Social Practice and Political Culture in the Turkish Republic 9781617191350, 1617191353

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Social Practice and Political Culture in the Turkish Republic

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

78

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

Social Practice and Political Culture in the Turkish Republic

Michael E. Meeker

The Isis Press, Istanbul

preSS 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 2004 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2010

ISBN 978-1-61719-135-0

Printed in the United States of America

Michael E. Meeker was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1935. He first studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then worked several years as a research physicist in Boston. Leaving this career in 1961, he began his studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. in 1970. He has done field work in Turkey in Trabzon, Antalya, and Istanbul. He has taught at Middle East Technical University, Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, and for most of his academic career, at the University of California, San Diego where he is now Professor Emeritus. Besides the articles in this volume, his publications dealing with the Turkish Republic also include a recent book on local elites in Trabzon, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). He has also published two book-length studies of religion, poetry, and ecology among stock-keepers, one based on stories and poems among the Rwala Bedouins, Literature and Violence in North Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and another comparing different groups of East African stock-keepers, The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

7

Section One The Black Sea Turks 1.

2.

3.

1971. "The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background," International Journal of Middle East Studies 2: 318-345 1976a. "Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples from the Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs (1)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 7: 243-270 1976b. "Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples from the Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs (2)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 7: 383-422

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49

83

Section Two Society and State in the District of Of 4.

5.

6. 7.

1972. "The Great Family Aghas of Turkey." In Rural Politics and Social Change ed. Iliya Harik and Richard T. Antoun (Bloomington: University of Indiana, pp. 237-266 1996. "Concepts of Family, State, and Society in the District of Of, Trabzon" (revised). In Turkish Families in Transition, edited by Dr. Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 4660 2004a. "The Muradoglu Family Line in the District of Of." Unpublished Manuscript 2004b. "Michael Deffner's 1877 Commentary: 'Five Weeks among the Abjurers of Of.'" From Hestia (Athens) Vol. 2 (1877), pp. 547-550, translated from Greek by Allan R. Taylor

131

165 183

205

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Section Three Writers and Writing of the Islamic Resurgence 8.

1991. "The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey." In Islam, in Modern Turkey, edited by Richard L. Tapper. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., pp. 189-219 9. 1994a. "Oral Culture, Media Culture, and the Islamic Resurgence in Turkey." In Exploring the Written in Anthropology, edited by Eduardo Archetti, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp. 3163 10. 1994b. "The Muslim Intellectual and his Audience: A New Configuration of Writer and Reader among Believers in the Republic of Turkey." In Cultural Transition in the Middle East, edited by §erif Mardin. Leiden: E J . Brill

215

243

271

Section Four Interpersonal Exchange and Political Authority 11. 1992. "The Dede Korkut Ethic," International Journal of Middle East Studies 24: 395-417 12. 1997. "Once There Was and Once There Wasn't: National Monuments and Interpersonal Exchange." In Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, edited by Sibel Bozdogan and Re§at Kasaba, pp. 157-191. Seattle: University of Washington Press

305

335

INTRODUCTION

The articles in this volume have their origins in two extended periods of field work, the first in provincial Turkey, from 1966 to 1968, and the second in Istanbul, from 1986 to 1988. As their titles suggest, I have sometimes addressed topics and relied on methodologies that are not usually associated with socio-cultural anthropology. Nevertheless, I would claim that my work has always focused on a problem that is classic in this discipline, the way in which social conventions imply structures of political authority. This problem, increasingly overlooked, is of special interest for the study of modern mass societies. As Max Weber anticipated, centralized bureaucracies and capital markets have become the principal instruments for the supervision of modern mass societies. This has come about with the assistance of political and economic sciences that seek to determine what can and cannot be achieved by means of such instruments. In themselves, these sciences consist of specific propositions of limited applicability; however, they rely on sweeping generalizations about human behavior. Universalized principles, such as "economic interest," and "rational choice," determine what kinds of problems are addressed, what methods of analysis are acceptable, and what evidence is significant. As a consequence, a wide range of human activity and association has been deemed irrelevant, or simply ignored. Segments of cities and nations, even entire countries and world regions, are written off as in the domain of non-conformity, unsuitable for incorporation into the system of modern mass society, and so, uninteresting as objects of study. 1 In fact, the condition of non-conformity is general rather than spatially or temporally limited. It is as much a phenomenon of metropolitan centers as remote rural peripheries and as common at the top as at the bottom of government and financial hierarchies. In other words, social practices routinely sidestep, contradict, or subvert institutional principles.

1 Some of these apparent spaces of non-conformity have recently become the sites of movements that explicitly or implicitly threaten modern mass society. They have therefore become "insteresting" but only in a negative way.

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The formal institutions of modern mass societies - bureaucracy, markets, nationalism, and territorialism - do overtly exhibit a measure of uniformity. The inhabitants of any modern mass society, however, feature a multiplicity of habits, skills, conventions, and memories. As a consequence, the conduct of interpersonal relationships always carries a potential for informal arrangements that go beyond the logic of formal institutions. This means that sciences of government and finance risk more than incompleteness or inaccuracy. They could be nothing more than total fictions, mere fairy tales. The problematic relationship of formal institutions and interpersonal association is especially salient in the Turkish Republic. I have argued elsewhere that this is a legacy of the imperial system. 1 For the Ottomans, centralized state authority was closely linked with social disciplines. Forms of interpersonal association were the building blocks of the imperial system, and so as well, the building blocks for group assertion and resistance within the imperial system. A conflict of formal institutions and interpersonal association was therefore structurally inherent in, rather than incidental to, the imperial system. The link between state authority and social discipline was carried forward into the Turkish Republic, and so also the structural conflict that it entailed. Even a casual visitor to the Turkish Republic must quickly notice the striking contrast between the rigidity of public institutions and the adaptability and fluidity of interpersonal relationships. Indeed, the nonconformity of social practices with official principles is a perennial topic of cartoons and jokes. To cause the listener or viewer to laugh, however, these cartoons and jokes depend on a feeling that the discontinuities they expose should not occur. The essays in this volume all address the discontinuities of social practices with formal institutions but differ in their approach to this topic. My earlier articles published during the early 1970s consider local social traditions as having a separate history and existence, one that had no inherent connection with imperial or national institutions. My later publications address the nonconformity of social thinking and practices as a structural feature of both imperial and national history

1

See Meeker (2002) for a systematic development of this argument.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

9

Section One The articles in Section One consider the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey as an ethnographic region characterized by specific patterns of social and political life. "The Black Sea Turks" (1971) describes these patterns and poses the question of their origin. It is suggested that they are the remainders of an east to west migration of Kartvelian peoples from the Caucasus during ancient times. 1 More recently, I have taken an entirely different approach to this problem, setting aside "ethnic" explanations. The most striking patterns of social and political life among the Black Sea Turks (Karadenizliler) can be directly traced to their participation in imperial institutions. 2 The remaining two articles, "Meaning and Society" (1976a and 1976b), compare concepts of honor among the Black Sea Turks and the Levantine Arabs. Among both peoples, such concepts serve as a framework of meaning that defines the place of the individual in a community. In the first article, I show how a similar framework of meaning among the two peoples leads to similar social practices, and as a result, to similar social structures. In the second article, I examine a seemingly "small" difference between the two peoples to illustrate how meanings affect thoughts and actions. Is a wife/sister under the protection of her husband or her brother? For the Black Sea Turks, it is the husband, and for the Levantine Arabs, it is the brother. These different responses lead to contrasting opinions and practices, and hence, to contrasting social structures and ideals.

