Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (19 page)

However, as we will see in
Chapter Four
, the issue of military conscription quickly became a source of rivalry and contention in the Ottoman Empire—a marker of the limits and boundaries of Ottomanization. Likewise, education reform would also pit the centralizing impulses of the CUP against the protectionist impulses and cultural preferences of non-Muslim and non-Turkish communities.

CHALLENGES TO “EQUALITY AND BROTHERHOOD”

In addition to the difficulties of instiutionalizing Ottomanism, from the outset it faced additional significant challenges. Neither Muslims nor non-Muslims were homogeneous, monolithic groups, and there were to
be found numerous advocates of Ottomanism and Ottomanization as well as opponents to it. We have seen already that some Muslim public speakers objected to the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims, although they seemed to occupy a much smaller space in the press—perhaps more a testament to the orientation of the intellectual classes rather than a pure public referendum.
¹²⁶

Other public expressions, although in theory supportive of equality, nonetheless revealed internal inconsistencies and the difficulty of internalizing a true notion of equal citizenship. For example, at the same time that Rashid Rida extolled the beauty of equal brotherhood, his language was layered with terms resonant of Islamic history that placed non-Muslims in the empire back in the role of “tolerated guest” rather than “fellow citizen.” In one article in which he fiercely defended the record of Muslim liberals, Rida wrote:

After the victory of the constitution they were the ones who agreed to Ottomanism with the Armenians and other Christians, and they were the ones who raised their voices everywhere that we will not cause the religion to divide us and our Ottoman brothers but rather we will be with them as Islam commands us in the famous saying “for them that which is for us, and upon them that which is upon us.”
¹²⁷

At first glance this expression might sound like a notion of republican citizenship—shared rights and duties irrespective of religion. However, this famous saying reportedly originated with the Caliph ‘Umar bin al-Khattab, who is remembered in Islamic history for normalizing relations between Muslims and non-Muslims under the so-called “Pact of ‘Umar.” By returning non-Muslims to their position as “people of the book,” the article explains, the superior role of Islam in the empire is preserved. This is made clearer later in the article, where Rida denounces those liberals who “exceeded the boundaries” of brotherhood and equality by offering to convert the Aya Sofia Mosque (formerly the Hagia Sophia Byzantine church) into the future parliament: as he reminds his readers, many still remembered the conquest of Constantinople as one of the glories of Islam. In other words, even among people who had struggled for liberty and theoretically supported equality and brotherhood, Ottoman equality threatened some Ottoman Muslims' sense of history, divine will, and sacred revelation.

Likewise, the “cost” of equality and brotherhood was not far from the minds of non-Muslims. Like his predecessor during the Tanzimat's first attempts to reform the status of non-Muslims, the Greek-Orthodox patriarch was the most visible—and worrying—example of unwillingness to fulfill the emancipation bargain by giving up the special privileges provided non-Muslims under the Capitulations. One foreign correspondent,
admittedly no friend of the Greeks, commented about the Greeks in the empire that

their idea of Ottoman citizenship, so far as themselves were concerned, was to avoid all the obligations of that citizenship, while enjoying all the rights conferred by it and retaining all their special privileges intact.… The Moslems have had to give up their special rights, but the Greeks refused to surrender a single one of their privileges for the sake of Ottoman unity. The Greeks chatter about liberty, equality, and fraternity, but their aim is to secure to themselves advantages over the other Christian peoples.
¹²⁸

The response of the CUP, through its cheerleader
Tanin
, was quite clear. After receiving legal equality, the right to vote for and serve in parliament, and above all after being welcomed as full members in the Ottoman nation, non-Muslims who clung to their privileges had no place in the new era.

