TURKEY: A PAST AND A FUTURE
BY A.J. TOYNBEE
MCMXVII
CONTENTS
I THE PAST
II THE PRESENT
III THE FUTURE
I
What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing, for no formula can
embrace the variety of the countries marked "Ottoman" on the map: the
High Yemen, with its monsoons and tropical cultivation; the tilted rim
of the Hedjaz, one desert in a desert zone that stretches from the
Sahara to Mongolia; the Mesopotamian rivers, breaking the desert with a
strip of green; the pine-covered mountain terraces of Kurdistan, which
gird in Mesopotamia as the hills of the North-West Frontier of India
gird the Plains; the Armenian highlands, bleak as the Pamirs, which feed
Mesopotamia with their snows and send it the soil they cannot keep
themselves; the Anatolian peninsula--an offshoot of Central Europe with
its rocks and fine timber and mountain streams, but nursing a steppe in
its heart more intractable than the Puszta of Hungary; the
coast-lands--Trebizond and Ismid and Smyrna clinging to the Anatolian
mainland and Syria interposing itself between the desert and the sea,
but all, with their vines and olives and sharp contours, keeping true to
the Mediterranean; and then the waterway of narrows and land-locked sea
and narrows again which links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and
the Russian hinterland, and which has not its like in the world.
The cities of Turkey are as various as the climes, with the added
impress of many generations of men: Adrianople, set at a junction of
rivers within the circle of the Thracian downs, a fortress since its
foundation, well chosen for the tombs of the Ottoman conquerors;
Constantinople, capital of empires where races meet but never mix,
mistress of trade routes vital to the existence of vast regions beyond
her horizon--Central Europe trafficking south-eastward overland and
Russia south-westward by sea; Smyrna, the port by which men go up and
down between Anatolia and the Aegean, the foothold on the Asiatic
mainland which the Greeks have never lost; Konia, between the mountain
girdle and the central steppe, where native Anatolia has always stood at
bay, guarding her race and religion against the influences of the
coasts; Aleppo, where, if Turkey were a unity, the centre of Turkey
would be found, the city where, if anywhere, the races of the Near East
have mingled--building their courses into her fortress walls from the
polygonal work of the Hittite founders to the battlements that kept out
the Crusaders--and now the half-way point of a railway surveyed along an
immemorially ancient route, but unfinished like the history of Aleppo
herself; Van by its upland lake, overhanging the Mesopotamian lowlands
and with the writing of their culture graven on its cliffs, yet living a
life apart like some Swiss canton and half belonging to the infinite
north; Bagdad, the incarnation for the last millennium of an eternal
city that shifts its site as its rivers shift their beds--from Seleucia
to Bagdad, from Babylon to Seleucia, from Kish to Babylon--but which
always springs up again, like Delhi, within a few parasangs of its last
ruins, in an area that is an irresistible focus of population; Basra
amid its palm-groves, so far down stream that it belongs to the Indian
Ocean--the port from which Sinbad set sail for fairyland, and from which
less mythical Arab seamen spread their religion and civilisation far
over African coasts and Malayan Indies; these, and besides them almost
all the holy cities of mankind: Kerbela, between the Euphrates and the
desert, where, under Sunni rule, the Shias of Persia and India have
still visited the tombs of their saints and buried their dead;
Jerusalem, where Jew and Christian, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant,
Armenian and Abyssinian, have their common shrines and separate
quarters; Mekka and Medina in the heart of the desert, beyond which
their fame would never have passed but for a well and a mart and a
precinct of idols and the Prophet who overthrew them; and there are the
cities on the Pilgrim Road (linked now by railway with Medina, the
nearer of the _Haramein_): Beirût the port, with its electric trams and
newspapers, the Smyrna of the Arab lands; and Damascus the oasis,
looking out over the desert instead of the sea, and harbour not of ships
but of camel-caravans.
The names of these cities call up, like an incantation, the memory of
the civilisations which grew in them to greatness and sank in them to
decay: Mesopotamia, a great heart of civilisation which is cold to-day,
but which beat so strongly for five thousand years that its pulses were
felt from Siberia to the Pillars of Hercules and influenced the taste
and technique of the Scandinavian bronze age; the Assyrians, who
extended the political marches of Mesopotamia towards the north, and
turned them into a military monarchy that devastated the motherland and
all other lands and peoples from the Tigris to the sea; the Hebrews,
discovering a world-religion in their hill-country overlooking the
coast; the Sabaeans, whose queen made the first pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
coming from Yemen across the Hedjaz when Mekka and Medina were still of
no account; the Philistines and Phoenicians of the Syrian sea-board, who
were discovering the Atlantic and were too busy to listen to the Hebrew
prophets in their hinterland; the Ionians, who opened up the Black Sea
and created a poetry, philosophy, science, and architecture which are
still the life-blood of ours, before they were overwhelmed, like the
Phoenicians before them, by a continental military power; the Hittites,
who first transmitted the fruitful influences of Mesopotamia to the
Ionian coasts--a people as mysterious to their contemporaries as to
ourselves, maturing unknown in the fastnesses of Anatolia, raising up a
sudden empire that raided Mesopotamia and colonised the Syrian valleys,
and then succumbing to waves of northern invasion. All these people rose
and fell within the boundaries of Turkey, held the stage of the world
for a time, and left their mark on its history. There is a romance about
their names, a wonderful variety and intensity in their vanished life;
yet they are not more diverse than their modern successors, in whose
veins flows their blood and whose possibilities are only dwarfed by
their achievements.
