Ottoman Turkish Quotes

We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

In Bilaath, I said. Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain. In fact, one English colloquial name for Britain, Blighty, somewhat archaic these days and mainly reserved for comedy, is derived from the word Bilaath, which was current in India in the time of the British Raj.

Damlaya damlaya göl olur. Drop by drop a lake is formed. - A Turkish proverb

Albania’s future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe

The government here is entirely in the hands of the army. The Grand Signor [Ottoman Sultan], with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janissary's frown.

The Turks have an army that goes back to the Ottoman Empire. Our army is very new. But there's a world of difference already between the early 1990's and now (early 2000). The food and pay, it's all better.

The prohibition of wine is a very wise maxism and meant for the common people, being the source of disorders amongst them, but that the prophet never designed to confine those that knew how to use it with moderation.

Sovereignty and kingship are never decided by academic debate. They are seized by force. The Ottoman dynasty appropriated by force the government of the Turks, and reigned over them for six centuries. Now the Turkish nation has effectively gained possession of its sovereignty… This is an accomplished fact… If those assembled here … see the matter in its natural light, we shall all agree. Otherwise, facts will still prevail, but some heads may roll.

The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.

...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end. ....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178)

Before the First World War, in many places military officers who had not taken part directly in operations became liable one way or another under the jurisprudence and military law of their own countries. But the question of prosecuting the political authorities--the people who ran the country--had not yet been considered. Calls during the war to hold the Ottoman political elite and the German kaiser personally responsible for the Armenian massacres and to prosecute them on those grounds heralded a turning point. From that point on, personal responsibility and prosecution--even of those in the political sphere--became one of the most important principles of international law.

The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the devshirme, to serve as courtiers and soldiers in his Jeni Ceri – new army – the Janissary corps; the cavalry was still drawn from Turkish levies under Anatolian beys. Those enslaved would number uncountable millions. His harem was simultaneously drawn from girls stolen from Slavic villages or Greek islands, often sold via Mongol khans and Italian slave traders. While Ottomans were Turks from Turkmenistan, Murad’s system meant that the Ottomans were often the sons of Slavic concubines, and viziers were often Slavs too.

In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.

Osmanlı Karaman beylikleri arasındaki mücadeleyi anlatan, ayrıca şaman bir karakterin şamanlık gelişimiyle tüyleri diken diken eden ayrıntılar sunan tarihi roman serisinin ikinci kitabı da akıcı, tarihi bilgilerle dolu doluydu. Üstelik Edirne'den çıkan karakterlerin ilgi çekici mekanlara olan seyahatlari beni tarihi bir yolculuğa çıkardı. Çok keyif aldım. Kumru ve Bengi diğer Osmanlı şehzadeleri ile Edirne'den çıkıp ikinci Osmanlı payitahtı Bursa'ya ve çevredeki başka şehirlere gittiler. Bursa'nın tasvirleri çok hoşuma gitti. Ayrıca diğer karakterlerin de kişisel gelişimine daha çok girildi. Kötü olduğunu sandığımız bazı kişilerin aslında daha karmaşık karakterlere sahip iyi-kötü arasında kişiler olduğunu görmüş oldum. Bu da kitap okurken keyif aldığım bir noktadır çünkü hiçbir insan sadece iyi sadece kötü değildir. Karakterler kişilikler psikolojik değişimler katman katman açılır, bu konuda da çok tatmin oldum. Kitap herkesin bildiği ünlü Ankara Savaşı ile sona erdi ve savaş sahnelerinde her şey gözümde apaçık canlandı. Olaylar açılırken ve sırlar ortaya çıkarken savaş alanında kılıç kullanan şehzadelerin bazılarının babalarını savaş alanında bırakıp kaçması çok acıklıydı. Dönem tarihini biraz bilenler Ankara savaşında kimlerin kaçtığını iyi bilir :D Sonuç olarak Larende'nin Varisleri çok keyif aldığım ve herkese tavsiye ettiğim bir kitaptı.

In this sense, Islamism in Turkey was at least partly an unintended consequence of Kemalism. The latter’s zeal against Ottoman tradition impoverished Islamic thought, suppressed even its most moderate proponents (such as the Nur movement), and created a vacuum that a radical Islamism of a foreign origin could fill. The 1960 coup contributed to this void by destroying the Democrat Party, whose center-right umbrella had been uniting nearly the entire Islamic camp. Had Menderes survived, politically and literally, Erbakan and his Milli Görüş probably would not have found an audience. That’s why Turkish historian Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, a respected expert on Turkish Islam, thinks that the country’s radical Islamists can well be regarded as the “illegitimate sons” of its radical secularists. The Turkish Herodians, in other words, unintentionally helped create Turkish zealots.

