Kemal's shahids and gazis

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Jul 1, 2012 at 05:55

Gerard wrote

> "And it was also a British that wrote the death fatwa against Kemal in 1919 and not the caliph and his sheikh ul-Islam?"

Can it not be argued that the sheikh ul-Islam was as equally traitorous as the caliph, placing their own interests over the interests of the general population?<

That would be a strange argument if you looked at who was financing, arming and politically supporting Kemal's movement - Lenin, the Third International,the Red Army, Soviet Special Services. So if you insisted on your point, you should be immediately confronted with the question - Who wasn't traitorus and who was more traitorous ? In my opinion Kemal finally won because he lied better. He was more traitorous, mendacious, perfidious, and ruthless than all his opponents put together.

Second,even if this argument were valid, then it was invented ex post when Kemal badly needed arguments to get rid of the Sultanate and the Caliphate whereas in the old days it was never used. His movement was based on the lie that Kemal was secretly cooperating with the caliph who is under arrest and must be liberated and whose rights infringed upon by the infidel Westerners must be restored. His was a secred mission on behalf of Islam and its head. And indeed,at that time the question was nver mooted on not how to abolish the sultan-caliphn but how to help him regain full power and independence; not how to circumvent him but how to liberate him and make him as strong as before.

In the notorious fatwa which Kemal's grand mufti of Ankara Mehmet Rifat Effendi Börekçi composed on 15th April 1920 we read :

"ask yourselves : Is it a sacred duty of all the Moslems to fight with all their might for the liberation of their caliph who has been deprived of his prestige and whose hands are bound ?

Answer : Allah knows best all of all that it is!

Are therefore the Moslems , who are fighting to rescue the sultane from the claws of those who are robbing him of his ability to exercise his lawful rights and to liberate the territories of the fatherland attacked by the enemies, considered as straying from the path of Allah ?

Answer : Allahs knows best of all that they aren't !

Oh ye who have fought to restore to the caliph his rights of which he has been deprived , ask yourselves : Must those individuals who have died fighting for this cause be considered shahids and those who have survived gazis - holy warriors of Allah ?

Answer : Allah knows best of all that they must ! "

(E. Zengis, The Abolishment of the Sultane and caliphate in Turkey, Thessaloniki 2002,p.141-142 where the Kemalist fatwa is quoted in its entirety)

As an historical document the Kemalist fatwa of April 1920 is by all means worth mentioning as it exposes better than anything else the later crooked and misleading official Kemalist propaganda which you seem to be repeating and which intellectual janissaries from the West uncritically accept while others are simply fooled by it.

"Third, Turkey lost a war which it had started by bombing Russian Black Sea ports and by declaring jihad on the Entente."

The declaration was a political move, intended to inspire Muslims in India to rise up against the British and to discourage the Arabs from siding with the British.<

In Islam religion is a different name for politics. Can you name a single war which Turkey waged which was not for the Turks jihad ?

> T.E. Lawrence noted the failure of this declaration as it was repudiated by the Arabs because the jihad had been declared with an infidel Christian nation (Germany) has an ally.<

As allies of another Christian nation, namely Britain, the Arabs were hardly the most appropriate judge on how jihad is to be declared and how not, I surmise.

> Members of the young turks (not all of them muslims), while being disdainful of Islam, had no qualms leveraging it in order to attack their enemies.

Where did you fdin the news that the Young Turks were "disdainful of Islam"?The period of their rule coincides with an upsurge of Islamic fanaticism, pogroms and persecutions of Christian minorities which logically culminated in the Armenian genocide and which was continued by a disciple of the Young Turks Mustafa Kemal in the form of the Greek and Assyrian genocides. The period of official contempt for Islam began much later and was Kemal's violent reaction to the inevitable exposure of his lie that he was allegedly fighting to liberate the caliph.

And as to your phrase "not all of them muslims", those naive non-Moslems who supported the young Turks before 1907 quite soon regretted having done so as generally all who support Turks in the end regret what they have done.

> In fact, the Young Turk propagandists tried to portray the German Kaiser as being descended from Muhammed and having gone on pilgrimage to Mecca (I cite Aaron Aaronsohns "With the Turks in Palestine").<

True. Kaiser Wilhelm II also contributed a lot to this myth declaring himself to be protector of Islam and showing how respectful of its laws and customs he was.

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