FOR CENTURIES, THE Ottomans had been open to receiving every type of person as a Muslim, no matter his or her language or background, whether a slave, commoner, or member of the elite. When faced with losing power to the ascendant Western European empires and brand-new Southeastern European nations, the Ottomans began to turn away from the Ottoman Way of incorporating diversity of Islam and conversion to it. In an effort to restore the empire to its once dominant position, certain activists among the Ottoman elites sought to remake it into a ‘civilised’ Ottoman Muslim nation-empire on par with the West. No longer an empire of conversion, it was to be made into an empire of Muslim Turks. The Ottoman elites’ Orientalist view of their own society and the peoples they governed was channelled into new forms of ethno- and ethno-religious nationalism. When compounded by coups, revolutions, counterrevolutions, and war, the consequence was that tolerance was replaced by ethnic cleansing and genocide, leading ultimately to the dynasty’s demise.
From the 1880s to 1913, the Young Turks would promote revolution and two wars but face counterrevolution and resistance. Working together with Sufis, Freemasons, and other esoteric groups in Ottoman Salonica—the port city in Macedonia that is today Thessaloniki, Greece—these Muslim officers and bureaucrats of varied backgrounds spearheaded opposition to Abdülhamid II. At first they demanded only restoration of the constitution and parliament, but their demands soon evolved to overthrow the sultan. In a short period of time, the ideology of these elitist, militarist, anti-Christian imperialists evolved from Ottoman Muslim nationalism to Turkish nationalism.
In every age of Ottoman history, deviant dervishes posed a potential threat to the dynasty. One group that became important in the Period of Reforms (1839–1876) and after were the descendants of the followers of the Jewish ‘deviant dervish’ Sabbatai Zevi, who had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century and primarily resided in Salonica. In the Ottoman telling, Sultan Mehmed IV converted Sabbatai Zevi to Islam in 1666. But according to letters the self-proclaimed messiah wrote after the conversion, Sabbatai Zevi changed religion because that was what the ‘true’ God, whom he ‘alone has known’, wanted him to do.1 He claimed to have converted neither while in a manic or depressive state nor while under duress by the sultan. He did it of his own volition, he declared, ‘thanks to the great power and strength of truth and faith’.2 He called on other Jews to follow suit, urging those who followed him into Islam to bury their belief in him as the messiah in their hearts and to live it secretly.3 That underground faith reemerged in tandem with the progressive reforms of the second half of the nineteenth century, as his followers worked first to enact social change and then conspired with the Young Turks to foment revolution, with explosive results for the dynasty.
Legally Muslims, Sabbatai Zevi’s followers secretly continued to adhere to the beliefs and practices of him and his successors, in whom they believed Sabbatai Zevi’s soul had been reborn. Transmigration of souls had been a common theme in deviant dervish theology. But most elements of their theology and rituals placed them beyond the pale of Islam and Judaism alike. Unlike Jews, they ostensibly followed the requirements of Islam such as fasting during Ramadan. Unlike Muslims, they maintained belief in Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism. They called themselves ‘the Believers’, but outsiders referred to them as the Dönme, ‘the Converts’.4
The Dönme benefited from the establishment of a locally selected mayoralty, municipal council, and other local political bodies, and late nineteenth-century Western European capitalism as well.5 Dönme politicians and international merchants formed a conspicuous, significant part of the new elite.
From the fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century, Salonica had been the centre of the Ottoman Empire’s woolen cloth and textile industry. Having founded the industry, Jews predominated in it, supplying the market and receiving a monopoly to furnish uniforms for the Janissaries. The expanding ranks of the Janissary corps over the sixteenth century benefited Salonican Jews. In the seventeenth century, however, treaties allowed Western Europeans to export their textiles to the Ottoman Empire. Competition from English, Dutch, and French suppliers, the rising price of raw materials, and fiscal crises weakened the Ottoman textile industry.
One of those affected was Sabbatai Zevi’s father, Mordecai, who like many other Salonican Jews sought his fortunes instead in the boomtown of İzmir, the port city on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. As brokers and agents for English merchants, Mordecai and his two eldest sons made enough of a fortune to allow Sabbatai Zevi to study Jewish law with famous rabbis who were also drawn to the city by its wealth. As fortunes were being made and heresies hatched in İzmir, Salonica’s wool manufacturing declined and became merely a military supply industry, continuing only due to the need to supply the Janissaries. By the eighteenth century, trade between Salonica and Western Europe had increased greatly, but as is the case in a multicultural, plural empire, when one ethno-religious group declines, it presents an opportunity for another group to rise and take its place. Salonican Jewish merchants and manufacturers had been largely replaced by other groups, including Italian Jews who were protected by foreign consuls. The abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 led to the demise of woolen cloth manufacturing by Jews.
The decline of most Salonican Jews afforded an opportunity to many Dönme, who stepped into Jews’ former role and became the leading textile merchants. New economic possibilities were also seized upon by the Dönme, who soon became wealthy and significant economic players. This wealth, combined with being ostensibly Muslim, speaking both Turkish and French, and fluency in Ottoman culture, allowed them to take advantage of their legal position as Muslims. They easily rose in a city in which Jews predominated.
