Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (48 page)

For Turjeman and others, these men were martyrs for a new cause, the Arab nation. If most Arabs had been loyal Ottomanists because of their belief in the civic Ottomanist project or their loyalty to the Ottoman state and dynasty, the war years altered that sentiment irrevocably.

On December 9, 1918, the mayor of Jerusalem, Husayn Hashem al-Husayni, surrendered his city to the arriving troops of British General Edmund Allenby, abruptly ending four centuries of Ottoman rule over Palestine. The surrender was signed in the office of the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem; his daughter, who had grown up in Jerusalem, had strong feelings about the divine mission that Great Britain was fulfilling by taking over the Holy Land. In her mind, “Turkish rule is like a cancer, and Palestine was saved only in time.”
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With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we know that British rule over Palestine was itself no paradise, and that exactly thirty years later the governing British high commissioner would pack up the imperial bags, so to speak, leaving behind him a Palestine engulfed in the flames of civil war—the embers of which are still burning today.

This book has sought to undo the view of Ottoman Palestine as a picture of imperial oppression, backwardness, and implacable hatred. Instead, turn-of-the-century Palestine underwent a dynamic and vibrant period of imperial reform and political engagement that was underpinned by an ideological commitment among Muslims, Christians, and Jews to a shared homeland and a shared empire. That the empire in 1914 fell far short of what had been envisioned in the heady days of 1908 was not due to insufficient revolutionary fervor or weak ideological commitment. Rather, we have seen that there were deep structural challenges to that imperial vision, which, combined with a series of wars, territorial contraction, and anxieties over the role of non-Muslims, constrained it even more. In other words, as circumstances changed in the years following the Ottoman revolution, so too did the scope, viability, and desirability of the revolutionary project.

Rather than a battle of competing ethno-nationalist separatist paths, I see late Ottoman political culture as characterized by ultimately irreconcilable imperial citizenship discourses. Looking at the ways which
various citizenship discourses and practices coexist within a single state setting has been shown by the social scientists Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled to be a fruitful and enlightening path of inquiry.
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Ottomans sought to reconcile the various demands and expectations of new liberal and republican citizenship paradigms with the existing corporate status and shifting political power of the ethno-religious group. Oftentimes, these different understandings of citizenship were simply not compatible.

On the one hand, the liberal basis of citizenship privileged each Ottoman citizen as the bearer of political rights, irrespective of religion or ethnic group, and put forth the expectation of the state as a neutral arbiter with respect to the various ascriptive traits of its citizens. In other words, Ottoman citizenship and its subsequent rights and responsibilities—electoral franchise, conscription—were awarded to the individual Ottoman citizen. Certain aspects of the liberal ideal of citizenship—namely its expansive views of personal liberties—were valorized in the revolutionary period.
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However, to the extent that Ottoman liberalism was based on erasing political and public roles for other collectivities, it also presented a significant challenge to the existing Ottoman sociopolitical order. Indeed, the words of Ottoman official Hilmi Pasha—that their policy would be “frankly national…[knowing] neither Greeks, Bulgarians, nor Albanians, but only Ottomans”—seemed to support such a view.
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Ottoman liberalism, whether viewed as “fraternity” or “fusion of the peoples,” could also bring about—indeed might even be premised on—the obliteration of the distinctiveness of religio-ethnolinguistic collectives.

