‘THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS,’ BY EUGENE ROGAN
New York Times
April 16 2015
By BRUCE CLARKAPRIL 16, 2015
In November 1914, the world’s only great Muslim empire was drawn into
a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers
— Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations
about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing
out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every
page of Eugene Rogan’s intricately worked but very readable account
of the Ottoman theocracy’s demise.
As Rogan explains in “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
Middle East,” the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions
of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by
the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the
war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other
European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically,
the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an
Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial
game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if
the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the
influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects
— including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and
economically important minority in both the empire’s capital and the
Anatolian heartland.
In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns
all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based
calculations had consequences, many of them tragic.
Rogan’s narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia
as he traces those consequences, and shows how they led, ultimately,
to the Ottoman Empire’s defeat and collapse.
Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history
lecturer at Oxford University and the author of “The Arabs,” carefully
distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918
was not total, and left some of the sultan’s -forces intact. One of
his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had
bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The
final collapse of the Ottoman order was -neither an instant result of
the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan’s reading, an inevitable one. But
for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than
commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough.
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In the Ottomans’ confrontation with Britain, there were several
early -surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London’s Muslim
subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks’ hold
over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who
controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks,
Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu
or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia.
But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed
an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous
British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent
landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began
crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish
soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they
served.
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Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a
heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks’
costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that
unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day
Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the
Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events
to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions.
It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The American
administration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using
the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It
is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the
“relocation” of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia;
nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march
whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or
perished from exhaustion and starvation.
But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines,
Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast,
brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress,
the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort,
issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees.
Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts
the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam.
This book uses words like “annihilation” and “massacre” more often than
“genocide” but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote,
Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the “courageous efforts”
of Turkish historians and writers to “force an honest reckoning with
Turkey’s past.”
At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified
defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter
1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia
between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians fought alone,
and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time,
Turkish officialdom’s fear of an “enemy within” was running high
because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain’s plans
to advance on the city.
All that provides some psychological background to the drive against
the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life,
from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian
victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment
suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the
Armenians endured. To stress, as some Turkish versions of the story
do, that this was a period involving tragic suffering on all sides
is valid as far as it goes, but it is not an adequate statement. It
is to Rogan’s credit that he acknowledges this.
Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not the
main purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision
of a conflict that is often described through the eyes of British
generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In
what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several
pages on the motives of the Ottomans’ adversaries, especially Britain;
that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of
the story to life.
Some gripping sections describe the -British-led advance on
Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city’s capture in time
for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it
well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the
ingenuity of Britain’s -tactics.
The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at
its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims
of Arabia and the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so
they established the principle that in the 20th century, ethnicity
and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump
religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the
early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions
of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago.
THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS
The Great War in the Middle East
By Eugene Rogan
Illustrated. 485 pp. Basic Books. $32.
Bruce Clark, who writes about religion, history and society for
The Economist, is the author of “Twice a Stranger,” a study of the
Turkish-Greek population exchange.
From: A. Papazian