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Ottoman modernity, colonialism, and insurgency in the interwar arab east
Abstract
The foundations of both Arab and Turkish nationalism lay in the late Ottoman mass education and conscription project and in the region-wide struggle against colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s. The anticolonial insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s have passed into history as the formative expressions of new nations: the Turkish War of Independence, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Syrian Battle of Maysalun, the Great Syrian Revolt, and the Palestinian uprisings of 1920, 1929, and 1936. But all insurgents of the 1920s had been Ottoman subjects, and many and probably most had been among the nearly three million men mobilized into the Ottoman army between 1914 and 1918. The Ottoman State, like all 19th-century European powers, had made mass education and conscription a centerpiece of policy in the decades before the Great War.
... It quickly morphed into a countrywide armed uprising which was paused in October 1936, resumed in September 1937, and ultimately suppressed in the second half of 1939 as a result of a British counterinsurgency effort which entailed, at its height, the deployment of tens of thousands of British soldiers to Palestine right on the eve of the Second World War. The great revolt is perhaps the most closely studied event in Palestinian history before 1948 (Abboushi 1977;Anderson 2018;Khalidi 2006;Provence 2011;Stein 1990;Swedenburg 2003;Yazbak 2000), while the British counterinsurgency which eventually suppressed it has also been the subject of much historical attention both in its own right (Anderson 2019;Hughes 2009Hughes , 2010Hughes , 2019Kelly 2017;Norris 2008), as well as in relation to its prefiguring of the strategies of the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories many decades later (Anderson 2019;Khalili 2010). For all the attention the period has received, however, the medical history of the revolt has been overlooked. ...
This article reconstructs how Arab doctors, medical missionaries, British counterinsurgents, and Palestinian rebels negotiated and contested the legitimate role of medical workers and healthcare in times of colonial conflict. Drawing insight from a medical anthropological literature which challenges the notion of medical neutrality as normative, and setting mandate Palestine alongside other case studies of medicine in times of conflict from the interwar Middle East and North Africa, this article argues that while healthcare and medical authority could be put to work to support the colonial status quo, they could serve other, more radical ends too. To highlight the complexity of the political positioning of medical workers and healthcare, this article focuses on the town of Hebron during the great revolt which rocked the foundations of British rule in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, and relies on a range of colonial and missionary archival sources. The first part of the article uses the case study of an Egyptian medical doctor who took up political office in the town in moments of crisis to show how medical authority could be consciously transmuted into a force to uphold a besieged political order. The second part draws on the diary of a British mission doctor to reconstruct his efforts to assert medical neutrality during the great revolt, and—more strikingly still—how Palestinian insurgents participated actively in this attempt to transplant international legal protections to Hebron. The final part traces the incorporation of healthcare into the strategies of both British counterinsurgents and Palestinian rebels, with the British policy of collective punishment indirectly but appreciably degrading access to healthcare for Palestinians, and Palestinian counterstate ambitions extending to the establishment of insurgent medical services in the hills.
... Furthermore, the increasing number of Western economic relations with Arabs via port cities such as Beirut, Basra, Aleppo and Egypt and newly graduated students from secular and scientific school throughout Ottoman territory produced a new middle class that affected social conditions (Abu-Manneh, 1980). This newly born class originating from implementation of mass education as a part of reform movements and so being influenced by western ideologies (Provence, 2011) were anxious for the situation in that time and willing more liberal arrangements from the authorities (Açıkgöz, 2016). The demands that were expected by that new class were not related to the nationalist concept but associated with personal interests and ambitions. ...
The entire 19th century was the most controversial years of the Ottoman Empire. It was the time period that the Ottoman Empire, as once one of the great powers in the world, had to struggle with the great western powers. This struggle ended with the disintegration of the Empire and several nation-states were conceived of in the Middle East immediately after the First World War. Within this century, transformation from traditional social, political and philosophical structures to modernization had been severely felt by the last decades of the Empire. While this transformation had been a significant motive on both domestic and foreign policies of the centre, peripheries of the Empire did not follow the same ideals with the centre, especially Arab provinces. This paper seeks to depict the transformation in the Arab provinces. To crystalize, the eras of Abdulhamid II with pan-Islamist and of the CUP with secular modernist would be compared via tracing policy changes in the Arab provinces.
