Shifting Sands

by Raja Shehadeh

  Mifleh/Nassar’s account of his trial in the military tribunal contains a farcical moment that identifies a second list of charges. In the first list he is accused of hostility to the ruling party in Istanbul, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), to the government, nominally headed by the Sultan but controlled by the ‘Three Pashas’ and in particular Enver Pasha, and to the German army. He is also accused of being pro-British and favouring Arab separatism. In a second meeting of the court he is questioned about changing the name of his son from Anwar (Enver) to Adib. Here is the exchange in my translation:

  MILITARY JUDGE: Following the Constitutional Revolution [1908] you named your newborn son Anwar, after the unionist leader and war minister Enver Pasha, then it seems you changed his name.

  MIFLEH: Yes, it is true I named my second son Anwar, in celebration of the hero of the constitution. I changed his name to Adib later not because I lost faith in the unionists, but because Anwar Bey deserted the Arabs in Tripoli [Libya, where the Ottoman army, alongside Arab tribesmen, fought Italy from October 1911 to November 1912] and left them to fight the Italians without leadership.

  MILITARY JUDGE: What was Enver Pasha to do at the time, when the Ottoman government concluded a peace agreement with the Italians and ordered him to withdraw his troops?

  MIFLEH: In my modest view he should have resigned from his commission and continued to fight the Italians to the end, instead of allowing this Arab province to be removed from the body of the Ottoman sultanate, and undermining the loyalty of the Arabs to the state.

  When asked about his partisan views, Mifleh declares that he was never an enemy of the unionists, but he was against their Turkification schemes, which weakened the bonds of loyalty of the Arabs towards the state. To the charge of being pro-British, Mifleh did not hide his Anglophilia and answered that he had favoured an alliance with the British over an alliance with Germany before the war, but once war was declared, ‘Then – I wrote in the daily press – we have to talk in the tongue of the government, see with its eyes, and hear with its ears.’1

  The vindication of Nassar’s stance in his real trial, as well as in the fictional trial of Mifleh al-Ghassani, is used in the novel to illustrate both the protagonist’s commitment to the principle of non-intervention in the war and his loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, despite his relentless criticism of the Turkification scheme of the CUP government. But the novel also demonstrates a degree of integrity in the military court system, since he successfully overturned the charge sheet accusing him of desertion and betrayal.

  The second set of diaries and memoirs examined here contains soldiers’ writings. Such narratives of the war were rarer, in large part because literacy was limited, but also because the diaries tended not to survive the consequences of exile, trench warfare and fear of discovery. Here I will examine the narratives in three soldiers’ diaries that reached us against the odds. They allow us to examine how events affected the lives of three Ottoman (Arab and Turkish) soldiers. Their narratives are doubly significant because, contrary to popular assumptions, the manner in which the war affected their consciousness did not always correspond to their ethnic background.

  The first was a soldier known as Mehmet Fesih (Muhammad al Fasih), who came from a mixed Turkish–Arab family in Mersin, a frontier area in the Turkish–Arab divide of the Ottoman sultanate. He fought in Gaza and in Gallipoli where he kept a daily diary of his observations. Mulazim (Lieutenant) Fesih occupied a liminal position in the nascent ethnic divide that separated southern Anatolia from northern Syria. Belonging to a family that combined Arabic and Turkish as their spoken language, he would nevertheless choose to identify with and fight for the Kemalist forces. While his diary is replete with references to the communal solidarity of the various ethnic groups that made up the Ottoman army, particularly to his Syrian comrades at Gallipoli/Çanakkale, he would make his decision in favour of the post-war Republican movement and the new Turkish nationalism it embodied. After the termination of the Great War, he volunteered to fight against the invading European and Greek forces, where his contribution was duly recognised and rewarded. He eventually Turkified his name, in adherence to the diktat of Kemalist ideology, and became a general in the Republican army.

