A History of the Middle East

by Peter Mansfield

  Their immediate problem was an attempt at counter-revolution. While avowedly accepting the new constitution, Abdul Hamid secretly encouraged the disgruntled and reactionary elements who opposed the new order. In April 1909, troops of the Istanbul garrison mutinied, massacred their officers and raided parliament. When Abdul Hamid pardoned the leaders of the revolt and formed a new cabinet, the Young Turks sent an army from Salonika to restore order, punish the insurgents and restore the authority of the CUP. Three days later parliament met and announced the abdication of Abdul Hamid. His brother Reshad was proclaimed sultan, with the title of Mohammed V. This mild and self-effacing 64-year-old was quite prepared to accept the role of constitutional monarch.

  The CUP wisely decided to spare Abdul Hamid’s life, and he was interned in a private villa in Salonika. His former subjects have extraordinarily mixed impressions of his long reign. For Turks, the record of the modernizing reforms he achieved in some limited areas is outweighed by his inability to prevent the final humiliation of the House of Ottoman which had once been a great European power. But a different impression has remained among the non-Turkish Muslims in the empire. In some cases they were peoples or tribes whom he had favoured over their rivals – Kurds against Armenians, Sunnis against Shiites in Mesopotamia. But over a longer period it is the record of his pan-Islamic policies which has survived. It matters less that these were often used to further his despotic ends than that he is seen as the last ruler to champion the cause of the Islamic umma. In the late twentieth century, Arabs will almost invariably refer to the fact that it was Sultan Abdul Hamid who refused the request of the Austrian Dr Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, to lease part of Palestine as a national home for the Jews. In fact Abdul Hamid was inclined to accept the request in return for substantial loans from international Jewry, but he was persuaded by his ministers that this would be disastrous for his pan-Islamic policies and his prestige among his Arab subjects. It is the sultan’s refusal which is remembered.

  If in 1908 there were scarcely any Arabs who thought of separation from the Turkish heart of the empire which remained the sole protector of Sunni Islam, there were undoubtedly many who hoped for decentralization, autonomy for the Arab provinces and the acceptance of Turco-Arab equality. The Young Turks, on the other hand, did not so much insist on Turkish domination as take it for granted. It was only when they felt threatened by increased national feeling among the remaining non-Turkish elements in the empire – Greeks, Armenians and Kurds as well as Arabs – that they turned to a specifically Turkish nationalism. In its narrower form this aimed at the consolidation of the Turkish nation within Anatolia (or approximately the borders of the present Turkish Republic). But there was also a wider movement – the pan-Turanian – of which the ideologist was the writer Zia Gokalp. This called for the union of all Turkish-speaking peoples, including those of central Asia where the Turks had originated. Although the CUP did not formally adopt the pan-Turanian programme, the concept was highly attractive to some of its leaders such as Enver Bey. Romantic and historically dubious in its expression, it was essentially racist. It was also anti-Islamic, in that it called for a return to an era before the Turks adopted Islam.

  The dominant outlook in the CUP was therefore secular and nationalist, rather than pan-Islamic. Most of its leaders were Freemasons, and they were closely associated with the Jews of Salonika, who played an important role in the Young Turk movement. But this did not mean that they were either able or willing to abandon the empire’s role of leadership of the Islamic world which, after four centuries, was still acknowledged by both its Christian and its Muslim subjects.

  Talaat Bey recognized the problem that this presented for the Young Turks’ objective of an empire which would be both centralized and ‘ottomanized’ to a far greater degree than under Sultan Abdul Hamid. In a secret speech to the Salonika CUP in August 1910, he said that, while the constitution provided for equality of ‘Mussulman and Ghiaur [i.e. non-Muslim]’, they all knew that this was an unrealizable ideal.

  The Sheriat [i.e. sharia], our whole past history and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Mussulmans and even the sentiments of the Ghiaurs themselves, who stubbornly resist every attempt to ottomanize them, present an impenetrable barrier to the establishment of real equality. We have made unsuccessful attempts to convert the Ghiaur into a loyal Osmanli and all such efforts must inevitably fail, as long as the small independent States in the Balkan Peninsula remain in a position to propagate ideas of separatism among the inhabitants of Macedonia.

