Ottoman Sources on Armenian Genocide

The mass killings of Armenians during World War I constitute a genocide.  There is no way around this unless one asserts that to qualify as a genocide an event must be like the Holocaust, in which case there is only one genocide.  If we use the main text of international law, however, then we need only have "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group," by which means the Armenian Genocide counts, as does the earlier Herero Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and several others.

A book which should remove all doubt on this matter is Taner Akcam's The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity, which performs the service of demonstrating to any reasonable satisfaction that a genocide was committed using entirely Ottoman accounts, including from Turkish archives which have become much more open over the last decade.  Although there have been several waves of cleansing, detritus revealing what happened still remains, especially in some of the provincial archives which were less thoroughly vetted.

To follow one thread Akcam puts together, the records of the Ottoman Parliament show that one MP who briefly served in the Cabinet told of a two-track method of giving orders regarding the Armenians, where deportation orders would be officially circulated, followed by specially delivered orders, often oral, to liquidate the deported populations.  There is ample evidence the second types of orders were given.  Two provincial governors offered a refusal to implement secret orders as their reason for resigning.  Several others insisted on having the orders in writing so that they could use them if they were ever called to account.

Many Ottoman government documents discussing Armenian deportations clearly lapse into expectations that the deportees will actually die, as with a reference to the fact their children are "soon to be orphans."  In one cable to a governor, Talaat Pasha, who as interior minister was responsible for implementing the genocide wrote, "The Armenian question in the eastern provinces has been resolved.  There is no need to sully the nation and the government's honor with further atrocities."  This clearly indicates an awareness that atrocities had been committed.  There are also orders not to kill members of other Christian groups because they are not Armenians, which suggests the orders would have been different if they were.

In carrying out the genocide, the Young Turk government was implementing a "Five to Ten Percent Policy" according to which no region of Anatolia should have more than that percentage of Christians.  As nationalist movements broke up the Ottoman state during the 1800's, the new Balkan states became avowedly Christian, and began the outbursts of ethnic cleansing that would continue until the end of the 20th century.  Although thanks to the Sochi Olympics the Circassian Genocide in 1860's Russia is the best known, hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed or driven out of the Balkans, as well, during the half century before World War I.

A characteristic of nationalism is an emphasis on cultural homogeneity, and so the Young Turks' were concerned in part to make Anatolia as homogenous as possible.  Muslims, it was thought, could be Turkified, and so they were, with forced Turkification the policy toward the Kurds even under the Turkish Republic.  Christians, however, were seen as a minority population which would always be set apart by religion, and so would also pose a risk of fracturing what remained of the state.  This was the reason the Young Turks' began their own ethnic cleansing campaign to reduce the population to their desired percentage.  Some populations, notably the Greeks, could simple be pushed into another state.  There was no Armenian state, however, and so annihilation became what was variously referred to as a "fundamental and permanent solution" or one that was "comprehensive and absolute."

There was much suffering among all ethnic groups of the declining Ottoman Empire, and still is today as its former territories continue to see a loss of once rich diversity.  The Armenian Genocide, however, was unique in the region, beyond an ethnic cleansing, and apparently an atrocity even to the man who supervised it.

Suleyman Shah's Tomb

Turkey controls a tiny exclave about 20 miles south of its border, an exclave around the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of Osman, consider the first Ottoman ruler.  Ishaan Tharoor writes about how it matters today:

So potent was the symbolism of this Ottoman ancestor's tomb that the new Turkish republic concluded an agreement in 1921 with France, then Syria's colonial ruler, guaranteeing Ankara's ownership over the site. Since at least the 1970s, when the tomb was relocated following the damming of the Euphrates, a Turkish guard has been posted there to protect it.

The arrangement over the tomb, in most circumstances, would be a curious footnote of history. But it now may be at the heart of a battle in one of the more intense fronts of the brutal, three-year-long Syrian civil war. The site is not far from the border city of Kobane, where the extremist fighters of the Islamic State have been advancing on Syrian Kurdish militias. The battles of the past few weeks prompted the single most dramatic refugee exodus of the whole war: a conspicuous moment, given that the conflict has displaced roughly a quarter of all Syrians.

