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"Part #320: Death and Denial

“SCHEHERAZADE RETURNS!

Mehmet Ertegun’s 1983 hit-craze sale-breaker is BACK at the Alhambra Odeon, Victor Street, for ONE WEEK ONLY!

Honour the late, great Latife Hurkus’ life by once again experiencing her magnum opus of acting in the title role of this epic of Near Eastern filmery!

ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS – ONE MILLION AND ONE THRILLS!

Available with both the original 1985 authorised dub or the 2004 retranslated subtitles – ask at the box office desk.

“SCHEHERAZADE” – NOVEMBER 23rd-28th ONLY – GET YOUR TICKETS BEFORE THEY SELL OUT!

See Motext page 10V-105”

- Advertising poster seen on Harley Crescent, Fredericksburg, ENA.
Photographed and transcribed by Sgt Bob Mumby, December 2020​

*

(Lt Black’s note)

That Thai lecture was a bit uncomfortable, wasn’t it? Fortunately, it seems not all the lectures we’ve recorded took quite such a confrontational approach to contentious issues. There’s some other world politics we need to cover to explain the leadup to the Sunrise War, and the Middle East is a part of that. Now Bob, where’s my cliff notes, you know I have trouble keeping all those Turkish politicians straight…

*

Extract from recorded lecture on “Land of War, Land of Peace” by Dx Tsanna Iskandar, Daburah bint Yusuf al-Tamimi and Saliha Halayik, recorded October 26th, 2020—

Welcome, everyone. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the other lectures in this festival looking at the culture and history of other nations. If so, you may have gathered that some people think that the proper exercise of Diversitarian values should be represented by yelling at each other from three feet away. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles) My colleagues, here, and I have a different perspective. We believe that you, our audience, can only truly exercise your freedom of thought if you hear different perspectives from all of us – expressed respectfully when we differ – and then to make up your own minds. (Mixed reaction from audience)

Another way we differ from some other lectures you may have seen is that I don’t have a handler. (Brief murmur) That is, I’m here speaking for myself, not going through an American. To understand why, I should first introduce myself. My name is <PRESIDIO_ANONYMIZED_PERSON>. I was born in Cairo, I won’t say when, (A few chuckles) and studied at the University of Alexandria, where I met my husband. He is in the diplomatic service, and for the past ten years he has been part of the Egyptian Embassy staff here in Fredericksburg. I have been awarded a visiting chair at Augusta University and lecture there on Egyptian and broader Asian and African history.[1] That is my day job, and evidently I have been here long enough that they trust me to handle one of these lectures by myself. (A few chuckles and other reactions)

But I’m not alone, of course. I have my two friends here to assist me, and they’ve had much more exciting lives than me. Please introduce yourselves.

‘Interesting’ is one choice of word…thank you, Tsanna. Er, hello, I’m Daburah al-Tamimi, or should I say salaam aleikoum, as we say in Araby. It is a greeting but it means ‘peace be with you’.

Peace being something that has frequently been in short supply in our homelands, it is sad to say.

Perhaps…I originally came here to the Empire as a dancer in the opera, and then I was ‘discovered’ by Nassau Street.[2] I’ve sung contralto in a number of productions since then. Never top billing though!

You underestimate yourself, Dab, or perhaps you’re just looking for pity. (Slightly nervous audience chuckles) As you won’t, as they say here, blow your own trumpet, I’ll just tell the ladies and gentlemen that you were most recently in Il Consigliere as Giovanna on its run back in May of this year. (Impressed reactions from some parts of the audience) And you, Saliha?

I’m not sure what to say now, Tsanna! Ah…I was in California as an actress for some time, and then I married a New Englander (Mixed cheers and boos) and I’ve since been something in the Boston theatre scene. Nothing on Dab’s level though!

I think the critics who wowed over your Lady Macbeth last year would say otherwise, Saliha. (More impressed reactions) Well, now you know who we are as people. But it’s also important you know where we’re from. I’m Egyptian, and more specifically I’m niremenkhemi. You normally say a Copt. Al-Qibt in Arabic. We are the original people of Egypt, from which Egypt gets its name in English – the ‘gypt’ part. Lots of people in Egypt now consider themselves Copts, but traditionally Copts were Christians like me. It gets complicated…

Don’t overdo it this early, Tsanna, you’ll lose them. (Chuckles) I’m from Araby, as I mentioned, and from the Banu Tamim tribe. We’re all over the place now, but I’m from the deep desert of Najd originally, though my father moved our family to Couaite when I was a little girl.[3] And as far as faith goes, I’m a Sunni Muslim.

Whereas I’m a Turk, from Aintab.[4] My people are part of the minority of Turks who escaped the rule of the Eternal State and have fully preserved our heritage and language. I’m a Sunni Muslim also.

Thank you Dab, Saliha. Well, hopefully now you can see that we offer different perspectives here on our part of the world, the Near and Middle East as you usually call it in English.[5] It’s been a contentious and troubled area for longer than any of us have been alive, though we all hope that peace is now possible.

