38. Pan-Turkism

British Foreign Office

In April 1913, in Budapest, Abdul Baha, parallel to the latter’s visits with Theosophists as part of his extensive travels just prior to the outbreak of World War I, met with Arminius Vambery, as president of the Turanian Society. Turanism and the ideology of Pan-Turkism—which was influenced by Bektashi Sufism—was a Divide and Conquer strategy popularized by Arminius Vambery, which a racist ideology which became the guiding principle of state policy by an influential group among the Young Turks, and which they shared with their counterparts in Europe, particularly the Thule Society, which was responsible for the birth of Hitler’s Nazi Party.[1] In his book, Meine Wanderungen und Erlebnisse in Persien (“My Travels and Experiences in Persia”), published in 1867, Vambery discusses the Bab and his followers. During his conversation with Abdul Baha, Vambery confessed the following to him:

 

I have been following your teachings for many years and have always wanted to meet with you in person. I admire your courage, above all that at such an old age you left everything else behind and are travelling in the world spreading your humane teachings. You are doing a marvellous work. Your work will be met by success because your sincerity, unshaken faith and high ideals have had their mark on the minds of the great thinkers of the world. I hope to hear from you. When you return home in the East please send me your Father’s Writings and Treatises and I will do my best to spread them in Europe. The more these principles spread the closer will we get to the age of Peace and Brotherhood.[2]

 

Arminius Vambery, who was acquainted with both Herzl and Wolffsohn, became employed by the British Foreign Office as an agent and spy whose task it was to combat Russian attempts at gaining ground in Central Asia and threatening the British position on the Indian sub-continent.[3] His purported usefulness was his friendship with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, “your friend in Constantinople,” as his controller in London described him.[4] In 1897, the Foreign Office expressed concern about Abdul Hamid II’s “manoeuvres for the encouragement of Musselman agitation in India and Afghanistan.”[5] Lord Salisbury (1830 – 1903), however, commented that what Vambery had to report was “alarmist” and “had done us more harm than good.”[6] Gill Bennett, the chief historian of the Foreign Office, described Vambery as “a sort of near eastern pimp.”[7] According to Herzl:

 

[Vambery] doesn’t know whether he is more Turk than Englishman, writes books in German, speaks twelve languages with equal mastery and has professed five religions, in two of which he has served as a priest… He told me 1001 tales of the Orient, of his intimacy with the sultan, etc. He immediately trusted me completely and told me, under oath of secrecy, that he was a secret agent of Turkey and of England.[8]

 

The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, where Tibet, Afghanistan and Iran were divided into spheres of interest, and Russia acknowledged Britain’s rights over India, had delivered a deathblow to Vambery’s painstaking efforts at Ottoman-Anglo cooperation.[9] Vambery believed, explains Mim Kemal Oke, “that the ill-fate of the Turkish people, with whom he took great pride in belonging to the same racial roots, could only be averted by the British, whom he saw as champion of liberty among the Western nations.”[10] Although Vambery’s secret correspondence with the British Foreign Office, stored in the British National Archives, only details the years between 1889 and 1911, according to Herzl’s diaries, Vambery had been a secret agent since Disraeli was Prime Minister, from as early as 1868.[11] According to Herzl, in conversation, Vambery:

 

…repeatedly went back to the memorable circumstances of his life which, indeed, were striking. It was through Disraeli that he became an agent of England. In Turkey he began as a singer in coffee-houses; a year and a half later he was the Grand Vizier’s confidant. He could sleep at Yildiz, but thinks he could also be murdered there. He eats at the Sultan’s table—in full intimacy, mit den Fingern aus der Schussel—but cannot dismiss the idea of poison. And a hundred more touches, equally picturesque.[12]

 

Contrary to the policy of his predecessors, Lord Salisbury, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1877, did not believe in an Ottoman role as a buffer against Russian expansionism.[13] Nevertheless, it was hoped that perhaps some sort of understanding could be reached with the Ottoman Empire, which would lead, as Otto von Bismarck had proposed, to an Ottoman participation in the Mediterranean Agreements, a series of treaties signed in 1887 by the Great Britain and Ireland with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Spain. One of the objectives was to halt the expansion of the Russian Empire in the Balkans and its wish to control the straits of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. From that perspective, it also assured the survival of the Ottoman Empire. From the point of view of the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, the benefit of these agreements, to which Germany was not a party, was in bringing Britain closer to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary.[14] In 1887, Lord Salisbury invited Vambery to Whitehall to recruit him to the task.[15] As explained by Mim Kemal Oke:

 

Thus, the British desperately needed to recruit the help of an intermediary who in his private capacity would succeed in penetrating Yildiz Palace, in obtaining the delicate background information for the future shaping of British foreign policy, and, if possible, in cultivating the friendship and good will of the Sultan.[16]

 

Thus, during the years between 1887 and 1907, Vambery frequented Istanbul annually, sometimes twice a year, and sought to bring about a rapprochement between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. From 1895 onwards, Britain, in collaboration with Russia, embarked upon a new course, and, with the ultimate aim of establishing new protectorates on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, began to provoke nationalist-secessionist movements within it.[17] Vambery defended Abdul Hamid II’s character and leadership qualities, but resented his refusals to adopt reforms, but blamed his intransigence on the duplicitous actions of the British. Among them was the British support for Armenian separatists. As detailed by Mim Kemal Oke:

 

The professor argued that London, instead of backing the minorities who were craving to dissociate themselves from the Ottoman body politic, should have provided support for the Young Turks who genuinely wished to bring ethnic peace among the subjects under the banner of the “unity of race.” Thus, we see Vambery trying to encourage the Young Turks to appeal to the British government to back them in replacing the tyrannical rule of Abdulhamid with the constitutional order of 1876. At the same time, he was also urging Whitehall to offer a helping hand to Ottoman Liberals in their struggle against the Sultan. Vambery came to believe that Britain had lost all her faith in the Ottomans as a bulwark against the expansionist designs of Russia, and instead she started to rely on the nation-states, which would be established after the impending disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. If the British foreign policy was geared to support the national self-determination of the ethnic groups composing the Ottoman Empire, then Vambery sincerely hoped that London would also encourage the Turks alongside the Armenians, Arabs, etc. to establish their own nation-state upon the Empire’s remnants.[18]

