Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (8 page)

Whatever their political persuasion, Ottomans immediately grasped that their empire was poised to enter a new era.
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Middle-class, urban, literate Ottomans had internalized the Western critique of their empire as decrepit and sick, and saw in the revolution the possibilities of an imperial renaissance. In an article entitled “The Rebirth of Our Empire,” published in one of Jerusalem's Hebrew-language newspapers, the young Jewish journalist Avraham Elmaliach cheered on the revolution as a literal new beginning. “Our homeland has returned to rebirth. A people of 30 million souls awaken to a new life. A whole nation, a huge empire returns to life—a life of freedom!”
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A Jewish Ottoman patriot in Cairo, Shmuel Ashkenazi, wrote an article for the Judeo-Spanish newspaper
Liberty (El Liberal)
, in which he forecast that “in place of the Old Turkey [sic], ruined and rotten, a New Turkey has emerged, a regenerated Turkey—'Young Turkey.'”
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“New versus old” was not the only dichotomy put to use in the revolutionary period; we also see broad usage of “healthy versus sick,” “light versus dark,” “good versus evil,” all meant to mark a dramatic rupture with and inversion of the past. The influential and widely read Cairene Islamic modernist monthly
The Lighthouse (Al-Manār)
highlighted the rupture implied by these terms: “The difference between the past and the present is like the difference between night and day, or darkness and light, or justice and injustice, or knowledge and ignorance, or strength and weakness.”
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At the same time, given that the language of “rebirth,” “awakening,” and “regeneration” was also a recurrent motif in nineteenth century European nationalism, its use in the Ottoman case reasserted the empire's role at the center of Europe rather than at its margins.
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Patriotic Ottomans dreamed of restoring the empire's lost position as a leading world power, and saw the revolution as the perfect opportunity for imperial redemption. Such was the vision of the Christian schoolteacher Eftim Mushabbak of Jerusalem, who proclaimed, “This day is the true beginning of the life of the Ottoman nation [
al-umma al-'Uthmāniyya].
On this day all the nations of the earth will envy us, and on this day the sky and the earth and the angels and the prophets and the gods will
bless the free Ottoman nation.”
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A free Ottoman Empire would finally be able to compete again with Europe, hopefully not only catching up with the West economically and technologically but perhaps even surpassing it. A free Ottoman, whose individual and national pride had been restored, would be able to hold his head high in the face of Europeans.
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As well, Muslim liberals in the empire saw the revolution as the final answer to those European critics who accused Islam of being a fanatical and backward theocracy. For men like Rashid Rida, the religious scholar from Tripoli who edited
The Lighthouse
, the revolution was a stage for showing the world that Islam and modernity could, in fact, coexist. Not only had Muslim intellectuals and army officers successfully carried out the liberal revolution, but they had done so without extensive bloodshed—a distinct accomplishment in world history. For the empire's non-Muslims, the revolution presented the possibility of finally becoming equal members of the imperial body politic. Earlier imperial proclamations of equality had not substantively altered the existing social, legal, or political hierarchy, but 1908 promised to be different in that regard.

