Washington Free Beacon
Nov 2 2014
The Ottoman Spring
Review: Bedross Der Matossian’s ‘Shattered Dreams of Revolution’
BY: Sam Taylor
November 2, 2014 5:00 am
On July 24, 1908, a group of disaffected Ottoman military officers and
members of the secretive Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) mounted
a successful coup against the despotic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II,
and restored the constitution that he had suspended thirty years
prior. What became known as the Young Turk Revolution brought euphoria
and optimism to the multi-ethnic, multi-religious populations of the
Ottoman Empire, who were enticed by the CUP with the promise, rooted
in the rhetoric of the French Revolution, of ‘Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity.’
In Izmir, Ottoman Jews marched alongside government dignitaries,
shouting “Long live the fatherland! Long live liberty!” In Beirut,
Biblical and Quranic passages were posted side by side. In Jerusalem,
Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs celebrated under a banner at the city
gate that read, “Long live the army, long live freedom. Liberty,
equality, and fraternity.” All over the Ottoman Empire, Muslims,
Christians, and Jews marched in processions together, basking in the
dawn of a new era.
But within a year, the last great Islamic empire’s brief foray into
secular constitutionalism deteriorated into ethnic and religious
violence.
The major consequences of the coup, in real terms, were a genocide
that claimed the lives of more than one million ethnic Armenians, the
displacement of hundreds of thousands of former Ottoman citizens in
Eastern Anatolia, and–following the First World War–the loss of the
Ottoman Arab lands, which were carved into unwieldy nation-states
controlled by British and French suzerains.
In Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the
Late Ottoman Empire, historian Bedross Der Matossian addresses the
fraught ethnic relations that played a significant role in the failure
of the Ottoman constitutional experiment.
According to Der Matossian, the goals of the revolution were doomed
nearly from its inception because of their own internal
contradictions.
CUP leaders, including Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, sought to unite
disparate populations of Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds and
Turks under the banner of “Ottomanism”–a nebulous concept that could
be molded to advance either a commitment to a multi-ethnic Ottoman
political project, or to a Turkish nationalist agenda, depending on
the context.
Due to linguistic limitations (perhaps ‘limitations’ is an
inappropriate word, as Der Matossian conducted research in Arabic,
Armenian, French, Hebrew, Ladino, and Ottoman Turkish for the book)
the author chooses to examine the dissolution of Ottoman unity among
three primary non-Turkish ethnic groups: Arabs, Armenians, and Jews.
Although all three groups played instrumental roles in bringing the
CUP to power in the 1908 coup d’état, it soon became clear that the
Young Turks’ version of Ottomanism–assimilation and promotion of
Ottoman Turkish as the primary language of the empire–clashed with the
promotion of their respective identities, languages, and
ethno-religious privileges.
This clash precipitated a collective disillusionment with the ideals
of the revolution, which had failed to satisfy each community’s desire
for autonomy within a decentralized Ottoman framework. Loss of
prestige among the empire’s Arab population gave rise to Arabism,
violence against Armenians “shook their trust” in the CUP, and Zionism
was met with significant hostility from both Arabs in Palestine and
the Ottoman government.
As early as 1909, the semblance of ‘brotherhood’ in Palestine that had
existed in the brief euphoric moment following the revolution had
devolved into bitter ethnic rivalries that manifested themselves in
the pages of the local Arabic and Hebrew press.
Der Matossian has sought out primary sources–including newspapers,
political communications, speeches, and religious sermons–which help
to paint a picture of late Ottoman society unavailable in official
repositories like the Ottoman Archives. It is well-known among
scholars of Republican Turkey that Ataturk hired scholars to construct
a historical narrative that suited his political ambitions, advanced
the notion of a modern and secular Turkish state, and eschewed the
inconvenient blemishes of its Ottoman past, especially the Armenian
genocide.
Thus, utilization of the Ottoman Archives becomes problematic for the
historian seeking the truth. It should further be noted that access to
the Ottoman Archives is difficult and in many cases impossible to
achieve for those of Armenian origin, depending on the ‘nature’ of his
or her research.
Der Matossian’s ambitious project (the 260 pages of which may seem
modest when one considers that they are distilled from a 600-plus-page
dissertation completed at Columbia) breaks sharply from the
‘microhistorical’ approach employed by many scholars of the period.
Rather than examining one locality and attempting to extrapolate
larger conclusions about the empire as a whole, Der Matossian’s work
analyzes the complex revolution from both central and peripheral
areas, sifting through the “study in contradictions” that is the Young
Turk Revolution to establish a comprehensive narrative about the
feverish rise and fall of the 20th century Ottoman dream.
The lessons of the failed Ottoman experiment, however, extend far
beyond the limited historical scope of Shattered Dreams of Revolution,
which covers a period between 1908 and 1909. Like other modern
revolutions, Der Matossian writes, the Young Turk Revolution was
driven by the notion that the predicaments of society “should be
solved through the kind of political reform that had transformed the
West into a successful entity: constitutionalism and parliamentary
rule vehicles to curb the power of the monarchy.” Constitutionalism
alone, however, “failed to create a new understanding of Ottoman
citizenship,” and could not stem the rising tide of nationalism that
enveloped the rapidly decaying multi-ethnic Empires of the
era–including Czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, both of which
crumbled at the end of the First World War.
Even in the 21st century, we continue to see a similar template in
Middle Eastern revolutions. In the book’s conclusion, Der Matossian
includes an excerpt from a speech given in an Egyptian church at the
peak of the Arab Spring’s optimism in December 2011. The Anglican
pastor, Reverend Sameh al-Qasim, welcomes a prominent imam from a
Tahrir Square mosque along with a delegation of hundreds of Muslims to
celebrate the New Year side by side. The imam, Sheikh Mazhar Shahin,
invokes Egyptian patriotism and describes the relationship between
Christian and Muslim Egyptians as one of “love and harmony.”
“The pillars of this country were founded with the sweat of the
Egyptians…Muslims and Christians [alike],” Shahin says. “Egypt will
remain a safe country, guarded by whoever walks on it, be they Muslims
or Christians.”
It is, sadly, clear just how that worked out.
Der Matossian rightly points out that in the wake of both the Young
Turk and Egyptian revolutions, “continued tensions between Christians
and Muslims quickly became part of the post-revolutionary political
milieu.” These parallels make Shattered Dreams of Revolution essential
to a sober and honest understanding of the Middle East in the 20th
century–and in the 21st.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/the-ottoman-spring/