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War in History War in History http://wih.sagepub.com/ Ottoman Arab Officers between Nationalism and Loyalty during the First World War Mesut Uyar War In History 2013 20: 526 DOI: 10.1177/0968344513494658 The online version of this article can be found at: http://wih.sagepub.com/content/20/4/526 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for War in History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://wih.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://wih.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Nov 7, 2013 What is This? Downloaded from wih.sagepub.com at UNSW Library on November 7, 2013 WIH0010.1177/0968344513494658War in HistoryUyar 4946582013 Article War in History 20(4) 526 –544 Ottoman Arab Officers © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: between Nationalism and sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0968344513494658 Loyalty during the First wih.sagepub.com World War Mesut Uyar University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australia Abstract According to commonly held opinion, Arab officers of the Ottoman Army were instrumental in the initiation of the Arab Revolt and the Ottoman final defeat by throwing their lot in with the British and French. This article is an effort to correct this stereotypical opinion by making use of untapped Ottoman archive records and creating a data set. Even though the Ottoman Empire did not manage to integrate different ethnic groups, it did succeed in creating a viable and effective officer corps by making use of military educational institutions for implanting general unity and a sense of inclusiveness. Thanks to esprit de corps and long-established military institutions, most of the Arab officers stayed loyal to the empire up until the very end. Keywords Ottoman Arab officers, First World War, Arab nationalism, Arab Revolt, military education, military professionalism The Arab officers of the Ottoman Army remain an enigma, even after many years and many books.1 Many rumours and misleading views have helped create erroneous stereo- types which persist to this day. There is a general consensus that Ottoman Arab officers 1 A much earlier version of this article was presented to the conference ‘Palestine and the First World War: New Perspectives’, Tel-Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, 3–6 September 2007. I am greatly indebted to Dr Serhat Güvenç, who read drafts of this article, corrected it, and provided me with ideas. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Hew Strachan, Prof. Eliezer Tauber, Dr Michael Province, and Dr Nabil Al-Tikriti. Corresponding author: Mesut Uyar, Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, PO Box 7916, Canberra BC, ACT 2610, Australia. Email: [email protected] Uyar 527 played a crucial role in the birth of Arab nationalism, in its expansion, and, more impor- tantly, in the initiation and execution of the Arab Revolt during the First World War. According to this view, Ottoman Arab officers were ready to collaborate with Britain and France in their struggle for independence from Ottoman rule from the very beginning. They deserted to the Entente armies at the first opportunity or were recruited for the Arab Revolt from prisoner-of-war camps. Others who had no choice but to stick with the Ottoman military either tried their best to undermine the war effort or did nothing to sup- port it. Thus the behaviour of the Arab officers was instrumental in the final defeat of the Ottomans.2 Interestingly, not only contemporary observers and modern Arab nationalist historians but also Turkish nationalist historians have shared this view. For them the Arab officers betrayed the trust of the empire and stabbed it in the back. This account therefore pro- vides yet another proof of the failure of the multinational Ottoman imperial system.3 The motives of contemporary Western observers of the empire were easy to understand. They saw every rebellion and all social unrest from the perspective of nationalism. For them, carving separate homelands from the Ottoman Empire was legitimate and unavoidable.4 They perceived Arab officers as agents of drastic change and ardent nationalism. Unfortunately we – as researchers and scholars – are still using these very problematic and biased observations for the evaluation of this traumatic period of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. The respective roles of Arab officers as individuals in Arab nationalism and independ- ence movements have been much debated, but a satisfactory monograph has yet to appear. More recently the Iraq conflict played an instrumental role in arousing the inter- est of scholars in Ottoman-trained Arab officers as a whole and in Iraqi officers in par- ticular. But unfortunately the outputs of this recent interest are far from adequate. The essential questions remain unanswered. 