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Or, l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus
aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi
que tous aient oublié bien des choses.
(Renan 1947 [1882]: 892)
The voyage to the province starts today. It is, first of all, a voyage in time. Anyone wishing to be a historian of Cyprus must first address the commonplace issue of a historiography that bears the traces of the present day. The island's recent history, normally referred to as the âCyprus disputeâ, would seem to have led not only to brutal antagonism but also to new terms in the history of (and in) the island. And these terms are those of the nation. Thus most available publications on the history of Cyprus are remarkable for the way they constantly reappropriate the past and rewrite history to conform to the canons of national teleology. Or to put it differently, the polarization of national current affairs reaches out beyond the borders of its original sphere (the recent context), and has taken hold of prior periods (primarily the Ottoman and British periods) so as to look for what are taken as retrospectively manifest signs of an emergent nation. Such rewriting thus presupposes that Cyprus acquired a national identity at a very early stage, at least during the final centuries of the Ottoman period if not earlier still (see Michael 2009a).
If here I speak of Cyprus and not Cypriot it is as a reminder that several national identities are at play here, something it can seem hard to ignore nowadays, viz. Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Greek, Turkish â and straight Cypriot too. But the key thing that interests us here â the way imposing an identity has repercussions on the elaboration of social knowledge â lies elsewhere: above and beyond variations in its object of reference, the same principle of national identification is at work. It may therefore be said that several Cypriot histories coexist and clash but, whatever the end of each one may be, their writing generally proceeds with the same means, the same categories, and the same polarizations.
Cyprus is not at all a particular case. On the contrary, the national question is a powerful and fertile trend in studies of the history of the âlongest century of the Ottoman Empireâ (Ortaylı 1983). This trend covers two possible attitudes: certain works set forth an approach that is critical of the emergence of national identities and the building of nation states (it may be called ânational historiographyâ), whilst others adopt a nationalist stance and the immediately exclusive passion for the One, the âpure hatred of the Other, a coming together in order to excludeâ (RanciĂšre 1995: 23). It is essential to distinguish between these two positions, but tricky too as the critical drive of a scientific approach can at times embrace the apologetic urges of national ideology. In other words, it is possible to speak an erudite language of nationalism.1
The uncertain distinction
Ahmet C. GazioÄlu's book The Turks in Cyprus. A province of the Ottoman Empire (1571â1878) was published in 1990. Five years later the Turkish history journal Tarih ve Toplum, published in Istanbul and intended for a general readership, published a review of the work (by the historian Kemal Ăiçek) situating it in comparison to other publications:
Most history works about the Turkish period in Cyprus are works of propaganda far removed from any form of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the Turkish period in Cyprus is generally not addressed seriously but based on superficial information. [âŠ] From this point of view, GazioÄlu's work is the first in the English language to address the history of Cyprus under Ottoman administration in a scientific way and from the point of view of the Turkish historian.
(Ăiçek 1995a: 58)
Ăiçek's first observation relates to the need to distinguish between âpropagandaâ and âscienceâ, which are not to be confused. But what is such a distinction expected to deliver? It is not only meant to guarantee a rigorous method but also the recognized authority of âscientific knowledgeâ: in the same text Ăiçek refers to another historian of Cyprus, Halil Fikret Alasya (1939, 1964), as an âunquestionable authority [italics added] on the history of Cyprusâ. But is âunquestionableâ really the right word if one wishes to designate the search for knowledge in action?2 In addition to a few works that are indeed works of history, Alasya is primarily the author of countless articles marked by his commitment to the Turkish nationalist cause in Cyprus, published in the heat of the intercommunal conflicts that erupted in the island, especially in 1963 (see TĂŒrkiye diĆındaki TĂŒrkler bibliografyasi 1992: 537 et seq.). There is a certain similarity here to GazioÄlu, who has frequently appeared in the official media of the self-styled âTurkish Republic of Northern Cyprusâ, subject to the conflicting pulls of propaganda and knowledge.3 In both cases, it is clearly problematic to âascertain whether the task of the researcher is to codify or to analyse, if the researcher truly seeks or just restricts himself to translating the real into the terms of a particular social systemâ (Bayart 1978: 114). Are we confronted here with the fixing of meaning or the floating of signification? The problem is that no language, be it scientific or propagandist in intent, falls outside performativity, âwhich defines precisely the power of language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or of the power of language over constative or cognitive languageâ (Derrida 2002: 118; emphasis in the original). And so by this yardstick the word âunquestionableâ is indeed wholly appropriate, as by overlaying the prestige of critical knowledge with an affirmation of legitimacy it clearly brings out this duplicity.
This aporia of distinction is fundamental, and one we cannot escape. Yet if we are to avoid turning scientific endeavour into a petitio principia, this aporia has to be recognized, expressed, and thus circumscribed. Is this what Ăiçek is seeking to do in observing that GazioÄlu âaddresses the history of Cyprus under Ottoman administration in a scientific way and [italics added] from the point of view of a Turkish historianâ? Equally, it is possible to see this as a tacit renewal of non-distinction (or indeed pure and simple reiteration of it). On the one hand Ăiçek makes it clear that the Turkish historian has his word to say when it comes to questions of rigour, whilst on the other he suggests that there is no incompatibility between historical science and the rationale of a Turk who is also a historian, that is to say with the point of view of a historian writing as a Turk. It thus becomes a matter of a Turkish writing of history, not the writing of a national history but the national writing of history. Here it is exactly as if Ăiçek took these two closely related ideas as identical, making it impossible to detect when the Turkish historian becomes a Turk who is also a historian.
