ثورة فلسطين - أسبابها ونتائجها
The Palestine Revolt: Its Causes and Consequencesby Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā

Page 462

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تجرأوا على قتله، فوهت قوة الوحدة، وكثر السلاطين في الدولة، ووقف سير العلم والحضارة؛ لأن العلم كان عربيًّا وكان المرشد إليه القرآن العربي، وكان العرب هم الذين أحيوا منه ما أماته الزمان، وجددوا ما أخلقته صروف الحدثان، وجاراهم فيه مواليهم وتلاميذهم من الفرس والسُّريان، وكانت الحضارة عربية بالتبع للعلوم والفنون العربية، وكان الترك أبعد شعوب البشر عن العلم والحضارة؛ وإنما عندهم من آلة المُلك: الحرب والعصبية، فكانت دولتهم دولة حرب وفتح، لا دولة علم وفن.

وكان أكبر سيئات الترك العثمانيين إيثار لغتهم الهمجية، على اللغة العربية، لغة الدين والعلم والأدب والحضارة، وتحريهم إضعاف الأمة العربية واستذلالها لئلا يعود إليها حقها في الخلافة الإسلامية وحكم المسلمين؛ فإن الله تعالى بعث رسوله محمدًا خاتم النبيين في الأمة العربية، وأنزل عليه كتابه المعجز للبشر باللغة العربية، فجعل هدايته لهم عربية وحكمهم به عربيًّا فقال: وَكَذَلِكَ أَنزَلْنَاهُ حُكْماً عَرَبِياًّ (الرعد: 37) ولذلك انتهت عداوة دولتهم للغته بعداوتها له، وهؤلاء خلفاؤهم الكماليون يعدون التكلم بالعربية والتعلم للعربية وكتابة التركية نفسها بالحروف العربية من أكبر الجرائم السياسية التي يعاقب قانونهم مجترحها، فلا غرو أن يقول رسول الله النبي العربي فيما يعد من دلائل نبوته بخبر الغيب (أول من يسلب أمتي ملكهم وما خولهم الله بنو قنطوراء) وهو يدل بالإشارة أو فحوى العبارة إن لم يكن بنصها على أن سالبي ملك أمته لا يعدون منها، وقال الحافظ ابن حجر في شرح البخاري أن المراد هنا بالأمة أمة الجنس لا أمة الدين. ونحن لا نطعن في إسلام الشعب التركي نفسه؛ وإنما نطعن في جهل دولته وعصبيتها، التي انتهت بضعف دينها ودنياها، ثم بما يشكو منه كل مسلم منهم ومن غيرهم من نبذ خلفها لكتاب الله وشرعه ظهريًّا.

استقلال العرب وحالهم بعد الحرب

(8) تغلب الترك العثمانيون على الدولة العباسية في الشرق، وخذلوا الدولة الأموية في الغرب (إذ استنصرت بهم على الأسبانيين فلم تنصرهم) واستولوا على مهد الحضارة العربية في العراق وسورية ومصر، فأضعفوا الحضارة والعلم في هذه البلاد؛ ولكنهم لم يستطيعوا إماتة اللغة العربية فيها، ولا الإدالة للغة التركية منها،

English
translation

they dared to kill him. The strength of unity weakened, sultans multiplied within the state, and the advance of knowledge and civilization stopped. Knowledge had been Arab, guided by the Arabic Qur'an. The Arabs had revived what time had killed and renewed what the changes of fortune had worn out, and their Persian and Syriac clients and pupils had kept pace with them. Civilization was Arab as a consequence of Arab sciences and arts. The Turks were the people farthest from knowledge and civilization. Their means of rule were war and group partisanship, so their state was one of war and conquest, not of knowledge and art.

