turkey, past and future islamic supremacy alive and well in ankara

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Turkey, Past and FutureIslamic Supremacy Alive

and Well in Ankaraby Diana Muir Appelbaum

Supersessionism refers to the belief that Christians have superseded Jews in a newcovenant with God. Islam, too, sees itself as superseding all previous divine rev-elation but, unlike Christianity, which canonized the Old Testament embedding long

centuries of pre-Christian history into the Christian narrative, Islam freely erases historyitself. But Kemalist Turkey appeared to offer a revolutionary break with Islamic traditionwhen it established a secular republic on the ashes of the Ottoman caliphate. For decadesit has been held up as a model of a modern, westernized, Middle Eastern democracy, thathappened to have a Muslim majority. Closer examination, however, reveals substantial“continuity between the late Ottoman Empire” and the republic1 as Turkish treatment ofreligious and ethnic minorities exposes an unacknowledged streak of Islamicsupersessionism.

Diana Muir Appelbaum is the author of Reflec-tions in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Eco-system in New England (University Press of NewEngland, 2000).

ISLAMICSUPERSESSIONISM

Islamic supersession can be understood intwo senses, as replacement and as erasure. Goingforward, Islam will supplant all other faiths. ButIslam also controls the time before the birth ofMuhammad; it claims to have preexisted all otherfaiths with the Qur’an preexisting all other scrip-ture. Because Islam has always existed, all chil-dren are born Muslim although their parents mayrear them in another faith. The proof text is in thereported words of Muhammad: “Every child isborn according to God’s plan; then his parents

make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian [Zoroas-trian].”2 The claim that Islam has always existedeffectively erases all that went before Muham-mad. The notion that Islam is the final, true faith,divinely ordained to rule everywhere, has drivenIslamic imperialism for 1,400 years.3

Supersessionist erasure can also be en-acted on the landscape. The ancient paganshrine in Mecca was converted into the MuslimKaaba. But the Muslim claim is not that mono-theism has replaced pagan worship at the Kaabain the way that a thousand Christian churcheswere built on pagan altars, but rather that theKaaba was the “first house” of God (Qur’an 3:96-

Appelbaum: Turkish Islamic Supersessionism

1 Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Build-ing: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (New York:I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. ix.2 Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 152, n. 8.3 See Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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97) built by Abraham and Ishmael.The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was super-

seded by the erection of the Dome of the Rock,bolstered by the myth of Muhammad’s “NightJourney” to Jerusalem, erasing the pre-Islamic his-tory of the temple and, with it, all Christian andJewish claims.4 In later cases, however, sites areincorporated into Islam as symbols of Islamic im-perial triumph. So it was when the great cathedralof St. Sophia in Constantinople, originally built in360, was converted into a mosque by Sultan Me-

hmet II in 1453.The fact that Chris-

tians and Jews contin-ued to live under Mus-lim rule reinforced Is-lamic triumphalist be-liefs because as “pro-tected people” (ordhimmis), they publiclyacknowledged their legaland institutional inferior-ity to Muslims. But withthe rise of European na-

tionalism during the nineteenth century, Islamencountered Christians and eventually Jewswho claimed political and religious equality withMuslims and even rights to sovereignty in landsthat had hitherto been part of the domain ofIslam. Christian or Jewish sovereignty andequality challenge Islamic supersessionism.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the Turkishrepublic. Modern Turkey not only inheritedsupersessionist attitudes from Islam, it contin-ued the policies of the Ottoman Empire in thisregard.

OTTOMAN HISTORY

Turkic speaking tribes reached Anatolia fromCentral Asia by the eleventh century, by whichtime they had already adopted Islam. By thetwelfth century, after Anatolia slipped away fromSeljuk Turk control, various tribes and strongmen

had established principalities that conducted raidsor ghaza against infidels and one another in thename of Islam and in search of riches and terri-tory. One of these principalities, founded byOsman I in northwestern Anatolia, would becomethe core of a dynasty that would last for centu-ries. The Osmanli or members of the clan ofOsman, would become known in Europe as theOttomans.

Though having a variety of legends glorify-ing Osman himself, Ottoman magnates thoughtof themselves as Muslims. They adopted the his-tory of the Arab conquests as their own as wellas that of popular Arabic epic poems in whichUmayyad Arabs defeated Byzantine Greeks in 740.For many Ottomans, the aspirational ancestor wasnot an Osmanli Turk, but rather, Muhammad, andlegal procedures were instituted by the state tocertify those claiming the status of sayyid (a de-scendant of Muhammad).5

In this sense, the Ottomans were differentfrom the Greek, Roman, and Arab empires thatpreceded them: There was no ruling ethnic groupbut rather a ruling elite. Muslims as a whole wereconstituted as the millet-i hakime, the dominantor ruling people, in relation to the Christians andJews who were a millet-i mahkume, dominatedpeople born to be governed. The idea that themembers of the Muslim millet were members of agreat and historic Turkish people was a noveltyintroduced only in the nineteenth century byMuslim Tatar refugee intellectuals from the Rus-sian conquest of the Ukraine seeking to enhancetheir status as they created new lives in Istanbul.6

The business of the polyglot empire wasconducted in Ottoman, a Turkic language writtenin Arabic script with a great deal of vocabularydrawn from Arabic and Persian taught to boysintended for careers in the imperial service. Al-most all Muslim boys who went to school at-tended Qur’an schools where they were taughtto recite the Qur’an and prayers in Arabic; a few

4 William J. Hamblin, “The Temple in the Qur’an,” paperpresented, Dublin, July 3, 2012.

5 Ruya Kilic, “Sayyids and Sharifs in the Ottoman State: Onthe Borders of the True and the False,” Muslim World, Jan.2006, pp. 21-35.6 Jacob Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Coopera-tion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 7-73.