Section Two The articles in Section Two address social practice and political culture in the district of Of during the later Empire and the early Republic. "The Great Family Aghas" (1972) analyses aghas and agha-families as political improvisations that arose in response to the breakdown of the state system during the later imperial period. After carrying out a program of archival and historical research during the 1980s, I revised this interpretation. The aghas and agha-families did appear in the context of a weakening of centralized state institutions; nonetheless, they were directly linked with local participation in

1 See Alexandre Toumarkine, Les Lazes en Turquie (xixe - xxe siècles) (Istanbul, 1995) for a recent evaluation of this argument. See the articles in Section Two, Three, and Four of this volume.

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Ottoman military and religious institutions. Wherever this later interpretation has a bearing on my earlier account, I have inserted comments in brackets. "Concepts of Family, State, and Society" (1996) considers how local participation in the imperial system led to the formation of an ottomanist provincial society in the Turkish Black Sea region. Unlike my two "Meaning and Society" articles (see Section One), this analysis raises the question of the historicity of social practice and political culture. Taking the example of the district of Of, I first examine two institutional complexes: a mansion/coffeehouse complex associated with political elites (aga, bey) and a mosque/academy complex associated with religious elites (hoca, mtiderris). These complexes are analyzed as intermediary institutions that had come to link district society with the imperial system no later than the eighteenth century. I conclude with a re-examination of concepts of honor in the Turkish Black Sea region. The personal status of masculine individuals was referred to three different contexts: supervision of a household, membership in a community, and official standing or accomplishment. Each of these contexts is associated with one of three concepts of honor (§eref, namus, irz), while all three concepts are understood to comprise a single standard of propriety. "Concepts of Family, State, and Society" is the first statement of an argument that is revised and elaborated in my recent book, A Nation of Empire (2002). "The Muradoglu Family Line," is a case study of aghas and aghafamilies. The founder of the Muradoglu was an outsider who rose to prominence in the district of Of with the support of the provincial government (sometime in the 1810s). His first three successors - a son, a grandson, and a great grandson - gradually assembled an extended social network of agnates, affines, friends, partners, and allies over the course of several decades (1830s to 1860s). After the founding of the Turkish Republic, leading individuals of this family line remained prominent figures in an extended social network. The Muradoglu family line provides a striking example of the adaptability of the political culture of the older imperial system. "Five Weeks among the Abjurers of Of," is a second-hand account of a Greek teacher's visit to the district during the 1870s.1 Although the facts of the report are probably accurate, Michael Deffner chooses to portray its residents as frightening and threatening. "Five Weeks" can be compared with Karl Koch's report of his earlier visit to the district of Of during the 1840s (see the preceding article). Koch rejected the bad reputation of the residents of Of as an oversimplification and offered explanations for why outsiders misunderstood and misrepresented them.

1

Michael Deffner (1848-1934) was a well-known German philologist and Hellenist.

INTRODUCTION

11

Section Three The articles in Section Three address the new religious public culture that appeared in the Turkish Republic during the early 1980s. "The New Muslim Intellectuals" (1991) considers the biographies and publications of three Islamist authors, Rasim Ozdenoren, Ali Bulag, and Ismet Ozel. Although their essays and books represented but a small fragment of the new Islamist media in Turkey at the time, these three authors were especially successful in challenging secular public culture in its own terms. "Oral Culture, Media Culture" (1994a), examines the personal experiences that inclined many Turkish citizens to take an interest in the new Islamist public culture. The program of secular reforms that accompanied the founding of the Turkish Republic altered, but did not suppress, older patterns of interpersonal relationships in villages and towns. These older patterns were oftentimes Islamic in spirit, even when they were Atatiirkist in appearance. During the 1980s, Muslim intellectuals, themselves individuals of provincial background, were able to direct attention to this submerged Islamic dimension of interpersonal relationships. In doing so, these writers were able to transform an unconscious "oral culture" into a conscious "media culture." Excerpts from the essays of Rasim Ozdenoren and ismet Ozel are cited as examples. "The Muslim Intellectual and His Audience" (1994b), begins with a review of the social changes and political conflicts that preceded the appearance of the new Islamist public culture in Turkey. Six excerpts from the writings of Ismet Ozel are examined in order to illustrate the way in which he addressed these changes and conflicts in his essays.

Section Four The two articles in this section address broad themes in Turco-Ottoman political culture. "The Dede Korkut Ethic" (1992) argues that the Book of Dede Korkut is a literary adaptation of oral stories circulating among the Oghuz Turkic peoples of Anatolia during the fourteenth century (following Boratav). The author of this literary adaptation preserved the flavor of the oral tales, but recomposed them so that they reflected the outlook of ruling Turkic eJiies of that time. In effect, the twelve stories in the Book of Dede Korkut are the artifacts of a Kulturkampf taking place in fourteenth century northeastern

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Anatolia. One of the stories, the story of Basat and Tepegoz, is reminiscent of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. The Turkic story, however, reorganizes the Homeric story, and in doing so, replaces the Hellenic with a Turkic ideal of personal identity and social relations. "Once There Was and Once There Wasn't" (1996) compares two national monuments, Atatiirk's T o m b and the Kocatepe Mosque. T h e monumental architecture and ceremonial occasions at each site refer to intimate interpersonal associations even as they represent a mass national unity. In effect, both the tomb and the mosque attempt to reconcile older social practices with national modernity, but in different ways. Analyzing the "arguments" of the t o m b and mosque, I explain how each implicitly challenges the other, and so, how the two together expose the difficulty of reconciling a political culture based on interpersonal association with a project of national modernity. Other Publications not included in this Volume 1969.

"Note on 'The Last Laz Rising and the Downfall of the Pontic Derebeys' by A. Bryer," Bedi Kartlisa XXVI, pp. 150-152.

1979.

Literature and Violence in North Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. "The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth's Study of Swat," Man (n.s.) 15, pp. 682-701. "Culture, Exchange, and Gender: Lessons from the Murik," with Kathy Barlow and David Lipset, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 673. "Heroic Poems and Anti-Heroic Stories in North Arabia: Literary Genres

1980. 1986.

