A History of the Middle East (23 page)

The liberal interregnum lasted only a few months. The Balkan war was reaching its most disastrous stage, with the enemy at the gates of Istanbul. It was the occasion for the CUP to recover power. On 23 January 1913, Enver Bey and a group of officers forced their way into the cabinet room and shot dead the minister of war. A CUP government was restored, and Turkish liberalism went underground for a long period.

The empire was now effectively ruled by a triple dictatorship of Enver, Talaat and Jemal Pashas. Enver, the youngest of the three, was brave, vain and flamboyant – still the popular hero of the Young Turks. He commanded adoration in the army and concentrated on the revival and improvement of the Ottoman military forces, whose morale was at a low ebb following the Balkan disasters. His admiration for the military power of Germany, which was helping to train the Ottoman army, made him the most pro-German of the triumvirate. In contrast to Enver, Jemal Pasha was cool and calmly self-assured, but his aristocratic politeness concealed a streak of
coarse ruthlessness. Talaat, the only civilian, was the ablest and most intelligent – a man of ideas. He was charming and humorous, but quite uncompromising in his fierce Turkish patriotism.

By 1914 the CUP had been in charge of the empire for barely six years. The liberal interregnum had been too brief to affect its policies. In the Arab provinces these had caused a serious deterioration in Turco-Arab relations, but in the Turkish homeland there were some substantial achievements of the kind that are often associated with effective modernizing dictatorships which are little concerned with constitutional liberties. Provincial and municipal government were greatly improved; the cities were made cleaner and safer and public transport was organized. Javid Pasha, the brilliant finance minister, of Jewish origin, was able to do little to ease the empire’s burden of foreign debt – especially as costly wars were being fought – but he successfully reformed the tax system to improve revenues. (The CUP failed in its efforts at liquidating the Capitulations; that had to wait until Turkey joined the Great European War.)

Perhaps the Young Turks’ greatest achievement was in expanding education. Building on the efforts of the nineteenth-century reformers, they went much further in creating a modern progressive system at all levels, with new teacher-training colleges and specialized institutes. They were the first rulers of an independent Muslim country to create a state education system which was open to girls; previously the daughters of only the wealthiest classes had been educated, privately. The way was opened for Turkish women to enter public life as lawyers, doctors and administrators.

Enver Bey’s degree of success in rejuvenating the Ottoman armed forces is difficult to evaluate. The armed forces were of enormous size; one million men were under arms when the Young Turks came to power, and this number was increased by the introduction of military conscription. But it was the raising of military standards and the modernization of weapons which were most required. The German general Liman von Sanders was appointed inspector-general of the Ottoman army, and the British admiral Sir Arthur Limpus was given the task of reorganizing the navy. When war came,
Turkey’s opponents, who had never doubted the courage of the Turkish soldiers, certainly found them better prepared for modern warfare than they had expected.

In its foreign policy the CUP was by no means unresourceful. The overriding aim, as in everything else, was the preservation of Turkey’s Asian empire and the strengthening of its defences. The intense rivalry between the European powers left opportunity for manoeuvre. Both Talaat and Jemal were anxious to secure an alliance with the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain which aimed to hold the balance of power in Europe against the ambitions of the Central Powers – imperial Germany and Austro-Hungary. Russia was the most eager to respond, as it was by now thoroughly alarmed by the dominant position Germany had acquired in Istanbul and feared that it would gain control of the Dardanelles straits. Although Britain and France had shown some benevolence towards the Young Turks’ revolution, they were unprepared to include the Balkan states in any territorial guarantees for Turkey’s remaining position in Europe. They both expected Turkey to remain neutral in any forthcoming war and that their interests would thus remain secure. Britain no longer regarded the survival of the Turkish Empire as a matter of great concern; the alliance with Russia provided sufficient protection for vital British interests in the Persian Gulf.

