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About Joel

Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 17 August 2006 · 6:14 am

Looking East from Berlin in the 1920s

At twenty-one, Lev had a young writer’s classic lucky break: perhaps through the Pasternaks, he got an introduction to Die Literarische Welt‘s powerful editor, Willy Haas. In no time he was one of the favorites, part of the inner circle around the charismatic Haas, who gave Lev top billing when most of the columnists were twice his age or older. Haas called him the paper’s “expert on the East,” and that was a timely thing to be. Whatever the reason for Haas’s initial patronage—and spotting an improbable hurricane of talent and energy had to have been the main thing—Lev, or rather “Essad Bey,” became one of the journal’s three most prolific contributors.

Lev’s first article, appropriately enough, was “From the East,” in 1926—a discussion of newspaper journalism in Malaysia and Azerbaijan. His contributions would range from a consideration of the poetry of Genghis Khan (Genghis got a positive review) to “Film and the Prestige of the White Race,” a seemingly frivolous but actually prescient consideration of how images of European and American immorality were lowering the status of the West in the eyes of Easterners, Muslims in particular. Lev prescribed some positive images of Western culture on the double, if the “white race” did not want to permanently lose the respect of the increasingly independence-minded peoples of Asia. He reported on curiosities like “The Eunuch Congress,” describing how the former palace and harem eunuchs of the Ottoman sultan had recently held a trade organization meeting in Constantinople. And he wrote a positive review of the first German biography of Ataturk, concluding that Mustafa Kemal is the “least Turkish of all Turks, who aided the victory of the West with Eastern methods, with cunning, tyranny and deception.”

In these early pieces, Lev pays particular attention to Eastern leaders who know how to use the West to their advantage, like Ataturk and, later, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who becomes a subject of particular fascination. During the 1930s Lev would become obsessed with Peter the Great, the monarch who, more than any other, united East and West in his realignment of Russia to absorb the European Enlightenment. Lev loved and hated Peter, but in the end he was overwhelmed by his subject and could not finish the book. For another author that might have meant wasted years; for Lev it meant bringing his study of Peter to biographies of Czar Nicholas and Reza Shah. (Lev believed that the dictator of Persia came much closer to ruling like Peter the Great than the last czar, Nicholas, ever did.) But in a droller vein, Lev also covered the glamour of the East. In one feature, “Buchara at the Hotel Adlon: The Last Emir, Fairytales from 1,001 Nights in the 20th Century,” he describes in amusing detail how the royal courts of Central Asia, defeated by the Bolsheviks, are now living rather well in the heart of the Potsdamer Platz, entertaining and going to formal parties.

The series of articles Lev wrote for Die Literarische Welt and other papers about the visit of the dynamic Afghan monarch King Amanullah to the German capital in 1928 allowed him to combine his nose for East-meets-West drama with critical political analysis. Though the articles paint a picture of the bleakness of both the geographical and social climate of Afghanistan (it “is inhabited by wild, mutually alien clans … who hate everything foreign [and] patrol their borders on small ugly horses, stare greedily at the armed caravans that come from far away, and show them pyramids of skulls that until recently marked the borders”), Lev also conveys the bright hope that characterized Afghanistan in the twenties, where “in contrast with the other Islamic countries that found a rather humble present on a glorious past, it is a country without a past but with a great future.”

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 206-208

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by | 16 August 2006 · 8:39 am

Education of Essad Bay Nousimbaoum, Orientalist

On October 17, 1922, Lev enrolled as a student in classes in Turkish and Arabic in the Seminar for Oriental Languages at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. On his application, he wrote his name as “Essad Bey Nousimbaoum,” from Georgia. This was the first recorded official use of his new name—which was essentially “Mr. Leo Nussimbaum” transposed into Turkish. (However, the word “Bey” had connotations of Turkish nobility, and his new name helped build the impression that Lev was of princely origin.)

The inconvenient detail that Lev had not yet graduated from high school was not mentioned, and it became his great secret for the next year and a half. At first he was slightly disturbed by the university lectures, for he found that “the professors spoke about their subject matter as though they were speaking about completely ordinary things.” But gradually, he understood that the professors saw the Orient as a professional pursuit, while he was driven by “a mysterious compulsion.” Lev started to figure something out—a neat trick, in fact; a mental survival skill. He found that his love of ancient crumbling walls and winding souks was a guiding light he could shine on almost any landscape, no matter how bleak and intimidating it might seem. He would learn to carry a portable “Orient” inside him, one that he could unpack whenever he found a comfortable spot and the right audience.

