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Ottoman Brothers

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

In late July 1908, Muhammad 'Izzat Darwaza, a twenty-year-old government postal clerk in Nablus, a town in the northern hills of Palestine, transcribed a startling telegram from the governor in Beirut to his local deputy: units of the Ottoman army were marching on the imperial capital in Istanbul, demanding that the sultan reinstate the constitution he had suspended more than three decades earlier. As Nabulsis celebrated with "great joy" over the news, Darwaza joined his fellow clerks in adorning the town post office with banners bearing the revolutionary slogan: "liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice."

Sixty miles to the south in Jerusalem, the young Jewish journalist Gad Frumkin caught wind of the startling news from the wire bulletins that arrived from neighboring Egypt. Trembling with excitement and disbelief, Frumkin went out in search of the government censor to sign off on publication of the unofficial rumors in his father's newspaper, the Hebrew-language Lily (Havazelet). When he could not find the Jewish censor, Frumkin gathered his courage to go to the villa of Isma'il "Bey" al-Husayni in the affluent Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood outside the city walls, daring to interrupt the Muslim notable's afternoon siesta only due to the seductive promise of freedom and equality. Frumkin received permission to publish the news, and the following day Lily proclaimed exuberantly to its readers: "This is one of the greatest deeds of His Highness the Sultan, May He Be Exalted!" At the same time, printed notices in Arabic were tacked onto the city walls to inform the rest of the city's population about the recent events.

Halfway around the world, in New York, the young Christian expatriate Khalil al-Sakakini read of the granting of the constitution in a local Arabic-language newspaper and considered it an auspicious sign. Like tens of thousands of Ottomans before him, al-Sakakini had left his homeland for less restrictive shores, seeking both liberty and fortune abroad. With the news of the revolution, however, al-Sakakini reconsidered his options and decided to return home to Jerusalem to fulfill his dreams of establishing a progressive school, a newspaper, and youth clubs. It took him a few weeks to tie up his affairs in America and borrow the necessary funds for the long, expensive journey home, but by September al-Sakakini was back in Palestine.

As all three men had perceived, unprecedented and widespread changes were about to take place in Palestine and in the Ottoman Empire as a whole that would deeply affect Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike. Within weeks, their hometowns and their empire were irrevocably altered. As one resident of Jaffa wrote to his friend in Beirut, "one does not recognize any more our Turkey [sic], and it sometimes seems as if one lives in a dream." More than any other word, "freedom" or "liberty" (hurriyya, Ara.; hürriyet, Ott. Tur.) captured the hopes and dreams that millions of Ottoman citizens invested in the 1908 revolution. From the elite military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals who had been involved in underground political activity for decades to the millions more whose first political act may not have taken place until after the revolution's announcement, Ottomans empire-wide had complex and often contradictory expectations of what "freedom" would look like.

At the basest level, hurriyya was a symbol of rupture from the past and the promise of a new era. As was the case in other revolutionary moments, Ottoman hurriyya was utopian and messianic, serving as a metonym for "righting" the course of history and restoring the Ottoman Empire to a leading political, economic, and cultural role in the world. At the same time, hurriyya also drew on a specific nineteenth-century discourse of political liberalism that engaged with, and at times stemmed from, Islamic sources of inspiration. Central in this discourse of political liberalism was a reconfiguration of the legitimate role of the sultan, who went from being a sacred ruler (caliph) to being subject to the will of the nation. Surprisingly, hurriyya also was a potentially sacrilegious discourse, as the boundaries between support for and sanctification of the revolution became increasingly blurred.

But first, we must turn for a moment to the broader empire and wider intellectual currents in order to understand, not only where the revolution came from and why it came about, but also how it was to take the shape and meaning that it did in our corner of the empire, Palestine.

PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION

The fact that newspapers and telegrams played an instrumental role in bringing news of the revolution to these three young men is a significant marker of the extent to which the empire had been transformed by modern technology and the new ideas and habits that inevitably went along with it. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman cities were connected via telegraph, steamboat, and railroad to the greater empire and to the world beyond. Cities throughout the empire exploded in size as they became magnets for regional rural migrants, foreign immigrants, and international capital. Beirut, for example, went from a fishing town of 6,000 residents to a booming port city of 150,000 to 200,000, the largest on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, in less than one hundred years. The largest, most important Ottoman cities, like Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, and Beirut had running water, electricity, and intracity tramways, developments which had a revolutionary effect on reshaping the urban landscape, restructuring local notions of time, and altering habits of consumption.

