Between Empire and Nation-State
because it was an atheist, Masonic enterprise, the CUP refused to accept
honorable members with good morals, but only brought in “men of dis-
gusting morals.”^126
Dönme headed the list of men with repugnant morals. When he be-
came the head of the Committee of Muslim Unity at the beginning of
1909 , Vahdetî began to claim that the Salonikan Dönme were behind
the spread of Freemasonry and thus of atheism in the empire and that
this was a Jewish plot. In order to connect the dots in this argument,
Vahdetî had to prove that the Dönme were secret Jews. He quickly found
the evidence he sought. Vahdetî notes how in an article in a recent issue
of the Salonikan newspaper Zaman, the term gavur (infidel) was mis-
spelled as yavur. The author implies that the misspelling was neither a
random mistake nor a slip of the typesetter, but was based on the fact that
Jews mispronounced words that way. Since Zaman was a Dönme paper,
the reader understands the connection made between Dönme and Jews.
Vahdetî asks whether the author of the article with the telling misspelled
word accepted or rejected hypocrisy and dissimulation and pretended to
embrace Islam.^127 Later, he again discussed this Dönme gaffe using plays
on the names of the Dönme newspapers. “This age, this epoch, how dis-
agreeable! [Bu asır, bu zaman, ne yamandır!],” he writes. “Whatever day
of this age [asır] or epoch [zaman] we look at is always full of carnal
passions, sedition, and rebellion. This disgusting age [asır], this epoch
[zaman] that we hate.” He then goes on to more explicitly articulate his
racist view of the Dönme, writing: “In our previous article, we criticized
the author of the piece implying another cause for his beginning the word
‘gavur’ with a ‘ya’ instead of a ‘kâf.’ We later came to the conclusion that
the reason the author of the piece, our brother Celal Dervish, spelled it
that way is because that is precisely his predominant natural tendency in
pronouncing the word.”^128 Vahdetî had caught the slip, however, which
revealed the true and unchanging Jewish essence of the Dönme.
Other writers in Volkan and their readers also attacked the Dönme. In
a letter, Sheikh Abdurrahim, a member of the Council of the Commit-
tee of Muslim Unity, declared that “consenting to infidelity is infidelity.”
In his opinion, the editors of Asır and Zaman had made their infidelity
manifest to all believers. A newspaper ridiculing Muslims and placing a
sacred verse from the Qur’an on the same page was not acceptable to
Muslims. Sheikh Abdurrahim insisted that if the editors had a conscience,
they should remove the Qur’anic verse in the name of the religion. Other-