Читать книгу The Rebirth of Turkey - Clair Price - Страница 9

KEMAL’S BIRTH AT SALONICA—​HOW HE BECAME A YOUNG TURK—​WHAT THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS LIKE—​THE DIVISION OF ITS POPULATION INTO RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES—​THE WESTERN CHALLENGE OF ITS Rûm (GREEK) COMMUNITY—​ITS DUTY TO ISLAM.

Forty-two years ago, when Abdul Hamid II ruled in Constantinople and the Ottoman Crescent and Star still floated over Salonica, an underling in the Salonica customs office died, leaving his widow with a small daughter and an infant son on her hands. The daughter in time grew up and married, as is the way of Turkish daughters. The son was intended by his mother for the mosque school and the career of a hoja, as is the way of Turkish mothers, but he became fascinated by the uniforms of the Ottoman Army officers whom he saw about the streets, as is the way of Turkish sons. In time he succeeded in passing the examinations for the military preparatory school at Salonica, where his mathematics teacher became so fond of him that he left off calling him by his given name of Mustapha and dubbed him Kemal, a Turkish name meaning rightness.

The military preparatory school at Salonica, the officers’ school at Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him, a headstrong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play Watan (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But Watan gave the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time was a rather ridiculous thing to be.

Abdul Hamid was an able Easterner who maintained his grip on his country by such a system of espionage that the life and liberty of no Ottoman subject was safe who was remotely suspected of having heard of the French Revolution, a system of espionage which could not keep Western ideas out of the capital but which could, and did, keep them underground. The military tradition of the country continued to attract its best brains into the Army but the network of espionage which radiated from Yildiz Kiosk had the effect of giving the Army a sort of dual existence. On the surface, it continued to be a military organism, the trustee of an Eastern military tradition, but beneath the surface it became a ferment of forbidden Western ideas and the example of Nihilism in Russia which did much to spread the secret society craze, found no more fertile element to work upon than the yeasty mentality of the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in Constantinople. So a secret political society which called itself the Society of Liberty was formed among the students at the War Academy and a similar society, the Society of Progress, was launched across the Bosphorus at the Military College of Medicine. But both were mere seeds sprouting underground in the rich and rotting soil of the capital. The country itself, outside the capital, was still a primitive Eastern land ruled by any man who proved himself strong enough to take it.

There were some 600,000 square miles in the old Ottoman Empire when Abdul Hamid came to the Throne. It was a compact area, lying at the junction of three continents. On the west, it ran deeply into the Balkans in Europe; on the east, it extended into Trans-Caucasia and down the frontier of Old Persia in Asia; on the south, it followed the Arabian coast of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and crossed to the African coast to include a waning sovereignty over Egypt. In the Balkans and Asia Minor, it consisted of a mountainous massif tilting up to the high plateau of Trans-Caucasia, its slopes dotted with isolated villages quite out of effective touch with any Government which might exist in Constantinople. Only the larger villages had a gendarmerie post, fewer still had a telegraph key to connect them with the provincial capital and throughout most of the country such Western contrivances as railroads were wholly unknown. With the country’s administration rigidly centralized in Constantinople, only the high prestige of the Padishah linked these scattered villages in their loosely organized provinces.

South of Asia Minor, the mountains dipped into a great desert arched by the Tigris-Euphrates basin on the east and by the green Syrian corridor on the west. Here, except in the Syrian corridor, the inaccessibility of the country from Constantinople and the nomadic nature of its sparse population gave the provincial administrations a degree of semi-independence which increased to complete independence down in the Arabian peninsula. The case of the Syrian corridor was exceptional, however. Compared with the distant Tigris-Euphrates basin, it was easily accessible from Constantinople; it was the home of a settled population with a very high culture of its own; and it was on the only line of land communication with the most venerable holy places of Islam, the Haram-esh-Sherif at Jerusalem, the Prophet’s Tomb at Medina and the sacred Kaaba at Mecca. The first of these lay at the southern end of the corridor and the other two amid the arid mountains which parallel the Arabian coast of the Red Sea.

Over these 600,000 square miles of country, the Sultan at Constantinople maintained the loosest sort of government, permitting his subjects to conduct their own affairs largely in their own ways and confining his administration to the task of keeping the trade routes open and the taxes collected, for under the Eastern tradition this was the whole duty of government. There were about 25,000,000 of his subjects, the overwhelming majority of them Moslems. The great Moslem reformation had swept the entire area centuries ago, but in accordance with the tolerance prescribed by the Prophet, Christians and Jews, while set aside in their own community organizations as dissenters, had been allowed to worship in their own ways. This was quite in accord with the loose Eastern idea of government which permitted every man to go his own way as long he paid his taxes regularly and refrained from disturbing the peace of the country. Even foreigners were likewise set apart under the Capitulations and were permitted to govern themselves under their own laws and customs.

