Ottoman army and reduced its empire to ruins, Turkish nationalists, inspired by ideologies from the West, seized control and proclaimed a republic. On March 3, 1924, the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, and his Ottoman family were stripped of their nationality and titles, and dispatched from Stambouli station aboard the Orient Express. With them went the Ottoman’s multi-ethnic, multi-faith ideal.
The Young Turks, who emerged out of a secular association called the Committee for Union and Progress in the first decade of the twentieth century, were a Turkish clone of the southeastern European nationalist movements that had thrust off Ottoman inclusiveness for the course of ethno-religious supremacy. They sprung from the empire’s most Westernized cities, particularly Thessaloniki, and institutions, particularly the army, which with German training had replaced the Janissaries, the old force of emancipated slaves. Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, the father of the Turks, as he subsequently styled himself, was the blue-eyed, fair-haired son of a Macedonian born in Thessaloniki. The two leading members of the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, were both of Balkan stock. Initially their ideas were a composite, mixing Robespierre’s anti-imperialism with romantic nineteenth-century folk nationalism, which idealized a “great and eternal land” called Turan, whose one language—Turkish—replaced the polyglot caliphate.
Initially, many non-Muslims and children of mixed-faith marriages latched onto the new movement. Its elected parliament, constitutional caliphate, and national government committed to founding a welfare state and promised the coming of a secular egalitarian age. But with the onset of the First World War and the invasion of the Anatolian heartland that soon followed, the raw nationalism of the Young Turks pushed aside whatever liberal aspirations they at first had professed. All non-Turkish and non-Muslim suspects appeared suspect. As Russia’s army advanced from the east, their Armenian and Assyrian co-religionists seemed set to become the vanguard of a Russian takeover of Anatolia. It did not help that Armenian nationalists assassinated Ottoman officials and cheered for Uncle Christian, as Russia was called.
Further west, treacherous Greeks in İzmir celebrated the allied conquest of Istanbul and Christendom’s recapture of Constantinople, its lost capital of Byzantium. Russian Jewish Zionists newly arrived in Jaffa looked like foreign agents bent on sloughing off Turkish rule. Ahmed Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria and third member of the Young Turk triumvirate, deported 6,000 of them to Alexandria, turning their settlement, Tel Aviv, into a ghost town. As minorities turned on the empire, the demise of what had been six centuries of Turkish rule seemed only a matter of time.
Of all the Ottoman Empire’s Christian subjects, the Armenians had been the most loyal and the most favored. Along with the Jews, the sultan called them his millet-i sadika, or favored community. But as the last of the Christian minorities to break with the regime, the Armenians bore the brunt of a century of pent-up revenge. Many of the perpetrators of the twentieth century’s first genocide were themselves victims of milleticide. The Bushnaks, Bosnian Turks chased out by Serb secessionists, liquidated Armenians from the villages around the Anatolian city of Bitlis. Circassian Muslims, the boat people expelled by Russian Cossacks, organized the march of non-Muslims from Anatolia, in which an estimated 500,000 people died. Mehmed Reshid, a Circassian military doctor, was the governor of Diyarbakır province who gave the order to “kill microbes.” In a secular age, the protective religious umbrella of the millet was no more.
The Turkish generals salvaged Anatolia for their state, but despite the passage of a century the land still feels physically and culturally hollow without its two million Armenians. All but a tenth were killed, exiled, or abducted and forced to convert. As they were marched into the desert, locals plucked women and children for concubines and beslame, or servant girls. Their owners changed the girls’ names, erased their identities, and transposed one religion for another. Atatürk himself adopted an Armenian, raised her as his daughter, and called her Sabiha Gökçen. Her name survives as one of Istanbul’s two international airports. Bereft of their women and children, Western Armenians lost the means to propagate and were denied a future.
Like their southeastern European counterparts, the Turkish generals transformed their Ottoman inheritance from a multi-faith to a mono-faith realm.
Religion became the badge of national identity. “Under the new definition any real Turk had to be a Sunni Muslim,” says Edham Eldem, a Turkish historian and descendent of Enver Pasha, the Young Turk’s Minister of War.
Catholic processions were banned from the streets for the first time since the sixteenth century. In 1942, the government imposed a capital tax, the Varlık Vergisi, on non-Muslims, reminiscent of the jizya, a tax that non-Muslim subjects historically had to pay Muslim conquerors. Amidst the Cyprus crisis in 1955, Greeks were expelled en masse from the mainland, including many who only spoke Turkish. Turkey’s population of Greeks numbered 300,000 in 1920 and fell to 3,000 by the end of the century. Istanbul’s last remaining Greek school has just 50 students. The irony was that the architects of the liquidation of religious pluralism were dogmatically secular. The Kemalists banned any expression of religion in public. They abolished the caliphate, sharia courts, Sufi lodges, and closed thousands of mosques.
Turkey’s founders imposed a process of forced assimilation on the non-Turkish Muslims that remained. School textbooks reproduced the notion of an empire that was great when it was purely Turk, and atrophied as alien peoples seeped into its governing apparatus. The Kurds, who comprised perhaps 20 percent of the population, were subject to one of the world’s most comprehensive programs of assimilation. Kurdish was banned, and its place names and history Turkified. “I couldn’t speak to my grandmother,” says Nurcan Baysal, a Kurdish writer and political activist in Diyarbakır, who grew up speaking Turkish.
Anatolia’s transformation into a Turkish land was a misreading of history. The sultans never described themselves as Turks. Most of them were born to slave girls from across the empire. Like their subjects, they were a hybrid reflecting the empire’s multicultural mix. And when, with British encouragement, Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924, the Kurds rose up the following year under Sheikh Said, a leader of the Sufi Naqshabandi order, in a failed rebellion aimed at restoring the caliphate.
On the thirteenth floor of his modest housing estate, Orhan Osmanoğlu nurses a French handkerchief embossed with the letter “H,” his sole surviving possession from his great-great-grandfather Sultan Abdülhamid II. Allowed to return with other Ottoman relatives of the caliphs in 1974, he lives a modest life far removed from his ancestors’ grandeur. “The republic’s greatest sin was to Turkify,” says Osmanoğlu. “The problem began with the word Turk. They didn’t want other nationalities. The Ottomans had no problem with the Armenians. The Young Turks are the reason for the fall of the multi-cultural state.”
Thrust out of their Ottoman embrace, Arabs and Jews followed Turks in filling the vacuum with a notional ethnic nationalism.
In the empire’s twilight years, Istanbul was abuzz with lawyers and students from across the region, imbibing the nationalism of the Young Turks and applying it to their own kind. Like the Young Turks, they were Westernized, secular, and overwhelmingly anti-religious. They aspired to supplant the empire’s religious-based hierarchies with new exclusively ethnic ones, give their religious communities a territorial base and thereby assume power. In the secret societies they formed they plotted the dissection of the empire, creating new societies from old, and crafting Zionism out of Judaism and Arab nationalism out of Islam. Before he took the name of Ben-Gurion, David Grün attended the law schools in Salonika and Istanbul where Turkish ideologues were fashinoning the new nationalism. Studying with him were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s future second president, and Israel Shochat, the founder of the second Zionist movement’s militia arm, Hashomer, and together they studied in Ottoman Turkish and developed a young Jewish variant of the Young Turks’ program. Though charier of dismantling the world’s last major
