706729

research-article2017
WIH0010.1177/0968344517706729War in HistoryHock

Article

War in History

“Waking us from this

2019, Vol. 26(2) 204­–226
© The Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0968344517706729
https://doi.org/10.1177/0968344517706729
Ottoman–Italian War and journals.sagepub.com/home/wih

North Africa in the Ottoman

Twentieth Century

Stefan Hock
Georgetown University, USA

Abstract
The Ottoman–Italian War of 1911–1912, often overlooked as little more than a prelude to much
greater calamities, produced a vibrant discourse in Ottoman-language newspapers that called
attention to issues including the efficacy of international law, Ottoman sovereignty, and the place
of North Africa in the Ottoman imperial imagination. This article explores the coverage of the
war in the Ottoman-language press and argues that the outbreak of the Ottoman–Italian War
produced similar claims on the need to protect the Ottoman nation – and Ottoman imperial
ambitions – to those following the Balkan Wars to which historiography ascribes much more
importance.

Keywords
Ottoman–Italian War, Ottoman Empire, Libya, Ottoman Press, Committee of Union and
Progress

I. Introduction
Italy invaded Trablusgarp. There is no apparent reason; it is completely contrary to international
law. The reason for the invasion is so facile and the attack so hasty that the whole world was
astonished, as Sadrazam Paşa [the Grand Vizier] said. However, we should not be surprised by
this. We must think of this as a warning to guard our country, our fatherland. Our being at war
with Italy, in my opinion, must take the shape of saving the Ottoman people’s national honour

Corresponding author:
Stefan Hock, Department of History, Georgetown University, ICC 600, 37th and O Streets NW,
Washington, DC 20057, USA.
Email: sgh28@georgetown.edu
Hock 205

(milli namusunu) in Trablusgarp. The Hundred Years’ War between the French and the English
is well-known. We too must continue our Hundred Years’ War with Italy.1

So explained Emrullah Efendi, a representative from Kırk Kilise (Kırklareli in modern

Turkey), in his address to the Ottoman Parliament on 19 October 1911, twenty days after
Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. After citing the weakness of the Ottoman
navy as one of the main causes for the Italian attack having been carried out, he con-
cluded his address by calling for the war’s continuation, imploring Ottomans to take
back their ‘right’ (hakkı).
Three years after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the restoration of the Ottoman
constitution, the Italian declaration of war on 29 September 1911 marked the first of a
series of conflicts that embroiled the empire in an almost continuous state of war between
1911 and 1923. These included the Ottoman–Italian War (1911–1912), the Balkan Wars
(1912–1913), the First World War (1914–1918), and the Turkish War of Independence
(1919–1923). These wars effected deep changes politically, socially, and militarily within
the empire. As Feroz Ahmad articulates, ‘Anyone seeking an appropriate period in order
to study the impact of war on society is unlikely to find one more suitable for this pur-
pose than the decade 1908-18 in the history of the late Ottoman Empire’.2
Emrullah Efendi’s address illustrates that the outbreak of hostilities with Italy sparked
a reappraisal of the empire’s place in the international community. To many contemporary
observers, the war was wholly contrary to the tenets of international law and exposed the
hypocrisies of Great Power politics.3 Twentieth-century Ottoman leaders ‘viewed Great
Power diplomacy as a fixed game’ which the Ottomans could not win;4 the only alterna-
tive that could guarantee Ottoman independence, many believed, was a strong military
capable of going to war at any time. International law and diplomacy, by contrast, were
depicted by the press as ‘scarcely disguised tools of imperialist expansionism’.5
Most English-language studies of the Ottomans’ growing disillusionment with Great
Power politics have centred upon the impact of Balkan Wars. According to Touraj

  1 Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıt Ceridesi, 19 October 1911, Dördüncü İntikad, p.26, quoted in
İsrafil Kurtcephe, ‘Osmanlı Parlementosu ve Türk-İtalyan Savaşı (1911-1912)’, Osmanlı
Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 5 (1994), pp.238-9.
   2 Feroz Ahmad, ‘War and Society Under the Young Turks, 1908-1918’, Review (Fernand
Braudel Center) 11, no. 2 (1988), p.265.
   3 Mustafa Aksakal, ‘Not “by those old books of international law, but only by war”: Ottoman
Intellectuals on the Eve of the Great War’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 15 (2004), pp.516-7.
Also see on developments in Ottoman international law theory Mustafa Serdar Palabıyık,
‘International Law for Survival: Teaching International Law in the Late Ottoman Empire
(1859–1922)’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78, no. 2 (2015), pp.
271-292 and the special issue on international law of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish
Studies Association 3 (2016).
  4 Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First
World War (New York, 2010), p.9.
   5 Mustafa Aksakal, ‘The Limits of Diplomacy: The Ottoman Empire and the First World
War’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 7 (2011), p.198.
206 War in History 26(2)

Atabaki and Erik Zürcher, the Balkan Wars revealed ‘painful object lessons in the
Empire’s military weakness’ and ‘the threat of imminent disintegration’.6 Michael
Reynolds adds that ‘The message of the Balkan Wars was that the death of Europe’s
“Sick Man” was at hand’.7 However, Isa Blumi has pointed to problems with this narra-
tive. Blumi posits that remembrance of the Balkan Wars has been the victim of ‘the
academic fixation on the emergence of the nation-state’,8 specifically as it related to the
ascendancy of nationalism in twentieth-century Europe. Writing the history of war in the
Ottoman twentieth century specifically in relation to this ascendancy in Europe occludes
challenges that the empire faced from other sources of conflict.
I argue that the 1911–1912 Ottoman–Italian War, often overlooked as it occurred on
the heels of the Balkan Wars, began a similar process of assessing the efficacy of inter-
national law and the inability of the Great Powers to intervene on the empire’s behalf.
Although scholars pay lip service to the Ottoman–Italian War as the first in the empire’s
near continuous decade of warfare, few treat it as anything more than a precursor to a
much greater disaster. Isabel Hull suggests of Germany that historians have adopted the
viewpoint of turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers who believed that ‘small wars’ in
the colonies were of secondary importance from ‘real’ European conflicts; a salient
observation in the context of the Ottoman–Italian War’s historiography vis-à-vis that of
the Balkan Wars.9
I suggest that it was through the vocabulary of Osmanlılık, or Ottomanism, that intel-
lectuals could argue that a relatively far-flung part of the empire like Libya was, in fact,
a pivotal Ottoman territory and used that status to garner support to resist the Italian
occupation. Carter Findley defines Osmanlılık as ‘an imperial Ottoman supranational-
ism’,10 while Palmira Brummett characterizes it as an ‘inclusive, understood, assumed
category’, which attempted to supersede local affiliations and senses of identity.11 For the
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Ottomanism was a political tool with which it
could attempt to face the problems of governing a multi-ethnic state and managing cri-
ses.12 It existed alongside other ideologies like Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism which,
along with Ottomanism, the CUP drew upon simultaneously for the purpose of

  6 Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under
Atatürk and Reza Shah (New York, 2004), p.183, p.5.
  7 Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian
Empires 1908-1918 (New York, 2011), p.36.
   8 Isa Blumi, ‘Impacts of the Balkan Wars: The Uncharted Paths from Empire to Nation-State’,
in M. Hakan Yavuz and Isa Blumi, eds. War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913,
and their Sociopolitical Implications, (Salt Lake City, 2013), p.540.
  9 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial
Germany (Ithaca, 2005), p.3.
10 Carter Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton, 1989), p.42, ft. 3.
11 Palmira Brummett, Image & Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911
(Albany, 2000), p.320.
12 On this point, see Abigail Jacobson’s distinction between ‘ideal Ottomanism’ and ‘instru-
mental Ottomanism’. Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between
Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse, 2011), p.91.
Hock 207

maintaining the empire.13 This article shows that Ottomanism was used during the
Ottoman–Italian War in an attempt to foster a sense of imperial interconnectedness
between the Turcophone portions of the empire with both the geographical space of
Libya and its inhabitants. Ensconcing Ottoman North Africa within the imagined
‘vatan’ (fatherland), in turn, gave teeth to the Ottoman remonstrations against the lack
of Great Power protection of Ottoman territory.
Scholars like M. Şükrü Hanioğlu have rightly pointed to the psychological impact
produced by the Balkan Wars, in that the Ottomans lost the vast majority of their
European territories that had been held for centuries, as the Ottoman Empire was ‘reduced
to an Asiatic state’.14 Might the same be said of the empire’s loss of its final territory in
Africa? At the commencement of hostilities in 1911, Africa was still presented as part of
the empire’s dominions that spread across three continents. In the 28 September 1911
edition of Servet-i Fünun, Ahmet İhsan (Tokgöz) argued that ‘we would be obliged to
confess our inability to safeguard and defend our country (ülkemizin) that spans the con-
tinents of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the event of a sudden attack’. He criticized the
European alliance system and the failure of international law as reasons for such a blatant
attack to be carried out and exclaimed ‘here is the diplomacy of Europe in the twentieth
century!’15
What is today known as Libya (Trablusgarp in Ottoman Turkish) was incorporated
into the Ottoman Empire in 1551. Trablusgarp became a vilayet in 1864 while Benghazi
became a semi-autonomous sancak that was still subordinate to Istanbul in 1877.16 As
the ‘scramble for Africa’ amongst the Great Powers intensified in the 1880s, Libya
assumed a larger importance to İstanbul, especially in the wake of the loss of Tunis in
1881 and the British invasion of Egypt in 1882.17 Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909)
placed particular importance on the Ottomans’ North African holdings, as he believed
these areas were rife with the opportunity to spread Islam to tribes as well as to expand
the empire’s borders deeper southward.18 Other observers too underscored Tripoli’s sui
generis qualities in North Africa; Mohammad Farid wrote in 1902 that Trablusgarp was

13 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902-1908 (New York,
2001), p.298.
14 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008), p.173.
15 ‘Trablusgarb’, Servet-i Fünun, 28 September 1911.
16 On the history of Ottoman Libya, see Mostafa Minawi, ‘Lines in the Sand: The Ottoman
Empire’s Policies of Expansion and Consolidation on its African and Arabian Frontiers
(1882–1902)’ (PhD Diss., New York University, 2011); Rachel Simon, Libya Between
Ottomanism and Nationalism: The Ottoman Involvement in Libya during the War with
Italy (1911-1919) (Berlin, 1987); Lisa Anderson, ‘Nineteenth-Century Reform in Ottoman
Libya’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 3 (Aug., 1984), pp.325-348;
and Michael Le Gall, ‘The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 21, no. 1 (1989), pp.91-106.
17 Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman
Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no.
2 (Apr., 2003), p.319.
18 Hale Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı ve 1911-1912 Türk-İtalyan İlişkileri: Trablusgarp
Savaşı’nda Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’le İlgili Bazı Belgeler (Ankara, 1989), p.6.
208 War in History 26(2)

‘the one vilayet in North Africa that foreigners have not entered’.19 The short period of
time after the Ottoman defeat to Russia in the War of 1877–1878 offered the Ottomans a
chance to ‘participate in the new system of imperialism or risk becoming a “fair target”
of European colonialism’.20 Libya was a key site upon which the Ottoman participation
in imperial politics unfolded.
Scholars writing in Turkish in the 1980s and 1990s produced several monographs and
articles on the Ottoman–Italian War, providing valuable histories of parliamentary
debates and political decision-making processes leading up to the war. More recent his-
torians writing in English, however, often treat Ottoman Africa with tertiary importance
at best. Edward Erickson argues that the Ottoman loss of Trablusgrap ‘cost the Turks
next to nothing except a near worthless province’.21 While Sean McMeekan cogently
characterizes the 1911–1912 war as the conflict that perhaps best ‘exemplifies the reduc-
tio ad absurdum of European imperialism’, he suggests at the same time that the Libyan
territories were ‘a mere afterthought in the Ottoman Empire’. The Sanusi tribesmen who
inhabited them were, moreover, ‘essentially untouched by the modern world’.22
In addition to archival evidence indicating that the Ottoman government endeavoured
to more firmly integrate its Libyan territories as early as 1895,23 accounts written by
contemporaries during and immediately after the conflict belie the dismissive tone of
some modern historians. Several scathing critiques of international law emerged in the
years after the war’s outbreak as a response to the perceived illegality of Italy’s attack.
To one observer, Örikağasızade Hasan Sırrı,24 Italy’s was a war without a casus belli and
had only the express purpose of annexing the Ottoman Libyan provinces. ‘There is no
doubt’, he argued, that such a war was ‘illicit’ (gayr-i meşru).25 Celal Nuri, a prominent
Ottoman journalist, similarly argued in a 1911/2 compilation of articles he had previ-
ously published in Tanîn, the semi-official organ of the Committee of Union and Progress:

19 Aḥmad Ṣidqī al-Dajjānī, Lībiyā Qubayla al-Iḥtilāl al-Īṭālī, aw, Ṭarāblus al-Gharb fī ākhir
al-ʻahd al-ʻUthmānī al-Thānī 1882-1911 (Cairo, 1971), p.15.
20 Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara
and the Hijaz (Stanford, 2016), p.6.
21 Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912-1913
(Westport, 2003), p.74.
22 Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern
Middle East, 1908-1923 (New York, 2015), p.63. In point of fact, a French report from the
end of the nineteenth century puts the number of students enrolled in two schools opened by
the Sanusiyya at 15,600, while the number of pupils in mobile schools likely exceeded this
number, as they were successful in attracting individuals from nomadic tribes without inter-
fering in their economic livelihood. See Minawi, ‘Lines in the Sand’, p.59 and Anderson,
‘Nineteenth Century Reform in Ottoman Libya’, p.332 on the Sanusiyya and education.
23 Specifically, the Ottomans planned a North African telegraph network that aimed to bet-
ter connect the Libyan provinces to İstanbul. Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa,
pp.95-7.
24 Sırrı (1861-1939) was an administrator and educator, notably at the Darülfünun Devletler
Hukuku Müderrisi and the İstanbul Hukuk Mektebi during the Hamidian period (1876-1909).
25 Örikağasızade Hasan Sırrı, Hukuk-i Düvel Nokta-yı Nazarından Osmanlı-İtalya Muharebesi
(İstanbul, 1914), p.10.
Hock 209

Today there is more or less a law that Europe applies to the international body. In fact this law
is supposedly accepted and affirmed by all… Because we are not Christian, European, or
American, we supposedly have no right to profit from this law – this Christian law and European
law – to the same degree. As such in their relations with us, conforming to these rules is quite
a burden for the European nations.26

In light of this discrepancy between the application of international law, he concluded,

‘The time for us to scrutinise these laws has now come to pass’, as the Italian attacks
‘have occurred against right and justice, against an oath and promise’.27 Mustafa Halit
likewise pointed out the inability of international law to protect Ottoman sovereignty:

There exists no higher authority to safeguard the ordinances of international law – there is no
code of laws, no court, and there is no universal power. Justice is now supposedly established
between nations; although binding agreements are established, these do not constitute law.28

The Great Powers’ failure to rein in their Italian colleagues convinced some Ottomans
that any European guarantees of security based on international law were hollow ones.
This is a phenomenon that again escalated after the Balkan Wars, but Italy’s ability to
execute a blatant land grab against Ottoman territory threw into stark relief the inadequa-
cies of international law and Great Power protection to ensure Ottoman sovereignty.
Some observers outside of the Ottoman Empire also noted the illegality of the war.
A New York Times article from 28 September 1911 averred that the Italian attack ‘is a
violation of the principles of international law, humanity, and civilisation. It is evident
that there is no justice in Europe. Treaties are merely instruments of deception’.29
These arguments raise the question of how Ottomans were rallied to fight and show
their support for a war that threatened the empire’s place in the Concert of Europe. This
article draws primarily upon Ottoman-language newspapers that were published during
the Ottoman–Italian War. Historians Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Oktem, and Maurus
Reinkowski have described the twentieth-century Ottoman state ‘an anti-colonial
empire’, illustrating the paradox between its leaders’ desire to maintain the empire’s
status as a nominal imperial power while it simultaneously resisted European imperial
encroachment.30 The press needed to toe a delicate line in this regard; it thus both needed
to defend Ottoman claims to sovereignty over a faraway territory while also denouncing
the supposedly immoral qualities of European imperialism vis-à-vis the Ottoman brand
of imperium.
The large number of articles and books published in the years during and immediately
after the war reflects the continued importance that Ottoman thinkers ascribed to Libya.

