Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (5 page)

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.
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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 Abdulmecid, 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”(
ma
la
a
), 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.
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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
(meşveret
, Ott. Tur.;
shūra
, Ara.), sovereignty of the people, equality between ruler and ruled, and notions of justice and inalienable rights.
¹²
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.
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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, Abdulhamid 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.”
¹⁴
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 Abdulhamid 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
¹⁸
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?”
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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.
²⁰
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.

PALESTINE CELEBRATES
AL-
URRIYYA

The following summer, just as British and Russian diplomats were preparing to meet to “settle” the Balkan problem once and for all (a solution which was certain to include further territorial losses and humiliating limitations on Ottoman sovereignty), Ottoman troops based in Macedonia revolted against the provincial Ottoman authorities, assassinating several of the sultan's most trusted generals in the region. Imperial troops sent from Anatolia failed to crush the rebellion, and on July 23, the Salonica-based Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) unilaterally declared the reinstatement of the 1876 constitution. Afraid of losing control entirely after the rebelling units threatened to march on the capital in Istanbul, the following day Sultan Abdulhamid II restored the constitution, announced elections to a new parliament, and promised widespread political and social reforms including individual freedoms and regulation of all government bodies.

In Salonica, epicenter of the rebelling army units, news of the sultan's “granting of the constitution” immediately resulted in spontaneous mass gatherings at Olympios Square, later renamed “Liberty” (Hürriyet) Square, where the crowd applauded the news and pledged their loyalty to the revolution. News spread quickly to Istanbul, which the young writer Halide Edib Adivar described as a celebratory sea of red and white, drenched in the colors of the Ottoman flag, and from there to the four
corners of the empire and globe.
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Letters and telegrams arrived from Ottoman subjects-turned-citizens within the empire as well as outside it, such as from British-controlled Sudan and from faraway Brazil and the United States, expressing euphoria and loyalty to the revolution.
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