Turkish Village
Copyright 1965, 1994 Paul Stirling. All rights reserved.
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social changes, though it did inhibit both government reforms and overt radical opinion.
The splendid confusion of ideas held by the Committee of Union and Progress which combined to overthrow Abdul Hamid and ruled Turkey from 1908 until the end of World War I, embraced pan-Ottoman parliamentarianism, rights for minorities, pan-Islamism and pan-Turanianism,1 together with a flavouring of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and a practical admixture of Turkish nationalism and Prussian absolutism. The political unit to which these ideas were to be applied contained numerous violently nationalist minorities, Islamic as well as Christian, each as much against its neighbours as against the Turks, and in many cases so dispersed and mixed territorially that, once the system of the independent `millet'2 of the Ottoman Empire was abandoned, no satisfactory political substitute could be found. Moreover, the vast majority of the inhabitants on whom this hotchpotch of political and social ideas was to be imposed were illiterate peasants, many living in places inaccessible to wheeled transport, for whom government meant the tax collector and the drafting officer, both foreign and hostile meddlers with village life. Few of the minor officials who would be responsible for the detailed administration and application of the `reforms' had any knowledge of the models on which they were founded, or any comprehension of the purposes they were intended to achieve.
The founders of the Republic, headed by the great figure of Mustafa Kemal, were the heirs of this confusion. Historical events had solved some of their problems and given them the means of solving others. The European Christian peoples and the Arabs were now entirely independent of them. The end of the political power of the Sultan and Caliph and the break-up of his dominions meant the end of any serious political pan-Islamism. Pan-Turanianism was pointless in face of the Russian
- A movement to unite olitically all the Turkish-speaking peoples of Central Asia, then under Tsarist rule.
- Non-Islamic communities were outside Islamic law. They enjoyed some degree of political separateness and internal autonomy under their own religious leaders, albet as second-class citizens. The criterion of membership in such a community was not place of residence, but religion. The word millet is now the standard word for nation.
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