The end of the World War I marked the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new countries. Lebanon and Syria were both created by France in the 1920s. These arbitrary boundaries, which opened a new chapter in the region, have been at the center of conflicts ever since. The Civil War that began in Lebanon in 1975 and lasted 15 years caused the deaths of 120,000 people.
Syria has also been devastated by a bloody war in which Europe was conspicuous by its absence. At a time when many Arab countries are divided by political and sectarian passions, a lot of discussion focuses on the Great War’s partition plans. In a timely and meticulously researched book, Eugene Rogan sheds light on the neglected Middle-Eastern theater of World War I.
“The Fall of the Ottomans – The Great War in the Middle East 1914-1920” fills a void. Very little is known about the Turkish and Arab experiences of the Great War and its centenary also attracted little attention in the Middle East. Yet battles were fought in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestinian territories, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. It was these battlefields stretching from Turkey to Iran, across the Arab provinces, and across North Africa that dragged the Middle East into the war and ultimately redesigned the map of the entire region.
When the Ottoman Empire called for a Holy War on Nov. 14, 1914, it was already described as crumbling. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottomans began losing wars to the Russian Empire of Catherine the Great and to the Habsburg emperors. By the early 19th century, the Ottomans lost Greece, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, which became independent and Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria became autonomous. Then between 1878 and 1882, Britain took over Cyprus and Egypt, Russia annexed three provinces in the Ottoman Caucasus in 1878 and finally, France occupied Tunisia in 1881.
As the news of the war reached the rest of the world, the Ottomans were hoping that Arabs and Turks within the empire would respond favorably to the Sultan’s call for a holy war. In 1914, the greatest number of Muslims lived under colonial rule: 100 million under British rule, 20 Million in French colonies and another 20 million within the Russian Empire. It now remained to be seen if the Sultan’s call for Jihad against Britain, France and Russia would affect Muslim loyalties toward the Entente.
Rogan has used Turkish and Arabic sources that tell the story through Ottoman eyes. In a diary, that belonged to a Muslim cleric from the southern Lebanese village of Nabatiyye, one can read how the people reacted on Aug. 3, 1914. These few lines captures admirably the shock and consternation felt across the Ottoman Empire:
“The people were deeply troubled and agitated by the news (of general mobilization). They gathered in small groups in public spaces, astonished and bewildered, as if confronting the Day of Judgment. Some wanted to flee but where would they go? Others wanted to escape, but there was no way out. Then we heard that war had broken out between Germany and Austria on one side, and the Allies on the other side. This only increased the fear and alarm of the outbreak of a murderous war that would devour the cultivated lands and the dry earth.”
According to the author, the diaries and memoirs of Turkish soldiers and low-ranking officers are the most original contribution that the book offers to Western readers.
In an interview he gave to the Hurriyet Daily News, Rogan said that:
“What is really striking is how common the experiences of that horrible conflict was to all sides. It shouldn’t surprise us, but they all experienced the industrial warfare of the Great War in very similar ways. They suffered the same discomforts, and unhealthy conditions in the trenches, they suffered equally from what we would call shellshock, or traumatic stress disorders that are associated with relentless warfare … The Britons assumed they would be fighting on the Western Front, while the Ottomans had never anticipated making war against Great Britain. So they had no predisposition to hate each other. When the trenches got close to each other … they would exchange greetings or jokes … they would even throw things to each other out of kindness – a Turk would throw a pack of cigarettes or a Tommy would throw a pot of jam. One Turkish diarist comments on how nobody ever took the opportunity to mix dirt in with the jam, and nobody followed up a pack of cigarettes with a hand grenade. They threw gifts to each other’s lines in genuine acts of comradery. Such examples leap out as extraordinary human exchanges in the monstrous machine of war.”
One of the most interesting chapters deals with the Arab revolt and particularly the role played by Sharif Husayn, who was emir of Makkah. The British and the Turks were both searching for an alliance with Sharif Husayn. When the latter learned of the Young Turks’ plan to murder him, he turned toward Britain. But the very lands that Sharif Husayn was negotiating with the British were also at the center of secret discussions between France and Britain. On June 10, 1916, the Hashemites led by Sharif Husayn entered the war against the Turks. A few months later, with the help of his sons — Ali, Abdullah, Faysal and Zayd — had won over Makkah, Taif, as well as Jeddah, Rabigh and Yanbu. Then in the beginning of December, the military situation tilted toward the Ottoman forces. They had won several battles. Capt. T.E. Lawrence believed that Hashemite forces were about to lose but on Dec. 11, 1916, the Ottoman army that reached the outskirts of Yanbu was in a very bad shape. Although they were in a position to chase the Arab forces, they could not deal with the Royal Navy. “So, they turned back. And that night, I believe, the Turks had lost their war.”
A year later, on the Dec. 9, 1917, 401 years of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem had come to an end. The Ottomans had also lost control over three cities: Makkah, Baghdad and Jerusalem. The war ended on Nov. 11, 1918, and the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the Ottoman sultanate on Nov. 1, 1922.
The Hashemite claims to Greater Syria collided with French demands and they surrendered Madinah in December 1925. Sharif Husayn had every reason to feel bitter. He had been betrayed by secret negotiations that took place all along.
“These outlandish agreements, which were only conceivable in wartime, were concluded solely to advance Britain and France’s imperial expansion. Had the European powers been concerned with establishing a stable Middle East, one can’t help but think they would have gone about drafting the boundaries in a very different way,” concludes Eugene Rogan.
This masterful account of World War I opens up a window to vital chapters in the history of the Great War. The extensive Turkish and Arabic sources, used mostly for the first time, bring events alive and contribute to highlight the little known viewpoint of the Ottoman Empire. Magnificent, captivating and easy to read, “The Fall of the Ottomans” is in a league of its own.
• life.style@arabnews.com
Book Review: Roots of today’s Middle East chaos found on the battlefields of World War I
Book Review: Roots of today’s Middle East chaos found on the battlefields of World War I
Book Review: ‘When Breath Becomes Air’
- Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon, talks about his own journey from being a physician to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality
Published a year after the author’s death aged 37 in 2015, “When Breath Becomes Air” is an autobiography about the life and struggle with terminal lung cancer of Dr. Paul Kalanithi.
In the book, Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon at Stanford University, talks about his own journey from being a physician providing treatment to his patients to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality.
The narrative moves from talking about how Kalanithi saved lives to confronting the end of his own, reflecting on what makes life worth living in the face of death.
Despite his diagnosis, Kalanithi continued working as a physician and even became a father, explaining to his readers how he embraced life fully until the very end.
Unfortunately, the book had to be completed by his wife after his passing, and serves as a moving meditation on legacy, purpose, and the human experience.
Among the book’s strengths are its authenticity and depth of emotions, touching on everything from the day-to-day experiences of physicians to Kalanithi’s own love of literature — originally, he had studied English at university. A fitting tribute, then, that his own work would go on to become a New York Times’ bestseller.
Neurosurgery, though, was in his words an “unforgiving call to perfection” which not even his diagnosis could check. “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when,” he wrote. “After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.”
The book garnered praise upon publication, winning the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir and Autobiography in 2016. Its run on the NYT’s bestseller list lasted an impressive 68 weeks.
Writing in the Guardian, Alice O’Keefe suggested: “The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live — and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook.”
What We Are Reading Today: ‘An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology’
Author: Steven A. Balbus
General relativity has entered a new phase of its development as technical advances have led to the direct detection of gravitational radiation from the merging of single pairs of stellar-sized black holes. The exquisite sensitivity of pulsar signal timing measurements has also been exploited to reveal the presence of a background of gravitational waves, most likely arising from the mergers of supermassive black holes thought to be present at the center of most galaxies. This book demonstrates how general relativity is central to understanding these and other observations.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘How to Change a Memory’ by Steve Ramirez
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones.
In “How to Change a Memory,” Ramirez draws on his own memories—of friendship, family, loss, and recovery—to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory’
- Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan
Author: ROMAIN BRETTE
“In The Brain, In Theory,” Romain Brette argues that the brain is not a “biological computer” because living organisms are not engineered.
Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan. Brette reviews the main theoretical frameworks for thinking about the brain, including computation, neural representations, information, and prediction, and finds them poorly suited to the study of biological cognition.
He proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Physics of the Tropical Atmosphere and Tropical Cyclones’
Author: Kerry Emanuel
“Physics of the Tropical Atmosphere and Tropical Cyclones” provides readers with a firm grounding in the observations, theory, and modeling of tropical weather systems and tropical cyclones.
How and why do tropical cyclones form? What physics underpins their genesis, intensification, structure, and power?
This authoritative and accessible book tackles these and other questions, providing a unifying framework for understanding most tropical weather systems.
