“Waking us from this Endless Slumber”: The Ottoman–Italian War and North Africa in the Ottoman Twentieth Century

I. Introduction

Italy invaded Trablusgarp. There is no apparent reason; it is completely contrary to international law. The reason for the invasion is so facile and the attack so hasty that the whole world was astonished, as Sadrazam Paşa [the Grand Vizier] said. However, we should not be surprised by this. We must think of this as a warning to guard our country, our fatherland. Our being at war with Italy, in my opinion, must take the shape of saving the Ottoman people’s national honour (milli namusunu) in Trablusgarp. The Hundred Years’ War between the French and the English is well-known. We too must continue our Hundred Years’ War with Italy. ¹

So explained Emrullah Efendi, a representative from Kırk Kilise (Kırklareli in modern Turkey), in his address to the Ottoman Parliament on 19 October 1911, twenty days after Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. After citing the weakness of the Ottoman navy as one of the main causes for the Italian attack having been carried out, he concluded his address by calling for the war’s continuation, imploring Ottomans to take back their ‘right’ (hakkı).

Three years after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the restoration of the Ottoman constitution, the Italian declaration of war on 29 September 1911 marked the first of a series of conflicts that embroiled the empire in an almost continuous state of war between 1911 and 1923. These included the Ottoman–Italian War (1911–1912), the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), the First World War (1914–1918), and the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1923). These wars effected deep changes politically, socially, and militarily within the empire. As Feroz Ahmad articulates, ‘Anyone seeking an appropriate period in order to study the impact of war on society is unlikely to find one more suitable for this purpose than the decade 1908-18 in the history of the late Ottoman Empire’. ²

Emrullah Efendi’s address illustrates that the outbreak of hostilities with Italy sparked a reappraisal of the empire’s place in the international community. To many contemporary observers, the war was wholly contrary to the tenets of international law and exposed the hypocrisies of Great Power politics. ³ Twentieth-century Ottoman leaders ‘viewed Great Power diplomacy as a fixed game’ which the Ottomans could not win; ⁴ the only alternative that could guarantee Ottoman independence, many believed, was a strong military capable of going to war at any time. International law and diplomacy, by contrast, were depicted by the press as ‘scarcely disguised tools of imperialist expansionism’. ⁵

Most English-language studies of the Ottomans’ growing disillusionment with Great Power politics have centred upon the impact of Balkan Wars. According to Touraj Atabaki and Erik Zürcher, the Balkan Wars revealed ‘painful object lessons in the Empire’s military weakness’ and ‘the threat of imminent disintegration’. ⁶ Michael Reynolds adds that ‘The message of the Balkan Wars was that the death of Europe’s “Sick Man” was at hand’. ⁷ However, Isa Blumi has pointed to problems with this narrative. Blumi posits that remembrance of the Balkan Wars has been the victim of ‘the academic fixation on the emergence of the nation-state’, ⁸ specifically as it related to the ascendancy of nationalism in twentieth-century Europe. Writing the history of war in the Ottoman twentieth century specifically in relation to this ascendancy in Europe occludes challenges that the empire faced from other sources of conflict.

I argue that the 1911–1912 Ottoman–Italian War, often overlooked as it occurred on the heels of the Balkan Wars, began a similar process of assessing the efficacy of international law and the inability of the Great Powers to intervene on the empire’s behalf. Although scholars pay lip service to the Ottoman–Italian War as the first in the empire’s near continuous decade of warfare, few treat it as anything more than a precursor to a much greater disaster. Isabel Hull suggests of Germany that historians have adopted the viewpoint of turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers who believed that ‘small wars’ in the colonies were of secondary importance from ‘real’ European conflicts; a salient observation in the context of the Ottoman–Italian War’s historiography vis-à-vis that of the Balkan Wars. ⁹

I suggest that it was through the vocabulary of Osmanlılık, or Ottomanism, that intellectuals could argue that a relatively far-flung part of the empire like Libya was, in fact, a pivotal Ottoman territory and used that status to garner support to resist the Italian occupation. Carter Findley defines Osmanlılık as ‘an imperial Ottoman supranationalism’, ¹⁰ while Palmira Brummett characterizes it as an ‘inclusive, understood, assumed category’, which attempted to supersede local affiliations and senses of identity. ¹¹ For the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Ottomanism was a political tool with which it could attempt to face the problems of governing a multi-ethnic state and managing crises. ¹² It existed alongside other ideologies like Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism which, along with Ottomanism, the CUP drew upon simultaneously for the purpose of maintaining the empire. ¹³ This article shows that Ottomanism was used during the Ottoman–Italian War in an attempt to foster a sense of imperial interconnectedness between the Turcophone portions of the empire with both the geographical space of Libya and its inhabitants. Ensconcing Ottoman North Africa within the imagined ‘vatan’ (fatherland), in turn, gave teeth to the Ottoman remonstrations against the lack of Great Power protection of Ottoman territory.

Scholars like M. Şükrü Hanioğlu have rightly pointed to the psychological impact produced by the Balkan Wars, in that the Ottomans lost the vast majority of their European territories that had been held for centuries, as the Ottoman Empire was ‘reduced to an Asiatic state’. ¹⁴ Might the same be said of the empire’s loss of its final territory in Africa? At the commencement of hostilities in 1911, Africa was still presented as part of the empire’s dominions that spread across three continents. In the 28 September 1911 edition of Servet-i Fünun, Ahmet İhsan (Tokgöz) argued that ‘we would be obliged to confess our inability to safeguard and defend our country (ülkemizin) that spans the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the event of a sudden attack’. He criticized the European alliance system and the failure of international law as reasons for such a blatant attack to be carried out and exclaimed ‘here is the diplomacy of Europe in the twentieth century!’ ¹⁵

What is today known as Libya (Trablusgarp in Ottoman Turkish) was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1551. Trablusgarp became a vilayet in 1864 while Benghazi became a semi-autonomous sancak that was still subordinate to Istanbul in 1877. ¹⁶ As the ‘scramble for Africa’ amongst the Great Powers intensified in the 1880s, Libya assumed a larger importance to İstanbul, especially in the wake of the loss of Tunis in 1881 and the British invasion of Egypt in 1882. ¹⁷ Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) placed particular importance on the Ottomans’ North African holdings, as he believed these areas were rife with the opportunity to spread Islam to tribes as well as to expand the empire’s borders deeper southward. ¹⁸ Other observers too underscored Tripoli’s sui generis qualities in North Africa; Mohammad Farid wrote in 1902 that Trablusgarp was ‘the one vilayet in North Africa that foreigners have not entered’. ¹⁹ The short period of time after the Ottoman defeat to Russia in the War of 1877–1878 offered the Ottomans a chance to ‘participate in the new system of imperialism or risk becoming a “fair target” of European colonialism’. ²⁰ Libya was a key site upon which the Ottoman participation in imperial politics unfolded.