He began to keep a crazy schedule. He was determined that no one in the Russian gymnasium find out that he was attending the university (under false pretenses), and at the same time no one at the university must realize that he was still in high school. At 6 a.m. each day, he set out from Charlottenburg and walked all the way to the other side of the city to the university. He would spend the morning in seminars while the gymnasium was still full of German girls. When the Russian school opened, at 3 p.m., he would be there just as if he had been loafing all day like his classmates. “While the teacher was explaining a geometric theorem, the Arabic grammar lay on my knees.”…

Lev’s capacity for hard work and mental focus was something that would drive the rest of his short life. The emigre writers were known for drinking and working like fiends, but Lev would soon astound even them. His clandestine academic activities made him feel at times like he was in an “exclusive club,” and at other times as though he lived in another world. He was glad to have a reason for being separate, however. Both the work and the schedule were a sort of emotional survival strategy. “Most likely I would have perished from this leap into poverty, if it had not been for the love of the ancient Orient that kept me going,” he recalled. Lev also found he enjoyed having a secret life. He was different, he knew, because of what he had done and what he was doing. He was now an Orientalist….

On the day of his final examination at the Russian gymnasium, Lev felt lost and hopeless. He had spent far too much time at night school, studying Arabic, Turkish dialects, and Uzbek geography. There was no hope he could pass in his basic subjects—especially Latin and mathematics. He felt a fool and imagined how his and his father’s prospects would become even worse when he flunked the exam. He would not be able to face the old man, who had experienced so much hardship. It would be more than he could bear.

The chairman of the examination committee, a wrinkled old Romanov prince with a monocle sunk impossibly deep into his face, seemed to take barely any notice of Lev during his exam. Then Lev saw he had written on his pad, “in his melancholy aristocratic handwriting” next to the name Nussimbaum, “a very poor candidate.” During the history examination, the old chairman practically seemed asleep as Lev was quizzed, sitting there indifferently and gazing off into the distance. Suddenly, he raised his head, fixed Lev through his monocle, and said: “Tell us something about the dominion of the Tartars and Mongols over Russia.”

The question would already have been the ultimate gift to Lev, even if he wasn’t in his third semester at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität.

“I saw before us the wide Mongolian steppes and the horsemen … and there was no stopping me,” Lev recalled. I think I even forgot that I was in the middle of the examination. I spoke and spoke, I quoted Arabic, Turkish, Persian authors in the original languages. Indeed, I even knew some Mongolian. The committee was dumbstruck—the prince dropped his monocle. Then suddenly he started posing questions, and lo and behold!—he posed questions in Persian, in Mongolian, he even quoted the classics of Oriental literature…. Only later did I find out that the prince was one of the most renowned Orientalists of Russia. The examination committee sweated; the whole thing went beyond their imagination. The teacher suddenly looked like a little schoolboy. What started out as an examination turned into a discussion in all different languages about all sorts of Oriental problems. I think it lasted two hours and it would have continued into the evening if the person sitting next to the prince, a former Russian privy councilor, hadn’t given him a nudge.

The discussion saved Lev. Whatever other mistakes he made on his examinations, the old prince saw his talent and would not let him fail. In place of “a very poor candidate,” the chairman made sure that all his examiners marked Lev as “average.” He could graduate.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 193-194, 198-199

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by | 15 August 2006 · 5:38 pm

Weimar–Soviet Alliance, 1920s

At the world economic conference in Italy, [German Foreign Minister Walther] Rathenau charmed and negotiated around the clock, trying everything to press the Allies for some concessions on reparations. He wanted Germany to deal with the West, but France was adamantly opposed—and Rathenau was not the sort of man to let the company collapse just because it was unsuccessful in one market. If the Western democracies would not help Germany, he was determined to “play the Russian card.” In a midnight phone call with the Russian delegation, Rathenau arranged a secret meeting in the nearby seaside town of Rapallo. There, he entered into negotiations with none other than Leonid Krasin, the elegant bomb-maker of Baku … Krasin’s terrorist days were over, and he was now helping bolshevism with his smooth negotiating skills and wide knowledge of the oil business. (In fact, his main brief was to sell Baku oil concessions to Western companies on behalf of the new Bolshevik regime …)

The new special relationship between Germany and Soviet Russia was based on their purely negative common affinity—a hatred for the West and the “victors of Versailles”—and would have terrible unforeseen consequences. Its secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German “work commandos” would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react. Under the treaty, the Germans built aircraft outside Moscow and manufactured poison gas in a plant in the Russian provinces. Red and German armies trained their aviators and tank officers together at a series of new schools throughout the Soviet Union. Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), p. 183

A great many alliances based on “purely negative common affinity” seem to have “terrible unforeseen consequences.”

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by | 15 August 2006 · 8:59 am

Human Rights Interventions: Principles vs. Practices

During the Kosovo conflict, the human rights consensus seemed particularly powerful to those who sought to question the policies forwarded by the advocates of rights intervention. Kirsten Sellars noted that questioning the altruistic motives behind the Kosovo bombing campaign was regarded as ‘heresy’: ‘The consensus rules that anything done in the name of human rights is right, and any criticism is not just wrong but tantamount to supporting murder, torture and rape.’ The use of available facts to challenge the case for war, found relatively little support or media space in this climate of consensus. This was true whether the issue at hand was the manipulation of the Rambouillet talks by US officials, to cut short peace negotiations by demanding Nato freedom of manoeuvre across the entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; or the fabricated stories during the bombing campaign of alleged evidence of planned genocide and fake German Defence Ministry documentation of ‘Operation Horseshoe‘. For critical factual coverage of the conflict many people turned to non-Western media sources, where strongly researched articles were published in many countries, including Russia, China, India, Greece, Egypt and Israel. It seemed that the facts on the ground mattered less to the Western advocates of intervention than the principle that a stand must be made on the side of the human rights cause.

This would appear to be confirmed in the responses of commentators to the revelations, in the years since the Kosovo war, that the claims of mass slaughter or genocide of Kosovo Albanians, which were the media focus during the bombing campaign, were an exaggeration. In August 2000, the ICTY put the preliminary body count of Serbs and ethnic Albanians that died in the civil conflict at between 2,000 and 3,000, raising doubts over the alleged ‘proportionality‘ of the Nato military response of 12,000 high-altitude bombing raids, including the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions over heavily populated areas and destruction of much of the civilian economy of the region. The leading British liberal broadsheet, the Guardian, editorialised in response that, yes, Nato may have ‘lied’ about its bombing campaign, and yes, massacre claims may have been ‘exaggerated’ and ‘manipulated’: ‘Yet the sum of all these criticisms does not change the central issue. Was intervention needed?’ What the Guardian sought to defend was that ‘the principle of intervention was right’ rather than the practice of it or its outcome. It appears that once the discussion of international relations revolves around ‘principles’ rather than ‘practices’ the existing consensus on human rights activism can all too easily sidestep factual criticism.

This confidence in the justice of the cause of the Nato bombers, and of the principle they were seen to be acting on, reflected a profound transformation in the perception of international priorities. In fact, the most common criticisms of the Nato campaign, from human rights activists, were that it should have been launched earlier or that it should have been extended (against US opposition) to send troops in on the ground and to the Nato occupation of Serbia itself. Back in 1990, few people would have imagined that, within the decade, the international human rights community would be advocating the military occupation of independent countries on human rights grounds, the establishment of long-term protectorates, or the bombing of major European cities on a humanitarian basis.

SOURCE: From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, new ed., by David Chandler (Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 15-16

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by | 14 August 2006 · 5:55 pm

The Showa War: Japan’s Poor Grasp of Global Trends

The Daily Yomiuri, Japan’s largest newspaper (and a far cry from the Daily Worker), has been running a series of historical retrospectives leading up to the August 15 shusen kinenbi ‘end-war memorial-day’. Notice that they call the war that lasted from 1931 until 1945 the Showa War, named for the third emperor of modern Japan, known outside Japan as Hirohito. Here’s the 18th instalment, about Japan’s poor grasp of global trends as several regional wars mutated into a global conflagration.

What should we learn from Showa War?

Many people who experienced the Showa War have died in the 61 years since the curtain came down on the fighting. To younger generations, the war is a distant event.

The Yomiuri Shimbun’s War Responsibility Verification Committee attempted to determine the truth behind the hostilities, examined the facts and found many lessons that can be learned. To close the committee’s yearlong verification process, we summarize the mistakes made by the political and military leaders:

A nation’s future will teeter on a knife-edge if it cannot accurately read the balance of power among nations and global trends. After World War I, Japan found itself in such a situation.

Japan’s first mistake was the Manchurian Incident.

At the Washington Naval Conference held in Washington from late 1921 to 1922, the Nine-Power Treaty, whose signatories agreed to respect China’s sovereignty, and the Five-Power Treaty that limited tonnage of aircraft carriers and capital ships by the United States, Britain, Japan, France and Italy, were concluded. The invasion by the Kwantung Army into Manchuria challenged these treaties, which formed the backbone of the international order at the time.

The expansion of the Imperial Japanese Army into Manchuria provoked a fierce response from the United States, the country that advocated compliance with international agreements, nonintervention in domestic politics of other countries, market liberalization and equal opportunities. The reaction led to the Stimson Doctrine of January 1932, named after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson. The doctrine said the United States would not recognize any territorial or administrative changes imposed on China by Japan through the use of military force.

Japan’s growing isolation from the international community was highlighted by its withdrawal from the League of Nations in March 1933. Less than seven months later, Adolf Hitler’s Germany also left the league.

Japan’s plan to seek closer ties with Germany exacerbated this isolationism. The plan to conclude the Tripartite Alliance with Germany and Italy was once dropped due to circumstances in Europe described as “complicated and mysterious” by Prime Minister Kiichiro Hiranuma. However, dazzled by Germany’s string of victories in Europe, Japan finally concluded the Tripartite Treaty in September 1940.

Conclusion of the pact meant Japan was allied with the nation bombing London. This was a fatal choice.

The Japanese military, whose leaders mostly were pro-Germany at that time, were unaware of the repercussions the treaty would have on the Sino-Japanese War. Britain had further clarified its stance of assisting Chiang Kai-shek, and the United States also promised substantial assistance. Japan had, accidentally, internationalized the Sino-Japanese War.

Japanese military and government leaders at that time failed to accurately grasp the international situation. They did not understand the rise of nationalism in China that set the foundations for the country’s unification after the Chinese Revolution of 1911.

At the heart of the problem was the common perception in Japan in those days that “Shina [China] isn’t a country.” Japan justified its invasion into China by claiming that China was a “society of marauding bandits.” The prevailing view in Japan at that time was that Chinese people lacked the ability to establish a modern state.

Of course, a few politicians, such as Tsuyoshi Inukai, clearly understood the nationalism in China. However, such politicians were shunted from the political stage early on during the Showa War by acts of terrorism by the military, making it impossible for them to influence Japan’s policy toward China.

Furthermore, army officials who should have played important roles in policy toward China instead became “an advanced group” to lay the groundwork for invading China. Dubbed “army China specialists,” they included Kenji Dohihara, chief of the Mukden Special Service Agency, and Takashi Sakai, chief of staff of the China Expeditionary Force. As military advisers to warlords possessing territories in China, they used conspiracies and various tactics as if they were real-life characters from the “Three Kingdom Saga.”

They ignored moves by Chiang Kai-shek and other leaders of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) and the rapidly rising Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. They also failed to consider the united national front of the Kuomintang and Communists that would later determine China’s destiny.

The leaders lost a balanced perspective of the international situation because Japan analyzed only one-sided data collected from Germany in Europe and warlords in China.

In the Imperial rescript on the declaration of war against the United States, as well as Britain, Emperor Showa said the war was for “self-existence and self-defense.” However, Japan changed the purpose of the war to create the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere after the war started. This was based on the concept of dividing the world geopolitically into four spheres–East Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Soviet Union–in which Tokyo planned to create a self-sufficient bloc of Asian nations led by Japan and free of Western powers.

However, this concept ignored the existence of China and focused too much on ideology. Consequently, it opened the door to an almost limitless expansion of the battle, although Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, who played an important role in wartime diplomacy, took steps such as holding the Greater East Asia Conference in November 1943.

As Japan sought to bring an end to the war, it asked the Soviet Union, which had remained a virtual enemy of Japan, to serve as a mediator in peace negotiations. Japan’s leaders were unaware that the Soviet Union had pledged in a secret agreement at the Yalta Conference to enter the war against Japan within 90 days of Germany’s defeat, the U.S. success in developing atomic weapons and the U.S.-Soviet tug-of-war for the postwar global political leadership. In the end, Japan suffered two atomic bombings and was attacked by Soviet forces in the final days of the conflict, which led to the incarceration of many Japanese in Siberian internment camps after the war.

via Foreign Dispatches, who comments:

The day that Korea’s largest newspapers are capable of such candor about the less than glorious aspects of their country’s past is the day that I’ll know there are more than two true liberal democracies in East Asia (Taiwan being the other apart from Japan). As for China – well, I won’t expect any such thing in my lifetime …

UPDATE: Taiwan urges Japan to ‘face history‘

UPDATE 2: As commenter Peter North observes, this piece is far from hard-hitting. Instead, it reads like a wishy-washy committee report. The other instalments I’ve read are similar in that regard.