26 Celal Nuri, Kendi Nokta-yı Nazarımdan Hukuk-i Düvel (İstanbul, 1911/2), pp.4-6.
27 Ibid., p.6.
28 Mustafa Halit, Telhis-i Hukuk-u Umumiye-yi Düvel (İstanbul, 1911/2), p.12.
29 ‘Constantinople Expects War’, The New York Times, 28 September 1911, p.2.
30 Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski, introduction to World War I
and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (New York,
2015), pp.6-9.
210 War in History 26(2)

After an initial period of relaxing restrictions on the press following the 1908 revolution,
the CUP issued a new press law in the summer of 1909 in the wake of the aborted coun-
ter-revolution that revived censorship as the CUP struggled to maintain its dominance.31
This provides a window into examining officially sanctioned views about the war and
helps to add insight into how the Ottoman press attempted to manage the crisis of an
unexpected war.
On the eve of the First World War, Ottoman political writing sought to mobilize all
segments of society for the defence of the state, which required ‘a comprehensive pro-
cess, a process that would equip the people with the necessary passion and industry to
fend off the dangers facing the empire’.32 Newspapers offer important insight into the
values of the Ottoman elite, for by the time the war broke out, ‘If Ottomans wanted to
live, and to live honourably, they had to embrace an unfaltering patriotism in pursuit of
which they laboured and made sacrifices in the empire’s service’.33 During the Balkan
Wars too, it has been argued that the press ‘brought the war, with its images of cruelty
and mayhem, to homes all over the Ottoman state and beyond’. The Ottoman state used
the press, along with other modes of mass communication, ‘to win citizens over and to
ensure their loyalty, motivation and readiness to make sacrifices’.34 Through analysis of
newspapers in 1911 and 1912, it is evident that these same themes were present during
the war with Italy as well.
Circulation figures for these newspapers are difficult to pinpoint. Most gazettes did
not include circulation statistics as a part of their subscriber information. Some of the
bigger dailies might have enjoyed a daily figure of 50,000 copies, though many had
much smaller numbers, likely closer to 10,000.35 Palmira Brummett describes accounts
of circulation as ‘impressionistic’, and cites one first-hand account from Turkish histo-
rian Enver Şapolyo on the distribution of the newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat, one of the
newspapers used in this study: ‘Tercüman still came out in the evenings in Ebussuud
Caddesi…Hundreds of paper-sellers (müvezzi) waited at the door of the publishing
house. They bought the papers, and sold them, shouting “Tercüman”’.36 These sorts of
descriptive accounts are more prevalent than reliable numerical figures.
What historians have ascertained, however, is that the well-to-do males made up the
majority of Ottoman readers. Consumption of Turkish-language newspapers in İstanbul
was, moreover, wider than those in the provinces, due to the need to wait for papers to arrive
from printing houses in the capital, which could take a considerable amount of time.37
Before the outbreak of the First World War, the number of Arabs in Syria that read newspa-
pers totalled some 12,000, while Palestine and Iraq might have had half that number.38 Most

31 Brummett, Image & Imperialism, p.9.

32 Aksakal, ‘Not “by those old books of international law”’, p.515.
33 Ibid.
34 Eyal Ginio, ‘Mobilizing the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913):
Awakening from the Ottoman Dream’, War in History 12, no. 2 (2005), p.158.
35 Brummett, Image & Imperialism, p.43.
36 Ibid., p.35.
37 Ibid., p.45.
38 Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York, 1995), p.152.
Hock 211

educated Arabs had reading knowledge of Turkish, so presumably members of the Arab
elite would have had the ability to consume Turkish-language publications as well.

II. The Italian Ultimatum

According to Ali Ahmida, Italian nationalists, industrialists, and the Catholic Church had
called for colonial expansion as early as 1886.39 Even prior to Italian unification,
Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian politician and activist for Italian unification, in 1831
claimed an Italian right over Tunisia and Libya.40 These groups argued that colonialism
could elevate Italy to the status of other European great powers; it could provide a solu-
tion to the alleged problem of overpopulation; that Italy had a historical claim to the
Mediterranean as a sphere of influence, based on overtures to a Roman legacy; and that
it could be a grounds for carrying out an Italian-brand of a mission civilisatrice. Advocates
of colonial expansion into Africa also argued that conquest of Tripolitania would be a
strategic waypoint into further trade and expansion into West Africa.41
Italian territorial expansion into Africa began in 1882 in Eritrea. Tripolitania became
all the more important for Italian interests in North Africa after the French established the
protectorate in Tunisia in 1881, where some 11,000 Italians had been living compared
with 500 French. France began to take over many Italian interests in Tunisia, inciting
bitterness from the Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, who described Tunisia as
‘an Italian colony occupied by France’.42 Beginning in the final decade of the nineteenth
century, Italy began to open banks, schools, and publish newspapers in Tripolitania.
Powerful local Jewish and Muslim merchants were in contact with the Italian consulate
in Tripoli as early as 1890.43 Other endeavours in which Italians were engaged through-
out Libya included flour milling, shipping agencies, printing presses, and import/export
ventures under the umbrella of the Società Coloniale Italiana.44
The Banco di Roma was also an important institution in Italian expansion into Libya.
The bank was headed by Ernesto Pacelli of the papal aristocracy and Romolo Tittoni, the
brother of a former Italian foreign minister, both of whom had become interested in
Libya around 1905 and by 1907 had begun investing there. By 1911, the total amount of

39 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and
Resistance, 1830-1932 (Albany, 1994), p.104. A more recent argument by Giuseppe Parlato,
however, argues that Italian nationalists did not ascribe much importance to Tripoli until
December 1910, believing the ‘Tripoli question’ to be a foreign policy issue best handled
by the government. See Giuseppe Parlato, ‘The War in Libya and the Italian Nationalism’,
in Luca Micheletta and Andrea Ungari, eds. The Libyan War 1911-1912 (Newcastle upon
Tyne, 2013), pp.39-57.
40 Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation: Colonial Legacy, Exile and the
Emergence of a New Nation-State (New York, 2010), p.33.
41 Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, p.104.
42 Francesca Fauri, ‘Italians in Africa (1870s-1914), or How to Escape Poverty and Become a
Landowner’, The International History Review 37, no. 2 (2014), p.12.
43 Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, p.105.
44 Anthony Cachia, Libya: Under the Second Ottoman Occupation (1835-1911) (Tripoli,
1945), p.106.
212 War in History 26(2)

capital that had been invested in Libya by the bank amounted to four or five million dol-
lars.45 The Italian government viewed the bank’s investments in Libya as an instrument
to carry out its policy of ‘peaceful penetration’.46 According to Fabio Grassi, one of the
biggest problems that Italy faced in expanding its colonial enterprise was finding territo-
ries that could actually provide it with economic benefits, as Italy’s previous conquests
in Africa failed to yield significant economic advantages.47 Thus the Italians that were
present in Libya sought to wield significant economic influence; Italian shipping lines
controlled some 45 per cent of commerce entering the port of Tripoli.48 The Italian com-
munity had also established its own hospitals, schools, and cultural organizations. The
Banco di Roma, for its part, also began to acquire land through foreclosures on mort-
gages or through agents, in spite of Ottoman laws preventing such acquisition.49
Rodoslu Ebü’l Muzaffar, in a contemporary study of Ottoman Libya, argued that the
actions of the Banco di Roma constituted ‘an economic war’.50 Enver, who would later
earn the title Paşa and become War Minister in 1914 after he gained notoriety from his
exploits in the Balkan Wars, also excoriated the Banco di Roma in the diary he kept dur-
ing the Libyan War. After seeing an Italian solider, whom he believed could not have
been older than a child, Enver asked, ‘Why has someone chased these poor people into
carnage’? His answer:

To fill the coffers of the Banco di Roma. In order to amass a million more in the bankers’
coffers, someone has sent the children of the country [Italy] to their death, to raid another
people (Volk), and all of this in the name of humanity and national honour!51

By 1911, Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti believed that a ‘relatively cheap colonial
war’ would also be politically useful, as the war would shift electoral focus from domes-
tic issues to foreign ones.52 Italy had secured agreements with Germany, Britain, Russia,
France and Austria that legitimized its ambitions. In response to Ottoman attempts to
limit Italian expansion in Libya, Italian nationalists began to push for a military solution
to protect Italian interests. An issue of L’Idea Nazionale ran an article entitled ‘The Duty
to Remember’, which declared: ‘At this hour yet once more Africa calls to us: the ques-
tion of Tripoli is vital…Nationalism today is also Africanism’.53 Nationalist propaganda