Because of its proximity to Beirut and the status of Jaffa as the second most important port city on the Eastern Mediterranean coast, Palestine was by no means unaware of or unaffected by many of the markers of technological modernization and imperial cosmopolitanism that characterized the rest of the empire. It is true that governors and officers sent from Istanbul or Salonica often thought of Palestine as comparatively backward and provincial, far from the glittering lights and stylish public promenades of the capital, but nevertheless, late Ottoman modernity did arrive in the region to a certain extent. In the 1890s, regular train service between coastal Jaffa and holy Jerusalem began, and within a few years an auxiliary line of the famous Hijaz Railway linked Haifa in northern Palestine with Damascus. Ships from Ottoman ports, neighboring Egypt, and Europe arrived in Jaffa on a regular basis, bringing with them pilgrims, migrants, commodities, and mail.

These technological changes went hand in hand with important intellectual developments; as we saw in the case of Shlomo Yellin and his Beirut audience of gentlemen patriots, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented access to education, public as well as private, which contributed to a rise in literacy, an emerging middle class, and the development of a vibrant public sphere of a multilingual press, civil society organizations, and new ideas about sociability and political involvement. Newspapers, magazines, and books from Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Istanbul, and other corners of the empire (not to mention from Paris, Berlin, Odessa, and other European publishing centers) made their way into coffeehouses, libraries, and private homes in Palestine. Young men from affluent Palestinian families went to Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul to continue their studies; many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian families from other parts of the region chose to send their sons to study in boarding schools in the holy city of Jerusalem, bringing with them ideas, contacts, and habits that connected Palestine to the wider empire. In the last years before World War I, public parks for leisurely family strolls and picnics, "moving pictures" (the cinema), competitive soccer matches, and the automobile and airplane all arrived in Palestine to great acclaim and not a little discomfort.

If modernity in Palestine and the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century echoed certain elements of fin-de-siècle Europe, it was out of a spirit of competition more than simple imitation. Generations of Ottoman reformers had seen the empire's relative military and economic decline vis-à-vis Europe as inseparable from the empire's increasing internal corruption and chaos, and in the mid-nineteenth century, reform-minded government officials cooked up an ambitious and broad-ranging program known as the Tanzimat, or Reordering. The reforms aimed at overhauling the empire through centralization and modernization, and within a few decades they had succeeded in bringing about dramatic, if incomplete, changes in the Ottoman military, judiciary, provincial rule, taxation, and land reform.

In addition to bureaucratic reform over the mechanics of imperial rule, there emerged as well a sharp critique of the nature of imperial rule and of the role of the sultan himself. In the Ottoman and Islamic political traditions, the sultan was considered not only the head of state but also the "deputy of the Prophet," "commander of the faithful," and "shadow of God on earth"; this intertwining of political office with sacred legitimacy had always been a source of loyalty and submission by the sultan-caliph's subjects. Classical Ottoman rule relied on the sultan upholding justice and order, and "complaint registers" monitoring reports from the provinces were an important mechanism in the contract between ruler and ruled.

Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century the Ottoman system had broken down under dynastic absolutism and corruption. The foundational text of the Tanzimat, the 1839 Noble Rescript of the Rose Garden pronounced by the pious and reform-minded Sultan Abdülmecid, argued for the restoration of morality and justice in Ottoman rule as a necessary component of reform. The document echoed earlier classical texts on the proper role of a Muslim ruler which centered on the "public good" (maslaha), and reports from around the empire indicated that the sultan's appeal made a favorable impression on his subjects and was an important component in shoring up domestic support in light of both the expansionist ambitions of the rebellious governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, as well as the recent independence of Greece and the European powers' increasing agitation among the empire's Christians.

By the early 1860s and under a new sultan, a group of intellectuals who became known as the Young Ottomans emerged in the capital, turning to Islamic sacred sources and history in calling for further liberal and democratic reforms. Men like Ali Suavi, an intellectual and educator, and Namik Kemal, a poet-playwright who translated Rousseau's Social Contract into Ottoman Turkish, preached in mosques (in the case of Suavi) and published opposition newspapers at home and later (in exile) in Europe that rejected sultanic absolutism and instead cited Islamic tradition in support of principles of representation and consultation (mesveret, Ott. Tur.; shura, Ara.), sovereignty of the people, equality between ruler and ruled, and notions of justice and inalienable rights. Namik Kemal reminded his fellow Ottomans that "monarchs have no right to govern other than the authorization granted to them by the nation in the form of allegiance," which he equated with the oath of allegiance given to the Prophet's successors in early Islamic history. Both Kemal and Suavi cited Qur'anic verses as well as hadith (oral traditions about the sayings and deeds of the Prophet, Muhammad) to support their positions.

