Even those who do not share his convictions still feel the need to display a certain allegiance to him. Nonetheless, one might wonder how long the edifice will hold in the face of growing religious radicalism and with European nervousness. How can the Kemalists convince their people to Europeanise, if the Europeans tell them over and over that they are not European and don’t belong among them?
Many Muslim leaders dreamed of following Turkey’s example. In Afghanistan, Amanullah, a young king of twenty-six, came to power in 1919 and wanted to follow in Ataturk’s footsteps. His army launched an attack on the occupying English forces and succeeded in gaining recognition for his country. Strengthened by the prestige he had won, he embarked on ambitious reforms, forbidding polygamy and the veil, opening modern schools for boys and girls, and encouraging the development of a free press. The experiment lasted ten years, but in 1929 Amanullah was ousted in a conspiracy by traditional chiefs who accused him of impiety. He died in exile in 1960.
Reza Khan’s experiment in Persia proved more durable. He was a fervent admirer of Ataturk and, like him, an army officer. He wanted to reproduce the same modernising programme in his country, but he turned out to be unable to achieve a clean break with the past and instead founded a new imperial dynasty, the Pahlavis, rather than a European-style republic, and tried to play on the differences between the great powers rather than impose a clearly independent line. He probably lacked Ataturk’s talent, though in his defence the discovery of oil meant there was little chance of the great powers letting Iran run its own affairs. In order to remain in power, the dynasty was forced to ally itself first with the British and then with the Americans; in other words, with those nations whom the Iranian people viewed as the enemies of their prosperity and dignity.
This is a counter-example to that of Ataturk. A leader who appears to be the protege of opposing powers will be denied legitimacy and everything he attempts will be discredited. If he wants to modernise the country, the people will oppose modernisation. If he wants to emancipate women, the streets will be full of veils in protest.
Many sensible reforms have failed because they bear the hallmark of a hated power. And conversely, many senseless acts have been applauded because they bear the seal of combative legitimacy. This holds good regardless of where the situation arises. When a proposal is put to the vote, the electorate votes not so much on its content as on the confidence they do or do not accord to the person who has put it forward. Regret and second thoughts only come later.
Chapter 3
In Arab countries, the Turkish experiment received a more qualified welcome than elsewhere in the Muslim world. Ataturk’s bold reforms were certainly a source of inspiration for modernising elements of society, such as the Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba, but there was also in Turkish nationalism a predisposition to distrust the Arabs, which made them unreceptive to his ideas.
For the wish to make Turkey more European was also a wish to make it less Arab. The breakup of the Ottoman empire during the First World War had begun to look like a divorce between the Sultan’s Arab and Turkish subjects. When the Hashemites in Mecca raised the standard of revolt in 1916, encouraged by the English, one of their declared objectives was that the dignity of the caliph, a title to which the Ottoman sovereigns had laid claim for four hundred years, should return to the Arabs. Freed from the Turkish yoke, the people of the Prophet would at last be able to reconnect with their past glories.
Turkish nationalists displayed similar resentments: if we have not been able to progress, they said in essence, it is because we have been dragging the Arabic millstone around for centuries; it’s high time we got rid of that complicated alphabet, those outmoded traditions, this archaic mentality; and, some added more quietly, that religion. ‘The Arabs want to separate from us? So much the better! Good riddance! Let them go!’
They didn’t stop at changing their alphabet; they undertook to purge the Turkish language of vocabulary of Arabic origin. These terms were very numerous and widespread, more so than in Spanish, for example, which borrowed Arab words mainly for everyday things — the landscape, trees, food, clothes, instruments, furnitures, trades — whereas its intellectual and spiritual vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin. Conversely, the Turkish language mainly borrowed abstract concepts from Arabic, such as ‘faith’, ‘progress’, ‘revolution’, ‘republic’, ‘literature’, ‘poetry’ and ‘love’.
Which is to say that this acrimonious divorce was a separation of both body and soul.
Born at the same time, under the same roof so to speak, but with little mutual sympathy, Turkish and Arab nationalism were to have extremely different destinies. The first was born an adult, the second was never able to become one. It is true that they did not come into the world with the same advantages or the same restrictions.
The Turks had long governed an immense empire which had gradually slipped away from them. Some territories had been taken or reclaimed by other powers — Russia, France, England, Austria or Italy — and others had had to be ceded to renascent peoples: Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Montenegrins or, more recently, Arabs. Ataturk told his compatriots that, rather than crying over the provinces they had lost, they should try to save what they could; make their own national territory where a majority spoke their language, principally Anatolia and a narrow band of land in Europe around Istanbul; consolidate their hegemony there, even if it was at the expense of other nationalities who lived alongside them; and unceremoniously abandon the trappings of the Ottoman past in order to begin a new life in new garb.
For the Arabs, the creation of a national homeland was on the agenda too, but was infinitely more difficult to realise than for the Turks. Uniting in a single state all the Arabic-speaking peoples who lived between the Atlantic and the Persian Gulf was a Herculean undertaking. The Hashemites were doomed to failure, as were Nasser and all the Arab nationalists — as would Ataturk himself have been if he had set himself such an ambitious task.
With hindsight, it may seem as though the enterprise should never have been attempted, but just after the First World War it did not seem so absurd. The Ottoman period had only just come to an end, during which almost all these countries had effectively been united under the rule of the same Turkish sultan: why could they not be united again under an Arabic monarch? In addition, it matched the spirit of the times. Italian unification had been achieved by Cavour in 1861 and Germany had been united by Bismarck in 1871. These events were still relatively recent and the memory of them was still vivid. Why should Arab unity have been impossible?
Today, the prospect of forging a single country from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Algeria, Sudan and Saudi Arabia seems like pure fantasy. But then, none of these countries existed. When their names appeared on maps, they were geographical regions or administrative units, sometimes provinces of vanished empires; none of them constituted a separate state. Arab countries which could claim a continuous history were rare: Morocco, though it was then under a French protectorate; Egypt, though it was under English control; and Yemen, whose archaic monarchy kept it apart from the rest of the world.
Therefore, if it was madness to advocate Arab unity, it was equal madness not to advocate it. Some historical dilemmas cannot be resolved, even by the most exceptional characters. The Arab world was destined to fight with passion and ferocity to realise its dream of unity, and destined to fail.
It is in the light of this insoluble dilemma that we can try to understand Nasser’s tragedy and all the dramas that have stemmed from it down to the present. Thirty-five years before the advent of the Egyptian leader, the Arabs had been seduced by another character who, in some circles, has remained legendary: the Hashemite prince Faisal (the same Faisal to whom Lawrence of Arabia was adviser and to some extent mentor). The son of the Sharif of Mecca, he dreamed of an Arab kingdom with him as sovereign which would bring together in the first instance the whole of the Middle East as well as the Arabian peninsula. The British promised it to him in return for the Arab uprising against the Ottomans, just as they promised to recognise his father as caliph; and at the end of the Great War, he went to the Paris Peace Conference along with Colonel Lawrence to get the backing of the great powers for his plans.
During his time in Paris, he met Chaim Weizmann, an important figure in the Zionist movement who would become the first president of the state of Israel thirty years later. On 3 January 1919, the two men signed an astonishing document boasting of the blood ties and close historical links between their two peoples and stipulating that if the great independent kingdom desired by the Arabs were created, it would encourage the settlement of the
