state.41
The Ottoman government did very little to implement its lofty declarations, however. Its promise to improve the conditions of the Christian population was the main sticking point, inciting as it did the opposition of the traditional Muslim clergy and conservatives. There were only minor improvements. The death penalty for apostasy was renounced by the Sultan in 1844, although a small number of Muslims who had converted to Christianity (and Christians who had reversed conversion to Islam) were still executed on the authority of local governors. Blasphemy continued to be punished by the death sentence. Christians were admitted to some of the military schools and were liable to conscription, but since they were not likely to be promoted to the senior ranks, most chose to pay a special tax for exemption from service. From the late 1840s Christians were allowed to become members of the provincial councils that checked the work of governors. They also began to sit on juries alongside Muslims in the commercial courts where Western legal principles were liberally applied. But otherwise there was not much change. The slave trade continued, most of it involving the capture of Christian boys and girls from the Caucasus for sale in Constantinople. The Turks continued to regard the Christians as inferior, and thought that Muslim privileges should not be given up. The informal rules and practices of the administration, if not all the written laws, continued to ensure that the Christians were treated as second-class citizens, although they were rapidly emerging as the dominant economic group in the Ottoman Empire, which became a growing source of tension and envy – especially when they evaded taxes by acquiring foreign passports and protection.
Returning to Constantinople for his third term as ambassador in 1842, Stratford Canning became increasingly despondent about the prospects of reform. The Sultan was too young, and Reshid too weak, to stand up to the conservatives, who gradually gained the upper hand against the reformers in the Council (Divan) of the Porte. The reform agenda was increasingly entangled in personal rivalries, in particular between Reshid and Mehmet Ali Pasha,c one of Reshid’s reformist protégés, who served as ambassador in London from 1841 to 1844, and then as Foreign Minister from 1846 to 1852, when he replaced Reshid as Grand Vizier. Such was Reshid’s jealousy of Mehmet Ali that, by the early 1850s, he had even joined the Muslim opposition to granting equal rights to the Sultan’s Christian subjects in the hope of stopping his rival. The reforms were also hampered by practical difficulties. The Ottoman government in Constantinople was far too distant and too weak to force through laws in a society without railways, post offices, telegraphs or newspapers.
But the main obstacle was the opposition of traditional élites – the religious leaders of the millets – who felt beleaguered by the Tanzimat reforms. All the millets protested, especially the Greeks, and there was a sort of secularist coup in the Armenian one; but the reforms were most opposed by Islamic leaders and élites. This was a society where the interests of the local pashas and the Muslim clergy were heavily invested in the preservation of the traditional millet system with all its legal and civil disabilities against the Christians. The more the Porte attempted to become an agency of centralization and reform, the more these leaders stirred up local grievances and reactionary Muslim feeling against a state which they denounced as ‘infidel’ because of its increasing dependence on foreigners. Incited by their clergy, Muslims demonstrated against the reforms in many towns: there were acts of violence against Christians; churches were destroyed; and there were even threats to burn the Latin Quarter in Constantinople.
For Stratford Canning, who was no friend of Islam, this reaction raised a moral dilemma: could Britain continue to support a Muslim government that failed to stop the persecution of its Christian citizens? In February 1850 he was thrown into despair after hearing of ‘atrocious massacres’ of the Christian population in Rumelia (in a region later part of Bulgaria). He wrote in gloomy terms to Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, explaining that ‘the great game of improvement is altogether up for the present’.
The master mischief in this country is dominant religion … Though altogether effete as a principle of national strength and reviving power, the spirit of Islamism, thus perverted, lives in the supremacy of the conquering race and in the prejudices engendered by a long tyrannical domination. It may not be too much to say that the progress of the empire towards a firm re-establishment of its prosperity and independence is to be measured by the degree of its emancipation from that source of injustice and weakness.
Palmerston agreed that the persecution of the Christians not only invited but even justified the policy pursued by the Russians. In his view, it gave Britain little choice but to withdraw support for the Ottoman government. Writing to Reshid the following November, he foresaw that the Ottoman Empire was ‘doomed to fall by the timidity and weakness and irresolution of its sovereign and his ministers, and it is evident we shall ere long have to consider what other arrangement can be set up in its place’.42
British intervention in Turkish politics had meanwhile brought about a Muslim reaction against Western interference in Ottoman affairs. By the early 1850s Stratford Canning had become far more than an ambassador or adviser to the Porte. The ‘Great Elchi’, or Great Ambassador, as he was known in Constantinople, had a direct influence on the policies of the Turkish government. Indeed, at a time when there was no telegraph between London and the Turkish capital and several months could pass before instructions arrived from Whitehall, he had considerable leeway over British policy in the Ottoman Empire. His presence was a source of deep resentment among the Sultan’s ministers, who lived in terror of a personal visit from the dictatorial ambassador. Local notables and the Muslim clergy were equally resentful of his efforts on behalf of the Christians, and saw his influence on the government as a loss of Turkish sovereignty. This hostility to foreign intervention in Ottoman affairs – by Britain, France or Russia – would come to play an important role in Turkish politics on the eve of the Crimean War.