  These independent states – Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria – were indeed afraid that an Ottoman Empire rejuvenated by the Young Turks might try to recover its hold over the Balkans. Without any encouragement from the European powers – except for Russia – they formed a secret alliance, and in October 1912 they launched a war against Turkey. By December, they had seized Salonika and western Thrace, forcing the CUP to move its headquarters to Istanbul. The Turkish army retreated to lines defending the capital. When the Balkan allies fell out over the division of the spoils and fought each other, Turkey was able to recover a portion of Macedonia and the key city of Edirne, but Crete and most of the Aegean islands were ceded to Greece. Turkey’s role in Europe had almost been eliminated.

  The Young Turks did not expect ottomanization of the empire’s Muslim subjects to present the same problems. The trouble was that, for them in their newly invigorated spirit of Turkish nationalism, ottomanization really meant ‘turkification’. (It hardly needs to be said that pan-Turanian ideas were unlikely to appeal to Ottoman Arabs.) Turkish had always been the language of Ottoman officialdom, but Arabic held its place among the mass of Ottoman Arabs. As the language of religion, Arabic was also predominant in education. The Young Turks now aimed to turn the heterogeneous empire into a nation with a single language. Turkish was made a compulsory subject in every school. It was required to be used in the law courts, and even the street names in the cities were turned into Turkish, although it was incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population in the Arab provinces.

  The result of these turkification policies was a profound stimulus to the consciousness of their Arabism among the Ottoman Arabs. This was still a long way from the secular Arab nationalism which emerged later: it was rooted in their pride in Arabic as the language in which God spoke to the world through the Prophet, and in the unique place of the Arabs in the history of Islam. This Arab awareness had been submerged but in no way eliminated by the acceptance of Turkish political and military leadership during many centuries.

  One of the Arab responses to the concept of a Turkish master race was the founding of various societies or parties dedicated to the protection of Arab rights and the achievement of Arab autonomy within the empire. In Beirut, Baghdad and Basra these societies had to remain underground, but the most important of them – the Young Arab Society or al-Fatat – was established by a group of Arab students in Paris, and this secretly gathered support throughout the Arab provinces.

  Within the empire, the Arab leader who was best placed to challenge Ottoman domination was the Grand Sharif of Mecca. As custodian of the holy places of Islam and supervisor of the Muslim hajj or pilgrimage, he was hardly a subject for ‘turkification’. The powers in Istanbul had to treat him with a certain respect. The post was now occupied by Hussein Bin Ali, the troublesome member of the hereditary sharifian Hashemite family whom in 1893 Sultan Abdul Hamid had ‘invited’ to settle in Istanbul, where his activities could be kept under observation. As a gesture of goodwill during the brief Turco-Arab honeymoon after the 1908 revolution, the CUP appointed him Grand Sharif, ignoring the shrewd warnings of Sultan Abdul Hamid. They soon had cause for regret. Now in his mid-fifties, the venerable, white-bearded Sharif Hussein was powerfully ambitious. His mild and courteous manner concealed a will of steel which sustained his sense of his own destiny. But he was also naturally cautious, and he did not immediately cause trouble with the Turks. He even conducted a s
uccessful expedition on their behalf to suppress a rebellion in the Asir province of south-western Arabia. In return, the Ottoman government encouraged him to extend its authority into the interior. This involved him in conflict with a formidable Arab rival – the House of Saud – which would cause the downfall of his Hashemite family in Arabia, just as the Hashemites would be the instrument for the overthrow of Turkish rule in the Arab provinces of the empire.

  The House of Saud had recovered from its internal divisions in the 1860s, which had allowed the Turks to occupy eastern Arabia, but had then suffered defeat at the hands of its long-standing rivals in northern Nejd, the Rashids. In 1891 Abdul Rahman, the head of the House of Saud, was forced to flee from Riyadh and take refuge with the emir of Kuwait. He was accompanied by the eldest of five sons, the ten-year-old Abdul Aziz, commonly known by his patronymic Ibn Saud, who was to prove to be one of the outstanding figures in the modern history of the Middle East.

