Читать книгу The Rebirth of Turkey - Clair Price - Страница 11

KEMAL’S ARREST AND HIS EXILE TO DAMASCUS—​HIS EVENTUAL RETURN TO SALONICA—​WHAT THE YOUNG TURKS WANTED—​THE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM WHICH CONFRONTED THEM—​THE ROLE OF AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND EDUCATORS—​CHRISTENDOM VS. ISLAM.

The young Kemal had no sooner been graduated from the General Staff classes at the War Academy in Constantinople, than he engaged a small apartment in Stamboul to serve as the headquarters of the secret Society of Liberty. But an acquaintance whom he trusted and whom he permitted to sleep in the apartment at night on the plea that he was penniless, proved to be one of Abdul Hamid’s spies and Kemal was arrested. Having been questioned at Yildiz Kiosk, he was held for three months in a police cell and then exiled late in 1902 to a cavalry regiment in Damascus. Fresh from the War Academy, fired with the spirit of revolution and schooled in its technique, he lost no time at Damascus in getting into touch with other exiles from the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in the capital. His colonel, Lutfi Bey, introduced him to the keeper of a small stationery shop in the Damascus bazaars who had been exiled from the College of Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.

The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the interior by Konia whose historic dervish tekkes were a well of Islam undefiled. It was the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who girded each new Caliph with the Prophet’s sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.

But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans were already in a ferment of Westernism and in their grim way were preparing to disentangle themselves in the wake of the retreating Empire. Salonica, Uskub and Monastir were already seething with forbidden political ideas and if the Empire were ever to halt its retreat, it was here it would have to make its peace with Westernism. It was here that Old Greece had flung down its challenge and it was here that challenge would have to be picked up. Furthermore, if any force were to be mobilized to thrust Westernism upon Abdul Hamid in Constantinople, it was from Salonica that it would inevitably be launched.

Kemal accordingly abandoned his work in Syria and induced Lutfi Bey to give him leave under an assumed name to Smyrna, intending to make his way from there to Salonica. Fearing, however, that Constantinople would detect his presence in Smyrna, he went to Egypt instead and sailed from Alexandria to the Piraeus, whence he reached Salonica. Constantinople was coming more and more completely into the grip of Abdul Hamid. The General Staff was being periodically broken up and scattered to the four corners of the Empire, and the Military College of Medicine was finally locked up and abandoned. Hamid was beginning in similar fashion to tighten his grip on Salonica and, although Kemal remained there in strictest hiding, his presence was discovered after four months and he fled precipitately to Jaffa, where a convenient outbreak of “trouble” at Akaba on the Red Sea gave him an alibi which served to soothe the ruffled feelings of the capital. From Akaba he went back to Damascus and waited there until a change of War Ministers in Constantinople made it possible for him to request, and secure, a transfer to the Staff of the Third Army at Salonica. Back in Salonica again, he threw himself into the work of the secret Young Turkish organization.

A little group of Ottoman exiles in Paris of whom Ahmed Riza Bey was the leader, had discovered the formula which was to achieve that internal unity which the Empire had long enjoyed and without which no Empire could endure. It was the formula of Ottomanization. “A new Ottoman Empire one and indivisible” was their dream, an expression which they had borrowed from the French Revolution. “Oh, non-Moslem Ottomans—​Oh, Moslem Ottomans” was their program. All the races of the Empire were to be drawn together into “a new nation,” “a new Ottoman Empire,” whose military strength would enable it to halt its long retreat and put an end to interference in its internal affairs from without. To Riza Bey, Moslems and Christians alike were sufferers under Abdul Hamid’s Easternism. The restoration of the still-born Constitution of thirty years before, was his objective; with the Constitution restored, Moslems and Christians would enjoy alike the rights and the duties of Ottoman citizenship. Moslems would no longer suffer in silence. Christians would no longer lift their complaints throughout Europe and the United States. “We shall no longer be slaves, but a new Ottoman nation of freemen.”