1988.

and the Relationship of Center and Periphery in the Near East," Edebiyat Vol. 2, Nos. 1 and 2, pp. 1-40. 1989.

The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religion, Society, and Person among Stock-Keepers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

1990.

"Natural Objects and Substitutive Acts: The Symbolic Process in the Anthropologies of Durkheim and Freud." In Personality and the Cultural Construction of Society, edited by David K. Jordan and Marc J. Swartz. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, pp. 60-79.

2002.

Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

INTRODUCTION 2004c.

13

"Magritte on the Bedouins: 'Ce n'est pas une société

segmentate,'"

proceedings of the conference on Differenz urtd Integration, University of Leipzig (2002). 2004d.

"Greeks who are Muslims: Counter-Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Trabzon," proceedings of the conference on Archaeology

and Heritage

University, Wales (2001).

in the Balkans

Anthropology,

and Anatolia,

Lampeter

SECTION ONE THE BLACK SEA TURKS

THE BLACK SEA TURKS: SOME ASPECTS OF THEIR ETHNIC AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND1

The social and cultural composition of Turkey's provincial society is still poorly understood, not only in the West, but in Turkey itself. Because of this situation, contemporary accounts of Turkish society have a tendency to underestimate the variety of provincial life and to discount the importance of this variety for the nation as a whole. Some events in recent decades, it is true, have certainly eroded the diversity of provincial society. The population exchanges after World War I virtually removed the entire Christian population from Asia Minor. As well, the development of a national polity and the accompanying acceleration of westernization established a new national culture and society which has affected even the most remote areas of the country. Despite this trend toward a greater uniformity, local traditions and local loyalties still retain a vitality that is seldom fully appreciated. This regionalism has an impact on almost every aspect of Turkish society, but for social anthropologists it holds a special significance. Turkey, it has often been observed, forms a land bridge which links southwest Asia to Europe. Therefore Turkish rural society, besides representing a kind of cultural entity in its own right, can also be viewed as a transition between the rural societies of other countries. In the various border provinces of Turkey one encounters Caucasian, Persian, Arab, northern Mediterranean, and eastern European influences. These influences are not restricted to the presence of nonTurkish-speaking minorities, whose numbers, with the exception of the Kurds, are quite small; they are also to be found among the customs of Turkish-speaking villagers. As a result, Turkish rural society presents unique opportunities for studying a number of contrasting Near Eastern institutions in close proximity and in a relatively uniform context.

^The fieldwork on which this paper is based was made possible by the National Institute of Mental Health. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Center for Advanced Stady, University of Illinois, where a portion of the research leading to this paper was performed. I am especially indebted to Anthony Bryer of the University of Birgmingham without whose help and advice this article could not have been written.

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The people of Turkey are aware of the different cultural influences which affect the various regions of their country, and they have a number of stereotypes which depict the expected customs, ways of thinking, and character traits of the people of different regions. Perhaps the most unusual and distinctive regional stereotype is that of the eastern Black Sea Turks. These are the people who inhabit the northern slopes of the Pontic mountains of Turkey, a region that comprises, more or less, the modern Turkish provinces of Ordu, Giresun, Trebizond and Rize, and the coastal section of Artvin. As an introduction to the ethnography of the region, this paper examines the relationship of this stereotype to the present-day Black Sea Turkish customs and traces some of the important ethnic and cultural influences which are the source of these customs.

Geography and Climate Much of Asia Minor's coastline is separated from the interior Anatolian plateau by a formidable mountain barrier, but nowhere is this separation so abrupt and dramatic as along Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. The peaks of the Pontic mountains, running parallel to the coastline, reach a maximum elevation of 10,000-14,000 ft. at a distance of only 20-45 miles from the sea. Until recently, few roads traversed the Pontic chain, and even today only one all-weather highway between Hopa in the east and Samsun in the west connects the coast with the Anatolian interior. This highway follows the ancient trade-route from Trebizond through the Zigana Pass to Erzurum. Although a lively traffic in goods crosses even some remote passes of the Pontic mountains during the summer months, the villagers of the northern slopes and those of the southern slopes generally live in two different worlds, their most notable contact being the occasional bitter conflicts over the high mountain pastures (yayla). Passing from the northern slope through the mountain passes to the southern slopes and the interior plateau, one moves from one form of Turkish rural society to another. In some areas a complete change occurs within a few miles in the design and materials used in house building, the style of peasant dress, agricultural techniques and field usage, village settlement patterns, accents, kinship terms, and many other details of peasant life.

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Some of the contrasts are the direct result of the different geography and climate of the two regions- In the interior the climate is severe, with extremes in temperatures being reached during the different seasons. Rainfall is sparse and the terrain is treeless and rocky. Cereals are dry-farmed on the open plains, but the most fertile crops must be grown in valleys and irrigated with mountain streams. Houses are constructed of mud bricks, and there is no fuel other than cattle dung, which is molded into patties (tezek) for use in the remarkably efficient ground ovens (tandir) which are characteristic of the region near Erzurum. The coastal region, on the other hand, is Turkey's most verdant. Winters and summers are mild and precipitation is high, with the town of Rize receiving over 1,500 mm. per year. However, the geography of the entire coastal region is not altogether uniform. To the west, near Bafra and Samsun, the terrain is gentle and agriculture is highly productive. Extensive alluvial plains of fertile soils have been formed by the Kizil and Ye§il Rivers, and further inland the mountains are low and rolling. To the east, the terrain becomes more rugged and agriculture more difficult. There are only small alluvial strips along this part of the coast, and in many places rocky bluffs rise directly out of the sea. Inland foothills are irregular and broken, and the Pqntic mountains are both higher and situated nearer the sea. The area between Trebizond and the £oruh River represents the climax of this geographic and climatic pattern, which begins to assert itself to the east of Samsun. Here the Pontic flora, identical with that of the western Caucasus, dominates. 1 At the lower deforested elevations the vegetation is sometimes so dense as to be impassable, and at the higher elevations one finds magnificent virgin forests shrouded in mists for several months of the year. The melting snow from the mountain peaks and the high amounts of rainfall in the foothills have cut deep and precipitous valleys into the mountains. Minor landslides are a regular occurrence, and on rarer occasions catastrophic floods and slides result in drastic changes in the features of a coastal valley. 2 Flat land is at a premium in this region and plow agriculture is almost nonexistent. In a few places, agriculturalists must work their fields while secured with ropes tied around their waists. Village settlements tend to consist of scattered hamlets spread over the mountainous terrain, overseeing their own small fields of maize, hazelnuts, and more recently tea, while clustered village settlements, so common in Anatolia, are the exception.

