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The Young Turks – Children of the Borderlands?
Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)
[October 2002]
Empires and borderlands
Although the history of the continental empires of Europe, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, can be written in terms of a strong imperial centre trying control diverse peripheries, it is also true that those peripheries have been extremely important in defining the central characteristics of each of these empires. Cases abound: Prussia came into existence in the Easternmost regions of the German-speaking world, in constant confrontation with Baltic and Slav populations. Its military and political traditions were shaped in an environment, which was totally different from (and alien to) the inhabitants of Saxony, the Rhineland or Württemberg; Russia’s view of the world and of itself was shaped to a large extent by, first, its emancipation from, and later, its conquest of the successor states to the Mongol Golden Horde. From the beginning, it was quintessentially a state on the borderline of Christianity and Islam. Although the roots of Habsburg power lay elsewhere, it is nevertheless no exaggeration to say that it was the struggle against the Muslim Ottoman Turks, first at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and later during the conquest of Hungary and the Northern Balkans, which gave the Habsburg Empire its unique character, both as “defender of the faith” and as multinational state. In the emergence and growth of the Ottoman Empire since the Fourteenth Century the border between Islam and (Byzantine) Christendom was likewise of crucial importance. From Paul Wittek in the Nineteen Thirties[1] to Cemal Kafadar in the Nineteen Nineties[2], all historians of the early Ottoman Empire have emphasized the importance of the cultural climate of the border. Wittek especially became known for his thesis (published in The rise of the Ottoman Empire) that the ethos of the warrior for the faith (the gazi) determined the culture of the early Ottomans. William McNeill, in his seminal work Europe’s steppe frontier,[3] launched the notion that the Ottoman Empire was dependent on constantly pushing outward its borders to find enough sources of revenue to keep up its state apparatus and that when conquests came to an end, the subsequent necessity to raise the pressure of taxation on the existing population caused social dislocation.
While it can thus be said that the phenomenon of the border was a formative influence in the emergence of these empires, it is also true that they played an important role in the final stages of their decline. The most obvious example is of course the political murder of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This murder, the product of nationalist agitation in the Habsburg periphery, after all unleashed the chain of events, which would bring an end to all four great empires – the Russian in 1917, the Austro-Hungarian and German in 1918 and, finally, the Ottoman in 1922.
In this article I will try to show that in the final decade of the Ottoman Empire it was also a group of people from the periphery which decisively influenced the course of events in these last years of empire as well as the direction of Ottoman and Turkish politics after the war.
The Young Turks
The group of people we are dealing with in this article is that of the so-called Young Turks. ‘Young Turks’ has now, of course, become a generic term denoting rebels attacking an established order, but primarily it is the name used in Turkish historiography for the groups which strove for the regeneration of the Ottoman Empire in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. They saw the key to this regeneration in the restoration of constitutional and parliamentary rule, which had been introduced in the Ottoman Empire in 1876, but had been suspended by the increasingly autocratic Sultan Abdülhamit II in 1878, after the defeat in the great war against Russia, which brought the Russian army to the outskirts of the capital İstanbul. In the centennial year of the French revolution, 1889, a group of young students in the army medical school founded a secret committee, which would later become known as the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, C.U.P.) and which had as its express goal to restore constitution and parliament. The thinking behind this was that the empire was threatened by the centrifugal forces of separatist minority nationalism, which could be both stimulated and used by foreign powers with designs on Ottoman territory. The Young Turk ideal was that of the “Unity of the (ethnic and religious) Elements” (İttihadı Anasır) and they felt this could only be achieved by giving all communities a stake in the empire through parliamentary representation.
