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Vignette #2 - "Turning Turkish"
Turning Turkish
As far as first wars go, the War of ’77 was not a bad one to be in, as long as you were on the right side of course. There was the initial panic as the Russian advance columns stormed their way to the Balkan passes barely a few weeks after they’d crossed the Danube. Then there was the held breath as the Russians attempted to break our fellows positioned at Tarnovo, the relief when their assaults shattered. But the greatest of all emotions felt by both us officers as well as the rank and file was when Osman Paşa, latter referred to as “Ghazi” for his efforts, pulled our forces together and threw the Russians back across the Danube. At that moment, it didn’t matter that the Russians may still have had many more men than us, or that the Ottoman government was on the verge of bankruptcy once again. We had taken an army which, by all accounts was to roll over us, and stopped it in its tracks. Although I am not a Turk, I still felt a tremendous amount of pride in that moment, that little in my life has since matched.
Of course I had done well personally as well. I’d been involved in a number of actions which mostly through no special effort on my own part saw me promoted to the rank of Yüzbaşı, which translates into captain in English. Nevertheless I still embellished somewhat my stories to my mother back home, while emphasising of course that I was not yet missing any limbs. When I’d finally received a letter back it described how she wished she could see her “brave soldier boy”, and supposed that I looked rather fetching in a Turkish uniform. I must confess that by the end of the war, I had become rather partial to the tasselled fez myself, which made me look quite the oriental alongside my appearance.
I’d also met a number of interesting characters during the war, including Osman Paşa, and a Danish officer named Wilhelm Dinesen who had, like me, managed to persuade the Turks to take him into the Sultan’s service. He was a bit of an odd chap, who always seemed rather too eager to be thrown into dangerous combat situations. Were it not for the fact that he usually came out of these unscathed, I would have thought that he had some kind of death-wish. Despite this he was even more experienced than his thirty-two years of age would suggest. As the war came to a close I had discovered from him that he had not only been a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, but had even been an officer in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 when he was eighteen years of age. Someone who had fought the Germans so many times and survived was a man who clearly knew his way around a battlefield [1]. Especially when battalions, brigades and divisions became disordered as we pursued the Russians, the instincts of a man like Dinesen were life-saving and I thank my good fortune that I knew him.
Of course with the end of the war, most of the Europeans who had joined the Turkish army would go on their separate ways. Most went back to their home countries, and those who went back to the United Kingdom in particular received a warm welcome, though apparently the British army made little effort to see what they had actually learned from a modern war. I too had considered making my way back to old England, but I hesitated. First it was a week, then a month. I had gone so far as to make my way to a booking office for the journey home before deciding “not today”. To this day I can’t quite account for the feeling which seemed to have me chained to Constantinople, but I suppose it was a strange synthesis of reason and emotion. After all, my limited family aside what was waiting for me back home? An army career had been closed off, and the thought of a clerical job produced a great misery within me. Whereas in Turkey, I was already a proven man.
Or so I thought at any rate. Nearly all of the foreigners in the Turkish army had been released from service at the end of the war, and none of the foreigners that I had met in my service seemed to be all too keen on staying. Dinesen had said something along the lines of “I’ll find another war somewhere to fight in”. Sometime in the summer of 1878 I made the decision to re-enlist in the Ottoman Army, when which I was informed that in the peacetime, any such effort from a foreign non-Muslim would be nigh-impossible unless they were from some kind of foreign military mission, or were Helmuth Von Moltke. There was nothing else for it of course, and it was thus that I began my journey into the Islamic religion.
When I had written to home to inform my family of this my mother, who in all fairness was never the regular Sunday churchgoing type, did not seem to be too concerned in her reply which still took me by surprise. Less surprising was that she had told me that my granpapa had begun to rant that the “mad Mohammedans” had taken his grandson. But to be perfectly candid, I couldn’t have cared less about what those self-righteous grouches thought. If this is what it would take to make a career in the army, then this is what I would do. The chap at the mosque near the room that I rented (who is an Imam, more of a prayer leader than a vicar) explained that before I were to become a Muslim, much in the way of study had to be done. Contrary to popular opinion amongst Europeans in which the fanatical Turk seeks the conversion of all infidels in his country with baited breath, the process to actually become a Muslim needs a level of official verification [2]. I began learning Arabic, which remains the primary religious language for all Muslims even outside of Arabic speaking countries, and as well as becoming able to recite the Islamic prayers, which of course are all in Arabic, began to gain a basic knowledge surrounding the theology of Islam.
