WHY DID YOU RENAME YOUR SON? DIARIES OF THE GREAT WAR FROM THE OTTOMAN FRONT

Salim Tamari

THE GREAT WAR on the Eastern Front, reconsidered after the passage of a century, led to major transformations in the way in which the people of the region – from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to the Arab provinces of the empire – looked at themselves and at the world. What I propose to do is to see how the war and the fighting were reflected in the biographical trajectories of soldiers who fought in it and civilians who endured it, and how the war affected the transformation of their lives and the reshaping of their identity and affiliations during and after the war.

The First World War was fought in the east on four Ottoman fronts. One was the Caucasian front with the Russians; the second was in southern Iraq, mainly around Basra and Kut al Amar; the third, at Suez, Sinai and Beersheba, was known as the Palestine front. The principal front, as far as the Ottoman leadership was concerned, was fought in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, or Çanakkale as it is known in Turkish, where the main encounter with the British and the Anzac forces took place under the command of Mustapha Kemal, later known as Atatürk and the founder of the Turkish Republic.

The war was so devastating that, according to contemporary accounts, it destroyed one-sixth of the total population of Greater Syria – one of the highest death tolls on all war fronts during that period. The victims, both civilians and combatants, perished as a result of the fighting, hunger, famine and diseases. Tens of thousands of civilians died because of the British naval blockade on food supplies coming into ports like Jaffa and Beirut, as well as from Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha’s sequestration of crops for the Fourth and Fifth Army Corps in Syria. The urban landscape was devastated in a way that recalls, under different circumstances, the destruction that we witness today in Syria and Iraq. At the time, Greater Syria – that is, the Ottoman provinces of Bilad al-Sham, which included Palestine and Mount Lebanon – suffered the highest proportion of deaths of any region in the world, even when compared with Belgium, Britain, Germany and France. The scale of the devastation, although for a smaller population, had a much greater impact in terms of the denuding of the countryside, the dislocation of the urban centres and the disappearance of the younger male population.

The first three memoirs I will examine were written by civilians, among a number of texts published by literary figures from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Those narratives were published in the form of diaries and memoirs, as well as in semi-fictional accounts. The writers include Khalil Sakakini, who kept a daily diary during the war in Jerusalem. His account is riveting in that it conveys a vivid portrait of the desolation of the city in 1915 and 1916, the famine years. One of Sakakini’s most moving episodes concerns the so-called Volunteer Labour Brigades (tawabeer al ‘amaleh), which mobilised older residents of the region on the home front to perform menial tasks such as street cleaning and digging trenches. Towards the end of 1917 Sakakini was arrested for harbouring the Hebrew poet Alter Levine, who was suspected of spying for the allies. Sakakini was chained and tied to Levine and force-marched to Damascus, where he spent the final days of the war in prison. He later escaped and joined the forces of Emir Faisal in Jabal Druze, then engaged in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, where he wrote the anthem of the first, short-lived independent Arab state.

Muhammad Kurd Ali’s Damascene memoirs cover his period as a publicist – some critics would say apologist – for the excesses of Jamal and Anwar (Enver) Pashas in Syria and Palestine. He was the chief organiser of two expeditions of Arab public figures and intellectuals to Gallipoli and Medina (in the Arabian Peninsula) to defend the war effort and bring the experiences of the fighters to the general Arab public. He was also active in the advocacy of Arab–Turkish bilingualism in the Ottoman administration, including the schooling and court system, as a means of integrating the Arabs into the Ottoman system. During the war he became editor of the newspaper al-Sharq, Jamal Pasha’s instrument for propaganda in the Arab provinces. Today Kurd Ali is best known as the author of the Khitat ash-Sham (Chronicles of Syria), a multi-volume work covering the geography and history of Greater Syria over six centuries, and a treatise of Ottoman modernity in the Levant. His war memoirs, however, were remembered as a blot on his integrity as a scholar and he was criticised as an apologist for Ottoman attacks on ‘Arab separatism’ – that is, on his fellow countrymen who were allied with the Arab nationalists against the Ottomans.

The most important fictional work to come out of the Great War in Arabic is The Life of Mifleh al-Ghassani (1921) by the Palestinian writer and journalist Najib Nassar. Subtitled ‘A Page from the Events of the Great War’, the novella is a thinly disguised autobiographical war memoir of the author, who spent 1916–17 hiding from the Turkish gendarmes in the Bedouin encampments of the Jordan Valley, escaping possible execution on charges of being pro-British. Nassar also published the combative al-Karmil newspaper in Haifa, a satirical newspaper that became known for its defence of peasants’ rights and attacks on Zionist land purchases. He published The Life of Mifleh al-Ghassani in serial form in al-Karmil and later as a book in the early days of the Mandate. Almost half of the book deals with his capture, interrogation, trial and eventual release from imprisonment in Damascus.