  The second narrative is that of Second Lieutenant Aref Shehadeh, a junior officer in the Fifth Army Corps, who was from a Jerusalem family of merchants. In April 1915 he was captured by the tsarist army in fighting at Erzurum on the Caucasian front and spent the bulk of the war years in an internment camp for German and Ottoman prisoners in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. In the Siberian camp, in common with many soldiers who were captured in the war, he began to reflect on his destiny. He records how the Siberian exile made him reflect on his national identity in a manner he was not aware of until he later joined one of the literary clubs in Istanbul:

  I was not aware that I was an Arab, and that I should think of the future of my Arab nation until the establishment of the Literary Forum (al Muntada al Adabi) in Istanbul. Of the founders I remember four names: Abdul Karim al Khalil, Yusif Mukhaibar, Jamil al Husseini, and Seiful Din al Khatib. I was registered as a member and was since then engulfed with the prevailing Arab nationalism among the students. It was then that I began to hear the words Arabs, Arabism, Nationalism, and Homeland (Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, 8 February 1917).2

  During the first two years of internment he lived in common quarters with Turkish officers, lectured and wrote in Turkish, and was generally loyal to the Ottoman war aims. The Hijazi revolt of Sharif Hussein and the Syrian nationalists in Damascus for Arab independence from the Ottoman Empire, known as the Arab Revolt, compelled him to rethink his Ottoman loyalties in favour of an amorphous Arabness. In this regard the Russian command played a significant role in encouraging Arab separatism by keeping the living quarters of Arab and Turkish officers apart, and extending favouritism to Syrian detainees in terms of passes to leave the camp and access to newspapers and the outside world. In this process Shehadeh shifted his loyalties from adherence to the principles of Osmenlilik (Ottomanist constitutional ideology) to those of Arab independence.

  Lt. Aref Shehadeh’s Prison Camp Identity Card, Krosnayersk, Siberia, 1915 (Institute of Palestine Studies Archives)

  We should keep in mind, though, that these claims of a sudden awakening, however sincere, were made retrospectively by Shehadeh in the shadow of Ottoman military defeat and his escape from Siberia to join the forces of Prince Faisal in southern Syria. After the war Shehadeh became editor of Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah, an organ of the Faisali movement in Palestine. He adopted the name of Aref al-Aref and became a prominent historian of Jerusalem, but his writings continued to reflect his early Ottomanism in Istanbul and in his Siberian exile.

  This issue of national dualism, ethnic ambivalence and reinvention of identity is exemplified differently, through the prism of pacifism in war, in the experiences of the third soldier in this trilogy. Ihsan Turjman, a clerk in the Ottoman Fourth Army, was stationed in Jerusalem. He fought briefly on the Suez front and perished towards the end of the war, in 1917. His situation was exceptional because he was a self-proclaimed pacifist. He hated the war and he was desperate for it to end. He recorded in his diary in excruciating detail the degradation experienced by the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Palestine during the locust attack and famine of 1915. In December 1915, he wrote: ‘I haven’t seen darker days in my life. Flour and bread have basically disappeared since last Saturday … We have so far tolerated living without rice, sugar and kerosene. But how can we live without bread?’ He also dwells on the extreme measures taken by his compatriots in order to survive, including prostitution and desertion.

  A page from the diary of Private Ihsan al Turjman, Jerusalem, 30 March, 1915 (Turjman Family Papers, by permission)

  Diary writing was rare but not altogether uncommon among soldiers on the Ottoman front. Those who were literate were aware of the need to record their impressions of the war for posterity. This is how Turjman opens his second diary:
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br />   Jerusalem, Sunday the 28th of March [Gregorian], 1915, Mart 1331 [Ottoman Fiscal Calendar]

  Two years ago I began to keep a daily diary. But I soon neglected the routine and started writing occasionally until I quit writing altogether.

  This evening I went to visit Khalil Effendi al Sakakini, in the company of Hasan Khalidi and Omar al Salih. Khalil Effendi read to us from his diary. It so excited me that I decided to re-start my own memoirs. Our conversation revolved around this miserable war, and how long it is likely to continue, and about the fate of this [Ottoman] state. We more or less agreed that the days of the state were numbered, and that its dismemberment was imminent.

  But what will be the fate of Palestine? We all saw two possibilities: independence or annexation to Egypt. The last possibility is more likely since only the English are likely to possess this country, and England is unlikely to give full sovereignty to Palestine, but is more liable to annex it to Egypt, and create a single dominion ruled by the Khedive of Egypt. Egypt is our neighbour and since both countries contain a majority of Muslims, it makes sense to annex it and crown the Viceroy of Egypt as King of Palestine and Hijaz. Rumours abound in the street today. We heard that the English fleet has bombarded Haifa, and that several English frigates crossed the Dardanelles until they reached the Sea of Marmara. Even if this item is not true, it will soon be realized since the Dardanelles have been hammered relentlessly [by Allied ships] and cannot resist the British fleet forever. The city of […] fell today in Austria. This is most likely to change the course of the war, and bring our deliverance nearer.3

  This entry is also exceptional in that it reveals political debates that were being discussed by soldiers and officers on the front, and in army administrative headquarters, where Turjman was employed. He raises, for example, questions about expectations for the future of Palestine after the war. Three options are suggested. One was for Palestine to become part of Syria and separate from the Ottomans. The second was to remain an Ottoman province through the struggle for autonomy under the aegis of common Ottoman citizenship. But Turjman talks also about a third alternative, which today may sound extraordinary. Namely, that the future of Palestine lies in unity with Khedival Egypt. That was apparently an opinion that many people thought was natural because the Egyptian links, through trade and commerce, as well as cultural exchanges (newspapers, music and theatrical troupes), were common and frequent, even during the war period. The future of Palestine and Syria being with Egypt was therefore seen as a possibility, on an equal footing with independent Syria and autonomy within the empire. In his diary Turjman makes numerous references to the ‘degenerate’ lifestyle of the Ottoman military leadership, and their lack of credibility. He was proud of the Sharifian rebellion in the Hijaz and full of criticism of the ‘servility’ of the ‘Syrian and Palestinian people’ who failed to rise up and fight for their freedom. He also makes oblique references to the Zionists in the context of Jamal Pasha’s presumed Jewish mistress, Lea Tannenbaum, but his thoughts on the Zionist political project were unrecorded.

  In Gallipoli, the battle which became an icon for Ottoman resilience in defence of the Fatherland, one forgets that more than half the war dead came from non-Turkish regions of the empire – they were Bulgarians, Albanians, Kurds, Arabs and Armenians. Of the two battalions that fought with Mustafa Kemal in Gallipoli, the majority of combatants, as well as the dead, were reportedly Syrian Arab soldiers. Yet those indicators of Ottoman solidarity were soon replaced by Turkish nationalist iconography, and the story was retold retrospectively as a Turkish victory against the invading allies. The Ottoman victims were now rebaptised, post-mortem, as Turkish martyrs. In this conspiracy of silence, Arab and Turkish historiography colluded in excluding the nature of the multi-ethnic character of the sultanate, and of the officers and soldiers who fought under its banner. European historiography, similarly, became preoccupied with the tragic use of Anzac soldiers as cannon fodder by the British Empire. To them the significance of Gallipoli was its singularity in giving birth to Australian nationhood.

  The biographic trajectories of the three soldiers suggest several responses by soldiers to their experience of war: rethinking and reinvention of identity (Fesih); separatist nationalism (Shehadeh); and pacifism (Turjman). I draw two conclusions from this discussion. First, the reconstruction of identity experienced in the Great War was fluid. Self-conceptions transform themselves through ruptures very quickly during times of war, because war disrupts the tempo of daily routine. It compels us to rethink where we are and where we are heading in the immediate future. The second conclusion is that, when people are faced with devastation, they tend to revert to the comfort and security of local identity, because it is protective and familiar and allows people to insulate themselves from what seems to be the impending collapse of the world around them. Such reversions are apparent in the war and devastation that are happening today.

