6

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

The academic fields explaining the behaviour of human collectivities (i.e., nations, states, and civilizations) such as the disciplines of History and International Relations have a significant shortcoming, namely the attachment of extreme significance to the concept of “state” instead of the concept of “people.” The discourse in these disciplines follows as, for example, “state X declared war on state Y,” or “state X signs a treaty with state Y.” In other words, instead of focusing on people, the students of history and international relations prefer to personify states. States emerge as mechanical entities, having their own reason, mentality, interests, in sum, having their own personality. Contrarily, the human factor has been neglected to a great extent; the fact that the states have been established and administered by people has been oftenly disregarded.

Indeed, relatively recent debates in the discipline of history have begun to bring the human factor to the forefront. Some historians tend to emphasize the human presence behind the state machinery in addition to the political relations between states.¹ However, in the discipline of International Relations, except for some limited attempts to challenge it (such as constructivist or historical sociological analyses) the state-centric discourse underestimating the human factor still prevails.² Although the name  of  the  discipline, “international

¹ Especially, the Annales School, established in the 1930s onwards by a group of French historians, including Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby, Jacques le Goff, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. This movement, known as la nouvelle histoire (the new history), aims, according to Peter Burke, for (1) substituting a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events, (2) substituting the history of the whole range of human activities for political history, and (3) cooperating with other disciplines to present a holistic account of history. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution, 1929-89, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1-2.

 

² For the constructivist analysis of the social construction of the concepts of state, anarchy, agent and structure, see, for example, Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer, 1987), 335-370; Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is what States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power,” International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), 391-425; Alexander Wendt,

“Constructing International Politics,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer, 1995), 71-

81. For a detailed account of historical sociology of international relations, see Stephen Hobden,

International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries, (London and New

relations” refer to the relations between particular human collectivities, namely the nations, what has so far been examined in the literature has been the inter- state, instead of inter-national relations.

One significant attempt to insert human factor into the discipline of international relations is the incorporation of the concept of identity to understand state behaviour.³ Such an attempt evidently necessitates the inclusion of societal factors, as history, traditions, language, or religion of a particular social group turned out to be essential elements of an identity ascribed to a particular state. The argument that the state identity influences state behaviour provides the discipline of International Relations with the need of examining the human factor in addition to the state machinery.

In the formation of social identities, and by extension, state identity, perceptions matter. On the one hand, human beings develop certain perceptions regarding their external environment either through their own observations or through learning from others. On the other hand, these individual modes of thinking are shaped by the social framework, of which the individual is a part. Therefore, a mutually-constituting process is operational in the formation of perceptions. The individual perceptions contribute to the formation of a body of societal perceptions and this, in turn, shapes the individual perceptions. The identity of a particular social entity or a state, therefore, emerges out of this process.

Among many factors shaping perceptions, such as religion, traditions, language or the common experiences, literature has a significant place. The oral or written narration of the individual or social feelings contributes much to the establishment  of  perceptions.  Here,  the  process  of  mutual-constitution  is

York: Routledge, 1998) and Stephen Hobden and John M. Hobson (eds.), Historical Sociology of International Relations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

 

³ For some examples of identity studies in international relations, see Fuat Keyman, Globalization, State, Identity/Difference: Toward A Critical Social Theory of International Relations, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997); Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Albert J. Paolini, Navigating Modernity: Post-Colonialism, Identity and International Relations, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publications, 1999).

operational as well. As a member of a particular society, the narrator or writer’s perceptions have been shaped by social structures on the one hand, and through dissemination of his own narration, he/she contributes to the shaping of these structures on the other. By affecting the minset of people, literature contributes to their understanding of the external world.

Despite this significance, the students of international relations have long ignored literature as a source to understand socio-political identities and perceptions. Only recently, with the utilization of the findings of post- colonial/subaltern studies, which has originally emerged under the discipline of literary criticism, they began to consider literature as an important tool to understand international relations better. This new interest in linking discourse analysis to the discipline of International Relations is still in its infancy; however, it contributes to the emergence of seminal works initiating fierce and thought-provoking debates in this field.⁴ What is more, the importance attached to the human factor through discourse analysis makes the students of international relations aware of the need for interdisciplinary studies for presenting a more compact account of the interaction between states and other socio-political entities. In other words, these students begin to underline that it is the connections between the discipline of International Relations and other fields

⁴ The field of postcolonial studies has gained significance since the late 1970s. According to some authors, the popularity of postcolonial studies has risen in the Western academy after the dissemination of Edward Said's influential critique of Western constructions of the Orient. This field is quite interdisciplinary, linking the disciplines of literature, anthropology, film studies, or political science. Among the major intellectual founding fathers of post-colonialism, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fannon, Albert Memmi and Edward Said attracted attention. The field has been further developed with the writings of a new generation of authors, such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Bill Ashcroft, and Partha Chatterjee. For a review of postcolonial literature see Diana Brydon (ed.), Post-Colonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 5 Volumes, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). It is difficult to completely discern the differences between postcolonial and subaltern studies, since both of them are interested in the study of “inferior” groups; however, the scope of subaltern studies is wider, since it includes not only resistance to colonial discourse, but also all other kinds of classifications, which create superior-inferior distinction based on the criteria such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion. For a review of subaltern studies and its relationship with the postcolonial studies, see Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, (London and New York: Verso, 2000) and David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia, (London: Anthem Books, 2002).

of social sciences and humanities that eradicate the shortcomings of the former as well as the latter.

One of the most successful applications of interdisciplinary analysis to the discipline of International Relations is the concept of “Orientalism.” This concept has emerged in the 1960s as a result of the decolonization movement and it was popularized in the 1970s with the publication of one of the most inspiring (and for some, provoking) pieces of social and literary studies, namely Edward Said’s masterpiece, Orientalism.⁵ The concept of Orientalism and the literature evolved around it gather scholars from different fields, including literary criticism, sociology, history, political science, and international relations. The utilization of this concept for understanding the interrelationship between the largest collectivities of human beings, namely civilizations, and for criticizing the perceptions of a particular civilization (the Western civilization) over the rest of the world, have created a fierce debate. The critiques of Said have challenged the generalizing and essentializing nature of the writings of a group of Western authors from the late eighteenth century onwards in a way to reach a grand conclusion, which is the ultimate and unsormountable distinction between the West and the rest. In other words, the strength of the Saidian understanding of Orientalism comes from the utilization of a corpus of literature to reach this grand conclusion, which, in turn, becomes its main weakness, as the critiques of Said have argued. Still, the approach that Said and those writing along the same line pursued contributes to the discipline of International Relations at least for two reasons. The first contribution is related to the argument of “civilization” as a “unit of analysis.” The acceptance of civilizations as units of analysis in international relations provides the discipline of International Relations with a historical and sociological depth, since the analysis of the concept of civilization requires an extensive temporal and socio-spatial framework. In other words, the examination of large collectivities experiencing a longer lifespan than the states, forces the student of international relations to

⁵ Edward Said, Orientalism, 3^rd Ed., (London: Routledge&Kegan Paul Ltd, 2003). The literature on Orientalism is reviewed in the first part of this dissertation.

engage in an interdisciplinary study linking history and international relations. The second contribution of Saidian understanding of Orientalism was the emphasis placed on the literature; in other words, literary works are considered as a significant source to understand societal perceptions, and thereby inter- societal relations. The reliance on literature as a source to understand international relations also encourages incorporation of human factor into the discipline besides the mechanization of the state.

The idea behind writing this dissertation is exactly derived from these two contributions. The need for interdisciplinarity and the significance attached to the study of human perceptions for producing a better outlook of international relations stimulates the author of this dissertation to focus on a particular literature (the travel literature) in order to understand the perceptions of a particular group (the Ottoman travellers) over a particular geography (the “East”). The formulation of the subtitle of the dissertation as “The Ottoman Travellers’ Perception of the East in the Late Ottoman Empire” reflects this combination.

Having mentioned the rationale of writing this dissertation, in order to delineate the boundaries of its subject matter, to set its main arguments and to argue for the reasons for its penning, the 5W 1H approach is borrowed from the discipline of journalism. As is known, this approach employs six questions (when, where, who, what, why, and how) for examining any event to comprehend all of its dimensions. Similarly, these questions are answered below to present the reader a compact picture of what this dissertation is about and why it has been written.

 

The “When” Question: The Temporal Boundaries of the Dissertation The subtitle of this dissertation indicates that the temporal range of the dissertation comprises the period called “the late Ottoman Empire.” This rather vague expression needs to be clarified. In this dissertation, “the late Ottoman Empire” roughly includes the period between the promulgation of the Edict of Tanzimat (Reordering) in 1839 and the ultimate disintegration of the Empire in the early 1920s. The end point of this temporal scale is quite understandable

since the political framework has been totally transformed with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic. The reason for setting the Edict of Tanzimat as the starting point is the transformation of the Ottoman bureaucratic, social and intellectual structures after its promulgation to a considerable extent. The Tanzimat reforms could hardly be implemented properly; however, despite their shortcomings, they altered traditional structures and resulted in the emergence of a dual system in which the traditional and modern elements conflictually coexisted. This duality produces one of the most fertile periods of the Empire in terms of intellectual debates; hence, the Ottoman intellectuals’ discussions regarding the concept of civilization and their perceptions of the “East” were intensified in the Tanzimat period and aftermath. That is why the dissertation examines the period after the promulgation of the Edict of Tanzimat.

The temporal framework set between early 1840s and early 1920s is also quite significant for the world history; as Selim Deringil notes laconically, in this period, “the world history seemed to accelerate.”⁶ The beginning of the Tanzimat period roughly corresponds to the aftermath of a destructive series of intra- European wars (the Napoleonic Wars) and the long nineteenth century of the Ottoman Empire ended with a worldwide confrontation (the First World War). Between these two significant collisions, there emerged a precarious balance among the European powers, which had been transformed after the consolidation of new unified states in Europe, namely Germany and Italy. Besides this political dimension, regarding the economic and technological spheres, the period considered in this dissertation was revolutionary as well. One after another, new inventions appeared to facilitate daily life; European economies prospered and European capitals such as Paris and London were reconstructed as “world- capitals,” namely as models for the developing nations.

This period is also significant for the maturation of the concept of civilization and a closely related debate, namely the “Orient/Occident debate.”

⁶ Selim Deringil, “The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808 to 1908,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), 3-29, 3.

There emerged a particular perception of the concept of civilization in this period in general, and of the Western civilization’s supremacy over the rest of the world, in particular. All these debates resonated in the Ottoman intellectual circles and produced vivid discussions on the concepts of civilization and the “East,” which are examined in this dissertation in detail.

In sum, the temporal delineation has both theoretical and practical reasons. First of all, the consolidation of the linkage between the concept of “civilization” and “Orient/Occident debate” in Europe lasted almost until the first half of the nineteenth century; its reception by the Ottomans has been realized later, from 1840s onwards. Hence, only after this period, it is possible to frequently encounter with Ottoman intellectuals’ elaborations on such themes. What is more, especially since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there emerged an increasing Ottoman interest towards the “East,” as a result of the Pan-Islamic policies of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909).⁷ Therefore, the number of travels to, and the travelogues written about the “East” increased in this period. In other words, the basic source of this dissertation, namely the Ottoman travelogues on the “East,” only appeared as a distinct literary genre from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and this is the practical reason for the temporal limits of this dissertation.

 

The “Where” Question: The Spatial Boundaries of the Dissertation

The second question to be answered to draw the boundaries of the dissertation is where the “East” is. Until here in this dissertation, the word “East” is written in quotation marks; the reason for such usage is to question this very word. In other words, the concept of the “East” (which is sometimes used interchangeably with the concept of “Orient”) is not merely a geographical concept; there are some values attached to it and the essence of Saidian

⁷ A Note on the Dates: In this dissertation, the dates attached to the names of the rulers (with a mark of “r.”), show the period of their reign; whereas, the dates attached to the names of authors, diplomats, intellectuals, etc., show the year of their birth and death. Some of the names do not have an indication of dates of birth or death; the reason of this absence is that these dates cannot be clearly determined.

understanding of Orientalism is the presentation of these values to reveal the power/knowledge relationship carved in the perceptions of the geographical entity called the “East” as well as of its inhabitants.

Therefore, in this dissertation, the “East” means the territories defined by the Western corpus of literature as the East. In a narrower sense, this region comprises the contemporary Middle East. In a wider context, the non-European world (excluding the North and Latin America, Australia and Oceania), including the Africa, the Middle East, the Central Asia, and the South and East Asia constitute the East. In this dissertation, this wider context is preferred, meaning that the concept of the East denotes the non-European parts of the Old World.

However, such conceptualization does not necessarily mean a monolithic perception of these vast lands and their inhabitants. Therefore the East, in this dissertation, is displayed under three broad categories, being (1) the Muslim provinces of the Ottoman Empire in which non-Turkish population constituted the majority, namely the North Africa, the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula; (2) the Muslim (and partially Turkish) outback of the Ottoman Empire, namely Iran, Central Asia, East Turkistan, Afghanistan and some parts of India; (3) and finally the non-Muslim countries of Africa as well as the East and South Asia, such as Abyssinia, some parts of India, China and Japan. In other words, the criteria used for categorizing the East are religion and the degree of Ottoman control. The level of exertion of the Ottoman control was strongest in the first category because these regions were politically part of the Ottoman Empire. In the second category, the Ottoman Empire still had a limited impact beyond its borders because of the religious/spiritual source of authority of the Caliphate. Finally, the Ottoman Empire was an external actor, having diplomatic or non-diplomatic relationships with the non-Muslim countries establishing the third category.

In sum, when thinking about the concept of the East, this dual meaning should be taken into consideration. On the one hand, the Ottomans had a perception of the East as a distinct religious-cultural entity defined vis-à-vis the West and most of the Ottoman intellectuals thought that they were part of this

entity. On the other hand, the East was not monolithic; the Ottoman travellers’ narration varied from region to region or from country to country. Depending on the internal and external circumstances, personal experiences and the Ottoman intellectuals/travellers’ backgrounds, and the characteristics of the regions that they were dealing with, there might be multiple perceptions of the Eastern world.

 

The “Who” Question: The Actors of the Dissertation

This dissertation is about the writings of a particular group of Ottoman intellectuals who had travelled to the East. Whether these travellers are members of the Ottoman intellectual community is a matter of controversy and could be answered either affirmatively or negatively. Among the multiple definitions of the concept of “intellectual,”⁸ the author of this dissertation prefers a wider and simpler definition, which facilitates the linking of the Ottoman intellectuals and travellers by defining Ottoman travellers as Ottoman intellectuals at the same time. For the purposes of this thesis, the “intellectual” is defined as a member of a small group of men of letters, who, in various degrees, are aware of the main problems of his age and offer prospective solutions for these problems. Since the Ottoman travellers preferred to write their travel accounts in a way to reflect

 

⁸ Like all such abstract words, the word “intellectual” has no single definition. What makes the matter more complex is its social connotation and the discussions on who can be defined as an “intellectual.” The dictionary definitions of the word ranges from the simple definition of “a person of superior intellect” to a more complicated version, namely “a person, who places a high value on or pursues things of interest to the intellect or the more complex forms and fields of knowledge, as aesthetic or philosophical matters, esp. on an abstract and general level.” For these definitions, see Random House Unabridged Dictionary, (London: Random House, 2006). Similar to dictionaries, there is no consensus among the scholars for the definition of this concept. According to Raymond Aron, in its widest usage, the term “intellectual” can be defined as all non-manual workers, including the three categories of scribes, experts and men of letters. However, Aron himself brings about concentric circles to define the word hierarchically, which limits his wider definition. In other words, a second and narrower definition would only include experts and men of letters; while a final and narrowest definition would solely include men of letters. See Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, translated by Terence Kilmartin, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1962), 205-206. Among many scholars who dwell upon the concept of “intellectual,” André Malraux defines the term as “a man whose life is guided by devotion to an idea”; Peter Viereck as “a full-time servant of the Word, or of the word” connoting both the religious and non-religious dimensions; or Maurice Barrés as “pen pushers and leftist ideologues.” For further definitions, see Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual, (New York: Arlington House, 1973), 7-8.

upon the problems that the East had encountered and to comment about possible solutions, they could be labelled as intellectuals.

The degree of independence of these travellers from the political authority is another controversial issue regarding the objectivity of their writings. Most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman travellers to the non-European world were state agents (diplomats, bureaucrats, sanitary officials, soldiers, or spies); very few of them undertook travels for personal reasons. Some of the travelogues were initially written as reports to the authorities sending these officials; others were published to inform their readers about distant lands and peoples. Keeping these in mind, arguably, in the Ottoman Empire, the state-traveller relationship is an intimate one; however, there were some travellers, who did not refrain from writing critically about the Ottoman administration. Therefore, being an agent of state does not necessarily mean a relationship based on patronage. The outcome of these diverging patterns is the differences between the styles and contents of the Ottoman travelogues.

Of course, as literary pieces, one should not expect the travelogues to be composed of objective knowledge regarding the Eastern lands and peoples. The travellers’ mindset influenced the themes to be written down as well as the style. The observations and experiences in these distant territories were generally penned down for a purpose, either for contributing to a particular discourse pursued by the political authority or for criticizing it. Hence, the travelogues should be read carefully in order to discern the intentions and aims of the traveller in writing this particular narration.

