Young Turks

views updated

YOUNG TURKS

Young Turks is the term generally applied to the opposition to the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamit II's rule (Ar., ?Abd al-Hamid, 1876–1908). Although the foundations of the movement can be traced back to 1889, it only became politically active prior to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. Its members at the time forced the reinstatement of the constitution and the parliament after thirty years of autocracy. Between 1908 and 1918 it was the Young Turks who governed the Ottoman Empire.

The Young Turks belonged to the generation following that of the Young Ottomans, whose legacy was the constitutional era inaugurated in December 1876. But when in February 1878 Sultan Abdulhamit II dissolved the parliament and embarked on absolute rule, an opposition slowly began to form underground. In 1889 a group of students from the imperial Medical School formed an alliance called the Association for the Union of Ottomans. By 1895 they had changed their name to the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP). The CUP was mostly active in Europe and Egypt. Its members came from diverse backgrounds, ethnically and professionally. Due to Abdulhamit's autocratic rule, many educated Turks, Greeks, Kurds, Arabs, Albanians, and Armenians came to support the idea of Ottomanism, a nineteenth-century ideology that combined Ottoman culture and Islam with modern nationalism. In 1902 the First Congress of Ottoman Liberals was held in Paris where the opposition to the sultan came into the open.

In 1906 some military officers and government officials formed another group called the Ottoman Freedom Society, in Salonika. They joined the CUP in 1907 and because of their reputation for action these men became the ruling faction. From then on the new coalition was named the Committee for Progress and Union (CPU). In the same year, between 27 and 29 December, the Second Congress of Ottoman Liberals met in Paris and resolved to topple Abdülhamit II from power.

By the spring of 1908 those CPU members who had served in the Ottoman army in Macedonia began to act more openly. They reacted to Abdülhamit's efforts to discipline and spy on their activities by assassinating inspectors and others loyal to the sultan. In July, Adjunct Major Ahmed Niyazi Bey and later Enver Bey renounced their loyalty to the sultan and took their troops into the mountains to engage in guerilla activity. Later, the special military commander sent to take control of the Macedonian army was assassinated by a CUP member. The CPU further pressured the sultan with a series of telegrams threatening to occupy the capital if the constitution were not reinstated. In July 1908, Abdülhamit felt obliged to reinstitute the 1876 constitution, inaugurating the second constitutional era, also known as the Young Turks' revolution.

The event was celebrated by every ethnic group that stood to acquire greater security. Yet when the parliament began meeting, the division among the Young Turks's supporters became clear. Two major factions were identified: unionists CPU and the liberals. The unionists favored a strong centralized state to achieve modernization and progress. The liberals wanted a decentralized and autonomous polity benefiting non-Muslim and non-Turkish groups. The multireligious and multinational population of the empire eventually forced the Young Turks to adopt a middle way, which has been called Ottomanism. Meanwhile, Turkist and Islamist thinkers were still involved in the government.

In April 1909 an insurrection led by an Islamist organization made it clear that Muslim influences were strong among the unionists. But in 1912 a military coup brought the liberals into power. Meanwhile the demographics of the empire were changing: the Ottoman army had suffered repeated defeats in the Balkans, and during its last withdrawal from 1911 to 1913, the empire lost almost all of its remaining European lands and one-quarter of its population. The unionists took advantage of the political turmoil and in January 1913 took over the government once and for all. By June, they had eliminated the liberal opposition.

Throughout World War I, with the deportation and ethnic cleansing of Armenians and the arrival of Turkish people from the Balkans and Caucasus, the empire population became increasingly Muslim-Turkish and Arab. The unionists started to rely more on religion. Their pan-Islamism was often aimed at appeasing Arab constituencies who were displeased with the empire.

In the prewar period, both the Turkish and the Arab nationalists were intent on forming a solid nationalist ideology. Under the CPU, official and popular sentiment started to embrace Turkish nationalism. The Turkish Hearth (Türk Ocagi), founded after March 1912, was a side organization of the CPU whose original duty was to advocate Islamism and Ottomanism. But they were also trying to convince Turkish people that the only way for the empire to survive was to embrace Turkish nationalism. The Turkish Hearth was also responsible for propagating the use of Turkish instead of other languages. Under CPU pressure, government officials increased the use of Turkish in government administration, and as the religious schools and courts came under state control, Turkish started to predominate. The immigrating Caucasian and eastern European Turks participated in these developments, and a project to unite all the Turks, or all the Turanian people, began.

After 1914 the notion of Arab independence emerged, along with the possibility of the Ottoman Empire's fall and the inevitability of subsequent foreign hegemony. Many such ideas were current in Beirut, Damascus, and Basra, where the independence movements in the Balkans had already been noted and the Young Turks had been active. Triggered by an alliance between Sharif Husayn of Mecca and the British, in 1916, the Arab Revolt started the separation of Arab lands from the Ottoman Empire.

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire proved incapable of fighting on a scale equal to the European forces. The end of the war in 1918 also signaled the end of the Young Turks era. After the ensuing war for independence, the new Turkish republic was formed, owing much of its social infrastructure to the Young Turks. Although under the CPU the state ideology remained Ottomanist and Islamist, the emergence of non-Turkish Muslim nationalist movements among the Balkan and Arab populations strongly influenced Turkish intellectuals and statesmen. The major intellectual development of the Young Turks era was Turkish nationalism. The secular ideas of Young Turks leaders like Ziya Gökalp found popular support long after the CPU.