In fact, the communitarian critique of liberal citizenship centers on this very erasure of ethnic identity at the expense of the civic one. Instead of being attribute-free universal liberal citizens, communitarians argue that individuals are embedded in and have a strong sense of community: “They conceive their identity—the subject and not just the object of their feelings and aspirations—as defined to some extent by the community of which they are a part.”
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As we have seen, a communitarian critique of the Ottoman liberal citizenship project emerged in two directions. First, the loss of an institutionalized role for religious corporate bodies was decried. Before the revolution, the
millet
played a central role as the primary intermediary between the individual subject and imperial state, from cradle to grave, in terms of registering and governing personal life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death), as well as implementing the collection of taxes, administering conscription, and carrying out other government duties. This political role of the religious leadership to speak for, represent, and implement imperial decisions concerning their co-religionists was directly challenged by a
new liberal imperial citizenship. Predictably, officials who had long benefited from this monopoly of political power, such as the patriarchs of the various Christian denominations or the chief rabbis of the empire's Jewish communities, often resented and fought against their demotion in status under the new regime. As the Greek Orthodox patriarch Joachim declared, “What we cannot and will not do is sacrifice one iota of the ecclesiastical autonomy which we have enjoyed since Constantine XI [the last Byzantine emperor] died.”
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In addition to this real loss of temporal power, the positive aspects of belonging to an ethno-religious corporate body were also powerful factors in terms of the critique of the Ottoman liberal citizenship project, as individuals and groups felt the loss of their privileged (and closed) status as a collective that individual citizenship would impose on them. After all, the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms weakened guilds and Sufi brotherhoods as strong nodes of corporate life, while at the same time strengthening the
millet.
As a result, notwithstanding the sincerity and intensity of the ideology of Ottoman brotherhood and the existence of deep cross-confessional social networks, Ottoman Christians, Muslims, and Jews felt a strong affinity to their co-religionists, and their evaluation of the liberal Ottoman project was often filtered through communal lenses.

Furthermore, as the political theorist Jeff Spinner has noted, part of the communitarian critique is rooted in a criticism that the supposed neutrality of the liberal state ignores the reality that members of a certain group often control it.
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Along those lines, some elements within the larger Muslim community saw the constitutional regime and its view of Ottoman liberal citizenship as threatening their status as the “ruling
millet [millet-i hakime],”
and at times sought to reinject
neo-dhimmi
political limitations into the liberal citizenship project, despite consistent attempts by the political and religious leadership to illustrate the congruence of equality with Islamic law. As well, the rise in cultural and ethnic associations among Arabs, Kurds, Turks, and other groups after the revolution indicates that communitarian ethnic identities were taking shape as part and parcel of the Ottoman imperial identity.

Alongside the complex liberal basis of Ottoman citizenship and its communitarian critique, the Ottoman imperial citizenship project was also built on strong elements of republican citizenship, which sees politics both as a communal affair and as the pursuit of the common good. In the best of times, the universal, civic Ottoman nation was protected and strengthened by its members, who all contributed to its welfare. To that end, universal conscription was formally adopted by the Ottoman parliament in 1909, reversing the past exemption of non-Muslims from
the Ottoman military. Public discourse embraced universal conscription as sharing the burdens of defending the empire from internal and external threats as well as providing an end to the myriad privileges (and subsequent marginalization) experienced by the non-Muslim communities of the empire. In addition, universal conscription was seen as a tool of social engineering, a universalizing experience that would Ottomanize the empire's polyglot communities.

Increasingly vocal, however, was the awareness that contributions to the (imperial) public good were
not
born equally, and indeed, that certain individuals—and more ominously, entire groups—shirked their duty (conscription most pointedly) at the expense of the nation as a whole. The republican discourse of imperial citizenship, in the name of equality, then, not infrequently promoted rivalries over each group's contribution to the Ottoman nation—in essence, over the relative measure of Ottoman-ness itself.

Perhaps because of this growing, public competition and rivalry between the various ethno-religious groups in the Ottoman Empire, most histories of the Ottoman Empire have attributed its breakup in no small part to ethno-national fragmentation from within. However, the ethnic citizenship discourse that viewed the “nation” as “völkisch, due to membership in a homogeneous descent group,”
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was highly circumscribed, largely seeing the nation as
also
ethnic and civic. For the vast majority of ethnic and religious groups within the empire, collectively, ethno-religious identity was expressed within the context of Ottoman imperial citizenship, not necessarily outside of or against it.

Even among the most “problematic” ethnic groups within the empire, the Armenians and Greek Orthodox, the historical record is far more equivocal than the historiography. For example, the leading Armenian movement, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), or Dashnak, was closely aligned with the CUP until 1912. A joint decision between the CUP headquarters and the ARF Constantinople Responsible Body explains their alliance, “considering that saving the sacred Ottoman fatherland from separation and division is an objective of the two organizations' joint cooperation, they will work to practically dispel within public opinion the false story inherited from the despotic regime that the Armenians strive for independence.” When the two parties did finally part ways, the ARF decision was based on their conclusion that the CUP was either unable or unwilling to accede to the Armenians' citizenship demands such as land reform and judicial equality.
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Likewise, elements of the Greek Orthodox Christian population were split between the irredentism of Greek nationalism's
megali idée
and the claims of Ottoman patriotism and imperial citizenship.
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In this regard, then, looking toward multicultural theories of citizenship can be extremely illuminating. Will Kymlicka has theorized a place for group rights within liberal citizenship, along a trajectory he sees of self-government rights, polyethnic rights, and special representation rights.
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All of these demands were expressed within the late Ottoman Empire as an alternative citizenship discourse within Ottoman imperial citizenship: self-government rights, which “involve the devolution of powers to minorities within the state,” hearken back to the Ottoman decentralist movements promoted even before the 1908 revolution; by 1912–13, they were promoted by Albanian and Arab reform groups. Polyethnic rights like cultural autonomy, language, and education rights were also prominent demands in the late empire, in many ways tapping into the communitarian critique of liberalism. Finally, as we have seen, some groups like the Greek Orthodox demanded special representation rights that would guarantee minority representation in imperial bodies such as the parliament.
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In other words, while the CUP may have complained about the specific demands of the empire's various religious and ethnic groups, there was nothing inherently anti-imperial in any of them—rather, they represented a multicultural vision of an Ottoman imperial citizenship discourse. Given that multicultural citizenship claims still pose significant challenges to twenty-first-century Europe and America, it should come as no surprise that the late Ottoman Empire proved unprepared, unwilling, and ultimately unable to fully deal with them.

A little over a decade after 1908, the Ottoman liberal revolution was a distant if bittersweet memory: a new wave of political authoritarianism had ushered in military rule; ethnic rivalries had exploded in slaughter and population transfer; and the empire had fought three costly wars on three continents, the last of which it did not survive intact. Post-World War I nationalist projects in the Ottoman successor states contributed to an indifference to the Ottoman past bordering on historical distortion. As one recent study has argued about the dominant influence of the war in cementing alienation among Arabs from their Ottoman past, “in the Arabic discourse of what became known as ‘the days of the Turks,' the erasure achieved a retrospective replacement of four centuries of relative peace and dynamism…by four miserable years of tyranny.”
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Understanding this key moment of the late Ottoman Empire thus necessarily raises questions about the presumably inevitable historical transition from empire to nation. Rather than a stagnant empire crumbling
under its own decay, the Ottoman Empire underwent a dynamic period of political reform and intellectual fermentation in the last decade of its existence. The relationship between empires and their subjects cannot be limited to inequity, coercion, and collaboration; rather, the relationship must be seen as historically contingent and dynamic, and in many cases ties of identification “thicker” than simple cooptation were born.
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And yet, this imperial reform that engaged important notions such as liberty, political rights, enfranchisement, and civic belonging did not mesh with the dominant European picture of an Islamic world steeped in “Oriental despotism” and therefore in need of Western enlightenment. Putative adherence to Wilson's principle of self-determination notwithstanding, the League of Nations mandate issued in the aftermath of World War I that awarded Syria and Lebanon to France and awarded Transjordan, Iraq, and Palestine to Britain, illustrates this quite clearly: the mandates were described as in need “of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone.”
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It is clear that in the interest of preserving their own political role in the Middle East, the Western mandatory powers had an interest in ignoring and even reversing the developments that had taken place in the last decade of Ottoman rule. Fast forward to the twenty-first century: according to the way that the current American-led regime change and occupation in Iraq is depicted, one would never imagine that Baghdad had ever held parliamentary elections, debated the meanings of “freedom” in the public sphere, or embraced significant political and social reform—although it did all of this a century ago.