^W. Rickmer Rickraers, 'Lazistan and Ajaristan', The Geographical Journal, vol. LXXXIV (1934), p. 469. Sirri Erinç, 'Trabzon Vilayeti: Cografi Çartlar ve Imkânlar', Maliye Enstitüsü Haftalan: Birinci Hafta — Trabzon, T. C. Maliye Enstitüsü Yaymlan, no. 24 (Istanbul, Fakülteler Matbaasi, 1966), p. 84.

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The setting is a bizarre one in a near Eastern context, a judgement with which the Anatolian from the steppes of the interior enthusiastically agrees. He considers these Turks, who eat bread made from corn rather than wheat, whose diet includes anchovy (hamsi), who plow minute fields by hand instead of using tractors or draft animals, and who live not in clustered villages but in scattered hamlets, more than a little ridiculous. They are in many ways like him, but they are also very different. It is not surprising that the Black Sea people have been given a special name. They are referred to as 'the Laz', and here begins an intriguing problem.

Regional and National Identity in Turkey The word 'Laz' has been connected with various regions and peoples of the eastern bight of the Black Sea coast since the early Christian era. 1 The word has often served to classify as a single group diverse peoples speaking diverse languages; therefore, 'the Laz' should not be understood as necessarily referring to a specific ethnic or linguistic group. This situation is further complicated by the fact that a Black Sea people who call themselves 'the Lazi' and who are also referred to as the Laz by outsiders do represent a specific ethnic group and do speak a language of their own. The principal settlements of the ethnic Lazi are found today at the extreme eastern end of Turkey's Black Sea shore in the coastal lowlands between Pazar and the Coruh River. Their language is closely related to Mingrelian and more distantly related to Georgian and Svan. 2 The ethnic Lazi constitute a very small minority, even among Turkey's eastern Black Sea people. The category Laz, as used by Anatolian Turks, does not precisely designate the ethnic Lazi, but frequently refers to all Black Sea peoples of Turkey and most typically designates those peoples living along the eastern shoreline. The ethnic Lazi are therefore only one variety of Laz for Anatolians. This Anatolian usage, which is probably a very old one, has resulted in some confusion about who the Laz really are. Scholars writing in English, Turkish, and other languages have tended to apply the term 'Laz' in a careless fashion. At times, it signifies the Lazi, and at times it is widened to include most or

*See V. Minorsky, s.v. 'Laz' Anthony Bryer, 'Some Notes PP. 174-95; and idem., 'Some (1967), pp. 161-8. 2 B. Geiger et al, Peoples and pp. 14-15.

in Encyclopedia of Islam (1st ed.; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1913-36); on the Laz and Tzan (I)', Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XII (1966), Notes on the Laz and Tzan (II)' Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXIII-XXIV Languages of the Caucasus (The Hague, Mouton and Co., 1959),

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all Black Sea Turks. In this paper the term 'Lazi' will be used to refer to a specific linguistic and cultural group — the people who accept that they are Lazi, even though they may not openly admit this. The term 'Laz' will be used in the same sense as it is used by the majority of Turks, i.e. to designate the people of a certain region who have a number of customs and characteristics in common. The Laz in this latter sense refers to the Black Sea people of Turkey in general and evokes the 'Laz' characteristics which distinguish them from the other Turks. The Black Sea Turks themselves use the term 'Laz', but in a fashion somewhat different from the Anatolians. For example, the people of Eregli, a town on the western Black Sea coast, do not accept that they themselves are Laz, nor do they consider as Laz all those people within and west of Zonguldak, the province in which Eregli is located. 1 They do refer to those people to the east of Zonguldak as Laz and believe that the customs of the latter are both inferior and different from their own. So it continues along the coast to the most eastern areas. The people of Of, a district east of Trebizond, do not consider themselves as Laz, but reserve this term for the people east of Pazar, who correspond closely, but not exactly, to the Lazi. Again, the people of Of believe that their immediate neighbors to the east and west have customs similar to their own, while those of the Laz are different and inferior. On the other hand, the people living west of Of and even the descendants of Anatolians who settled in Of during the late nineteenth century frequently refer to the people of Of as Laz. A number of such social categories are in use in different parts of Turkey. The category Kurd {Kürt), for example, is not unlike the category Laz. Western Anatolians often refer to people who come from areas east of a line roughly through Sivas, Kayseri, and Adana as Kurds, regardless of the language they speak or any other single characteristic.2 This category, like the category Laz, is based on a regional and cultural classification rather than an unambiguous linguistic criterion. When such categories are understood, it is clearer why many rural Turks claim that Kurdish is merely a Turkish dialect and not a separate language. From their point of view they are no more wrong than the Westerner whose own racial and linguistic categories are also ill suited to deal with a complex situation.3

^Miibeccel B. Kiray, Eregli, T. C. Bajbakanlik Devlet Planlama Tegkilati (Ankara, Devlet Karayollari Matbaasi, 1964), pp. 44, 55. 2 Ibid. The usage of the terms 'Laz and 'Kurd' in Turkey is not so unusual as it may seem. The torn 'Yankee' as used in the United States is a similar case. People who are called Yankees by one group deny that they themselves are Yankees, but apply the term to some other group, generally to the north.

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In Ottoman times, social categories like Laz and Kurd, although not prestigious, were no worse than 'Turks', a similar kind of term, which derogatorily referred to a Muslim Anatolian villager or a Turcoman nomad. Since the development of Turkish nationalism, however, new implications have arisen in connexion with the use of these words. Now the conclusion is sometimes drawn that people categorized as Laz or Kurd are somehow less than true Turks. Consequently, the Black Sea people of Turkey have become increasingly sensitive to being called Laz. They maintain they are Turks and would only distinguish themselves as being Black Sea Turks (Karadenizli), an explicit regional classification.1 This is only one of a number of conflicts between the new and old ideologies of group identity which have resulted since the ideas of Turkish nationalism have taken root. During Ottoman times a number of religious groups within the empire were formally recognized as separate communities (millet), each with its own leaders and laws. This perception of society is still very much alive in the rural areas of Turkey. Sunnite Turkish villagers, for example, consider the religious criterion indispensable for determining who is and who is not a Turk. For them, to be Turkish merely means to be a member of the orthodox Muslim millet within the confines of Turkey. Hence they judge that Turkish citizens who are Christians or Jews are not Turks. More curiously, they refuse to designate as Turks the Turkish-speaking Alevis, whose customs are thought to be most closely related with the traditions of the Central Asian immigrants into Anatolia. 2 On the other hand, they readily designate as Turks the Kurdish-speaking and Arabic-speaking Sunnites of eastern Turkey. A more literate villager or townsman might go on to argue that the latter are actually descendants of the Central Asian tribes who acquired new languages. Such subtleties and contradictions lie behind the voluminous literature on Turkish nationalism which has appeared in Turkey since the founding of the Republic. For the present purposes, the significant point is that categories such as Laz and Kurd do not necessarily contrast with the category 'Turk'. Rather they often are used in what might be said to be their old connotation ;

' In the late 1930s a Trebizond newspaper published an article which criticized Ankara Radio for referring to the songs of the eastern Black Sea people as Laz songs (Yeni Yol [Trebizonde], 1 April 1939). Biim A. Yamkoglu, Trabzon ve Havalisinde Toplanmi$, Folklor Malzemesi (Istanbul, Kenan Matbaasi, 1943), pp. 26-7, objects to the people of the Black Sea being called Laz because it incorrectly implies that they are not Turkish. 2 The Alevis constitute a rural sect whose doctrines are similar to those of the urban Bektashis. There are Turkish-speakers, Kurdish-speakers, and Arabic-speakers among the Alevi.

