The Assassination Attempt on Abdülhamid II

Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2018

This book explores an event described by the Times as 'one of the greatest and most sensational political conspiracies of modern times'. On 21 July 1905, just after the Friday Prayer at the Yıldız Hamidiye Mosque in Istanbul, a car bomb exploded and left 26 dead with another 58 wounded. Sultan Abdülhamid II, the target of the attack, remained unscathed. The Ottoman police soon discovered that Armenian revolutionaries were behind the plot and several people were arrested and convicted, among them the Belgian anarchist Edward Joris. His incarceration sparked international reaction and created a diplomatic conflict.The assassination attempt failed, the events faded from memory, and the plot became a footnote in early twentieth-century history. This book rediscovers the conspiracy as a transnational moment in late Ottoman history, opening a window on key themes in modern history, such as international law, terrorism, Orientalism, diplomacy, anarchism, imperialism, nationalism, mass media and humanitarianism. It provides an original look on the many trans- and international links between the Ottoman Empire, Europe and the rest of the world at the start of the twentieth century.

ACTA HISTRIAE, 2023

İsmail Mahir Pasha was sent to Thessaloniki by Abdulhamid II as an inspector to investigate the Committee of Union and Progress which caused him to get caught by the radar of the Committee Union and Progress members when he returned to Istanbul. The Committee Union and Progress members sent him a fake letter to get him out of his household and consequently assassinated him on a street on December 2nd, 1908, by a man dressed as an officer who couldn’t get caught. The aim of this article is to evaluate the reasons of the assassination process and who he was assassinated by and to examine the political results of this assassination. L’ASSASSINIO DEL GENERALE İSMAIL MAHIR PASHA A ISTANBUL (1908) SINTESI Abdulhamid II mandò il generale İsmail Mahir Pascià a Salonicco con il compito di indagare intorno al Comitato per l’Unione e il Progresso. Al suo ritorno a Istanbul, il generale finì nel mirino dei membri del Comitato che gli inviarono una falsa lettera per farlo uscire di casa e di conseguenza, il 2 dicembre 1908, venne ucciso in strada. L’as- sassino, vestito da ufficiale, riuscì a dileguarsi. Lo scopo dell’articolo è approfondire le ragioni dell’assassinio e indagare su chi lo eseguì, oltre che esaminare i risvolti politici dell’omicidio. ATENTAT NA GENERALA İSMAILA MAHIRJA PASHO V ISTANBULU (1908) POVZETEK Po razglasitvi 2. ustavne monarhije je Odbor za zvezo in napredek še naprej usmerjal svoje napade na ljudi, ki so jih imeli za ljudi starega režima, in Mahir Pasha je bil kot sta- ri pomočnik sultana Osmanskega cesarstva Abdulhamida II. nedvomno eden od tistih, ki so bili v nevarnosti. Kot izkušen vojak, ki se je zavedal te nevarnosti, ni imel nikakršnega namena, da bi zapustil svoj dvorec. Nekega dne, pred 2. decembrom 1908, ga je nekdo, ki je bil oblečen v vojaška oblačila, povabil na ministrstvo, vendar temu vabilu ni verjel in se z vednostjo vojnega ministra ni zglasil na ministrstvu, minister pa je sam potrdil, da je bilo vabilo lažno. Vendar pa je 2. decembra spet nekdo v vojaških oblačilih prinesel telegram, kjer je spet pisalo, da ga vojni minister vabi na ministrstvo. Po tem telegramu se je Mahir Pasha odpravil na ministrstvo, vendar ga je na ulici Divanyolu umoril nekdo v oficirskih oblačilih. Atentatorja ni bilo mogoče ujeti. Ta atentat, ki je bil podoben tistim, ki jih je izvedla skupina atentatorjev Odbora, imenovana »Fedais«, je ostal nerešen umor. Umor Mahirja Pashe, ki se je zgodil zelo blizu palače in samega sultana, sredi dneva in sredi Istanbula, je imel svoje politične posledice. Namen tega članka je oceniti razloge za atentat, raziskati, kdo ga je umoril ter preučiti politične posledice tega atentata.