Scholars writing in Turkish in the 1980s and 1990s produced several monographs and articles on the Ottoman–Italian War, providing valuable histories of parliamentary debates and political decision-making processes leading up to the war. More recent historians writing in English, however, often treat Ottoman Africa with tertiary importance at best. Edward Erickson argues that the Ottoman loss of Trablusgrap ‘cost the Turks next to nothing except a near worthless province’. ²¹ While Sean McMeekan cogently characterizes the 1911–1912 war as the conflict that perhaps best ‘exemplifies the reductio ad absurdum of European imperialism’, he suggests at the same time that the Libyan territories were ‘a mere afterthought in the Ottoman Empire’. The Sanusi tribesmen who inhabited them were, moreover, ‘essentially untouched by the modern world’. ²²

In addition to archival evidence indicating that the Ottoman government endeavoured to more firmly integrate its Libyan territories as early as 1895, ²³ accounts written by contemporaries during and immediately after the conflict belie the dismissive tone of some modern historians. Several scathing critiques of international law emerged in the years after the war’s outbreak as a response to the perceived illegality of Italy’s attack. To one observer, Örikağasızade Hasan Sırrı, ²⁴ Italy’s was a war without a casus belli and had only the express purpose of annexing the Ottoman Libyan provinces. ‘There is no doubt’, he argued, that such a war was ‘illicit’ (gayr-i meşru). ²⁵ Celal Nuri, a prominent Ottoman journalist, similarly argued in a 1911/2 compilation of articles he had previously published in Tanîn, the semi-official organ of the Committee of Union and Progress:

Today there is more or less a law that Europe applies to the international body. In fact this law is supposedly accepted and affirmed by all… Because we are not Christian, European, or American, we supposedly have no right to profit from this law – this Christian law and European law – to the same degree. As such in their relations with us, conforming to these rules is quite a burden for the European nations. ²⁶

In light of this discrepancy between the application of international law, he concluded, ‘The time for us to scrutinise these laws has now come to pass’, as the Italian attacks ‘have occurred against right and justice, against an oath and promise’. ²⁷ Mustafa Halit likewise pointed out the inability of international law to protect Ottoman sovereignty:

There exists no higher authority to safeguard the ordinances of international law – there is no code of laws, no court, and there is no universal power. Justice is now supposedly established between nations; although binding agreements are established, these do not constitute law. ²⁸

The Great Powers’ failure to rein in their Italian colleagues convinced some Ottomans that any European guarantees of security based on international law were hollow ones. This is a phenomenon that again escalated after the Balkan Wars, but Italy’s ability to execute a blatant land grab against Ottoman territory threw into stark relief the inadequacies of international law and Great Power protection to ensure Ottoman sovereignty. Some observers outside of the Ottoman Empire also noted the illegality of the war. A New York Times article from 28 September 1911 averred that the Italian attack ‘is a violation of the principles of international law, humanity, and civilisation. It is evident that there is no justice in Europe. Treaties are merely instruments of deception’. ²⁹

These arguments raise the question of how Ottomans were rallied to fight and show their support for a war that threatened the empire’s place in the Concert of Europe. This article draws primarily upon Ottoman-language newspapers that were published during the Ottoman–Italian War. Historians Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Oktem, and Maurus Reinkowski have described the twentieth-century Ottoman state ‘an anti-colonial empire’, illustrating the paradox between its leaders’ desire to maintain the empire’s status as a nominal imperial power while it simultaneously resisted European imperial encroachment. ³⁰ The press needed to toe a delicate line in this regard; it thus both needed to defend Ottoman claims to sovereignty over a faraway territory while also denouncing the supposedly immoral qualities of European imperialism vis-à-vis the Ottoman brand of imperium.

The large number of articles and books published in the years during and immediately after the war reflects the continued importance that Ottoman thinkers ascribed to Libya. After an initial period of relaxing restrictions on the press following the 1908 revolution, the CUP issued a new press law in the summer of 1909 in the wake of the aborted counter-revolution that revived censorship as the CUP struggled to maintain its dominance. ³¹ This provides a window into examining officially sanctioned views about the war and helps to add insight into how the Ottoman press attempted to manage the crisis of an unexpected war.

On the eve of the First World War, Ottoman political writing sought to mobilize all segments of society for the defence of the state, which required ‘a comprehensive process, a process that would equip the people with the necessary passion and industry to fend off the dangers facing the empire’. ³² Newspapers offer important insight into the values of the Ottoman elite, for by the time the war broke out, ‘If Ottomans wanted to live, and to live honourably, they had to embrace an unfaltering patriotism in pursuit of which they laboured and made sacrifices in the empire’s service’. ³³ During the Balkan Wars too, it has been argued that the press ‘brought the war, with its images of cruelty and mayhem, to homes all over the Ottoman state and beyond’. The Ottoman state used the press, along with other modes of mass communication, ‘to win citizens over and to ensure their loyalty, motivation and readiness to make sacrifices’. ³⁴ Through analysis of newspapers in 1911 and 1912, it is evident that these same themes were present during the war with Italy as well.

Circulation figures for these newspapers are difficult to pinpoint. Most gazettes did not include circulation statistics as a part of their subscriber information. Some of the bigger dailies might have enjoyed a daily figure of 50,000 copies, though many had much smaller numbers, likely closer to 10,000. ³⁵ Palmira Brummett describes accounts of circulation as ‘impressionistic’, and cites one first-hand account from Turkish historian Enver Şapolyo on the distribution of the newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat, one of the newspapers used in this study: ‘Tercüman still came out in the evenings in Ebussuud Caddesi…Hundreds of paper-sellers (müvezzi) waited at the door of the publishing house. They bought the papers, and sold them, shouting “Tercüman”’. ³⁶ These sorts of descriptive accounts are more prevalent than reliable numerical figures.

