The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire: 1918-1922 by Ryan Gingeras

Author:Ryan Gingeras [Gingeras, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141992785
Google: kSVhEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 60229100
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2021-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

‘BRIGHTEST JEWELS IN THE OTTOMAN CROWN’: THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT AND THE FATE OF THE ARAB LANDS

In Damascus today, a wide boulevard known as an-Nasr runs west from the foot of the city’s ancient citadel. On either side of the street lie two of the most important landmarks left in Syria’s largest city by the Ottoman Empire. Just north of the street is Martyrs’ Square, which served as the administrative epicenter of Damascus after the late nineteenth century. To the south, at the far west end of the street, sits a disused railway station which once connected Damascus to Istanbul and to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. When it was first built, the boulevard was named after the military governor who oversaw its construction, Cemal Pasha. As commander of the imperial Fourth Army during the Great War, Cemal Pasha endorsed a series of infrastructure and renovation initiatives throughout the Levant. He constructed intercity highways and urban streets, widened roads, and beautified thoroughfares with trees and walkways. He supervised the opening of primary and secondary schools as well as mosques and religious endowments. With German help, he lent government support to the excavation and restoration of the region’s antiquities. Expanding the protection of ancient sites, he declared, was critical, so that ‘no Ottoman patriot could fail to respect the artistic achievements of past civilizations’.68

One of Cemal’s wartime aides, Ali Fuad, did not necessarily see the governor’s dedication to public works in altruistic terms. The paving of Cemal Pasha Boulevard clearly served no military purpose. The same could be said for other efforts he endorsed, such as the building of parks, clubs and casinos in Beirut and other cities and towns. Such ventures, as Fuad put it, were ‘decorative symbols of civilization’ suitable only in peacetime.69 More than anything, they distracted from the perilous state of Cemal’s beleaguered administration. After a failed offensive against British-held Egypt, the Ottoman Fourth Army contended with the constant threat of Allied invasion from the coast. Famine devastated much of the countryside within the war’s first year. Conditions in Beirut were so hopeless, as another aide to Cemal Pasha put it, that the city’s streets echoed with ‘the moans of those in their death throes from hunger’.70 Then there was the threat of popular insurrection, an anxiety that plagued senior officials through much of the war. By his own account, Cemal ‘felt perfectly sure of the civil population’, never once sensing the need to question the loyalty of the Arab soldiers who defended the Levantine coast.71 His subordinates, however, later testified that this was not the case. By the closing stages of the war, Cemal and his staff saw to it that they were guarded by units comprising Sufi dervishes from Anatolia and volunteers from the Balkans, not Arabs. Their headquarters, in the words of Ali Fuad, was ‘like an isolated island in a sea of revolt’.72

The sentiments and actions of Cemal Pasha and his staff epitomize a paradox at the heart of the empire’s final years.

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