Part 3

The present political, social, economic, and religious problems of Turkey center in the sultan. Few countries in the world would respond so quickly to the influence of good government, and few people would so appreciatively welcome a firm and righteous administration as the people of Turkey.

The sultan exercises his power through his army and his appointees to office. The Turks make perhaps the best soldiers in the world. They are strong, inured to hardship, uncomplaining, and practical. To them all war with non-Moslems and rebels—and they fight with no others—is holy war. Only Mohammedans are enrolled in the army, and all such, over twenty years of age in the country, are liable to military service until they are forty. The empire is divided into seven army administrative districts, in each of which is located an army corps. These are Constantinople, Adrianople, Monastir, Erzerum, Damascus, Bagdad, and the Yemen, with the independent divisions of the Hejaz and Tripoli. The infantry are armed with Mauser rifles. The effective war strength of the Turkish army is 987,900 men. The navy possesses no fighting power.

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.

It used to be said about 1880 by those who were in a position to know best—no one has ever been in a position to have quite certain knowledge in Constantinople—that the sultan was a Dervish of the class called vulgarly the Howling, and that when (as was often the case) the ministers of state summoned to a council had to wait hour after hour for the sultan to appear, he was in an inner room with a circle of other Dervishes loudly invoking the name of Allah and working up the ecstatic condition in which it should be revealed whether and when he should enter the council. I do not doubt that the great idea of appealing to the world of Islam was struck out in some such moment of ecstasy. At the same time, Abd-ul-Hamid has had a good deal to gain from the success of this policy.

Europeans who have been admitted to meet the sultan in direct intercourse are almost all agreed that he possesses great personal charm and a gracious, winning courtesy. On the other hand, ministers of state used to speak with deep feeling of the insults and abuse poured on any, even the highest, who had the misfortune to express an opinion that did not agree with his wishes.

An official in the palace described very frankly—it is wonderful how freely and frankly Turks express their opinion; this seems inseparable from the Turkish nature—to an Englishman whom he knew well the situation in the palace at the time when an ultimatum had been presented, and before it was known what would be the issue; how the sultan was flattered up to believe that he had only to go into Egypt and resume possession, and that the English would never resist. The Englishman remarked, “But you know better than that, and of course you give better advice when the sultan asks your opinion.” “God forbid,” was the reply, “that I should say to the sultan anything except what he wishes me to say. No! when he asks me, I reply that of course the master of a million of soldiers has only to enter Egypt and it is his. And it is not for nothing that I do this. The sultan is pleased with me, and signs some paper that I have brought him, and it may be worth 10,000 piastres to me.”

The sultan hates England with a permanent and ineradicable hatred; this feeling dominates and colors his whole policy; it is only for that reason that he tolerates Germany, which otherwise he dislikes. England has always been the friend of the Reform party in Turkey; and the sultan is the great reactionary who has trodden the Reform party in the dust. But, worse than that, England, pretending to help Turkey, took possession of Cyprus, nominally to enable her to guarantee Turkey against Russia in Asia Minor, but really (as it seems to the Turks) by pure theft, because all pretence of using Cyprus as a basis of operations against Russia in Asia Minor was abandoned in 1880, and yet England kept Cyprus.

Now to the sultan the sting lies in this, that Cyprus was his private appanage, and not part of the State. The whole revenue of Cyprus went to the sultan’s privy purse. But worse still: at first the English paid over the Cypriote revenue, about £95,000 a year, to Constantinople, but after the Gladstonian government came into power, in 1880, this revenue was diverted to pay interest on the Turkish debt, emptying the sultan’s private purse into the lap of the European bondholders.

The sultan, therefore, welcomed the German intervention, for the Germans encouraged him to govern as he pleased. They even persuaded him that railways were necessary for military efficiency, and showed that the Hedjaz Railway must be the foundation of his khalifate. Yet the railways that he has made, and the Moslem schools that he has founded, are the surest means of educating his people, and education is the inevitable enemy of autocracy.

The German policy has seemed to be very successful in promoting German interests in Turkey. But, after all, the ground fact is that the German policy was an opportunist policy, and the English policy, ignorant and ill-managed as it has been, was founded on deeper principles. History will record hereafter that the former proved a failure, and that the hatred of a people more than compensated for the favor of an evanescent tyrant. The same struggle is going on in Turkey as in Russia—the educated part of the people on one side, a tyranny resting on bureaucracy and obscurantism on the other. Whatever may be the faults of Abd-ul-Hamid, his worst enemy must place him on an immensely higher level than the czar on any point of view, humanitarian or patriotic, personal or political. But for England in Turkey the greatest danger is that she be tempted to Germanize her policy from experience of the apparent German success. Her policy has been, on the whole, the wiser, but it has been carried out with an ignorance of Turkish facts that is appalling.

