The Young Turk Revolution

In July 1908 a movement of reformist officers and officials, loosely called the Young Turks and led by the Committee of Union and Progress (the Ittihat ve Terakki), rose in the Ottoman Balkan provinces of Macedonia and forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the constitution of 1876, which he had suspended for some thirty years, and to recall the parliament, opening what Ottomans called the Second Constitutional Era. The movement's strength lay in the Third Army officers stationed in Rumelia, who marched their units out in defiance of the palace; when the sultan-caliph yielded, the news ran by telegraph from the provinces to the capital and out across the empire. It was met with extraordinary jubilation: crowds poured into the squares of Istanbul and the provincial cities, banners and placards were raised in the streets, and for a brief season Muslims, Christians and Jews celebrated together under the slogans of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice, hailing what they hoped would be a new era of constitutional and shared Ottoman citizenship. M. Sukru Hanioglu's study of the Young Turk movement and Feroz Ahmad's account of the Committee in power trace both the conspiratorial preparation behind the rising and the politics that followed it. The hope was that constitutional government would halt the empire's decline and bind its peoples together; the reality proved harder. The Committee soon came to dominate politics; a counter-revolution in 1909 was put down and Abdulhamid II was deposed; and under the pressure of the Italian war over Libya, the Balkan Wars and the rise of competing nationalisms, the early promise of a liberal, multi-communal Ottomanism gave way to a narrower and increasingly authoritarian, Turkish-nationalist rule that would carry the empire into the First World War. The 1908 revolution is therefore remembered as a moment of great and genuine hope whose promise was not kept, a hinge between the long Hamidian era and the final decade of the empire. This scene depicts that first jubilation in a hillside square of Istanbul in the summer of 1908: a crowd massed with banners and placards before a telegraph office where the proclamation has been posted, with army officers in their red fezzes standing among the townspeople and the domes and minarets of the city rising across the strait beyond.