198 • 12 THE RISE OF NATIONALISMTurkish Nationalism
Amid these crises, the CUP leaders became more and more Turkish in
their political orientation. Their early hope that the Great Powers and the
empire's minorities would back their Ottomanist reforms had been
dashed. The powers grabbed land and withheld aid. The minorities grum¬
bled, plotted, or rebelled. What could the Young Turks do? Some stuck to
their Ottomanist guns. Others argued for pan-Islam, which would have
held the loyalty of most Arabs and also won needed support from Egypt,
India, and other Muslim lands. But the new wave was pan-Turanism. This
was the attempt to bring together all speakers of Turkic languages under
Ottoman leadership, just as pan-Slavism meant uniting all speakers of
Slavic languages behind Russia. Indeed, as most speakers of Turkic lan¬
guages were then under czarist rule or military occupation, pan-Turanism
seemed a good way to pay back the Russians for the trouble they had
caused the Ottoman Empire. Some of the leading pan-Turanian advocates
were refugees from Russian Turkistan or Azerbaijan, but it was hard for
the Ottoman Turks to forget their traditional ties to Islam or their own
empire. Few believed in a distinct Turanian culture. The CUP's efforts to
impose Turkish in the schools and offices of their Arabic-speaking
provinces stirred up Arab nationalism, further weakening the empire. The
committee could not influence Central Asian Turks. The Turks' ethnic and
linguistic nationalism caused more problems than it solved, until they
limited their national idea to fellow Turks within the Ottoman Empire.
The idea was not unknown. A Turkish sociologist named Ziya Gokalp was
writing newspaper articles to promote what he called Turkism, but this
idea would become popular only after World War I. By then it was too late
to save the Ottoman Empire.
NATIONALISM IN PERSIAPersia did not westernize as early as Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, but it
had a compensating advantage when it came to developing Persian nation¬
alism. Let us look at what historians and political scientists usually cite as
nationalism's components: (1) previously existing state, (2) religion, (3) lan¬
guage, (4) race, (5) lifestyle, (6) shared economic interests, (7) common en¬
emies, and (8) shared historical consciousness. If you test Egyptian or
Turkish nationalism against these criteria, you will find that they fall short
on several counts. Not so Persian nationalism. The Qajar dynasty may have
governed ineptly, but it was heir to a Persian political tradition traceable to
the ancient Achaemenids, slightly interrupted by Greek, Arab, Turkish, and