Turkish historiography

This paper sheds light on the role of evolutionary ideas in
the making of Turkish nationalism during the Kemalist era
(1923–1938). By so doing, it aims to challenge some of the
dominant historiographical viewpoints as to the nature of
Turkish nationalism. One is related to the Kemalist elites'
predisposition towards the so-called “scientism” seen as
one of the bases for nationalism. We intend to turn upside–
down the relation between the Kemalists' use of science
and Turkish nationalism. Second, we problematize the “culturalist”
origins of Turkish nationalism arguing that the
seemingly “culturalist” reflections of the time were, indeed,
materialist formulations based on the science of the times.
We discuss in this respect the Kemalist elites' use of evolutionary
ideas. By synthesizing the ways in which these elites
employed evolutionary ideas in the fields of history, language,
geography, anthropology, biology, eugenics, and
pedagogy, we aim to understand the specific nature of
Turkish nationalism before 1945. This secular nationalism
conceived culture as having materialist bases and differed
fundamentally from the culturalist varieties of Turkish
nationalism coloured by Islam in the post-1945 era. Furthermore,
the paper empirically enriches the complex and
entangled story of evolutionary ideas in the early Turkish
Republic.

Abstract
The literature on Turkish modernization presumes a linear and positive relationship between modernization and women’s liberation. According to this literature, the process that began in the 19th century has increasingly improved the social position of women by establishing a secular order and making women legal subjects as well as equal citizens. Such a positive perception neglects the contradictory nature of the modernization process The modernization process could be seen as a contradictory process which brings not only rights but also new types of obligations and subordinations as well as a contadictory movement conducted by the struggles of women. Thus, “new women” is not a political project just imposed from above but a consequence of a contradictory process on three levels. The first level signifies the change in women’s position in the relations of production, that is, their process of becoming a productive labor force. The second level indicates their position at home which is the change in their reproductive functions. The third level comprises the change in the position of women as mothers manifesting itself in reproducing the nation. This article argues the process of women liberation by referring to the contradictions in these three levels at the beginning of 20th century and by addressing the journal Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World) published between 1913-1921 and known as the first feminist journal of Ottoman women.
Keywords: Women, Liberation, Contradiction, Labor, Production, Reproduction, Work, Nation.

