The Ottoman Empire, firmly established after the conquest of Constantinople cum Istanbul in 1453 lasted for almost five centuries, with the last sultan, Mehmet VI, leaving Turkey in November, 1922. In March, 1924 the official end of the “Ottoman Caliphate” was announced. The so-called “sick man of Europe” in its last century was ultimately a victim of the disastrous World War I. What was the view of the future near the end of the empire? In the May, 1917 issue of Century Magazine, Herbert Adams Gibbons wrote an article entitled “Europe and Islam: The Problems of the Califate and the Devolution of Mohammedan Lands.” This article also serves as a chapter in his book, published in the same year as The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near East (pp. 101-153). His use of “Mohammedan” was common for the time, but his argument is well worth reading today for his critique of European relations with the Ottomans and the Islamic world.
For Gibbons, who had spent years as a journalist in Turkey, the handwriting was already on the wall. The Ottoman “defenselessness has kept whetted the territorial appetite of the European powers. Some choice morsels have already been devoured: Russia was eating steadily until she reached Armenia across the Caucasus in 1878; and France and England did not stop for half a century until Tunis was consumed in 1881 and Egypt in 1882; Austria revived the European traditions of the generation before in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908; Italy and France in Tripoli and Morocco in 1911.”
“And after the present what – what more?” asked Gibbons. The carving up of Ottoman lands on the back of a napkin had already been set on the table, so the knives were ready. Gibbons noted that Russia wanted all of Armenia and even Istanbul; the French claimed Syria; the British were beating their way to Baghdad; Italy was dreaming of Albania and Asia Minor; Austria-Hungary was savoring Macedonia. Germany, on the other hand, “claims to be the protector of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and the sole friend left to Islam.”
“The history of international diplomacy in the Islamic world,” writes the American journalist Gibbons with little sympathy for European political ambitions, “is an unbroken record of bullying and blundering on the part of all the powers. In governmental policies one searches in vain for more than an occasional ray of chivalry, uprightness, altruism, for a consistent line of action in attempting to solve the problems that were leading Europe from one war to another, for constructive statesmanship. European cabinets used the aspirations of Christian subject races to promote their own ends against one another and to threaten Turkey. Then, for fear of sacrificing what they thought they had gained, foreign offices and ambassadors allowed the wretched Christians to be massacred for having dared to respond to European overtones and to put faith in promises of protection.”
Here is what Gibbons proposed:
Gibbons continues: “The indictment of European diplomacy in the near East is terrible; one might even say that it seems incredible.” After recounting the havoc sown by the major European powers, he adds, “The result is that virtually every Mohammedan country in the world has been treated by European nations as Belgium and Serbia and Poland have been treated. Their wrongs cry out to Heaven to be redressed, their aspirations cry out to the sense of fairness and justice for all mankind to be heard.”
So what was the author’s wish in 2017: “The problem is a thorny one, and, I am told by my diplomatic friends, ‘exceedingly difficult’. But that is only because European statesmen and politicians have made it so. Let every power in Europe proclaim its own disinterestedness, and state that it does not regard this war as a war of conquest, but a war of emancipation, and, lo! the problem disappears.”
Sadly, the problem did not disappear and new problems inevitably evolved.