The ideas of the Young Ottomans buttressed reformist government officials like Midhat Pasha, who as grand vizier to the new sultan, Abdülhamid II, was able to achieve the short-term adoption of an Ottoman constitution and establishment of an Ottoman parliament in 1876. For Midhat Pasha, the constitution was nothing short of an Ottoman Magna Carta—intended to be "the curb and limit of arbitrary power and exaction." Instead, even before it was officially promulgated, the constitution was amended by the sultan, who claimed the original version was "incompatible with the habits and aptitudes of the nation." A Russian military assault in April 1878 gave the sultan an excuse to suspend the constitution entirely, disband the parliament, and imprison and exile the reformers who dreamed of turning the empire into a constitutional monarchy. Ali Suavi was killed in an attempt to overthrow the sultan; Namik Kemal died under house arrest in the Aegean islands; and Midhat Pasha was sent to prison in Ta'if on the Arabian Peninsula, where he was strangled by his guards on the order of the sultan.

Despite this severe setback, the ideas of the Ottoman reformists and the ideals of a constitutional, parliamentary government continued to resonate throughout the Ottoman and broader Muslim worlds. Although Abdülhamid II shut down the free press in most of the empire, semiautonomous Egypt and Lebanon, like the capitals of Europe, served as important centers of political dissidence. Scholars, journalists, and political activists like 'Abdullah al-Nadim, Mustafa Kamil, Wali al-Din Yakan, Francis Fathallah Marrash, and Adib Ishaq published broadly and engaged with meanings of governmental reform, personal liberty, and political legitimacy. The 'Urabi revolution in Egypt in 1881-82 against an impending British occupation and a concessionary palace, and the mass boycotts and emergence of an independent press in Qajar Iran in the 1890s, challenged the political status quo and provided new models for an active political life that drew from both Western liberalism and Islamic tradition.

These ideas of internal reform were linked to the growing awareness by the end of the nineteenth century that the Ottoman Empire was in a precarious geopolitical position. In a period of less than fifty years, the empire lost most of its North African and European provinces to Europe—in the cases of Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, through direct military occupation; whereas in the cases of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cyprus, due to unfair treaties imposed upon the empire by the Great Powers. In addition, because of the massive debts it accumulated in the 1856 Crimean War, the empire had been forced to declare bankruptcy and accept a British and French-run Public Debt Administration in 1881, which ensured that Ottoman revenues went first and foremost to servicing its foreign creditors and only later (if at all) to paying for the military, government bureaucracy, public works, and education systems. As a result, Ottomans of the late nineteenth century had every reason to literally fear for the continued existence and well-being of their empire. In the words of one contemporary Turkish historian, the feeling that "the state was slipping from our hands" was palpable among turn-of-the-century Ottoman elites.

By the 1890s, fear of continued European meddling in Ottoman affairs combined with opposition to Hamidian autocracy, inefficiency and corruption crystallized among groups of government bureaucrats, army officers, intellectuals, students, and even estranged princes from the sultan's own family. Ali Fuat, at the time a student at the military academy from a prominent political and military family, expressed the sentiments of his generation aptly:

Sultan Abdülhamit II, in whose honor we had to shout "Long Live our Padishah" several times a day, gradually lost lustre in our eyes.... As we heard that the government worked badly, that corruption was rife, that civil servants and officers did not receive their pay, while secret policemen and courtiers, covered in gold braid, received not only their pay but purses of gold, our confidence in the sultan, which was not strong at the best of times, was totally shaken. We saw that delivered into incompetent hands, the army was losing its effectiveness and prestige.... But no one dared to ask "Where are we going? Where are you taking the country?"

Opposition organizations like the Ottoman Consultative Society and the Ottoman Union and minority groups such as the Armenian Dashnak were active in the 1890s, in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and even in the Ottoman diaspora in South America. The organizations and activists differed on a number of questions, from the type of empire envisioned (centralized vs. decentralized) to whether or not the path of opposition to the sultan should include requesting European aid or intervention, but in 1902 they agreed to hold the First Congress of Ottoman Opposition Parties in Paris. The following year, an uprising in Macedonia of the Bulgarian nationalist International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) led to the arrival of additional European military and civilian "advisors" in Salonica, the most important city in Ottoman Europe. At the same time, economic crisis throughout 1905-8, sparked by a rising cost of living and declining salaries, dislocation of local workers and industries due to European economic penetration, and agricultural failures, added a new layer of opposition to the government in the form of workers' strikes, grain riots, and tax revolts. These uncertain economic conditions also led to significant unrest in the countryside. For all these reasons, then, by the time the Second Congress of Ottoman Liberals convened in Paris in December 1907, the various opposition movements were unanimous in resolving to overthrow the Ottoman government in order to save the empire.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Ottoman Brothers by Michelle U. Campos Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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