Rethinking the Ottoman Greek World: Memory, Narrative, Debate in the Age of Reform
Panel V-15, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Wednesday, October 7 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
This panel seeks to discuss the role Ottoman Greek world played in both upholding and dismantling the Ottoman Empire. The concept of Ottoman national identity and Ottomanism as its ideology marked the age of reform and became an important framework of study for of non-Muslims. Indeed, the spate of scholarship on non-Muslim citizenry in the last two decades has resulted in a deeper sense of the tremendous range of the Greek experience in the late Ottoman Empire under the larger framework of the 19th century through the modernization paradigm. However, through the study of modernization reforms toward the construction of Ottoman citizenship for all, filled with institutional "progress", Ottoman scholarship has also traversed from one teleology to another; from decline to modernization. This new teleology has come replete with its own paradoxes in the construction of Ottomanism above and beyond Panislamism, marking the empire's late history also with conflict, violence, and nationalisms. Thus the question whether the Ottoman Empire was, as a whole, with all of its "equal" communities, moving in the direction of a 'modern' capitalist framework before its final demise remains unresolved. Therefore, this panel seeks to re-visit the construction of Ottoman citizenry beyond such binary oppositional teleologies through multiple discourses on the production and perception of Ottomanism.
For, although the second half of the 19th century onward, Greek-Orthodox communities did not explicitly oppose a sense of Ottoman citizenship, the establishment and expansion of the Greek Kingdom became very intertwined with this process. So how do we situate the various understandings of Ottomanism for Ottoman Greeks amidst intercommunalism on the one hand and otherization and minority construction on the other?
Ottoman print representations of the memory and perception of Greek Independence in Greek and Armenian newspapers revolved around a debate in an age when Greek history was molded into a national continuity from ancient Greek civilization onwards, challenging both the hegemonic national model of Greek identity and modern Ottoman identity. Ottoman Greek literature provided another trajectory in making their own Ottomanism as part of the wider Ottoman political spectrum. Ottoman Turkish historywriting of the Hamidian period also unearthed surprisingly multiple trajectories of Ottomans and Greek identity, particularly through the newly attractive concept of civilization. Finally, the 1908 constitution introduced new debates on equality as conscription unfolded Ottoman Greek opposition in parliamentary minutes and newspapers.
These different trajectories of political modernity are all the more pivotal to note when we consider the unique roles the perceptions of Greeks under the Ottomans and Greek independence played in the creation of both Turkish and Greek historiographies.
Some decades ago Michael Ursinus related the development of a corpus of Ottoman Turkish works between 1870 and 1920 dealing with Roman and Byzantine history to the “westernizing trends in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire over the same period.” Indeed, the nineteenth century, particularly the last quarter, signified the prevalence of the writing of ‘universal histories’ by Ottoman intellectuals based on European sources. This genre paralleled the new need for texts beyond Ottoman history for the curricula in the specialized schools such as Mekteb-i Mülkiye. As such the genre temporally matched the production of Ottomanism which entailed an Ottoman nationalist historiography. Ahmed Midhat also repeated this trajectory, especially when it came to his views of Ancient Greek Civilization, Byzantium and the contemporary Greek Kingdom. I aim to look at his histories to study the Ottoman Turkish products of historicism as part of a universal historical production which meant a different kind of political modernity like that of colonial contexts to which European thought has a relationship of struggle if not contradiction.
The Ottoman self-image of the time also reflected a struggle in establishing a legitimate modern political entity in a similar fashion to those of other multi-ethnic empires’ policies and even to the value systems of the west: But the paradigms of modern statehood was not simplistically appropriated, instead they were filtered through Ottoman aspirations through a process.
Ahmed Midhat penned a 15 volume Kainat (Universe) in which a very country based history follows, one of which is Greek history from ancient to the kingdom. As more of a literary person then a historian, his work points to making universal history an Ottoman intellectual endeavor in which not just histoire eventielle but story telling, narrative, also mattered for the construction of Ottomanism.
