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The Libyan War and Student Pan-Islamism: The Edinburgh Declaration of 1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2022

Jonathan Conlin
Affiliation:
School of Humanities (History), University of Southampton, University Road, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK; j.conlin@soton.ac.uk
Filiz Yazıcıoǧlu
Affiliation:
Department of History, Marmara University, Göztepe Campus, 34722 Kadıköy, Istanbul, Turkey; filizyazicioglu.fy@gmail.com

Abstract

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Type
Foundational Text
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 A transcript of the declaration was published by Selahittin Özçelik as an appendix to his 2000 study of the Ottoman Navy League; this Ottoman text is among the league records held by the Historical Institute of the Turkish Revolution (Türk İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü Arşivi, or TITEA); Selahittin Özçelik, Donanma-yi Osmani Muavenet-i Milliye Cemiyeti (Istanbul: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000).

2 Isa Blumi, Ottoman Refugees, 1878–1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 67.

3 Cemil Aydın, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Bein, Amit, “A ‘Young Turk’ Islamic Intellectual: Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi and the Diverse Intellectual Legacies of the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 4 (2007): 607–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

4 Tanin, 19 November 1911; Donanma, 29 July 1912, 202.

5 Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War (Leiden: Brill, 2012), ch. 1. See also Ahmad, Feroz, “War and Society under the Young Turks,” Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 11 (1988): 265–86Google Scholar; Özbek, Nadir, “Defining the Public Sphere during the Late Ottoman Empire: War, Mass Mobilization and the Young Turk Regime,” Middle Eastern Studies, 43, no. 5 (2007): 795809CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eyal Ginio, “War, Civic Mobilization and the Ottoman Home-Front during the Balkan Wars,” in The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War, ed. Dominik Geppert et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 92–113.

6 Özçelik, Donanma; S. Güvenç, Birinci Dünya Savaşı’na Giden Yolda Osmanlıların Drednot Düşleri Ciltli (Istanbul: Türkiye İs Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2009). Contrast with Jonathan Conlin, “‘Our Dear Resadiye’: The Legend and the Loans behind Ottoman Naval Rearmament, 1908–1919,” International History Review, 22 June 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2021.1938634. See also Gökatalay, Semih, “Economic Nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress Revisited: The Case of the Society for the Ottoman Navy,” Nationalities Papers 48 (2020): 942–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 William L. Ochsenwald, “The Financing of the Hejaz Railroad,” Die Welt des Islams, 14, no. 1 (1973): 129–49; Ufuk Gülsoy, Hicaz Demiryolu (Istanbul: Eren, 1994); Wasti, Syed Tanvir, “Muhammad Inshaullah and the Hijaz Railway,” Middle Eastern Studies 3, no. 2 (1998): 60–72Google Scholar; Jacob M. Landau, The Hejaz Railway and the Muslim Pilgrimage: A Case of Ottoman Political Propaganda (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017).

8 For a survey, see Orhan Koloǧlu, The Islamic Public Opinion during the Libyan War, 1911–12 (Tripoli, Libya: GSPLAJ, 1988); and Jonathan McCollum, “The Anti-Colonial Empire: Ottoman Mobilization and Resistance in the Italo-Turkish War, 1911–1912” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2018), xvii–xviii.

9 Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 36–37, 86, 97.

10 Feroz Ahmad, “Great Britain's Relations with the Young Turks, 1908–1914,” in From Empire to Republic: Essays on the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Feroz Ahmad, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2008), 1: 141–72. See also Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkekey, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 108.

11 Kuneralp, Sinan, ed. Ottoman Diplomatic Documents on the Origins of World War I: The Turco-Italian War, 1911–1912 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2011), Letter 219, Tevfik Pasha to Hakki Pacha, 28 September 1911.

12 McCollum, “Italo-Turkish War,” vi.

13 Bein, “Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi,” 612, 623n43.

14 Musa Kazım (1858–1920) was far from a conservative, advocating reform of kalām (Islamic theology) by the application of modern philosophy and insisting that the 1876 constitution and “Islamic political theory” were in lockstep. See Reinhart, Kevin, “Musa Kâzım: From ʾIlm to Polemics,” Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001): 281306Google Scholar; and Ahmet Şeyhun, Islamist Thinkers in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2015), ch. 2.