 

It is not known whether or not Vambery was aware of London’s true intentions, but from his extensive reports to the Foreign Office, especially after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, he continuously pressed the British to Support the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).[19]

 

Thule Society

Rudolf von Sebottendorf (1875 – 1945), who was initially interested in Theosophy and Freemasonry. After being introduced to the Bektashi Sufis when he lived in Istanbul, he returned to Germany where he formed the Munich branch of the Thule Society, founded in 1910 by Felix Niedner, the German translator of the Old Norse Eddas, that combined Sufism and Freemasonry, claiming descent from the Ismaili Assassins had.[20] According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Sebottendorf was initiated by the Termudi family of Jewish Freemasons in Salonica, into a lodge believed to have been affiliated to the French Rite of Memphis.[21] The lodge was, before the Young Turks seized power, the secret Bursa base of the CUP.[22] Sebottendorf eventually inherited their library of texts on alchemy, Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and Sufism. In later years, Sebottendorf would explain that the magical practices of “Oriental freemasonry,” meaning the Betkathis, preserved the secrets of the Rosicrucians and the alchemists, that modern Freemasonry had forgotten.[23]

The Thule Society identified the Germanic people as the Aryan race, the descendants from Thule—much like the theory advanced by Bal Gangadhar Tilak—and sought its transformation into a super-race by harnessing the power of Vril, first mentioned in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, The Coming Race. Inspired by Greco-Roman geographers who located the mythical land of “Ultima Thule” in the furthest north, Nazi mystics identified it as the capital of ancient Hyperborea, a lost ancient landmass supposedly near Greenland or Iceland, and the land of the super-race who inhabited the Hollow Earth. The Ancient Greeks wrote not only of the sunken island of Atlantis, but also of Hyperborea, a northern land whose people migrated south before it was destroyed by ice. In the late seventeenth-century, Swedish author Olaf Rudbeck (1630 – 1702), personal chaplain to King Gustavus Adolphus, father of Queen Christnia, located Hyperborea at the North Pole and several other accounts related that before its destruction, it broke into the islands of Thule and Ultima Thule.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak asked in his preface to The Arctic Home of the Vedas, “But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried back to 4500 B.C., one was still tempted to ask whether we had, in that limit, reached the Ultima Thule of the Aryan antiquity.”[24] Following Blavatsky, the Anthroposophists and Ariosophists viewed Atlantis as Thule. The ideology regarding the Aryan race, runic symbols, Nordic paganism and the swastika are important elements of Ariosophy, related to the occult systems developed by Guido von List (1848 – 1919) and his pupil Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874 – 1954), as part the Völkisch movement. Liebenfels was the founder of the Order of New Templars (Ordo Novi Templi, or ONT) an offshoot of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which included Aleister Crowley and which practiced tantric sex rituals.[25] Liebenfels claimed that Lord Kitchener, an important member of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was a member of his Order of New Templars (ONT) and a reader of his anti-Semitic magazine Ostara.[26]

From 1908 to 1912, the List Society began to attract distinctive members, including Franz Hartmann, founder of the OTO and the German Theosophical Society, and the complete membership list of the Vienna Theosophical Society, founded by Freud’s friend Frederick Eckstein, both members of the Pernerstorfer Circle.[27] Prana, a German monthly for applied spiritualism which was published by the Theosophical publishing house at Leipzig, was edited by Johannes Balzli, the secretary of the Guido von List society, and secretary of the Leipzig Theosophical Society. Hartmann, Steiner, Liebenfels and Guido von List himself were contributors, as was C.W. Leadbetter, a known pedophile and close associate of an associate of Annie Besant.[28] Hartmann became one of the leading followers of List, through his attraction of the parallels between his ideas and those of Blavatsky. List believed that the lost language of the ancient Germans could be found in the mystic writings of the Kabbalah, mistakenly believed to be Jewish, but in reality a compilation of ancient German wisdom which had survived the suppressions of the Christianity. Similarly, Blavatsky rejected the Jewish origins of the Kabbalah, considering it a survival of true and secret wisdom.[29]

Liebenfels claimed that Hitler had visited him at the office his Ostara journal in Rodaun on the outskirts of Vienna during 1909.[30] Hitler was in Vienna in 1913, where in the same year there also lived Leon Trotsky, Yugoslavia’s eventual leader Marshal Tito, Freud and Joseph Stalin. Freud frequented the Cafe Landtmann, while Trotsky and Hitler often visited Cafe Central. Hitler read newspapers and pamphlets that published the thoughts of philosophers and theoreticians such as Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon and Arthur Schopenhauer.[31] Hitler was also influenced by Eugen Karl Dühring, Paul Anton de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Adolf Stoecker, Gobineau, and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[32]

The membership of the List Society “implies that List’s ideas were acceptable to many intelligent persons drawn from the upper and middle classes of Austria and Germany.”[33] The success of List’s 1888 novel Carnuntum caught the attention Georg von Schönerer and Karl Hermann Wolf (1862 – 1941), who commissioned similar works.[34] List was also supported by Karl Lueger (1844 – 1910), the mayor of Vienna, who was also a supporter of von Schönerer and the German National Party. Lueger was known for his antisemitic rhetoric and referred to himself as an admirer of Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. Asked to explain the fact that many of his friends were Jews, Lueger famously replied, “I decide who is a Jew.”[35]

The Thule Society would be responsible for development of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or DAP), founded in January 1919, which was joined by Adolf Hitler, and which was eventually renamed as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), known as Nazi party. After the founding of the Nazi party, members of the Thule Society maintained very close ties with the Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth circle”), an active and influential group of pan-German intellectuals, editors, and writers who promoted Wagner’s ideas and work. Thule leader Dietrich Eckart introduced Hitler to Thule Society members, including Dr. Gottfried Grandel, nationalist publisher Julius Lehmann, General Erich Ludendorff, as well as piano company executive Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helena, society matron Elsa Bruckmann, Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried and his English-born wife Winifred Wagner, who saw Hitler as “destined to be the savior of Germany.”[36] The Bayreuther Blätter, founded in by Wagner in 1878, and written primarily for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival, increasingly “nazified” Wagner, linking his work with the ideology of National Socialism.

