Hasan Kayal?, Imperial Resistance, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations by Hasan Kayalı Mostafa Minawi Hasan Kayalı. Imperial Resilience: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Xix + 271 pp. Hardback, $85.00. ISBN: 9780520343696 This is an important book that reflects Hasan Kayalı's decades in the field and the exceptional breadth and depth of his engagement in the historiographical debates concerning the late Ottoman and early post-Ottoman era in the Arabmajority former provinces. Imperial Resilience can be thought of as a much awaited follow up to Kayalı's first book, Arabs and Young-Turks, taking his argument against the nationalist telling of the history of the first decade of the 1900s, through the First World War, and the post-war period up to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. He argues that the potential for post-war Arabo-Turkish political unity endured, reflecting an "Ottoman longevity" lasting even past the end of World War I. He highlights what he believes to be indications of a commitment on both sides of the Syria-Anatolia-Mesopotamia "incidental" border to a "resilient" Ottoman imperialism and an imagined potential of a future federative empire. He posits that neither CUP policies before the war; the horrors of WWI; the Arab Revolt in the Hijaz; the rule of the military commander and governor general of the Levant, Cemal Pasha; the Ottoman defeat in the Levant; or the multitude of post-war treaties and Western-imposed visions meant an inevitable divorce between Arabs and Turks. It is masterfully written, using published sources as well as Ottoman, Turkish, and European military archival records to support its argument. Since it is a revisionist take of popular political history, Kayalı necessarily highlights documentary and circumstantial evidence that shows the alternatives to well-known historical arguments. Throughout the book, Kayalı remains laser-focused on debunking commonly held ideas about the rise of Turkish ethnic nationalism and the end of Arab-Turkish [End Page 331] "Muslim" synthesis under Ottoman imperial rule during and immediately after WWI. Through a detailed analysis of post-war historical events and a masterful multilingual (re)interpretation of several treaties and foundational texts of Turkish nationalism, Kayalı argues that a collective anti-Western colonial struggle of Muslims (Turks and Arabs), whether in "Greater Syria," Mesopotamia, or Anatolia held more political purchase than Turkish or Arab ethnic, racial, or cultural identification. His argument focuses on nine years between 1914 and 1923, with an emphasis on the understudied interaction between Turkish and Arab political and military leadership from 1918 to 1923. This is a bold revisionist argument that stands against the notion that ethnic or racial identification played a determinative role in Turkish nationalism before 1923 and suggests that effective Arab-Turk disengagement on the popular, cultural, or political levels did not exist before the second half of the 1920s. The book is organized chronologically. The first chapter recasts the actions of CUP members—particularly the maligned figure of Cemal Pasha—as "integrationist." He argues that nationalist telling of the draconian measures followed by Ottoman rulers in Greater Syria during the war were not indications of anti-Arab sentiments but a reflection of the CUP's "commitment to the defense, retention, integration and even recovery of the relinquished Arab provinces … to secure the empire's survival and longevity …" (53). The second chapter takes on the post-War victors' vision of the Ottoman Empire, in particular the 1918 British Lloyd George manifesto and Wilson's Fourteen Points statement. While the Lloyd George manifesto erroneously envisioned the "separation of Arabs and Turks as the principal criterion in the partitioning of Ottoman imperial territories," Article 12 of Wilson's proclamation did not necessarily assume the breakup of the empire. Instead, it insisted on the "autonomous development" of the empire's peoples and nationalities, including Arabs and Turks (59–64). Kayalı suggests that many figures that are assumed to have been Turkish nationalists had, in fact, a similar vision to Wilson of a post-war Arab-Turkish federated state. The Armistice of Mudros, for example, did not take the "quest to secure ethnic and linguistic...