In May 1989, two series of demonstrations in Turkish villages of northeast Bulgaria was followed by a massive gathering of more than 50,000 Muslim Turks in the town of Shumnu in the same area. The Turks had converged to Shumnu from the surrounding villages and smaller towns in order to protest the forced changes of names and the bulgarization imposed by the government of Todor Zhivkov, then undisputed ruler of Bulgaria. The demonstration was put down in the usual brutal Bulgarian way; some twenty to thirty-five demonstrators were killed and hundreds were injured. However, the Turks had made their point; they were not going to give up, however fierce the official terror, their Islamic identity and culture.

Students of Middle Eastern, North African, and Balkan history of the period extending roughly from the middle of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of World War I ought to know about the vital developments that have occurred since 1985 in the Turkish Archives or Başbakanlik Arşivleri (prime minister’s archives). These materials were to be moved to the central archive building in Ankara, but the ultimate decision was made to keep the Ottoman documents in Istanbul and to use the large Ankara archive building for preserving the material accumulated during the Republic.

An international conference was convened by the Turkish government in 1985 to discuss the situation of the Ottoman archives. The meeting was opened by Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, who promised on behalf of the government to do whatever was necessary to expedite the classification of the existing material and facilitate its use. After the conference, Professor Halil Inalcik and I were invited to Ankara to discusss with Mr. Hasan Celal Güzel—then prime minister’s aide, currently minister of culture—the measures necessary to train archivists. Later, in the summer of 1986, I participated in several working sessions presided over by Mr. Güzel to discuss various technical questions, such as the administrative framework of the archives, the training of personnel both at home and abroad, and so on. In a recent visit to the archives (November 1988), I was able to assess on the spot the work carried out since 1986 under the supervision of Professor Ismet Miroglu, the current director general of the archives.

Population movements have always played a major role in the life of Islam and particularly the Middle East. During the nineteenth century, however, the transfer of vast numbers of people from one region to another profoundly altered the social, ethnic, and religious structure of the Ottoman state—that is, the Middle East and the Balkans. The footloose tribes of eastern Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula were spurred into motion on an unprecedented scale by economic and social events, and the Ottoman government was forced to undertake settlement measures that had widespread effects. The Ottoman-Russian wars, which began in 1806 and occurred at intervals throughout the century, displaced large groups of people, predominantly Muslims from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands. Uprooted from their ancestral homelands, they eventually settled in Anatolia, Syria (inclusive of the territories of modern-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel as well as modern Syria), and northern Iraq. These migrations continued until the time of the First World War. In addition, after 1830 waves of immigrants came from Algeria—especially after Abdel Kader ended his resistance to the French—and from Tunisia as well. These people too settled in Syria at Damascus.

Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.

The most important and undoubtedly the most fateful period in Ottoman history is the Young Turk or Union and Progress era in 1908–18. The final disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the rise of independent states in the Middle East, the intensification of conflicts over Macedonia, the full emergence of Turkish and Arab nationalisms, the start of the Muslim anti-imperialist mobilization through struggle in Libya in 1911, and other events of vital importance in the social and political history of the area occurred during the Young Turk era. It was a historical watershed which marked simultaneously the end of an imperial form of political organization in the Middle East and the beginning of a new political existence in the form of national states. The Young Turks affected profoundly the course of history among the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans. Moreover the Young Turks were the first group in the Ottoman state to approach the social, political, and cultural transformation of their society in the spirit of modern politics. Yet the Young Turks remain the least studied and understood and the most distortedly portrayed power group in the history of the Balkans and the Middle East. Most of the existing works on the Young Turks, consisting mainly of memoirs, were written by their authors to credit themselves with political roles and achievements which did not always correspond to reality.

The study of the Ottoman state in tĥe latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman State at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted.