Turkic peoples

“ They intended, from the very first days of the constitutional régime, to make Turkey a nation of Turks. Theirs was the strong, virile race, into which the other races would be fused. Turkey was weak, they declared, because it was the home of a conglomeration of peoples. If Turkey was to become like the nations of Europe, these different nationalities must be destroyed. To destroy them, the Government had first to aim at the foyer of national life, the ecclesiastical hierarchies. ”

“ Towards the end of the tenth century, a branch of the Turks, henceforth known as the Turcomans, accepted Islam at the hands of the conquering Arabs, and in course of time all of the Turkish peoples became Moslem. Naturally through their religion the Arabs came to exert a strong influence on the rude Turks, so strong that Turkish thought has never since been wholly free from Arabic dominance. The Turks are an exceedingly loyal people, accepting the religion imposed upon them with whole‐heartedness. They are not by nature fanatical ”

“ TURKISH INFLUENCE IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE The isolation of the Turks has prevented them from assimilating the higher culture of the peoples whom they conquered. They have never created anything in science, art, literature, commerce, or industry. Conquest has been the Turks' one business in the world, and when they ceased conquering their decline set in. But it was not till the end of the seventeenth century that the Turkish Empire entered on that downward road which is now fast leading to its extinction as a European power.
STUDIES 1. Locate these cities: Bokhara; Samarkand; Merv; Herat; Bagdad ”

“ It must be remembered that the corrupt officialdom created by the Palace, which had a degrading influence on everything in touch with it, is not representative of the Turkish people. The typical Turk possesses the virtues and the failings of a conquering and dominant race. He is courageous, truthful, and honest amid races not conspicuous for truthfulness or honesty, some of which are likewise lacking in courage. The Turk, moreover, is shrewd and gifted with common sense, and he is not a visionary, as are the Arabs and some other peoples holding the Mos7lem faith. ”

“ As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country. ”

“ The position of Turkey is certainly an anomaly. It is an Asiatic power planted in Europe. It is a Mohammedan power ruling over millions of Christians. It is a government of Turks—that is of Tartars—over men of a better race as well as a purer religion. It is a government of a minority over a majority. The Mohammedans, the ruling caste, are only about one-quarter of the population of European Turkey—some estimates make it much less, but where there is no accurate census, it must be a matter of conjecture. ”

“ Someone has said: "The greatest enemy of Turkey is the Turk." I have too much love for the Turkish people, too much sympathy for them, to adopt this pessimistic attitude without great inward opposition; but unfortunately it is only too true. We have seen how the Turkey of Enver and Talaat has reacted sharply against the Western-minded, [Pg 263] liberal era of the 1876 and 1908 constitutions, and has turned again to Asia and her newly discovered ideal, Turanism. To the Turks of to-day, European culture and civilisation are at best but a technical means; they are no longer an end in themselves. ”

“ There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. ”

“ The number of the Turkish inhabitants of European Turkey is indeed small. It is generally stated at 2,000,000; but Shafarik estimates the number of genuine Turks at not more than 700,000, who rule over fifteen millions of people. The different Turkic dialects of which the Osmanli is one, occupy one of the largest linguistic areas, extending from the Lena and the Polar Sea, down to the Adriatic.
The most ancient name by which the Turkic tribes of Central Asia were known to the Chinese was Hiung-nu. These Hiung-nu founded an empire (206 b. c.) comprising a large portion of Asia, west of China. ”

“ Neither corruption nor the modern coloring of European civilization, however, has yet deprived the upper-class Turk of that indefinable air, at once severe and melancholy, which is seen in the lower classes as well, and which, not considered individually, but in the general mass of the people, produces an undeniably favorable impression. In fact, judging only from appearances, one would be inclined to pronounce the Turkish population the most civilized and well-behaved of any city in Europe. ”

“ Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish tekkes at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction. ”

“ With few exceptions the races interpenetrate one another to a remarkable extent and the Turk himself is numerically in the majority in comparatively few districts of Asia Minor, where the bulk of the Turkish population lives, and in scarcely any part of European Turkey. The Turks are literally overlords, a ruling class. ”

“ The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and with it the Caliphate of Islam. ”

“ They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place. ”

“ It is incredible how large a proportion of Turks are illiterate, and what fantastic views of the world and their place in it the common people hold. To nothing more than this ignorance must be laid a great part of Turkey’s troubles. But another part is due to the character of the empire which it befell the Turk to conquer. If he had happened, like ourselves, into a remote and practically empty land he might have developed his own civilisation. ”