In many ways, then, this “new era” envisioned was a utopian one. In the Ottoman Empire, utopia had a material face, and
urriyya
became a code word for alternately concrete and vague hopes and expectations of technological progress, economic prosperity, and social reform. In order to catch up with Europe in terms of economic, cultural, and technological advances, domestic reform was necessary. A report from an Istanbul-based newspaper correspondent echoed this sentiment: “And suddenly the voice of freedom was raised—and a heavy burden was lifted from every shoulder and a large stone from every heart. We too like all the nations will taste the taste of freedom. Our fate is in our hands, and Turkey [
sic
] will finally enter into the family of European nations and march forward on the road of development.”
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Political liberty would open the gates for—and indeed was a necessary precondition for—economic, technological, and cultural efflorescence of the empire generally, and of Palestine specifically. We saw in Sa'id al-Husayni's speech that he linked new schools, new cars, and new railroads to the new order. He was not alone. Jurji Habib Hanania had similar expectations linking
urriyya
and material progress: “And now, O gentlemen, now you must raise our situation among the enlightened nations…. You must [see to] the agricultural and industrial and commercial advancement in this, your homeland.”
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This expectation that the empire was entering a new, more promising era was represented in political cartoons in the satiric press and in
popular postcards. In the Ottoman satiric press, the European image of the empire represented by the old, hunchbacked, crooked-nosed sultan (the “Sick Man”), had its Ottoman counterpart in depictions that contrasted Abdulhamid II with two of his most illustrious ancestors who represented the golden age of the empire: Osman, the founder of the dynasty, was depicted as the tree of life, whereas Abdulhamid was portrayed as death; likewise, Suleyman the Magnificent, known as “the Law-Giver” in Ottoman Turkish, was contrasted with Abdulhamid as a violator of laws. In other words, Abdülhamid, symbol of the Old Empire, was transformed in Ottoman cartoon space into “a clown, a crow, a monster, a tyrant, a pitiable old man, an obsolete institution, a shade.”
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Meanwhile, the New Empire was represented by nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals who had been martyred for their ideals and by the young heroic army officers of the Third Army Brigade who led the revolution. Midhat Pasha, the author of the original constitution who was strangled in his prison exile and therefore served as the original “martyr of liberty,” as well as Enver Bey and Niyazi Bey, famous revolutionary army officers, were ubiquitous symbols, the sources of book dedications,
poems of admiration, postcards, and commemorative kerchiefs, ceramics, and cigarette papers and cases, not to mention the subjects of numerous laudatory reports in the press.
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The city of Beirut even renamed a street adjacent to Liberty Square after Niyazi Bey.
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Statesmanlike, vigorous, and representative of virtue, struggle, and hope, these men were the complete opposite of the negative, deathly images of the sultan.

In the postcard shown in
Figure 1.5
, with the caption “the dawn of liberty,” the New Empire is represented by officer Enver Bey, nicknamed by a British observer as “the Garibaldi of Young Turkey,” and Midhat Pasha (in the frame), his martyrdom signified by the black ribbon. They are accompanied by cherubic angels, and the heavens smile down on the scene of an empire being led by such honorable men into a sunny future.

In a second postcard, the liberal heroes of the nineteenth century
(Namik Kemal, Midhat Pasha, Fuat Pasha) support a chained “Lady Ottomania” while the young army heroes Enver and Niyazi take a hammer to her shackles. A crowd approvingly watches in the background, while an angel supervises the event from above, representing the divine blessings being bestowed upon the New Empire. “Lady Ottomania” bears an uncanny resemblance to the French revolutionary Marianne; clearly Ottoman producers and consumers of these images saw themselves as continuing that liberal tradition.

As these images suggest, it was the Ottoman army and the Committee for Union and Progress which were seen as the twin pillars of revolutionary power and promise, the representatives and guardians of liberty. Blow-by-blow accounts of the revolution and its heroes were published in newspapers and on broadsheets and were spread by word of mouth in city cafes and village squares. Niyazi Bey published his own account of those critical weeks, which was quickly translated into Greek, Armenian, Bulgarian, French, and English. When an Arabic translation failed to appear as quickly as the others, one Beiruti newspaper editor complained about the oversight.
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The theater was another outlet for the construction and dissemination of revolutionary political culture. The play
How It Came About (Nasil Oldu)
, by Kâzim Bey, highlighted the central themes that spoke to the revolution's resonance among the Ottoman populations.
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The play was performed in the fall in Istanbul as a fundraiser for the winter clothing drive of the Ottoman army, under the patronage of the newly freed half-brother of the sultan, Mehmet Re
at, with two other formerly imprisoned princes in attendance. The protagonist of the play, a young officer named Behalul
(behlül
means “noble” in Ottoman Turkish), belonged to a secret organization of liberals. The motives of the liberal officers clearly stemmed from their sorrow over the impotence of the Ottoman Empire (“once the strongest in the world!…and today—the weakest state in Europe!”), and their desire to revive the empire through constitutional parliamentarism.