As Syrian Kurdish militias struggle to resist the Islamic State, it's believed that the tomb has been encircled by Islamic State forces and that the Turkish soldiers guarding it have been taken hostage. Details are a bit murky. 

Kurds accuse Turkey of tacitly supporting ISIS in the region, which the Turks vociferously deny.

The Dogs of Cairo

Some of the most fascinating recent research in Middle Eastern history has been in the field of environmental history.  I have blogged previously about work on climate change in the region by Sam White and Ronnie Ellenblum, as well as a bit on the wood supplies which sustained Ottoman Egypt, using a work by Alan Mikhail.  Mikhail's most recent book, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, is a fascinating contribution to the growing field of human/animal relationships.  One of its three broad sections concerns dogs.

Despite the book's title, this section also draws significant material from Istanbul, the Ottoman capital.  It chronicles how, during the early Islamic period, there were disputes about whether dogs were pure, based primarily on a Quranic verse and several hadith in which dog saliva was said to be unclean and require washing away.  However, the most common view reflected in written sources quickly came to be positive, noting their intelligence and usefulness, and highlighting the important roles they played in human society as guardians and hunting companions who often in stories sacrificed themselves for humans.

Mikhail demonstrates, through both images and written testimony, that dogs were everywhere in Istanbul and Cairo from the 16th through the 18th centuries.  They roamed the streets in packs, supported by religious endowments and government officials who valued them as consumers of garbage and a defense against rodents.  In addition to special watering troughs and feeding stations, there were laws to protect them from human violence.  Many people kept dogs as guards and carriers.  Religious writings were quoted on the beneficence of dogs for society, including the story that the prophet Muhammad prayed among dogs and a dog guarded the cave of the Seven Sleepers.

After 1800, things changed.  As Mikhail chronicles, this was actually part of a broader change in which animals of all species came to play less of a role as rural laborers, replaced by humans working en masse for other humans on large estates, especially with the rise of mechanization.  As other animals were squeezed out of the labor force, so were dogs.  Improved policing and sanitation removed their guarding and garbage-eating functions.  Dogs instead came to be seen as noisy and uncontrollable disease carriers, and authorities in both Egypt and Istanbul tried to eliminate them.  Religious writings were also quoted on their undesirability.  This radical new anti-canine ideology seems to have taken root among Egyptians within a single generation.  People began attacking them on the streets, and comparing someone to a dog became an insult in ways not previously attested.

Mikhail's book is, of course, not all about dogs.  I have already mentioned the shift by which animals lost their roles in the rural labor force.  In his conclusion, he considers how part of modernity is also the sidelining of certain classes of humans.  Machines can replace some humans as much as machines and humans replaced animals in the past.  Much as animals came to be acceptable only when managed in "useful" contexts, economically and culturally undesirable humans were enclosed in state institutions, such as hospitals for both physical and mental health.  If this is an ongoing process for a couple of centuries now, then where is it leading us?

Does Gul Matter?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly elected as Turkey's president, has installed someone as prime minister whom he expects to dominate:

The nomination of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as Turkey's next prime minister was seen by some as confirmation of Erdogan's efforts to put a subservient prime minister into place, and freeze out AKP co-founder and Turkey's outgoing President, Abdullah Gul...

Addressing reporters at a farewell reception in Ankara last week, Gul predicted Davutoglu would become the new leader of the AKP, but also noted that he favours a parliamentary system, in the most direct contradiction to Erdogan's stated policies yet...

With solid party credentials, and having increasingly fallen foul of Erdogan in the last year, notably over a widespread corruption scandal enveloping the party, Turan said Gul would never have been the pliable prime minister Erdogan sought. "He has tried to prevent Gul form coming back and trying to take back the prime ministership. All of the founders are going to be out of parliament by next elections," Turan said.

Is Abdullah Gul really the counterweight to Erdogan I keep reading he could be?  I feel like I keep reading about issues, such as the Gezi Park protests or social media law, where people look to him to stand up to Erdogan, but he never actually does so.  Why would he be any different as prime minister?

In Petroleo Veritas

Turkey is now doing business with the Iraqi Kurds of all people, to the annoyance of Baghdad:

Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz says that crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan has started flowing through a new pipeline that leads to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

Yildiz told reporters on January 2 that the oil would be put in storage facilities until the Iraqi central government gives consent for exports to world markets to start.

Turkey and authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan reached the oil export agreement without the participation of the government in Baghdad.

This isn't precisely news, as it has been brewing for ages and the agreement was reached last year, but it is still worth pausing to contemplate in historic perspective.

Headscarves in Turkey's Parliament

Since Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's approach to religion in public life has much more resembled France's aggressive secularism than the Anglo-American model of inclusion without endorsement.  A key sign of this has been the ban on headscarves in government offices.  For the devout they are required by modesty and a sign of faith, but for the Kemalists who reacted most strongly against the late Ottoman Islamo-centric policies of Sultan Abdulhamid II, they were a dangerous sign of reversion to what they saw as a primitive an unenlightened age.  That is why the fact Turkey now has four head-scarf wearing MPs is a big deal:

All four were members of Parliament in Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) list. They were elected without their heads covered because women with headscarves were not accepted as candidates by political parties after a major conflict in Parliament back in 1999, when a deputy, Merve Kavakçı, came to the opening session wearing a headscarf. She was denied ground following protests led by former Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, who claimed the move would violate the secularist principles of the Turkish state...

Erdoğan has just issued a decree and freed the use of the headscarf for public servants (with the exception of the military, police, prosecutors and judges). Followed by that major step, woman deputies within the AK Parti started to talk about wearing headscarves in parliamentary sessions. It was the pilgrimage season and some of them already covered their hair after visiting the Kaabah in Mecca, uncovering it during their working hours in Parliament.

In a sign of how much Turkey's political culture has changed under the AKP, the leader of the Kemalist party expressed support for breaking this taboo, albeit to the disgruntlement of many backbenchers.  The Kurdish party also supported the idea that people should be free to dress based on what they believed.  That said, the Kemalists have also made the point that the AKP should remember the value of freedom for those who are not conservative Muslims.  Glad to hear it, and I hope they remember their experiences in the minority whenever they regain power.

Syrian al-Qaeda and the Kurds

Continuing the theme that the al-Qaeda-like groups in Syria are now battling against their fellow anti-Assad forces, a Kurdish rebel official named Redur Khalil explains the battle his militias are waging against Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS:

Since Jul. 16 our forces have been constantly engaging in clashes with Al Qaeda-linked groups like Jabhat al Nusra and, especially, the ISIS – Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant – all across our territory.

These terrorist groups have not only killed and abducted Kurdish people and displaced civilians from their villages but also looted their properties, homes and places of work. After heavy clashes in areas like Afrin, 340 km north of Damascus, and Serekaniye, 506 km north of Damascus, we have pushed them down to Til Kocer, 840 km northeast of Damascus on the Syria-Iraq border.

Khalil claims that these groups are supported in their efforts by Turkey, which would prefer not to have a strong Kurdish autonomous area in Syria to go with the one in Iraq.  If those allegations are true, then it is short-sighted on the Erdogan government's part, since a Syria dominated by salafi militants poses the risk of long-term instability on the border from which the Kurds are likely to benefit anyway.  My best guess is that there is simply a confluence of both the Turkish army putting pressure on the armed Kurdish groups and the al-Qaeda types waging steady battles, but not actual support from one to the other.

Erdogan's Monumental Building

The Economist reports on new infrastructure projects in Turkey:

Abdul Mejid I, the Ottoman’s 31st sultan, had a dream. Reigning between 1839 and 1861, the determinedly Western-leaning sultan envisaged the construction of a submerged tunnel under the Bosphorus Straits connecting Asia to Europe. A French architect duly came up with a blueprint. But a dearth of technology and cash stood in the way.