Of course. No-one is quite happy with the Treaty of Jerusalem, but that is diplomatic compromise for you.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Dab. Now our lands are home to the oldest civilisations in history – sorry, China! (Audience chuckles and ‘oohs’) A contrast to the young history of this land, at least since colonisation. So we could go back five thousand years or more and be here all day – but we won’t. To understand the Near and Middle East today, the best place to start is with the Ottoman Empire before its fragmentation.

Yes, the Ottoman Empire still casts a shadow over the way we think. Our idioms, our phrases. In some ways it is as though we are still expecting a Sultan in Stamboul, that is, Constantinople, to be looking over our shoulder.

But in order to understand that, Saliha, the good people here first need to understand what the Ottoman Empire truly was. First of all, that’s not technically a name which anyone who lived under it used. Like the Byzantine Empire before it – nobody called that ‘Byzantine’ except historians in hindsight. That Christian-led empire based in Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453…the people who lived there just called themselves Romans. They might speak Greek, they might have adopted forms of government and faith which Cicero and Caesar wouldn’t recognise, but they were Romans nonetheless, in continuity with a state stretching back two millennia to Romulus and the founding of Rome.

The early Ottomans also focused heavily on that continuity. The Sultanate of Rum, or Rome, in Anatolia far from the city of Rome…but Rome is an idea, not just a city.

Very true, Saliha. I may be the professional historian here, but you two keep me on my toes! (Audience chuckles) Yes, the Ottoman Sultan considered himself the heir to Rome. He was the Caliph, the Commander of the Muslim Faithful, the Shadow of God on Earth, Lord of the Horizon, and a whole host of other titles. And at the empire’s height, he had the temporal might to lend credence to his claims.

Yes, trying to understand the Ottoman Empire is always a challenge, isn’t it? All those centuries of history…

And in some ways, less change across them than one might expect.

In some ways, yes. Not in others.

Outsiders never truly understood it. They didn’t even call it by the right name.

That’s what I was saying. Like Byzantium. As far as the people of the empire were concerned, it was the Sublime Ottoman State. Some Europeans called it the Sublime Porte, but really that was a name for the gateway into Topkapi Palace.

Ottoman being another way of saying House of Osman. Named for the dynasty, not a people.

Yes, like when Danubia was just called the Hapsburg empire. Europeans sometimes just called it Turkey or the Turkish Empire, but that was never really the case. Turks sometimes had privileges, of course, but under Ottoman rule people from all kinds of backgrounds – Egyptians, Arabs, Albanians, Bulgars, Greeks, Armenians – could rise to positions of power.

Providing they didn’t try to form their own state and break away, of course. Then the iron fist came down. In some ways, proto-Societist. (Audience murmurs)

No, I don’t agree with that, Dab. People say that about lots of things. Yes, the Ottoman state structure was against nationalism and self-determination. But so had been the Byzantines and Romans before it. It was not global Societism, but the idea that peculiar citizenship of the empire came first before tongue or blood.

Well, we can agree to disagree. Which, I suppose, was the principle the empire often ran under.

You might say so. The way the empire worked was always difficult for outsiders to understand. Many parts of it seemed very archaic, while others were radical and alien to how Europeans thought. And often Novamundines and Chinese as well. I won’t go into detail here, but I’ll touch on a few points. The Ottoman army, historically, resembled the structure of Turkic steppe armies from centuries before, long after Turks had settled down and founded the empire.

Like the Banners in old Qing China.

True. Now the Ottoman approach to matters like citizenship and slavery still owed a lot to the classical world and the Romans, which often confused Europeans. Here in the Novamund, you are used to the idea that a slave can only mean someone with no rights who carries out backbreaking labour on a plantation. (A few murmurs) In the Ottoman system, it was possible for someone to be a titular slave while rising to a position of power. The Janissary corps were founded, back in the 1300s by your calendar, by levying a tax of boys from Christian subject family of the empire and raising them as Muslim soldiers and, technically, slaves. (More murmurs) Yet the Janissaries became an integral part of the state and, at one point, were effectively appointing and disposing of emperors on their say-so.

They were also forbidden to marry before the age of forty, back in the day. I really do think the inspiration for the Societist Celatores was—

Another time. And what of that Sultan? Sultans were descended from Osman I, but in the Ottoman system the succession passed down sideways through brothers, rather than directly to sons. So any brothers of a Sultan were a potential threat, and sometimes they would succeed at an advanced age. Some Sultans were powerful and effective rulers, such as Suleiman the Magnificent, who conquered vast swathes of territory, in many ways the height of empire. But, especially from the seventeenth century, many were ineffectual. A tradition had arisen of raising successors under house arrest in the Kafes, the ‘gilded cage’, luxury apartments that were part of the Imperial Harem. Needless to say, raising future monarchs completely isolated from the outside world was not a recipe for success.

But that’s another thing the Europeans didn’t understand – the influence that the women of the harem exerted, especially the Valide Sultan.

Usually the mother of the Sultan, yes. That point’s been over-egged by Cythereans before – I don’t think Doctrix Lacklin or Lady Bidwell would like to win political power through being a concubine! (Shocked audience laughter) But it is true to an extent, and yes, Europeans did not understand it.

In general, there was a sense by many outsiders – especially the Russians – that the empire was perpetually in a state of decline and about to fall over at any moment, simply because the Ottoman system of governance was so alien to them that they could not understand it.