 

The “What” Question: Main Arguments of the Dissertation

Having set the temporal and spatial boundaries and having introduced the actors, in this section the main arguments and basic questions of the dissertation are examined. To start with, the departure point of this dissertation is a recent trend in the literature on the late Ottoman Empire, which aims to extend post- colonial studies to the Ottoman case in a way to argue for an “Ottoman Orientalism.” The scholars following this trend argue that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman ruling elite and intellectuals began to

perceive the Middle East, its adjacent territories and inhabitants by utilizing the Western discourses of the Orient. In other words, these scholars claim that the Ottomans perceived the Orient as the Westerners did.⁹

This dissertation, on the other hand, argues that the concept of “Ottoman Orientalism” has significant shortcomings in presenting the Ottoman perception of the East because this concept is based on the presumption that the Ottoman attempts for Westernization resulted in the emergence of Western modes of thinking with regard to the concepts of civilization and the Orient. In other words, according to the defenders of the “Ottoman Orientalism” argument, the Ottoman search for the adoption of Western civilization consolidated the perception of inevitability of Westernization. Presuming themselves as “civilized” in Western terms, the Ottomans began to reflect their Orient as an “uncivilized” region and tried to project their civilizational development over these backward territories in the form of a civilizing mission. However, this dissertation asserts that the argumentation of “Ottoman Orientalism” neither fits into the Saidian understanding of Orientalism, nor is immune from its basic shortcomings, namely generalization and monolithization of the East. In making this argument, this dissertation does not deny the existence of a quasi-Orientalist mode of thinking in the writings of some Ottoman intellectuals regarding the Ottoman Orient; however, it claims that these perceptions cannot be generalized in a way to argue that the Ottoman intellectual and bureaucratic elite were totally Orientalist.

Then, this dissertation has two main arguments. The first argument was that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman bureaucratic elite and intellectuals have developed a unique understanding of civilization  different  from  European  conceptions.  Although  they  admired

⁹ For the argumentation of “Ottoman Orientalism,” see Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism ‘alla turca’: Late 19^th / Early 20^th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,” Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 40, No. 2, Ottoman Travels and Travel Accounts from an Earlier Age of Globalization (July, 2000), 139-195; Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (June, 2002), 768-796; 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 (Apr., 2003), 311-342.

European material achievements and accepted the inevitability of the transfer of these achievements into the Ottoman Empire, this did not necessarily mean that they aimed for total westernization. Rather, based on the writings of the major intellectuals of this period, this dissertation argues that the Ottomans applied the notion of selectivity in their conceptualization of civilization, meaning that they tried to reach a synthesis by combining the material achievements of Western civilization with the Eastern/Islamic/Ottoman morality. In other words, they aimed to be modernized without being westernized. This synthesis is one of the most significant impediments in front of the argumentation of “Ottoman Orientalism,” because, although the Ottomans were critical of Eastern backwardness vis-à-vis the West, this was not done to emphasize their superiority over the East, but to criticize their wrongdoings as members of the Eastern community.

If the Ottoman perception of the Orient was not Orientalist in essence, then what kind of a perception did the Ottoman intellectuals develop for this region and its inhabitants? In other words, can one argue for a particular Ottoman perception of the “East”? In answering these questions, the second main argument of this dissertation claims that unlike the Western Orientalist discourse, the Ottomans had not a monolithic perception of the East; rather their perceptions changed from one traveller to another, from one period to another, and from one region to another. It is this personal, temporal and spatial differentiation that contributes to a colourful description of the Eastern lands and peoples on the one hand, and impedes the establishment of a static and unchanging concept of the “East” based on the distinction between the East and West on the other.

 

The “How” Question: The Methodology of the Dissertation

In addition to the boundaries and themes of the dissertation, its methodology and the sources utilized for its penning should be mentioned in order to answer the question of how this dissertation is written. Two types of sources are used in the writing process. The first one is the secondary sources, which are utilized extensively in the discussions of Orientalism in general and

the “Ottoman Orientalism” in particular, as well as with regard to the European perceptions of the concept of civilization. The second and more significant source, on the other hand, is the primary sources, namely the writings of the Ottoman intellectuals on the concept of civilization and the Ottoman travelogues focusing on the non-European world. The Ottoman intellectuals’ writings have generally been transliterated; therefore, these transliterations are utilized and the original texts are referred only when necesssary. On the other hand, although most of the Ottoman travelogues to the non-European world have either been transliterated or abridged, in order to provide the reader with the original style and wording, and to reflect the spirit of time that the travelogues had been written in better, the texts written in Ottoman Turkish are utilized, whenever they are available. In order to reach these original texts, the author of the dissertation consulted several libraries including Süleymaniye Library, Beyazıt Library, Millet Library, the National Library and the Halil Đnalcık Collections in the Bilkent University Library.

After having been collected from these libraries, these texts have been submitted to a detailed reading process, in which the specificities of the period that they were written in and of the places that they were about have been considered. In other words, discourse analysis is the basic method utilized in this dissertation to set out the Ottoman understanding of the concepts of civilization and the “East.” The travelogues have been examined to find some common themes with regard to particular regions and their inhabitants in order to emphasize the similarities and differences that the Ottoman travellers had underlined. In sum, in this dissertation, the primary sources are contextualized with the knowledge acquired from the secondary sources to display how the Ottoman intellectuals had understood the concepts of civilization and the “East.”

 

The “Why” Question: The Justification of the Dissertation

The first reason for engaging in such a difficult project, which requires detailed elaborations upon a long period, a wide geography and highly debated concepts such as civilization and Orientalism, is to fill a significant gap in the literature on the Ottoman perceptions about the external world. Indeed, the

literature of the linkage between Orientalism and the Ottoman Empire has so far had two pillars: (1) the Western perception of the Ottoman Empire and (2) the Ottoman perception of the West. Here, an ironic point is that although there is a significant literature written by Turkish scholars on the Western travelogues depicting the Ottoman Empire,¹⁰ a similar effort regarding the Ottoman travelogues is not much visible. One significant exception to this neglect is a voluminous book written by Baki Asiltürk and entitled Osmanlı Seyyahlarının Gözüyle Avrupa (Europe in the Eyes of Ottoman Travellers).¹¹ In this book, Asiltürk examines the Ottoman travelogues on Europe, most of which were written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing that, he tries to put forward the Ottoman perception of Europe in its totality. Another significant secondary source on the Ottoman travelogues is Đbrahim Şirin’s Osmanlı Đmgeleminde Avrupa (Europe in the Ottoman Imagination).¹² This book is composed of an introductory chapter on the Ottoman imagination of Europe in the early modern period and this chapter is followed by two chapters on ambassadorial reports (sefâretnâme) and travelogues. This last chapter on the travelogues cites only a few nineteenth century travelogues on Europe and evaluates them with regard to the Ottoman perception of European civilization, daily life, administration, science and technology.

Although these two studies are among the most comprehensive studies that have ever been done so far on the Ottoman travelogues of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, they hardly surpass a simple travel literature review. In other words, what Asiltürk and Şirin do is to pick up some themes and to classify the excerpts from the Ottoman travelogues in accordance with these

¹⁰ For a couple of examples, see Feridun Dirimtekin, Ecnebi Seyyahlara Nazaran XVI. Yüzyılda Đstanbul, (Đstanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1964); Necati Güngör, Seyyahların Kaleminden Şehr-i Şirin Đstanbul, (Đstanbul: Milliyet Yayınları, 1996); Đlhan Pınar, Hacılar, Seyyahlar, Misyonerler ve Đzmir: Yabancıların Gözüyle Osmanlı Döneminde Đzmir, 1608-1918, (Đzmir: Đzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2001); Gülnur Üçel-Aybet, Avrupalı Seyyahların Gözünden Osmanlı Dünyası ve Đnsanları, (Đstanbul: Đletişim Yayınları, 2003); Salih Özbaran, Portekizli Seyyahlar: Đran, Türkiye, Irak, Suriye ve Mısır Yollarında, (Đstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007).

 

¹¹ Baki Asiltürk, Osmanlı Seyyahlarının Gözüyle Avrupa, (Đstanbul: Kaknüs Yayınları, 2000).

 

¹² Đbrahim Şirin, Osmanlı Đmgeleminde Avrupa, (Ankara: Lotus Yayınevi, 2006).

chosen themes. They do not contextualize nineteenth century travel literature within the concept of “civilization” and “Orient/Occident debate”. Therefore, the Ottoman self-perception vis-à-vis the European civilization is somehow provided in these books, while the Ottoman perception of the “East” is completely neglected. Although, in the introductory chapter of his book, Asiltürk enlisted a couple of the nineteenth century travelogues on the East; in the coming chapters he does not review them.

Ironically, a systematic study of the Ottoman travelogues on the “East” has been done not by the students of Ottoman history in Turkey, but by two foreign scholars, Christoph Herzog and Raul Motika. Although their article examines most of the travelogues utilized in this dissertation, it does not comprehensively question the Ottoman perception of the East as well; rather it focuses on the patterns of Ottoman travel to and travel writing about the Muslim outback of the Ottoman Empire.¹³

This dissertation, therefore, aims to fill this gap by utilizing the Ottoman travelogues as a source to reveal the Ottoman perception of the Eastern lands and peoples. Such an analysis is quite important because it also helps to question the Ottoman self-perception vis-à-vis the East. In other words, this dissertation tries to contribute to the Ottoman modernization literature and Ottoman intellectual history through combining the Ottoman discourse of “civilization” and the Ottoman perception of the “East.” Such an approach seems to be more productive, because it tries to refrain from two significant simplifications generally encountered in the literature on this issue. First of all, this dissertation questions the argument that the Ottoman intellectuals had been the mere imitators of the Western civilization. Contrarily, it argues that there had been a fierce and sophisticated debate among the Ottoman intellectuals regarding the notion of “civilization,” its material and moral elements. What is more, they were also aware of the Occident/Orient debate vividly discussed in Europe, since the Ottoman Empire had been one of the most significant actors of this debate as a “westernizing” Eastern state. Thus, to label the Ottoman modernization process

¹³ Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism ‘alla turca’.”

as a simple imitation procedure is an oversimplification. Secondly, this dissertation also questions the very existence of the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism,” in other words, the monolithization of the Ottoman perception of the “East” and the generalization of any kind of superior-inferior discursive relationship in the form of Orientalism.

 

The Challenges Encountered during the Preparation of this Dissertation

There are two significant challenges encountered during the argumentation and writing processes of this dissertation, which should be mentioned to inform the readers about the problems of writing on these issues. To start with, avoiding generalizations in this dissertation required an ardous effort since this method is strongly criticized. However, writing on a long period of time and a vast region make the resistance towards grand conclusions quite difficult. Still, instead of answering the questions posed in this dissertation as completely affirmatively or negatively, a rather balanced approach is followed by including most of the debates regarding the contentious issues. For example, with regard to the Ottoman perception of the concept of civilization, although, at the end, it is argued that the Ottomans had developed a version of this concept different from the European one, this does not necessarily mean that this version was adopted by the entire Ottoman intellectual community. Rather it means that it was the dominant discourse of civilization among other discourses. Similarly, although this dissertation clearly questions the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism,” it does not altogether reject the existence of quasi-Orientalist texts in the Ottoman literature. However, it is emphasized that such pieces could and should not be generalized as if they established the dominant discourse in the Ottoman Empire.

A second challenge stems from the question whether the Ottoman travelogues to the East suffice to argue for an Ottoman perception of the “East.” In other words, do the Ottoman travellers’ accounts represent the Ottoman perception of the “East”? Indeed, the author of this dissertation is aware that there are other sources written by the Ottoman intellectuals on this particular part of the world; however, most of them were written not as a result of their authors’

actual experiences in these regions. Rather, they were penned after reviewing the Western or Eastern literature on these lands and their inhabitants. On the other hand, the travelogues narrated the firsthand experiences; the actual presence of the traveller in the “East” is therefore more fruitful to produce a relatively objective outlook. Of course, the degree of objectivity in these pieces is a matter of controversy, since these travelogues are not academic studies. Indeed, they are subjective pieces reflecting the sentiments of the travellers. However, it is this subjectivity that produced an original perception of the regions travelled and the peoples encountered. Therefore, although the travelogues comprised a limited part of the Ottoman literature on the “East,” as being firsthand accounts, they tell about the Ottoman perception of the East more than any other source.

 

The Structure of the Dissertation

This dissertation is composed of thirteen chapters under four parts. The first part of the dissertation analyzes the concept of Orientalism, the travel literature as a source of Orientalist discourse, and the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism.” In other words, this part provides the theoretical background of the dissertation. There are two chapters in this introductory part. The first chapter deals with a brief analysis of the concept of Orientalism with reference to pre- Saidian and Saidian versions. This chapter provides the reader with the essential elements of the Orientalist discourse and establishes the linkage between travel writing and Orientalism. The second chapter focuses on the specific application of the Orientalist discourse to the Ottoman case in a way to argue that the Ottomans perceived the Orient as the West did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This argument is questioned in this chapter and its shortcomings are emphasized through questioning whether it fits to the Saidian Orientalism and whether the problems of Saidian Orientalism have also been reflected in this specific version of Orientalism.

Following this theoretical account, the second part of the dissertation introduces the sources, namely the Ottoman travel literature, to the reader. Within this framework, the third chapter mainly analyzes the Ottoman travel writing before the nineteenth century and tries to demonstrate the reasons for the

underdevelopment of this genre in the classical period. The fourth chapter, on the other hand, focuses on the renewed Ottoman interest towards travel writing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and underlines the intellectual, social and technological factors contributing to the development of Ottoman travel and travel writing. What is more, this chapter also serves as a brief historical background for the transformations that the Ottoman Empire had experienced in the nineteenth century. Finally, the fifth chapter introduces the Ottoman travelogues to the non-European world through enlisting them both chronologically and in terms of the reasons for travel.

After having discussed the theoretical background and the literature utilized in the dissertation, the third part analyzes the Ottoman perception of civilization. In the sixth and seventh chapters, the emergence and evolution of the concept of civilization in Europe and in the Ottoman Empire are presented in a parallel setting. Especially, in the seventh chapter, the emergence of the Ottoman version of this concept, medeniyet, and its different perceptions in different periods are examined. The eighth chapter focuses on the Ottoman travellers’ perception of civilization and the similarities and differences between those who had never been to the East and those who had actually experienced it. This comparison also demonstrates that the idea of civilization had been perceived not exactly the same as the Western or Western-influenced perceptions.

Finally, the fourth part of the dissertation is devoted to the Ottoman travellers’ perception of the non-European world and its inhabitants. This part is composed of five chapters, each of which is devoted to a distinct region, being the North Africa, the Ottoman Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula), Iran, the Central Asia and the South and East Asia. In each of these chapters there are two sections. While the first section sets the historical background for the Ottoman relationship with that particular region, the second section deals with Ottoman perception of the regions and their inhabitants based on the account of the travelogues. The dissertation finally ends with an overall conclusion recapitulating its main arguments and answering its basic questions.

PART I

 

 

ORIENTALISM, TRAVEL AND “OTTOMAN ORIENTALISM”

 

 

As the cover of this dissertation indicates, the subtitle used for defining its subject matter is “The Ottoman Travellers’ Perception of the East in the Late Ottoman Empire”. From this very title, three significant themes could be derived. First of all, the actors presented in this dissertation are the travellers; in other words, the practice of travel and travel writing is one of this dissertation’s significant components. Secondly, the expression of “perception of the East” directs the reader to the concept of Orientalism, which can be used as a framework to understand the East. Finally, the identity of the actors attracts attention; the travellers, whose travelogues are examined, were from the Ottoman Empire. It is their perception of the East that establishes the basic subject matter of the dissertation. In other words, there are three issues, which should be examined briefly before engaging in deeper analysis of the Ottoman traveller’s perception of the East: These are the concept of Orientalism, its interrelationship with the practice of travel and travel writing, and one of its claimed versions, namely the “Ottoman Orientalism.”

In this first part of the dissertation, therefore, these three issues are introduced to the reader in two chapters. In the first chapter, the concept of Orientalism is examined in order to set the background for the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism.” What is more, the intimate interrelationship between travel writing and Orientalism as mutually-feeding mechanisms is covered. After putting this general analysis of the concept, the second chapter particularly focuses on the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism.” Here, first of all, some different variants of Orientalism are examined in order to discuss the possibility of claiming a particular Ottoman version of the concept. Then the literature on the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism” is reviewed, and the limits of the applicability of post-colonial studies and Orientalism to the Ottoman case are examined.

CHAPTER 1

 

 

THE CONCEPT OF ORIENTALISM

 

 

Published in the year 1978, Edward Said’s masterpiece, Orientalism, has initiated a fervent debate within social and literary theory for its ambitious, if not provocative, style and content. This book not only transforms the understanding of “Orientalism” and “the Orientalist,” but also presents a significant critique of the corpus of Western literature on the Orient. What is more, with this book, Said develops the previous studies on Orientalism (which is called in this dissertation as the non-Saidian Orientalism) by adding a significant literary criticism. Some authors accused Said’s arguments of being biased, generalizing and essentialist,¹⁴ while others tend to generalize them more in a way to include any kind of relationship between a colonial/imperialist power and the colonized entity.¹⁵ Said’s book and its critiques have established a literature of its own; therefore, the studies focusing on the relationship between the East and the West generally refer to this literature before extending it.

Since this dissertation is about the Ottoman perception of the East in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and since this temporal framework converges with the period concentrated by the studies on Orientalism, the emergence and evolution of this concept should be analyzed in order to understand how the Oriental Studies themselves have been studied. Therefore, this chapter of the dissertation is devoted to an analysis of the concept of Orientalism and its relationship with travel writing. The first section deals with how the concept of Orientalism had been perceived before Said, and focuses on

¹⁴ For a summary of the criticisms directed against Orientalism, see Fred Halliday, “Orientalism and Its Critics,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1993): 145-163; Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluvalia, Edward Said, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 69-82; Robert J. C. Young, Post-Colonialism: An Historical Introduction, (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 389-392

 

¹⁵ For an examination of the application of Orientalism to the regions other than Orient see the first section of the next chapter entitled “New Orientalisms.”

the pre-Saidian critiques of Western literature on the Orient. The second section focuses on the Saidian understanding of Orientalism by examining his definition of three pursuits of this concept and analyzes the evolution of Oriental Studies and discourses. Finally, in the third section, the intimate relationship between travel writing and Orientalism is elaborated since travel writing is one of the major sources of the Orientalist discourse. Here, the evolution of the perception of travel and travel writing in the West is briefly covered as well.

