Osman’s Dream

A banker by profession, Salim Ansar has a passion for history and historic books. His personal library already boasts a treasure trove of over 7,000 rare and unique books.

Every week, we shall take a leaf from one such book and treat you to a little taste of history.

BOOK NAME:  Osman’s Dream

AUTHOR: Caroline Finkel

PUBLISHER: John Murray Publishers, United Kingdom

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2005

The following excerpt has been taken from Pages: 490 — 493

“According to the Ottoman chronicles the first sultan, Osman, had a dream in which a tree emerged fully formed from his navel ‘and its shade encompassed the world’ - symbolizing the vast empire he and his descendants were destined to forge. His vision was soon realized - at its height, the Ottoman realm extended from Hungary to the Persian Gulf, from North Africa to the Caucasus. A multitude of religions flourished within its frontiers.

“Standing at the crossroads of the European West and the Asian East, the Ottoman Empire played a unique and vital role in world history. For centuries, Europe watched with fear as the Ottoman’s steadily advanced toward Vienna. Yet travelers and merchants were irresistibly drawn toward Istanbul and the sultan’s domains by their fascination with the Orient and the lure of profit.

The Islamic Empire

“One member of the Young Ottomans made a startling appearance on the public stage, when in May 1878 the radical journalist Ali Suavi masterminded a plot to restore Murad V. This was third attempt of Abdulhamid’s reign to restore the former sultan - and the most dramatic. After returning to Istanbul from exile in Paris on Abdulhamid’s succession, Ali Suavi was appointed to government office but soon fell from grace; he began speaking out in public and writing in the press about the parlous condition of the empire, and on 20 May 1878 stormed Ciragan Palace at the head of a band of some 250 fighters - disaffected men who had been forced to migrate from Bulgaria to Istanbul by the recent Russiian-Ottoman war. Murad had been informed of the plot and was dressed and waiting for them, but Ali Suavi and 23 of his fellows were killed by palace guards, 30 more were wounded and many were apprehended; Murad was removed first to a pavilion in the grounds of Yildiz Palace in the hills above Ciragen before being held under strict supervision in the Feriye Palace, where Abdulaziz had met his end. In the subsequent inquiry into the incident, the intellectuals and statesmen found to be complicit in the plot were sentenced to three years’ hard labour, to monetary fines, or to imprisonment or internal exile.

“For Sultan Abdulhamid the Treaty of Berlin was a conspiracy against the Ottoman Empire and Islam. Under its terms, 8 percent of the empire’s territory - much of it rich and productive - and almost 20 percent of its population were forfeit. Christians formed the majority of the estimated 4.5 million people who were no longer Ottoman subjects. The corollary of this was that Muslims now formed a higher proportion of the empire’s population, a proportion that had been increased still further by the influx during and after the war of 1877-88 of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, the Crimea, Kazan and Azerbaijan. It became ever clearer to many in power as well as in opposition that unity at home was a prerequisite of any effective resistance to further territorial dismemberment of the empire by the Great Powers and their Balkan clients, and that with the altered demography of the empire post-Berlin a new basis for loyalty to the state was needed - the ‘Ottomanism’ of the Tanzimat reformers, intended to counter the desire for self-determination of an empire of diverse religions and national aspirations, was no longer appropriate for a state whose population was three quarters Muslim.

“Recent events had revealed once again how ephemeral European protestations of friendship could be, and in particular those of Britain, whose aid in the war against Russia the Ottomans had hoped for in vain. Nevertheless, at one level Ottoman confidence remained undented: like their predecessors, Abdulhamid and his statesman still considered themselves the equal of their European fellows, and the Ottoman state the peer of the European Powers. The liberal ethos of the constitutional monarchies of Britain and France seemed to give rein to any with secessionist ideas, so Abdulhamid preferred to portray himself as a proud autocrat in the mould of the German Kaiser or the Austrian Emperor - although any resemblance to the equally autocratic Tsar Alexander II of Russia was downplayed. Most tellingly, the Sultan and his circle presented themselves and their world as ‘modern’, and deserving of respect as such: any public manifestations of ‘Ottomanness’ - as in the tableaux and stalls at the World Fairs in which the Ottomans participated - that might be construed by spectators as exotic or uncivilized were strictly forbidden, on the grounds that they laid the empire open to ridicule. Where the Ottoman Empire clearly differed from European states was in the matter of religion, but this the Ottomans in no way considered a mark of inferiority. To the contrary: Abdulhamid made a virtue of it, bending the Islamic faith of the majority of his subjects to provide a parallel to the ethnic and linguistic nationalisms by his European peers.