There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War, and
during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by
massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this daemoniac effort
after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of racial and
social types that has ever been placed at a single Government's mercy.
The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but you might search long
before you found one among its inhabitants. These Osmanlis are a
governing class, indigenous only in Constantinople and a few
neighbouring towns, but planted here and there, as officers and
officials, over the Ottoman territories. They come of a clan of Turkish
nomads, recruited since the thirteenth century by converts, forced or
voluntary, from most of Christendom, and crossed with the blood of
slave-women from all the world. They are hardly a race. Tradition
fortified by inertia makes them what they are, and also their Turkish
language, which serves them for business of state and for a literature,
though not without an infusion of Persian and Arabic idioms said to
amount to 95 per cent. of the vocabulary[1].
This artificial language is hardly a link between Osmanli officialdom
and the Turkish peasantry of Anatolia, which speaks Turkish dialects
derived from tribes that drifted in, some as late as the Osmanlis, some
two centuries before. Nor has this Turkish-speaking peasantry much in
common with the Turkish nomads who still wander over the central
Anatolian steppe and have kept their blood pure; for the peasantry has
reverted physically to the native stock, which held Anatolia from time
immemorial and absorbs all newcomers that mingle with it on its soil.
Thus there are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, divided by
blood and vocation and social type; and even if we reckon all who speak
some form of Turkish as one group, they only amount to 30 or 40 per
cent. of the whole population of the Empire.
The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. Those who speak
Arabic are as strong numerically as the Turks, or stronger, but they too
are divided, and their unity is a problem of the future. There are
pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled in
towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the Muntefik
in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan Koreish,
but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race; there are Arabs
in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their language--most of
the peasantry of Syria are such, and the inhabitants of ancient centres
of population like Damascus or Bagdad; in Syria many of these "Arabs"
are Christians, and some Christians, though they speak Arabic, have
retained their separate sense of nationality--notably the Roman Catholic
Maronites of the Lebanon--and would hardly be considered as Arabs either
by themselves or by their neighbours. The same is true of the Druses,
another remnant of an earlier stock, which has preserved its identity
under the guise of Islam so heretically conceived as to rank as an
independent religion. As for the Yemenis--they will resent the
imputation, for no Arabs count up their genealogies so zealously as
they, but there is more East African than Semitic blood in their veins.
They are men of the moist, fertile tropics, brown of skin, and working
half naked in their fields, like the peoples of Southern India and
Bengal. And on the opposite fringes of the Arabic-speaking area there
are fragments of population whose language is Semitic but
pre-Arabic[2]--the Jacobite Christians of the Tor-Abdin, and the
Nestorians of the Upper Zab, who once, under the Caliphs, were the
industrious Christian peasantry of Mesopotamia, but now are shepherds
and hillmen among the Kurds. The Kurds themselves are more scattered
than any other stock in Turkey, and divided tribe against tribe, but
taken together they rank third in numerical strength, after the Arabs
and Turks. There are mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen
and herdsmen, Kurds who have kept to their original homes along the
eastern frontier, and Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread
themselves over the Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes,
the Taurus valleys, and the hinterland of the Black Sea.
The chief thing the Kurds have in common is the Persian dialect they
speak, but it is usual to class as Kurds any and every community in the
Kurdish area which is not Turkish or Arab and can by courtesy be called
Moslem (the Kurds, for that matter, are only Moslems skin-deep). Such
communities abound: the Dersim highlands, in particular, are an
ethnographical museum; "Kizil-Bashi" is a general name for their kind;
only the Yezidis, though they speak good Kurdish, are distinguished from
the rest for their idiosyncrasy of worshipping Satan under the form of a
peacock (Allah, they argue, is good-natured and does not need to be
propitiated) and they are repudiated with one accord by Moslem and
Christian.
But not all the scattered elements in Turkey are isolated or primitive.
The Greeks and Armenians, for instance, are, or were, the most
energetic, intellectual, liberal elements in Turkey, the natural
intermediaries between the other races and western civilisation--"were"
rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless
steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its
subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centres like Smyrna and
Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has
mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As for
the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre and
deportation since April, 1915--business and professional men, peasants
and shepherds, women and children--without discrimination or pity. A
third of the Ottoman Armenians may still survive; a tenth of them are
safe within the Russian and British lines. Fortunately half this nation,
and the majority of the Greeks, live outside the Ottoman frontiers, and
are beyond the Osmanli's power.
To compensate for its depopulation of the countries under its dominion,
the Ottoman Government, during the last fifty years, has been settling
them with Moslem immigrants from its own lost provinces or from other
Moslem lands that have changed their rulers. These "Mouhadjirs" are
reckoned, from first to last, at three-quarters of a million, drawn from
the most diverse stocks--Bosniaks and Pomaks and Albanians, Algerines
and Tripolitans, Tchetchens and Circassians. Numbers have been planted
recently on the lands of dispossessed Armenians and Greeks. They add
many more elements to the confusion of tongues, but they are probably
destined to be absorbed or to die out. The Circassians, in particular,
who are the most industrious (though most unruly) and preserve their
nationality best, also succumb most easily to transplantation, through
refusal to adapt their Caucasian clothes and habits to Anatolian or
Mesopotamian conditions of life.
All this is Turkey, and we come back to our original question: What
common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat of many
colours to one political hue? The answer is simple: Blood. Turkey, the
Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geographical, racial, or
economic; it is a pretension, enforced by bloodshed and violence
whenever and wherever the Osmanli Government has power.
It is a complex pretension. The first impulse, and the traditional
method by which it has been given effect, came from a little tribe of
pagan, nomadic Turks who wandered into Anatolia from Central Asia in the
thirteenth century A.D. and were granted camping grounds by the reigning
Turkish Sultan of the country--for Anatolia was already Turkish two
centuries before the Osmanlis appeared on the scene. But to call them
Osmanlis is to anticipate the next stage in their history. They are
named after Osman, their first leader's son, and he after the third
successor of the Prophet--it was a good Moslem name, and he took it when
he was converted to Islam and organised his pagan tent-dwellers into a
settled Mohammedan State in the north-western hills of Anatolia, on the
borders of Christendom. A tribe had become a march, and the final stage
was from march to empire.
From this point onwards Ottoman history singularly resembles the history
of the Osmanlis' present allies. The March of Brandenburg, the March of
Austria, and the March of Osman--they were each founded as the outer
bulwarks of a civilisation, and all erected themselves into centres of
military ascendancy over their fellow-countrymen and co-religionists to
the rear as well as the strangers opposite their front. The Osmanlis may
have been more savage in their methods than the marchmen of
Germany--though hardly, perhaps, than the Teutonic Knights who prepared
the soil of Prussia for the Hohenzollerns. The Teutonic Knights
exterminated their victims; the Osmanlis drained theirs of their blood
by taking a tribute of their male children, educating them as Moslems,
and training them as recruits for an Ottoman standing army. Their first
expansion was forwards into Christian Europe; their capital shifted from
a village in the hills to the city of Brusa on the Asiatic shore of
Marmora, from Brusa across the Dardanelles to Adrianople, from
Adrianople to the imperial city on the Bosphorus; and, with the capture
of Constantinople, the Osmanli Sultans usurped the pretensions of East
Rome, as the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns the emblems of Charlemagne and
Caesar Augustus.
Byzantium has become a very potent element in the Osmanlis' character,
more potent than the habits of the march or the instinct of the steppes.
It has dictated their system of administration, dominated their outlook
on life, penetrated their blood. But the heritage of "Rûm" is not the
final factor in the Ottoman Empire as it exists to-day; for after the
successors of Osman had founded their military monarchy with blood and
iron on the ruins of one-third of Europe, they turned eastwards, with a
genuinely Oriental gesture, and overran kingdoms and lands with the
apparently mechanical impetus of all Asiatic conquerors, from Sargon of
Akkad and Cyrus the Persian to Jenghis Khan and Timur. The stoutest
opponent of the Osmanlis in Asia was the Anatolian Sultanate of
Karaman--Moslem, Turkish, and the legitimate heir of those Seljuk
Turkish Sultans who had given Osman's father his first footing in the
land. Osmanli and Karamanli fought on equal terms, but when Karaman was
overthrown there was no power left in Asia that could stop the Osmanlis'
advance. The Egyptians and Persians had no more chance against Ottoman
discipline and artillery than the last Darius had against the
Macedonians. A campaign or two brought Sultan Selim the First from the
Taurus to Cairo; a few more campaigns at intervals during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, when Ottoman armies could be spared from
Europe, drove the Persians successively out of Armenia and Mosul and
Bagdad. And thus, by accident, as it were, in the pursuit of more
coveted things, the Osmanlis acquired "Turkey-in-Asia," which is all
that remains to them now and all that concerns us here.
"Turkey-in-Asia" is a transitory phenomenon, a sort of chrysalis which
enshrouded the countries of Western Asia because they were exhausted and
needed torpor as a preliminary to recuperation. Many calamities had
fallen upon them during the five centuries before the chrysalis formed.
The break-up of the Arab Caliphate of Bagdad had led to an
interminable, meaningless conflict among a host of petty Moslem States;
the wearing struggle between Islam and Christendom had been intensified
by the Crusades; and waves of nomadic invaders, each more destructive
and more irresistible than the last, had swept over Moslem Asia out of
the steppes and deserts of the north-east. The most terrible were the
Mongols, who sacked Bagdad in 1258, and gave the _coup de grâce_ to the
civilisation of Mesopotamia. And then, when the native productiveness of
the Near East was ruined, the transit trade between Europe and the
Indies, which had belonged to it from the earliest times and had been
the second source of its prosperity, was taken from it by the western
seafarers who discovered the ocean routes. The pall of Ottoman dominion
only descended when life was extinct.
The Osmanlis, whose nomadic forefathers had fled before the face of the
Mongols out of Central Asia, took the heritage which had slipped from
the Mongols' grasp, and gathered all threads of authority in Western
Asia into their hands. The most valuable spoil of their Asiatic
conquests was the Caliphate. Hulaku, the sacker of Bagdad, had put the
Caliph Mustasim to death, and the remnant of the Abbasids had kept up a
shadowy succession at Cairo, under the protection of the Sultan of
Egypt. Selim the Osmanli, when he entered Cairo as a conqueror in 1517,
caused the contemporary Abbasid to cede his title, for what it was
worth, to him and his successors. It was a doubtful title, scorned by
all Shias and regarded coldly by many Sunni rulers who were unwilling to
recognise a spiritual superior in their most formidable temporal rival.
But such as it was, it strengthened the Osmanli's hold on his dominions.
Caliph of Islam, victorious guardian of the Moslem marches, and heir by
conquest of imperial Rûm, the Osmanli Sultan held his Asiatic provinces
with ease; but the best security for his tenure was the misery to which
they were reduced. Commerce and cultivation ebbed, population dwindled,
and nomads still drifted in upon what once had been settled lands. The
Ottoman Government, desiring a barrier against Persia, encouraged the
Kurds to spread themselves over Armenia; it welcomed less the Shammar
and Anazeh Arabs, who broke over the Euphrates about the year 1700 and
turned the last fields of Northern Mesopotamia to desolation; but it was
too impotent or indifferent to turn them out. Western Asia lay fallow
under the Ottoman cannon-wheels. There have been fallow periods before
in the slow rhythm of its life--under the Persians, for instance, who
overran all lands and peoples of the East in the sixth century B.C.,
overshadowed the Greeks for a moment, as the Osmanlis overshadowed
Europe, halted, too massive for offence but seemingly unassailable, and
then collapsed pitifully before the probing spears of Alexander.
The Osmanlis are passing at this moment as the Achaemenids passed then.
They lost the last of Europe in the Balkan War, and with it their
prestige as increasers of Islam; the growth of national consciousness
among their subjects, not least among the Turks themselves, has loosened
the foundations of their military empire, as of the other military
empires with which they are allied. They forfeited the Caliphate when
they proclaimed the Holy War against the Allied Powers--inciting Moslems
to join one Christian coalition against another, not in defence of their
religion, but for Ottoman political aggrandisement. They lost it morally
when this incitement was left unheeded by the Moslem world; they lost it
in deed when the Sherif of Mekka asserted his rights as the legitimate
guardian of the Holy Cities, drove out the Ottoman garrison from Mekka,
and allied himself with the other independent princes of Arabia. All the
props of Ottoman dominion in Asia have fallen away, but nothing dooms it
so surely as the breath of life that is stirring over the dormant lands
and peoples once more. The cutting of the Suez Canal has led the
highways of commerce back to the Nearer East; the democracy and
nationalism of Europe have been extending their influence over Asiatic
races. On whatever terms the War is concluded, one far-reaching result
is certain already: there will be a political and economic revival in
Western Asia, and the direction of this will not be in Ottoman hands.
We are thus witnessing the foundation of a new era as momentous, if not
as dramatic, as Alexander's passage of the Dardanelles. The Ottoman
vesture has waxed old, and something can be discerned of the new forms
that are emerging from beneath it; their outstanding features are worth
our attention.
II
The new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate factor to be reckoned
with. It is very new--newer than the Young Turks, and sharply opposed to
the original Young Turkish programme--but it has established its
ascendancy. It decided Turkey's entry into the War, and is the key to
the current policy of the Ottoman Government.
The Young Turks were not Nationalists from the beginning; the "Committee
of Union and Progress" was founded in good faith to liberate and
reconcile all the inhabitants of the Empire on the principles of the
French Revolution. At the Committee's congress in 1909 the Nationalists
were shouted down with the cry: "Our goal is organisation and nothing
else[3]." But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Liberalism gave way
to Panislamism, Panislamism to Panturanianism, and the "Ottoman State
Idea" changed from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the
Turkification of non-Turkish nationalities by force.