What historians have ascertained, however, is that the well-to-do males made up the majority of Ottoman readers. Consumption of Turkish-language newspapers in İstanbul was, moreover, wider than those in the provinces, due to the need to wait for papers to arrive from printing houses in the capital, which could take a considerable amount of time. ³⁷ Before the outbreak of the First World War, the number of Arabs in Syria that read newspapers totalled some 12,000, while Palestine and Iraq might have had half that number. ³⁸ Most educated Arabs had reading knowledge of Turkish, so presumably members of the Arab elite would have had the ability to consume Turkish-language publications as well.

II. The Italian Ultimatum

According to Ali Ahmida, Italian nationalists, industrialists, and the Catholic Church had called for colonial expansion as early as 1886. ³⁹ Even prior to Italian unification, Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian politician and activist for Italian unification, in 1831 claimed an Italian right over Tunisia and Libya. ⁴⁰ These groups argued that colonialism could elevate Italy to the status of other European great powers; it could provide a solution to the alleged problem of overpopulation; that Italy had a historical claim to the Mediterranean as a sphere of influence, based on overtures to a Roman legacy; and that it could be a grounds for carrying out an Italian-brand of a mission civilisatrice. Advocates of colonial expansion into Africa also argued that conquest of Tripolitania would be a strategic waypoint into further trade and expansion into West Africa. ⁴¹

Italian territorial expansion into Africa began in 1882 in Eritrea. Tripolitania became all the more important for Italian interests in North Africa after the French established the protectorate in Tunisia in 1881, where some 11,000 Italians had been living compared with 500 French. France began to take over many Italian interests in Tunisia, inciting bitterness from the Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, who described Tunisia as ‘an Italian colony occupied by France’. ⁴² Beginning in the final decade of the nineteenth century, Italy began to open banks, schools, and publish newspapers in Tripolitania. Powerful local Jewish and Muslim merchants were in contact with the Italian consulate in Tripoli as early as 1890. ⁴³ Other endeavours in which Italians were engaged throughout Libya included flour milling, shipping agencies, printing presses, and import/export ventures under the umbrella of the Società Coloniale Italiana. ⁴⁴

The Banco di Roma was also an important institution in Italian expansion into Libya. The bank was headed by Ernesto Pacelli of the papal aristocracy and Romolo Tittoni, the brother of a former Italian foreign minister, both of whom had become interested in Libya around 1905 and by 1907 had begun investing there. By 1911, the total amount of capital that had been invested in Libya by the bank amounted to four or five million dollars. ⁴⁵ The Italian government viewed the bank’s investments in Libya as an instrument to carry out its policy of ‘peaceful penetration’. ⁴⁶ According to Fabio Grassi, one of the biggest problems that Italy faced in expanding its colonial enterprise was finding territories that could actually provide it with economic benefits, as Italy’s previous conquests in Africa failed to yield significant economic advantages. ⁴⁷ Thus the Italians that were present in Libya sought to wield significant economic influence; Italian shipping lines controlled some 45 per cent of commerce entering the port of Tripoli. ⁴⁸ The Italian community had also established its own hospitals, schools, and cultural organizations. The Banco di Roma, for its part, also began to acquire land through foreclosures on mortgages or through agents, in spite of Ottoman laws preventing such acquisition. ⁴⁹

Rodoslu Ebü’l Muzaffar, in a contemporary study of Ottoman Libya, argued that the actions of the Banco di Roma constituted ‘an economic war’. ⁵⁰ Enver, who would later earn the title Paşa and become War Minister in 1914 after he gained notoriety from his exploits in the Balkan Wars, also excoriated the Banco di Roma in the diary he kept during the Libyan War. After seeing an Italian solider, whom he believed could not have been older than a child, Enver asked, ‘Why has someone chased these poor people into carnage’? His answer:

To fill the coffers of the Banco di Roma. In order to amass a million more in the bankers’ coffers, someone has sent the children of the country [Italy] to their death, to raid another people (Volk), and all of this in the name of humanity and national honour! ⁵¹

By 1911, Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti believed that a ‘relatively cheap colonial war’ would also be politically useful, as the war would shift electoral focus from domestic issues to foreign ones. ⁵² Italy had secured agreements with Germany, Britain, Russia, France and Austria that legitimized its ambitions. In response to Ottoman attempts to limit Italian expansion in Libya, Italian nationalists began to push for a military solution to protect Italian interests. An issue of L’Idea Nazionale ran an article entitled ‘The Duty to Remember’, which declared: ‘At this hour yet once more Africa calls to us: the question of Tripoli is vital…Nationalism today is also Africanism’. ⁵³ Nationalist propaganda reached a boiling point in September 1911, particularly when the newspaper La Ragione published a series of false correspondences that the newspaper purported dated to 1894–5 between German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs and then Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. According to the report, the abundance of natural resources in Libya would counterbalance the costs of a military campaign. ⁵⁴

The pressure continued to mount and on 26 September 1911, Italy drafted an ultimatum and delivered it on the 28^th to the Ottoman Empire, which accused the Porte of abusing Italian interests in Libya and leaving the province in a backward state of disarray. ⁵⁵ As a result, it announced that Italy would occupy the territory if the Ottomans did not reply within 24 hours. Although the Ottomans were greatly unsettled by the timing of the ultimatum, they claimed that Italian interests were, in point of fact, not being abused and solicited Italian suggestions for solutions to the crisis other than war. ⁵⁶ The Ottomans blamed any backwardness that existed in Tripolitania on the Hamidian regime and were even willing to offer economic concessions if it meant the aversion of war. ⁵⁷ According to Anna Baldinetti, however, Italy had already decided upon war regardless of the Ottoman response, and indeed, the next day declared itself at war with the Ottoman Empire. ⁵⁸

