Starting with their arrival in1820’s, the restriction of religious liberties in the Ottoman Empire was the main concern for the American and British missionaries who were the most widely organized proselytizing group in the empire. On the one hand, the missionaries were enduring difficulties and harassment at the hands of local Eastern churches; on the other, the major religious group was out of their reach due to strict prohibition of proselytization among Muslims. This prohibition is based on Islamic irtidad (apostasy) principle, according to which blasphemy and renouncing the faith of Islam are crimes condemned to capital punishment. Witnessing the consequences of interpretational slipperiness when an ex-Christian convert was executed under the charges of apostasy in 1844, the legendary British ambassador to Constantinople, Stratford Canning who saved the Ottoman armies an inevitable disgraceful loss to Russia, took charge in drafting another reform edict. Islahat Fermani of 1856 clearly sanctioned the freedom of conscience for all Ottoman subjects, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, annulled legal consequences of the Apostasy principle- executions, and opened the possibility of Protestant missionary work among Muslims which produced a number of converts throughout 19th century. Utilizing the archival materials from Ottoman, British and missionary collections, I intent to unravel cases of Muslim conversion into Protestantism in the post-1856 period. Arguing against the nationalist narratives that deny any peaceful interaction between missionaries and Muslim communities, first, I will demonstrate how orthodox Sunni Muslims also opted out of Islam in their intellectual search for the “Truth.” Second, in detailing their encounter with the missionaries, attempts for registration of the apostasy and the crack down in 1865 by the state officials; I shall argue that the Muslim apostasy stood at the intersection of the local and international politics and became a litmus test for the discrepancy between the Ottoman/Islamic praxis and the new civilizational standards imposed by Western powers. Going beyond their quantitative significance, every case of apostasy received enormous attention from the diplomatic circles and missionaries alike, which triggered an official anxiety, and turned apostates into a gaze and a threat to the raison d’état in the eyes of the Ottoman officials. Third, by illustrating the changes in policies over time from official indifference to the disappearances of the converts, I will also demonstrate how the Ottoman statecraft re-defined and revealed its power through inventing and carrying out extra-judicial measures in the absence of legal sanctions against apostates.

Ali Suavi was a journalist and a member of the Young Ottoman opposition group that was active in the late 1860s. He is best known for his failed attempt to rescue the deposed Sultan Murat V from captivity in 1878, presumably with the intention of restoring him to the throne. Suavi died in this attempt and was subsequently vilified in official circles and in the Ottoman press, though he was later anachronistically portrayed by the Young Turks as a sort of epic hero in the struggle against Hamidian tyranny. Beginning just before the founding of the Turkish Republic there was a shift in the type of attention that was paid to Suavi. The numerous articles and books that have been written about Ali Suavi since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 can, with very few exceptions, be neatly divided into two groups. On the one hand there are the works that claim Suavi as a Turkish nationalist and a secularist. This approach necessarily requires very selective use of passages from Suavi’s writings taken out of context in order to argue that Suavi was a Turkist and would have supported the secularizing reforms of the Turkish Republic. This view of Suavi was actively promoted by the Turkish Ministry of Education and the Turkish Historical Society beginning in the 1940s. On the other hand there are the works that portray Suavi as an erratic, incompetent zealot. Serif Mardin’s portrayal of Suavi in The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought falls into this category, which draws heavily on the earlier vilification from the Hamidian era. This uncertainty as to whether Suavi should be embraced or rejected by the historians of the Turkish Republic is symptomatic of the larger problem of constructing a Turkish national history that breaks with the Ottoman-Islamic past but at the same time keeps some of its heroes. A closer examination of Suavi’s own writings, many of which have been previously ignored by scholars, reveals a conservative Ottoman patriotism with pan-Islamic leanings. Suavi thus does not fit comfortably into a nationalist history that views Ottomanism and pan-Islam as obsolete and reactionary. Ali Suavi, then, should be studied not through an anachronistic Turkish nationalist lens but rather in the context of the Ottomanism and emergent pan-Islam of his era.