 

Ergenekon 

Pan-Turkism, which became the dominant ideology of the CUP after 1911, considered Turkish nationality, as defined by Turkic languages and the people who spoke them, as a Turkish “race.”[37] The Bektashi’s belief in their origins in Ergenekon corresponded with the legend of Agartha and Shambhala. Through the influence of the Dönmeh and Bektashi Sufism, the Young Turks adopted an ideology of Pan-Turkism, which aspired towards reviving the ancient shamanic traditions of Tengrism, believed to have originated in the Altai Mountains, as the true religion of the Turkish heritage. Turanism is a closely related movement to Pan-Turkism, but it is a more general term, because Turkism only applies to Turkic peoples.[38] Pan-Turanism grew in popularity among the Hungarians, who were interested in Bektashi traditions because they preserved pre-Islamic elements that can be traced to ancient Turkish origins which the Hungarians shared.[39] At the same time, the idea of a Turanian empire was being promulgated amongst the Ottoman Turks by Vambery, whose thesis was based on the observation that, as much of Central Asia shared a common Turkic language, this then necessitated the formation of “Turan,” which he saw as a political entity spanning from the Altai Mountains in Eastern Asia to the Bosphorus. “It has been speculated,” notes Markus Osterrieder, “that Vámbéry’s mission was to create an anti-Slavic racialist movement among the Turks that would divert the Russians from the “Great Game” which they were involved in against Britain in Persia and Central Asia.”[40]

Occult legends place the home of the Aryan race in the mythical land of Shambhala of Tibetan Buddhist legend, which was typically located in either in Xinjiang, in Western China, or the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in south-central Siberia, where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. In Turkish nationalist mythology, Ergenekon, which is related to the synarchist myth of Agartha, is the name of an inaccessible valley in the Altai Mountains of Central Asia, where the remnants of a number of Turkic-speaking tribes regrouped following a series of military defeats at the hands of the Chinese and other non-Turkic peoples, where they were trapped for four centuries.[41] Under the leadership of Bumin Khan (died c. 552), they expanded and founded what has come to be known as the Göktürk Empire. According to legend, they were able to leave Ergenekon when a blacksmith created a passage by melting rock, allowing the grey wolf named Asena to lead them out.[42]

Blavatsky mentioned the mythical lost city of Shambhala in her main work, The Secret Doctrine, the teachings for which she said she received telepathically from her teachers in Tibet. There are many legends associated with the location of Shambhala. The Zhang Zhung scriptures of the Bön tradition mention that Shambhala is located in the Sutlej Valley in Punjab, while the Mongolians believe that it is located in a valley in Southern Siberia. Altai folklore has it that the gateway to Shambhala is located on Mount Belukha, and modern Buddhist scholars believe that Shambhala is located in the high reaches of the Himalayas in the Dhauladhar mountains around Mcleodganj from where the current Dalai Lama manage the Tibetan government in exile.[43] The geographical teachings in the Kalachakra Tantra indicate that Shambhala is located to the north of India, and according to the measurements provided by these teachings, this pure land is located in a sacred place for Buddhists, Hindus, Bön and Jains, Mount Kailash in southwestern Tibet.

Vambery was inspired by Alexander Csoma de Körös (1784/8 – 1842), who was an important source for Blavatsky, and the first in the West to mention Shambhala, which he regarded as the source of the Turkish people, and which he situated in the Altai Mountains and Xinjiang. Under British assistance, in 1820, Körös had travelled to Kashmir to trace the origin of the Hungarians.[44] Based on the linguistic affinities between Hungarian and the Turkic languages, de Körös felt that the origins of the Hungarian people were in “the land of the Yugurs (Uighurs)” in Xinjiang, a province of Northwestern China. In a 1825 letter, Csoma de Körös wrote that Shambhala is like a Buddhist Jerusalem, and believed it would probably be found in Kazakhstan, close to the Gobi desert, where it would later be situated by Blavatsky. Others later would also locate it more specifically either in Xinjiang, or the Altai Mountains.[45]

Through Csoma de Körös’ influence, Hungarian nationalists founded their sentiments, known as Turanism, on the basis that Hungarian, Finnish, Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu belong to the Ural-Altaic family of languages, and was born in the nineteenth century, in response to the growing influence of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism.[46] As the term “Aryan” is used for Indo-European, “Turanian” is used in reference to with Ural-Altaic.[47] In 1855, Max Müller had proposed a new grouping of the non-Aryan and non-Semitic Asian languages, in his work The Languages of the Seat of War in the East, which he called these languages “Turanian.”[48] The Ural-Altaic family of languages are also known as the Turanian family, after the Persian word Turan for Turkestan. The word Turan is derived from Tur, the son of emperor Fereydun in ancient Persian mythology. In the Shahnameh, an epic poem written by Ferdowsi in the ninth century AD, Tur is identified with the Turks, and the land of Turan refers to the inhabitants of the eastern-Iranian border and beyond the river Oxus.

