The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Abstract

“The hopelessness of the Turkish Government,” former British prime minister William Gladstone wrote in 1897, “should make me witness with delight its being swept out of the countries which it tortures.” His words simultaneously reflected past generations of European imperial thought on the subject of the Ottoman state and prefigured future generations of historians' conclusions about it. For decades after the final fall of the Ottoman government at the end of the First World War, scholars viewed Ottoman reform as a failed project that had given way, inevitably if not smoothly, to a regional landscape of successor nation-states with at least the hope of producing greater political coherence and inspiring deeper loyalties than their sprawling, despotic, incoherent predecessor.Of course, such a view was not only analytically incorrect but politically self-serving. The mostly Anglo-French scholarship that tarred the late Ottoman state with the brush of backwardness, despotism, violence, and political failure served, first, to cover up the substantial European role in the empire's troubles (encouraging, funding, and arming separatist nationalisms, claiming control over Ottoman “minorities,” and using military threats to enforce European commercial claims to Ottoman resources). Then it was used to justify the British and French military takeover and brutal thirty-year colonial occupation of the empire's Arab provinces during and after the First World War. As such, it represented a remarkably coherent and long-lived body of work that continued to project the nineteenth-century imperial image of the Ottoman state as the “sick man of Europe” into the late twentieth century, as any casual reader of—for instance—David Fromkin's utterly undeservedly famous book The Peace to End All Peace (first published in 1989) can attest.Michael Provence's new book belongs to a revisionist tradition that has been trying for several decades, with considerable success at least among scholars, to point out the obvious holes in this narrative. The Last Ottoman Generation traces the lives of a generation of mostly Arab Ottoman elites who witnessed and weathered the brutal transition from Ottoman to European colonial rule between the late nineteenth century and the eve of the Second World War. This history goes over some well-trodden ground (the peace settlement of 1920–23 that doled out the Arab Ottoman provinces to the European imperial powers; the anticolonial revolts of 1920, 1925–27, and 1936–39 in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine respectively; the semi-withdrawal of Britain from Iraq and the rising struggle between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine; and the Alexandretta crisis and French refusal to disengage from Syria in the late 1930s) from a fresh perspective. It tries, as Provence describes it in the introduction, to re-imagine the world of the Middle East as it might have seemed to a formerly optimistic and privileged person at the moment of … the collapse of a state and its institutions and the certainties that had ordered life for millions for centuries, albeit certainly with constant change, but also with hope, occasional optimism, and collective effort. That is, this book serves simultaneously as a kind of rehabilitation of the political landscape of Ottomanism and a rebuke to the brutal systems of colonial oppression that replaced it.It begins by trying to reconstruct the worldview of an Ottoman political and, especially, military elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through an investigation of the late Ottoman state's system of imperial civil and military schools, which recruited talent from across the empire (including rural areas and impoverished urban communities) and lifted many promising boys from the peasantry to the elite. Several future leaders of Arab nationalist movements—Jaʿ far al-ʿAskari and Yasin al-Hashimi in Iraq, Yusuf al-ʿAzma in Syria, Fawzi al-Qawuqji in Syria and Palestine among them—were notable graduates of these Ottoman military academies; others, like Shakib Arslan and ʿAbd al-Rahman Shahbandar in Syria and Musa Kazim al-Husayni in Palestine, came out of the Ottoman civil system. The military schools, in particular, imparted to their students a German-flavored notion of soldiers as “saviours of the nation,” intended to bolster the empire's performance in the brutal wars in the Balkans (1911–13) and then, of course, in the bloodbath of 1914–18. Provence makes the case that these schools were important engines of social mobility that became “quickly popular and oversubscribed,” even in areas where other state intrusions – census-taking, conscription, and taxation – were met with violent resistance.He moves quickly past the war itself to the unfolding of the “peace”: the dismantling of the old Ottoman state and the parceling out of the spoils to the Allied powers, with the language of mandatory trusteeship under the auspices of the new League of Nations acting as a thoroughly unconvincing fig leaf for the exercise of raw military power in an increasingly anti-imperialist age. Of course, drawing lines on a map and coloring in areas red or blue has no actual effect on the regions depicted; and Provence is at his best in the following chapter, which details the armed struggles of the immediate postwar period. He takes the perspective (refreshingly) not of nascent nationalist movements lining up against European imperial occupation but of a now fractured and decentered but still extant Ottoman military establishment intent on resisting the imposition of a settlement they viewed as profoundly, unforgivably corrupt—including not only the partition of the empire and the giveaway of the Arab provinces to Britain and France but also the League's formal approval of the European Jewish colonization of Palestine.It didn't work, of course, and the occupations proceeded apace, fueled by the British and French use of such tactics as bombing villages; public executions of opposition leaders; mass arrests and imprisonments; curfews, checkpoints, and censorship; techniques of collective punishment of civilians; and, of course, the nearly complete denial of any kind of