Turkey; the Awakening of Turkey; the Turkish Revolution of 1908Knight, E. F. (Edward Frederick)
History
Turkey; the Awakening of Turkey; the Turkish Revolution of 1908
Knight, E. F. (Edward Frederick)
Eastern question (Balkan); Turkey -- History -- 1878-1909; Turkey -- Politics and government -- 1878-1909
In Paris the “Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress,” to give the
association the now world-famous name which it assumed a few years
ago, was ably directed by Ahmed Riza Bey, who, having worked with
devotion for the cause through eighteen years of exile, returned to
Turkey after the proclamation of the Constitution last year, and is
now the President, or Speaker, of the Turkish Chamber of Deputies.
The Committee was also strengthened during the last few years of the
Hamidian _régime_ by the admission to it of several distinguished
Turks of high rank, who fled from Constantinople to Paris so as to be
able to assist the national movement from that safe vantage-ground.
Among these fugitives was the Sultan’s relative, Prince Sabah-ed-din,
who threw himself heart and soul into the revolutionary movement, and
advocated a policy more advanced and radical than that favoured by the
large majority of the Young Turks, whose Liberalism is full-blooded
Toryism when compared to what passes for Liberalism in England in these
latter days. Prince Sabah-ed-din is an advanced home ruler, and he
is the virtual leader of the “Liberal Union” party, which is working
for a degree of centralisation that is regarded as dangerous by most
Mussulmans, but is naturally pleasing to the Greeks.
But though these Turkish gentlemen, with their clever conversation and
their charming manners, were welcomed in Paris _salons_ and London
drawing-rooms, few people in Europe realised that the Young Turkey
movement had the remotest chance of attaining its ends; for it was
a silent movement, and while the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians
voiced their grievances with a persistence that gained for them a wide
hearing and much sympathy, the patriotic Turks, unwilling to invoke
the help of foreigners, took no steps to make their aspirations known
in Europe. Ahmed Riza did, indeed, come over to London in 1904, and,
for the first time in his life, addressed a meeting of Englishmen,
but it was not to crave sympathy for the Mussulman Turks whom he
represented, but to express the sentiments of his party regarding
foreign intervention in Turkey, whether it were that of a Government
or of the English humanitarian committees. In the course of his speech
Ahmed Bey, while admitting the justice of a revolt against despotism,
condemned the European friends of Armenia and Macedonia for wrongfully
and artificially inciting a rising, and so playing the part of the
Pan-Slavist agents, and he practically put it that by fomenting
insurrection among the Christian populations in Turkey they were more
or less responsible for the massacres which followed. The meeting,
to quote from the official report, “became extremely agitated, and
many interruptions were addressed to the speaker.” The speakers who
followed had some unkind things to say concerning Ahmed Riza and the
Young Turks. Here is a quotation from the speech of an influential
humanitarian who was present: “I am not sorry that the gentleman has
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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