“When, after the European rediscovery of the Zend-Avesta in the later part of the 18th century,” explains Osterrieder, “the Zoroastrian legends about the eternal struggle of the agricultural peoples of Iran against the nomadic peoples of Turan spread across Europe, they were embraced by the Russian intelligentsia as a fitting description of the social situation in the Tsarist Empire.”[49] Aleksandr Herzen, after the failure of revolutionary Europe of 1848 and his consequent ideological shift to support of Russia, pointed out that the hope of the world revolution would lie not in Europe but in the Turanian East.[50] Another champion of the Asian cause was the Theosophist Prince Esper Ukhtomskii, a confidant of Tsar Nicholas II and a close ally of Piotr Badmaev and Sergei Witte, who shared Blavatsky’s dream of uniting Central Asia, India, Mongolia, Tibet and China, with the involvement of Russia, in order to create a grand Eurasian power able to oppose the British.[51]

Among the favorite European authors of the Pan-Turkists were Nietzsche and Gobineau.[52] According to historian Marc David Baer, the Young Turks “wholeheartedly embraced theories of race, although they rearranged the hierarchies to place Turks on top. By 1906, Turkish nationalism based on the pseudoscientific race theories of Europe had become the guiding ideology of the CUP.”[53] Arnold Toynbee, in a report written for British naval intelligence in 1917, noted the “anti-Islamic tendencies” in the Pan-Turkish movement, including the employment as a symbol of CUP’s youth movement, and a Turkish army order directing troops to include the Grey Wolf in their prayers. Historian Arnold Toynbee quoted from a circular produced by Turkish Hearths, a Pan-Turkist group, which condemns the “monstrous figment of the imagination, which is known as the community of Islam, and which has for long past stood in the way of present progress generally, and of the realization of the principles of Turanian unity in particular.”[54]

Many pan-Turkish publications reflecting Vambery’s outlook were made available to Young Turks in Salonica.[55] As he outlined in this Travels in Central Asia, Vambery considered the “Osmanians” as “these pseudo-Turanians,” the non-Turkish citizens of the Ottoman Empire, such as the Slavs, Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and so on, as a “mongrel people par excellence.”[56] The true Turanians were the Turks, the “Turkish-speaking Iranians from Choi to Teheran,” the Turks in Iran proper and Transcaucasus, the Uzbeks and other peoples of Central Asia, as well as the  Muslims of China. His vision of a pan-Turanian realm appeared in a map appended to his travelogue, entitled “Turkestan,” and stretched from Turkey and Persia to “Chinese Turkestan.”[57]

 

Turanian Society

Consumed with regret that his plans for an Anglo-Ottoman alliance had failed, Arminius Vambery asked the British Foreign Office for his retirement and was granted a generous pension.[58] During his time in Budapest in 1913, mere months from his eventual passing in September of the same year, Vambery met several times with Abdul Baha. Vambery became a Bahai after their meeting, and is considered the first Bahai believer in Hungary.[59] Somewhat later, Vambery wrote:

 

I FORWARD this humble petition to the sanctified and holy presence of Abdul-Baha Abbas who is the centre of knowledge, famous throughout the world and beloved by all mankind. O thou noble friend who art conferring guidance Upon humanity, may my life be a ransom to thee!

The loving epistle which you have condescended to write to this servant and the rug which you have forwarded came safely to hand.

The time of the meeting with your excellency and the memory of the benediction of your presence, recurred to the memory of this servant and I am longing for the time when I shall meet you again. Although I have traveled through many countries and cities of Islam, yet have I never met so lofty a character and so exalted a personage as your excellency and I can bear witness that it is not possible to find such another. On this account, I am hoping that the ideals and accomplishments of your excellency may be crowned with success and yield results under all conditions; because behind these ideals and deeds I easily discern the eternal welfare and prosperity of the world of humanity.

This servant, in order to gain first hand information and experience, entered into the ranks of various religions; that is, outwardly I became a Jew, Christian, Mohammedan and Zoroastrian. I discovered that the devotees of these various religions do nothing else but hate and anathematize each other, that all these religions have become the instruments of tyranny and oppression in the hands of rulers and governors and that they are the causes of the destruction of the world of humanity.

Considering these evil results, every person is forced by necessity to enlist himself on the side of your excellency and accept with joy the prospect of a fundamental basis for a universal religion of God being laid through your efforts.

I have seen the father of your excellency from afar. I have realized the self-sacrifice and noble courage of his son and I am lost in admiration.

For the principles and aims of your excellency I express the utmost respect and devotion and if God, the Most High, confers long life, I will be able to serve you under all conditions. I pray and supplicate this from the depths of my heart.[60]

 

Vambery’s son Rustem Vambery (1872 – 1948) described the circumstances and interest generated about Abdul Baha’s visit to Budapest:

 

His (Abdul Baha) room in the Dunapalota Hotel became a veritable mecca for all those whom the mysticism of the East and the wisdom of its Master attracted into its magic circle. Among His visitors were Count Albert Apponyi, Prelate Alexander Giesswein, Professor Ignatius Goldziher, the Orientalist of world-wide renown, Professor Robert A. Nadler, the famous Budapest painter, and leader of the Hungarian Theosophical Society.[61]

 

Rudolf, Count of Apponyi (1812 – 1876) was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and Ambassador to London under Franz Joseph I of Austria, who had had appointed Vambery to the post of professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Budapest.[62] Like Vambery before him, Goldziher was granted a bursary by Hungarian Minister of Education Baron Jozsef Eotvos, in his case, to travel to Damascus and Cairo, where, contrary to Vambery, he openly identified himself as a Jew, but was nevertheless granted access to the highest institute of religious studies in the Muslim world.[63] Goldziher befriended Jamal ud-Din al Afghani in Cairo in the mid 1870s, the formative period in Afghani’s political development in Egypt. Goldziher also met the Shaykh Al-Azhar, and became the first European non-Muslim to attend lectures at the university.[64] Abdul Baha also met with another of Vambery’s students, Gyula Germanus (1884 – 1979), who converted to Islam and took the name Julius Abdulkerim Germanus. Germanus was a professor of oriental studies, a Hungarian writer and Islamologist, member of the Hungarian Parliament and member of multiple Arabic academies of science, who made significant contributions to the study of the Arabic language, history of language and cultural history.