Between 1889 and 1896 this C.U.P. slowly gained adherents, primarily within the Ottoman bureaucracy. At the same time a number of constitutionalists who had to flee the country or left voluntarily, conducted a publicity campaign from Europe against what they saw as the tyranny of Abdülhamit. By 1896 the movement had gained such a following (at a time when Sultan Abdülhamit was beleaguered because of the bloody repression of the Armenians he had instigated)[4] that it could consider taking over power. Literally on the eve of a coup d’etat its secret network was exposed by the Sultan’s secret police. Large numbers of arrests followed and for the next decade the Young Turk movement within the empire was silenced. The opposition abroad continued, but it was divided and the factions spent as much time fighting each other as attacking the Sultan.[5]
The situation changed from 1905. Newly arrived activists reorganised the émigré movement into a far more effective force, with a cell structure and secure communications, while in 1906 in Salonica, an independent group of conspirators, some of whom had been members of the C.U.P. before 1896, founded a secret committee, which, within two years, managed to gain an important following among the officers of the Ottoman garrisons in the Balkans. In July 1908 some of these officers, on the orders of the committee, took their troops into the mountains and sent ultimatums to the palace. When his half hearted attempts to suppress the revolt were unsuccessful, the sultan capitulated and the constitution was restored on 24 July.
After the revolution the C.U.P. reorganised itself in a political party, which took part in elections and parliamentary debate, but the secret organisation also remained in being and real power remained in the hands of the Central Committee of this organisation. In April 1909 a counterrevolution in İstanbul drove the C.U.P. from power, but the insurgency was suppressed with the help of the army after a fortnight. In the three years that followed, the Young Turks lost a large part of their support in the country and in 1911 they actually were ousted from the government, but during the crisis engendered by the de defeat in the Balkan War of 1912, the C.U.P. carried out a coup d’etat (in January 1913). From then on until the end of World War I, parliamentary government was a matter of form and to all intents and purposes the Ottoman Empire was a one-party dictatorship. The C.U.P. used its power monopoly in these years to carry our far-reaching secularising and modernising reforms, which foreshadowed those of the Turkish Republic.
In spite of their enormous importance in the modern history of Turkey, the social, geographical and ethnic background of the Young Turks remains largely unstudied. In the major works on the history of the period generalizations abound. Feroz Ahmad calls them “lower middle class”[6] and “newly emerging professional classes”[7]; Allen says they were “young officers”[8], which is also how Geoffrey Lewis sees them.[9] Bernard Lewis talks about “Muslim Turks, mostly soldiers” and “members of the ruling elite”[10], while, by way of contrast, Stanford Shaw typifies them as “lower class” and even “subject class”.[11] The anthropologists Richard Robinson describes them as “new technicians, newly awakened intelligentsia, western-oriented army officers”[12], while Sina Akşin, finally, has summed up the common denominators of the Young Turks as “Turks, youngsters, members of the ruling class, western-educated with a bourgeois mentality”.[13]
At best, these are very broad generalizations, but they are also contradictory. Were they professionals or soldiers? Ruling elite or subject class? Let us make an effort to see what was the reality behind these generalizations. In doing so we cannot base ourselves on data for the rank and file of the Committee of Union and Progress. After the C.U.P.’s victory in the constitutional revolution, thousand, possibly even tens of thousands joined it, but we have little or no information about this membership. At the same time, however, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a relatively small group of people, not more than a hundred or so, about whom we can know quite a bit.
Within that leadership we can discern several groups. First of all, the leaders of the opposition movement against the rule of sultan Abdülhamid between 1889 and 1908. This group includes the founders of the movement at the Military Medical School in 1889 and the early members as well as those Young Turks, who kept up the publicity campaign against the sultan’s autocracy from Paris, Geneva or Cairo. Some, but not all, of these re-emerged in the second group, that of the members of the Central Committee of the C.U.P., which was the most powerful political body in the Ottoman Empire from the constitutional revolution of 1908 until the defeat in World War I ten years later. A third group is that of the administrators or party bosses (governors, inspectors, party secretaries (or in the terminology of the C.U.P. “responsible secretaries”), who were entrusted by the leadership with the control over provinces and cities. Finally, we have the activist, politicised army officers, who ultimately gave the C.U.P. its power through their influence in the army and who came to the rescue each time the C.U.P.’s hold on power was threatened. Some of these held formal positions in the Committee and even served on the Central Committee but most did not. As the Turkish independence movement after World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (the later Atatürk) was also completely dominated by former C.U.P. members, we could also include the members of the leadership of this movement, the “Representative Committee” and the commissars of the first Great National Assembly in Ankara among the leading C.U.P. cadres whose background we want to investigate, but for the purposes of this article I have left these post-World War I leaders out of consideration.