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that is, to designate regional stereotypes among the Muslim polity of Turkey. This is especially true with respect to the category 'Laz'. Central and western Anatolians accept the Laz as Turks by virtue of their allegiance to the Republic, their religion, and their almost universal fluency in Turkish. At the same time, they are considered to be Turks with peculiar and somewhat inferior accents, characters, and customs. The category 'Laz' derives from these peculiarities, and they are what the Anatolian wishes to emphasize when he uses the term. Similarly, when the Black Sea man refers to the Laz, he has in mind a cultural pattern which seems more clearly expressed among the people to the east of him.

The Anatolian's

Conception of the Laz

In the Karagoz shadow plays of Ottoman times one of the characters was a man named Laz. Metin And describes him as follows : Laz, who comes from the Black Sea coast, is either a boatman, woolbeater or tin smith. He has a strong Black Sea coast accent. He is very talkative and also speaks quickly. He takes approximately fifteen minutes just to say 'hello' and is very jittery. As he is usually too busy talking himself, he cannot listen to other people or follow what they say and has a habit of becoming angry in a very short time. Karagoz often has to forcibly close Laz's mouth in order to get a word in himself J The conventional plays of Ankara and Istanbul continue the tradition, and their plots are still likely to include a man from the Black Sea coast as a minor figure. For Anatolian Turks, the most amusing trait of the Karagoz Laz and his modern counterpart is his accent. The eastern Black Sea accent is marked by a flagrant disregard for the vowel harmony typical of most Turkish dialects, and the result is a type of speech which strikes other Turks as hilarious. One of the many anecdotes concerning the Laz derives from this characteristic. It is said that the Laz when conscripted are automatically placed in the navy. This is because Anatolians associate Black Sea men with the sea, even though many of them have little or no experience as sailors or fishermen. The eastern Black Sea men, realizing that the period of service for the navy is three years, while that for the army is only two, naturally try to hide their origins, but the recruiting officer simply asks each man to pronounce the word 'hazelnut.' The 1 Metin And, A History of Theatre and Popular Yaymlan, 1963-4), pp. 46-7.

Entertainment

in Turkey (Ankara, Forum

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vowel sounds of this word are inevitably distorted by the eastern Black Sea men, and the recruiting officer places each man in the army or navy according to his pronunciation.1 Most proverbs and anecdotes usually imply that the Laz are sadly deficient in common sense. One such story tells of the Laz who could not correctly name the parts of his body. When asked to name his finger, he said nose; for arm, liver; for foot, lip; for ear, eye; etc. After months of psychiatric care and careful training he was finally to be released after passing a test in which he correctly named various parts of the body. Informed of his success, he jubilantly exclaimed, pointing to his head, 'What an ass I have on my shoulders, eh?' Another story describes the Laz as curious about the height of their village minaret. 2 One of them explains that by standing on each other's shoulders they can measure it. They proceed to carry out this plan until the last man is able to reach the gallery of the minaret, whereupon he shouts down to the bottom man, 'Now run and get me a meter stick'. Proverbs about the Laz often associate him with a goose (kaz): 'Laz reason is goose reason', or, 'The goose flies, why not the Laz?', implying that a Laz would be stupid enough to try to fly upon seeing a goose fly. 3 The eastern Black Sea men's reputation in Anatolia for perplexing and contradictory qualities is very striking. 4 Although they are said to be clever and ingenious, their overwhelming stupidity is also celebrated in proverbs and anecdotes. In hard work and ambition they supposedly outstrip other Turks, but another reputation asserts that the men are loathe to undertake low-status labor. Their sensitivity with regard to their women is also famous, and some Turks link the frequent reports of blood feuds along the Black Sea to affairs of honor involving women. At the same time, the extremely inferior status of women on the Black Sea is a commonplace notion in Anatolia and urbanites occasionally relate hair-raising tales of the treatment of eastern Black Sea women.

'The accents of the Black Sea Turks are by no means uniform even in one given locale, but most accents east of Samsun feature a distortion of the vowel harmony typical of Anatolian Turkish. As one proceeds eastward along the coast the accents tend to become more unlike the Anatolian accents, until in the province of Rize even some Anatolian consonants are distorted or changed. For example, geldim becomes jeldum and balik becomes paluk. These consonantal changes are more localized than the distortion of vowel harmony, therefore the latter remains the best test for detecting eastern Black Sea origins. ^Eastern Black Sea men are very prominent among the minaret builders of Turkey. 3 In Turkish these two expressions are, respectively, 'Laz akli, kaz akli' and 'Kaz ucar da, Laz ugmaz mi'. 4 Anatolian stories of the Laz are reminiscent of the English stories of the Irish, who are represented as having no English common sense and acting in unexpected and contrary ways.

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More objective Turks acknowledge the eastern Black Sea men to be unusually resourceful and ambitious. A businessman in Istanbul who finances smaller firms all over Turkey told me that the eastern Black Sea men rarely default on loans, while the men of certain other regions have a much poorer record. Likewise, a professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara remarked that he expected his eastern Black Sea students to do exceptionally well in their studies. And almost all Turks are aware that eastern Black Sea men have been successful in trade and professions, a fact which is quickly verified by casual enquiries in the markets of Istanbul. They are especially active, both as capitalists and workers, in fishing, boating, shipowning, pastry and breadmaking, restaurants, petty merchandizing, trucking, and construction in the large cities of Turkey. The success of eastern Black Sea men in worldly affairs can be extended to include their success in the affairs of organized religion. A significant number of the mosques in the towns of Turkey are staffed by eastern Black Sea men, and many of the latter are among the district administrators of religious affairs (miiftii). This is not a simple consequence of their enterprising character and professionalism which has served them so well in business . It is more closely connected with their region's religious traditions, for the eastern Black Sea villagers are exceptionally devout, so much so that other Turks consider them to be fanatical (mutaassib). Local religious practices consist of a highly disciplined form of Sunnite orthodoxy in which great emphasis is placed on the importance of the sacred Law. In particular, the orthodox ritual duties, the fast, the ritual ablutions, and the prayers receive their careful attention. Religious teachers abound in the eastern Black Sea rural regions, where there is an old tradition of village schools of religion (medrese). One locale, the district of Of, has become so famous for its argumentative and uncompromising men of religion that any hardheaded religious teacher is proverbially referred to as an 'Of hodja' (Oflu hoca). Those Turks who know the eastern Black Sea people well associate their religious mentality with their business mentality. The Laz, they say, are narrow-minded and self-righteous in religion, just as they are stubborn and aggressive in their business tactics. The association is probably not completely ill-founded, even if excessively denigrating in its formulation. The village hodjas have in the past pursued simultaneously the three migrant occupations of trade, crafts, and 'imaming' (imamlik), and eastern Black Sea traders often attribute their stamina in business to the strength they derive from their religion.

