Asking "how can this homeland be saved"…

How we were defeated at the end of the First World War, the collapse of the Ottoman State as a result of that defeat, and our retreat from a vast empire back to Anatolia have not been dwelt upon enough. For years, because we could not bring ourselves to see defeat as suited to us, we listened to stories that our allies, the Germans, had been defeated in the war and that we were therefore judged defeated by default. Otherwise, how could we have been defeated?

Another story is still repeated without any questioning, and without being measured against either historical data or the standards of logic: the Arabs stabbed us in the back, and since we therefore had no chance of holding on in the Arab geography, we withdrew. To accept that the great Ottoman army collapsed because Sharif Hussein or a few Arab tribes betrayed and switched sides is something that can be made acceptable neither to reason, nor to logic, nor to the facts of history.

In truth, there were Arabs who continued the war in the Ottoman ranks until the last day, even after the Ottomans had withdrawn from the war, who fought in favor of the Ottomans and wrote epics on that path. We have written about these before. It is enough to look at Gallipoli, Sarıkamış, Kut al-Amara, the Senussi movement, the Defense of Medina, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, Fevzi Kavukçu, and the struggles conducted in Syria and Iraq in the name of the Ottomans even after the Ottomans.

The truth is that the idea of withdrawing from the Arab geography had in any case been adopted among the Union and Progress officers so long before that, in the face of those officers' intentions and plans, a few Arab tribes' having gone over to the British side served those intentions and plans only a little. Otherwise they had neither the power nor the capacity to play the leading role in this event.

These days I cannot put down Şükrü Hanioğlu's book dealing with Atatürk's biography in its intellectual dimensions. I also go to the sources he cites; he draws attention to very interesting openings, to many pieces of information and events that in fact were always before our eyes in history.

For example, the new Turkey horizon that emerged, as early as 1907, in the discussions that took place among Ottoman officers about the future of the Ottomans.

Hanioğlu shows that a reading of history that was gradually gaining currency in the Harbiye milieu where Mustafa Kemal too was raised indicated that the Ottoman idea had long since been renounced. Proceeding from the thought that the multicultural, multiethnic Ottoman state made a homogeneous and governable country difficult and also prevented the realization of a nationalist ideological ideal, the idea of founding a small country of only Turks, or with a Turkish majority, and discarding the surplus, gradually came to be accepted among Ottoman officers. Indeed, Hanioğlu relays the following statements of a commander within the leadership cadre of Union and Progress: "A nation's being composed of various elements ... the various elements' [having] separate characters, separate ideals, has the potential to cause the fragmentation of both the nation and [the] army." (İsmail Hafız Hakkı, Bozgun, 57).

The concrete example that convinced the Ottoman officers of this thought was the success achieved by Japan, which had the character of a homogeneous nation, against Russia, a multinational structure.

These examples seem already in those years to have inclined Ottoman officers toward the idea of withdrawing from the Arab geographies and founding a state governing a homogeneous society on lands inhabited only by Turks. Yet the Ottoman State is still standing upright, but the Ottoman officers with this ideological inclination had also badly adopted the idea that this country was collapsing. Instead of protecting the Ottoman State that they, as Ottoman officers, were charged with and responsible for preserving and safeguarding, they adopted as an ideal a thought that would shrink it and withdraw it to the borders of Anatolia.

Of course, for this two ideas must proceed together. One is an othering, alienating emotional and ideological distance toward the Arabs or other Ottoman subjects. The other is the redefinition, construction, creation of Turkishness anew.

In particular, a Turkishness that would be unable to stay together with the Arabs would first of all need to be stripped of its Islamic ties as well. The Seljuk and Ottoman rule that Turks, one with and together with the Arabs, exercised over three continents for centuries has no value at all. Or rather, this value will be lowered for this purpose. On the contrary, before Islam and the Arabs the Turks had a far greater potential for leadership and development, indeed a history. Is there such a thing? If there is not, it will be invented.

In this period there is great interest among Ottoman officers in pre-Islamic Turkish history. Şükrü Hanioğlu mentions the influence of Necip Asım and Süleyman Hüsnü Pasha, who taught French lessons at the military school. Necip Asım wrote a history based on David Léon Cahun's work titled Introduction à l'histoire de l'Asie: Turcs et Mongols des origines à 1405, which would also deeply influence Mustafa Kemal. In this book he drew attention to the importance of the role Turkishness played in world history. Radicalizing a little further the ideas in this book, which had made a great impact among Ottoman officers, Mustafa Kemal would say: "The Turks, who had lived as rulers for centuries, would naturally not come under the rule of these marauders [the Arabs]. They could not, by accepting the religion of Islam, descend from mastership to clientship [slavery] ... It is only after deciding to be masters of the Arabs, who wanted to make them clients, that the Turks entered the religion of Islam en masse" (Tarih, II, Ortazamanlar, İstanbul Maarif Vekaleti, 1931, pp 146).

These ideas were of course quite accepted among a very significant segment, if not among all Ottoman officers.

Under these conditions, "Mustafa Kemal, who had an inclination as an 'evlâd-ı fatihân' [child of conquerors], and whose orientation strengthened after his idadi and Harbiye education, is seen to have adopted quite radical views, starting from his youth years, in the field of Turkism. For example, as early as 1907, he put forward the idea of founding a 'Turkish state' living within 'national borders' as a result of the liquidation of those regions of the empire where Turks were not in the majority. According to him, such a contraction would lead to the shaping of a more homogeneous and stronger structure, and society would be rid of the surplus that was non-Turkish and prevented evolution into a 'nation.' Such a renewal would open the way to creating a 'Turkish millet-i müsellehası' (Turkish armed nation)." (Şükrü Hanioğlu, Atatürk, pp 102).

It is also interesting that Mustafa Kemal's project of a "Turkish nation withdrawn to national borders" was made among the Ottoman officers of that period under the heading of "saving the empire." How would the empire be saved by withdrawing from the great majority of its lands and giving them to others?

Whom would the Ottomans be saved from? In 1907, when the Ottomans were still standing with all their elements, what was the place of such an idea of "salvation"?

And of course the far more important question: what is the relationship between this thought and our having lost our entire presence in the whole Middle East to the British and French at the end of the First World War? Let us continue.