This was the ideal which Riza Bey lifted up in the little revolutionary periodical Mechveret which was smuggled into every garrison in the Empire from his little flat in the Place Monge, near the Montmarte section of Paris. This was the ideal which young Turks like Enver and Niazi and Kemal were propagating, as they built up the secret organization which was to compel Abdul Hamid to restore the Constitution. Throughout the Empire, they had their agents in every garrison, converting both the officers and the enlisted personnel of Abdul Hamid’s Army, and assassinating hostile officers and men known to be spies. Small organizing committees had been planted in all the larger garrisons and directing committees were functioning in Constantinople, Salonica, Smyrna, Adrianople, Uskub and Monastir. Under the Eastern tradition of government, it was the Army which immediately mattered. Deprived of his Army, Abdul Hamid for the moment would be caught defenseless.

But in reality the Army was only the instrument of Abdul Hamid’s power. The substance of his power lay in Moslem law and in the unswerving devotion to it of the Old Turks. Strong simple men, these Old Turks were, men who knew nothing of the arts of debate, broadly tolerant of the usages of others and rigidly conservative of their own usages, men who took their starkly simple faith very seriously, in whose lives religion was still the dominating factor. They were found in the mosque schools rather than in the War Academy, in Konia rather than in Salonica, and in winning over the Army, the Young Turks were not touching the vast and silent body of conservative Old Turkish opinion which formed Abdul Hamid’s real strength. Here was a dead weight of usage which knew no necessity for change and which would have resisted to the end if it had. True, there was a section of Old Turkish opinion in the capital and the larger provincial centers, which disliked Abdul Hamid the Sultan, but Abdul Hamid the Caliph was quite another matter. Under the Caliph, Moslem and non-Moslem were not equal. Non-Moslems had been given far more tolerant treatment under the Caliph than religious dissenters had sometimes been given under Christian rule in the West, but the tolerance which the Caliph guaranteed them did not make them the equals of Moslems.

Whether Moslem law was really thus inflexible was obviously a matter for Moslems themselves to determine, but the record of India’s Moslems in accommodating themselves to British rule would have seemed to indicate otherwise. India’s Moslems, however, were in touch with the Western world as the Old Turks were not. The very fact of British rule, not to mention their long contact with Hindus, had given India’s Moslems a breadth of vision which Old Turkish opinion lacked. Old Turkish leadership embodied Islam at its best, but in the range of its experience it embodied Islam at its narrowest.

Meanwhile, the Rûm community whose relations with the Sultan-Caliph were still generally peaceful, had a very large source of strength outside the Empire. Had the Young Turks eventually proved successful in equalizing Moslem and non-Moslem in an Ottoman citizenry, the Rûm community might or might not have accepted the change and undertaken to work the newly Ottomanized Empire. But if the Young Turks failed, there were sources of outside strength available to the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople which would have broken the Old Turks by force and substituted a new regime which might be described as Old Greek. The old Byzantine Empire had been snuffed out as an independent political entity in 1453, but it still lived as an ecclesiastical, commercial and political force in the Oecumenical Patriarchate in the Phanar suburb of Stamboul. Its clergy still perpetuated its memory in the black cylindrical hats and the black robes of Orthodoxy, but for the time being their communicants wore the red fez which marked the Ottoman subject.

The King at Athens whence the challenge of Westernism had first been flung down to the Empire, had adopted the title of King of the Greeks and Orthodoxy dominated Old Greece with a degree of intolerance which had never marked Islam in the Empire. Orthodoxy had established its hold on Russia and Orthodox Russia had become the most powerful enemy Islam had ever known. Russia had acquired the protectorship of the Rûm community in the Empire and the great yellow-brown mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul had become the most sacred irredentum of the Orthodox. Russia sent thousands of pilgrims annually from Odessa to Palestine, and built a hospice on the Mount of Olives which commands Jerusalem in a military sense, with a tower which could not have been better adapted for the uses of a signal tower if it had been built for the purpose. Between Orthodoxy and Islam, there had arisen that state of bitter truce which was typified in the juxtaposition of a Russian church and a Turkish serai.