While in Istanbul, Afghani influenced several influential Turkish intellectuals, including Abdullah Cevdet, Ahmet Agaoglu, Ziya Gökalp (1876 – 1924), Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869 – 1944) and Şemsettin Günaltay (1883 – 1961).[65] Agaoglu, an admirer of Afghani who had been a prominent contributor to Jabotinsky’s Le Jeune Turc, became a founder of Kemalism.[66] Drawing on the inspiration of Afghani, through his articles in Islam Mecmuasi, Gökalp sought to uphold the legitimacy of the use of Ijtihad to respond to changing circumstances of modern times.[67] Gökalp was the foremost pan-Turkist ideologue, a well-known newspaper columnist and political figure, the primary ideologue of the CUP, and a close friend of Talaat Pasha. Influenced by contemporary European thought, particularly by the sociological view of Émile Durkheim, Gökalp concluded that Western liberalism was inferior to solidarism, because liberalism encouraged individualism, which in turn diminished the integrity of the state.[68] Gökalp rejected both the Ottomanism and Islamism in favor of Turkish nationalism. He advocated a Turkification of the Ottoman Empire, by promoting Turkish language and culture to all Ottoman citizenry. He found Greeks, Armenians and Jews to be an undesirable foreign body in the national Turkish state. Gökalp believed that the Ottoman Empire had to be Turkified, and he envisioned a national territory stretching across Russia and Asia, approximately same land mass represented in Vambery’s map. “For the Turks,” he wrote in a 1911 poem entitled Turan, “Fatherland means neither Turkey, nor Turkestan; Fatherland is a large and eternal country – Turan!”[69] One slogan he coined was “All the Turks are one army.”[70]

Günaltay befriended Gökalp, under whose influence he began to carry out research on Turkish history. In 1914, he was appointed professor of the history of Turks and Islamic tribes at the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul University. The same year began to publish articles in the journal, İslam Mecmuası, which was sponsored by the CUP. Later, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Theology at the same university. Günaltay praises Afghani saying, “Sheikh [al-Afghani] is worthy of as much respect as a prophet. Those who object to this are as deserving of damnation as Prophet Mohammed’s archenemy Abu Jahl. Because he had set out to revive the Islam [that was practiced] during the time of the prophet.”[71] Yurdakul’s early literary work was influenced by Afghani, who he was to get to know in Istanbul in 1892.[72] After Afghani died in 1897, Yurdakul published a compilation of his poetry in the book Türkçe Şiirler, which were accompanied by paintings from Italian artist Fausto Zonaro (1854 – 1929).[73]

In Budapest, Abdul Baha also met with members of the Türk Derneği (“Turkish Association”), founded in 1908, after the Yount Turk revolution, to promote research into the language, literature, history and culture of the Turks and related fields, and which also published a periodical under the same name.[74] The Turkish Association was founded by Yusuf Akçura (1876 – 1935), a prominent Turkish politician who escaped exile in 1899, after being accused of being a member of the Young Turks, and made his way to Paris where he began to emerge as a staunch advocate of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turkism.[75] There, Akçura contributed to Meşveret, a periodical published by the exiled members of the CUP. In 1908, he returned to Istanbul where his ideas began to gain more interest after the Young Turk Revolution.[76] In 1911, Akçura founded the Türk Yurdu association together with, among others, Turkologist Ahmet Agaoglu, and Ali bey Huseynzade (1864 – 1942), a founding member of the CUP, and later creator of the modern Flag of Azerbaijan. Huseynzade became a leading force within the Turkish Hearths, acting as their Vice-President.[77] The Turkish Hearths included numerous Young Turks at its founding in 1911, and was joined by Enver Pasha as well as Gökalp.

On April 11, 1913, Abdul Baha spoke at the hall of the old building of parliament, and on the following day he received many visitors at his hotel, including Vambery, as president of the Turanian Society, founded in 1839 by Tatars with the goal of uniting the various Turkic peoples living in the Russian Empire.[78] Abdul Baha also visited Vambery at his private residence. On April 14, Abdul Baha was invited to speak at the former House of Magnates, the upper chamber of the Diet of Hungary, by the founder of the Turanian Society, Alajos Paikert (1866 – 1948 ), later director of the Hungarian Agricultural Museum. Abdul Baha’s plans to depart on April 14 were delayed due to a request from the president of the Turanian Society, Count Pal Teleki (1879 – 1941), who later became twice the Hungarian Prime Minister. At a meeting of the Turanian Society in the Grand Hall of the National Museum, Abdul Baha gave a lecture entitled “Peace Between Nations and Religions” to some 200 people. The talk was translated into Hungarian by Leopold Stark and into English by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab (1890 – 1958), who served as Abdul Baha’s secretary and interpreter.[79]

Abdul Baha left Stuttgart, arriving in Paris on May 2, 1913. Here again he met with Turkish and Persian ministers. On June 6, Izzet Pasha hosted a dinner party in his honor, just months after the Raid on the Sublime Porte, and just prior to his appointment as War Minister in the cabinet of Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Turkey[80] Djemal Pasha, as reported by a Bahai eyewitness, supposedly asked Abdul Baha what the cause of the Ottoman Empire’s weakness was and he responded, “the existence of diverse religions.” And when Cemal asked what the solution might be, Abdul Baha allegedly answered, “that the leaders of all religions and denominations existing within the Ottoman Empire and Islamic lands gather in Constantinople and, after consultations, agree on a single and unifying religion.” Djemal Pasha is said to have approved these words and added: “After my return [from the Suez campaign], I will take you to Constantinople. There I will gather the religious leaders and force them into unity and agreement on one religion.”[81] Abdul Baha left France for the last time, and landed in Port Said in Egypt on June 17, 1913. During his time he met with many Bahais who had come to visit him from Haifa, as well as local Muslims and Christians. He made one last visit to Abbas II of Egypt, and then finally, set sail, landing in Haifa in December 1913.[82]

 