The sultan’s dream is now coming true, 150 years later. The world’s first sea tunnel linking two continents will be inaugurated on October 29th, marking the 90th anniversary of the founding of Ataturk’s Republic. Stretching over 76km (47 miles), and with 1.4km of it laid at the bottom of the sea, the $3 billion “Marmaray” rail system will “eventually link London to Beijing, creating unimagined global connections” boasts Mustafa Kara, mayor of Istanbul’s Uskudar district, where the tunnel comes out...

AK’s projects, which have included hundreds of hospitals and roads, have earned it the unwavering support of millions of rural Anatolians, long ignored by the country’s secular elites. But Mr Erdogan’s grandiose projects, being pushed through with little if any public debate, including building Turkey’s biggest-ever mosque, on Istanbul’s Asian side, are increasingly seen as a sign of hubris.

According to the article, Turkey's opposition see many of these projects, including the proposed Ottoman-themed Gezi Park shopping center at the center of the recent protests, as being all about Erdogan remaking the landscape.  It focused a lot on the environmental damage done by these development projects.  I'd guess plenty of well-connected people are also getting rich off of them, since under the AKP Turkey's cities have seen quite a bit of what scholars call "neoliberal urbanism," or the privatization of public space.

Taksim Cleared

Taksim Square is largely clear this morning after a night like this:

Riot police fired tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets in day-long clashes that lasted into the early hours Wednesday, battling protesters who have been occupying Istanbul's central Taksim Square and its adjacent Gezi Park in the country's most severe anti-government protests in decades...

Thousands of police moved in early Tuesday, pushing past improvised barricades set up by the protesters who have swarmed through the massive square and park in the tens of thousands for the past 12 days...

Police fired repeated rounds of tear gas that rose in stinging plumes of acrid smoke from the square in running battles with groups of protesters hurling fireworks, bottles, rocks and firebombs in a cat-and-mouse game that lasted through the day and into the night.

More than 30,000 converged on the square again as dusk fell and were repelled by water cannon, rubber bullets and tear gas after Istanbul's governor, Huseyin Avni Mutlu, said the police came under attack from "marginal groups."

It seems clear that Erdogan's proposed meeting with selected protest leaders is almost exclusively about protecting his image with weaker voters in his coalition while trying to portray the demonstrators as unreasonable.  There may also be an element of trying to divide the protestors, isolating a hypothetical group focused just on the park from the larger anti-government movement which has appeared.

Erdogan: Forget the Mall

Erdogan is clearly backpedaling, trying to defuse the protests while saving face:

Erdoğan repeated willingness to discuss “democratic rights,” saying, “The shopping mall is not possible in the Artillery Barracks anyway, given the measures. We told them that we may build a city museum instead, and a green area that would be far better than the current park. We also wanted to turn the Ataturk Culture Center to an opera building.”

The prime minister, who bids to rebuild the historic barracks there, called for an end to ongoing Gezi Park protests on his return from a four-day trip to North Africa in the early hours of June 7. “These protests must end immediately,” Erdoğan said today in front of thousands of Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters who greeted him at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport. “No power but Allah can stop Turkey’s rise,” he said.

Despite this, he is still criticizing the protestors, and is proposing a net replacement of Ataturk commemorations with Ottoman ones.

Gezi Park Demands

Taksim Platform, a group which seems to have played an organizational role in Turkey's initial protests over the fate of Gezi Park, has issued a list of demands:

The demands included the dismissal of the governors of Istanbul; the capital, Ankara; and the city of Hatay; as well as the heads of the security forces in those three cities. The list also included the release of detained protesters; an end to the use of tear gas by the police; and the cancellation of the project that started the protests: the construction of an Ottoman-era replica that would destroy a park in Taksim Square in Istanbul.

As prioritized in that quote, the demands include the original one of cancelling the development project, but also actions against officials implicated in police brutality over the last week.  The demands also included an end to restrictions on demonstrations.

Prime Minister Erdogan himself has dug in and been contemptuous of the protestors, but other AKP figures have been more conciliatory.  They include President Abdullah Gul and Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, to whom these demands were presented.  Arinc is handling the situation in Turkey while Erdogan is overseas.

