Imran Abdullah
On March 3, the anniversary of the Ottoman Caliphate was officially abolished in 1924 after the removal of the last sultans, Mohammed VI, by a decision by the founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who abolished the Sultanate in 1922 and declared the Turkish Republic to be its president in 1923 until his death in 1938.
The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War greatly affected the Arabs who fought on both sides of the fighting and provided an excuse for the European powers to share the spoils of the Sultanate, known as the "sick man of Europe" after losing the war.
In addition, the First World War contributed to the birth of a new context in the Middle East that led to the development of three nationalist movements in the East, the Arab, Turkish and Zionist movements that formed the history of the region in the century following the war.
Although Arab, Turkish, and even Western historians agree that the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate is not entirely the face of the Middle East, they differ in assessing this change.
In the following lines we review the writings of British historians Eugene Rogan and American Shawn McMekin who wrote about the Ottoman end and the birth of a new Middle East with Western eyes.
"The fall of the Ottomans .. The Great War in the Middle East" by Eugene Rogan
In November 1914, the last and only Islamic empire in the world was swept into a life or death struggle against three historic Christian forces Britain, France and Russia, according to American historian and professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Oxford University Eugene Lawrence Rogan.
The Christian countries in the war had millions of Muslim citizens who might be "seduced" by the Ottoman sultan, but the Ottomans were allied with two other European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Ironically, the Germans urged the Sultan to use his role as Khalifa and the declaration of an Islamic holy war.
As Rogan explains in his book, one of the Germans' motives for this idea was that it was a newcomer to the imperial game and had relatively few Muslims. Statistics show that in 1914 there were 100 million Muslims living under the British Empire, 20 million in the French Empire and 20 million in the Russian Empire.
In the meantime, the Ottomans feared the influence of the enemies, especially Russia, on their Christian subjects, including Greeks and Armenians, who formed a large and economically important minority in both the capital of the empire and the Anatolia region.
As World War I began, the Ottoman Empire was in a precarious state. When Sultan Abdul Hamid II came to the throne in 1876 he was seen as a young reformer who considered the idea of parliamentary democracy.
However, when the first elected parliament refused to support "jihad" against the growing Russian threat, the Sultan threw democracy aside and took power, Rogan said.
Two years later, following the unrest in the Balkans, the empire abandoned the Berlin Treaty for some of its territory in the Balkans, which led to the British control of Cyprus and the French control of Tunisia and handed Egypt to the care of the British.
Chaos
This chaos, fostered by authoritarianism, was a justification for the 1908 Turkish revolution, which, like many revolutions, looked good at the time.
But five years after the Italian-Turkish war, Italy sought to occupy the Libyan territories. The London Treaty of 1913 led the Ottomans to lose 60,000 acres of land and 4 million people. It was considered destructive to the system that was seen after the Byzantine era as "the great Islamic empire in the world" but by 1914 it was too small to survive.
In the course of the war, while the Ottomans were facing Britain, there were many surprises. Instead of winning the Sultan for Britain's Muslims, it was the British who benefited from the Turks' lack of control over many Muslims in India and Egypt as well as the rulers who controlled the Arabian Peninsula. The deployment of its colonial forces, whether Hindu or Muslim against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia.
"The Ottoman End ... Empire Collapse" by Xi'an McMikin
Between 1911 and 1922, a series of "wars of the Ottoman caliphate" took place and submerged the empire, according to Sean McMekin. The game of the Ottoman end illustrates the context that led to a new unstable regime in the post-war Middle East that many still suffer from today.
Mkmikin presents new epic stories from the Ottoman front on fronts such as Gallipoli and even Lawrence's novels in the Arabian Peninsula. He also presents his reading of the period before the First World War and the central role of the Ottoman Empire in the war itself by diving in the archives of the Ottomans and Russians as well as British, German, French and American sources And Austro-Hungarian.
He also discusses the emergence of modern Turkey and the conditions of its abandoned Ottoman territories, and deals with the issues of bloodshed for historical and religious reasons, forced population transfers during the collapse of the empire, the Balfour Declaration, the overthrow of the Caliphate, the division of Iraq, Syria and others. Events that have contemporary consequences so far.
The writer tells the impact of the Russian Revolution on the course of events, and how the campaign of Anwar Pasha, whose responsibility and his German allies in the east failed, how Damascus became the British headquarters of the Allies, and how Iraq fell before it in the hands of the English.