They [non-Muslims] surely are guilty of an injustice if, still dissatisfied, they also continue to claim their former privileges. For the aim of the constitution is to establish equality for all. To exact more is not right. We will never force our Greek countrymen to renounce their privileges, but we will say to them that the time of inequalities is over and if they want to live with us as brothers, we will open our arms wide and also our hearts. If, on the other hand, they also insist on maintaining the exceptional conditions of other times, they must still be
rayas
in our eyes, for surely we cannot grant them more than we ourselves enjoy, or the Arabs, or the Albanians!
¹²⁹

In addition to a certain unwillingness to give up their special privileges, there also was a latent concern and fear about the transgressive potential of “brotherhood” and what this would mean for communal solidarity and existence. In the play
How It Came About
, discussed in
Chapter One
, the hero of the play, Behalul, falls in love with a Greek Orthodox Christian girl, Victoria. The actors proudly proclaim that “the love of a Greek and a Turk will be a symbol of the union of all the Ottoman peoples!” And yet, several scenes later, Victoria converts to Islam and renames herself Hope (Umit), after which she and Behalul finally wed.
¹³⁰
According to Islamic law, however, a Muslim male is permitted to marry a Christian or Jewish female without requiring her conversion and without compromising the religion of the future children of such a union, who would automatically take their father's religion. So the question remains, why did the playwright call for Victoria's conversion? What did this symbolic act suggest for the real possibilities of the “union of the Ottoman peoples”?

Perhaps not coincidentally, in the fall of 1908, the story of an actual Muslim-Turkish—Greek-Christian romance in Istanbul shook the empire,
making its way through the press even to faraway Jerusalem. In this case it was a Greek doctor, Teodori, who fell in love with a Muslim neighbor girl, Badriyya. According to the news report, Teodori went to Badriyya's father to ask for her hand in marriage, but the father flew into a rage, yelling to his neighbors that his daughter was leaving Islam. After a mob assembled, the police were summoned to escort the star-crossed lovers to the police station. However on their journey the couple and their police escort were intercepted by the mob, which beat Teodori to death and (possibly) fatally injured Badriyya. Of course the sad tale of the Ottoman Romeo and Juliet was complicated by the fact that Islamic law does
not
permit the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men, an important difference from our fictional lovers Behalul and Victoria-Hope. Teodori's funeral reportedly drew three thousand Greeks, and while the CUP declared it would prosecute the perpetrators, tensions in the capital ran high after that.
¹³¹
According to the newspaper report, the lynching was incited by two conservative Muslim leaders in the capital who were battling against the constitutional regime.

In the aftermath of Teodori and Badriyya, the trope of intercommunal sexual transgression became a persistent subtext throughout the constitutional period of the fearful side of Ottoman brotherhood. For example, Armenians were inflamed by rumors of an Armenian girl being kidnapped and married to a Turk, and the Jewish press frequently decried rumors of Jewish women entering into relations with Arab Muslim or Christian men. After one such report, a Jerusalem newspaper cried out to its readers for help: “Help us save this woman! Three more Jews are ready to convert [after her]!”
¹³²

In addition to these conflicts sparked by passion, there were also inter-religious and interethnic tensions of a more long-term, structural basis that would prove in some cases stronger than an ideological or political commitment to brotherhood. The Beirut newspaper
Ottoman Union
related in the fall of 1908 that the “pillars of corruption” had led to Muslim-Christian clashes in the northern Palestinian town of Shefa-'Amr; afraid of the riots spreading, the governor chided the villagers in a letter “reminding them of the meaning of the constitution and of liberty.”
¹³³

Far more significant than the scuffle in this Palestinian village, however, was the series of anti-Armenian riots that spread from the fall of 1908 through the spring of 1909 in eastern Anatolia. Kurdish-Armenian relations in eastern Anatolia had long been uneasy, going back to at least the 1890s and ongoing land disputes between the two communities. Unrest began in October 1908, when news of Kurdish attacks against Armenians in the village of Viranşehir was published in the press throughout the empire.
¹³⁴
After several months, reports were published
that a local Muslim religious leader in eastern Anatolia was calling for attacks on Armenians, and he was soon arrested. In the spring of 1909, however, against the backdrop of the failed anticonstitutional coup and the deposition of the sultan, tensions in Anatolia finally erupted: locals were reportedly incensed by rumors of mosque desecrations and rapes, and by fears that the Armenians wanted to restore the ancient Armenian kingdom of Cicilia in Anatolia. In violence that lasted several weeks and decimated the town of Adana and several villages, between ten thousand and twenty thousand Armenians were killed.
¹³⁵

The massacres shook the empire to its core: less than a year after the revolution and within weeks after the triumph of the constitutionalists over their opponents in the capital, the bonds of Ottoman brotherhood were tested to their breaking point. The public response was one of shock—newspapers in Jerusalem collected funds for the Armenian victims of the massacre and watched the response of the government closely.
¹³⁶
The most moving tribute was made by Halide Edib (Adivar), a young Muslim writer for the Turkish-language press in Istanbul. She attributed the massacres to the spirit of the past, but also called on the CUP to apply justice and to ensure that such an atrocity never occurred again:

My poor Armenian brethren, you are the greatest victims of the Hamidian regime. The fiery joy of my soul for our reestablished liberty turns to ice in the face of your darkened, desolate lands, the sad fate of your homeless, motherless little ones! Our national joy stalls in the dust with shame before this awful tragedy…. The ruins of Adana! O vast, bloody grave of my countrymen, you are a humiliation, not only to the Turks who caused it, but to the whole human race.

O great Ottoman nation…Ottoman race…[we] must wipe out the blood of our Armenian brethren, that reddens the hands of our people.
¹³⁷

In the aftermath of the massacres, the CUP-aligned Armenian leadership like member of parliament Krikor Zohrab had to contend with Armenian nationalists who wanted them to break off ties with the CUP at the same time that they pushed the CUP for further aid to the Armenians. In negotiations between the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak) and the CUP, it was agreed that Armenian guards would be posted in Armenian villages and that local reforms would be implemented to help calm matters on the ground. However, in an address to the Armenian National Assembly, Krikor Zohrab revealed that Muslim-Armenian relations had taken a serious hit. “You should know, compatriots, that the famed revolution of the Ottoman Constitution is still far from accomplishing its entire work. Indeed that circumstance where the Muslim element, full of hatred, resumes their criminal oppression, is a sign that the Turk has not matured enough for constitutional order.”
¹³⁸

Despite Krikor Zohrab's own apparent ethnic and religious prejudices and the pressures he and other ARF leaders faced from the Armenian National Assembly as well as from their Armenian co-religionists, a joint decision was reached by the CUP headquarters and the ARF-Constantinople Responsible Body that stated that “considering that saving the sacred Ottoman fatherland from separation and division is an objective of the two organizations' joint cooperation, they will work to practically dispel within public opinion the false story inherited from the despotic regime that the Armenians strive for independence.”
¹³⁹
With that, Ottoman brotherhood and equality were put back on course, at least for the time being.

CHAPTER THREE

Of Boycotts and Ballots

In its first edition which appeared in late September 1908, the Beirut newspaper
Ottoman Union
published an “open letter to every esteemed Ottoman.” This open letter appeared exactly two months after the announcement of the restoration of the constitution—by which time many cities and towns throughout the empire, Beirut included, had witnessed numerous mass rallies, celebrations, and an unprecedented, persistent level of public engagement. The editor of the paper, Shaykh Ahmad Husayn Tabbara, sought to prepare his readers for “the day after” the constitution once the heady days of revolutionary celebrations had died down. Tabbara lectured his readers:

This is not a time of laziness and ignorance, but of hard work and wisdom…. It is not enough to show our joy and proclaim “long live the constitution,” but rather it demands from us great efforts…. The revolution is just one phase, and if we do not study these rights or laws and work for these deeds, then [the constitution will be in name only]. On its own, the constitution will not advance the nation from backwardness to progress suddenly, nor will it bring it to progress from decay at once, but rather it points the nation on the path of goodness and away from the path of damage and harm.

