Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/206

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railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.

Ferid's agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid's administration in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the war, and the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet's Sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia's