Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (14 page)

As a result of this state of affairs, the patriotic lawyer Shlomo Yellin argued that the Capitulations had become “criminal” in the eyes of Ottoman citizens.
²⁰
By passing the Ottoman Law of Nationality, the Ottoman state had unsuccessfully attempted to reinforce its claims of proprietorship and to strengthen the bonds of loyalty between the state and its non-Muslims, particularly those whom neighboring rival states would claim as their own.
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However, because of its relative weakness vis-à-vis its European rivals, the Ottoman Empire was unable to abrogate or limit the terms of the Capitulations until the outbreak of World War I; immediate reinstatement of the Capitulations was one of the Allies' demands in the postwar armistice.

FROM OFFICIAL CITIZENSHIP TO POPULAR NATIONALISM

On one level, the imperial policy of Ottomanism fits in with the noted scholar of nationalism Benedict Anderson's “official imperial nationalisms,” what he saw as the response of continental empires like the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman to increasing domestic nationalist threats. In Anderson's view, faced with the rise of ethnic nationalisms in central, eastern, and southern Europe, these official nationalisms were efforts to “stretch…the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire.”
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Indeed, for Sultan Abdülhamid II, the Ottomanist project was less about fostering any sort of national collective than about protecting the state's paternal interests.

Henceforth all my subjects will be considered children of the same country, and will be placed under the protection of one law. They will be designated by the name borne by the illustrious race of the Founders of the Empire—a name associated with the glorious annals of a history of six hundred years. I have a firm conviction that from this moment all my subjects will unite their efforts to make the name Osmanli retain the force and power hitherto surrounding it.
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For scholars like the historian Ussama Makdisi, this kind of sentiment is evidence that the broader state reform project known as the Tanzimat
was a top-down project par excellence, “imagined by the center, then unilaterally imposed on the periphery.” Makdisi argues that the notion of Ottoman citizenship that was envisioned was no more than an “empty vessel to be filled by the center, to be disciplined and then reformed by the authoritarian but supposedly benevolent and modernizing power of the imperial state.”
²⁴

Undoubtedly, in many respects, the state's initial impetus for reform was rooted in self-interest; it viewed its subjects as objects of, rather than partners to, imperial reform. For example, when Sultan Mahmud II pushed for the vernacular language to be used in the official newspaper
Takvim-i Vekayi
(Register of Events), which appeared starting in 1831, he did so in order that all subjects could familiarize themselves with the institutions of the state and the reforms taking place.
²⁵
Likewise, the Imperial Rescript of 1845 argued that new modern schools should be “a means of elevating and enlarging the young Ottoman's intellectual horizon so as to prepare him to comprehend Tanzimat reforms.”
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In other words, the state set the path of reform, and the empire's subjects were left to adapt to it.

And yet, looking at Ottoman reforms in general, and Ottomanism in particular,
only
in terms of the official state project ignores the ways in which Ottoman subjects themselves adopted, finessed, and challenged the state project from the second half of the nineteenth century until the final years of the empire. As one Balkan historian has pointed out, Ottoman subjects learned to “speak Tanzimat,” skillfully negotiating the gap between official and subaltern versions of reform and state power.
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Beyond the Ottoman state's official policy, then, the second critical component of the project of Ottoman nation building lies in the broader social, economic, and cultural changes that took place throughout the nineteenth century that produced a new class of educated professionals and intellectuals, an emerging popular press, and a nascent civil society, all of which played an important role in articulating and disseminating various visions of the imperial collective.

The logic of the Ottoman citizenship legislation and the project of Ottomanism immediately found resonance among intellectuals of the empire. For the Young Ottomans, the “Ottoman nation” was a social contract between the various ethnic and religious groups of the empire, a “union of the peoples [
ittihad-i anasir].”
The leading intellectual Namik Kemal supported a “fusion of the Ottoman peoples [
imtizaj-i akvam],”
but expected that in return for their constitutional rights, non-Muslims would have to show loyalty to the Ottoman homeland and subordinate their religious and ethnic sympathies to their allegiance to the dynasty.
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They would also, needless to say, be expected to give up their claims
on Capitulatory rights as well as their reliance on the intervention of Western powers on their behalf. In Namik Kemal's view, these special privileges for Christians were themselves an injustice to Muslims, reversing the European perception of the source and victims of inequality within the empire.