We (Turkish soldiers) were met by just a few men on horseback in Caucasian dress, like fairy-tale soldiers with silver-plated sabres in their belts. Our small procession seemed to me to be the harbinger of a great liberation, the awakening of the vast land of Turan. It was a new Ergenekon.

Our duty would be to create, in the place of the outdated (Ottoman) Empire, a new national entity in harmony with its historic and linguistic unity and its desires.

This period also saw the Yeni Ceri (“New Soldiers” or Janissaries) win their war of influence against the Ottoman nobility. There was a natural rivalry between the Turkish nobility who formed the Ottomans’ cavalry (the Sipahis), and the Janissaries, the Ottoman foot soldiers who were initially foreign slaves coming from Christian villages under Ottoman occupation. This rivalry, also largely fueled by the Sultan who saw it as a way to prevent both sides from allying against him, turned in the Janissaries’ favor during the mid-sixteenth century, leading to the confiscation of the Sipahis’ lands, and the consolidation of their power.

Voltaire also keenly endorsed Catherine of Russia’s plan to ‘preach tolerance with bayonets at the end of their rifles’ in Poland. Exhorting Catherine to learn Greek as she prepared to attack the Ottoman Empire, he added that ‘it is absolutely necessary to chase from Europe the Turkish language, as well as all those who speak it’.

1453: Coffee is introduced to Constantinople by Ottoman Turks. The world's first coffee shop, Kiva Han, opens there in 1475. Turkish law makes it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he fails to provide her with her daily quota of coffee.

and liberating the Byzantine capital from the Turkish blockade.

He would have learned Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish;

The boys were forced to convert to Islam; they learned Turkish

where they would learn Arabic, Persian, and Turkish

the period from which the Turkish state emerged as a true empire. As for Mehmed II, it was only the beginning

successfully led the troops of the Greco-Turkish alliance against the Serbians when they invaded southern Thrace,

Murad retaliated, turning his attention from the east, where he had proven his dominance against the other Turkish principalities,

In Turkey there is a clear combination of Greek / Roman / Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, and this is because of the cultural mesh between the East and the West that occurred as a result of the inclusive nature of the Ottomans.

The new Turkish identity, which I call Muslim nationalism, is that of a pious Muslim Turk whose subjectivity and vision for the future is shaped by an imperial Ottoman past overlaid onto a republican state framework, but divorced from the Kemalist state project.

On the theme of the bewilderment of ordinary people when confronted by speakers of Ottoman, there is the tale of the sarrkli hoca (the turbanned cleric), who, wishing to buy some mutton, addresses a butcher's boy with the words Ty sagird-i l:assab, lahm-i ganeniden bitki ve bilvexin band 'ita cyler misin?' (0 apprentice of the butcher, wilt thou bestow on me one oke avoirdupois of ovine flesh?). The perplexed boy can only reply 'Amin!' (Amen!).

The author was told by Fahir Iz that, during his military service in the neighbourhood of Erzurum just before the Second World War, he had got into conversation with a shepherd, whom he shocked by using the words `Biz Torkler' (We Turks). `Estagfurullah!' was the reply, `Ben Torkiim, zat-i aliniz Osmanlismrz' (Lord have mercy! I'm a Turk; Your Excellency is an Ottoman).

The Oasis compound was a fortress and an encampment for high Turkish army officials, long ago. Built around the late 1600s, it became a command post for the Ottoman Empire, hence, the beautifully ornate Moorish mosaic inlays around the Bahriji buildings. Since photography of the school was not allowed, I can only describe the school's marvelous historical architecture by reference to other structures that vaguely resembled the school’s architectural splendor.

All the Turkish prisoners were taken out of the dungeons and slaughtered on the ramparts. He sent a messenger to the commander of the garrison at Mdina with orders to kill all his prisoners, but slowly, one a day, every day. Later that day the guns of Saint Angelo opened up. A volley of human heads bombarded the Ottoman camp across the water. There would be no repeat of the chivalrous truce at Rhodes.

