VTHE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”—THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND ITS DEFEAT—HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM—KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT FROM POLITICS—THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.Threemonths after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908, the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July 23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in Turkish—“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica. Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find Moslemhojasand Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting for thePadishah. The magic of that Western word “Constitution” blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.Illustration: FEVZI PASHAFIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHAPrime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.Illustration: ALI FETHY BEYALI FETHY BEYNationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russianentente, its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two communions in Constantinople.The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with shouts of “Sheriat!” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies—two Turks, a Christian and a Jew—presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government. And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its headquarters at Salonica.Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more tightly to their community institutions. The application of Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as unpalatable to theRûmandErmenicommunities as to the dominant Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a merecoup d’etat. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as militaryattachewhere he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made theirRûmcommunity more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque ofAyiah Sophiain Stamboul.An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact withRussianOrthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in theRussianclaim to the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry ofEvkafsupplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the SlavicSokolsand the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “I am a Turk, my race and language are great.” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raiderHamidiehduring the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople, with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition, the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the LiberalEntenteParty, but it had a poor time of it.
“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”—THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND ITS DEFEAT—HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM—KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT FROM POLITICS—THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.
Threemonths after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908, the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July 23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in Turkish—“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica. Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find Moslemhojasand Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting for thePadishah. The magic of that Western word “Constitution” blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.
Illustration: FEVZI PASHAFIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHAPrime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.
FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA
Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.
Illustration: ALI FETHY BEYALI FETHY BEYNationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.
ALI FETHY BEY
Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the Second Grand National Assembly.
But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russianentente, its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two communions in Constantinople.
The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with shouts of “Sheriat!” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies—two Turks, a Christian and a Jew—presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government. And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its headquarters at Salonica.
Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more tightly to their community institutions. The application of Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as unpalatable to theRûmandErmenicommunities as to the dominant Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.
Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a merecoup d’etat. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as militaryattachewhere he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.
The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire, its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia, preparing at Athens for still another war.
Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made theirRûmcommunity more than ever tenacious of its institutions, and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the yellow-brown dome of the great mosque ofAyiah Sophiain Stamboul.
An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into contact withRussianOrthodoxy and it was only a matter of time until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in theRussianclaim to the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts of the Dardanelles.
The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks, while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.
There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish. It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the Ministry ofEvkafsupplied funds to start a national library and to subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds. It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the SlavicSokolsand the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “I am a Turk, my race and language are great.” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam, the Empire still obscured and confused it.
The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raiderHamidiehduring the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by private subscription before an order could be placed with British yards for two new battleships.
Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.
The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople, with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition, the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the LiberalEntenteParty, but it had a poor time of it.