Public debate in Turkey on the massacres of Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has long been constrained by law as well as by the structures of the public sphere, most prominently regarding the usage of the term genocide. The issue has constituted a serious taboo throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, and attempts to challenge official narratives have provoked harsh reactions from both state and civil actors. This taboo has also imposed a heavy burden on the Armenian minority in Turkey, perpetuating an uneasy majority-minority relationship. Simultaneously an elite formation and a counter-public, liberal public intellectuals in Turkey construe this limitation on public discourse as a symptom of the deep-set nationalist ideology permeating state and society, posing a key obstacle to furthering the democratic development of the republic. Drawing on personal interviews as well as key texts, this paper offers three case studies examining the engagement of public liberal intellectuals in Turkey. The first covers the ”alternative” academic conference on the atrocities against Armenians during the fall of the Ottoman empire, held in Istanbul in 2005, illustrating how liberal intellectuals breeched the taboo in the academic community as well as framed the event as well as the issue itself as central to the democratization process in Turkey. The second explores a series of public actions following the murder of the Turkish-Armenian intellectual Hrant Dink in 2007, commemorating Dink and his role in Armenian-Turkish dialogue while protesting the Turkish state’s flawed investigation of the murder. The final case study examines the campaign to collect signatures for a public apology for the crimes committed against Armenians in 1915, showing how these intellectuals sought to form a new public challenging the dominant official view and thereby transforming public discourse. In their dual role as knowledge producers and activists, through these actions liberal intellectuals construe both 1915 and the 2007 assassination as two interrelated national traumas and use these to show the need to deal with the ideological underpinnings of the Turkish Republic. With these events the past, present and future of the Armenian minority’s situation are connected and used to challenge the state-enforced narratives of Turkish nationalism and history, to democratize the Turkish public sphere and re-imagine citizenship in Turkey.

It has become a frequent critique that the buffer zones between the European metropolis and the formally colonized peripheries have been understudied by the histories of global power structure. By the same token, intellectuals of these buffer zones and their criticisms of colonialism and global hierarchies have been overshadowed by the canonical figures of decolonization. The case of the late Ottoman Empire as one of these buffer zones and the ways in which Ottoman intellectuals had faced the threat of colonization have not also been sufficiently discussed in the literature. This paper aims to provide an overview of the Ottoman case as a missing element in the scholarship by focusing on the Unionist intellectual Ahmed Riza and his major work, La Faillite Morale de la Politique Occidentale en Orient (1922). The paper first suggests the concept of “space of subjugation” as a theoretical tool to understand the spaces between metropolis and formal colonies, and situates the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish case within this context. It will be argued that colonial criticism is embedded in spaces of subjugation, whether formally colonized or not, and thus the intellectual agendas in the geographies of informal colonialism were considerably similar to the intellectual agendas of formal colonies. The concept of space of subjugation implies an experience of modernization outside the borders of the core countries, with a peculiar self-perception of belatedness and a search for model. By using the framework of space of subjugation, the paper then will focus on the Unionist politician and author Ahmed Riza, and his work, La Faillite Morale de la Politique Occidentale en Orient as an example of an Ottoman intellectual’s critique of ideas and prejudices constructed within the colonial context. It will be suggested that Ahmed Riza offered an early version of the later critiques of Orientalism by maintaining that colonialist practices cannot function without a specific set of ideas behind them. The paper also discusses how Ahmed Riza, as a positivist, defended Islam as a civilization against various types of Orientalist prejudices, and concludes by highlighting the risk of nativism in Ahmed R?za’s perspective. The main argument of the paper is that the late Ottoman Empire can be revisited as a space of subjugation, and as an Ottoman intellectual, Ahmet Riza’s book needs to be read as a well-formulated analysis of global hierarchies and as a critique of colonialism and Eurocentrism.