  However, unlike the ‘localism’ of today’s Syria and Iraq, which have reverted to homologous religious sectarianism, the protectionist localism of the Great War was communal, and existed peacefully with the rising secular nationalism of Damascus, Beirut and Istanbul. But if ordinary soldiers sought a protective reversion to the comforts of localism, the civilians discussed here reacted to the devastation in the opposite direction. Sakakini sought an assertion of a common humanist bond, that transcended nationalism (Arab and Turkish), Muhammad Kurd Ali became an advocate of Greater Syrian unity, while Najib Nassar, the doyen of Palestinian journalists – as he later became known – took to a class perspective, defending peasants’ land rights and tribal entitlement, in honour of the nameless people who hid and defended him when he was pursued by the authorities.

  The ideological choices made by these three soldiers and three civilians were often the result of contingencies of geography and lineage: that is, they were dictated mostly by where they lived, where they grew up and how they thought of their family origins. But the ultimate determining factor in their choices was the devastating war which led to the death of the Ottoman idea – the conceptual framework that had been able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of imperial subjects to fight for the Sultan, an array of committed intellectuals behind them, under the rubric of common citizenship and a multi-ethnic homeland.

  IN THE PRESENT TENSE

  The Unravelling of the Old Order

  OPENING POLITICS’ BLACK BOX: REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION

  Khaled Fahmy

  ON 25 JANUARY 2011, I went to midan Tahrir (Liberation Square) to join what I thought would be yet another small demonstration doomed to be crushed by overwhelming police force. The minute I stepped into the square, however, I realised that this time the situation was different. For one thing, our numbers were huge. For another, the slogans were new. There was the same beat as familiar slogans, but now I heard strange, unrecognisable words. Soon, I figured out what people were shouting: ‘Al-sha’b.’ Stop. ‘Yurid.’ Stop. ‘Isqat al-Nizam.’ Stop. ‘The people.’ ‘Demand.’ ‘The downfall of the regime.’ Goosebumps spread all over my body. I then found myself joining tens of thousands of fellow citizens at the top of my voice.

  For the following eighteen days, I went to Tahrir nearly every day, returning home only to sleep and to get provisions for my friends who preferred to camp in the square. Mubarak’s step-down was only a matter of time, we firmly believed. The regime is teetering on the brink of collapse. We are finally making our voice heard. We are shaping our country’s future. And soon a new slogan spread like wildfire throughout the huge midan and was repeated by hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life: ‘Irfa’ rasak fo’. Inta Masri.’ ‘Lift up your head. You’re Egyptian.’

  Four years later, this confident, hopeful mood is no more. Instead of the open, democratic country that seemed, for a short while, to be ours at last, Egypt is now in the grip of a military dictatorship that has arrested our friends, imprisoned our comrades and quashed our dream
s. Kangaroo trials have passed death sentences on hundreds of Islamists in sessions that lasted less than an hour. And on 14 August 2013 security forces committed what Human Rights Watch described as one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators on a single day in recent history, a massacre in Raba’a Square in Cairo that was more lethal than what took place in Tiananmen Square and that probably amounts to a crime against humanity.

  How did the eighteen days in Tahrir that saw so many Egyptians embrace these lofty ideals lead to twelve hours in Raba’a Square that witnessed a massacre in which more than 800 people were killed? How did we start in such a hope-filled way in 2011 and end up with this bloody massacre in 2013? How did the Arab Spring morph into an Arab nightmare, out of which we seem not to be able to awaken?

  I am a historian by training, so I will offer a historical reading of the Arab Spring – particularly in Egypt, but applicable to some extent, I think, to other countries involved in the Arab Spring. Thus I will not only reflect on the events of only the past four years, but will consider the revolution’s deeper historical roots.

  One way to do so is by reflecting on a peculiar personal experience. Only a week after Mubarak stepped down, the head of the Egyptian National Archives, together with the Minister of Culture, appointed me as chair of an official committee whose mandate was to document the momentous events the country had just witnessed. I assembled a team of archivists, historians and IT experts, and we set about laying down criteria for accomplishing the mammoth task ahead of us.

  We soon found ourselves having to answer some difficult questions: ‘How do we go about collecting people’s testimonies?’ and, even more problematic, ‘Given that we are effectively a government committee, can we guarantee that the testimonies do not end up falling into the hands of security agencies and are not used against the very people who entrusted us with these potentially self-incriminating testimonies?’