Turkey in the Middle East

Abstract

All Muslims are, at least in theory, brothers; nationalists of neighbouring countries are not. This is one reason for the ambivalence of Turkish feelings about the Middle East. There are others. Geographically Turkey is at least in part a European country; the Ottoman Empire in its heyday was much more so. Although, to Europe, the Turks were Asiatics, whether in Europe or in Asia, although to the Arabs the Ottoman Empire was the Muslim State and therefore their state too, Ottoman Turks were invested with a degree of European otherness in Arab eyes. 'Between the Persians and Rum, what woe befell us', the inhabitants of Baghdad complained in an old song,1 and Rum was in this context the Eastern Roman Empire which the Turks had conquered. Paradoxically, it was only towards the end of its life, when many of its institutions and much of its ruling class had been westernized, that the Ottoman Empire came closest to becoming purely a Near (or Middle) Eastern country. After the Russian victory of 1878, and the loss of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Thessaly, and other possessions in Europe, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and with him many leading Ottoman Turks, despaired of saving Turkey-in-Europe, and became all the more resolved to keep intact the Ottoman possessions in Asia. This explains the official promotion of Pan-Islamism, Abdul Hamid's insistence on keeping alive his suzerain rights in Egypt, and the harshness of the Turkish reaction to Armenian nationalism. The monument of that era is the Hijaz Railway, built with money donated by Muslims throughout the world. Abdul Hamid's policy might have led to the growth of a Middle Eastern Islamic nationalism embracing Turks, Arabs, and Kurds. Instead a more divisive form of nationalism prevailed. Not only was this nationalism a western creed; it was largely foisted on the