  By the time he reached manhood, Ibn Saud dominated his companions with his physical presence and personality. In 1902 he succeeded in recapturing the Saudi capital of Riyadh with a tiny force, and he set about restoring the former Saudi/Wahhabi state. Rashidi power was in decline; he reconquered Nejd and in 1913 went on to occupy the eastern Arabian province of al-Hasa, which had been barely held by the Turks. He was recognized by Britain as ‘Sultan of Nejd and its Dependencies’, but he could not go further as the entire Persian Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman was under Britain’s exclusive influence.

  In western Arabia, he suffered a setback. Sharif Hussein succeeded in taking Ibn Saud’s favourite brother, Saad, hostage and Ibn Saud was forced to accept a nominal Ottoman suzerainty in order to ransom him. He swore revenge against the Hashemites.

  Sharif Hussein, having made himself indispensable to the Turks, set about asserting the rights and dignity of his office against the Ottoman wali of the Hejaz. But he was looking further – to making the Hejaz an autonomous Arab province which could then be the nucleus for the independence of all the Arab provinces within the empire.

  Hussein’s sons, by now grown to manhood, shared his ambitions. Abdullah, the second and cleverest, was deputy for Mecca in the new Ottoman parliament, and he caused the CUP the greatest suspicion. They tried to win him over by offering him the post of governor-general of Yemen, where Ottoman authority had recently been reasserted, but he cannily refused. Less cautious than his father, in February 1914 he visited Cairo to sound out the British agent, Lord Kitchener, and his oriental secretary, Sir Ronald Storrs, on the possibility of the British government supporting his family’s ambitions on behalf of the Arabs. But although Britain by this time did not see how war with its great rival imperial Germany could be avoided, it did not see an Ottoman alliance with Germany as inevitable. The traditional policy of regarding the survival of the Ottoman Empire as favourable to British interests remained. Kitchener was therefore non-committal to the point of being discouraging, and Abdullah came away disappointed.

  After Sultan Abdul Hamid’s unsuccessful counter-coup in 1909, the CUP were in sole command in the empire and free to pursue their illiberal and centralizing policies. They at once prohibited the formation of political associations based on ethnic or national groups and closed down minority clubs and societies. They made much wider use of the death penalty than Abdul Hamid would have considered. The CUP’s policies did not, however, go unchallenged. In the Young Turks movement there had always been a different, liberal, tendency which favoured decentralization of power and saw ottomanization not as the imposition of Turkish political and cultural dominance but as the creation of a pluralist and multi-denominational empire in which the autonomous rights of the religious and national minorities would be respected. In its most explicit form, this tendency was represented by the Ottoman Decentralization League of Prince Sabah al-Din, a nephew of Abdul Hamid, who had gone into exile in Paris to escape his uncle’s despotism. With his programme for the devolution of power to autonomous provinces under the Ottoman flag and for protection of the Ottoman army, he appealed to Arabs as much as to liberal Turks. Branches of his League sprang up throughout the empire. It was dissolved as subversive by the CUP shortly after the 1908 revolution, but it continued to survive underground and in 1912 it emerged as the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party, which was formed in Cairo under British protection by a group of prominent Syrian émigrés.

  Although the Prince’s League was suppressed by the CUP, there were many more in the new Ottoman parliament who favoured both constitutional government and some degree of decentralization. They feared that the CUP was proving even more despotic in its methods than Abdul Hamid. They received support from respected liberal elder statesmen from the Hamidian era.

  All these groups and individuals combined in 1911 to form a single opposition front: the Liberal Union. This soon demonstrated that it had widespread popular support. The CUP acted promptly by dissolving parliament and using all means of pressure in the subsequent election – known as the ‘big-stick election’ – to ensure that out of 275 members only six belonged to the opposition.

