'The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal by Tekin Alp' [‎3r] (10/58)

FOREWORD
Tekin Alp’s The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal contains rather
valuable information as to the underlying forces in the Near and Middle
East which in the recent past have been shaping the destinies of those
regions, have been, perhaps, the main factors in bringing about the
present “ War for the East ”, and may in the future seriously affect the
British and Russian positions in Turkey, Persia, Egypt, the Caucasus,
Trans-Caucasia, Afghanistan, and India.
Tekin Alp styles the Pan-Turkish ideal and its workings as a “ revolu
tion whose very existence has been almost unsuspected by the world
at large ”, and a study of the picture he portrays may be useful to those
responsible for British, Russian, French, and Italian interests in the East.
He would seem to be, perhaps, consciously inaccurate as to cause and
effect when he describes the Young Turks as driven from Ottomanism
into Turkification and Pan-Turanianism by the hostility of the non-
Turkish elements in the Ottoman Empire. The “ Ottoman ” idea as
opposed to the l( Turkish ” idea, which would correspond to the British
as opposed to the “ English ” idea in the British Empire and to the
u German ” as opposed to the ii Prussian idea in Central Europe, was
welcomed by the non-Turkish races in the Ottoman Empire as guaran
teeing them their “ Particularismus”, but, at the outset of the Young Turk
Revolution in 1908, it was noticed that many purely Turanian agents
from the Caucasus, Persia, &c., were in close touch with the inner circle
of the Committee of Union and Progress, and when in 1909 the Committee
began to Turkify the Albanians, Arabs, and others, the non-Turkish
elements felt that their national existence was menaced by the new
dispensation. The Albanians revolted and the Balkan States were driven
into union by the common enemy, while the Arabs and Armenians took
up a defensive attitude. Jemal Pasha’s recent anti-Arab and Pan-
Turkish policy has been the cause of the Hejaz rising, and the same
policy and tendency were, doubtless, responsible in great part for the
extermination of the Armenians who formed an Aryan race-wedge
between the Asia Minor Turks and their Turanian brethren in NW.
Persia and the Caucasus.
Whereas the old regime in Turkey under Sultan Abdul Hamid was
mainly theocratic and based on the brotherhood of Islam, the new regime,
while still championing Islam, relegated Pan-Islamism to the second
place and aimed at the reincarnation of the purely Turkish soul by
grafting modern science and knowledge on the old Turanian traditions
represented by Attila, Genghiz Khan, and Sultan Selim the Grim. The