The Period of Reforms introduced new political positions, which Dönme promptly filled, expanding their power, wealth, and influence in the city. The best example is Salonican mayor Hamdi Bey (in office 1893–1902), who was an urban reformer, international businessman, and leader of one of the three Dönme sects.6 He changed the face of the city, hiring the Italian architect Vitaliano Poselli to plan and build most of Salonica’s new public buildings. Poselli designed the eclectic Dönme mosque (1904), the last Ottoman mosque built in the city. Hamdi Bey put an Ottoman stamp on modernity. He made public fountains run red with sour cherry juice, the favoured Ottoman drink. And he furthered the interests of the Dönme, ensuring they served in local politics without suspicion or interference from officials sent from Istanbul. The prevalence of members of his sect of Dönme in municipal offices—recognisable by their shaved heads, like deviant dervishes—caused at least one governor to take notice. Şemsi Efendi, a famous Dönme educator, opened a school just two blocks east of the governor’s building. The proximity of Dönme schools to the seat of the governor was symbolic of the heavy proportion of Dönme in city governance.
While helpful in introducing modernising administrative, architectural, and educational reforms, as well as embracing global capitalism for industrialising the empire, the Dönme became a dangerous threat to the palace when they joined forces with revolutionary, underground opposition groups in Salonica.
Salonica was a site of great political agitation. It was the birthplace of the Young Turk revolutionary movement as well as assorted socialist organisations.7 It had the highest concentration of factory labour in the empire, particularly in the tobacco industry. Headed by Bulgarian Jew Avram Benaroya, the city’s Workers’ Solidarity Federation was considered by the Second International—the global federation of socialist parties and trade unions—to be the spark of the proletarian struggle in the East. Salonica was also a centre of Masonic activity and the main domicile of the Dönme. Salonica was one of the Ottoman cities best supplied with schools, including a law faculty, and army headquarters, both of which were open to new currents of thought. Professionals and civil servants who shared a progressive outlook—especially employees of the Post and Telegraph Department such as Mehmed Talat (later promoted to pasha) and members of the Third Army such as Enver Bey (later promoted to pasha)—made up the majority of the revolutionaries. The heart of the struggle was Salonica.
Abdülhamid II had his supporters, as all dictators do. They included the top military brass and the members of the religious class that supported his Islamisation campaign. But more legion were his enemies, who opposed his closing of the parliament, suspension of the constitution, and authoritarian reign.
Opposition to Abdülhamid II was launched by the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, CUP), first initiated as a secret society (with a slightly different name, the Committee of Progress and Union) in 1889 by students at the Royal Military Medical Academy in Istanbul. They were heavily influenced by biological materialist ideology. Biological materialism promoted science in place of religion to cure all of society’s ills. The CUP supporters later spread to Paris, Geneva, and Cairo, and then to cities throughout the Ottoman Empire, including Salonica. Following a failed coup attempt in 1896, opponents of Abdülhamid II’s autocratic rule who had operated underground in the empire in the 1890s were forced to move overseas. The constitutionalists operated mainly abroad for a decade. In 1907, they reemerged in strength in the empire as a political organisation. By that time, the CUP was a merger of the decades-old, Paris-based Committee of Progress and Union and the new Salonica-based Ottoman Freedom Society. The guiding figures of the Committee of Progress and Union included Dr. Bahaettin Şakir and Dr. Nazım, the director of the modern municipal hospital in Salonica.8 He would become one of the two leading Young Turk ideologues. The Ottoman Freedom Society had been founded in 1906. One founder was Mehmed Talat, born in the Hasköy district of today’s Bulgaria, who knew Ottoman Turkish, Greek, and French and had been exiled to Salonica, where he ran the Telegraph and Post Office.9 The other was Enver Bey.10
These men, who in wishing to save the empire paved the way for its end, shared common characteristics. They were part of a new generation of elite, highly educated, young, urban Muslim men. Most were Rûmis, as they came from Southeastern Europe, northwestern Anatolia including Istanbul, and the Aegean. They received higher education in the new medical and military colleges. Despite calling themselves Young Turks, the four students who founded the organisation at the Royal Military Medical Academy that would later become the CUP were not Turks. They were Ibrahim Temo (an Albanian), Abdullah Cevdet (a Kurd), Mehmed Reşid (a Circassian), and İshak Sükûti (a Kurd).11
Sufi brotherhoods and Freemasons also played a role in opposition politics in the Hamidian era, supporting the CUP and favouring the assassination or overthrow of Abdülhamid II. Although that sultan had been close to a sheikh from the Nakşibendi order named Gümüşhanevi, the Bektaşi and Mevlevi Sufi orders opposed him.12 Ruthlessly suppressed in 1826 because of their affiliation with the Janissaries, the Bektaşis had made a comeback by the beginning of Abdülhamid II’s reign in 1876 and were the strongest Sufi order opposing the regime.13 The Young Turks were sympathetic to the Bektaşis because they considered the Sufi order to be liberal, and a number of Young Turks were Bektaşi. The radical tendencies of the Bektaşis matched the progressive ideas of the Young Turks, and Bektaşis were affiliated with Freemasons, who let the CUP use their lodges after 1906.
The CUP also had a relationship with Rûmi’s Mevlevi order. Mevlevi lodges distributed CUP propaganda, and Mevlevi sheikhs hosted CUP meetings in their homes. Other sheikhs were exiled together with Young Turks for their political activism. Sultan Abdülmecid I had supported the Mevlevis, and his successor, Sultan Abdülaziz I, had been a member of the Mevlevi order, as was Sultan Abdülhamid II’s brother Mehmed Reşad in Galata.14 But during Abdülhamid II’s reign, the Mevlevi order had abandoned its traditional quietism, and the CUP tried to install Mehmed Reşad as sultan in a failed coup in 1896. In the last decade of Abdülhamid II’s rule, the Mevlevi sheikhs in Istanbul, İzmir, and Konya aligned with the CUP, and some were arrested and exiled. The grand çelebi even asked the British for asylum.15
The Sufi role in revolutionary politics was significant, but until 1895 it was the Freemasons who were more important in opposition politics. The Freemason Murad V, envisioned as an enlightened sultan who would unite Turks and Greeks, had come to power in a coup d’état aided by Freemasons in 1876. The nucleus of the Young Turks emerged from the members of a Masonic lodge established by those who had brought that sultan to the throne.