Yet in some ways, it was just the same as the Byzantine Empire that those Russians idolised. Cutthroat emperors and scheming viziers had been par for the course there, as well.

It’s a fair point. The Ottomans were judged differently not only because they were dominated by a people alien to Europe – the same could be said of the Hungarians, after all – but because of the Islamic faith. Those two things together, especially with the military power the empire exerted in times of triumph like under Suleiman, meant Europe would always hate and fear the empire.

A whole culture was built along the Military Frontier between the Ottomans and Danubia, or what became Danubia. And a lot of feuding Catholic countries came together to oppose the empire’s navy in the Battle of Lepanto in the 1500s.

Yes. Well, that’s a brief description of the empire. I’m passing over centuries of history here, of course, to focus on the most relevant points for our discussion. Some things did change over time. It wasn’t necessarily a backwards place for science and technology, despite the impression that’s sometimes given in period dramas, and it was a state that prized art and literature. To really understand what happened to the lands today that were once part of the empire, though, we probably have to start with the turn of the nineteenth century.

By the Gregorian calendar, yes. Well, the empire went through a period of dominance from 1806 by a Bosniak war hero general turned vizier called Damat Melek Pasha, whom you may have heard of. (A few murmurs) Damat Melek rose to a greater height of power than most viziers and at one point he was effectively appointing Sultans, with the support of the Janissaries.

While alienating the Mamelukes who were ruling over Egypt at the time. Baba Ismail Pasha led a faction-

Yes, don’t worry, I’ll be talking about that later. But when Damat Melek died in 1816 after a decade in power, that left a power vacuum.[6] Opposition forces had been building for years in many parts of the empire, and multiple vizier hopefuls were assassinated in the streets of Constantinople. Unity essentially collapsed. They called it the Time of Troubles.

And outsiders took advantage of the empire’s weakness to expand at its expense – the Hapsburgs, the Russians, the Persians.

Yes, though perhaps to a lesser extent than any of them had hoped. All those opposition forces from within – Azadis in Iraq, or Mesopotamia as some of you may know it as, Wahhabis in Araby, Janissary extremists in Rumelia, Esad Ali Bey at the Omani court in Muscat… [7]

The Wahhabi extremists have ever been a plague on Araby. Unfortunately, they weren’t totally eradicated by the Time of Troubles, either.

No. I won’t go into the full details of that very complex period, but the empire stabilised into three main power groups; the Balkan Party, or Janissary Sultanate, which controlled Rumelia; the Shadow Faction which controlled Anatolia; and then there was the rest. The Mamelukes under Ibrahim Bey had tried to break away with help from Sennar, but they were stopped by Abdul Hadi Pasha, wali of Egypt, and his allies from Esad Ali Bey and the Azadis.

Do you not root for Ibrahim Bey today, Tsanna, in Egypt? After all, did he not try to declare independence as the Sultanate of Egypt?

Not really, Dab. Abdul Hadi was a popular reformer, and nobody really thinks of the Mamelukes as ‘ours’ anymore. They were foreign rulers, just the same as the Achaemenids or the Ptolemies in ages past. If the Mamelukes had managed to regain sole power in Egypt, it would not have been an Egypt for the Egyptians.

In your opinion.

…Yes. (Awkward pause) Well, regardless, Abdul Hadi Pasha emerged triumphant. He defeated the Wahhabis, seized the Islamic holy places, and controlled Egypt, Araby, Mesopotamia – essentially, all the empire except Rumelia and Anatolia. By 1825, with the end of the civil war and the foreign interventions, he had destroyed the Shadow Faction and taken back all but Rumelia.[8]

Then the empire would be divided for decades between Abdul Hadi and the Rumelian remnant – the Janissary Sultanate.

Another anachronistic name, not used at the time. Both groups claimed to be the only legitimate Ottoman state, of course. That caused all sorts of problems. Without an unambiguous single holder of the Caliphal office, all sorts of unscrupulous madmen could take advantage – like the Mahdi in India, who ignited the Great Jihad. (Audience murmurs)

The so-called Janissary Sultanate finally collapsed in 1848 after losing a war to the Greek rebels. Then the empire was finally reunited after thirty years.

It’s important to dwell on this, isn’t it, Tsanna, because it helps us understand why people in the 1930s expected the empire to reunite then as well, yes?

That’s right, Saliha. That’s a good point. Everyone was so used to the idea of a united Ottoman Empire that it would have shocked them to learn that nearly a century has passed and the empire has gone from another two-way division, like it was in Abdul Hadi’s time, to a complete fragmentation.

For better and for worse.

Yes. But let’s get there first. After the empire was reunited in 1848, there were a lot of reforms to governance and the military. The Janissaries were gone, of course, and a lot of other useless archaicisms were thrown out. They called it the Devrim Period, that’s the Reform Period.

The millet system was rationalised to improve relations between the faiths. Like the change to the Three Faiths Under One Flag banner.

Yes, well, not everyone saw it that way, but yes. The military reforms were put on full display when the new navy, the Donanmasi, unexpectedly reconquered Algiers in 1861.[9] That shocked many Europeans who had thought the empire was in inevitable decline.

Of course, by that point Abdul Hadi has passed away. Only about a year before, I think. That happened under Huseyin Yusuf Pasha.

But it was probably Abdul Hadi’s plan. Anyway, after that success, the empire focused on gradual expansion into Africa, building railways into the interior and competing with the Persians and Omanis around the Moon Lakes. In some ways the pace of reform did slow down after the 1870s, but still, one might have expected gradual progress to continue.

And then the Pandoric War happened.

Yes…but before we come to that, I think we should take a moment to look at just why the late Long Peace was something of a lost golden age. It wasn’t perfect, but…

No, you’re right. There was greater freedom of speech and less censorship than had been experienced for a long time, under the liberal vizier Hafiz Mustapha.

The Bulgar convert?

Yes, that’s the one. Not technically a Pomak, I suppose.[10]

He gets exaggerated too much as though he was the only one, though. There were quite a few influential liberal ministers in the Tricameron.[11] Utudjian, the Armenian, who was vizier before Abdullah Seyyid, he did a lot to liberalise censorship when he was Minister for the Interior.

Aydub, aydub, I suppose it is always more complex than that. There were freer newspapers, an expansion of popular literature and the printing press, and European-style plays for the first time.

Though operas began quite a while before that.[12]

True. You may recognise some of the names – Dab, you’re the expert.

Well, there’s Deukmejian’s, ah, in English you translate it as The Costermonger, there’s Koprulu the Younger’s The Little World, you know, the one that relates the Imperial Harem and the Kafes to the Platonic Cave…

Or just Constantinople! ? (Murmurs of recognition from audience)

Well, if you want to be modern about it…

Er, if I can get a word in, there’s literature too. From every corner of the empire, of course. Who would have thought that a Sennari author would write a novel that would wow millions of readers across Europe and the Novamund? But that’s exactly what happened with Ibn Adlan’s The Voice of the Desert. (Another murmur of recognition) Perhaps better known from the film adaptations these days.

If you really consider ibn Adlan to be a Sennari, I mean, he grew up in Souan…[13]

Well, let’s not start another Heritage Point of Controversy. (Slightly uncertain chuckles from audience) The point is, it was something of a golden age for culture.

There were still a lot of problems. Valide Sultans aside, Cythereanism was finding it hard making headway, slavery wasn’t completely abolished, there was still a lot of discrimination against Christians and other minorities.

But still, I think it’s fair to say that things would have improved without the war.

Though, of course, that might have made it hard for certain homelands to win their freedom. But there’s no profit in counterfactual questions. Yes, let’s talk about the Pandoric War, or as it’s usually known in our region, the Trebizond Disaster.

Yes. The Empire proclaimed neutrality at the outbreak of the war in 1896. (A few murmurs from the audience). That neutrality was maintained until 1898.

You may have seen the film The Vienna Mission, with Curt Smith, you know, which dramatises the events leading up to it – not very accurately, but you’ll get a general idea.

Yes…an aerodrome, a rather early and unreliable one, was sent from Constantinople to Vienna in June of that year to negotiate for Ottoman entry into the war. Archking Ferdinand of Danubia was desperate. The Pressburg Pact, that’s Germany, Danubia and Poland, were losing the war with Russia, and Ferdinand was willing to try anything to tip the scales.

Grand Vizier Abdullah Seyyid had been of the peace party, but when court opinion turned against peace, well, he had Archking Ferdinand over a barrel. He got him to sign Servia over to Constantinople’s control after the war. (Audience murmurs) And the Danubians did keep their promis e. But the war went badly, after some initial victories.[14]

They didn’t coordinate with the French peace efforts, and ended up isolated and facing the full force of the Russians when Germany and Danubia made peace.

Yes. There is a story that the hopes had been pinned on an alliance with Persia, and then the Persians refused to honour a treaty…but a lot of records were lost later, and there’s no proof.

No. In fact, if Abdullah Seyyid had been relying on the Persians, he got a rude awakening when they accused the Ambassador of murdering their Chancellor and then mobilised their army on the border with Iraq. It didn’t come to blows, but it meant there were even fewer troops to field against the Russians in the Caucasus. And so Trebizond was lost.

Isn’t that when the Sultan deposed the Mamaliks in Iraq?

That came a bit later, I think, after the war, but the process started then. The idea that they were unreliable and had been infiltrated by the Persians. Whether it was true or not, I don’t know.[15]

Well, regardless, the people were certainly angry when they found out all the confident pronouncements of victory in the papers were misplaced. And, sadly, they turned on Christians like yourself, Tsanna.

Well, not usually Copts, but yes, they turned on Armenian and Bulgarian Christians, claiming that they had acted as cryptic reservists for the Russians. It was a grim period of public persecution and rioting. Then the Sultan tried to appease the people by having Abdullah Seyyid executed...

Not realising how popular he was in Araby. Abdullah Seyyid was a rare example of a full-blooded Bedouin having worked his way up to the highest office in the land, in the face of sneering and prejudice. The killing drove his Arab brothers and sisters to a renewed fury and a sense of injustice.

Yes...maybe it’s a testament to how successful Abdullah Seyyid was, until the war at least, that enough people in the City seemed to have forgotten he was a rustic Arab at all, and missed those consequences.

And they replaced him with a Sennari. An actual Sennari, not like ibn Adlan...

Don’t start that again. Yes, Fadil Karim Pasha became Grand Vizier and stayed in office for a decade.[16] He was focused on trying to save his homeland from the Societists...

Well, in the beginning it was more about expanding the empire’s power to the Moon Lakes, as it took a while before Barkalus was really pushing into Africa. But yes, that was the priority, and it didn’t always sit well with others.

The Societists were always a growing threat in the background. Both on the frontier in Darfur or Kitara, and in the underground coffee-houses of the City.

Not at first. But eventually. Of course, the so-called Constantinople School Societists ran afoul of the authorities when their cobelligerents with Barkalus started attacking Darfur.[17]

For better or for worse. If more heterodox Societists had stuck around, it would probably have been harder for them to take over later.

Mm, controversial. (Subtle audience reactions) Anyway, you’re right that that growing war in the background meant that the First Interbellum was a more tense era for the Empire than for a lot of nations. Murad X became Sultan as a young man and his mother the Valide Sultan, Mehveş Sultan, became one of the most powerful and influential women in Ottoman history.

For better and for worse. Mehveş Sultan had ambitions to repair the losses of the so-called Trebizond Disaster – I won’t call it the Trebizond Backstab, that’s what those who blamed it on the Christians called it – but she also underestimated the depths of continuing unrest in Araby after the crackdown.

She’s a controversial figure in Egypt today, of course.

Well, she would be. She was certainly always regarded as an Egyptian through and through even before the Black Twenties, but I don’t know if she would have approved of how Egyptians sometimes see her legacy.

Not that we all see it the same way.

No. Well, we had the unrest in Araby, we had clashes between innovative youth groups and authoritarians in the City...you must remember that that antebellum golden age of culture we were discussing was not universally felt throughout the Empire.

No. It was mostly in the City, a few places in Rumelia, the big cities of Egypt and Iraq, a little in Anatolia. The countryside everywhere often remained as backward as it ever had been, no matter the push for universal education, and Araby was...

Araby was backward, you can say it. Isolated, proud, traditionalist, poor. Resentful of being looked down on, resentful of the killing of Abdullah Seyyid, and that’s before the One-Way Hajj.

Well, yes, we’ll get to that. Before the Black Twenties, Mehveş Sultan had cemented her power as the most powerful woman in the Empire. She had ambitions, and saw the Khivan War – as it was then known – as an opportunity.

We wanted Trebizond back, of course, but there was no desire to back the Persians against the Russians after they stabbed us in the back in the last war. And obviously even less to support the Russians. So Mehveş Sultan’s idea was to use the opportunity to attack and reclaim Greece (Audience murmurs), taking advantage of the fact that the European powers were engaged in a massive war and could not afford to antagonise the City.

They couldn’t lose access to the Sinai Canal.

No. That was the calculation. At first, the peace party still held the Tricameron, but then Said Izzet Pasha died of the plague—

Actually it was scarlet fever. This was before the plague reached us.[18]

Really? Strange...anyway, Mehveş Sultan was able to make Ferid Ibrahim Pasha Grand Vizier.

The Butcher of Belgrade. (Audience murmurs)

He was certainly better known for his brutality towards the Servs than his battlefield prowess. But in 1923 Mehveş Sultan was able to launch her surprise attack. Victory was won over the Greeks, at least on the mainland, but the Russians had been misread, and Tsar Paul declared war, no matter how many other foes he had.

It was a stupid decision on his part. He was already overstretched. The rational position would be what the Bouclier allies did – be furious, but try to cover it up with diplomatic rhetoric, knowing they had to keep the Empire on side.

Yes, it was an emotional decision. Under normal circumstances he’d probably have had cause to regret it. But then the plague reached us...

It hurt everyone, but we had the misfortune to be facing the one Russian general – Belosselsky – who had a good idea how to combat the plague.

Well, Vorobyov and Vershinin did, and Belosselsky knew to trust them.[19] He managed to break through to Erzurum and Erzincan and capture the railways intact. He took advantage of Kemal Fevzi Pasha’s disarray. Then he was able to use the railways to keep pushing until his armies reached Malatya, and then Adana and the Mediterranean.

The so-called Tarsus Salient. Cutting the empire in two.

Yes. Under any normal circumstances it would have been very vulnerable to being squashed from both sides, but with the plague and the mountainous terrain, it somehow endured for more than a quarter of a century through war and peace. A kind of frozen conflict.[20]

Belosselsky also got Tsarevich Mikhail killed too, and they ended up replacing him with Pazukhin. He was the one who held the salient through the fighting.

While Mehveş Sultan fled to Egypt.

She didn’t ‘flee’, she was trying to get more food shipments when the farmers were plague-ridden and the people were starving.

Still, it meant she wasn’t around when Ahmet Ismail, that brilliant general of Rumelia, got conned by some Neo-Azadis into launching a coup in the City that got her son and Ferid Ibrahim killed.

