The Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath

Author: Bernard Lewis

Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 15, No. 1, Imperial Hangovers (Jan., 1980), pp. 27-36

Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University and a Long-term Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. His works include The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1961 (rev. ed. 1968); Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire, 1963; The Middle East and the West, 1964; The Assassins, 1967; Race and Color in Islam, 1971.

The Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath

During the last decades of the Ottoman Empire three different unifying ideologies competed for the loyalty of Ottoman subjects. They may be designated as the Islamic, the Ottoman, and the Turkish principles of identity.

Islam was the traditional basis of the Ottoman state as of virtually all other states in the classical Islamic world. It provided the principle of authority, of identity, and of political and social cohesion and loyalty. The polity was conceived as the Community of Muslims, its head as the successor of the Sultans and Caliphs of the glorious past and as the holder of an Islamic sovereignty dedicated to the maintenance of Islam and the extension of its domain. Characteristically, when Ottoman Muslims observed the role of Prussia and Savoy in the unification of the German and Italian peoples in the nineteenth century and considered a possible parallel role for themselves, they saw it in terms not of Turks but of Islam - of a greater Islamic unity, embracing all Muslims, with Ottoman Turkey as its leader. In this sense the Empire was conceived not as a domination of Turks over non-Turks, since all Muslims were theoretically equal irrespective of language or origin, but as a domination of Muslims over non-Muslims. The task of the Muslim Empire was to preserve the heritage of the Prophet, to uphold and enforce the law of Islam and bring it ultimately to all mankind. Non-Muslims were at least to be subjugated and preferably converted. Those who accepted the faith of the masters of the Empire could aspire to full equality with them and access to all positions, even the highest. Those who preferred to adhere to their old religions were permitted to do so but were requiredto recognize the primacy of Islam and submit to the supremacy of the Muslims.

Even during the Turkish War of Independence 1919-1922, the Islamic component in Turkish identity was still very strong, and many of Kemal's supporters certainly saw themselves as fighting for Islam against the unbeliever rather than for Turkey against the foreigner. But the influence of Islam was much weakened by the defection of the Islamic establishment, which in the eyes of many Turks was guilty of collaboration with the occupying powers. This greatly facilitated Kemal's subsequent task in secularizing the Turkish state, disestablishing the Islamic religion and replacing the Islamic codes by modern laws. With the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, the Turkish state formally renounced the Islamic religious leadership which had been embodied in that office. In the debate on the subject which took place in the Turkish parliament and elsewhere, the question whether to retain or abandon Turkey's role as the leading Islamic power was discussed at length, and the renun- ciation of Islamic empire expressed in the abolition of the office was conscious and explicit.

Since then, there has been no indication whatever of any desire on the part of any significant body of Turks to resume that role. It is noteworthy that even in recent years, when Islamic revivalism has become something of a force in Turkish domestic politics, there has been no suggestion that Turkey should seek to resume her erstwhile role as the champion and leader of Islam. On the contrary, the Turkish revivalists have been content - no doubt for good practical as well as ideological reasons - to fall in behind the leadership of other Islamic claimants.

The Ottoman dynasty and state lasted for 500 years. Allegiance to the Ottoman house was the main political loyalty, not only of the Muslim subjects of the empire, but even, to a degree which is not always appreciated, of the non-Muslim subject peoples. The ideal of Ottomanism, however, as a nationality in the European sense is a product of nineteenth century liberal reformism. This was the concept of an Ottoman identity and loyalty embracing all Ottoman subjects irrespectiveof religion or of ethnic origin in a single Ottoman nation inhabiting the Ottoman fatherland.

Such an idea was a chimera. It won only limited support among Ottoman Muslims and even less among the Christian peoples of the Empire. It was undermined both by the traditional Islamic even the highest. Those who preferred to adhere to their old religions were permitted to do so but were requiredto recognize the primacy of Islam and submit to the supremacy of the Muslims.

