Remember, the Ottoman Turks are not Semitic, as is the bulk of the Moslem world. Tradition derives them from Turk, son of Japhet, and they are a Turco-Mongol blend which most people agree to call Tartar. Their language is closely allied to Mongolian, though written in Arabic, or rather Persian, character, and its Arabic words are pronounced unintelligibly to an Arab. A true Turk learns Arabic with difficulty, and a far higher percentage of Britons in India speak Hindustani than Turks do Arabic in Turkish Arabia.
Then, again, look at their early history. Their Mongol-Turkish ancestors were driven westward because they made Mongolia too hot for them, and we hear of Turks smelting iron for their Mongol masters in what is now Eastern Turkestan until they threw off the Mongol yoke in A.D. 552, when Turkish history begins.
At the dawn of Islam (A.D. 632) Turks and Mongols were harrying each other all over the Caspian countries like rival wolf-packs, sometimes combining for a raid on their neighbours and then fighting over the loot. That is why you find racial Turks in such outlandish places as Merv, Khiva, Samarcand, Bokhara and Cabul, for the Turkish race is not confined to Asia Minor and Turkey in Europe, but is scattered over parts of Russia and China and Afghanistan.
Now to consider the Ottoman Turks, with whom we are chiefly concerned. They were superior to their Mongol fellow-wolves in that they could smelt iron and had some idea of constructive enterprise. They had also adopted Islam, which was a great advance from the Shamanistic wizardry and totem-worship they used to practise, and their contact with the Arabs who raided them and afterwards accepted their military service to the Caliphate had civilised them considerably. Their Seljouk cousins were already ruling in Asia Minor, whither they had been driven by the Mongols when a wandering Turkish band sought similar asylum there in the earlier part of the thirteenth century and intervened most opportunely to help the Seljouks repulse a Mongol raid; in return, the Seljouk Emperor gave them a grant of land in Bithynia.
In 1300 the Seljouk Empire was finally smashed by the Mongols, who withdrew eastward without occupying the country, for they were merely predatory and destructive and had no gift or desire for permanent colonisation. So it came about that the Ottoman Empire began in 1326 under Othman I in Bithynia and grew by absorption and lack of effective opposition until, in 1517, we find it spreading under Selim I (the Magnificent) to the gates of Vienna and extending from Germany to Persia and from Arabia to the Atlantic.
The benign sun of the Arabian Caliphate, under which learning and industry flourished securely, had long since set in blood under circumstances of treachery and murder which have hardly been surpassed even in the late war.
Under the later Abbasides, when the glories of the Caliphate were waning, there were bitter dissensions between Sunnis and Shiahs (the main orthodox and schismatic sects of Islam) which culminated in fierce rioting at Baghdad in 1258. The then Caliph was foolish enough to appeal for assistance against the schismatic seditionists to his Mongol neighbours. It had been done before under similar conditions, and even in these days such a manœuvre seems still to appeal to some types of religious fanaticism, judging by certain passages between our sister isle and the modern Hun. On the above occasion, however, it was practised once too often. Hulaku Khan, the fierce Mongol chief, had long had his eye on Baghdad as holding princely loot in all too slack a grip, for the Caliphate had been relying on Tartar mercenaries for years.
He approached that queen of cities, as she then was, with a great host, lured the Caliph out to meet him by the promise of an alliance, and murdered the whole party, the Caliph being trampled to death. Then Baghdad was given over to sack and massacre for more than a month, by which time 1,800,000 people are said to have perished.
The Caliphate was transplanted to Cairo, where it dragged out an anæmic existence until Selim I seized it, with the person of the then Caliph, by right of conquest, and it has been an appanage of the Ottoman reigning house ever since.