Ottoman/Turkish Visions of the Nation, 1860-1950

D. Gürpinar, Do?an Gürp?nar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137334213
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Seeing the critical phase in the construction of a Turkish historical imagination between 1860 to 1950 disregarding the political disruptions, this book demonstrates how history and historical imagery had been instrumental in the nation-building process.

1

The Encounter with the Ottoman Heritage: Imperial Grandeur, Medieval Decay, and Double Discourses

Development of a (liberalized) national epic of the Ottoman Empire

The onset of the Enlightenment ushered in a novel curiosity. Krzystof Pomian defines the early modern era as an ‘age of curiosity’ and as ‘an interim rule between those of theology and science’.¹ Especially, in the 18th century with the expansion of the British Empire, the British gentleman traveling overseas to British outposts pioneered a new phenomenon, the collecting of curiosities.² These English gentlemen collected vases, urns, coins, fossils, seeds and plants, stuffed animals, and antiques from exotic places. It is not a coincidence that the British Museum was a natural sequel to the British imperial expansion. It was founded through the will of Sir Hans Sloane to display his vast collections publicly, and it expanded with the contributions of other imperial collectors who brought their marvels from all around the world.³ The discovery of Roman, Greek, and, later, ancient Egyptian artifacts in the early 19th century further fueled this fascination. The collectors of antique artifacts developed a dialog with the ancients and attributed meanings to these artifacts far superseding their material qualities.⁴ Although this curiosity was more an aristocratic preoccupation, the new quest for antiques was not confined to aristocrats who were mesmerized by Greco-Roman artistic products. It certainly had a popular appeal in Britain. Britishness was also reinforced and affirmed via new historical and cultural objects and fascination. Apparently, this new curiosity and vision of history contributed significantly to the emergence of a national imagination and, subsequently, a national identity.

British historians began in the 1990s to focus on the molding of a new sensitivity and consciousness with regard to history, the nation, and the self that developed in the second half of the 18th century in England. Cheap books and pamphlets, engravings, journals and every kind of media addressing the masses, beliefs, and folk tales conveyed this new sensitivity and consciousness. This interest was not free of class biases. However, as had been demonstrated, a larger popular following was observable, contrary to the claims of earlier scholarship that regarded the masses as passive bystanders before the advent of modernity and urbanization. This new interest was non-political in many ways. However, the political implications of these discourses were obvious. The premises and contours of this emerging cultural identity and nationalism are illustrative of the conflation of political and seemingly non-political imaginations.

Not coincidentally, just at this time, Sir Walter Scott, ‘the man who invented the historical novel’ was refashioning English history in his historical novels. Nevertheless, Sir Walter Scott’s historical imagination was more complex than a mere hagiography. There were no heroes and no eternal villains in Walter Scott. He believed that ‘history works through compromise, and ... the extreme version of position is not its quintessence but its corruption’.⁵ His social and historical visions were praised even by the Marxist literary critic George Lukacs, especially for his espousal of an imagined organic community that embraced the lower classes.⁶ Scott evoked a yearning for the chivalry of the bygone age without repudiating the contemporary age and its cultural baggage. Furthermore, the tenor of the novels of Sir Walter Scott was progressive and not nostalgic. ‘On the one hand ... [Scott] feels compelled to affirm the fact of human progress through history; on the other, he is deeply sympathetic to the heroic qualities found in past societies and to people who, through no fault of their own, are bound to be destroyed by the historical process.’⁷ Hence, the literary work of Sir Walter Scott epitomized the emerging modern national and historical proclivities in which imagination was at its best when it romanticized the past but sought for glory and prosperity in the present.⁸

