From Wikipedia:
During his rule, [Ottoman sultan] Abdul Hamid refused Theodor Herzl's offers to pay down a substantial portion of the Ottoman debt (150 million pounds sterling in gold) in exchange for a charter allowing the Zionists to settle in Palestine. He is famously quoted as telling Herzl's Emissary "as long as I am alive, I will not have our body divided, only our corpse they can divide."
Muslim sites have a variant of the story of the Sultan's valourous turning down money. Here is a fairly complete mythology from "The London Post:"
A little peak [sic] in the history shows how honorable people lived and die for truth and justice. In 1901 the Jewish banker Mizray Qrasow and two other Jewish influential leaders came to visit Sultan Abdul Hamid II(Turkish Sultan), they offered to give him :
1) Paying ALL the debts of the Uthmani Khilafah.
2) Building the Navy of the Ottoman state.
3) 35 Million Golden Leeras without interest to support the prosperity of the Uthmani Khilafah.
In Exchange for
1) Allowing Jews to visit Palestine anytime they please, and to stay as long as they want “to visit the holy sites.”
2) Allowing the Jews to build settlements where they live, and they wanted them to be located near Jerusalem.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II refused to even meet them, he sent his answer to them through Tahsin Pasha, and the answer was
“Tell those impolite Jews that the debts of the Uthmani state are not a shame, France has debts and that doesn’t effect it.Jerusalem became a part of the Islamic land when Khalifah Omar Bin Alkhattab took the city and I am not going to carry the historical shame of selling the holy lands to the Jews and betraying the responsibility and trust of my people. May the Jews keep their money, the Uthamani’s will not hide in castles built with the money of the enemies of Islam.”
He also told them to leave and never come back to meet him again.
The Jews did not give up on Abdul Hameed, later in the same year, 1901, the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Hertzl, visited Istanbul and tried to meet the Sultan. Sultan Abdul Hamid II refused to meet him and he told his Head Of The Ministers Council “Advise Dr. Hertzl not to take any further steps in his project. I can not give away a handful of the soil of this land for it is not my own, it is for all the Islamic ummah. The Islamic ummah that fought Jihad for the sake of this land and they have watered it with their blood. The Jews may keep their money and millions. If the Islamic Khilafah State is one day destroyed then they will be able to take Palestine without a price! But while I am alive, I would rather push a sword into my body than see the land of Palestine cut and given away from the Islamic State. This is something that will not be, I will not start cutting our bodies while we are alive.”
This entire story, especially the Sultan's supposed response to Herzl, is a complete myth.
Herzl did meet the Sultan, in May 1901. And I can find no record of anything close to what the Sultan supposedly said. The earliest mention I can find of this story is from a message board in 2000.
I cannot find a single book that mentions this story.
The American Jewish Yearbook at the time summarized Herzl's meeting this way:
The Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1907, says the Sultan even gave a medal to Herzl!
A number of reasons are given for the failure of the negotiations, but the Sultan's undying love for Palestine is not one of them..
Interestingly, Hamas dramatized a TV version of the fake Sultan story in 2010.