Chapter VII. Yildiz Intelligence Service

-There is a lot of speculation, Madame, that she could be your new maid. The only thing her family requests is to see her in order to be sure. To make sure she is not his wayward daughter, the wise man will accompany her father.

-And, Sheikh, have we been forced to make our staff available to anyone at any time? Do you not realize that you are going beyond your bounds? In this place, we and our ancestors spent a considerable amount of time. Your sanctities were not violated by us, and neither were yours.

Your requests only seem to me to be an infringement on our sacredness.

-But, dear lady, I beg your pardon.

-The meeting is done, we are not required to follow your assumptions, I told you that this is an orphan from Luxor, so if you have a witness or evidence that confirms the veracity of what you claim, bring him to hear from him, and then see what we do, she sternly interrupted him.

She got up from her seat, requested the servant to lead the man outside the palace, and then, politely asking permission, went upstairs.

Aisha, who was standing at the top of the steps, overheard her chat with the sheikh, a member of the village’s elders.

-You promised to turn her over if they asked about her.

-Yes, if they asked.

-If so, why didn’t you?

-because he didn’t ask. All they have are rumors and suspicions. They make a connection between the timing of her escape, her characteristics, and her age with what they learned about the new maid. They just have uncertainties; they can never be sure until they have really seen her.

She continued: If he had indicated that they were certain of her identification and that they had witnesses and evidence, I would have given her up to them, but I won’t let them go to such far as to request entry inside the castle for examination. A guard would be broken by everyone who enters and goes, for a variety of reasons, if I were to be agreed upon once.

My reluctance is not for her sake, but rather to maintain our reputation, she said with a sneaky smirk.

She went to an office on the second floor, shut the door and the window curtains, leaned back against a large bookcase, pushed a lock loose, and then slipped forward. Behind it was a secret door, which she opened and descended one step. She then pulled the locker back into place and secured the lock.

With candlelight, she walked down the stairs as though returning to the first floor, then walked for approximately fifty meters to a basement that was sealed off by an iron door that she knocked three times.

A pealing sound was heard in the basement’s silence when one of them opened a little window, shook his head at her, and shut the window.

Iron locks are open.

This afternoon, in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Caliphate, a small boat crossed the Bosphorus Strait, heading towards the beach of the Uskudar neighborhood in the Asian part of it.

-Here sir, here I am

The groom’s voice called out to him, waiting for his arrival. The man rode the carriage and moved quickly.

After a few minutes of walking through the alleys, he stopped in front of a new two-story building, recently painted bright yellow, with a black iron door decorated with Ottoman carvings.

The man knocked on the door, and he heard footsteps behind him, one of them opened a small window from it, and as soon as he saw the man he closed it, then a rattle sounded in the stillness of the alley, iron locks opening.

He entered through a corridor adorned with gilded Ottoman lines, towards a spacious hall strewn with chairs and tables in the modern Ottoman style, a water fountain in the middle of the lobby, the sound of which dared to scratch the awe of the silence in the place.

The servant indicated to him to sit down. He said: I will inform Sheikh Omar of your arrival.

Moments later, the servant returned: “Please go ahead, sir, he is waiting for you.”

In the next room, sitting on a rug barely protecting him from the cold of the concrete floor, a man in his seventies, with a long beard as white as snow, a slender body, face, black eyes, and white skin, in a patched woolen dress, wears a green bracelet on his wrist, it was engraved with symbols that didn’t seem to mean anything.

A staggering contradiction, as if they had moved from the neighborhood of palaces, where the elite of the people are, to the neighborhood of the destitute poor, with only one door separating them.

– Please sit down, Abd al-Haqq, what is the news in the Sultan’s court?

-Nothing new, sir, since he came to power and he has been preoccupied with various affairs, the man said as he sat on a rug across from the Sheikh and slightly bowed in respect.

– Interrupted him: I mean Sultan Abdul Hamid.

-He shook his head and said, “He’s not well, sir. He was imprisoned in the Jewish, Latin Jewish palace in Thessaloniki.”

Sheikh Omar groaned and grabbed a piece of paper from his jacket pocket, a written declaration that had been plastered over the city for nearly a year. He gave it a melancholy expression.

His eyes welled up with tears, revealing his sadness. This piece of paper has been hurting him for a year, and he refuses to let it go.

“O Ottomans, no longer is anyone in the dark about our goal, which is the preservation of the khilafat and the integrity of the state. It is enough for us to watch while a mighty, unbelieving sultan destroys conscience, faith, and the Qur’an beneath his feet.

Wake up, Muslim nation! Muslims, have courage! God provides victory, assistance, and near conquest, and we must have courage.

Oh, monotheistic Muslim, read in the name of your Lord, stand up, protect your religion and your faith from the hands of the bad people, and you’ll save yourself in the process.

Here is a powerful Satan holding your beliefs and religion in his grasp as well as a crown over his head. So, save your beliefs and religion from him, monotheist.

O Muslims, the Sultan Abd al-Hamid is legally neither a sultan nor a caliph, and whoever does not believe this saying of ours, let him look into the Qur’an and the Sunnah,

Our association has highlighted the Qur’anic verses, the hadiths of the Prophet, the commands of God, and the commands of the Messenger directed to the government and the people, but Sultan Abdul Hamid turned his face away from the commands of God and the commands of the Messenger and then proved his injustice, he was not ashamed of objecting to God,

  Therefore, our people should resort to arms against them, and if the people do not do this, then let them bear the burden of the injustice inflicted of Sultan Abdul Hamid.”

Abdul Haq: Get over it, Sheikh, it’s over.

Sheikh Omar: It is not that simple, we will not get over it unless we learn the lesson, how a movement that was founded, funded, and planted among the people managed to manipulate their minds and isolate the caliph! A secular movement, claiming to be an Ottoman union movement, funded by the Jews and the West, which has infiltrated the ranks of the people and politicians, speaking in the name of religion! They write statements like this full of lies.

He sighed and then added: They manipulated the feelings of some of our sons, and put us in front of two options, either an internal war, we are the losers in it, even if we win it, because of what we will lose in terms of the blood of our sons and the discord and conflict that will afflict our country or the overthrow of the caliph.

-We did our best, Sheikh, and did what we could, and no one listened to us. We advised the Sultan not to concede to them, and to put an end to their transgressions and expansion.

-This is not a justification. A way had to be found, even if without his knowledge. The Sultan did not want any confrontations, nor internal disputes. He wanted to deal with the issue with politics, but as I said to you, Abd al-Haqq, it was necessary to confront them and put an end to them years ago since their founding, we have submitted many reports about their financing, plans, and goals, but he preferred flexibility with them, and conceded a lot to them. It was neither logical nor acceptable to concede to a group that we know very well that they do not want the country well. They took advantage of our complacency with them, until they managed to get what they want, and then you know what happened.

-Sir, the Sultan did not trust all our reports. He thought that among them were malicious reports.

-Not us. He trusted everything I gave him. Our group in particular was the most credible to him. However, he did not see that our advice to arrest and imprison them since the beginning of their appearance was appropriate. In any way, I want you for something other than this.

You are a young guy in your prime who has done well since joining the “Yildiz” apparatus, he said, but I fear for you since things are different in Istanbul and I don’t want you to stay.

-What should I do, sir?

-We won’t learn the lesson while we are sitting here; it must be learnt. There will be a lot of changes. Information we have demonstrates that. You’ll be given a task outside of Turkey. I’ll let you know more about it tonight. A significant person, Prince Suleiman, will be present at our meeting. He will arrive, and we will discuss all the specifics.

– Sheikh, as you have always promised me, I will always be a devoted soldier of the Ottoman Empire and I will accept any mission given to me.

International intrigues and scheming came to fruition one year ago, in the year 1909 AD. All of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s political, religious, and military positions as well as his right to lead the Ottoman Islamic State’s succession were ousted from him. He was replaced in power by his brother, Sultan Muhammad V.

In an effort to create a state for themselves in Israel, Jews have been making efforts since the end of the eighteenth century with help from the West. In exchange for granting them control over Palestine, so they might find a Jewish state there, they offered Sultan Abd al-Hamid the chance to pay off all of the Ottoman state’s debts and, in return, made numerous more tempting offers.

His response, which will go down in history, was, “I will agree if you bring me a paper signed by all Muslims on the face of the earth, who accept this. Because Jerusalem is not mine or the Ottoman Empire’s only, but rather theirs all, their agreement must be approved.”

All the strenuous efforts did not bear fruit, despite the Ottoman Empire’s sinking in debt – internal unrest – and poverty in many of its regions, he refused to do so.

As a result, the Jews and the West worked to establish many secret societies in Istanbul, headed by the Ottoman Union, which was founded in 1889 AD; A secret society, whose aim is to stir up riots and rumors in Istanbul, the capital of Turkey, and the entire empire, claiming to be an Ottoman movement, whose aim is to develop the Ottoman Empire, not overthrow it.

The Ottoman politicians were unable to cope with it despite the Yildiz Intelligence Service (the Star Intelligence Agency)’s ability to gather a lot of information on it.

