[A-List] Turkey: "Soldier of God" opens fire in courtroom

[Henry C.K. Liu]

When I was in Turkey, I suggested to my Turkish freinds that what is 
needed in the Middle East is a New Ottomanism.

See: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EJ11Aa01.html

The Crimean War was unique in Ottoman history in that the conflict was 
not motivated, managed or even influenced by Ottoman policy or 
interests. The war was a European conflict fought on Ottoman territory, 
with Britain and France allying with the Ottomans in order to protect 
their own lucrative economic interests in the region from Russian 
infringement. The war ended badly for the Russians, with unfavorable 
terms in the Paris Peace of 1856, but the Ottomans as victors fared even 
worse. From that point onward, the Ottoman Dominion fell under direct 
European domination and earned the derisive label as "the sick man of 
Europe". The Crimean War marked the decline in Ottoman morale and 
self-respect.

Europeans, for their part, no longer saw the Ottoman state as an equal 
force as they had three centuries earlier, but as a pliant victim that 
could be manipulated for larger European purposes. This Eurocentric 
geopolitics permeated beyond Ottoman territories, throughout the whole 
world, especially in the final decades of dynastic China.

The imperialist push from Europe, revived after the defeat of Napoleon 
Bonaparte, took on new economic and racist dimensions. Colonization took 
on the added objective of developing new markets for manufactured 
products of European industrialization, and a self-righteous mission of 
the White Man's Burden. It differed from the current post-Cold-War 
neo-imperialism of finance capitalism, in which manufacturing is 
outsourced to low-wage emerging economies through the globalization of 
finance controlled from New York, but with the equally self-righteous 
mission of spreading Western democracy to the non-Western world.

The concept of Great Powers in geopolitics was formalized during the 
Congress of Vienna of 1814, which produced a European balance of power 
among the four European Great Powers - Britain, Russia, Austria and 
Prussia. France, represented by the great diplomat Talleyrand, exploited 
the rift between the victors over the Poland-Saxon question to re-enter 
the diplomatic game as a power in its own right. With Napoleon defeated 
and the abolition of the Continental System - the precursor of the 
European Union, with industrialization financed through capitalism at 
home not for the benefit of the people but for the further enhancement 
of the propertied class - with no effective rival left for overseas 
domination, and a virtual monopoly of naval power, Britain embarked on 
its century of hegemonic superpower predominance, which lasted from 1814 
to 1914 and finally deferred to the United States after World War II.

For Britain, the Crimean War was part of the Eastern Question of how to 
solve the problems posed by the continuing territorial erosion of the 
Ottoman Dominion, which had been going on since the 1780s and the time 
of the ministry of Pitt the Younger (1759-1806). To maintain the 
territorial integrity of the Ottoman Dominion for the purpose of more 
effectively exploiting its vast resources had become one of the 
principles of Britain's foreign policy. By the Convention of Balta Liman 
(1838), Britain had won widespread concessions from the Sublime Porte 
(French for Sublime Gate), as the Europeans called the Ottoman 
government, that included special rates on most of the raw materials 
sold to Britain throughout the Ottoman Dominion, and a host of other 
benefits, grants, acknowledgements and extraterritoriality, known as 
capitulations, that gave Britain a very privileged position in the 
dominion. Unlike the capitulations granted to France as an Ottoman ally 
against the Holy Roman Empire three centuries earlier, the capitulations 
granted to Britain were in the form of unequal treaties by a government 
under duress.

Consequently, Britain felt that it was essential to keep control over 
the Mediterranean sea routes and to preserve the Ottoman Dominion as a 
barrier against further Russian expansion. A similar anti-Russian 
calculation was central to British opposition to imperialist partition 
of China. Britain promoted free trade, which favored British national 
interests, as a universal truth that would lead to world peace and 
prosperity. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had set the course of 
Britain as a free-trade nation.

By encouraging other nations to turn to free trade, Britain was 
attempting to increase its own wealth and dominance because its economy 
was more advance in the exploitation of trade and, as Friedrich List has 
pointed out, that it was the nature of trade that once other nations 
fell behind in trade, they could never catch up with the hegemonic 
leader. The British boasted that they had the "secret of civilization" 
and wanted to export their political and economic system to the rest of 
the world through a network of local elites acting as compradors for 
British interest in its colonies and spheres of interest. It is a 
strategy that the United States inherited after World War II, 
particularly after the Cold War, in the name of promoting, through 
trade, allegedly superior American values, vaguely identified as 
democracy and free-market entrepreneurship.

