Turkey

A Past Against History

Christine M. Philliou

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780520276390
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520382398
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

From its earliest days, the dominant history of the Turkish Republic has been one of national self-determination and secular democratic modernization. The story insisted on total rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the modern Turkish state and on the absolute unity of the Turkish nation. In recent years, this hermetic division has begun to erode, but as the old consensus collapses, new histories and accounts of political authority have been slow to take its place.

In this richly detailed alternative history, Christine M. Philliou focuses on the notion of political opposition and dissent—muhalefet—to connect the Ottoman and Turkish periods. Taking the perennial dissident Refik Halid Karay as a subject, guide, and interlocutor, she traces the fissures within the Ottoman and the modern Turkish elite that bridged the transition. Exploring Karay’s political and literary writings across four regimes and two stints in exile, Philliou upends the official history of Turkey and offers new dimensions to our understanding of its political authority and culture.

ONE

Against Power? (1888–1909)

REFIK HALID WAS BORN IN 1888 into a comfortable family that was part of the Istanbul bureaucratic establishment. He came of age during an era when political opposition was being driven underground by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). In his early years, he had no direct connection to political opposition, or to the concept of muhalefet. Muhalefet as an ideal—meaning space for disagreement, dissent, and multivocality—had been a preoccupation of the Young Ottoman movement in its struggle to envision a just and liberal constitutional order in the 1860s and early 1870s. Abdülhamid’s suspension of the constitution in 1878 interrupted that conversation for nearly three decades. As opposition to Hamidian absolutism gained momentum in the 1890s, it was formulated within a language of liberalism and Ottoman patriotism, not expressly as muhalefet. Only in late 1907 did muhalefet return to currency, used to indicate the coalition of constitutionalist parties united against the tyranny of Abdülhamid. And it was only after 1908, when the Young Turk revolution ushered in the Second Constitutional Era, that Refik Halid and muhalefet met in earnest. After this encounter, the course of Refik Halid’s life and that of muhalefet became inextricable.

This chapter traces the period prior to this convergence and reconstructs the formation of Refik Halid as a product of the Ottoman establishment and as a writer. It begins with a consideration of his early life and background, which owing to a dearth of contemporary firsthand sources is often largely filtered through the lens of his post-1909 career and reputation. In retelling the story of Refik Halid’s development, the chapter examines two short stories that he wrote just before he stepped into the worlds of muhalefet and satire. It then examines the broader class tensions that helped bring muhalefet to the fore in 1907 and, ultimately, to restore the constitution in 1908.

A PEDIGREED REBEL

In the absence of contemporary sources about Refik Halid prior to 1909, his biographers are careful to emphasize two aspects of his early life: his privilege and pedigree on the one hand, and his spirited, rebellious character on the other. Following Refik Halid’s own lead, they are conspicuously silent about aspects of his life that detract from this reputation, such as his vested interest in the old regime for the first year after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908. The choice of what to include—and what to omit—from his story reflects the view of muhalefet that would take shape in later decades; namely, the image of the muhalif as a consistently principled opponent. Upon closer inspection, however, we see that even the most principled muhalif had partisan and class interests.

The story of Refik Halid’s privilege and pedigree begins with his birth on March 14, 1888, to Mehmed Halid and Nefise Ruhsar, both from families that were part of the distinguished class of Muslims associated with the Ottoman state. As a child, Refik lived in a village on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus near Beylerbeyi, a seaside village named for the Ottoman palace rebuilt under Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) and home to many Ottoman grandees of the Tanzimat and Hamidian eras. From 1890 onward, the family spent summers in a villa purchased from relatives that was located in the Erenköy district, just inland from the quay of Kadıköy on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus. The family wintered in a mansion in the Emin Nurettin neighborhood of Şehzâdebaşı, on the southern side of the Golden Horn near the historic Şehzâde and Süleymaniye mosques and much of the Ottoman administration.¹ This quarter was inhabited by many Muslim state officials and their families. Like their villa in Erenköy, it was a place where the family enjoyed the company of those of a similar social station. As Refik Halid frequently mentions in his fiction and memoirs, his was a childhood populated by midlevel bureaucrats.²

Indeed, the Halid family, having lived for several generations in Istanbul, was ensconced in Istanbul society and the continually expanding—some might say moribund—Ottoman bureaucracy.³ Refik’s father, Mehmed (1849–?), was chief treasurer or cashier (serveznedar) of the Ministry of Finance. He was also the superintendent (nazır) of the Ottoman Bank, which was founded in the wake of the Crimean War (1853–56) as a joint venture between the Ottoman government and British and French interests.⁴ While the top positions at the bank were reserved for Europeans, and jobs immediately below those were kept for non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, Mehmed Halid apparently held a position that involved some authority. A biographer of Refik, writing in the 1940s, pointed out defensively that as serveznedar, Mehmed had bureaucrats under his watch who were in charge of both Anatolia and the Danube province and that his job “was not just about counting money.”⁵

