The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  This general had spoken very clearly and in a strong voice had said what we all knew already, but the starkness of the decline had never been so visible to me before. One question had always bothered me.

  “Forgive my ignorance, General, but why were we unable to take Vienna?”

  Everyone sighed in exasperation as if this was something they had been discussing all their lives and now, of all things, a woman wanted to know the answer. It was the young officer from Salonika who replied.

  “As you can imagine, this is something our military historians have been discussing for a long time and there is no real agreement. The defeat of our army outside Vienna in 1683 was understandable. The Habsburgs and the Poles were in possession of new Western techniques of warfare. Our soldiers were demoralised and in a state of some discontent. I think by then it was a bit late for us. The real question is what happened when we were at the height of our strength and Sultan Suleman’s armies were sweeping aside everything in front of them as they took Belgrade, Rhodes, Hungary and Transylvania but stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529. Why did we lift that siege when the city was in our grasp? That is the real mystery. For at that time we were militarily dominant and politically in alliance with the best people in Europe: German and Dutch Protestants as well as the Jews and people of our own faith being expelled from Spain. If we had taken Vienna we might have defeated the Catholics decisively and changed the face of Europe. Think what might have happened if we had reversed the trend in Spain. The victory might have forced us to modernise ourselves two hundred years ago, along with the rest of Europe. Suleman’s failure to take Vienna was the decisive moment, in my opinion. And everyone here is likely to give you a different reason for the failure. We would be here for weeks and even then we would not reach agreement. If you are seriously interested in Ottoman military history we will plan an evening in Istanbul and bring all the experts together. I think...”

  My brother Halil interrupted the discussion. “Always the past. Always the past. It’s what we usually accuse our enemies of doing. Let us discuss the future. Before we proceed, however, I have something important to report to you. There is an old family friend staying here. He was once a German tutor, but on the death of his brother, he inherited the family estates in Prussia and became a Baron. He claims that there is a person present in this room, who is spying on behalf of the palace. He knows this because he was present in Berlin when this same person negotiated a secret treaty between the Sultan and Prussia, committing us to support them in any future European conflict. In return they would help preserve the Sultan in power. This is treachery on two different levels. The first is against the interests of our country. The second is directly against the Committee. If such a person is actually present it would be useful at this stage if he could identify himself.”

  These remarks created a sensation. The young officers rose to their feet in anger. The general with the squeaky voice was beginning to tremble. He was looking at the floor, but everyone was looking at him. His voice cracked even further.

  “This is a complete misunderstanding. It is true I went to Berlin on behalf of the Sultan, but how could I refuse without betraying our cause? I did as I was told by the Grand Vizier. Is that a crime?”

  A long silence followed this remark. The other general looked at his colleague with a sad expression. “Orders have to be carried out. We know that well, but why did you not inform me at the time? I was your senior officer. And why, when you established contact with the Committee, did you not inform its members in Istanbul? I think it would be best if you told us the truth, general.”

  Then the young officer spoke again. “Have you given our names to anyone?”

  “How could he?” The menace in Halil’s voice was completely new to me. “He has never met you before, but he could have given the names of the two generals who approached him to join the Committee. Did you?”

  I began to feel sorry for the man with the woman’s voice. He was shaking his head in disbelief as he began to shrink and disappear in the corner of Iskander Pasha’s large, faded green leather armchair. I suppose he was amazed by the coincidence of a Prussian junker with links to the military leaders in Berlin being here on this particular day and recognising him. Who can blame the poor general? Very few people, including some who were very close to the family, were aware that Uncle Memed and the Baron had been lovers for thirty years. Even the most brilliant spy could not have foreseen such a disaster, but, at the very least, he might have been better able to pull himself out of the morass by inventing a story that created a doubt in the minds of some of those who were present. Not this man.

  Never in my life have I seen someone disintegrate so completely as did the eunuch-general on that day in the library of our summer house in August 1899. Everyone was looking at him. Nobody spoke. He was cowering in fear. Slowly a smell began to pervade the room. Our noses began to twitch. I realised then that the wretched man had soiled his trousers. I think this act disgusted his stiff-backed colleagues even more than the treachery. Halil ran out of the room and returned with Petrossian, who stepped back as the stench assaulted his senses.

  “What one is, one does,” said the other general in a tone of total disgust.

  The eunuch-general had begun to cry. He pleaded for mercy. He sought our forgiveness. He swore on the Koran that he would tell us everything, including the names of all the spies in the Committee, provided his life was spared.

  “Go and change your clothes first, you wretch,” said the young officer. “You deserve to be executed for this act alone. We will determine your fate on your return. Your very presence in the army is an outrage.”

