Erdoğan, the Hejaz Railway and the Political Economy of Ottomanism
References to the glorious Ottoman past have been flying around in Turkey amid the memorandums signed with Syria and Saudi Arabia to revive the Hejaz railway. What is really going on?
We have discussed over several posts what the Erdoğan regime really wants from its closeness to Ahmad al-Sharaa, the man who has led Syria since the fall of Assad. Part of it is the wish to write a success story for an Islamist government, the kind that came apart in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda. Remember how Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, recently in an interview with Al Jazeera made the subtext explicit about Syria being exactly that. True or not, it is what Erdogan government wants Syria to be, an Islamist-led state turning into a success under Erdoğan’s auspices.
But the larger pull, as I keep underscoring, is political economy. Or should I say clientelism. Influence over Syria, and inside it, gives Erdoğan’s patrimonial network of favoured businessmen somewhere to invest, above all through build-operate-transfer, the trademark arrangement of the AKP years in which a chosen firm puts up an asset and runs it for years under state guarantees before handing it back. More wealth, in other words.
The groundwork is already being laid. At a trade summit on 9 June, in Gaziantep, the Turkish border city across from Aleppo, ministers from both countries sat down to plan the commercial architecture. The Turkish trade minister Ömer Bolat set a target of five billion dollars in annual trade within two years and ten billion by the early 2030s, said Ankara was ready to open new customs gates at Islahiye and between Nusaybin and Qamishli, and confirmed that Turkish banks had agreed to open branches inside Syria. Turkey’s ambassador in Damascus, Nuh Yılmaz, called Syria a logistics corridor to the Gulf and Turkey its gateway to Europe, and told investors to think in long-term partnerships rather than quick trades. Syria’s economy minister, Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar, put it more plainly: ‘Our country is your country too, he said. Please come.’
Resurgence of the Neo-Ottomanism
The trade is the public face. That is fine. But what is unsaid is whose firms collect the contracts. Surely not the people of Turkey or Syria, who struggle, in different ways and to different degrees, to make ends meet. Therefore to package this in a favourable way to its base, the regime reached for the Ottoman banner.
Neo-Ottomanism has had a resurgence in the last couple of weeks. I have argued before that it is an emotional tool from the regime’s repertoire of consolidation, deployed for domestic purposes even though the regime knows it irritates European, Balkan and Arab audiences alike. The more the regime feels it is losing legitimacy and popularity to authoritarianism and terrible economic conditions at home, the more the Ottoman symbols are invoked. Classic Erdoğan. And classic Erdoğan sycophants.
“Just as we witnessed the liberation of Damascus, Aleppo, and Karabakh, God willing, one day we will also witness the liberation of Jerusalem,” the interior minister Mustafa Çiftçi told an AKP conference last weekend in central Anatolia. The reaction from Israel was swift. Its foreign ministry told Çiftçi to “wake up,” that the “Ottoman Empire is gone.” The defence minister Israel Katz, who has on more than one occasion displayed his radical love(!) for Erdoğan’s Turkey, added that Jerusalem “will remain Israel’s capital forever.”
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu reached for it too. The former chairman of the CHP, the main opposition party, has just been reinstated by judicial writ, a politically motivated usurpation of the elected leadership under Özgür Özel that has thrown the party into the chaos Erdoğan was hoping for. Then he, wallah out-Ottomaned the lot of them. Perhaps the one win in a career of defeats, which is exactly why the regime wanted him back. “Look at the lands of the Ottomans. Turkey must reach that geography and build its own character there. We have to go not by shrinking but by growing. Turkey must be present across the Ottoman geography,” he said, and one wonders if he is being ventriloquised by an Erdoğan adviser.
And then the Reis (the chief) as Erdoğan likes to be called, entered the Ottoman arena himself and tweeted: “The Ottoman plane tree has flown our flag with pride across seven climes. The Republic of Turkey, which took the place of the Ottoman state, is not the first state on these lands but our last. The eternal state is the beloved nation itself. As long as the Turkish nation exists, our state will go on existing.”
Abdülhamid II sounds so familiar!