In the days preceding the outbreak of the war, both the Ottoman press and government endeavoured to give the impression that relations between the Ottomans and Italians were normal. An article in Tanîn dated 24 September 1911 written by Hüseyin Cahit, the newspaper’s editor, argued that according to the author’s own research, there were no tensions between the Porte and Italy in their official interactions. Friendly relations were thus persisting and reports of bombardments were, moreover, out of the question, as the Porte had requested the views of European governments on this subject. Their response indicated that there was nothing new to be reported other than the peaceful status quo. ⁵⁹

There were, of course, problems with the two governments’ balancing acts, as the Ottomans were not unaware of certain Italian newspapers having ran fiercely interventionist editorials. In response to the claims of the editorials, Italy argued to İstanbul that these newspapers were not official ones, and that only government-approved publications could be trusted for accurate coverage. As late as 27 September, in fact, La Tribuna insisted that the presence of Italian soldiers was only a precaution, and not indicative of any incoming occupation so as to assuage Ottoman concerns. Among the official newspapers, Matin only published on the same day its first story making reference to troop preparations. ⁶⁰ And indeed, based on memorandums issued from İstanbul to the provinces, Hale Şıvgın concludes that until the last moment, the Ottoman government did not give much likelihood to the chance of an Italian occupation of Tripolitania. ⁶¹ Even after the outbreak of hostilities, İstanbul appreciated the patriotic sentiments that emerged in the press while it simultaneously attempted to give the impression that the imbroglio was under control. ⁶²

The shock of the war’s outbreak engendered a strong reaction from the Ottoman print media. The ultimatum struck a particularly acrimonious chord with elites within the ranks of the CUP. According to The Times’ correspondent in İstanbul, there existed among these individuals a ‘natural feeling of indignation at Italy’s aggressive policy’. The elites also ‘severely censured’ the government headed by Hakkı Paşa, the Grand Vizier until he resigned on 30 September, for its failure to avert the crisis. ⁶³ According to the newspaper Sebîlürreşad, ⁶⁴ the Ottoman state was faced with a threat from ‘a vile and dishonourable enemy’ (alçak ve namussuz bir düşmana). ⁶⁵ The newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat ⁶⁶ enclosed the phrase ‘Italians are our eternal enemy’ (İtalyanlar Ebedi Düşmanımızdır) inside a box on the front page of each issue of the newspaper beginning on 15 October 1911. The magazine Rübab posed the question ‘Which nation is the most despicable in the world?’, to which the answer was ‘The Italians’. ⁶⁷

From the outset, newspaper articles presented the Italian attack as an assault upon Ottomanism, synonymous with the well-being of Ottoman society as a whole. This parroted the internal view as seen in a letter dated 10 October 1911 from Ottoman War Minister Mahmut Şevket Paşa to the staff officer of Tripoli, Albay Neşet, which informed him that in performing his duties in Tripolitania, ‘The honour of Islam (Müslümanlığın) and Ottomanism is now in your hands’. ⁶⁸ On 30 September 1911, two days after the ultimatum, an article written by journalist Ahmet Agayif in Tercüman-ı Hakikat declared:

Compatriots! The ideas and intentions that heretofore maintained us and all the Islamic peoples have become manifest. For one, look at state of the Islamic world today. Marakeş is being torn between Italy and Spain. Iran is being contested between England and Russia. A base and vile enemy walks with all its strength against Osmanlılık; it seems that the trampling upon of all religious precepts and customs has been decided upon. You know in detail the status of the people in the pieces left of the Islamic world. In a word, they are moaning under the chains of captivity. ⁶⁹

In addition to the allusions to Ottomanism, the very fabric of the Islamic world was threatened by the enemy according to Agayif. As such, the outbreak of hostilities gave renewed rise to Ottoman claims of protection over the whole of the Islamic world and for broad Muslim participation in defending the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Sebîlürreşad called upon the people of Islam to open their eyes, as their enemies were ‘attacking us like animals, tearing all of our limbs’. ⁷⁰ This article, too, spoke of the Italian attack as one that necessitated a response from all Muslims. Ahmet İhsan in Servet-i Fünun likewise exclaimed:

Let us send from here a look of gratitude and our compliments to the whole of our nation and brothers in religion (din kardeşlerimize) who embarked upon the battlefield in Trablusgarp in respect of saving the Ottoman future and let us venerate their names and eternally preserve the nation. ⁷¹

In a historical milieu where Ottoman sovereignty was increasingly challenged by local and foreign interests, Ottomanism and its inclusiveness gave İstanbul a powerful vehicle to claim the ability to protect Muslims across the Islamic world, and attempt to enlist their help to assist the empire. And indeed, a foreign correspondent to The Times reported on 28 September 1911 that ‘Events seem to be shaping themselves in a fashion calculated to stir Islam throughout Africa to its depths’. ⁷² From 1908, anti-imperialism ‘constituted one of the main pillars of CUP ideology’, and the Young Turks pointed to the examples of the massacre of American Indians and the divvying up of Africa as examples of the type of brutal imperialism that now had the Ottoman Empire in its crosshairs. ⁷³ European policies against the Ottoman Empire were, moreover, part of a broader imperialism that ‘lacked moral values and idolised money’. ⁷⁴ This context gave the Ottoman press a pretence to assert the empire’s own claims to its more moral brand of empire, one that firmly included North Africa within its boundaries. That the Ottomans were engaged in a delicate balance between maintaining an imperial system from which they had not completely disavowed themselves and repelling European imperial advances on their own territory made discourses of morality a useful tool for differentiating the Ottoman form of empire from their European rivals, while still legitimizing the Ottoman imperial structure. The dynamic of an ‘anti-colonial empire’ was fully apparent in this context.

The outbreak of the war, to some observers, offered the empire a chance to renew its commitment to patriotism. In Tanîn, an article the day after the ultimatum was issued outlined the details of the ultimatum and ended with a call to action for Ottomans:

The lullabies of future Ottoman children will henceforth constitute cries of animus and revenge, and this nation, if there exists in it the slightest self-respect, virtue, and sense of honour, will take revenge on Italy. This passionate revenge will hereafter be the foremost stimulant for the lives of Ottomans. Ottomans will hereafter live for this revenge, prepare for it, and certainly will exact revenge. Come compatriots, with complete steadfastness and serenity to the mission! ⁷⁵

Mehmet Beşikçi has said that the Balkan Wars were ‘experienced as a collective trauma’ and that ‘the idea that “the fatherland is in danger” became widespread among elite and non-elite alike’. ⁷⁶ While the Balkan Wars accentuated these feelings, newspapers’ coverage of the Italian Ultimatum suggests that these sentiments also had currency at the outset of the war with Italy. The Ottoman press thus appears to have made appeals to a similar psychological impact of a European attack upon Ottoman African territory to which scholars of the Balkan Wars also make reference.