France which had divorced Church and State at home, still held the protectorship of the Katolik community in the Ottoman Empire. Italy whose relations with the Vatican at home had not always been friendly clung tenaciously to the rights of Italian Catholic orders in Palestine. Germany whose Lutherans had no specified rights in the Christian holy places and whose Kaiser had proclaimed himself the friend of Islam, had planted stronger colonies in Palestine and more buildings in Jerusalem than any other Western Power, and had built a hospice on the Mount of Olives “strengthened” by a wall which could hardly have been better adapted for the uses of military defense if it had been built for the purpose. So we had a city sacred to Moslems, Christians and Jews, dominated by Russian and German hospices on the Mount of Olives, strong fortress-like structures erected ad gloriam maiorem Dei. Meanwhile the Caliph of Islam continued to administer the city with fairness to the communicants of all three faiths, keeping his garrison down at Jaffa on the coast except on the occasions of such religious festivals as required its temporary presence in Jerusalem.

One expects from American Protestantism and British Nonconformism an attitude of aloofness from this sort of thing, for both have revolted against the use of the Church by the State. Both have revolted against that ritualism which marks the older forms of Christianity and have set up for themselves a form of service severely simple and aggressively evangelical. In accordance with the finest of its evangelical traditions, American Protestantism has carried on a long and vigorous missionary endeavor in the old Ottoman Empire, but actual contact with Islam in its own country has done much to make plain to the missionaries themselves the reasons for the great Moslem reformation which all but swept Christianity out of existence in the land of its origin. Whatever may have been thought in the United States as to the work in which American missionaries have been engaged in the Empire, that work has been directed towards the reformation of the decadent survivals of Christian worship. The missionaries themselves, as distinct from their supporters in the United States, have rightly observed that Christianity will not command the respect of Islam until Moslems have been shown a different type of Christian from that type to which they have been accustomed. The missionaries accordingly, beginning on one of the outermost fringes of Christendom, have devoted themselves to work largely among the Armenians and have drawn away from their Gregorian Church a new community which the Caliph in Constantinople recognized as the Prodesdan community.

But an important circumstance exists which is inevitably present in any missionary endeavor in an alien land and of which we sometimes need to remind ourselves. In actual practice, Islam is not only a religion but a form of civilization as well and, in the life of any devout Moslem, it would be very difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins. Precisely the same is true of American Protestantism. It might be simple enough to state the theology of American Protestantism, but that theology would fall far short of defining the actual missionary. For the missionary is not only a Protestant but an American as well, and in any alien country he embodies the American Protestant form of civilization. However rigidly he may seek to confine his work within the limits of religious teaching (and I am thoroughly convinced that the overwhelming majority of missionaries have so sought to confine their work in the Ottoman Empire), it is impossible for him not to be an American and a center of American ideas. In actual practice, it proved impossible for him not to stand as a center of Westernism in an Eastern country to which the application of Western ideas necessitated the utmost caution. The Armenians among whom most of the missionaries worked, were the farthest East of all the Ottoman peoples and among the non-Moslem communities they were the last to respond to the Western lure. For centuries they have lived generally in peace under the Caliph’s rule. Themselves an Eastern people, they had lived under their Eastern masters in the enjoyment of the autonomy of their community institutions. The terms under which the Ermeni community conducted its own affairs in its own way, were the only terms under which they could have enjoyed the degree of autonomy which they did enjoy, for they had a majority in no province[1] and the Western idea presupposes a majority as the first requisite of independence.