 

1.1.          The Perception of the Concept of Orientalism before Edward Said

Very few concepts in social sciences and humanities have experienced a more significant transformation than the concept of Orientalism. In the nineteenth century, this word had multiple meanings in the Western world. For an intellectual, it generally referred to the work of “a scholar versed in the languages and literatures of the East;” for an artist, it identified “a character, style or quality commonly associated with the Eastern nations;” for a British colonial administrator in India, it meant the policy of preserving local laws and customs for ruling this colony better.¹⁶ Except for the last meaning, which had disappeared due to the abandonment of that particular colonial policy, the references perceiving Orientalism as an academic field or an aesthetic movement continued. After the end of the Second World War, the concept acquired additional meanings, which transformed its reception by the academic community. Particularly, the decolonization movement of 1950s and 1960s and subsequent emergence of the critical and reactive stance of post-colonial and subaltern studies resulted in a swift and massive transformation of the concept of Orientalism. As A. L. Macfie writes:

[…I]n a little more than twenty years [following the end of the Second World War], it [the concept of Orientalism] came to mean not only the work of the orientalist, and a character, style or quality associated with the Eastern nations, but also a corporate institution, designed for dealing with the Orient, a partial view of Islam, an instrument of Western imperialism, a style of thought, based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between Orient and Occident, and even an ideology, justifying and accounting for the subjugation of blacks,

¹⁶ A. L. Macfie, Orientalism, (London and New York: Longman, 2002), 3

Palestinian Arabs, women and many other supposedly deprived groups and peoples.¹⁷

 

In this transformative development in the literature on the Orient, Said’s Orientalism has a significant place. The perception of Orientalism not only as an academic endeavour, but also as a discourse based on the epistemological and ontological distinction between two separate geographical entities, namely between the Occident and Orient, owed much to his work, which has provided a significant inspiration for postcolonial studies as well.¹⁸ However, more important than that, Said’s Orientalism considerably transformed the values once attached to several political, sociological and philosophical themes. As Macfie argues, with this book:

[w]hat had previously been seen as being good (orientalism, text-based scholarship, knowledge of classical languages, concepts of absolute truth, ethnocentricity, racial pride, service to the state, and national pride) was now seen as being bad, or at least suspect. And what had previously been seen as being bad (anti-colonialism, racial equality, uncertainty regarding the nature of truth, resistance to imperialism, mixed race and internationalism) was now seen as being good, worthy of promotion.¹⁹

 

Although these changing values revolutionized the understanding of Orientalism, indeed, this concept had been examined critically before Said, particularly by three scholars, namely Anouar Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian-Coptic sociologist, Abdullatif Tibawi, a Palestinian student of Arabic history, and Bryan

S. Turner, a leading English sociologist and a student of Marxism. Together with Said’s critique, Macfie calls their works as the “four assaults on Orientalism,”²⁰ because all these authors questioned the academic (or quasi-academic) works done under the framework of Oriental Studies, and emphasized the Western prejudicial attitude towards the Orient, which permeated into these texts.

¹⁷ Macfie, Orientalism, 4.

 

¹⁸ According to Gayatri Spivak, an eminent scholar of postcolonial/subaltern studies, it was this work of Said that “released” the colonial discourse studies, which “has […] blossomed into a garden where marginal can speak and be spoken”. See, Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, (New York, Routledge, 1993), 56.

 

¹⁹ Macfie, Orientalism, 7-8.

 

²⁰ Macfie, Orientalism, 4, 73 ff.

Abdel-Malek’s article entitled “Orientalism in Crisis” was published in 1963 and includes one of the earliest critical approaches to Orientalism. According to Abdel-Malek, the decolonization process and independence movements of former colonies resulted in a crisis within Oriental Studies, since the former “objects of study” turned out to be “sovereign subjects”.²¹ In other words, the inhabitants of the colonies were no more passive actors waiting for the Westerners to come and study themselves in a way to tell them what they really were. By acquiring their sovereignty, they not only established their political independence, but also became independent from Western imagination. They began to define themselves by their own means. This transformation from “object” to “subject” leads Abdel-Malek to distinguish between “traditional orientalism,” which was based on the objectification of the Orientals during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and “neo-orientalism,” which emerged from the mid-1950s onwards both in Western Europe and in the Socialist bloc in order to reproduce Western perceptions of the Orient in a setting where Orient was no more a simple object of study.²²

Regarding traditional orientalism, Abdel-Malek appreciates Oriental Studies for their contribution to the understanding of the Oriental cultures; however, he argues that the prejudice infiltrated in these studies should not be disregarded. According to him, the nineteenth century Orientalists were composed of two groups: the first group was the scholars dealing with the Orient solely as an academic field of study, while the second group was formed by “an amalgam of university dons, businessmen, military men, colonial officials, missionaries, publicists and adventurers,” whose “[…] only objective was to gather intelligence information in the area to be occupied, to penetrate the consciousness of the people in order to better assure its enslavement to the European powers.”²³ With regard to the Occidental perception of the Orient,

²¹ Anouar Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes, Vol. 11, No. 44 (Dec., 1963): 103-

140, also incorporated in Brydon (ed.), Post-Colonialism, Vol. 3, 815-845, 815.

 

²² Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” 822-824.

 

²³ Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” 817-818.

Abdel-Malek argues that both these groups perceived the Orient and Orientals as an object of study and such a perception required non-participating, non-active, non-autonomous, and non-sovereign understanding of the region and local peoples.²⁴ What is more, this essentialist conception expresses itself through an ethnist, even a racist typology.²⁵ The absence of autonomy for Orientals and their objectification finally leads Abdel-Malek to perceive Orientalism as an instrument of imperialism designed to secure colonization and enslavement of the Third World.²⁶

Unlike Abdel-Malek’s general criticism of Orientalism, Tibawi focuses on the Orientalist perception of Islam and Arab nationalism. His two articles on the English-speaking Orientalists mainly criticize their centuries-long prejudiced misinterpretation of Islam and the Islamic texts as well as their biased outlook towards Arab nationalism since the end of the Second World War.²⁷ In the first article published in 1964, Tibawi refers to the “unfortunate antecedents” of the Islamic and Arabic studies in the West. He argues that since the medieval period, the “Judeo-Christian hostility to Islam” has resulted in significant distortions in the writings about Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (571-632), since “Muhammad’s role as the bearer of the divine message” has continuously been challenged.²⁸ Although Tibawi narrows his research to the English-speaking Orientalists, the temporal range of the texts he chooses is quite extensive ranging from the Crusades until the mid-1950s.

According to Tibawi, in the mid-1950s, the earlier prejudiced perception of Islam was extended in a way to include Arab nationalism. The Anglo-

²⁴ Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” 818.

 

²⁵ Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” 818.

 

²⁶ Macfie, Orientalism, 6-7.

 

²⁷ A[bdul] L[atif] Tibawi, “English Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism,” the first part of the article was published in Islamic Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1-2 (Jan.-June, 1964): 25-45, (thenceforward, Tibawi, “English Speaking Orientalists”, I) and the second part was published in the same journal, Vol. 8, No. 3-4 (July-Dec., 1964): 73-88 (thenceforward, Tibawi, “English Speaking Orientalists”, II).

 

²⁸ Tibawi, “English Speaking Orientalists”, I, 25.

American fear from a prospective communist expansion in the Middle East, the irritation emerged as a result of the Muslim world’s rejection of the liberal- democratic model, the sympathy and support for Israel, the concern for the continuity of the flow of Arab oil, and, finally, the disappointment because of the decline of Western power in the Middle East resulted in such a biased perception of Arab nationalism.²⁹ In sum, Tibawi underlines the continuity of the Western perceptions from the Crusades to the mid-1950s in essence; his point of departure is the eternal and deep-seated hostility between the Islamic and the Christian world, which has transformed from the perception of Islam to the perception of Arab nationalism.³⁰

Different from Abdel-Malek’s focus on the academy and Tibawi’s focus on the texts on Islam and Arab nationalism, Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism, which was published in the same year with Said’s Orientalism, engages in a Marxist critique of Orientalist studies. According to Turner, the Orientalist literature takes underdevelopment of the Orient for granted because of the stereotypes that this literature has developed. The Orientalists argue that social development is caused by internal characteristics of a society, and the historical development of a society should follow either an evolutionary progressive or a gradually declining pattern. Turner claims that these arguments lead the Orientalists to establish a dichotomy between an ideal Western society, having an evolutionary progressive pattern of development, and a stagnant and even declining Orient.³¹ However, he asserts that the underlying reason for the economic and political underdevelopment of the Orient is not the inherent

²⁹ Tibawi, “English Speaking Orientalists,” II, 80-88.

 

³⁰ Fifteen years after this first article, in 1979, after the publication of Said’s Orientalism and Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism, Tibawi published his second article on the English speaking Orientalists. In this article, he once more examined the problems raised in his first article in the recent colossal publications, such as the Cambridge History of Islam or the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and concluded that the motives and methods employed to analyze Islamic themes had changed very little from the earlier ages to the recent period. See A[bdul] L[atif] Tibawi, “Second Critique of the English-Speaking Orientalists,” Islamic Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1979): 3-54.

 

³¹ Bryan S. Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), 81.

internal structure of the region, but its entrapment in a peripheral relationship with the global centres of capitalism. When capitalism has once established, in order to pursue this centre-periphery relationship, it has to conserve and even intensify the pre-capitalist modes of production on the periphery. This resulted in the total closure of the evolutionary path from traditional to modern society, and that is what has happened in the Orient.³²

Although Turner utilizes the Marxist understanding of centre-periphery relations to demonstrate the significance of external reasons for economic and political underdevelopment of the Orient, he also criticizes the infiltration of Orientalist ideas into the Marxist thinking. According to Burke and Prochaska, Turner evaluates “Marx’s assumptions that history proceeded in stages and that Europe was at the leading edge of progress, and his efforts to distinguish an Asiatic mode of production all derived from the penetration of Marx’s thought by orientalist categories and assumptions.”³³ Thus, what Turner tries is to replace the Orientalist roots in Hegelian Marxism with the introduction of an analysis of the pre-capitalist modes of production, the effects of colonialism and the post- colonial state on the one hand, and to revise the reasons for the political and economic underdevelopment of the Orient through these new analyses on the other.

What unites Abdel-Malek, Tibawi and Turner is their commitment to the necessity of questioning the literature produced in the West about the East. All of them argue that this literature has produced valuable knowledge on the region and its inhabitants. But this body of knowledge should be critically scrutinized, since it has been a prejudiced one distorting the reality of the Orient. In other words, they were sceptical about the literature on Orient and this scepticism distinguished them from the other studies on Orientalist literature. However, despite their valour for opening a significant discussion, the studies of Abdel- Malek, Tibawi and Turner are very much concealed under the shadow of Said’s

³² Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism, 82-83.

 

³³ Edmund Burke and David Prochaska, “Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism,”

History and Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 2 (June, 2007): 135-151, 141.

Orientalism, which initiated a revolutionary and equally provocative debate regarding the Western perceptions of the Orient.

 

1.2.          Edward Said’s Orientalism

What makes Said’s Orientalism so much popular in social science and humanities literature is his systematization and generalization of the vast Western literature on the Orient from the antiquity to the 1960s by blending them with Foucauldian notion of discourse, Gramscian notion of hegemony, and his personal characteristics including his belongingness to a subaltern culture (Palestinian/ Christian Arab) as well as his humanism.³⁴ His generalizing attitude, on the other hand, becomes the main target of his critics. The book has opened such a provocative discussion that a corpus of related writings, almost all of which adopt a critical approach towards the Saidian understanding of Orientalism, has emerged. As Robert J. C. Young rightly puts “[t]he production of a critique of Orientalism even today functions as the act or ceremony of initiation by which newcomers to the field assert their claim to take up the position of a speaking subject within the discourse of postcoloniality.”³⁵

Said starts this controversial work by arguing that the Orient was a European invention since the antiquity. According to him, the Orient “[…] is not only adjacent to Europe [but] also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”³⁶ In other words, Said underlines the Western distinction between “us” and “them” otherizing the Orient, which legitimizes the superior-inferior type of relationship between the Occident and Orient. Therefore, this relationship “[…] is a relationship  of  power,  of  domination,  of  varying  degrees  of  a  complex

³⁴ Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 184-185, and Jacinta O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations: From Spengler to Said, (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 188.

 

³⁵ Young, Post-Colonialism, 384.

 

³⁶ Said, Orientalism, 1-2.

hegemony.”³⁷ Said, moves from this inherent distinction based on power, domination and hegemony, to one of the basic elements of his argument of Orientalism, namely the inequality between the West and the East:

The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically. True, the relationship of strong to weak could be disguised or mitigated, […b]ut the essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was seen – in the West, which is what concerns us here – to be one between a strong and a weak partner.³⁸

 

After setting this unequal relationship between the Orient and Occident, Said defines Orientalism as a “mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.”³⁹ Therefore, although Orientalism seems to be an academic endeavour in the first instance, it is absolutely more than that:

[…] Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do).⁴⁰

 

 

 

³⁷ Said, Orientalism, 5.

 

³⁸ Said, Orientalism, 40.

 

³⁹ Said, Orientalism, 2.

 

⁴⁰ Said, Orientalism, 12.

From this long excerpt, it can be inferred that Orientalism cannot be confined to the simple geographical distinction between the Occident and Orient; this distinction permeates into almost all spheres of Western discourse, from art to sciences, from literature to politics. Secondly, Orientalism cannot be perceived solely as a passive understanding, whose only aim is to understand and interpret the Orient; rather, it is a set of perceptions deliberately designed for producing and reproducing hegemonic relationship between the Occident and the Orient.

Although Said’s main emphasis is on the discursive level of Orientalism, it is not the only level that he elaborates upon. He mentions about three different pursuits of Orientalism, which are closely interrelated with each other. To start with, Said defines Orientalism as an “academic discipline,” which, for centuries, has assembled an archive of knowledge serving the development of a systematic approach to the Orient as a subject of learning, discovery and practice. Here, he focuses on the academic achievements since the late eighteenth century onwards, although he sometimes refers to the studies of earlier periods. Secondly, Said defines Orientalism as a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between” the Orient and Occident. Within this context he includes not only the academicians but also poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, or imperial administrators, who incorporated this basic distinction as the starting point for their works on the Orient and Oriental peoples. With this definition, Said extends the temporal range of his study by including the works of the authors from the Greek playwright Aeschylus (524-455 B.C.) to the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1335), from the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) to the French linguist Jean François Champollion (1790-1832), from the British colonial administrator Lord Cromer (1841-1917) to the Hungarian anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910-1996). He concludes that the distinction between the Orient and Occident exceeds any temporal limitations. Finally, Said perceives Orientalism as a “corporate institution” for dealing with the Orient “dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring,

and having authority over the Orient.”⁴¹ This pursuit of Orientalism illustrates the use of discourse to execute authority and domination over the Orient. In other words, in this third pursuit, Said refers to the institutional establishment of Orientalism.

What is common with all these three pursuits of Orientalism is the ultimate ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and Occident. Indeed, this distinction is not peculiar to the period after the late eighteenth century; the historical record demonstrates that the first two pursuits of Orientalism, namely Orientalism as an academic discipline and a style of thought have already been consolidated until that period. Accordingly, the perception of the Orient as an academic field could be traced back to the medieval period, when the Western scientists, theologians and philosophers met with the Islamic science and culture during the long Arabian domination of the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, the Western concern to learn about Islam was quite practical; it had been derived from the desire to know more about the adversaries of Christianity. However, not only Islamic theological, but also Arab/Islamic scientific and philosophical texts were translated into Latin and other European languages in the late medieval period.⁴² What is more, in 1312, the Church Council of Vienna decided to establish chairs in Arabic, Hebrew and Assyrian languages at the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca. This was one of the first indications of the emergence of Oriental Studies in the West.⁴³ During the zenith of Ottoman power in Europe, namely between the fifteenth and

⁴¹ For these definitions of three pursuits of Orientalism, see Said, Orientalism, 2.

 

⁴² Among them, al-Farabi’s Kitâb-ı Đhsâ al-Ulûm (The Enumeration of Sciences) and Ibn Sina’s Al-Kânûn Fî’t Tıbb (The Canon of Medicine) translated by Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187) in Toledo, several works of Ibn Rusd were translated by Michael Scot (1175-1232), and excerpts from al-Ghazali’s Tahâfut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of Philosophers) and Ibn Rusd’s Tahâfût al-Tahâfût (The Incoherence of Incoherence) replying al-Ghazali’s work were translated by Ramon Llull (1232-1316). For a detailed analysis of these translations see Marshall Claget, “Some General Aspects of Physics in the Middle Ages,” Isis, Vol. 39, No. 1/2 (May, 1948): 29- 44; Harry A. Wolfson, “The Twice-Revealed Averroes,” Speculum, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Jul., 1961): 373-392; Ramon Llull, Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316), 2 Volumes, translated by Anthony Bonner, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

 

⁴³ Said, Orientalism, 49-50.

seventeenth centuries, the works on the history of the Turks and the Turkish Empire were quite popular; it was the fear from the Turk that had increased the popularity of such pieces.⁴⁴

Turks and Islam was not the only subject of study for the Westerners in this period. The Jesuit missions to the Far East starting from the late sixteenth century onwards introduced Chinese language and culture to Europe. David Martin Jones’ study on the image of China in Europe demonstrates that these missionaries were quite impressed from the complexity of Chinese religion and culture, and became aware of the intellectual inferiority of Europe vis-à-vis China. Hence they tried to accommodate the contradictions between Christianity and Confucianism by attempting to create a “Christian-Confucian synthesis”. These efforts of accommodation reached such a level that in the first half of the eighteenth century, Vatican had to renounce the Jesuit strategy of creating a synthesis by two Papal Bulls. Despite this renunciation, these missionary works served for the establishment of the field of Sinology in Europe. ⁴⁵

The style of thought created by such academic studies was not monolithic. On the one hand, the European philosophers and scientists were aware of the virtues of Islamic science and philosophy; however, the Church was extremely sceptic regarding the utility of these texts for religious reasons. Quran was translated into Latin by Robert of Ketton (c. 1110 – c. 1160), however, it had been perceived as a work by Muhammad, not as a divine text.⁴⁶ What is more, the perception of Islam as an alternative system caused a significant reaction by the Church. For example, after the geographical explorations, the

⁴⁴ For example, Richard Crafton’s The Order of the great Turckes Courte, of hys menne of warre and of all hys conquestes with the summe of Mahumetes doctryne, published in 1544 as a translation from Antoine Geuffroy, Peter Ashton’s Short Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles published in 1546 as a translation from Paolo Giovio, and Richard Knolles’ The General Historie of the Turkes published in 1603 emerged as significant history books in England in this period. For a detailed account of English history literature on the Turks see Hamit Dereli, Kraliçe Elizabeth Devrinde Türkler ve Đngilizler, (Đstanbul: Anıl Matbaası, 1951), 23-29.