... Scholars who focus on Ottoman modernity trace its particular characteristics through the travel accounts and memoirs of the officials of Turkish descent serving solely in the Arab and North African provinces. Their studies reveal an increasing divide between the educated, ''civilized'' officials of the imperial center who attempt to study, discipline, and improve the ''colonial'' subjects in the periphery (Herzog & Motika, 2000;Provence, 2011). Scholars analyzing the Ottoman provinces of the Transjordan (Carroll, 2011), Yemen (Ku¨hn, 2007), Algeria (Shuval, 2000), and the Balkans (Spiridon, 2006) also empirically substantiate this new polarization between the Ottoman-Turkish officials and their colonial subjects. ...
The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such
... It can be concluded from the above mentioned statements that in the case of Southeast Europe the former Ottoman Empire and its extent stand in the centre of the historical and geographical factors. As a result, the findings of the authors who define the 21st century Turkish foreign policy as a philosophy soaked by 'neo-Ottomanism' or define the neo-Ottomanism itself as a summarised interpretation of Davutoğlu's foreign policy seem to be relevant (Murinson, 2006;Fisher Onar, 2009;Öktem, 2010;Rüma, 2010;Petrović & Reljić, 2011;Provence, 2011;Arin, 2013;Ekinci, 2013;Küçükkeleş & Küçükcan, 2013;Remiddi, 2013;Tanasković, 2013;Mitrović, 2014). The aspiration of Turkey is also based on these facts, namely, Turkey is willing to lead the events in the region, because it does not want to adjust to them. ...
The aim of this paper is to consider whether there is an evolving regional economic integration (or disintegration) in Southeast Europe, which is based on the ethno-religious composition of the countries concerned. Namely, to analyse the evolving regional integration in Southeast Europe by evaluating foreign trade data. The main focus of this paper is on the case of Turkey, because after the Millennium the foreign policy of Turkey puts a higher emphasis on focusing on the states which had been parts of the former Ottoman Empire. It can be presumed that in the fields of social relations these countries have more fruitful economic relations as well. Jovan Cvijić in his ‘anthropogeographical’ research analysed the geographical influences on cultural dynamics and ethics, which still prevail. This present study attempts to explore the relations between the social factors and the economic matters by carrying out an analysis of product lines, their types, and market value in the period 2008-2014. The study suggests that despite the fact that the cultural ties of Turkey based on ethnicity and religion are tighter with Albania and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina than with e.g. Serbia and Croatia, in a globally connected world, the market opportunities, the geographical distance, and the ability to pay for products and services matter more than historical and cultural relations. This is the reason why Turkey has profitable economic relations with Romania, Greece and Bulgaria.
In the MENA region, women still get fewer opportunities than men in regard to facilities that help journalists improve their skills, as well as having less access in the hierarchies of the media and continue to be discriminated at large across the region’s newsrooms. Many female journalists continue to be treated differently and to be seen, by many men in position of editorial power, as not capable of producing work of as high a quality as men do. Furthermore, some news sources avoid giving information to female journalists because they do not believe in their journalistic abilities, especially when the woman mentions her name on the news. In this chapter, the authors explore gender imbalance in the region and how this affects the overall reach and quality of science journalism. Women practising journalism do so in the context in which they also face additional challenges and problems relating specifically to the activities they carry out when reporting STEM news. Overall, the empowerment of women in journalism in Arab countries still faces important challenges that range from lack of professional autonomy, limited access to sources, absence of appropriate training and education towards specialisation and lack of economic incentives. There are undoubtedly common issues that one can observe across the region in which issues such as culture and politics play a central role in shaping gender and participation in the gathering and production of science news in MENA.
This research paper narrates the role of Young Turk technocrats, experts, and political advisers in the modernization of state-building efforts during the reigns of Amir Habibullah Siraj and King Amanullah Khan in Afghanistan. Its examined that how were Turkish technocrats and specialists building Turkish-style designs in Afghanistan between the rivals of British colonialism and new-coming communist vibes during the first World War. The Afghan political elites, intellectuals, and academia-polities were observing for partners, aiming to build a cluster of systems for broader institutional reforms in a variety of areas, including legislation, military training, media support, public health and education, and more aspects. Afghans were wanting such men that could adapt to the social realities of Afghanistan, and to give Afghanistan strength in development, modernization projects, political reforms, national interests, and anti-British policies. The first group of those experts to enter Kabul at the request of Mahmud Tarzi (father of Afghan reforms and journalism) and become part of the Afghan government were the exiled members of the committee of union and progress, CUP, (the political reforms wing of Turkish constitutionalists), These men remained in Afghanistan for decades and played a significant role in implementing Shah Amanullah Khan's reform program.