What Began in Taksim

The protests which began in Istanbul have spread throughout Turkey:

The demonstrations started in Istanbul a few days ago. The initial objective was to protect the park in Taksim, Istanbul's central square, from being demolished and replaced by a shopping mall. But the police intervened with excessive force against a peaceful assembly, liberally using tear gas to disperse protesters. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that the project will go ahead regardless of the "few" people that oppose it. As a result, this local dispute was unexpectedly transformed into a city and then a nation-wide mass demonstration against his polarizing style.

The mass protests should be seen as a reaction against the ruling AKP and Prime Minister Erdogan's style of majoritarian governance. By cementing a pro-government majority and avoiding consensus on sensitive issues, Erdogan's political strategy has polarized Turkish society. This majoritarian approach to decision-making has worked well for him so far. He not only succeeded in setting the agenda for the country, but he also increased his popular support over three successive elections. But it now seems that this style of governance has reached the limit of Turkish society's tolerance. The recent adoption of a law on alcohol that significantly impedes the marketing, sales and consumption of alcoholic drinks had already stirred a debate in Turkey about the government's negligence to take into account the sensitivities of Turkey's non-conservatives. Moreover, Erdogan's defense of the law by referencing religious principles only served to provoke the law's secular opponents. Instead the decision to transform a public park in the central square of Istanbul into a shopping mall became the rallying theme for many Turks to demonstrate their dissatisfaction with Erdogan's leadership. 

I can't comment on what was happening in the early days of the protests, though I suspect the dense symbolism of Taksim Square played a role alongside the proposed redevelopment.  However, what sent the protests nation-wide and definitely put generalized opposition to the AKP at their center was the police brutality a couple of days ago.  Sometimes the crackdown is worse than the initial reasons for the protests.

I don't know where this ends.  Erdogan could simply wait it out, or he could try to cut his losses and back down, possibly with an eye to Istanbul's 2020 Olympic bid and his own planned presidential campaign.  If he does back down, he should probably do it soon, before the protestors demands start to grow.

Taksim Occupied

This week Istanbul's central Taksim Square has been the site of peaceful protests against plans to turn its public green space Gezi Park into a shopping mall.  This morning, police launched a crackdown that injured a dozen:

Demonstrators, reaching as many as 5,000 on Thursday night, have been keeping watch at Gezi Park, where the İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality is planning a project to rebuild an Ottoman barracks that existed at the site at some point and a shopping center. The demonstrators occupied the park for the past four days and nights in order to stop bulldozers from removing the park's trees, and the police have been using tear gas and pressurized water to disperse them. However, the already tough approach reached a new peak on Thursday and Friday morning, when at least 12 people, including a deputy, were seriously injured, according to figures from the Istanbul Chamber of Doctors.

The police, during their intervention on the early hours of Friday, destroyed tents put up by demonstrators and used pepper spray, seriously injuring a 23-year-old protestor. The protestor was kicked by police officers while holding onto a tree trying to regain his balance after being disoriented by pepper spray.

Many civil society organizations and intellectuals condemned the use of excessive force against the demonstrators, who have remained peaceful.

I don't think you can really understand what led to these developments without either being on the ground in Istanbul or being immersed in Turkish media, and I am neither.  My suspicion, however, is that it arises out of long-standing opposition to the moderately Islamist AKP government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his political allies in the municipality on the part of largely secular Istanbulis, an opposition brought to the level of protest by the plans for Taksim Square, the heart of secular Kemalist Turkey where stands the monument commemorating the foundation of the modern, Kemalist republic.

Another thread to this is the AKP government's ongoing privatization of public assets, which has led in Turkey to the rampany privatization of public space, something scholars call "neoliberal urbanism."  Many former public beaches in southern Turkey have been turned into private property for the hotel industry, and turning a park into a shopping mall would fit the same pattern.  Recreating the Ottoman barracks on this site is also a symbolic stab at the heart of Kemalist Turkey, which was founded, at least ideologically, as a repudiation of the Ottoman system.

