HUSSEIN RAUF BEY
Head of the Ottoman Delegation which signed the Mudros Armistice, October, 1918; Nationalist Party Leader in the Ottoman Chamber, January and February, 1920; arrested and deported to Malta, March 16, 1920; Minister of Public Works and Prime Minister of the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921.
GENERAL RAFET PASHA
Minister of War and Interior of the First Grand National Assembly until November, 1921; Minister of War until January, 1922; Governor of Eastern Thrace since November, 1922.
But when Abdul Hamid II ascended the Ottoman Throne at Constantinople, religion was still the dominant factor in his primitive and loosely organized country. From its surface to its core, the Ottoman Empire was still Eastern. The Moslem community was still the governing community, a community with a profound self-respect and a knowledge of its own duties as well as of the deference which was due to it. The dissenting communities were exempt by Moslem law from the duty of preserving the peace and hence were able frequently to attain a degree of prosperity which many Moslems never knew. Since the bulk of the Sultan’s revenue was obtained from taxation provided for in Moslem law, foreigners, most of whom were Christians, were naturally exempt from the payment of any but secular taxes such as land tax and customs duties. We Westerners think of it today as a hopelessly mediaeval method of governing a country, but we sometimes forget that it permitted every man in the country a generous liberty which we in the West have lost. It exemplified the Eastern tradition at its best and if we in the West have won for ourselves the blessings of modern industrialism, we have paid for them with a considerable share of the liberties we once enjoyed. What larger liberties our new industrial democracies may yet confer upon us in exchange for the liberties they have taken from us, remain to be seen. We are still evolving our Western tradition of government, but at present it has taken from us feudalism and the open fields and given us in exchange democracy and the machine-shop.
Even before Abdul Hamid II came to the Throne, the Western tradition had begun to make itself felt in the old Empire, for it was obvious that Western industrialism would succeed eventually in generating such power that no non-industrial country could stand against it. The disturbing lure of the Western tradition was heightened by the religious element, for both Islam and Christendom, while divided within themselves, tend to draw together when menaced from without. The Islamic world found its political leadership in Constantinople, its scholastic leadership in Cairo and its juridical leadership in Mecca, and it was natural that it should resent any menace to the old Ottoman Empire within whose frontiers these three centers of leadership lay. At the same time, the memory of the great Moslem reformation had not yet passed from Christendom and it was natural that it should resent the fact of Moslem rule over Palestine and the inferior position necessarily accorded to Christian communities in a Moslem country. There were a number of these Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire, but we shall confine ourselves here to the mention of the two of them which most vitally concern us—the Rûm community which included all members of the powerful Orthodox Church who recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the Ermeni community or the Gregorian Church, a small but historic sect whose membership was limited to Armenians. Both these communities were exempt from the operation of Moslem law and subject instead to their own Christian laws. Both were officially established and represented in the Sultan’s Government, the Oecumenical Patriarch himself representing the Rûm community and the Ermeni community, since the seat of its Catholicos is in Trans-Caucasia, being represented by a Patriarch appointed for the purpose in Constantinople. These communities included most of the Christians who had survived the great Moslem reformation and on the whole they lived quite peaceably under Moslem rule. While their Moslem neighbors formed the governing class, they formed the trading class and in any feudal country trading is the occupation of the lower class. Still, their ablest men were frequently utilized by the Sultan in the government of the country and when they were so utilized, they were called upon quite without reference to their position as religious dissenters, just as Nonconformists, Catholics and Jews are utilized in the British Government without reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.
It was through the Greeks, as the Rûm community is called in the West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820’s and were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire. Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over their entire population without community organizations for dissenters or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad tolerance which distinguishes Islam.
The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which had existed between the Sultan and his Rûm community, but not as violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country.