 

⁴⁵ David Martin Jones, Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought, (Gordonsville VA.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 14-19.

 

⁴⁶ For an analysis of Robert of Ketton’s translation, see Bruce Lawrence, The Quran: A Biography, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), particularly Chapter 7, 97-107.

natives of America did not attract such a fierce reaction from the Church because their primitive belief systems did not pose a significant threat to the very existence of this institution. However, Islam was perceived as the rival of Christianity not only as a religion, but also as a social system.

During the medieval and early modern period, the main criterion of the Western academic perception of the Orient was religion; however, starting from the eighteenth century onwards, science began to replace it. The reasons for this transformation are manifold. First of all, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, first the Reformation, and then the Enlightenment processes resulted in the gradual retreat of religion from science. In other words, the world was begun to be perceived more secularly. The geographical explorations revealed the unknown parts of the globe, while the developments in various fields such as anatomy, botany, zoology, astronomy, or physics, and the understanding of the mechanics of the universe besides the divine intervention to worldly affairs consolidated this transformation. Within this framework, the Orient was searched by the Western scholars as the bearer of an ancient revelation, which had once established the roots of Western knowledge. Therefore, these scholars had “[…] the desire to escape into some remote and fantastic ‘other’ and to find there a lofty yet illusory means of uplift, or the material for dreams of lost wisdom or golden ages.”⁴⁷ Secondly, the military balance between the Eastern and Western worlds began to be deteriorated by the defeats of the Easterners, particularly the Ottoman Empire, by the Western powers. In other words, Islam and Orient could no more pose systemic threats to Christianity and the Occident. This disappearance of the fear from the East contributed to a more objective understanding of the Orient.⁴⁸

During the eighteenth century, the academic aspect of Orientalism became more visible with the Western interest towards Oriental languages. In his

⁴⁷ J[ohn] J[ames] Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought, (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 19.

 

⁴⁸ Bryan S. Turner, “Outline of A Theory of Orientalism,” in Bryan S. Turner (ed.) Orientalism: Early Sources, Vol. 1, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 7.

famous study entitled The Oriental Renaissance, Raymond Schwab argues that around the turn of the eighteenth century, Oriental Studies consisted of nothing more than the study of Hebrew for theologians and the study of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish for the interpreters serving in the Levant.⁴⁹ However, this situation had changed tremendously after 1700 with the emergence of systematic studies on Oriental literatures such as Barthelemy d’Herbelot’s (1625-1695) Bibliothéque Orientale (Oriental Library) published in 1697, or Antoine Galland’s (1646-1715) translation of the Kitâb 'alf layla wa-layla (The Thousand and One Nights), which consolidated the exotization of the East.⁵⁰ These works influenced the field of Oriental Studies in the first half of the eighteenth century, while in the second half Sinology and Indology became two significant subfields of Oriental Studies. The European intellectuals’ search for an ancient linkage between the Eastern and Western languages resulted in the mushrooming of linguistic studies.⁵¹

This linguistic interest also directed many Enlightenment thinkers, including John Locke (1632-1704), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), John Toland (1670-1722), François-Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1778), and David Hume

⁴⁹ Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Discovery of India and the East (1680-1880), translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 21.

 

⁵⁰ Kabbani summarizes the impact of Galland’s translation as such: “[The Thousand and One Nights] was greeted with great enthusiasm in an era that was fidgeting under the stern dominion of rationalism, desiring imaginative space and relief from sobriety. They came at a time of intellectual secularization, when Europeans wished to become acquainted with cultures that were not Christian. The East was an obvious repository of such cultures, and although Islam continued to be regarded with suspicion and distaste, its sublunary aspects […] produced a passionate desire for additional narrative of this kind.” Kabbani, The European Myth of Orient, 28-29. This translation was followed by other influential works regarding the Orient such as George Sale’s (1697-1736) translation of Quran, Simon Ockley’s (1678-1720) History of Saracens, or Baron de Montesquieu’s (1689-1755) Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters). See Pallavi Pandit Laisram, Viewing the Islamic Orient: British Travel Writers of the Nineteenth Century, (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 9

 

⁵¹ For example, the German philosopher Gottfried William Leibniz (1646-1716) wrote that the Chinese people were the prima gentis (the first origins) and the Chinese language was the key to a universal language. Similarly, the European linguists such as Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil- Duperron (1731-1805) and Sir William Jones (1746-1794) argued that Sanskrit language might be the origin to European languages since its roots went deeper than Latin and Greek. See Jones, Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought, 20.

(1711-1776) to appreciate the virtues of the East.⁵² The Enlightenment universalism, prevalent in the writings of these philosophers, contributed to the enthusiasm of perceiving the East as a source of inspiration for the universal rationalist scientific thinking; however, this universalism soon disappeared in the late eighteenth century, when “the elaborate and detailed examinations of Oriental languages, histories and cultures were carried out in a context in which the supremacy and importance of European civilization” became unquestioned.⁵³ Therefore, for most of the authors writing on Orientalism, the last decades of the eighteenth century was a turning point for all three Saidian pursuits of Orientalism.

There are some historical events taken place in this period, which are considered as having a transformative impact on the Western perception of the East. For example, for Abdel-Malek, the creation of Orientalist societies starting from the late eighteenth century onwards constitutes the first wave of the systematization of Oriental Studies.⁵⁴ For Said, on the other hand, the major turning point was Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798.⁵⁵ All such historical occurrences have implications on the transformation of the Western perception of the East; however, in order to understand the systemic dynamics that reveal this transformation, the combination of material and mental factors should be examined. In other words, it is this combination that transformed academic, discursive and imperialist aspects of Orientalism.

By material transformation, the consolidation of Western military and technological superiority over the East is meant. The evident military decline of the three Muslim Empires (namely, the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires),

⁵² For example, Jones writes that Voltaire argued “[...] what Europe had only just came to realize through Lockean psychology and Newtonian physics, the Chinese had known from the earliest historical times and had sustained that knowledge through the practical virtue of a Confucianized mandarinate.” Jones, Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought, 21

 

⁵³ Ashcroft, Edward Said, 50-51.

 

⁵⁴ Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” 816.

 

⁵⁵ Said, Orientalism, 76.

which had been controlling the vast region stretching from the North Africa to the Southeast Asia, was compounded with an increasing European penetration to these regions; in other words, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Orient became a scene of rivalry among the European colonial powers. That is why the concepts like the “Eastern question” or the “Great Game” had dominated the European public opinion during the nineteenth century.⁵⁶

The technological superiority of Europe, which also fostered an economic advantage for the Europeans in expanding their capitalist interests towards the non-European world, was the second material aspect contributing to the Western sense of supremacy over the East. The development in military technology was significant for the military victories of the Europeans over the Eastern Empires, while the establishment of factories based on steam power and the development of transportation facilities including steamship and train resulted in a dramatic increase in the economic production and long-distance trade. All these factors facilitated further European economic penetration into the non-European world not only for commercial purposes, but also for the extraction of raw materials and natural resources required for cheaper production in Europe, which contributed to the rapid industrialization of the West at the expanse of the colonies.⁵⁷

⁵⁶ Although there were many definitions of the concept of “Eastern Question,” it can be briefly defined as the rivalry of the Great Powers for domination over the Ottoman territories from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. There is a plethora of literature on the Eastern Question; however, two books provide the reader with a comprehensive account of the emergence and evolution of the Eastern Question: Matthew Smith Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923: A Study in International Relations, (London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966) and A. L. Macfie, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923, (London and New York: Longman, 1994). “The Great Game”, on the other hand, is a term used for the strategic rivalry and conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. For a brief account of the Great Game see Robert Johnson, Spying for Empire: The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757-1947, (London: Greenhill Books, 2006).

 

⁵⁷ For example, the East India Company’s revenues soared from 3 million pounds in 1765 to 22 million pounds in 1818. See Sugatha Bose and Ayseha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History Culture and Political Economy, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 71. What is more, from 1750 to 1938 the non-European world was almost completely de-industrialized either forcefully by the colonial powers or through internal economic dynamics. The statistics shows the impact of imperialism clearly. In the year 1750, the developed core produced the 27 % of the world manufacturing output, while China and India produced 32,8 and 24.5 % respectively. By the year 1830, the share of developed core rose to 39. 5 percent, while Chinese and Indian shares declined

The European self-declared civilizational supremacy, which established the mental transformation towards the end of the eighteenth century, was even more significant than the European military, technological and economic superiority. As a result of this transformation, the Enlightenment perception of universal rationality was replaced by a universalized version of European understanding of rationality. In other words, the European civilization was perceived as the only modern civilization, which the others had to emulate.⁵⁸

It is this material and mental transformation that contributed to the emergence of the third Saidian pursuit of Orientalism in the nineteenth century, namely, Orientalism as a corporate institution. The combination of military, technological, economic and civilizational superiority claims consolidated the inherent ontological distinction between the Orient and Occident to a degree unseen before.⁵⁹ In sum, during the nineteenth century, the three pursuits of Orientalism were combined and consolidated in a way to produce a particular structured perception of the Orient. The academic pursuit reached to a zenith with the linguistic works of one of the most eminent linguists of this period, namely Antoine Isaac Sylvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), and his students such as Jean François Champollion (1790-1832) in France, John Martin Augustine

to 29.8 and 17.6 % respectively. The most dramatic decline was experienced with the fierce implementation of imperialist expansion. In the year 1880, the share of developed core was doubled to 79.1 % and the total share of India and China was declined to 15,3 %. Finally in 1938, the developed core produced 92,8 percent of the world manufacturing output, sweeping almost all other producers in the world. See table 5.1 on the world manufacturing output (1750-1938) in Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and the Poor Periphery before 1950, (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006), 68.

 

⁵⁸ J. J. Clarke, Jung and the Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 15. For a detailed account of this mental transformation regarding the concept of civilization see Chapter 7 of this dissertation.

 

⁵⁹ One of the first significant indications of this combination was the Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, which was not only a military expedition aiming to dominate Egypt and Syria in order to challenge the British colonial rule in India, but also a scientific one since the French army was accompanied by a group of scientists, archaeologists, geographers, and cartographers “to study” the regions that they conquered. In other words, the expedition did not only mean the first European military encroachment to the very heart of the Orient since the Crusades, but also an enterprise, as Napoleon himself declared to his soldiers, having “incalculable consequences for civilization.” In other words, this expedition united the academe and the discourse in order to dominate and restructure the Orient. See Julie Reeves, Culture and International Relations: Narratives, Natives and Tourists, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 16.

Scholz (1794-1852) in Germany, and Carl Johann Tornberg (1807-1877) in Sweden. The anthropological studies soon followed the linguistic ones particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century under the shadow of social evolutionism and even social Darwinism.⁶⁰

Besides these academic works, the rapid and efficient institutionalization of Oriental Studies was quite remarkable as well. Starting from the late eighteenth century onwards, numerous Orientalist societies and organizations were established in European countries as well as in their colonies. The Asiatic Society of Calcutta, founded in 1784, was soon followed by Société Asiatique (Asiatic Society) in Paris (1822), the Royal Asiatic Society in London (1834), the American Oriental Society in Massachusetts (1842) and the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) in Leipzig (1845). All these institutions also published academic journals in which the findings of studies on Orient were exhibited. In the second half of the nineteenth century, another initiative was introduced for gathering the academicians studying the Orient, namely the Congress of Orientalists, which had first been convened in Paris in 1873; sixteen congresses were held from this first congress until the First World War.

Regarding the discursive level of Orientalism, it was literature that contributed the most to the consolidation of a discourse based on the distinction between the Orient and Occident because while the academic studies had a limited number of recipients, literary works could easily be reached by the masses. Painting and architecture also created an Orientalist aesthetic based on the exotization and thereby alienation of the East. Particularly, in the world exhibitions, in which the Oriental countries were represented through architecture, Oriental buildings were constructed to introduce not only the Eastern architecture but also the Eastern living-style to the Westerners.⁶¹ The

⁶⁰ For a brief analysis of the implications of social evolutionism and social Darwinism on the literature on Orient, see the Chapter 6 of this dissertation on the evolution of the concept of civilization in Europe.

 

⁶¹ For the Orientalist painting, exoticizing and eroticizing the East, see, for example, Lynne Thornton’s two essential works, Les Orientalistes: Peintres Voyageurs, 1828-1908, (Paris: ACR Edition, 1983) and La Femme dans la Peinture Orientaliste, (Paris: ACR Edition, 1993). For a

paintings and architectural works enhanced the European feeling that the East was different from the West not only in terms of mentality, but also in terms of appearance. In sum, as Bryan Turner notes “[f]rom the eighteenth century, the Orient has existed within a literary and visual tradition which is both romantic and fantastic.”⁶²

In this period, while the Orientalist discourse emphasized the superiority of the Western civilization, at the same time, it defined the Orient by what the Occident has and what the Orient lacks. According to Turner, this resulted in the definition of Orient by “a series of lacunae”, which can be summarized as the absence of revolutionary change, the missing middle class, the erosion or denial of active citizenship, the failure of participatory democracy, the absence of autonomous cities, the lack of ascetic disciplines and the limitations of instrumental rationality as the critical culture of natural science, industrial capitalism and rational government.⁶³ All these absences resulted in a general public attitude towards the Orient especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, fed by the writings and speeches of these authors, politicians and colonial administrators, which was a “mixture of patronising chauvinism and racist contempt.”⁶⁴

In sum, although Saidian Orientalism focuses on a long period of time in order to understand the Western monolithic perception of the East, it is in the nineteenth century that the three Saidian pursuits of Orientalism became interrelated the most. The academic studies nourished the Western discourse on the Orient based on the civilizational superiority and dynamism of the West over

detailed analysis of these nineteenth century world fairs and Islamic architectural monuments constructed for these exhibitions see Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1992).

 

⁶² Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Orientalism,” 1.

 

⁶³ Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Orientalism,” 4.

 

⁶⁴ Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, 17. For a comprehensive collection of such Orientalist speeches and writings see Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (eds.), Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

the inferiority and indolence of the East; this in turn contributed to the rationale and justification behind the European imperialist expansion and persuaded the European public opinion about the necessity of bringing the European civilization to the “uncivilized” parts of the world.

 

1.3.          Travel Writing and Orientalism

In the establishment of the Orientalist discourse, the role of travel writing has been extremely significant. It has been the travellers, who introduced the unknown lands and their unknown inhabitants to their countrymen, and thus provided them with the opportunity to make a comparison between “the self” and “the other.” In other words, travel literature produced the “elemental questions of epistemology, the relation between subject and object, knower and the known.”⁶⁵ Making the self a subject via the category of “the knower” and making the other an object via the category of “the known” has been a fundamental aspect of the Orientalist discourse as well, which promote an active Occident aiming “to know” a fixed and passive Orient. Therefore, the mentality of travel writing overlapped with the mentality of Orientalism to a great extent. As Paul Smethurst writes:

European travel writing, a corpus spanning several centuries, has been hugely influential in producing and circulating knowledge about the rest of the world and fuelling aspirations for expansion and conquest. Travel and travel writing, and the imaginative geographies they conjured, were crucial to the discursive formation of empire, especially by their insinuation and cementation of crude binaries such as the West/the Rest, attached to which were the clearly pejorative formulations of civilised/savage, scientific/superstitious, and so on.⁶⁶

 

Since travel writing has targeted the curiosity of the reader by introducing what he wonders because he does not know, travel literature has proven to be remarkably popular in general. However, its popularity reached a zenith with the geographical explorations. The fascination to the concept of “new world,” which had been believed to have beautiful and bountiful lands with extreme riches,

⁶⁵ Quoted from Janis Stout by Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: The Self and the World, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 3.

 

⁶⁶ Paul Smethurst, “Introduction,” in Paul Smethurst and Julia Kuehn (eds.), Travel Writing Form and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1.

attracted the attention of the people to the travelogues about the newly explored lands. On the other hand, by the late Renaissance, travel became to be perceived as a significant opportunity, crucial to the development of one’s intellectual powers. Hence a particular form of travel, the Grand Tour, which was performed by the younger sons of the European aristocrats towards Italy, became a significant component of their education.⁶⁷

These two different ways of travel produced two different types of travel writing. From the geographical explorations, there emerged the logbooks and journals of the sailors, having a linear factual structure, in which the events were reported chronologically following the itinerary of the trip. A similar style was also visible in the narration of the voyages of pilgrims and merchants, since the purpose of travel was not travel itself, but exploration, religious devotion, or economics. From the travels, such as the Grand Tour, on the other hand, there emerged travel writings including the emotions, thoughts and personal characteristics of the author, since the purpose of travel was to acquire self- development through learning about other geographies.⁶⁸ Especially during the Enlightenment period, “the Lockean perception of knowledge, rooted in experience and nowhere else,” resulted in an increase in the importance and desirability of travel.⁶⁹

“[T]he precarious Enlightenment balance between science and sentiment”⁷⁰ ended with the subjectivity of the romantic period towards the end of the eighteenth century, in which the sentiments about the lands that the traveller had seen surpassed their factual appearance. In other words, the reader read what the traveller had felt more than what he had seen. Hence, “[b]y the early nineteenth century, travel writing had clearly become a matter of self

⁶⁷ Blanton, Travel Writing, 11.

 

⁶⁸ Blanton, Travel Writing, 11.

 

⁶⁹ James Buzard, “The Grand Tour and After (1660-1840),” in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37.

 

⁷⁰ Blanton, Travel Writing, 15.

discovery as well as a record of the discovery of others.”⁷¹ Together with the European travellers’ belief in the superiority of the European civilization vis-à- vis other native cultures, this self-discovery resulted in the establishment of an “imperial self”.⁷² As Roy Bridges writes, “[w]ith technological superiority came presumed intellectual superiority: Europeans could claim to be able to understand and interpret not only the terrain they entered but the inhabitants as well.”⁷³ Therefore, it is not surprising that the period between 1850 and 1930, which was the heyday of European imperialism, was also the period that the quality and quantity of travel and travel writing had reached to a zenith. The reasons for this development are manifold. First and foremost, travel became easier with the development of transportation facilities. The steamship and train became the two mediums of travel in the second half of the nineteenth century, providing not only speed but also comfort to the travellers.⁷⁴ Secondly, “democratization of travel,” in other words, transformation of travel from an aristocratic enterprise to a bourgeois practice, increased the number of travellers and thereby travel writing.⁷⁵ In this period, travel was continued to be perceived as an informative instrument; however it began to be understood as a source of enjoyment as well.⁷⁶

⁷¹ Blanton, Travel Writing, 15.

 

⁷² Blanton, Travel Writing, 16.

 

⁷³ Roy Bridges, “Exploration and Travel outside Europe,” in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 53.

 

⁷⁴ Barbara Korte, English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, translated by Catherine Matthias, (Hampshire: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 85.

 

⁷⁵ Blanton, Travel Writing, p. 19. Paul Fussell also linked the rise of travel during the nineteenth century to the “bourgeois vogue of romantic primitivism.” See Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 38.

 

⁷⁶ Derek Gregory mentions about the “conversion of sites into sights” in order to underline the popularization of travel; the historical sites, which had been travelled by scholars previously, was transformed in the late nineteenth century into sights, even places of touristic attention. See Derek Gregory, “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel,” in James S. Duncan (ed.), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, (London: Routledge, 1998), 117. What is more, according to Casey Blanton, especially for women, travel became an opportunity to escape

All these factors contributed to the increase in travel and travel writing in the second half of the nineteenth century; however, it was the nature of the lands travelled that determined the style and content of travel writing in this period. The destinations were either European colonies or interior parts of the continents, which had not been explored yet, but which had been partitioned by the colonial powers on paper. In other words, the travellers usually went to the regions, which were, at least nominally, under the control of the European states. There, they could experience the relationship between the colonial self and the colonized other. Their narration of these lands and the communities living there was therefore shaped by that particular colonial setting. Smethurst defines this phenomenon as “mobilization of knowledge” and argues that “[…t]he uneven development of travel and exploration (and travel writing) provided the West with both literal and figurative mobility, and this gave imperialist discourse its vigour and means of dissemination.”⁷⁷ In other words, travel writing became a significant tool for the expansion of the discursive basis of European imperialism.

The outcome of the popularization of travel and travel writing within this colonial framework was the emphasis on the sentiments of the travellers more than the factual appearance of the locations of travel, which resulted in the construction of “imaginative geographies.”⁷⁸ Hence the Orient was constructed with little or no reference to those who really lived and what really existed there; rather, it was exoticized to a degree that it became a “flittering phantasmagoria,” half illusion, half reality.⁷⁹

the rigidity of Victorian society; therefore the number of female travel writers increased considerably. Blanton, Travel Writing, 20.

 

⁷⁷ Smethurst, “Introduction,” 1-2.

 

⁷⁸ This concept was derived from the title of the second section of Said’s Orientalism, “Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental.” For a detailed examination of this concept, see Derek Gregory, “Imaginative Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 1995): 447-485.

 

⁷⁹ Gregory, “Scripting Egypt,”145-146. He quoted the concept of “flittering phantasmagoria” from William Henry Bartlett’s travelogue entitled The Nile Boat: Or Glimpses of the Land of Egypt, (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1849).

In the nineteenth century, travel also became one of the major sources of knowledge accumulation. For example, the anthropological studies utilized the material produced by the travellers to a great extent. As Caroline Brettell writes:

[w]hile contemporary ethnologists tend to regard fieldwork and participant observation as their primary methods of data collection, a century ago anthropologists depended almost entirely on the accounts of missionaries and merchants, traders and travellers for their ethnographic material.⁸⁰

 

The impact of travel writing over anthropological studies also demonstrates the linkage between science, travel writing and Orientalism. As Barbara Korte argues, this linkage produced “a seminal instrument of control” or an imperialist ideology, which produced and reproduced an object-oriented description of the manners and customs of the inhabitants of the lands that had been travelled through.⁸¹ This resulted in the detachment of the writers from the “other;” to put it differently, “the text constructs an ‘other’ with whom the European traveller does not establish a genuine interpersonal relationship.”⁸²

All in all, there has always been an intimate relationship between Orientalism and travel writing, and this relationship was mutual. On the one hand, the travel literature provided the Orientalist with a particular knowledge of the Orient shaped not solely by the objectivity of what the traveller had actually seen, but also by the subjectivity of what he had felt. On the other hand, the traveller has been influenced from the Orientalist discourse and started his travel with a pre-defined mindset. In other words, travel writing and Orientalism feed each other. The outcome is the exacerbation of the Orient-Occident divide, which continuously fed the Orientalist discourse.

In sum, both the Saidian and non-Saidian versions of Orientalism argue for an unsormountable distinction between the West and the East emerged out of

⁸⁰ Caroline B. Blattell, “Introduction: Travel Literature, Ethnography and Ethnohistory”,

Ethnohistory, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Spring, 1986): 127-138, 127.

 

⁸¹ Korte, English Travel Writing, 89-90.

 

⁸² Korte, English Travel Writing, 92. For a detailed analysis of the construction of this imperial ideology, see Mary Loise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992).

the perceived civilizational supremacy of former over the latter. The Western objectification of the East resulted in the creation of a fixed and static account of the political, economic and socio-cultural structures of the non-European world. Although both versions of Orientalism examined the Western perceptions of the East, recently, some scholars began to question the possibility of extending the presumptions of Orientalism to non-European actors in a way to reach a conclusion that the perception of a particular territory or group of people as “uncivilized” by another group of people, who called themselves as “civilized,” might be understood through employing the principles of Orientalism. The next chapter examines these new Orientalisms and questions their limits.

CHAPTER 2

 

 

OTTOMAN ORIENTALISM

 

 

The previous chapter on the evolution of the Orientalist discourse as well as the discourse of Orientalism aims to provide the reader with a general outlook of how the Western perception of the East has developed and how travel writing has contributed to this process. In this chapter, the possibility of arguing for other Orientalisms is discussed. In doing this discussion, the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism,” namely the systematic Ottoman perception of the Orient, is focused on. Indeed, this argument has not a well-established background. It has emerged in the 2000s, particularly as a result of a recent trend in post- colonial studies for widening the scope of Orientalism by using the framework that Orientalism offers to understand any kind of colonial-discursive relationship. Those arguing for a particular “Ottoman Orientalism” suggest that in the nineteenth century, together with the reforms for centralization, the Ottoman centre’s perception of its Arab periphery had been transformed, and this transformation can be understood within a colonial setting. In other words, the Ottomans adopted the discourses of Western imperialist states and their Orientalist agents in order to define and perceive their Arab provinces. This adopted discourse produced a particular Orientalist mode of thinking evident in the works of Ottoman travellers, intellectuals and bureaucrats as well as in the policies of late nineteenth century Ottoman governments.

This chapter focuses on the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism” and questions the applicability of Saidian Orientalism to the Ottoman case as advocated by the proponents of this argument. It focuses on some structural conceptual problems labelling the Ottoman perception of Arabs as Orientalist, and aims to demonstrate that Saidian Orientalism does not fully fit into the Ottoman case. The first section of this chapter deals with the attempts to extend the scope of Orientalism by introducing new Orientalisms, such as the Russian or the Japanese versions. The second and third sections review the “Ottoman

Orientalism” literature and discuss the limits of applicability of Saidian Orientalism to the Ottoman perception of the Orient.

 

2.1.          New Orientalisms

From the 1990s onwards, post-colonial/subaltern studies have relatively been a well-established field of social science and, compared to the earlier periods, both the quality and the quantity of the works on “post-colonial condition have increased. Moreover, the definition of the “colonial power” and “colonized” was extended. Before, post-colonial studies mainly focused on British, French and German colonialism of the nineteenth century and American and Soviet encroachments to the Third World after the end of the Second World War to a lesser degree.⁸³ However, recently, new actors have been defined, whose policies somehow resembled to the “classical” or “modern” colonial powers. Therefore, there emerge new Orientalisms besides the British, French, German or American versions.

One of these new Orientalisms is the “Russian Orientalism.” The proponents of this argument claim that the colonial policies and discourses of the Russian Empire are so similar to the British and French ones that one can advocate for a specific “Russian Orientalism.” According to the scholars,

⁸³ Just to cite a few examples, one can refer to David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Nicholas Tromans (ed.), The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, (London: Tate, 2008); Andrew Long, “The Hidden and the Visible in British Orientalism: The Case of Lawrence of Arabia,” Middle East Critique, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2009): 21- 37; Madeleine Dobie, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Srilata Ravi, “Adventure in Malaya: Henri Fauconnier and French Orientalism,” Asia-Europe Journal, Vol.1, No. 3 (Aug., 2003): 419-432; Gerald Needham, “Orientalism in France,” Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 4, The Crisis in the Discipline (Winter, 1982): 338-341; Jennifer Jenkins, “German Orientalism: Introduction,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2004): 97-100; Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Ursula Wokoeck, German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945, (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Mae M. Ngai, “American Orientalism,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Sep., 2000): 408- 415; Meghana Nayak and Christopher Malone, “American Orientalism and American Exceptionalism: A Critical Rethinking of US Hegemony,” The International Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June, 2009): 253-276.

through the attempts of modernization and westernization, especially in the nineteenth century, the Russians turned out to be a colonial power, whose discourse regarding its Southern and Eastern peoples were quite Orientalist in a Saidian sense. What is more, they argue that from the early nineteenth century onwards, the Russians were aware that the knowledge of the East was essential for their colonial expansion; therefore, there emerged a significant body of Oriental Studies in this country. The Russian travellers’ perception of the Orient was almost the same with the Western perceptions, in other words, in discursive level an Orientalist depiction of the East was evident in the Russian travelogues. In sum, nineteenth century Russia might have gathered the three Saidian pursuits of Orientalism, namely Orientalism as an academic field, as a style of thought and as a corporate institution.⁸⁴

However, these scholars are also aware of the problems of extending Saidian Orientalism to Russia. First of all, Russia is a hybrid case, a “grand paradox”, as Sahni Kalpana writes, because of its westernizing but oriental characteristics. According to Kalpana, Russia adopted the Western model of progress without being colonized by Europe in order to distance itself from the “true barbarians” living in the southern and eastern borders of the Empire.⁸⁵ In other words, the “awkward triptych” placing Russia in the midst of the West and the East makes this country “not only the subject of Orientalist discourse but also the object of it.”⁸⁶ Therefore, Russian understanding of the Orient cannot be as similar to the Western understanding as it has been thought.

⁸⁴ For an argument of Russian Orientalism, see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sahni Kalpana, Crucifying the Orient: Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia, (Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 1997); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire : North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (Montréal, London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003); Izabela Kalinowska, Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient, (Rochester, N.Y. : University of Rochester Press, 2004); Elena Andreeva, Russia and Iran in the Great Game: Travelogues and Orientalism, (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

 

⁸⁵ Calpana, Crucifying the Orient, xv.

 

⁸⁶ Nathaniel Knight, “Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?,” Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2000): 74-100, 77.

Another problem of “Russian Orientalism” is its incompatibility with the monolithic nature of the Orientalist discourse. Unlike Western Orientalism, which has the tendency to create a unified perception of the Orient, the Russians looked for distinguishing between different lands and peoples. According to Nathaniel Knight:

Orientalism sweeps away the need for distinctions and focuses on the production of a core knowledge consisting of factual statements universally applicable to the orient as a whole. For Russians, however, it was not quite so easy to dispense with the particular. As is often pointed out, in Russia, the oriental “other” was not necessarily an unknown creature set apart by thousands of miles and vast oceans. In Russia, the “other” was all around – in ethnic enclaves penetrating deep into the heartland of Russian settlement, in scattered settlements and in vast stretches of borderland in which ethnic groups met and interacted over the course of centuries. In such a setting, the knowledge that one “other differed from another was of fundamental significance.⁸⁷

 

In sum, the argument for Russian Orientalism has two significant shortcomings, being the ambivalent Russian identity situated between the East and the West, and the lack of unified perception of the East. These two shortcomings draw the limits of the Russian version of Orientalism.

In addition to Russia, another new actor in the post-colonial studies is Japan. The debate on “Japanese Orientalism” is quite different from the Russian case because it is not related to the Japanese perception of the Orient, but rather to the Japanese perception of their colonies in the Far East, such as Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia, and Manchuria. In other words, in the Japanese case, Orientalism is used not as a specific Western or Western-like perception of the Orient, but as a representation of certain colonies by a certain colonial power.⁸⁸ According to Daisuke Nishihara, similar to Russia, Japan was an Eastern but, at the same time, a colonial power in the nineteenth century; therefore the reception of Said’s Orientalism in Japan produced mixed results. On the one hand, the Japanese appreciate Said’s effort to reveal the Western hegemonic perception of

⁸⁷ Knight, “Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862,” 97.

 

⁸⁸ For an argument of Japanese Orientalism see Brian Moeran, Language and Popular Culture in Japan, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989) and Jennifer Allen Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

the East, unifying and degrading the Eastern people as the “other” of the Western civilization; on the other hand, this reception does not give way to an anti- Western sentiment:

Rather, the manner in which Said's work was received emerged out of the feelings of guilt associated with the fact that Japan itself, just like Western nations, had been a colonizer. […] Thus, the history of the Japanese Empire cannot but become a target for severe criticism under Orientalist theory. As a result, Said's conception of postcolonialism was smoothly adopted by the tradition of Japanese Marxism that had condemned pre-war militarism. So- called left wing scholars started to apply Said's theory in order the better to analyze Japan's pre-war discourse on other Asian countries.⁸⁹

 

In other words, some Japanese scholars tried to utilize Said’s theoretical findings to explain the Japanese perception of their own colonies; the similarity between the Western and Japanese colonial ventures directed them to argue for a specific Japanese Orientalism.

The problem of extending Saidian Orientalism to the Japanese case is the possibility of generalizing the conclusions of Said regarding the Western perception of the East to any other colonial power’s perception of their colonies.⁹⁰ This generalization contradicts with the fundamental elements of Orientalism. To start with, in Japan, in the nineteenth century, there was no academic studies and thereby no extensive knowledge accumulation about the

⁸⁹ Daisuke Nishihara, “Said, Orientalism, and Japan,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 25, Special Issue: Edward Said and Critical Decolonization (2005): 241-253, 243.

 

⁹⁰ Such a generalization was also evident in other studies. For example, Wurlig Borchigud mentions about a Chinese “Orientalist,” Ma Hetian, who had written about Inner and Outer Mongolia in the mid-1920s. He wrote that similar to the Western Orientalists, “Ma had an authority to speak of his ‘inferior’ Inner Mongol objects as their civiliser as well as to represent his ‘helpless’ Outer Mongol ‘brothers’ as their national guardian.” See Wurlig Borchigud, “Between Chinese Nationalism and Soviet Colonisation: A Chinese Orientalist's Narration of Inner and Outer Mongolia (1926-1927),” Inner Asia, Vol. 4 (2002): 27-46, 27. Another advocate of Chinese Orientalism was Christian Tyler, who perceived Chinese policy towards East Turkistan as “Chinese Orientalism.” See Christian Tyler, Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang, (London: John Murray, 2003). Another attempt to enlarge the scope of Orientalism is the “Latin American Orientalism” which focuses on the perception of the Orientals brought to Latin America by the Spanish conquistadors. In his article entitled “Latin American Orientalism,” Hernan G. H. Taboada, writes that the Spanish brought their perception of the Moor to Latin America and made it diffused into the natives of the continent. From the late eighteenth century onwards this Spanish-origin perception gave way to an Anglo-French version of the perception of Orientals in Latin American countries. See Hernan G. H. Taboada, “Latin American Orientalism: From Margin to Margin,” in Sylvia Nagy-Zekmi, Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said, (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006).

colonized territories to produce and reproduce colonial presence. As Ronald Suleski writes, for instance, Chinese studies in Japan have developed into one of the most active and productive fields of academic inquiry in the world only after the end of the Second World War and particularly in the 1960s, long after the end of Japanese colonial project.⁹¹ Moreover, in discursive level, Saidian Orientalism was based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident; this was not only a distinction of superior- inferior; rather, it was the distinction between the superior West and inferior East. In other words, Orientalism is a concept designed for a particular geography (the Orient), particular actors (the Western statesmen, intellectuals, artists, men of letters, and Eastern countries and peoples), and although being less clear, a particular time period (from the late eighteenth century onwards). The attempts to see any kind of colonial discourse based on the civilizational supremacy of the colonial power and the inferiority of the colonized as Orientalism, means the abuse of Saidian definition of Orientalism as “a generic term” employed to “describe the Western approach to the Orient.”⁹²

Despite its hybrid nature, “Russian Orientalism” seems to be more similar to the Saidian sense of Orientalism, since it denotes a non-Western but extremely Westernized perception of the Orient by the Russian academia, intellectuals, or statesmen. What is more, this perception contributed to the production and reproduction of colonial rule in the Russian periphery. The argument for “Japanese Orientalism” is more difficult to sustain because the targeted area was not the Orient; but the colonies of an Eastern colonial power. Therefore, there is the problem of extreme generalization of a particular phenomenon. However, the most recent offspring of Orientalism, namely the argument of “Ottoman Orientalism,” is a very interesting case study regarding the applicability of Saidian sense of Orientalism to the perceptions of an Oriental actor about the Orient. The rest of this chapter, therefore, focuses on the recent

⁹¹ Ronald Suleski, “Modern Chinese Studies in Japan and the West: Coming Closer Together,”

The China Quarterly, No. 75 (Sep., 1978), 655-659, 655.

