The general tendency of Islam is to stimulate intolerance and to engender hatred and contempt not only for polytheists, but also, although in a modified form, for all monotheists who will not repeat the formula which acknowledges that Mohammed was indeed the Prophet of God. Neither can this be any matter for surprise. The faith of Islam admits of no compromise. The Moslem is the antithesis of the pantheistic Hindoo. His faith is essentially exclusive. Its founder launched fiery anathemas against all who would not accept the divinity of his inspiration, and his words fell on fertile ground, for a large number of those who have embraced Islam are semi-savages, and often warlike savages, whose minds are too untrained to receive the idea that an honest difference of opinion is no cause for bitter hatred. More than this, the Moslem has for centuries past been taught that the barbarous principles of the lex talionis are sanctioned, and even enjoined by his religion. He is told to revenge himself on his enemies, to strike them that strike him, to claim an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Islamism, therefore, unlike Christianity, tends to engender the idea that revenge and hatred, rather than love and charity, should form the basis of the relations between man and man; and it inculcates a special degree of hatred against those who do not accept the Moslem faith. “When ye encounter the unbelievers,” says the Koran, “strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter among them, and bind them in bonds.... O true believers, if ye assist God, by fighting for his religion, he will assist you against your enemies; and will set your feet fast; but as for the infidels, let them perish; and their works God shall render vain.... Verily, God will introduce those who believe and do good works into gardens beneath which rivers flow, but the unbelievers indulge themselves in pleasures, and eat as beasts eat; and their abode shall be hell fire.” It is true that when Mohammed denounced unbelievers he was alluding more especially to the pagans who during his lifetime inhabited the Arabian Peninsula, but later commentators and interpreters of the Koran applied his denunciations to Christians and Jews, and it is in this sense that they are now understood by a large number of Mohammedans. Does not the word “Ghazi,” which is the highest title attainable by an officer of the sultan’s army, signify “one who fights in the cause of Islam; a hero; a warrior; one who slays an infidel”? Does not every Mollah, when he recites the Khutbeh at the Mosque, invoke Divine wrath on the heads of unbelievers in terms which are sufficiently pronounced at all times, and in which the diapason of invective swells still more loudly when any adventitious circumstances may have tended to fan the flame of fanaticism? Should not every non-Moslem land be considered in strict parlance a Dar-el-Harb, a land of warfare? When principles such as these have been dinned for centuries past into the ears of Moslems, it can be no matter for surprise that a spirit of intolerance has been generated.
—Lord Cromer in “Modern Egypt.”
[Pg 41]
The present sultan, Abdul Hamid II, is the thirty-fourth in direct male succession from Othman and the second son of Sultan Abdul Medjid. He succeeded to the throne upon the deposition of his brother, Murad V, August 31, 1876, at the age of thirty-four. By the Turkish law of succession the crown is inherited according to seniority by the male descendants of Othman springing from the imperial harem. All children born in the harem, whether from free women or slaves, are legitimate and possess equal rights. The sultan is succeeded by his eldest son, in case there are no uncles or cousins of greater age. The present heir apparent to the throne is the oldest brother of the sultan, who outranks all of the five sons of Abdul Hamid as heir to the throne. It is not the custom of the sultans to contract regular marriages. The harem is kept full of women by purchase, capture, or voluntary offering. Most of the inmates come from districts beyond the limits of the empire, largely from Circassia.
The sultan is, without question, the most phenomenal person sitting upon any throne to-day. Educated within his own palace, having passed but once beyond the borders of the land in which he was born, he is able to outwit and outmatch in diplomacy the combined rulers of Europe. He has administered his widely-extended and varied empire in accordance with the unmodified Moslem principles of the Middle Ages, and has [Pg 42] successfully defied all attempts upon the part of Christian nations to change his policy. Without a navy he has succeeded in averting repeated threats of attack by the strongest navies of the world. With depleted and diminishing resources he has held his creditors at bay, capitalized his indebtedness, and continued to live in lavish luxury. It is true that his refusal to comply with the demands for reform have at times in the past led to the loss of some of his possessions, still he does not seem to have learned therefrom any permanent lesson.
Turkey as a whole has never been so unrighteously governed as it is to-day, and, in spite of the pressure of European governments, there is little prospect of radical reforms so long as the present sultan sits upon the throne. While he is an astute and unprincipled diplomat and a tireless sovereign, he is not a reformer in any sense of the word. So long as he is sultan, he proposes to be master, preferring to lose entire provinces rather than to share the administration with any. He yields only when subterfuge fails and the policy of delay is rejected; after he has yielded, he devotes himself to vitiating the advantages his subjects might gain by his concessions.
