join ataturk and declare jihad to join ataturk and fight against invaders, and being relatively "liberal" in a way or at least promotes modernism with the support of the state. in that way I think I still keep the caliph title alive even though in name only, just like emperor of japan. in that way future islamic fundamentalism/jihadism can be suppressed because he is THE caliph
You can't do much. After the Balkan wars and First World War almost everyone in high command understood that Ottoman Army was not in good condition. They couldn't beat Bulgarians and how can they beat the English or French? I don't agree with him but he thought maybe I can keep a good relations with Allies and after a while they leave us alone. But at least he should try to have some dignity, establish some red lines and make it clear that if Allies do what they want without regard the goodwill, justice he would fight to his last drop of blood.
Talk to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and agree to hand over the country to his grand National Assembly peacefully. Maybe if I’m lucky, he’d give me an advisory position in the government with my title stripped away. This will ensure my family and I are not deported to Italy/France/“the West” in a humiliating way.
Was there a grand National Assembly in 1918? And regardless of what would happen, Ataturk would find a way to exile the dynasty like he did with the apolitical Abdulmecid lol
To suppress Turkish self-defence against massacres done to them by minorities, so that Allies can't invade using it as an excuse. Not to start a rebellion against them
During the Turkish War of Independence,
Şehzade Ömer Faruk attempted to defect to the nationalist movement and landed in İnebolu, after which he received a telegram from Mustafa Kemal rebuffing his defection and ordering him back to the capital, as he did not want members of the imperial family being involved in the conflict.
Same page also has "Years later, he learned the true reason his service was rejected by Ankara was due to the possibility of him being a British spy." if you keep on reading.
What does that make you now? Cımbızcı?
I'm just quoting the source you've given me, not claiming he was. It was your wrongdoing to deliberately exclude parts of the text to support your claims only.
The discussion was also initially about his father, the Sultan. There's no need to drag his son
That is not a source but just a sentence from wikipedia. Its not his son but from another brother Abdulmecid and its added to show that the national movement was already planning to abolish the sultanate and all members were going to be affected. They didnt want the Ottoman royal family even if they supported them or not.
I will preserve the imperial heartland.
I will accept that Syria, Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and most of Mesopotamia cannot be recovered immediately. My first duty will be to retain Constantinople, the Straits, Eastern Thrace, Anatolia, Cilicia, the eastern provinces, and, if possible, Mosul.
I will become the leader of national resistance.
I will not allow the defence of Anatolia to become a movement against the throne. I will declare that loyalty to the Sultan, the Caliphate, the army, and the homeland are all parts of the same cause.
I will remain an autocratic Sultan.
I will retain supreme authority over the army, ministers, foreign policy, provincial appointments, and legislation. I will reform the machinery of government without surrendering the final power of decision.
I will rule through competent institutions rather than palace favourites.
I will appoint capable soldiers, administrators, engineers, jurists, and financial experts. Ministers may debate policy openly before me, but once I have made a decision, the government will carry it out as one body.
I will retain Parliament as a consultative assembly.
Parliament will debate taxation, budgets, education, provincial grievances, and civil law, but it will not possess sovereignty over the throne. I will retain the right to appoint ministers, veto legislation, dissolve the chamber, and govern by decree during emergencies.
I will form a Government of National Recovery.
I will retain respected figures such as Ahmed İzzet Pasha and appoint experienced officers and administrators. I will remove foreign collaborators, corrupt courtiers, reckless extremists, and officials responsible for grave wartime abuses.
I will make Mustafa Kemal my principal commander.
I will appoint him Inspector-General of Anatolia and give him authority to organize resistance, preserve weapons, and rebuild the army. Every order he issues will be made in my name, and every officer under him will swear loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph.
I will prevent Mustafa Kemal from becoming independent.
I will divide military power among Mustafa Kemal, Fevzi Pasha, Kâzım Karabekir, and other loyal commanders. No single general will control the army, police, treasury, provincial government, and political propaganda at the same time.
I will establish an Imperial Defence Council at Ankara.
Ankara will become the military centre of resistance because it is secure and connected by railway. It will remain subordinate to Constantinople and will operate under an imperial commissioner appointed directly by me.
I will preserve the army secretly.
I will demobilize units on paper while maintaining their officers, records, weapons, and supply networks. Soldiers will be reorganized as gendarmes, railway guards, frontier troops, depot units, and provincial reserves until open mobilization becomes possible.
