Daybreak in Turkey / Second Edition

by James L. Barton

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 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 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 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.