After visiting the Krupp factories, the Turkish party spent ten days in Berlin, where Vahdettin told a German journalist that women had begun to work in public in Turkey, and that although progress was slow, ‘we are making the effort to give equal rights to our women’.88 Mustafa Kemal was not alone in favouring women’s emancipation in the Ottoman state.

The book is limited in time and space to addressing population policies in the Young Turk era (1913–50) in Eastern Turkey. It begins with the Young Turk seizure of power in the 1913 coup d’état and ends with the end of Young Turk rule in 1950.1 It will describe how Eastern Turkey as an ethnically heterogeneous imperial shatter zone was subjected to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at transforming the region into an ethnically homogeneous space to be included into the Turkish nation state. How was Eastern Turkey moulded by Young Turk population policies? Why was the Turkish process of nation formation so violent in this region? Why do political elites launch policies to increase homogeneity in their societies? These will be the guiding questions in this book. The focus will be on an account of the implementation of these nationalist population policies in the eastern provinces, in order to discuss the policies in detail. This book argues that the Young Turk nationalist elite launched this process of societal transformation in order to establish and sustain a Turkish nation state. In this process, ethnically heterogeneous borderland regions were subjected to more encompassing and more violent forms of population policies than the core regions. The eastern provinces were one of these special regions. This book highlights the role played by the Young Turks in the identification of the population of the eastern provinces as an object of knowledge, management, and radical change. It details the emergence of a wide range of new technologies of population policies, including physical destruction, deportation, forced assimilation, and memory politics, which converged in an attempt to increase population homogeneity within the nation state. The common denominator to which these phenomena can be reduced is the main theme of population policies. The dominant paradigms in the historiography of the great dynastic land empires can be characterized as a nationalist paradigm and a statist paradigm. According to the first paradigm, the phenomenon of nationalism led to the dissolution of the empires. Centrifugal nationalism nibbled at the imperial system for several decades until the empire crumbled into nation states. Due to their relatively early acquaintance with nationalism, the main force behind this nationalist disintegration was often located among minority groups such as Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, and Armenians. In this interpretation, the Young Turks too, were a nationalist movement that reacted to minority nationalisms by pushing for the establishment of a Turkish state in the Ottoman Anatolian heartland. In 1923, they succeeded when a unitary Turkish nation state rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The expulsion and welcome of the Jews provides a striking contrast between Christian persecution and Muslim tolerance, and in economic terms between western Europe’s short-sightedness and sound Ottoman investment.

a kind of Turkish parallel to the German idea of lebensraum, the future was to be found in the East—in an invasion of Russia to reclaim ancestral lands from the thirteenth century and earlier, not only those of the Ottomans but of the other great Turanians, the Mongols and the Huns.*21

Kemal (who would later take the name Ataturk) went on to lead the Turkish National Movement in a war against Greece, winning back territory the Ottomans had forfeited. In 1923 Kemal would preside over the creation of the secular nation of Turkey. For that reason, secular Turks have long viewed the battle of Canakkale as marking the birth of their modern society.

The capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople, still carried the name given to it in the year 330, when it became the imperial capital for the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. In World War I literature it is sometimes referred to as Istanbul or Stambul, but Constantinople did not officially become Istanbul until the Turkish parliament passed legislation to this effect in 1930.

Changes elsewhere in the Middle East swept a region racked by continued instability. Following a bitter clash with Allied occupying forces, the nucleus of a Turkish republic arose in Anatolia in place of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Britain failed to impose a one-sided treaty on Iran and withdrew its occupation forces in 1921. France established itself in Syria and Lebanon, after crushing Amir Faysal’s state. Egyptians revolting against their British overlords in 1919 were suppressed with great difficulty by the colonial power, which was finally obliged to grant Egypt a simulacrum of independence in 1922. Something analogous occurred in Iraq, where a widespread armed uprising in 1920 obliged the British to grant self-rule under an Arab monarchy headed by the same Amir Faysal, now with the title of king. Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.

Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had controlled the Middle East for some four hundred years, the area that is now Syria and Lebanon fell to France.