Of course as any convert who has gone “full Turk” can attest to, the conversion to Islam is far from a painless process, in a very literal sense. As the Jews do, the Muslims conform to the covenant of Abraham and are circumcised. Amongst native Muslims this usually happens as a youth but adult converts are required to undergo the practice as well. I would prefer not to relive this painful memory, so suffice to say that I was in significant pain for a number of weeks. Around three months or so from the time that I made my decision to convert, I said the Shahada or “the testimony” as it is known in Arabic that confirmed my belief that there was no God except for Allah, and that Mohammed was his final messenger. There is much more to being a Mohammedan than this simple ceremony, but that would all come with time.
In the meanwhile my conversion had certainly expanded my horizons in many more ways than I could have anticipated. When it was heard in the higher ranks that there was a native Englishman who had “gone renegade”, which was more common in the past than it was by the late 19th century, there was certainly a great deal of interest, especially from Anglophile factions in the officer corps. Only a couple of years after I had re-enlisted with the Turkish army, I knew many more of the senior brass than a man of my standing would normally do, an in an environment which was characterised primarily by favouritism, this was a good omen for my future prospects.
[1] – Wilhelm Dinesen was the father of Karen Blixen, and an interesting character in his own right. He fought in the Russo-Turkish War of OTL, but ended up committing suicide at a relatively early age.
[2] – At least this is according to The Well Protected Domains by Selim Deringil. In normal circumstances (i.e. outside of intercommunal conflicts and massacres) at least in the core of the Empire there seems to have been a surprisingly rigorous process for conversions to Islam. Muslim minorities such as Alevis and some non-Muslims such as Yazidis were targeted in particular by the state authorities for conversion however.
Turning Turkish
As far as first wars go, the War of ’77 was not a bad one to be in, as long as you were on the right side of course. There was the initial panic as the Russian advance columns stormed their way to the Balkan passes barely a few weeks after they’d crossed the Danube. Then there was the held breath as the Russians attempted to break our fellows positioned at Tarnovo, the relief when their assaults shattered. But the greatest of all emotions felt by both us officers as well as the rank and file was when Osman Paşa, latter referred to as “Ghazi” for his efforts, pulled our forces together and threw the Russians back across the Danube. At that moment, it didn’t matter that the Russians may still have had many more men than us, or that the Ottoman government was on the verge of bankruptcy once again. We had taken an army which, by all accounts was to roll over us, and stopped it in its tracks. Although I am not a Turk, I still felt a tremendous amount of pride in that moment, that little in my life has since matched.
Of course I had done well personally as well. I’d been involved in a number of actions which mostly through no special effort on my own part saw me promoted to the rank of Yüzbaşı, which translates into captain in English. Nevertheless I still embellished somewhat my stories to my mother back home, while emphasising of course that I was not yet missing any limbs. When I’d finally received a letter back it described how she wished she could see her “brave soldier boy”, and supposed that I looked rather fetching in a Turkish uniform. I must confess that by the end of the war, I had become rather partial to the tasselled fez myself, which made me look quite the oriental alongside my appearance.
I’d also met a number of interesting characters during the war, including Osman Paşa, and a Danish officer named Wilhelm Dinesen who had, like me, managed to persuade the Turks to take him into the Sultan’s service. He was a bit of an odd chap, who always seemed rather too eager to be thrown into dangerous combat situations. Were it not for the fact that he usually came out of these unscathed, I would have thought that he had some kind of death-wish. Despite this he was even more experienced than his thirty-two years of age would suggest. As the war came to a close I had discovered from him that he had not only been a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War, but had even been an officer in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 when he was eighteen years of age. Someone who had fought the Germans so many times and survived was a man who clearly knew his way around a battlefield [1]. Especially when battalions, brigades and divisions became disordered as we pursued the Russians, the instincts of a man like Dinesen were life-saving and I thank my good fortune that I knew him.
