World War I ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and its remaining territories were divided at the Paris Peace Conference. However, this settlement was complicated by a global wave of Islamic solidarity, as revolutions, uprisings, and wars of independence swept throughout the Islamic world.Global Muslims resisted European imperialism, demanded self-determination, envisioned federations, and sought anti-colonial alliances with Soviet Russia. In the midst of this crisis of empire, European powers were deeply concerned about the specter of “Islamo-Bolshevism” – an ideological, accidental or imagined alliance between anti-colonial Islamic movements and communism – which they saw as a threat to the world order.Alp Yenin tells the story of a group of exiled leaders of the Young Turks—fugitive Ottoman statesmen wanted as war criminals for the Armenian Genocide—who sought to seize this moment by founding the Union of Islamic Revolutionary Societies.
This “international Young Turk movement” linked Muslim revolutionaries with German revisionists and Russian Bolsheviks, and established cross-border networks with Arabs and Indians and international alliances with Türkiye, Iran, and Afghanistan to challenge European hegemony.Although their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, their story highlights the lost potential of Islamic globalization and the emergence of a post-Ottoman political landscape.
This book goes beyond the astonishing rise and fall of this movement between 1918 and 1922, exploring how discourses of imperial security, the role of non-state actors, and the consolidation of state hegemony shaped the global order. Based on in-depth research into private documents and government archives, the book “The Turkish International"The Young Woman" is a new global history of the peace settlement that followed World War I.