"The French Ideal," writes the Nationalist Tekin Alp in _Thoughts on the
Nature and Plan of a Greater Turkey_, "is in contradiction to the needs
and conditions of the age." By contrast, "the Turkish national movement
does not exhibit the failings of the earlier movements. It is in every
way adapted to the intellectual standard and feelings of the nation. It
also keeps pace with the ideas of the age, which have for some decades
centred round the principle of Nationality. In adopting Turkish
Nationalism as the basis of their national policy, the Turks have only
abandoned an abnormal state of affairs and thereby placed themselves on
a level with modern nations[4]."
The development of Nationalism among the Turks was a natural phenomenon.
Starting in the West, the movement has been spreading for a century
through Central Europe, Hungary, and the Balkans, till from the Turks'
former subjects it has passed to the Turks themselves. Chance played its
part. Dr. Nazim Bey, for instance, the General Secretary of the "Union
and Progress" Committee, is said to have been fired by a work of M. Léon
Cahun's on the early history of the Turks and Mongols, lent him by the
French Consul-General at Salonika, and the movement was, and still is,
confined to a small _intelligentsia_. But that is the case with other
national movements too, and does not hinder them from being powerful
forces. Turkish Nationalism was kept alive after 1909 by a small group
of enthusiasts at Salonika--their leader was Ziya Bey, who had come up
to the Young Turk Congress from Diarbekir, and was one of the first
converts to the new idea. It gained ground suddenly during, the Balkan
War. The shock of defeat produced a craving for regeneration; the final
loss of Europe turned the minds of the Osmanlis to the possibilities of
Asia, and they were struck by the action of several prominent Russian
subjects of Turco-Tatar nationality, who, out of racial sympathy, had
given their services to the Ottoman Government in this time of
adversity. As Tekin Alp expresses it:
"The Turks realised that, in order to live, they must become essentially
Turkish, become a nation, be themselves.... The Turkish nation turned
aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked instead upon Turania,
the ideal country of the future."
Two years later this "New Orientation" had so mastered the Ottoman
Government that it drew them into the European War.
There are many aims within the new Turkish horizon. Some of them are
negative and non-political, some practical and extremely aggressive.
Ziya Bey's adherents first took in hand the purification of the Turkish
language. A Turkish poet had endeavoured before to dispense with the 95
per cent. (?) of the vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and
Arabic, and "his poetry had to be published in small provincial papers
because the important newspapers of the towns would not accept it." The
established writers in the traditional style made a hard fight, but
Tekin Alp claims that the _Yeni Lisan_ (New Language) "is to-day in
possession of an absolute and unlimited authority." Borrowed rhythms
have been banned as well as borrowed words, and there is even an
agitation to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish alphabet--an
imitation of the Albanian movement which was opposed so fiercely by the
Turks themselves before the Balkan War. In 1913 the Government stepped
in with the foundation of a "Turkish Academy" (_Turk Bilgi Derneyi_),
and the Ministry of Education started an "Institute of Terminology,"
"Conservatoire," and "Writing and Translation Committee." The
translation of foreign masterpieces as an incentive to a new national
literature was in the programme of Ziya Bey's society, the _Yeni Hayat_
(New Life). Their most cherished plan was to translate the Koran and the
Friday Sermon, to have the Khutba (Prayer for the Caliph) recited in
Turkish, and to remove the Arabic texts from the walls of the mosques[5];
the eyes and ears of Turkish Moslems were to be saved from the
contamination of an anti-national language; but the campaign against
Arabic passed over into an attack upon Islam.
"The Turkish Nationalists," Tekin Alp explains, "have made great efforts
to nationalise religion itself, and to give it the impress of the
Turkish national spirit. This idea was zealously supported by a
fortnightly periodical, and one of the noblest tasks undertaken by it
has been the translation of the Koran into Turkish. This is a reform of
the greatest importance. It is well known that the translation of the
Koran has hitherto been considered a sin. The Nationalists have cut
themselves off from this superstitious prejudice and have had three
translations made, the above-mentioned and two others."
On this issue the Nationalists broke a lance with the _Islamjis_, or
"clericals," as Tekin Alp prefers to call them.
"Because it is written in the Koran that Islam knows no nationalities,
but only Believers, the _Islamjis_ thought that to occupy oneself with
national questions was to act against the interests and principles of
Islam itself.... According to the Nationalists, the pronouncement in the
Koran was directed exclusively against the very frequent dissensions of
clans and parties in the various Arab races." (A sneer which is meant to
have a modern application.) "Although the Nationalists proclaim
themselves the most zealous followers of Mohammed, nevertheless they do
not conceal the fact that their interpretation of Islam is not the same
as that of the Arabs. They maintain that the Turks cannot interpret the
Koran in the same manner as the Arabs.... Their idea of God is also
different."