One of the reasons for this recent and euphoric Ottomania is that Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Saudi Arabia for the revival of the Hejaz railway.
Riyadh is the latest capital to sign on to the revival of the Hejaz railway, the Ottoman line that once ran from Istanbul towards the holy cities, and which Ankara now wants rebuilt across Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Turkey’s transport minister Uraloğlu called it a strategic necessity, the regional supply chain too fragile to leave exposed, and said Ankara means to open routes through Syria, Jordan and Iraq.
Looks like the ambition goes further. The longer-term aim seems to be to extend the line down to Oman and the Indian Ocean, create a corridor that sidesteps the Strait of Hormuz, and turn Turkey into the junction where Gulf trade meets European markets. In April, Turkey, Syria and Jordan had already signed a trilateral framework on connectivity covering road, rail, sea and air.
A tad bit history is apt here.
Among the railways the Ottomans laid, the Hejaz line was the odd one out. Every other line in the empire was built with foreign money, by foreign engineers, to turn a profit, the Anatolian and Baghdad lines among them. The Hejaz railway was none of those things. It was financed by the Ottoman state and by Muslim donations, surveyed and increasingly built by Ottoman engineers, and it made no commercial sense whatever. Marschall, the German diplomat of the day, called it “completely worthless in economic terms”, and on the numbers he was right. The Hejaz was the poorest province in the empire, a stretch of sand and stone that fed itself on pilgrims and little else, a drain on the treasury rather than a source of revenue. Murat Özyüksel’s 2014 book The Hejaz Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Modernity, Industrialisation and Ottoman Decline turns on this fact. If the line could never pay, the reasons for building it lie elsewhere, he argues. In religion, in the army, and in the politics of a shrinking empire.
Abdülhamid II, who ruled from 1876 to 1909, had come to the throne as the empire was losing its Christian lands. The Russian war of 1877 to 1878 stripped away much of the Balkans and left 5.5 million Christian subjects outside the new borders. What remained was overwhelmingly Muslim, more an Asian and Arab state than a European one. Abdülhamid drew the obvious conclusion and became more paranoid and authoritarian.
Does this remind anyone of someone?!
Abdülhamid II suspended the new constitution, sent the first parliament home, and dismissed the constitutionalists Midhat Pasha and Namık Kemal who had wanted a parliamentary order. From then on he ruled as an absolutist, a caliph at the centre rather than a sovereign bound by any contract with his subjects. He pictured the empire as a tall plane tree. The Balkan provinces were blighted leaves, already lost. The trunk was the Muslim lands, and the trunk had to be saved.
Again; familiar?!
The means of saving it was Islam. Özyüksel describes the policy that followed as a pragmatic one rather than a devout one, a programme that used Islamic symbols and the language of the caliphate to hold together the Muslim populations the empire could not afford to lose. Religious orders were cultivated and their leaders brought to Istanbul. Clerics were sent to Egypt, India, Algeria and beyond to carry the caliph’s name. Pro-Ottoman Muslim newspapers were subsidised. The caliph’s name was read in Friday prayers in distant mosques. The aim, in the phrase that recurs, was to make Yıldız Palace the Vatican of the Islamic world, a single religious centre to which Muslims everywhere would look.
Europe watched this and saw pan-Islamism, by which it meant a coming revolt of the world’s Muslims directed from Istanbul. Britain and France, ruling tens of millions of Muslim subjects between them, filled their consular files with anxious reports about it. The fear was largely their own invention. Abdülhamid knew the limits of his power and had no intention of leading three hundred million Muslims into anything.
What he was running, in Özyüksel’s reading, was an “internal pan-Islamism”, a defensive policy aimed inward. Goltz Pasha, the German general who advised him and understood him well, called it an attempt “to conquer from within”. Raise the caliph’s prestige abroad, and you strengthen his authority at home. The point was to keep the empire’s own non-Turkish Muslims, the Arabs above all, but the Kurds and Albanians too, from catching the nationalism that had already cost it the Balkans. The biggest blow to the empire. A wound that has never healed, even in the psyche of the empire’s inheritor, modern Turkey.