«Օրենքը պարզապես վերացնելով հարցը չի փակվի… Այդ օրենքը դանակ է, կացին, որը պատասխանատու է բազմաթիվ հանցագործությունների համար։ Եկեք չփորձենք շտկել այդ հանցագործությունները՝ սոսկ դանակը բթացնելով… Դրա պատճառով շատ անմեղների արյուն է թափվել… Անհնար է որոշել այրված կամ ոչնչացած տների թիվը։ Այդ երեքտողանոց օրենքը սարսափելի բան է։ Մենք պետք է վերափոխենք դրա ձևն ու բովանդակությունը… Սակայն այն վերացնելով՝ մենք պետք է նաև շարժվենք դեպի պատիժն առանց բացառության բոլոր նրանց համար, ովքեր, հիմնվելով այդ օրենքի վրա, կործանեցին երկիրը. նրանք, ովքեր սպանությունն գործելու համար օգտագործեցին ու չարաշահեցին այդ օրենքը, պետք է պատժվեն։ Հարցը զենքերը վայր դնելով չի փակվում»։ — Արթին Բոշգեզենյան, Օսմանյան կայսրության խորհրդարանի հայազգի պատգամավոր

The worst military defeat for the Ottoman Empire came in the Great Turkish War which raged in Europe from 1683 to 1699.

The Crown would appoint the Massachusetts Council in lieu of the former council elected by the legislature. Thirty-six men were appointed by "mandamus"—an order commanding a supposed legal duty—to serve in this council, but many of them refused, and others were persuaded or intimidated into resigning.4 These "Mandamus Counselors" became known to the patriots as "the Divan," after the privy council of the Ottoman Empire. These Turkish rulers were considered perhaps the world's most absolute despots.

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Since the fall of Kiev in 1240, the western lands of Galicia and Volhynia had served as the stage for major developments in Ukrainian history. However, by the end of the i6th century, the focus of events shifted back to the east, to the lands of the Dnieper basin that had long been partially depopulated. In that vast frontier, which at that time was specifically referred to as Ukraina - the land on the periphery of the civilized world - the age-old struggle of the sedentary population against the nomads flared up with renewed intensity, fueled by the bitter confrontation between Christianity and Islam. The oppressive conditions that obtained in the settled western areas provided numerous recruits who preferred the dangers of frontier life to serfdom. As a result, a new class of Cossack-frontiersmen emerged. Initially, the Cossacks concentrated on pushing back the Tatars, thereby opening up the frontier to colonization. But as they honed their military and organizational skills and won ever more impressive victories against the Tatars and their Ottoman Turkish over lords, Ukrainian society came to perceive the Cossacks not only as champions against the Muslim threat, but also as defenders against the religion, national and socioeconomic oppression of the Polish szlachta. Gradually, moving to the forefront of Ukrainian society, the Cossacks became heavily involved in the resolution of these central issues in Ukrainian life and, for the next several centuries, provided Ukrainian society with the leadership it had lost as a result of the Polonization of the Ukrainian nobility.

Whatever it did to Churchill, Gallipoli saw the birth of a nation, or rather two. By no remote consequence of the campaign, Mustafa Kemal would become Kemal Ataturk, while the rump of the Ottoman Empire became a Turkish national state under his leadership. And Australia would change also. The headstone of one Australian infantryman bears the words, chosen by his parents, ‘When day break, duty done for King and Country,’ but that was not how later generations of Australians would feel. ‘From a place you’ve never heard of, comes a story you’ll never forget’ was the quaint slogan advertising the 1981 Australian movie Gallipoli, which helped launch Mel Gibson’s career, but every Australian has heard of it.

Although largely unnoticed by the Allies, and still not well known in his own country, Mustafa Kemal had come out of the war in charge of the longest front held by the Ottoman armed forces. He was only 37, and still a Brigadier. But his professional reputation was high among Turkish commanders. True, they knew him as a difficult man to work with. He was ambitious and wilful. He had strong political views, and played politics to get his way. He was convinced he knew best. But then he usually did, for he had good sense, a rare quality in a world that had torn itself to pieces.

The failure of Byzantium to uphold its territorial integrity from 1180 or defend itself 1203-1204 did not suggest it could necessarily have presented much of a bastion against the later Turkish invasion, however unpleasant the fourth crusade did not lead to the triumph of the Ottoman Turk

was already in Turkish hands.