The “typical” Young Turk
On the basis of the biographies of these leading Young Turks it is possible to discern a number of shared characteristics, which together make up a “typical Young Turk profile”. They were males and they were Muslims (with the exception of one single Sabbataic Jew or dönme)[14] of different ethnic backgrounds: Turk, Arab, Albanian, Kurd or Circassian. Their social background varied (some of them being sons of landowners, others of great dignitaries or generals, yet others sons of small-time civil servants), but it was urban and literate, with most fathers being in the service of the Ottoman state. Almost without exception, they were educated in modern schools, which had been founded after European examples in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.
The Young Turks on the whole deserved their name: they were quite young when they joined the movement and even at the time of the constitutional revolution (1908) very few were over forty years old. They also wanted to be young. Youth, with its associated qualities of dynamism, activity and progressiveness, was seen by the Young Turks as a very positive characteristic and one which gave legitimacy to their actions. Theirs was the voice of modernity. A striking example of this awareness of being a new and youthful generation is given in the memoirs of the Young Turk officer Kazım Karabekir, when he relates how, together with three friends, he founded a secret society the General Staff college in 1904. They adopted the expression “Jeunes Gens” as password, after a cartoon in the French review Le Petit Parisien, which showed spies who were eavesdropping and had the caption “Jeunes gens, prenez garde aux choses que vous dites.”[15] In his standard work on the C.U.P, Tarık Zafer Tunaya also says that the Young Turks valued youth above anything else.[16] In this, their habitus was strikingly at odds with the traditional Ottoman value system in which authority was closely linked to age and experience.
Even if as a group they were quite young, there were important differences among them. The Young Turks were a mixed group of civilians and military officers and among the civilians we find medical doctors, educators and administrators. Equating the Young Turks with military officers is clearly an oversimplification. Before 1906 the civilians dominated the movement and it was only between 1906 and 1908, with the establishment of C.U.P. cells in the second and third Ottoman armies that the officers became the most important element. Hence, the civilians among the leadership formed a significantly older group than the officers – in 1908 their average age was 38 as opposed to 29 for the military men. Within the two groups, and among the second group especially, the age differentials are very small – in other words: when we talk about Young Turk officers, we are definitely dealing with an identifiable generation, born around 1880.
These are only very broad characteristics, of course, and a lot more detailed research remains to be done, but in this article I now want to focus on one aspect of the Young Turk profile, that of the geographical origin of the leading Young Turks and its implications.
Geographical origins
The birthplace, or more precisely the geographical origins of the family, was an important distinguishing mark among the Young Turks, as indeed it is among the Turks of today. This is shown by the many references to origin we find in the lakaps, the nicknames which were widely used before the introduction of family names in Turkey in 1934: Filibeli Hilmi (Hilmi from Plovdiv), Selanikli Mustafa Kemal (Mustafa Kemal from Salonica), Resneli Niyazi (Niyazi from Resen) or Rodoslu Süleyman. A caveat is in order, though: because the Young Turks were often sons of officers or bureaucrats, their birthplace may be the place their fathers were stationed at a given time. I have as yet not been able to systematically separate birthplace and the origin of the family, but the importance of this distinction should be recognized: the later second president of the Republic of Turkey, İsmet İnönü, was born in İzmir, but in a Kurdish family hailing from Malatya in Eastern Turkey and in the Turkish context this would make him a man from Malatya much more than one from İzmir.
Let us first of all look at the first group mentioned above, that of the founders and early members in the period between the start of the Young Turk movement in 1889 and its suppression in 1896. This is a group of 20 persons, whose origins were as follows:
İstanbul
2
Balkans
7 (this includes 2 from provinces lost in 1878)
Aegean
3 (Rhodes, Smyrna and Crete)
Arab provinces
2
Kurdistan
2
Caucasus
4 (all from the Russian Empire).
Anatolia
0
Of the seven actual founders themselves, four came from the Russian Caucasus, one from the Albanian area in the Western Balkans and two from Kurdistan. Ethnically, not one was an Ottoman Turk. Surely, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is highly significant. It suggests that the fundamental questions regarding identity and loyalty were being asked earlier among the non-Turkish Muslim communities than among the ethnic Turks (but later than among the Christian communities of the empire).