Until 1902, because they were forbidden in the empire, Ottoman Freemasons had organised their own political organisations under other names and distributed political tracts on liberty and freedom across Europe. Thereafter they supported the Paris-based Committee of Progress and Union (which with the Ottoman Freedom Society became the CUP in 1907), whose leader, Ahmed Rıza, included in his inner circle many prominent Freemason leaders. All the founding members but one of the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonica were Freemasons or became Freemasons. They were members of either the Italian Obedience of Macedonia Risorta or the French Obedience of Véritas (Truth). After the merger of the Committee of Progress and Union and the Ottoman Freedom Society as the CUP, the CUP was based in Salonican Masonic lodges.16 In a society not ready to abandon hierarchies of religion, and in which sectarianism had become a problem—leading to massacres of Armenians in Anatolia and Maronite Christians in Syria—Christians, Jews, and Muslims could meet in Masonic lodges as equals, united in secrecy. Freemasons benefited from social egalitarianism, which allowed them to accommodate their religious differences and promote societal change. At Masonic lodges, strangers were transformed into brothers seeking the same political goal. Murad V’s successor, Abdülhamid II, recognised the threat and suppressed the Freemasons. His government labelled them a constant source of treason.
There were close links between secret societies of Freemasons and the diverse members of the CUP, a secret society imitating Masonic practices and meeting in Masonic lodges. In a dictatorship, secrecy afforded political organisation. The Jewish attorney Emmanuel Carasso, one of the leaders of the CUP in Salonica and in the hierarchy of the entire organisation, received medals of honour from the very sultan he worked to overthrow. He also headed the Italian rite Macedonia Risorta, whose lodge was the site of secret CUP meetings and the place where CUP archives and records were kept. The Masonic order counted among its members the majority of the leaders of the Salonican branch of the CUP. Freemasonry was important for the CUP. Masonic lodges were crucial channels through which oppositional politics could germinate.
Many prominent Dönme were Freemasons as well as Sufis, which facilitated their entry into the CUP. Dönme were among the founders of the French Obedience of Véritas, established in 1904, and sat on its supreme council. That order counted two future grand viziers, Ali Rıza Pasha and Hussein Hilmi Pasha. Jews and Dönme were prominent in the clubs of Freemasons where the CUP met in Salonica.17 Mason and dervish lodges where many Dönme participated in Sufi rituals sided with the CUP against the sultan, in part because Freemasons and some Sufi sects promoted equality and brotherhood. Conveniently, given Salonica’s secret CUP cells, Masonic membership, and revolutionary cells in the Third Army, ancient underground storage spaces located in the main Dönme neighbourhoods allowed passage undetected from house to house and even from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. When police raided homes, people on the run and the secret documents they carried could easily disappear in these spaces.
Dönme played an important founding and supporting role in the revolutionary movement.18 The banker, textile merchant, director of one of the largest banking and commercial houses in the city, and head of the chamber of commerce Mehmed Kapancı used his wealth to fund the CUP. Wealthy merchants such as Kapancı supported the revolution because they were Freemasons who believed that the sultan was stifling society. These were men who supported progressive schools that promoted critical thinking, especially the Dönme schools the Feyziye (Excellence) and Terakki (Progress), considered centres of revolution.
Some Dönme became so committed to the political ideas discussed in secret CUP meetings at the city’s Masonic lodges that they were considered the revolutionary vanguard. Dönme intellectuals and civil servants played a crucial revolutionary role. Their history and religion had caused them to evolve more and more into an association of freethinkers, separate from Muslims and Jews yet placed in a position to be a progressive factor in the city.
Dönme, Freemasons, Bektaşi and Mevlevi Sufis, students at the new medical and military colleges, young army officers, wealthy capitalists, liberal professionals, and bureaucrats all conspired to compel Abdülhamid II to reinstate the constitution and parliament.
Determined to save the empire from itself and its ever more dictatorial ruler, the CUP, led by Muslim men of diverse background (Albanian, Caucasian, Circassian, Dönme, Kurdish, and Turkish) launched the events of June and July 1908 known as the constitutional revolution. What transpired was actually not very impressive, but it achieved the CUP’s aim. The revolutionaries considered their event on par with the other significant events that occurred in July, the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.19 But there was no storming of the Bastille as in France, and the sultan was left formally in power. More like an armed revolt, it did not seem to be a revolution at all. The CUP forced Abdülhamid II to reinstate the abrogated 1876 constitution and reconvene the parliament. This was no mass uprising. Nor was it a toppling of the political and social system.
The revolution of 1908 was triggered by the secret CUP central committee in Salonica when it decided to reveal itself by publicly rejecting British and Russian efforts to make Ottoman Macedonia an autonomous region under foreign oversight.20 Macedonia was claimed by Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian nationalists. As the Ottomans had steadfastly refused to offer autonomy, the diverse Southeastern European Christian nationalists had proselytised national consciousness among their people through their churches and schools, used violence against Ottoman authorities (who responded in kind), and appealed for foreign intervention to achieve their political aims.21
The self-outing of the CUP caused the Ottoman government to investigate it. The CUP shot the man charged with this task, Nazım Bey, brother-in-law of Major Enver Bey of the Ottoman Third Army. The CUP ordered its branches throughout Macedonia to start an insurgency and to form guerrilla bands on the model of those of the Bulgarians, Greeks, Macedonians, and Serbs already operating in the region to fight both the Christian guerrillas and Ottoman forces that opposed them. Enver Bey, leader of the CUP branch in Monastir, western Macedonia, headed to the hills. He established a band of guerrillas outside Salonica. Battalion commander Adjutant Major Niyazi Bey, an Albanian, formed a guerrilla band in Macedonia.