This amazing _Kulturkampf_ is quite possibly a reminiscence of
Bismarckian Germany, for Turkish Nationalism is saturated with forgotten
European moods, and its vein of Romanticism is as antiquated as the
Kaiser's. It has taken Attila to its heart, and rehabilitated Jenghis
Khan, Timur, Oghuz, and the rest with the erudition of a Turanian Walter
Scott.
"My Attila, my Jenghis," sings Ziya Gök Alp, "these heroic figures,
which stand for the proud fame of my race, appear on the dry pages of
the history books as covered with shame and disgrace, while in reality
they are no less than Alexander and Caesar. Still better known to my
heart is Oghuz Khan[6]. In me he still lives in all his fame and
greatness. Oghuz Khan delights and inspires my heart and causes me to
sing psalms of gladness. The fatherland of the Turks is not Turkey or
Turkestan, but the broad eternal land of Turania."
The Ministry of _Evkaf_ (Religious Endowments) recently made a grant of
£50,000 (Turkish) towards the publication of works on these worthies;
the students at the Military College in Constantinople are alleged to
have been diverted from their studies by their devotion to such
literature, and on the eve of the War the Professor of Military
Education there is reported to have delivered the following address to
an instruction class of reserve officers:
"We are, gentlemen, before all, Turks. I wonder why we are called
Ottomans, for who is Osman after whom we are named? He is a Turk from
Altai, who overran this country with his Turkish Army. Therefore it is
more of an honour to us to be named after his origin than after himself.
We have so far been deceived by the ignorance of our forebears, and fie
on these forebears who made us forget our nationality.... Be sure that
Turkish nationality is better for us than Islam, and racial pride is one
of the greatest social virtues[7]."
These extravagances must not be taken too literally. The Young Turk
politicians, though they have embarked on a Nationalist policy, are not
so reckless as to break openly with Islam or to denounce the founder of
their State. They see clearly enough that Turkish Nationalism carried to
a logical extreme is incompatible with the Ottoman pretension, and they
favour the view, so severely criticised by Tekin Alp, "that all three
groups of ideas--Ottomanism, Islamism, and the Turkish Movement--should
work side by side and together." But, with this reservation, they follow
the doctrinaires, who on their part are quite ready to press Islam into
their service. Tekin Alp candidly admits that
"They sought after a judicious mingling of the religious and national
impulses. They realised only too clearly that the still abstract ideals
of Nationalism could not be expected to attract the masses, the lower
classes, composed of uneducated and illiterate people. It was found more
expedient to reach these classes under the flag of religion."
This sentence reveals in a flash one motive of the Armenian
"Deportations," which followed Turkey's intervention in the War; and a
celebrated German authority, in a memorial[8] written in 1916, gives
this very explanation of their origin.
"Turkey's entry into the War," he writes, "was unwelcome to Turkish
society in Constantinople, whose sympathies were with France, as well as
to the mass of the people, but the Panislamic propaganda and the
military dictatorship were able to stifle all opposition. The
proclamation of the 'Holy War' produced a general agitation of the
Mohammedan against the Christian elements in the Empire, and the
Christian nationalities had soon good reason to fear that Turkish
chauvinism would make use of Mohammedan fanaticism to make the War
popular with the mass of the Mohammedan population."
The evidence presented in the British Blue Book on the _Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire_[9] shows that this explanation is
correct. The Armenians were not massacred spontaneously by the local
Moslems; the initiative came entirely from the Central Government at
Constantinople, which planned the systematic extermination of the
Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire, worked out a uniform method of
procedure, despatched simultaneous orders to the provincial officials
and gendarmerie to carry it into effect, and cashiered the few who
declined to obey. The Armenians were rounded up and deported by regular
troops and gendarmes; they were massacred on the road by bands of
_chettis_, consisting chiefly of criminals released from prison by the
Government for this work; when the Armenians were gone the Turkish
populace was encouraged to plunder their goods and houses, and as the
convoys of exiles passed through the villages the best-looking women and
children were sold cheap or even given away for nothing to the Turkish
peasantry. Naturally the Turkish people accepted the good things the
Government offered them, and naturally this reconciled them momentarily
to the War.
Thus in the Armenian atrocities the Young Turks made Panislamism and
Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of
their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist
gaining ground.