But considering the ever-growing public debt that had accumulated since the Crimean War and increased with the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78), it was not an ideal moment for Mehmed Halid to work in imperial financial administration. Both the Finance Ministry and the Ottoman Bank were linked to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), which was formed in 1881 after the Ottoman central government defaulted on loans to foreign creditors. The OPDA controlled a third of the empire’s revenues and became an important symbol of the compromised status of the state vis-à-vis Europe. Alongside the oppressive capitulatory regime, European oversight of Ottoman finances through these institutions was an important target of criticism and animus for the Young Turk movement. As such, the topic of Mehmed Halid’s position and the family’s socioeconomic status would prove to be a problem for Refik Halid—and for sympathetic biographers, who had to walk a fine line between emphasizing his father’s position of responsibility and downplaying the role he played in propping up the semicolonial position of the Hamidian financial bureaucracy.

When famed poet and writer Yahya Kemal (Beyatlı; 1884–1958) reflected on a meeting with Mehmed Halid in 1912, he offered a view that pierced through subsequent constructions of the family’s pedigree. “Halid Bey,” Yahya Kemal wrote, “clad in his robe (entari) and furs, with his pronunciation, his way of eating and enjoying himself, and his way of dealing with people, made it clear that he was a commoner, and that he was deeply resentful of the Unionists, and more generally of the whole ‘revolutionary’ generation [of which Yahya Kemal, and for that matter Refik Halid, were members]. As for Niyazi Bey [Refik’s brother], had he not been sitting with us at the table, he would have been thought by any guest to have been the butler.”⁶ In describing this scene, Yahya Kemal called into question the family’s status in a changing world and pointed to cleavages within the Ottoman establishment that were beginning to appear, only to deepen in time. The Erenköy villa, Yahya Kemal reflected in the 1950s, had an ostentatious portrait of Refik’s parents “in the style of a tuğra [i.e., old-fashioned and tasteless], painted by hand by a house painter-artist (boyacı bir sanatkar) on the wall.”⁷

Yahya Kemal’s open disdain for Mehmed Halid’s status was laden with a deep ambivalence toward the recent Ottoman past that was shared by many in Turkey in the 1950s. It reflected the animosity that many Unionists harbored toward people like Mehmed Halid, who worked in the French-run OPDA and were considered to have collaborated with the capitulatory regime. As the locus of the empire’s loss of sovereignty, institutions such as the OPDA had fueled the Unionist movement. Even as early as 1912, the ways of the aging Hamidian “bureau-aristocracy” of Istanbul would have elicited the hostility of someone like Yahya Kemal, who not only came from provincial origins in the Balkans but had lived for many years in Paris and later forged strong connections with the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).

Refik Halid’s extended family, according to his biographers, included a number of prominent statesmen and artists, some of whom would be sources of pride and others targets of opprobrium in the national era. For example, his paternal uncle, Rıza Paşa, was a graduate of the War Academy. Wounded at the Siege of Plevna during the Russo-Ottoman War, he is said to have died later while commanding the Ottoman forces in Mecca. Another of Refik’s uncles, Behlül Efendi, was a prominent Mevlevi flutist. Behlül Efendi was apparently also a maternal relative of Mehmet Akif (Ersoy) (1873–1936), the composer of the Turkish national anthem. The family, particularly Refik Halid’s father, was also affiliated with the Mevlevi Sufi order. This was yet another marker of some social status—or aspirations to it—since this order was associated with the upper echelons of society. In contrast to the more popular Bektashi order (in which were found craftsmen and Janissaries until the order was banned in 1826), Mevlevis included many followers from the upper ranks of the Ottoman ulema and bureaucracy.⁸ On his mother’s side, Refik was said to be descended from the Crimean Tatar Khanate. Although it is not clear when Nefise Ruhsar’s ancestors joined the thousands of Muslims who migrated to the Ottoman territories after imperial Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 1783, according to one of Refik’s biographers, at the turn of the twentieth century some members of the family, including Refik, were still receiving a small pension from the office of the Şeyhülislam (Chief Müfti) because of their descent from the Crimean khans.⁹