The Taksim protests, especially after this crackdown, may bring the tensions between the AKP and its secular statist opponents out to the open streets for what might be the first time.  If the government simply crushes this opposition, it will, in the eyes of many, join the ongoing intimidation of the media as an example of how Erdogan is setting up a party dictatorship under his auspices.

Ottoman Heritage Revival

Aslihan Agaoglu writes about Turkey's growing interest in Ottoman heritage:

I recently read an article on the BBC Turkish website that the Ottoman language is on its way to becoming a new selective course in Turkey’s high school curriculum. The news read: “Every day there’s a new course opening on Ottoman language and history. With the support of the government, this newfound interest in the Ottoman Empire just keeps on growing...”

Moreover, the fascination with our Ottoman heritage is not just limited to the language or TV shows; it has a significant presence in almost every aspect of cultural life. A growing number of Turkish fashion designers are creating clothing lines inspired by the Ottoman women living in the Saray; jewellery created using Ottoman motifs can be found in most stores and there are now shelves solely dedicated to Ottoman literature in bookshops.

However, there’s a deeper, more profound reason behind this fascination towards our history that goes beyond nostalgia. Language is organic, it changes and evolves over time, yet a drastic transition such as ours can cause a significant gap between the different generations, that today we find hard to bridge. When asked, a man in his fifties said his reason for wanting to learn Ottoman was to be able to read his grandfather’s tombstone. This paints a fair portrait of the situation and the causality of collective amnesia.

To understand the reason such a revival is necessary, you have to understand that after World War I, the Turkish nationalists blamed the Ottomans for the polity's failures.  The dynasty and its extensive social class of retainers and political servants were seen, correctly, actually, not as fully Turkish, but an amalgam of different ethnicities which diluted the assumed grandness of Turkishness.  Their emphasis on Islam was also seen as backward given Ataturk's push to Europeanization.

In 1974 a volume was published by Brill entitled The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History. Its chapters, which included what I believe to be Arnold Toynbee's last publication, were developed from papers presented at a conference at the University of Wisconsin, a conference that was actually protested at the time by Turkish students at that university.  Apparently, however, that rejection of an important part of the Turkish heritage has petered out, and a new generation is interested in those centuries of the Anatolian past.

Turkey's Unfree Press

I'd known the media was under pressure in Turkey, but I had not realized how bad things have gotten:

Fearful of antagonising Turkey’s autocratic prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, media bosses (who have diverse business interests) have begun a cull. Many recall the $2.5 billion fine slapped on the Dogan Group, Turkey’s biggest media conglomerate, in 2009. Its owner, Aydin Dogan, was forced to shrink his empire and dump some critics of Mr Erdogan before the pressure eased.

By some counts scores of journalists have been sacked (soon after she started this story, your correspondent was dropped as a columnist by a local paper). Yet Ercan Ipekci, president of the Turkish Journalists Union, calls the sacked hacks “the luckier ones”. Turkey is now the world’s leading jailer of journalists. Estimates vary, but at least 49 are behind bars. The World Press Freedom Index 2013, recently published by Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based lobby group, ranked Turkey 154th among 179 countries, behind such places as Mali and Afghanistan.

Turkey's Imam-Hatip Schools

Turkey's education system contains various pre-professional schools, including a network for training mosque imams and preachers (hatips).  These "imam-hatip schools" have come to be used by many Turks as a way to see that their kids are educated in an environment that encourages religious values, much like the niche occupied by religious schools in the United States.  The Islamist political movement which currently controls the national government is dominated by imam-hatip school graduates, and has pursued policies favorable to these institutions.  Other Turks, on the other hand, see them as a particularly dangerous threat to the country's 20th-century history of militant secularism.

