Քանի որ այստեղ արդեն խոսք գնաց օրիենտալիզմի, դրա դրսևորման և պատմության մասին, Ձեր ուշադրությանն եմ ներկայացնում հակիրճ ուսումնասիրությունս, որ, բնականաբար, չէր կարող ամբողջությամբ ներկայացնել պատկերը: Այնուամենայնիվ, սա փորձ էր ներկայացնելու օրիենտալիզմի մեկ այլ՝ «արևելյան» դրսևորում: Ի վերջո՝ այդ օրիենտալիզմ ասվածը հաճախ է կապվում և’ կայսրությունների՝ արևելքի հանդեպ ունեցած հետաքրքրությունների հետ, և’ տարածված կարծրատիպերի, որոնք երկու հիմնական ճյուղով կարելի է ներկայացնել, երկուսն էլ կապակցված: Առաջինը ստեղծվող պատկերն էր, ըստ որի արևելքը հետամնաց, բայց հետաքրքիր մի աշխարհ էր (սա պրիմիտիվ ձևակերպում է), երկրորդն էլ այն էր, որ տերությունները, այս դեպքում՝ զարգացած, առաջավոր և այլն, կարող էին և երևի թե «պարտավոր» էին իրենց ներկայությամբ այս տարածքներում «բարբարոսներից քաղաքակիրթ մարդ պատրաստել»: Ստորև ներկայացված նյութում փորձում եմ հայացք նետել Օսմանյան կայսրությանը դրսից և ներսից, այսպես ասած: Կայսրությունը մի կողմից ինքը «եվրոպացիների օրիենտալիզմի» ուշադրության կենտրոնում էր, որպես հենց այդ օրիենտի մի մասնիկ, իսկ մյուս կողմից էլ կայսրություն էր, հաճախ նույն եվրոպական տիրությունների նման ծրագրերով ու կառուցվածքով, որն իր հայացքն ուղղել էր մի կողմից դեպի Եվրոպա, մյուս կողմից էլ դեպի իր տերությունները «բուն արևելքում», որն էլ դարձավ «օսմանյան օրիենտալիզմի» առարկան:  Մնացածն էլ, ինչպես ասում են, դատեք ինքներդ:

Նյութը, ներեցեք, անգլերեն է:

Ottoman ‘Orientalism’

by Gevorg Avetikyan

There seems to be a certain trend in nowadays approaches and analysis of the past and in this case the studies of the Ottoman Empire, which tend to look at the sources, events and their further interpretations with a relatively new and probably deeper insight using terms of relativity and comparative methodologies.

One such example could possibly be the following excerpt from a recently published article on Ottoman colonialism, where the author quotes Karl Blind’s critique of a comment (made by Gladstone) stating that the “Turks were the one great anti-human species of humanity” with the following remark: “How if he had been reminded by a member of the anti-human race that there are some Irish Home Rulers and Secessionists who in United Ireland, speak of England, on account of her rule of the Sister Isle and her many polyglot dominions as the ‘Anglo-Saxon Grand Turk”[1]. There is, of course, no objective way of approving Gladstone’s comment on the Turks made as early as in the nineteenth century, when it was still the Ottoman Empire and not Turkey, but on the other hand, what Blind suggests and what Deringil repeats does not, in any way, stand as a successful rebuttal to the initial negative label and accusation but is rather an attempt to say the Ottomans (to be further extended to ‘the Turks’) were not much different in terms of  ‘anti-humanity’ as imperialists in comparison with the other colonialists.

The very fact or the will to introduce that as a fact that the Ottoman Empire was not that different and in Homi Bhabha’s words was “almost the same but not quite”[2] gradually came to be realized in the nineteenth century, at a time, when the Ottomans “rejected the subaltern role imposed by the West by inviting ‘their own’ subalterns into history”[3]. What began to take place in the Ottoman Empire, its new policies, the reform edicts of 1839 and 1856 and a shift in the relations of the center with the more and more shrinking peripheries shaped what was termed as Ottoman Orientalism[4] or Ottoman colonialism. Borrowed colonialism, the term used by Dietrich Geyer in reference to the late Russian Empire, is also Deringil’s definition for Ottoman colonialism, which needed a set of concepts, methods, tools of statecraft, prejudices and practices[5].