Kemalism 

Gökalp later supported Atatürk.[83] It is claimed that Atatürk once said “Father of my meat and bones is Ali Riza Efendi and father of my thought is Ziya Gökalp.”[84] As concludes Muriel Mirak-Weissbach, “This pan-Turkic ideology was instrumental in shaping the CUP’s policy towards the Armenians in the course of behind-closed-doors conferences held in Saloniki.”[85] Many historians and sociologists have suggested that Gökalp’s brand of nationalism contributed to the Armenian genocide.[86] Spearheaded by the CUP, in 1915 and 1916, the genocide was carried out primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Becoming Grand Vizier during World War I, Talaat Pasha, who was heavily influenced by Gökalp, [87] has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide, and was responsible for other ethnic cleansings during his time as Minister of Interior Affairs.[88] Along with Talaat, the fanatical pan-Turk Enver Pasha, who assumed the primary role in the direction of the Special Organization, the CUP’s intelligence agency, was one of the principal perpetrators of the Late Ottoman Genocides and thus is held responsible for the death of between 800,000 and 1,800,000.[89]

After the disastrous military defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Sultan Mehmed VI fired Enver on October 4, 1918. Ten days later, Talaat’s government resigned and the triumvirate fled the country. In 1919, under British pressure, the Ottoman government agreed to put the Young Turks on trial for war crimes. The entire CUP leadership of criminal objectives and methods. Since the ministries of Defence, Interior and War, especially the Special Organization. had been run by Enver and Talaat, they too were included. CUP leaders were convicted and sentenced in absentia, as they had managed to flee the country in time. British intelligence and Soviet intelligence reportedly helped identify their whereabouts, and also agreed that Armenian revolutionaries should be “allowed” to carry out the executions. Talaat was assassinated in Berlin in 1921.[90] Said Halim Pasha was slain in Rome by Armenians the same year. Enver was killed while fighting against the Red Army in Russian Turkestan in 1922.

Raphael Lemkin, then a law student who followed Talaat’s trial, later coined the term “genocide” to describe what Talaat master-minded against the Armenians and Assyrians, and later what Germany committed against Jews.[91] The genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey. The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide.

Gökalp’s influence figured prominently in the development of Kemalism, and its legacy in the modern Republic of Turkey.[92] Kemalism proper is symbolized in the six points enumerated in the Republican People's Party (CHP), and include: Republicanism, Populism, Nationalism, Secularism, Statism, and Reformism. Together, they represent a kind of Jacobinism, defined by Atatürk himself as a method of employing political despotism to break down the social despotism prevalent among the traditionally-minded Turkish-Muslim population, foremost among which, he believed, was the bigotry of the Ulema.[93]

In 1918, Agaoglu served as the political advisor to the commander of the Islamic Army of the Caucasus, which came to assist the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. On December 26, 1918, he was elected as a member of the Parliament of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic from the Zangezur district as a neutral representative. However, he later declined the membership. Agaoglu was also part of the delegation sent by the Republic to participate in the Paris Peace Conference. Upon reaching Istanbul, he was arrested along with other leaders of the CUP by the British and exiled to the island of Malta.

Agaoglu who served as an advisor to Atatürk and played an important role on creating Turkey’s constitution of 1924, like the majority of the Atatürk’s staff who assisted him in the foundation of the Turkish Republic, was a Freemason.[94] At least three were heavily involved in the Armenian genocide. Abdülhalik Renda (1881 – 1957), Minister of Finance, Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, responsible for the deportations and murder of the Armenians.[95] Şükrü Kaya (1883 – 1959), Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign affairs in several governments, mainly tasked with managing the Armenian deportations and administration of the concentration camps located in Syria. In order to manage the large influx of Armenians into the area, Şükrü instituted a policy that enforced a certain ratio of Armenians to be left untouched. However, once the Armenians exceeded this ratio, they were evacuated from their camps and massacred.[96]

Another Mason was Bekir Sami Kunduh (1867 – 1933),[97] a leading member alongside other members of the CUP of the Karakol society, a secret Turkish nationalist organization formed in 1918 to continue various aspects of the CUP’s covert work, such as resistance to the Allied occupation and partition of Anatolia, and concealment of former CUP members accused of participation in the Armenian genocide.[98] Karakol was founded on Talaat Pasha’s orders, soon after he fled the country, as the first clandestine organization fighting against the Allied Occupation of Constantinople. It served as a continuation of the CUP’s intelligence agency, the Special Organization, known for its key role in the commission of the Armenian deportation.[99] During his stay in Istanbul between November 1918 and May 1919, Atatürk met with members of the Karakol society, whereupon a revolutionary committee was established. The committee was to assassinate the sultan and overthrow the government, applying pressure on the government that was to succeed it.[100]

In 1922, Abdullah Cevdet, a founding member of the CUP, a friend of Herzl and a convert to the Bahai faith, publishing an article in his journal Ictihad a demand that the Ottoman state substitute Bahaism as the state religion, which caused a great outcry.[101] Some months earlier, in November 1921, and January and February 1922, a series of articles on the Bahai religion with the title “A scientific study of the Baha’i movement” was published in the same periodical, in which the author, Mehmed Emin Ali Pasha, a Freemason and Grand Vizier five times during the reign of Sultan Abdul Majid and Sultan Abdul Aziz, spoke positively about the history and beliefs of Bahaism, based, in his own words, on the voluminous writings of Bahaullah and Abdul Baha, whom he met personally. In response, on March 1, 1922, Abdullah Cevdet published his article “The doctrine of Bahaullah, a world religion in Ictihad. The religious authorities and the Turkish press quickly responded, accusing him of attacking the Prophet Mohammad and Islam, and praising the Bahai religion. Consequently, Cevdet was sentenced to two years in prison, although he never served the sentence.[102]