Nassar successfully defended himself against all charges and was acquitted by the Martial Court of Damascus. The fictional format allowed him to construct extensive dialogues with imaginary and real companions, soldiers, officers, prisoners, Bedouins and with his ultimate nemesis, Jamal Pasha, who nonetheless sincerely believed in his innocence and pressed for his release behind the scenes. All the events and characters in the story were built on real people and events that can be corroborated from external sources.

Mifleh/Nassar’s account of his trial in the military tribunal contains a farcical moment that identifies a second list of charges. In the first list he is accused of hostility to the ruling party in Istanbul, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), to the government, nominally headed by the Sultan but controlled by the ‘Three Pashas’ and in particular Enver Pasha, and to the German army. He is also accused of being pro-British and favouring Arab separatism. In a second meeting of the court he is questioned about changing the name of his son from Anwar (Enver) to Adib. Here is the exchange in my translation:

MILITARY JUDGE: Following the Constitutional Revolution [1908] you named your newborn son Anwar, after the unionist leader and war minister Enver Pasha, then it seems you changed his name.

MIFLEH: Yes, it is true I named my second son Anwar, in celebration of the hero of the constitution. I changed his name to Adib later not because I lost faith in the unionists, but because Anwar Bey deserted the Arabs in Tripoli [Libya, where the Ottoman army, alongside Arab tribesmen, fought Italy from October 1911 to November 1912] and left them to fight the Italians without leadership.

MILITARY JUDGE: What was Enver Pasha to do at the time, when the Ottoman government concluded a peace agreement with the Italians and ordered him to withdraw his troops?

MIFLEH: In my modest view he should have resigned from his commission and continued to fight the Italians to the end, instead of allowing this Arab province to be removed from the body of the Ottoman sultanate, and undermining the loyalty of the Arabs to the state.

When asked about his partisan views, Mifleh declares that he was never an enemy of the unionists, but he was against their Turkification schemes, which weakened the bonds of loyalty of the Arabs towards the state. To the charge of being pro-British, Mifleh did not hide his Anglophilia and answered that he had favoured an alliance with the British over an alliance with Germany before the war, but once war was declared, ‘Then – I wrote in the daily press – we have to talk in the tongue of the government, see with its eyes, and hear with its ears.’¹

The vindication of Nassar’s stance in his real trial, as well as in the fictional trial of Mifleh al-Ghassani, is used in the novel to illustrate both the protagonist’s commitment to the principle of non-intervention in the war and his loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, despite his relentless criticism of the Turkification scheme of the CUP government. But the novel also demonstrates a degree of integrity in the military court system, since he successfully overturned the charge sheet accusing him of desertion and betrayal.

The second set of diaries and memoirs examined here contains soldiers’ writings. Such narratives of the war were rarer, in large part because literacy was limited, but also because the diaries tended not to survive the consequences of exile, trench warfare and fear of discovery. Here I will examine the narratives in three soldiers’ diaries that reached us against the odds. They allow us to examine how events affected the lives of three Ottoman (Arab and Turkish) soldiers. Their narratives are doubly significant because, contrary to popular assumptions, the manner in which the war affected their consciousness did not always correspond to their ethnic background.

The first was a soldier known as Mehmet Fesih (Muhammad al Fasih), who came from a mixed Turkish–Arab family in Mersin, a frontier area in the Turkish–Arab divide of the Ottoman sultanate. He fought in Gaza and in Gallipoli where he kept a daily diary of his observations. Mulazim (Lieutenant) Fesih occupied a liminal position in the nascent ethnic divide that separated southern Anatolia from northern Syria. Belonging to a family that combined Arabic and Turkish as their spoken language, he would nevertheless choose to identify with and fight for the Kemalist forces. While his diary is replete with references to the communal solidarity of the various ethnic groups that made up the Ottoman army, particularly to his Syrian comrades at Gallipoli/Çanakkale, he would make his decision in favour of the post-war Republican movement and the new Turkish nationalism it embodied. After the termination of the Great War, he volunteered to fight against the invading European and Greek forces, where his contribution was duly recognised and rewarded. He eventually Turkified his name, in adherence to the diktat of Kemalist ideology, and became a general in the Republican army.

The second narrative is that of Second Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, a junior officer in the Fifth Army Corps, who was from a Jerusalem family of merchants. In April 1915 he was captured by the tsarist army in fighting at Erzurum on the Caucasian front and spent the bulk of the war years in an internment camp for German and Ottoman prisoners in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. In the Siberian camp, in common with many soldiers who were captured in the war, he began to reflect on his destiny. He records how the Siberian exile made him reflect on his national identity in a manner he was not aware of until he later joined one of the literary clubs in Istanbul:

I was not aware that I was an Arab, and that I should think of the future of my Arab nation until the establishment of the Literary Forum (al Muntada al Adabi) in Istanbul. Of the founders I remember four names: Abdul Karim al Khalil, Yusif Mukhaibar, Jamil al Husseini, and Seiful Din al Khatib. I was registered as a member and was since then engulfed with the prevailing Arab nationalism among the students. It was then that I began to hear the words Arabs, Arabism, Nationalism, and Homeland (Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, 8 February 1917).²

During the first two years of internment he lived in common quarters with Turkish officers, lectured and wrote in Turkish, and was generally loyal to the Ottoman war aims. The Hijazi revolt of Sharif Hussein and the Syrian nationalists in Damascus for Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire, known as the Arab Revolt, compelled him to rethink his Ottoman loyalties in favour of an amorphous Arabness. In this regard the Russian command played a significant role in encouraging Arab separatism by keeping the living quarters of Arab and Turkish officers apart, and extending favouritism to Syrian detainees in terms of passes to leave the camp and access to newspapers and the outside world. In this process Shehadeh shifted his loyalties from adherence to the principles of Osmenlilik (Ottomanist constitutional ideology) to those of Arab independence.

Lt. Aref Shehadeh’s Prison Camp Identity Card, Krosnayersk, Siberia, 1915 (Institute of Palestine Studies Archives)

We should keep in mind, though, that these claims of a sudden awakening, however sincere, were made retrospectively by Shehadeh in the shadow of Ottoman military defeat and his escape from Siberia to join the forces of Prince Faisal in southern Syria. After the war Shehadeh became editor of Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah, an organ of the Faisali movement in Palestine. He adopted the name of Aref al-Aref and became a prominent historian of Jerusalem, but his writings continued to reflect his early Ottomanism in Istanbul and in his Siberian exile.

This issue of national dualism, ethnic ambivalence and reinvention of identity is exemplified differently, through the prism of pacifism in war, in the experiences of the third soldier in this trilogy. Ihsan Turjman, a clerk in the Ottoman Fourth Army, was stationed in Jerusalem. He fought briefly on the Suez front and perished towards the end of the war, in 1917. His situation was exceptional because he was a self-proclaimed pacifist. He hated the war and he was desperate for it to end. He recorded in his diary in excruciating detail the degradation experienced by the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Palestine during the locust attack and famine of 1915. In December 1915, he wrote: ‘I haven’t seen darker days in my life. Flour and bread have basically disappeared since last Saturday … We have so far tolerated living without rice, sugar and kerosene. But how can we live without bread?’ He also dwells on the extreme measures taken by his compatriots in order to survive, including prostitution and desertion.

A page from the diary of Private Ihsan al Turjman, Jerusalem, 30 March, 1915 (Turjman Family Papers, by permission)

Diary writing was rare but not altogether uncommon among soldiers on the Ottoman front. Those who were literate were aware of the need to record their impressions of the war for posterity. This is how Turjman opens his second diary:

Jerusalem, Sunday the 28th of March [Gregorian], 1915, Mart 1331 [Ottoman Fiscal Calendar]

Two years ago I began to keep a daily diary. But I soon neglected the routine and started writing occasionally until I quit writing altogether.

This evening I went to visit Khalil Effendi al Sakakini, in the company of Hasan Khalidi and Omar al Salih. Khalil Effendi read to us from his diary. It so excited me that I decided to re-start my own memoirs. Our conversation revolved around this miserable war, and how long it is likely to continue, and about the fate of this [Ottoman] state. We more or less agreed that the days of the state were numbered, and that its dismemberment was imminent.

