On Monday 9 July 1860, the old city of Damascus exploded in unprecedented communal violence. Over the course of eight days, a mostly Muslim crowd tried to exterminate the Christian community. Surviving Damascenes remembered the bloodletting, eyes downcast, as “the Damascus Events”.
The murderous mob in Damascus took inspiration from a civil war in neighbouring Mount Lebanon earlier that same summer. In late May 1860, the Druze community launched a series of surprise attacks on Christian strongholds in the southern highlands. Druze victories over Lebanese Christians excited a blood lust in Damascus that fed on deep and growing antagonisms against their own Christian neighbours. When the Druze over-ran the Lebanese Christian stronghold of Zahleh in June 1860, shopkeepers strung up lanterns in the markets of Damascus in celebration.
While the violence in Mount Lebanon stemmed from different roots than in Damascus and involved different communities — Druzes versus Maronites in Mount Lebanon, Muslims versus all Christian denominations in Damascus — they had one element in common: the attackers believed the Christians posed an existential threat to their lives and livelihoods. In the face of such a threat, extermination came to be seen as a reasonable solution. In that sense, both events were genocidal moments.
It would be comforting to distance ourselves in the 21st century from the barbaric horrors of communal mass murder as relics of ages past. Unfortunately, genocidal moments and outright genocides (the distinction can be drawn between massacres in which the attackers are deterred in their bid to exterminate, and genocides in which extermination in part or whole is achieved) remain an enduring feature of modern history.
In the 75 years since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948, the world has witnessed repeated instances of mass murder across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia: in the Bosnian conflict and the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, the violence against the Darfuri people of Sudan, Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq and the Burmese attacks on the Rohingya in Myanmar in the 2010s to name but some of the most recent.
Today, Israel stands before the International Court of Justice after South Africa lodged a case accusing it of perpetrating genocide against the people of Gaza following the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7 2023. Whatever the judges’ eventual ruling on these charges, which Israel rejects, both sides in this conflict now see the other as an existential threat that seeks their extermination. We wonder how Israelis and Palestinians might overcome the deeply divisive traumas caused by the Israel-Hamas war to live in peace as neighbours.
Yet such reconstruction and reconciliation must happen. And the Damascus Events, as well as showing us how societies can descend into violence, are also an example of how they can pull back from the brink.
In 1860, nearly 85 per cent of Damascus’s estimated total population of 150,000 were Muslim. Christians were a distinct minority, representing no more than 10-12 per cent of the total population. The Jewish community numbered less than 5 per cent. Christian homes and churches were concentrated in the east of the walled city centre, while Jews lived in the nearby southern quarters.
Until the middle of the 19th century, Ottoman Christians and Jews enjoyed security of life and property as protected but distinctly second-class citizens. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, Damascus witnessed major changes in society and economy that were to challenge this long-standing social hierarchy and threaten the primacy of the city’s Muslim community.
Starting in the 1840s, European industrial goods began to flood the markets of Damascus. Syrian Christians, hired as agents for European trading houses, were prime beneficiaries of a business that undermined local weavers and merchants. The European powers dispatched consuls to Damascus to protect their growing interests. These consuls hired local Christians for clerical jobs that conferred tax and legal privileges over the city’s Muslim merchants.
By the 1850s, the Christians of Damascus were gaining in wealth and influence thanks to their European connections. These gains were compounded by Ottoman reforms in 1856 that conferred equality before the law on Muslims, Christians and Jews. Suddenly, the minority communities shed their second-class status and claimed equality with the city’s Muslim elites. Two decades of Christian gains at Muslim expense generated deepening resentments.
Rather than moderating their behaviour to mollify the Muslim community, the Christians of Damascus grew if anything more assertive after 1856. As one Muslim notable recalled in his diary: “The Europeans . . . impressed on the Christians that the Tanzimat [administrative reforms] made the Muslim and the Christian the same, all God’s creatures, so why shouldn’t a Christian wear the same clothes as a Muslim and so on. If a Christian quarrelled with a Muslim, whatever the Muslim said to him the Christian would say the same and more. If they complained to the government, it would take the side of the Christian.” For the Muslims of Damascus, equality with non-Muslims was an inversion of the natural order.
