Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
June 22 2005
Blast from past: The Ottoman shadow on Arab politics
BY MATEIN KHALID
A HUNDRED years after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the shock
waves of its death are still rattling the Middle East. Both Arabs and
Turks have not come to terms with their common imperial Ottoman past.
Kemal Ataturk ridiculed and demonised the Ottoman heritage of the
Turkish Republic, as did the generation of Arab nationalists who
fought the Sultan’s armies in Syria, Hijaz and Palestine. Ataturk
deposed the last sultan, abolished the caliphate Sultan Selim had
claimed from the Mamluks, replaced the Shariah with the Swiss civil
code and replaced the Ottoman Umma with an aggressively secular
Anatolian nationalism.
Ataturk banned the fez, introduced by the Napoleonic era Sultan
Mehmet II as a symbol of the modern Turk, as anachronistic. Turkey
abandoned its historic ties to the Arab world. It was more than
history as amnesia. Ataturk performed a lobotomy on the Ottoman past.
Yet the Ottoman shadow still lingers in the landscape, politics and
souls of Islamic societies from Sarajevo to Sanaa to Sharjah. On
Khalid Lagoon in the UAE “capital of Culture”, I see mosques with
slender Byzantine minarets reminiscent of the Sulemaniya in Istanbul.
There are beautiful Ottoman mansions with latticed windows in Jeddah,
Beirut, Alexandria, Belgrade and Sarajevo. In fact, the hillsides of
the Bosnian capital evoke the old Ottoman place names long after
Tito’s Yugoslavia has vanished into a bitter memory.
The Ottoman ghosts haunt Arab politics. Take Iraq, for instance. The
Hashemite kingdom of Iraq was created out of the Ottoman vilayets of
Baghdad, Mosul and Basra (which, Saddam argued in August 1990,
included the Gulf emirate of Kuwait). Yet the Turkish republic never
accepted the Iraq Churchill sketched on a napkin and created out of
the carcass of its Mesopotamian empire at the Cairo conference. The
tragedy of Kurdistan was spawned amid the Machiavellian cynicism of
wartime British realpolitik in the Middle East.
As late as 1997, President Suleiman Demirel questioned why the
British gave the Ottoman oil rich province of Mosul to Iraq. The
Turkish republic sent troops across the international border into
northern Iraq on successive occasions and strangled the idea of a
Kurdish state that might well inflame the secessionist psyche of
Turkey’s own “mountain Turks” in the east, whose PKK civil war has
claimed 30,000 lives.
At fateful moments of Iraqi history, after Saddam’s armies were
routed at Fao in 1982 and Kuwait in 1991, Turkey signalled its
intention to annex Mosul if the Baathist regime in Baghdad fell. Even
Turkish-Syrian relations are held hostage to the Ottoman past. In
1998, Ankara almost went to war over the House of Assad’s covert
assistance to the PKK and Damascus still resents colonial France’s
decision to wrest Hatay province from Syrian. The Turkish republic’s
hostility to Alawite Syria and theocratic Iran has echoes of the
Ottoman sultan’s role as the standard bearer of Sunni orthodoxy
against the Persian Shia and esoteric Islamic sects of Bilad Shaam.
Even Israel’s close strategic relations with Turkey are a legacy of
the Ottoman past. The Jews of Istanbul are the descendants of the
Sephardis expelled by the Spanish Inquisition after the fall of the
Moorish Nasirid emirate of Granada in 1492. Sultan Selim welcomed the
Andalusian Jews himself at Galata and their descendants became the
empire’s richest bankers, grand viziers, pashas and scholars.
While Christian Europe persecuted its Jews, the Ottomans showered
their most brilliant minds with the highest offices of state. In
fact, the first Zionist aliyas (settlements) in Palestine would not
have been possible without the Sublime Porte’s consent though Sultan
Abdel Hamid angrily rejected the Jewish agency’s offer to literally
buy Palestine. The Ottoman cult of absolute rule, bureaucratic
politics, an elite palace guard and Western-centric reform was a
template for generations of Middle East dictators. If Ataturk was a
son of the Enlightenment, so were Reza Khan Pahlavi, Habib Bourguiba,
and Jamal Nasser.
The Ottoman empire was the antithesis of the sort of nineteenth
century nationalism, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution,
that swept across the Balkans, the Levant, Iran and the Hijaz as the
“sick man of Europe” went into its final, fatal convulsion in 1918.
Armenian, Azerbaijani, Iraqi, Syrian Lebanese, Egyptian, Greek,
Serbian, Bulgarian and Saudi nationalism were all nurtured in the
geopolitical chaos that followed the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
So many of the tragedies that haunt the Middle East in our time have
their origins in the British-French plots to dismember the Ottoman
empire. What if the Allies had not double-crossed Sharif Hussein and
his sons after the success of the Arab revolt in the Hijaz? What if
the French had not expelled the Hashemite Prince Faisal from
Damascus, not created a Maronite enclave in Mount Lebanon, not
recruited Alawite peasants from Latakia in the Syrian Army? What if
the Hijaz Railway still carried pilgrims from Bosnia, Turkey and
Albania to Makkah? What if Lord Balfour’s HM Government had not
viewed with favour the establishment of a Jewish national home in
Palestine?
The Ottoman past continues to influence the political culture and
international relations of the Arab world even today. Take the
Ottoman millet system, where Istanbul ruled multiethnic provinces via
hierarchies of religious leaders.
The modern Middle East intelligence state owes its model to Sultan
Abdel Hamid’s secret police, the most expensive, ruthless and
extensive organ of state in the Ottoman twilight. Strange, much as
the Arab tried to forget their Turkish past, the modern warlords,
spymasters are still haunted by familiar Ottoman ghosts. After all,
for six hundred years, the epicentre of world politics was not the
Kremlin, the Elysee Palace, Whitehall or the White House but the
palace, kiosks and terraces of Topkapi Serai on the Sea of Marmara,
the citadel of the House of Osman for six centuries.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress