Ottoman Empire, please come back!
(published in the Turkish weekly Yarin)
Israel
Shamir
On Mt
Carmel, there is a pleasant townlet, slightly more than a
village, called Zichron Yaakov. Now known for its robust wine
and Frenchy restaurants, in the days of World War One it was a
home for the Zionist pro-British espionage ring, NILI. Its
members, prominent Zionist settlers and citizens of Turkey,
communicated with the British troops in Egypt, delivered to them
news of the Turkish forces’ disposition and contributed to the
Empire’s defeat. They were connected with Haim Weitzman, who
squeezed the Balfour declaration from unwilling Brits and became
the first president of the Jewish state. To this day, the NILI
is greatly venerated in Israel, and schoolchildren are often
taken to the museum where they are indoctrinated in Jewish
loyalty to the Jews only, and in their duty to betray any other
power if it is called for by their loyalty as Jews.
They
had a good reason to betray their country, the Ottoman Empire,
for if the Empire were still intact, the Jewish State with its
millions deprived natives immured beyond the high wall, its
millions of equally deprived guest workers locked in shantytowns
would have never come into existence. Incidentally, the US
attack on defenceless Iraq with its hundreds of thousands dead
and ensuing civil strife would have never materialised, either,
for Iraq was a part of that powerful Empire.
And
not only has the Middle East suffered from the Empire’s demise,
but NATO planes would have never had the fun of bombing
Belgrade, if the Empire were still with us. Even Greece, the
first break-away province, now devastated by the introduction of
the Euro, and reduced to the status of an hotelier for wealthy
Northerners, has a good reason to regret the days when Greeks
formed the elite of the Empire from Alexandria to
Constantinople. The Turks, the Empire-building nation, were
admired and feared in Europe, while now they are treated as
unwanted competitors for dish-washing jobs in Frankfurt and
London.
We,
the heirs to the Byzantines and the Ottomans, have now to deal
with a great new challenge, the American colonisation project.
The Mammonite forces now at the helm of the US are using the
dismantlement of the great continental Empires to build their
world-embracing neo-liberal one. In this new Empire, Western
Europe will be ‘the old country’, Greece to Rome, object of
imperial benevolence and guidance; while the rest of the world
will be re-colonised. Instead of trying to fit into this plan by
trying to join the EU, as some Turkish leaders hope to do, a
better response would be to re-establish a big
civilisation-based framework. Mankind is ripe for a new stage in
its development, the re-formation of civilisation blocks. By the
end of this stage, there will be five super-states, five
civilisations: the US, Europe, China, Latin America and ours,
the Commonwealth of the East. The alternative is a world
colonised by Mammonite America.
Indeed, it is the right time to give a thought to bringing the
Ottoman Empire back. The Empire did not fail because it was too
big and unwieldy: in its heyday it was smaller than Brazil or
Russia. It failed because inexperienced local elites grasped the
poisoned fruit of nationalism, offered by the western Masters of
Discourse.
Nationalism, this European invention, has probably killed more
people than the Black Plague of old. Worse, it has not offered a
plausible alternative to the unity of the Empire, where dozens
of tribes and ethnic groups felt at home, in peace with each
other. None of the break-away countries has succeeded in
creating a viable state, and the Western predators continue to
spread strife among smaller and smaller groups, as the Kurdish
rebellion in Turkey and Iraq reminds us. The Pan-Arabism of
Nasser and the Ba’ath Party, the Islamism of Osama, the
Pan-Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and Halide
Edib Adivar
have all failed to propose a viable ideology to counteract the
continuing onslaught of the Mammonite forces.
We
should take a leaf from the book of our brothers in the EU.
Europe has succeeded in bringing back the Empire of Charlemagne,
which collapsed a millennium ago; our Empire is still alive in
the memories of people, and in the glorious palaces, fortresses,
mosques and churches. Our reconstituted Empire may and should
embrace the entire post-Byzantine expanse: the bright future of
Turkey, the Middle East, and the Balkans lays in joining in with
Russia, Ukraine, and the Turkic republics of Central Asia.
These
two heirs to the glory of Byzantium, the Russian and the Ottoman
Empires, fought each other for centuries; but the same can be
said of the French and the Germans, the heirs to the Western
Roman Empire. If these eternal enemies in the West could succeed
in uniting, it can be done in the East, too.
This
summer as I travelled in Russia and Ukraine, I noticed much in
common between the Russians and the Turks (or Tatars, in Russian
usage). “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Turk”, fumed
Churchill, his cigar in full blast. “And the other way around”,
quipped Leon Gumilev, a great and late Russian historian, the
guru of the Russian pro-Eastern tendency. Indeed, Russia as a
state came into being as the union of the steppe-dwelling Muslim
Turks and the forest-based Orthodox Slavs. Gumilev demolished
the Western myth of the ‘Tatar (Turk) Yoke’ and correctly
described the Moscow Rus as the successor state to the Golden
Horde founded by the Turkic Genghisid princes. “Russia is
unbeatable in its union with the brave Turks”, said Gumilev who
identified the West as the greatest source of danger for Russian
identity.
The
National Bolshevik leader and a prominent writer, Edward
Limonov, wrote recently of Russia being ‘a Turkey with German
coating’. Russians still prefer ‘sharovary’, baggy trousers
popular among Anatolian peasants and the Ottoman nobility of
old. They squat like the Turks do, noticed Limonov. This
positive feeling of Russians towards the Turks is so different
from the European mistrust of them. It finds its way into the
cinema: the new Russian blockbuster called The Turkish Gambit
describes the Russo-Turkish war for Plevna without the usual,
for Hollywood, racist overtones and presents Osman Nuri Pasha as
a hero.