"After the deposition of Abd-ul-Hamid," writes the German authority
quoted above, "the Committee of Union and Progress reverted more and
more to the ex-Sultan's policy. To begin with, a rigorous party tyranny
was set up. A power behind the Government got the official executive
apparatus into its hand, and the elections to Parliament ceased to be
free. The appointment of the highest officials in the Empire and of all
the most important servants of the administration was settled by decrees
of the Committee. All bills had to be debated first by the Committee and
to receive its approval before they came before the Chamber. Public
policy was determined by two main considerations: (1) The centralistic
idea, which claimed for the Turkish race not merely preponderant but
exclusive power in the Empire, was to be carried to its logical
consequences; (2) The Empire was to be established on a purely Islamic
foundation. Turkish Nationalism and the Panislamic Idea precluded _a
priori_ any equality of treatment for the various races and religions of
the Empire, and any movement which looked for the salvation of the
Empire in the decentralisation or autonomy of its various parts was
branded as high treason. The nationalistic and centralistic tendency was
directed not merely against the various non-Mohammedan nationalities
--Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, and Jews--but also against the
non-Turkish Mohammedan nations--Arabs, Mohammedan Syrians, Kurds,
and the Shia element in the population. An idol of 'Pan-Turkism' was
erected, and all non-Turkish elements in the population were subjected
to the harshest measures. The rigorous action which this policy
prescribed against the Albanians, who were mostly Mohammedans and had
been thorough loyalists till then, led to the loss of almost the whole
of European Turkey. The same policy has provoked insurrections in the
Arab half of the Empire, which a series of campaigns has failed to
suppress. The conflict with the Arab element continues"--this was
written in 1916--"though the 'Holy War' has forced it to a certain
extent into the background."
"The conflict with the Arabs"--that has been the worst folly of the
Young Turkish politicians, and it will perhaps be the most powerful
solvent of the Empire which the Osmanlis have misgoverned so long. It is
the inevitable consequence of the camarilla government and the
Pan-Turkish chauvinism for which the Committee of Union and Progress has
come to stand.
The Committee consists by its statutes of Turks alone, and the election
even of one Arab was vetoed[10]. Tekin Alp informs us that
"The portfolio of the Minister of Trade and Agriculture, which has been
in the hands of Greeks and Armenians since the time of the Constitution,
and was lately given to a Christian Arab, has at last been handed over
to the Constantinople deputy Ahmed Nasimi Bey, who joined with Ziya Gök
Alp in laying the foundations of the Turkish Movement immediately after
the proclamation of the Constitution. With one exception the members of
the Cabinet are all imbued with the same ideas and principles."
The Armenian deportations gave the Committee an opportunity of
tightening its hold over the provincial officials as well. Valis who
refused to carry out the orders were superseded if they were
strong-minded enough to persist; but more often they were browbeaten by
the leaders of the local Young Turk organisations, or even by their own
subordinates, and let things go their way. Ways and means of packing the
administration with their own henchmen had been discussed by the
Committee already in their congress of October, 1911, and they had
defined their policy then in the following remarkable resolutions[11]:
"The formation of new parties in the Chamber or in the country must be
suppressed and the emergence of new 'liberal ideas' prevented. Turkey
must become a really Mohammedan country, and Moslem ideas and Moslem
influence must be preponderant. Every other religious propaganda must be
suppressed. The existence of the Empire depends on the strength of the
Young Turkish Party and the suppression of all antagonistic ideas....
"Sooner or later the complete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects
must be effected; it is clear, however, that this can never be attained
by persuasion, but that we must resort to armed force. The character of
the Empire must be Mohammedan, and respect must be secured for
Mohammedan institutions and traditions. Other nationalities must be
denied the right of organisation, for decentralisation and autonomy are
treason to the Turkish Empire. _The nationalities are a_ quantité
négligeable. _They can keep their religion but not their language. The
propagation of the Turkish language is one of the sovereign means of
confirming the Mohammedan supremacy and assimilating the other
elements_."
The confusion of aims in these two paragraphs reveals the direction in
which Young Turkish policy has been travelling. Religion is now
secondary to language, and the precedence still given to the Islamic
formula is only in apparent contradiction to this, for Mohammedan
supremacy is equated with the Turkish National Idea. Such a version of
Panislamism leaves no room for an Arab race under Ottoman rule, and the
"Panturanian" address given by the Turkish Professor at the Military
College in Constantinople had a sequel which showed the Arabs what they,
too, had to expect from Turkey's entrance into the War.
There were Arabs among the officers whom the Professor was addressing,
and one of them ventured to protest.
"All Ottomans are not Turks," he said, "and if the Empire were to be
considered purely Turkish, then all the non-Turkish elements would be
foreign to it, instead of being living members of the political body
known as the Ottoman Empire, fighting the common fight for it and for
Islam."
To this the Professor is reported to have replied:
"Although you are an Arab, yet you and your race are subject to Turkey.
Have not the Turks colonised your country, and have they not conquered
it by the sword? The Ottoman State, which you plead, is nothing but a
social trick, to which you resort in order to attain your ends. As to
religion, it has no connexion with politics. We shall soon march forward
in the name of Turkey and the Turkish flag, casting aside religion, as
it is only a personal and secondary question. You and your nation must
realise that you are Turks, and that there is no such thing as Arab
nationality and an Arab fatherland."