Revised translation of Faithful Encounters with new introduction
One of the most common tropes about Turkey is that it is a “bridge” between “East” and “West”. This characterisation informs most of the narratives about Turkey’s engagement with the international. The present chapter aims to problematise the underlying assumptions of these characterisations through situating Turkey within the colonial/modern international. The first section presents an overview of the concept of coloniality and discusses how it has been expanded upon throughout the years. The section underlines how the concept should not be taken as explaining processes in a linear manner but rather as providing a useful entry point to making sense of the structural forces and hegemonic knowledge systems. The second section focuses on the coloniality of international relations and how approaching the “modern” international as the colonial/modern makes visible hidden histories and power relations of the international. The third section then moves on the example of Ottoman Empire/Turkey to demonstrate how the study of the coloniality of the international and production of sameness/difference can be approached in a manner that problematises the binaries through which the international is narrated. As such, the section underlines that there is no one moment of interaction that defines the production of sameness/difference but a multitude of moments that constantly redefine and renegotiate the sameness/difference but also in that renegotiation also redefine the spatio-temporal hierarchies of the colonial/modern international.
More than a decade after the withdrawal of Ottoman administration from the Empire’s Iraqi provinces, in November 1929, Iraqi Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Muḥsin al-Sa‘dūn committed suicide by shooting himself to the heart leaving a note in Ottoman Turkish to his son ‘Alī. This article explores the dynamics for a “Hashemite memory of state” under the monarchy of Fayṣal, centered on a supposedly homogenous and immemorial Arabness. In particular, I ask whether there could have existed, in the shadow of official memory, a multiplicity of marginal memories. A close reading of the Prime Minister’s political and personal trajectory – between his Ottoman Turkish socio-political background and the mounting tensions with Southern Iraqi Shi‘ite leadership – exposes complex issues of identity politics behind claims of Arabness. The legacy of the Turkish language: amnesia or indifference?
The idea of a continued Turco-Arab co-existence under the Ottoman Sultanate might appear counterfactual or marginal – if not nostalgic – from the sober vantage of knowing “the end of history”. The Ottoman Empire neither survived the Great War nor made way for a multinational co-existence of Turks and Arabs. For contemporaries, however, different models of federalism and multinationalism offered solutions to save the Ottoman Empire and safeguard Turco-Arab co-existence. While the federalist ideas of Ottoman Arabs are far better known in the academic literature, in regards to Ottoman Turks, the commonplace interpretations follow the teleology of the Turkish nation-state formation. In order to correct this misperception, I will illustrate the existence of corresponding Turkish voices and visions of federalism and multinationalism. Envisioning Turco-Arab co-existence was a serious feature of policy debates, especially in the years of crisis from the Balkan Wars to the settlement of post-Ottoman nation-states in the aftermath of the First World War.
American missionaries made a lasting impact on education and religion in the
late Ottoman Middle East. After the 1880s, provincial-level conflicts increased
and affected diplomatic relations between the United States and the Ottoman
Empire. Much scholarship examines Washington-based papers and missionary
collections, depicting—perhaps unconsciously—the Turks as uncompromising
hosts and the missionaries as saviours or U.S. agents. This dissertation exposes
these stereotypes by emphasizing the complexity and variation of the historical
actors and their interactions. It places concerned parties within the context of
Ottoman imperial statecraft and defines the central government as a
sophisticated and powerful actor on missionary issues. Reading previously
untapped Ottoman archival sources through analytical eclecticism, the
dissertation analyzes central government responses to missionary expansion
and, more specifically, how changing circumstances affected the ways in which
the fin-de-siècle government approached increasing numbers of missionaries,
their institutions, publications, and local-level legal cases. In addition to
offering a nuanced and detailed account of Ottoman-missionary relations, the
dissertation also provides: an alternative periodization for the topic; new
historical narratives to the scholarship; and historical context for the
contemporary debate over missionary activity in the Ottoman Empire.
