Echoes of a universalism lost: Rival representations of the ottomans in today's Turkey

Middle Eastern Studies

Volumn 45, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 229-241

  Onar, Nora Fisher ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FOREIGN POLICY; IMPERIALISM; ISLAMISM; NATIONAL IDENTITY; NATIONALISM; OTTOMAN EMPIRE; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY;

EURASIA; EUROPE; TURKEY;

EID: 67650381808     PISSN: 00263206     EISSN: 17437881     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00263200802697290     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. A. Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), p.31.
2. R. Prodi, Europe as I See It (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p.56.
3. W. Graf, 'Reappropriating the Past: History in Ideology and Discourse in the Third World', New Political Science, Vol.19, No.3 (1997), p.50.
4. Ibid., p.52.
5. A. Kadioǧlu, 'Republican Epistemology and Islamic Discourses in Turkey in the 1990s', The Muslim World, Vol.88, No.1 (1999), p.2.
6. Y. Çolak, 'Ottomanism vs. Kemalism: Collective Memory and Cultural Pluralism in 1990s Turkey', Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.42, No.4 (2006), p.592.
7. Ş. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p.135.
8. M. Soykut, Historical Image of the Turk in Europe: 15th Century to the Present, Political and Civilizational Aspects (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003), p.58.
9. Bodin cited in S. Deringil, 'Turkey and "Europe": The Argument from History', Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.43, No.5 (2007), p.712.
10. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, p.38.
11. Ş. Hanioǧlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.9.
12. Ç. Keyder, Memâlik-i Osmaniye'den Avrupa Birliǧi'ne (Istanbul: Iletişim, 2004), p.24.
13. Adeeb Khalid, 'Pan-Islamism in Practice: The Rhetoric of Muslim Unity and Its Uses', in E. Özdalga (ed.), Late Ottoman Society (London: Routledge, 2005), p.202.
14. Sayyid observes that Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate actually fed pan-Islamism more than Abdü lhamid's attempt to rejuvenate the institution because 'the master signifier of Islam was no longer fixed to a particular institutional arrangement' making it available for appropriation by political movements across the fragmented Muslim ümmet (B. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 1997), p.63).
15. K. Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p.72.
16. H. Psomiades, The Eastern Question: The Last Phase, a Study in Greek-Turkish Diplomacy (Thessaloniki: N Nicolaïdes, 1968), p.61.
17. Mustafa Kemal in a speech to a teacher's association in 1922 cited in N. Berkeş, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (New York: Routledge, 1998), p.466.
18. Specifically, Armenians and Greeks; Jews were perceived of as having remained loyal and the Jewish community went to great lengths to preserve this image. They renounced, for example, their constitutional right to education in Judeo-Espanol (Ladino) to which they were entitled through the Treaty of Lausanne. Jewish intellectuals also played a role in revitalizing the 'Citizen Speak Turkish' campaign when it flagged in the early 1930s (S. Caǧaptay, 'Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s', Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.40, No.3 (2004), p.86).
19. Çolak, 'Ottomanism vs. Kemalism', p.592.
20. Ibid., p.587.
21. As Eissenstat notes, the 'prominence of place' in which Atatürk is held makes him a 'vessel in which any number of formations of Turkish nationalism, must, of necessity, be poured'. For example, Islamist leader and nemesis of the Kemalist establishment Necmettin Erbakan once - rather improbably - claimed that were Atatürk alive today he would belong to Erbakan's party. Özyürek, in her recent volume on the politics of public memory, likewise asserts that in the 1990s Islamists sought not only to rehabilitate the Ottoman past but to reframe the 1930s by claiming that the early republicans had sought to infuse the nation with Islamic principles (H. Eissenstadt, 'History and Historiography: Politics and Memory in the Turkish Republic', Contemporary European History, Vol.12, No.1 (2003), p.104
22. E. Özyürek, 'Public Memory as Political Battleground', in The Politics of Public Memory (Syracus: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p.136).
23. Çolak, 'Ottomanism vs. Kemalism', p.588.
24. Cited in M.B. Altunişik, 'The Turkish Model and Democratization in the Middle East', Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol.27, No. 1/2 (2005), p.46.
25. E. Manisali, Sömürgeleşen Türkiye (Istanbul: Derin, 2004), pp.145-6.
26. '3. Uluslararasi Lale Festivali başladi'. Available at http://www.haber7.com/haber.php?haber_id=311065 (accessed 24 May 2008).
27. Marita Sturken, 'Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory', in M. Bal, J. Crewe and L. Spitzer (eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), p.243.
28. H. Yavuz, 'Turkish Identity and Foreign Policy in Flux: The Rise of Neo-Ottomanism', Critique, Vol.89 (1998), p.196.
29. In this statement, Yavuz is specifically criticizing state elites' inability to understand the works of Said Nursi. Ibid., p.198.
30. For an excellent overview of the genesis and evolution of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis see G. Çetinsaya, 'Rethinking Nationalism and Islam: Some Preliminary Notes on the Roots of the "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis" in Modern Turkish Political Thought', The Muslim World Vol.89, No.3-4 (1999).
31. Ibid., p.375.
32. Needless to say neither Özal nor Erbakan's paternalism was particularly well received in the Turkic and Muslim worlds. Erbakan was in fact humiliated by Ghaddafi during a state visit to Libya when the latter charged him of abetting persecution of the Kurds.
33. I am indebted to William Hale for this insight.
34. Interview with Akif Emre.
35. Interview with Ali Bulaç.
36. A. Davutoǧlu, Civilizational Transformation and the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Mahir, 1994), p.199.
37. N. Onar, 'Kemalists, Islamists, and Liberals: Shifting Patterns of Confrontation and Consensus, 2002-2006', Turkish Studies, Vol.8, No.3 (2007), pp.273-88.
38. Çolak, 'Ottomanism vs. Kemalism', p.592.
39. Interview with Hasan Bülent Kahraman.
40. Tanil Bora goes on to quote the columnist who characterizes the music 'that gushes forth from [pop star] Tarkan's unbuttoned shirt' as 'the first sign that an exodus that had rejected the East without being able to set foot in the West, a mental migration, an aesthetic nomadism is achieving a transition to sedentary life'.
41. T. Bora, 'Nationalist Discourses in Turkey', South Atlantic Quarterly Vol.102, No.2-3 (2006), p.445.
42. M. Belge, Istanbul Gezi Rehberi (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfi Yayilari, 1999), p.13.
43. Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, The Spirit of Istanbul, 2007 (Istanbul: Culture and Social Works Daire Baskanligi, 2007).
44. Interview with Ismet Berkan.
45. Interview with Murat Belge.
46. The military interventions of 1971 and 1980 dealt harsh blows to leftists of all colours. Today, the ultranationalist, anti-western, anti-capitalist left affiliated with Doǧu Periçenk's Worker's Party (Işçi Partisi IP) garners a trifling .02 to .05 per cent in national elections. Periçenk himself has recently been charged with conspiring to incite a coup and, if convicted, faces a life sentence.
47. Interview with Gündüz Aktan.
48. The Grey Wolf is the iconic symbol of ultranationalist youth groups; it derives from the myth that a lone grey wolf led Turkish warriors through a treacherous mountainous pass into Anatolia.
49. Interview with Hasan Ünal.