45 Charles Stephenson, A Box of Sand: The Italo-Ottoman War 1911-1912, The First Land, Sea
and Air War (East Sussex, 2014), p.37.
46 Timothy Winston Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy and the War over Libya, 1911-1912
(Leiden, 1990), p.32.
47 Fabio L. Grassi, ‘Niçin Trablusgarp? İtalyan Çıkarması Ardındaki Siyaset ve Kültür’, in
Mehmet Ersan and Nuri Karakaş, eds. Ege Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi I. Uluslararası
Tarih Sempozyumu: Osmanlı Devleti’nin Dağılma Sürecinde Trablusgarp ve Balkan
Savaşları, 16-18 Mayıs 2011/İzmir Bildiriler (Ankara, 2013), pp.37-8.
48 Claudio Segrè, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago, 1974), p.41.
49 Stephenson, A Box of Sand, p.37.
50 Rodoslu Ebü’l Muzaffar, Trablusgarp Ahvali: Yeni Dünya (İstanbul, 1911/1912), p.70.
51 Enver Paşa, Um Tripolis (Munich, 1918), pp.27-8.
52 Stephenson, A Box of Sand, p.42.
53 Quoted in Parlato, ‘The War in Libya and the Italian Nationalism’, p.45.
Hock 213

reached a boiling point in September 1911, particularly when the newspaper La Ragione
published a series of false correspondences that the newspaper purported dated to 1894–
5 between German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs and then Italian Prime Minister Francesco
Crispi. According to the report, the abundance of natural resources in Libya would coun-
terbalance the costs of a military campaign.54
The pressure continued to mount and on 26 September 1911, Italy drafted an ultima-
tum and delivered it on the 28th to the Ottoman Empire, which accused the Porte of abus-
ing Italian interests in Libya and leaving the province in a backward state of disarray.55 As
a result, it announced that Italy would occupy the territory if the Ottomans did not reply
within 24 hours. Although the Ottomans were greatly unsettled by the timing of the ulti-
matum, they claimed that Italian interests were, in point of fact, not being abused and
solicited Italian suggestions for solutions to the crisis other than war.56 The Ottomans
blamed any backwardness that existed in Tripolitania on the Hamidian regime and were
even willing to offer economic concessions if it meant the aversion of war.57 According to
Anna Baldinetti, however, Italy had already decided upon war regardless of the Ottoman
response, and indeed, the next day declared itself at war with the Ottoman Empire.58
In the days preceding the outbreak of the war, both the Ottoman press and government
endeavoured to give the impression that relations between the Ottomans and Italians
were normal. An article in Tanîn dated 24 September 1911 written by Hüseyin Cahit, the
newspaper’s editor, argued that according to the author’s own research, there were no
tensions between the Porte and Italy in their official interactions. Friendly relations were
thus persisting and reports of bombardments were, moreover, out of the question, as the
Porte had requested the views of European governments on this subject. Their response
indicated that there was nothing new to be reported other than the peaceful status quo.59
There were, of course, problems with the two governments’ balancing acts, as the
Ottomans were not unaware of certain Italian newspapers having ran fiercely interven-
tionist editorials. In response to the claims of the editorials, Italy argued to İstanbul that
these newspapers were not official ones, and that only government-approved publica-
tions could be trusted for accurate coverage. As late as 27 September, in fact, La Tribuna
insisted that the presence of Italian soldiers was only a precaution, and not indicative of
any incoming occupation so as to assuage Ottoman concerns. Among the official news-
papers, Matin only published on the same day its first story making reference to troop
preparations.60 And indeed, based on memorandums issued from İstanbul to the

54 Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation, pp.34-5.

55 The full text of the Italian Ultimatum and the Ottoman response can be found in Sir Thomas
Barclay, The Turco-Italian War and Its Problems (London, 1912), pp.109-112.
56 W. David Wrigley, ‘Germany and the Turco-Italian War, 1911-1912’, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 11, no. 3 (May 1980), p.320. See also Kurtcephe, ‘Osmanlı
Parlementosu ve Türk-İtalyan Savaşı’.
57 Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy, pp.68-9.
58 Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation, p.36; Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy, p.69.
59 Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, p.43. The article cited by Şıvgın is ‘Trablusgarp’, Tanîn, 24
September 1911.
60 Ibid., p.44.
214 War in History 26(2)

provinces, Hale Şıvgın concludes that until the last moment, the Ottoman government
did not give much likelihood to the chance of an Italian occupation of Tripolitania.61
Even after the outbreak of hostilities, İstanbul appreciated the patriotic sentiments that
emerged in the press while it simultaneously attempted to give the impression that the
imbroglio was under control.62
The shock of the war’s outbreak engendered a strong reaction from the Ottoman print
media. The ultimatum struck a particularly acrimonious chord with elites within the
ranks of the CUP. According to The Times’ correspondent in İstanbul, there existed
among these individuals a ‘natural feeling of indignation at Italy’s aggressive policy’.
The elites also ‘severely censured’ the government headed by Hakkı Paşa, the Grand
Vizier until he resigned on 30 September, for its failure to avert the crisis.63 According to
the newspaper Sebîlürreşad,64 the Ottoman state was faced with a threat from ‘a vile and
dishonourable enemy’ (alçak ve namussuz bir düşmana).65 The newspaper Tercüman-ı
Hakikat66 enclosed the phrase ‘Italians are our eternal enemy’ (İtalyanlar Ebedi
Düşmanımızdır) inside a box on the front page of each issue of the newspaper beginning
on 15 October 1911. The magazine Rübab posed the question ‘Which nation is the most
despicable in the world?’, to which the answer was ‘The Italians’.67
From the outset, newspaper articles presented the Italian attack as an assault upon
Ottomanism, synonymous with the well-being of Ottoman society as a whole. This par-
roted the internal view as seen in a letter dated 10 October 1911 from Ottoman War
Minister Mahmut Şevket Paşa to the staff officer of Tripoli, Albay Neşet, which informed
him that in performing his duties in Tripolitania, ‘The honour of Islam (Müslümanlığın)
and Ottomanism is now in your hands’.68 On 30 September 1911, two days after the
ultimatum, an article written by journalist Ahmet Agayif in Tercüman-ı Hakikat declared:

Compatriots! The ideas and intentions that heretofore maintained us and all the Islamic peoples
have become manifest. For one, look at state of the Islamic world today. Marakeş is being torn

61 Ibid., p.45. There is some disagreement on the question of the extent to which the Porte was
abreast of the possibility of war. Kazim Bey, the Ottoman ambassador in Rome, sent warn-
ings to İstanbul that Italy was considering attacking Tripolitania on 7 February and again
on 4 June 1911. The Ottoman ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna also sent warnings. In the
estimation of Kazim Bey’s Military Attaché, Ali Fuat Cebesoy, however, ‘bureaucratic slug-
gishness’ delayed a timely Ottoman response. Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy, p.27.
62 Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman
Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley, 1997), p.108.
63 ‘Turkish Reply to Italy’, The Times 30 September 1911, p.8.
64 For a detailed account of Sebîlürreşad and the types of ideas it presented, see Amit Bein,
Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic: Agents of Change and Guardians of Tradition (Stanford,
2011), pp.45-49.
65 ‘İtalya’nın Ültimatomu’, Sebîlürreşad, 30 Eylül 1911.
66 On this publication, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, third edition
(New York, 2002), pp.190-1.
67 Quoted in Nâzım Polat, Müdâfaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti (Ankara, 1991), p.10.
68 Quoted in Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, p.75.
Hock 215

between Italy and Spain. Iran is being contested between England and Russia. A base and vile
enemy walks with all its strength against Osmanlılık; it seems that the trampling upon of all
religious precepts and customs has been decided upon. You know in detail the status of the
people in the pieces left of the Islamic world. In a word, they are moaning under the chains of
captivity.69

In addition to the allusions to Ottomanism, the very fabric of the Islamic world was
threatened by the enemy according to Agayif. As such, the outbreak of hostilities gave
renewed rise to Ottoman claims of protection over the whole of the Islamic world and for
broad Muslim participation in defending the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Sebîlürreşad
called upon the people of Islam to open their eyes, as their enemies were ‘attacking us
like animals, tearing all of our limbs’.70 This article, too, spoke of the Italian attack as one
that necessitated a response from all Muslims. Ahmet İhsan in Servet-i Fünun likewise
exclaimed:

Let us send from here a look of gratitude and our compliments to the whole of our nation and
brothers in religion (din kardeşlerimize) who embarked upon the battlefield in Trablusgarp in
respect of saving the Ottoman future and let us venerate their names and eternally preserve the
nation.71

In a historical milieu where Ottoman sovereignty was increasingly challenged by local

and foreign interests, Ottomanism and its inclusiveness gave İstanbul a powerful vehicle
to claim the ability to protect Muslims across the Islamic world, and attempt to enlist
their help to assist the empire. And indeed, a foreign correspondent to The Times reported
on 28 September 1911 that ‘Events seem to be shaping themselves in a fashion calculated
to stir Islam throughout Africa to its depths’.72 From 1908, anti-imperialism ‘constituted
one of the main pillars of CUP ideology’, and the Young Turks pointed to the examples
of the massacre of American Indians and the divvying up of Africa as examples of the
type of brutal imperialism that now had the Ottoman Empire in its crosshairs.73 European
policies against the Ottoman Empire were, moreover, part of a broader imperialism that
‘lacked moral values and idolised money’.74 This context gave the Ottoman press a
pretence to assert the empire’s own claims to its more moral brand of empire, one that
firmly included North Africa within its boundaries. That the Ottomans were engaged in
a delicate balance between maintaining an imperial system from which they had not
completely disavowed themselves and repelling European imperial advances on their

69 ‘Osmanlılara Hitap’, Tercüman-ı Hakikat, 30 September 1911.