Of course with the end of the war, most of the Europeans who had joined the Turkish army would go on their separate ways. Most went back to their home countries, and those who went back to the United Kingdom in particular received a warm welcome, though apparently the British army made little effort to see what they had actually learned from a modern war. I too had considered making my way back to old England, but I hesitated. First it was a week, then a month. I had gone so far as to make my way to a booking office for the journey home before deciding “not today”. To this day I can’t quite account for the feeling which seemed to have me chained to Constantinople, but I suppose it was a strange synthesis of reason and emotion. After all, my limited family aside what was waiting for me back home? An army career had been closed off, and the thought of a clerical job produced a great misery within me. Whereas in Turkey, I was already a proven man.
Or so I thought at any rate. Nearly all of the foreigners in the Turkish army had been released from service at the end of the war, and none of the foreigners that I had met in my service seemed to be all too keen on staying. Dinesen had said something along the lines of “I’ll find another war somewhere to fight in”. Sometime in the summer of 1878 I made the decision to re-enlist in the Ottoman Army, when which I was informed that in the peacetime, any such effort from a foreign non-Muslim would be nigh-impossible unless they were from some kind of foreign military mission, or were Helmuth Von Moltke. There was nothing else for it of course, and it was thus that I began my journey into the Islamic religion.
When I had written to home to inform my family of this my mother, who in all fairness was never the regular Sunday churchgoing type, did not seem to be too concerned in her reply which still took me by surprise. Less surprising was that she had told me that my granpapa had begun to rant that the “mad Mohammedans” had taken his grandson. But to be perfectly candid, I couldn’t have cared less about what those self-righteous grouches thought. If this is what it would take to make a career in the army, then this is what I would do. The chap at the mosque near the room that I rented (who is an Imam, more of a prayer leader than a vicar) explained that before I were to become a Muslim, much in the way of study had to be done. Contrary to popular opinion amongst Europeans in which the fanatical Turk seeks the conversion of all infidels in his country with baited breath, the process to actually become a Muslim needs a level of official verification [2]. I began learning Arabic, which remains the primary religious language for all Muslims even outside of Arabic speaking countries, and as well as becoming able to recite the Islamic prayers, which of course are all in Arabic, began to gain a basic knowledge surrounding the theology of Islam.
Of course as any convert who has gone “full Turk” can attest to, the conversion to Islam is far from a painless process, in a very literal sense. As the Jews do, the Muslims conform to the covenant of Abraham and are circumcised. Amongst native Muslims this usually happens as a youth but adult converts are required to undergo the practice as well. I would prefer not to relive this painful memory, so suffice to say that I was in significant pain for a number of weeks. Around three months or so from the time that I made my decision to convert, I said the Shahada or “the testimony” as it is known in Arabic that confirmed my belief that there was no God except for Allah, and that Mohammed was his final messenger. There is much more to being a Mohammedan than this simple ceremony, but that would all come with time.
In the meanwhile my conversion had certainly expanded my horizons in many more ways than I could have anticipated. When it was heard in the higher ranks that there was a native Englishman who had “gone renegade”, which was more common in the past than it was by the late 19th century, there was certainly a great deal of interest, especially from Anglophile factions in the officer corps. Only a couple of years after I had re-enlisted with the Turkish army, I knew many more of the senior brass than a man of my standing would normally do, an in an environment which was characterised primarily by favouritism, this was a good omen for my future prospects.
[1] – Wilhelm Dinesen was the father of Karen Blixen, and an interesting character in his own right. He fought in the Russo-Turkish War of OTL, but ended up committing suicide at a relatively early age.
[2] – At least this is according to The Well Protected Domains by Selim Deringil. In normal circumstances (i.e. outside of intercommunal conflicts and massacres) at least in the core of the Empire there seems to have been a surprisingly rigorous process for conversions to Islam. Muslim minorities such as Alevis and some non-Muslims such as Yazidis were targeted in particular by the state authorities for conversion however.
- Nassirisimo
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