  This high-handed action only provoked a more dangerous opposition to the CUP from within the armed forces. A group called the ‘Saviour Officers’ demanded the withdrawal of the army from politics and, with the support of Albanian units, used threatening troop movements to carry out a bloodless coup which forced the resignation of the CUP-controlled government and its replacement by one led by the veteran liberal Kamel Pasha.

  The liberal interregnum lasted only a few months. The Balkan war was reaching its most disastrous stage, with the enemy at the gates of Istanbul. It was the occasion for the CUP to recover power. On 23 January 1913, Enver Bey and a group of officers forced their way into the cabinet room and shot dead the minister of war. A CUP government was restored, and Turkish liberalism went underground for a long period.

  The empire was now effectively ruled by a triple dictatorship of Enver, Talaat and Jemal Pashas. Enver, the youngest of the three, was brave, vain and flamboyant – still the popular hero of the Young Turks. He commanded adoration in the army and concentrated on the revival and improvement of the Ottoman military forces, whose morale was at a low ebb following the Balkan disasters. His admiration for the military power of Germany, which was helping to train the Ottoman army, made him the most pro-German of the triumvirate. In contrast to Enver, Jemal Pasha was cool and calmly self-assured, but his aristocratic politeness concealed a streak of coarse ruthlessness. Talaat, the only civilian, was the ablest and most intelligent – a man of ideas. He was charming and humorous, but quite uncompromising in his fierce Turkish patriotism.

  By 1914 the CUP had been in charge of the empire for barely six years. The liberal interregnum had been too brief to affect its policies. In the Arab provinces these had caused a serious deterioration in Turco-Arab relations, but in the Turkish homeland there were some substantial achievements of the kind that are often associated with effective modernizing dictatorships which are little concerned with constitutional liberties. Provincial and municipal government were greatly improved; the cities were made cleaner and safer and public transport was organized. Javid Pasha, the brilliant finance minister, of Jewish origin, was able to do little to ease the empire’s burden of foreign debt – especially as costly wars were being fought – but he successfully reformed the tax system to improve revenues. (The CUP failed in its efforts at liquidating the Capitulations; that had to wait until Turkey joined the Great European War.)

  Perhaps the Young Turks’ greatest achievement was in expanding education. Building on the efforts of the nineteenth-century reformers, they went much further in creating a modern progressive system at all levels, with new teacher-training colleges and specialized institutes. They were the first rulers of an independent Muslim country to create a state education system which was open to girls; previously the daughters of only the wealthiest classes had been educated, privately. The way was opened for Turkish women to enter public li
fe as lawyers, doctors and administrators.

  Enver Bey’s degree of success in rejuvenating the Ottoman armed forces is difficult to evaluate. The armed forces were of enormous size; one million men were under arms when the Young Turks came to power, and this number was increased by the introduction of military conscription. But it was the raising of military standards and the modernization of weapons which were most required. The German general Liman von Sanders was appointed inspector-general of the Ottoman army, and the British admiral Sir Arthur Limpus was given the task of reorganizing the navy. When war came, Turkey’s opponents, who had never doubted the courage of the Turkish soldiers, certainly found them better prepared for modern warfare than they had expected.

  In its foreign policy the CUP was by no means unresourceful. The overriding aim, as in everything else, was the preservation of Turkey’s Asian empire and the strengthening of its defences. The intense rivalry between the European powers left opportunity for manoeuvre. Both Talaat and Jemal were anxious to secure an alliance with the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain which aimed to hold the balance of power in Europe against the ambitions of the Central Powers – imperial Germany and Austro-Hungary. Russia was the most eager to respond, as it was by now thoroughly alarmed by the dominant position Germany had acquired in Istanbul and feared that it would gain control of the Dardanelles straits. Although Britain and France had shown some benevolence towards the Young Turks’ revolution, they were unprepared to include the Balkan states in any territorial guarantees for Turkey’s remaining position in Europe. They both expected Turkey to remain neutral in any forthcoming war and that their interests would thus remain secure. Britain no longer regarded the survival of the Turkish Empire as a matter of great concern; the alliance with Russia provided sufficient protection for vital British interests in the Persian Gulf.