During this period of European balance of power, the Ottoman sultans 
hoped to turn their weakness into strength by exploiting inter-European 
rivalry, a policy that had been successfully practiced by Suleyman three 
centuries earlier. But with the loss of political and economic 
independence on the part of the Ottomans under the New Imperialism, such 
a policy only reduced the Ottoman Dominion deeper into semi-colonial 
status, further dependent on Franco-British pleasure. The dominion had 
become much weaker after the loss of territory to Russia, from the 
separatist creation of new nations dependent on foreign powers within 
the dominion, and from British and French economic domination. Sultan 
Abd al-Majid (reigned 1839-61), son and successor of Mahmud II, relied 
heavily on foreign aid to help him hold the remainder of his dominion 
together rather than embarking on a struggle of resistance against 
foreign domination.

In 1799, Muhammad Ali, an Ottoman military officer from the Albanian 
region, commanded an army in an unsuccessful attempt to drive Napoleon 
from Egypt. As pasha of Egypt after 1805, he was virtually autonomous of 
his titular overlord, the Ottoman sultan. He Westernized his armed 
forces and administration, created Westernized schools for children of 
the elite, and began many public works, particularly irrigation projects 
with foreign loans, to be paid back with resultant agricultural output. 
The cost of these Westernization reforms weighed heavily on the peasants 
but brought them few benefits. In 1811, he exterminated the leaders of 
the Mamluks, who had ruled Egypt almost uninterruptedly since 1250. The 
Mamluks were a warrior caste dominant in Egypt and influential in the 
Middle East for more than 700 years. Islamic rulers created this warrior 
caste by collecting non-Muslim slave boys and training them as cavalry 
soldiers especially loyal to their owner and each other. They converted 
to Islam in the course of their training. With his son, Ibrahim Pasha, 
Muhammad Ali conducted successful campaigns in Arabia against the 
Wahhabis. In 1820, he sent his armies to conquer Sudan. He scored great 
successes fighting for the Ottoman sultan in Greece until the British, 
French, and Russians combined to defeat his fleet at Navarino in 1827.

The sultan, Mahmud II, to secure the intervention the Muhammad Ali in 
the Greek revolt, had promised to grant him the governorship of Syria. 
When the sultan refused to hand over the province, Muhammad Ali invaded 
Syria. In 1839, he rebelled against his Ottoman overlord in Asia Minor, 
but was forced to desist when he lost the support of France and was 
threatened by united European opposition, checked by the intervention 
(1840-41) of Britain, Russia, and Austria. In a compromise arrangement, 
the Ottoman sultan made the governorship of Egypt hereditary in Muhammad 
Ali's line. Muhammad Ali retired from office in 1848 because of insanity.

The new Ottoman sultan, Abd al-Majid, was advised by the British to 
introduce Western reforms. Two decrees (1839, 1856) led to many 
superficial changes but did not have fundamental or permanent effect. 
Confident in receiving British and French support, Abd al-Majid in 1853 
resisted the Russian claim to act as protector of the Greek Orthodox 
Christians in the Ottoman Dominion. He had allowed the dominion to 
weaken because history had shown that a legitimate cause could always 
get help from a superior source, a cardinal principle of Ottomanism. 
What he failed to understand was that the New Imperialism was 
fundamentally indifferent to the Ottoman doctrine of universal virtue 
and justice. Europe supported the sultan not because it considered it a 
just cause, but because European powers benefited from such a policy 
over a despised race.

Russia found the Ottoman Dominion vulnerable in resisting Russian access 
to the Istanbul Straits - the Bosporus as the West calls it, the Sea of 
Marmara and the Dardanelles - for easy passage into the Mediterranean. 
Britain, jealously guarding its mastery of the sea, considered it 
imperative that Russia must be kept out of the Mediterranean, and the 
sultan knew it. He continued to play off one European power against 
another. Russia had shown that it was always going to take any 
opportunity to probe into Turkish territory; Britain's policy was that 
the Russians needed firm handling to prevent them from invading Turkey. 
It was thought that the Russians were not prepared to go to war with 
Britain over Ottoman territory.

The failure of the 1848 Revolutions turned Europe backward in a retreat 
from modernity. The balance-of-power diplomacy since 1815 became 
inoperative as reactionary governments and despotic leaders took hold in 
Europe, exemplified by Napoleon III in France. Power politics derived 
from bourgeois dictatorship replaced issues of social justice, political 
legitimacy and international balance of power.

By 1850, Britain's sensitivity to the Eastern Question increased because 
India, which had been subjugated and maintained with a mere 75,000 
British troops, had become the most important part of the Empire - a key 
economic asset and the "jewel in the Crown" - as a result of imperialist 
free trade and overseas expansion. India was a source of raw materials 
and a populous market, and above all a living demonstration in support 
of the British superiority complex. Britain feared any threat to the 
overland rail route to India. A century of the British policy of 
maintaining the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Dominion on behalf 
of British interests in the Middle East and the Balkans was shaping up 
as a conflict to its policy on India.

Napoleon III, the bourgeois Emperor of the French, needed glory through 
expansionism to uphold the meaning of the "Second Empire", which was 
ideologically different from the universal monarchist aim of the First 
Empire. All through the 1840s, the pacifist government of British prime 
minister George Hamilton Gordon Aberdeen had given Czar Nicholar I the 
strong impression that Britain would not go to war over the Ottoman 
Dominion, which encouraged Russia to probe farther south.

In 1815, Britain had been seen in Europe as the principal agent in 
defeating France militarily, through the successful activities of the 
Royal Navy and then Arthur Wellesley Wellington's army in the peninsular 
campaign and later in Europe, economically through providing gold to its 
allies and supplies to the allied armies and diplomatically through the 
establishment and maintenance of four anti-Napoleon coalitions. Britain 
was anxious to enhance its European status after Waterloo and regarded 
itself as a major force on the international scene. Of all European 
nations, Britain's political system was the only one that had remained 
intact throughout the French Wars. Other crowned heads had been removed 
from their thrones; countries had had their systems of government 
overturned and replaced, sometimes several times in the period. In 
Britain, it was felt that only Britain was stable enough to pull Europe 
together again, because of its conservatism, not its modernity.

Europe was looking to Britain to slow the process of modernization. 
Britain could not afford to distance itself from Europe because of the 
proximity of potentially huge markets and the fact that continental 
instability, particularly the march toward modernity, would adversely 
impact its domestic affairs.

Britain had adopted the principle of balance of power after the defeat 
of Napoleon, with itself as first among equals, in an attempt to prevent 
the domination of Europe by any one other power, and to prevent the 
march of modernity from again destabilizing Europe. In the past and at 
various times, different nations had dominated Europe - Spain, France, 
and Austria-Hungary in particular - with consequences that ended up in 
war. The Treaty of Paris in 1815 and the settlement at the Congress of 
Vienna of 1814 ensured that there were no spectacular winners or losers 
from the French Wars. Britain wanted to maintain the status quo of 1815, 
not to herald a new modern age. Britain wanted to contain France through 
cooperation with the other powers. This was a priority in 1815, a policy 
that was shared by all other European nations.

Later, this policy became a British national prejudice that caused it to 
fail to note the rise of Prussia. Britain was almost paranoid about a 
possible replay of French expansionism in the name of modernity, whether 
it was diplomatic, territorial, economic or through hegemonic influence. 
Britain tried to keep France pinned down within its borders because 
France was seen as the most radical and dangerous nation in Europe that 
could challenge British hegemony. This policy toward France was 
backward-looking and was maintained for far too long. Even by 1850, the 
British Foreign Office was still virtually blind to the rise of Prussia, 
which steadily emerged as a greater threat to the peace and stability of 
Europe than France. Prussia under Otto von Bismarck was able to delude 
Britain diplomatically.

In 1875, the Slavic peoples living in the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina were encouraged by the Western European powers to rise 
up against Ottomanism. The decline of the Ottomans led two independent, 
neighboring Slavic states, Montenegro and Serbia, to aid the rebellion. 
Within a year, the rebellion spread to the Ottoman province of Bulgaria. 
The rebellion was part of a larger Pan-Slavic movement that had as its 
goal the unification of all Slavic peoples, most of whom were under the 
control of Austria, Germany, and the Ottoman Dominion, into a single 
political unity under the protection of Russia. Anxious also to conquer 
the Ottomans themselves and seize Istanbul, the Russians allied with the 
Slavic rebels Serbia and Montenegro and declared war against the Ottomans.