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by | 13 August 2006 · 1:58 pm

Ataturk and the Last Caliph, 1922–24

After the disastrous Young Turk flirtation with Germany, the last Ottomans were in fact cosmopolitan and progressive. The brief “jazz years” of Constantinople saw the throne reject its recent disastrous leap into ethnic nationalism and resurrect its centuries-old tradition of tolerance. The city got a Kurdish chief of police and a flowering of Kurdish newspapers. The Armenians were left in peace. Women’s hemlines were rising and the veils were falling. Yet these last Ottomans were enormously unpopular. It was not that the Turkish people weren’t ready for liberalization of all kinds, as Ataturk would prove shortly thereafter. It was rather that the last Ottomans had shown a love for all things modern, liberal, and Western—fast cars, fast women, “high life,” as Mr. Osman called it—just as their empire was being picked apart by the European powers. They were seen, quite simply, as traitors.

Ataturk was firmly in control of the “new” nation of Turkey by 1922, though it was unclear what his official position was. He had moved the seat of government to Ankara, a small, barren city in Anatolia, in order to insulate Turkish politics from the intrigues of Constantinople. He had removed the temporal rights from the Ottoman throne—that is, detached the title of sultan from caliph—turning the position, for the first time in history, into a purely religious one, but he was not prepared to abolish it yet. To end the caliphate at the same time as the sultanate might have been too much for the hidebound Turks, especially the religious establishment. Ataturk did not want a civil war, so he ended the sultanate first, and then looked around for the cleverest, most honorable Osman to become caliph.

He chose … Abdul Mejid, who was a serious-minded Renaissance man—an accomplished scholar, painter, musician, and poet—and perhaps the most progressive ruler ever to have sat on the throne. An American magazine profile in 1924 noted that the caliph “read a great deal … German and French philosophers … he regretted his inability to read English well enough to understand the English philosophers. He found politics distasteful, because it is ‘the cause of so much hardship and unhappiness.'” Mr. Mejid had told the magazine that he counted on foreigners to come to Turkey. “Their coming here should be of great assistance to this country,” he said. “Their money will enable us to build schools and enlighten the people of this unfortunate nation, who until now have been nothing but excellent warriors, though they have all the aptitudes for becoming philosophers and scientists.”

Most astonishingly, perhaps, the spiritual leader of all the world’s Sunni Muslims flatly denied the superiority of Islam. The scholar-sultan told the American reporter that he dreamed of a world “where all human beings will call one another brothers, racial and religious considerations will disappear, and people will live obeying the true word of God as it was brought to them by His prophets, Moses, Christ, Confucius, Buddha and Mahomet.”

Then, on March 3, 1924, Ataturk suddenly abolished the position of caliph, a little more than a year after convincing the enlightened Mr. Mejid to take the job. On March 23, the vali of Constantinople, a sort of lord high chamberlain, received instructions from Ankara that “the Caliph should be treated with utmost courtesy but must be out of Turkey before dawn.” All male descendants of the Osmans were to be given twenty-four hours to leave. Princesses and others had three days. The caliph would receive $7,500 in cash, and $500 each would go to the other members of the Osman family. The Osmans had never handled money before, as their servants had always had unlimited access to the country’s treasury on behalf of their material wishes. Many barely knew how to dress themselves. The family’s passports were to be stamped to bar them from ever returning to Turkey; they were to be permitted to live wherever they chose in the West, but no Osman was to take up residence in a Muslim country, for fear that he could resurrect himself as either sultan or caliph.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 117-118

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by | 11 August 2006 · 7:57 pm

The Head Heeb on the UN Peace Plan for Lebanon

The resolutely level-headed Head Heeb offers a positive take on the latest Franco-American UNSC resolution on Lebanon.

The compromise reportedly has the backing of all five permanent Security Council measures, which if true will make it virtually certain to pass. The Israeli and Lebanese governments have both been consulted, and although the IDF brass may be reluctant to give up on the planned push to the Litani and Lebanon is wary of an expanded French role, it would be politically unfeasible for either country to reject the United Nations’ terms. The real question mark is Hizbullah, which would have to accept three conditions that it had vehemently rejected up to today: a ceasefire with IDF troops still on Lebanese soil, an augmented international force south of the Litani, and the loss of its military presence in the border region.

The decisive vote in this respect may be neither the United States nor France but Qatar. Qatar is the sole Arab country currently sitting in the UNSC, and as such has spoken for the Arab world and been the focus of the Arab League’s crisis diplomacy. If the Qatari delegate votes in favor rather than abstaining or dissenting, then Hizbullah could only say no at the price of bucking the United Nations, its own national government and the Arab world. It might be willing to chance the first two, but probably not all three.

If all these hurdles are overcome, then the Israel-Hizbullah war will end on terms that allow everyone to gain something. Israel will have weakened Hizbullah and will get a stable northern border for the first time in more than 30 years, Hizbullah will be able to claim that it fought the IDF to the end, and the Lebanese government will obtain sovereignty over the entire country as well as a chance to resolve its outstanding disputes with Israel. France, as Lebanon’s once and future patron, will increase its regional influence, and even the United States will (against all odds) have played a critical role in brokering the settlement.

