Families-in-Arms: Kinship Networks of Arab Ottoman Army Officers from the Late Ottoman Empire to Postwar Syria and Iraq (1885-1932)

Abstract

This is a study of the shift from empire to nation state that occurred in what had been part of the Ottoman Empire for four centuries and is now known as the Middle East, and more specifically, Syria and Iraq. This study begins in the 1880s, with the birth of many of the individuals who served as officers and bureaucrats in the Ottoman military and civil service prior to and during the First World War. This study traces the trajectories and life writings of eleven such individuals who eventually served as Ottoman military officers during World War I (1914-1918). Although the devastating experiences of that war brought about the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its allies, the actions of the individuals in this study and others like them challenge longstanding characterizations of the empire’s collapse as inevitable. After the war, Ottoman lands in the Middle East were occupied and claimed by victorious European powers. During the interwar period (1918-1939), the eleven individuals in this study participated in local nationalist movements, contesting and alternately collaborating with various foreign imperial interventions, and wider populations, establishing the nation states of the modern Middle East. This study ends in 1932, when Iraq achieved formal independence. For the eleven individuals in this study who were involved in these processes and had relocated to Iraq by that point, all these momentous events and changes occurred within a single lifetime. Analyzing their life writings provides a glimpse of both how these individuals experienced this dynamic time, as well as how they constructed historical narratives and silences about this time, these events, and their roles therein. Many historians have examined the activities and legacies of members of this group of individuals in various ways, illuminating the formation and activation of networks based on shared education, military service, participation and leadership in anticolonial revolts, membership in underground secret political groups, ideas and worldviews, diverse nationalist ideologies, national identities, and class. One element often taken for granted or left out of these studies is the role of different forms of kinship relations, including siblinghood; relationships with parents (i.e. the “second to last Ottoman generation,” to modify Provence’s concept); affinal kinship (spouse and in-laws); extended family connections; and close friendships often portrayed through discourses of fraternalism or “fictive kinship.” These kinship-based connections formed a complex and multilayered matrix of network connections which individuals relied on throughout their lives of mobility and public service. Centering these relationships, their origins, and their effects on the trajectories of individuals through periods of intense upheaval and conflict, rather than ideologies and identities, restores an appreciation for the different ways in which individuals and their families sought to navigate this important historical moment. Yet while these “personal” relationships were dynamic and imperative to officer trajectories, they have largely been erased from memoir accounts themselves. It is only by comparing multiple memoir accounts, information from descendants, archival records, and secondary sources that it is possible to illuminate these connections. Investigating these memoir silences yields glimpses into the ways in which memoir authors engaged with changing ideas about the very idea of “public” and “private,” gender, wartime trauma, class, and changing communitarian and national identities which many of these authors helped construct. In analyzing the construction of many of these works as predominantly conforming to the genre of political memoirs, this study also suggests an expanded understanding of their potential as war memoirs.