Despite Talaat’s and Jemal’s repeated efforts, they were unable to achieve an alliance with the Triple Entente. Feeling that there was an urgent need for protection from one of the powers, they accepted Enver Pasha’s view that this should be Germany. On 2 August 1914 – five days after the assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo, which led directly to the First World War – Turkey signed a secret alliance with Germany which allowed Turkey to remain neutral unless Russia intervened in the Austro-Serbian conflict which had just broken out. On 4 August Britain declared war on Germany. Yet even then all was not lost. Talaat still favoured neutrality. Diplomatic relations with Britain were satisfactory. The British naval mission headed by Admiral Limpus and the British ambassador Sir Louis Mallet were of high standing. In
London the Ottoman ambassador, Hakki Pasha, had by the summer of 1914 succeeded in negotiating a series of agreements which satisfactorily resolved all the outstanding differences between Turkey and Britain, France and Germany over their railway interests in Mesopotamia and Syria and navigation on the Tigris and Euphrates. An Ottoman–British agreement defined the borders between Kuwait, Nejd and Iraq.

Turkey ultimately abandoned neutrality because Enver – the dominant member of the triumvirate – was convinced that Germany would win the coming war. Any doubts about taking Germany’s side were removed when Britain commandeered two Turkish battleships which were on the point of completion in British shipyards. This high-handed action caused a wave of anti-British feeling throughout Turkey. As Germany poured ships and men into Istanbul, the British fleet blockaded the Dardanelles and demanded that Turkey affirm its neutrality by expelling the German mission. On 28 October the German admiral took the Turkish fleet into the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports, and on 3 November the British fleet shelled the Turkish ports at the entrance to the Dardanelles. Although they had been reluctant to join the war before having time to mobilize, Enver and his colleagues could not retreat. Turkey declared war on the Allies on 5 November.

The only great schism in Islam – between Sunnis and Shiites which followed the death of the Prophet – led to a prolonged struggle for dominance in the Muslim world between the two branches of the religion. For some four centuries it was possible or even probable that Shia Islam would prevail, and it reached the height of its power in about
AD
1000. But first the Seljuk Turks who came to dominate the Islamic heartlands in the eleventh century and then their Ottoman successors four hundred years later were fiercely Sunni. Shiism continued to survive and flourish in Persia and Mesopotamia, but henceforth it constituted a declining minority of the Islamic
umma
.

There is no great doctrinal difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam: they agree on the absolute centrality of the Prophet in the religion and on most of the historical details of his life; there are no major differences in ritual; and on theological matters there is a broad consensus. The division is historical and political. The Shiites believe that the Prophet should have been succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Ali and that the succession was then reserved for the direct descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali. The successor, or imam, who was also the infallible interpreter of Islam, was generally nominated by the previous imam from among his sons. Most Shiites believe that there were twelve imams – Ali, his sons Hassan and Hussein, and nine in line of descent from Hussein. The last was Muhammad, born in 873, who disappeared mysteriously or went into occultation. The ‘Twelver’ Shiites, who in the twentieth century form the great majority of Shiites in the world, believe that Imam Muhammad is only hidden and will reappear as the Mahdi or ‘Rightly Guided One’ to restore the golden age. (Another Shiite sect, the Zaydis, is confined to Yemen, while offshoots of Shiism, such as the Druze,
Alawites and Ismailis, are numerically small although they may have strong local political importance.)

Shah Ismail I of Persia, who ruled from 1501 to 1524 and founded the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), established Shiism as the state religion. It is probable that a majority of his subjects were Sunnis, but he skilfully used the new faith to bind his disparate peoples together. Shia Islam became the foundation of a proud and even xenophobic Persian nationalism which still flourishes in the modern age, as for the past four centuries Persia (renamed Iran in 1935) has been the only nation-state of significance in which Shiism is the official religion.

Ismail had wider aspirations for his religion, and when the ardently Sunni Ottoman sultan Selim I persecuted his Shiite subjects, he attempted to come to their aid. His ill-trained troops were no match for the Ottoman Janissaries and he was defeated, but he was able to prevent the Turks from seizing any of his territory and he even held on to the districts of Mosul and Baghdad which he had won in earlier campaigns. He also held off the Sunni Uzbeks in Turkestan to the north-east. Persia was on the defensive, but the menace of Sunni enemies helped the process of welding the nation together.