  Petrossian lifted him out of the room. We all rushed to breathe the fresh air of the scented garden. Usually I find the scent of jasmine too cloying. How welcome it was on that day as I inhaled its sweetness! Halil and the other general were walking together, deciding what to do with their colleague. The officers, including Selim, were in a huddle closer to the house. I was looking at the sea, unable to take in every possible angle of the events of the afternoon. Even if the eunuch-general gave us a list of the spies there would be no guarantee that he was telling the truth. He might deliberately mislead us to create more trouble within the Committee. It was difficult to think of him doing anything intelligent, given the scale of the earthquake that had shaken his life, but he might be thinking now as he cleaned himself up in the bathroom.

  The generals signalled that the officers should join them. The eunuch-general’s fate had already been decided and the young men were being asked for their opinion. I did not want him executed. I knew what he had done was shocking, but killing him would not help anyone. They must have read my thoughts, for Selim and Halil came to join me.

  “It’s his life or ours,” said Halil. “If we let him live we will all have to go into exile and that will leave the Committee headless inside the army in Istanbul. We cannot let that happen. It’s a military decision, Nilofer.”

  I was not to be convinced that easily.

  “And if you kill him and bury his body somewhere, what will the man waiting anxiously for his reports begin to think? I assume he will be suspicious. He’s not an insignificant person, you know. He is a general and they don’t just disappear into thin air, not even in a dying Empire.”

  Halil nodded seriously. “The others never told him they were coming here. He did not even know that he would be meeting us. He was simply told that we had organised a meeting with two officers who had come for consultations from Salonika and that there might be a member of the Committee arriving from Paris. Nothing else. That is all he could have reported to his superior who, don’t forget, is the Grand Vizier, a man with a few other problems on his mind. It is very possible he said nothing at all and decided to wait till he had met the officers. Even if he has informed the Vizier that two generals are interested in the Committee, that is something we can always deny. We cannot take the risk of these young officers being exposed at this stage, Nilo
fer. It would be like destroying our future. Don’t forget that the spy was present during our morning discussions as well. We evaluated our strength in different units of the army in his presence. That is the sort of information for which the palace would happily sacrifice dozens of lives. Instead we are only taking one. You must understand.”

  “So you are going to kill him?”

  Halil and Selim looked at me, at each other and finally their gaze shifted far away, in the direction of the sea. I knew then that the poor eunuch-general would never see the sun rise again. Within an hour they had saddled their horses, summoned the coachman and left our house for ever. I knew I was seeing the eunuch-general for the last time and, despite myself, the thought saddened me. A human life was about to be truncated. I understood why he had to be despatched. I knew that it was sometimes necessary to do bad things for a good cause, but the man was so pathetic that I felt another way might have been found. Selim did not agree with me. He admitted that he, too, was unhappy, but he was convinced there was no other solution. I had seen them leave. The sentenced man had recovered some of his dignity. He walked to the carriage with his head raised, which somehow made it worse for me.

  That evening’s meal was dominated by a discussion of the day’s events. The Baron had emerged as the unlikely hero of the whole affair. That is how Halil referred to him as he proposed a toast in the Baron’s own champagne. After we had all sipped the sparkling liquid, I could not resist speaking.

  “Hero, perhaps,” I said, and then surprised myself. “Surely executioner would have been the more appropriate word.”

  There was silence. Selim glared at me.

  The Baron recovered rapidly and smiled. “You are right, Nilofer, but look at it this way. If the eunuch had been spared, your brother, husband and those fine officers who were here earlier today might have lost their lives.”

  “Baron,” I continued, “I did not mean to sound offensive. I accept what you say and perhaps what is being done probably even as we eat and drink is something that had to be done. That doesn’t make it less distasteful. Can I ask you another question?”

  He nodded.

  “The dead man was actively engaged in the interests of both the Sultan and your Kaiser Wilhelm. It was he who signed the secret protocol between Istanbul and Berlin. Our officers may regard that as short-sighted treachery, but surely you would favour such a course.”

  The Baron sat up straight in his chair. “I would. But for me old family loyalties are more important than politics. The ties between our two families go back a very long way. Did you know that my great-grandfather once stayed at this very house with Memed’s grandfather? That is why I agreed to come here as a tutor. So you see, my dear child, that there are more important things in life, such as personal loyalties and these, for me, always override political affiliations.”

  “Spoken like a true junker and a good friend, my dear,” said Memed in a surprisingly emotional tone. “I propose another toast. To loyalty and friendship and a curse on the narrowness of politics.”

  This time, unlike the others, I did not raise my glass.

  I had not been alone with Selim the whole day and I began to feel a pent-up, uncontrollable tenderness for him. The meal, alas, was far from over. Memed was in an ebullient mood. I had referred to the spy as a eunuch-general. This was now confirmed by Memed.