70 ‘Yaldızlı Medeniyet!’ Sebîlürreşad, 4 October 1911.
71 Servet-i Fünun, 15 October 1911. It should be noted that the Jewish press also expressed its
approbation for Jewish soldiers who participated in the Ottoman–Italian War. While outside
the scope of this paper, twentieth-century wars offered Jewish communities the opportunity to
demonstrate their loyalty to the Ottoman state. See Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans:
Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York, 2014), pp.134-5.
72 ‘Islam in Africa. Effects of the Tripoli Conflict’, The Times 28 September 1911, p.3.
73 Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution, p.302.
74 Ibid.
216 War in History 26(2)

own territory made discourses of morality a useful tool for differentiating the Ottoman
form of empire from their European rivals, while still legitimizing the Ottoman imperial
structure. The dynamic of an ‘anti-colonial empire’ was fully apparent in this context.
The outbreak of the war, to some observers, offered the empire a chance to renew its
commitment to patriotism. In Tanîn, an article the day after the ultimatum was issued
outlined the details of the ultimatum and ended with a call to action for Ottomans:

The lullabies of future Ottoman children will henceforth constitute cries of animus and revenge,
and this nation, if there exists in it the slightest self-respect, virtue, and sense of honour, will take
revenge on Italy. This passionate revenge will hereafter be the foremost stimulant for the lives of
Ottomans. Ottomans will hereafter live for this revenge, prepare for it, and certainly will exact
revenge. Come compatriots, with complete steadfastness and serenity to the mission!75

Mehmet Beşikçi has said that the Balkan Wars were ‘experienced as a collective trauma’
and that ‘the idea that “the fatherland is in danger” became widespread among elite and
non-elite alike’.76 While the Balkan Wars accentuated these feelings, newspapers’ cover-
age of the Italian Ultimatum suggests that these sentiments also had currency at the
outset of the war with Italy. The Ottoman press thus appears to have made appeals to a
similar psychological impact of a European attack upon Ottoman African territory to
which scholars of the Balkan Wars also make reference.
Tercüman-ı Hakikat also called Ottomans into action, proclaiming:

Our sense of honour alone is connected to our sense of affection. If eight million Ottomans each
give a Lira, with a gigantic sum of eight million Lira, a navy can be formed! But if all eight
million Ottomans cannot give one Lira, there are one million Ottomans that can give eight Lira.
Then and only then will the welfare of the nation be procured. Then and only then can we
ensure the protection of the House of God, the holy tomb of the Prophet…Then and only then
will the Kuran and the honour of Islam be secured.77

The periodical Halka Doğru published a story that likewise extolled the virtues of the
Turkish soldier in combat. In the article, a soldier fighting in Libya declared:

What fear have I? If I die, I am a martyr, if I remain, I am a gazi. Until now, the vatan has taken
care of me. Now I too will protect the vatan, the Turkish son does not flee from battle, when he
embarks before the perfidious enemy, he forgets everything.

God and the Ottoman nation aided the soldier: ‘In wartime, in the course of danger,
Turkish blood rests not in its vessels. So now we go. Allah is our helper, the nation prays
for us (millet duacımızdır). There is nothing else we need’.78

75 ‘İtalya’nın Ültimatomu’, Tanîn, 29 September 1911.

76 Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between
Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden, 2012), p.57.
77 ‘Osmanlılara Hatip’, Tercüman-ı Hakikat, 30 September 1911.
78 Ahmed Necmeddin, ‘Türk Kanı’, in Nesîme Ceyhan, ed., Trablusgarp Savaşı Hikâyeleri,
(İstanbul, 2009), p.166. Originally published in Halka Doğru 36, 14 December 1913,
pp.282-284.
Hock 217

The coverage that appeared in Sebîlürreşad of the ultimatum also made a strong case
for its readers to take an active part with the war effort:

Indeed, we must aid and assist our brothers in Trablusgarp in a more tangible way. However, it
cannot be helped that many years of idleness and our navy’s nonexistence cause us to be
deprived of carrying out this desire. Let us at least hope that this terrible force, along with
waking us from this endless slumber, becomes a call for carrying out our rightful national and
religious duties.79

The article’s references to an ‘endless slumber’ along with the destitute condition of the
Ottoman Empire’s navy called attention to both tangible and spiritual reasons for Italy’s
ability to declare such an ultimatum. When scholars suggest that it was the Balkan Wars
that constituted a ‘crucial point’ at which Muslim Ottomans were all ‘required to be pre-
sent – in body or soul – at the various fronts, be it in the trenches of Çatalca or in the
neighbourhoods of besieged Edirne’,80 they can overlook the significance of the Libyan
War in making similar calls to Ottomans, such as those made by Sebîlürreşad and
Tercüman-ı Hakikat. The Italian attack engendered not only the need for a national
response, but one that called upon the whole of the Muslim world to awake from its
spiritual ‘slumber’.
Some outside Ottoman borders did indeed attempt to assist the war effort. In 1911 in
Tunisia, Bash Hamba, editor of Le Tunisien and an individual who was influenced by the
Pan-Islamist tendencies of the Young Turks, for example, launched an effort to raise
money and gather supplies to aid local resistance in Libya by invoking an amalgam of
Pan-Islamic rhetoric and traditional notions of Muslim identity.81 A few months later, on
9 February 1912, an Italian streetcar driver struck and killed a Tunisian child. Hamba
organized a boycott of the public transportation system in response to the child’s death,
and demanded that only French and Tunisians be eligible for employment in the transit
system; equal pay for Tunisians and Italians for the same work; and the election, rather
than appointment, of the Tunisian members of the Consultative Conference.82 The gov-
ernment demanded an end to the boycott, and when the Young Tunisians refused, it
exiled Hamba and other leaders of the group. Kenneth Perkins describes this movement
as one that succeeded in ‘galvanising the previously inert masses’ and had ‘contained
within it the germ of full-scale rebellion’.83 In other parts of the empire, The Times noted
that on 30 September 1911, mobs in Salonika destroyed Italian arms that were displayed
at the Italian consulate and Italian schools. Italian fishing boats that had attempted to
leave Salonika were also confiscated.84 While it is outside the scope of this essay to con-
sider widely the effects of the Ottoman–Italian War across North Africa, preliminary

79 ‘İtalya’nın Ültimatomu’, Sebîlürreşad, 30 September 1911.

80 Ginio, ‘Mobilizing the Ottoman Nation’, p.156.
81 Kenneth Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, second edition (New York, 2014), p.76.
82 Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, p.77; Charles-André Julien, L’Afrique du Nord en
Marche: Algérie – Tunisie – Maroc 1880-1952 (Paris, 2002), pp.65-6.
83 Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia, p.77.
84 ‘Anti-Italian Outbreak at Salonika’, The Times, 2 October 1911, p.6.
218 War in History 26(2)

evidence points to an opportunity to further understand the transnational impact of the

war outside the Ottoman Empire’s borders.
Ottoman writers also took to task the European press in its presentation of the conflict.
Celal Nuri was one such journalist who expressed this frustration; he implored his audi-
ence to read the articles published by the French press in relation to the Italian War. One
would not find, he claimed, any mention of the violations ‘of right and equity’, ‘of justice
and clemency’ that the war produced, nor would one find the European press calling for a
‘sense of mercy, a sense of compassion, [and] the regulations of humanity’.85 Those
French newspapers that did cover the war had by and large presented Italy’s attack as a
valid one.86 An article in Tanîn from November of 1911 indicated that the Ottomans were
in league with both Algeria and Tunisia for the purpose of maintaining public order in
areas affected by the war.87 According to Tanîn, this had been necessary because of a mili-
tary movement against Italian forces that had supposedly claimed the lives of not only
Italians, but bystanding Arabs and Frenchmen as well. This led to attacks from European
newspapers claiming that the Ottoman forces had acted with ‘fanaticism’ (taassup), a
claim that Tanîn, of course, set out to refute: ‘We must say that to describe or explain any
uprising that would occur within the dominions of Islam with the word fanaticism is
unjust’. This was especially rueful given the fact that, ‘Every day our newspapers are
filled with information quoted from European newspapers on the Italians’ atrocities that
will make one’s hair stand on end (tüyleri ürpertecek vahşetleri)’.88 Sebîlürreşad cited
European atrocities during the 1901 Boxer Rebellion in China to demonstrate European
hypocrisy, as there ‘was not a murmur from the civilised world’ when Chinese women and
children were ‘driven like a herd of animals’ and drowned in the Amur River.89 Servet-i
Fünun also published many pictures and illustrations depicting ‘Italian atrocities’.90
Although Europeans were evidently not unaware of what Tanîn believed to be repre-
hensible Italian acts, it was only the Ottomans that were accused of fanaticism. The
article further linked this discourse to the Ottomans’ increasingly isolated position in the
Mediterranean: ‘Italy is at war with neither Tunisia nor Egypt; every day they only
intend, indeed, to harm our lives’.91 This discussion of the European press’s reticence to