Even during the Turkish War of Independence 1919-1922, the Islamic component in Turkish identity was still very strong, and many of Kemal's supporters certainly saw themselves as fighting for Islam against the unbeliever rather than for Turkey against the foreigner. But the influence of Islam was much weakened by the defection of the Islamic establishment, which in the eyes of many Turks was guilty of collaboration with the occupying powers. This greatly facilitated Kemal's subsequent task in secularizing the Turkish state, disestablishing the Islamic religion and replacing the Islamic codes by modern laws. With the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, the Turkish state formally renounced the Islamic religious leadership which had been embodied in that office. In the debate on the subject which took place in the Turkish parliament and elsewhere, the question whether to retain or abandon Turkey's role as the leading Islamic power was discussed at length, and the renun- ciation of Islamic empire expressed in the abolition of the office was conscious and explicit.

Since then, there has been no indication whatever of any desire on the part of any significant body of Turks to resume that role. It is noteworthy that even in recent years, when Islamic revivalism has become something of a force in Turkish domestic politics, there has been no suggestion that Turkey should seek to resume her erstwhile role as the champion and leader of Islam. On the contrary, the Turkish revivalists have been content - no doubt for good prac- tical as well as ideological reasons - to fall in behind the leadership of other Islamic claimants.

The Ottoman dynasty and state lasted for 500 years. Allegiance to the Ottoman house was the main political loyalty, not only of the Muslim subjects of the empire, but even, to a degree which is not always appreciated, of the non-Muslim subject peoples. The ideal of Ottomanism, however, as a nationality in the European sense is a product of nineteenth century liberal reformism. This was the concept of an Ottoman identity and loyalty embracing all Ottoman subjects irrespectiveof religion or of ethnic origin in a single Otto- man nation inhabiting the Ottoman fatherland.

Such an idea was a chimera. It won only limited support among Ottoman Muslims and even less among the Christian peoples of the Empire. It was undermined both by the traditional Islamic supremacism of the rulers of the Empire and at the same time by the growing nationalism and separatism of the subject peoples. Finally, even the Turks themselves embraced nationalism, while the role of the last Sultan in cooperating with the victorious allies and opposing the nationalist rebels discredited the monarchy and ultimately the dynasty in the eyes of many Turks. The loss of the Arab provinces - the only significant non-Turkish (albeit Muslim) areas which had remained under Turkish rule - had removed the last justification for the imperial institution. The Ottoman Sultanate was abolished in 1923, the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Since then, there has been no attempt to restore the Ottoman dynasty or revive the territorial and other claims associated with it.

The third and latest of the competing ideologies was Turkism, a new notion owing much to external influences especially from the Turkish-speaking subject populations of the Russian Empire, many of whom came to Turkey as refugees from Russian oppression. In Russia, they had encountered militant pan-Slavism and reacted against it with a nationalist ideology of their own. This ideology was concerned not just with Turkey - the very word was still alien to a people who were not yet accustomed to define and name their country in this way - but with all the Turks, i.e. pan-Turkism (sometimes called pan-Turanianism) rather than Turkism, involving the vaster community of Turkish peoples extending across Eastern Europe and Asia from the Aegean to the China Sea and embracing large populations in Iran, Afghanistan, China and, above all, the Russian Empire. In this largerscheme of pan-Turkish unification, Ottoman and later republican Turkey, the only part of the Turkish world that still retained political independence, was cast for a role of leadership. This role too had something of an imperial quality. The years of defeat, surrender and occupation, the conduct of the Sultan's government, the rift with the Arab subjects of the Empire, the indifference of the Muslim world to Turkey's fate - all combined to bring about radical changes in the Turks' perception of themselves and of their place in the world. Ottomanism was dead; Islamism gravely weakened. The way was open for a new identity and loyalty based, not on community and empire, but on nation and country. The change, and in particular the relationship between these two - between nationalism and patriotism - raised new questions, and evoked new answers.

