There, long-simmering Islamist resentment boiled over into outright rebellion.
The resentment had its roots three centuries earlier, when Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, the local emir of Al Diriyah, became a vocal critic of the Ottomans who had conquered his lands. He considered Mehmed IV, who was sultan at the time, unworthy of his position as caliph—the leader of the world’s Muslims and defender of the faith. After all, most Ottomans didn’t even speak Arabic, the language of the holy Koran, and many elements of their culture and daily life were at odds with the strict teachings of orthodox Islam. Furthermore, no sultan had ever made the hajj pilgrimage, which was every Muslim’s sacred duty. Saud set about to liberate his homeland from Ottoman control and wipe out what he perceived as the Ottomans’ heretical practices. The sultan, who considered himself the shadow of God on earth, was infuriated. Fresh from his conquest of Vienna, Rome, and the rest of western Europe, he sent his Egyptian vassals in, took control of the peninsula, and had Saud and several of his Salafi scholars, most notably a preacher by the name of Abd al-Wahhab, publicly berated and humiliated before they were put to the sword.
Three hundred years later, Saud’s ideas resurfaced with a vengeance. Abd al-Wahhab’s descendants rose up against Murad’s reforms, angrily believing they distanced the empire from its Islamic roots, only this time their tactics were different. Armed attackers and suicide bombers began to strike random targets across the empire. Then they hit Istanbul itself, hijacking a commercial airliner and crashing it into the Topkapi Palace.
The sultan had been out on an unannounced hunting trip that morning, but over two hundred of his subjects were killed.
Murad responded ferociously. As his ancestor had done, he sent in another Egyptian force, this time supported by air strikes and aerial drones, to subjugate the rebels. The troops met stiff resistance, countless civilians were killed, and the campaign was trumpeted as a success, even though the fanatics’ scattershot attacks never stopped.
The plane strike also had a ripple effect in a quiet home in Paris. It was there that Kamal, fresh out of school at eighteen, decided to enroll in the military academy at Poitiers and not, following his older brother, the university.
He’d never been particularly academic. His interest in life was more visceral, and the idea of defending his family and fellow countrymen was too strong to resist. But by the time he graduated and joined the Hafiye’s counterterrorism directorate, everything had changed.
After forty years of dignified rule, Murad V succumbed to a brain aneurysm at the age of seventy-one.
Abdülhamid III, the petulant tyrant who grabbed the throne as his successor, turned out to be everything his father was not.
And in an unfortunate synchronicity of terrible luck for the empire, the Americans’ energy revolution took hold, choking the life out of the Ottomans’ golden goose and gutting their economy almost overnight.
It galled Kamal that a people the Ottomans had long derided for being backwardly racist—the CRA was exclusively Christian and exclusively white; no one else was allowed in—had pulled the economic rug right out from under them. But the truth was that the Americans’ alternative to oil shouldn’t have hit the Ottomans as hard as it did. After all, their elected monarch, Elijah Huntington, had announced his intentions publicly long before they actually managed to make it happen.
A decade earlier, Huntington had decided that his people couldn’t, and wouldn’t, remain reliant on a foreign empire—much less a Muslim one—for their energy needs. He proclaimed that America had to come up with an alternative, one they could produce themselves. He also decreed that it shouldn’t harm the environment. His vision wasn’t just shaped by his strategic foresight; it was also driven by his faith. As a devoted servant of Christ and a passionate follower of the long-standing Puritan tradition that guided his rule, he fervently believed that doing everything in his power to protect the planet—God’s creation—was his sacred duty.
Huntington’s fiery speeches galvanized public opinion; public officials and big business, despite fierce lobbying by the coal and auto industries, had no choice but to follow suit. The best minds up and down the Americas went to work, and in less than a decade they turned his vision of clean energy into reality: wind farms, ocean-wave generators, and solar power became the primary sources of energy across the Christian nation. While the Ottoman Empire obstinately clung to its reliance on fossil fuels, the Americans, with an eye on weakening their Muslim rivals, aggressively pushed the spread of their new technologies in the Far East and Africa, whose inhabitants happily joined in the revolution.
The price of oil—the empire’s main source of revenue—collapsed, dropping from a high of well over a hundred kurush to its present level of ten.
As a consequence, the empire started to hurt. Badly.
In such a time of crisis, the Ottomans would have benefited from the stewardship of a wise and noble leader, someone with a calm temperament and a reasoned mind. Someone like Murad V. But he was now gone, and Abdülhamid III was anything but calm and reasoned.
The new sultan was forty-six when he seized power after his father’s death. He had not been chosen for rule, nor was he the sultan’s eldest son. Ottoman imperial succession still followed a centuries-old tradition of having no appointed heir to the throne. The many sons of the sultan, brothers and half-brothers born in the harem to a multitude of Christian slaves who were never wed to the monarch and who were raised by these slaves in the palace, would have to fight for the throne. Whoever emerged victorious would then have his rivals killed—siblings, cousins, uncles, any male with a potential claim to the throne. This “law of fratricide” ensured that only the most ruthless of princes acceded to power.
Unfortunately for the empire, Abdülhamid had little to offer beyond a narcissistic craving for power. Guided by a monstrous ego, a fiery temper, and a rigid, incurious mind, he was far from qualified to deal with the economic tsunami caused by Huntington’s vision.
With the empire’s currency collapsing and its economy buckling under severe strain, Abdülhamid and his cabinet of self-serving sycophants put into place a series of measures that hit hard. Taxes were raised, although, much to the distaste of the populace, the askeri—the privileged ruling class of clergy, military, and state officials—were still exempt. Social services, particularly for schooling and medical care, were caught in a spiral of cuts. Inflation rose. Imperial public spending shrank, and the little that remained was earmarked for Istanbul, seat of the sultan, and its surroundings, where it was eaten away by the inflated price-rigging of the sultan’s cronies.
Unrest, inevitably, began to stir.
Some of it manifested physically: demonstrations and riots, which were swiftly shut down by the authorities using violence and mass arrests.
A different reaction to the economic crisis was far more insidious and harder to stifle: the questioning of absolute rule.
Galvanized by the widespread discontent, intellectuals across the empire—and nowhere more so than at the far reaches of the empire, in the ancient capital of arts and culture of Paris—began to explore alternatives to the centuries-old status quo. The whispers got louder. Radical ideas weren’t just being aired in private discussions anymore; previously unthinkable questions were finding their way into print and even into radio and television broadcasts.
The state hit back.
Mass surveillance, aided and abetted by the state’s mandatory “social credit system,” was expanded indiscriminately. Television and radio stations were nationalized and placed under the control of the Supreme Council for Radio and Television. Newspapers that questioned the state’s actions were vilified and purged of their best reporters before ending up under the stewardship of government insiders. Countless university professors and lawyers lost their jobs.