The general tendency of Islam is to stimulate intolerance
and to engender hatred and contempt not only for
polytheists, but also, although in a modified form, for
all monotheists who will not repeat the formula which
acknowledges that Mohammed was indeed the Prophet of
God. Neither can this be any matter for surprise. The
faith of Islam admits of no compromise. The Moslem is
the antithesis of the pantheistic Hindoo. His faith
is essentially exclusive. Its founder launched fiery
anathemas against all who would not accept the divinity
of his inspiration, and his words fell on fertile ground,
for a large number of those who have embraced Islam are
semi-savages, and often warlike savages, whose minds
are too untrained to receive the idea that an honest
difference of opinion is no cause for bitter hatred. More
than this, the Moslem has for centuries past been taught
that the barbarous principles of the _lex talionis_ are
sanctioned, and even enjoined by his religion. He is told
to revenge himself on his enemies, to strike them that
strike him, to claim an eye for an eye, and a tooth for
a tooth. Islamism, therefore, unlike Christianity, tends
to engender the idea that revenge and hatred, rather than
love and charity, should form the basis of the relations
between man and man; and it inculcates a special degree
of hatred against those who do not accept the Moslem
faith. “When ye encounter the unbelievers,” says the
Koran, “strike off their heads until ye have made a great
slaughter among them, and bind them in bonds.... O true
believers, if ye assist God, by fighting for his religion,
he will assist you against your enemies; and will set your
feet fast; but as for the infidels, let them perish; and
their works God shall render vain.... Verily, God will
introduce those who believe and do good works into gardens
beneath which rivers flow, but the unbelievers indulge
themselves in pleasures, and eat as beasts eat; and their
abode shall be hell fire.” It is true that when Mohammed
denounced unbelievers he was alluding more especially to
the pagans who during his lifetime inhabited the Arabian
Peninsula, but later commentators and interpreters of the
Koran applied his denunciations to Christians and Jews,
and it is in this sense that they are now understood by a
large number of Mohammedans. Does not the word “Ghazi,”
which is the highest title attainable by an officer of
the sultan’s army, signify “one who fights in the cause
of Islam; a hero; a warrior; one who slays an infidel”?
Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khutbeh at the
Mosque, invoke Divine wrath on the heads of unbelievers
in terms which are sufficiently pronounced at all times,
and in which the diapason of invective swells still
more loudly when any adventitious circumstances may
have tended to fan the flame of fanaticism? Should not
every non-Moslem land be considered in strict parlance a
Dar-el-Harb, a land of warfare? When principles such as
these have been dinned for centuries past into the ears of
Moslems, it can be no matter for surprise that a spirit of
intolerance has been generated.
—LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”
The present sultan, Abdul Hamid II, is the thirty-fourth in direct
male succession from Othman and the second son of Sultan Abdul Medjid.
He succeeded to the throne upon the deposition of his brother, Murad
V, August 31, 1876, at the age of thirty-four. By the Turkish law of
succession the crown is inherited according to seniority by the male
descendants of Othman springing from the imperial harem. All children
born in the harem, whether from free women or slaves, are legitimate
and possess equal rights. The sultan is succeeded by his eldest son,
in case there are no uncles or cousins of greater age. The present
heir apparent to the throne is the oldest brother of the sultan, who
outranks all of the five sons of Abdul Hamid as heir to the throne.
It is not the custom of the sultans to contract regular marriages.
The harem is kept full of women by purchase, capture, or voluntary
offering. Most of the inmates come from districts beyond the limits of
the empire, largely from Circassia.
The sultan is, without question, the most phenomenal person sitting
upon any throne to-day. Educated within his own palace, having passed
but once beyond the borders of the land in which he was born, he is
able to outwit and outmatch in diplomacy the combined rulers of Europe.
He has administered his widely-extended and varied empire in accordance
with the unmodified Moslem principles of the Middle Ages, and has
successfully defied all attempts upon the part of Christian nations to
change his policy. Without a navy he has succeeded in averting repeated
threats of attack by the strongest navies of the world. With depleted
and diminishing resources he has held his creditors at bay, capitalized
his indebtedness, and continued to live in lavish luxury. It is true
that his refusal to comply with the demands for reform have at times in
the past led to the loss of some of his possessions, still he does not
seem to have learned therefrom any permanent lesson.
Turkey as a whole has never been so unrighteously governed as it is
to-day, and, in spite of the pressure of European governments, there is
little prospect of radical reforms so long as the present sultan sits
upon the throne. While he is an astute and unprincipled diplomat and
a tireless sovereign, he is not a reformer in any sense of the word.
So long as he is sultan, he proposes to be master, preferring to lose
entire provinces rather than to share the administration with any. He
yields only when subterfuge fails and the policy of delay is rejected;
after he has yielded, he devotes himself to vitiating the advantages
his subjects might gain by his concessions.