A railway against nationalism
The railway was where this policy met the ground. In his memoirs Abdülhamid set out two purposes for it, and neither was commercial. The first was military, to move troops quickly to Syria and the Hejaz in times of trouble without depending on the Suez Canal, which the British controlled and could close. The second was to bind Muslims together so tightly that British “malice and deceit” would break against them like a hard rock. There were aims he did not announce. The line would let Istanbul rein in the Amir of Mecca and the Bedouin tribes who taxed and robbed the pilgrim caravans. It would blunt the British Arab card, the campaign, real enough, for an Arab caliph and an Arabia free of Ottoman rule. It would keep the holy cities from seceding. To pay for it, Abdülhamid called on Muslims inside and outside the empire to fund a sacred line that belonged to the whole Islamic world, and they answered, covering roughly a third of the cost. Contemporary observers noted how quickly the appeal turned him into the most celebrated figure in the Muslim world.
What became of it is the part that should temper any neat lesson. The line reached Medina in 1908 and went no further. It eased the hajj, cut the Damascus to Medina journey from forty days to barely more than two, and it did strengthen Ottoman control in Syria and help move troops during the First World War. It never reached the Red Sea or Mecca. It did not prevent the Arab Revolt that Sharif Husayn launched in 1916, nor the British conquest of the Arab provinces, nor the collapse of the empire that followed.
Özyüksel’s verdict is that the railway was at once a success and a failure, and his image for why is worth keeping. The Ottomans, he writes, were like doctors treating a dying patient. The problems they could solve, the money and the engineering, they solved. The body was failing all the same. The empire’s economic dependency and its military and political weakness were beyond any single cure, and so the cure did not take.
Set Abdülhamid’s railway beside Erdoğan’s revival of it and some things rhyme. Infrastructure is again being made to carry religious and political meaning, a line to the holy cities standing in for a claim to leadership in the Muslim world.
Ottoman and Islamic symbolism are again being put to domestic use, and, as I have argued before, it tends to be invoked most loudly when the government feels its legitimacy thinning at home. In both cases the pious, solidaristic language sits on top of harder strategic and material calculations. In both cases the man pursuing it bargains pragmatically with greater powers while wearing a civilisational banner, Abdülhamid among the British, French and Germans, Erdoğan in a post-Assad Syria crowded with American, Israeli, Gulf and Russian interests.
Ottoman symbols and clientelism
However…
The rhyme should not be pushed too far, and three differences matter. The first is direction. Abdülhamid’s was a policy of defence, the management of decline, an effort to hold a Muslim core together against forces pulling it apart. Erdoğan is not holding an empire together. He is building a position in a Syria suddenly without Assad, reaching for influence rather than guarding against secession.
The second is the resource. Abdülhamid actually held the caliphate. It was an office, and it carried weight. Erdoğan invokes its memory, a thinner and more theatrical thing. Still annoying for many in the region. Especially Israelis.
The third is Özyüksel’s own argument. That Abdülhamid’s railway had no economic motive at all. It was prestige and security, bought with money the treasury did not have. Erdoğan’s version arrives in the same packaging, but the drive behind it, on the reading I keep returning to, is closer to the share of contracts that flows to a favoured business network than to any devotion to pan-Islamism.
What I mean here is that, looking at Erdoğan’s influence in Syria, the rhetoric of the Ottoman Empire, the Hejaz revival etc., the Ottoman symbolism is the loudest and flamboyant thing about it.
In addition: Yes, Erdoğan has embraced Abdülhamid II throughout his career, and, yes, they resemble each other in their authoritarianism, Islamist credentials and pragmatism.
So, I totally get the temptation to read Erdoğan’s roadmap through that lens, as neo-imperial ambition or a caliphate redux. And surely there is some of that. But only to a point. In his sweet dreams, maybe. My argument is that such a reading remains on the surface and explains very little.
To understand why the railway is being built, why the Erdoğan regime cannot afford to let Syria fail, and why Gulf involvement matters so much, the productive question is not “what does the Ottoman imagery mean?” but “whose firms get the contracts, whose capital enters the project, and where does the money go?”