Page:PhilipK.Hitti-SyriaAShortHistory.djvu/226

Rh Clearly the dark ages which began under Seljuk Turks were getting darker under Ottoman Turks. While Europe was entering upon its age of enlightenment, Syria was groping in Ottoman darkness.

Occasionally reforms were introduced by able grand vizirs or bold sultans, but all remained merely ink on paper because of obstruction and opposition by Janissaries, corrupt officials, local collaborators and powerful conservative theo- logians. Even after the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826, reform rescripts could not be effectively implemented and the old corrupt and inefficient system persisted far into the modern period, which for Syria and Lebanon began about 1860.

Neither the political nor the ethnic structure of Syria was seriously affected by the Ottoman conquest. The only radical change in the Ottoman period was incidental and involved the desert tribes, which migrated into the Syrian Desert from Arabia. In this last great bedouin immigration were included such currently prominent groups as the Shammar and the Anazah, of which the Ruwalah are a major branch. Turks came and went as officials but there was no Turkish colonization of the land. At heart they and their Syrian subjects always remained strangers to one another. A few thousand Moslem Circassians drifted into northern Syria and Transjordan after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, and several thousand Armenian refugees found a haven in Lebanon after the first World War. Arabic remained the language of the people. It borrowed only a few Turkish words, mostly relating to politics, army and food.

Syrian economic life underwent a steady decline for which Ottoman maladministration, however, was not entirely to blame. The Ottoman conquest of the Arab East coin- cided with changes in the international trade routes that left that region economically insignificant. The discovery of America and of the Cape of Good Hope route to India deprived the Arab world of its intermediate position between Rh