The most striking evidence of the change in Turkish attitudes can be seen in the situation in 1923. The newly established Turkish republic was triumphant. The Greeks had been driven from Anatolia; the Allied powers, the former victors over the Ottoman Empire, were divided, in disarray, and unable to offer any effective resistance to the Turkish recovery. The great Russian Empire, once Turkey's most dangerous enemy, was rent by revolution and civil war, and, far from constituting a threat, seemed instead to offer a tempting opportunity. Syria and Iraq, deeply disappointed with the results of the war, now found themselves under French and British rule and might well have been ready to listen to the blandishments of the victorious Turkish leader.

But Kemal was interested in none of these. In 1922, after the capture of Izmir, he made it clear to his more enthusiastic followers that he was not going, as some of them hoped, to advance on Salonica. Instead, he affirmed his recognition of the pre-1914 frontier in Europe. Others, who urged him to lead his victorious armies into Syria and Iraq and recover the lost Ottoman provinces in Asia, were similarly disappointed. An Ottoman claim on Mosul was in due course renounced and Ottoman claims on the Sanjak of Alexandretta and the island of Cyprus, both with substantial Turkish populations, were left in abeyance as long as the western powers remained.

Perhaps the greatest temptation of all was the liberation of the Turkish subject peoples of the Russian Empire, for which the fall of the Tsars seemed at last to offer a real possibility. But here again Kemal resisted the temptation. Renouncing all adventures beyond the newly defined borders of the Turkish republic, he directed his own energies and those of his people to the difficult and unglamourous task of development at home. He makes the point quite clearly in a speech delivered as early as 1 December 1921:

Every one of our compatriots and co-religionists may nourish a high ideal in his mind; he is free to do so, and no one will interfere. The government of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey has a firm, positive, material policy, and that, gentlemen, is directed to the preservation of life and independence... within defined national frontiers. The Grand National Assembly and government of Turkey, in the name of the nation they represent, are very modest, very far from fantasies, and completely realistic… 

Gentlemen, we are not men who run after great fantasies and present a fraudulent appearance of doing things which in fact we cannot do. Gentlemen, by looking as though we were doing great and fantastic things, without actually doing them, we have brought the hatred, rancour, and malice of the whole world on this country and this people. We did not serve pan-Islamism. We said that we had and we would, but we didn't, and our enemies said: 'let us kill them at once before they do!' We did not serve pan-Turanianism. We said that we could and we would, and again they said: 'let us kill them!' There you have the whole problem... Rather than run after ideas which we did not and could not realize and thus increase the number of our enemies and the pressure upon us, let us return to our natural, legitimate limits. And let us know our limits. Gentlemen, we are a nation desiring life and independence. For that and that alone may we give our lives.1

In another speech delivered in 1923, his renunciation of old style military empire is still more explicit: 

My friends, those who conquer by the sword are doomed to be overcome by those who conquer with the plough, and finally to give place to them. That is what happened to the Ottoman Empire... The arm that wields the sword grows weary and in the end puts it back in the scabbard, where perhaps it is doomed to rust and moulder; but the arm that holds the plough grows daily stronger, and in growing stronger becomes yet more the master and owner of the soil.2

One of the more remarkable features of the decline of the Ottoman Empire is the extent to which the Turks were conscious of the process and discussed it among themselves. The long debate on the question 'what is wrong with the Empire?' began during the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, when the Empire was still at its height. It continued during the seventeenth century when the succession of Ottoman victories in Europe gave way to a stalemate, and was resumed with added urgency when the stalemate in turn was ended by a series of defeats from the late seventeenth century onwards. In 1822, an Ottoman official called Akif Efendi drafted a memorandum discussing the dangers confronting the Empire and the different ways of dealing with them.