Personally timid and fearful, he astonishes the world by the boldness
of his strokes at home and his stubborn resistance to pressure from
abroad. Himself profoundly religious, he horrifies all by the wholesale
murder of his subjects through his lieutenants acting upon direct
orders from the palace. This he has done repeatedly, and it is a
part of his method of administering his home affairs and keeping his
subjects properly subdued.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF OFFICIAL TURKS IN PRAYER FOR THE SULTAN UPON
HIS BIRTHDAY]
The present political, social, economic, and religious problems of
Turkey center in the sultan. Few countries in the world would respond
so quickly to the influence of good government, and few people would
so appreciatively welcome a firm and righteous administration as the
people of Turkey.
The sultan exercises his power through his army and his appointees
to office. The Turks make perhaps the best soldiers in the world.
They are strong, inured to hardship, uncomplaining, and practical.
To them all war with non-Moslems and rebels—and they fight with no
others—is holy war. Only Mohammedans are enrolled in the army, and all
such, over twenty years of age in the country, are liable to military
service until they are forty. The empire is divided into seven army
administrative districts, in each of which is located an army corps.
These are Constantinople, Adrianople, Monastir, Erzerum, Damascus,
Bagdad, and the Yemen, with the independent divisions of the Hejaz and
Tripoli. The infantry are armed with Mauser rifles. The effective war
strength of the Turkish army is 987,900 men. The navy possesses no
fighting power.
The governing force of the empire is strictly Mohammedan. The army
is indeed a church militant with no unbeliever among its officers or
men, except as European military experts are employed to drill and
discipline the troops. The entire administration of both civil and
military affairs is a religious administration. Men of other religions
are asked to take part in civil affairs only when Mohammedans cannot
be found to do the work required. Many high positions, even in the
cabinet, have been creditably filled by Armenians and Greeks, but this
is the exception and not the rule. Turkey agreed some time ago to admit
Christians to her army, but has never seen her way clear to carry out
the agreement. At the center of this Mohammedan administration sits
the sultan, Hamid II, with his valis or governors at the head of
affairs in every province, in close and constant communication with
himself and carrying out his imperial will. These local governors are
sustained by the Moslem army, commanded by officers who also receive
their instructions directly from the palace on the Bosporus.
This is the system of administration that has become established in the
Ottoman empire, and that must be borne in mind as we proceed with the
study of the country, the people, their economic, social, and religious
conditions.
The position of Turkey and of the Ottoman empire is unique among the
countries of the world. For centuries it has stood before the world as
the one great Mohammedan temporal power, with its laws and usages built
upon the tenets, traditions, and fanaticisms of Islam. Every civilized
definition of a government fails when applied to Turkey, and every
conception of the duty of a government to its subjects is violated in
the existing relations between the Turkish government and the people of
that empire. Under these conditions, much worse now than they were two
generations ago, mission work is carried on.
While there are many Turkish officials who keenly deplore the evils of
the system, and would change if they could the untoward relations of
the government to its oppressed subjects, they are powerless to act
and must even conceal their dissatisfaction for fear of being branded,
as many have been, as traitors to the existing rule, for which charge
the penalty is banishment or death. There is a general feeling that no
reform can be inaugurated or carried out so long as the present monarch
sits upon the throne.
A distinguished Orientalist, intimately acquainted with affairs at
Constantinople, has recently written upon the sultan and his diplomatic
methods in the following terms. For obvious reasons the identity of the
writer is concealed:
Rarely has a young sovereign been in a more desperate and apparently
hopeless position than Abd-ul-Hamid occupied in the third year of his
reign, 1878. His armies had been utterly beaten in a great war. His
people had no confidence in their country, or their future, or their
sultan. Prophecies were widely current about 1878-1882 identifying
him as the last sultan of Turkey and the consummator of its ruin. The
treasury was almost bankrupt. He himself had, and still has, a dislike
and fear of ships, which paralyzed his fleet during the war that had
just ended, and has ever since left it to rot in idleness, until there
is at the present day, probably, not a Turkish ship of war that could
venture to cross the Ægean Sea in the calmest day of summer.
The sultan alone in Turkey did not despair. He alone saw how the power
of the sultans could be restored. And twenty-eight years after he
seemed to be near the end of a disastrous and short reign he is still
on the throne, absolute autocrat to a degree that hardly even the
greatest of the sultans before him attained, in close communication
with the remotest corners of the Mohammedan world from the east of Asia
to the west of Africa, respected and powerful in Moslem lands where the
name of no former sultan was known or heeded, courted by at least one
leading Power in Europe and by the great American republic.
The last fact is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all in this strange
history. The diplomatists of America, so strong and self-confident in
their dealings with the greatest of European Powers, so accustomed to
say to them all, “This is our will and intention,” have for many years
been the humblest and most subservient of all the Christian Powers
in their attitude to Turkey, aiming always at imitating the German
policy and being on the friendly side of the Turks, but forgetting that
Germany has that to give which America has not, and that America has
interests to protect in Turkey of a kind which Germany has not.