The latter term seems to be more appropriate for evaluating the Ottoman policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Despite the analysis, which stand as a proof of the existence of some kind of Ottoman ‘Orientalism’, there still seems to be little success achieved by the Ottoman elites of the time as well as the major successor state, which is still somewhere between the European projections of an orientalist image of the ‘Other’ and its own image of the ‘Self’ to be obtained and introduced to the very same Europe, with a hope for recognition by the latter. In other words, although one of the major arguments is that the Ottomans “de-Orientalized the empire by Orientalizing it”[6], it would be more accurate to say they attempted to de-Orientalize it, while the perceptions of the Ottoman Empire or the ‘Orient’ in general have not changed greatly and in some cases have even gone through a new wave of reinforced imagining of the Ottomans, the Turks, the Muslims, the Arabs etc.

Not only it seems to be just a mere attempt to change the perceptions and to create a new image of the empire in order to survive or resist the challenges of the major powers of the time it could also be argued that to some extent what is called Ottoman Orientalism was possibly an early version of a somewhat new approach to the state of affairs within the empire, where the always existing ethnic as well as religious fragmentation became even more important and where the supposed all-inclusive notion of ottomanness gradually turned into ‘Turkishness’ giving birth to Turkish nationalism and possibly Turkish colonialism under the cover of ‘Ottomanness’ however. The increasing contacts with the West were viewed as one of the major factors leading to the final transformation of the religious communities into ethnic ones within an empire in which despite the freedom and equality in terms of personal status and religious practice, guaranteed by the new reforms, the prohibition for the non-Muslims “from performing public services created two societies, side by side, with unequal rights”[7].

When referring to Ottoman Orientalism, the authors write about the empire’s new depiction of its distant peripheries in northern Africa and the Arab provinces- territories with predominantly Muslim populations. It was not, probably, for no reason that the Christian population of the empire did not appear as the ‘victim’ or object of the new kind of ‘Orientalism’ that the state had just launched. In very general terms and in a simplified way one could say Orientalism is to a great extent just about creating two images: the civilized center or patron and its uncivilized subjects or possible subjects to be included as a result of expansion under the motto of bringing civilization unto those territories and their inhabitants.

The creation of such images with the Greek or Armenian population, however, would either be too hard or impossible at that point not just because they were inhabiting territories closer to the center or within the imagined core of the empire and thus did not fit the definition of the inhabitants of the empire’s distant provinces, but also because there was a significant gap in terms of education and literacy between the Christians and the Muslim Turkish community, from which the ruling elite was also formed. The Christians in this case did not fit also within the image of the savage nomads and quite the contrary, could even be viewed as a challenging element as well as untrustworthy citizens because of their contacts with the foreign powers. The Western-style education of the Christian minorities “proceeded at a much faster pace than that of the Ottoman Muslims”[8]. Not only the Ottoman government was failing to make education available for larger portions of the Muslim population, but quite the contrary, there were some suggestions to control the further progress of education within the Christian population instead of raising the level of education and therefore ‘civliziation’ (since the very same ‘Orientalism’ was also, as mentioned above, about bringing enlightenment and education to the allegedly backward subjects) for themselves:

The non-Muslim schools also spurred the Turks to improve the quality of education in their own schools. Ziya Bey complained bitterly that the Turks were far behind in promoting literacy… The conservative Istanbul newspaper Basiret in the 1870′s demanded as a remedy that the government severely control the Greek and Armenian schools. But the actual result of improved Westernized schools among the non-Muslim millets seems to have been to prod the Turks to greater efforts[9].

Therefore it would be easier or it would make more sense in the minds of the Ottoman elite to look for their own savages and subalterns in Africa and the Arab provinces. The civilizing mission of the empire as well as the geographic boundaries and territories to become parts of the ‘Other’ were not, however, to be limited within the existing borders only. On one hand just in parallel with the emergence of the ‘borrowed colonialism’ and ‘Ottoman Orientalism’ there existed a specific view of the West and/or of Europe, which is known as the ‘Occidentalist’ approach and was not limited to just opposing to the West or constructing the ‘Other’. Interestingly enough, Europe appeared both as a kind of antithesis and as a sample at the same time. If in terms of its material progress it was viewed both as a good example and a source for deriving the specific pattern of creating ones own ‘orientalism’ or ‘colonialism’, it’s “moral progress”, on the other hand, was not to be emulated or imitated by the Ottomans as Ahmet Midhat suggested in late nineteenth century[10].

The introduction of Western-style education was one of the ways of ‘borrowing’ the tools to build an empire of the new kind.