  “He was castrated as a child so that he could serve in the palace as a eunuch, but with the promise of reforms in the air, his poor parents realised they had a mistake. The story reached the office of the Grand Vizier and, to his credit, he felt sorry for the child’s family. The father was an Albanian water-carrier. This boy was one of six children. He was sent to a medresseh, but a very good one, with teachers who taught and did not just beat the pupils into submission. It is where the children of the palace servants were sent and the teachers had to be careful. When he reached his sixteenth year, the Vizier took him as an office boy and watched his mind develop. He had a prodigious memory for faces and documents. He had to read a paper only once and he could memorise most of the important details. He was transferred to the palace and became a crucial figure in the spy network of the state. He will take many secrets to his grave.”

  My father was surprised. “How do you know all this, Memed?”

  Memed exchanged a quick glance with the Baron.

  “I told him,” interjected the Baron. “The eunuch developed a fondness for me and one night in Berlin, over his cups, he told me his life story. That is why I was shaken when I sensed his presence in this house today. It was his intelligence that made him so dangerous. Poor man. How was he to know that I would be here? Poor, poor, man.”

  We retired to the library after supper. This had been the scene of the eunuch’s ignominy and there was a vacuum where once the chair had stood. Father had to be told now that his favourite chair was being cleaned and it needed to be aired for at least a day in the sun to lose its stench. He was outraged.

  “May that eunuch roast in hell!”

  “He will, Father,” replied Halil in a cold voice. “He will.”

  Just as we were about to leave the table, the Baron decided to enlighten us with one of his pronouncements. “I spoke briefly to the younger officers, today. One of them strikes me as the strong leader who will be needed one day when a new state needs to be carved from the rubble of the old Empire. I recommended a reading of Machiavelli to this officer and he said something very interesting to me in return. He said he was not well educated enough in foreign languages and he would, therefore, have to wait till the Italian text was translated into Turkish. Then he said something truly remarkable, which filled me with hope. ‘I think’, he said with total confidence, ‘in order to move forward fast we will have to change many things, included our outdated script. We will Latinise the Turkish alphabet within a year of taking power. It will make it easier for everyone to learn the languages of Europe. Perhaps then many people can read your Machiavelli.’ I thought to myself then, I hope this young man succeeds in his mission. It is the vision you need to go forward.”

  Later that night, Selim and I made love in silence. We had been deprived of each other’s company for the whole day and words were no longer sufficient to express the longing. Afterwards we talked for a very long time.

  He was excited by the events of the day. He spoke of the young officer who had made what was really difficult sound possible, namely to make progressive ideas a reality. So often in the past, lofty ideas had been transformed into their opposites, when those who had proclaimed them actually came to power. This had happened in France after their Revolution, but it had happened here as well. Whenever the reformers had been made Viziers, their ideas disappeared and they were compelled to govern the Empire in the only way they knew, which was the old way.

  This time, Selim felt it would all be very different. They had agreed to transform our Arabic script to Latin, abolish the powers of the clergy, make education for girls compulsory and remove the veil from their lives for ever. He gave me a detailed account of the only major disagreement that had marred the day. That too had been an argument about the past, not the future. The three generals had said that it had been necessary to crush the janissary uprising of 1826. The younger officers were inclined to be more sympathetic to the janissaries, since they felt they were now in a similar situation to the defeated cohort in that they were preparing to unleash their own mutiny against the Sultan.

  “Halil got angry with us at this stage,” Selim laughed. “He said we had nothing in common with the rabble that was crushed in 1826. They were degenerates who oppressed the people and had become completely corrupted. They should have been disbanded many centuries ago and a new army created on the European model. We should have learnt from the French and the English. He said that all the janissaries would have done is to have imposed a new Sultan, more amenable to their crimes. The young officer from Salonika who seems to have made a big impact on the Baron was not in a mood to compromise. He agreed
that the janissaries had too much power in the Ottoman state, but it was the only way to maintain the core of a permanent standing army. Either you have dukes and lords on the European model, whose responsibility it is to raise an army for their king, or you have the janissaries. The only other way was during popular revolutions, such as when the English created their New Model Army and the French their own version after 1789. In the end we were convinced by their arguments, but it was an interesting debate. What did you think of the officer from Salonika?”

  “I thought he was from Istanbul. That is where his wife teaches.”

  “Yes, but he was born in Salonika and that is where he has most support.”

  “I was impressed.”

  “You were meant to be.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  I was not prepared for sleep and so I returned to the subject that Salman had raised with me earlier. “Did you discuss how pure the new state would be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are people in the Committees who openly say that we need Turkishness. They say that Ottoman culture is too cosmopolitan and that the influence we have assimilated from the Arabs, Persians and Europeans is comparable to flowers raised in the hothouse. They want native plants only to be nourished. How can this happen, Selim? In our cities and villages different communities have lived side by side for many centuries. Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Jews and heaven knows how many smaller groups.”

  Selim agreed with me and insisted that Turkishness had not been discussed at all in their deliberations, though he could see that it might become an important question in the future.