The sultan had the genius or the good fortune to divine almost
from the beginning of his reign what only a few even yet dimly
comprehend,—the power of reaction and resistance which Asia can oppose
against the West. He formed the plan of consolidating the power of the
entire Mohammedan world, and placing himself at the head of this power,
and he has carried the plan into effect. The sultans had always claimed
the position of khalif, but this had hitherto been a mere empty name,
until Abd-ul-Hamid appealed from his own subjects, who rejected him,
to the wider world of Mohammedans, won their confidence, and made them
think of him as the true Commander of the Faithful.
One naturally asks whether this result was gained through the strength
of a real religious fervor or through the clever playing of an astute
and purely selfish game. While there may have been something of both
elements, I do not doubt that there was a good deal of religious
enthusiasm or fanaticism; the first idea could never have been struck
out without the inspiration of strong religious feeling.
It used to be said about 1880 by those who were in a position to
know best—no one has ever been in a position to have quite certain
knowledge in Constantinople—that the sultan was a Dervish of the class
called vulgarly the Howling, and that when (as was often the case)
the ministers of state summoned to a council had to wait hour after
hour for the sultan to appear, he was in an inner room with a circle
of other Dervishes loudly invoking the name of Allah and working up
the ecstatic condition in which it should be revealed whether and when
he should enter the council. I do not doubt that the great idea of
appealing to the world of Islam was struck out in some such moment of
ecstasy. At the same time, Abd-ul-Hamid has had a good deal to gain
from the success of this policy.
Europeans who have been admitted to meet the sultan in direct
intercourse are almost all agreed that he possesses great personal
charm and a gracious, winning courtesy. On the other hand, ministers of
state used to speak with deep feeling of the insults and abuse poured
on any, even the highest, who had the misfortune to express an opinion
that did not agree with his wishes.
An official in the palace described very frankly—it is wonderful
how freely and frankly Turks express their opinion; this seems
inseparable from the Turkish nature—to an Englishman whom he knew well
the situation in the palace at the time when an ultimatum had been
presented, and before it was known what would be the issue; how the
sultan was flattered up to believe that he had only to go into Egypt
and resume possession, and that the English would never resist. The
Englishman remarked, “But you know better than that, and of course you
give better advice when the sultan asks your opinion.” “God forbid,”
was the reply, “that I should say to the sultan anything except what
he wishes me to say. No! when he asks me, I reply that of course the
master of a million of soldiers has only to enter Egypt and it is his.
And it is not for nothing that I do this. The sultan is pleased with
me, and signs some paper that I have brought him, and it may be worth
10,000 piastres to me.”
The sultan hates England with a permanent and ineradicable hatred;
this feeling dominates and colors his whole policy; it is only for
that reason that he tolerates Germany, which otherwise he dislikes.
England has always been the friend of the Reform party in Turkey; and
the sultan is the great reactionary who has trodden the Reform party
in the dust. But, worse than that, England, pretending to help Turkey,
took possession of Cyprus, nominally to enable her to guarantee Turkey
against Russia in Asia Minor, but really (as it seems to the Turks)
by pure theft, because all pretence of using Cyprus as a basis of
operations against Russia in Asia Minor was abandoned in 1880, and yet
England kept Cyprus.
Now to the sultan the sting lies in this, that Cyprus was his private
appanage, and not part of the State. The whole revenue of Cyprus went
to the sultan’s privy purse. But worse still: at first the English paid
over the Cypriote revenue, about £95,000 a year, to Constantinople, but
after the Gladstonian government came into power, in 1880, this revenue
was diverted to pay interest on the Turkish debt, emptying the sultan’s
private purse into the lap of the European bondholders.
The sultan, therefore, welcomed the German intervention, for the
Germans encouraged him to govern as he pleased. They even persuaded him
that railways were necessary for military efficiency, and showed that
the Hedjaz Railway must be the foundation of his khalifate. Yet the
railways that he has made, and the Moslem schools that he has founded,
are the surest means of educating his people, and education is the
inevitable enemy of autocracy.
The German policy has seemed to be very successful in promoting German
interests in Turkey. But, after all, the ground fact is that the German
policy was an opportunist policy, and the English policy, ignorant and
ill-managed as it has been, was founded on deeper principles. History
will record hereafter that the former proved a failure, and that the
hatred of a people more than compensated for the favor of an evanescent
tyrant. The same struggle is going on in Turkey as in Russia—the
educated part of the people on one side, a tyranny resting on
bureaucracy and obscurantism on the other. Whatever may be the faults
of Abd-ul-Hamid, his worst enemy must place him on an immensely higher
level than the czar on any point of view, humanitarian or patriotic,
personal or political. But for England in Turkey the greatest danger
is that she be tempted to Germanize her policy from experience of the
apparent German success. Her policy has been, on the whole, the wiser,
but it has been carried out with an ignorance of Turkish facts that is
appalling.