Other CUP branches in other Ottoman cities and their leaders sent telegrams to the sultan demanding the restoration of the constitution and parliament. Şemsi Pasha, the Ottoman general sent after them, was murdered by the CUP. Enver and Niyazi traversed the Macedonian countryside with their bands. They rallied Muslims behind them by playing on their fears of attacks by Christian guerrillas supported by the Russian army. They made little use of the soldiers under their command, who they assumed were loyal to the sultan. They appealed instead to Muslims—Albanians, self-sacrificing volunteers, brigands and outlaws, and CUP men—rather than Christian villagers. They planned to march on Istanbul. When they captured Monastir and its significant garrison, they declared that the constitution was back in force. Abdülhamid II agreed to reconvene the prorogued parliament of 1878. Urban-based junior officers educated in the new military academies had gone to the mountains of Macedonia with irregular forces and had compelled the sultan to act. The constitutional revolution was over.
In their proclamation to the public, read out in city squares across the empire to jubilant crowds, the constitutional revolutionaries declared that ‘the basis for the constitution will be respect for the predominance of the national will’.22 The will of the people, and not the whims of the sultan, was to be the governing force of empire. They offered universal suffrage to men, permitted political parties, freed the press, gave more rights to women, and confirmed that ‘every citizen will enjoy complete liberty and equality, regardless of nationality or religion’. All Ottomans were ‘equal before the law as regards rights and duties relative to the state’ and were ‘eligible for government posts, according to their individual capacity and their education’. They confirmed that Christians and Jews were liable for military service. In fact, between 1908 and 1914, to an extent not seen even after the reform decrees of 1839 and 1856—which promised legal equality to all subjects of the sultan—Armenians, Greeks, and Jews entered political office and military service.
When the revolution was announced, speeches were made on the balcony of the Dönme-owned Olympos Hotel on Plateia Eleftherias (formerly Olympos Square) in Salonica. Among the speakers was Moiz Kohen (who later adopted the Turkish name Tekinalp), a Turkish nationalist of Jewish background. He shouted, ‘We want brotherhood between all peoples. We are all one without regard to religion or sect. Long live the fatherland! Long live freedom! There are no Greeks, Jews, or Bulgarians, there are only Ottomans’.23 Postcards printed to mark the event travelled the globe, depicting the diverse Ottoman peoples uniting behind ‘freedom, equality, brotherhood, and justice’, the words translated into Armenian, Greek, Ottoman Turkish, French, and Judeo-Spanish.
Dönme journalists played a decisive role in the events of July 1908. Journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman, a Dönme member of the Véritas lodge and leading CUP activist and publicist, was put in charge of organising the movement’s propaganda in Salonica. He penned patriotic poems and articles welcoming the new freedoms and propagating the movement’s excitement about the beginning of a new era. He held street demonstrations and organised writers and a press association. In 1914, Yalman would become the news editor of the CUP’s main publication, Echo. Yalman’s alma mater, the Dönme school Terakki—whose name, ‘Progress’, was the same as that used in the title of the CUP—boasted that it raised freedom-loving, constitution-supporting youths, and that those who announced the second constitutional government were Terakki graduates.24 The Dönme Feyziye school was proud of its former administrator, the new finance minister Mehmed Cavid, and praised the revolution.
The revolution ushered in a renaissance for the Bektaşi Sufi order and Masonic lodges favoured or founded by the CUP. Revolutionary officers visited Bektaşi lodges to pay tribute, and Bektaşi publications were again permitted. Newspapers attacking the Bektaşis were closed. New Bektaşi lodges were opened.25 Freemasons declared themselves ‘the main force’ behind the 1908 revolution, supported the CUP in power, and thrived. The CUP established its own exclusive Masonic lodge in 1909, Le Grand Orient Ottoman, to reduce the power of foreign-affiliated lodges.26 Its first grand master was none other than Young Turk leader Mehmed Talat.
Elections were held in October and November. CUP-backed candidates won 287 of the 288 seats in parliament. The lone opposition parliamentarian was a member of the Liberal Party. The bicameral legislature opened in December.27
The CUP held sway in parliament and in the provinces with its local party bosses. Yet the real centre of CUP power was not its parliamentarians, but its secretive central committee in Salonica, which numbered fewer than two dozen members. Members included Mehmed Talat, Enver Bey, Dr. Bahaettin Şakir, and Dr. Nazım. The central committee was the real power holder in the empire. The members of the central committee we know about averaged around thirty-five years of age, all had college educations, and nearly half originated in Southeastern Europe, with most of the rest coming from Istanbul and the Aegean region.28 These demographics displayed the continued relevance of Rûminess, of being Roman.
