alternatehistory.com
Vignette #1 - Journey to the East
Ibrahim Osman, Zeynep Osman; Adventures in the East, A Memoir of a Naturalised Mohammedan: Palgrave Macmillan
Brief notes on the papers of Ibrahim Osman
Ibrahim Osman, around 1905 [1]
Ibrahim Osman, my great-grandfather, is a man little remembered by history. In my own studies of politics in the Islamic World around the turn of the century (which I should hopefully have finished my PHD on next year) his name appears but little else besides. Earlier this year however my attention was brought to a few old papers that my grandmother had in her room after she had died. The papers themselves were a bit of a confusing mess, mostly written in English but some of the later parts in Turkish [2]. Amongst the family we had an idea that my great grandfather was born “In the East” and educated in England the truth was much more interesting.
I’ve taken care to censor various offensive words that were unfortunately amongst common usage at the time and whose full inclusion would not add to the text, and have added a few notes here and there to add context to what Ibrahim says but otherwise have left the writings as I have found them.
[1] – Actually a photo of an Arab officer from Damascus, but in the absence of photoshop skills, use your imagination guys!
[2] It’s worth mentioning that Turkish as its referred to here is different than the Turkish of our own world, retaining more of the Persian and Arabic vocabulary that Ottoman Turkish had. Think of it as a continuation of Ottoman Turkish without the reforms of Ataturk it underwent in OTL.
* * * * * *
Journey to the East
The story of how I had come to be in the service of the Sultan of Turkey is a strange one, but I suppose I should not have expected anything different from my upbringing. From the time I was conceived it would seem that the path I would walk on would be a bit more difficult than that of my fellows. This difficulty was in part due to my father or the lack thereof. My mother had always been most evasive on the whereabouts of, or any other details regarding, my father besides explaining he was “from the East, somewhere”, which didn’t quite square up to the boasts that he had once been an Eton boy, but I digress. Due to the race of my father, which I was ignorant of at the time, I had an appearance unlike that of most British boys, who were quick to identify me as a “W*g” or “Half-N****r” and exclude me on the basis of my distinctly Mediterranean appearance. So I suppose you could say that my childhood was a lonely one and by the time I was coming of age had produced in me an inalienable sense that something was lacking in me, some kind of masculinity.
And as an eighteen year old man there was only one thing for it! I had endeavoured to become an officer in the British army. The 1870s had been a relatively quiet time, with only the odd war against African blacks to keep the soldiers sharp, and perhaps that accounts for what happened at the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1880s when the English began experiencing setbacks to an alarming degree. Alas my own career was to take me to a rather quite different place, as a violent disagreement with an officer of the Lancashire fusiliers. I had only disagreed with his insulting manner of addressing me – w*g– but the unsympathetic army authorities discharged me, leaving me disgraced already before my twentieth year of life, and with but a little income with which to support my mother. Perhaps I should have known better than to try and make a name for myself in what was essentially a white section of the army.
I had by that point made the acquaintance of a man who had told me that he was off to the Near East to “show the Russian bear what for”. The newspapers had talked about the growing crisis in the Balkans, and to be honest the stories of the atrocities that the Turks had committed in Bulgaria made one’s heart sink, and even the Prime Minister Disraeli was not able to follow his usual prescription of support for the Turk against the Russian, leaving them open to the machinations of the Russians. The Russians, insofar that I am able to tell, had the ambition of seizing the city of Constantinople, capital of the Turkish Empire, and restoring the Christian rule that had prevailed in the city prior to 1453. No doubt that behind this were great strategic plans, but these have no doubt been covered in more detailed and well-read histories than my own.
Originally my journey to Turkey was to simply be one to see “what all the fuss was about”, so to speak. By the time that I’d arrived in the January of 1877 the oriental city full of indolent, fatalistic Turks that I had expected was not what I saw. There is of course the old city south of the Golden Horn, in which can be found the old Topkapi Palaces and all the mosques that one expects, but north of this in neighbourhoods like Pera one finds a city which is in every way the match of any in Europe, right down to the inhabitants. Besides the expatriate European inhabitants, there are a great many Greeks, Armenians and even Bulgarians which bring the Christian population of the city to almost half the total. The Turks themselves had been most energised by the impending conflict with Russia, and various guides explained to me the situation amongst the Turkish section of town. I must confess that I was rather taken up in the great storm of emotion in the city, both amongst the Turks and the Turkophile English acquaintances I had made, and before long I had decided to renew my military career in a different setting by enrolling in the military academy.
I still remember the day that I enrolled and began my journey as a Turkish officer. The recruiting officer, a man on the older end of middle age with sunken eyes and a drooping moustache had eyed me sceptically when I had initially attempted in my atrocious Turkish to communicate my wish to sign up. With a raised eyebrow he spoke to me in French, which I thank God I understood. “Another European? I suppose we have room for another one of you. What is your nationality?”