The war went against the Ottomans, and by 1878 they had to sue for 
peace. Under the peace treaty, the Ottomans had to free all the Balkan 
provinces, including Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria. Russia also took 
substantial amounts of Ottoman territory as "payment" for the war. The 
Ottomans fell out of the picture, but the Russian victory produced a 
European crisis over the expansion of Russia. By the early 20th century, 
the Ottoman Dominion in Europe had receded to a small coastal plain 
between Edirne and Istanbul. One measure of the losses: before 1850, 
about 50 percent of all Ottoman subjects lived in the Balkans, while in 
1906, the European provinces held only 20 percent of the total.

Foreign wars on the Balkan frontiers, sometimes against the Hapsburgs 
but especially against Russia, continued to shred Ottoman domains. 
Within the dominion, many provincial notables during the 18th century 
had enjoyed substantial degrees of autonomy while acknowledging the 
titular legitimacy of Ottomanism and the Ottoman state. Seldom, if ever, 
had rebels sought to break out of or destroy Ottomanism. There had been 
revolts, but generally these had worked within the Ottoman system, 
claiming as their goal the rectification of problems within the Ottoman 
realm, such as the reduction of taxes or restoration of provincial 
justice. But in the 19th century - in the Balkan, Anatolian, and the 
Arab provinces alike - movements emerged that actively sought to 
separate particular areas from Ottomanism and Ottoman rule to establish 
independent, sovereign states subordinate to no higher political 
authority, except European protection.

Further, in almost every instance, one or another Western European 
powers supported the anti-Ottomanism revolts of the 19th century, and 
Western assistance was crucial to the success of all separatist 
movements. Thus the 19th century was different in that many of the 
territorial losses resulted from revolts and rebellions on the part of 
Ottoman subjects against their suzerain or sovereign occurred with the 
direct instigation and support of European imperialism.

The 18th century had closed with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to 
strike at British interests in the Middle East, having successfully 
evaded Horatio Nelson's fleet to take Malta on the way to Egypt. 
Napoleon won a brilliant battle over the Mamluks in the Battle of the 
Pyramids in July 1798. But the invasion was cut short when the French 
fleet was destroyed by Nelson in Aboukir Bay. Napoleon returned to 
France in 1799. In the turmoil, Muhammad Ali eventually seized power in 
1805 and established himself as master of Egypt. During his reign (until 
his death in 1848), Muhammad Ali built up a formidable military that 
threatened the European balance of power and the Ottomans' hold on the 
sultanate itself. Egypt embarked on a separate course for the remainder 
of Ottoman history. It remained the sultan's nominal possession after 
the British occupation in 1882 but, in 1914, formally became part of the 
British empire with the Ottoman entry into World War I on the German and 
Austro-Hungarian side.

At the same moment that Muhammad Ali was seizing control of the 
southeastern corners of the Ottoman Dominion, the Serbs in the 
northwestern corner rebelled in 1804. Instead of appealing to the sultan 
to correct abuses at the hands of the local administration, Serb rebels 
turned to Russia for aid. A complex struggle involving the two powers 
and Serb separatists evolved. By 1817, hereditary rule by a Serbian 
prince had been established and from that date, in reality, Serbia was a 
state separate from the Ottoman Dominion, falling into the Russian 
sphere of influence. Legally it became so only in 1878, as a result of 
the Congress of Berlin. In a sense, this pattern from direct rule to 
vassalage to independence reversed that of the process of Ottomanism. 
Other losses derived from the more familiar pattern of war with Russia, 
ending with a formal agreement, as instanced by the 1812 Treaty of 
Bucharest that acknowledged the loss of Bessarabia.

The overall pattern in the Balkans was confusing in detail but clear in 
overall direction. Often a revolt would meet with success with the 
Russians driving very deep into the southern Balkans. But aroused 
Western concern, fearful of Ottoman disintegration or Russian success, 
would convene a gathering to undo the extreme results but allow some 
losses of Ottoman territory to ensue. The 1829 Treaty of Adrianople 
typified this pattern. In 1828, Russian armies, while winning major 
victories in eastern Anatolia, drove down through the western Black Sea 
areas, through Varna, captured the former Ottoman capital of Edirne on 
the present-day border of Turkey and Bulgaria and seemed poised to 
attack Istanbul itself. Nonetheless, despite the decisive victories, 
Russia yielded up nearly all of its conquests, settling for a few small 
pieces of land and actual but not formal Ottoman withdrawal from 
Moldavia and Walachia.