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The physical discipline which local religious behaviour requires is not inconsistent with another reputation of the Laz: their fame as courageous soldiers and fighters. During Ottoman times the region is supposed to have provided some of the best troops in the Sultan's armies. More recently, Atatiirk's bodyguards are said to have been composed of Laz, chosen specifically for their bravery and ferocity. Anatolian villagers also assent to the Laz's fighting qualities; one man from a village near Ankara told me that it would take four of his own kind to handle one Laz. This is the more forbidding side of the eastern Black Sea men. They are said to be tense and nervous, attentive to slights, relentless in pursuing vengeance, and decidedly trigger-happy. Still, for most other Turks the eastern Black Sea men are a paradox and, above all, an amusing paradox. When, in a folk festival, they come on to the stage, everyone is delighted. Their frenetic, restless dances (horon), their thin three-stringed violin (kemenge) and its nervous music, their accents, even their somber and fierce looking costumes often strike an Anatolian audience as a little funny. 1 Certainly this amusing strangeness must lie in their similarity to Anatolians, combined with so many differences. While Anatolians are themselves far from uniform in accents and customs, the behaviour of eastern Black Sea men falls outside some Anatolian sense of an acceptable limit of variation.

Turkey's Black Sea Coast and the Caucasus Many of the manners and customs of the eastern Black Sea Turks which their Anatolian counterparts find so odd have strong resemblances to the typical features of Caucasian societies. Here is the element of truth in the term 'Laz' which implies a connexion between the eastern Black Sea Turks and the Caucasians. This connexion is in part a result of geography. While the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey is isolated from the interior plateau, it is open, so to speak, at both its western and eastern ends to Anatolia and the Caucassus, respectively. The coastline therefore forms a passage between two regions. As

^The feeling of amusement at each other's constrasting but similar institutions is mutually shared. During a visit to a tea factory on the coast I was expressly taken and introduced to a particular man. Everyone was smiling and one man could not suppress his laughter. This man, it was explained, was from Bayburt, a town on the plateau; in other words, he was an Anatolian. The eastern Black Sea Turks consider Anatolian villagers to be naive and unsophisticated, almost a little barbaric. They see themselves as more intelligent, diligent, and courageous than the Anatolian, but they say that the Anatolian is stronger and hardier, due to his better mountain air, water, and more strenuous way of life.

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one proceeds along the passage, one traverses a society which ecologically and culturally represents a transition between western A n a t o l i a and the southerwestern Caucasus. This transition accords with the Black Sea Turks' shifting application of the term 'Laz' to those peoples farther east. In the following discussion the Caucasian heritage of the Black Sea Turks will be examined. As has been mentioned, the villages along the Black Sea coast f r o m Ordu to Artvin are composed of many hamlets, each dominating a hilltop or rnountain side on which its own crops are separately planted. This type of settlement pattern is in sharp contrast with the typical nucleated Anatolian village, but is characteristic of many rural settlements of the western Caucasus, notably those of the Abkhaz, Circassians, Georgians, Mingrelians, and Ossetes. 1 While descriptions of these hamlets in Turkey date back to at least the fifteenth century and possibly to ancient times, observers have rarely attempted to relate settlement to social organization. W. E. D. Allen, who travailled in the far eastern area, is an exception: A typical settlement, such as that of Gorjomi [a Georgian village], occupies an area stretching about four miles along each side of the river and about a mile outwards on either side. This area is dotted with groups of timber-built houses, which are separated from each other by distances of about one-third of a mile. Each group has its own name, after the family name of those composing it. Each group is bound together in a loose community by common interests which centre around the 'jami' (mosque). Each group has its own corn-lands, hayfields, pasture-ground and woods.2 Whether these details of social organization can be applied to the entire area from Ordu to Artvin is uncertain, but the description is very close to the settlement pattern and social organization of many of the Turkish villages in the modern provinces of Trebizond and Rize.

Karl Koch, Reise durch Russland nach dem Kaukasischen Isthmus in den Jahren 1836, 1837, und 1838, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, J. Cotta, 1842); vol. I, pp. 378-9; vol. II, pp. 105, 199. The Karbardian Circassians lived in clustered villages, but the settlements of other Circassians consisted of scattered hamlets. Also see W. E. D. Allen, A History of the Georgian People (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1932), pp. 54-5. 2 W . E. D. Allen, 'The March-Lands of Georgia,' The Geographicla Journal, vol. LXXIV (1929) p. 144. For an earlier description of these scattered hamlets see Ruy Gonzales le Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane: 1403-1406, trans. Guy Le Strange (London, G. Routledge and Sons, 1928), p. 336. Also see the comments of Anthony Bryer, Bedi Kartlissa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 185 ; and vols. XXIII-XXIV (1967), p. 168.

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The house types, pastoral techniques, and subsistence crops of both the western Caucasus and Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast are also similar. The description of one form of Caucasian house applies equally well to houses in the Pontic highlands: 'The typical house is a rectangular building, sunk partly into the side of the mountain; the walls of the ground floor are of stone while the upper story has wooden walls. The beams, between the two stories project in front of the building forming a balcony.' 1 Pastoral techniques are directly associated with such houses. During the winter, large cattle such as water buffalos or cows are stabled in the lower floor and fed with fodder; during the summer, the cattle are taken to high mountain pastures for grazing. 2 Finally, the major crops in both regions, while varying over the centuries, have tended to be identical. In the seventeenth century the principal medieval subsistence crop, millet, was replaced with maize, and more recently tea cultivation has become an important cash crop. None of these crops are grown to any appreciable degree by the villagers of Anatolia. 3 Other cultural patterns common to Caucasian and Black Sea Turkish rural societies are less closely related to the similar environment of the two regions. Patrilineal descent groups, sometimes including hundreds of households, are important aspects of social structure. Bride-prices are exceptionally high, and affinal ties between men count for little. Marriage festivities emphasize the division between bride-givers and bride-takers and are sometimes structured as mock abductions. There is also an unusual concern in both regions for the chastity and purity of women, which in many respects goes beyond Anatolian customs. 4 The ethnology of both the Caucasians and the eastern Black Sea Turks is not yet far enough advanced to pursue this formal comparison of social structure, but a more general feature of both societies can be outlined — the 1