Erik Jan Zürcher (Universiteit Leiden)
[October 2002]
Empires and borderlands
Although the history of the continental empires of Europe, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, can be written in terms of a strong imperial centre trying control diverse peripheries, it is also true that those peripheries have been extremely important in defining the central characteristics of each of these empires. Cases abound: Prussia came into existence in the Easternmost regions of the German-speaking world, in constant confrontation with Baltic and Slav populations. Its military and political traditions were shaped in an environment, which was totally different from (and alien to) the inhabitants of Saxony, the Rhineland or Württemberg; Russia’s view of the world and of itself was shaped to a large extent by, first, its emancipation from, and later, its conquest of the successor states to the Mongol Golden Horde. From the beginning, it was quintessentially a state on the borderline of Christianity and Islam. Although the roots of Habsburg power lay elsewhere, it is nevertheless no exaggeration to say that it was the struggle against the Muslim Ottoman Turks, first at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and later during the conquest of Hungary and the Northern Balkans, which gave the Habsburg Empire its unique character, both as “defender of the faith” and as multinational state. In the emergence and growth of the Ottoman Empire since the Fourteenth Century the border between Islam and (Byzantine) Christendom was likewise of crucial importance. From Paul Wittek in the Nineteen Thirties[1] to Cemal Kafadar in the Nineteen Nineties[2], all historians of the early Ottoman Empire have emphasized the importance of the cultural climate of the border. Wittek especially became known for his thesis (published in The rise of the Ottoman Empire) that the ethos of the warrior for the faith (the gazi) determined the culture of the early Ottomans. William McNeill, in his seminal work Europe’s steppe frontier,[3] launched the notion that the Ottoman Empire was dependent on constantly pushing outward its borders to find enough sources of revenue to keep up its state apparatus and that when conquests came to an end, the subsequent necessity to raise the pressure of taxation on the existing population caused social dislocation.
While it can thus be said that the phenomenon of the border was a formative influence in the emergence of these empires, it is also true that they played an important role in the final stages of their decline. The most obvious example is of course the political murder of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. This murder, the product of nationalist agitation in the Habsburg periphery, after all unleashed the chain of events, which would bring an end to all four great empires – the Russian in 1917, the Austro-Hungarian and German in 1918 and, finally, the Ottoman in 1922.
In this article I will try to show that in the final decade of the Ottoman Empire it was also a group of people from the periphery which decisively influenced the course of events in these last years of empire as well as the direction of Ottoman and Turkish politics after the war.
The Young Turks
The group of people we are dealing with in this article is that of the so-called Young Turks. ‘Young Turks’ has now, of course, become a generic term denoting rebels attacking an established order, but primarily it is the name used in Turkish historiography for the groups which strove for the regeneration of the Ottoman Empire in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. They saw the key to this regeneration in the restoration of constitutional and parliamentary rule, which had been introduced in the Ottoman Empire in 1876, but had been suspended by the increasingly autocratic Sultan Abdülhamit II in 1878, after the defeat in the great war against Russia, which brought the Russian army to the outskirts of the capital İstanbul. In the centennial year of the French revolution, 1889, a group of young students in the army medical school founded a secret committee, which would later become known as the Committee of Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, C.U.P.) and which had as its express goal to restore constitution and parliament. The thinking behind this was that the empire was threatened by the centrifugal forces of separatist minority nationalism, which could be both stimulated and used by foreign powers with designs on Ottoman territory. The Young Turk ideal was that of the “Unity of the (ethnic and religious) Elements” (İttihadı Anasır) and they felt this could only be achieved by giving all communities a stake in the empire through parliamentary representation.