The CUP—its junior officers and civil servants—did not formally take power. It was influential behind the scenes in the newly elected parliament and was able to have a grand vizier appointed that was to its liking. But it faced much opposition and responded in brutal fashion. The CUP was blamed for the assassination of the leading Liberal opposition newspaper editor Hasan Fehmi in 1909. His assassination galvanised massive anti-CUP opposition, organised by the Liberal Party, Nakşibendi Sufi sheikhs, and students of religious colleges, as well as a group calling itself the Muslim Union. Members of the Muslim Union were especially worried by the new societal role of women. In 1908, just as Armenian women fought for women’s rights, self-proclaimed Muslim feminists had published half a dozen journals and founded organisations, such as the Ottoman Association for the Protection of the Rights of Women, demanding legal reforms including the end to polygamy and expanded access to education and employment outside the home.29
Beginning in 1908, there was a renewed clash of two cultural visions, a central feature of which was the role of women in society. One group called for equality between men and women and making women visible in the public sphere. It perceived Islam as a hindrance to modernity and civilisation. If women were veiled and not participating in political life, then the empire would never become modern or civilised and would surely fall. For the opposing group, such exposure of women corrupted society, which needed to adhere to a model in which women’s roles were well-defined and women’s bodies invisible. In this vision, if women were unveiled and participated in societal roles formerly the preserve of men, then the empire would come to ruin. Both groups looked at women’s bodies and saw the future of the empire—for good or ill.
Radicals advocated for the human rights of women, arguing for the necessity of seeing women as human beings rather than as females limited to roles as wives and mothers.30 They argued against the practice of veiling. Only when women were unveiled and participating fully in the life of society would they become human beings, individuals. In this view, free individuals were the building blocks of a modern society. Once women were treated as individuals, Ottoman society would become civilised.
Their opponents, the Muslim Union, countered that unveiling women and thrusting them from the private to the public sphere would cause moral and political decline. They claimed that what the radicals advocated was not freedom, but a turning away from religion towards anarchy and chaos, thereby ruining the family, the true building block of society. They proposed a correlation between the abandoning of the veil and the opening of taverns and whorehouses.31 And they opposed the new freedoms granted by the constitution and fomented rebellion to replace it.
Much more dramatic than the constitutional revolution of 1908 was the counterrevolution of April 1909. The counterrevolution witnessed a mass uprising and its ruthless suppression, massacres of Armenians, and the deposition of Abdülhamid II.
In April 1909, an armed uprising broke out in Istanbul. The mutinous troops and the religious students who joined the mob marched to the palatial parliament building located adjacent to the Hagia Sophia (designed by an Italian architect, the parliament building burned down in a fire in 1933). The counterrevolutionaries demanded the dismissal of a number of government ministers, including the grand vizier, the banishment of some CUP parliamentarians, and restoration of Islam and Islamic law.32 Although Islamic law was still in effect in the empire, Western European secular law was increasingly practised, in part due to the opening of the empire to capitalism and world trade. Gathering at the Hippodrome, where they were joined by more soldiers and lower-ranking religious scholars, the protestors quickly took over Istanbul. The grand vizier resigned, and the counterrevolutionaries attacked and even killed CUP parliamentarians and destroyed the offices of their newspapers. The CUP was driven out of Istanbul or forced underground.
From their base in Macedonia, troops loyal to the CUP organised themselves as the Action Army. It was led by Niyazi Bey, the hero of the revolution of 1908, and included mainly Albanian volunteers along with Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and a Jewish battalion from Salonica. The army was sent by train to Istanbul to defend the constitution, shed blood in the name of brotherhood, and suppress the insurrection. It accomplished all of these aims in less than two weeks. With the rebels holed up in the artillery barracks in what is today Gezi Park in Taksim Square, the Action Army bombed the barracks and partly destroyed them before the rebels surrendered.33 Jewish volunteers suffered dozens of casualties taking the neighbourhood from the counterrevolutionaries.
Meanwhile, news of the counterrevolution had incited Turks, Kurds, Circassians, and Muslim refugees in the southern Anatolian city of Adana to express their anti-CUP feelings by massacring tens of thousands of Armenians with the complicity of local governmental and army officials.34 Local notables and religious students in Adana and the surrounding region opposed the new visibility of Armenian political parties and cultural institutions, which they blamed on the reinstitution of the constitution and parliament. Despite the complete destruction of the Armenian quarter of the city and many adjacent Armenian villages, the CUP responded leniently towards the main culprits, not wishing to exacerbate hostility against itself. Nevertheless, in the wake of the massacres in Adana and surrounding region, on 20 August 1909 the newly appointed interior minister Mehmed Talat and the CUP signed an accord with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to cooperate ‘to save the Ottoman fatherland from separation and division’ and to defend the constitution against reactionaries.35
The CUP was deeply shaken by the counterrevolution and used it as a pretext to restrict the freedoms granted by the constitution, thereby strengthening the party’s grip over the empire. The counterrevolution confirmed CUP leaders’ belief that Muslim ‘reactionaries’ were among their greatest enemies. Within days of the surrender of the rebels, the parliament—representing the nation, the will of the people—deposed Abdülhamid II. It sent the last of the strong sultans and caliphs to house arrest in Salonica, the city from whence the CUP had launched its own coup. It replaced Abdülhamid II with his younger brother, the Mevlevi Sufi Mehmed Reşad, who became Mehmed V (reigned 1909–1918). Blaming the counterrevolution on the Muslim Union—the organisation of religious extremists that had protested against women’s rights and in favour of Islamic law—the army, ruling under martial law, executed its leader, the Nakşibendi sheikh Dervish Vahdeti.
Alongside religious Muslim opposition to the CUP, several other factors had been at work to spark the counterrevolution. They included tensions between the young officers and revolutionaries trained in the new academies and the undereducated officers and soldiers loyal to the sultan who had been hurt by the CUP’s mass purge of their ranks. The Liberal opposition party in parliament also played a major role in the revolt. But this pragmatic alliance between secularists and Islamists instigating revolt instead brought about military rule under the CUP. In the view of the CUP in 1909, however, this was a war between themselves—the representatives of enlightenment and progress—and the forces of reaction, represented by Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Muslim Union.