Tercüman-ı Hakikat also called Ottomans into action, proclaiming:

Our sense of honour alone is connected to our sense of affection. If eight million Ottomans each give a Lira, with a gigantic sum of eight million Lira, a navy can be formed! But if all eight million Ottomans cannot give one Lira, there are one million Ottomans that can give eight Lira. Then and only then will the welfare of the nation be procured. Then and only then can we ensure the protection of the House of God, the holy tomb of the Prophet…Then and only then will the Kuran and the honour of Islam be secured. ⁷⁷

The periodical Halka Doğru published a story that likewise extolled the virtues of the Turkish soldier in combat. In the article, a soldier fighting in Libya declared:

What fear have I? If I die, I am a martyr, if I remain, I am a gazi. Until now, the vatan has taken care of me. Now I too will protect the vatan, the Turkish son does not flee from battle, when he embarks before the perfidious enemy, he forgets everything.

God and the Ottoman nation aided the soldier: ‘In wartime, in the course of danger, Turkish blood rests not in its vessels. So now we go. Allah is our helper, the nation prays for us (millet duacımızdır). There is nothing else we need’. ⁷⁸

The coverage that appeared in Sebîlürreşad of the ultimatum also made a strong case for its readers to take an active part with the war effort:

Indeed, we must aid and assist our brothers in Trablusgarp in a more tangible way. However, it cannot be helped that many years of idleness and our navy’s nonexistence cause us to be deprived of carrying out this desire. Let us at least hope that this terrible force, along with waking us from this endless slumber, becomes a call for carrying out our rightful national and religious duties. ⁷⁹

The article’s references to an ‘endless slumber’ along with the destitute condition of the Ottoman Empire’s navy called attention to both tangible and spiritual reasons for Italy’s ability to declare such an ultimatum. When scholars suggest that it was the Balkan Wars that constituted a ‘crucial point’ at which Muslim Ottomans were all ‘required to be present – in body or soul – at the various fronts, be it in the trenches of Çatalca or in the neighbourhoods of besieged Edirne’, ⁸⁰ they can overlook the significance of the Libyan War in making similar calls to Ottomans, such as those made by Sebîlürreşad and Tercüman-ı Hakikat. The Italian attack engendered not only the need for a national response, but one that called upon the whole of the Muslim world to awake from its spiritual ‘slumber’.

Some outside Ottoman borders did indeed attempt to assist the war effort. In 1911 in Tunisia, Bash Hamba, editor of Le Tunisien and an individual who was influenced by the Pan-Islamist tendencies of the Young Turks, for example, launched an effort to raise money and gather supplies to aid local resistance in Libya by invoking an amalgam of Pan-Islamic rhetoric and traditional notions of Muslim identity. ⁸¹ A few months later, on 9 February 1912, an Italian streetcar driver struck and killed a Tunisian child. Hamba organized a boycott of the public transportation system in response to the child’s death, and demanded that only French and Tunisians be eligible for employment in the transit system; equal pay for Tunisians and Italians for the same work; and the election, rather than appointment, of the Tunisian members of the Consultative Conference. ⁸² The government demanded an end to the boycott, and when the Young Tunisians refused, it exiled Hamba and other leaders of the group. Kenneth Perkins describes this movement as one that succeeded in ‘galvanising the previously inert masses’ and had ‘contained within it the germ of full-scale rebellion’. ⁸³ In other parts of the empire, The Times noted that on 30 September 1911, mobs in Salonika destroyed Italian arms that were displayed at the Italian consulate and Italian schools. Italian fishing boats that had attempted to leave Salonika were also confiscated. ⁸⁴ While it is outside the scope of this essay to consider widely the effects of the Ottoman–Italian War across North Africa, preliminary evidence points to an opportunity to further understand the transnational impact of the war outside the Ottoman Empire’s borders.

Ottoman writers also took to task the European press in its presentation of the conflict. Celal Nuri was one such journalist who expressed this frustration; he implored his audience to read the articles published by the French press in relation to the Italian War. One would not find, he claimed, any mention of the violations ‘of right and equity’, ‘of justice and clemency’ that the war produced, nor would one find the European press calling for a ‘sense of mercy, a sense of compassion, [and] the regulations of humanity’. ⁸⁵ Those French newspapers that did cover the war had by and large presented Italy’s attack as a valid one. ⁸⁶ An article in Tanîn from November of 1911 indicated that the Ottomans were in league with both Algeria and Tunisia for the purpose of maintaining public order in areas affected by the war. ⁸⁷ According to Tanîn, this had been necessary because of a military movement against Italian forces that had supposedly claimed the lives of not only Italians, but bystanding Arabs and Frenchmen as well. This led to attacks from European newspapers claiming that the Ottoman forces had acted with ‘fanaticism’ (taassup), a claim that Tanîn, of course, set out to refute: ‘We must say that to describe or explain any uprising that would occur within the dominions of Islam with the word fanaticism is unjust’. This was especially rueful given the fact that, ‘Every day our newspapers are filled with information quoted from European newspapers on the Italians’ atrocities that will make one’s hair stand on end (tüyleri ürpertecek vahşetleri)’. ⁸⁸ Sebîlürreşad cited European atrocities during the 1901 Boxer Rebellion in China to demonstrate European hypocrisy, as there ‘was not a murmur from the civilised world’ when Chinese women and children were ‘driven like a herd of animals’ and drowned in the Amur River. ⁸⁹ Servet-i Fünun also published many pictures and illustrations depicting ‘Italian atrocities’. ⁹⁰

Although Europeans were evidently not unaware of what Tanîn believed to be reprehensible Italian acts, it was only the Ottomans that were accused of fanaticism. The article further linked this discourse to the Ottomans’ increasingly isolated position in the Mediterranean: ‘Italy is at war with neither Tunisia nor Egypt; every day they only intend, indeed, to harm our lives’. ⁹¹ This discussion of the European press’s reticence to criticize a war with so little of a pretence as Italy’s made plain the Great Powers’ willingness to acquiesce to another European power’s annexation of Ottoman territory.