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks expanded on the ambitions of Pan-Turkism and tried to replace the lost legacy with a new Turkish commonwealth. The legend of Ergenekon, the Turkish equivalent of Agartha, was therefore promulgated by Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, who sought to create a sense of nationalism to replace the religion of Islam as the primary identity of the new Turkish secular regime.[103] According to the archives at the Grand Orient of France, Atatürk was a member of the Dönmeh-dominated and Marinist Veritas Lodge of the Grand Orient of France, and of the Macedonia Risorta Lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy. From archives of the United Grand Lodge of England, it is also known Atatürk was also associated with La Renaissance Lodge, affiliated with the Young Turks movement. Turkish National Movement, also known as the Kemalists, originally featured a Masonic symbol on its flag.[104] In 1923, after establishing the Republic of Turkey, the movement merged into the Republican People’s Party (CHP), and Atatürk was elected the republic’s first president. The Ottoman Caliphate was abolished on March 3, 1924 by decree of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The list of prominent Freemasons included: Fethi Okyar (1880 – 1943), the second Prime Minister of Turkey (1924–1925) after Atatürk; Turkish naval officer Rauf Orbay (1881 – 1964); Refet Bele ((1881 – 1963), served as the Ministry of Interior and Minister of National Defense; Ali Ihsan Pasha (1882 – 1957), commander for the Sixth Army during World War I and known for his role in the Armenia genocide; Kâzım Özalp (1882 – 1968), President of the Grand National Assembly; Hasan Saka (1885 – 1960), Minister of Foreign Affairs, and eventual Prime Minister; Mehmet Cemil (1880 – 1957), Secretary General of the CHP; Tevfik Rüştü Aras (1883 – 1972), Deputy and Foreign Minister; Refik Saydam (1881 – 1942), fourth Prime Minister of Turkey.[105]

 


[1] Jacob M. Landau. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (India University Press, 1995), p. 45.

[2] Star of the West, 4: 17. cited in Léderer György: Bahá’ízmus Budapesten [Bahá’ísm in Budapest]. in: Keletkutatás, Autumn 1989, pp. 81-96; cited in “A Draft Summary of the History and International Character of the Hungarian Bahá’í Community.”

[3] Richard Norton-Taylor. “From Dracula’s nemesis to prototype foreign spy.” The Guardian (1 April 2005). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/apr/01/highereducation.artsandhumanities1

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Derek Jonathan Penslar. Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale University Press, 2020). p. 137.

[9] Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 18.

[10] Ibid., p. 15.

[11] Mandler. Arminius Vambéry and the British Empire, p. 2.

[12] Marvin Lowenthal (ed.). The Diaries of Theodor Herzl (New York: The Dial Press, 1956), p. 328; cited in Mandler. Arminius Vambéry and the British Empire, p. 147.

[13] Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 15.

[14] W. N. Medlicott. “The Mediterranean Agreements 1887.” The Slavonic Review, 5: 13 (June, 1926), pp. 66-88.

[15] Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 18.

[16] Ibid., p. 16.

[17] Ibid., p. 22-–21.

[18] Ibid., p. 23-–24.

[19] Ibid., p. 16.

[20] Dr. Alexander Berzin. “The Nazi Connection with Shambhala and Tibet.” Study Buddhism. Retrieved from http://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies/history-culture/shambhala/the-nazi-connection-with-shambhala-and-tibet

[21] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 138.

[22] David Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism (Potomac Books, Inc., 2012).p. 51.

[23] Ibid., p. 48.

[24] Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Arctic Home of the Vedas (Poona City: Tilak Bros, 1903).

[25] Howard. The Occult Conspiracy.

[26] Howard. Secret Societies; Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 113.

[27] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 43–44.

[28] Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism,” p. 87.

[29] G. L. Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 1 (1961), p. 86.

[30] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 195.

[31] Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna, p. 233.

[32] Louis L. Snyder. “Dühring, Eugen Karl (1833-1921).” Encyclopedia of the Third Reich (Wordsworth Editions, 1976), p. 75.

[33] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 43.

[34] Kenneth Hite. The Nazi Occult (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), p. 7.

[35] Amos Elon. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (2002), p. 224

[36] Friedeland Wagner. The Royal Family of Bayreuth (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), pp. 8–9. Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 122.

[37] Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 42.

[38] Alaatin Oguz. “The Interplay Between Turkish and Hungarian Nationalism: Ottoman Pan-Turkism and Hungarian Turanism (1890-1918). Masters Thesis (Middle East Technical University, 2005), p. 29.

[39] Eva Csaki. “Shamanistic features preserved in Bektashism.” (Budapest: Péter Pázmány Catholic University).

[40] Osterrieder. “Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of Nicholas Roerich,” p. 109, n. 31.

[41] “Agartha Cell in the Cem House.” Yeni Şafak (July 2008).

[42] Andrew Finkle. Turkish State, Turkish Society (Routledge, 1990), p. 80.

[43] John Chyan. I Spy Hidden Angels from Shambhala (PublishAmerica, 2012).

[44] Theodore Duka. Life and Works of Alexander Csoma de Körös (London: Trubner & Co., 1885).

[45] Alexander Berzin. “The Nazi Connection with Shambhala and Tibet.” The Berzin Archives, (May 2003)

[46] Alaatin Oguz. “The Interplay Between Turkish and Hungarian Nationalism: Ottoman Pan-Turkism and Hungarian Turanism (1890-1918). Masters Thesis (Middle East Technical University, 2005), p. 4.

[47] M. Antoinette Czaplicka. The Turks of Central Asia in History and at the Present Day (Elibron, 2010), p. 19.

[48] Max Müller. The languages of the seat of war in the East. With a survey of the three families of language, Semitic, Arian and Turanian (Williams and Norgate, London, 1855).

[49] Osterrieder. “Political Occultism and Social Messianism in the Activities of Nicholas Roerich,” p. 108.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Sabeheddin. “The Secret of Eurasia.”

[52] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods, p. 53.

[53] Baer. The Dönme.

[54] Luhrssen. Hammer of the Gods.

[55] Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 43.

[56] Vambery. Travels in Central Asia (London, Murray, 1864); cited in Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, pp. 42–43.

[57] Vambery, Travels, op. cit., map cited in Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 43.

[58] Oke. “Professor Arminus Vambery and Anglo-Ottoman Relations (1887-1907),” p. 24.

[59] “A Draft Summary of the History and International Character of the Hungarian Bahá’í Community.” National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahai Community of Hungary, 2011). Retrieved rom https://web.archive.org/web/20120421012216/http://www.bahai.hu/english/draft-summary-history-international-character-hungarian-bahai-community/#toc-abdul-bah-and-arminius-vmbry

[60] Ibid.