The common underlying thrust of all the recent studies informed by the ‘new cultural history’ was a call to contextualize the emergence of nationalism within a larger cultural and political setting. Discrediting the earlier generation of scholars who viewed nationalism primarily as a political project, they regarded nationalism not necessarily as an ‘ism’ but a cluster of perceptions of national identity embedded within discourses of self-identity. Furthermore, following the path opened by historians such as Adrian Hastings, Liah Greenfeld, Colin Kidd, and others,⁹ they denied the exclusively modern nature of nationalism. Given that all these studies focused on the half century from circa 1770 to 1830 in which they do not necessarily locate the origins of national identity and consciousness in early modernity, the studies attested to the ideational advances preceding industrialization and full-blown modernization in which (a la Benedict Anderson) new media of communication, epistemology and ideas could be disseminated to a larger audience. This engendered the emergence of a certain sense of community and nation. In the late Ottoman Empire, we do not observe a comparable burgeoning market. Nevertheless, the late Ottoman intellectuals, observing and mesmerized by the new romantic historical fascination, also committed themselves to disseminate a comparable national imagination, ‘popular Ottomanism’, that has lived ever since.

Namık Kemal and the emergence of the modern historical imagination of the Ottoman Empire

As discussed in the introduction, the pre-1848 ‘romantic’ nationalisms were ‘liberal’ as in the case of the anti-Russian Polish nationalism or the Mazzinian Risorgimento Italian nationalism. These nationalisms were designed to emancipate their respective nations simultaneously from both foreign domination and medieval obscurantism. These two tasks were perceived as complementary before these romantic and self-styled emancipationary nationalisms were transformed and turned reactionary.¹⁰

The national sentiments of the mid-19th-century Ottoman-Turkish intellectuals, the first Turkish public intellectuals, resembled these nationalisms in their visions of the past. Liberalizing the Ottoman past was a major objective for the early Tanzimat intellectuals. Extolling the grandeur and virtues of the Ottoman classical age, this discourse betrays the main contours of the yet-to-come Republican vistas of the classical Ottoman Empire—the tolerance of the Ottomans toward non-Muslims,¹¹ the enlightened visions of the Ottoman regime, and the Ottomans’ concern for justice; all of which apparently prevailed before the decay of the Empire began at the end of the 16th century. As 19th-century Ottoman reformism portrayed itself as the ‘renewal and regeneration of the Ottoman Empire’ after ages of stagnation and decline¹² and the ‘regaining of the lost glory of the Empire’, the Ottoman Golden Age had to be reinvented in accordance with the values and ethos of 19th-century Ottoman reformism.

With the Tanzimat, we encounter the emergence of the ‘rhetoric of tolerance’ and its extension to the Ottoman classical age. The preeminent Young Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal portrayed the Ottoman Empire in its Golden Age as liberal, enlightened, and tolerant of other faiths (as Ottomanist before Ottomanism) and as the precursor of the Tanzimat. He stipulated that the Ottoman Empire ‘emerged at a time when the fire of bigotry (taassub) was burning like a volcano ... We protected the Greeks, their kin, confessions, beliefs, interests and rights. We saved the Armenians in Iran and the Jews in Spain from the paws of oppression ... In the lands of the Ottoman Empire, there were Christian princes and non-Muslim clerks in state service three-four centuries ago’.¹³ The Ottoman imperial system of managing religious and confessional groups began to be consecrated as ‘tolerance’, and this concept, a historically bounded notion applicable solely to post-reformation Europe, became eternalized and adapted to the classical age of the Ottoman Empire, although it was only after 1856 that the non-Muslims were admitted (reluctantly or not) into the political nation.¹⁴ Namık Kemal further noted that in the beginning, the Ottoman institution of recruitment of Christian boys (devşirme) was practiced only ‘upon request’ of the parents of the Christian villagers and not enforced.¹⁵ This was certainly an effort to ‘historicize’ the Tanzimat ideology of Ottomanism.