III. Creating Ottoman North Africa

Along with calls to action to the public, the Ottoman press faced another task, that of situating Libya, a relatively backwater province, into the imagined space of empire. Palmira Brummett argues that the press does not ‘reveal or define a formed and fixed Ottoman nation’, but instead can be used to ‘suggest the boundaries within which the symbols of people, nation, and sovereign were construed’. ⁹² Indeed, as we have already seen above, Ottoman North Africa needed to be presented as a part of the empire worth protecting. This involved both incorporating the space of the Libyan provinces into the established boundaries of the empire and depicting the people of North Africa as loyal members of a shared Ottoman citizenship. In doing so, the Ottoman press was part of a larger process that occurred from the 1880s of imperial powers justifying increasingly costly, both in terms of money and human life, occupations in moral terms. ⁹³ Both the people and physical space of Ottoman Libya were presented as vital components of the empire which, as discussed above, were seen as under attack by a Christian power that threatened both Ottoman sovereignty and Islam alike.

The task of educating readers about Ottoman North African land and people was not lost upon contemporary observers, and some made specific mention of the need to provide the reading public with information about Tripolitania as the impetus for decision to write. Mahmud Naci prefaced his 1914 study of Libya by stating that he published it as a service to Ottoman citizens in the wake of the Italian occupation. ⁹⁴ Hasan Safî, in a history of Libya written in 1912/3, likewise noted that his book was a response to the scant literature on the history and society of Libya before the war with Italy. His contribution, drawing upon 10 years he spent travelling the province, was ostensibly meant to fill this gap. ⁹⁵

The Ottoman press paid particular attention to the qualities of Arabs as fellow Ottomans. This phenomenon was a hallmark of French colonial rule in the Maghreb, by way of comparison. According to George Trumbull, ‘Cultural descriptions articulated with an eye towards the maintenance of power represented the fundamental means through which agents of French colonialism conceived of Algerians’. ⁹⁶ He explains further, ‘cultural description took on the force of creating political realities’. ⁹⁷ According to several scholars of the Ottoman–Italian War, the cooperation between Arabs and Turks in Libya during the war was illustrative of greater trends within the empire, in that such cooperation was typical of relations between Arabs and Turks in general. Mümine Çakır, for example, cites a telegraph that was published in Tanîn on 14 January 1912 that she argues reveals the ‘solidarity’ (dayanışma) between Arabs and Turks as well as the ‘loyalty’ (bağlılıklarını) the former had for the latter: ‘We are sons of the same nation’, averred the author of the telegraph. ⁹⁸ One must be cautious to take such telegraphs and other reports too literally; Jafar al-Askari recounts in his memoirs how his brother, who fought with the Ottomans, thought negatively of Enver after a battle in mid-August 1912 in which many Arab lives were lost. Enver reportedly dismissed the casualties, asking, ‘Did we buy them with our money’? His crass dismissal of the importance of the Arabs’ lives, according to al-Askari, further alienated the officer corps, especially the Arabs among them, from Enver. ⁹⁹

Nevertheless, the presence of local irregulars within the Ottoman ranks cannot be discounted. Rachel Simon places the number of Libyans who volunteered between 20,000 and 30,000. ¹⁰⁰ The Turkish-language press, furthermore, endeavoured to foster a shared sense of citizenship between Turkish readers and inhabitants of Ottoman North Africa. Libyan Arabs were often presented as heroic fighters alongside their Turkish officers; their place as worthy partners in empire – albeit in a subordinate position to their Turkish counterparts – is evident. Ahmet İhsan described in Servet-i Fünun how Khoms, Benghazi, Tobruk, and Derna were conquered by the Italians. İhsan made clear the importance of Turkish–Arab cooperation in successful Ottoman resistance by proclaiming it was only in Benghazi that the Italians encountered serious resistance, as ‘the Ottoman military forces, with the brave contributions of Arab sons, vigorously attacked the Italian occupation forces’. ¹⁰¹

The war correspondence of Şerif Bey, a contributor to Tanîn who travelled throughout Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Arab provinces between 1909 and 1914, ¹⁰² is instructive for analysing the portrayal of Libyans in the Ottoman press. The propagation of a ‘supra-nationalism’ entailed not only the need to enlist Arab support, but to show Turks that their co-subjects possessed redeeming qualities as well. He used the word ‘bahâdır’ (hero) when speaking of Arab soldiers, comparing them to their Turkish peers. ¹⁰³ Likewise, in an article published in Tanîn on 24 January 1912, Şerif Bey informed readers that ‘The war, in general, continues to go well for us. The officers, the soldiers, and the true meaning of the Arab mücahits’ sacrifices are above all manner of admiration’. ¹⁰⁴ Şerif Bey’s description of what motivated the local irregulars is also notable:

The war is not only for the defence of Ottomanism and the vatan, mostly, rather, they embark with the urge of sacred religious sentiments, in the theatre of war, their tongues are engaged with praise, their hearts are full with love of religion, with love of the God and the Prophet, full of love for everything sacred.

‘The whole of the people of Trablusgarp’, moreover, ‘are to the utmost extent god-fearing and are sincere in their faith to Islam. No matter where they are, no matter with what duty that are occupied, they assuredly do not forget to pray five times and do not forget their other worship’. ¹⁰⁵ Yet they also possessed characteristics beyond religiosity that were enviable. In a later article published in Tanîn on 6 May 1912, Şerif Bey also related how the people of Trablusgarp exhibited much faith in both doctors and medical knowledge. He described how, one by one, the injured of the Battle of Kırkkarış appealed to the Red Crescent for treatment. This, he argued, ‘does not at all resemble our Anatolian people’, who were not as trusting of the benefits of modern medicine as were their Libyan counterparts. ¹⁰⁶

For these fighters, Ottomanism and Islam were not mutually exclusive. According to Şerif Bey, when he spoke with the inhabitants of Trablusgarp about Ottomanism, they understood the concept to mean three things: Islam, the caliphate, and the sultan. As a result, he questioned the extent to which it can be said that Anatolians are more faithful to the government than Libyans. This sentiment, moreover, was not limited to the people of only Tripoli:

All of the Islamic lands of Africa, the Islamic world, and those with the same sentiment are anguished with the same pain [from the Italian invasion]. To believe this, it is sufficient to view the theatre of war in Trablusgarp and the fighters. ¹⁰⁷

The power of Ottomanism and Muslim cooperation, even if they could not be fully unleashed, contributed to the Ottomans’ ability to continue fighting:

Truthfully, if one recalls how the war began all together, how it continued for six or seven months, and what sort of phases it demonstrated, these reveal, from the perspective of Osmanlılık, that the sole word which can explain these is miracle (hârika). Especially if one considers the many circumstances and conditions that existed against Osmanlılık and the fact that the strength and vitality of Osmanlılık could not be used in Trablus as much as one would like, this miracle, altogether, becomes extraordinary. ¹⁰⁸

If Ottomanism could be reconciled with religious sentiment, the potential of Ottomanism to recapture the whole of the Muslim world might be reached, again buttressing Ottoman claims to the whole of North Africa. In both Tunisia and Libya, he argued, there existed among the Arabs ‘an extraordinary fervour, an enthusiasm’ (olağanüstü bir heyecân, coşku vardı). ¹⁰⁹ Tânin reinforced this sentiment in other articles; a 19 November 1911 article entitled ‘To All Our Muslim Brothers’, that was written by a certain Abdüllatif Said Efendi from Edinburgh, for example, informed readers that, ‘Muslims on all sides of the world, to the extent of their abilities, are working to help the Ottoman government, which finds itself in a state of crisis and danger’. ¹¹⁰

Another contemporary observer named Rodoslu Ebü’l Muzaffar described his first visit to Ottoman Libya in a 1912/3 monograph in terms not dissimilar to Şerif Bey: ‘The first day I entered the land of Africa, truthfully, I had entered into another world inside this world’. ¹¹¹ One chapter of the book, entitled ‘The Social and Spiritual Conditions of the People of Trablusgarp’, gives some of the author’s opinions on the residents of the province. He opened the chapter by declaring, ‘The people of this vilayet: hard and strong’ (çetin ve metin). ¹¹² Weddings, he further suggested, were carried out without much trouble, indicating that the people were also socially responsible Ottomans. ¹¹³ He continued to describe how the people of Trablusgarp had endured many hardships, and as a result, should be viewed ‘with an eye of understanding’. ¹¹⁴

In spite of the vigour of the people of Trablusgarp, what they possessed in spirit they lacked in knowledge; as Ebü’l Muzaffar explained, the territories under Ottoman suzerainty were far away from each other and the people were not aware of the Ottoman government’s political relations with and practices of administration in other provinces. Again, this was not due to any natural defect on their parts; according to Ebü’l Muzaffar, the people of Trablusgarp were very much interested in the affairs of the vilayet as a whole. ‘By dint of their natural intelligence’, he averred, ‘most of them are inclined towards politics’. The issue, then, was presumably one of a lack of access to information. He further elaborated: ‘In Trablusgarp, what is in need of reform is not the people, but the government’. ¹¹⁵ The subtext is clear, that Trablusgarp needed to be further integrated into the core of the empire and that the fact it had not been so already was not necessarily the fault of the populace itself. These people, moreover, were willing and able partners in the project of empire.

The disconnect between Tripoli and İstanbul was made even more acute from Ebü’l Muzaffar’s cavaliering view of the supposed desire of the province’s people to work in public service. According to Ebü’l Muzaffar, the desire for government posts had become like ‘a chronic illness without remedy’, ¹¹⁶ as even those who had otherwise earned a salary of 150 kuruş per month were eager to find government jobs that paid far less. This desire, however, was a relatively recent phenomenon in Ebü’l Muzaffar’s judgment. He juxtaposed the ‘constitutional government’ with the ancien régime, suggesting that under the latter, public opinion had come to hold that no work could be completed by government officials without a bribe. The people were now conscious, however, ‘of the righteousness of the officials that the constitutional government assigned’. ¹¹⁷

Overall, the impression that Ebü’l Muzaffar gave to readers was that the people of Tripolitania were perfectly good imperial subjects: ‘we again speak of the fact that the region’s honour and reputation will not be spoiled, of the people of Trablusgarp’s beneficence and kindness, and of their sound morals and courage’. ¹¹⁸ These people’s righteousness was particularly important given Ebü’l Muzaffar’s view that ‘Today, the component of strength that preserves a nation’s existence is that nation’s individuals’. ¹¹⁹ The Arabs of Tripoli to Ebü’l Muzaffar, were, then, firmly part of the Ottoman nation. That a flexible definition of Ottomanism could be shaped and reshaped during conflict gave writers a language with which North Africa could be fully ingrained into the Ottoman imperial vision.

If the vatan was at stake in the war, the geographical space of Libya needed to be fashioned as part of that vatan in addition to its people. Şerif Bey is again instructive for illustrating how this task was carried out in the press. He first left from İstanbul for Tripoli on 1 November 1911 and spent 10 days in Marseille in order to procure supplies for the Red Crescent. ¹²⁰ Upon passing the Tunisian border into Libya, which he described as the ‘holy fatherland’ (kutsal vatan), he and his party took a breath, as if they had entered their own homes. ¹²¹ Later on 8 March 1912, he recounted that he had left Anatolia for Tripoli with an attitude he described as ‘quite pessimistic’ (pek kötümser) at the time, as news on the state of Libya was ‘quite ambiguous and complicated’ (pek belirsiz ve karışık). He believed that by entering Libya, he would find ‘poverty, disorder, misery’ (sefâlet, düzensizlik, perişanlık). ¹²² After spending two and a half months on the front lines, he exclaimed, ‘My negativity, from all that I saw and researched, was refuted more every day, and today, I return from Trablusgarp in quite a positive and sanguine state’. ¹²³ He also described the Zuwarah port as one of the most beautiful in the world and spoke of the ‘ardent spirit’ (ateşli ruhuna) of the North African deserts. ¹²⁴ Furthermore, Şerif Bey linked the lands of Ottoman Libya to the history of the empire itself; ‘one thing that is certain’, he wrote, ‘much heroism and sacrifice that will keep Ottoman history alive with bravery’ was present in Libya. ¹²⁵ Among his most important discoveries, he explained, were from his contact with local Arabs. On the general disposition of the locals in the town of Azizîye, he commented: ‘Everyone, merry and joyful, thinks of his duty, with complete joy and honour, and awaits the coming to pass of the war in which they will participate’. ¹²⁶