V. RACE QUESTIONS AND SOME OF THE RACES

The rigidity of the Sacred Law has been at times slightly tempered by well-meaning and learned Moslems who have tortured their brains in devising sophisms to show that the legal principles and social system of the seventh century can, by some strained and intricate process of reasoning, be consistently and logically made to conform with the civilized practices of the twentieth century. But, as a rule, custom based on the religious law, coupled with exaggerated reverence for the original lawgiver, holds all those who cling to the faith of Islam with a grip of iron from which there is no escape. “During the Middle Ages,” it has been truly said, “man lived enveloped in a cowl.” The true Moslem of the present day is even more tightly enveloped by the sheriat.

In the third place, Islam does not, indeed, encourage, but it tolerates slavery. “Mohammed found the custom existing among the Pagan Arabs; he minimised the evil.” But he was powerless to abolish it altogether. His followers have forgotten the discouragement, and have very generally made the permission to possess slaves the practical guide for their conduct. This is another fatal blot in Islam.

Lastly, Islam has the reputation of being an intolerant religion, and the reputation is, from some points of view, well deserved, though the bald and sweeping accusation of intolerance requires qualification and explanation. The followers of the Prophet have, indeed, waged war against those whom they considered infidels. They are taught by their religious code that any unbelievers, who may be made prisoners of war, may rightly be enslaved. Moreover, sectarian strife has not been uncommon. Sunni has fought against Shiah. The orthodox Moslem has mercilessly repressed the followers of Abdul Wahab. Further, apostasy from Islam is punishable with death, and it is not many years ago that the sentence used to be carried into effect. On the other hand, the annals of Islam are not stained by the history of an Inquisition. More than this, when he is not moved by any circumstances specially calculated to rouse his religious passions, the Moslem readily extends a half-contemptuous tolerance to the Jew and the Christian. In the villages of Upper Egypt, the Crescent and the Cross, the Mosque and the monastery, have stood peacefully side by side for many a long year. —LORD CROMER in “Modern Egypt.”

All questions relating to the internal government of the Ottoman empire would be greatly simplified and much more easily comprehended, were the people of Turkey substantially of one race like those of China or Japan. But this is not the case. As the Moslems overran Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, they conquered peoples of other races than themselves and of other religions. In their wars of conquest the Mohammedans revealed a degree of toleration which is to be commended. All conquered people were asked to embrace Islam. If they persistently refused, they were conceded the right to live upon the payment of an annual tribute _per capita_. The acceptance of this condition was an outward recognition that the Moslems were their masters, while the money thus obtained enabled the conquerors to extend their conquests. Whoever declined to accept Islam and refused to pay the life tax was put to the sword. This left within the conquered districts only two classes, the Mohammedan rulers and those who, by annual tribute, confessed themselves to be a conquered people, permitted to live from year to year by virtue of the money paid.

It is most natural that this distinction, perpetuated for thirty generations, should lead to aggravated relations of conqueror and conquered. It was inevitable that the Moslems should become imperious and the other people depressed and subservient.

In order to understand certain governmental and religious phases of the Turkish empire, it is essential that we look a little in detail into the history and characteristics of these divergent elements of its population which together make up the populations of that country. It is a subject preeminently of races and religions. Within the empire there is only one unifying force and that is Mohammedanism. All who embrace Islam, irrespective of the race from which they sprang, become an integral part of the governing body. Such begin at once to use either the Turkish or the Arabic language and to bear the name “Turk.”

Besides this one unifying force, there is no tendency to bring together the different races or to amalgamate them. There is little intermarriage. Each race has its own language and its distinct religion. To them all religion is racial, or, as they call it, “national.” A man without a religion is beyond their conception; and under the laws of the empire he can have no place in any community or possess any rights that others are bound to respect. Each man, woman, and child must be registered upon the rolls of some national church. There his name stands, and in that record his rights inhere until he changes to Islam. Turkey allows few rights or privileges to one not a registered member of a religious community.

We will consider briefly a few of the old historical and, in some cases, once powerful races, now found in that empire, and among which mission work is carried on. Only by acquaintance with these races can we understand the real factors in the problem.

There are the many non-Moslem races of Syria, the country first overrun by the Moslem invaders as they pushed their way northward. The races who occupy that country in connection with perhaps one million Mohammedans are the Nusairiyeh, the Maronites, Greeks and Armenians, Jacobites, Druses, and Jews. The three mentioned here especially peculiar to Syria are the Nusairiyeh, the Maronites, and the Jews.