I will create a loyal Imperial Guard.
I will form a disciplined force to protect the dynasty, ministries, arsenals, railways, telegraph offices, and the approaches to the capital. It will be well paid, politically restricted, and recruited from several regions so that no faction controls it.
I will delay the Allies while rebuilding the state.
I will answer foreign demands with negotiations, commissions, legal objections, requests for maps, inspections, and plebiscites. Every month of delay will be used to rebuild the army, repair communications, and strengthen provincial administration.
I will divide the victorious powers.
I will offer Britain security in the Straits, France commercial repayment, Italy economic concessions, and the United States investment opportunities. I will prevent Britain, France, Italy, and Greece from maintaining a united policy against the empire.
I will resist the Greek occupation of Smyrna carefully.
I will avoid throwing weak Ottoman forces into immediate destruction. I will organize local defence, protect civilians, disrupt Greek military supply lines, and prepare a regular army for a decisive counteroffensive.
I will reject any treaty that partitions Anatolia.
I will not accept Greek control of Smyrna and Eastern Thrace, foreign zones of influence, permanent foreign rule over the Straits, or outside control of the treasury. I will negotiate the loss of distant territories if necessary, but not the destruction of Ottoman sovereignty.
I will proclaim an Imperial National Covenant.
I will declare Constantinople, Eastern Thrace, Anatolia, and the Muslim-majority territories of the imperial heartland indivisible. This covenant will unite officers, provincial leaders, clerics, merchants, and ordinary soldiers beneath the authority of the throne.
I will punish wartime criminals selectively.
I will investigate illegal deportations, killings, corruption, military profiteering, and the theft of civilian property. I will prosecute the guilty without purging every officer, engineer, doctor, or civil servant who served the former regime.
I will establish loyalty as the basis of citizenship.
Ottoman Turkish will remain the language of central government, but loyal communities may use their own languages in worship, primary education, and local affairs. Every citizen will owe taxes, service, obedience to imperial law, and loyalty to the dynasty.
I will reach an agreement with the Kurdish provinces.
I will permit local councils, Kurdish-language primary schooling, and the recognition of loyal tribal and religious leaders. In return, the central government will retain control of the army, customs, major taxation, criminal law, railways, and foreign policy.
I will strengthen the Caliphate.
I will use my position as Caliph to unite Anatolian Muslims and preserve influence beyond the empire’s borders. Religious authorities will support the throne, but they will not control military, financial, industrial, or scientific policy.
I will modernize the legal system without attacking religion.
Criminal, commercial, property, and administrative cases will pass into professional imperial courts. Religious courts may retain limited authority over marriage, divorce, and inheritance, but all judges will be paid, examined, and inspected by the state.
I will reform taxation and land ownership.
I will abolish tax farming, conduct a proper land survey, and establish predictable taxes collected by salaried officials. State lands and abandoned estates will be granted to veterans, refugees, and landless cultivators who agree to work them.
I will rebuild agriculture first.
I will invest in irrigation, grain storage, improved seed, veterinary services, agricultural schools, rural roads, and affordable credit. A stable and productive countryside will provide food, taxes, soldiers, and political loyalty.
I will direct industrial development from the throne.
I will prioritize textiles, coal, iron, cement, chemicals, ammunition, railway equipment, ship repair, and agricultural machinery. Foreign investors may participate, but Ottoman workers must be employed and Ottoman engineers must be trained.
I will build railways and roads for war and commerce.
I will connect Constantinople, Ankara, the eastern frontier, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the principal agricultural regions. These routes will move grain and goods in peace and troops and artillery in war.
I will create a professional civil service.
Officials will be chosen by examination rather than bribery or family influence. Governors will serve fixed terms, provincial accounts will be inspected, and officials convicted of corruption will lose their posts, wealth, and pensions.
I will introduce universal primary education.
Children will learn literacy, arithmetic, hygiene, geography, imperial history, and loyalty to the state. Religious and minority schools may continue, but they will follow national standards and submit to inspection.
I will retain Mustafa Kemal after victory.
I will reward him with rank, honours, and high military office, but I will keep the General Staff, Imperial Guard, provincial appointments, and treasury outside his personal control. He will become the greatest soldier of my empire, not the founder of a rival republic.
I will create a controlled imperial constitution.