Iren Ozgur has published a useful study of these schools, their students, and the parents who send their kids there.  One thing that it highlighted for me is just how socially divided Turkey is over the issue of religion in public life.  In the introduction, she describes how the imam-hatip students are bound together by the experience of hostility and discrimination on the part of secular society enhances their sense of solidarity, and in practice their lifelong support for each other.  This hostility is a two-way street, however:

The Imam-Hatip school community can be so insular that those who no longer associate with it can find it difficult to maintain their ties with other members.  Ahmet Hakan told me that once he began working for a secularist media group and "hanging out in secularist neighborhoods," he was ostracized by members of the community for his "out of the ordinary" lifestyle.  Ahmet Hakan's feelings were justified.  Individuals within the Imam-Hatip school community voiced their disappointment and antipathy toward him and others who had left the community.

The other conclusion I drew from this book, and which may be stated overtly in the work itself, though I can't find it now, is that the schools in the present form seem to arise out of Turkey's religious milieu rather than create it.  During periods when there were debilitating handicaps put on imam-hatip graduates, parents simply hired private religious tutors to make up for the lost inclusion of Islamic values in the curriculum.  I think if there is any strengthening effect of the students' religious orientation, it is that they are not forced into the secular milieu at all to become familiar with it.  This element, especially when combined with the mutual discrimination between the religious and secular wings of society only enforces and perpetuates those divisions.

Mesopotamia Running Dry?

We've known the Euphrates has been flowing below late 20th-century levels for about a decade now, but apparently it afflicts the entire Tigris-Euphrates valley:

(T)he Tigris-Euphrates—which flows through the so-called fertile crescent that gave birth to agriculture itself—is getting drier. According to a study in Water Resources Research, an American scientific journal, between 2003 and 2009 the region that stretches from eastern Turkey to western Iran lost 144 cubic kilometres of fresh water...

The main reason for the depletion turns out to be that more water is being taken out of the underground aquifer, mainly by farmers. The rate of loss accelerated after drought hit the region in 2007. Between 2007 and 2009, in response to reduced flows of water in the rivers, Iraq’s government dug 1,000 new wells and abstracted four-fifths of all its groundwater reserves. The aquifer is not being replenished at anything like that rate, so this cannot continue for long.

In other words, the initial decline in river water is now leading to aquifer depletion, which only makes the trends worse.

War on Hookahs

An anti-smoking push in Turkey is also targeting hookahs:

Fans of the water pipe, also known as a hookah or shisha, can no longer get their fix in cafes, bars, and restaurants after a law banning smoking from closed public spaces came into force in January...

This is exactly the misconception that health specialists take issue with: fruity it may be, but the tobacco in the nargileh is just as damaging to health as regular smoking, if not more so, doctors warn.

According to findings from the US-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, an hour-long session with a nargileh is the equivalent of inhaling 100-200 cigarettes.

The bigger intake of breath needed to inhale from a water pipe means hookah users may absorb higher concentrations of toxins.

Antakya and Syria's Civil War

Kurdish blogger Dilar Dirik writes about the effects of Syria's civil war on her native Antakya, in the Turkish province of Hatay:

Increasingly worried, the people of Hatay witness the horror of the civil war on their doorstep. Those who have always been proud of their cosmopolitan hometown of peaceful religious and ethnic co-existence now report that the atmosphere of their once tolerant province has changed to the worse. Aside from the suffering economy, many feel harassed by the warriors that fight in Syria during the day, and spend the night in Antakya. Local sources claim that Turkey trains rebels to send them across the border - among them jihadists with Al Qaeda ties. The population of Antakya started campaigns like “I want my Antakya back,” to protest government policies that take advantage of Hatay as a host for warriors.

Alawite Arabs, who form the majority in Hatay, hold strong sympathies with the internationally condemned Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad. Threatened by the rise of religious fundamentalism among parts of the rebel forces, many of these liberal democrats and Kemalists prefer Assad’s rule out of fear of what Syria’s and their own future might hold if a Sunni majority, taken advantage of by jihadist groups, seizes power across the border. Existing political loyalties for Turkish parties transcend the border to find their expression in solidarities within the Syrian context. The population in the city of peaceful co-existence feels threatened by the increasing politically religious face of the revolutionaries, and fears for the secular regime in Syria, as though secularism was a sufficient guarantor for democracy. Bashar and Asma Assad are seen as a modern couple and enjoy an almost iconic status among supporters.

