288 DESTINY DISRUPTED
factories, the ulama railed against Ottoman officials using typewriters-
Prophet Mohammed never used one, they argued.
For a moment, the modernists gained the upper hand. In 1876, they
forced the sultan to adopt a constitution, a momentous victory widely cel-
ebrated as the "French Revolution of the East." For just a few years there,
the crumbling empire was a constitutional monarchy like Great Britain (in
form). In that brief period, modernizing activists of every ethnic and reli-
gious stripe interacted companionably in a heady atmosphere of progres-
sive enthusiasm: Turkish Muslims, Arab Muslims, Jews, Orthodox
Christians, Armenians, all rubbed shoulders as members of a single broad
movement to build a new world.
But the old guard retrenched, outmaneuvered the modernists, and re-
built the sultan's power, until he was strong enough to abolish the consti-
tution and rule as an absolute monarch again. The pendulum swung back,
in part, because the reforms were not working. Turkish Muslims of Asia
Minor saw their standard of living sinking, their autonomy shrinking.
They felt ever more powerless against the enormous forces of Europe
pressing from outside.
But they did have what they regarded as one fragment of that outside
world within their borders and completely in their power. That fragment
was the Armenian community. In reality, of course, the Armenians were no
more European than the Turks. They lived right where they had been liv-
ing since time immemorial. They had their own non-European language,
traditions, and history. They didn't come from anywhere else and were, in
fact, more indigenous than the Turks.
They were, however, a Christian minority surrounded by a Muslim ma-
jority, and what's more, in that period of ever more humiliating capitula-
tions, when business interests from western Europe acquired the power to
march into the Ottoman Empire and establish profitable business opera-
tions at the expense of the locals, the Armenians found themselves in a
paradoxical position. For Ottoman citizens, the only way to prosper at this
point was to work for, do business with, or best of all form partnerships
with European businesses. But when Europeans sought business partners
in the empire, they gravitated quite naturally towards those with whom
they felt kinship, and if they had a choice, they chose Armenian Christians
over Muslim Turks, so the favorable terms extracted by foreigners seemed