New genetic datareveals that thecitizens of modernTurkey areoverwhelminglydescended fromindigenousChristians.

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learned Arabic and continued on to careersin Muslim law. Translations into Turkishfrom Arabic and Persian existed, but phi-losophy, mathematics, law, and literatureread in Arabic shaped the culture and val-ues of educated Muslims. Even the lowli-est Muslim field hand belonged to the domi-nant, millet-i hakime. The vast majority ofthe population, however, consisted of peas-ants of many religions and cultures whospoke local dialects of Turkic, Slavic, andother languages.

In order to control and IslamizeAnatolia, the Ottoman Empire engaged inan ancient practice of engineering large-scale population movements.7 The Balkancampaigns of Mehmet the Conqueror,Murad I, and Murad II during the fifteenthcentury were especially notable for the largeChristian communities enslaved andshipped out of the conquered territory.Through conversion and demographic en-gineering, by the nineteenth century,Anatolia had shifted from overwhelminglyChristian to predominately Muslim al-though it retained large areas of dense Ar-menian, Greek, and Syriac Christian settle-ment, and the Balkans and Aegean islandshad strong Christian majorities. New genetic datareveals what has long been known from othersources that the citizens of modern Turkey areoverwhelmingly descended from the indigenousChristian peoples.8

Conversion was usually voluntary althoughthe pressures on subaltern peoples to convertwere real. In the traditional phrasing, a Christianor Jew who “surrendered” to the will of Allah was“honored by the glory of Islam.” Even the land-

scape was converted to Islam at the time of con-quest with synagogues and churches turned intomosques, including bells removed from churchtowers transformed into minarets. The conver-sion of individuals, prisoners of war, slaves, girlsacquired as wives or concubines, and entire vil-lages took place in a process of Islamization thatcontinued through the end of the empire.9

NATIONALISM ARRIVES

The Greek war of independence, which be-gan in 1821, shook the foundations of Ottoman


The Ottoman Turks eagerly accepted the Islamicsupremacist view of other faith communities andlooked on in horror as their empire was dis-membered by despised dhimmis beginning in the19th century. Here, Bulgarian king Ferdinand(center) and Austrian emperor Franz Joseph (left)tear apart the map while Ottoman sultan AbdulHamid glowers.

7 Doðan Gürpønar, “Anatolia’s eternal destiny was sealed:Seljuks of Rum in the Turkish national(ist) imagination fromthe late Ottoman Empire to the Republican era,” EuropeanJournal of Turkish Studies, May 22, 2012; Nesim S. Eker,“Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire andthe Armenians,” Middle Eastern Studies, May 2007, pp. 461-74.8 Uður Hodoðlugil and Robert W. Mahley, “Turkish Popula-tion Structure and Genetic Ancestry Reveal Relatedness amongEurasian Populations,” Annals of Human Genetics, Mar. 2012,pp. 128–41.

9 Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conver-sion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2008), pp. 13-8, 81-104, 185-203, 138-40, 148,160-1; Tijana Krstic, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam andthe Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conver-sion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” ComparativeStudies in Society and History, Jan. 2009, pp. 35-63.


hegemony less because of the loss of territorythan because it turned a religiously-ordered,millenarian world upside down. Islam and em-pire were supposed to expand forever, and thesultans had inherited the caliphate from theMamluks of Egypt, along with responsibility forits maintenance. Conquered peoples, millet-imahkume, were supposed to stay conqueredand, ideally, to see the beauty of Islam and con-vert. Greek independence announced an alter-native view of the world, one in which Chris-tians were the equals of Muslims, and Bulgar-ian, Romanian, Montenegrin, Serb, Armenian,and Jewish peoples claimed the right to self-de-termination. Where Christians and Jews hadbeen scorned as subservient communities fatedto submit to Islam, they were now perceived asan enemy and a threat.

To make matters worse, a series of Balkannational liberation movements and victories bythe Habsburg, Russian, then French and Britishempires confronted nineteenth-century OttomanMuslims with the prospect of living under Chris-

tian rule. Muslim legal authoritiesmaintained that Muslims placed insuch a situation ought to move toMuslim-governed territory. Manydid, especially in the Balkans andCaucusus. The Crimean War (1854-56)alone drove a million Muslims to theshrinking empire. Revolts in Crete,Serbia, and elsewhere added to theflow as the empire revived conquest-era policies, directing Muslim settlersto densely Christian regions of the Ar-menian highlands and the Balkans.Some 850,000 Muslim settlers weresent to Armenian majority areas be-tween 1878 and 1904.10 Beyond thedisplacement—especially frighteningfor the many Muslim refugees whospoke only Slavic languages—the lossof such enormous territories was in-explicable within the supersessionistparadigm of an Islam chosen by Godto expand to the farthest horizons.

Resentment over the perceivedinjustice of loss of empire fueled largescale massacres in the Armenian high-

lands during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid, be-ginning in 1894. War, the crumbling of the empire,concessions forced on remaining Ottoman prov-inces, internal liberalizing, reforms, all promptedcontinual rethinking of the empire and its iden-tity. But Islam remained a continuous thread.

A NEW TURKISM

Muslim intellectuals forwarded pan-Turkismin the late nineteenth century as an answer to thechallenge of nationalism. It also arose in parallelwith the emerging racial and ethnic concepts ofpan-Germanism and pan-Slavism that imaginedthe superiority and unity of those groups. As AliSuavi, one of the leading nineteenth-centuryYoung Ottomans, put it, the “Turkish race is su-

Although the Young Turks and Atatürk (center) aregenerally viewed as progressives seeking to reformOttoman society and promote civil rights, they wereactive in the ethnic cleansing of Armenians andAnatolian Greeks. The Young Turk press bemoanedtheir loss of prestige, declaring: “How can theOttomans who once ruled the world become servantsto their own shepherds, slaves, and servants.”

10 Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic; Turkish National-ism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zoryam Institute,2004), p. 93.

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perior to and older than all other races.”11 Inthis scheme, the natural role of the racially pureand superior Turks was to be the ruling nation(millet-i hakime) of the empire. The Turkishrace was thousands of years old; its historywas a series of world-altering triumphs, culmi-nating in fusion with Islam and the conquest ofAnatolia.12

At their most extreme, these ideologues wenton to claim that Turks had founded the first greatcivilization, the one from which all subsequenthuman civilizations were drawn, including not onlyBabylonia and Europe, but the Maya, Inca, andAztec. Turks were entitled to rule because theywere the original, indigenous people of Anatolia,one branch of which had left this land, foundedSumer, expanded north into the steppe, convertedto Islam, and returned to Anatolia to conquer theRoman Byzantine Empire.13

This new concept of Turkishness, whichtransformed a linguistic group into an ethnic andeven racial one, was not invented from wholecloth. Turkic tribes including Osmanli Turks didexpand out of central Asia in great waves of con-quest. Millions of Anatolian peasants wereTurkic speakers. Anatolia’s Turkic speakersshared a history, a group of Turkic dialects, landthat had been their home for centuries, and areligion. The Young Turks proudly took up thename Turk—which had previously been usedas a term of scorn to describe illiterate peasants—and turned it into the name of the new nationthey were working to invent. All of this followedthe pattern of nation creation among Christianpeoples in the Balkans so exactly as to be a kindof imitation of the Christian peoples the Otto-mans ruled.

Balkan Christian nationalists had creatednew literary languages from spoken dialects, writ-ten national histories, and worked to wrest inde-pendence from the empire. Turkish nationalismvaried from this pattern in that it was the national-ism of a ruling imperial community with its in-

tense supersessionism. Nationalist historians inGreece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and other Ottoman landswrote triumphalist histories that exaggerated theachievements of their nations, strove to pushorigins into an improbably ancient past, andpainted the Ottomans as brutal conquerors. TheTurks went further. They wrote histories in whichthe Turks were portrayed as having always beenin Anatolia with the indigenous Armenian,Syriac, and Greek peoples branded as interlop-ers. The deepening fusion of Turkish and Mus-lim identities would prove fateful during the com-ing decades.

THE ARMENIANMASSACRES OF THE 1890S

Security in the poorly-governed Armenianhighlands had long meant living in ethnic or tribalgroups capable of self-defense. Farmers couldsurvive only if they lived in villages strongenough to negotiate favorable arrangementswith Kurdish tribesmenwho collected protectionmoney from farmers in ex-change for not raidingthem. This system leftmuch of the empire un-derpopulated, and eventhough farmers mostlypaid, violence was en-demic. The channeling ofhundreds of thousandsof resentful Muslim refu-gees into the Armeniandistricts and the spreadof modern ideas of self-government led someArmenians to organize themselves as defend-ers of the nation. Their assumption that theArmenian people had a future only if it couldgovern itself was accurate, but the nationalistswere too few to launch a revolt. The Armenians,however, did muster armed defense of a fewtowns. Informed estimates of the Armeniandead as a result of massacres ordered by thegovernment and carried out between 1894 and1896 primarily by Kurdish tribesmen commis-sioned as paramilitary units range from 80,000


11 Ibid., p. 75.12 Gürpønar, “Anatolia’s eternal destiny was sealed.”13 Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Lifeand Teachings of Ziya Golkalp (London: Luzac 1950), p. 112.

Turks wereportrayed ashaving alwaysbeen in Anatoliawith theArmenians,Syriacs, andGreeks brandedas interlopers.


to 300,000.14 Sultan Abdulhamid’s combinationof wholesale massacres and directed flows ofMuslim immigration meant that by 1896, Muslimswere in the majority in the Armenian highlandsfor the first time in history.

There is an extremely black irony here. TheOttoman authorities understood that implement-ing ethnic cleansing by offering tens of thou-sands of victims for sale in large, public slavemarkets—as had been done during the Greek warof independence a few decades earlier—was no

longer acceptable. Arme-nian victims were not dis-persed across the empireas slaves; they were killed.The exception, severalthousand Armenian chil-dren and young girlswho were taken intoMuslim families as labor-

ers, adopted children, servants, concubines, wives,or some combination thereof, demonstrates thatthe Armenian massacres were not about race inthe eugenic sense;15 they were about replacingArmenian Christian identity and culture with Is-lam so as to ensure imperial integrity.

The most progressive segment of OttomanMuslim society was the Committee of Union andProgress (CUP), the group that would becomeknown as the Young Turks. In the 1890s, theywere a small elite supporting a program of liberalreform that would offer civil rights to all the peopleof the empire. The shallowness of CUP liberalismwas revealed when the Armenian massacres be-gan. CUP members were not horrified by the mas-sacre of tens of thousands of Ottoman subjectsbut rather by the idea that some Christians re-sisted being murdered. At the height of the mas-sacres, the CUP posted placards protesting the“impudent actions” of Armenians who attemptedto defend their families.16

THE YOUNG TURKS

The fear that haunted the CUP was that theArmenians and other Christians would mount warsof national liberation, which appeared to the Mus-lim elite as Christian efforts to deprive the Otto-mans of territory. This nightmare came to life withthe First Balkan War of 1912, in which Greece, Bul-garia, Serbia, and Montenegro forced the empireout of its most populous, wealthiest provinces.The Ottoman army was able to hold only Istanbuland its immediate suburbs.

Muslims found the loss unimaginable. EnverPasha, the ambitious minister of war who wouldplay the key role in taking the Ottoman Empireinto World War I, asked how Ottomans could bearto let the region fall into the hands of Christianswho were “our slaves.” In a letter to his wife, hecalled for “revenge, revenge, revenge; there is noother word.” The Young Turk press was appalledby the prospect of a world in which independentstates of “Armenia and Kurdistan [will be] ourneighbors, and Muscovites our masters. We willbecome their slaves. Oh! Is it not shameful for us!How can the Ottomans who once ruled the worldbecome servants to their own shepherds, slaves,and servants.”17

The shock was particularly great for theYoung Turks, many of whom were Balkan-bornsons of the imperial ruling class. The families ofEnver and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were amongthe 400,000 Muslims who fled their homes. Tomodern eyes, the Balkan war looks like a tragic butfamiliar story of the end of empire. But, like otherimperialists, the Ottomans had persuaded them-selves of their right to rule the land their forbear-ers had conquered; their sense of grievance wasenormous.

Having seized power in a 1908 military coup,the Young Turks carried out the ethnic cleansingin the winter and spring of 1914 of Greek Chris-tians from coastal Anatolia, an action ostensiblyaimed at precluding the possibility that Greek vil-lagers might assist future invasions. But it was

Turkey is uniquein having beencreated in anact of genocide.

14 Soner Çaðaptay, “Reconfiguring the Turkish Nation in the1930s,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Summer 2002, pp.67-82.15 Uður Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nationand State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011), p. 19.16 Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide andthe Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Holt, 2006),p. 60.

17 Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, pp. 45-6.

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equally a campaign of calculated theft: Greek-owned farms and businesses—many of them sub-stantial—were seized and awarded to Muslims. Inmodern terms, it was a highly unusual event: agovernment-sponsored peacetime dispossessionand ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people whohad not acted against the state. Anatolian Greekswere neither armed nor agitating for unificationwith Greece when Ottoman militia began to ap-pear in the village squares at midnight, beatingloud drums to wake the population. Local officialsannounced that, within twenty-four hours, theywould be unable to guarantee the safety of Chris-tian families. Some 200,000 Greeks fled to nearbyGreek islands.18

The Young Turks felt threatened on almostevery side. Some fears were chimerical, as whenthey persuaded themselves that the large Chris-tian populations of Anatolia would form armednational liberation movements. But other threats,such as the fear of Russian expansionism, werereal. From a practical and religious point of view,these developments were unacceptable to theTurks.

GENOCIDE AS TURKEY’SFOUNDATIONAL EVENT

The modern Turkish republic created itselfin two monumental acts of mass dispossessionand murder: the Armenian genocide of 1915-16,and the ethnic cleansing of Greeks culminating in1923. Other nations were founded by migration,conquest, wars of national liberation, wars of self-defense, or acts of gradual consolidation, butTurkey is unique in having been created in an actof genocide.

The Ottomans had been content to allowthe Christian dhimmis to live as second-classsubjects. The Young Turks, however, feared thatChristians would claim the right to self-deter-mination and equality with Muslims by form-ing nation states in their ancient homelands.19

Although they applied the rhetoric of nationalself-determination to themselves and were deeplypersuaded of their right as Muslims to govern,the Young Turks regarded any suggestion thatChristian Ottomans possessed a right to nationalself-determination as an attack on Muslim rights.They feared that so long as the Armenian, Greek,and Syriac peoples con-tinued to live in Anatolia,they would have a claimto the right of self-deter-mination in their ancienthomelands. The YoungTurks eliminated thispossibility by annihilat-ing the Armenians, anni-hilating much of the farsmaller Syriac community,and using mass murder todrive the Greeks into thesea.

Undertaking a genocidal policy of system-atic ethnic cleansing on such a huge scale re-quired the participation of tens of thousands ofTurkic, Kurdish, and other soldiers, officials, andindividuals as willing executioners. It also requiredthe passive participation of a mostly illiterate popu-lation, few of whom had been exposed to the ide-als of Turkish nationalism. The sole factor thatunited the soldiers, officials, and civilians whoexecuted the ethnic cleansing was their statusas members of the Muslim millet-i hakime andthe superior rights that entailed.

For the Young Turks, however, the goal wasto annihilate the Armenians as a nation and extin-guish their language, faith, and culture. To thisend, men, women and children were driven fromtheir homes, forced to walk in the endless Syriandesert or killed in other ways. Groups of men wereled out of town and shot, some forced to dig theirown graves, others herded into buildings andburned to death, or roped together and thrownoff cliffs into the Euphrates. Notionally, an Arme-nian could save his life by accepting Islam. Inpractice, conversion was forbidden during the


18 Erik-Jan Zürcher, “Greek and Turkish Refugees andDeportees 1912-1924,” Turkology Update, Leiden Project Work-ing Papers Archive, Dept. of Turkish Studies, UniversiteitLeiden, Jan. 2003.

The Young Turks’goal was toannihilate theArmenians asa nation andextinguish theirlanguage, faith,and culture.

19 Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, p. 36.


genocide for fear that clusters of converts mightremain culturally Armenian.20

Yet the men who commanded the genocidewere technocrats who knew that Anatolia wasunderpopulated. They calculated that the Turk-ish nation would be strengthened if small num-bers of healthy, young Armenians were absorbedinto the Turkish people. And they allowed someArmenian families to survive in the expectationthat a scattered population could be assimilated.Thus, while most Armenian children were mur-dered, some were sold. Even as the genocide be-gan, the government planned to add strong,healthy Armenian children and young girls to theMuslim population; the Interior Ministry cabledinstructions regarding “the children who are likelyto become orphans.”21 Financial inducements

were offered for takingan Armenian child intoa household and be-coming the legal heir ofthe family propertywhen the child’s familywas murdered. Onecould even marry ayoung Armenian wifeand become the legalheir to the property ofher dead husband.Well-connected Turksangled to adopt thechildren of wealthyfamilies or to wed thewidows of Armenianlandowners. Some offi-cials managed to getseveral.22

No governmentacted to protect the Ar-menians, but whenWorld War I began inAugust 1914, Germanydemanded that the em-

pire refrain from the ethnic cleansing of Greeks inthe hope that Athens would become an ally ofthe Central Powers, or, at least remain neutral. Ac-cordingly, Minister of the Interior Talat Pasha or-dered that Muslims cease “attacks and oppres-sions” of Greeks. Repeated government ordersto this effect were not fully obeyed. Greeks con-tinued to be attacked, murdered, and to have theirland and businesses confiscated by powerfulMuslims, events the patriarchate recorded withthe description, “normal oppressions arose.” Cen-trally-directed ethnic cleansing of Greeks did,however, cease during the first two years of thewar, resuming in September 1916 when it becameapparent that Greece would enter the war on theAllies’ side. Greek villagers were quickly evicted,and Muslims moved in to their empty homes.23

Supersession as physical replacement of Chris-tians by Muslims was far more efficient under the

20 Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity:The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the OttomanEmpire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 291.21 Ibid., p. 317.

22 Ibid., p. 226.23 Ibid., p. 100.

The Young Turks were deeply persuaded of their right as Muslims togovern their Christian Ottoman subjects but were convinced that theChristian populations of Anatolia would form armed nationalliberation movements. In the winter and spring of 1914, they carriedout the ethnic cleansing of Greek Christians from coastal Anatolia,an act repeated in 1922 in Smyrna. Some 200,000 Greeks fled tonearby Greek islands. Ostensibly aimed at precluding a Greek “fifthcolumn,” it was equally a campaign of calculated theft with Greek-owned farms and businesses seized and awarded to Muslims.

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Young Turks than it had been under the sultans.The war ended with the Young Turk govern-

ment in disarray, most of its members in flight, theempire shrunken to the borders of modern Tur-key with the victorious Allies planning to estab-lish protectorates over much of what remained.Their goal was to internationalize Istanbul andthe straits and assign the densely Greek districtof Smryna (Izmir) to Greece.

The story of the formation of an army andthen a government by Mustafa Kemal Atatürkand his victory over the invading foreign forcesis well known. The ethnic cleansing of one and ahalf million Anatolian Greek Christians that fol-lowed is less widely remembered than the Arme-nian genocide because the Greeks had a statewilling to give them refuge and citizenship andbecause most of them were not murdered.

After most Anatolian Greeks had been eth-nically cleansed, Ankara and Athens negotiatedthe Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, which stipu-lated that all remaining Greek Christians would berequired to leave Turkey and all Muslims wouldleave Greece. The treaty was intended by the Al-lies to provide some compensation for Greek refu-gees by enabling at least some of them to moveinto the homes and farms that would be vacatedby the far smaller population of Muslims requiredto leave Greece. Exemptions were made for theGreek residents of Istanbul and, to maintain par-ity, the Muslim residents of eastern Thrace. Twosmall islands, Imbros and Tenedos, were also ex-empted because of their strategic position at themouth of the Dardanelles. Turkey undertook toguarantee autonomy to the almost entirely Greekpopulation of the islands.