Yüksek Lisans tezinde, Cumhuriyet tarih yazıcılığının gelişimi “Türk Tarih Tezleri”, “Anadoluculuk akımı”, “Hümanist Akım” ve “Türk-İslam Sentezi” yaklaşımları çerçevesinde incelenmiştir. Tezin genel amacı, bu akımların ilk-orta öğretimde ve genel olarak akademik dünyada Eski Yunan algısı üzerindeki etkilerini görmektir. Böylece, Cumhuriyet dönemindeki siyasal akımların, ulusçuluğun ve kimlik inşa sürecinin tarih yazıcılığı üzerindeki etkilerini saptamak hedeflenmiştir. Yukarıda adı geçen akımların her biri, Cumhuriyet yurttaşları için farklı kimlikler (farklı “biz” tahayyülleri) önermektedir. 1930’lara damgasını vuran, I. ve II. Türk Tarih Kongreleri’nde (1932, 1937) olgunlaştırılan ve nihayet “Türk tarihi’nin Ana Hatları adlı kitapla taçlandırılan ilk yaklaşımda “biz”in öznesi, “Orta Asya’dan göçlerle dünyaya yayılan ve gittiği her yere uygarlık götüren Türkler”dir. Yine devlet eliyle desteklenen ve 1943’teki III. Tarih Kongresi’nden sonra ilk/ortaokul-lise ders kitaplarında yerini alan “Hümanist Akım”ın “biz”i ise, “İnsanlık aleminin bir parçası olarak Anadolulu Türkler”dir. Arif Müfit Mansel gibi akademisyenlerin geliştirdiği “Hümanist Akım”, batılılaşma tercihi doğrultusunda Grekoromen kültürü-tarihi anlama ve bunu genç kuşaklara eksiksiz biçimde aktarma” derdindedir. Azra Erhat, Halikarnas Balıkçısı, Vedat Günyol ve Sabahattin Eyuboğlu’nun (“Mavi Yolcular”ın) çabalarıyla gelişen Anadoluculuk, “biz”i kuran unsur olarak Anadoluluğu öne çıkarır ve “Grek Mucizesi”nin temeline Anadolu uygarlıklarını koyar. Ancak burada sözü edilen Anadoluluğun çoğu kez Türklükle iç-içe geçmiş biçimde kullanıldığı gözden kaçırılmamalıdır. İbrahim Kafesoğlu gibi Orta Çağ Türk-İslam tarihçileri ve özellikle de Aydınlar Ocağı’na mensup milliyetçi-muhafazakar yazarlarca desteklenen “Türk-İslam Sentezi”ne gelince… Burada Türklüğün İslam’ın kılıcı olarak tarif edildiğini, İslam-öncesi Türk kültürünün de aslında İslam ile ortak karakteristikler sergileyen (içinde İslamlaşma eğilimi taşıyan) bir halkın macerası olarak aktarıldığını gözleriz. 1980 Darbesi’nden sonra Milli eğitim tarih programlarının resmi yaklaşımına dönüşen bu akım, “çağdaş düşman” Yunan’ın “eski” tarihini Türk çocuklarına okutmayı yakışıksız bulur; Grekoromen tarihin ders kitaplarındaki yeri azalırken “biz”i kuran İslam’ın ve Türklüğün 10. yüzyıldaki “kutlu karşılaşma”sı yüceltilir.

Many contemporary historians who are critical of official or nationalist Turkish historiography, date the emergence of an alternative historiography to the 1980s. This essay, argues that its beginnings can be traced further back. The essay starts by examining early indications of an emerging critique during the initial years of the Republic. Publications critical of aspects of official historiography in the 1950s are recognized as stepping-stones in the development of an alternative historiography.  The focus of the essay, however, is on the period between 1960-71, when the easing of restrictions on civil liberties, coupled with the upsurge of social and political movements, produced a praxis of critical thought and political action that gave impetus to the emergence of an alternative historiography. The essay argues, that in this period, the taboos of official historiography were directly challenged and many of its untold aspects uncovered, pointing to the emergence of an alternative historiography.

Osmanlı Devletinin yıkılışını engellemek üzere ileri sürülen görüşlerin geçerliliklerini yitirdikleri bir dönemde yeni bir kimlik edinimi sağlamanın yanında yeni bir siyaset kurgusu oluşturma gayesi de taşıyarak ortaya çıkan Anadoluculuk, toprak milliyetçiliği üzerine inşa edilmiştir. 20. yüzyılın ilk çeyreğinde görülmeye başlayan Anadoluculuk, Türk Ocaklarındaki Turancılık ve Türkiyecilik tartışmaları sırasında belirginleşmiştir. Ocağın faaliyet alanı konusundaki bu tartışma, bir tercih yapma zorunluluğu sonucunda doğmuştur. Uzun ve yıpratıcı savaşların getirdiği kayıplar artık öze, Anadolu'ya dönmeyi gerekli kılıyordu. Esasen bu daralma, realist bir yaklaşımın ürünüydü.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Anadoluculuk, Anadolucu Tarihyazımı, Türk Tarih Tezi.

Anatolianist Movement, which came into being with the objective of building the provide for acquisition of a new identity and create a new politics of fiction, and at a time when the validity of the ideas regarding the prevention of Ottoman Empire from falling started to disappear, was built on territorial nationalism. Anatolianism firstly appeared in the first quarter of the 20th century, during the discussions about Turanism and Turkiyecilik in Türk Ocakları. The Ocak on the field of activity this discussion is born out of the necessity of making a choice. A long exhausting war casualties it was necessary to return to Anatolia to the essence now. In fact, this restriction was a product of the realistic approach.
Keywords: Anatolianism, Anatolianist Historiography, The Turkish History Thesis.