Between 1889 and 1896 this C.U.P. slowly gained adherents, primarily within the Ottoman bureaucracy. At the same time a number of constitutionalists who had to flee the country or left voluntarily, conducted a publicity campaign from Europe against what they saw as the tyranny of Abdülhamit. By 1896 the movement had gained such a following (at a time when Sultan Abdülhamit was beleaguered because of the bloody repression of the Armenians he had instigated)[4] that it could consider taking over power. Literally on the eve of a coup d’etat its secret network was exposed by the Sultan’s secret police. Large numbers of arrests followed and for the next decade the Young Turk movement within the empire was silenced. The opposition abroad continued, but it was divided and the factions spent as much time fighting each other as attacking the Sultan.[5]
The situation changed from 1905. Newly arrived activists reorganised the émigré movement into a far more effective force, with a cell structure and secure communications, while in 1906 in Salonica, an independent group of conspirators, some of whom had been members of the C.U.P. before 1896, founded a secret committee, which, within two years, managed to gain an important following among the officers of the Ottoman garrisons in the Balkans. In July 1908 some of these officers, on the orders of the committee, took their troops into the mountains and sent ultimatums to the palace. When his half hearted attempts to suppress the revolt were unsuccessful, the sultan capitulated and the constitution was restored on 24 July.
After the revolution the C.U.P. reorganised itself in a political party, which took part in elections and parliamentary debate, but the secret organisation also remained in being and real power remained in the hands of the Central Committee of this organisation. In April 1909 a counterrevolution in İstanbul drove the C.U.P. from power, but the insurgency was suppressed with the help of the army after a fortnight. In the three years that followed, the Young Turks lost a large part of their support in the country and in 1911 they actually were ousted from the government, but during the crisis engendered by the de defeat in the Balkan War of 1912, the C.U.P. carried out a coup d’etat (in January 1913). From then on until the end of World War I, parliamentary government was a matter of form and to all intents and purposes the Ottoman Empire was a one-party dictatorship. The C.U.P. used its power monopoly in these years to carry our far-reaching secularising and modernising reforms, which foreshadowed those of the Turkish Republic.
In spite of their enormous importance in the modern history of Turkey, the social, geographical and ethnic background of the Young Turks remains largely unstudied. In the major works on the history of the period generalizations abound. Feroz Ahmad calls them “lower middle class”[6] and “newly emerging professional classes”[7]; Allen says they were “young officers”[8], which is also how Geoffrey Lewis sees them.[9] Bernard Lewis talks about “Muslim Turks, mostly soldiers” and “members of the ruling elite”[10], while, by way of contrast, Stanford Shaw typifies them as “lower class” and even “subject class”.[11] The anthropologists Richard Robinson describes them as “new technicians, newly awakened intelligentsia, western-oriented army officers”[12], while Sina Akşin, finally, has summed up the common denominators of the Young Turks as “Turks, youngsters, members of the ruling class, western-educated with a bourgeois mentality”.[13]
At best, these are very broad generalizations, but they are also contradictory. Were they professionals or soldiers? Ruling elite or subject class? Let us make an effort to see what was the reality behind these generalizations. In doing so we cannot base ourselves on data for the rank and file of the Committee of Union and Progress. After the C.U.P.’s victory in the constitutional revolution, thousand, possibly even tens of thousands joined it, but we have little or no information about this membership. At the same time, however, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a relatively small group of people, not more than a hundred or so, about whom we can know quite a bit.
Within that leadership we can discern several groups. First of all, the leaders of the opposition movement against the rule of sultan Abdülhamid between 1889 and 1908. This group includes the founders of the movement at the Military Medical School in 1889 and the early members as well as those Young Turks, who kept up the publicity campaign against the sultan’s autocracy from Paris, Geneva or Cairo. Some, but not all, of these re-emerged in the second group, that of the members of the Central Committee of the C.U.P., which was the most powerful political body in the Ottoman Empire from the constitutional revolution of 1908 until the defeat in World War I ten years later. A third group is that of the administrators or party bosses (governors, inspectors, party secretaries (or in the terminology of the C.U.P. “responsible secretaries”), who were entrusted by the leadership with the control over provinces and cities. Finally, we have the activist, politicised army officers, who ultimately gave the C.U.P. its power through their influence in the army and who came to the rescue each time the C.U.P.’s hold on power was threatened. Some of these held formal positions in the Committee and even served on the Central Committee but most did not. As the Turkish independence movement after World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (the later Atatürk) was also completely dominated by former C.U.P. members, we could also include the members of the leadership of this movement, the “Representative Committee” and the commissars of the first Great National Assembly in Ankara among the leading C.U.P. cadres whose background we want to investigate, but for the purposes of this article I have left these post-World War I leaders out of consideration.
The “typical” Young Turk
On the basis of the biographies of these leading Young Turks it is possible to discern a number of shared characteristics, which together make up a “typical Young Turk profile”. They were males and they were Muslims (with the exception of one single Sabbataic Jew or dönme)[14] of different ethnic backgrounds: Turk, Arab, Albanian, Kurd or Circassian. Their social background varied (some of them being sons of landowners, others of great dignitaries or generals, yet others sons of small-time civil servants), but it was urban and literate, with most fathers being in the service of the Ottoman state. Almost without exception, they were educated in modern schools, which had been founded after European examples in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.
The Young Turks on the whole deserved their name: they were quite young when they joined the movement and even at the time of the constitutional revolution (1908) very few were over forty years old. They also wanted to be young. Youth, with its associated qualities of dynamism, activity and progressiveness, was seen by the Young Turks as a very positive characteristic and one which gave legitimacy to their actions. Theirs was the voice of modernity. A striking example of this awareness of being a new and youthful generation is given in the memoirs of the Young Turk officer Kazım Karabekir, when he relates how, together with three friends, he founded a secret society the General Staff college in 1904. They adopted the expression “Jeunes Gens” as password, after a cartoon in the French review Le Petit Parisien, which showed spies who were eavesdropping and had the caption “Jeunes gens, prenez garde aux choses que vous dites.”[15] In his standard work on the C.U.P, Tarık Zafer Tunaya also says that the Young Turks valued youth above anything else.[16] In this, their habitus was strikingly at odds with the traditional Ottoman value system in which authority was closely linked to age and experience.
Even if as a group they were quite young, there were important differences among them. The Young Turks were a mixed group of civilians and military officers and among the civilians we find medical doctors, educators and administrators. Equating the Young Turks with military officers is clearly an oversimplification. Before 1906 the civilians dominated the movement and it was only between 1906 and 1908, with the establishment of C.U.P. cells in the second and third Ottoman armies that the officers became the most important element. Hence, the civilians among the leadership formed a significantly older group than the officers – in 1908 their average age was 38 as opposed to 29 for the military men. Within the two groups, and among the second group especially, the age differentials are very small – in other words: when we talk about Young Turk officers, we are definitely dealing with an identifiable generation, born around 1880.
These are only very broad characteristics, of course, and a lot more detailed research remains to be done, but in this article I now want to focus on one aspect of the Young Turk profile, that of the geographical origin of the leading Young Turks and its implications.
Geographical origins
The birthplace, or more precisely the geographical origins of the family, was an important distinguishing mark among the Young Turks, as indeed it is among the Turks of today. This is shown by the many references to origin we find in the lakaps, the nicknames which were widely used before the introduction of family names in Turkey in 1934: Filibeli Hilmi (Hilmi from Plovdiv), Selanikli Mustafa Kemal (Mustafa Kemal from Salonica), Resneli Niyazi (Niyazi from Resen) or Rodoslu Süleyman. A caveat is in order, though: because the Young Turks were often sons of officers or bureaucrats, their birthplace may be the place their fathers were stationed at a given time. I have as yet not been able to systematically separate birthplace and the origin of the family, but the importance of this distinction should be recognized: the later second president of the Republic of Turkey, İsmet İnönü, was born in İzmir, but in a Kurdish family hailing from Malatya in Eastern Turkey and in the Turkish context this would make him a man from Malatya much more than one from İzmir.
Let us first of all look at the first group mentioned above, that of the founders and early members in the period between the start of the Young Turk movement in 1889 and its suppression in 1896. This is a group of 20 persons, whose origins were as follows:
İstanbul
2
Balkans
7 (this includes 2 from provinces lost in 1878)
Aegean
3 (Rhodes, Smyrna and Crete)
Arab provinces
2
Kurdistan
2
Caucasus
4 (all from the Russian Empire).
Anatolia
0
Of the seven actual founders themselves, four came from the Russian Caucasus, one from the Albanian area in the Western Balkans and two from Kurdistan. Ethnically, not one was an Ottoman Turk. Surely, it is not an exaggeration to say that this is highly significant. It suggests that the fundamental questions regarding identity and loyalty were being asked earlier among the non-Turkish Muslim communities than among the ethnic Turks (but later than among the Christian communities of the empire).
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