The Turkish military government that tookpower in 1960 reneged on that agreement replac-ing the Greek population of the islands with Mus-lim settlers. Greek-speaking schools were closedin 1964, and the following year, the first mosquewith the highly charged name Fatih Camisi (theConqueror’s Mosque) was built on land confis-cated from the Greek Orthodox church. The Greekpopulation had supported itself by farming andfishing, but Turkey banned fishing on the pretextof creating an underwater marine reserve. Almostall arable land was expropriated for a large militarybase and to build an “open prison”; the inmates

would live on and work the confiscated farms.With no schools, no land, and even fishingbanned, the Greeks, preyed on by Turkish con-victs, left.24 Turkey replaced a Christian popula-tion with Muslims by a series of administrativemaneuvers.

SUPERSESSIONISM INTHE TURKISH REPUBLIC

Men who drew on eugenic race theory toconstruct and privilege a Turkish master racedominated Turkish politics from the 1920sthrough the 1940s. Racism was a comfortabletheory for men and women who had grown upthinking of Muslims as the millet-i hakime. AsAtatürk explained in 1923, “Armenians have norights at all in this prosperous country. The landis yours; the land belongs to the Turks. In his-tory this land was Turkish, therefore, it is Turk-ish and will remain Turkish forever. The land hasfinally been returned toits rightful owners. TheArmenians and the oth-ers have no rights here atall. These blessed regionsare the native lands of thetrue Turks.”25 During aKurdish uprising in 1930,Mahmut Esat, a close as-sociate of Atatürk, echoedthis: “All friends, enemies,and the mountains shallknow that the Turk is master of this country. Allthose who are not pure Turks have only one rightin the Turkish homeland: the right to be servants,the right to be slaves.”26


24 Andreas Gross, “Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos):preserving the bicultural character of the two Turkish islands asa model for co-operation between Turkey and Greece in theinterest of the people concerned,” Committee on Legal Affairsand Human Rights, Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assem-bly, Strasbourg Cedex, June 6, 2008.25 Marc David Baer, The Donme; Jewish Converts, MuslimRevolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Palo Alto: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 2010), p. 188.26 Ibid., pp. 249-50.

“Armenianshave no rightsat all in thisprosperouscountry. Theland is yours.”—Atatürk, 1923


The plight of the Turkish Donme illustratesthe racism that gripped Turkish ideologues at thetime. The Donme originated as Jewish followersof a false messiah named Shabbatai Tzevi whoconverted to Islam in 1666. Like many groups ofOttoman converts to Islam, the Donme werelargely endogamous and retained many pre-con-version customs until the late nineteenth centurywhen they welcomed modern, secular culture moreeagerly than any people in the empire. By the1880s, the Donme, most of whom lived in Salonika,

ran some of the finestsecular schools in Otto-man lands, including onethat Atatürk attended.They were also amongthe intellectual leaders ofTurkish nationalism. Likeother Muslims, they wereexpelled from Salonicaunder the terms ofLausanne; most moved

to Istanbul where they assimilated into Turkishsociety.27

But in the 1920s, a frenzy of hatred was un-leashed against the Donme by Turkish leaders.They made use of the newly fashionable languageof race, accusing them of being of non-Turkishblood. As the 1934 Turkish settlement law no. 2510put it, “Unity in language, culture, and blood.”28

Under the wealth tax of 1942, a tax aimed at driv-ing non-Muslims out of Turkey by imposing taxesexceeding the value of their property, theDonme—Muslims of three centuries deeply com-mitted to the republic—were classified as Jews.

Muslim supersessionism—in the form of radi-cal nationalism where the Turkish “race” and Is-lamic hegemony were effectively identical—wastransferred to the republic with a new goal of re-placing all non-Turkish languages, cultures, andidentities. While the republic directed its effortstoward remaking the Kurds, Alevis, and other non-Turkish Muslims into Turks, the erasing of non-

Muslim history and populations continued. Indescribing Turkey in 2012 as “one nation, onestate, one flag, and one religion,” Prime MinisterRecep Tayyip Erdoðan expressed an enduringTurkish aspiration.29

The settlement law of 1934 was designed to“create a country speaking with one language,thinking in the same way, and sharing the samesentiment,” said Þükrü Kaya, minister of the Inte-rior.30 It privileged persons of “Turkish culture,”defined as Turkish-speaking Muslims and mostOttoman Muslims of every tongue who had fledinto the empire, but not Kurds or non-Muslims.Kurds were also targeted for forced resettlementamong Turkic speakers with the replacement ofKurdish culture as the goal, as were Alevis, Roma,Circassians, and other Muslim minority groupsin Turkey.

The 1934 settlement law also defined a seriesof “type one” zones along borders, railroad lines,and other areas regarded as security concerns.Residence in these zones was restricted to per-sons of “Turkish culture.” Settlers from this privi-leged category were given land and property takenfrom Kurds and non-Muslims. It was under thislaw that the 1934 ethnic cleansing of the Jews ofeastern Thrace was carried out.

A far larger event was the Turkish takeoverof the old Ottoman sanjak of Alexandretta, part ofFrench Mandatory Syria. Ankara falsely claimedthat the province was a majority Turkish area.Perhaps 40 percent of the population of the eth-nically-mixed coastal province was Turkish. Nev-ertheless, the French and Turks colluded to pro-duce a census “proving” the Turkishness of theprovince. Paris then allowed Ankara to rig a plebi-scite that awarded the province to Turkey underthe rubric of self-determination for a Turkish-ma-jority area.31 Some 80 percent of the province’sChristians and many of its Arabs fled. Ankara thenimposed Turkish language and culture on thepolyglot Muslim population that remained.