On the surface, the Sultan’s administration of his country from Constantinople was very much like the King’s administration of his realm from London. Both the Ottoman Sultan and the British King were the heads of the dominant faiths in their respective countries. The Sultans had become Caliphs of Islam in 1517, although not all Moslems recognize them as such, just as the British Kings had become Defenders of the Faith in 1521, although not all Christians recognize them as such. The Sultan administered the spiritual affairs of his country through the Sheikh-ul-Islam and its temporal affairs through the Grand Vizier, just as the King in London administers the spiritual affairs of his realm through the Archbishop of Canterbury and its temporal affairs through the Prime Minister. The surface of both countries is feudal and mediaeval, and springs from the same source, but their resemblance in the reign of Abdul Hamid II stopped at the surface. Beneath the surface, England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, was in a state of transition from feudalism to the modern Western idea of democracy. A growing industrial plant was giving rise to trade unions and trade unions, exerting a growing influence on ideas of government, were drawing authority down to a popular electorate. Government was tightening its hold on the lowliest peasant and a civil service was being formed as a permanent body to which the increasing duties of government were entrusted. The country was becoming a powerful industrial unit, able to mobilize the vast new energies which machinery was opening up to it. It was embarking on manufacture and trade on such a scale as had never been dreamed of before. It was becoming the ganglion of a financial nervous system whose sensitive fibres covered the world. The old religious aspect of government was dwindling and in its place we saw a drilled and disciplined industrialism taking form beneath the feudal trappings which still constitute the surface of British government.

HUSSEIN RAUF BEY

Head of the Ottoman Delegation which signed the Mudros Armistice, October, 1918; Nationalist Party Leader in the Ottoman Chamber, January and February, 1920; arrested and deported to Malta, March 16, 1920; Minister of Public Works and Prime Minister of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921.

GENERAL RAFET PASHA

Minister of War and Interior of the First Grand National Assembly until November, 1921; Minister of War until January, 1922; Governor of Eastern Thrace since November, 1922.

But when Abdul Hamid II ascended the Ottoman Throne at Constantinople, religion was still the dominant factor in his primitive and loosely organized country. From its surface to its core, the Ottoman Empire was still Eastern. The Moslem community was still the governing community, a community with a profound self-respect and a knowledge of its own duties as well as of the deference which was due to it. The dissenting communities were exempt by Moslem law from the duty of preserving the peace and hence were able frequently to attain a degree of prosperity which many Moslems never knew. Since the bulk of the Sultan’s revenue was obtained from taxation provided for in Moslem law, foreigners, most of whom were Christians, were naturally exempt from the payment of any but secular taxes such as land tax and customs duties. We Westerners think of it today as a hopelessly mediaeval method of governing a country, but we sometimes forget that it permitted every man in the country a generous liberty which we in the West have lost. It exemplified the Eastern tradition at its best and if we in the West have won for ourselves the blessings of modern industrialism, we have paid for them with a considerable share of the liberties we once enjoyed. What larger liberties our new industrial democracies may yet confer upon us in exchange for the liberties they have taken from us, remain to be seen. We are still evolving our Western tradition of government, but at present it has taken from us feudalism and the open fields and given us in exchange democracy and the machine-shop.

Even before Abdul Hamid II came to the Throne, the Western tradition had begun to make itself felt in the old Empire, for it was obvious that Western industrialism would succeed eventually in generating such power that no non-industrial country could stand against it. The disturbing lure of the Western tradition was heightened by the religious element, for both Islam and Christendom, while divided within themselves, tend to draw together when menaced from without. The Islamic world found its political leadership in Constantinople, its scholastic leadership in Cairo and its juridical leadership in Mecca, and it was natural that it should resent any menace to the old Ottoman Empire within whose frontiers these three centers of leadership lay. At the same time, the memory of the great Moslem reformation had not yet passed from Christendom and it was natural that it should resent the fact of Moslem rule over Palestine and the inferior position necessarily accorded to Christian communities in a Moslem country. There were a number of these Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, but we shall confine ourselves here to the mention of the two of them which most vitally concern us—​the Rûm community which included all members of the powerful Orthodox Church who recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the Ermeni community or the Gregorian Church, a small but historic sect whose membership was limited to Armenians. Both these communities were exempt from the operation of Moslem law and subject instead to their own Christian laws. Both were officially established and represented in the Sultan’s Government, the Oecumenical Patriarch himself representing the Rûm community and the Ermeni community, since the seat of its Catholicos is in Trans-Caucasia, being represented by a Patriarch appointed for the purpose in Constantinople. These communities included most of the Christians who had survived the great Moslem reformation and on the whole they lived quite peaceably under Moslem rule. While their Moslem neighbors formed the governing class, they formed the trading class and in any feudal country trading is the occupation of the lower class. Still, their ablest men were frequently utilized by the Sultan in the government of the country and when they were so utilized, they were called upon quite without reference to their position as religious dissenters, just as Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews are utilized in the British Government without reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.

It was through the Greeks, as the Rûm community is called in the West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820’s and were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire. Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over their entire population without community organizations for dissenters or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad tolerance which distinguishes Islam.

The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which had existed between the Sultan and his Rûm community, but not as violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country.

To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.

But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful stewardship of that law. It had come to a time when the Empire was one of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam’s own. The Caliphate which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam was powerful, was now in the days of Islam’s political decline, becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.

The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them, a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to grope about after a way out of the apparent impasse in which they found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire, not to the hothouse Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India’s 70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.