“ The Turk, as a race, is composed of two elements, a ruling class of land-owners and military and civil officials, arrogant though courteous, corrupt though honest in private life, parasitical though self-respecting, and a peasant class, hopelessly ignorant, lacking in energy, initiative, ambition, aspirations, and ideals. The great bulk of the Turkish element in the Empire looked with the indifference of ignorance and the hostility of jealous regard for their unique position in the community upon the granting of a constitution. ”

“ The Turks, who purchase a vast number of these slaves, are so intermixed with Armenians, Georgians, Turcomans, Arabs, Egyptians, and [261] even Europeans, it is hardly possible to distinguish the real natives of Asia Minor, Syria, and the rest of Turkey. The Turkish men are generally robust, and tolerably well made, and it is rare to find a deformed person among them. The women are also commonly beautiful, and free from blemishes; they are very fair, because they seldom stir from home, and never without being veiled. ”

“ While Turkish race-fanaticism, which finds practical outlet in Turanistic ideas, is still the intellectual backbone of official Turkey to-day and has to be broken by the present war, the Young Turkish Islam policy is already completely bankrupt and can therefore be studied here dispassionately in all its aspects. ”

“ That a State so raised, so maintained, should act as an organization for protecting and furthering the interests of its subjects, of whatever race or creed, is not to be expected, neither did the great body of the Turkish nation ever wish it to assume such functions. For the Turks were the dominant race, the conquerors, and to them any idea of their non-Islamic, non-Turk fellow-subjects as equals was inconceivable ”

“ Such also are the Turki peoples of Afghan Turkestan, and of the neighbouring uplands (Hazaras and Aimaks who claim Mongol descent, though now of Persian speech) ; the Aderbaijani and many other more scattered groups in Persia; the Nogai and Kumuk tribes of Caucasia, and especially most of the nomad and settled agricultural populations of Asia Minor. The Anatolian peasantry form, in fact, the most numerous and compact division of the Turki family still surviving in any part of their vast domain between the Bosporus and the Lena. ”

“ The Turks, the least gifted among the races living in Turkey, themselves form only a minority of the population, and are still far behind even the Arabs in civilisation. Is there anywhere any Turkish commerce, Turkish handicraft, Turkish manufacture, Turkish art, Turkish science? Even law and religion, even the literary language, is borrowed from the subjected Arabs.
We teachers, who for years have taught Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks and Jews in German schools in Turkey, can only declare that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the least willing and the least capable. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say that this human tax has been levied on almost every family of the Caucasus, western Asia and the countries of the Balkan peninsula. Today the net result of this variegated intermixture is that the Tatar origin of the average Turk, so called, is entirely concealed by the mingling with Mediterranean, Armenoid-Alpine and even Nordic elements. Except in a few isolated instances the Turki type of central Asia is rarely met within Turkish boundaries. Clearly no valid claim to racial distinctiveness can be set up by the Turks.
In religion the Turk is no innovator. ”

“ It is a stirring history, full of ups and downs, that of the Turkish people. As we have seen, they emerged from a seething mass of nomadic humanity which infested Central{158} Asia, and threatened those Empires which had settled and acquired civilization, such as China, whence, by the way, come some of the earliest records of the Turks. These nomads had no other use for civilization than to acquire unearned riches ”

“ I was of military age and Turkey was under blockade. When I had left Constantinople a few years after the Turkish revolution, the whole country was exhilarated, filled with joy, with ambition and with hope. Freedom and emancipation from an autocratic domination had been obtained. Nothing was to prevent the normal advance of Turkey and the Turks along the road to progress. We were at last to obtain full recognition as a civilized nation. We were at last to receive equal treatment from the other European nations. ”

“ The real ‘Turkey’ is Turkestan, and the real Turks are the Turcomans. The Osmanlis are the least typical Turks surviving. Only a very small proportion of them have any strain of Turkish blood, and this is diluted till it is rarely perceptible in their physiognomy: and if environment rather than blood is to be held responsible for racial features, it can only be said that the territory occupied by the Osmanlis is as unlike the homeland of the true Turks as it can well be, and is quite unsuited to typically Turkish life and manners. ”

“ The history of Turkey has been a sad and painful history. That race has not been without remarkable and even in some cases fine qualities, but from too many points of view it has been a scourge to the world, made use of, no doubt, by a wise Providence for the sins of the world. ”

“ It is the one great empire existing in the world that originated on the banks of the river Euphrates. It was in the district to the east of that river that the Turk, who originally came from Turkistan, became a formidable power, and from thence that the Turkish hosts were let loose against Roman Christendom. For we must remember that the Turks, or Ottomans, do not belong to the soil of Turkey. The French are the natives of France, and the Italians of Italy, but the Turks are not the natives of Turkey, but invaders from Asia. They hold the country by conquest. ”