Turkey and Ottoman Empire
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Marmaduke Pickthall wrote a number of letters on the Armenian issue to The New Age in the year between May 1919 and April 1920. They contained a vigorous defence of the Ottoman Turks and a very forthright and plain-speaking criticism of the Armenians. However, Pickthall found an adversary in Dikran Kouyoumdjian (Michael Arlen), another writer for The New…
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A letter to The New Age in its edition of 6 January 1916 is very interesting. It explains how Britain drove the Ottomans over to Germany’s side in the Great War. It does not suggest that this was intentional, rather that it was a blunder, foreseen, but not avoided. Blunders, foreseen, but not avoided, may…
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This powerful article by Marmaduke Pickthall is as relevant today as it was when it was written a century ago (in The Age, Vol 18, No.5, December, 1915). In fact, Pickthall was pinpointing something that had its origin at that point and which has made for chaos and instability in the world ever since. It…
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In 1915 Marmaduke Pickthall was the most informed man in England on the region governed by the Ottoman Empire. Pickthall was an English Tory and a famous novelist, as well as a journalist. Pickthall published nine novels set in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Yemen and Turkey. E.M. Forster wrote in 1921 that Pickthall was “the only contemporary…
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The Bundestag has passed the ‘Remembering and Commemorating Genocide against Armenians and other Christian minorities in the period of 1915-1916’ Resolution. The vote of the German Parliament is more an indication that there is something rotten in the modern state of Germany than there was in Ottoman Turkey. Germany had no reason to pass such…
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In the debate on the Treaty of Lausanne, T.P. O’Connor, one of the last remaining Redmondite MPs left in the British House of Commons, made an impassioned plea on behalf of the establishment of an Armenian state in Anatolia, which had been abandoned in the Treaty signed by the British Empire with the Turks. The…
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‘The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919’ by Dr Mohammad Gholi Majd begins with one of the most startling statements I have read: “The great famine of 1917-1919 was unquestionably the greatest calamity in the history of Persia, far surpassing anything that has happened before. It is shown in this study that as much as…
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Reproduced below is a speech by General Charles Townshend, who surrendered his army to the Turks at Kut el Amara 100 years ago. It was made in the British House of Commons in December 1922, four years after his release from captivity, after Townshend had become an M.P. In the speech Townshend says some very…
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A ‘National Conference on the Eastern Question’ took place in Piccadilly, London, on 8 December 1876. The Convention was attended by 1,200 delegates and The Times noted “we have never known any association for a political object which has obtained support over so large a part of the scale of English society.” But who is aware…
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We have reached the Centenary of the Easter Rising. On this day it is fitting we remember North Antrim’s Roger Casement who not only gave up his life for Irish freedom but did so much, in his writings, to give Ireland independence of mind. This represented the beginnings of a Foreign Policy – an essential…