But what will be the fate of Palestine? We all saw two possibilities: independence or annexation to Egypt. The last possibility is more likely since only the English are likely to possess this country, and England is unlikely to give full sovereignty to Palestine, but is more liable to annex it to Egypt, and create a single dominion ruled by the Khedive of Egypt. Egypt is our neighbour and since both countries contain a majority of Muslims, it makes sense to annex it and crown the Viceroy of Egypt as King of Palestine and Hijaz. Rumours abound in the street today. We heard that the English fleet has bombarded Haifa, and that several English frigates crossed the Dardanelles until they reached the Sea of Marmara. Even if this item is not true, it will soon be realized since the Dardanelles have been hammered relentlessly [by Allied ships] and cannot resist the British fleet forever. The city of […] fell today in Austria. This is most likely to change the course of the war, and bring our deliverance nearer.³

This entry is also exceptional in that it reveals political debates that were being discussed by soldiers and officers on the front, and in army administrative headquarters, where Turjman was employed. He raises, for example, questions about expectations for the future of Palestine after the war. Three options are suggested. One was for Palestine to become part of Syria and separate from the Ottomans. The second was to remain an Ottoman province through the struggle for autonomy under the aegis of common Ottoman citizenship. But Turjman talks also about a third alternative, which today may sound extraordinary. Namely, that the future of Palestine lies in unity with Khedival Egypt. That was apparently an opinion that many people thought was natural because the Egyptian links, through trade and commerce, as well as cultural exchanges (newspapers, music and theatrical troupes), were common and frequent, even during the war period. The future of Palestine and Syria being with Egypt was therefore seen as a possibility, on an equal footing with independent Syria and autonomy within the empire. In his diary Turjman makes numerous references to the ‘degenerate’ lifestyle of the Ottoman military leadership, and their lack of credibility. He was proud of the Sharifian rebellion in the Hijaz and full of criticism of the ‘servility’ of the ‘Syrian and Palestinian people’ who failed to rise up and fight for their freedom. He also makes oblique references to the Zionists in the context of Jamal Pasha’s presumed Jewish mistress, Lea Tannenbaum, but his thoughts on the Zionist political project were unrecorded.

In Gallipoli, the battle which became an icon for Ottoman resilience in defence of the Fatherland, one forgets that more than half the war dead came from non-Turkish regions of the empire – they were Bulgarians, Albanians, Kurds, Arabs and Armenians. Of the two battalions that fought with Mustafa Kemal in Gallipoli, the majority of combatants, as well as the dead, were reportedly Syrian Arab soldiers. Yet those indicators of Ottoman solidarity were soon replaced by Turkish nationalist iconography, and the story was retold retrospectively as a Turkish victory against the invading allies. The Ottoman victims were now rebaptised, post-mortem, as Turkish martyrs. In this conspiracy of silence, Arab and Turkish historiography colluded in excluding the nature of the multi-ethnic character of the sultanate, and of the officers and soldiers who fought under its banner. European historiography, similarly, became preoccupied with the tragic use of Anzac soldiers as cannon fodder by the British Empire. To them the significance of Gallipoli was its singularity in giving birth to Australian nationhood.

The biographic trajectories of the three soldiers suggest several responses by soldiers to their experience of war: rethinking and reinvention of identity (Fesih); separatist nationalism (Shehadeh); and pacifism (Turjman). I draw two conclusions from this discussion. First, the reconstruction of identity experienced in the Great War was fluid. Self-conceptions transform themselves through ruptures very quickly during times of war, because war disrupts the tempo of daily routine. It compels us to rethink where we are and where we are heading in the immediate future. The second conclusion is that, when people are faced with devastation, they tend to revert to the comfort and security of local identity, because it is protective and familiar and allows people to insulate themselves from what seems to be the impending collapse of the world around them. Such reversions are apparent in the war and devastation that are happening today.

However, unlike the ‘localism’ of today’s Syria and Iraq, which have reverted to homologous religious sectarianism, the protectionist localism of the Great War was communal, and existed peacefully with the rising secular nationalism of Damascus, Beirut and Istanbul. But if ordinary soldiers sought a protective reversion to the comforts of localism, the civilians discussed here reacted to the devastation in the opposite direction. Sakakini sought an assertion of a common humanist bond, that transcended nationalism (Arab and Turkish), Muhammad Kurd Ali became an advocate of Greater Syrian unity, while Najib Nassar, the doyen of Palestinian journalists – as he later became known – took to a class perspective, defending peasants’ land rights and tribal entitlement, in honour of the nameless people who hid and defended him when he was pursued by the authorities.

The ideological choices made by these three soldiers and three civilians were often the result of contingencies of geography and lineage: that is, they were dictated mostly by where they lived, where they grew up and how they thought of their family origins. But the ultimate determining factor in their choices was the devastating war which led to the death of the Ottoman idea – the conceptual framework that had been able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of imperial subjects to fight for the Sultan, an array of committed intellectuals behind them, under the rubric of common citizenship and a multi-ethnic homeland.