 

⁹² Said, Orientalism, 73.

literature on Ottoman Orientalism and discusses the degree of applicability of Orientalism to the Ottoman case.

 

2.2.          Orientalism alla turca? Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika

Setting the relationship between the Ottoman imperial centre and the peripheral provinces within a colonial framework has already been discussed in the literature on Ottoman history;⁹³ however incorporating the Saidian understanding of discourse into this analysis is a relatively novel approach. The first attempt to link Orientalism with the Ottoman Empire is the article written by Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika and published in 2000 in Die Welt des Islams with a stimulating title “Orientalism ‘alla turca’.”⁹⁴ Indeed, Herzog and Motika do not intend to apply post-colonial studies to the Ottoman case; they do not engage in a critique of Ottoman centre-periphery relations as a kind of colonial relationship. Rather, they try to examine the travelogues written by the Ottoman travellers on their travels to the Muslim “outback” of the Empire, and to reveal their self-perception vis-à-vis their perception of the regions that they had been to. Therefore their analysis is very much similar to the studies of literary criticism, rather than the studies of political science or history.⁹⁵

⁹³ For example, Efraim Karsh reinterpreted Said’s brief account of Ottoman millet system as an indication of “Ottoman colonialism;” see Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History, (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2007), 109. Heather Jane Sharkey labelled the Ottoman rule in Egypt as “Ottoman colonialism;” see Heather Jane Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 126. Ussama Makdisi goes one step further and defined the Ottoman rule in Lebanon in the nineteenth century as “Ottoman imperialism;” see Ussama Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman Imperialism: Modernity, Violence and the Cultural Logic of Ottoman Reform,” in Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber (eds.), The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, (Beirut: Orient Institut der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft, 2002), 29-48.

 

⁹⁴ Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism alla turca: Late 19^th / Early 20^th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’.”

 

⁹⁵ Besides Herzog and Motika, Ezgi Dikici’s article on the signs of Orientalism in the some stories of Turkish author Ömer Seyfeddin (1884-1920) is another literary linkage between Orientalism and the Ottoman Empire; however Dikici does not generalize Orientalist discourse to the whole Ottoman intellectual circles and she only focuses on a particular author. See Ezgi Dikici, “Orientalism and the Male Subject of Turkish Nationalism in the Stories of Ömer Seyfeddin,” Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Apr., 2008): 85-99.

In their article, Herzog and Motika focus not only on the perceptions, but also on the patterns of travel and travel writing in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Therefore, the article introduces some of the Ottoman travelogues about the Ottoman periphery to the readers and explains why and how they had been written. Moreover, it tries to reveal why the Ottomans interested in travel and travel writing in the nineteenth century more than any other period. In displaying the reasons for the increasing Ottoman interest to travel and travel writing, the article excerpts a nineteenth century travelogue’s preface written by Ahmed Midhat (1844-1912), a prominent Turkish author of the nineteenth century, and mentions how Ahmed Midhat’s perception of travel and travel writing differs from the Orientalist version. Indeed, according to Herzog and Motika, Ahmed Midhat was aware of the power/knowledge relationship that the European Orientalists established to understand and represent the Orient:

Ahmed Midhat Efendi clearly sees an intimate connection between European travel cum travel-accounts and the economic and political dominance of the European powers. However, in his view the connection of travel and power does not invalidate the accumulation of universally valid knowledge achieved in this way. Nor does he in this context unduly refer the lack of an Ottoman interest in travel to an “Orientalist” representational model of “Oriental” culture. This means that he does not essentialize a (defective) “Oriental” or “Muslim” otherness vis-à-vis Europe. Rather, the focus of his criticism aims at the bureaucratic and commercial middle and upper strata of the Ottoman imperial centre.⁹⁶

 

In other words, Ahmed Midhat’s awareness of European essentializations and generalizations directed him to a critical stance, in which he intended to avoid such defective articulations in his writings. However, this does not necessarily mean that Ahmed Midhat’s writings had no similarities with the Orientalist literature. Rather, Herzog and Motika argue that despite his effort to define a middle position between Western and Islamic civilizations, uniting the material elements of the former and the moral elements of the latter, Ahmed Midhat perceived the Ottoman Empire as a natural leader of the Islamic

⁹⁶ Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 150. The travelogue was written by Mehmed Emin on his voyage to Central Asia and published in the printing house of Ahmed Midhat, who also wrote its preface. See the preface of Mehmed Emin, Đstanbul’dan Asya-yı Vusta’ya Seyahat, (Đstanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1296 [1878]).

community bringing European innovations and “new laws of civilization” to the Islamic world. This means, according to the authors of the article, a mission civilisatrice ottomane.⁹⁷ That is to say, the Ottomans distinguished between civilized and uncivilized parts of the Empire and assumed a self-responsibility to civilize the underdeveloped regions. However, Herzog and Motika are aware that although the Ottomans had a civilizing mission mentality, this was different from the European mentality. Again, referring to a novel of Ahmed Midhat, Rikalda Yahud Amerika’da Vahşet Alemi⁹⁸ (Rikalda or the World of Savagery in America) Herzog and Motika argue for an anti-Orientalist stance in Ahmed Midhat’s writings, particularly with regard to the Ottoman conceptualization of civilization:

It is interesting to note that Ahmed Midhat, in his fictitious travelogue Rikalda, criticised what the Europeans believed to be an inseparable link between Christianity and civilisation: For the Europeans, he claims, the difference between savagery and civilisation was Christianity alone. A savage people was regarded as civilised by Europe just by its acceptance of Christianity, whereas even the most civilised peoples of India and China were regarded by them as barbarians. For most modern Ottoman travellers, civilisation was not only Islam but a combination of modern [i.e. Western] civilisation and Islam.⁹⁹

 

In other words, according to Herzog and Motika, the Ottoman perception of civilization differs from the European one. The Ottomans argued that the European conceptualization of civilization was religious; whereas they perceived civilization as a combination of religious and secular elements.

Herzog and Motika’s examination of the Ottoman travelogues is equally cautious. While they try to establish similarities between the Ottoman and Western traveller’s perception of the Orient, they do not clearly link the Ottoman perception with a colonial relationship between the Ottoman imperial centre and the Muslim periphery. Rather, they focus on the different perceptions of different communities establishing the Muslim “outback” of the Empire living both within

⁹⁷ Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 150-151.

 

⁹⁸ Ahmed Midhat, Rikalda Yahud Amerika’da Vahşet Alemi, (Đstanbul: [Tercüman-ı Hakikat Matbaası], 1307 [1890]).

 

⁹⁹ Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 191.

and outside the state borders, such as the Tuaregs, the Central Asian nomadic Turkish tribes, the Indian Muslims, the Sudanese, Iraqi Arabs, or Iranian Shiites:

There existed no overall picture or discourse which defined the non-Ottoman Muslim. However, there seems to have been a common feeling of Ottoman superiority vis-à-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.¹⁰⁰

 

Thus, Herzog and Motika emphasize that the Ottoman travellers developed a hierarchical representation of the Muslim communities extending from the category of “savage” to “brother.” Therefore, they attract the attention to the lack of monolithization in the Ottoman discourse of the Orient.

In sum, Herzog and Motika’s study of Ottoman travelogues do not label the Ottoman travellers of the nineteenth century as Orientalist in a Western sense. Rather, they underline the specificities of the Ottoman perception of their Muslim periphery by labelling it as “Orientalism alla turca.” According to their analysis, there are some significant differences between the Ottoman and Western perceptions of the Orient. First of all, the Ottoman and Western conceptualization of civilization are different. What the Ottomans sought was not to adopt the Western civilization as a whole; rather they tried to establish a synthesis of Western civilization with Islam in order to be able to project its achievements to the underdeveloped parts of the Islamic world, at least rhetorically. Secondly, unlike the Western inclination for essentializing and generalizing the Orient as a monolithic entity, the Ottomans focused on different characteristics of different Muslim communities. They established a “hierarchy of relegations” among these communities and declared the Ottoman superiority over the other Muslim peoples. This sense of superiority, according to Herzog and Motika, is the only factor that unites the Ottoman travellers. All in all, they conclude that even if one can label the Ottoman travelogues to the Muslim outback as Orientalist, he/she should be aware that this labelling is different from the discourse of Western Orientalism.

¹⁰⁰ Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 195.

2.3.          Ottoman Orientalism/Ottoman Colonialism: Ussama Makdisi and Selim Deringil

Although Herzog and Motika’s study underlines the differences between the Western Orientalism and the quasi-Orientalist writings of the Ottomans, the articles of Ussama Makdisi and Selim Deringil almost equate the Ottoman perception of the Orient with the Western perception by examining them within the same framework of colonial discourse. The article of Makdisi was published in 2002 in American Historical Review with the simple but ambitious title of “Ottoman Orientalism.”¹⁰¹ This was the first utilization of the concept of “Ottoman Orientalism,” similar to the other versions such as “British Orientalism” or “French Orientalism,” meaning that the Ottomans were not only the victims of European imperialism, rather they were similar to the European imperialist powers in terms of their perceptions on the Orient. Selim Deringil followed Makdisi by publishing his article in 2003 in Comparative Studies in Society and History with a long title: “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate.”¹⁰² As the title indicates, what Deringil aims in this article was to apply the findings of post-colonial studies to the Ottoman case. These two articles have significant similarities regarding their evaluation of the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire and the policies of the imperial centre towards the Arab provinces of the Empire.

To start with, the aim of both authors is to extend post-colonial studies to the Ottoman Empire. Makdisi clearly stipulates that his aim was to employ the conclusions of Saidian understanding of Orientalism to the Ottoman case:

[t]his essay, therefore, extends Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism by looking at how Ottomans represented their own Arab periphery as an integral

 

¹⁰¹ Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”.

 

¹⁰² Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate”. Indeed, Deringil writes a book published in 1998, which included the precedents of the arguments crystallized in this article. See Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876- 1909, (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998). However, in this dissertation, rather than his book, which does not clearly mention about Ottoman colonialism, his article is preferred to be analyzed.

part of their engagement with, explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East.¹⁰³

 

Therefore, he argues that there is a particular version of Orientalism, which he calls the “Ottoman Orientalism.” He defines this version as such:

By Ottoman Orientalism, I mean a complex of Ottoman attitudes produced by a nineteenth-century age of Ottoman reform that implicitly and explicitly acknowledged the West to be the home of progress and the East, writ large, to be a present theatre of backwardness.¹⁰⁴

 

In other words, what leads Makdisi to coin the concept of “Ottoman Orientalism” is his perception of the Ottoman modernization as a phenomenon producing an ultimate distinction between the superior West and inferior East, which is the essence of Saidian understanding of Orientalism.

Deringil, on the other hand, does not underline Saidian Orientalism; indeed, he does not even mention about “Ottoman Orientalism” at all. What he focuses on is the “Ottoman colonialism” instead of “Ottoman Orientalism:” “In this article I will argue that as the nineteenth century neared its end, the Ottomans adopted a colonial stance toward the peoples of the periphery of their empire.”¹⁰⁵ In other words, Deringil clearly labels the Ottoman Empire as a colonial power administering and perceiving its periphery in a colonial setting.

Despite this conceptual difference, both authors mainly concentrate on the centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire in a way to establish a linkage between the Orientalist discourse and colonial intercourse. Unlike Herzog and Motika, who turn their attention to the Ottoman perception of the Muslim “outback,” namely to the Muslims living outside the borders of the Empire, Makdisi and Deringil examine the Ottoman perceptions and policies regarding the Ottoman provinces located in the Orient. Makdisi particularly gives priority to the province of Mount Lebanon, while Deringil provides the

 

 

¹⁰³ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 768.

 

¹⁰⁴ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 769.

 

¹⁰⁵ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 313.

reader with analyses on wider regions, including the provinces of Hejaz, Yemen, and Tripolitania.

In sum, Makdisi and Deringil argue that during the nineteenth century (or in a particular period in the nineteenth century) the relationship between the imperial centre and Arab periphery of the Empire was a colonial relationship. As Makdisi argues:

[…T]hrough efforts to study, discipline, and improve imperial subjects, Ottoman reform created a notion of the pre-modern within the empire in a manner akin to the way European colonial administrators represented their colonial subjects. This process culminated in the articulation of a modern Ottoman Turkish nation that had to lead the empire’s other putatively stagnant ethnic and national groups into an Ottoman modernity. Islam in this vein served to signify the empire’s commonality with the Muslim majority of its subjects, but this commonality was implicitly and explicitly framed within a civilizational and temporal discourse that ultimately justified Ottoman Turkish rule over Muslim and non-Muslim subjects.¹⁰⁶

 

Quite similarly, Deringil advocates the existence of a distinct Ottoman colonialism towards the end of the nineteenth century:

It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting. It is my contention that the Ottoman elite conflated the ideas of modernity and colonialism, and applied the latter as a means of survival against an increasingly hostile world.¹⁰⁷

 

From these two excerpts, some common points could be derived. First of all, according to Makdisi and Deringil, the colonial relationship between the Ottoman imperial centre and the Arab periphery was a direct result of the Ottoman modernization. Adopting some aspects of the Western civilization had been perceived by the ruling elite as the only way of survival. This would not only modernize the Ottoman Empire, but also demonstrate to the Europeans that the Empire could be a modern state while retaining its Islamic nature. In borrowing from the West, the Ottomans adopted not only technological achievements or some institutions, but also the colonial discourse and methods in order to employ them to sustain the territorial integrity of the Empire. In doing

¹⁰⁶ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 769.

 

¹⁰⁷ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 311-312.

that, they developed the category of “pre-modern” to distinguish themselves from the backward components of the Empire (as Makdisi argues), and conflated the ideas of modernity and colonialism as a means of survival in a hostile world (as Deringil argues). Whatever the reason, the Ottomans utilized colonial discourse and practices on their Arab periphery.

Secondly, Makdisi and Deringil underline the significance of Islam in this colonial setting. They argue that the role of Islam is one of the most significant differences of the Ottoman Orientalism/colonialism from the Western Orientalism /colonialism. Islam turned out to be the ultimate legitimation for the Ottoman rule over the Muslim constituents and it was utilized in the nineteenth century in a way to converge with the components of Western civilization. As Deringil writes:

One half of this borrowed colonialism was based on tried and true practices of Islamic Ottoman empire building; the Caliphate, the Sharia’, Hanefi Islamic jurisprudence, guilds, and Turkish/Islamic law (kanun/yasa). The other half, or ‘new’ half, was a creature of the nineteenth-century positivist, Enlightenment- inspired centralizing reforms.¹⁰⁸

 

To put it differently, according to Deringil, Ottoman colonialism was not solely derived from the adoption of Western discourses, practices and structures; rather Islam was also used as a means of colonialism through several institutions (such as the Caliphate) and legal frameworks (such as the Islamic jurisprudence). Third, Makdisi and Deringil resemble the Ottoman perception of the Arab periphery to the perceptions of the European colonial powers such as Britain or France on their colonies, such as India or Algeria. In making this comparison, they utilize the concepts favoured by post-colonial studies; among them the most significant ones are the “civilizing mission” and “white man’s burden.” For

example, Deringil writes:

Ottoman’s constant use of the “civilizing motif” was similar to the White Man's Burden as applied by the British Raj in India, where all opposition to

 

 

¹⁰⁸ Deringil names Ottoman colonialism as “borrowed colonialism,” in order to emphasize that the Ottomans adopted colonial methods and discourses in order to ensure the survival of the Empire. Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 316.

British rule was dubbed, as by nature, “fanatic” as in a “fanatic Moulvi” who “provoked the fanaticism of the natives.¹⁰⁹

 

Similarly, according to Makdisi:

By casting the Ottoman Empire as the progenitor of the Enlightenment ideal (and therefore its natural inheritor), capable of its own renaissance, Ottoman reformers also articulated a notion of the “Ottoman man’s burden” toward its subject populations, who would have to be disciplined and reformed before the Ottoman Empire could firmly establish itself as a civilized power.¹¹⁰

 

In other words, by employing such European conceptualizations to describe the Ottoman discourse on the Arab provinces, Makdisi and Deringil try to demonstrate that the European and Ottoman “colonial” discourses were quite similar; hence they open the way for arguing a particular “Ottoman Orientalism” likewise the British or French Orientalism.

In sum, the debate of “Ottoman Orientalism” is quite stimulating in the sense that it focuses on a long-underestimated dimension of Ottoman studies, namely the Ottoman discourses on the East. The Ottoman perceptions of the West and Western civilization have already been covered by several works (most of which are cited in the third part of this dissertation on the Ottoman perception of civilization); however its perceptions of the East have not been discussed thoroughly. The applicability of post-colonial studies to the Ottoman Empire could inspire a better understanding not only of the concept of Orientalism, but also of the Ottoman intellectual history. However, besides these contributions, the debate of “Ottoman Orientalism” has significant shortcomings, most of which are also admitted by its proponents. These problems might result in questioning both the limits of the applicability of post-colonial studies to the Ottoman case and the very definition of the concept of “Ottoman Orientalism.”

To start with the conceptual problems, the concept of “Ottoman Orientalism” had significant differences from the Saidian understanding of this concept. The Ottoman perception of the Orient does not totally fit into Said’s three pursuits of Orientalism (namely, Orientalism as an academic field of study,

¹⁰⁹ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 318.