Louis J. Luzbetak, Marriage and the Family in Caucasia (Vienna, St Gabriel's Mission Press, 1951), p. 204 n. 75. Luzbetak summarizes the Gebirgsbauerkultur concept of D. J. Wôlfel. The Gerbirgsbauerkultur is supposedly found in the Caucasus, parts of North Africa, among the Basques, in the Alps, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the Carpathian Mountains. 2 F o r a description of transhumance in the Giresun-Ordu area, see Xavier de Planhol, 'A travers les chaînes pontiques', Bulletin de l'Association de Géographes Français, nos. 311-12 (1963), pp. 2-12. Johannes Hamlum, Zur Geographie des Maisbaus (Copenhagen, E. Harcks Forlagt 1942), p. 90, notes that maize, spreading rapidly after its discovery, was an important crop in Turkey by the early seventeenth century. Describing Mingrelia in the middle of the seventeenth century, Evliya Chelebi (Narrative of Travels to Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Seventeenth Century, trans. J. von Hammer, 2 vols. [London, Allen and Co., 1846], vol. II, p. 197) wrote that 'Corn and wheat are scarce as hardly anything but millet and Lazud [?] is sown'. The question mark was inserted by the translator. Lazud is today the word for maize in the rural areas of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. ^Two of the best accounts of Caucasian customs and institutions are Luzbetak and Koch.

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contrast between the place of men and the place of women in the rural society. This is a matter which many travellers to these regions have found remarkable. Europeans who witnessed the Russian occupations of the Caucasus during the nineteenth century have described the interest of Caucasian men in weapons, raiding, and vengeance. The male was a man of arms who, together with his kinsmen, was frequently in armed conflict with opposing groups. 1 Karl Koch described the Circassian's attachment to his weapons as follows: The dress of a Circassian is incomplete without his weapon, which he only partly lays aside when he sleeps or enters the house of a stranger. The weapons decorate the hut as well as their owner. Often the entire wealth of a Circassian lies in his weapons and they are the object of his greatest attention. The rifle, always loaded of is not allowed to show a spot of rust on the metal and the sharpened sabre [broad sword] is without a nick.Similar warlike qualities were observed among the eastern Black Sea Turks. In the early nineteenth century the British Vice-Consul at Trebizond described the villagers living east of the town as: A hardy, labourious and bold race, they are skilled in the use of a short rifle, which every man carries slung at his back, wherever and on whatever occasion he moves, and they enjoy a high reputation as soldiers. A demand is always made on this country by the Porte to supply a certain number of men for the arsenal at Constantinople.3 This opinion was verified during the Turco-Russian wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the ' L a z ' irregulars were frequently a major concern of the Russian armies. 4

For example, see Luzbetak, pp. 68, 70, 148, 151, 160-1. Almost any commentary of length touches on these particular qualities of the Caucasus. See, for example, W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields (Cambridge University Press, 1953); John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1908); and James S. Bell, Journal of a Residence in Circassia, 2 vols. (London, Edward Moxon, 1840). ^Koch, Reise durch Russland, vol. I, p. 387, my translation. ^James Brant, 'Journey through a Part of Armenia and Asia Minor in the Year 1835', Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, vol. VI (1836), p. 192. 4 Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, pp. 28,41-4, 61, 62, 123, 248, 275 n. 1, 293-5. It is probable that Allen and Muratoff use the word 'Laz' in its Turkish sense to mean eastern V'Aack Sea Muslims. For example, their account of a specific conflict between the Russians and the Laz tribesmen in the campaign of 1828-9 may well have involved the non-Lazi people of Of, who have a mountain pasture in the immediate vicinity (ibid. p. 41).

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Today, the commonly accepted manly virtues remain at least reminiscent of former times. As their reputation asserts, eastern Black Sea men do have an exceptional propensity f o r blood feuds and a relative willingness to use firearms in comparison to most central and western Anatolians. All but the poorest households have their firearms, and pistols are commonly carried and talked about. 1 The most important non-religious festival in one district, when thousands of villagers gather in the main market center, is in large measure the celebration of the local society's military virtues. This is the anniversary of the district's liberation from the Russian occupation by Ottoman irregulars during 1918. The high point of this celebration, at least as far as the local men are concerned, is the arrival of an armed group dressed in the uniform of the irregulars. These men proceeded to shoot their antique, muzzle-loading guns at a black flag — a symbol of the enemy. Afterwards, speeches made by local people eulogise the bravery of the local men in resisting the advance of the Russian army and hastening its withdrawal, while privately the townsmen of neighboring Rize are vilified for their alleged cowardice. During most of the nineteenth century and earlier times, warfare and feuding were endemic among the Caucasian and Black Sea Turkish peoples, so that men were primarily bearers of arms and members of armed groups. Since the f o u n d i n g of the Republic of Turkey the authority of the central government has been firmly established among the Black Sea Turks, and the latter are no longer forced to depend on their fighting skill for self-defence or as a way of life. In this modern context it is clearer that the military virtues represent only one side of the local ideals of manliness. More generally, men have to concern themselves with and excel in public affairs. But before this point can be fully understood, it will be necessary to clarify the place of women in these societies. While public life is the exclusive province of men, women are restricted to the households in which they are wives or unmarried daughters. Their world is the private world of the family. Only on festive occasions does it include the larger number of women of a few neighbouring hamlets. This 'seclusion' of women, untypical of village Turkey, is not simply a ' One late afternoon when I presented myself to the cashier of the government administration in Trebizond, the clerk brusquely informed me, before I could say a word, that I was too late to obtain a pistol permit, apparently his main activity. The eastern Black Sea Turks readily assent to the Anatolian conception that they are brave fighters. One group of Black Sea Turks said with some amusement that such qualities, as well as their short tempers, were a result of eating maize and anchovies.