The creation and establishment of libraries, public monuments and museums (therefore development of archaeology and other relevant fields of science) were also important ways of displaying the might, the culture and the progress of the state. It was precisely at this period that the first archaeological expeditions began to operate on the Ottoman territories and it was also during the same period, when major museums were established not only in Istanbul, the capital city of the empire, but also in other major cities such as Cairo and Damascus. One such example, where the Ottoman Empire “developed diverse and independent collections to display those aspects of its identity that became vital to its independence and survival” was the section of the Ottoman Imperial Museum displaying the items of Islamic Arts[11]. Wendy Shaw notes that the “Ottoman museums mimicked their European forebears only to subvert the assumptions of power implicit in them”[12]. The opening of the Islamic Arts section is also remarkable as an attempt of both inviting Islam into the scene as a significant aspect of Ottoman identity and the religion of the empire (rather than that of the Arabs only) and a modern way of looking at Islam per se, where it ceased to bear solely a spiritual and divine meaning, which in its turn could be viewed as a step towards a more secularized perception of Islam, Islamic art, lifestyle and society. A copy of the Koran as well as other items, which while in the mosque, have some special religious significance, gain more the role and meaning of just items, subjects worth to show and to see in the museum among many other ‘things’ be those paintings, antique items of art or a hundred-years-old cannon. Bringing those items from the mosque to the museum could be viewed as another step in creating the background for the ‘borrowed colonialism’ or as a first step towards secularization hand in hand with the rise of a new kind of identity, which would be based on ethnicity (Turkish) rather than the general ‘Ottomanness’ in the first place and then only, possibly, religion.

As mentioned above, it was not only the notion of the savage nomads, which, as far as they belonged to the Ottoman territories, were still perceived as a part of the ‘Self,’ although a backward part, which, however, could and should be brought up to a decent level of civilization. Writing and publishing travelogues, both real travel memoirs and fiction, about the non-Ottoman Islamic world gained popularity since the second half of the nineteenth century. Ahmet Midhat was among a number of other authors (Mehemmed Mihri, Abdülkadir Cami Bey etc), which ascribed a great political, economic and cultural significance to travelling and writing travelogues[13]. Just as there was no agreed and coherent discourse on modernization, resisting the negative perceptions of the West towards the Ottoman Empire, bringing changes through reforms or creating a specifically designed ‘Orientalism’ of their own, there was also no overall picture or discourse to define the non-Ottoman Muslims, as Herzog and Motika also argue:

Reading modern Ottoman travelogues which deal with voyages to the Muslim ‘outback’ makes it clear that the construction of “Otherness” was multi-facetted…  However, there seems to have been a common feeling of Ottoman superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the Islamic world, which included a hierarchy of relegations ranging from “our little brother” Afghanistan to “those savage” Tuaregs who were implied to be incorrigible desert bandits. Perhaps not surprisingly, Iran appears to be placed right at the bottom of this hierarchy[14].

Iran has been both a competitor of the Ottoman state and a Shi‘ite rival of the pre-dominantly Sunni Ottoman Muslims as well as the Muslims of Central Asia. The specificity of Ottoman ‘construction of “Otherness”’ becomes even more fascinating in this context since again there is not a single and firmly designated standard criteria of perceiving the ‘Others’ or possibly future parts of the ‘Self’ as the example of depicting the Shi‘ite Muslim Iranians as uncivilized savages while embracing the Turkic-speaking, but yet again Shi‘ite Muslims of the South Caucasus (later to be called Azerbaijanis) within the general picture of “our little brothers”:

Several important Baku intellectuals […] praised their Islamic zeal. The Young Turks remained there sixteen days. During the last evening, a fare-well party was given by their “brothers in faith” (ihvan-i din) and a joint communique was set declaring, among other things, that the day of this party was “the date of the unity of the Turks” (tevhid-i Etrak tarihi)[15].

It is true that the above-mentioned passage relates to a somewhat later period when the changes in the Ottoman Empire had finally come to a point to witness an explicit emergence and growth of Turkish nationalism, but as a matter of fact, the same connotation of ‘Turkishness’ could be found in earlier works published in 1870s-1890s, when it should seemingly be more about the still unclear ‘Ottoman’ or possibly Islamic identity. Still, even there one finds the notion of being Turkish, rather than just Muslim, as an important precondition for getting an access to power, while also “many Turkish officers of the Ottoman military, – as Ussama Makdisi notes, – regarded the Arabs as fellow Muslims indeed, as once noble members of the race of the Prophet who could be redeemed and raised up by the Turkish race”[16].  Finally, the great interest of the same Ottoman intellectuals (who also shaped the ‘Ottoman Orientalism’) towards the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Central Asia comes as another indicator of an interesting intercourse of the ‘Ottoman Orientalism’ or ‘borrowed colonialism’ with the inconsistent variations between pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism.