If Christian worship as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire was ever to command the respect of Moslems, in theory it was all to the good that the missionaries should draw their new Protestant community out of the old Gregorian Church. But that the Armenians should be exposed incautiously to Western ideas of nationalism was quite another matter. Events might have worked out differently had the missionaries been able to lay aside their Americanism, had they became Ottoman subjects themselves and confined their work to the propagation of Protestantism under Ottoman rule. But this sort of thing is not done. Without the steadying influence of responsibility to the Ottoman Government, they permitted their work to take them into the most intimate and delicate parts of the Ottoman structure. Their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was that of the Capitulations, their only responsibility was to their American supporters at home to whom the Ottoman Government was as far away as the moon.

Nobody has ever expected American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to become Ottoman subjects. Indeed, nothing could have made such a proceeding more ridiculous than the mere mention of it, and I am inclined to believe that in the very ridicule which its mention would have provoked, there is food for very sober reflection. Among imperialists, one can thoroughly understand such an attitude, for imperialism is based on force and prestige is the very necessary legend of the invincibility of Western force. But do we Christians also build on force?

Yet the history of Old Greece is by no means an isolated instance of intolerance in modern Christendom. We Christians have built a world in which only Christian nations are admitted to equality (the recent example of Japan to the contrary notwithstanding). Old Greece and Old Russia we have recognized as complete equals with us and if the Armenians had gained their independence, presumably we would have recognized Armenia also as an equal, although every American missionary who knows the Armenians in their own country knows what their abilities are. But forgetting that the true worth of a nation lies in character, we have never recognized Moslem nations as equals with us. We found in the Turks a people of integrity and tolerance, but because they refused to turn Christian, we have concurred in the modern Capitulations and have visited the butcher-legend upon them while exalting Greeks and Armenians upon an equally artificial martyr-legend. Among imperialists, one can understand the necessity of an inflexible attitude of superiority, but among Christians it corresponds neither to reality nor to the teachings of the First Christian.

“And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nought: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast, saying, God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he that humbleth himself shall be exalted…”

The missionaries remained Americans as well as Protestants. They administered Westernism as well as Protestantism to the Armenians, and the result of the administration of Westernism was bloodshed. The example of Nihilism in Russia lured the Armenians on into the secret society craze. Armenian revolutionary societies answered bloodshed with more bloodshed, and the tragedy began whose ghastly fruition we have seen.

Some of the missionaries recoiled from further missionary effort and opened schools and hospitals instead which they threw open impartially to all the races of the Empire. These schools were instituted solely for educational purposes and the largest of them offered as good a schooling as most American colleges in the United States offered. Their effort was to offer the best that Americans at home had and even in such incidentals as the architecture of their buildings, they made themselves as completely American as possible. Two of the largest of them were built high on the wooded shores of the Bosphorus and nobody can glance at them today without knowing at once that they are American. High above the suburbs of the old capital, they look as if they had been transported bodily from Chicago.

One can share our pride in our own devices and our own customs, one can sympathize in our desire to see other countries adapt themselves to American methods, but it was not the effort of these schools to strike a balance between American and Ottoman cultures. What these schools offered was out-and-out Americanism and their attitude toward the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople, American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word “imperialism” means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet, “Imperialism has never bothered us….”

While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the Shiah Moslems of Persia under the suzerainty of the Sunni Caliph and this scheme involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in 1902. But Abdul Hamid had his own imperialism to consider, made necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate, and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply into Central Asia.

Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the Sheikh-ul-Islam in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the greatest Moslem Power in the world.

But King Edward’s first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem opinion both in the Ottoman Empire and in India. The Emperor of India was growing impatient. His further visits in 1905 and 1907 resulted in a program of reforms in gendarmerie, finances, judiciary, public works and the Army, which were to be imposed from without upon the rigidly conservative Empire. To the Young Turks who had been working feverishly ever since the first visit to Austria in 1903, preparing to attempt the imposition of their really fundamental reforms from within, his program was only a step toward the final break-up of the Empire. Already, instead of securely bridging the gap between East and West the Empire creaked and cracked as though presently it would tumble into the widening chasm.

Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of 1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide and empty.

[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918 by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their (the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from 1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in any vilayet.”