Personally timid and fearful, he astonishes the world by the boldness of his strokes at home and his stubborn resistance to pressure from abroad. Himself profoundly religious, he horrifies all by the wholesale murder of his subjects through his lieutenants acting upon direct orders from the palace. This he has done repeatedly, and it is a part of his method of administering his home affairs and keeping his subjects properly subdued.
A GROUP OF OFFICIAL TURKS IN PRAYER
FOR THE SULTAN UPON HIS BIRTHDAY
[Pg 43] The present political, social, economic, and religious problems of Turkey center in the sultan. Few countries in the world would respond so quickly to the influence of good government, and few people would so appreciatively welcome a firm and righteous administration as the people of Turkey.
The sultan exercises his power through his army and his appointees to office. The Turks make perhaps the best soldiers in the world. They are strong, inured to hardship, uncomplaining, and practical. To them all war with non-Moslems and rebels—and they fight with no others—is holy war. Only Mohammedans are enrolled in the army, and all such, over twenty years of age in the country, are liable to military service until they are forty. The empire is divided into seven army administrative districts, in each of which is located an army corps. These are Constantinople, Adrianople, Monastir, Erzerum, Damascus, Bagdad, and the Yemen, with the independent divisions of the Hejaz and Tripoli. The infantry are armed with Mauser rifles. The effective war strength of the Turkish army is 987,900 men. The navy possesses no fighting power.
The governing force of the empire is strictly Mohammedan. The army is indeed a church militant with no unbeliever among its officers or men, except as European military experts are employed to drill and discipline the troops. The entire administration of both civil and military affairs is a religious administration. Men of other religions are asked to take part in civil affairs only when Mohammedans cannot be found to do the work required. Many high positions, even in the cabinet, have been creditably filled by Armenians and Greeks, but this is the exception and not the rule. Turkey agreed some time ago to admit Christians to her army, but has never seen her way clear to carry out the agreement. At the center of this Mohammedan administration sits the [Pg 44] sultan, Hamid II, with his valis or governors at the head of affairs in every province, in close and constant communication with himself and carrying out his imperial will. These local governors are sustained by the Moslem army, commanded by officers who also receive their instructions directly from the palace on the Bosporus.
This is the system of administration that has become established in the Ottoman empire, and that must be borne in mind as we proceed with the study of the country, the people, their economic, social, and religious conditions.
The position of Turkey and of the Ottoman empire is unique among the countries of the world. For centuries it has stood before the world as the one great Mohammedan temporal power, with its laws and usages built upon the tenets, traditions, and fanaticisms of Islam. Every civilized definition of a government fails when applied to Turkey, and every conception of the duty of a government to its subjects is violated in the existing relations between the Turkish government and the people of that empire. Under these conditions, much worse now than they were two generations ago, mission work is carried on.
While there are many Turkish officials who keenly deplore the evils of the system, and would change if they could the untoward relations of the government to its oppressed subjects, they are powerless to act and must even conceal their dissatisfaction for fear of being branded, as many have been, as traitors to the existing rule, for which charge the penalty is banishment or death. There is a general feeling that no reform can be inaugurated or carried out so long as the present monarch sits upon the throne.
A distinguished Orientalist, intimately acquainted with affairs at [Pg 45] Constantinople, has recently written upon the sultan and his diplomatic methods in the following terms. For obvious reasons the identity of the writer is concealed:
Rarely has a young sovereign been in a more desperate and apparently hopeless position than Abd-ul-Hamid occupied in the third year of his reign, 1878. His armies had been utterly beaten in a great war. His people had no confidence in their country, or their future, or their sultan. Prophecies were widely current about 1878-1882 identifying him as the last sultan of Turkey and the consummator of its ruin. The treasury was almost bankrupt. He himself had, and still has, a dislike and fear of ships, which paralyzed his fleet during the war that had just ended, and has ever since left it to rot in idleness, until there is at the present day, probably, not a Turkish ship of war that could venture to cross the Ægean Sea in the calmest day of summer.
The sultan alone in Turkey did not despair. He alone saw how the power of the sultans could be restored. And twenty-eight years after he seemed to be near the end of a disastrous and short reign he is still on the throne, absolute autocrat to a degree that hardly even the greatest of the sultans before him attained, in close communication with the remotest corners of the Mohammedan world from the east of Asia to the west of Africa, respected and powerful in Moslem lands where the name of no former sultan was known or heeded, courted by at least one leading Power in Europe and by the great American republic.
The last fact is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all in this strange history. The diplomatists of America, so strong and self-confident in their dealings with the greatest of European Powers, so accustomed to say to them all, “This is our will and intention,” have for many years been the humblest and most subservient of all the Christian Powers in their attitude to Turkey, aiming always at imitating the German policy and being on the friendly side of the Turks, but forgetting that Germany has that to give which America has not, and that America has interests to protect in Turkey of a kind which Germany has not.