 

¹¹⁰ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 782.

as a style of thought and as a corporate institution used to dominate and authorize the Orient). First of all, according to Said, the knowledge of the Orient is extremely significant for the establishment of biased and prejudicial accounts of this particular region. That is why, Oriental studies had been consolidated both institutionally and academically in the nineteenth century in the Western world. However, in the Ottoman Empire such an academic study of the Orient had not existed as systematically as in the West. The Ottomans did not engage in linguistic studies such as Sinology or Indology. Their interest to the Arabic and Persian as Oriental languages did not arise from an academic attraction; rather Arabic and Persian had been taught in Ottoman madrasah curricula for centuries for theological or literary purposes.¹¹¹ Beyond that, the Ottomans did not also engage in archaeological or anthropological studies as intensely as the Western scientists did in various parts of the world, because they did not perceive the Orient as an “object of study” in a Western sense. However, there are always some exceptions to this general trend; one of such exceptions is Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910), the famous nineteenth century Ottoman archaeologist and artist, who has been referred in Makdisi’s and Deringil’s articles as a proof of the existence of Ottoman Oriental Studies.¹¹² As a disciple of the famous French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823-1892), of course, Osman Hamdi Bey was influenced from the Orientalist literature and art; however, it would be more accurate to perceive him as an exception because his studies did not suffice to create a body of Oriental studies in the Ottoman Empire. All in all, one of the most significant components of Orientalism, namely the academic knowledge of the Orient treating the region as an “object of study,” is largely absent in the Ottoman Empire.

 

¹¹¹ For a brief account of Arabic and Persian teaching in classical Ottoman education, see Đsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Đlmiye Teşkilatı, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1988), 19-31 and Đlhan Tekeli and Selim Đlkin, Osmanlı Đmparatorluğu’nda Eğitim ve Bilgi Üretim Sisteminin Oluşumu ve Dönüşümü, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1999), 21.

 

¹¹² Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 783-787; Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 331-333.

Secondly, Said particularly perceives Orientalism as a style of thought based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and Occident. This distinction was first religious; the reason of its insurmountable nature was the ultimate distinction between Christianity and other monotheistic or polytheistic religions. In the nineteenth century, the concept of civilization, which also included religion to some extent, became the main medium of differentiation. Applied to the Ottoman case, it can be argued that the Ottomans had also distinguished between the Orient and Occident based on religion and then on civilization. As Makdisi writes, “[j]ust as European Orientalism was based on an opposition between the Christian West and the Islamic Orient, the Ottomans believed that there were some essential differences that distinguished them from the West – especially a notion of Islam.”¹¹³ However, in this distinction the Ottomans were generally perceived themselves as a part of the Orient, not the Occident. True, in the nineteenth century, they tried to adopt some elements (particularly the material ones) of the Western civilization; however, this does not necessarily mean that they began to perceive themselves as Westerners, as the members of the Occidental community. Rather, they were sensitive to preserve their Oriental morality (religion and ethics) although sometimes they were critical of the current problems of the Orient. This criticism was not similar to Western Orientalism, which perceived the stagnancy of the Orient as a fixed phenomenon. The Ottomans were aware of the detriments of Western imperialism and argued for the modernization of the East (in particular the Islamic world) in order to cope with this threat. What they criticized, therefore, was the Eastern indolence, and what they tried was to evoke a revival based on the convergence of Western modernity and Islamic morality. This means that rather than producing and reproducing the ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and Occident, they tried to reach a synthesis.¹¹⁴

¹¹³ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 769.

 

¹¹⁴ For a detailed analysis of the Ottoman perception of civilization and their Oriental identity see Chapter 7 of this dissertation.

Makdisi and Deringil rightly argue that the Ottoman attempt for modernization resulted in the Ottoman perception of some communities of the Empire as backward within a civilizational framework, similar to the perceptions of Western Orientalism. However, this was the perception of the Ottoman ruling elite, who, at the same time, perceived themselves as modernized-yet-oriental. In other words, the Ottoman elite’s perception of, for example, the Arabs of Iraqi provinces, was the perception of a relatively under-developed Oriental group by a more developed Oriental group. In other words, although it was similar to a Westerner’s perception of an Easterner, it was not the same in essence. Indeed, Makdisi himself was aware of this paradox. He writes:

[Ottoman Orientalism] posited an empire in “decline” yet capable of an independent renaissance, westernized but not Western, leader of a reinvigorated Orient yet no longer of the “Orient” represented by the West, nor that embodied in its unreformed subjects. Ottoman Orientalism accommodated both strictly secularist and explicitly Islamist interpretations of modern Ottoman identity. It discredited Western representations of Ottoman indolence by contrasting Ottoman modernity with the unreformed and stagnant landscape of the empire. In effect, it de-Orientalized the empire by Orientalizing it.¹¹⁵

 

In other words, Makdisi admits the ambiguous positioning of the Ottoman ruling elite between the Western world and its Eastern periphery, and surpasses this paradox by arguing that the Ottomans demonstrated to the Europeans that there was an Ottoman modernity through distancing themselves from the underdeveloped parts of the Empire. In doing that, he presents another paradox, “the de-Orientalization of the Empire by Orientalizing it.”

What is more, the utilization of the concepts like “Ottoman civilizing mission” or “Ottoman man’s burden” is equally subject to debate. According to Robert Geraci, there are two kinds of civilizing mission, one internal and the other external. The external civilizing mission meant the Western colonial powers’ discourse regarding the “uncivilized” inhabitants of the non-European world, while the internal one can be seen everywhere in the world in terms of provision  of  internal  civilizational  development  of  one  states’  citizens.

 

 

¹¹⁵ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 772-773.

Considering the French case, Geraci explains the internal civilizing mission as such:

Arguably, one of the first civilizing missions was the spread of the French Revolution – that great crusade for progress – throughout Europe by Napoleonic France. Afterward, European states and elites undertook the extension of civilization downward on the social scale and outward from capitals to the rural world. As Eugen Weber has described it, the process of making “peasants into Frenchmen” – rooting out linguistic and intellectual parochialism and instilling what were considered proper manners, mores, and mentalities through nationalizing institutions such as schools – was essentially a civilizing mission.¹¹⁶

 

In line with this explanation, the “Ottoman civilizing mission,” if such a concept can be used, is more domestic than external, since the Arab provinces were an integral part of the Empire. In other words, just as the French state had tried to transform “peasants into Frenchmen,” the Ottoman state had also attempted to create an Ottoman citizenship including the nomadic tribes as well as the settled Arabic people of the Empire. The Ottoman perception of the inhabitants of Arabia as Muslims more than Arabs almost until the last decades of the Ottoman Empire enhances the argument for internal civilizing mission instead of the colonial-external version.

To recapitulate, considering the three pursuits of Saidian Orientalism, the argument for “Ottoman Orientalism” does not fit into the first pursuit, namely Orientalism as an academic discipline, and only partially fits into the second pursuit, namely Orientalism as a style of thought. Indeed, what Makdisi and Deringil focus on is the third pursuit of Orientalism, being the corporate institutional characteristics of this particular body of discourse, which has been used to dominate and authorize the Orient. Both authors either directly or indirectly mention that the Ottomans had engaged in colonial discourses and practices somewhere in the nineteenth century. However, the perception of Ottoman Empire as a colonial power is equally problematic.

In the beginnings of his article, Deringil makes a quotation from Edhem Eldem and a reference to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s (1870-1924) famous pamphlet

¹¹⁶ Robert P. Geraci, “The Concept of Civilization,” in John Merriman and Jay Winter (ed.), Europe 1789 to 1914, Vol. 1 of Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, 5 Volumes, (New York: Thomson Gale, 2006), 461.

Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism in order to base his arguments on Ottoman colonialism. The quotation that he makes from Eldem argues that the Ottoman Empire imitated the Western colonial powers in the nineteenth century through consolidating a homogenous core region based on Eastern Thrace and Anatolia and establishing an Arabian periphery.¹¹⁷ Then Deringil argues that his definition of colonialism closely follows the Leninist position, which he finds one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism.¹¹⁸ However, when this pamphlet of Lenin is exposed to closer analysis, there is hardly any proposition that could be applied to the Ottoman case in a way to explain Ottoman colonialism. What is more, in line with the propositions that Lenin made, it can be argued that the Ottoman Empire was the victim of the Western imperialism, not an active actor of it. In other words, the Leninist perception of colonialism could not easily be adopted to define an “Ottoman colonialism.”¹¹⁹

Creating single definitions for the concepts of colonialism and imperialism is quite difficult because there are multiple definitions for each of them. For the purposes of this dissertation, colonialism can be briefly defined as “the settlement of territory in one region or country by people from outside that area, with control over the new territory generally remaining in the hands of the country from which the colonizers have come.”¹²⁰ Imperialism, on the other

¹¹⁷ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 312.

 

¹¹⁸ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 312, footnote no. 1.

 

¹¹⁹ For an English translation of this pamphlet, which had first been published in Petrograd in 1917, see Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism, [unknown translator] (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1934). Anthony Brewer makes a brief summary of Lenin’s pamphlet and argues that he focused on the following themes in order to reveal the emergence of imperialism: (1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’ of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among themselves; and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

 

¹²⁰ Alastair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 34.

hand, can be described as “the larger organization of colonies into one economic, military or political system controlled by the imperial power.”¹²¹ Said’s own definition of imperialism is also important to set the relationship between imperialism and colonialism:

As I shall be using the term, “imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; “colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.¹²²

 

Keeping these definitions in mind, the labelling of Ottoman rule over the Arab provinces as colonialism has some significant problems. True, there had been Ottoman settlements in the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these settlements had significant similarities with settler colonies of other nations; however, in the Middle East, such settlements were quite insignificant. What is more, in the Middle Eastern provinces until the mid- nineteenth century, there had been a significant autonomy; the local elites were in charge to a great extent besides a governor appointed by the centre. Even in the eighteenth century, the governors in some provinces were appointed from the local notable families such as Al-Azm family in Syria and Jalili family in Mosul.¹²³ According to Thomas Philipp, the loyalty of these families to the centre “was not just a cause of paying lip service;” the reason for their obedience was that “[…t]he Ottoman political system was the frame of reference for their own worldview and gave, in the last analysis, legitimacy to their own acts.”¹²⁴ Hence the classical definition of colonialism, like the Leninist definition, can not

¹²¹ Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, 34.

 

¹²² Said, Orientalism, 8.

 

¹²³ Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 47. Other notable families such as the Bakri family in Cairo, Khalidi and Alami family in Jerusalem, Jabiri family in Aleppo, and Gaylani family in Baghdad had significant political authority in these respective cities. See Albert Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 11. For a brief account of Ottoman rule in the Middle East, see the Chapter 10 of this dissertation.

 

¹²⁴ Thomas Philipp, “Bilād al-Šām in the Modern Period: Integration into the Ottoman Empire and New Relations with Europe,” Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies/Revue d'études arabes et islamiques, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2004): 401-418, 405.

easily be applied to the Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces of the Empire at least until the mid-nineteenth century.

Then what had happened in the mid-nineteenth century that transformed the Ottoman-Arab relations so dramatically and directed Makdisi and Deringil to argue for an “Ottoman colonialism”? The answer they give to this question was the Ottoman centralization. Makdisi and Deringil prefer to read nineteenth century Ottoman centralization in a way to justify their argument of Ottoman colonialism. Accordingly, they argue that the Ottoman centralization, which had been perceived as a policy of ensuring the preservation of the Ottoman territorial integrity and provision of the survival of state, was realized in a way to curb the local autonomy of Arab periphery vis-à-vis the centre. This policy resulted in a “reformist imperial gaze,” which was based on the backwardness of Arab provinces of the Empire at the discursive level.¹²⁵

Indeed, this argument has validity to some extent. The Ottoman ruling elite might have perceived centralization as a means for diminishing the local autonomy of local rulers and chieftains. However, as Hasan Kayalı argues, they did not do this as a colonialist venture. The local elites were represented in the provincial assemblies, which contributed to the governance of the provinces and therefore retained most of their power.¹²⁶ What is more, in the late nineteenth century, the Arabs were not only represented in the local municipal councils and institutions but also in the Ottoman Parliament, which had first been convened in 1877 and then in 1908. Accordingly, in the two subsequent sessions of the Parliament between 1877 and 1878, there were 32 Arab deputies out of 232, elected through provincial councils from the provinces of Aleppo, Syria,

 

 

 

¹²⁵ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 770; Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 338.

 

¹²⁶ Hasan Kayalı, Jön Türkler ve Araplar: Osmanlıcılık, Erken Arap Milliyetçiliği ve Đslamcılık (1908-1918), (Đstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 20. For a detailed account of the transformation of the Ottoman rule in the Middle East, also see the Chapter 10 of this dissertation on the Ottoman perception of the Middle East.

Baghdad, Basra and Tripolitania.¹²⁷ According to Kayalı, these deputies perceived themselves as the representatives of the Empire; but rather than dealing with the general issues discussed in the Parliament, they preferred to focus on the local problems of their respective provinces.¹²⁸

The representation of the Arab community in the Ottoman Parliament was a phenomenon unseen in the European colonial states. Such a representation was never the case in the British or French Parliaments; there could be no Algerian parliamentarian in the French Parliament, or the presence of an Indian parliamentarian in the British Parliament was impossible in the nineteenth century.¹²⁹ In other words, the Arab representation in the provincial assemblies in local level and in the Ottoman Parliament in central level demonstrate that the centre-periphery relations were quite different from European colonial experience.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the policies for Ottoman centralization had been applied smoothly in the periphery. There had been significant reactions, even rebellions, to the Ottoman central rule and the Ottomans sometimes attempted to suppress these rebellions by force. Makdisi’s emphasis on the problematic status of the province of Mount Lebanon and

¹²⁷ Mount Lebanon was also invited to send deputies to the Assembly; however, in order to underline their extensive autonomy obtained in 1860s, the provincial assembly rejected this invitation. See, Kayalı, Jön Türkler ve Araplar, 28.

 

¹²⁸ Kayalı, Jön Türkler ve Araplar, 31. After its dissolution in 1878, the Parliament was reconvened in 1908; in this Parliament the number of Arab deputies was 60 out of 260. Kayalı, Jön Türkler ve Araplar, 94. According to Faroz Ahmad and Dankwart A. Rustow, in 1914, the number of Arab deputies reached a zenith, 84 out of 259; comprising almost one third of the Ottoman Parliament. See Faroz Ahmad and Dankwart A. Rustow, “Đkinci Meşrutiyet Döneminde Meclisler: 1908-1918,” Güney-Doğu Avrupa Araştırmaları Dergisi, Vol. 4-5 (1975-1976): 245-

284, 246.

 

¹²⁹ Even, the Jewish citizens of United Kingdom could not be a member of the Parliament; that is why the parents of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), a Jewish-origin British politician and prime minister, baptised him when he was thirteen years old. See Bernard Glassman, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory, (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2002), 38. Meanwhile, in the late Ottoman Parliaments there were several Jewish deputies representing different parts of the Empire. Emmanuel Carosso from Salonika, Vitali Faraci and Viktor Çorbacıoğlu from Đstanbul, Nesim Masliyah from Đzmir and Sasun Hasgayl from Baghdad were among such deputies. See Ahmad and Rustow, “Đkinci Meşrutiyet Döneminde Meclisler: 1908-1918,” see the list of deputies, 265-284.

Deringil’s emphasis on Yemen’s upsurge against central rule can be understood within this framework. However, whether to label the Ottoman suppression of these rebellions in order to provide the integration of the periphery as a colonial policy is a matter of discussion.

Another problem in the analysis of Makdisi and Deringil is their frequent comparison of the Ottoman Empire with the major colonial powers of the nineteenth century, namely Britain and France. This comparison usually disregards the structural differences between the imperial establishment of the Western colonial powers and the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century, Britain and France had a modern, centralized, and a novel form of empire, which was composed of a centre (or a core), being more or less a nation state, and a periphery (or colonies/dependencies). These states had their own colonial administrations, bureaucracies, establishments to rule their colonies. However, in the Ottoman Empire, there was no such “nationalized” centre. Makdisi’s equation of Ottomanization with nationalization does not necessarily mean the creation of a nationalized centre as in British or French cases because Ottomanization, particularly in the sense of Tanzimat reforms, based on the legal equality of all the subjects of the Ottoman Empire. In other words, unlike the inequality between the British/French citizens in the metropolis and their colonial subjects, in the Ottoman Empire, at least legally, starting from Tanzimat period, all the Ottoman subjects had the same rights and obligations. What is more, the main target of this legal equality was the non-Muslim constituents of the Empire, not the Arabs, who had assumed legal equality for centuries, since they were Muslims and subject to the Islamic law. In other words, even before the Tanzimat reforms, Arabs were not treated separately in legal sense. What Tanzimat brought, therefore, was the Ottoman citizenry. Makdisi also admits this reality by writing that:

[b]eginning with the Tanzimat, Ottoman reformers identified with these subjects as potential fellow citizens with whom they should be united in a newly defined common modern Ottoman patriotism. They also saw them as fellow victims of European intrigue and imperialism.¹³⁰

¹³⁰ Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 770.

The perception of legal equality continued until the end of the Empire despite some grave problems in its last decades in practical terms. In other words, there had been some significant practices disturbing the legal equality of Ottoman citizens. Makdisi and Deringil particularly refer to the Turkification policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP); however these policies could only be partially realized after the Balkan Wars, when the Ottoman military failures created a significant panic and anxiety about the future of the Empire. According to Benjamin Fortna, although the dominant trend in the late Ottoman historiography was to emphasize the supremacy of secular/Turkist thinking in the last decades of the Empire, this is a mistake; as he quoted from Şerif Mardin, this means the “underestimation of the sacred,” in other words, the Islamic credentials of the imperial structure.¹³¹ Similarly Ernest Dawn argues that even in the last decades of the Empire, most of the Ottoman intellectuals “[…] remained conservative and merely reaffirmed with renewed vigour the traditional belief that Islam was the best of all possible ways of life.”¹³² According to Feroz Ahmad, the leaders of the CUP had adhered to the ideology of Ottomanism and understood it as the only way to safeguard the Ottoman state. For them granting all the Ottomans, regardless of their ethnic origins or religion, the same rights and demanding the fulfilment of the same duties under the vague umbrella of Ottomanism would provide the survival of the state. It was only after the Balkan Wars, in other words, in the last years of the Empire that, the ruling elite’s ideology was transformed from an Ottomanist to a Turkist one.¹³³ To sum up, the emphasis on the CUP’s policies of Turkification seen in the articles of the authors arguing for “Ottoman Orientalism” resulted in their overestimation of Turkish nationalism. This overestimation contributes to their perception of the Ottoman ruling elite’s relations with the Arabs as Turkish-Arab relations as well

¹³¹ Benjamin C. Fortna, “Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman ‘Secular’ Schools,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Aug. 2000): 369-393, 370.

