The Turkish generals salvaged Anatolia for their state, but despite the passage of a century the land still feels physically and culturally hollow without its two million Armenians. All but a tenth were killed, exiled, or abducted and forced to convert. As they were marched into the desert, locals plucked women and children for concubines and beslame, or servant girls. Their owners changed the girls’ names, erased their identities, and transposed one religion for another. Atatürk himself adopted an Armenian, raised her as his daughter, and called her Sabiha Gökçen. Her name survives as one of Istanbul’s two international airports. Bereft of their women and children, Western Armenians lost the means to propagate and were denied a future.
Like their southeastern European counterparts, the Turkish generals transformed their Ottoman inheritance from a multi-faith to a mono-faith realm.
Religion became the badge of national identity. “Under the new definition any real Turk had to be a Sunni Muslim,” says Edham Eldem, a Turkish historian and descendent of Enver Pasha, the Young Turk’s Minister of War.
Catholic processions were banned from the streets for the first time since the sixteenth century. In 1942, the government imposed a capital tax, the Varlık Vergisi, on non-Muslims, reminiscent of the jizya, a tax that non-Muslim subjects historically had to pay Muslim conquerors. Amidst the Cyprus crisis in 1955, Greeks were expelled en masse from the mainland, including many who only spoke Turkish. Turkey’s population of Greeks numbered 300,000 in 1920 and fell to 3,000 by the end of the century. Istanbul’s last remaining Greek school has just 50 students. The irony was that the architects of the liquidation of religious pluralism were dogmatically secular. The Kemalists banned any expression of religion in public. They abolished the caliphate, sharia courts, Sufi lodges, and closed thousands of mosques.
Turkey’s founders imposed a process of forced assimilation on the non-Turkish Muslims that remained. School textbooks reproduced the notion of an empire that was great when it was purely Turk, and atrophied as alien peoples seeped into its governing apparatus. The Kurds, who comprised perhaps 20 percent of the population, were subject to one of the world’s most comprehensive programs of assimilation. Kurdish was banned, and its place names and history Turkified. “I couldn’t speak to my grandmother,” says Nurcan Baysal, a Kurdish writer and political activist in Diyarbakır, who grew up speaking Turkish.
Anatolia’s transformation into a Turkish land was a misreading of history. The sultans never described themselves as Turks. Most of them were born to slave girls from across the empire. Like their subjects, they were a hybrid reflecting the empire’s multicultural mix. And when, with British encouragement, Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924, the Kurds rose up the following year under Sheikh Said, a leader of the Sufi Naqshabandi order, in a failed rebellion aimed at restoring the caliphate.
On the thirteenth floor of his modest housing estate, Orhan Osmanoğlu nurses a French handkerchief embossed with the letter “H,” his sole surviving possession from his great-great-grandfather Sultan Abdülhamid II. Allowed to return with other Ottoman relatives of the caliphs in 1974, he lives a modest life far removed from his ancestors’ grandeur. “The republic’s greatest sin was to Turkify,” says Osmanoğlu. “The problem began with the word Turk. They didn’t want other nationalities. The Ottomans had no problem with the Armenians. The Young Turks are the reason for the fall of the multi-cultural state.”
Thrust out of their Ottoman embrace, Arabs and Jews followed Turks in filling the vacuum with a notional ethnic nationalism.
In the empire’s twilight years, Istanbul was abuzz with lawyers and students from across the region, imbibing the nationalism of the Young Turks and applying it to their own kind. Like the Young Turks, they were Westernized, secular, and overwhelmingly anti-religious. They aspired to supplant the empire’s religious-based hierarchies with new exclusively ethnic ones, give their religious communities a territorial base and thereby assume power. In the secret societies they formed they plotted the dissection of the empire, creating new societies from old, and crafting Zionism out of Judaism and Arab nationalism out of Islam. Before he took the name of Ben-Gurion, David Grün attended the law schools in Salonika and Istanbul where Turkish ideologues were fashinoning the new nationalism. Studying with him were Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s future second president, and Israel Shochat, the founder of the second Zionist movement’s militia arm, Hashomer, and together they studied in Ottoman Turkish and developed a young Jewish variant of the Young Turks’ program. Though charier of dismantling the world’s last major Muslim power, Arab nationalists formed al-Muntada al-Adabi, or the literary forum, with branches in Syria and Iraq.
Western powers gave them succor, wise to the advantages of fostering dependencies in the former empire. Drawing on the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, which had championed the defense of minority rights in Europe, they encouraged indigenous populations to slough off the yoke of occupying Turks. Britain gave sanctuary to Arab nationalists in Cairo, and France hosted the Arab Congress in Paris in 1913. Having conquered the Middle East in the final throes of the First World War, the two powers began demarcating the former Ottoman Empire along sectarian lines. Syria’s French governors divided Syria between the Sunnis in the country’s central spine running from Aleppo to Damascus and a host of other minorities on its fringe. Lebanon was hived off from Syria and entrusted to Christian rule in 1920. The Alawites were assigned a state in the mountains above Latakia, and the Druze their fiefdom in their mountain, Jebel Druze, in the south. Britain promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine.
The paradox is that while the Second World War exposed the danger of unfettered nationalism and resulted in the creation of anti-national, federal models in Europe, it precipitated the opposite in the Middle East. The Zionist movement’s transfer of the Palestinian population fell short of the Young Turks’ level of violence, but, combined with the chaos of war, it led to a similar change in the ethnic balance. By the end of the 1948 war, around 80 percent of the Palestinian population had left the new state of Israel. The new prime minister, Ben-Gurion, herded most of the remnants into demarcated enclosures and kept them under military rule until most of their land had been appropriated and their historic towns and villages reduced to rubble. Israeli leaders denied Palestinian loss and criminalized commemoration of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, in public places. They promoted the mass ingathering of their co-religionists from across Europe and the Middle East to consolidate their majority.
Arab nationalists, too, forcibly sought to establish new nation-states, replacing the Ottoman reality of a diverse and composite empire with the monochrome ideal of “an Arab world.” For the most part, they preferred to achieve unity through assimilation rather than expulsion. They rewrote the histories of non-Arabs, renamed their towns and hills, and treated non-Arabic languages as alien. History textbooks celebrated a classical golden age of Islam that only began to rust when incoming Turkish mercenaries diluted Arab armies under the ninth-century Abbasid caliph al-Mu’tasim. Iraq’s Ba’ath Party launched successive campaigns of Arabization, called al-Anfal (the spoils), replacing Kurds with Shias from the south. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi branded the Berbers “mountain Arabs” and banned their language, Tamazight.
Like the Young Turks, Arab nationalists were initially inclusive of other religions. Michel Aflaq, the secular intellectual who founded the Ba’ath Party, was Christian. His call to replace the confessional basis of statehood with ethnic Arab kinship appealed to non-Muslims, particularly those entering the armed forces, which tradition and Islamic legal codes deemed an exclusively Sunni domain. As they rose through the military ranks, minorities in Syria and Iraq captured the core of the state. “The state for all, and religion for God,” ran the slogan of the Ba’ath Party, which sought to restrict religion to the personal sphere.
But that religious inclusivity faced challenges from the first. Aflaq had noted the overlap between religion and ethnicity. “The strength of Islam, which in the past