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S A R A H D. S H I E L D S
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Acknowledgments ix
Note on Names and Translations xi
Appendix I 251
Appendix II 253
Note on Sources 255
Abbreviations 257
Notes 259
Bibliography 289
Index 297
vii
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ix
x Acknowledgements
Ankara, the Hafez al-Assad Library in Damascus, the Cultural Center Library in
Antakya, and Princeton University Special Collections.
I have benefited from conversation with colleagues in many places while
working on this book, including Lisa Pollard, James Gelvin, Joshua Landis,
Michael Hunt, and the History Department at Mustafa Kemal University in
Antakya. Many, many thanks go to those who have taken the time to read pre-
vious versions, make helpful suggestions, ask difficult questions, and provide
continuing support: Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Jane Thrailkill, Sheryl Kroen, John
Sweets, Zeynep Turkyilmaz, Kathryn Burns, Yektan Turkyilmaz, Peter Sluglett,
Marko Dumančić, Joy Reeder, and Brett Merryman. Many thanks to Süha Ünsal,
Öktay Özel, and the now-defunct Nüvis, for carrying out the oral history project
related to this research. Thanks also to Koray Cengiz and my other friends in
Antakya who have hosted me and those who have taken time to tell me about
their own experiences, especially Zeki Ural. I appreciate Mihrac Ural’s permis-
sion to use family photographs, and Mehmet Saplama’s agreement to let me
include his photographs. Thanks to Bill Nelson for the maps and to Jane Merry-
man for the index. Thanks also to Susan Ferber, Joellyn Ausanka, the board at
Oxford University Press, and my anonymous readers for their suggestions
toward improving this book.
My friends have listened to my big questions with even greater patience, and
helped me work through many of my ideas; thanks go to Ömür Kayıkcı, Hala
Khdeer, Sahar Amer, Martine Antle, and Lisa Lindsay. Katie and Ian allowed
themselves to be dragged from archive to archive nearly every summer for most
of high school, when they might well have preferred other activities. They have
always been unfailing in their patience and support for me and my projects, for
which I am much more than grateful. And to William, who has lived with this
book, has read too many drafts without complaint, has been consistently
encouraging and endlessly helpful, I owe more than I can express. This book
is dedicated to him, with the greatest thanks, for his love, his insight, and his
presence.
N O T E O N N A M E S A N D T R A N S L AT I O N S
The problems created by fracturing the commonalities of the past are evident on
every page of this book and have created a serious challenge for the author. Most
of the cities in the contested Sanjak gradually acquired two different names. Was
the altercation at Karim’s café in Rihaniye (transliterated from Arabic) or in
Reyhanlı (Turkish spelling)? I have tried to provide place names consistently as
they appear in 2010 international usage to make it easier for readers to actually
locate them on maps. The index will provide alternative names.
Even more difficult, and central to the whole project, is the problem of per-
sonal names. The same four Arabic letters, for example, would be used to iden-
tify Muhammad in Syria and Mehmet in Turkey; four other Arabic letters could
indicate Cemil in Turkey and Jamil in Syria. What should I call these men? The
spelling I choose could, unfortunately, appear to assign an identity with which
Muhammad/Mehmet or Cemil/Jamil might disagree. Hyphenating names
would be completely unwieldy. I ask the reader’s indulgence if I have provided
inaccurate cues through the spellings of individual names. I hope it will remind
readers of the common origins of the people of the Sanjak, the arbitrariness with
which they were asked to “identify” themselves into mutually exclusive and ex-
ternally constructed categories, and the confusion that resulted when people
who had long been allowed multiple identities were informed that they could
henceforth belong only to either one group or another.
xi
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Fezzes in the River
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Introduction
Saydo’s Argument
In the early afternoon of May 10, 1938, a chauffeur named Saydo sat chatting in
front of a café in the town of Reyhanlı, in the Sanjak of Alexandretta. Haydar
Hassan Musto and a group of friends saw Saydo, approached his table, and began
screaming at him. Witnesses described the scene that followed: harsh words,
blows, and revolvers brandished in the air. When prosecutors questioned the
witnesses, however, most were unable to recount the crescendo of words as
Haydar insulted Saydo’s mother, demanded that Saydo declare himself to be an
Arab, threatened to kill him if he claimed to be a Turk, and taunted him about
the brimmed hat he was wearing. The witnesses were unable to recount the
argument about whether Saydo should declare himself an Arab or a Turk because
it had taken place in a language they did not understand: neither Arabic nor
Turkish, but Kurdish.1
In Saydo’s argument, the main participants were Kurds, but one Kurd was
demanding that the other claim to be an Arab instead of registering as a Turk.
Saydo’s argument suggests that nationalism in the Middle East was somehow
fluid—that people were not convinced they had single, fixed identities, or that
their identities had to determine their political outlooks. This study examines
how people in the Sanjak of Alexandretta struggled to articulate their complex
set of allegiances and beliefs when the League of Nations demanded, in 1937,
that every man declare his “identity.”
Although Saydo’s argument took place thousands of miles from Europe, it
was one of the countless ripples reverberating from the Europeans’ reinvention
of the world at the end of World War I. The war had been catastrophic, leaving
more than eight million people dead, another 21 million wounded, and making
refugees of uncounted millions more. As diplomats, generals and politicians
contemplated the future, they searched for clues on how to proceed. Like foren-
sic investigators at an arson site, European statesmen shifted through the ashes
of their old order to try to discover the causes of the inferno that seemed to have
3
Antioch, circa 1940. Courtesy of: Mehmet Saplama.
Introduc tion 5
engulfed the world and forever transformed it. Their varied analyses of the causes
of the war, added to their perceptions of the consequences of the peace, would
produce over the next decades an array of ideological impulses ranging from a
new liberalism, through communism, fascism, and Naziism.
That wide range of ideologies reflects the complexities of the questions facing
Europe’s leaders at the end of the Great War. What caused the war? How could
Europe cope with frustrated nationalists, like the gunman who killed Francis
Ferdinand? What kind of government—indeed, what type of state—should
replace the expansive and autocratic empires just defeated? What should happen
to the Asian and African colonies of the defeated powers? How could the colo-
nial competition that had exacerbated European animosities be brought under
control? To the urgency of finding answers in the ashes was joined the exciting
possibilities inherent in vast reconstruction.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson articulated the exhilarating potential of the
new opportunities, insisting that the postwar settlements would constitute “a
readjustment of those great injustices which underlie the whole structure of
European and Asiatic society.” Those great injustices, for Wilson, were rooted in
the absence of democratic rule. The new postwar order would put all govern-
ments “in the hands of the people and taken out of the hands of coteries and of
sovereigns, who had no right to rule over the people. It is a people’s treaty, that
accomplishes by a great sweep of practical justice the liberation of men who
never could have liberated themselves. . . . The men who sat around the table in
Paris knew that the time had come when the people were no longer going to
consent to live under masters, but were going to live the lives that they chose
themselves, to live under such governments as they chose themselves to erect.
That is the fundamental principle of this great settlement.”2 It was a liberatory
impulse that had led to the postwar settlements, he insisted, consonant with the
demand for “self-determination of peoples” that he had articulated during his
1917 speech to the U.S. Congress.
The League of Nations was constructed as the embodiment of the new order
and the repository of its hopes. Here, statesmen could work out their disagree-
ments without recourse to war; in its chambers, people’s grievances could be
addressed before they escalated into revolution. Among the first projects of the
League of Nations would be to legitimize the territorial settlements that resulted
from the defeat of the enormous empires and to agree on a means for dealing
with their colonies. Working from a set of assumptions about the superiority of
nationalism and self-determination as the future of civilized Europe, the League
of Nations carved out new nation-states, trying to satisfy potentially destabiliz-
ing nationalists where possible and creating a series of treaties to protect “minor-
ities” when it became clear that each group claiming to be a nation could not be
awarded an independent state.
6 Fezzes in the River
over issues of identity. Underpinning this claim was an assertion about the pri-
macy of linguistic affiliation: Turkey could claim neighboring territory because
the people there spoke Turkish. Under the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian
empires, claims had been made and territories defined on the basis of the power
of the ruling family. Linguistic groups had lived for centuries divided among
competing empires, and each empire had always contained more than one lin-
guistic group. Now the Turks were playing by new rules—rules in which linguis-
tic identity marked “national” affiliation, which in turn would determine
territorial destiny.
But, as this book shows, these were not rules that Atatürk’s new Turkish
Republic had created. Rather, nationalism was the fundamental assumption
behind the League of Nations; the League’s ideology of nationalism provided a
blueprint for allocating both power and territory. Thus, Turkish claims that the
Sanjak should have special treatment because it was home to a preponderance of
Turks resonated among the European states deliberating at the League’s head-
quarters in Geneva. Irredentist claims, in which one country asserted its right to
territory on the basis of the inhabitants’ identity, had become the daily fare of the
League of Nations by the time the French and Turkish governments brought up
the question of the Sanjak of Alexandretta. Indeed, by 1936, when the dispute
first garnered international attention, Germany had already left the League after
its own territorial claims based on linguistic identity were frustrated. With the
radical new ethnolinguistic definition of political identity, the League’s problem
in the Sanjak became simple: once it had devised a process to define accurately
the people of the Sanjak, the League of Nations would know how to allocate the
Sanjak’s territory.
This new, widespread acceptance of the notion that the language of a territo-
ry’s population indicated a distinct ethnic identity that defined its political affili-
ation was a marked departure from previous notions of belonging, and not only
in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout Europe, states incorporated diverse lin-
guistic groups, while at the same time excluding many people who spoke the
majority language of the state; many tongues could be heard within Germany’s
borders, for example, and German was spoken by people who were citizens of
other states. Censuses taken by the newly defeated Ottoman Empire had
reflected only religious groups; linguistic groups like Turks, Kurds, and Arabs
never made sense under Ottoman imperial ideology. The Ottoman Empire that
had ruled the Sanjak for centuries before Saydo’s argument was hardly Turkish.
It was a polyglot, multiethnic empire, home to many religious groups, and held
together by its ruling family, the descendants of Osman. That remarkable diver-
sity was quite evident in the Sanjak of Alexandretta, where people often spoke
more than one language, where Kurds married Turks, Arabs married Kurds, and
the church steeples were easily visible from neighboring minarets. This is not to
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