Population movements have always played a major role in the life of Islam and particularly the Middle East. During the nineteenth century, however, the transfer of vast numbers of people from one region to another profoundly altered the social, ethnic, and religious structure of the Ottoman state—that is, the Middle East and the Balkans. The footloose tribes of eastern Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula were spurred into motion on an unprecedented scale by economic and social events, and the Ottoman government was forced to undertake settlement measures that had widespread effects. The Ottoman-Russian wars, which began in 1806 and occurred at intervals throughout the century, displaced large groups of people, predominantly Muslims from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands. Uprooted from their ancestral homelands, they eventually settled in Anatolia, Syria (inclusive of the territories of modern-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel as well as modern Syria), and northern Iraq. These migrations continued until the time of the First World War. In addition, after 1830 waves of immigrants came from Algeria—especially after Abdel Kader ended his resistance to the French—and from Tunisia as well. These people too settled in Syria at Damascus.
The study of the Ottoman state in tĥe latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman State at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted.
Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.
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