15 University of Edinburgh, Centre for Research Collections (hereafter EUA) IN1 ADS/STA/2, IN1 ADS/STA/4, and IN1 ADS/STA/8. Records of nongraduates in medicine also were checked (EUA IN1 ADS/STA/8N).

16 Given the collusion of the Central Powers with the Greek takeover of Crete, one wonders if ‘İbadi was expressing solidarity with Cretan Muslims, whom the Ottomans had sought to settle in Cyrenaica; Lorenz, Fredrick Walter, “The ‘Second Egypt’: Cretan Refugees, Agricultural Development, and Frontier Expansion in Ottoman Cyrenaica, 1897–1904,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (2021): 89–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 EUA IN1 ADS/STA/8, T. W. Arnold to Harvey Littlejohn, 1 May 1911; A. L. to Littlejohn, 5 May 1911; L. J. Grant to Littlejohn, 14 November 1911.

18 Avril A. Powell, Scottish Orientalists: The Muir Brothers, Religion, Education and Empire (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 268.

19 Sumita Mukherjee, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (London: Routledge, 2010), 59.

20 Roy M. Pinkerton, “Of Chambers and Communities: Student Residence at the University of Edinburgh, 1583–1983,” in Four Centuries: Edinburgh University Life, 1583–1983, ed. Gordon Donaldson (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1983), 116–30.

21 For the Ismaili Atiya Fyzee (1877–1967), who did her teacher training at Maria Grey College in London in 1906–7, see Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma, eds., Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010).

22 Report of the Committee on Indian Students 1921–2 (London: HMSO, 1922), 79. Said proposed the secretary of the Indian Association, Gopal Rao, as witness in one letter to the dean; EUA IN1 ADS/STA/8, A. L. Said to Littlejohn, 5 May 1911. K. G. Rao is identified as secretary of the Indian Association in the student representative council's list of officials for 1911–12; EUA ESRC Minutes Book 8.

23 EUA EUSRC Minutes Book 8.

24 Gordon Donaldson, ed., Four Centuries: Edinburgh University Life, 1583–1983 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1983), 107.

25 Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 40.

26 “Report of the Committee Appointed by the Secretary of State for India in 1907 to Inquire into the Position of Indian Students in the United Kingdom,” appendix to Report of the Committee on Indian Students, 71–105. See also Mukherjee, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities .

27 McCollum, “Italo-Turkish War,” 42–45.

28 Kuneralp, Turco-Italian War, Letter 333, Tevfik Pacha to Said Pacha, 6 October 1911; Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 74.

29 “English: Italians,” İkdam, 9 November 1911, 5. The following day İkdam reported Bombay protests against Italian “atrocities” (“cinayât-ı vahşiyâneler”) warning that “Indian Muslims will turn away from Britain” if the latter did not intervene (“Hindistan ahali-i İslâmiyesinin İngiltere devletinden yüz çevirmelerini mûcib olacaktır”); “Indian Muslims,” İkdam, 10 November 1911, 3.

30 Kuneralp, Turco-Italian War. See also Ali, Shamshad, “Turko-Italian War and Its Impact on Indian Politics,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 53 (1992): 571–79Google Scholar.

31 Kuneralp, Turco-Italian War, Letters 447 and 891, Ohannès Effendi (Johannesburg) to Haridjié, 23 October 1911, and Tevfik Pacha to Assim Bey, 12 December 1911. See also McCollum, “Italo-Turkish War,” 96.

32 Kuneralp, Turco-Italian War, Letter 853, Tevfik Pacha to Assim Bey, 1 December 1911.

33 “Eed-Ud-Duha Turkish Navy Fund,” The Near East 5, no. 63 (1911): 11.

34 For context see John Ferris, “‘The Internationalisation of Islam’: The British Perception of a Muslim Menace, 1840–1951,” Intelligence and National Security, 24, no. 1 (2009): 57–77.

35 Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 52.

36 Mark Sykes to Editor, 11 November 1911, The Near East 5, no. 68 (1911): 166; C. D. Brunton to Editor, 16 December 1911, The Near East 5, no. 69 (1911): 193. For Cairo, see The Near East 4, no. 62 (1911): 636; and The Near East 5, no. 63 (1911): 4. See also Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 141–42.

37 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 2012), 249. See also Sean McMeekin, Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 (New York: Penguin), 62.

38 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire (1815–1914) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ozan Ozavcı, Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021).

39 Koloǧlu, Libyan War, 40.