THE NUSAIRIYEH

The Nusairiyeh number a quarter of a million souls or more and are perhaps the most degraded of all of the races in Turkey. They are also most difficult to classify religiously or ethnologically. Their religion is a mixture of ancient heathenism, the survival of certain Gnostic beliefs, tinged strongly with Mohammedanism. The Mohammedans claim them, as they do the Koords and Albanians. They dwell in the mountains north of Syria and along the Mediterranean coast as far north as Cilicia. Their origin is lost in obscurity. At present they are decidedly a mixed race. Their name comes from Nusair, who led them in their separation from the Shiites, of which they were a branch. The Nusairiyeh are most reticent upon the subject of their religion. It is regarded as an unpardonable sin to reveal their religious beliefs and rites. They worship the moon, which they think is the throne of Ali, and the sun, which is the throne of Mohammed. They also worship fire, the waves of the sea, and anything that manifests power. They believe in transmigration of the soul, progress being upward or downward according to the life of the individual.

It is, in short, a rude, primitive, rough, and ignorant race, absolutely under Turkish sway and terribly oppressed. Little progress has yet been made in the line of mission work among them. The Turks guard them with a jealous eye, and the severest persecutions await all who profess Christianity, and every effort is made to prevent their education and general enlightenment.

THE MARONITES

The Syrian Maronites number not less than 250,000 and are scattered all over the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges. They are found in largest numbers in the northern districts of Lebanon and there they have control of local affairs. They are also found as far south as Mount Hermon in the country of the Druses. The hostility of these two races led to the massacres of 1860 in which thousands of the Maronites were slain. They take their name from John Maron, their first patriarch and political leader, who died in 701 A. D. They were mixed up with the Monophysite controversy in the sixth and seventh centuries. In an attempt to reconcile them, John Maron, a Monothelite (one will) leader, at the time of the Moslem invasion, conducted them into the high mountains of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, where for five hundred years they maintained their independent existence in the face of every attempt to subdue or dislodge them. They developed qualities of manly strength and industry. Their language was the Syrian and their government a simple feudal system. They had a patriarch with Episcopal dioceses at Aleppo, Balbek, Jebeil, Tripoli, Ehden, Damascus, Beirut, Tyre, and Cyprus.

This interesting people was discovered to the world by the Crusaders and through them were brought under the wing of the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Florence in 1445. They adopted the Arabic language but retained their old Syriac ritual. They are to-day recognized as followers of the Church of Rome with a form of worship somewhat modified to meet their special conditions. The Jesuits and forces of the Catholic Church have made every effort to prevent the Protestant missionaries from getting a foothold among them. Much, however, has been done for them by both the Presbyterian Board North, and the Free Church of Scotland. The Irish Presbyterian Church of Damascus is reaching the Maronites in that part of the country. Education is greatly transforming the race and through this they are becoming more and more responsive to evangelical religion.

THE DRUSES

The Druses are a smaller sect numbering probably not more than 100,000, possibly less, and occupying the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon in touch with the Maronites. They are found as far north as Beirut and as far south as Tyre, extending even to Damascus. Their chief town is Deir-el-Kamor, about fifteen miles southeast of Beirut. They are decidedly a mixed race with the blood of the Crusaders mingling with that of native and invading peoples. They are a people of an unusually high order of intelligence and outward refinement. They are an offshoot of the Mohammedans through the fanatical, if not insane, leadership of one of the caliphs of Egypt who began to reign in 996. One Darazi who made known the claims of the caliph to divine incarnation led these people into the mountains of Lebanon and is supposed to have given them his own name.

They believe in one God and in a fixed number of human souls that can never be increased or diminished. This resemblance to the religions of India is probably due to Persian teaching. They recognize the claims upon them of no other religion, and yet with manifest indifference they join in the prayers of the Mohammedans in their mosques and sprinkle the holy water of the Catholic Church with the Maronites, according as expediency may require. They have seven commandments:

1. Speaking the truth (only between Druses, however). 2. Combination for mutual defense. 3. Renunciation of all other creeds. 4. Social separation from all who are in error. 5. Recognition of the unity of Hakim with God. 6. Complete resignation of the will. 7. Obedience to orders.

They believe in free will and reject the fatalism of the Mohammedans.

When the Mohammedans inaugurated the massacre of the Maronites to check their growing strength under Christian enlightenment, the Druses joined with the Turks as the enemies of Christianity. It was this massacre which led to the intervention of Europe, resulting in the exclusion of Turkish officials from the Lebanon and the establishment of a special government for that district with a Roman Catholic governor and a mixed council under a constitution drawn by the European Powers. This has made a great change in the Lebanon, affording the people of that vilayet larger freedom of action and greater exemption from Turkish persecution than are enjoyed in any other part of the Turkish empire. The Druses and Maronites live on terms of harmony. They are a brave, fine-looking and enterprising people, living mostly by agriculture.

THE JEWS