lshevik revolution at the end of
1917, Pan-Turanian hopes knew no bounds. So certain were they of triumph
that they began to flout even their German allies, thus revealing that
hatred of all Europeans which had always lurked at the back of their
minds. A German staff-officer thus describes the table-talk of Halil
Pasha, the Turkish commander of the Mesopotamian front and uncle of
Enver: "First of all, every tribe with a Turkish mother-tongue must be
forged into a single nation. The national principle was supreme; so it
was the design to conquer Turkestan, the cradle of Turkish power and
glory. That was the first task. From that base connections must be
established with the Yakutes of Siberia, who were considered, on account
of their linguistic kinship, the remotest outposts of the Turkish blood
to the eastward. The closely related Tartar tribes of the Caucasus must
naturally join this union. Armenians and Georgians, who form minority
nationalities in that territory, must either submit voluntarily or be
subjugated.... Such a great compact Turkish Empire, exercising hegemony
over all the Islamic world, would exert a powerful attraction upon
Afghanistan and Persia.... In December, 1917, when the Turkish front in
Mesopotamia threatened to yield, Halil Pasha said to me, half vexed, half
jokingly: 'Supposing we let the English have this cursed desert hole and
go to Turkestan, where I will erect a new empire for my little boy.' He
had named his youngest son after the great conqueror and destroyer,
Jenghiz Khan."[165]

As a matter of fact, the summer of 1918 saw Transcaucasia and northern
Persia overrun by Turkish armies headed for Central Asia. Then came the
German collapse in the West and the end of the war, apparently dooming
Turkey to destruction. For the moment the Pan-Turanians were stunned.
Nevertheless, their hopes were soon destined to revive, as we shall
presently see.

Before describing the course of events in the Near East since 1918,
which need to be treated as a unit, let us go back to consider the
earlier developments of the other "second-stage" nationalist movements
in the Moslem world. We have already seen how, concurrently with Turkish
nationalism, Arab nationalism was likewise evolving into the "racial"
stage, the ideal being a great "Pan-Arab" empire, embracing not merely
the ethnically Arab peninsula-homeland, Syria, and Mesopotamia, but also
the Arabized regions of Egypt, Tripoli, French North Africa, and