Abdülhamid II was placed under house arrest in a Jewish villa built by the architect Vitaliano Poselli.36 Mehmed Cavid was part of the delegation that relayed to Abdülhamid II the news of his downfall. This Freemason and former Feyziye school principal was the most influential Dönme government minister who came to power after the sultan was deposed.37
After the revolution, the Dönme Cavid served in the new parliament from 1908 to 1918 and was one of the leaders of the CUP in 1916 and 1917. He was finance minister between 1909 and 1912, and again in 1917 and 1918. Although influential, Cavid was overshadowed by his fellow Salonicans Mehmed Talat and Enver Bey, who were not of Dönme origins.38
The overrepresentation of Dönme in the CUP allowed conspiracy theorists to believe the revolution of 1908 was a Dönme or Jewish plot, even though most of the new elite was not Dönme, most Dönme were not members of the new elite, and the Dönme were distinct from Jews. Revolutionaries who had Jewish background but did not consider themselves Jewish played down their origins. So, too, did others who were falsely considered Jewish, such as the radical Mustafa Kemal. Although Mustafa Kemal did not have Jewish ancestors, he was accused of acting on behalf of ‘secret Jews’.39
Mustafa Kemal was born in Ottoman Salonica in 1881. Salonica boasted a Francophone Muslim and Dönme elite who incorporated the latest pedagogical methods in their schools. Mustafa Kemal benefited from the ‘new type of education’, which combined Ottoman and modern French schooling courses and methods. Although the family lived in a Muslim rather than a Dönme neighbourhood, Mustafa Kemal’s progressive father enrolled him in the exclusive primary school of Dönme leader Şemsi Efendi. This fact has stoked the fire of conspiracy theories about his identity, as has the fact that ‘Dönme’ in Turkish slang means ‘passive homosexual’. Mustafa Kemal’s conservative mother had first insisted he go to the local religious Muslim school instead.40 But after a few days at the Muslim school, he switched to the Dönme school, which was attacked repeatedly by conservative Muslims. Şemsi Efendi’s school taught Dönme and Muslim religious principles, not secularism. Mustafa Kemal lost his father when he was seven, and one could argue he spent the subsequent years searching for a replacement father. One day he would claim to be the father of all Turks, calling himself Atatürk.
Mustafa Kemal founded the Fatherland and Freedom Society in Damascus in 1905, and had come to Salonica to open a branch in that city. While he may or may not have actually opened one, he was in contact with other opposition politicians. In the end, the Fatherland and Freedom Society became the Ottoman Freedom Society, established by Mehmed Talat and Enver. All of the members of this group were Freemasons, and one was a leading Sufi; it merged with the CUP in 1907. Mustafa Kemal was a member of that generation of revolutionaries who would bring down the Ottoman dynasty.
The Young Turks shared a worldview. They were Muslim men of diverse background born between 1875 and 1885, most Rûmis. They were educated in the new leading institutions of the empire, including the new military medical colleges. They formed an elite of military officers and bureaucrats who shaped the politics of the last decades of the empire.41 They saw the rising Christian middle class as a threat. They conceived of a future empire without Christians, whom they began to equate with foreigners, while at the same time perceiving European bourgeois culture as a model to be adopted and adapted.42 Tellingly, they banned Christians and Jews from membership in the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonica when it was founded in 1906.
Having been educated in the new science-oriented colleges, they shared a belief in rationality, progress, and enlightenment and were heavily influenced by French and German thinkers.43 Contrary to traditional Ottoman attitudes, they also believed that authority did not come from age. In their view, it arose from education. The Young Turks were no peaceniks. From the beginning, they used violence to achieve their aims and take power. These young men believed that the future was theirs to shape. The fact that they were able to topple the elderly, seemingly all-powerful Abdülhamid II, whose spies and police were everywhere, gave them an unbreakable confidence in their own potential. Seeing themselves as saviours of the empire, they were haunted by the fear that Muslim opponents could undo their enlightening mission, such as occurred with the counterrevolution of 1909. Referring to their opponents as ‘reactionaries’, they despised religious leaders and were jealous of their ability to whip up the masses with accusations of alleged Young Turk atheism and desecration of holy places. Their religious opponents spread rumours of their wine drinking and alleged entering of mosques with their shoes on.
Most of these Young Turks served with the Ottoman army in Southeastern Europe fighting guerrilla warfare against paramilitary bands of Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, and Serbian revolutionaries. The fight was especially vicious in Macedonia. A terrorist group known as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, formed by schoolteachers in Salonica in 1893, bombed banks, post offices, and cafés, assassinated and kidnapped government officials, robbed and murdered local notables, burned government buildings, and fomented uprisings to gain national independence.44 Violence was not an outgrowth of nationalism, but a force that helped create it.45 The Young Turks’ experiences strengthened their view that a life-and-death struggle between nations was taking place, a view that caused them to consider all Christians as terrorists supported by foreign powers.46 They adopted the nationalism and military tactics of their enemy. Enver Bey, Mustafa Kemal, and others would organise guerrilla resistance against the invading Italians in Libya after 1911. Again and again, CUP officers and self-sacrificing volunteers (suicide squadrons) used violent guerrilla tactics.
The revolution of 1908 and the counterrevolution a year later confirmed for the Young Turk leadership that they faced two life-and-death struggles. One was between Ottoman Christians and foreigners on the one side, and Muslim Turks on the other. The other was an all-important internal battle between Muslims. The Young Turks claimed to be civilised, enlightened, modern, progressive, revolutionary Muslims facing off against religious, reactionary, traditional Muslims.47
They also had an imperial view. They were on a mission to save the empire. As an intellectual elite, they saw themselves as the vanguard, steamrolling change in society. This entitled them to lead top-down, radical changes. For them, the empire was more important than the individual, who was expected to sacrifice his or her life if need be.48 For this reason, after the revolution of 1908 they violently suppressed labour unrest, banned trade unions, and made industrial action nearly impossible.49 Between 1909 and 1912 the CUP-dominated parliament passed legislation limiting free speech, a free press, and the right to assembly and to form associations.