O, intellectuals, know that the nation is decayed in its knowledge, poor in its commerce, backward in its industry, ignorant in its agriculture, and many of its sons especially in the interior have not comprehended the meaning of the constitution until now.
¹

By cautioning his fellow citizens not to assume that the hard work of liberty had been achieved with the mere announcement of the constitution, Tabbara sought to convince his readers that they, too, were each personally and collectively responsible for political change and for the empire's general progress. This view of Ottoman citizenship as an
active
citizenship was expressed in various ways over the fall of 1908 with the establishment of numerous political and civil society organizations, the holding
of parliamentary elections, and the publication of countless newspaper editorials that reveal a great deal about people's ideas, expectations, and hopes for an Ottoman imperial citizenship. This citizenship was premised on a strong Ottoman patriotism and drew on republican citizenship and historic Islamic notions like the “public good” and “general benefit.”

“PRACTICING” CITIZENSHIP

The sultan's tyrannical reign had been propped up by hundreds if not thousands of government officials and spies, and “liberty” included a sense that justice would put in their place the men who had spied on, punished, and impoverished the Ottoman people. In various Ottoman cities and towns throughout the empire, ordinary citizens were emboldened to petition the state to dismiss local officials known to be corrupt, whether through formal channels such as petitions and telegrams or through informal channels such as demonstrations and vigilante justice. The press in some cases aided and even provoked this watchdog phenomenon; for example, several early issues of
Ottoman Union
featured letters either denouncing or defending particular individuals who were accused of belonging to the ancien régime.
²

Heads of the gendarme and police lost their positions in Beirut and Damascus, and in the latter city another forty military and administrative officials reportedly were purged from their positions.
³
According to postal clerk ‘Izzat Darwaza, emboldened by telegraphs reporting the “will of the nation [
irādat al-umma]”
in other neighboring cities like Jerusalem, ‘Akka, and Beirut, in Nablus the “people's anger [
gha
ab al-nās]”
erupted and they informed on clerks who had been corrupt and demanded their dismissal.
⁴
The military commander of Nablus, a notable religious scholar, and other leading men all known to be spies for the sultan were brought down in the revolutionary era.

In Jerusalem, despite former governor Ekrem Bey's systematic purges against local officials which had resulted in the firing of forty-five corrupt officials in his two-year tenure, various Jerusalemites nonetheless called for further purges of those officials who were, in their words, “accustomed to tyranny in the nation and [did] not place importance on the reforms of the people.”
⁵
At a public demonstration, Shaykh Muhammad Shakir Diab al-Baytuni threatened the region's clerks: “We will learn which of them is wicked and who among them is good, because most of them were raised in the culture of cunning swindlers.”
⁶
This was considered a vital step, and al-Baytuni called for “purifying the homeland [
ta
hīr al-wa
dan]”
of the despots.

Simultaneous to these grassroots purges, within days after the announcement of the restoration of the constitution public education efforts were taking place on the streets and in the press. Public lectures on the constitution were held throughout the empire by individuals and nascent institutions established to support the revolution's aims. For example, in early October the Beirut Ottoman Union Society announced that two lawyers, ‘Abd al-Ghani Badran and Jean Naqqash, would give public lectures on the Basic Law at the society's club. “All liberal Ottomans” from the various sects were invited to attend the lectures and join the society.
⁷
A few days later, the Beirut CUP branch announced that it too would hold a public meeting with speeches about the “beloved homeland and its holy laws.”
⁸
Similar traces of public education talks survive in Nablus, where Ibrahim al-Qasim ‘Abd al-Hadi “would speak to the public in the courtyard of the government house in a language close to the masses…in a simple style explaining the meaning of the constitution and the banishment of its announcement [in 1878] and its appearance, and that which was granted of liberty and brotherhood and equality and justice.”
⁹
In Jerusalem, Yitzhak Levi gave a lecture at the Jewish cultural club Beit ha-'Am (House of the People/Nation), analyzing various relevant articles of the constitution.
¹⁰