No. And that’s what started the process of disintegration towards Societism and the Eternal State.[21]

The worst Societists, from our perspective, were not the ones who took out Ahmet Ismail, nor Barkalus’ lot in Africa. They were the ones in the Nusantara. The ones who drove Javanese refugees from their land in millions, only for the damned Siamese to foist them on us...

Yes, the One-Way Hajj. It was a terrible time. Common decency meant one had to sympathise with those poor people...

Islamic brotherhood.

I might as well say Christian charity. But, fine. The point is that even the most sympathetic person in Araby knew what they brought with them.

The plague. It wasn’t their fault. It was the vile pagan Siamese’s fault. Blood was – is – on their hands. (Audience murmurs) Then that was an excuse for Jizani to rile up the people, proclaim the end was at hand, and march on Mecca.

While Algiers rose up as well. And the Kurds. The empire was disintegrating.

Not quite yet. Mehveş Sultan managed to stop Jizani’s mujahideen, reclaim Mecca and reassert her authority over everywhere but Algiers and Tunis, but the split of the Russian salient became permanent. Rumelia was separated once more, and this time, so was western Anatolia.

And at the time, people assumed the empire would one day reunite, just like it had after the Time of Troubles when the Janissary Sultanate fell. But not this time.

Well, a traditionalist might say it’s too early to say. (Slightly uncertain audience chuckles)

If the Pharaoh decides to don the mantle of a caliph again, I’ll be the first to know, I’m sure. (More reassured audience laughter) When the dust settled after the Black Twenties – it’s sometimes known as the War of the Schism to us – we were left with Mehveş Sultan and the boy sultan Murad XI in Alexandria ruling over the remnants of the empire. The Alexandrine Empire, as some called it.

They had actually done quite well in the Sudan. Building on Fadil Karim’s legacy. In the 1940s they managed to push the Societists out of Darfur, once Barkalus had gone back to South America.

Yes, and that was important for world history - all the pictures in the world papers showing what had been uncovered there, the forlorn abandoned Biblioteka Mundial centres and Celator training camps, the mass graves...but it’s another topic.

A grim one. So, how do we broach the topic we really came here to discuss – how the so-called ‘Alexandrine Empire’ fell apart.

Well, it unquestionably began with the food riots in 1929. Mostly the empire was held together – there was another period of unrest in Araby...

Trying to integrate the new Javanese population, with no support from Alexandria...should we be surprised there was unrest?

That wasn’t an accusation, Dab. Also, it didn’t help that the ringleaders of the unrest could always go and hide out over the border in Yemen when the police were sent to arrest them.

The ‘police’. You could call them that...

Well, anyway. The instability was such that Tunis was lost altogether to the Italians under that silly Romulan regime. After that, Mustafa Kamil in Alexandria tried to do a deal with Ahmet Ismail Pasha – while he was still alive, I mean-

I rather think that goes without saying, Tsanna.

Shut up, Dab...to crush the Russian salient after they’d been embarrassed by the Sikhs and thrown out of India. In 1936.

But Mehveş Sultan betrayed him and attacked Rhodes instead. So the salient survived, Ahmet Ismail was overthrown by the Societists, and the Corfiote Greeks almost managed to reconquer continental Greece due to the infighting.

That was probably the final nail in the united empire’s coffin. Certainly, the avalanche seems to have started then.

Either then or when Mehveş Sultan died in 1939. Then you had Princess Fawzia, the widow of Murad X, succeeding her as Valide Sultan...

Use her proper name, Tsanna. Not Fawzia Sultan. Call her (inaudible) Queen Cleopatra. (Audience reaction)

Not that old saw, Dab...

Come on. You can’t deny the cynicism of it. Right when the archaeological tourist trade was at its height? When every European and Novamundine was eager to explore the Pyramids and learn about Ramses and Shoshenq? When you had Russians putting on accents and showing fake Polish passports because they were so desperate to get around the ban? It just so happens that, ahem, Fawzia decided to start going around putting on a stripey headdress and signing autographs of tourists who said they’d loved her in Dawson’s Anthony and Cleopatra?

Oh, don’t exaggerate, Dab. Yes, obviously it was a time where the fascination with our ancient history started to influence our latter-day culture and identity. Finally being able to read those ancient records, as the Iraqis and Persians already had for decades, to bring vanished eras of history to life?[22] But that doesn’t mean we’d all become a bunch of interthesps as you clearly mean. (Mutters under breath) And for the record, it’s called a nemes, not a ‘stripey headdress’.

Well, it didn’t go well down in Araby, let me tell you. All sorts of rumours that you had started bowing down to statues of Ra and Horus, practising idolatry, turning your backs on Islam...

Some of us had never been Muslims to start with, Dab.

Well, that’s not the point. And with a Sultan who was still young and experienced, the caliphal authority was weakened. Every angry mullah could stir up a group of equally angry young men.

To torch a few Javanese homes, yes, but...

Not by this point. Oh, sometimes, I suppose, but by this point the Javanese were angry right alongside us. Muslim brothers.

Well...you’re being quiet, Saliha.

