A man called Abd al-Hamid from Tripoli, Lebanon, came to Istanbul to work in the Justice Department and has an amazing story. A man named Munif Pasha came to pay his respects because he already knew him. The Pasha asked him when he got there and where he was staying. The man said that he had just arrived that day and was staying in Yildiz. The Pasha asked how that could be possible because he thought by “Yildiz” the man meant the Sultan’s own house.
The man replied that he was staying at a hotel called Yildiz, which means “star” and is close to Al-Sarkaji. Muhsin Pasha got up right away. The man was told to leave the hotel right away and find another one. The man also stood up, shocked beyond belief; he couldn’t figure out why he had been given such short directions. His name is Abd al-Hamid, and the name of the hotel is Yildiz. Have you forgotten?” asked the Pasha. What are you planning to happen that will make things bad for you and me?” Being shocked by the chance that the man hadn’t thought of before, he almost passed out.
He ran away right away, swearing at his parents as he did so. When he got to the hotel, there were already a bunch of cops waiting for him. We would be ahead of everyone else if this level of speed and awareness could be used for the good of everyone. They took the man away to question him. After going through the scary thing, he came out without his mind or money. He stayed in Istanbul for a while, thinking that this was a “blessing,” but he couldn’t meet anyone or find work.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Munif Pasha, who is Minister of Education and a very smart and wise person, is worried even more than he should about this issue. At one point, the word Yildiz had also hit him like a lightning bolt. In his case, he had written a book that talked about the glowworm, a bug whose tail lights up at night like a star. It was called a “Yildiz animal” by him. As soon as the spies got to the palace, they told the authorities that Munif Pasha was fighting His Majesty the Sultan by using the double meaning of glowworms to refer to “Yildiz animals.”
Someone named Munif Pasha was fired right away and had bad luck for five years because he used a single word in its literal sense, which made His Majesty the Sultan angry. But the spies were able to pull back the curtains and let the Sultan see through all of these lies. If they knew they would get in trouble for what they did, they might think twice about attacking the Sultan’s throne and putting these false meanings on it.
It is amazing how they can change the facts to make the guilty person look like they are not guilty and the other way around. People are able to do all of this through kindness, tricks, magic, hypnosis, and other ways we don’t know about yet. There is another story about a spy who wrote to the Minister of Police and said that Mustafa Rushdi Efendi, who was on the Education Council, had some papers that were bad for the Sultanate and the Sultan himself. He had his house searched by the cops, who took a lot of books and papers.
Their first move was to get an interpreter from the Sublime Porte to help them. He learned that they were full of sins and offenses. He told the police to lock up Mustafa Rushdi. That made AlSayyid As’ad very mad because Mustafa Rushdi was one of his favorites and a student. Now, Al-Sayyid Asad told His Majesty the Sultan what the Minister of Police had done and accused him of being too quick. During this time, the Minister of Police sent copies of the translated papers to His Majesty the Sultan every hour.
Al-Sayyid As’ad didn’t know what they were about. In fact, they had attacks on the Caliphate and His Majesty the Sultan that no Shiite would have ever made to discredit Al-Walid ibn Yazid, the Umayyad Caliph. They had secret knowledge in them about horrible things that happened in the Hijaz and other things that the Sharif did that anyone, Muslim or not, would be upset about. Because the Minister of Police read these papers over and over again, he made the prison terms worse each time.
Al-Sayyid Asad was very worried when he found out what was in these papers. He was scared because he had defended this person in front of the Sultan. He was then taken up by “the lion of the squadron amid the crowd.” This is where Al-Sayyid Abu al-Huda comes in. In fact, the man’s friend had already asked Abu al-Huda how to get out of this mess.
Abu al-Huda told them not to worry because they would give the problem to Kamil Pasha, the Grand Vizier, who was known as an expert in these kinds of things and someone who didn’t back down when he was criticized. Early in the morning, before the Minister of Police knew what was going on, an official order was made that freed Mustafa Rushdi, gave him fifty pounds, and gave him back his job. It was only natural that everyone was shocked. It’s interesting that the Minister of Police had the order in one hand and the translation of the two famous lines that made fun of Caliph Musa al-Hadi in the other.
In order to show what things were really like at the time, Rushdi wrote a lot of lines that were very alike. He also talked a lot about decrees that had lost a lot of their value and meaning because there were so many of them. As an example, “Decrees are now as common and easy to find as locust eggs.” That person would have been severely punished if they had said such stupid things without the support of someone very important.
One of the reasons why Kamil Pasha was fired as minister was because of this man, Mustafa Rushdi. The two Al-Sayyids were able to get a royal order from His Majesty the Sultan that allowed Munif Pasha, who was Minister of Education, to give Mustafa Rushdi a job in his office. They both knew that Munif Pasha would not accept him because he knew how stupid and careless Rushdi was. The order was sent back with the note that there were no open positions in the Ministry of Education at that time.
Right away, a report was sent out saying that Munif Pasha had told Mustafa Rushdi that his small piece of paper, which was the official decree, had come but that there was no room for him in the ministry. At the time, people were working in the way that this report confirmed: Kamil Pasha and all of his ministers kept putting down Sultan’s orders. This is why the Ministry that had been in charge of running the Sultan’s business for six years was fired: You people who support reform at a time when reform itself is being hated!