The struggle between the rival Sunni Ottoman and Shiite Persian Empires lasted more than two centuries along their common frontier which stretched for some 1,500 miles from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. The battle for Mesopotamia wavered back and forth and was finally decided in the Ottoman favour only at the end of the seventeenth century. Even then, Mesopotamia was far from secure from Persian attack. Persia’s western frontiers have remained roughly unchanged until the present day.

The need to guard against the hostile Persian presence on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern borders acted as a brake to Turkish western expansion, earning Persia the gratitude of the Christian states of Europe. Equally, the Ottoman Empire served to isolate the Persian Empire from the West.

Except for relatively brief periods of recovery, the Safavid
dynasty went into a long secular decline on the death of its founder. The apogee of the dynasty was the reign (1587–1629) of Shah Abbas the Great. With the help of the English adventurer Sir Robert Sherley, he carried out much-needed reforms of his army, establishing an élite cavalry corps which was comparable to the Turkish Janissaries, and his reign was a period when the stuggle went against the Ottomans. He was a capable administrator, and a builder of genius. He made his capital the city of Isfahan, which became one of the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. He fostered trade and industry and, although an ardent Shiite Muslim, encouraged Christian Armenians to inhabit a quarter of the capital. Isfahan grew until his English visitors noted that it rivalled London in size.

When Shah Abbas died, he left his country immeasurably stronger than when he had come to the throne at the age of sixteen. European penetration of the Persian Empire had hardly begun. With the help of the fleet of the British East India Company in the Gulf, he was able to evict the Portuguese, who, a century earlier, in the time of Shah Ismail, had obtained a foothold on the island of Hormuz and on the adjoining mainland. In return for its help, he granted the Company valuable privileges at the port of Bandar Abbas, which was named after him. But British domination of the Gulf still lay well in the future.

Envoys of the European powers to Abbas’s court were politely received but he resisted their suggestions that he form an alliance with them against the Ottoman Turks – Persia’s isolation from the West was the best guarantee of its empire’s integrity.

Abbas left his country one fatal legacy: he instituted the practice, which closely resembled that in the Ottoman court, of immuring the heir apparent and other royal princes in the harem, for purposes of security. The result was that the heir and princes were physically weakened and totally inexperienced in the art of government. His successors were not only cruel and despotic but also incompetent, and the court eunuchs secured excessive power and influence.

In 1709 the Sunni Afghans rose in rebellion, and, repeatedly defeating the badly led Persian forces sent against them, succeeded
in capturing Isfahan and forcing the shah to flee. The Afghans controlled only part of the country, and a majority of the people remained loyal to the Safavids.

Persia was in a gravely weakened condition. Tsar Peter the Great of Russia had for long been seeking ways of establishing a trade route to India across the Caspian Sea and beyond. Using as a pretext the attacks on some Russian merchants in northern Persia during a tribal uprising, he invaded the country in 1722. His action alarmed the Ottoman Turks, who now also invaded Persia, to prevent Russia from gaining control over territories on their borders. War between Russia and Turkey was avoided by the settlement of 1724, under which the two powers agreed to partition northern and western Persia between them, leaving the rest to the Afghan usurpers in the centre and the Safavids in the east. Russian pressure was henceforth a permanent feature of Persia’s existence.

In 1729 the Safavids were restored to the throne. However, this was accomplished only with the help of Nadir Quli Beg, a member of the Asfar tribe, who had formerly been a leader of a gang of robbers but turned out to be a brilliant general. In 1736 he deposed the young Shah Abbas III, bringing the Safavid dynasty to an end, and placed himself on the throne with the title of Nadir Shah.

Before he ascended the throne, Nadir Shah’s military skill had already succeeded in forcing both the Ottoman Turks and the Russians to relinquish their conquests. He recaptured Kandahar from the Afghans and thus restored Persia’s previous borders. But this enormously ambitious man was not content with this. He turned eastwards with his armies to invade India, which, under the Mogul dynasty, was sunk in corruption and decline but still vastly wealthy. Bypassing the well-defended Khyber Pass, he defeated the Mogul emperor Mohammed Shah and in March 1739 entered Delhi in triumph. The booty was on a gigantic scale. An Indian historian remarked that ‘the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed owners in a moment.’ One captured item was the Peacock Throne, which Nadir removed to Persia where it served for the coronation of future shahs.