Most likely the fashioning of this pedigree—laid out repeatedly and in rote fashion by Refik Halid’s biographers and originating, no doubt, from Refik himself—was in part an attempt to claim an Ottoman pedigree despite the family’s status as commoners and Mehmed Halid’s position as only a midlevel bureaucrat. It was sufficient to claim a class status in contrast, and in opposition, to the modest backgrounds of the up-and-coming members of the Young Turk elite. And it would have given Refik Haild a solid, if not unassailable, status in the old imperial hierarchy of Hamidian Istanbul. His was certainly not the only family that had achieved a position in the Tanzimat-era bureaucracy and that was eager to construct a longer, aristocratic history. On the basis of his confessional, ethnic, and linguistic identity, the family history would later make Refik Halid ripe for inclusion, one would think, in the elite of a future Turkish nation-state. Neither he nor his biographers mention, for instance, that his maternal grandfather was a Greek convert from the island of Chios, a claim that may have undermined his construction of a pure Turkish, imperial pedigree.¹⁰ Instead they emphasize his paternal roots in Anatolia and maternal links to the Turco-Mongol Crimean dynasty, which put him ahead of—and in tension with—many Muslims from the Balkans and Russian territories who could not make similar claims. While the latter would vehemently espouse Turkist ideas, they would do so as outsiders who had to assimilate into Turcophone Istanbul.

EDUCATING AN OTTOMAN

For children of affluent families in the Hamidian era, education began in the home and then continued in elite institutions that trained Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals. Refik Halid was no exception. At the age of four he had a tutor (lala) named Veli Ağa, who hailed from Anatolia and wore a Reading coat, denoting the tight-fitting cutaway or tuxedo jacket worn by Hamidian bureaucrats; it tended to symbolize elitism and a slavish submission to the regime. Veli Ağa took the young Refik to mosques and other neighborhood sites.¹¹ The boy received his initial instruction in literature from his maternal uncle, İhsan, an accounting clerk at the Finance Ministry and member of the Tatar Aid Society, who later got Refik Halid his first post as a clerk at the same ministry. Refik later recalled starting school at the age of eight; in summer he attended a coed “stone school” (taş mektebi), Mekteb-i Latif, near his family’s Erenköy villa, and in winter he went to the primary school later named “Şemsülmaarif mektebi” (Light of Knowledge School), near the Şehzâdebaşı mansion.¹²

Information about the instruction Refik received between ages eight and twelve is sparse. We know that his school seems to have moved several times in the few years he was attending and that this occurred against the backdrop of Hamidian efforts to alter the course of education reforms that dated to the Tanzimat era (1839–76). The Education Regulation, which remained the framework for educational reform for the next half century, called for the establishment of a French-style centralized education system at the secondary level. But between the promulgation of that reform and Sultan Abdülhamid’s accession to the throne, little had been done to make the plans a reality across the empire. By the 1880s, when the new sultan turned his attention to education, he had different goals than statesmen such as Ali and Fuat Paşa, who had played a major role in fashioning the Tanzimat “reordering” of state and society. Instead of a wholesale imitation of French education, Abdülhamid espoused a kind of reactive or defensive modernization that entailed a selective adaptation of French schooling infused with Islamic and Ottoman content. These changes caused significant flux in the formal structure of schooling. While the 1869 plan had had three levels of schooling—sıbyani (elementary), rüşdiye (middle), and sultani/Darülfünun (university)—problems with funding and training personnel meant that the lower two levels were “unable to produce students sufficiently qualified for the higher levels.”¹³ The rüşdiye schools were thus downgraded to the primary level, and a new class of schools, the idadi, was established to fill the gap between rüşdiye and sultani schools. By the 1890s, an estimated ten thousand idadi schools had been built around the empire.

For Refik Halid and his cohort, gone were the medreses of the past. In their place were schools like the Galatasaray Lyceum, where Refik enrolled in 1901, at the age of twelve or thirteen. Also known as Mekteb-i Sultani, or the Imperial School, Galatasaray was founded in 1868 in Beyoğlu, the European, largely non-Muslim quarter of Istanbul.¹⁴ It became the showcase of the Tanzimat-era Ottoman education system and was open to student...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration
• Timeline
• Introduction: How Happy Is He Who Calls Himself a Turk?
• 1 • Against Power? (1888–1909)
• 2  •  The Contradictions of Ottoman Constitutionalism and the Remaking of Muhalefet (1908–1913): The Porcupine Speaks
• 3  •  The Joke (1913–1918)
• 4  •  The True Face of Istanbul (1918–1922)
• 5  •  Muhalefet from Abroad (1922–1927)
• 6  •  There Is a World Underground (1928–1945)
• 7  •  Muhalefet in the Free World (1945–1965)
• Epilogue: Muhalefet, Reconsidered
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index