In addition to public talks taking place in various cities around the empire, numerous newspapers published translations of the constitution, making the document accessible to citizens empire-wide regardless of mother tongue.
¹¹
The Lighthouse
told its readers it was publishing sections of the constitution “so that the Ottomans will contemplate it and know their worth and that they are not servants to their rulers.”
¹²
Other newspapers published queries from their readers about the new laws and new political system. For example, the Cairene newspaper
The Crescent
, which had wide distribution in the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, published the following letter from reader Muhammad Hasan al-'Amari. “Al-'Amari: People talk about the constitution that the Ottoman liberals attained and we understand that [the empire] moved from tyranny to liberty, but we do not understand the shape of a constitutional government, and we have heard that the Easterners [are not compatible with constitutionalism]. Also, what is the role of the Basic Law and the parliament?”
¹³

The Crescent
responded with a long explanation of comparative political history: In a tyrannical government like that which had previously ruled in the East, the ruler makes the laws over his people, and he is the highest authority and can rule the people as he wishes; also, men of government implement the laws over the people. In contrast, constitutional government constrains absolute power. It is guided by the constitution, which is a handbook on how to compose government, what the traits of
its members should be, and how to govern. The most important difference,
The Crescent
emphasized to its readers, is that constitutional government is based on “the will of the nation,” and the nation itself elects who will represent it in the government. Furthermore,
The Crescent
argued that there was no inherent reason why Easterners could not adopt constitutionalism—they simply needed to familiarize themselves with it.

To that end, numerous political and civil society organizations were established in the fall of 1908 to support the constitution. In fact, the establishment of universal civic organizations was seen as a vital step to supporting Ottomanism. The journalist Husayn Wasfi Rida pleaded with his countrymen: “It is not permissible that [an organization] be for only some of the people, neither Muslims nor Christians nor Jews, neither in aims nor design, but it must be purely Ottoman…. You are Ottomans, O brothers, therefore your associations must be Ottoman.”
¹⁴
As Rida argued, only by establishing organizations held together by civic rather than religious bonds would Ottomans succeed in “operationalizing liberty.”

We have already seen the existence of an Ottoman Unity Society in Beirut that held public lectures on the constitution. A branch of the society was established in Tripoli that was aimed at “support[ing] the Basic Law and defend[ing] its laws and serv[ing] its general benefit—in other words, “service to the beloved homeland.”
¹⁵
Reports of other organizations sprouted throughout the empire after the revolution, such as Ottoman Brotherhood (Uhuvvet-i Osmaniye).
¹⁶
However, far beyond these local societies in terms of both spread and importance were the local branches of the Committee for Union and Progress.

THE “SACRED COMMITTEE”: THE LOCAL BRANCHES OF THE CUP

Because of the relative ease with which it succeeded in restoring the constitution, the CUP had burst onto the imperial stage as the heroic “savior” of the Ottoman Empire, attaining widespread popularity and a significant degree of public legitimacy virtually overnight. Popularly referred to as the “sacred committee [
cemiyet-i mukaddese],”
the CUP had local branches popping up in the empire's cities and towns almost immediately. According to one report, by the end of 1909 there were over 360 CUP branches and 850,000 members spread throughout the empire.
¹⁷
In Palestine, CUP branches were established in the important cities of Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nablus, and ‘Akka, but also in the smaller towns of Safad, Tiberias, Haifa, and Gaza. Over the next several years these provincial branches became significant political actors, injecting
previously apolitical social classes into political life, mobilizing a mass street boycott of a major European power, and pointing to new modes of political participation.

Some of the provincial branches grew out of existing underground cells, whereas others were newly constituted by local initiative, comprised of members who were unknown and in many cases unaccountable to the central committee. For the first few years after the revolution, while the CUP remained an unofficial (shadow) actor in central government politics, CUP headquarters in Salonica had limited control over the provincial branches, their internal organization, membership, or activities. Indeed, until 1910 there were reported cases of branches attempting to overrule local government officials and of imposters issuing forged announcements and imposing fake taxes on the local populace, and as a result, the central CUP preferred to rely on loyal army officers rather than the branches to carry out its program.
¹⁸