This means that the proposed resolution is, at this point, about the best possible end that can be imagined for the whole sorry mess. A war in which all parties can claim achievements is one that is less likely to fester and more likely to provide a foundation upon which the underlying issues can be settled. As Israel has learned from bitter experience, a draw that leads to a resolution of the root conflict is preferable to a victory that doesn’t – the Yom Kippur War ultimately resulted in peace with Egypt while the Six Day War led to nothing but an endless nightmare of occupation. If this war, like the war of 1973, leaves all parties proud but chastened, the not-defeat may have better results in the long term than an unequivocal battlefield victory.

UPDATE: The half-life of hope about anything that involves the combination of the Middle East and UN resolutions is about equal to that of ununoctium.

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by | 11 August 2006 · 8:03 am

Young Turks and "Deutschland über Allah" in the 1910s

The spirit of universal Ottoman brotherhood soon melted away, revealing a harder, more exclusive ideology. The Young Turks [who seized power in 1908] embraced something called “pan-Turanianism”—the notion that all Turks from the Russian steppes to Anatolia came from a single ancestral land called “Turan.” In this view, the entire historical orientation of the Ottoman Empire toward Europe and the Middle East had been misplaced. Instead, the empire should be focused on reuniting the Turanic peoples in Russia and Central Asia. In his book Allah Is Great, Lev [Nussimbaum aka Kurban Said] compared the Turanian obsession to “blood and soil” ideas in Germany. In a kind of Turkish parallel to the German idea of lebensraum, the future was to be found in the East—in an invasion of Russia to reclaim ancestral lands from the thirteenth century and earlier, not only those of the Ottomans but of the other great Turanians, the Mongols and the Huns.* (*Since at least the eighteenth century, Russian ministers and theorists had referred to the Ottoman capital not as Constantinople but as Czargrad, in anticipation of absorbing it into the new world-dominating Super Russian Empire. The counter-theory of the pan-Turanian principle meant that if the Russians wanted to reconquer Constantinople, the Turks would do them one better, reconquering half of Russia.)

What clinched the Turkish-German axis in the First World War was really the personality of Enver Pasha. A dark fireplug of a man who had served as the Ottoman military attaché in Berlin, Enver had embraced all the pointed helmets and polished boots and talk of Wagnerian Götterdämmerung-cum-Jihad. (Kaiser Wilhelm did his part by spreading the rumor that he had converted to Islam.) When Enver led the Young Turks to power in 1908, as war minister, he was sporting a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, which should have been a clue as to which way things would go. What ensued may have amounted to the most dramatic “self-colonization” in history: in the name of achieving instant modernization and international power, the Young Turk junta turned the Ottoman Empire into a virtual military colony of the German Reich. “Deutschland über Allah,” said some diplomatic wags. But it was a dead serious maneuver, and it happened with lightning speed. Enver turned over the entire Ottoman officer corps to the Germans; more than twenty-five thousand German officers and NCOs assumed positions of direct command. A Prussian officer founded the Turkish Air Force, and two German battleships arrived in the Golden Horn. The German crew brazenly donned fezzes and sang “Deutschland über Alles” beneath the seaside villa of the Russian ambassador.

The Young Turks had launched the Ottoman Empire off a cliff. It is hardly remembered now what a large role Turkey played in the First World War, except for the storied Gallipoli landing, where the defending Turks slaughtered British, Australian, and New Zealander expeditionary forces. Almost everywhere else, it was the Turkish soldiers who were slaughtered. More than three hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died fighting the Russians in the Caucasus alone, as a result of Enver’s plan to begin a great reconquest of the ancient Turkish heartland. The plan was to take Baku so as to launch Turkish armies across the Caspian in oil tankers, landing at Kizel-Su and crossing Turkestan, conquering Bukhara, Samarkand, and eventually, even Mongolia. On the eve of the revolution, the czar’s forces poised for a final attack on Constantinople. Had Russia stayed in the war and the Bolsheviks not prevailed, Istanbul might today be called Czargrad and the Middle East might be an imperial Russian federation. The Turkish rout was the fault of poor planning and bluster—Enver sent Turkish troops to fight in the Caucasus in winter with no overcoats and without even boots—but the increasingly fanatical Young Turk junta looked for someone else to blame for the failure of the Turanian dream. Thus, the infamous Armenian massacres of 1915 were set in motion.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 106-108

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by | 9 August 2006 · 9:34 pm