Another important statesman and reformer, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, however, doubted that national and patriotic aims could really replace religious ones in the Ottoman Empire. In his words, “Only when we make homeland a theme, only when it has penetrated the people's heads as strongly as in Europe, will it attain the strength of the religious aims.”
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As the organ of the Young Ottoman liberals, the London-based newspaper
Liberty (Hürriyet)
played an important role in disseminating new ideas of patriotism and collective belonging. Mustafa Fazil Pasha, an Ottoman bureaucrat and a copublisher of the paper, argued “it does not matter whether one is Muslim, Catholic, or Greek Orthodox to be able to place the public welfare ahead of private interests. For that it suffices to be a man of progress or a good patriot.”
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Here it is important to underscore that Ottoman intellectuals did not live in a linguistic or spatial vacuum. The Parisian travel memoirs of the Egyptian scholar-cleric Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, which disseminated new notions of patriotism, homeland, and peoplehood, had been published in Arabic in 1834 and translated into Ottoman Turkish in 1840. This work undoubtedly influenced the Young Ottomans, not least of all but perhaps most directly in its revival of a reported hadith that supported the idea of patriotism: “Love of homeland is an article of faith [
ubb al-watan min al-īmān].”
Kemal's newspaper
Hürriyet
took this as its official slogan, as did at least two Ottomanist newspapers in Beirut in the 1860s and 1870s.
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Namik Kemal's landmark play
Vatan yahut Silestre
(Homeland; or, Silestre), which was performed only twice in 1873 and was published as a supplement to the newspaper
Candle (Siraj)
before being banned, played a pivotal role in developing a sense of homeland and territorial patriotism. Importantly, Kemal's depiction of the homeland and his casting of its defense as sacred martyrdom reveal a merging of physical and spiritual elements of homeland. As the hero of the play, Islam Bey, tells his beloved, “God created me, the homeland reared me. God nurtured me for the homeland…. I feel the bounty of the homeland in my bones. My body [is part] of the homeland's earth, my breath [is part] of the homeland's air. Why was I born if I was not to die for the homeland?”
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(We will return to this play and the theme of martyrdom shortly.)

It is difficult but not impossible to measure the direct influence of the Young Ottomans on the broader Ottoman intelligentsia. With the
establishment of state institutions of higher education in the second half of the nineteenth century and the employment opportunities they provided, increasing numbers of Ottoman intellectuals were at the very least bilingual, with Ottoman Turkish serving as the lingua franca of the empire. Students at the higher academies circulated underground copies of Kemal's and others' works, some of them still in handwritten manuscript form.
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In addition, works of prominent thinkers were translated into the other major languages of the empire. Kemal, for example, was featured in the prominent biographical dictionary compiled by the Cairo-based Jurji Zeidan, and so at the very least Arab writers were exposed to his works in summary translation if not in the original.

Over the last decades of the nineteenth century, independent newspapers not only in Ottoman Turkish but also in Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), and a variety of other languages were critical platforms for promoting patriotism, love of homeland, and a common imperial identity at the same time that they wrestled with what it meant to “be Ottoman.”
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After bloody riots between Muslims and Christians in Mount Lebanon, Aleppo, and Damascus shook the Ottoman and European worlds, the Beiruti Christian journalist-intellectual Butrus al-Bustani argued that the “spirit of the times” demanded a change from religious solidarity
(‘u
ba dīniyya)
to national-patriotic solidarity
(‘u
ba jinsiyya wa-wataniyya)
, and he urged his fellow Christians to develop their Ottoman feelings.
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Already in 1860 he had advocated the development of feelings of mutual solidarity, or “love as members of one family, whose father is the homeland, whose mother is the land, and whose one creator is God.” Bustani continued the language of kinship the following decade, promoting a “brotherhood of Turk, Arab, Druze, Jew, Mitwali, Maronite, Orthodox, Protestant, Armenian, Assyrian, and Copt as brothers in the homeland.”
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As well, Ottoman intellectuals in exile in Egypt, such as the Damascus-born Christian writer Adib Ishaq, further articulated this new imperial collective solidarity. For Ishaq, neither lineage-race nor language-ethnicity were essential to the nation, but rather the nation was rooted in a common nationality, common territory, and a certain collective agreement of belonging to one nation. (Ishaq had the model of the United States in mind.) “The nation,” Ishaq wrote,

for any living being, as well as for a man, is his “people.” According to politicians, it is the group that belongs to one nationality and obeys one law…. By unity of nationality we mean the agreement of the community to belong to one nationality, under which their children are born and whose name they carry…. The “Ottoman nationality” covers all the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, in Europe as well as in Asia, whether they be, by origin, Turks, Arabs, or Tartars.
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