The "Eastern question" continued to be addressed in the manner over the 
course of the 19th century. On the one hand, many European leaders came 
to understand the grave risks total Ottoman collapse posed to the 
general peace held together by a delicate balance of power. Thus they 
agreed to seek to maintain Ottoman territorial integrity, reversing the 
potentially devastating results of war at the negotiating table and, in 
1856, admitting the Ottoman state into the "Concert of Nations". Thus, 
the European consensus that the old empire should be maintained, 
tottering but intact, helped preserve the Ottoman state. The same policy 
applied to the Open Door policy for China by Western imperialist powers. 
On the other hand, through their wars and support of the separatist 
goals of rebellious Ottoman subjects, European powers abetted the very 
process of fragmentation that they feared and were seeking to avoid. 
Nationalism was fanned as a weapon only against collapsing empires, not 
rising ones.

The 1821-30 Greek war of independence clearly illustrates the central 
role of international geopolitics in the revolts against the sultan. 
After failing to suppress the Greek rebels, Sultan Mahmut II in 1824 
invited Muhammad Ali Pasha to intervene with his powerful navy and army. 
When the Greek rebellion appeared to be over, in 1827, the combined 
British, French and Russian fleets annihilated the Egyptian navy at 
Navarino, and three years later the 1830 Treaty of London forced the 
Ottomans to acknowledge the formation of a new state, in the southern 
area of modern Greece.

This sequence of events in turn led to a near takeover of the Ottoman 
Dominion by Muhammad Ali Pasha. Believing that his help against the 
Greek rebels entitled him to the Syrian provinces, Muhammad Ali sent his 
son Ibrahim Pasha against his Ottoman overlord in 1832. Conquering Acre, 
Damascus, and Aleppo, the Egyptian army won another major victory at 
Konya in central Anatolia and seemed poised to capture Istanbul (as 
Russia had been just three years before). In an irony of geopolitics, 
the Russian nemesis landed its troops between Muhammad Ali's army and 
Istanbul and became the Ottomans' savior. The century-old foreign foe 
thwarted a major domestic rebel's intent of overthrowing Ottoman rule. 
Fearing that a strong new dynasty leading a powerful state would become 
its neighbor, the Russians backed the Ottomans and signed the 1833 
Treaty of Hunkiar Iskelesi to confirm their protection. The Ottomans 
fell from the status of a rival to the status of a Russian protectorate.

During the 1830s, Muhammad Ali controlled a section of southeast 
Anatolia and most of the Arab provinces and, in 1838, threatened to 
declare his own independence. The Ottomans attacked his forces in Syria, 
but were crushed and again rescued, this time by a coalition of Britain, 
Austria, Prussia and Russia (but not France). These clashes stripped 
Muhammad Ali of all his gains - Crete and Syria as well as the Holy 
Cities of Mecca and Medina - leaving him only hereditary control of 
Egypt as compensation.

The lesson seemed clear. The Western powers were unwilling to permit the 
emergence of a dynamic and powerful Egyptian state that threatened 
Ottoman stability and the international balance of power. Muhammad Ali 
did not become the master of the Middle East in significant measure 
because the European states would not allow it. Much of current US 
policy toward Iraq can be understood in a similar light.

The severance from the Ottoman state of its Egyptian province entered a 
final phase in 1869, when the Egyptian ruler, the Khedive Ismail, 
presided over the opening of the Suez Canal under British protection, 
with the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida". The canal brought 
British occupation of the province by 1882. Britain declared a 
protectorate over Egypt in 1914, nearly four centuries after the armies 
of Sultan Selim I had entered Cairo and incorporated the Mamluk empire 
into the Ottoman Dominion.

The Eastern Question revealed the diplomacy after the Ottoman-Russian 
war of 1877-78 that triggered major territorial losses for the Ottomans. 
In the first round of negotiations, Russia forced the Ottomans to sign 
the Treaty of San Stefano, creating a gigantic zone of Russian puppet 
states in the Balkans reaching to the Aegean Sea itself. Such a 
settlement would have vastly enlarged the Russian area of dominance and 
influence and destroyed the European balance of power.

