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Passing the bounds of the limited, mainly territorial, idea connoted by the term "Ottomanism," it had embraced the far-flung and essentially racial concepts known as "Pan-Turkism" and "Pan-Turanism." These wider developments we shall consider later on in this chapter. Before so doing let us examine the beginnings of nationalism's "first stage" in other portions of the Moslem world.
Now, by the amazing irony of fate, who weaves stranger dramas than could ever be set on censored stages, for they both take hundreds of years to unravel themselves, and are of the most unedifying character, Turkey, the rodent cancer, has been infected by another with greater organisation for devouring; the disease of Ottomanism is threatened by a more deadly hungerer, and Prussianism has inserted its crab-pincers into the cancer that came out of Asia.
If the Porte loses sight of this duty, it will be digging its grave with its own hands, for if the Arabs do not forget their language, their history, and their customs, they will seek to restore their ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia.
The more men came to love their country and aspire to its future, the more European assaults on Turkish territorial integrity spurred them to defend their threatened independence. The nationalist ideal was "Ottomanism" the welding of a real "nation" in which all citizens, whatever their origin or creed, should be "Ottomans," speaking the Turkish language and inspired by Ottoman patriotism.
They see clearly enough that Turkish Nationalism carried to a logical extreme is incompatible with the Ottoman pretension, and they favour the view, so severely criticised by Tekin Alp, "that all three groups of ideas Ottomanism, Islamism, and the Turkish Movement should work side by side and together."
If the Porte loses sight of this duty it will be digging its grave with its own hands, for if the Arabs do not forget their language, their history, and their customs, they will seek to restore their ancient empire on the ruins of Ottomanism and of Turkish rule in Asia."
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