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Dubai: Blast from past: The Ottoman shadow on Arab politics

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  • Dubai: Blast from past: The Ottoman shadow on Arab politics

    Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
    June 22 2005


    Blast from past: The Ottoman shadow on Arab politics
    BY MATEIN KHALID



    A HUNDRED years after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the shock
    waves of its death are still rattling the Middle East. Both Arabs and
    Turks have not come to terms with their common imperial Ottoman past.


    Kemal Ataturk ridiculed and demonised the Ottoman heritage of the
    Turkish Republic, as did the generation of Arab nationalists who
    fought the Sultan's armies in Syria, Hijaz and Palestine. Ataturk
    deposed the last sultan, abolished the caliphate Sultan Selim had
    claimed from the Mamluks, replaced the Shariah with the Swiss civil
    code and replaced the Ottoman Umma with an aggressively secular
    Anatolian nationalism.

    Ataturk banned the fez, introduced by the Napoleonic era Sultan
    Mehmet II as a symbol of the modern Turk, as anachronistic. Turkey
    abandoned its historic ties to the Arab world. It was more than
    history as amnesia. Ataturk performed a lobotomy on the Ottoman past.

    Yet the Ottoman shadow still lingers in the landscape, politics and
    souls of Islamic societies from Sarajevo to Sanaa to Sharjah. On
    Khalid Lagoon in the UAE "capital of Culture", I see mosques with
    slender Byzantine minarets reminiscent of the Sulemaniya in Istanbul.
    There are beautiful Ottoman mansions with latticed windows in Jeddah,
    Beirut, Alexandria, Belgrade and Sarajevo. In fact, the hillsides of
    the Bosnian capital evoke the old Ottoman place names long after
    Tito's Yugoslavia has vanished into a bitter memory.

    The Ottoman ghosts haunt Arab politics. Take Iraq, for instance. The
    Hashemite kingdom of Iraq was created out of the Ottoman vilayets of
    Baghdad, Mosul and Basra (which, Saddam argued in August 1990,
    included the Gulf emirate of Kuwait). Yet the Turkish republic never
    accepted the Iraq Churchill sketched on a napkin and created out of
    the carcass of its Mesopotamian empire at the Cairo conference. The
    tragedy of Kurdistan was spawned amid the Machiavellian cynicism of
    wartime British realpolitik in the Middle East.

    As late as 1997, President Suleiman Demirel questioned why the
    British gave the Ottoman oil rich province of Mosul to Iraq. The
    Turkish republic sent troops across the international border into
    northern Iraq on successive occasions and strangled the idea of a
    Kurdish state that might well inflame the secessionist psyche of
    Turkey's own "mountain Turks" in the east, whose PKK civil war has
    claimed 30,000 lives.

    At fateful moments of Iraqi history, after Saddam's armies were
    routed at Fao in 1982 and Kuwait in 1991, Turkey signalled its
    intention to annex Mosul if the Baathist regime in Baghdad fell. Even
    Turkish-Syrian relations are held hostage to the Ottoman past. In
    1998, Ankara almost went to war over the House of Assad's covert
    assistance to the PKK and Damascus still resents colonial France's
    decision to wrest Hatay province from Syrian. The Turkish republic's
    hostility to Alawite Syria and theocratic Iran has echoes of the
    Ottoman sultan's role as the standard bearer of Sunni orthodoxy
    against the Persian Shia and esoteric Islamic sects of Bilad Shaam.

    Even Israel's close strategic relations with Turkey are a legacy of
    the Ottoman past. The Jews of Istanbul are the descendants of the
    Sephardis expelled by the Spanish Inquisition after the fall of the
    Moorish Nasirid emirate of Granada in 1492. Sultan Selim welcomed the
    Andalusian Jews himself at Galata and their descendants became the
    empire's richest bankers, grand viziers, pashas and scholars.

    While Christian Europe persecuted its Jews, the Ottomans showered
    their most brilliant minds with the highest offices of state. In
    fact, the first Zionist aliyas (settlements) in Palestine would not
    have been possible without the Sublime Porte's consent though Sultan
    Abdel Hamid angrily rejected the Jewish agency's offer to literally
    buy Palestine. The Ottoman cult of absolute rule, bureaucratic
    politics, an elite palace guard and Western-centric reform was a
    template for generations of Middle East dictators. If Ataturk was a
    son of the Enlightenment, so were Reza Khan Pahlavi, Habib Bourguiba,
    and Jamal Nasser.

    The Ottoman empire was the antithesis of the sort of nineteenth
    century nationalism, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution,
    that swept across the Balkans, the Levant, Iran and the Hijaz as the
    "sick man of Europe" went into its final, fatal convulsion in 1918.
    Armenian, Azerbaijani, Iraqi, Syrian Lebanese, Egyptian, Greek,
    Serbian, Bulgarian and Saudi nationalism were all nurtured in the
    geopolitical chaos that followed the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

    So many of the tragedies that haunt the Middle East in our time have
    their origins in the British-French plots to dismember the Ottoman
    empire. What if the Allies had not double-crossed Sharif Hussein and
    his sons after the success of the Arab revolt in the Hijaz? What if
    the French had not expelled the Hashemite Prince Faisal from
    Damascus, not created a Maronite enclave in Mount Lebanon, not
    recruited Alawite peasants from Latakia in the Syrian Army? What if
    the Hijaz Railway still carried pilgrims from Bosnia, Turkey and
    Albania to Makkah? What if Lord Balfour's HM Government had not
    viewed with favour the establishment of a Jewish national home in
    Palestine?

    The Ottoman past continues to influence the political culture and
    international relations of the Arab world even today. Take the
    Ottoman millet system, where Istanbul ruled multiethnic provinces via
    hierarchies of religious leaders.

    The modern Middle East intelligence state owes its model to Sultan
    Abdel Hamid's secret police, the most expensive, ruthless and
    extensive organ of state in the Ottoman twilight. Strange, much as
    the Arab tried to forget their Turkish past, the modern warlords,
    spymasters are still haunted by familiar Ottoman ghosts. After all,
    for six hundred years, the epicentre of world politics was not the
    Kremlin, the Elysee Palace, Whitehall or the White House but the
    palace, kiosks and terraces of Topkapi Serai on the Sea of Marmara,
    the citadel of the House of Osman for six centuries.

    Matein Khalid is a Dubai based investment banker

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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