These changes gave rise to antagonisms between Muslims and Christians in the late 1850s. Yet those forces, however divisive, were not sufficient to engender mass murder. It took the bloodletting in Mount Lebanon to set an example for genocidal violence. But for the events in Mount Lebanon, the Damascenes might never have thought of wholesale massacre as the solution to their own “Christian problem”.
If the Druze massacres of Lebanese Christians unleashed a bloodlust among resentful Damascene Muslims, the rush of dangerous emotions did not stop there. Many Damascene Muslims believed their Christian neighbours harboured similarly violent aspirations towards them.
Fear fanned the flames of rumours. One Damascene Christian recorded how, following the massacres in Mount Lebanon, a Muslim friend “asked me if it was true that there were 100 Christian houses each hiding 1,000 armed men” waiting to rise up and kill Damascene Muslims in retribution. The same Christian reported wild rumours of alleged Christian massacres against the Muslims of Jerusalem and the Syrian town of Homs to the north while the Muslims were at Friday prayer. “Thus lies intended to enflame the rage of the Muslims are confirmed quickly,” he concluded.
As June 1860 drew to a close, Muslims in Damascus prepared to celebrate Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday in the Islamic calendar. Normally a festive season, the approach of the Eid in 1860 was marked by an irrational fear of Christian reprisals against the Muslims of Damascus. The mosques were left empty in the lead-up to the holiday. Even the governor of Damascus failed to put in an appearance at prayers, confirming most Damascenes’ fears that it simply wasn’t safe to go out. As the preacher in the city’s venerable Umayyad mosque recorded, “This news spread deep anxiety among the Muslims who called for the killing of the Christians.”
On 9 July 1860, the governor of Damascus sent a chain gang of Muslim youths to sweep the streets of the Christian quarter, as punishment for drawing crosses on the streets to defile the Christian symbol. The sight of young Muslims debased as common criminals for a seemingly minor offence proved the spark that unleashed eight days of mob violence. As a Christian survivor recalled: “There was a general commitment to kill all of the Christians from all sects and denominations and classes without exception.” It was a genocidal moment.
The UN’s 1948 convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. As the convention makes clear, there are many different means to eradicate a community. In the course of the Events, Damascene Christians were the victims of many of the practices associated with genocide.
The primary tool of genocide is mass murder. During the Events, an estimated 5,000 Christians were killed — 2,500 Damascenes, and another 2,500 from neighbouring villages who had sought refuge in Damascus. Hundreds of men chose forced conversion, and hundreds of children were separated from their families and taken into Muslim households to be raised as Muslims. These too are recognised genocidal practices, as alternate ways to exterminate a target community.
Extensive reports of rape, and of the abduction of women into Muslim households, and even of forced impregnation, took place in the course of the Events, with Christians forced to give birth to children recognised under Islamic law as Muslims.
Finally, Christian churches, monasteries and houses were plundered and stripped to the brickwork before being set alight. Ottoman figures confirm that no church was left standing in central Damascus, 1,500 Christian houses were burnt to the ground, and another 270 severely damaged. Christian shops and workplaces suffered similar destruction. It was a concerted bid to eradicate the Christian presence in Damascus once and for all.
The 1860 Events were a genocidal moment, but they were not a genocide. Leading Muslim notables, appalled by the violence against their Christian townsmen, gave shelter to survivors. The Amir ’Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, who had led Algerians’ resistance to the French colonisation of their country in the 1830s and 1840s, had taken up residence in Damascus in 1855 and commanded a group of 1,200 Algerian veterans who chose to go into exile with him rather than live under French imperial rule. ’Abd al-Qadir’s armed men played a key role in rescuing thousands of Christians from the mob and escorting them to safe houses until the violence ended. In this way, some 85 per cent of the Christians of Damascus survived the Events.
