Abdul Hamid II is one of the most divisive figures in the modern history of the Middle East. His Turkish admirers, in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, have rehabilitated him as a wise pan-Islamic statesman who held the empire together through three impossible decades. His Armenian critics — and they have the better archival evidence — have called him, with justification, the first of the great twentieth-century perpetrators of mass political violence against a religious minority. Both portraits are partially true. They describe, in different aspects, the same sultan.
What is uncontested is that he was, by temperament, a paranoid. He spent virtually his entire thirty-two-year reign inside the Yıldız Palace, on the wooded hill above Beşiktaş, rarely venturing out except for the weekly Friday prayer at the nearby Yıldız mosque. He surrounded himself with a personal household guard of Albanian and Kurdish irregulars. He maintained a network of secret informants — the Hafiye — said to have numbered in the tens of thousands. He centralised the government in a way no Ottoman sultan had since Süleyman: every appointment, every ministerial decision, every diplomatic note, every budget request, passed across his personal desk in the Yıldız.
The losses
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 — which Abdul Hamid had inherited from his uncle three months into his reign — ended in catastrophe. Russian troops reached the outskirts of Istanbul. The peace treaty at San Stefano in March 1878 would have stripped the empire of almost all its European territory. British and Austrian intervention at the Congress of Berlin in July 1878 partially undid these terms, but the empire still lost: Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro (all of which became fully independent); Bulgaria (which became autonomous); Cyprus (occupied by Britain); Bosnia-Herzegovina (occupied by Austria); and large slices of eastern Anatolia (annexed by Russia). About forty per cent of the empire's European territory and twenty per cent of its population were lost. The next eight years saw further losses: Tunisia to France in 1881, Egypt to British occupation in 1882. By 1885 the empire had been reduced, in Europe, to Macedonia, Albania, and Thrace.
The Sultan's response to these catastrophes was twofold. He resolved, first, to make no further significant European concessions. Second, he reoriented the empire's identity. The empire would now be — as the universal caliphate had once been — the political home of all the world's Muslims, particularly those in the new colonial empires. Pan-Islamism became the dominant ideology of his court. Diplomatic and religious missions were sent to the Muslims of India, the Caucasus, Egypt under British occupation, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. The sultan corresponded with Indian Muslim leaders. The empire became, in its propaganda, the protector of Islam everywhere.
The Hejaz Railway
The pan-Islamic project found its most visible expression in the Hejaz Railway, built between 1900 and 1908 to carry pilgrims from Damascus to Medina (a planned extension to Mecca was never completed). The line was 1,300 kilometres long and crossed some of the most difficult desert terrain in the Middle East. It was funded entirely by donations from Muslims across the empire and beyond — about a third came from India, Egypt, and other foreign Muslim communities — and built largely without European loans. It was, in every sense, an Ottoman achievement.
The Hejaz Railway opened on the 1st of September 1908. It cut the journey from Damascus to Medina from forty days to three. It carried, in its first year of operation, around thirty thousand pilgrims. It also carried Ottoman troops to garrisons in the Hejaz that had previously been almost unreachable. It would be put out of action a decade later by Lawrence of Arabia's Arab guerrillas during the First World War; substantial sections were never rebuilt, and the Saudi government has not, despite recurring announcements, restored it. A remarkable number of its original station buildings still stand along the Syrian and Jordanian portions of the route. Several of them, in modern Jordan, are still in occasional use for desert tourism.
The Hamidian Massacres
The other side of the Hamidian regime was its treatment of Armenians. The Armenian community of eastern Anatolia — perhaps two and a half million people — had, by the 1880s, become politically organised. A small number had joined revolutionary parties (the Hunchakian, founded in 1887; the Dashnaktsutyun, founded in 1890) which advocated, variously, autonomy, equality, or independence. Most Armenians wanted reform, security from Kurdish tribal raids, and protection of their property — not independence. But Abdul Hamid, with his characteristic paranoia, treated all Armenian political demands as evidence of a Russian-backed separatist conspiracy.
Between 1894 and 1896 the regime organised, with Kurdish irregular cavalry units called the Hamidiye (raised by the sultan and named for him), a series of massacres of Armenian civilians in eastern Anatolia. The death toll has been variously estimated between 80,000 and 300,000; modern scholars converge on around 200,000. Tens of thousands more Armenians fled the empire; many emigrated to Russia, Egypt, France, and North America. The massacres marked the first sustained programme of state-organised violence against a religious minority in the modern Middle East. They were, in a structural sense, the prelude to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16, conducted by a different government in much darker circumstances.
"We can shake their fanaticism out of them only with the sword. By doing so we punish them, we set an example for others, and we restore the prestige of the Sultanate." — Abdul Hamid II, attributed by his French biographer, c. 1894
The Young Turks
The Hamidian regime had, by the 1900s, alienated almost every educated constituency in the empire. The military officers, particularly those trained in the modern military schools of Salonika and Monastir; the medical students of Istanbul; the bureaucrats of the foreign ministry; the Armenian and Greek professional classes; the Albanian intelligentsia; the Arab notables — all had reasons to want the sultan removed.
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), an underground political society founded in 1889 by medical students in Istanbul, became the principal vehicle of opposition. By 1908 it had built networks in the Third Army, garrisoned in Macedonia, where its officers had been disillusioned by the slow Ottoman response to Bulgarian and Serbian guerrilla activity. In July 1908 those officers — led by men whose names would become famous: Enver, Talat, Cemal — mutinied. They issued a public demand for the restoration of the 1876 constitution. The sultan, faced with the prospect of an army march on Istanbul, capitulated within two weeks. He restored the constitution on the 24th of July 1908.
The Young Turk Revolution had begun. Abdul Hamid was formally deposed nine months later, after a failed counter-coup. He spent the rest of his life in a villa on the Bosphorus, dying in 1918, two months before the empire he had ruled for thirty-two years lost its last war. The new ruling group — the CUP — would have eleven years in power. It would, in that time, lose the Balkan Wars, drag the empire into the First World War, conduct the Armenian Genocide, and preside over the dissolution of the state.
To that catastrophic decade we turn next.
End of Chapter VIII