Ottoman Empire and Turkey Essay Example

together but also inherently hindering the Turkish nationalist movement. The idea behind this was that the Turkish nationalism might be triggering other nationalism as well. So reforms had been implemented according to this Ottomanist ideology; whereby the declaration of Kanun-i Esau's constituted a peak point in the historiography of Ottomanist politics (Davison, et all., 13).

Abdulhamid era slowed down Ottomanists, whose ultimate aim was to construct the ideal Ottoman individual. During the reign of Abdulhamid, the hegemony of the Islamist state policies came forward with overt references to the caliphate, which was used as political bargaining/ control tool. As Kemal Karpat puts it, the Islamist vision of the 19th century imperial elites was obviously a historical product of Ottomans’ identification with the Islam connected to the encounter with the imperialist West. Preceding ruling classes, even though they were Muslims too, tried to preserve their equal distance both to Muslim and non-Muslim subjects (Davison, et all., 21).

The declaration of the 2nd Constitution in 1908 could be defined as a political victory-but a temporary victory- for Ottomanism. With the Balkan Wars (1912-13), where a big majority of the non-Muslims subjects had a break off from the empire, leaving almost a completely Muslim (Turkish-Arabic) empire behind, urged the Ottoman ruling elites towards finding new ways other than Ottomanism. This was at the same time initiated by the coming of nearly one million Muslims to the Anatolia from the Balkan region.

Ittihat ve Terakki, the political party in the government during the period of transition from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism, immediately proposed a transformation of the empire system into a unitary nation-state. The fact that Ittihat ve Terakki was defined as

a holy community by its members is analyzed by Erich Jan Zürcher with the party’s ultimate political orientation based on the continuation of the omnipotence of the state and preservation of the position of Muslim elites. In other words, the sacredness of Ittihat Terakki is inherently dependent on its effort to save the sacred state. In the aftermath of WWI, during the Turkish War of Independence, nationalist mobilization had followed a particular path; Defend of National Rights. In Sivas Congress “national right and national aim” was defined as the Independence of Anatolian Muslims under the reign of Ottoman Rule. This historical significance flirtation between nationalism and religion was also a legitimized response to the propaganda of Istanbul government. In that sense, it was strategically utilized during the independence struggle spread over Anatolia. Nevertheless, it can easily be said that the era of national struggle was an era “without nationalist social engineering”, whereby nationalism and all the imagination on the ideal national identity was a nebula, as Tanil Bora formulized it (Fenwick, et al., 20).

After the Independence War, Kemalist group in the government was to decide the main path of the Turkish nationalist wave. In that sense, by trying to implement a comprehensive national consciousness Kemalists actually wanted to rely on a westernization modernization where suffocating Gemeinschaft of Islam is to be excluded. It was, on the other hand, obvious that the Kemalist nationalist discourse perceived the West as a universalized form of high civilization and thus as an all-encompassing abstract notion. Paralyzed with such a view, Turkish nationalism could have hardly coded the West as the “Other” but the universal truth to be caught (Davison,

et all., 37).

Thinking regarding the “others” of Turkish nationalism, it can be observed how the discourse of Westernization/modernization had been dominantly operating within the kernel of Turkish nationalist thought. Since the actual substance of any nationalism, as many scholars historicized and de-constructed the essence of nationalist ideologies, lies on a dialectic space of the “other”, outside of the boundaries of national identity. This quasi-epistemological negative-space can be constructed through certain sub-processes of negation, exclusion, banalization, transformation as well as silencing of the past of a particular community living on a particular geography. In the Turkish case, the emerging nationalist thought in the early 19th century had chosen the “old Turkey”, namely the Ottoman as the “Other” where the religious worldview had been dominating the political realm for centuries. Then according to Kemalist ideology, it was the Ottoman religious view that blocked Turkish modernization. In this line, parallel to the construction of the nation-state a national identity built around universal secularism brought by the West should be put forward. The former, the process of construction of nation state, will result with a French type secularism and pave the for the emergence of the latter, a secularized national identity (Fenwick, et al., 23).

Works cited

1. Davison, Roderic H. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876. Princeton University Press, (2015): 1-56.
2. Fenwick, Rhona SH, et al. "Settlement Reorganisation and the Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire: Bayesian Modelling Narrows Dates for Post-
3. Medieval Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük, K?r?ehir Province, Turkey." International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2016): 1-25.