Enver Paşa

Great liberator of the Empire or the man primarily responsible for the Ottomans' catastrophic collapse?

A good patriot or an extreme Germanophile? The idol of "liberty" or a ruthless dictator? A Jacobin nationalist or a pan- Turkism adventurist?




Enver Pasha, the last of Ottoman radicals, has been brought back from his cemetery in Tajikistan to Istanbul, Turkey on Saturday, 03 August,1996 and was reburied on Sunday with a state ceremony to Hurriyet- i Ebediyye hill where Talat Pasha, the second powerful figure of the Young Turk government, Cemal Pasha who completed the Young Turk troika and Mahmut Sevket Pasha, Young Turk's prime minister for four months in 1913 until his assassination, along with the first Ottoman radical constitutionalist Mithat Pasha are resting. The transfer ceremony coincided with the 74th anniversary of Enver's death (4 August 1922) in Tajikistan when leading rebellious Turkic contingents against the Red Army.

Enver Pasha was born on November 22, 1881, in Divanyolu, Istanbul (Turkey), to a relatively humble family of Monastir. His father, Ahmet, during his youth, might have been either a railway official or a porter. Later on, however, his circumstances changed; he was promoted to the position of Bey and included in the retinue of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Within a short time in this position, he was promoted again to the rank of Pasha. Enver's mother, Aisha, was an ethnic Albanian well-known for holding the lowest occupation in the Empire--that of laying out the dead.

Following his education in the modern military schools of the late Ottoman state, he graduated as a staff captain in 1902. Enver's promotion in the army was rapid in spite of his sympathies with the Young Turk movement abroad whose ideas, based on the principles of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, were spreading among military and civilian intelligentsia, at a period of Sultan Abd- ul Hamid's absolutism. Enver was already a major, climbing the stairs of army hierarchy with considerable speed, when he joined the clandestine organization Ittihad ve Terakki (Union and Progress) in 1907.

Enver Pasha died on August 4, 1922, near Baljuan, in present-day Republic of Tajikistan, of a wound that he sustained while leading a cavalry charge. After 1918, Enver continued to develop his Pan-Turkist ideology among Central Asian Turks; at no time did he tire of pursuing the ever-elusive victory that would have made him the caliph of all Islamic domains.

Selected Bibliography

Caroe, Olaf. Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism, New York: St Martin's Press, 1952, 1967.
Hostler, Charles Warren. Turkism and the Soviets, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1957.
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press, 1961.
Barber, Noble. The Sultans, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Ramsauer, Ernest Edmondson. The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of 1908, Beirut: Khayats, 1965.
Hopkirk, Peter. Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia, New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984.
Marwat, Fazal-ur-Rahirm. The Basmachi Movement in Soviet Central Asia: A Study in Political Development, Peshawar: Emjay Books International, 1985.
Vucinich, Wayne S. The Ottoman Empire: Its Record and Legacy, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Ltd., 1965.
Yale, William. The Near East: A Modern History, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1958.