“Recognising that the Tanzimat notion of the disparate peoples of the empire embracing a common identity as Ottoman subjects was outworn even before his accession, and with the example of Russia’s pan-Slavism - not to mention pan-Hellenism and pan-Germanism - before him, Abdulhamid supported the formulation of the new and more relevant ideological principle. He took the latent notion of the Ottoman sultan as caliph and refashioned it to command the allegiance not just of his own people but of all Muslims, asserting more insistently that any Ottoman sultan before him the potency of his identity as caliph, and the appropriateness of Islam as a focus of loyalty for the state. In the opinion of Sir Henry Layard, British ambassador in Istanbul between 1877 and 1880, Abdulhamid considered his position as caliph superior to that of sultan and accorded it more importance. If this was the case, it was because he saw no other way of saving the empire.

“It was traditional for a sultan to emphasize his devotion to Islam at the outset of his reign, and the choice of sword used in the girding ceremony that had become part of Ottoman accession ritual from the time of Sultan Selim II in 1566 had a significance that cannot have been lost on contemporaries. In recent times, Sultan Mahmud II had been girded with two swords on his accession in 1808, those supposedly belonging to the Prophet Muhammad and to Osman I - the first of the Ottoman sultans - in a statement of his parallel dynastic and religious claims; his choice of the sword of Osman - known to posterity as ‘Gazi’, ‘Warrior’ - rather than that of any other sultan, may be interpreted as symbolizing his intention to restore the military might of the empire. In 1839, however, Abdulhamid’s pious father Abdulmecid chose to be girt only with the sword of the Caliph ‘Umar, second caliph of Islam, who had adopted the title of ‘Commander of the Faithful’ to indicate his spiritual authority over the emerging Muslim community. Sultan Abdulaziz had chosen likewise in 1861, but Abdulhamid was, like Mahmud, girt with the sword of Osman as well as that of Caliph ‘Umar. Abdulmecid had asserted the Islamic character of the Gulhane Edict promulgated soon after his accession; the constitution Abdulhamid promulgated referred to an Ottoman claim to the ‘supreme Islamic caliphate.’

“The title caliph had been used by Ottoman sultans from the time of Selim I, but in an ill-defined and not overtly political sense. Ottoman claims to inherit the caliph’s spiritual authority over all Muslims rested on the belief not only that Selim had brought back the relics of the Prophet from his campaign to conquer Egypt in 1517-18, but that he had also been invested with the office of caliph by the last Abbasid incumbent. The idea that the Ottoman sultan was caliph, the ‘representative of God on earth’, was given contemporary force by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha who, writing of the girding ceremony of Sultan Abdulaziz, stated that, ‘When Sultan Selim (I) conquered Egypt and brought the Abbasid Caliph to Istanbul, the Abbasid Caliph girded Sultan Selim with this sword (of ‘Umar) and thus transferred the Islamic Caliphate to the house of Osman.’

“Ahmed Cevdet Pasha’s elaboration of this myth was prescriptive. He was Sultan Abdulhamid’s guide in many aspects of his politics of Islam, and his copious writings on the issue of the caliphate were reflected in the Sultan’s policies.

“The issue of the sultan’s political-legal role as caliph had been aired from time to time in the centuries since Selim’s conquest of Egypt - during the reigns of Suleyman I and Mehmed IV for instance - but what prompted the Ottomans to emphasize the religious authority over Muslims everywhere of the sultan as caliph were the Austrian and Russian assaults on Ottoman territory of the later eighteenth century. A heightened consciousness of the Ottoman sultan’s function as caliph began when the Crimea was lost to the empire and came under strong Russian influence: the sultan’s spiritual authority over the Tatars - in his capacity as ‘Caliph of all Muslims’ - was enshrined in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca of 1774. In 1783 Empress Catherine declared the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, and one result of the shock of this loss of Muslim territory was Ottoman insistence on the sultan’s role as protector of all Muslims regardless of who their temporal ruler might be. It did not take long for the notion to appear in print; one of the earliest mentions of the former transfer of the caliphate to Selim I appeared very shortly after 1774, in 1787, in the celebrated Tableau general de l’Empire othoman by the Istanbul Armenian Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, who began his career as dragoman at the Swedish Legation and rose to become minister plenipotentiary and head of the legation.” 

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