Archiv orientální, 2023

Archiv orientální, Oriental Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences), vol. 91 no. 1 (2023), 19-39. Odjek pokušaja atentata na sultana Abdulhamida II među bosanskohercegovačkom muslimanskom inteligencijom okupljenom oko lista Bošnjak In the second half of July 1905, the Belgian anarchist Edward Joris and members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation attempted to assassinate the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in Istanbul. The Sultan survived, but the lives of numerous civilians were lost. The first part of this paper reviews the assassination attempt, its participants, and its political background, whereas the second part analyzes how this event was presented to Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the political press at the time, with a special review of the echoes it had among the Muslim intelligentsia gathered around the Bošnjak gazette.

The transformation of the Ottoman Empire from absolute monarchy to the constitutional monarchy was actualized after the Revolution of 1908. The Ottoman Freedom Society (Osmanlı Hürriyet Cemiyeti) was founded in 1906 by young officers of the Third Army to conduct an effective revolutionary organization in Macedonia. After Resneli Niyazi Bey revolted against the Hamidian regime, Abdülhamid II decided completely abolish the Unionist structure in Rumelia. The plan was to use Albanian warriors, whose loyalty to the palace was well-known, under the command of Şemsi Paşa. However, Şemsi Paşa was assassinated outside the Telegraph Office by a Unionist partisan, Atıf Bey, shortly after he arrived in Manastır. This not only caused the disappearance of the threat against the existence of the Committee of Union and Progress, but also left thirty thousand armed Albanians gathered in Firzovik aimless. The dissident agents who infiltrated into this group managed to convince them to do the exact opposite of what Şemsi Paşa planned. They threatened Abdülhamid II in their successive telegrams to “either declare the Constitution immediately, or they would march on to İstanbul”. The Sultan was forced to re-institute the Constitution on the night of July 23, 1908, with the death of one of his famous generals and the loss of Albanian support. This work aims to highlight the great importance of the assassination of Şemsi Paşa during the process that led to the Second Constitutional Period.

Ali Kemal's Abduction from Istanbul (1922) - His Abductor's First-hand Account, 1922

Ali Kemal, who in 1922 was the chief editor of the newspaper Peyam-ı Sabah in Istanbul, was abducted in Istanbul by Nationalist policemen for transport to Ankara for trial in November of that year. However, en route, in Izmit, the Nationalist commander there, Nureddin Paşa, took Ali Kemal from the custody of the Istanbul policemen and allowed a mob to stone Ali Kemal to death, after which his body was symbolically hanged on a scaffold with a sign around his neck that read “Artin Kemal”, a not-so-subtle reference to Ali Kemal’s support for Armenians. In 1977, the magazine Hayat Tarih transcribed a 1925 article in Akşam newspaper written in Ottoman Turkish by journalist Esat Mahmut Karakurt that contained the first-hand account of Ali Kemal’s abduction and transport to Izmit by his abductor, policeman Cem’i Bey. This is the English translation of the two installments of Cem’i Bey’s story that appeared in Hayat Tarih in September-October 1977.

Abstract This article examines the reasons why Süleyman the Magnificent executed his son Şehzade Mustafa during the Nahçıvan military campaign of 1553. According to the dominant narrative in both Ottoman sources and academic literature, Süleyman’s concubine and later wife Hürrem Sultan and her closest ally, Süleyman’s son-in-law Rüstem Pasha, plotted against Mustafa in order to save the throne for one of Hürrem’s own sons. Though the latter was widely beloved, this scheme cost him his father’s favor. Afterward, however, the sultan regretted the decision and dismissed Rüstem Pasha from his position as grand vizier. This article examines the roles of Sultan Süleyman, Şehzade Mustafa, Hürrem Sultan, and Rüstem Pasha in the Ottoman, Venetian, Habsburg, French, and Persian sources, investigating why the sultan executed the prince in the context of the Ottoman succession experience. Adding complexity to the common narrative, this article concludes that the sultan, who was losing his authority to the prince, desired to consolidate his power and to remove his dynasty from the competition between social groups that had characterized earlier succession struggles. Keywords: Şehzade Mustafa, succession, fratricide, Hürrem Sultan, Kanuni Sultan Süleyman, Rüstem Paşa

Publications by Presidency's Directorate of Communications, 2021

"On January 28, 1982, Consul General of the Republic of Türkiye in Los Angeles, Kemal Arıkan, was assassinated by the crossfire of two terrorists in the morning hours while he was in his vehicle stopping at a traffic light close to his residence. The “Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide” claimed responsibility for the assassination. It is useful to remember the city of Los Angeles and the state of California at that time."