Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (9 page)

Behalul manages to escape from the sultan's spies, avaricious men seeking their own promotion rather than the national good, and becomes a lawyer while continuing his mobilization on behalf of the CUP. One day, his luck runs out and he is finally arrested. The brief exchange at his court-martial makes clear that Behalul's loyalty belongs not with the sultan, but with the nation.

INTERROGATOR:
How can you be disloyal to the sultan, who has bestowed such benefits on you?

BEHALUL:
Ask the spies about benefits—not me! I care nothing for the personality of the Sultan—I am for my country, against the tigers who ravage her.
(Applause.)

INTERROGATOR:
And your precious Committee—what good will that do you?

BEHALUL:
It will do everything; it is going to save the Fatherland.
(Renewed applause.)

At that moment, a revolutionary infantry bursts into the interrogation chamber, setting the prisoners free and arresting the judges, spies, and interrogators. The play ends with the troops taking to the hills to spread the revolution, taking “the solemn oath” and delivering “a speech full of ‘liberty,' and ‘fraternity for all,' and ‘long live the Constitution!'” As the play sought to convince its audience, the army was the true protector of the Ottoman nation, and would usher in a future of divinely-sanctioned prosperity and justice (“…and God defend us, God who loves justice!”). Other plays, such as
Those Who Were Sacrificed for Liberty
and
Fighters of Liberty
, reinforced this theme.
⁶¹
This intertwining of the CUP, the army, and the nation was also reflected in the fundraising drive of a local CUP branch in Sidon that wanted to purchase two cruisers for the Ottoman navy to be named in honor of Enver and Niyazi, called “liberators of the homeland and the givers of a constitutional life to the Ottoman people.”
⁶²

The sultan himself was forced to recognize and grudgingly acknowledge the growing influence and prestige of the CUP, which threatened to eclipse his primary position not only within the state but also in the hearts and minds of his “flock.” There are reports that he sought to co-opt the rising popularity of the CUP by aligning himself with the organization, either claiming or requesting the office of president, after which he was informed that there was no such position open.
⁶³
The symbolic demotion of the sultan was expressed in various ways in the new revolutionary popular culture. For one, a new liberty anthem was composed that supplanted the sultanic “Hamidiye” march at official ceremonies.
⁶⁴
In some postcards the sultan's image appeared flanked by Enver and Niyazi Beys, reflecting the sultan's attempt to harness his image to the popularity of the revolutionary officers as well as suggesting the extent to which the sultan's political legitimacy was no longer able to stand on its own. Even more startling, in
figure 1.7
we see a postcard of Enver and Niyazi stomping out the skeletal figure of “despotism,” alluding to the sultan's aged and decrepit body and foreshadowing the eventual subordination of the sultan to the will of the CUP, the army, and the nation, a sentiment that would be developed in the popular press throughout the fall of 1908.

SACRED LIBERTY II: FROM OPPRESSION TO CONSULTATION AND JUSTICE

Given that the sultan was not only the political leader of the empire but was also the caliph, or deputy of the Prophet, in guiding the “community of believers,” the image of Abdulhamid in the revolutionary satirical press as a comic-grotesque figure representing the “Old Empire” revealed an utter breakdown in sultanic authority.
⁶⁵
This claimed divinity and infallibility of the sultan was undoubtedly an important factor for some segments of the Ottoman Muslim population, who, as relayed in one account in
The Lighthouse
, saw the “creation of the sultan as replacing the creation of the rest of humanity” and were “ready to go through fire for his life.”
⁶⁶
Furthermore, over the three decades of his rule the sultan had explicitly fostered a public image of himself as a benevolent monarch and paternal figure.
⁶⁷

In that sense the Ottoman sultan's divine-paternal-political roles echoed that of the other Eurasian imperial dynasties at the time, the Habsburgs and the Romanovs. The Habsburg dynasty, even as late as under Emperor Franz Joseph (r. 1848-1916), strove to assert “the inherent sacredness of sovereign power” as protectors of the by-then defunct Holy Roman Empire through public displays of imperial piety, such as participation in the Corpus Christi procession and in the Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, as well as attendance at religious ceremonies in churches, synagogues, and mosques.
⁶⁸
Similarly, the Russian Empire depended on inculcating a strong sense of loyalty to the Romanov family, as the heirs to the Byzantine emperors and thus protectors of the Orthodox faith, by means of coronation ceremonies, church holidays, and secular celebrations that comprised a “theater of power” that aimed “to present the ruler as supreme and to vest him or her with sacral qualities.” In the 1830s official policy declared the monarch as the embodiment of the nation, and loyalty to the tsars would remain a significant component of Russian imperial identity beyond the turn of the twentieth century.
⁶⁹

The emerging political criticism of the Ottoman sultan in the new era would never hold without a corresponding desacralization of his person, made possible by a religious criticism of his performance in office. In the first few months of the revolution, Ottomans wrestled with differing views of the sultan, centering on questions about his responsibility for the “reign of tyranny,” his motives for acceding to the demands of the revolutionaries, and the legitimacy and nature of his position. At first, when it was unclear how deep the reforms would be or how long the revolution would last, there was a ritual invocation of the sultan in public demonstrations and to a certain extent in the pages of the press. For
example, one enthusiastic report read: “Good news follows good news: the secret police is abolished—Long live the sultan! Newspaper censorship is canceled—Long live the sultan! State prisoners will be released to freedom—Long live the sultan!”
⁷⁰
Likewise, at a celebration in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the assembled Ottoman émigrés presented the consul with a petition, two and a half feet long by one and a half feet wide, offering thanks to the sultan for allowing the publication of the Basic Law. These invocations of the sultan might have been sincere, or they simply might have been formulaic, a public performance of sultanic loyalty without a necessary internalization of it.
⁷¹