[61] Shoghi Effendi. God Passes By (Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1971), p. 287. Retrieved from https://bahai-library.org/writings/shoghieffendi/gpb/286-290.html

[62] Vambery. The story of my struggles, p. 261.

[63] “‘Magyar Jew or Jewish Magyar?’ A Unique Symbiosis.” In The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 346.

[64] Shalom Goldman. “Europe’s Jewish Scholars of Islam.” (March 29, 2024). Retrieved from https://www.juancole.com/2024/03/europes-jewish-scholars.html

[65] Prof. Dr. Ekrem Buğra Ekinci. “Mysterious Scholar Between East and West: Legend of Jamal al-Din al Afghani.” Retrieved from https://www.ekrembugraekinci.com/article/?ID=583&mysterious-scholar-between-east-and-west:-legend-of-jamal-al-din-al-afghani

[66] Ozavci. “A Jewish ‘Liberal’ in Istanbul,” p. 290.

[67] Markus Dressler. “Rereading Zya Gökalp: Secularism and Reform of the Islamic State in the Late Young Turk Period.”  International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47: 3 (2015), p. 516.

[68] Taha Parla. The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gokalp (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), p. 31.

[69] Jacob B. Landau. Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1995), p. 47; cited in Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 43.

[70] Walker, op. cit., p. 242; cited in Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 43

[71] Ibid.

[72] Erol Köroğlu. Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey During World War I (Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), p. 129.

[73] Hakan Arslanbenzer. “Mehmet Emin Yurdakul: ‘My name is Turk’.” Daily Sabah. Retrieved from https://www.dailysabah.com/portrait/2016/09/10/mehmet-emin-yurdakul-my-name-is-turk

[74] H.M. Balyuzi. Abdul Baha The Centre of the Covenant of Baháʼu'lláh (Oxford: George Ronald, 2001), pp. 383–387.

[75] M. Vedat Gürbüz. “Genesis of Turkish Nationalism.” Bulletin Türk Tarih Kurumu, 67: 249 (August 2003). Retrieved from https://belleten.gov.tr/tam-metin/3552/eng

[76] Yusuf Akçura. “Three types of policy.” Modernism: The Creation of Nation-States : Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945: Texts and Commentaries, volume III/1, Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 (Central European University Press, 2013), pp. 218–226.

[77] Hugh Poulton. Top Hat, Grey Wolf, and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (C. Hurst & Co. 1997), pp. 82–83.

[78] H.M. Balyuzi. Abdul Baha The Centre of the Covenant of Baháʼu'lláh (Oxford: George Ronald, 2001), pp. 383–387

[79] “National Affairs: Two Men & a Robot.” Time (May 31, 1948). Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,798674,00.html#ixzz1Ci7aE8nA

[80] H.M. Balyuzi. Abdul Baha The Centre of the Covenant of Baháʼu'lláh (Oxford: George Ronald, 2001), pp. 388–401

[81] Mu’ayyad: Khatirat-i Habib, vol. 1, pp. 318–320 and pp. 451–2; cited in Alkan. “The Young Turks and the Baháʼís in Palestine,” p. 272.

[82] H.M. Balyuzi. Abdul Baha The Centre of the Covenant of Baháʼu'lláh (Oxford: George Ronald, 2001pp. 388–401.

[83] Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 43.

[84] Hasan Huseyin Kemal. “Ezberbozan Aciklamalar”, 09.12.2013, 32-33; cited in Alihan Limoncuoglu. The evolution of Turkish nationalism between 1904 and 1980 (Exeter University, College of Social Sciences and International Studies, 2015).

[85] Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 44.

[86] Richard G. Hovannisian. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (Transaction Books, 1986), p. 77.

[87] Hans-Lukas Kieser. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 64.

[88] Ibid., p. xi, 22–23, 247, 333.

[89] Fatma Müge Göçek. Denial of violence : Ottoman past, Turkish present and collective violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 1.

[90] Mirak-Weissbach. Through the Wall of Fire, p. 47.

[91] “Operation Nemesis.” NPR (May 6, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/993128456/operation-nemesis

[92] Taha Parla. The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gokalp (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), p. 7.

[93] Mete Tunçay. “Kemalism.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (Oxford Islamic Studies Online). Retrieved from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e0440

[94] Bob Nairn. “Freemasonry in Turkey.” World of Freemasonry (extract). Bob Nairn. “Freemasonry in Turkey.” World of Freemasonry (extract). Retrieved from https://linfordresearch.info/fordownload/World%20of%20Fmy/Nairn%20Turkey.pdf

[95] Ugur Ungor. Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum International Publishing, 2011). p. 7.

[96] Mehmet Polatel. “Social engineer: Şükrü Kaya.” Agos (March 27 2015)

[97] Bob Nairn. “Freemasonry in Turkey.” World of Freemasonry (extract). Retrieved from https://linfordresearch.info/fordownload/World%20of%20Fmy/Nairn%20Turkey.pdf

[98] Taner Akçam (transl. Paul Bessemer). A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 309–312. 

[99] Donald Bloxham. “The Armenian Deportation of 1915–1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy.” Past & Present, 181 (2003), pp. 141–191.

[100] Nesrin McMeekin. “Turkey’s Relations with the Bolsheviks (1919–1922).” Thesis: Bilkent University Thesis (Bilkent University. 2007), pp. 26–27.

[101] Hanioğlu. The Young Turks in Opposition, p. 255, n. 355.

[102] Alkan. “‘The eternal enemy of Islam’: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha’i religion,” pp. 1–20.

[103] Gareth Jenkins. “Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation” (Silk Road Studies, August 2009).

[104] Derin Cag. “Historical Figures: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Biography & Leadership Traits).” Richtopia (April 20, 2023). Retrieved from https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/mustafa-kemal-ataturk/

[105] Nairn. “Freemasonry in Turkey.”

Divide & Conquer