2 From Cheetham to Grey, no. 177, 15 November 1914, in A.L.P. Burdett, ed., Arab Dissident Movements, 1905–1955 (Oxford: Archive, 1996), I, pp. 275–80. From Cheetham to Grey, no. 2037, 13 December 1914, in ibid., pp. 284–6. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 44–7, 49–50, 59. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, 2nd printing (Beirut: Libraire du Liban, 1969), pp. 76, 119, 149, 156–9, 186, 204, 212, 221–2, 226, 229. Alec Kirkbride, An Awakening: The Arab Campaign, 1917–18 (Tavistock: University Press of Arabia, 1971), pp. 4, 57. Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia (London: Hutchinson, 1924), pp. 112, 237. Ariel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–23 (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 64–72 . Maxwell Orme Johnson, ‘The Arab Bureau and the Arab Revolt: Yanbu to Aqaba’, Military Affairs XLVI (1982), pp. 194–9. For a more recent example, see Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge: Belknap, 2010), pp. 304–6. 3 İlhan Arsel, Arap Milliyetçiliği ve Türkler, 4th printing (Istanbul: İnkılap, 1987), pp. 201–3. Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk İnkılabı Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1953), III, section 1, pp. 65–7, 401, 410–11. 4 From Cumberbatch to Lowther, no. 39, 13 May 1913, in Burdett, Arab Dissident Movements, I, p. 233. Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Origins of Arab Nationalism: Introduction’, in Rashid Khalidi et al., eds, The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. ix. Lawrence, Seven Pillars, pp. 42–4, 56. 528 War in History 20(4) This article addresses some of those unanswered questions. Through archival records it investigates the group identity of Ottoman Arab officers and their conduct during the First World War. Simply put, it uses statistical data to refute commonly held opinions and misperceptions about the Arab officers in the Ottoman service. I. The Ottoman Officer Corps Before getting into the identity and background of Arab officers, we need to consider the Ottoman officer corps as a whole. At the time of the First World War this was the product of two centuries of Ottoman military reforms.5 After the disastrous conduct of the Ottoman military in a series of wars with Russia and against internal threats such as the Greek rebellion, the Ottoman administration linked the poor performance and the main weakness of the army to the incompetence of its officer corps. Efforts to train officers according to Western models failed6 until the foundation of the Military Academy (Mekteb-i Harbiye) in 1834.7 The early reformers sought officers who were both professional and on a par with their European counterparts. Moreover, they were expected to understand Europe in every aspect and to be able to carry the reforms into the civilian realm. In order to achieve these widely diverging goals a very demanding semi-engineering curriculum was adopted.8 However, the Ottoman civilian educational system was not able to produce officer candidates with the solid educational foundation required. Consequently, after an 5 The first military reforms were initiated immediately after the disastrous end of the Ottoman- Habsburg-Venetian War of 1715–18. Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans from Osman to Atatürk (Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International and ABC-Clio, 2009), pp. 112–15. 6 Some military schools had been opened before the Military Academy, but either they disappeared in a short time or they were purely technical schools with very limited enrolment, such as the Military Engineering School (Mühendishane-i Berri Hümayun). See Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). Kemal Beydilli, Türk Bilim ve Matbaacılık Tarihinde Mühendishane, Mühendishane Matbaası ve Kütüphanesi (1776–1826) (Istanbul: Eren, 1995). Çağatay Uluçay and Enver Kartekin, Yüksek Mühendis Okulu (Istanbul: Berksoy, 1958), pp. 12–110. Also see Avigdor Levy, ‘Military Reform and the Problem of Centralization in the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century’, Middle Eastern Studies XVIII (1982), pp. 227–49. 7 The Military Academy had been opened to educate and commission infantry and cavalry officers. For a period of time veterinary officers were also commissioned from the acad- emy. Turkish Prime Ministry Archives, Royal Decrees (Hatt-ı Hümayun), catalogue no. 1747. Mehmed Esad, Mirat-ı Mekteb-i Harbiye (Istanbul: Artin Asaduryan, 1310 [1894]), pp. 1–57. Turkish Military Academy Archives (hereafter TMAA), Registry Logbook (Künye Defteri), no. 1. Avigdor Levy, ‘The Officer Corps in Sultan Mahmud II’s New Ottoman Army, 1826– 1839’, International Journal of Middle East Studies II (1971), pp. 32–6. 8 Mesut Uyar and A. Kadir Varoğlu, ‘In Search of Modernity and Rationality: The Evolution of Turkish Military Academy Curricula in a Historical Perspective’, Armed Forces & Society XXXV (2008), pp.
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