To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.
But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful stewardship of that law. It had come to a time when the Empire was one of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam’s own. The Caliphate which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam was powerful, was now in the days of Islam’s political decline, becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.
The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them, a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to grope about after a way out of the apparent impasse in which they found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire, not to the hothouse Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India’s 70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.
III
THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM
KEMAL’S ARREST AND HIS EXILE TO DAMASCUS—HIS EVENTUAL RETURN TO SALONICA—WHAT THE YOUNG TURKS WANTED—THE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM WHICH CONFRONTED THEM—THE ROLE OF AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND EDUCATORS—CHRISTENDOM VS. ISLAM.
The young Kemal had no sooner been graduated from the General Staff classes at the War Academy in Constantinople, than he engaged a small apartment in Stamboul to serve as the headquarters of the secret Society of Liberty. But an acquaintance whom he trusted and whom he permitted to sleep in the apartment at night on the plea that he was penniless, proved to be one of Abdul Hamid’s spies and Kemal was arrested. Having been questioned at Yildiz Kiosk, he was held for three months in a police cell and then exiled late in 1902 to a cavalry regiment in Damascus. Fresh from the War Academy, fired with the spirit of revolution and schooled in its technique, he lost no time at Damascus in getting into touch with other exiles from the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in the capital. His colonel, Lutfi Bey, introduced him to the keeper of a small stationery shop in the Damascus bazaars who had been exiled from the College of Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.
The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the interior by Konia whose historic dervish tekkes were a well of Islam undefiled. It was the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who girded each new Caliph with the Prophet’s sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.
But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans were already in a ferment of Westernism and in their grim way were preparing to disentangle themselves in the wake of the retreating Empire. Salonica, Uskub and Monastir were already seething with forbidden political ideas and if the Empire were ever to halt its retreat, it was here it would have to make its peace with Westernism. It was here that Old Greece had flung down its challenge and it was here that challenge would have to be picked up. Furthermore, if any force were to be mobilized to thrust Westernism upon Abdul Hamid in Constantinople, it was from Salonica that it would inevitably be launched.