Originally Posted by
John J. Xenakis in 'Generational Dynamics: Forecasting America's Destiny'
> A new major invasion by Russia against the Ottomans occurred in
> 1853, when the Crimean War began. The Ottomans pushed the
> Russians back, but only with the help of the English and French.
> This was very significant because it was the first time that a
> significant number of European forces were present on Ottoman
> soil. This resulted in enormous changes in the decades to come,
> for it led to the way European forces encroaching on Ottoman
> lands throughout the empire.
> Following their stunning defeat with the Treaty at Karlowitz in
> 1699, the Ottomans began more and more to imitate the victors. At
> first the imitation was primarily in the area of military
> technique and weaponry, but by the 1800s began to include some
> cultural imitation.
> However, the Wars of German Unification and Italian Unification
> that occurred in the 1860s and 1870s also had a significant effect
> on the Ottomans in the awakening period following the Crimean War:
> A "pan-Islamic" movement began among the Muslims to unify all
> Muslims along a common front, and Istanbul would be center of
> this worldwide identity group.
> Instead of becoming larger and more unified, however, the Ottoman
> Empire continued to lose large parts of their former empire. By
> 1914, Egypt, Cyprus, Aden and all of North Africa were being
> occupied by European powers. Furthermore, the Europeans were
> exerting influence in the Balkans, and Russia was exerting control
> in Iran and Afghanistan.
> These losses caused increasing discontent among the Ottoman
> people. The most significant development occurred in 1889, when
> students of the military medical school in Istanbul formed a
> secret society to fight the government. Similar secret societies
> sprang up in other colleges and among junior officers in the army,
> despite crackdowns by the authorities. The best-known group was
> the Ottoman Freedom Society, founded in 1906. It united with
> other groups and became the Committee of Union and Progress in
> 1907.
> The Committee of Union and Progress was the leading faction in
> the Young Turk Revolution.
> In 1908, the Young Turks launched a rebellion in the Balkans that
> soon engulfed the entire empire. In 1914, the Ottomans entered
> World War I on the side of Germany, resulting in enormous
> dislocations. Of the three million men drafted for the army, half
> of them deserted. Inflation was enormous, resulting in a 2500
> percent increase in cost of living between 1914 and 1918. A
> famine in Syria and Lebanon (still part of the empire) in 1915-16
> claimed 100,000 lives.
> In the late 1800s, a Turkish identity movement had begun to form,
> promoting Turkish (as opposed to Ottoman) literature and culture.
> However, the Turkish nationalism movement didn't gain much
> traction with the public at that time, mainly because for 1,400
> years the great strength of the Ottoman Empire, and indeed all of
> the Islamic empires, was that they were all multi-ethnic and the
> Muslim rulers were really very good at preserving the rights and
> meeting the needs of their various ethnic minorities.
> Turkish nationalism began to grow during World War I because it
> was becoming clear that only the Turkish people would remain from
> the Ottoman Empire, and furthermore, some Europeans wanted to even
> break off even pieces of Turkey. By 1919, there were so many
> Allied forces in Istanbul that the Ottomans feared that the Allies
> intended to keep Istanbul for themselves.
> Actually, there were three separate Muslim identities within the
> Ottoman Empire that formed in the Mideast around this time: The
> Turkish identity (in what is now Turkey), the Arab identity
> (Saudi Arabia), and the Persian identity (Iran).
> With the encouragement of the English, the Arab nationalists
> turned against the Ottomans.
> Another group that turned against the Ottomans must be mentioned:
> The Armenians. This Orthodox Christian population lives in the
> midst of the Muslim population of what was the eastern portion of
> the Ottoman Empire. An Armenian uprising that occurred in
> Istanbul in 1894-96 was brutally put down, with a large-scale
> massacre of Armenians in Istanbul.
> In 1914, Russia organized four large Armenian volunteer guerrilla
> units to support the war effort against the Ottomans. In
> reaction, the Ottomans began deporting the entire Armenian
> population -- millions of people -- resulting in deaths of over a
> million Armenians in what amounted to a death march.
> Finally, in October, 1922, the Turkish Republic was declared,
> putting an official end to the Ottoman Empire after 600 years.
> The president of the new nation was Mustafa Kemal, an activist who
> had led the fight to keep Turkey from being split up among the
> Europeans.
> Mustafa Kemal, who later took the name Ataturk (father of the
> Turks), led the new country in a distinctly Turkish direction. He
> did everything he could to sweep away the Ottoman past. He
> abandoned the Ottoman policy of territorial expansion, required
> Turks to wear Western-style clothing, abolished polygamy, adopted
> the Christian Gregorian calendar, and adopted the Latin alphabet
> for writing in the Turkish language, which had previously been
> done in Arabic script. He even sought to purge Arabic and
> Persian words from the Turkish language.
> Perhaps most important is that he sought to secularize Turkish
> society. The caliphate, the office of the supreme spiritual
> leader for Sunni Muslims worldwide, was abolished. Religious
> schools were closed, and Islamic law courts were dismantled. A
> new constitution separated religion from the state, and gave all
> male Turkish citizens over 21 the right to vote,
> As for the other pieces of the Ottoman Empire, they were turned
> into independent nations: Iraq in 1924, Saudi Arabia in 1932,
> Syria in 1945, Lebanon and Jordan in 1946.