The Young Turks were militarists who believed in social Darwinism as taught to them by their German military instructors.50 Darwinism is the scientific theory that evolution favours those organisms that fit their environment and their time, those with inherited traits that best allow them to survive and reproduce. Social Darwinism was an imperialist, colonialist theory of a struggle for survival waged between races or nations. It was war on a global scale. The Prussian general Colmar von der Goltz had taught the Young Turks at the Ottoman Royal Military Academy that the only way for the Turkish nation to ‘earn its right to live’ among other nations was by making the Turks into ‘a nation in arms’ at the expense of those other nations.51 This belief promoted the sentiment that ‘every Turk is born a soldier’ and every man is called upon to die for his fatherland. Instilled with the conviction that the empire must be a military nation led by army officers, the Young Turks conceived of the world in terms that propelled them to kill rather than be killed.
The CUP leadership was also anti-religion.52 These secularists and atheists used Islam consciously as a tool, treating religion as the stimulant, not the opiate, of the masses. Like the sultans who preceded them, they used Islam to propagate loyalty to themselves, to increase the bonds among their followers, and to inspire and mobilise them against their enemies. At the same time, they presented their enemies as reactionaries and obscurantists who hindered the progress of the nation.
Echoing the Ottoman ‘science’ of reading the fate written on one’s forehead to determine who is most fit for palace service—used for centuries in the selection of Collection recruits—the CUP promoted phrenology to prove theories about the hierarchies of races. Phrenology is the disgraced pseudoscience that links the form of the skull to intellectual abilities and moral character. As proponents of the view that science could solve all social problems, the Young Turks absorbed Western European ideas about race. These included the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon’s obsession with protecting the superior race—in his case, white Europeans—and Edmond Demolins’s inquiry into the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. The Young Turks simply replaced the Anglo-Saxons or white races with the Turks. After Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905, leading thinkers such as Russian Turk Yusuf Akçura promoted Turkish nationalism based on race.
Akçura’s article ‘Three Kinds of Policy’ played a role in the advancement of Turkism similar to that played by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in the spread of communism. In the article, Akçura argued that the best choice among Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism was the latter.53 Akçura had been educated at the Ottoman Royal Military Academy in Istanbul. An opponent of Abdülhamid II, he had been exiled and ended up in Paris, where he studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (today Sciences Po). He returned to Istanbul in 1908 following the revolution. He promoted Turkist idealism by editing the journal Turkish Homeland and serving as a professor of political history.
‘Three Kinds of Policy’ was published in 1904 in Cairo in the extreme nationalist Young Turk journal Türk. It was published again in Istanbul as a pamphlet in 1912. In this work, Akçura argued that the political project of Ottomanism—to create an Ottoman nation based on a union of the empire’s diverse peoples through loyalty to the dynasty—had failed in part due to the rise of nationalism.54
Pan-Islamism, the political unification of all Muslims through loyalty to the caliph sultan, was an impossibility, he claimed. The Ottomans did not rule over all Muslims, who were divided among competing empires. He concluded that the only viable political strategy was the ‘creation of a Turkish political nation based on race’ and the unification of the primarily Muslim Turkic peoples, including those beyond the Ottoman borders in the Caucasus and Russia. Nationalism would be the determining force of the future.
Casting aside the Arabs and Christians of the empire, Akçura argued that Turkism, an idea still in its infancy, held the most advantages. Since ethno-religious bonds were stronger than religious bonds alone, Ottoman Turks would be strongly united, joined by Muslim elements that were already Turkified. He added ominously that other elements would be Turkified by force.55
In his racialised fantasy, he envisioned the unification of all Eurasian Turkic peoples, from East Asia to Southeastern Europe and Africa, with the Ottoman Empire at its centre. The Turkish world would join the ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ races in a middle position, and the Ottoman Empire would assume the duty in Turkic-majority Eurasia that Japan sought as leader of East Asian states.
For Akçura, Turkism comprised not only the great sultans and intellectuals of Ottoman history, but also the Oğuz (the Central Asian people to whom the Ottomans traced their origins), Genghis Khan, and Timur Lenk (Tamerlane). Akçura’s way of thinking was revolutionary. But his prediction of the rise of Turkism was an omen for the unravelling of the empire of conversion and the separation and decimation of some of its component peoples.
After the 1908 revolution, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulgaria declared independence. The large island of Crete proclaimed union with Greece. The Cretans had supported the 1821 Greek rebellion and engaged in several insurrections against the Ottomans from the 1860s to the 1890s. Following the 1889 revolt and further violence in 1896, including massacres of Cretan Christians and Muslims, the Ottomans had offered Crete autonomy, appointment of a Christian governor, and the election of an assembly, two-thirds of whose members would be Christians. But Greece sent troops to the island and declared Crete part of Greece. In 1897, Greece and the Ottoman Empire fought a thirty-day war in Epirus, in northwestern Greece, and Thessaly, in eastern Greece, to settle the Cretan question. The Ottoman army, whose officers were trained by German advisors and whose soldiers were equipped with the latest German rifles and field artillery, was victorious.56 After receiving a large war indemnity from Greece, the Ottomans conceded to make Crete an autonomous part of the empire with a high commissioner chosen by Britain, France, and Russia, who selected a Greek prince. Ottoman troops left the island accompanied by a mass exodus of Cretan Muslims.57 A decade later when Cretans again declared they had joined Greece, the Ottomans could do nothing to stop them. In 1911, Italy invaded Libya, then took the Dodecanese islands, including Rhodes—an island within sight of the Anatolian coast conquered by Suleiman I in 1522.