“I’m British monsieur”
“Aha, another Englishman? We have had a few of your countrymen join recently” He looked up and down as if to study me, in a way that made me rather quite uncomfortable. “Most of them speak better Turkish than you”
“I am learning. I already know how to write the alphabet and…”
“Do you have any experience? Combat experience I mean?” the man cut me off brusquely.
“I was commissioned as an officer back in England before I was discharged” I had told a little white lie, as although trained I had never received a commission. Realistically, I knew all that there was to know about being an officer or so I thought, and the rather shabby nature of some of the soldiers surrounding me gave me something of an air of confidence.
However when I told him this, the man’s face suddenly seemed to lift. “Turkish can be taught easily enough, and at any rate one in three of our men find writing beyond their limited capacities. Teaching someone the instincts of an officer is harder. I suppose you will be useful…”
“Then I’m accepted?”
The man shrugged. “You’ll have to bring someone from your embassy. Swear that your disbelief in Islam shall not be an impediment to your service, and this kind of thing. But provided that it all goes well, than you will be one of the Sultan’s soldiers. So I would learn some Turkish in the meantime young man. What’s your name?”
“Abraham Haslam sir”
“That’s easy enough to Turkify I suppose. Any objections to being ‘Ibrahim Osman’?”
I hadn’t quite intended to be a Turkish officer when I had been turfed out of the British army, but the prospect did not seem so bad now. An upcoming war against long odds always promises military glory for those willing to fight for even, even if they are foreigners. Besides improving my Turkish which I was to refine from that point until now, I grew to understand the specifically Turkish way of warfare, which admittedly was inferior of the British In many respects but which had its own strength. By the time that war with the Russians actually broke out in the April of 1877, I had been commissioned as an officer in the Turkish army, in part owing to the military education that I had already received in Britain, and I was ready to play my part in the upcoming war.
* * * * * *
Author's Notes - I had strongly considered adding vignettes to the story when I had began writing it, but I feel as though without this element the timeline will be a bit "dry" for lack of a better word. Rather than focusing on a number of POV characters, for the time being we will focus on Abraham Haslam/Ibrahim Osman, for the simple fact that I already have a story planned out for him that will take him to many interesting places.
A good inspiration for Ibrahim's original journey and subsequent enlistment in the Turkish army is William von Herbert's rattling good read "The Defence of Plevna". Herbert had actually fought in Plevna in OTL and wrote an account which was published several decades later, which besides being an interesting window onto Turkish society through the war, is unfortunately laden with anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. Interestingly enough though it is far from the most bigoted book I had to read while researching the timeline, and reading though some of the contemporary academic books is certainly an interesting window into how far academia has come along in a century or so.
Brief notes on the papers of Ibrahim Osman
Ibrahim Osman, around 1905 [1]
Ibrahim Osman, my great-grandfather, is a man little remembered by history. In my own studies of politics in the Islamic World around the turn of the century (which I should hopefully have finished my PHD on next year) his name appears but little else besides. Earlier this year however my attention was brought to a few old papers that my grandmother had in her room after she had died. The papers themselves were a bit of a confusing mess, mostly written in English but some of the later parts in Turkish [2]. Amongst the family we had an idea that my great grandfather was born “In the East” and educated in England the truth was much more interesting.
I’ve taken care to censor various offensive words that were unfortunately amongst common usage at the time and whose full inclusion would not add to the text, and have added a few notes here and there to add context to what Ibrahim says but otherwise have left the writings as I have found them.
[1] – Actually a photo of an Arab officer from Damascus, but in the absence of photoshop skills, use your imagination guys!
[2] It’s worth mentioning that Turkish as its referred to here is different than the Turkish of our own world, retaining more of the Persian and Arabic vocabulary that Ottoman Turkish had. Think of it as a continuation of Ottoman Turkish without the reforms of Ataturk it underwent in OTL.
* * * * * *
Journey to the East
The story of how I had come to be in the service of the Sultan of Turkey is a strange one, but I suppose I should not have expected anything different from my upbringing. From the time I was conceived it would seem that the path I would walk on would be a bit more difficult than that of my fellows. This difficulty was in part due to my father or the lack thereof. My mother had always been most evasive on the whereabouts of, or any other details regarding, my father besides explaining he was “from the East, somewhere”, which didn’t quite square up to the boasts that he had once been an Eton boy, but I digress. Due to the race of my father, which I was ignorant of at the time, I had an appearance unlike that of most British boys, who were quick to identify me as a “W*g” or “Half-N****r” and exclude me on the basis of my distinctly Mediterranean appearance. So I suppose you could say that my childhood was a lonely one and by the time I was coming of age had produced in me an inalienable sense that something was lacking in me, some kind of masculinity.
And as an eighteen year old man there was only one thing for it! I had endeavoured to become an officer in the British army. The 1870s had been a relatively quiet time, with only the odd war against African blacks to keep the soldiers sharp, and perhaps that accounts for what happened at the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1880s when the English began experiencing setbacks to an alarming degree. Alas my own career was to take me to a rather quite different place, as a violent disagreement with an officer of the Lancashire fusiliers. I had only disagreed with his insulting manner of addressing me – w*g– but the unsympathetic army authorities discharged me, leaving me disgraced already before my twentieth year of life, and with but a little income with which to support my mother. Perhaps I should have known better than to try and make a name for myself in what was essentially a white section of the army.
I had by that point made the acquaintance of a man who had told me that he was off to the Near East to “show the Russian bear what for”. The newspapers had talked about the growing crisis in the Balkans, and to be honest the stories of the atrocities that the Turks had committed in Bulgaria made one’s heart sink, and even the Prime Minister Disraeli was not able to follow his usual prescription of support for the Turk against the Russian, leaving them open to the machinations of the Russians. The Russians, insofar that I am able to tell, had the ambition of seizing the city of Constantinople, capital of the Turkish Empire, and restoring the Christian rule that had prevailed in the city prior to 1453. No doubt that behind this were great strategic plans, but these have no doubt been covered in more detailed and well-read histories than my own.
Originally my journey to Turkey was to simply be one to see “what all the fuss was about”, so to speak. By the time that I’d arrived in the January of 1877 the oriental city full of indolent, fatalistic Turks that I had expected was not what I saw. There is of course the old city south of the Golden Horn, in which can be found the old Topkapi Palaces and all the mosques that one expects, but north of this in neighbourhoods like Pera one finds a city which is in every way the match of any in Europe, right down to the inhabitants. Besides the expatriate European inhabitants, there are a great many Greeks, Armenians and even Bulgarians which bring the Christian population of the city to almost half the total. The Turks themselves had been most energised by the impending conflict with Russia, and various guides explained to me the situation amongst the Turkish section of town. I must confess that I was rather taken up in the great storm of emotion in the city, both amongst the Turks and the Turkophile English acquaintances I had made, and before long I had decided to renew my military career in a different setting by enrolling in the military academy.
I still remember the day that I enrolled and began my journey as a Turkish officer. The recruiting officer, a man on the older end of middle age with sunken eyes and a drooping moustache had eyed me sceptically when I had initially attempted in my atrocious Turkish to communicate my wish to sign up. With a raised eyebrow he spoke to me in French, which I thank God I understood. “Another European? I suppose we have room for another one of you. What is your nationality?”
“I’m British monsieur”
“Aha, another Englishman? We have had a few of your countrymen join recently” He looked up and down as if to study me, in a way that made me rather quite uncomfortable. “Most of them speak better Turkish than you”
“I am learning. I already know how to write the alphabet and…”
“Do you have any experience? Combat experience I mean?” the man cut me off brusquely.
“I was commissioned as an officer back in England before I was discharged” I had told a little white lie, as although trained I had never received a commission. Realistically, I knew all that there was to know about being an officer or so I thought, and the rather shabby nature of some of the soldiers surrounding me gave me something of an air of confidence.
However when I told him this, the man’s face suddenly seemed to lift. “Turkish can be taught easily enough, and at any rate one in three of our men find writing beyond their limited capacities. Teaching someone the instincts of an officer is harder. I suppose you will be useful…”
“Then I’m accepted?”
The man shrugged. “You’ll have to bring someone from your embassy. Swear that your disbelief in Islam shall not be an impediment to your service, and this kind of thing. But provided that it all goes well, than you will be one of the Sultan’s soldiers. So I would learn some Turkish in the meantime young man. What’s your name?”
“Abraham Haslam sir”
“That’s easy enough to Turkify I suppose. Any objections to being ‘Ibrahim Osman’?”
I hadn’t quite intended to be a Turkish officer when I had been turfed out of the British army, but the prospect did not seem so bad now. An upcoming war against long odds always promises military glory for those willing to fight for even, even if they are foreigners. Besides improving my Turkish which I was to refine from that point until now, I grew to understand the specifically Turkish way of warfare, which admittedly was inferior of the British In many respects but which had its own strength. By the time that war with the Russians actually broke out in the April of 1877, I had been commissioned as an officer in the Turkish army, in part owing to the military education that I had already received in Britain, and I was ready to play my part in the upcoming war.
* * * * * *
Author's Notes - I had strongly considered adding vignettes to the story when I had began writing it, but I feel as though without this element the timeline will be a bit "dry" for lack of a better word. Rather than focusing on a number of POV characters, for the time being we will focus on Abraham Haslam/Ibrahim Osman, for the simple fact that I already have a story planned out for him that will take him to many interesting places.
A good inspiration for Ibrahim's original journey and subsequent enlistment in the Turkish army is William von Herbert's rattling good read "The Defence of Plevna". Herbert had actually fought in Plevna in OTL and wrote an account which was published several decades later, which besides being an interesting window onto Turkish society through the war, is unfortunately laden with anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. Interestingly enough though it is far from the most bigoted book I had to read while researching the timeline, and reading though some of the contemporary academic books is certainly an interesting window into how far academia has come along in a century or so.
- Nassirisimo
- Word Count: 1.7k