The Son of a vacuum Among the tall trees he sat lost, broken, alone again, among a number of illegal immigrants, he raised his head to him without fear, as nothing in this world is worth attention. -He said: I am not a hero; I am nothing but a child looking for Eid. The Turkmen of Iraq, are the descendants of Turkish immigrants to Mesopotamia through successive eras of history. Before and after the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, countries crossed from here, and empires that were born and disappeared, and still, preserve their Turkish identity. Although, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the Arab world, they now live in one of its countries. Kirkuk, one of the heavens of God on earth, is one of the northern governorates of Iraq in which they live. The Kurdish race is shared with them, a race out of many in Iraq. Two children of two different ethnicities, playing in a village square in Kirkuk province when the news came from Baghdad, of a new military coup. Without delay, Saddam Hussein took over the reins of power, and faster than that, Iraq was plunged into successive wars that began in 1980 with its neighbor Iran, a war that lasted eight years. Iraq barely rested for two years, and in the third, a new war in Kuwait, which did not end in the best condition as the leader had hoped, as he was expelled from it after the establishment of an international coalition to liberate it, led by the United States of America. Iraq entered a new phase of suffering, a siege that lasted more than ten years, and ended up with the removal of Saddam Hussein from his power followed by the US occupation of it in 2003. As the father goes, he returns from this road, there is no way back but from it. As the date approaches, the son stands on the back of that hill waiting for him to return. From far away he waved a longing, with a bag of dreams in his hands, a bag of candy in his pocket, and a poem of longing by a Turkmen poet who absorb Arabic, whose words danced on his lips, in his heart. -When will you come back, dad? -On the Eid, wait for me on the hill, you will see me coming from the road, waving, carrying your gifts. The father bid his son farewell to the Arab Shiite city of Basra, on the border with Iran, after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, as the homeland is calling its men, or perhaps the leader is calling his subjects. In Iraq, as in many countries of the Arab world, the homeland is the leader, and the leader is the homeland. Months passed, the child eagerly anticipating the coming of the feast, but the father hurried to return without an appointment, loaded on the shoulders, the passion reached its extent in the martyr’s chest, with a sheet of paper in his pocket on which he wrote: Every morning takes me nostalgic for you, to the jasmine flower, oh, melody in the heart, oh balm I sip every while, To you, I extend a hand and a fire that ignites in the soul a buried love, night shakes me with tears in my eyes, my longing for you has shaped me into dreams, stretching footsteps to the left and to the right, gleam, calling out for me, you scream, waking me up to the glimpse of the light of life in your face, a thousand sparkles, in your eyes, a meaning of survival, a smile, and a glace, Eid comes to you as a companion, without, life yet has no trace, for roses, necklaces of love, so that you amaze. -Where is Ruslan? On the morning of the feast day, at the door of his house, the kids asked his mother, -with tears in her eyes: He went to meet his father. A moment of silence fell over the children, -Raman, with a little gut: Aunt, do you mean he went to the cemetery? -Mother: He went to meet him at those hills.

devshirme viziers occupying high-ranking positions, but they also acted as a balancing core to the Turkish nobility,

but also made sure the Turkish principalities of Anatolia were aware of the Ottoman state’s strength.

They were keener on waging holy wars in true Turkish fashion, just as their ancestors had done for centuries.

many Turkish princes who had previously been under the sultan’s rule defected to the shah, converting to Shia Islam

A year and a half had passed since Berchtold had first taken charge of the Viennese Foreign Office, and in this time all his efforts at diplomacy had ended in failure. When the Balkan War had started Berchtold had been so confident of a Turkish victory that he had then declared that, no matter what happened at the front, the status quo in the Balkans would remain unchanged. He had spoken recklessly, and too soon, for almost at once the rebels in the Turkish provinces had chased the Ottoman armies from the field, and so there had been no question, after such dizzying triumphs, of ordering the victorious insurgents to withdraw behind their former frontiers. Berchtold had then found himself in the unenviable position of having to go cap in hand to the London Conference, defend his now untenable former convictions and somehow save what he could from the debacle he had failed to foresee.

The vulgar Turk is very different from what is spoken at court, 'tis as ridiculous to make use of the expressions commonly used in speaking to a great man or lady, as it would be to talk broad Yorkshire or Somershetshire in the drawing room.

Strictures and prohibitions availed nothing. The fatwas, the talk, made no impression on the people. One coffeehouse was opened after another, and men would gather together, with great eagerness and enthusiasm, to drink coffee... such things do not admit of a perpetual ban.

In a fascinating extension of the same theme, the Turkish historian I˙lber Ortayı suggests that Mehmet now saw Ottoman Constantinople itself as the “Third Rome”—successor to pagan Rome in Italy and to Eastern Orthodox “Rome” in Constantinople—now an “Islamic Rome” in Istanbul. In this view, Islam did not represent a rejection of Eastern Christianity; rather, in powerful continuity, it picked up and smoothly adopted much of the Eastern imperial tradition from Christianity and integrated it into what would be the world’s biggest and longest-lasting Muslim empire. Empire looms larger than faith in this great transition.

