Turkey Had Its Own Version of 'Lawrence of Arabia'

In the twilight of the Ottoman Empire a restless Turkish prisoner of war languished in Malta, then a British possession. With copious leisure time forced upon him, EÅ?ref Bey began to write his adventures as an officer in the Ottoman army. His biography has not survived, yet, from the archival material that has, we can imagine what it might have included: a string of increasingly momentous assignments for the Committee of Union and Progress (Ottoman patriots opposed to the policies of the sultan) and for Enver Pasha, hero of the 1908 ‘Young Turk' revolution and the pre-eminent military figure of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.