27 Ibid.28 Erol Ülker, “Assimilation, Security and Geographical Na-tionalization in Interwar Turkey: The Settlement Law of 1934,”European Journal of Turkish Studies, 7 (2008).

The Republic ofTurkey has actedrepeatedly anddeliberately toexpel Christiansand Jews.

29 Hürriyet (Ankara), May 9, 2012.30 Ülker, “The Settlement Law of 1934.”31 Sarah D. Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics andEuropean Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of WorldWar II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 176-231.

/ 13

On September 6-7, 1955,the government of Turkeymoved to cleanse Istanbul ofits remaining Christians andJews, including the 100,000Greeks whose right to live inthe city was guaranteed bythe Treaty of Lausanne. Littlewas looted but ancient com-munities were destroyed. Al-though often associated withthe Cyprus dispute, historianDilek Güven argues persua-sively that the government-organized riot is best under-stood as part of a policy offorcible Turkification. Housesand businesses owned byArmenians, Greeks, and Jewswere identified, wire cutters,sledge hammers, welding ma-chines, and other tools dis-tributed, and on the assigneddate, 100,000 rioters brokeinto non-Muslim homes and businesses destroy-ing industrial equipment, personal property, andcommercial goods while Christian and Jewish fami-lies huddled in terror. Many women were raped,and a dozen Christians were killed. The non-Mus-lim past was erased by rioters who smashed icons,burned churches, and broke into the Greek cem-eteries of Þiþli and Baløklø, opening the tombs anddestroying the bones.32

This peacetime, government-sponsored eth-nic cleansing in a modern, ostensibly democratic,country was a remarkable event, and not onlybecause the Turkish government acted in viola-tion of treaty obligations. Greece has not expelledthe Muslim minority it retained under the Treatyof Lausanne and neighboring Bulgaria retains alarge Muslim minority. Most nation states havelarge confessional minorities. But the Republic ofTurkey has acted repeatedly and deliberately toexpel Christians and Jews.


THE CYPRUS CASE

The same approach was applied to Cyprus.The Ottomans conquered the island in 1570 andbegan moving Muslim settlers onto it in their usualmanner, an effort that ended with the Battle ofLepanto a year later. In the wake of that defeat,the most the empire could manage was to appointa Greek archbishop to govern the island’s over-whelmingly Greek population. Cyprus would bepoor, backward, and overwhelmingly Greek untilceded to Britain in 1878. The island prosperedunder British control, attracting significant Turk-ish immigration for the first time. It was never gov-erned by the republic, which renounced all claimsin the Treaty of Lausanne.

After World War II, the island’s Greeks de-manded that the British leave and enable unifica-tion with Greece. Britain, enmeshed in the ColdWar, opted instead to please Turkey by creatingan independent Cypriot State in 1960 with a com-plex binational constitution in which roughly100,000 ethnic Turks shared power with about500,000 Greeks. Britain, Turkey, and Greece re-

On September 6-7, 1955, the government of Turkey moved to ridIstanbul of its remaining Christians and Jews, including the100,000 Greeks whose right to live in the city was guaranteedby the Treaty of Lausanne. The government-organized riots werepart of a policy of forcible Turkification. On the assigned date,rioters broke into non-Muslim homes, businesses, and churches.Many women were raped, and some Christians were killed.

32 Dilek Güven, “Riots against the Non-Muslims of Turkey:6/7 September 1955 in the context of demographic engineer-ing,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, 12 (2011).


tained the right to intervene to protect “the integ-rity, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and indepen-dence” of the new state. Intercommunal violenceescalated. On July 20, 1974, Turkey invaded.

Whether Turkey had a treaty right to landtroops to protect the binational state from Greek

militants is a moot ques-tion, but the morphing ofthe invasion into perma-nent occupation was anact of pure imperialism.Turkey conquered morethan a third of the island,forcing Greeks to flee. Itquickly moved tens ofthousands of Turkishsettlers into the farms andhomes of Greek Christianfamilies. The majority of

the Turkish population of Northern Cyprus is nowcomprised of post-1974 settlers and their families.

THE TURKISH NAME GAME

Atatürk and his followers worked to createwhat was outwardly a secular, Turkish republic.Islamic law was disestablished, the Arabic alpha-bet abandoned, Sufi religious orders outlawed,Islam phased out of the public schools, and theMuslim head scarf banished from governmentschools and offices. The secular Turkish repub-lic also took steps with respect to the landscape,most notably the transformation of Hagia Sophiain Istanbul from a mosque into a museum. But theconjoined Turkification and Islamization were per-vasive throughout the twentieth century. Turkeyerases history by inventing new names and im-posing them on mountains, towns, and families.Although Constantinople, Smyrna, and someother places had Ottoman names, the old Greeknames continued in common use even by Otto-man officials. The first campaign to erase historyfrom the map began in 1915.