I was just practising the Societist Doctrine of the Last Throw; waiting for you two to kill each other so I could win the argument. (Audience laughter and a few ‘ooh’s) But some of what Daburah said was felt in Aintab and the other scraps of free Turkish land too. There were a lot of rumours that Egypt was not only drifting away from Islam, but that you were all, well, having parties and growing rich while we struggled on the frontiers. There were raids back and forth over the border with Kurdistan, and nobody quite agreed whether it was independent, Russian or Persian...no legal recourse. A lot of people chose to leave, if they could. It’s around this time that so many Turks fled, either from my land, from the Salient or out from under Societist rule in the Eternal State, and went overseas. Especially to California.

Where you all seem to have become involved in the film industry.[23]

That’s a stereotype...but there is a grain of truth to it. Certainly, it was felt it was the only way to become prosperous and safe. That or go into business in Pérousie or somewhere. The wealth in Egypt didn’t reach us.

It’s true the 1940s were a time of prosperity in Egypt, or at least in the big cities like Alexandria. Just like a lot of places in the world. And I know the shift to the Gold Standard wasn’t, ah, universally popular...

You can say that again. There were lots of factors behind the rebellion when it finally came. Stories of Arabs facing persecution and discrimination in Egypt.[24] The Iraqis were worried that they would be the front line of another war with Persia, and Russia. The tax regime being reformed.

Always the money. But yes, I get it. I do. I do regret what happened. Even though part of me is happy that Egypt is Egypt, and not just one part of a wider empire, even if the richest and most powerful part.

Poor you. No, sorry, that was unworthy. I know you and your people have had your own troubles.

Thank you.

Well, there was unrest long before the revolt began in earnest. You mentioned Yemen, well, the same applied to the Persian kleinkriegers blowing up Russian occupiers and then high-tailing it over the border to Iraq.

I know things were never the same after Hoseyin Pasha died in that drome crash in 1946. I know a lot of Arabs had seen him as the last hope—

It’s not as simple as that. Hoseyin Pasha wasn’t really an Arab – well, he was a Levantine Arab, Syrian. He was married to a Jewess.

...and what’s wrong with that?

Uh, nothing, Saliha, I just mean, he wasn’t seen as one of us.

But his policies were still popular, right? The tax reform? He was seen as a defender of the Arabs? Including the Peninsular Arabs, I mean.

All right, yes, I just think it’s an exaggerated point. All that stuff about everyone supposedly thinking he was murdered by the establishment, or the Societists or someone. Look, we all knew how unreliable dromes still could be in the 1940s, we weren’t stupid. It wasn’t about Egypt allegedly offing Hoseyin Pasha. It was about the idea that Egypt was so consumed with its parties and its high living that it never bothered to think about us and our needs enough to imagine it would need to off Hoseyin Pasha.

I mean...you were partly right. It is true that there was an embrace of ancient Egyptian fashion and culture by some – like our version of the Archie subculture in some other countries. Alexandria, and Cairo and some other cities, had thriving cultural scenes and the same kind of prosperity that the so-called Naughty Forties is associated with here in America, or in Europe or China. Giza expanded enormously as the tourist trade was built around the pyramids and the tombs of the ancient kings. Half the plays and operas were about Hatshepsut or Taharqa. Maybe your people were barely exaggerating to say we were worshipping them. Or we were worshipping the mammon they got us from the tourists.

I didn’t mean...

We still idolise that period now, really. So do a lot of foreigners. A time of historical epic films being made there, of glamorous leading ladies smoking hookahs while men dressed as centurions gamble away their savings at the casino. Where mysterious spies and exotic detectives intrude from the world of fiction into that of fact.

It does sound intoxicating.

That’s the word, probably. There was still strife. Struggle around the Moon Lakes, pushing the Societists out of Darfur. Initially there was suspicion of the ASN; nobody trusted the French and the Abyssinians were a bit suspect, too. But in time we would be one of the most important members. We had the grand cause of opposing Societism. Anything, really, to stop us thinking about the poor of Araby, the Javanese refugees, the borderlands with Russia in Iraq and the Levant, those who would be in the firing line when the golden age came to an end.

When you put it that way. I know we still have strife today. That arrangement in the Levant after all the fighting and disputes is...not universally popular. When I think about all that was unleashed, well, despite all our problems in that era before them, I can see why you’d see it as a golden age. One whose end you would mourn.

Exactly. And come to an end it did. In 1957...

*

(Lt Black’s note)

We will leave it there, lest we intrude into an era we have not yet adequately prepared the ground for. Next time, I’m bowing out, as apparently we need to hear about the world of physics...













[1] Augusta University is the institution that was founded in Lexington, Virginia both OTL and TTL in 1749 as Augusta Academy. In OTL it eventually became Washington and Lee University.

[2] The usual metonym for the theatre district in New York City in TTL, as opposed to Broadway in OTL.

[3] ‘Kuwait’ is normally still given with Portuguese-influenced spelling in English in TTL, even though it hasn’t been Portuguese for a long time.

[4] I.e. Gaziantep.

[5] These terms became remarkably confused in OTL. The Western distinction between Near East and Far East ultimately descends from the Greek geographer Ptolemy’s dividing line of the Ganges river; the Far East was ‘India beyond the Ganges’ to Ptolemy, the Near East was everything between the Ganges and Europe. In OTL they became applied increasingly specifically to smaller areas, and then the term ‘Middle East’ arose in the nineteenth century and, confusingly, was treated as synonymous to ‘Near East’ and eventually displaced it. In TTL, ‘Near East’ has come to mean Anatolia, the Levant and sometimes Egypt; ‘Middle East’ means the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran, and ‘Far East’ (like OTL) means China and its neighbours – thus cutting the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia/Indochina out of the scheme altogether. This somewhat artificial distinction has had the historiographic effect of implying more of a cultural separation between the Levant and Arabia or Iraq than, perhaps, actually exists.

[6] See Parts #85 and #99 in Volume II.

[7] See Part #102 in Volume III. ‘Rumelia’ here is usually used to mean all of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ or the Ottoman Balkans.

[8] See Parts #108, #113 and #116 in Volume III.

[9] See Parts #168 in Volume IV and #207 in Volume V.

[10] The Pomaks are a Balkan demographic descended from Bulgarians who converted to Islam over the course of Ottoman rule. In OTL they have sometimes become persecuted, and the term Pomak is sometimes now considered offensive. The distinction made here is that Hafiz Mustafa (not his birth name) was raised an Orthodox Christian and converted to Islam in adulthood for reasons of political ambition, rather than being descended from Bulgarians who had converted much earlier and on a larger scale.

[11] I.e. the Yuchyu Meclis or triple assembly – see the introduction to Part #238 in Volume VI.

[12] In OTL the first Ottoman play (by the European definition) was performed in 1860. It is thought that the first opera was performed at the Topkapi Palace in 1797, but public performances (initially of Italian operas translated into Ottoman Turkish) began in 1840. Operas and operettas by Ottoman writers also began to be performed from the 1870s. In OTL the arts in the Ottoman Empire suffered from the endemic border conflicts and internal political strife over reform from the late 1870s onwards. This is largely avoided in TTL, allowing a longer-lasting cultural flowering.

[13] Souan is the Coptic form of the name Aswan in Arabic.

[14] See Parts #241, #242 and #247 in Volume VI.

[15] From 1704, Ottoman Iraq was ruled over by semi-autonomous Mamluks (not to be confused with the specific Egyptian rulers with which the term Mamluk or Mameluke is usually associated); Mamluks were freed slaves who had converted to Islam and then been trained for administration. The Mamluks who ruled Iraq were of Georgian and Circassian descent. In OTL, Mamluk Iraq lasted from 1704 to 1831 when the Ottomans reimposed direct rule from Constantinople. In TTL, that state of affairs lasted for almost a century longer, though in practice the Devrim reforms had already de facto centralised much of the actual political power and the Ottomans left the Mamluks in place more as a symbolic gesture towards special status for the militarised border region of Iraq.

[16] See Part #255 in Volume VII.

[17] See Part #268 in Volume VII.

[18] See Part #281 in Volume VIII.

[19] See Part #286 in Volume VIII. The Russian breakthrough was also born of sheer Russian luck and Ottoman incompetence as well as just Belosselsky’s proactive approach to plague control keeping his army fighting fit against weaker opponents.

[20] Compare the OTL Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in an adjacent mountainous region, which remained static for 26 years between 1994 and 2020 before shooting war erupted again.

[21] See Part #296 in Volume VIII.

[22] Recall that as the Rosetta Stone was never discovered, in TTL hieroglyphs were not deciphered until the twenty-first century, so the Egyptomania craze is delayed (and largely replaced with an earlier fascination with Babylonia/Sumer instead).

[23] The (stereotypical) role of Turks in the Californian film industry in TTL can be somewhat compared to that of Armenians in OTL – though obviously it’s not as simple as that, and TTL has many Armenians in cinema just as OTL has many Turks. Note that the film classic Scheherazade mentioned in the introduction, based on a work of Arab literature, had people with Turkish names both as the leading lady and in the director’s chair.

[24] The elephant in the room to a viewer from OTL is that, in TTL, Egyptians generally do not consider themselves Arab. The identification of Egypt with pan-Arabism in OTL is mostly a twentieth century phenomenon (although this a complex and contentious subject). Even many experts on Egypt in foreign offices around the world were surprised and confused when Egypt began to embrace a pan-Arab identity in the 1930s and especially the 1950s with Nasserism. The difference is partly due to historical factors; in OTL Egypt and states across the Middle East shared a common hostility to colonialism (which can be argued to go back to Napoleon) and later to the existence of Israel, promoting a shared identity. In TTL, by contrast, Egypt is still seen as a distinct part of the Ottoman Empire, was the central authority of the ‘Alexandrine’ imperial remnant, and is embracing its newly-rediscovered ancient history and identity at a crucial time. Egypt in TTL still mostly speaks Arabic, of course, but TTL’s Egypt has a vested interest in emphasising the significant differences between Egyptian and Levantine or Peninsular Arabic (as they are known in OTL). By contrast, Egyptian media by 2020 TTL has largely swamped the other North African varieties of Arabic (especially in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica a.k.a. Libya) and replaced it with a standardised Egyptian form. There are still people in 2020 Egypt who consider themselves Arabs, but they are treated as a minority, and one outnumbered by the Coptic Christians (‘Copt’ alone does not imply Christian in the same way it does in OTL)."