Bismarck, the German chancellor who was the leading statesman of the age 
and in history, and who after 1871 had feared that another European war 
would jeopardize the new German Empire, proclaimed himself an "honest 
broker" seeking peace and no territorial advantage for Germany and 
convened the Powers in Berlin. There the assembled diplomats negotiated 
the Treaty of Berlin, which took away most of the Russian gains and 
parceled out Ottoman lands to other treaty signatories as door prizes. 
Serbia, Montenegro and Romania all became "independent" states under 
Austrian protection. Bosnia and Herzegovina were lost in reality to 
Hapsburg administration but remained nominally Ottoman, until their 
final break in 1908, when they were annexed by Austria. The Greater 
Bulgaria of the San Stefano Agreement was reduced, one-third becoming 
independent and the balance remaining under qualified and precarious 
Ottoman control. Romania and Russia settled territorial disputes between 
them, with the former obtaining the Dobruja mouth of the Danube and 
yielding southern Bessarabia to Russia in exchange. Other provisions 
included the cession to Russia of pieces of eastern Anatolia and to 
Britain the island of Cyprus, a strategic naval base to protect the Suez 
Canal and lifeline to India. France was appeased by being allowed to 
occupy Tunis.

The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 shows the hegemonic power of Europe over 
the whole world during the last part of the 19th century, able to impose 
its wishes on the world with little resistance from non-Europeans, 
drawing lines on maps and deciding the fate of peoples and nations with 
impunity for the benefit of Europeans. It would do so again on many more 
major occasions - for example, partitioning Africa in 1884, the 
near-partition of China and the partition of the Middle East and the 
Balkans after World War I.

With historic consequences, the peoples of both Western Europe and the 
non-Western partitioned lands falsely concluded that military 
strength/weakness implied cultural, moral and religious 
strength/weakness. The victims were brainwashed to believe that their 
failure to modernize their armed forces was the result of their cultural 
backwardness and as such had brought them a deserved fate of foreign 
domination. Western barbarism is misconstrued as modernization, and 
Westernization is seen to have been ordained as the only path to 
modernization for the non-Western world, rather than the cultural 
suicide that it actually was. The fateful history of oligarchic Sparta's 
conquest over Athens, the model of Greek democracy, during the 
Peloponnesian War, which set Western civilization on the wrong path, has 
been repeated globally age after age, all the way into modernity.

Sabri Oncu wrote:

>Henry:
>
>  
>
>>Secular politics is not synonymous with religious 
>>intolerance.
>>    
>>
>
>Unfortunately, however, it has been synonymous with religious intolerance in
>the Republic of Turkey from day one, if not even before that.
>
>Religious fundamentalists exit everywhere and in every religion, but the
>reactionary attitude of the Republic of Turkey to Islam in the beginnings
>was not just a reaction to the Islamic fundamentalists who were posing a
>threat to the establishment of a "Turkish Nation State" at the time. The
>"Turkish Nation" as we know it today, which did not exist before the
>republic, is a creation of the Turkist Ottoman Intellectuals, including the
>Kemalists, and the other two contenders of Turkism were Islamism and
>Ottomanism.  All three ideologies were about uniting the peoples of the
>Ottoman Empire against imperialism, although each envisioned a different
>type of unity. Eventually, the Turkists won, and their attempts to suppress
>the Islamists and Ottomanists were only natural.  The sad thing is that
>almost nothing has changed since then. The "secular" state apparatus still
>continues to see Islam as an enemy even today. 
>
>This is also connected with the misunderstanding of the "enlightenment" by
>the Ottoman Intellectuals and the inferiority complex they had developed
>against the "west." Not only they suppressed the religion at the time but
>also rejected their own culture, from the music they liked to the way they
>dressed, and wanted to create a "western nation," or a "nation" which
>dressed and acted like the "western nations", out of what they were able to
>save from the remnants of the Ottomant Empire. They were the ardent
>followers of what James Daly calls the Anglo-French Enlightenment. See:
>
>http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002/msg02032.htm
>
>And of course they screwed up. 
>
>What upsets me is that most people in Turkey are unaware of any of these.
>
>Best,
>
>Sabri
>
>
>
>
>
>  
>