The survival of the majority of Christians was of course a good outcome. However, these were people who had escaped with just the clothes on their backs. They had lost everything and now looked to the Ottoman government to provide for their every need. The European powers were watching. Further victimisation of Levantine Christians would almost certainly provoke an intervention and quite possibly a colonial occupation of Syria.
The stakes for the Ottomans could not have been higher. The sultan’s government needed to restore authority over the lawless provincial capital and bring its murderous population back from the brink of genocide. Whole quarters needed to be reconstructed, and the Christian population reintegrated into the social and economic life of the moribund city. Muslim antagonisms had to be blunted and Christian fears assuaged. It was the challenge of restoring civil society after a deeply divisive trauma.
The Ottoman route to reconstruction was slow but ultimately successful. The first measures were in many ways the most divisive. To restore the rule of law, Ottoman officials rounded up thousands of Damascene Muslims from all classes and professions. Fifty-seven were hanged and another 110 executed by firing squad for their crimes. Others were sent into exile. Thousands of young men were conscripted into the Ottoman army. Such draconian punishments made Damascene Muslims fear their government but also inflamed hostility towards their Christian neighbours. There was an ever-present risk of a new wave of massacres.
The next challenge was to raise the money to rebuild Christian homes and businesses. The Ottoman government had no funds to do so and imposed a heavy tax on the Muslim majority in Syria to create a special indemnity fund. The tax raised but a fraction of Christian losses, but it was enough to fund the reconstruction of homes and to enable Christian artisans and merchants to go back to work. By the end of 1864, four years after the massacre, the work of reconstruction was complete. Yet still tensions ran high between Muslims and Christians. As late as 1866-69, when the Christians of Crete revolted against the Ottoman Empire, sectarian tensions were unleashed, and Damascenes feared a return to the horrors of 1860.
So long as government measures to help the Christians came at the expense of the Muslims, they tended to exacerbate tensions between the two communities. The ultimate success of Ottoman measures came in the 1870s and 1880s, when the government embarked on a major spending spree in Damascus. This was made possible by the merger of three provinces under Damascus’s rule, giving the governor in Damascus more than five times the previous revenues to work with. What followed, between 1865 and 1888, was nothing short of urban renewal in a manner that benefited all — Muslims, Christians and Jews alike.
Over those two decades, the government overhauled provincial administration. This created new elected councils with seats for Muslims, Christians and Jews who enjoyed a say in municipal decisions. The expansion of government bureaucracy led to a construction boom, providing jobs for builders and artisans, and many more prized jobs in government service.
More important yet, the government spent lavishly on expanding and refurbishing the central markets of Damascus. Medieval alleys gave way to modern arcades on the European model, providing barrel-vaulted shelter over roads wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic. New public spaces such as cafés and theatres provided meeting grounds for Damascenes of all communities. Essentially, these reforms brought benefit to all without any one community losing out.
By investing in post-conflict society as a whole, where the benefits accrue equally to attackers and their victims, reconstruction allows divided communities to recover from past horrors. Contemporary Damascus, though today the capital of a country broken by civil war, has not witnessed a return to sectarian violence since the 1860 Events.
Damascus’s experience of pulling back from the brink of genocide holds useful lessons for other societies recovering from deeply divisive traumas. The restoration of the rule of law is essential, but total justice can be as harmful as it is illusive. Similarly, it is essential to provide survivors with the means to rebuild their lives, but it would be a mistake to tax the guilty endlessly in a bid to indemnify all of the victims’ losses. The longer the process of justice and indemnities drags on, the greater the risk of renewed violence.
The international community must apply pressure for human rights and the rule of law to be respected. Those responsible for atrocity must be held to account, but some degree of restraint or clemency will help to stabilise deeply divided societies. Reconstruction must include a dignified roof overhead and the wherewithal to resume professional life.
But the ultimate test of reconstruction lies in the promise of a better future for the next generation — through peace, security and education. It is only through such hope that aggressors and victims of genocidal moments will be motivated to turn the page of the horrors of the past.
Eugene Rogan is professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford. His book ‘The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World’ is published by Allen Lane/Basic Books
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