At the same time, we also read expressions of a conditional status for the sultan due to his role as the “giver of the constitution.” As “giver of liberty” or “giver of the constitution,” neither the sultan's person nor his office were in and of themselves deserving of loyalty from his erstwhile subjects; rather, Ottoman citizens suspended their criticisms of his past roles to focus on the promised new order.
⁷²
Another formulation described the sultan as simply the tool through which God had acted—“We thank God who inspired our great sultan who revived the nation [
umma
] by giving it the constitution.”
⁷³
In this context, the role of the
şeyhülislam
Cemaleddin Effendi, the foremost Muslim official in the empire at the time, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was paramount; indeed, some reports credited the
şeyhülislam
far more than the sultan. According to various accounts, Cemaleddin was extremely supportive of the new constitutional order and personally conveyed his ruling to Abdulhamid II that the constitution was congruous with Islamic law, the
shari'a.
Public reports cited Cemaleddin as telling the sultan that the day of the announcement of the constitution would be “engraved on the bosom of each
shaykh
and priest, nay each Muslim and Christian, nay each Ottoman and human.”
⁷⁴
It was his personal intervention that reportedly prevented the bloodbath which surely would have resulted had the sultan not acquiesced to the CUP's demands, implicitly countering the claims of the sultan's supporters that the sultan himself was a victim of the intrigues of the palace functionaries and that his own “true” sentiments of liberalism had been stifled during his thirty-three-year reign.
⁷⁵

Beyond the temporary and cautious recuperation of status the sultan received by being seen as the “giver of liberty,” however, several newspaper reports show that the sultan was a deeply polarizing figure among Ottomans who were celebrating the new era. Indeed, many liberals had good reason to suspect Abdülhamid's commitment to the new regime, for he had long been reviled at home and abroad for his “tyrannical rule.”
⁷⁶
At a popular gathering in Cairo, the assembled crowd decided
to send a telegram congratulating the exiled prince Sabaheddin Damad, a known supporter of the opposition parties, as well as the heroes of the Ottoman army, Enver, Nuri, and Niyazi, and finally, the grand vizier. When Rashid Rida, the editor of
The Lighthouse
, suggested that a telegram be sent as well to the sultan thanking him for agreeing to the liberals' demand, his proposal was shot down vigorously.
⁷⁷

Another extraordinary account quoted from the newspaper
Al-Muqattam
relays that a crowd at one of the public celebrations in Damascus shouted down a religious figure who tried to begin his speech with the traditional invocation for the sultan; the crowd cried out, “Sit down, sit down, the occasion is neither one of praying for the sultan, nor it is his accession day or his birthday. It is the day of liberty, and death be to anyone who does not cry aloud ‘long live liberty'!”
⁷⁸
Just as potentially subversive, upon his release from prison in Beirut, the Young Ottoman reformer Fuat Pasha found a populace enthusiastic and loyal to the constitution. He reportedly told the crowd that it was necessary to fight for the constitution, “even if the sultan himself” was found to be in opposition—to which the crowd responded in enthusiastic support.
⁷⁹

Because of the extensive censorship within the empire, these kinds of criticisms of the sultan were taboo before 1908; afterward, they flooded to the forefront. In public addresses and on the pages of the newly free press, complaints of the sufferings of the past thirty-three years abounded. Father, brother, and son had feared each other, neighbors had informed on one another, and man had to hide his own thoughts from himself.
⁸⁰
Even the Ottoman chargé d'affairs in New York, Mundji Bey, referred to “the despot who shall not be named” at a celebratory gathering held at Carnegie Hall in early September, where a congratulatory letter from President Theodore Roosevelt was read to the audience. Among the fete's attendees were Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs; according to a press report, the one Armenian speaker who praised the sultan elicited hissing from the audience.
⁸¹
Within months, one newspaper editor in Istanbul felt confident enough to publish a poem denouncing the sultan: “So diabolical you are; a greater evil than Satan.”
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Clearly, the divine and protected status of the sultan was dramatically undermined with the revolution.

For Ruhi al-Khalidi, a member of a leading Muslim family in Jerusalem who was serving as Ottoman consul in Bourdeaux at the outbreak of the revolution, the Ottoman dynasty's tyranny itself is what gave birth to the Ottoman revolution.
⁸³
In a series of articles published in the Cairene press in the fall of 1908 around the time he was running for a seat in the Ottoman parliament in his native Jerusalem, al-Khalidi argued that the events of July 1908 were a legitimate revolution
(“inqilāb”)
rather than a disobedient revolt
(“thawra”).
While arguing that most Arab writers in practice did not properly differentiate between these two words and phenomena, al-Khalidi maintained that the essential difference between them was vast. Whereas a revolt was “insubordination and a departure from obedience and upholding the legitimate government,” “revolution,” al-Khalidi explained, “advances the nation a step toward progress and climbs a rung on the ladder of prosperity.” At the same time, al-Khalidi explained that a true revolution was not simply a political change but also a revolution of values, customs, thoughts, and language.
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