Impressions of Persia, c. 1920

The years 1918–20 represented almost as close to a global apocalypse as the world had ever come. Most of the important monarchies of Europe and Asia, having provided stability for hundreds of years, suddenly ceased to exist. The khanates of Central Asia were distant backwaters, but Lev [Nussimbaum, aka Kurban Said] was deeply struck by the spectacle of “those glorious old kingdoms,” collapsing one after another, as “the desert fell beneath the power of the red star.”… There was nowhere to flee but south, so the Nussimbaums joined a caravan of Russian and Muslim refugees heading for Persia.* (*The nation would become Iran only in 1935, as part of a Nazi-influenced name change. As some Iranians will still proudly tell you, they are more closely related by blood to the Germans than to their Semitic neighbors: Iran means “land of the Aryans,” a notion that pleased Reza Shah Pahlavi, the country’s dictator at the time, and founder of a dynasty that would end with his son’s overthrow by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978.)

The desert borderland between Bukhara and Persia was still quiet, and the caravan crossed into the nominal domains of the shah without incident. Like Turkestan, northern Persia was largely unsettled, but the culture was older and more civilized. The caravan traveled for days across the desert, coming occasionally upon luxuriant oases and the ruins of old cities and forts, dusty and lonely, like some sprawling string of elegant ghost towns. The inhabited cities were surrounded by walls six feet deep and twenty feet high, made of pounded clay; as in the Middle Ages, city gates were opened in the morning and closed at night. The walls could not withstand modern artillery but served to keep out tribes of marauding bandits and nomads. The Kurds were common raiders in northern Persia, but, along with the ethnic Azerbaijanis, they also provided the bulk of the Persian Army. The native Persians did not like to fight. In this class-bound society, they thought it declassé to take up arms….

Of course, Persia was full of life—its forests were filled with wolves, tigers, foxes, and wild boars, while lions roamed the deserts along with Persian horses, which were famed for their beauty, even if they were not as fleet-footed as the Arabians. The country was also known for its agricultural wealth—some of the world’s finest wheat, cotton, sugar, grapes, and tobacco. Everywhere Lev went, he smelled tobacco and hashish, as well as the famous roses of Persian love poetry that bloomed in so many varieties in the gardens and oases. The kingdom of the Qajar shahs seemed like a sanctuary from history, where the people lived among the fig trees and orchards, spending their time distilling roses into precious perfumes, weaving rugs, guarding harems, and composing poetry. In this literary graveyard of versifying tent-makers, he found a land yet to be set upon by the modern world.

The caravan’s journey through post–First World War Persia sometimes sounds like a swing through the American Bible Belt. “In Persia religion alone is alive,” Lev wrote, but it was a religion of many strange branches, sects, and secret societies. He encountered Ismailis, devil worshippers, Babists, and Bahaists, a sect of universalist Muslims who believed that a Muslim messiah had returned to earth sometime in the mid-nineteenth century—around the same time Joseph Smith found the Books of Mormon—and that we were living in a millennium when all religions could come together. Mainstream Muslims despised the Bahaists as blasphemers, and they often persecuted them.* (*Until the 1980s, in fact, anti-Semitism was uncommon in Persia, whereas anti-Bahaism was rampant. In the minds of many of today’s mullahs, the two seem to be merged, so that the disciples of the Ayatollah Khomeini have warned of Zionist-Bahaist-American plots.) Islam’s original triumph in Persia in the seventh century had represented the defeat and banishment of the local religion, Zoroastrianism, whose dualistic creed had prevailed in the Persian court for hundreds of years. But along with the Muslim conquerors came another kind of Koranic proselytizer—refugees, not conquerors—who called themselves Shi’Ali, “the Partisans of Ali,” or simply the Shiites. The Shiites taught the Persians not to trust the Arab conquerors, who claimed to represent the way revealed by the Prophet Muhammad.

The Shiites believed that the right to be caliph, or spiritual leader, of Islam should have fallen after Muhammad’s death to his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Ali was chosen caliph for a short time, just four years, but then he was murdered with a poisoned sword. A few years after Ali’s assassination, his sons Hassan and Hussein tried to assert their family’s rights and were similarly dispatched: Hassan by poison, Hussein in a heroic last stand in the desert, near the town of Karbala, in modern-day Iraq, where, like Ali, he was killed by the Sunni warriors who opposed him. The martyrdom of Hussein, in which the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad sacrificed himself for the true message of God, was for his followers something like the crucifixion of Jesus was for Christians (though Hussein was not considered divine): in the eyes of the Shiites, Hussein’s death is Islam’s central tragedy. Shiite ideology was complex and kaleidoscopic, varying from place to place, but it all came down to one belief: the Prophet’s rightful successors were murdered, injustice ruled in the House of Islam, and the world would not be made right until the Mahdi, the Shiite messiah, arrived to implement the Divine Kingdom on earth….

