The Ottomanism of the Non-Turkish Groups: The Arabs and the Kurds after 1908

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Hamit Bozarslan

After 1909, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) abandoned the Ottomanist ideals that had earlier characterised the group, adopting instead a purely Turkish nationalist ideology. They were not necessarily hostile to Arab and Kurdish communities, but considered that the latter had no say in the definition of the Empire, let alone in its future. In contrast, many Arab and Kurdish intellectuals continued to define themselves as Ottomanists. These intellectuals, including Sāṭiʿ al-Ḥuṣrī and Şerif Pasha, were defenders of the fraternity of the Islamic umma and, before the ‘nationalist-turn’ they took after World War I, were opposed to any kind of nationalism within Islam. They could not, however, easily justify the fusion of Islam and an Ottoman entity defined as Turkish. Integration into the Ottoman Empire for them did not imply the dissolution of the Arab and the Kurdish component within its Islamic imperial fabric.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.


2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 35-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.


2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-985
Author(s):  
Anna M. Mirkova

AbstractThis article explores the migrations of Turkish Muslims after the 1878 Peace Treaty of Berlin, which severed much of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire as fully independent nation-states or as nominally dependent polities in the borderlands of the empire. I focus on one such polity—the administratively autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia—which, in wrestling to reconcile liberal principles of equality and political representation understood in ethno-religious terms, prompted emigration of Turkish Muslims while enabling Bulgarian Christian hegemony. Scholars have studied Muslim emigration from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire gradually lost hold of the region, emphasizing deleterious effects of nationalism and aggressive state-building in the region. Here I look at migration at empire's end, and more specifically at the management of migration as constitutive of sovereignty. The Ottoman government asserted its suzerainty by claiming to protect the rights of Eastern Rumelia's Muslims. The Bulgarian dominated administration of Eastern Rumelia claimed not only administrative but also political autonomy by trying to contain the grievances of Turkish Muslims as a domestic issue abused by ill-meaning outsiders, all the while insisting that the province protected the rights of all subjects. Ultimately, a “corporatist” model of subjecthood obtained in Eastern Rumelia, which fused the traditional religious categorization of Ottoman subjects with an ethnic one under the umbrella of representative government. The tension between group belonging and individual politicization that began unfolding in Eastern Rumelia became a major dilemma of the post-Ottoman world and other post-imperial societies after World War I.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-218
Author(s):  
Akram Khater ◽  
Jeffrey Culang

This issue opens with two articles that explore “Ottoman Belonging” during two significant moments bookending the Ottoman past. The first of these moments is the Ottoman Empire's incorporation of Arab lands after its defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1515–17; the second is the emergence of Ottoman imperial citizenship in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and World War I, which precipitated the empire's collapse. Helen Pfeifer's article, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” traces the intellectual component of the Ottoman Empire's absorption of formerly Mamluk subjects after rapidly conquering an immense territory stretching from Damascus to Cairo to Mecca. As Western European states expanded to control new territories and peoples, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) had new encounters of their own—with the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz. The conquest transferred the seat of political power in the Islamicate world from Cairo to Istanbul. Yet, as Pfeifer discusses, the Ottomans understood that their newly acquired political power had no parallel in cultural and religious domains, where prestige belonged predominantly to Arab scholars. Focusing on majālis (sing. majlis), or scholarly gatherings, in Damascus, Pfeifer traces “one of the greatest instances of knowledge transmission and cultural encounter in the history of the Ottoman Empire,” through which this asymmetry was overcome. By facilitating the circulation of books and ideas, she argues, scholarly gatherings—two depictions of which are featured on the issue’s cover—gave rise to an “empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Zeynep Bulutgil

According to the extant literature, state leaders pursue mass ethnic violence against minority groups in wartime if they believe that those groups are collaborating with an enemy. Treating the wartime leadership of a combatant state as a coherent unit, however, is misleading. Even in war, leaders differ in the degree to which they prioritize goals such as maintaining or expanding the territory of the state, and on whether they believe that minority collaboration with the enemy influences their ability to achieve those goals. Also, how leaders react to wartime threats from minority groups depends largely on the role that political organizations based on non-ethnic cleavages play in society. Depending on those cleavages, wartime minority collaboration may result in limited deportations and killings, ethnic cleansing, or minimal violence. A comparison of the policies of three multinational empires toward ethnic minority collaborators during World War I—the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italians, the Ottoman Empire and Armenians, and the Russian Empire and Muslims in the South Caucasus—illustrates this finding.


1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahakn N. Dadrian

The deportation of the majority of the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the massacres that accompanied it are of commanding interest. The paucity of scholarly contributions in this area, however, has impeded the development of interest in the subject, thereby contributing to the nebulous state surrounding the conditions that led to the disappearance of an entire nation from its ancestral territories. Some maintain that this nebulousness is compounded by the intrusion of political calculation.1 At issue is whether or not the disaster was intentionally organized by the Ottoman authorities, and whether or not the scope of Armenian losses bore any relationship to that intention.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fruma Zachs ◽  
Yuval Ben-Bassat

AbstractThis article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's “double-voiced” petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of “double-voiced” petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Necla Geyikdagi

Foreign direct investment entered into the Ottoman Empire to support and develop foreign trade. Europeans who wanted to sell their manufactured products and acquire raw materials were instrumental in the construction of trade-related infrastructure in this country. Therefore, the first French investments, like those of other countries, were made for constructing railways and ports. The growth of raw material production in primary commodities, finally led to an increase in the number of foreign service companies such as banks and insurance providers that served these transport and production facilities. The initial motivations of French investors were mainly economic as they tried to find new markets and secure a viable share in these markets before their international competitors. Motives gradually became political as the opinion about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire got stronger by the end of the nineteenth century. The French government assisted its investors in obtaining important concessions for investments in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces of the Empire.


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