It is said that the Arab officers present handed in a joint protest to
the Minister of War, asking for the Professor's dismissal, and that
Enver Bey's answer was to have them all sent to the front-line trenches.
Certainly the Turkish Nationalists have not concealed their attitude
towards the Arabs since the War began.
"The Arab lands," writes Djelal Noury Bey in a recently-published work,
"and above all Irak[12] and Yemen, must become Turkish colonies in which
we shall spread our own language, so that at the right moment we may
make it the language of religion. It is a peculiarly imperious necessity
of our existence for us to Turkise the Arab lands, for the
particularistic idea of nationality is awaking among the younger
generation of Arabs, and already threatens us with a great catastrophe.
Against this we must be forearmed."
And Ahmed Sherif Bey, again, has written as follows in the _Tanin_:
"The Arabs speak their own language and are as ignorant of Turkish as if
their country were not a dependency of Turkey. It is the business of the
_Porte_ to make them forget their own language and to impose upon them
instead that of the nation which rules them. If the Porte loses sight of
this duty it will be digging its grave with its own hands, for if the
Arabs do not forget their language, their history, and their customs,
they will seek to restore their ancient empire on the ruins of
Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia."
A Turkish pamphleteer wrote that "the Arabs have been a misfortune to
Turkey," and that "a Turkish conqueror's war-horse is better than the
Prophet of any other nation." This pamphlet was distributed in the
Caucasus at the Ottoman Government's expense as Turkish propaganda.
But the best proof of the Young Turks' intentions towards the Arabs is
their actual conduct in the Arab provinces of their Empire. In the
spring of 1916 an Arab who had escaped from Syria published some facts
in the Egyptian Press which the Turkish censorship had previously
managed to conceal[13]. Business was ruined, because the Turks had
confiscated all gold and forced the people to accept depreciated paper;
the population was starving, and the Turks had prohibited the American
colony at Beirût from organising relief; the national susceptibilities
of the inhabitants were outraged in petty ways--the railway tickets, for
instance, were no longer printed in Arabic, but only in Turkish and
German; and spies were active in denouncing the least manifestations of
disaffection. A Turkish court-martial was sitting in the Lebanon, and at
the time our informant left Syria it had 240 persons under arrest, 180
of them on political charges. These prisoners were the leading men of
Syria--Christians and Moslems without distinction; for in Syria, as in
Armenia, the Turks put the leaders out of the way before they attacked
the nation as a whole; most of the Syrian bishops had been deported or
driven into hiding; by the beginning of March, 1916, it was reckoned
that 816 Arabs in Syria and 117 in Mesopotamia had already been
condemned to death with the confiscation of their property. A Turkish
officer, taking our informant for a Turk too, remarked to him: "Those
Arabs wish to get rid of us and are secretly in sympathy with our
enemies, but we mean to get rid of them ourselves before they have any
chance of translating their sympathy into action." This caps what a
Turkish gendarme in Armenia said to a Danish sister serving with the
German Red Cross: "First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then
the Kurds[14]." Every non-Turkish nationality in the Ottoman Empire is
threatened with extermination.
But the aims of Turkish Nationalists are not limited by the Ottoman
frontiers. If they are resolved to clear their Empire of every
non-Turkish element, that is only a step towards extending it over
everything Turkish that lies outside. The Turks have not only aliens to
get rid of, but an irredenta to win.
"The Ottoman Turks," Tekin Alp reminds his readers, "now only represent
a tenth of the whole Turkish nation. There are now sixty to seventy
million Turkish subjects of various states in the world, who should
succeed in giving the nation an important place among the other Powers.
Unfortunately, there is no connexion between the separate groups, which
are distributed over great tracts of land. Their aspirations and
national institutions still divide them.... Now that the Ottoman Turks
have awakened from their sleep of centuries they do not only think of
themselves, but hasten to save the other parts of their race who are
living in slavery or ignorance....
"Turkish irredentism may be directed towards material or moral reforms
according to circumstances. If the geographical position favours the
venture, the Turks can free their brothers from foreign rule. In the
other case, they can carry it on on moral or intellectual lines.
"Irredentism, which other nations may regard as a luxury--though often a
very terrible and costly one--is a political and social necessity for
the Turks.... If all the Turks in the world were welded into one huge
community, a strong nation would be formed, worthy to take an important
place among the other nations of the world[15]."
This may be a dream, but the Young Turks have used the political and
military resources of the Ottoman Empire to make it a reality. At the
congress of 1911 it was resolved that "immigration from the Caucasus and
Turkestan must be promoted, land found for the immigrants, and the
Christians hindered from acquiring real estate." Turkey was first to be
reinforced by the Turks abroad; in the European War she was to strike
out as their liberator. The day after their declaration of war the Young
Turkish Government issued a proclamation in which the following
sentences occur:
"Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our
national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us towards the
destruction of our Muscovite enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural
frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all branches of
our race."