Lev found Persia’s Shiite Muslims theatrical and seductive. It was Islam in its most intoxicating form—a self-sacrificial dance of outsiders and rebels. He loved the raw religious fervor all around him, which he had never experienced in Baku. Shiism’s encouragement of the underdog nurtured Lev’s view of Islam as a bastion of heroic resistance in a world of brute force and injustice.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 62-65

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by | 8 August 2006 · 5:37 pm

Journalism: The First Draft of What?

I don’t feel the need to join all the sharks circulating around the self-inflicted wounds of Reuters and other propaganda facilitators (on whichever side) covering the latest outbreak of hideous warfare in the Middle East, but I would like to take this opportunity to sneer in the general direction of the legacy media and their much vaunted editors.

In keeping with the Far Outliers focus on items that languish in undeserved obscurity, I’d like to highlight a recent letter to the editor headlined Iwo Jima, Revisited on page A17 of Saturday’s Washington Post, a newspaper for which I retain more respect than most (a very low threshold, I admit). The letter reads:

Regarding “Next Exit Marine Land; Along I-95, a New Military Museum Goes Up — And Up” [Style, July 31]:

Philip Kennicott succumbs to the old canard that the famous photo of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima in 1945 was “a restaging of an earlier flag-raising on the hill that was not quite so visually dramatic.”

The second and larger flag was put up so that it might be more visible to the troops below. The second raising was not staged, and it was serendipitous that Joe Rosenthal was there to snap one of the most famous photos of all time.

I refer those interested to “Flags of Our Fathers,” a book by James Bradley and Ron Powers.

— Terrence Leveck
Bethesda

For 60-something years, this rumored “first draft” of history has been embedded in newsrooms and press clubs around the world (though not in Tokyo’s press club, I recently learned). If he really cared about accuracy, culture critic Kennicott didn’t need to go to the trouble of consulting the recommended book; he could instead have consulted a source far more accessible and reliable than any piece of fresh news off the wire or cable: Wikipedia. Journalists may wish to think they are writing the first draft of History, but in almost every case they are just writing the 51st draft of (edited!) Conventional Wisdom. (The stench of CW being synchronized is why I can no longer tolerate PBS’s Washington Week even though I regularly watch the NewsHour.) Wikipedia on almost any controversial topic is, by contrast, the 51st draft of History, if not the 101st. And Wikipedia’s editors are usually volunteers, often specialists in their fields, unlike the paid professionals whose job it is to know even less about more topics than the jack-of-all journalists they supervise.

Did the vaunted editors of the WaPo Style section catch the CW myth that the complacent Mr. Kennicott included in his article? No. It took an agitated reader to bring it to the newspaper’s attention. Bloggers and journalists who either provide email addresses or enable comments get the same kind of feedback all the time. What was the difference again?

I’d like to give the last word to a commenter at NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen’s thoughtful blog PressThink.

Michael Schrage of MIT’s Media Lab e-mails:

Sorry to come to Nick’s ‘analysis’ so late. Read your comment and Jeff Jarvis’s. May I just add a couple of cents?

In the course of being the Washington Post’s first “tech” correspondent back in the early and mid-80s, I had to cover Detroit and Ross Perot’s acquisition by GM. I learned a lot about the automobile industry (and, frankly, I really hadn’t planned on that or wanted to…)

Forgive the preamble but it leads to my key point: Detroit just sucked at competition. It thought of itself and behaved like a domestic oligopoly and even Chrysler’s near-death experience didn’t change that dynamic.

Competition from Japan? Establish voluntary export restraints and insist on domestic content and greenfield plants.

It took well over a decade—and literally hundreds of thousands of layoffs—before Detroit even began to be a global competitor. To this day we can see that competition more often drew out the worst of Detroit’s executives and employees rather than their best.

I feel this dynamic replayed in the so-called MSM; in 2001, I would have bet real money that competition from the blogs and Google was going to make the New York Times, WSJ, CBS, CNN, Time, LA Times, etc. better and sharper publications.

What I see and read today are so-called ‘professional’ journalists operating from a defensive crouch and the breathtaking (to me) arrogance that competition from ‘amateurs’ and responses by reader/viewers are, net-net, not worthy of their time. It’s astonishing to me.

My political biases and perceptions aside, I am just flat out disappointed by how poorly the MSM competes. And it’s clear to me why Rupert Murdoch—for whom competition is both fuel and goad—has done so well over the past twenty years.

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