 

¹³² C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 129.

 

¹³³ Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 22-23, 154.

as their perception of Turkish self-perception of civilizational superiority over the Arabs. However, except for a brief period after the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913, Turkish nationalism had not been the dominant ideology of the Ottoman ruling elite, and even after that period until the disintegration of the Empire, there were always strong contestants of Turkish nationalism as Ottomanism or Islamism.

Another problem in the writings of Deringil and Makdisi is their perception of the Arab community of the Empire as an entirely passive entity. In other words, while focusing on the Ottoman perception of modernism and civilization, they neglected the Arab perception of these two concepts. In his study on Arabism, Dawn focuses on the Arab modernists and their intimate relationship with the Ottoman counterparts as well as with the Arab and Ottoman conservative Islamists. He writes:

All [Arab modernists, Ottoman modernists, Arab and Ottoman conservative Islamists] were unwilling to admit that the East was inferior to Europe; instead, all maintained that Islam and the culture of the East were intrinsically superior to Christianity and Western civilization. The conservatives simply denied inferiority and reaffirmed superiority. The modernists, both Ottomanist and Arabist, admitted inferiority in their day but explained it away by making their backwardness the result of deviation from true Islam, which was inherently the perfect system.¹³⁴

 

In other words, the majority of the Ottoman modernists also perceived themselves as backward; therefore, while perceiving the backwardness of the Arab territories they emphasized not their own civilizational superiority, but the civilizational superiority of the West. The Arab modernists, on the other hand, also labelled the underdeveloped parts of the Arab provinces as backward; in other words, there was not much difference between the Ottoman and Arab modernist perceptions.

The arguement of the passivity of Arabs consolidated Deringil’s argument of “Ottoman colonialism.” In his article, he defines “Ottoman colonialism” as “[…] the new attitude of increased distance from the population […] whereby the fact that the population in question is Muslim is not of the first

¹³⁴ Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism, 140.

degree of importance.”¹³⁵ Contrarily, according to Kemal Karpat, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Arabs and the Turks were closer more than any other period in their common history. Karpat argues that this was a period when the Turkish language had been influenced from Arabic the most and the communication between Arab and Turkish intellectuals had been quite developed. What is more, the common anti-imperialist discourse consolidated this communication to a great extent.¹³⁶ Unlike Makdisi and Deringil, Karpat also argues that after 1911, the CUP had entered into a process of reconciliation with the Arab community in order to foster a “Muslim opposition” against the Western imperialist expansion; hence they began to abandon their former secular and positivist policies disturbing the Arab community.¹³⁷ This also demonstrates that even in the CUP period, pro-Islamic discourses were also visible besides Turkist ones and they were equally significant.

In sum, treating the Ottoman centre-periphery relations as a colonial relationship is equally problematic compared to the first two pursuits of Saidian Orientalism. First of all, the territories exemplified in the articles of Makdisi and Deringil were not Ottoman colonies, but Ottoman provinces; their administration was not similar to, for example, the British administration of India or the French administration of Algeria. Secondly, from the Tanzimat period onwards, the Arabs were legally equal citizens of the Empire and they were represented both in local and central level. Of course, the process of centralization resulted in several problems in centre-periphery relations; however labelling the Ottoman handling with these problems as the Ottoman colonialist venture in the Arab periphery of the Empire might be misleading.

Up to now, the literature on Ottoman Orientalism has been criticized in line with the perspective of Saidian Orientalism; however, two additional

¹³⁵ Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’,” 338.

 

¹³⁶ Kemal H. Karpat, Ortadoğu’da Osmanlı Mirası ve Ulusçuluk, translated by Recep Boztemur, (Ankara: Đmge Yayınları, 2001), 149-151.

 

¹³⁷ Karpat, Ortadoğu’da Osmanlı Mirası ve Ulusçuluk, 153.

criticisms can be directed to this literature, which are also the main criticisms directed towards Said himself. The first one is Said’s generalizations and selective literature review. Reaching grand conclusions in a way to exclude other representations through selective literature review is a significant shortcoming of Saidian Orientalism, which is also evident in the literature of “Ottoman Orientalism.” Makdisi and Deringil pick up several documents and writings of some bureaucrats or intellectuals to reach the conclusion that the Ottoman discourse and practice towards the Arab periphery could be understood in a colonial setting. However, the perceptions of these bureaucrats and intellectuals reflect only one set of perceptions. For example, Makdisi recalls the writings of a pro-Western Ottoman intellectual, Hüseyin Cahid (Yalçın, 1875-1957), on the Arabs and Arabic science in order to demonstrate the ethnic and even racial “segregation” of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire. However, he did not mention, for example, Abdül Bey, one of the deputies representing Ioannina in the Ottoman Parliament, who said in one of his speeches that the Ottomans are civilized because they had been descended from the Arab nation.¹³⁸ In other words, the Ottoman perception of the Arabs could not be generalized as a colonial/Orientalist perception; although there were such representations, the existence of other perceptions should not be neglected.

The argument that the civilizational tune of the Ottoman discourse on the Arab provinces makes this discourse colonialist/Orientalist is equally generalizing and therefore subject to criticism. True, the Ottomans sometimes evaluated the Arab periphery in terms of civilization and argued that at least some parts of these territories were uncivilized. Here, lack of civilization occasionally meant lack of settlement, since the Ottoman version of the word “civilization” generally referred to the concept of “settlement” more than the European version denoting a level of development; in other places, the word was utilized in the European sense. However, this does not necessarily mean that this discourse was peculiar to the Arab provinces. Rather the Ottomans utilized a

¹³⁸ “Madem ki Arab milletinden neş’et etmiş bir milletiz, elbette medenîyiz.” This speech was delivered in the Ottoman Parliament on January 24, 1878. Cited by Kayalı, Jön Türkler ve Araplar, 40.

similar discourse for some of their European territories as well. For example Ahmed Cevdet Paşa (1822-1895), one of the Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century, defined some parts of Herzegovina as being in the “state of savagery and nomadism” (hâl-i vahşet ve bedâvet).¹³⁹ Similarly, Cenap Şehabettin (1870-1934) perceived Bulgarian and Romanian villages as miserable settlements with indolent inhabitants.¹⁴⁰ Such a perception was not only peculiar to the Ottoman Empire at that time; almost all the nationalist movements in the Balkans produced an image of the “other” in civilizational terms. For example, according to Boriana Panayotova, Bulgarian nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century perceived themselves as “civilized” not only vis-à-vis the “barbarian” Ottomans, but also vis-à-vis the “barbarian” Serbs.¹⁴¹ In other words, the enmity among the Balkan states resulted in the development of civilization-barbarism discourse, which could not necessarily be labelled as Orientalist.

Therefore, not all the perceptions of the self as “civilized” and the other as “uncivilized” are Orientalist. What is more, the negative perception of the relatively weaker parts of the territories within a state in a civilizational sense might not always be Orientalist as well. For example, Glenn Hooper argues that some of the English travellers visiting Ireland perceived some parts of this island less civilized compared to British territories. He cited from the travelogue of Reverend James Hall (1755-1826) on Ireland, where Hall mentioned that after seeing the “miserably poor” cabins of Irish countryside, he sought “whether there were any manufacture in the country, and on other pretences.”¹⁴² Similarly,

 

¹³⁹ Ahmet Cevdet Paşa, Tezakir, 4 Volumes, transliterated and edited by Cavid Baysun, (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1991), Vol. 3, 34.

 

¹⁴⁰ Cenap Şehabettin, Avrupa Mektupları, (Đstanbul: [Matbaa-i Amire], 1335 [1917]), transliterated by Sabri Özcan Sav, (Ankara: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1996), 1-2, 14-16.

 

¹⁴¹ Boriana Panayotova, “Soi et I'Autre dans la perspective de I'antagonisme ‘barbarie- civilisation’: le cas de la Bulgarie et de ses voisins balkaniques,” Canadian Joumal of History/ Annales canadiennes d'histoire, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Aug. 2003): 199-229, 227-228.

 

¹⁴² James Hall, Tour through Ireland; Particularly the Interior and Least Known Parts, 2 Volumes, (London: Moore, 1813), Vol. 1, 56-57, cited in Glenn Hooper, Travel Writing and

Hall criticized the superstitious beliefs of the Irish priests, when he met a young girl carrying a pin-cushion hung round her neck given by the local priest for her recovery from illness.¹⁴³ This was quite similar to the Ottoman travellers’ criticism of the role of superstitions in the Orient, which will be examined in Part IV of this dissertation. In sum, it is difficult to label the Ottoman perception of Arab provinces as Orientalist, just as it is difficult to label the British perception of Ireland as Orientalist.

The second shortcoming of Saidian Orientalism and by extension the argument for “Ottoman Orientalism” is the monolithic perception of Orient. Both Makdisi and Deringil generalize the Arab provinces of the Empire as Orient and neglected the Ottoman perception of other parts of the Eastern world, such as Iran, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, or sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, they only focus on the internal Arab communities of the Empire and neglected the non-Ottoman Muslims as well as other Eastern peoples to a great extent. Looking solely the Ottoman perception of its Arab community and generalizing it as “Ottoman Orientalism,” therefore, is quite problematic.

All these criticisms should not be read as the total denial of any possibility of linking post-colonial studies in general and Saidian Orientalism in particular to the Ottoman case. Of course, there were many Ottoman intellectuals and texts, whose discourse were extremely similar to the discourses of the Western Orientalist literature. Influenced from Western civilization and being aware of the Western Orientalist texts, some of the Ottoman intellectuals sometimes emulated these discourses. What is attempted in this dissertation is not to ignore or exclude such works but to place them in a historical setting together with other kinds of representations of the Orient. Different Ottoman intellectuals might have different perceptions of the Orient and the Orientals, and it was these differences that created the intellectual richness of the Empire. In other words, what this dissertation disagrees is not the existence of the

Ireland, 1760-1860: Culture, History, Politics, (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 87.

 

¹⁴³ Hall, Tour through Ireland, p. 203, cited in Hooper, Travel Writing and Ireland, p. 87.

Orientalist discourse in the Ottoman Empire, but the generalization of the writings of some selected individuals or some selected documents to establish a particular “Ottoman Orientalism” as the dominant discourse in the nineteenth century within the framework of a colonial setting.

PART II

 

 

PATTERNS OF TRAVEL AND TRAVEL WRITING IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

 

The previous part of this dissertation sets the theoretical interrelationship between travel writing and Orientalist discourse. Before engaging in a deeper analysis of the Ottoman intellectuals’ and travellers’ perceptions of civilization and their reflections on Eastern peoples and cultures, this part is devoted to an examination of patterns of travel and travel writing in the Ottoman world. In doing that, it is argued that these patterns had considerably transformed from classical to modern age, and the reasons for this transformation are quite interrelated with the Ottoman encounter with the concept of civilization as well as with the renewed interest of the Ottoman intellectuals about the developments taking place in the distant parts of the Empire and in the regions outside the Ottoman borders by the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

This part of the dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, Ottoman classical travel writing is analysed. In doing that, the reasons for the underdevelopment of Ottoman travel writing and the earlier forms of travel literature are examined. The second chapter proceeds by underlining the intellectual, technological and socio-cultural factors contributing to the emergence of modern travel literature in the Ottoman literary circles and compares and contrasts the classical travel narration with the modern one. Finally, the third chapter examines the modern Ottoman travelogues on the non- European world in order to introduce the primary sources of this dissertation. Not only the patterns of travel writing, but also patterns of Ottoman travel to the non-European world are covered in this chapter. All in all, as the first part of the dissertation provides the reader with a theoretical background, this second part establishes the historical, intellectual and cultural setting, in which the travelogues examined in this dissertation had been penned.

CHAPTER 3

 

 

OTTOMAN TRAVEL WRITING BEFORE THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

 

Considering the Ottoman literature before the mid-nineteenth century, it can be argued that travel writing had not emerged as a distinct genre. In this period, the Ottoman verse is composed of a plethora of poems on love (both mundane and divine), heroism and amusements, while the Ottoman prose includes a surfeit of writings on Islamic theology, astrology, politics, history, and philosophy. However, travel writing is one of the extremely limited fields of the classical Ottoman literature, and except for a couple of works, travelogues from this period hardly appears in libraries compared to the other genres.

 

3.1.           The Reasons for the Underdevelopment of Travel Writing in the Ottoman Classical Literature

While most of those studying the Ottoman literature touch upon the rarity of travel writing during the Ottoman classical age, they fail to present a detailed analysis regarding the reasons for this underdevelopment.¹⁴⁴ However, elaborating upon the factors that deterred the Ottomans to write their travel experiences would provide the opportunity to understand the rationale not only behind the existence of only a few travel narrations, but also its revival as a new genre in the second half of the nineteenth century.

¹⁴⁴ For example Nicolas Vatin argues that before Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme, pieces of travel narration hardly exist and even the “logic of writing these pieces has nothing to do with what we understand from travel narration.” See Nicolas Vatin, “Bir Osmanlı Türkü Yaptığı Seyahati Niçin Anlatırdı?,” translated from French by Işık Ergüder, Cogito, No. 19, Osmanlı Özel Sayısı (1999): 161-178, 161. According to Orhan Şaik Gökyay, on the other hand, except for Mirâtü’l Memâlik written by Seydî Ali Reis, no travelogue was written by the Ottoman travellers in the Ottoman classical age. See Orhan Şaik Gökyay, “Türkçe’de Gezi Kitapları,” Türk Dili, Vol. 27, No. 258 (Mar., 1973), 457-467, 459. Baki Asiltürk emphasizes that between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman travel literature experienced a very futile period. See, Baki Asiltürk, “Edebiyatın Kaynağı Olarak Seyahatnameler,” Turkish Studies: International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic, Vol. 4, No.1 (Winter 2009), 911-995, 924.

Considering the Ottoman socio-political and cultural environment, several factors for the underdevelopment of travel writing in the classical age of the Ottoman Empire can be discerned. Accordingly, one of such factors might be that the Ottomans usually travelled only for official purposes, and the act of travel for the sake of travel was almost non-existent in the Ottoman classical age. In other words, it can be argued that it is not the rarity of travelling within and outside of the borders of the Ottoman Empire that resulted in the scarcity of travel narratives. As Nicolas Vatin argues, travelling in various forms – wars, merchandise activity, pilgrimage, diplomatic missions, and even espionage – was a frequent activity.¹⁴⁵ Each year, thousands of troops marched the plains of Balkans, the deserts of North Africa, or the mountains of Iran; thousands of people visited the sacred cities of Islam, namely Medina and Mecca, for pilgrimage. Dervishes and spies silently or clandestinely wandered within and outside the Ottoman realm. Merchants filled the ancient trade routes on camels and horses, carrying precious spices, silk and other commercial goods of the East to the West. Envoys handled diplomatic negotiations for resettling peace, for boundary demarcations, or simply for heralding the enthronement of the Ottoman Sultans to the foreign rulers. In sum, some Ottomans had a quite mobile life. Then, the answer of the question of what prevented the Ottoman travellers from writing their memoirs mainly resides in the lack of “travel consciousness,” or travel as a leisure activity. In other words, the problem was not the lack of travels or travellers, but the lack of “travel writing” as a genre, since the Ottoman traveller perceived himself as a soldier, official, pilgrim, or merchant, instead of a traveller.

A second reason for the underdevelopment of travel writing in the Ottoman classical literature might be the relative immobility of the Ottoman men of letters. Being a small group of talented as well as highly educated people, they were generally resident in the prominent cities of the Empire, such as Bursa, Edirne, Đstanbul, Baghdad, or Damascus, during their lives. In other words, except for a few of them, who had also have other capacities in military,

¹⁴⁵ Vatin, “Bir Osmanlı Türkü Yaptığı Seyahati Niçin Anlatırdı?,” 161.

bureaucratic or judiciary circles, the Ottoman poets, historians, or philosophers, rarely travelled, and even more rarely wrote their experiences when they did so. The eminent figures of the Ottoman verse, such as, Bakî (1526-1600), Şeyhülislam Yahya (1553-1644), Nailî (?-1666), or Nedim (1681-1730), were born and died in the same city; the esteemed historians such as Neşrî (?-1520), Peçevî (1572-1650), or Naîmâ (1655-1716) were born in different cities of the Empire; however, they came to Đstanbul when they were quite young, and after attaining a bureaucratic post, they rarely travelled except for going to their cities of appointment. Hence, even if they had travelled, they had not written their travel experiences, since they perceived their journey as a part of their mission.

Another major disincentive might be related to the very perception of the nature of writing activity as perceived by the Ottoman men of letters. Accordingly, writing was apprehended as a noble and venerable activity; therefore it was commonly accepted that only the issues or subjects worth of mentioning should be written down. Đskender Pala notes the Ottoman men of letters had a tripartite categorization of the oral expression. Accordingly, they perceived kâl/söz (meaning simply “the word”) as a neutral concept, while they utilized kelâm (meaning “a rhetorical word”) in order to define the act of beautifying the expression, and laf (meaning “an empty word”) to connote the sayings for the sake of saying something. For them, only kelâm is worth of recording through writing.¹⁴⁶ Love, being either mundane or divine, bravery of the masters (commanders, viziers, governors, and most importantly the Sultan himself), history, and philosophy were praised as the issues or fields deserving utmost literary talent, since they constituted the core of essential human existence for the Ottoman men of letters. On the other hand, travel, as a personal experience, which might not interest the majority of people, did not appeal an equivalent attraction compared to the “important” themes, unless it was presented to the people to lead them to draw a “lesson” (ibret). Hence, the secondary importance attached to travel might discourage the travellers to write

¹⁴⁶ Đskender Pala, Ah Mine’l Aşk, (Đstanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2004), 4.

their experiences. That is why travel narration did not emerge as a distinguishable literary genre, but as a part of other literary genres.