Note 143 — Chapter II · ORKHAN A NEW NATION IS FORMED AND COMES INTO CONTACT WITH THE WESTERN WORLD

In western Asia Minor, in Macedonia and Thrace, up to the present day the convert to Islam, no matter of what race, is immediately classified before the law as a Turk. When the Sublime Porte, after the reoccupation of Adrianople in the summer of 1913, laid a memorial before the Powers, it was claimed that the large majority of the population of the vilayet of Thrace was ‘Turkish’. This word had absolutely no racial significance. Every Mohammedan in Thrace, no matter what his race or language, would be considered a Turk. The Young Turks, when they established the Constitution in 1908, tried to revive the word ‘Osmanli’ as a term including all Ottoman subjects. But they not only failed to convince the nation—they failed to convince themselves—that a Christian could really be an Osmanli, with the full rights and privileges enjoyed by the Moslems.