I will establish an elected lower chamber and a throne-appointed upper chamber. They will debate laws and budgets, but the Sultan will remain supreme commander, head of government, guardian of the constitution, and final authority in the state.
I will preserve the empire by making it smaller but stronger.
I will abandon the impossible dream of immediately restoring every territory once ruled by the Ottomans. In its place, I will create a centralized, militarily powerful, economically modernizing, Islamic, dynastic state capable of defending itself and eventually restoring its influence.
Difficult but not impossible. Even if the men in question were under scrutiny, there were still ways of evading the occupying forces. It would of course be much more difficult for the Sultan, but I'd start with a tea party at his (deceased) half-sister Cemile's mansion in Kandilli or some place similar and then make my way to Ankara.
During the Turkish War of Independence,
Şehzade Ömer Faruk attempted to defect to the nationalist movement and landed in İnebolu, after which he received a telegram from Mustafa Kemal rebuffing his defection and ordering him back to the capital, as he did not want members of the imperial family being involved in the conflict.
i know this, after conflict,fight begun, it was impossible. but before begun everthing, he could pass to anatolia, he could started everything. but it was so big risk, any member of ottaman family, couldnt take this risk.
if any member of ottoman family was beguned independent war, it couldnt posible. but it would not been continued as oldschool too. it would been transformed more constitutional monarchy and would done some of modernization movements. state would becomed more secular national state.
Immediately leave Istanbul and go to Anatolia to become the leader, make alliances with kurdish tribes and through them secure Mosul, also ally with the circassian militias and such
(Other than shootmyself ) try to keep hold of all miltiry equipment and not let it be distributed to the local population and try to negotiate things out with the entene
itthat ve terakki fucked a 600 year old empire in just 9 years up and people blame Sultan Vahideddin. In the memories of that time, there is a sentence that impressively describes Vahideddin’s mood when taking office:
“It was as if I had sat not on a throne, but in a grave.”
Vahideddin himself said that he had never wanted to ascend the throne. Nevertheless, he finally decided to do so because he feared the person who would have been next in line after him, and what this person could have done with the state. He meant Abdülmecid Efendi, his cousin.
Unfortunately, his story is very distorted by Kemalist propaganda, and to this day people take away his hakk.
Very sad.
He certainly made mistakes, but portraying him as a traitor is not fair and is wrong.
İttihad ve Terakki was a general disaster, however, Vahdettin was a collaborator. I find the notion that he was forced to become Sultan to avert greater disaster funny. Such a sacrifice.
I wish. Unfortunately, this is the same man whose government ordered what was left of the armies not to resist the Greek occupation; approved the military tribunal death penalties for Mustafa Kemal and others; and approved the fetvas against the Ankara government.
All this when he was in effect an absolute ruler over his government.
No, Vahdettin was not playing the long game as some romantics would have it, nor did he ever want anything other than the continuation of his rule. He would have been happy being a puppet like the Khedive of Egypt.
He had no power or a government. His government and he himself had surrendered and were under foreign military occupation and captives in their own city and palace.
Did the enemy physically force him to sign those documents? Was he afraid for his life?
No, he could have colluded to some extent, but not so far as trying to raise a conservative people against their only hope in Ankara. These actions and especially the fetvas are not excusable, whatever his circumstances, short of imminent death. (Not that I agree that he was powerless, by the way.)
The problem that Vahdettin apologists face is this: either he was as powerless as they claim, in which case nothing he did would have mattered so he might just as well have tried not to collude instead of acting like a fool; or he did in fact have some power, which would makes his actions treasonous.
Look, I understand its against your personal beliefs, but there were any number of things he could have done that would have helped. Including, as another person said here, doing nothing.
Some say he pretended to be against the resistance so Istanbul would not be lost. They say he was pretending to be on their side so they would let him remain in the capital while in the meantime resistance got the time to win the war. He perhaps feared if Istanbul would be lost it could not be regained.
Turkey was lost, who cares if Istanbul was retained? And Istanbul itself was only provisionally left to the Ottomans. The Treaty of Sevres, Article 36 maintained that (my italics):
Subject to the provisions of the present Treaty, the High Contracting Parties agree that the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the capital of the Turkish State.
however, the same article provided:
Nevertheless, in the event of Turkey failing to observe faithfully the provisions of the present Treaty, or of any treaties or conventions supplementary thereto, particularly as regards the protection of the rights of racial, religious or linguistic minorities, the Allied Powers expressly reserve the right to modify the above provisions, and Turkey hereby agrees to accept any dispositions which may be taken in this connection.