Stamatopoulos undertakes the first systematic comparison of the dominant ethnic historiographic canons and divergences elaborated by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Romanian, Turkish, and Russian intellectuals with reference to the ambiguous inheritance of Byzantium. The title alludes to the seminal work of Nicolae Iorga in the 1930s, Byzantium after Byzantium, that argued for the continuity between the Byzantine and the Ottoman empires. If the idea of the continuity of the nation became the touchstone of the national historiographies, the continuity of empires especially in the nineteenth century—was the common motif of divergent historiographical schemes promoting the reconciliation of the nation with the imperial model. Rival Balkan nationalisms engaged in a “war of interpretation” as to the nature of Byzantium, assuming different positions of adoption or rejection of its imperial model and leading to various schemes of continuity in each national historiographic canon. Stamatopoulos discusses what Byzantium represented for nineteenth-, and twentieth-century scholars and how their perceptions related to their treatment of the imperial model: whether a different perception of the medieval Byzantine period prevailed in the Greek national center as opposed to Constantinople; how nineteenth-century Balkan nationalists and Russian scholars used Byzantium to invent their own medieval ages (and, by extension, their own antiquity); and finally, how the national historiographies of the twentieth century reused the scheme of the continuity of empires to revise some of the discontinuities or deadlocks of their dominant nationalist narratives.

“Dimitris Stamatopoulos is the first who achieves the immense feat of writing a comparative historiography of the Balkans, demonstrating how each national history writer needs to stand apart and compete with other historiographers related to the same contested area. The survival of the idea of ‘empire’ is subject to specific developments in the countries that belong to the Byzantine legacy, in consideration to contemporary positions concerning state and nation. But it is always conditioned by the reference to Western political thinking and to Western scholarship on Byzantium.”
BERNARD HEYBERGER, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

“Eighty-seven years after the publication of Byzance après Byzance, Dimitris Stamatopoulos masterfully revisits the after-life of Byzantium in the Balkans’ national historical constructs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A monument of
erudition and historiographical acuity, Byzantium after the Nation looks into no less than five historiographical traditions: Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian and of two regional offshoots in the twentieth century, Romanian and Turkish. A monu-
ment of erudition and historiographical acuity, Byzantium after the Nation is a most welcome contribution to the field.”

EDHEM ELDEM, Boğaziçi Üniversity, Istanbul

“Stamatopoulos’s Byzantium after the Nation was originally published in Greek and was received by the international community of Hellenists as a major scholarly achievement, especially by those in favor of breaking with the tra-
ditional nation-centered historiographical canons. This revised English edition finally renders the book accessible to a broader public of Balkanologists. What makes this book an original and significant contribution is not only the solid theoretical foundation and the high relevance of the subject matter—the ‘historiographical legacy’ of Byzan-
tium—but also the author’s genuinely comparatist and Balkanistic approach (involving the Balkans in its totality).”