The
commonality of Turks and Slavs goes back a long way. In northern
Ukraine, I visited the erstwhile capitals of Russian princedoms,
Novgorod, Chernigov and Kiev. Their princes married Turkic
princesses, daughters of the steppe, and Turkic warriors formed
an integral part of their retinue. The Russian epic lay of the
12th century depicts a Novgorod Prince Igor war raid
into Turkic steppe; the prince was defeated, but his captor
Konchak Khan gave him his daughter in marriage, and he returned
home to Novgorod. A sizable part of Russian nobility still has
Turkic names, be it Nabokov, the author of Lolita, or Usupov,
the wealthiest Russian prince at the court of Nicolas II.
In a
recent book, The Eurasian Symphony by St Petersburg
writer van Zaichik, an alternative history of our part of the
world is proposed. What would have happened if the Turkic Golden
Horde’s enlightened ruler Sartak Khan, a friend of St Alexander
Nevsky, had survived an assassination attempt and, as a
consequence, the Russians and the Turks had remained in one
prosperous state? Van Zaichik calls this resulting empire
‘Ordus’, an amalgam of Horde and Rus, embracing the bulk of the
Eurasian landmass. Ordus is a land where modernity has
incorporated tradition and religion; the family has remained
intact; and even though there are wealthy men, the unbridled
pursuit of wealth is frowned upon.
“We
work together and contain our egoism”, this is the credo of
Ordus, a model suitable for the East. Mosques and churches are
plentiful; however, all the citizens are united in harmony. This
image of an alternative universe was so attractive to the
Russians that I spotted a few cars carrying stickers “I want to
live in Ordus”. By the way, Ordus includes a Jerusalem Vilayet,
where many of the descendents of Jews found refuge from Hitler’s
rise in Germany (yes, there was a Hitler and a Germany even in
the alternative universe), but live as equals with the native
inhabitants.
A
fascinating new Russian historian, Fomenko, has proposed a
heretical model of history: in his eyes, there was always an
Empire, or rather, The Empire; and the city on the Bosporus is
the natural capital of Eurasia. Whether or not it was ever the
case in the past, it can certainly be the case in the future.
Instead of fighting for leadership in Eurasia, the Turks, Slavs,
Arabs (and their smaller neighbours) can unite their forces and
make Constantinople (‘Istanbul’ is just a corrupt reading of
Constantinople) their joint capital and the seat of the Imperial
government. Constantinople can be our answer to Brussels, New
York and Beijing. While the centuries-long quest for hegemony in
Eurasia has caused many wars, a union would satisfy all desires:
the Russians will have Constantinople as their capital, without
dislodging the Turks; the Turks will have lifelines to the
Crimea and Tashkent, even to the far-away diamond reserves of
Yakutia, the land of the Pravoslav Turks, restored without
fighting a single Russian. The Middle East will once again be
incorporated in Eurasia as it was; and it won’t have to listen
to orders from Washington, London or Brussels. Instead of being
a far-away place, Turkey will become the meeting place for the
people of Baghdad and Kiev, Belgrade and Cairo, Vladivostok and
Ankara.
Let us
raise the twin-headed eagle of Byzantium once again as the
symbol of our Eastern Civilisation’s unity of the Orthodox and
the Muslims, invest our ruler with the twin crown of Caliph of
Islam and Emperor of the Orthodox, bury petty nationalisms of
the recent past and begin an exciting new page in our history
and the history of the world. The reconstituted Commonwealth of
the East, the rightful successor to the Eastern Roman,
Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman Empires, will possess vast
material and spiritual resources, making it a world superpower,
next to a united Europe, to the US and to China.
This
Commonwealth will be united by an idea, as well as by material
considerations. For East and West are different, split by a
metaphysical cleavage. In the West, the Mammonite heresy brought
in the American troop carriers of the World War, had won the
day. They accepted a brutal faith of greed, of unbridled desire
for individual success, of the right and duty to grab and
consume as much as possible. They rejected solidarity in the
name egoism they call “absolute freedom of man”. They destroyed
Woman by turning her into an imitation of man; they destroyed
Man by making him compete with women. Having rejected God,
their churches are empty, their cities are centred on the
business quarters, while ours are centred on learning, art and
prayer.
The
East has retained its Christian identity, for Islam is just a
form of Christianity, though
as
distanced from the Nicene Orthodoxy as is the Calvinism of the
Swiss. The East denies Mammon for we have not rejected God; we
put spirit above material considerations as we have not rejected
Christ al Mesih, we adore Woman for we have not rejected His
Mother, Sitt Maryam. The East still loves nature, despises the
dishonest rich, believes in the value of work, and prefers
harmony to success. We like manly men and womanly women. We
respect tradition and family. The
US-led
West
creates a nomad civilisation out of an open society of atomised
individuals disconnected from family and soil. In the
Commonwealth of the East, we shall proceed in the opposite
direction. We will discourage immigration and encourage capital
transfer. We shall be in favour of the autochthon, for the
autochthon knows the needs and desires of his locality better.
The
West has proclaimed the sanctity of private property. We respect
it so long as it is small, but reject its excesses. We shall
rule against greed by taxing the super-rich, confiscating their
property and sending them for re-education and ‘de-greeding’ to
a friendly Anatolian or Siberian village. There will be no
privatisation of resources, no sale of lands to foreigners, no
dispossession of peasants. We shall discourage the growth of
cities and promote the countryside. The West over-regulates
private life; we shall uphold the eternal liberties of the East.
We shall be good friends to our neighbours, or terrible enemies,
if they so choose.
This
fantasy is actually the only plausible alternative to having our
lands colonised by the US or by the rising superpowers of Europe
and China.
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