The World полностью

* The mandates were based on amalgamated Ottoman vilayets that did not cohere and had never existed before: French Syria encompassed three vilayets, Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut, inhabited by Maronite Christians, Shia and Sunni, Druze and Alawites. The French planned to divide their mandate into four – a Sunni Syria around Damascus, a Christian state named Lebanon based in Beirut, an Alawite state at Latakia and another for the Druze. Later, much to the fury of the Alawites and Druze, they amalgamated these into Syria and Lebanon. One of the Alawite chiefs was Ali al-Assad (the Lion), who wrote to the French premier: ‘The Alawite people have kept their independence for generations, people of different religious beliefs, traditions and history from the Sunni Muslims … The Alawites refuse to be attached to Muslim Syria.’ His son Hafez would rule the very Syria Ali hoped would never exist. British Iraq was created out of three vilayets: Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, a mix of Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Yazidi and Jews that has proved as unmanageable for the Iraqis as it was for the British. LG and Clemenceau are rightfully criticized for this late imperial carve-up, though they were wise not to hand over the entire region to one family. The Ottomans ruled ruinously for four centuries: the Anglo-French ruled ineptly for twenty-five years. In seventy years of independence, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, Saudis, Palestinians and Jordanians have hardly proved paragons of governance.

Pahlavis and Songs, Roosevelts, Mafiosi and Kennedys

ATATüRK, REZA, LENIN: FATHER OF THE TURKS, LIGHT OF THE IRANIANS AND GREATEST OF GENIUSES

Blond, blue-eyed and lithe, Kemal was the son of a Turkish soldier and an Abkhazian mother, raised in Thessalonica, who joined the Young Turks and fought the Italians when they seized Libya in 1911 and then the Bulgarians in Thrace in 1912. He had warned Enver not to join Germany in the war, but made his name at Gallipoli before halting the Russians in the Caucasus and holding back the British in Syria. Now he faced the Anglo-French partition of the Ottoman heartland that granted swathes of territory to the Great Idea, the new Greek empire, much favoured by the enthusiastic Classicist LG.

In September 1921, Marshal Kemal, speaker of a Grand National Assembly in Ankara, halted the Greeks, then in August 1922 in a clash of 400,000 men routed them at Dumlupınar, bursting into the cosmopolitan Graeco-Turkish city of Smyrna where, in scenes of infernal slaughter, the Greeks were driven out in what they called the Catastrophe. The fiasco brought down Lloyd George. In November, Kemal abolished the monarchy: the last sultan, Mehmed VI, departed on a British warship, though a cousin was temporarily installed as caliph. The forty-three-year-old Kemal, elected president of a new republic of Türkiye, was acknowledged by the Allies, agreed a population swap of 350,000 Turks and 1.1 million Greeks^* and cancelled independent Armenia and Kurdistan.

Kemal was implacable to his opponents, who were assassinated or hanged,^* and he massacred and bombed the Kurdish rebels who threatened his regime.

Kemal had a vision of a Turkish nation. He rejected Ottoman decadence, separated religion from politics, commissioned a Turkish alphabet in Latin letters, founded Ankara university, liberated women from the veil and granted female education and suffrage. He moved the capital to Ankara and in the formally renamed Istanbul he converted the Hagia Sophia (the former church built by Justinian, converted into a mosque by Mehmed II) into a museum. He also ordered Turks to take surnames for the first time: he became Atatürk – Father of Turks.

Atatürk was a sultanic autocrat who lived in the old Ottoman palaces, cruising in his presidential yacht; although he was a raffish epicurean, a womanizer with a complicated love life and a hard drinker of rakı, he was also a generous paterfamilias, adopting thirteen orphans.^* He never became a sultan, but he inspired another general to become a shah.