INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 291
This new generation of activists called themselves the Young Turks.
They used the name in part because they actually were young, in their
twenties, mostly, but also in part as a way of thumbing their noses at the
old guard, for among traditional Muslims, older was always regarded as
better-respectful titles such as shiekh and pir literally meant "old man."
What the fuddy-duddies derided as a shortcoming, the Young Turks
flaunted with pride: they were young!
Although they had many incipient disagreements, the Young Turks
held together long enough to overwhelm the last Ottoman sultan, a weak
and silly man named Abdul Hamid II. In 1908, they forced him to rein-
state the constitution, reducing himself to a figurehead.
No sooner had they wrestled the sultan to the mat, however, then the
Young Turks realized they were not one group but several. One faction, for
example, favored decentralizing the empire, securing rights for minorities,
and giving the people a bigger voice in the government. They were quickly
squeezed out of the government altogether. Another faction embraced
Turkish nationalism. Founded around 1902 by six medical students, it co-
alesced into a tightly organized, militaristic party called the Committee for
Union and Progress.
The CUP found ever-increasing support for its views. Many anti-
imperial Turks, many younger Turks, many educated civil servants, univer-
sity students, intelligentsia and children of the intelligentsia, many literati
who had read the nationalist arguments of the European philosophers and
knew all about the successful strivings of German and Italian national-
ists, began to see nationalism as their road to salvation from imperialism.
Get rid of the cumbersome, old-fashioned, multicultural, Ottoman idea
of empire and replace it with a lean, clean, mean, specifically Turkish state
machine: this was the idea. The Arab provinces would have to be cut
loose, of course, they no longer fit, but these new Turkish nationalists
dreamed of linking up Anatolia with those central Asian territories that
formed the ancestral homeland of the Turkish people. They dreamed of a
Turkish nation-state that would stretch from the Bosporus to places like
Kazakhstan.
Turkish nationalist intellectuals began to argue that Christian minori-
ties, especially the Armenians, were a privileged aristocracy in Turkey, in-
herant internal enemies of the state, in league with the Russians, in league