Fear of Russian expansionism was at the heart of the Porte’s policy. The Turkish ambassador told Deedes that if the Allies won the war, they would cause or allow the Ottoman Empire to be partitioned, while if Germany won the war, no such partition would be allowed to occur. That was why the Porte had become pro-German… (Enver did not mention that, in addition, Germany had given a written guarantee to protect Ottoman territory…)

The history of this place with three names–Byzantion or Byzantium (c. 670 BC to AD 330), Constantinople, al-Qustantiniyye then Kostantiniyye (c. AD 330 to 1930), Istanbul or Stimboli (c. AD 1453 onwards)–is often isolated into discrete blocks: ancient, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turkish.

Nevlinsky had a more realistic, or more opportunistic, approach. He suggested that Herzl, as an eminent journalist connected with one of Europe’s most influential newspapers, could be of great service to the Ottoman Empire’s public relations regarding its persecuted Armenian minority. Accordingly, Herzl provided his newspaper a flattering interview with the Grand Vizier, Halil Rifat Pasha, and a pro-Turkish account of recent mass killings in Armenia as well as the empire’s conflict with Greece over Crete. Herzl was not unsympathetic to the Armenian cause, but he believed that Armenian “revolutionaries” were bringing misfortune upon themselves and, in a meeting in London with the Armenian nationalist leader Avetis Nazarbekian, urged him to order his followers to lay down their arms. Herzl may well have viewed the Armenians with compassion, but he also knew that so long as the “Armenian Question” exercised the sultan, he would not brook any consideration of concessions to another non-Muslim minority.

I am Lebanese and proud to be so. I am not Turkish, and I am proud not to be. I belong to a nation whose splendors I praise, but there is no state to which I might belong or where I might find refuge. I am a Christian and proud to be so. But I love the Arab prophet and I appeal to the greatness of his name; I cherish the glory of Islam and fear lest it decay. I am a Levantine, and although in exile I remain Levantine by temperament, Syrian by inclination and Lebanese by feeling. I am oriental, and the Orient has an ancient civilization of magical beauty and of fragrant and exquisite taste. Although I admire the present state of Western civilization and the high degree of development and progress it has attained, the East will remain the country of my dreams and the setting for my desires and longings. Some of you treat me as a renegade; for I hate the Ottoman state and hope it will disappear. To those amongst you Gibran answers: `I hate the Ottoman state, for I love Islam, and I hope that Islam will once again find its splendor.' What is it in the Ottoman state that so attracts you, since it has destroyed the edifices of your glory? ...Did Islamic civilization not die with the start of the Ottoman conquests? Has the green flag not been hidden in the fog since the red flag appeared over a mass of skulls? As a Christian, as one who has harbored Jesus in one half of his heart and Mohammed in the other, I promise you that if Islam does not succeed in defeating the Ottoman state the nations of Europe will dominate Islam. If no one among you rises up against the enemy within, before the end of this generation the Levant will be in the hands of those whose skins are white and whose eyes are blue.

In 1857, in response to the massive numbers of forced migrant Muslim Tatars from the Crimea, the Ottoman Sublime Porte promulgated a Refugee Code (also translated from Ottoman Turkish into English in some texts as the Immigration Law). Responding to the grave need to provide shelter and food for its subjects, expelled initially from the Crimea but also from other border-land regions with Russia, the Ottoman government set out to swiftly disperse and integrate its forced migrants. It aimed to provide ‘immigrant’ families and groups with only a minimum amount of capital, with plots of state land to start life anew in agricultural activity. Families who applied for land in Rumeli (the European side of the Ottoman Empire) were granted exemptions from taxation and conscription obligations for a period of six years. If, however, they chose to continue their migration into Anatolia and Greater Syria then their exemptions extended for twelve years. In both cases the new immigrants had to agree to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it for twenty years. Ottoman reformers were eager to see the largely depopulated Syrian provinces revived by these new migrants after several centuries of misadministration, war, famine, and several pandemics of the plague (Shaw and Shaw 1977: 115). The twenty-year clause also meant that these newcomers were released from the pressure of nineteenth-century property developers, as there was a kind of lien on the property, prohibiting its onward sale for twenty years.