Between Empire and Nation-State
for writing or supporting writers who opposed the rule of Sultan Abdül-
hamid II. Just before the Constitutional Revolution, he was imprisoned
far from Istanbul in remote Diyarbakir. After the revolution, he returned
to Istanbul and in December 1908 , he began to publish Volkan (Volcano),
which he agreed to make the organ of the Committee of Muslim Unity.
Soon afterward, referring to Dönme, Vahdetî wrote: “There are many
Jews who came to Istanbul who, of course, are not really Muslim. Soon
afterward, some Muslims joined the Masonic lodges, also displaying their
Freemason nicknames, and no longer could be considered pious, and fell
into disgrace in the Muslim community.”^113 He thus links the arrival of
the Salonikan Dönme with the spread of Freemasonry and immorality
among Muslims.
Vahdetî became most vocal of Muslims articulating opposition to po-
litically active Dönme. He opposed the revolution of 1908 and helped
incite the countercoup the following year. Dervish Vahdetî and others op-
posed the “atheism” (secularism) of the CUP, its alleged attacks on Islam,
the fact that many of its members were influential Freemasons, and the
Jews and Dönme in its ranks.
Bernard Lewis blames the widespread circulation of conspiracy theories
about the CUP being part of an alleged Jewish Masonic plot, not on Ot-
toman Muslims like Dervish Vahdetî, but on British writers and its use
as Allied propaganda during World War I.^114 It is indeed striking how
British officials, especially ambassadors, in their official correspondence
between 1909 and 1916 explicitly referred to the CUP as a cabal of Jews
and Freemasons, calling it the “Jew Committee of Union and Progress,”
and to Mehmet Cavid as a “crypto-Jew” and “apex of Freemasonry” in
the empire, “one of the only members of the cabinet who really counts,”
who was working to have total Jewish influence over the Ottoman Em-
pire.^115 Nevertheless, such arguments by Lewis and later Stanford Shaw
reflect these historians’ aim of deflecting any charges of Turkish antisemi-
tism onto Christians, foreign or Ottoman, and studied effort to avoid any
mention of such sentiment by Ottoman Muslims or Turks.^116
Austrian and German antisemitism, French racial thinking, and Russian
antisemitism, especially political antisemitism, all influenced Ottoman
Muslim and later Turkish writers and thinkers. Many of these ideas were
transmitted to Ottoman cities such as Salonika and Istanbul by Ottoman
Muslim intellectuals who had spent considerable time in Paris, Berlin, or
who originated in the Russian Empire, such as Yusuf Akçura. In literature