But we on the contrary need to do everything we can to make this distinction explicit, in order to prevent the language of nationalism from appearing indiscriminately alongside that of the historian (see Aymes et al. 2012). Otherwise critical knowledge can be overrun by an apologia directed at the present day: the emergence of a national identity and the construction of a nation state are no longer patiently examined and meticulously conceptualized, but become instead an accomplished fact, the naturalized crucible for all interpretation. The historian Halil Inalcik, a leading figure over the past fifty years in the study of the Ottoman Turkish world, has not always succeeded in avoiding this sort of slippage, as shown by his conclusion to an article about the population of Cyprus in the Ottoman period: âIn the past there were times when Turks constituted the majority or half of the population of Cyprus. Unlike the Latins, Turks settled in the Island to make it vatan, homelandâ (Ä°nalcik 1997: 9). The job of the historian (who happens to be Turkish) gives way here to the automatic reflexes of the Turk (who is only incidentally a historian). Inalcik clearly uses the word âvatanâ (homeland) in its most contemporary meaning â as he does with the term âTurksâ â an ideological construction of the final Ottoman decades and of the Kemalist Republic. His observation thus merges with the commonplaces staked out by Turkish nationalist discourse on Cyprus: as the slogan has it, âa land becomes the homeland [vatan] of those who die for itâ (quoted by Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux 2005: 80). The use of the word âvatanâ, in this sense, when applied to the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, vehicles an idea of a-tem-porality, of the naturalness of the homeland as something which clearly does not call for any further discussion. Furthermore, the use of the Turkish word in a text otherwise written in English tends to lend credence to the idea that the term bears an irreducibly Turkish imprint, and that the translation supplied is only a pale substitute for it. A term relating to history, whose origins need to be determined and analysed, is thereby immediately assimilated to the nature of things. And yet has it not become commonplace that âhomelandsâ often pretend to be older and more immemorial than they in fact are (Geary 2002); that a fair number of their âtraditionsâ turn out on examination to have been invented for the needs of the cause (Laroui 1976: 33â43; Babadzan 1999)? In failing to take stock of this fact, the national writing of history tends to âconfus[e] an epistemological itinerary with an ontological oneâ (Kafadar 1995: 58). It does not so much run the risk of being anachronistic, as the more absolute one of being achronistic: the nation has always existed as an incorruptible essence and the historian simply needs to account for its phenomenal variations. Such a form of history, deprived of temporality, becomes the taxonomy of national things.
Perduring communities
And so by establishing a perpetual identity of the self-same an erudite language of nationalism elides the question of historical continuity. It sounds bound to the âreassurance of fratricideâ (Anderson 1991: 199â203). Criticizing this language, on the contrary, involves inscribing the national here-and-now within the historical depth of a chain of actualizable signifiers.4 This is what Ilan PappĂ© proposes in the light of studies of Ottoman Palestine:
[âŠ] to widen the accepted historiographical view on Palestine in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a view which has hitherto tended to be conflictual in nature, focusing as it does, for the most part, on the clash between Zionism and the local Palestinian population. We wish to view the social history of Palestine â a path historians only recently have begun to take â as a continuum within the social history of the Ottoman Empire.
(Pappé 1997: 163)
What is at issue here is to initiate historicity by reinstating continuity. This implies supplementary work with regard to the categories of historical analysis. For from the Arab Near East to the Balkans, the privileged way of conceiving of the history of states and societies today is in terms of religious and ethnic âcommunitiesâ and the problems of âintercommunalâ relations, of which contemporary national formations are the (chrono)logical result.
A single word suffices to designate this approach, and the debates it gives rise to: millet. Its Arabic version, milla, âoccurs in the Koran with the meaning of religionâ (Lewis 1968: 335; cf. Copeaux 2002: 28â30). And this usage, denoting the belonging to a religious confession, is also to be found in certain nineteenth-century Ottoman documents. Thus the governor of Cyprus, paraphrasing a declaration by the Cypriot episcopacy about the ârites of the religion of Jesusâ, uses the expression ârites of the milletâ.5 However âcommunityâ (taken to be a religious community) is the most widespread translation of âmilletâ among historians, referring in this sense to the âframework within which the Christian and Jewish communal authorities functioned under Ottoman rule [which] has been called the millet systemâ (Braude and Lewis 1982: 12). What some call the âmillet systemâ means, in short, the institutionalization of an autonomous form of management accorded to certain confessional groups within the Ottoman political entity.
What follows does not seek to address the question of whether or not a âmillet systemâ existed in the Ottoman Empire: the meaning attributed to the phrase has been the subject of diverging and contrasting interpretations.6 The intention is to discuss the assertion that millets correspond to a form of pre- or proto-ânationalâ identity â or in other words an assertion of the continuity between the âcommunitiesâ of the past and the nations of today.
Already in the midst of the troubled 1950s, the British Islamic scholar Charles F. Beckingham hinted at some such view. Reporting on âIslam and Turkish nationalism in Cyprusâ he came to the following conclusion:
Under present conditions a strong and overt anti-religious movement among Cypriot Turks is no more likely than it would be in Pakistan. This is not because they are devout, which for the most part they are not, but because of the intimate relation that exists between religious and national feeling in consequence of the working of the millet system, the preponderance of the Greek Orthodox population and over three-quarters of a century of foreign rule.
(Beckingham 1957b: 83)
All of these composite factors have continued to play a key role in subsequent analyses of the âCyprus disputeâ. When devising an explanatory framework for nationalism at large in the Ottoman and then post-Ottoman world, the âconsequence of the working of the millet systemâ has tended to occupy centre stage. Thus Kemal Karpat, in his study of the relations between âcommunitiesâ and national identities in the Ottoman Empire, puts forward a condensed version of this hypothesis:
The process of nation formation first among Christians and then among Muslims in the Ottoman state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was conditioned to an important extent by the ...