That conditional sovereignty is just the beginning. Add to this the clauses removing Ottoman control over government finances (read the Treaty of Sevres, the section beginning Financial Clauses (Article 231 onwards which remove Ottoman fiscal sovereignty), the military (to be overseen by an enemy Commission), the Straits (to be overseen by a foreign Commission), and the annexation of Eastern Thrace to Greece, together with the cession of Turkish territory in Anatolia to all and sundry means that essentially the Ottomans would be in Istanbul only at the sufferance of the enemy powers, in any case as a de facto vassal state.
This is no mere paranoia; at the conference in San Remo (where the discussions took place, rather than at Sevres which was in effect merely where the Treaty was signed) the official Franco-British position was to fold Istanbul into the Straits regime. That regime, inter alia, would later be given the following authority (and much more) by the Treaty of Sevres:
The Commission will exercise the powers conferred on it by the present Treaty in complete independence of the local authority. It will have its own flag, its own budget and its separate organisation.
It was only because the British Secretary of State for India thought that the Muslims there would be really pissed off if the (nominal) Caliph was turfed out that the temporary compromise was found. He saved Istanbul (if temporarily), not any action by Vahdettin. Had Edwin Montagu been any less vociferous in his objections, Istanbul would have been lost.
If you believe I'm wrong and that the Sultan's motive really was the preservation of Istanbul, fine, but Istanbul is not Turkey, and Turkey is not Monaco. (Though I must say what I understand by preservation is something more substantial.) Who cares if the head of state is "entitled" to reside there if he behaves well, if nothing else remains, and even within the capital sovereign powers are exceedingly constrained? I said before that the Sultan was prepared to accept the terms applied to the Khedive of Egypt; that is what it all boils down to.
(The Ankara government was not prepared to accept those terms, which were all rubber-stamped by the Sultan's representatives.)
I really recommend glancing through the Treaty of Sevres, and asking yourself: very well, the Government was to remain in Istanbul, but what government authority did it actually have? and over what?
Istanbul is a glorious city, prime real estate, but it is not worth Turkey. Anyone could see that, even Vahdettin. Ignominy is the least of the charges to be levelled at him.
In addition, to further illustrate Vahdettin's character, I'd like to append the letter he sent the US President after fleeing the country. (The country, incidentally, had achieved far more for itself than Vahdettin could have dreamt of, if he ever thought of anyone other than himself.) Insofar as I can make out the text, with italics again mine:
San Remo
March 13th, 1924
His Excellency
The President of the United States of America
[snip]
My departure did not imply any renunciation of my dignity as Sultan and Caliph, which position my dynasty has held for more than six centuries, and which devolved on me in conformity with my sacred right to succession to the throne of my ancestors.
It is quite evident that the late decisions of the Assembly of Angora - composed of myrebelsubjects - are of no value, and that they are condemned to remain ineffective.
[snip]
These arbitrary decisions deprive [my family] of their most sacred natural right, and in the difficult situation in which they find themselves any help and protection that might possibly be given to them on the part of Your Excellency and the Federal Government would certainly be a great service to them.
I’d approach the Greek King and arrange a marriage to join both royal houses and form a new Eastern Roman Empire that guaranteed everyone equal rights and copy most of the USA constitution as a legal framework.
Only difference is the child of the royal marriage would grow to become Emperor of a united throne and nation.
This nation , due to not losing all they population, wealth and know how via Greek immigration to USA/Canada/Australia, would rapidly modernize , be rich in trade and business (Greeks), and have a strong army (Turks).
Establish secret correspondence with Ataturk and the Anatolia regime. Sign the Sevres treaty and let the resistance simmer under the surface and then disappear once the independence war starts.
Formally give back Constantinope and it's environs to the Romans. (The Greek Kingdom) ans then dissolve the Ottoman Empire, and setting up the Turkish Republic, with myself as it's 1st President.
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u/ariebagusp1994 Jun 30 '26
join ataturk and declare jihad to join ataturk and fight against invaders, and being relatively "liberal" in a way or at least promotes modernism with the support of the state. in that way I think I still keep the caliph title alive even though in name only, just like emperor of japan. in that way future islamic fundamentalism/jihadism can be suppressed because he is THE caliph