85 Nuri, Kendi Nokta-yı Nazarımdan Hukuk-i Düvel, p. 6. His opinion is also substantiated in a
report in The Times, which described the attitudes in France and Austria-Hungary as gener-
ally favourable towards Italy’s attack. See ‘The Outbreak of War’, The Times 30 September
1911, p.8.
86 Şıvgın, Trablusgarp Savaşı, p.27.
87 ‘Tunis’deki Vaka Münasebetiyle’, Tanîn, 20 November 1911.
88 Ibid.
89 ‘Yaldızlı Medeniyet!’ Sebîlürreşad, 4 October 1911.
90 Ottoman Turkish: İtalyan Mezalimi or İtalyan Vahşeti and also given in French as Atrocités
italiennes. See, for example, Servet-i Fünun, 9 November 1911 and Servet-i Fünun, 29
February 1912.
91 ‘Tunis’deki Vaka Münasebetiyle’. And indeed, it should be noted that the extent to which
the involvement of Italian organizations in Egypt, such as the Dante Alighieri Society,
affected Italian colonial ambitions in Libya has been a subject of scholarly debate. On this
issue, see Miftāḥ Balʻīd Ghuwayṭah, al-Nashāṭ al-Īṭālī fī Miṣr tujāh istiʻmār Lībyā, 1882-
1943 M (Tripoli, 2009) and Matthew Ellis, ‘Between Empire and Nation: The Emergence
of Egypt’s Libyan Borderland, 1841-1911’, (PhD Diss., Princeton University, 2012).
Hock 219

criticize a war with so little of a pretence as Italy’s made plain the Great Powers’ willing-
ness to acquiesce to another European power’s annexation of Ottoman territory.

III. Creating Ottoman North Africa

Along with calls to action to the public, the Ottoman press faced another task, that of
situating Libya, a relatively backwater province, into the imagined space of empire.
Palmira Brummett argues that the press does not ‘reveal or define a formed and fixed
Ottoman nation’, but instead can be used to ‘suggest the boundaries within which the
symbols of people, nation, and sovereign were construed’.92 Indeed, as we have already
seen above, Ottoman North Africa needed to be presented as a part of the empire worth
protecting. This involved both incorporating the space of the Libyan provinces into the
established boundaries of the empire and depicting the people of North Africa as loyal
members of a shared Ottoman citizenship. In doing so, the Ottoman press was part of a
larger process that occurred from the 1880s of imperial powers justifying increasingly
costly, both in terms of money and human life, occupations in moral terms.93 Both the
people and physical space of Ottoman Libya were presented as vital components of the
empire which, as discussed above, were seen as under attack by a Christian power that
threatened both Ottoman sovereignty and Islam alike.
The task of educating readers about Ottoman North African land and people was not
lost upon contemporary observers, and some made specific mention of the need to pro-
vide the reading public with information about Tripolitania as the impetus for decision to
write. Mahmud Naci prefaced his 1914 study of Libya by stating that he published it as
a service to Ottoman citizens in the wake of the Italian occupation.94 Hasan Safî, in a
history of Libya written in 1912/3, likewise noted that his book was a response to the
scant literature on the history and society of Libya before the war with Italy. His contri-
bution, drawing upon 10 years he spent travelling the province, was ostensibly meant to
fill this gap.95
The Ottoman press paid particular attention to the qualities of Arabs as fellow Ottomans.
This phenomenon was a hallmark of French colonial rule in the Maghreb, by way of com-
parison. According to George Trumbull, ‘Cultural descriptions articulated with an eye
towards the maintenance of power represented the fundamental means through which
agents of French colonialism conceived of Algerians’.96 He explains further, ‘cultural
description took on the force of creating political realities’.97 According to several schol-
ars of the Ottoman–Italian War, the cooperation between Arabs and Turks in Libya during

92 Brummett, Image & Imperialism, p.320.

93 Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa, p.5.
94 Mahmud and Mehmet Nuri, Trablusgarp, trans. Ahmet Kavas, Abdullah Erdem Taş, and
Muhammed Tandoğan (İstanbul, 2012) p.27.
95 Hasan Safî, Trablusgarp Tarihi: Trablusgarb'ın Teşkil-i Vilâyete Kadar Cereyan Eden Ahval
ve Vakayi-i Tarihiyesine ait Tedkikat ve Tetebbuâtı Muhtevidir (İstanbul, 1912/3).
96 George Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam
in Algeria, 1870-1914 (New York, 2009), p.2.
97 Ibid., p.262.
220 War in History 26(2)

the war was illustrative of greater trends within the empire, in that such cooperation was
typical of relations between Arabs and Turks in general. Mümine Çakır, for example, cites
a telegraph that was published in Tanîn on 14 January 1912 that she argues reveals the
‘solidarity’ (dayanışma) between Arabs and Turks as well as the ‘loyalty’ (bağlılıklarını)
the former had for the latter: ‘We are sons of the same nation’, averred the author of the
telegraph.98 One must be cautious to take such telegraphs and other reports too literally;
Jafar al-Askari recounts in his memoirs how his brother, who fought with the Ottomans,
thought negatively of Enver after a battle in mid-August 1912 in which many Arab lives
were lost. Enver reportedly dismissed the casualties, asking, ‘Did we buy them with our
money’? His crass dismissal of the importance of the Arabs’ lives, according to al-Askari,
further alienated the officer corps, especially the Arabs among them, from Enver.99
Nevertheless, the presence of local irregulars within the Ottoman ranks cannot be dis-
counted. Rachel Simon places the number of Libyans who volunteered between 20,000 and
30,000.100 The Turkish-language press, furthermore, endeavoured to foster a shared sense of
citizenship between Turkish readers and inhabitants of Ottoman North Africa. Libyan Arabs
were often presented as heroic fighters alongside their Turkish officers; their place as worthy
partners in empire – albeit in a subordinate position to their Turkish counterparts – is evi-
dent. Ahmet İhsan described in Servet-i Fünun how Khoms, Benghazi, Tobruk, and Derna
were conquered by the Italians. İhsan made clear the importance of Turkish–Arab coopera-
tion in successful Ottoman resistance by proclaiming it was only in Benghazi that the Italians
encountered serious resistance, as ‘the Ottoman military forces, with the brave contributions
of Arab sons, vigorously attacked the Italian occupation forces’.101
The war correspondence of Şerif Bey, a contributor to Tanîn who travelled throughout
Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Arab provinces between 1909 and 1914,102 is
instructive for analysing the portrayal of Libyans in the Ottoman press. The propagation
of a ‘supra-nationalism’ entailed not only the need to enlist Arab support, but to show
Turks that their co-subjects possessed redeeming qualities as well. He used the word
‘bahâdır’ (hero) when speaking of Arab soldiers, comparing them to their Turkish
peers.103 Likewise, in an article published in Tanîn on 24 January 1912, Şerif Bey

98 Mümine Çakır, ‘Trablusgarp Savaşı İle İlgili Hikâyelerde Araplar’, in Mehmet Ersan and
Nuri Karakaş, eds., Ege Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi I. Uluslararası Tarih Sempozyumu:
Osmanlı Devleti’nin Dağılma Sürecinde Trablusgarp ve Balkan Savaşları, 16-18 Mayıs
2011/İzmir Bildiriler (Ankara, 2013), p.637.
99 Jafar al-Askari, A Soldier’s Story: The Memoirs of Jafar Pasha al-Askari (1885-1936),
trans. Mustafa Tariq al-Askari (London, 2003), pp.73-4.
100 Simon, Libya Between Ottomanism and Nationalism, p.188.
101 Servet-i Fünun 26 October 1911.
102 Ahmet Şerif Anadolu’da Tanîn, I. Cilt, ed. Mehmed Çetin Börekçi (Ankara, 1999), xi.
Relatively little is known about Şerif Bey’s life; he was born in 1883 and died in August of
1927. Until the discovery of his remains, the editors of the Turkish Historical Foundation
(Türk Tarih Kurumu) were not even certain whether or not ‘Şerif Bey’ was a pseudonym or
his real name.
103 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Ahmed Şerif Bey’in 1911-1912 Yıllarında Trablusgarp Gezisi ile İlgili
Notları, Aziziyye Karargahı, 6 Aralık 1911’, in Mehmed Çetin Börekçi, ed., Ahmet Şerif
Arnavudluk’da, Sûriye’de, Trablusgarb’de Tanîn, II. Cilt (Ankara, 1999), p.244.
Hock 221

informed readers that ‘The war, in general, continues to go well for us. The officers, the
soldiers, and the true meaning of the Arab mücahits’ sacrifices are above all manner of
admiration’.104 Şerif Bey’s description of what motivated the local irregulars is also
notable:

The war is not only for the defence of Ottomanism and the vatan, mostly, rather, they embark
with the urge of sacred religious sentiments, in the theatre of war, their tongues are engaged
with praise, their hearts are full with love of religion, with love of the God and the Prophet, full
of love for everything sacred.