Worst of all for the Ottomans were the two Balkan Wars. In October 1912, an alliance of former Ottoman provinces, now the independent states of Bulgaria, Greece—which had rearmed and reformed its army and navy with assistance from Britain, France, and Germany—Montenegro, and Serbia, declared war on the empire in order to seize its few remaining European provinces including Macedonia. Macedonia was a rich agricultural region and home to Salonica, one of the Ottoman Empire’s largest, most industrialised port cities best connected by rail, and the birthplace of the Young Turks. This was the First Balkan War.
Attacked on multiple fronts, the unprepared Ottoman army was quickly defeated by the Bulgarians at Kırkkilise (‘Forty Churches’, now Kırklareli, ‘The Place of the Forty’) and Lüleburgaz, in Thrace; by the Serbs moving south into Kosovo, Skopje, and Lake Ohrid in Macedonia; by the Serbs and Montenegrins besieging Durazzo, Albania, on the Adriatic coast; and by the Greeks who besieged Ioannina in northwestern Greece. The Ottomans worried Salonica would fall and sent deposed sultan Abdülhamid II to the imperial capital, where he would pass away six years later. Ottoman forces withdrew to within fifty kilometres of Istanbul. By November the Bulgarian army besieged Edirne, the second Ottoman seat of the dynasty, from 1369 to 1453. On 8 November, as Bulgarian forces also drew near, the Ottomans surrendered Salonica—first captured in 1430 and the hometown of the CUP’s leaders—to the Greek army. This led to the mass expulsion of Southeastern European Muslims to the empire and compelled the Ottomans to demand a cease-fire. According to the armistice signed in December 1912, the Ottomans granted independence to Albania. The Western powers wanted the Ottomans to give up Edirne as well.
It seemed the government would accede to this plan. Political opposition had grown to the CUP hold on power since 1909. In spring 1912, the CUP seemed on the verge of losing its dominance to a new party that united conservatives and liberals. The CUP contrived to dissolve parliament and engineered new elections, accompanied by much violence, making sure its candidates won. But an anti-CUP group of officers demanded the government resign or face insurrection. That summer the government was replaced by a unity cabinet that was as opposed to the role of the military in politics as it was to the CUP. It dominated parliament, dissolved the CUP, and began to exile or arrest leading members of that organisation. It was this anti-CUP government that was in power during the First Balkan War.
The decision to surrender Edirne caused the CUP to seize direct power by the barrel of a gun. On 23 January 1913, Mehmed Talat and Enver Bey along with a few CUP officers stormed a cabinet meeting and killed the grand vizier’s guards and the minister of war. Enver Bey put his pistol to the head of Grand Vizier Kâmil Pasha, forcing his resignation.58 Sensing a weakness at the Ottoman centre, the Balkan states relaunched their attacks. In March 1913, the Ottomans surrendered Ioannina to Greece and Edirne fell to the Bulgarians. A new armistice and peace treaty in April confirmed the loss of the latter city, the former Ottoman capital, the hearth of the gazis. The CUP had failed in its primary aim.
But fortunately for the Ottomans, the Second Balkan War broke out in June and the Balkan states turned on each other. Each wanted to maximise its territorial gains at the expense of the others. All sides attacked Bulgaria. Enver seized the chance and led forces to retake Edirne in July. Despite this victory, the greatest consequence of the Balkan Wars was the loss of almost all remaining Ottoman territory in Europe, including some of the empire’s oldest provinces—Albania, Macedonia, and western Thrace—acquired as early as the fourteenth century.
The wars exacerbated anti-Christian sentiment in the empire. Efforts began in 1912 during the Balkan Wars to create a ‘national economy’ by organising boycotts of Christian (whether Ottoman or foreign) merchants and businesses. As a result of the two Balkan Wars, nearly 350,000 Muslims from Southeastern Europe migrated to the empire, almost half settling in the western coastal regions of Anatolia.59 In 1914, the Ottomans abrogated the capitulations—the trade privileges and concessions granted to European Christian powers since the Renaissance—through which the class of Ottoman subjects protected by those foreign powers had grown exponentially over the course of the nineteenth century. The CUP aimed to replace the rising Ottoman Christian, Jewish, and European merchant class with a Muslim Turkish bourgeoisie. What they envisioned was a massive transfer of wealth and property. As part of these efforts, in June 1914 Mehmed Talat ordered the expulsion of over 150,000 Greeks, half from the area where the largest number of Balkan migrants had settled on the Aegean coast. By his own calculations, Mehmed Talat determined that the Greeks had to abandon over one million dunum of valuable arable fields, vineyards, gardens, orchards, and olive groves, thousands of farm animals, and tens of thousands of homes, stores, and windmills—all of which were redistributed to Muslims.60
Traumatised by the massacres of Muslims in Southeastern Europe, humiliated on the battlefield, and having lost their homelands, the CUP leaders sought revenge on perceived enemies. They had surrendered their ancestral Southeastern Europe and Aegean islands, controlled by the Ottomans for half a millennium, so they turned to Anatolia, adopting it as the new fatherland, the final place to make their stand. Other peoples who stood in their way would be damned, leading to population expulsions, ethnic cleansing, forcible assimilation, massacre, deportation, and genocide.61 Nationalist movements within the empire—Arab, Greek, Jewish (Zionist), and Kurdish—had gained supporters. But in the CUP’s conspiratorial, paranoid view, one group in particular stood in their way of saving the empire: the Armenians.