The Muslims must choose between three resolutions: either, faithful to the command of God and the law of Muhammad, we must, regardless of our property and our lives, defend to the last what provinces we still retain; or we must leave them and withdraw to Anatolia; or finally - which God forbid - we shall follow the example of the peoples of Crimea, India and Kazan and be reduced to slavery. In fine, what I have to say can be reduced to this: in the name of the faith of Muhammad... let us proclaim the Holy War and let us not cede an inch of our territories.3 

For Akif, the danger - certainly a real one - was that Turkey like other parts of the Muslim world would fall under colonial rule. There were, as he saw it, three choices: to try at all costs to maintain the Empire, to submit to foreign rule, or to retreat to the Anatolian heartland from which the Turks had first entered Europe. During the century and a half that followed, the Turks failed in the first, avoided the second, and finally succeeded in the third.

The Ottoman retreat from empire was a long, slow and hard fought process beginning in the suburbs of Vienna in the seventeenth century and ending in the highlands of Anatolia in the twentieth. In its final stages it involved an endless succession of wars: the Balkan war in which most of the remaining European provinces of the Empire were lost; the Italo-Turkish war in which the last footholds in Northern Africa were abandoned; the Yemen war in which countless, hapless Turkish soldiers died in a futile attempt to maintain Turkish sovereignty at the southern end of the Red Sea; the First World War in which the Ottoman Empire, after a long and bitter struggle lost virtually all its territories - and then, in refreshing contrast, the War of Independence, the first major victory for centuries, which enabled the Turks to restore their national life in the Anatolian heartland in a Turkish national state. It was not surprising that for most Turks, Empire meant endless defeat, retreat and suffering; nationalism and the national state meant success, victory and the beginning of a new life.

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic there was not only a renunciation of empire; there was a positive revulsion. Not only the Imperial house and the Imperial provinces but even the Imperial capital was abandoned. The centre of the new Turkish Republic was not in the ancient city of Istanbul with its immemorial traditions of empire and more recent taint of decadence; instead it was moved to the hill city of Ankara, high on the Anatolian plateau, typifying and symbolizing the replacement of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire by a national Turkish state based on the Turkish homeland. Istanbul was deliberately neglected and starved of resources which were lavished on the new capital. And for some years, the fallen Ottoman dynasty and everything connected with it were accorded the same treatment in Turkish school histories as was formerly accorded to the Tsars in Soviet Russia. It was only gradually that Kemalist Turkey began to find it possible to come to terms with the Ottoman past, now presented as a part of the greater Turkish heritage, with the Ottomans merely as one in the succession of Turkish dynasties.

The Turkish rejection of their imperial past was at once an ideology, a policy, and a mood - yet, inescapably, much of it remained, for better or for worse. One example may be seen in the relatively large numbers of civil and military officials who had served in the lost provinces and who now returned to the homeland. Thanks to these, the Turkish Republic in its early formative years was able to draw on much larger cadres of trained and experienced administrators than were available to many other peoples embarking on a new life as nation states. They served Turkey well, and enabled the fledgling republic to survive many early difficulties.

Another inheritance not less important was the habit of responsibility. One of the main problems in newly independent states is the legacy of a past in which responsibility for all that went wrong could - often rightly - be ascribed to foreign rule or intervention. This sometimes bred a habit of irresponsibility which survived into the new era. The Turks did not at any stage - except perhaps briefly during the Kemalist war of independence - have their political life bedeviled by foreign domination and the struggle to end it. The Turks were always masters in their own house - and indeed for long periods in other houses too; they had retained the habit of calm and practical assessment of situations, of making decisions and of accepting responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. This may have helped the Turks - alone in the Muslim world - to create and maintain, despite many difficulties, a working parliamentary democracy. It may also explain a quality observable in the policies of the Turkish Republic, more particularly in its foreign policy - a kind of practicality and of realism lacking in other parts. In this may be seen the legacy if not of empire then at least of many centuries of sovereign independence.