Tercüman-ı Hakikat likewise made appeals to Ottoman history, when in an article entitled ‘Listen!’ dated 2 October 1911, it referenced ‘the elder hero’ Hayreddin Barbarossa, the sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral who was instrumental in expanding the Ottoman sphere of influence in North Africa and engaged in several battles with the Holy League. The author drew a parallel between ‘today’s torpedoes’ with Barbarossa ‘devastating the fleet of the whole of Christendom (alem-i nasraniyet)’. The Italian fleet to which these torpedoes would bring ruin was likened to that of Andrea Doria, whose ‘disgraceful defeat’ in the 1538 Battle of Preveza would again come to pass. ¹²⁷

Halka Doğru drew upon the mythical qualities of the ancient Turks to describe the sacrifices of those who fought in Libya: the character of a Turkish soldier in a story it published explained:

My ancestors always lived valiantly like a lion, the imprint of war effused in their breasts, and they died so that the vile did not trample upon their homeland…I, too, like them will die for the sake of my nation’s, my homeland’s honour. ¹²⁸

Such references to Ottoman history sought to cement North Africa’s place within the rightful boundaries of the empire and make appeals to the Ottoman ‘golden age’, depicting it as a time when heroic Ottomans successfully fought Christian powers to conquer North Africa and that these past glories could again be achieved.

Another article published in the newspaper Şehbâl ¹²⁹ in October 1912 raised the question of the extent to which Libya could be considered part of the Ottoman vatan in Anatolian imagination. According to the author, Salime Servet Seyfi, there had developed a sentiment in Anatolia questioning the extent to which Tripolitania, ‘our lovely sancak’ (sevimli sancağımızın), was part of the vatan. ¹³⁰ His concerns were, however, assuaged in a dramatic manner when in the ‘remote deserts’ his Arab coreligionists fell for religion, and their singing of patriotic songs alone had healed the wounds of a Turkish gazi! ¹³¹ He also drew readers’ attention to another Ottoman borderland in Yemen, where there had been a revolt in 1904, leading to an agreement in 1911 that restored nominal authority to İstanbul but allowed the Zaidi Imam to retain authority. Seyfi invited his readers to consider how many bones of deceased Turkish soldiers that had succumbed to thirst lay in the deserts of Yemen. ¹³² The reference is significant, as Yemen was synonymous with the plight of Ottoman soldiers in folklore. ¹³³

In order to avert the many deaths that the Ottoman army suffered in trying to quell the rebellion of 1904, Seyfi exclaimed, ‘O Turkish soldiers! Your vatan’s tasting of water is two minutes away! Walk a little bit further’. ¹³⁴ The connection between the two events illustrates the place that the author wanted to ascribe both to both Yemen and Tripolitania in the expanse of the empire. During the Libyan War, fighting meant not only avenging the deaths of soldiers who died in the Yemeni deserts, but also the preservation of the fatherland itself, as was the case in Yemen. Again, that the fate of Ottoman Libya was linked to the well-being of the empire as a whole demonstrates its importance as a part of the imagined boundaries of the empire.

Even after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, writers continued to make reference to the Ottoman–Italian War in their appeals to patriotic sentiments. Aka Gündüz, for example, urged Arabs in a fictional dialogue to join the Ottoman ranks fighting in the Balkans by reminding them that Turks had fought for the Arabs in North Africa, beseeching them to fight alongside the Turks once again. The man in the dialogue asked his Arab counterpart: ‘Will you be next to me when I pierce the enemies’ chests? Or will you keep going around in the sad deserts’? ¹³⁵ This appeal demonstrates that to one writer, at least, the lasting memory of the war in Tripolitania could still be used to make patriotic calls to action during the Balkan Wars.

IV. Conclusion

In an imperial ferman dated 15 October 1912, İstanbul delivered the following message to the inhabitants of Libya:

My government, finding it on the one hand impossible to render you the effective help that you need to defend your country, and caring on the other for your present and future happiness; desirous of avoiding the continuation of a war disastrous for you and your families and dangerous for our Empire; in order to cause to be reborn peace and prosperity and availing myself of my sovereign rights, I concede to you full and complete autonomy. ¹³⁶

Thus concluded what Enver called in his penultimate diary entry ‘a twentieth-century crusade against Islam’. ¹³⁷ The Libyan provinces were not lost in 1912 without a fight; it was not until the outbreak of the Balkan Wars that the Ottomans realized that they could not carry on fighting on two fronts. According to Rachel Simon, Mahmud Şevket Paşa privately believed that the campaign could not be won and the war on the European theatre gave him reason to focus the army’s efforts on the Balkans. ¹³⁸ The Ottoman General Staff, moreover, was unwilling to risk the effects of full mobilization upon the economy in spite of the fact it had made preparations for a potential Italian attack. ¹³⁹

The imperial ferman encapsulates a number of themes raised by this essay. As we have seen, the Ottoman press consistently attempted to propagate a notion of imperial interconnectedness between Libya and the rest of the empire. While it is true that Turks would be the dominant element in the imperial arrangement, the Ottoman press’s imagination of the empire’s sovereignty firmly included Libya. Ottomanism was used as a vehicle through which the Libyan land and its inhabitants could be integrated into the Ottoman imperial project. The war was not simply a prelude to greater and more calamitous conflict; the press used the Italian attack upon the last vestiges of Ottoman North African territory to articulate the empire’s increasingly perilous position in Great Power diplomacy. It raised concerns about the worth of international law in safeguarding Ottoman territory and the geographical extent of Ottoman influence and sovereignty. In sum, writing the history of the Ottoman Empire’s twentieth century must include North Africa in the intellectual and geopolitical processes that led to the empire’s ultimate decision to enter the First World War.