In 1925, the French Mandate government in Syria faced an armed uprising led by a rough alliance of Druze and Sunni Arab local elites. While this conflict can be validly interpreted as a clash between colonial power and nascent nationalisms, or as a contest between traditional local elites and the modernization and centralization introduced by the French, the conflict also included many episodes of explicitly sectarian violence. This paper argues that this violence, rather than being incidental or a result of colonial interference, reflected deep-seated sectarian divides in Syrian society that preceded and outlasted French involvement in Syria. Anti-French forces burned several Catholic villages in southern Syria. Insurgents massacred Armenian refugees outside Damascus, and local Muslim leaders, fearing a repeat of the 1860 massacres, organized to protect Damascus’ Christian quarter. Rebels besieged the Christian holy city of Maʿalula in the winter of 1925-1926. Christians in Hama faced boycotts and attacks, and Hama newspapers openly called for a “massacre” of Christians. For their part, Armenians and Christian Syrians fighting for the Mandate government committed atrocities against Sunni Muslims in the Damascus countryside and elsewhere, and the French supplied weapons to Christian villages to fight the rebels. While some Christians supported the uprising, and prominent rebel leaders tried to attract Christian support, most Christians either stood aloof or openly supported the French. This was especially true among Catholics and Armenians. Many scholars (most prominently, Michael Provence) correctly argue that the French encouraged this sectarian dynamic in order to justify their rule in Syria, styling themselves according to their historic role as “protector” of Levantine Christians. However, the violence itself revealed sectarian rifts in Syria, which have emerged periodically at moments of economic pressure (as Philip Khoury argues was the case in the 1860 massacres) or political uncertainty and insecurity (as Leila Fawaz claims vis-à-vis 1860.) These rifts and the violence they engendered in 1925 cannot be reduced to French colonial constructions, as Benjamin White and others contend. This paper draws on American and British diplomatic archives, French administrative records, and firsthand accounts from the siege of Maʿalula, as well as secondary literature including Philip Khoury’s Syria and the French Mandate, Michael Provence’s The Great Syrian Revolt, N. E. Bou-Nacklie’s account of the 1925 Hama uprising, and Ellen Marie Lust-Okar’s exploration of the relationship between the French Mandate and Armenian refugees in Syria.

Much has been written in recent years of the resurgent imperial tendencies of the late Ottoman state. It should be remembered, however, that in the eyes of many it continued to be viewed as a vital force in the struggle against European colonialism. In particular, the Ottoman Middle East, and especially Istanbul, constituted one of the focal points of South Asian discontent and opposition to British imperial rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not only did it feature prominently in the South Asian Muslim imagination as the seat of the Caliphate, and as such a last bastion of Islamic sovereignty against European imperialist expansion, but it provided a space beyond the direct reach of British authority for dissidence and activism. In consequence, from the first rumblings of Indian anti-imperialist nationalism in the uprising of 1857 until Turkish Independence in 1923, there was steady traffic of anti-imperialists intellectuals, renegade ulema and mujahideen wishing to fight for the Ottoman cause that flowed to the Ottoman heartlands, both via Afghanistan and Persia to the north and intermingled in the burgeoning Hajj traffic. This paper focuses on the activities of this revolutionary diaspora specifically during the First World War and argues that they were important participants not only in the swelling Indian nationalist struggle, but in the Middle East theatre itself, though in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. South Asians collaborated extensively with the Ottoman and German authorities to disseminate propaganda and conduct a series of intrigues against the British in the Middle East, many centred on the thousands of Indian British troops deployed in the region, of whom a number defected. However, Indian spies were also widely deployed by the British themselves before and during the conflict. Rather than seeing South Asians active in the wartime Middle East as proxies for German, British or Ottoman interests, this paper emphasises them as active agents in their own right, attempting to navigate the complex webs of ideology, allegiance and intrigue in pursuit of their goals, at a time when later national identities had yet to fully coalesce. At the same time, their activities demonstrate the ways in which South Asia and the Middle East were bound together in this period, both by imperialist competition and the shared political and intellectual movements against imperialism that criss-crossed the continents opposing it.