The sultan had the genius or the good fortune to divine almost from the [Pg 46] beginning of his reign what only a few even yet dimly comprehend,—the power of reaction and resistance which Asia can oppose against the West. He formed the plan of consolidating the power of the entire Mohammedan world, and placing himself at the head of this power, and he has carried the plan into effect. The sultans had always claimed the position of khalif, but this had hitherto been a mere empty name, until Abd-ul-Hamid appealed from his own subjects, who rejected him, to the wider world of Mohammedans, won their confidence, and made them think of him as the true Commander of the Faithful.
One naturally asks whether this result was gained through the strength of a real religious fervor or through the clever playing of an astute and purely selfish game. While there may have been something of both elements, I do not doubt that there was a good deal of religious enthusiasm or fanaticism; the first idea could never have been struck out without the inspiration of strong religious feeling.
It used to be said about 1880 by those who were in a position to know best—no one has ever been in a position to have quite certain knowledge in Constantinople—that the sultan was a Dervish of the class called vulgarly the Howling, and that when (as was often the case) the ministers of state summoned to a council had to wait hour after hour for the sultan to appear, he was in an inner room with a circle of other Dervishes loudly invoking the name of Allah and working up the ecstatic condition in which it should be revealed whether and when he should enter the council. I do not doubt that the great idea of appealing to the world of Islam was struck out in some such moment of ecstasy. At the same time, Abd-ul-Hamid has had a good deal to gain from the success of this policy.
Europeans who have been admitted to meet the sultan in direct intercourse are almost all agreed that he possesses great personal charm and a gracious, winning courtesy. On the other hand, ministers of state used to speak with deep feeling of the insults and abuse poured on any, even the highest, who had the misfortune to express an opinion that did not agree with his wishes.
An official in the palace described very frankly—it is wonderful how [Pg 47] freely and frankly Turks express their opinion; this seems inseparable from the Turkish nature—to an Englishman whom he knew well the situation in the palace at the time when an ultimatum had been presented, and before it was known what would be the issue; how the sultan was flattered up to believe that he had only to go into Egypt and resume possession, and that the English would never resist. The Englishman remarked, “But you know better than that, and of course you give better advice when the sultan asks your opinion.” “God forbid,” was the reply, “that I should say to the sultan anything except what he wishes me to say. No! when he asks me, I reply that of course the master of a million of soldiers has only to enter Egypt and it is his. And it is not for nothing that I do this. The sultan is pleased with me, and signs some paper that I have brought him, and it may be worth 10,000 piastres to me.”
The sultan hates England with a permanent and ineradicable hatred; this feeling dominates and colors his whole policy; it is only for that reason that he tolerates Germany, which otherwise he dislikes. England has always been the friend of the Reform party in Turkey; and the sultan is the great reactionary who has trodden the Reform party in the dust. But, worse than that, England, pretending to help Turkey, took possession of Cyprus, nominally to enable her to guarantee Turkey against Russia in Asia Minor, but really (as it seems to the Turks) by pure theft, because all pretence of using Cyprus as a basis of operations against Russia in Asia Minor was abandoned in 1880, and yet England kept Cyprus.
Now to the sultan the sting lies in this, that Cyprus was his private appanage, and not part of the State. The whole revenue of Cyprus went to the sultan’s privy purse. But worse still: at first the English paid over the Cypriote revenue, about £95,000 a year, to Constantinople, but after the Gladstonian government came into power, in 1880, this revenue was diverted to pay interest on the Turkish debt, emptying the sultan’s private purse into the lap of the European bondholders.
The sultan, therefore, welcomed the German intervention, for the Germans encouraged him to govern as he pleased. They even persuaded him that railways were necessary for military efficiency, and showed that [Pg 48] the Hedjaz Railway must be the foundation of his khalifate. Yet the railways that he has made, and the Moslem schools that he has founded, are the surest means of educating his people, and education is the inevitable enemy of autocracy.
The German policy has seemed to be very successful in promoting German interests in Turkey. But, after all, the ground fact is that the German policy was an opportunist policy, and the English policy, ignorant and ill-managed as it has been, was founded on deeper principles. History will record hereafter that the former proved a failure, and that the hatred of a people more than compensated for the favor of an evanescent tyrant. The same struggle is going on in Turkey as in Russia—the educated part of the people on one side, a tyranny resting on bureaucracy and obscurantism on the other. Whatever may be the faults of Abd-ul-Hamid, his worst enemy must place him on an immensely higher level than the czar on any point of view, humanitarian or patriotic, personal or political. But for England in Turkey the greatest danger is that she be tempted to Germanize her policy from experience of the apparent German success. Her policy has been, on the whole, the wiser, but it has been carried out with an ignorance of Turkish facts that is appalling.