His campaigns were less about winning territory than they were about denying the enemy strategic consolidation and prolonging Ottoman presence long enough to retain symbolic sovereignty.

The merit of Abdullah Bey’s translation lies in not allowing Enver Pasha to appear as a later caricature but, instead, as a historical actor articulating his own worldview. The letters, written between September 1911 and November 1912 during the Italo-Ottoman War, illuminate the Tripoli front, modern-day Libya, at the time an Ottoman province only tenuously connected to the imperial center.

The Ottoman state, unable to project conventional force across the Mediterranean due to Italian naval supremacy, resorted to clandestine officer deployments. Enver Pasha, along with other young officers, entered Libya covertly, organized tribal resistance, and coordinated with the Senussi Sufi order. As the translator notes, these letters were later compiled by the German General Staff for instructional purposes. This detail situates Enver Pasha within the broader context of Ottoman-German military cooperation: German officers restructured Ottoman staff training, while Ottoman elites absorbed Prussian doctrines of operational planning, discipline, and the rationalization of war. Enver Pasha himself, after being educated in Istanbul and Macedonia (where at the Imperial Military Academy he would encounter German and French literature) and later trained in Germany, emerged from a late Ottoman officer corps increasingly shaped by European military science.

As Abdullah Bey, the translator, informs us in the introduction, which provides relevant contextualization, Enver Pasha’s early career in the Balkans was decisive (although his family had long been settled in the Balkans, his paternal ancestors were in fact Gagauz, a sub-group of the Oghuz Turks, rather than ethnic Albanians, as is often assumed, even by myself, which demonstrates the value and pertinence of the introduction). Posted there as a young officer, he encountered insurgency, espionage networks, and the collapse of Ottoman authority in contested provinces. These campaigns, fought against socialist and separatist committees, forced him to adapt to decentralized warfare, intelligence-driven operations, and constant exposure to ambush and attrition. The Balkan theater functioned as a laboratory of irregular conflict. We also glimpse in the diary the cosmopolitan intellectual environment of this officer class: Enver Pasha follows Turkish, German, French, English, and Italian newspapers (1 August 1912), indicating an awareness of European public opinion and strategic narratives.

Politically and ideologically, Enver Pasha’s orientation differed markedly from the later Kemalist project. While both emerged from the same late Ottoman modernist milieu, Enver Pasha’s worldview remained anchored in Islamic political universalism, we could maybe even say Pan-Islamism, as his rhetoric repeatedly frames the war in religious and civilizational terms, situating Ottoman resistance within the moral horizon of the Muslim ummah rather than within the emerging grammar of “national sovereignty.”

This ideological orientation is mirrored in Enver Pasha’s literary style itself. In Tripoli is not written in the dry, technocratic language of modern statecraft or military bureaucratese. Rather, it moves fluidly between lyrical description, devotional reflection, and romanticized portrayals of sacrifice and hardship. Enver Pasha’s prose lingers on landscapes, prayers, the moral beauty of “simple” believers, and the emotional texture of separation and longing, most vividly in the letters addressed to his wife, the Ottoman princess Naciye Sultan.

These intimate epistolary passages disclose a parallel register of subjectivity. The Caliph’s envoy on the battlefield becomes the vulnerable believer-husband who interprets war, deprivation, and distance through tawakkul (trust and reliance in Allah) and divine decree.

The diary’s aesthetic register (at times confessional, at times almost mystical) reveals a political imagination still embedded in pre-secular forms of meaning, where war is narrated as moral drama and spiritual trial rather than just merely as strategy. This stands in stark contrast to the later Kemalist literary and political style, which favors rationalist, instrumental language and the sober idiom of modernization, reform, and national discipline.

Islam as Ideal and Political Horizon
What stands out in Enver Pasha’s rhetoric is his consistent framing of war as a religious obligation:

Since 5 o’clock in the morning, I have traversed the city in all directions to make purchases and finalize the last preparations. This time, my duty is leading me toward a goal from which I will obtain no material benefit. Tripolitania, the unfortunate land, is lost for the moment — who knows, perhaps forever. Why do I still go there? To fulfill a moral duty that the entire Islamic world expects of us! (9 October 1911)

And later, writing to his wife:

When you wrote to me when I was in Shkodra, even then, you favored war against the infidels. Well, now I am going to defend an entirely Muslim land. Yes! I too, know well, that my body alone cannot serve as a shield to defend the homeland. But let it be so, at the very least, in doing this, I will have fulfilled my duty! (20 October 1911)

The horizon of obligation is not confined to the Ottoman polity, still less to a nation-state that did not yet exist but, rather, to “the entire Islamic world.” The categories organizing political meaning are civilizational and religious. This stands in contrast to the later Kemalist reconfiguration of legitimacy, in which religious language was formally excluded from the political order and warfare was reframed as a struggle for national sovereignty. While Atatürk would at times deploy the title of ghazi to mobilize Muslim sentiment during the War of Independence, this was largely instrumental, a temporary idiom used to consolidate mass support within a society that remained overwhelmingly religious.