In an age of surging national consciousness and sentiments, the Western gaze and the Western historical imagery of the Ottomans were also motivations to set the record of the Ottoman Empire upright and exonerate it from ‘ungrounded’ allegations and slanders. Namık Kemal was particularly troubled with the depiction of the Ottoman Empire by Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), the Austrian historian, in his monumental ten-volume Ottoman history that is arguably the equivalent of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for Ottoman historiography, which had a enormous impact on the Ottoman intelligentsia. Namık Kemal wrote his (uncompleted) history of the Ottoman Empire ‘to exonerate the Empire from the rebukes of Hammer-Purgstall’. Throughout his Ottoman History, he pursued a polemic with Hammer-Purgstall. He was outraged by Hammer’s allegation that Osman killed his uncle Dündar in the midst of a council. For him, this could not be true, first and foremost because ‘it did contradict with the character and integrity of Osman,’ For Namık Kemal, this allegation reflects only the author’s view of the event, nothing more.¹⁶ For him, ‘Osman could not kill Dündar without any justifiable and substantial reason.’ Likewise, Namık Kemal was also concerned with Hammer’s contention that Bayezıd was known as Yıldırım (Thunderbolt) due to his cruelty towards his brother Yakub. For Namık Kemal, this assessment is also fallacious.¹⁷

Contrary to the idea that the modern scholarship regarding Ottoman historiography is distinct and easily dissociable from pre-modern and pre-scientific scholarship, a continuum between the accounts of travelers and Western diplomats beginning in the 15th–16th centuries and continuing to the 20th century scholarship can be traced. Arguably, the dispositions, biases, and cultural predispositions of the former were transplanted to the latter. It could be further argued that this continuum and point of intersection between traditional historiography and modern scholarship is most evident in the work of Hammer-Purgstall, the very liminal Janus-faced historian whose one face was oriented to the past and the pre-modern historiography as an apogee of the Ottoman chronicler tradition while his other face was looking towards the future and heralding the dawn of ‘modern historiography’. He was the first Westerner to undertake a comprehensive and erudite history of the Ottoman Empire reminiscent of the 19th-century German Rankean scholarship, a Rankean before Ranke.¹⁸ For Cemal Kafadar, Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte des Osmanischen Reichen was ‘the most comprehensive and monumental narrative of the Ottoman history ever written ... [and] represents the culmination of that tradition’.¹⁹ Born one generation before Ranke, Hammer-Purgstall did for Ottoman history what Ranke did for the history of the early modern German and Latin peoples. As a transitional historian, he bore the features of both modern and pre-modern scholarships. Apparently, it is very hard to distinguish between ‘traditional historiography’ which is to be dismissed and discredited and ‘modern dispassionate historiography’ which is to be espoused. This was even truer for the earlier constructors of the modern Turkish national(ist) historical imagination.

What are problematic here are the mechanisms and means of converting a medieval political hagiographical discourse to a modern nationalist historical imagination. This chapter will also scrutinize how the inherited medieval discourses were filtered through a nation-statist prism and how the praiseworthy personal merits of the Ottoman sultans were packaged as embodiments of national merits (such as benevolence, righteousness, and courage). The continuities and breaks between the Ottoman chronicles are also worth an examination. Whereas the medieval hagiographies are devoid of a central plot and a structured narrative and remained a summa of scores of deeds, the modern renderings are organized around a certain plot and theme. The wars, which emerged as unending, recurring one after the other, and as ends in themselves, were to be transformed into a means to a superior and loftier mission in an eschatological vein.

Many of the prominent Ottoman chroniclers which had been copied and widely read in manuscript form were published in the 1860s, contemporaneous with the massive expansion of the public sphere thanks to the activism and journalism of the Young Ottomans, the first cohort of intellectuals. This was the decade which the sanguine Ebuzziya dubbed the decade of the emergence of public opinion (efkar-ı umumiye) thanks to the efforts of the new public intellectuals (Young Ottomans), including Ebuzziya himself and first and foremost Namık Kemal.²⁰ This wave of printing activity involved The History of Peçevi (1864), a Turkish translation of Müneccimbaşı’s Sahaif ül-Ahbar originally pub...