It is quite well known that France’s North African dependencies provided large numbers of troops, great quantities of provisions, and critical manpower to the Metropole during the Great War, 1914-1918. Even Morocco, which was by no means fully under French control at the war’s outbreak, contributed 45,000 troops, all technically volunteers, to the Western Front. Many perished there in the service of France, even as France was pressing forward with the conquest of Morocco, also with the help of Moroccan troops and, as in the case of the European war, in the name of the Moroccan sultan and his government. Most of the works that treat with this apparently ironic situation have based their descriptions and assessments on French sources. These sources see Moroccan service and resistance only in terms of loyalty and disloyalty to France; as evidence of the acceptance or rejection of France’s version of what was then modern and civilized. Recent scholarship on Morocco by Driss Maghraoui and Mohamed Bekraoui has brought new information and a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to the discussion of military service, and issues of loyalty, collaboration, and resistance. Also, though still rare, more local voices have been brought into recent discussions about how the Great War was experienced by both soldiers and civilians in the Middle East and North Africa (e.g. Salim Tamari, Leila Fawaz). These have greatly assisted the critical reassessment of both colonial and nationalist discourses on the meaning and consequences of the war for the people living there as well as the regimes that emerged afterwards. Using biographical/autobiographical material drawn from Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Susi’s twenty-volume work al-Ma`sul, as well as published and archival materials from Moroccan, French and Spanish sources, this paper seeks to contribute to both of these discussions. It brings in voices of Moroccan resistance fighters, local and regional tribal leaders, proponents of jihad, and those who saw it as a noble duty impossible to realize, and people simply struggling to survive within whatever political order might be imposed. The paper demonstrates the complexity and contingency of their decisions, the shifting relationship between ideology and practical action, and the calculations that went into reaching a modus vivendi with more centralized government and foreign rule.

The emergence of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (A.R.F.- also known as the Dashnaks) in 1890, marked the opening of a new front of guerrilla warfare initiated by the ethnic minorities of the Ottoman Empire throughout the second half of the 19th century. A scrutiny of Dashnak activities from the 1890’s until the early 1900’s, indicates a gradual improvement of military strategies and operational tactics. This paper argues that the establishment of the Dashnak military academy in Bulgaria in 1906 was a crucial element in the institutionalization of the A.R.F. military platform, which was dictated by the political and military developments of the region at the time. In other words, this paper attempts to understand the history of the academy, by putting it in the context of Armenian-Bulgarian/Macedonian cooperation on the one hand, and the expansion of the Dashnak operational terrain in the Balkans as well as the Caucasus stipulated by A.R.F. Congresses on the other. Given the scarcity of the material on this particular topic, I will utilize published A.R.F. and Ottoman archives as well as secondary literature, in order to gauge the political/military implications of this academy and its significance in generating cross-fertilization among revolutionary organizations in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century.

My paper addresses a highly debated topic in late Ottoman history: inter-communal violence between the Muslim and Christian communities of the Empire. Studies that focus on this topic have often focused on the Young Turk period and especially rested on the discussion of whether the CUP leaders' deportation of Armenians throughout World War I constituted an act of genocide or not. Out of this discussion, there emerged two contrasting and mutually exclusive literatures which either blamed the Great Powers or the Ottoman state for instigating the inter-communal violence of the late Ottoman period. By focusing on the immediate period after World War I, my paper intends to problematize this literature by testing their claims on the reasons and actors of the inter-communal violence that occurred in Maras during the first two months of 1920. The Maras uprising occurred during the time of the Turkish War of Independence when the Empire's territories were occupied by the victorious Entente Powers right after the Mudros Treaty of October 1918. Maras and its vicinity was firstly occupied by Britain following the treaty and then by France beginning from November 1919. Since the beginning of the French occupation, there occurred clashes between the Muslims and Armenians of the city although both the local and colonial authorities intervened in order to prevent further exacerbation of inter-communal violence. As the Maras uprising began in late January and ended twenty days later by French retreat from the region, the reasons behind its instigation and its outcome of French defeat have been the object of a disputed literature. The Turkish official historiography evaluated the Maras uprising as a heroic nationalist struggle against colonial occupation while certain Armenian scholars have evaluated it as a continuation of the genocidal policies of CUP since World War I, who were intent on massacring the Armenian survivors. My research, on the other hand, brings into scrutiny the claims of both literatures by problematizing the roles they ascribe either to the leaders of the nationalist movement or the French colonial state in terms of their control over the uprising. In other words, by focusing on the memoirs of the main actors involved in the conflict, as well as the published documents of the Ottoman Empire, France, and United States, my research the intends to narrate the uprising within the initiative of local actors instead of a direct outcome of French or Turkish state policy.