Jewish colonies were established in rural areas of Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century; a period full of radical changes, including the industrial revolution, political and cultural shifts in the Ottoman Empire, and social transformations wrought by World War I. These global and local events had a significant impact on everyday life in the colonies, challenging the resilience of the built-up and open public spaces. According to urban space research, the ability of public spaces to withstand change depends on how these spaces are created and defined and the extent to which they evoke a communal sense of ownership and belonging. In light of the above, this paper combines archival and theoretical research in order to examine and characterize the resilience of public spaces in the Jewish colonies in Ottoman Palestine over four decades – from 1878, the foundation of the first colony, to 1918, the end of World War I. Planned and designed by mostly European-educated designers and entrepreneurs, the colonies’ public spaces demonstrated modernity, accommodated change, and created vibrant centres geared to serve a diverse ethnic local population.
This article proposes to re-examine the Turkish–Iraqi Frontier dispute by observing the strategies and attitudes of local populations, in particular in the border areas, between 1918 and 1925, a time when the region became a battleground of British and Turkish agents seeking to secure the loyalties of the local community leaders. The latter played a relevant role in two fundamental and complementary ways. First, by playing different sides, local leaders helped to inform the discourse that served to justify the opposing claims over Mosul province. Second, borderlanders pushed British and Turkish authorities to come to the conclusion that an international agreement was the best solution for both countries. I argue the socio-historical process that led Turkey and Great Britain to accept the Brussels line cannot be fully apprehended without taking into account local players and their interactions with a variety of both state and non-state actors.
The markings of the foundation of the Arab League can be traced back to the idea
of nationalism that emerged in the 19th century. The new ideas emerged from the
French Revolution began to spread in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire
with the temporary Napoleon occupation of Egypt, 1798-1801. Then, although
the French forces withdrew from Egypt, the effectiveness of Western ideas
increased as a result of reforms led by Mehmet Ali Pasha. At the same time,
consciousness about the Arabic language and history in the region begun to
increase by carrying out the missionary education activities and increasing
commercial relations between the Ottoman Arab provinces and the Western
states. In this way, the Arab nationalists, who dreamed of an independent Arab
kingdom, rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. And at the end of World War I,
Arab nationalists regretted that they came under British and French colonial rule.
After World War II, a number of independent Arab states emerged as a result of
the gradual withdrawal of Western colonial powers from costly Arab lands. At
that time these Arab states, which had profound disagreements with each other,
became pro-integration under an international organization rather than a single
state. In this article, the foundation of Arab League will be examined in the light
of historical datas over the presumption that this organization is based on Arab
nationalism which developed in the 19th century.
A riveting and timely narrative of how Muslim authorities treated Christian missionaries in the final age of the Ottoman Empire.
By the early twentieth century, there were close to two hundred American missionaries working in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. They came in droves as early as 1830, organizing hundreds of schools, hospitals, printing presses, and seminaries. Until now, the missionaries' sources and perspectives have dominated discussions of this moment in history, but the experiences of the Ottoman authorities are just as, if not more, revealing of an increasingly tense relationship between Christianity and Islam.
An enthralling narrative of how locals made sense of American religious activity in the Ottoman Empire, Faithful Encounters examines the relationships between the authorities who managed the empire from the capital city of Istanbul, provincial agents who carried out the capital's orders, and the missionaries who engaged with them. Exploring a wide range of untapped sources - from imperial ministries, security forces, and local petitions to international reports and missionary collections - Emrah Sahin traces the interactions of the Ottoman authorities, focusing on the viewpoints and manoeuvres they adopted to monitor and conquer the missionary presence at a time of turbulent public and political upheaval.
Offering a comparative context from which to reconsider recent cultural relations in the region, Faithful Encounters is not only a history of Christian and Muslim relations. It is a lesson about a failing mission in a failing empire, with stunning relevance to the looming religious and ethnic crises of today.
Different teaching methods are used to make individuals' learning easier and effective. Technological teaching tools are often used in this context. Technological teaching methods create socioeconomic effects while increase human capital, because investments made in human beings provide benefits, both for individuals and society in a long term. In this study, firstly the use of technological teaching methods is investigated and secondly, the role of the gains obtained in the development is analyzed. According to the results obtained, technological teaching methods cause externalities such as reduction of crime rates, revitalization of the economy thanks to investments, increase in the quality of relations of civil society, increase in HDI and increase in employment.
