While a great measure of attention has been paid to the transnational plight of the Kurds in recent decades, much of the academic literature has treated the idea of an imagined Kurdish nation as a foregone conclusion and, thus, its ultimate territorial manifestation as a nearly imperative expectation. However, one critical question frequently overlooked is why this massive body of people numbering 25 million, with an abundance of shared cultural capital and stretching across a relatively coherent geographic location, has not managed to realize a territorially-bound sovereign nation. This paper argues that understanding this question necessitates consideration of three paradoxes in the development of nationalism in Turkey. First, the very sociopolitical structures, enabling Kurdish peoples to maintain and develop a distinct cultural capital, from which the raw materials of nationhood could be drawn, were also the primary obstruction to the grassroots dissemination of an imagined community in territories dominated by Kurds. Second, the Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican states’ historical approach to integrating Kurds into their plans to centralize and solidify the Empire/Turkish nation predominantly involved measures aimed at weakening the existing sociopolitical structures in Kurdish dominated areas, thereby, facilitating the growth of a horizontal and “national” understanding of a Kurdish community among Kurds. Finally, Kurdish intellectuals, who have regularly criticized the Turkish state for its actions to integrate/assimilate the Kurds, have often been engaged, at least at the discursive level, in a project with largely the same strategy: to destroy the existing Kurdish sociopolitical structures in order to recreate a “modern” and horizontal understanding of Kurdishness.

Modern Turkish Republic was founded in the face of immense demographic changes and loss of massive territories in the Balkan Wars and World War I. The abrupt transition from a multi- ethnic religious empire to a modern secular nation transformed not only the political, social and economic institutions of the Ottoman Empire, but also dramatically changed the fabric of everyday life in a newly emerged state for the sake of creating an imagined community. Turkish nationalism, in the eyes of the founding elites, served as a redemptive ideology, to heal the collective traumas of the territorial losses and human sufferings of the late Ottoman Empire. The replacement of the Istanbul with Ankara as a capital and remaking of Ankara as a new capital of the Modern Turkish Republic lies at the heart of the intention to efface the memory of last vestiges of the Ottoman past. Remaking the city involved the introduction of the new public spaces and different kinds of practices as well as dismantling the environments that sustain the memories of the past which was sought to be forgotten.. I argue that state sponsored dismantling in the former capital of Istanbul and introduction of the new spatial strategies in the new capital Ankara in the early republican period, exemplified the traumatic impact of the late Ottoman period on the minds of the elites in modern Turkish Republic. By examining those spatial strategies in Istanbul and Ankara in the early Republican period, my goal is to categorize the all those space controlling strategies employed in the new capital into a single narrative to trace the traumatic impacts of the last Ottoman period in eyes of the elites of the modern Turkish Republic. Within the scope of the research, politics of city making in Ankara during the early Republican period ( 1923-1945) through construction and dismantling of iconic buildings, monuments, landmarks, squares, schools and governments offices will be subject to inquiry. As far as the implications of the research is concerned, the findings will provide more nuanced account to elaborate the socio-spatial strategies as a reflection of the efforts to reconstruct the past by shaping the everyday life of the individuals during state formation processes and will allow to examine the impact of the traumatic memories of the late Ottoman period on the minds of the Turkish Republican elites.

This talk aims to interrogate the ways in which the figure of the thirteenth-century theologian, mystic, and poet Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi al-Balkhi (d. 1273) –known in the Western world simply as Rumi– has come to occupy varied, interconnected, and sometimes contradictory positions in modern Turkish literature and literary studies. Following the abolishment of all Sufi orders in the nascent Turkish republic in 1925, including the Mawlawiyya of the whirling dervishes fame, the legacy of Mawlana Rumi survived in modern Turkey particularly through art and literature. I will concentrate on three distinct periods in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries to argue that the transformations of Rumi as a historical and literary figure, in scholarly studies and in literature alike, have been politically charged. Under the early Kemalist regime, and in line with its nationalist and secularist ideology, Rumi was promoted as a “Turkish humanist" who transcended above and beyond the boundaries of established religions. The advent of multiparty democracy in Turkey in 1946 brought about the rise of a number of conservative movements and witnessed the gradual emergence of a political and intellectual current commonly called the “Turk-Islam synthesis.” By the 1970s, influential proponents of the Turk-Islam synthesis were producing studies that recast the image of Rumi as a Turkish Muslim sage who had been pivotal in the Islamization of late medieval Anatolia. Finally in the late twentieth century, and especially since 9/11, there has been an international interest in the figure of Rumi as the ideal (or and even the “real”) face of Islam. Parallel to such high stake re-imaginings of Rumi, allusions and references to him, as well as the Mawlawi order in general, have increased exponentially in Turkish literature, culminating with Ahmet Ümit’s Bab-i Esrar and Elif Shafak’s 40 Rules of Love, both of which focus on Rumi and his circle. I will accordingly take a diachronic look at the transformations of Rumi as a historical and literary figure in modern Turkey through the analysis of select scholarly studies and novels: the inclusive humanist, the triumphant proselytizer, and “the good Muslim.” The socio-political dimensions of these transformations will be at the heart of my talk.