A more negative consequence of the Imperial past was a certain contempt for commerce and industry and those engaged in them. In the Empire the Turks had been peasants and artisans at the lower level or part of the apparatus of power - civil, military or religious - at the higher level. Industry, commerce and finance were left very largely to non-Turks and in the central lands even to non- Muslims, mostly Greeks, Armenians and Jews. The rivalries and vicissitudes of these competing non-Muslim communities form an important and somewhat neglected chapter in Ottoman history. In the Republic the non-Muslim communities were greatly reduced in numbers and would probably have been unable even if expected to fulfil the economic role of their immediate forebears. Instead, Muslim Turks now took it upon themselves to produce a commercial, technical and managerial middle class, only the merest rudiments of which had come into being under the Empire. It was a difficult task and there can be little doubt that the social and cultural attitudes inherited from the Imperial past hindered and delayed its accomplishment.

There are other more subtle legacies of empire - for example a certain attitude to former subject peoples which makes it difficult for a while to accept and treat them as equals. This has now passed. Dealings with the former Ottoman successor states are as between one nation and another even where, as with Greece, there is an adversary relationship. Sometimes, indeed, former subjects are treated not only with respect but even with deference.

A certain Imperial pride which persisted long after the fall of the Empire made Turks unwilling to plead or argue in their own cause, especially with those whom they felt entitled to regard as friends. This habit of mind often placed the Turks at some disadvantage as against their rivals or opponents and impeded the presentation of the Turkish case abroad. It was, in part, this disdain for the arts of propaganda and public relations which led to the striking isolation of Turkey at the United Nations. Even now, dignified reticence rather than persuasive eloquence is the quality which the Turks seem most to admire and therefore cultivate.

In one important respect the Turks seem to have fared rather better than some other post-imperial societies, and that is in accepting and accommodating themselves to their new place in the world. Turkish statemen and diplomats do not take the view that since their decisions and actions no longer determine the course of world events there is no point in bothering at all. On the contrary, they have adjusted themselves to their position as a middle ranking power and have adapted their perceptions and policies accordingly. The decline of the Ottoman Empire was slow and was resisted step by step; its end was clear and unequivocal. This double quality of sustained struggle and final clarity, as contrasted with the swift disintegration and blurred ending of the colonial empires, may have helped to prepare the Turks for their new role.

Something of the feelings of a Turk of the last generation of empire may be seen in the writings of a journalist called Falih Rifki Atay who visited London in 1934 to cover the World Economic Conference. In a book which he wrote at the time entitled The Banks of the Thames, he gives the text of a speech which he would have liked to deliver to an English audience in Hyde Park 'if only I had known enough English.'

I too am the child of a great empire. We came to it in the last days of its decline, as to the leavings of a banquet. I don't know if you can imagine the geography of this Sultanate as it still was in the time of our grandfathers. Let me explain what happened to us taking your own geography as an example. We began to fight in Bombay. Fighting all the way across the continent we fell back upon London and made our last stand in Glasgow. Now our borders are at Dover. When the Ottoman Empire was already a hundred years old England without Scotland or Ireland was a little country of three million inhabitants and London a town of 40,000. Like Bulgaria they sold sheep to the Europeans; like India they sold raw materials to the manufacturing Flemings. Because our empire was founded by conquerors its end was epic. Because yours was founded by merchants you are making a liquidation... We left the Danube to the tune of 'fair Buda', Africa to the 'Algerian march', the Arabian Sea to the dirge 'O Gazis' and we returned weeping to the soil of Anatolia. You are driven back to your island by downward turned graphs. Because I was born and grew up in the atmosphere and the morality of an empire I feel from afar, in the atmosphere and morality of London, with the sensitivity of a seismograph, the tremours of impending collapse. The great tree, rotted within, is awaiting a thunderbolt or a severe storm to hurl it to the ground.4 

Notes

1. Quoted in B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd edition (Oxford 1968), 352-3.

2. Ibid., 466.
3. Ibid., 325.
4. Falih Rifki,Taymis Kiyilari (Istanbul 1934), 126-28.