This article analyses relations among the Ottoman Empire, British imperialism and Shia religious proto-nationalism in the period before and after the battle of Sha’iba of 1915, one of the pivotal engagements of the Mesopotamian campaign. It illustrates how the narrow victory of the British at the battle led them to draw a number of over-optimistic conclusions regarding their role in Iraq and their ability to co-opt the Arabs of the province against their ‘Turkish’ overlords. The victory at Sha’iba and in particular the ambivalent role played by a number of the Arab mujahidin volunteers led the British to conclude that there had never been any real enthusiasm for the jihad declared by the Ottomans against the British occupiers. However, this was based on the false perception that lack of commitment to Ottomanism could be equated with sympathy for British imperialism. In particular, the British failed to recognise that the Ottoman summons to jihad had strengthened the developing forms of Shia proto-nationalist consciousness led by various mujtahids influenced by the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.
Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. However, a clear definition of Arab nationalism, even as a subject of scholarly inquiry, does not yet exist. Arab Nationalism sheds light on cultural expressions of Arab nationalism and the sometimes contradictory meanings attached to it in the process of identity formation in the modern world. It presents nationalism as an experienceable set of identity markers - in stories, visual culture, narratives of memory, and struggles with ideology, sometimes in culturally sophisticated forms, sometimes in utterly vulgar forms of expression. Drawing upon various case studies, the book transcends a conventional history that reduces nationalism in the Arab lands to a pattern of political rise and decline. It offers a glimpse at ways in which Arabs have constructed an identifiable shared national culture, and it critically dissects conceptions about Arab nationalism as an easily graspable secular and authoritarian ideology modeled on Western ideas and visions of modernity. This book offers an entirely new portrayal of nationalism and a crucial update to the field, and as such, is indispensable reading for students, scholars and policymakers looking to gain a deeper understanding of nationalism in the Arab world.
The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such © 2013 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.
Arab regionalism details and examines the power relations involved in the making of an Arab region. On an empirical level, this book concentrates on the drawing of topographic and ideational boundaries in the Arab region, on Arab regional organizations, on the functional cooperation among Arab states and institutions, and on the socio-cultural infra-structure that supports the Arab region making process, with a strong focus on post-1990 dynamics. On a theoretical level, this work makes a case for the analytical autonomy of "Arab" regionalism (as opposed to regionalism in the Middle East or in the Mediterranean) and for the necessity of approaching it as an actual process instead of a failed project. The attitude of debasement and erasure towards Arab regionalism that is common-place in the field of regional studies is replaced in this book for the acknowledgment that there is much more political coordination, economic cooperation and social integration in the Arab region than has previously been assumed. Providing a fresh perspective on Arab regionalism, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and researchers with an interest in Regionalism, Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations.
By charting the activities of Ottoman experts in Afghanistan from 1908–23, this article demonstrates how their arrival precipitated a series of state-building practices rooted in the particular historical experience of Ottoman reform projects. The country thus became the object of an Ottoman
mission civilisatrice
and the beneficiary, in the eyes of certain figures within the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress, of an avowedly Ottoman-Turkish modernity. Sharing this conviction were members of the Afghan royal family and its chief ministers, especially Maḥmūd Ṭarzī, who first invited the Ottoman advisers to Kabul. The provision of Ottoman technical assistance took a variety of forms, but is most evident in military, educational, and public health reforms enacted in Kabul in this period. Through the study of previously unexamined Ottoman, Afghan, and British sources, the aim here is to incorporate these events into discussions of Ottoman informal empire, Afghan developmentalism, and pan-Islam.
Tracing the complex history of Jordan through its archaeology, Competitive Archaeology in Jordan examines how foreign and indigenous powers have competed for and used antiquities to create their own narratives, national identities, borders, and conceptions of the nation.
The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab World for four centuries. Bruce Masters's work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: The Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the acyan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the acyan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities due to their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.
This book is a comprehensive history of the Lebanese migrant communities of colonial French West Africa, a vast expanse covering present-day Senegal, Cǒte d'Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin and Mauritania. While others have concentrated on these migrants' role in the colonial economy, this work reconstructs not just their commercial undertakings and strategies, but also their everyday practices, understandings of place and kin, and political thoughts and sentiments. In doing so, it makes the case for a new understanding of diasporic life. Lebanese migrants did not remain irretrievably wedded to the old country and its habits, or shed their former selves to meld into their new surroundings. But nor did they slump into a world-weary homelessness. Beings in the world, they dwelt in travel. Their lives were defined not by dislocation, but by constant strategic accommodation. Moreover, this work examines the fraught responses of colonial Frenchmen, who regarded these migrants as parasitic interlopers whose presence upset the colonial order of things. This discourse, with its echoes of metropolitan French racism, shaped the ways in which Lebanese migrants understood and represented themselves. For even as they stressed their own utility, these migrants came to think of themselves as intermediaries par excellence.
