Untold Histories of the Middle East

Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries

Amy Singer, Christoph Neumann, Selcuk Aksin Somel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780415570107
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136926655
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Historiographie

Much traditional historiography consciously and unconsciously glosses over certain discourses, narratives, and practices. This book examines silences or omissions in Middle Eastern history at the turn of the twenty-first century, to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics.

With a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Palestine, the contributors consider how and why such silences occur, as well as the timing and motivation for breaking them. Introducing unexpected, sometimes counter-intuitive, issues in history, chapters examine:

• women and children survivors of the Armenian massacres in 1915
• Greek-Orthodox subjects who supported the Ottoman empire and the formation of the Turkish republic
• the conflicts among Palestinians during the revolt of 1936-39
• pre-marital sex in modern Egypt
• Arab authors writing about the Balkans
• the economic, not national or racial, origins of anti-Armenian violence
• the European women who married Muslim Egyptians

Drawing on a wide range of sources and methodologies, such as interviews; newly-discovered archives; fictional accounts; and memoirs, each chapter analyses a story and its suppression, considering how their absences have affected our previous understandings of the history of the Middle East.

Part I
Missing women

1
Unravelling layers of gendered silencing

Converted Armenian survivors of the 1915 catastrophe

Ay

e Gül Altınay and Yektan Türkyılmaz

An unknown number of young Ottoman Armenians (including babies and small children) survived the death marches and massacres of 1915 as adopted daughters and sons of Muslim families. Fewer others became wives and, in exceptional cases, husbands. There were also occasional cases of whole families surviving by converting to Islam.¹ While some of these survivors (particularly young men) were reunited with their families or relatives in later years,² or were taken into orphanages by missionaries and relief workers, many others lived the rest of their lives as ‘Muslims’, taking on Turkish, Kurdish, or Arabic names. In recent years, the stories of these survivors have become publicly visible through memoirs, novels and historical works in Turkey. This new visibility has raised questions about the absence of this particular group of survivors in Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, as well as international scholarly and popular histories of 1915.³ Simply put, the stories of these survivors have been silenced by all historiographies, either in the form of total erasure or of serious trivialization.⁴

This chapter explores the development of this silence in Turkish nationalist historiography and discusses the implications of the recent ‘unsilencing’ for ‘the Armenian question’ and for the existing narratives of identity and belonging in contemporary Turkey. In what follows, we first present an overview of Turkish nationalist historiography on 1915 and its silence with respect to this particular group of survivors, and then discuss the nature of the debate on 1915 surrounding its ninetieth anniversary. The second part of the chapter provides a detailed reading of two pioneering works: a popular memoir (Anneannem by Fethiye Çetin) and an academic study (Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi (1915–1923) by

brahim Ethem Atnur) which have broken this silence in different ways. In the concluding section, we analyse the radical intervention that the stories of Islamized Armenian survivors pose for Turkish nationalist historiography and self-understanding.

From silence to defence: the ‘Turkish case’ against genocide allegations

‘A page of human history that is best forgotten’

In her analysis of the Ottoman and Turkish historiography of 1915, Müge Göçek identifies three historical periods marked by distinct narratives: the Ottoman investigative narrative (1910s), the republican defensive narrative (1953 onwards), and the postnationalist critical narrative (1990s onwards).⁵ Written around the time of the events of 1915, works that Göçek classifies as the Ottoman investigative narrative are based on a recognition of the Armenian massacres. According to Göçek, ‘the central tension in the Ottoman investigative narrative regarding the Armenian deaths and massacres in 1915 is over the attribution of responsibility for the crimes’,⁶ rather than their existence. Recent studies on the various texts of this period – from the memoirs of Cemal Pasha and Halide Edib to Ottoman newspapers and magazines published between 1915 and 1920, to Ottoman archival records – suggest that one can also find a wide range of narratives on the differential fates of the Armenian women and children during the deportations.⁷ These narratives point to the survival of significant numbers of women and children through Islamization and adoption into Muslim families (whether for protection, free labour or sexual abuse).

Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his study on the silencing of the Haiti Revolution, identifies four moments when silences enter the process of historical production: ‘the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).’⁸ Using Trouillot’s terminology, it is possible to argue that in the making of sources, archives and early narratives of 1915, neither the Armenian massacres of 1915 nor the survival of women and children through Islamization are silenced in the form of total erasure (although they are at times trivialized). Silence as erasure comes in the moment of ‘retrospective significance’, that is the making of history.

After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, both the Armenian massacres and the fate of the Islamized women and children become part of the nationalist silence cast over the dark pages of recent history. Hülya Adak argues that, starting with Mustafa Kemal’s Nutuk (the Speech), Republican memoirs, in an almost uniform fashion, fall into a deep silence about 1915 and its aftermath.⁹ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s biographer

evket Süreyya Aydemir defined it in 1965 as ‘a page of human history that is best forgotten’, and summarized the prevalent attitude of the time:

I believe that the Turkish-Armenian struggle and settlement is a page of human history that is best forgotten. Which side has the primary or real responsibility? Who? Again, I believe that it is better to refrain from searching for answers to these questions and forget this story forever.¹⁰

Only three decades afterwards were the first books published about 1915. According to Göçek, the two studies on Ottoman Armenians that came out in the early 1950s¹¹ mark a significant transition from the Ottoman investigative narrative to the republican defensive narrative. In the latter narrative, that developed after the 1950s, the size of the Armenian population before the war and the numbers of casualties during the war are minimized, wartime Muslim losses are emphasized, massacring of Armenians is denied, and the main responsibility for the tehcir (translated as ‘relocation’ or ‘deportation’, depending on the author)¹² is placed on the Armenians themselves and the Great Powers, with the Ottoman state/Muslims/Turks being represented as ‘victims’ rather than perpetrators.

Starting with the 1970s, the republican defensive narrative gained impetus, as well as a new layer of defensiveness, as a response to the lethal attacks against Turkish diplomats in Europe and North America by the Armenian armed group ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia).¹³ In 1976, Esat Uras’s 1950 book was reprinted by Belge Yayınları, becoming an important ‘source’ for subsequent works. A revised edition in 1987 included a lengthy introduction and was translated into English the following year.¹⁴

In the words of Göçek:

The nationalist cloak over [the republican defensive] narrative creates shortcomings: the use of archival material is highly selective, and nationalist scholars almost unanimously overlook other source material that contradicts the narrative, such as the investigation records of the Ottoman military tribunals and contemporaneous accounts in Ottoman newspapers documenting the deaths and massacres of 1915.¹⁵

One of the deep silences of the republican defensive narrative, until recently, has been the silence over the converted Armenian survivors. Not only does their existence remain unmentioned in canonical works, but in the ‘number-crunching’ regarding the total Armenian population and ...

Table of contents

• SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Missing women
• Part II Marginal lives
• Part III Memories of conflicts
• Glossary
• Select bibliography
• Index