RAYMOND DETREZ, Ghent University

Contents

I. Introduction

                1. The Discipline of History: Canons and Divergences

                2. The Problem of Continuity: Theories of Origin and Political Imperatives

                3. In Empire’s shadow

                4. Describing the Network: The Ottoman framework and its collapse



II.The Iconoclast Byzantium of the Greek Historiography

1. Manuel Gedeon’s Perception of History

2. A Periodization

3. Zambelios’s Transcendant Byzantium: from Aristotle to Hegel

4. Paparrigopoulos’s Phanariot Byzantium and French Imperial Nationalism

5. France and Russia in Constantinople: Towards an Interpretation of the Great Idea

6. Helleno-Ottomanism: The Response of Constantinople

7. The heretical Byzantium in The History of the Greek Nation

8. The Iconoclasm as a Conspiracy of the Monarchy

9. The Iconoclasm as Reformation

10. Gedeon’s Medieval HellemismHellenism: the Zambelios–Paparrigopoulos construct Scheme and the Ottoman Divergence

11. Footnotes: The Denunciation of Helleno-Orthodoxy

12. Byzantium as a Metaphor: Greeks and Slavs

13. The Iconoclast Byzantium and the break from Greek historiography

14. Byzantium as a Metonymy: The Church and the Ottoman State

15. Ecumenism as a Rromantic Rreconstruction

16. Histories of the Ottoman Empire



III. The “Medieval Antiquity” of the Bulgarian Historiography



1. The canon of Bulgarian historiography: the model of origins

2. Bulgarians: Vandals, Illyrians, or Macedonians?

3. Drinov’s History: the Slavicisation of the Bulgarians

                3.1 The two discontinuities

                3.2 The critique of alternative origin models

4. Krâstevič’s Thesis: the Bulgarians are Huns (the positive use of Byzantine chronography)

5. Drinov’s Thesis: the Bulgarians are Slavs (the negative use of Byzantine chronography)

6. Krâstevič’s Response: the Huns are Slavs

7. The Romantic Reconstruction of Imperial Discourse: Some Conclusions

8. Povestnost instead of Historija: Georgi Rakovski’s Hyper-Hermeneutic model

9. The Balkans as East: Charilaos Dimopoulos’ History of the Bulgarians



IV. Byzantinisms and the Third Rome: the Russian Imperial Nationalism



1. Konstantin Leont’ev: on the edge of two epistemological paradigmes

2. Leont’ev’s Byzantism

3. The Middle Ages as a canonical model

4. Byzantism as Imperial Discourse: the parity of Russians and Ottomans

5. Leont’ev’s Slavism: Greeks/Bulgarians, Germans/Czechs

6. The Three Romes

7. A Romantic reconstruction of History: the Persians’ vindication

8. Leont’ev and Marko Balabanov: the bridge of Byzantism

9. The meaning of progress and the possibility of an Ottoman Nation

10. Byzantium and the “groundless” accusation of ethno-phyletism”

11. Balabanov and Renan: “Balkans will become a volcano”

12. Byzantium and Great Idea: the Serbian perspective

13. Ivan I. Sokolov’s Byzantinism

14. Pan-Orthodox Ecumenism and Byzantinisms: Gedeon’s two moments



V. The “Roman Byzantium” of the Albanian Historiography



1. Namık Kemal and Renan

2. Between Ancient Greeks and Modern Europeans: Islamic Civilization as a Mediator

3. The “De-Arabification” of Islam

4. The Management of Time and Space in Islam

5. From the Islamic Ummah to the Albanian Nation: The Return of the Pelasgians

6. The Problem of Discontinuity in Albanian History

7. Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos and the Pelasgians

8. The De-Islamification of Albanian History

9. Pan-Islamic Ecumenism and Roman Byzantium: The Immanence of Empire



VI. Byzantium as Second Rome: Orientalism and Nationalism in the Balkans

1. From the Daco-Getae to the Romanians: In the Shadow of the First Rome

2. A. D. Xenopol: The Slav Middle Ages and Phanariot Modernity

3. Nicolae Iorga’s Byzance après Byzance: Invoking the Second Rome

4. Mehmed Ziya Gökalp’s “Canon”: The Rupture with the Imperial Middle Ages

5. M. Fuad Köprülü’s “Opposition”: The Reappropriation of the Ottoman Middle Ages

6. Nationalism, the Other Face of Orientalism: The Persians’ Return

7. Kemalist Nationalism: The Prevalence of Origin Over Continuity



VII. Iconoclasts against Iconolaters: Conclusions

1. Imperial Iconolaters and Nationalist Iconoclasts

2.  M. Fuad Köprülü: The Iconoclasts as Muslims

3 Nicolae Iorga: The Iconoclasts as organizers of national discourse

4. The Icon as the Representation of the Hegemon

5. Historiographical Divergences and Empire’s Memory



Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

This article explores the roles played by the memory of past migrations in the construction of national identity. National narratives tend to include and exclude certain migration experiences. Looking at historical evidence and alternative narratives of past migrations can help redefining a more inclusive national identity. Using the case of Turkey, the article identifies the migrations absent from the official narrative: migrations to Anatolia before 1071 CE (the arrival of Turkic tribes) and forced migrations during the Ottoman and Republican periods. Rehabilitating these migratory experiences leads to the recognition of both a glorious and violent past, and can help bringing together Turkey’s diverse identities.

This article attempts to understand and periodize the development of twentieth century Turkish historiography on Sufism. After grouping modern Sufi studies in Turkey into two as descriptive and analytical on the basis of their approaches, the article will focus on the second group and periodize its evolution. The history of analytical approaches in Sufi studies around the 1970s can roughly be divided into two as periods of genesis and surge. The first period, which is called “the genesis”,  is a period of exploration that witnessed the establishment of the field, the
discovery of major related historical sources, and the rise of Sufi orders as a research subject within the expanding field of social history in Turkey and abroad. The second period called “the surge” is a time when the studies of the third and fourth generation scholars led to a quantitative and qualitative upsurge in Sufi studies under the influence of contemporary developments in Western historiography. Also in this period we observe the establishment of major historical sources and fundamental paradigms of the field.

Public monuments and statues of Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish republic, are everywhere in modern Turkey. By the time Atatürk died in 1938, hundreds of busts, statues and monuments of him had already been erected in most important public spaces in I ˙ stanbul, Ankara and other major cities in Turkey. They exemplify one of the most effective instruments of the elite-driven projects of modernity by revealing the ways in which Atatürk and his political elites attempted to establish a new official public culture and official history.They have been instrumental in the formation and reproduction of Turkish nationalism since the beginning of the Turkish republic. If statuary is accepted in today's Turkey (marking a shift from the perception of figurative forms as something against the Islamic canon) the statues, monuments and busts of Atatürk have played a central role in this. However, they have also dominated open spaces in a way which has prevented city dwellers from constructing local identities through allegorical representations of the history of their cities.

How did a prehistoric artifact discovered in 1935 become the symbol for secularism in Modern Turkey? This story traces the meanings embedded in the rise and fall of the so-called Hittite Sun across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

A literary piece of work is not the solitary production of the writer whose sole incitement is inspiration. Quite the contrary, literature is not neutral vis a vis the cultural and political requirements of its community. In fact culture itself is in no way immune from the surrounding ideology and politics of identity. This work will focus on the books of three famous Turkish writers namely Kemal Tahir (Devlet Ana, Mother State 1967), Atilla Ilhan (Dersaadet'te Sabah Ezanları, Morning Prayers in Istanbul, 1981) and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, Time Regulation Institute, 1961) whose historical novels are good examples of the complex relationship between literature, culture and politics of identity formation. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü is an allegorical novel criticizing various aspects of the Kemalist Ideology. The present analysis will mostly concentrate on the "leadership aspect" of Kemalism that Tanpınar implicitly criticizes. The "father complex" he talks about is the most controversial aspect of the Kemalist ideology. Kemal Tahir's Devlet Ana, on the other hand, is no doubt one of the most influential historical-novels of the late-Republican Era. In a sense it exemplifies Tzvetan Todorov's emphasis on how a novel can be more influential than a mere

This presentation, comprising of a brief introduction to the topic of my doctoral research project, was given at the Russian State Archives in April 2014 as part of the Fourth Annual Clio Conference of Young Academics. It provides an outline of my research on the divergent trajectories of Soviet and Turkish historiography of early Central Asian history, and the political motivations for such differences.