political rights to the indigenous populations of the mandate territories. (Initially, the only colonial subjects to receive meaningful formal political representation were Zionist settlers in Palestine.) Provence is right that it is significant, and too infrequently noted, that the ex-Ottoman officers highlighted here (and their civilian counterparts) watched closely as a single nation, Kemalist Turkey, managed to successfully thwart the postwar settlement—not by negotiation or cooperation but by force of arms.There was a lesson here, and men like Sultan al-Atrash and Fawzi al-Qawuqji were not slow to learn it. Many Arab elites who had come out of the Ottoman civilian administration—for instance, Shakib Arslan in Syria—continued, for longer than really seems reasonable in retrospect, to engage in negotiations with the mandatory apparatus. But those who came from a military background saw things differently. The revolts in Syria and Palestine in the mid-1920sand mid-1930s represented an attempt by former Ottoman military personnelto resist the settlements in the only way that had previously proven successful.Where local politicians like Yasin al-Hashimi in Iraq blended the two approaches, they won at least minor victories as the British began to considerwhether formal independence (carefully hedged with treaties guaranteeing British military and, crucially, oil privileges) might be a cheaper and more efficient form of access to Middle Eastern territory and resources than ongoing occupation.So by the mid-1930s ex-Ottoman elites in Iraq and Syria, at least, had reached some kind of accommodation with the occupying powers—a British-dominated but technically independent government in Iraq, headed by Yasin al-Hashimi from the summer of 1935, and a recognizably powerful National Bloc negotiating the terms of Syrian independence with the French. But once again colonial realpolitik prevailed, as the British apparently colluded in the overthrow of al-Hashimi's government in 1936 and the French assembly refused to ratify the agreed-upon Syrian independence treaty in 1939. Palestine went in a still more calamitous direction, with a brutal British/Zionist crackdown on the revolt that resulted in the imprisonment, deportation, or execution of much of the Palestinian Arab political elite and (though Provence does not go into this) set the stage for the military and political disaster of 1948. “Thus crisis piled upon crisis,” Provence writes, “the remaining threads of Ottoman brotherhood were finally severed, and Ismet Inonu's advice to Musa Kazim al-Husayni at Lausanne in 1923, that the Ottoman Arabs were on their own, came to its logical conclusion.”The book's utter condemnation of the greed, hypocrisy, and sheer brutality of the British and French colonial occupations of the interwar Arab Middle East is right on target, and indeed long overdue. Though there have been many explorations of colonial policy during the mandate period—Provence's own excellent earlier study of the Syrian revolt among them—few have examined the specific local violence that underpinned such policies in such specific and damning detail, from the perspective of the opposition. Provence is also right to engage with the question of Ottoman “mindset,” and his argument that Ottoman civilian and military training continued to influence the political trajectories of the Arab Middle East into the mid-twentieth century is unimpeachable.And yet, for all its painstaking detail, the book's attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the late Ottoman state through the postwar experience of its Arab ex-officers is not totally satisfying. For it is an uncomfortable truth that there was another half to the empire, and there is another half to the historiography; and it is here that Provence's quick slide over the events of the actual war years—a period presumably crucial to the political development of his protagonists—does his argument no favors.From the beginning of the First World War, conscription (safarbarlik, literally “journey over land,” suggesting its association with deportation and exile) held such terrors for Ottoman subjects from Anatolia to Iraq that self-mutilation became a common mode of avoiding service. The Ottoman state engaged in ruthless censorship and brutal punishment of anything the CUP deemed a threat to imperial security, including in the Arab provinces; already by late 1914 Jamal Pasha had established military courts in Beirut and Mount Lebanon and begun to try large numbers of people whom he considered potential traitors to the Ottoman state. Over the next months, Ottoman tribunals condemned to death seventy-one of Ottoman Syria's most prominent politicians, journalists, and military officers, exiled hundreds of families and confiscated their property, and deported somewhere on the order of 50,000 people. And there was more: between 1915 and 1925, Syria and Lebanon became host to somewhere on the order of a 100,000 Armenian genocide survivors. The Ottoman Arab military officers stationed in Syrian cities—in particular Aleppo, but to a lesser extent also Damascus, Beirut, Homs, Latakia, and even Jerusalem—saw thousands of starving, suffering victims come through their gates, and knew full well what had happened to them and to their compatriots who had not survived the march through the desert.When we try to come to grips with the legacy of the late Ottoman state, then, we need at least to acknowledge what it looked like from the perspective of those who were not elite, not privileged, and, by the time of the First World War, not optimistic. Provence is surely absolutely right to condemn the brutalities of the interwar European colonial occupations and to see them as a source of contemporary regional chaos; but we should also recognize that the beginnings of the region's political unraveling predated the avaricious postwar settlements and owed something to the violence of late Ottoman state making as well. Only when historians of this period begin to unite the broadly optimistic accounts of the late Ottoman Arab world with the tragic accounts of the other half of the empire, from Anatolia to the Balkans, will we really, finally, begin to have a complete picture of the unmaking of the modern Middle East.