A Man of the Frontier: Ramadan Shallash and the Making of the Post‑Ottoman Arab East
A Man of the Frontier: Ramadan Shallash and the Making of the Post‑Ottoman Arab East
Focusing on the region surrounding Istanbul and the Balkans, important studies of the past couple decades centered on the men who challenged the monarchy in 1908, bent it to their collective will before 1914, and lost the war in 1918. Their post-war insurgency campaign, from which emerged the Turkish Republic, was understood a singular experience in which the “Turkish homeland” loomed large. Their collective ideology and shared habitus was believed to have been formed in the crucible of Great Power proxy wars, nationalist movements, and guerrilla struggles in the Balkans during the tumultuous decades preceding the Great War. But the Ottoman State was far more than its ‘European’ provinces, and similar individuals played equally key roles in the Kurdish and Arab regions as well. In fact, ex-Ottoman soldiers challenged the post-war settlement in distant places like Iraq, Syria, and Palestine into the 1940s. This chapter reconstructs the biography of one such individual, Ramadan Shallash. It traces his scholarly career first in the Imperial Tribal School and then in the Military Academy, followed by a discussion of his professional career as an officer for the Ottoman army and the roles he played in the making of the post-Ottoman Middle East.
Keywords: Ottoman Middle East, Syria, Tribes, Mandates, Education, insurgency
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