Before the First World War, Shakīb Arslān’s political views and polemic against the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party was primarily based on his and his family’s experiences in the politics of Mount Lebanon since 1861. His contacts with Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh did not inspire him to adopt a pan-Islamist or reformist stance. When he became involved in politics at the Ottoman imperial level after 1911, he called for strengthening Ottoman central control in the Arab lands. He interpreted the demands of decentralization and autonomy as the desire to establish a political system along the lines of the special administration in Mount Lebanon, which he viewed as an invitation to increase of European influence. He therefore accused those who promoted decentralization of dishonesty and treason. His essential motive at this time was to preserve and justify the strength and control of the Ottoman center. His view of Islam as a political unifier did not have a reformist edge, but was designed as a counterpoise to the idea of Arab exclusivity.
The imposition of British rule in Palestine following World War I did not immediately supplant one imperial system with another or Ottoman identities with national ones. Examining Palestinian responses to the Turkish war of independence, this article argues that the 1917–22 period should be seen as a “liminal” era suspended between imperial systems. Both Kemalists and Palestinians employed a discourse of loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty, Muslim identity, and resistance to European rule to frame their goals. It was only after the creation of the Turkish Republic and the promulgation of the British Mandate, the author argues, that nationalist identities displaced Ottoman ones for both Turks and Palestinians.
Fawzi al-Qawuqji was a soldier and Arab nationalist who fought European colonialism all over the Middle East between World War I and 1948. He served as an officer in the 4th Brigade of the Ottoman Army, fighting the British advance north through Palestine; led the al-Hama sector of the Syrian Revolt against the French in 1925––1927; was one of the rebel leaders in the Arab revolt against the British in Palestine in 1936; participated in the Rashid ‘‘Ali al-Kaylani coup against the British-controlled government in Iraq in 1941; and served as field commander of the Arab Liberation Army in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. This essay, part of a larger study of Qawuqji’’s life and career, is based on his published memoirs as well as his private papers, stored in boxes at the back of a closet in the Beirut apartment where he lived after his retirement until his death in 1976.
By order of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) a new school was opened in Istanbul in October 1892 to provide an Ottoman education for the sons of leading tribal notables. The Aşiret Mekteb-i Hümayun, or Imperial School for Tribes, was a five-year boarding school that admitted boys between twelve and sixteen years old. The school has been rightly interpreted as part of a broader policy pursued by Abdülhamid II of integrating the Arab provinces more closely to the Imperial center. However, the school, which reached beyond the Arab provinces to recruit eastern Anatolian Kurds, was essentially an experiment in social engineering which sought to foster an allegiance to the Ottoman state within one of the most alienated segments of its society: the empire's tribes. On the precedent of urban notables whose sons were educated in Istanbul, obtained government offices, and became Ottoman loyalists, Abdülhamid II and his advisers aimed to create a similar body of intermediaries between the state and its tribes. The experiment ran for fifteen years before the Aşiret Mektebi was closed in 1907; yet in that time the school sent waves of graduates on to higher education in special sections of the civil and military academies and thence to government office in the provinces. In all, the tribal education system represents one of the more ambitious Ottoman initiatives to integrate its tribal communities into the political life of the state.
When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.
This article is about the language of politics and religion in the Middle East. It argues that the "national" struggle of the Ottomans after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I was not aimed at the establishment of a Turkish state, as later Turkish historiography has claimed. A careful analysis of the terminology employed by the leadership of the "national" movement in its official documents during the early phase (1918-1920) shows that instead it based itself on a corporate identity that was primarily religious: that of the Ottoman Muslims. The adoption of secular Turkish nationalism as corporate political identity underlying the state was a later development, which took place after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The vocabulary then changed accordingly, and even where the vocabulary stayed the same, the meaning changed, as in the case of the central term millî 'national'.
Islamic Benevolent Societies and Public Education in Ottoman Syria, 1875–1882
- Cioeta
Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II's Photographic Albums
- Carney