declining empires, provided a paradigm not only for the Ottomans’ Slavic and Arab subject nations, but also for the Turks themselves. The collapse of the Soviet empire revived the dream, but the opportunity was largely spurned. ‘Too busy looking west to turn east,’ said Ahmad Bey. Below the map were printed a pair of quotations from the twin heroes of nationalism, Ataturk and Alp Arslan, who defeated the Byzantines at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, opening Asia Minor to Turkish conquest. ‘Ah, and here is someone who can translate them better than I,’ he claimed. At the door were two modestly dressed Western women, one older, slight, the other in her early twenties and robust in a corn-fed North American way. The younger one clutched a book to her chest that looked like a vinyl-covered day-to-a-page diary and turned out to be a New Testament, ragged with bookmarks. Their arrival demanded another round of tea.
Christine, the older woman, had been working as a missionary in Turkey for the last decade, and Sandi had been sent to join her for a few months by their church in Canada. As Christine and Ahmad Bey talked in Turkish, Sandi seemed to drift off into a world of her own, smiling inwardly and making repeated searches in her text. She found something that made her raise a fist and let out a mini-whoop of the kind usually heard at sporting events. Christine and Ahmad stopped to look at her. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I just found the great text I thought of when Yusuf was explaining the Holy Trinity to his wife on the back of that envelope.’ They had just come from a home visit with one of Christine’s few converts. She smiled indulgently at Sandi’s outburst.
‘Here are two texts,’ said Ahmad pointing to the calendar, ‘for you, Christine, to translate.’
‘Well, everyone knows that saying of Mustafa Kamal – “happy he who can call himself a Turk” – you see it spelled out in whitewashed stones on the hillsides behind barracks. This second one, “Size öyle bir vatan aldim ki ebediyen sizin olacaktir”, is something about how good the country is and how Alp Arslan is giving it to the Turks forever – like a Promised Land, eh, Ahmad Bey?’
‘No such thing. If you have the land, it’s yours; if you don’t have it no one can promise it to you.’ Christine had an amused expression when she spoke, more playful than beatific, and it seemed she and Ahmad frequently enjoyed such discussions. ‘Oh, we talk about history and religion and the history of religion,’ said Ahmad. ‘In the Middle East they are the same thing. What else is there to talk about and where better to do it? You know that both St Peter and St Paul preached in Antioch and it was here that the followers of Jesus the Nazarene were first called Christians.’
‘And St Simeon, the guy on the pillar,’ Sandi chimed in. ‘That’s why I wanted to come here. The pastor at the church organised a fund-raiser last summer where we recreated living on a pillar. It was a lot of fun. We built a pillar about twenty feet high and we took it in turns. We stayed up there for thirty days.’ Christine had taken her to the ruins of the monastery that grew up around the hermit’s pillar, high on a hill above the Orontes River. The stump of the pillar still stands; Sandi had had her picture taken sitting on the top. ‘And he was up there thirty years. Praises.’
The end of the nineteenth century saw the colonial powers involved in an unseemly scramble for territory in Africa. Europe’s two newest countries, Italy and Germany, saw their chance to join the club; their problem was to find an opening. The Portuguese ruled Angola and Mozambique. The Belgians had the Congo. The French and the British converted their trading interests in West and Sub-Saharan Africa into colonial rule. The Spanish held the Western Sahara and enclaves in Morocco, eventually French, as were Algeria and Tunisia. The Ottomans, nominally, ruled Libya. After the British took control of Egypt in 1882, the French threat to the headwaters of the Nile made it necessary to extend their power into the Sudan. The Germans made room for themselves in Cameroon and South-West Africa, agreeing their sphere of influence in East Africa by treaty with the British. The only place for the Italians to gain a foothold was in the Horn of Africa.
The Italian presence there began in 1869, less than a decade after Italy had reunited, freeing itself from the rump of Habsburg and Bourbon rule. Following the example of the British and the French in Seylac and Djibouti, the Italians established a coaling station at Aseb on the Danakil coast. Their ambitions did not end there. In 1885 they took another port, Massawa, on the Eritrean coast to the north, and in the space of four years extended their rule to such a degree that the Emperor of Abyssinia, Menilek II, was forced to cede the whole province to them. Their attention was then turned towards the Somali coast where they acquired two small protectorates in the north and succeeded to the interests of the British East Africa Company in the south. A direct attack against Abyssinia in 1896 was defeated, but Italy’s colonial intentions were stated for all to see, inscribed at the gateway to the Mediterranean on its consular building in Port Said: ‘Rome – once again at the heart of an Empire.’
In 1911 the Italians invaded Libya and during the resulting war with the Ottomans they took ten of the twelve Greek islands that make up the Dodecanese. In 1915 Italy joined the Allied camp and though largely unsuccessful against the Austrians, gained territory in the Tyrol and at the head of the Adriatic. Italian ambitions towards the Dalmatian coast and Albania were disappointed. Though it retained control of the Ottoman islands taken in 1912, Italy did not receive the possessions it had been promised on the Turkish mainland, and furthermore the Treaty of Saint-Germain proscribed Italian expansion in Africa.
The First World War was called the Great War until the Second World War started. It was supposed to be the last colonial war. Its closing territorial arrangements were to be ordered on Woodrow Wilson’s ‘principle of nationality’. Italy, which had regained its own nationality within living memory, felt cheated of the empire that was its birthright. Within a year of gaining office in 1922, Mussolini, at the head of a party whose symbol was the fasces of Imperial Rome, instructed his governors in Libya and Somalia to consolidate Italy’s power and this they did with enough vigour to prompt the last uncolonized state in Africa, Abyssinia, to join the League of Nations.
As a force for world peace, the League of Nations was even more ineffectual than its successor. When it acted – such as in its support of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine – and when it failed to act – such as against Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 – the consequences were alike: new conflicts. Abyssinia appealed to the League in vain as Italian forces encroached inland from the Somali coast, until the Italians provoked a skirmish at the Oasis of Welwel that provided the excuse for Italy’s invasion. The colonial powers of Europe expressed their horror. The League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy that had no bite since they did not include oil; Mussolini conceded that if they had he would have had to withdraw in a week. (At that time nobody knew that the Italians in Libya were sitting on one of the largest oilfields in the world.) In May 1936 Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile and the world worried about other things once more. The era of the appeasement of Fascism had begun.
The British protested strongly against the Italian trespass into their Nilotic sphere of influence, but took no direct action against their erstwhile allies. Britain did not have the military resources in Egypt and the Sudan to counter the Italian invasion. Moreover, to have attacked the Italians in Abyssinia would have not only threatened stability on the European mainland, but also prompted an attack against Egypt by Italy’s forces in Libya. Such an invasion would not have lacked local support. Since 1911 an increasing number of Italians of all types had settled in Alexandria and Cairo; the waterfront in Alexandria had come to resemble ‘a broken-down version of Naples’, according to Lawrence Durrell. King Fuad had been educated in Italy and numbered many Italians among his household. Realising the vulnerability of their own position, the British in Egypt could only take measures to discourage Italian ideas of further expansion, and these had a profound effect on the future of the 8th Hussars. Hackett recalls:
we were hastily