Where the Union Society waged a war of rumors, a media war, the Sultan’s failure to deal with it, and stoked Muslim resentment by spreading rumors about the Sultan in the streets, insulting the Holy Qur’an, burning the Qur’an, and engaging in injustice and bloodshed.

Due to the army’s unwavering commitment to the Sultan, all of the secret movements were unable to deeply infiltrate its ranks, therefore they instead used the money to buy certain allegiances, recruited some officers, and then engaged in war rumors, fraud, and lies while inflaming public sentiment; to participate in protests against him, the largest of which was the unrest that occurred in Istanbul on April 31, 1909 AD and resulted in the deaths of several Union Society members!

Although it is unknown who specifically killed them, the instigators insisted that the Sultan had given the order.

In order not to bring Istanbul into a stage of higher turmoil and prevent violence and any potential civil war, military units affiliated with the association moved and infiltrated the city. The Sultan resigned and consented to his brother, Sultan Muhammad V, being appointed in his place.

The Sultan was given an empire that was heavily in debt and on the verge of collapsing, but he is working steadily to restore it to its former glory, and signs of salvation are beginning to appear. However, because he refused to sell Jerusalem to the Jews in exchange for wiping out his state’s debts, he was imprisoned in a palace that belonged to a Jew, which only served to compound his humiliation.

If this sultan had completed his work, he would have wasted the efforts of decades of destroying this sick body and reviving it again. This was his sin.

Sultan Abdul Hamid himself established the intelligence service, which he named the Yildiz Intelligence Service after the palace where he currently resides, the Yildiz Palace. It is the one it reports to directly.

This apparatus was able to expose the plans of the Ottoman Union Society in full, and they submitted many reports confirming their malicious intentions and goals, as their involvement in sabotage operations and causing chaos, but the Sultan decided to move forward in dealing with them away from violence, However, the Sultan decided to move forward in dealing with them away from violence, the violence that the Union Society demanded and incited, and they were ready to fuel a civil war in Turkey, as they have nothing to lose, but this war and destruction is one of their most important goals, Sultan’s flag So, he preferred concession to his brother to achieve this goal for them.

Especially with the wide penetration made by the association into the ranks of politicians and the sources of decision, in the name of religion, and the name of the Ottoman Empire and its interests.

The association is moving in a different direction than what it claims, and earlier reports from the Yildiz apparatus started to show that they were sincere in their desire to monopolize power in Turkey under the banner of a single party. These new signs then emerged after the removal of the caliph.

The most perilous aspect is that, following the total collapse of the empire, its slogans started to shift away from what they had previously advocated in favor of Turkish nationalism, ethnic sectarianism, and secularism, or the secularization of Turkey.

A two-story building painted a light-yellow color, a Sufi corner, or so it appears, frequented by a number of elite adherents of the Sufi sect, according to what the locals believed, is one of the Sheikh Omar Group’s headquarters and is situated in the Uskudar neighborhood. Those present their claim that it is a place of worship.

In fact, among them are a number of people who, up until recently, belonged to the Yildiz apparatus’ high ranks.

In the streets and alleyways near the structure, certain people who look to have mental illnesses, referred to as madmen and dervishes, prowl in search of any strange activity or sudden appearances of Union Society spies.

The recruits, who appear to be insane, were some of Yildiz’s most crucial devices for acquiring information.

The dervishes, on the other hand, are mystics who devote their lives to serving humanity; they do not labor for wealth, fame, or power, but rather for the caliphate, the caliph, and the state.

Sheikh Omar, Sheikh al-Zawiya, or the head of the group, was one of the most skilled in the retinue of Sultan Abd al-Hamid II in intelligence work, and Abd al-Haqq was one of his most skilled men.

Sheikh Omar was one of the most significant of the sultan’s loyalists who was expelled from the area upon his ouster. They pursued him because they wanted to assassinate him and take his valuable documents. However, he vanished inside their covert headquarters with a number of his most devoted troops. They balked with leaving Istanbul. They continue to have faith. They developed into a covert organization with no longer any aims, plans, or future.

They called themselves the Dervishes of Yildiz, after the name of the intelligence agency they had previously worked for.

Although they were not Sufi dervishes in the actual sense of the word, they were dervishes in the deepest sense of it, ascetics in the world, with no concern for them but the empire.

The expected guest tonight is coming from the court of Sultan Mehmed V.

Prince Suleiman.

A young prince, not yet twenty years old, rebellious by nature, he did not and will never accept the decision to remove Sultan Abdul Hamid,

The fact that he recognizes that the state is headed in the wrong direction is what matters most…