‘The whole of the people of Trablusgarp’, moreover, ‘are to the utmost extent god-fear-
ing and are sincere in their faith to Islam. No matter where they are, no matter with what
duty that are occupied, they assuredly do not forget to pray five times and do not forget
their other worship’.105 Yet they also possessed characteristics beyond religiosity that
were enviable. In a later article published in Tanîn on 6 May 1912, Şerif Bey also related
how the people of Trablusgarp exhibited much faith in both doctors and medical knowl-
edge. He described how, one by one, the injured of the Battle of Kırkkarış appealed to the
Red Crescent for treatment. This, he argued, ‘does not at all resemble our Anatolian
people’, who were not as trusting of the benefits of modern medicine as were their
Libyan counterparts.106
For these fighters, Ottomanism and Islam were not mutually exclusive. According to
Şerif Bey, when he spoke with the inhabitants of Trablusgarp about Ottomanism, they
understood the concept to mean three things: Islam, the caliphate, and the sultan. As a
result, he questioned the extent to which it can be said that Anatolians are more faithful
to the government than Libyans. This sentiment, moreover, was not limited to the people
of only Tripoli:

All of the Islamic lands of Africa, the Islamic world, and those with the same sentiment are
anguished with the same pain [from the Italian invasion]. To believe this, it is sufficient to view
the theatre of war in Trablusgarp and the fighters.107

The power of Ottomanism and Muslim cooperation, even if they could not be fully
unleashed, contributed to the Ottomans’ ability to continue fighting:

Truthfully, if one recalls how the war began all together, how it continued for six or seven
months, and what sort of phases it demonstrated, these reveal, from the perspective of Osmanlılık,

104 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Dehîbân’, in Mehmed Çetin Börekçi, ed., Ahmet Şerif Arnavudluk’da,
Sûriye’de, Trablusgarb’de Tanîn, II. Cilt (Ankara, 1999), p.248.
105 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtırları 12: Muhârebeyi sevk ve idâre eden ma’nevî sebebler’, in
Mehmed Çetin Börekçi, ed., Ahmet Şerif Arnavudluk’da, Sûriye’de, Trablusgarb’de Tanîn,
II. Cilt (Ankara, 1999), p.279. Originally published in Tanîn on 20 April 1912.
106 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtırları 14: Kırkkarış Muhârebesi ve Mebrûke’, in Mehmed Çetin
Börekçi, ed., Ahmet Şerif Arnavudluk’da, Sûriye’de, Trablusgarb’de Tanîn, II. Cilt (Ankara,
1999), p.286.
107 Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtırları 12’, p.280.
222 War in History 26(2)

that the sole word which can explain these is miracle (hârika). Especially if one considers the
many circumstances and conditions that existed against Osmanlılık and the fact that the strength
and vitality of Osmanlılık could not be used in Trablus as much as one would like, this miracle,
altogether, becomes extraordinary.108

If Ottomanism could be reconciled with religious sentiment, the potential of Ottomanism

to recapture the whole of the Muslim world might be reached, again buttressing Ottoman
claims to the whole of North Africa. In both Tunisia and Libya, he argued, there existed
among the Arabs ‘an extraordinary fervour, an enthusiasm’ (olağanüstü bir heyecân,
coşku vardı).109 Tânin reinforced this sentiment in other articles; a 19 November 1911
article entitled ‘To All Our Muslim Brothers’, that was written by a certain Abdüllatif
Said Efendi from Edinburgh, for example, informed readers that, ‘Muslims on all sides
of the world, to the extent of their abilities, are working to help the Ottoman government,
which finds itself in a state of crisis and danger’.110
Another contemporary observer named Rodoslu Ebü’l Muzaffar described his first
visit to Ottoman Libya in a 1912/3 monograph in terms not dissimilar to Şerif Bey: ‘The
first day I entered the land of Africa, truthfully, I had entered into another world inside
this world’.111 One chapter of the book, entitled ‘The Social and Spiritual Conditions of
the People of Trablusgarp’, gives some of the author’s opinions on the residents of the
province. He opened the chapter by declaring, ‘The people of this vilayet: hard and
strong’ (çetin ve metin).112 Weddings, he further suggested, were carried out without
much trouble, indicating that the people were also socially responsible Ottomans.113 He
continued to describe how the people of Trablusgarp had endured many hardships, and
as a result, should be viewed ‘with an eye of understanding’.114
In spite of the vigour of the people of Trablusgarp, what they possessed in spirit they
lacked in knowledge; as Ebü’l Muzaffar explained, the territories under Ottoman suze-
rainty were far away from each other and the people were not aware of the Ottoman
government’s political relations with and practices of administration in other provinces.
Again, this was not due to any natural defect on their parts; according to Ebü’l Muzaffar,
the people of Trablusgarp were very much interested in the affairs of the vilayet as a
whole. ‘By dint of their natural intelligence’, he averred, ‘most of them are inclined
towards politics’. The issue, then, was presumably one of a lack of access to information.
He further elaborated: ‘In Trablusgarp, what is in need of reform is not the people, but
the government’.115 The subtext is clear, that Trablusgarp needed to be further integrated
into the core of the empire and that the fact it had not been so already was not necessarily

108 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtırları 10’, in Ahmet Şerif Arnavudluk’da, Sûriye’de,
Trablusgarb’de Tanîn, II. Cilt, ed. Mehmed Çetin Börekçi (Ankara, 1999), p.273.
109 Şerif Bey, ‘Ahmed Şerif Bey’in 1911-1912 Yıllarında Trablusgarp Gezisi ile İlgili Notları’,
p.244.
110 ‘Bütün İslam Kardeşlerimize’, Tânin, 19 November 1911.
111 Ebü’l Muzaffar, Trablusgarp Ahvali, p.3.
112 Ibid., p.96.
113 Ibid., p.82.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid., p.105.
Hock 223

the fault of the populace itself. These people, moreover, were willing and able partners
in the project of empire.
The disconnect between Tripoli and İstanbul was made even more acute from Ebü’l
Muzaffar’s cavaliering view of the supposed desire of the province’s people to work in
public service. According to Ebü’l Muzaffar, the desire for government posts had
become like ‘a chronic illness without remedy’,116 as even those who had otherwise
earned a salary of 150 kuruş per month were eager to find government jobs that paid
far less. This desire, however, was a relatively recent phenomenon in Ebü’l Muzaffar’s
judgment. He juxtaposed the ‘constitutional government’ with the ancien régime,
suggesting that under the latter, public opinion had come to hold that no work could be
completed by government officials without a bribe. The people were now conscious,
however, ‘of the righteousness of the officials that the constitutional government
assigned’.117
Overall, the impression that Ebü’l Muzaffar gave to readers was that the people of
Tripolitania were perfectly good imperial subjects: ‘we again speak of the fact that the
region’s honour and reputation will not be spoiled, of the people of Trablusgarp’s benefi-
cence and kindness, and of their sound morals and courage’.118 These people’s righteous-
ness was particularly important given Ebü’l Muzaffar’s view that ‘Today, the component
of strength that preserves a nation’s existence is that nation’s individuals’.119 The Arabs
of Tripoli to Ebü’l Muzaffar, were, then, firmly part of the Ottoman nation. That a flex-
ible definition of Ottomanism could be shaped and reshaped during conflict gave writers
a language with which North Africa could be fully ingrained into the Ottoman imperial
vision.
If the vatan was at stake in the war, the geographical space of Libya needed to be
fashioned as part of that vatan in addition to its people. Şerif Bey is again instructive for
illustrating how this task was carried out in the press. He first left from İstanbul for
Tripoli on 1 November 1911 and spent 10 days in Marseille in order to procure supplies
for the Red Crescent.120 Upon passing the Tunisian border into Libya, which he described
as the ‘holy fatherland’ (kutsal vatan), he and his party took a breath, as if they had
entered their own homes.121 Later on 8 March 1912, he recounted that he had left Anatolia
for Tripoli with an attitude he described as ‘quite pessimistic’ (pek kötümser) at the time,
as news on the state of Libya was ‘quite ambiguous and complicated’ (pek belirsiz ve
karışık). He believed that by entering Libya, he would find ‘poverty, disorder, misery’
(sefâlet, düzensizlik, perişanlık).122 After spending two and a half months on the front

116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p.99.
119 Ibid., p.100.
120 Şerif Bey, ‘Ahmed Şerif Bey’in 1911-1912 Yıllarında Trablusgarp Gezisi ile İlgili Notları’,
p.241.
121 Ibid., p.242.
122 Ahmet Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtıraları 1: Trablusgarp’de Şimdilik Durum’, in Mehmed Çetin
Börekçi, ed., Ahmet Şerif Arnavudluk’da, Sûriye’de, Trablusgarb’de Tanîn, II. Cilt (Ankara,
1999), p.248.
224 War in History 26(2)

lines, he exclaimed, ‘My negativity, from all that I saw and researched, was refuted more
every day, and today, I return from Trablusgarp in quite a positive and sanguine state’.123
He also described the Zuwarah port as one of the most beautiful in the world and spoke
of the ‘ardent spirit’ (ateşli ruhuna) of the North African deserts.124 Furthermore, Şerif
Bey linked the lands of Ottoman Libya to the history of the empire itself; ‘one thing that
is certain’, he wrote, ‘much heroism and sacrifice that will keep Ottoman history alive
with bravery’ was present in Libya.125 Among his most important discoveries, he
explained, were from his contact with local Arabs. On the general disposition of the
locals in the town of Azizîye, he commented: ‘Everyone, merry and joyful, thinks of his
duty, with complete joy and honour, and awaits the coming to pass of the war in which
they will participate’.126
Tercüman-ı Hakikat likewise made appeals to Ottoman history, when in an article
entitled ‘Listen!’ dated 2 October 1911, it referenced ‘the elder hero’ Hayreddin
Barbarossa, the sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral who was instrumental in expanding
the Ottoman sphere of influence in North Africa and engaged in several battles with the
Holy League. The author drew a parallel between ‘today’s torpedoes’ with Barbarossa
‘devastating the fleet of the whole of Christendom (alem-i nasraniyet)’. The Italian fleet
to which these torpedoes would bring ruin was likened to that of Andrea Doria, whose
‘disgraceful defeat’ in the 1538 Battle of Preveza would again come to pass.127
Halka Doğru drew upon the mythical qualities of the ancient Turks to describe the
sacrifices of those who fought in Libya: the character of a Turkish soldier in a story it
published explained:

My ancestors always lived valiantly like a lion, the imprint of war effused in their breasts, and
they died so that the vile did not trample upon their homeland…I, too, like them will die for the
sake of my nation’s, my homeland’s honour.128

Such references to Ottoman history sought to cement North Africa’s place within the
rightful boundaries of the empire and make appeals to the Ottoman ‘golden age’,
depicting it as a time when heroic Ottomans successfully fought Christian powers to
conquer North Africa and that these past glories could again be achieved.
Another article published in the newspaper Şehbâl129 in October 1912 raised the
question of the extent to which Libya could be considered part of the Ottoman vatan in

123 Ibid., p.249.

124 Şerif Bey, ‘Ahmed Şerif Bey’in 1911-1912 Yıllarında Trablusgarp Gezizi ile İlgili Notları’,
pp.242-3.
125 Ibid., p.244.
126 Şerif Bey, ‘Harb Hâtıraları 1: Trablusgarp’de Şimdilik Durum’, p.249.
127 ‘Dinleyiniz!’ Tercüman-ı Hakikat, 2 Teşrin-i Evvel 1911.
128 Necmeddin, ‘Türk Kanı’, p.166.
129 On this publication, see Bora Ataman and Cem Pekman, ‘II. Meşrutiyet Dönemi Osmanlı-
Türk Basınında bir Baskı Güzelliği Şampiyonu: Şehbal Dergisi’, Müteferrika Gaz 34 (2008),
pp.119-32 and Sabine Prätor, ‘Şehbal – Ein Herausragendes Beispiel Früher Türkischer
Magazinepresse’, Turcica 29 (1997), pp.433-42.
Hock 225

Anatolian imagination. According to the author, Salime Servet Seyfi, there had devel-
oped a sentiment in Anatolia questioning the extent to which Tripolitania, ‘our lovely
sancak’ (sevimli sancağımızın), was part of the vatan.130 His concerns were, however,
assuaged in a dramatic manner when in the ‘remote deserts’ his Arab coreligionists fell
for religion, and their singing of patriotic songs alone had healed the wounds of a Turkish
gazi!131 He also drew readers’ attention to another Ottoman borderland in Yemen, where
there had been a revolt in 1904, leading to an agreement in 1911 that restored nominal
authority to İstanbul but allowed the Zaidi Imam to retain authority. Seyfi invited his
readers to consider how many bones of deceased Turkish soldiers that had succumbed to
thirst lay in the deserts of Yemen.132 The reference is significant, as Yemen was synony-
mous with the plight of Ottoman soldiers in folklore.133
In order to avert the many deaths that the Ottoman army suffered in trying to quell the
rebellion of 1904, Seyfi exclaimed, ‘O Turkish soldiers! Your vatan’s tasting of water is
two minutes away! Walk a little bit further’.134 The connection between the two events
illustrates the place that the author wanted to ascribe both to both Yemen and Tripolitania
in the expanse of the empire. During the Libyan War, fighting meant not only avenging
the deaths of soldiers who died in the Yemeni deserts, but also the preservation of the
fatherland itself, as was the case in Yemen. Again, that the fate of Ottoman Libya was
linked to the well-being of the empire as a whole demonstrates its importance as a part
of the imagined boundaries of the empire.
Even after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, writers continued to make reference to the
Ottoman–Italian War in their appeals to patriotic sentiments. Aka Gündüz, for example,
urged Arabs in a fictional dialogue to join the Ottoman ranks fighting in the Balkans by
reminding them that Turks had fought for the Arabs in North Africa, beseeching them to
fight alongside the Turks once again. The man in the dialogue asked his Arab counter-
part: ‘Will you be next to me when I pierce the enemies’ chests? Or will you keep going
around in the sad deserts’?135 This appeal demonstrates that to one writer, at least, the
lasting memory of the war in Tripolitania could still be used to make patriotic calls to
action during the Balkan Wars.

IV. Conclusion
In an imperial ferman dated 15 October 1912, İstanbul delivered the following message
to the inhabitants of Libya:

130 Salime Servet Seyfi, ‘Türk Trablus’tan Nasıl Döner’, in Nesîme Ceyhan, ed., Trablusgarp
Savaşı Hikâyeleri (İstanbul, 2009), p.143. Originally published in Şehbâl 63, 28 October
1912, pp.290-1.
131 Ibid., p.144.
132 Ibid., p.145.
133 Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 3rd edition (New York, 2004), p.105.
134 Seyfi, ‘Türk Trablus’tan Nasıl Döner’, p.145.
135 Quoted in Eyal Ginio, The Ottoman Culture of Defeat: The Balkan Wars and their Aftermath
(New York, 2016), p.32.
226 War in History 26(2)

My government, finding it on the one hand impossible to render you the effective help that you
need to defend your country, and caring on the other for your present and future happiness;
desirous of avoiding the continuation of a war disastrous for you and your families and
dangerous for our Empire; in order to cause to be reborn peace and prosperity and availing
myself of my sovereign rights, I concede to you full and complete autonomy.136

Thus concluded what Enver called in his penultimate diary entry ‘a twentieth-century
crusade against Islam’.137 The Libyan provinces were not lost in 1912 without a fight; it
was not until the outbreak of the Balkan Wars that the Ottomans realized that they could
not carry on fighting on two fronts. According to Rachel Simon, Mahmud Şevket Paşa
privately believed that the campaign could not be won and the war on the European thea-
tre gave him reason to focus the army’s efforts on the Balkans.138 The Ottoman General
Staff, moreover, was unwilling to risk the effects of full mobilization upon the economy
in spite of the fact it had made preparations for a potential Italian attack.139
The imperial ferman encapsulates a number of themes raised by this essay. As we
have seen, the Ottoman press consistently attempted to propagate a notion of imperial
interconnectedness between Libya and the rest of the empire. While it is true that Turks
would be the dominant element in the imperial arrangement, the Ottoman press’s imagi-
nation of the empire’s sovereignty firmly included Libya. Ottomanism was used as a
vehicle through which the Libyan land and its inhabitants could be integrated into the
Ottoman imperial project. The war was not simply a prelude to greater and more calami-
tous conflict; the press used the Italian attack upon the last vestiges of Ottoman North
African territory to articulate the empire’s increasingly perilous position in Great Power
diplomacy. It raised concerns about the worth of international law in safeguarding
Ottoman territory and the geographical extent of Ottoman influence and sovereignty.
In sum, writing the history of the Ottoman Empire’s twentieth century must include
North Africa in the intellectual and geopolitical processes that led to the empire’s
ultimate decision to enter the First World War.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

136 Quoted in Childs, Italo-Turkish Diplomacy, p.248.

137 Enver Paşa, Um Tripolis, p.95
138 Simon, Libya between Ottomanism and Nationalism, p.93.
139 Erickson, Defeat in Detail, p.66.