My paper investigates the Greek-Ottoman receptions of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) through close readings of a number of literary works produced by Greek Orthodox subjects of the “Red Sultan” frequently associated with pan-Islamism. Focusing on how Greek-speaking intellectuals from across the Ottoman political spectrum reimagined non-Ottoman texts and tropes as translator-editors and consciously modulated Western Orientalist tropes to serve their own readerships and sociopolitical commitments, I challenge the historiographical argument that an adoption of Western European intellectual norms and literary discourse was part and parcel of the “embourgeoisement” of non-Muslim Ottoman communities -and their resulting evolution into isolated “Westernized” sociocultural pockets- in the final decades of the Empire. To advance this argument, I problematize the genre of these late Ottoman works, exploring the uncertain, oftentimes wilfully porous boundaries between “fiction” and “non-fiction” as well as “translation” and “re-writing” in these texts. The Greek-language works I examine include an “intimate history” of Abdulhamid by the son of an Ottoman pasha that went on to become an international best-seller (and the Orientalist classic) on the subject, a tract-novella on the Hamidian “secret police” written by the sultan’s personal physician, a readaptation of the aforementioned “intimate history” shortly after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and the semi-fictionalized memoirs of the Ottoman royal family’s piano instructor (who also happened to be one of Istanbul’s most prominent woman intellectuals.) Experimenting also with the adaptability of concepts from classical reception studies to an Ottoman and Islamic context, I argue that the Greek-Ottoman literature on the sultan, far from constituting a conceptually stable “minority literature” or operating within the neat confines of a Muslim/non-Muslim discursive duality, created a diverse, and yet uniquely “Ottoman,” reception of Abdulhamid II. Finally, I try to explicate the varying Greek-Ottoman conceptualizations of (and arguments as to the relevance of) Ottoman and Ottomanist belonging formulated in these texts.
The promulgation of the constitution in July 1908 spelled a new beginning for Ottomans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, planting in them the hope for the establishment of a regime based on equality among the empire’s populations. In the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution, the notion of equality permeated the lively debates over the definition of individual and communal rights. But the ubiquitous idea of equality carried conflicting connotations for Ottoman Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, and others. Despite differing on the definition of fundamental political concepts, there was one thing that Ottomans from various ethno-religious backgrounds agreed upon: under the new regime, everyone was equal not only in rights but in duties as well. Drawing on parliamentary minutes, state documents, memoirs, and newspapers in Greek and Ottoman Turkish, this paper addresses the post-constitutional debates over equality and imperial citizenship by focusing on the question of military conscription. The universal conscription as an idea received enthusiastic support of the Ottoman non-Muslims whereas its implementation attracted strong objections, particularly by Greeks. While the leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) presented the universal draft as a policy that would unite all Ottoman nationalities, many Greeks approached the Unionist policy with profound misgivings and regarded it as a tool to weaken the distinctive characteristics of their community. Through an examination of Greeks’ opposition to the CUP’s policy of conscription, this paper highlights different, and at times contradictory, interpretations of Ottomanism and explores the project of crafting an imperial identity based on the equality among Ottoman nationalities.
The uprising of 1821, since its inception by a group of conspirators during the post-Napoleonic Restoration, has been a contentious and divisive issue. Despite accounts of wholehearted support or opposition that are often disseminated by nationalist discourses, the revolt of 1821—similar to any revolutionary uprising aiming to radically change the political, social and economic reality—created a series of political divisions. This was the case in the Kingdom of Greece due to the republican and radical overtones of the revolt as a child of the Age of Revolutions in the region. However, its legacy has not yet been adequately studied in the Ottoman context. The revolution could have inspired secessionist nationalism among Ottoman Greeks, as a case where the Ottoman subjects rejected the authority of a monarch who claimed to rule without any popular accountability. However, Sultan’s experimentation with a constitution and a parliament in 1876-1878 revealed that his authority was under pressure from ideas of popular sovereignty. By starting my presentation from a debate that took place in the pages of Armenian and Greek newspapers in the spring of 1877 when Ottoman constitutional patriotism was at the peak of its popularity, I will examine how Ottomans dealt with the memory of the 1821 revolt. Did they try to erase it from the public sphere? What was their reaction to Paparigopoulos’ “History of the Greek Nation” which introduced the thesis of the historical continuity of the Greek nation since antiquity? How did they respond to the instances of popular mobilization in 1821? If possible, I will compare my findings with the legacy of other similar events such as the Serbian uprising of 1804.