The Bedouin as an Ideal

Later Turkish nationalism (both in secular and certain religious variants) often carried an implicit or explicit anti-Arab current, portraying Arab societies as backward and politically unreliable. Enver Pasha’s diary reflects a markedly different sensibility. He repeatedly describes Libyan Bedouin religiosity as moral authenticity, not as primitiveness. In a zawiyah associated with the dominant Senussi Sufi order, he writes to his wife:

At sunset, the old man went out to perform his prayer. Since he did not have the prescribed water for the usual ablution, he stuck his hands in the pure sand, clapped them together to shake off the sand, and then passed them over his face to appear pure before God. You can see his silhouette, sharply outlined against the clear evening sky as he bows, prostrates himself, and rises again.
He performs his prayer and is content because he is fulfilling his duty toward God, in whom he believes with all the fervor of his heart. He follows the simple principles of life, and the harmony that speaks from the strong and pure life of these simple people involuntarily communicates itself to me as well. (2 November 1911)

This passage suggests a romanticization of peripheral piety as a source of moral renewal for an empire whose urban elites were perceived as spiritually compromised, as the frontier often becomes a site of ethical authenticity.

Caliphate, Authority, and Sacred Politics

Enver Pasha’s conception of authority is explicitly Caliphal:

You may be astonished at how easily I can appoint governors! But it’s precisely the Sultan’s son-in-law and the Caliph’s envoy who issues orders and makes promotions. It is my connection to the imperial family alone that is immensely helpful here. The Arabs know no Enver Bey, the so-called ‘Hero of Freedom,’ or even a Major General Enver Bey; they respect the son-in-law of the Caliph. I rule here in the name of the Sultan, the Caliph, and perhaps my homeland is pleased with me in terms of my marriage.
Enver Pasha — the Arabs have named me Pasha because they cannot understand how the Sultan’s son-in-law could be a mere Bey — already looks completely like an Arab. His face is deeply brown from the sunburn, a full black beard frames his chin. I’m dressed in a simple khaki uniform. Only a precious saber sets me apart from my surroundings. That is Enver Pasha, the son-in-law of His Majesty. It is amusing, is it not? The devotion of the Arabs to me is touching. When I went to the Marabouts today, they came over to me to kiss my hands.
May God grant that I can do something for the defense of these poor, pure, and faithful people. (16 November 1911)

Here, legitimacy derives from proximity to the Caliphate, not from revolutionary charisma or popular sovereignty. Authority is sacral, embedded in the symbolic economy of the ummah. This model of legitimacy would be dismantled after 1924 with the abolition of the Caliphate, as the Kemalist regime reconstituted political authority in secular, statist terms.

Enver Pasha’s Libyan campaign thus appears as one of the last episodes in which Caliphal imagination still animated anti-imperial resistance.

The Rivalry With Atatürk and the Road Not Taken
Both Enver Pasha and Atatürk were products of the same late Ottoman military-modernist environment, yet they embodied divergent responses to imperial collapse.

Where Atatürk embraced radical secularization and national sovereignty as the conditions of political survival, Enver Pasha’s writings articulate an alternative synthesis: anti-imperial struggle grounded in Islamic solidarity, Caliphal legitimacy, and moral obligation.

Libya, in this sense, functions as an ideological frontier rather than merely as a military theater. It is an imagined space where Islamic political universalism could still be mobilized against European imperial encroachment.

Kemalist historiography later portrayed Enver Pasha as a reckless romantic and an emblem of Ottoman failure. The diary vastly complicates this judgment. Enver Pasha’s project did not fail simply because it was strategically unsound. Rather, it was because the global political order was shifting decisively toward secular national sovereignty. His defeat marks the eclipse of an entire political-theological imagination.

This arc finds its final expression in his death in Central Asia. In 1922, Enver Pasha was killed in the mountains of Tajikistan while participating in the Basmachi revolt against the emerging Soviet Union. The revolt itself was an asymmetric insurgency, tribal and religious networks confronting a rapidly modernizing revolutionary state. Enver Pasha’s end, a long way from Anatolia, underscores the persistence of his political horizon: the search for a transnational Islamic front against imperial and post-imperial domination.

The translator’s closing reflection captures the tragic arc of Enver Pasha’s life:

Enver dreamt that he would become a martyr one night, and on that same day, a Friday during Eid al-Adha, he would have his very last bloody battle in the mountains of Tajikistan at the ripe age of 40 and become lost in the annals of history.
“Enver was born like the sunrise and fell with the magnificence of the sunset; whatever happened in-between, we should leave to history.”