Has anyone else heard of Turkey serving as a base of fighters entering Syria?  If true, that would be a diplomatic card I expect Assad to use more.

Sam White's Hourani-Winner

Something I predicted has come true!  Sam White has won the Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association.  Here's a repost of the review of his book that I posted over the summer:

Don't be surprised if the next winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award is Sam White's The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. It has been ages since I've read a book both so subtle in its original conceptualization of its topic and based on such thorough research in a variety of different sources across what are often thought of by multiple disciplines.

In this book, White narrates a new interpretation of Ottoman history from the 1500s until the 1700s, one in which the Little Ice Age plays a prominent role in shaping the physical infrastructure for diverse historical actors. A key concept is his description of an Ottoman "imperial ecology," in which the premodern state is primarily a system for mobilizing natural resources. The Ottoman realm, in other words, was not so much a place on a map or peoples under a ruling dynasty, but system in which plants, animals, and presumably minerals were shipped around and processed to meet both human and dynastic needs. The dynasty's strength was its ability to access available resources and put them to, for example, military purposes.

We know that there was a warm period in the late 1400's and early 1500's, and it is in this environment that the Ottomans achieved their greatest strength vis a vis European powers and their population reached its greatest extent. This population, however, moved into ever more marginal farmland, and as the warm perid began to wane in the late 1500's, there were recurring signs that, in certain areas of Anatolia, it might be growing to large for the available resources.

The Celali Rebellion of the years around 1600 were the crisis point. The 1590's brought the longest drought the Middle East has seen in the last 600 years. In that same decade, the Ottoman Empire required significant resources for a war against the Habsburgs, but the population of certain areas was unable to meet the demands, and these were the areas where the rebellion began. Amidst the dislocation, famine, and plague, the population contracted sharply, and the rest of the 1600s saw a reconfiguration of the Ottoman imperial ecology that would endure until the 1800s.

One strength of White's work is his detailed work in the primary sources, especially Ottoman archival reports of provisioning difficulties, weather conditions, and burgeoning discontent, and their correlation with significant uprisings and broader climate events. Beyond that, however, he suggests credibly that the Ottoman experience of the Little Ice Age might represent a recurring pattern in Middle Eastern environment history, in which periods of growth are followed by ecological crises with protracted recoveries.

Early in the book, White visualizes Middle Eastern settlement history as having permanent population centers from which new settlement radiates to more marginal areas under favorable conditions. A key part of the long-term pattern, however, is the fact that Middle Eastern agriculturalists tend to engage in raising crops or nomadic pastoralism, but seldom both. Farmland expands at the expense of grazing. When there is a population collapse, however, animal populations with shorter generations recover first, and so in the 1600's former farmland became the grazing land for revitalized sheep herds and their newly powerful nomadic herders. Farming populations, meanwhile, fled to the cities to escape both starvation and insecurity, only to contribute to death of recurring epidemics. Agriculture only began to recover when this situation was stabilized in the 1800's.

The Ottoman dynasty survived by negotiating new power-sharing arrangements with local and regional elites that gave the latter more autonomy, autonomy which enabled them to enter the world market as suppliers of cash crops to Western European capitalists. The fact the regime survived this crisis is unusual, and White suggests that it is not necessarily better for the region than a change would have been, as happened when the Qing successfully imposed a new regime in China after the Ming collapse or the Romanovs did after Russia's "Time of Troubles," both of which were linked to the same climate changes. Another difference he notes is the lack of an open agricultural frontier where surplus population could expand, as Russia had with Ukraine and Siberia, India had in Bengal, and China had with its underpopulated south and west.

In his conclusion, White briefly suggests that his study might have significance as we consider contemporary climate change. That is certainly true in a general sense, but one thing I am wondering about is whether his model of Middle Eastern ecological changes has lessons for the environmental crises in the Middle East today, especially Yemen and the Euphrates valley. For that reason, I hope analysts of Yemen, Iraq, and Syria will become aware of his conclusions and remain sensitive to shifting environmental factors as a living infrastructure system for human civilization.