Among the greatest wrongs of the Ottoman Turks was their preference for their barbaric language over Arabic, the language of religion, knowledge, literature, and civilization, and their deliberate effort to weaken and humiliate the Arab nation so that it could not recover its right to the Islamic caliphate and rule over Muslims. God sent His messenger Muhammad, the seal of the prophets, among the Arab nation and revealed to him His miraculous book in Arabic. He made His guidance to them and their government by it Arabic, saying, “Thus We have sent it down as an Arabic judgment” (Qur'an 13:37). Their state's hostility to his language therefore ended in hostility to him. Their Kemalist successors count speaking Arabic, learning Arabic, and writing Turkish itself in Arabic letters among the greatest political crimes, for which their law punishes the offender. No wonder that the Messenger of God, the Arab prophet, said in a report of the unseen counted among the signs of his prophethood, “The first to strip my community of its rule and what God has granted it will be the sons of Qantura.” By direct wording, allusion, or implication, this indicates that those who seize his community's rule do not count as part of it. Ibn Hajar said in his commentary on al-Bukhari that “community” here means a community of descent, not religion. We do not question the Islam of the Turkish people themselves. We question their state's ignorance and partisanship, which ended in weakness in its religion and worldly life and, under its successors, in its casting God's Book and law behind its back, a matter of which every Muslim, Turkish or otherwise, complains.

Arab independence and their condition after the war

(8) The Ottoman Turks overcame the Abbasid state in the East and abandoned the Umayyad state in the West when it sought their help against the Spaniards. They took the cradle of Arab civilization in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt and weakened civilization and learning there. But they could neither kill the Arabic language there nor replace it with Turkish,

Analysis

Riḍā finishes his account of weakened caliphs, then calls Turkish rule a force of war rather than learning. He attacks Ottoman preference for Turkish over Arabic and cites Kemalist language policy, yet expressly says he does not question the Islam of Turkish people as a whole. That limit should be preserved, as should the broad ethnic judgments that remain in his argument. Turkey's 1928 Law No. 1353 required Latin-based letters for written Turkish in government, public print, books, and Turkish-language schooling. The law does not make speaking or studying the Arabic language a crime. It therefore supports the script-change part of Riḍā's account but not his wider legal claim. The relevant chapter of Ibn Ḥajar's Fatḥ al-Bārī discusses Banū Qanṭūrā, but the consulted text did not yield Riḍā's precise gloss that “community” means descent rather than religion. That attribution remains unverified beyond the chapter checked. The next section on Arab independence begins here and continues on p. 463.

The 1876 Ottoman Constitution confirms a narrower language preference. Article 18 makes knowledge of Turkish a condition for public office and calls Turkish the official language of the state. The surrounding articles state legal equality and admission to office according to fitness, merit and ability. This establishes formal Turkish preference in state service. It does not establish Riḍā's claim that the policy was designed to weaken and humiliate Arabs or prevent an Arab return to the caliphate.

The closing sentence compresses two different dynastic histories. The Baghdad Abbasid caliphate ended under Mongol conquest in 1258, before the Ottoman polity emerged around 1299. The Ottomans defeated the Mamluks in 1517 and deposed the later ceremonial Abbasid in Cairo. In Iberia, the Umayyad caliphate ended in 1031. The state that appealed for help near the fall of Granada was Nasrid, and one modern study reports both Ottoman diplomacy and a 1487 campaign by Kemal Reis. Riḍā's wording can refer to the later Cairo Abbasid, but it misnames the Andalusian state and presents the disputed question of Ottoman aid as settled.

Modern history of science rejects Riḍā's ethnic ranking of Turks as the people farthest from knowledge and civilization. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn documents Ottoman scientific activity across learning, translation, medicine, state infrastructure, and technology, including both Turkish- and Arabic-speaking participants. Her study also treats adaptation and exchange as forms of scientific work rather than measuring the empire only by original invention. This does not erase Ottoman educational limits or uneven development. It shows that Riḍā's absolute statement is not a sound historical classification.

Riḍā does acknowledge Persian and Syriac pupils, but his language makes Arab initiative the sole creative center. A Cambridge history describes Syriac-speaking Christians as major contributors to Abbasid Baghdad and chief mediators in translating Greek, Syriac, and Persian works into Arabic. This supports the importance of Arabic as the shared scholarly language and of the Abbasid translation movement. It also shows that the work was a multilingual, multi-community achievement rather than a simple Arab creation followed by dependent imitation.