Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (7 page)

And yet the official ceremonies like this one that took place throughout the empire were only the beginning of the story. For weeks and months during the fall of 1908, in municipal gardens, central squares, and coffeehouses throughout the empire, spontaneous popular gatherings took place that came to represent the transformation of the Ottoman public from prerevolutionary spectators to postrevolutionary participants.
³⁶
These spontaneous celebrations continued in Jerusalem and Jaffa for weeks; to the north in Nablus, ‘Izzat Darwaza, the young postal clerk, reported that his town also hosted celebrations.
³⁷
In scope and tone, the public celebrations in Palestine were strikingly similar to those taking place in other parts of the empire. Damascus, for example, hosted five large celebrations between July 31 and August 12; by the end of September the number had risen to twenty-five, when the CUP and local notables finally called for an end to the celebrations and a return to normalcy.
³⁸
The Jerusalem press faithfully transmitted news of
these celebrations taking place throughout the empire, thereby creating a sense of uniform time and experience which enabled residents to feel connected to distant corners of the Ottoman Empire.

Steering away from the official program of the government ceremonies, the celebrations then took on a carnivalesque, populist tone, and people celebrated in an informal manner more congruent with their feelings and local customs. While the Ottoman military band marched through the markets and streets playing patriotic music during the day, towns were alive with songs, drums, and cheers until well past midnight—quite a remarkable phenomenon when one considers that many towns had no electricity and normally only men and women of questionable repute would venture outside after dark. Men stood on each others' shoulders and held mock sword fights, much as they would in popular religious festivals and folk celebrations. Jurji Habib Hanania, editor of the newspaper
Jerusalem (Al-Quds)
observed: “Looking at the gathering of the great mass of mankind at the train station one would imagine the days of celebration of the religious festivals which take place each year in Jerusalem among the Muslims and Christians, where thousands gather and the collective voices of the people are raised and their hearts are filled with joy.”
³⁹

Governor Ekrem Bey's own description of the day echoes newspaper descriptions of the broad and popular support for the new revolution, and reveals how he also got caught up in spirit of joyous euphoria.

The voices of joy in the city of Jerusalem, which has no equal in the world to the contrast of religions, sects, and races in it, were raised to the heavens in a thousand languages and styles. Speeches were given. Hands were shaken. Pleasant tunes were played…. For hours one hears—until the furthest points of the city—the cries of “Long live the homeland,” “Long live liberty,” and “Long live the sultan.” At night I invited all the clerks, notables, and residents to my official residence…. At night I spoke to the people—and among the people especially the officers—as
Kemalzade.
…Tears flowed from the events, and the cries came out so deep from the heart, that there was no other place in the city where liberty was as honored and sanctified to such an extent.
⁴⁰

Beyond the celebrations, these public gatherings became important platforms for ordinary Ottomans to learn of, analyze, and debate the many changes that were about to take place. Some changes were already apparent: prisoners had been freed throughout the empire, exiles were returning home, and the notorious censorship had ended. And yet, many components of the revolution were far more ambiguous and uncertain. For over thirty years the Hamidian government had tried to control the power of words and ideas by censoring terms like
despotism, republic, dynamite, rebellion, justice, independence, constitution, parliament
,
and
liberty
⁴¹
Now, in this revolutionary moment, Ottomans were free to question the meaning of these long-forbidden terms and ideas. What did “liberty” mean? What was a “constitution” or a “parliament”? What would the role of the sultan-caliph be? And most importantly, how would people's daily lives change, if at all, in this new era?

Local notables and intellectuals, as well as anonymous speakers of all three religions, spoke out in public in a variety of languages. In one report, women and “even a child” took to the pulpit in public demonstrations. It is here, in the demand of common people to take the stage and to discuss and debate the meaning of events surrounding them, that the revolutionary euphoria provided a hint at the deep structural changes that were about to take place. These spontaneous gatherings where previously banned terms and ideas were bandied about freely not only symbolized the end of the sultan's absolutist power, but, more importantly, represented a broader struggle to control the symbolism and language of the revolution, and through that, to define the contours of imperial political culture. In this power vacuum individual Ottomans stepped onto the revolutionary stage and voiced their expectations of the revolution and began to imagine how they would engage and participate in the new era.

SACRED LIBERTY I : A NEW LIFE

Central in the symbolic arsenal of the revolution was the revolutionary slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity, justice” (translated as
urriyya, musāwā, ikhā', ‘adālah
), which echoed both the French revolution and the recent Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906.
⁴²
As we have seen, these slogans were prevalent as a popular cry as well as an emblem reproduced on ribbons, banners, and newspapers. The French historian Lynn Hunt identified the power of words as “revolutionary incantations…. Uttered in such a context or included in soon-familiar formulaic expressions, such words bespoke nothing less than adherence to the revolutionary community.”
⁴³
In addition to reinforcing loyalty to the revolution by their omnipresence and ritualized repetition, these terms also became central sites of discursive struggles, as Ottomans attempted to come to terms with their new political horizons.

Rather than speaking of a “revolution,” most often the press and public referred to “liberty”
(al-
urriyya)
, such as the “arrival of”
urriyya
or the periods “before” or “after”
urriyya
, and this term more than anything else served as a metonym for the 1908 revolution, encapsulating the aims of the revolutionaries, the dreams of its
supporters, and even the fears of its opponents.
⁴⁴
“Liberty” was not simply a question of political rights, but rather represented a broad, flexible package of competing political, philosophical, social, cultural, and even metaphysical worldviews. For reformist intellectuals, “liberty” had taken on transcendental and spiritual value, captured by the writer Adib Ishaq in the 1880s: “O Liberty, source of all majestic things on earth, we have learned that there is no success without you and no happiness away from you.”
⁴⁵
Likewise, the “love of freedom”
(
ubb al-
urriyya)
marked the consummation of a sacred union
between individual and collective, tied together through the sacral vow of liberty. As the reformist Rafiq al-'Azm wrote, “Whenever I met an Ottoman friend who was known for his love of freedom, whether in Syria or Egypt, we became overwhelmed with emotions, and our eyes burst with tears for the joy that was within us.”
⁴⁶
In other words,
urriyya
was an outlook, an ideology, a personal commitment, an intimate emotional feeling—both historical moment and revolutionary ideal, it was far more than the sum of its parts.