As the above examples show, at the very same time Iran could be viewed as the necessary ‘Other’ and an object of the ‘Ottoman Orientalism’ while the Muslims of Central Asia or the Caucasus could appear more as objects of interest in terms of further expansion with a somewhat different interpretation of the matter though: that of the “unity of Turks”, where it was not always seen as necessary to emphasize the supposed backwardness of, let us say, Central Asian “little brothers”. Instead, those were often described just as fellow Turks, and the territories they live in as the original land of the ‘Ottomans’ thus giving it a kind of ritualized and spiritualized significance and explaining the importance of unity rather than that of the civilizing mission.

It could appear to be meaningless to discuss seemingly two different phenomena in a short paper like this, but a major point here would be the acknowledgment that although undoubtedly there existed a specific kind of ‘orientalism’ in the 19^th and 20^th-century Ottoman Empire, it was, however, neither a complete reproduction of what the West had already been putting into practice long time ago nor it was necessarily a desperate attempt of resistance to protect the empire from the aggressive imperial powers of Europe. ‘Borrowed colonialism’ was given a preference here just for that very purpose of arguing that it was rather an attempt of the Ottoman elite, basically comprised of Muslim Turks, to bring new changes, launch a borrowed mechanism and use newly-acquired tools for establishing their own style of colonialism and possibly extending its power towards new territories, by using both religion and common Turkic origin as parts of the rhetoric not at all limited to the declared mission civilizatrice within the empire itself. All these phenomena are viewed as parts of the larger idea of ‘colonialism’ rather than just ‘orientalism’ and/or nationalism, since very often the very same individuals were at the same time Ottoman orientalists, Ottoman colonialists, Turkish nationalists and Islamic reformers. Selim Deringil’s definition of Ottoman colonialism would probably be a most appropriate form to sum up this short attempt of looking at the issue:

The hybrid unique nature of Ottoman colonialism may very well be a useful mirror to hold up to Western colonialism as a way of deepening our understanding of what is at the bottom of it all: power and the enforcement of rule over people who don’t want you there in the first place[17].

Sources

Davison, Roderic H. “Westernized Education in Ottoman Turkey,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1961), pp. 289-301.

Deringil, Selim. “”They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post- Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April, 2003), pp. 311-342.

Findley, Carter Vaughn. “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 15-49.

Gocek, Fatma Muge. “Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society,” Poetics Today, Vol. 14, No. 3, Cultural Processes in Muslim and Arab Societies: Modern Period I (Autumn, 1993), pp. 507-538.

Herzog, Christoph and Motika, Raoul.  “Orientalism “alla turca”: Late 19th / Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,”  Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 40, Issue 2, Ottoman Travels and Travel Accounts from an Earlier Age of Globalization (Jul., 2000), pp. 139-195.

Makdisi, Ussama. “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 2002), pp. 768-796.

Shaw, Wendy M. K. “Islamic Arts in the Ottoman Imperial Museum, 1889-1923,” Ars Orientalis, Vol. 30, Exhibiting the Middle East: Collections and Perceptions of Islamic Art (2000), pp. 55-68.

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[1] Selim Deringil, “”They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post- Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April, 2003), p. 342.

[2] Ibid., p. 314.

[3] Ibid., p. 342.

[4] See Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 2002), pp. 768-796.

[5] Selim Deringil, “”They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post- Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April, 2003), p. 312.

[6] Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 2002), p. 773.

[7] Fatma Muge Gocek, “Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society,” Poetics Today, Vol. 14, No. 3, Cultural Processes in Muslim and Arab Societies: Modern Period I (Autumn, 1993), p. 514.

[8] Ibid., p. 524.

[9] Roderic H. Davison, “Westernized Education in Ottoman Turkey,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Summer, 1961), p. 299.

[10] Carter Vaughn Findley, “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 44-45.

[11] Wendy M. K. Shaw, “Islamic Arts in the Ottoman Imperial Museum, 1889-1923,” Ars Orientalis, Vol. 30, Exhibiting the Middle East: Collections and Perceptions of Islamic Art (2000), p. 56.

[12] Ibid., p. 59.

[13] Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism “alla turca”: Late 19th / Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,”  Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 40, Issue 2, Ottoman Travels and Travel Accounts from an Earlier Age of Globalization (Jul., 2000), pp. 139-195.

[14] Ibid., p. 195.

[15] Ibid., p. 189.

[16] Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jun., 2002), p. 792.

[17] Selim Deringil, “”They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post- Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (April, 2003), pp. 316-317.