The Armenian genocide was underway whenEnver Pasha announced that it was a “suitablemoment” to replace the Armenian, Greek, andBulgarian names of “provinces, districts, towns,villages, mountains and rivers” with new, Turk-

ish names. However, changing the names of townson maps in the midst of a large-scale genocideconfused the movement of troops and popula-tions, so the idea was dropped.33

A new effort to purify the map began in 1922,carried forward by fits and starts over the courseof decades in conjunction with the efforts to purgethe newly-invented Turkish language of Persian,Arabic, and Greek words. Learned societies andgovernment departments carried out the work of“Turkifying” the map. Place names of Kurdish,Syriac, Arabic, Georgian, Laz, Armenian, and Greekorigin were replaced by Turkish names even asthese cultures had been or were slated to be su-perseded by Turkish culture. After the 1974 con-quest, the new Turkish government of NorthernCyprus rapidly renamed all of the Greek placenames as part of its “eradication of Greekness.”34

The surname law of 1934 extended this Turk-ish-Islamic imperial approach to families them-selves by requiring that, within two years, everycitizen of Turkey had to have a Turkish surname.It did not operate with perfect efficiency, espe-cially in the Kurdish region, but it did mean thatindividuals whose surnames indicated the family’sChristian, Jewish, or non-Turkic origin acquiredTurkish surnames. For many, this was a boon, anopportunity to enter the Turkish mainstream, al-though in everyday life, Turks often detectTurkified names of non-Muslim citizens and re-gard the members of minority groups they iden-tify in this way as foreigners.35

PLOTLINES OF A NATION

There are several plotlines that the authorsof a national history can follow. They can claim asthe English do to have emerged from a blend ofpeoples and cultures in a series of formative

Ankara movedtens of thousandsof Turkishsettlers into thefarms and homesof Greek CypriotChristianfamilies.

33 Kerem Öktem, “The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engi-neering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey,”European Journal of Turkish Studies, 7 (2008).34 Sarah Ladbury and Russell King, “Settlement Renaming inTurkish Cyprus,” Geography, Oct. 1988.35 Marcy Brink-Danan, “Names That Show Time: TurkishJews as ‘Strangers’ and the Semiotics of Reclassification,”American Anthropologist, Sept. 2010, pp. 384–36.

/ 15Appelbaum: Turkish Islamic Supersessionism

events. They can claim as the ancient Atheniansdid that they have always been where they arenow, a people born of the land. Or they can claim,as the Hungarian, Slavic, Hindu, and Americannations do, to have been founded by men whocame from elsewhere. Virgil made this claim forthe Romans, writing in the Aeneid about Rome’snoble founding father Aeneas who came fromTroy in Anatolia. The narrative of conquerors fromafar has a long and powerful history. The reasonswhy Turks reject it are interesting since, after all,it has the advantage of being true. Instead of us-ing this potent narrative, Turkishness was cre-ated as a nominally secular, racially-oriented ver-sion of Islamic replacement theology. In the faceof overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Turk-ish nationalists have spent a long century stak-ing a secularist claim that Turks are the originalpeople of Anatolia and that Muslim and Turkishidentity are inseparable.

But Turkey has never been the secular, demo-cratic nation-state that the Young Turks andKemalists claimed to be building. In part, this isbecause both Young Turks and Kemalists equatedtrue Turkishness with being Muslim. Despite hav-ing written the school curriculums and often con-trolled the press for four generations, Turkish na-tionalists have never persuaded the people of Tur-key to become secular Turkish nationalists. Forty-nine percent of Turkish citizens responded to a2011 poll by claiming that they regarded Islam astheir primary identity; only 21 percent thoughtthat their Turkish nationality was primary.36

Another failure of Turkish nationalism stemsfrom the wholesale transference of the old Islamicparadigm of supersessionism to Turkish national-ism: Turks expected all non-Turkish Muslimsto wish to become Turks.Since its foundation in1923, Turkey has repeat-edly enacted in policy, mili-tary conquest, and law thesupersessionist convic-tion that as Muslims andTurks, the citizens of therepublic were endowedwith special rights to ex-pand their territory by anymeans available, forciblyassimilate conqueredpeoples, eliminate non-Muslim populations, anderase pre-Muslim history.

It is important to understand that there wasa path not taken. Turks could have formed a na-tion-state alongside Armenian, Greek, Kurdish,and Syriac nation-states. That would have beenan act of banal nationalism. Instead, the YoungTurks and Atatürk, unable to escape the grip ofIslamic theology, failed to imagine that otherpeoples might have rights equal to those of Turks.And so it continues.

36 “Muslim-Western Tensions Persist,” Pew Global AttitudesProject, Washington, D.C., July 21, 2011.

Turkey hasnever beenthe secular,democraticnation-state thatthe Young Turksand Kemalistsclaimed to bebuilding.

Saudi Women, One Step Forward, Two BehindSarah Attar became the first Saudi Arabian woman to compete on an Olympic track, coming home last in the800m heats but cheered right to the line by 80,000 fans. She had just one female team-mate, in judo, as womenwere allowed to represent the Gulf kingdom for the first time.

The 19-year-old was born and raised in California and trains at Pepperdine University in Malibu whereshe is studying art. She has dual-nationality because of her Saudi father, Amer.

Many conservative Saudis had criticised women being included. The two women were forced to walkbehind the men at the opening ceremony and were instructed to wear long clothing and hijabs while compet-ing—symbolic of the ultra-conservative country, where women are actively discouraged from participating insport.

SBS News (Artarmon, Aus.), Aug. 9, 2012

turkey, past and future islamic supremacy alive and well in ankara

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