Mustafa Akyol
In
Turkey, there has been an unmistakable revival of the image of Sultan
Abdulhamid II. The powerful Ottoman monarch who ruled the empire
single-handedly from 1876 to 1909 is praised with a flood of articles in
the pro-government press, endless messages on social media and various
conferences and panels. The speaker of the Turkish parliament, Ismail Kahraman, a confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
even hosted an “International Symposium on Sultan Abdulhamid II and His
Era,” at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, a relic from the latter-day
Ottoman Empire. The great sultan, Kahraman said, “is a mariner’s compass to give us direction and enlighten our future.”
However, the new pro-Abdulhamid II wave has an additional line, which
actually seems to be its main point: Abdulhamid II was an authoritarian
ruler, heavily opposed by most Ottoman intellectuals of his time. His
career had actually begun by proclaiming the first Ottoman Constitution
and assembling the first elected Ottoman parliament in 1876. However, in
less than two years, in the midst of a disastrous war with Russia,
Abdulhamid II suspended the constitution and closed the parliament for
the next three decades. Ottoman liberals and even some Islamic figures,
who saw constitutional rule as the only way to save the empire, turned
against Abdulhamid’s authoritarianism, only to be silenced or exiled by
him.
That authoritarian legacy of Abdulhamid II seems to be one of the key
themes underlined by supporters of Erdogan. Erdogan, they say, is also
authoritarian, but for all the right reasons: Turkey is facing lethal
threats, and a strong leader must guide the nation without caring what
his liberal or foreign critics say.(*)
This historical analogy was first highlighted by Erdogan himself. “This newspaper had once called Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid an 'absolute monarch,'”(**) he
said during a public rally in May 2015, condemning The New York Times
after a critical editorial by the paper. “And today it directs to the
Republic of Turkey and the hate that it once directed to the Ottoman
state.”
Historian Ebubekir Sofuoglu soon expanded the argument by a much-publicized article comparing Erdogan and Abdulhamid II,
warning that the latter’s fall was also the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The great sultan’s naive opponents believed that “liberty, equality and
fraternity" would save the empire, the historian argued, but those
foreign-induced ideas only expedited the downfall. Erdogan’s liberal
critics, he said, are similarly serving Turkey’s enemies.
More recently, Derin Tarih (Deep History), a monthly magazine with a
clear pro-government line, further advanced the argument with a cover story that featured images of Abdulhamid II and Erdogan side by side. Titled “Abdulhamid’s resistance, the resurrection of New Turkey,”
the story argued that Erdogan was merely picking up the historical role
of Abdulhamid II, only to face the same challenges. “Their foreign
policy strategies, health and education services, their struggles with
foreign powers and the schemes planned against them” were supposedly all
similar.
Obviously all this narrative excites the pro-Erdogan base in Turkey,
as one can easily see by the countless social media posts that praise
Abdulhamid II along with “the chief,” the term his supporters use for
Erdogan. On a sober analysis, however, it seems inaccurate and
unimpressive.
For one thing, Abdulhamid II was the ruler of a crumbling empire,
whereas Turkey is a stable nation-state whose borders — with the
exception of Kurdish insurgency — are secure. These are very different
contexts. Moreover, the society Abdulhamid II ruled was largely a
peasant society, and the critical intellectuals were a tiny force.
Today’s Turkey, however, is urbanized, modern and complex. Opposition to
Erdogan, therefore, is not limited to a small circle of intelligentsia
but wide masses of different persuasions and lifestyles. Importing
Abdulhamid II’s century-old techniques — such as espionage and
censorship — would not result in the same “success.”
In addition, Abdulhamid II was actually not the anti-Western idol
that today’s Islamist rhetoric in Turkey romantically depicts. If the
Ottoman Empire had a real archenemy during the sultan’s time — and even
before and after him — it was Russia. With regard to Western powers,
Abdulhamid II had always followed a pragmatic policy, focusing on
building alliances with Great Britain and even the United States — as I
once explained in an article about this “pro-American caliph.”
Abdulhamid II also had Western tastes such as the piano and opera.
This, in fact, did come as a big surprise to some Turkish Islamists of
today, as noted by a columnist in the pro-Erdogan daily Star. At the
symposium on Abdulhamid II hosted by the speaker of the Turkish
parliament, the columnist wrote, a scholar explained that Abdulhamid II loved Western music. In return, “some religious youngsters objected, saying 'but we knew him as religious.'”
This not only indicates that there is a very parochial, narrow-minded
definition of “religiosity” among Turkey’s “religious youngsters.” It
also indicates that history is more complex than today’s ideological
imaginations. If the ruling Justice and Development Party is really a
“conservative” party as it claims, it should honor history by
discovering it, rather than sacrificing it to current political needs.
"Al-Monitor" (al-monitor.com), 29 September 2016
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(*) Neither Erdogan's supporters nor the author of this article would care to mention, indeed, that Abdul Hamid II's "authoritarian legacy" had its most extreme expression in the massacre of 100,000 to 300,000 Armenians from 1894-1896 ("Armeniaca").
(**) A dispatch by the New York Times correspondent in Constantinople reported on April 25, 1909, after the failure of the counterrevolutionary movement against the Young Turks, that "Abdul Hamid's reign as an absolute monarch is over." A ruler who suspended the Constitution and closed the Parliament can only be called an "absolute monarch," in a similar fashion to those who nowadays suspend constitutional guarantees to dictate states of emergency and turn legislative bodies into rubber-stamp parliaments ("Armeniaca").
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