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consequence of the settlement pattern, whereby each hamlet and its fields form an isolated unit, it is also an ideal in its own right. Male honor is a great concern, and honor is directly dependent on the purity and chastity of a man's female dependents. This purity is best legitimated, according to local views, by restricting women to the households of their fathers or husbands. The eastern Black Sea Turks see their customary handling of women as one of the cornerstones of Islam, but it is probably a much older preoccupation of the region's inhabitants. Certainly this is the case in the western Caucasus, where a similar concept of honor and many unusual practices regarding the purity and chastity of women have been observed among nominal Christians and Muslims. 1 The place of women among the western Caucasians and eastern Black Sea Turks is also linked to a conception of the household and the organization of household work. The Black Sea hamlet has a privacy that far exceeds that of the normal western Anatolian house. The houses of the hamlet as well as its surrounding fields are closely associated with its women, and the inviolability of the hamlet can be seen as an extension of the inviolability of the women who inhabit it. The hamlet is not only the sanctuary of women, its work and activities are considered appropriate to women. The men of these societies can, and frequently do, shift the entire maintenance of the household on to their w o m e n . 2 Besides performing the usual tasks of caring f o r the children, cooking, and keeping their houses in order, women hand plow and sow the corn fields and vegetable gardens, tend the growing crops, chop the firewood, and gather fodder for the stabled cattle. One facet of the w o m a n ' s role as household laborer is the many varieties of baskets which are unique to the Black Sea region of Turkey. The baskets range from those which are small and carried in the hand to those which are larger than a woman and strapped to the back. Using these baskets the women harvest their crops, carry produce to and f r o m the markets, transport cast-iron stoves and pieces of furniture, and gather enormous bundles ' S o m e examples of these institutions are as follows: the seclusion of women to special huts during menstruation and following childbirth, the betrothal of female infants, the practice of the groom's family rearing the betrothed female infant, the wearing of corsets by virgins and their removal by the groom on the wedding night, etc. These institutions, so far as I am aware, Vwwe. never been adequately analysed for any Caucasian society. They are described by Luzbetak and by Koch. 2 For Caucasian societies, see Luzbetak, pp. 156-69.

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of fodder weighing as much as 100 pounds. On occasion I have seen men carrying tea-leaves to collection agencies with rucksack-like baskets, but all baskets, and especially the largest ones, are primarily associated with the work of women. The place of men in the society can now be amplified. In what follows, the examples are taken from the rural districts of the eastern Black Sea Turkish region, but a similar pattern appears to prevail in western Caucasian societies. A number of household tasks requiring physical labor are properly undertaken by men. The difficult work of terracing new fields for tea, hazelnut, or maize cultivation is done by men, as are the construction and major repairs of houses. Many of the poorer men, through necessity, also take part in the planting and harvest of crops, working alongside their female kin. This is especially true in the lowland villages during the summer months, when the cutting of tea-leaves requires a great deal of work to be done in a short period of time. However, if a man accumulates a little capital or if he has grown sons, he scrupulously avoids even these categories of physical labor and hires workers or requires his sons to perform such tasks. This is the key to the paradoxical reputation of the Laz regarding work. The avoidance of the unspecialized and menial labor of the household is a high male ideal, whereas industriousness in the affairs of the public square (meydan) are much admired. 1 Those men who spend an excessive amount of time in their own hamlets are distrusted for their solitariness and ridiculed for their dependence on women, but those who sit idly in the coffee-houses playing backgammon (tavla) and cards are censured for laziness. One of the most highly valued public activities is political leadership. In the rural areas certain patrilineal descent groups, almost invariably the largest, claim the right to provide the leaders for the area's people. These leaders, locally referred to as aghas (aga), were the valley lords of the nineteenth century, and they still play a significant part in local politics. The frequent warfare and feuding of the past now manifests itself in the local

^Travellers' accounts of Caucasian societies usually stress the extreme indolence of men, and similar comments have been made about the eastern Black Sea Turks. While there is certainly variability in both regions with regard to the activity of men, the generalization that the men are lazy and unproductive is, I believe, superficial. The fact that the eastern Black Sea Turkish men spend all their leisure hours in public gives the illusion of idleness to Westerners, who associate leisure more closely with the privacy of the family. A man may spend several weeks of the year in the coffee-houses of his village, but at other times he is pursuing a grueling routine as a petty trader or construction worker, unable to visit his family for weeks or months at a time.

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electoral contests, which involve the active participation of large numbers of men in opposing alliances, headed by leaders from the larger descent groups. 1 The other important male role is that of religious teacher and expert — the hodja. 2 In some areas the authority of elders in general is associated with an exceptional knowledge of the sacred Law, and the younger men hail them with the polite phrase ' O hodja' (Ey hoca) instead of the more common ' O uncle' (Ey dayi). Unlike the aghas, the more accomplished hodjas usually come from small descent groups and from the poorer villages. They have no large personal followings, and their influence in political affairs is limited. Npnetheless, some of them are highly respected and well known by the people of many districts. A very few hodjas are said to have extraordinary powers, especially with regard to curing, but the idea of sainthood receives surprisingly little attention and some disapproval. Essentially, the religious teacher is no more than an expert in the sacred Law, and it is for this that he receives the esteem of his fellows. Of course, only a small number of men are influential leaders or respected religious teachers, but many more are able to become traders, craftsmen, and skilled laborers. Large numbers of eastern Black Sea Turks migrate to the cities of Turkey. In some areas, especially in the province of Rize, most men spend many years working in the cities, while their wives and children remain in the villages. There are good economic reasons for this — the region is the most densely populated in rural Turkey. Nevertheless, the success which the eastern Black Sea Turks have achieved as migrant laborers is also related to their disdain for the isolated life of the farmer and their high regard for affairs of the market-place and public square, attitudes which they share with their Caucasian neighbors.

' See Anthony Bryer, 'The Last Laz Risings and the Downfall of the Pontic Derebeys, 18121840', Bedi Kartlisa, vol. XXVI (1969), pp. 191-210, and Michael E. Meeker, 'Note on "The Last Laz Risings and the Downfall of the Pontic Derebeys, 1812-1840"', Bedi Kartlisa, vol. XXVI (1969), pp. 250-2. Political leadership is also highly valued among Caucasians, and I have been told by a recent traveller to the area that men resembling the Black Sea Turkish aghas can be found in the Soviet Caucasus today. 2 I have not been able to determine whether priests and hodjas play a similar role in the western Caucasus, but parts of Daghestan in the eastern Caucasus are known for their many hodjas. Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, p. 502, state that the hodjas constituted no less than 4 per cent of the Daghestan population.

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The Greek Laz Other evidence that the peculiar traits of eastern Black Sea Turks derive from the Caucasus comes from another quarter. Until the population exchanges following World War I, about a fifth of the eastern Black Sea population of Turkey was Greek-speaking and Christian. This fact has led some educated Turks to guess that the Black Sea Turkish customs and accents are essentially Greek in origin, and there is some truth in this. The Turks who settled along the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor first encountered for the most part a Greek-speaking, not a Lazi-speaking population, and the way of life which these Turks adopted was learned from Greek-speakers. But the customs of these Black Sea Greeks, or Pontic Greeks as they are generally known, were and still are highly Caucasianized. It is understandable, then, that the presentday Pontic Greeks, who now live in Greece, have the same reputation among Greeks that Black Sea Turks have among Turks. 1 The Pontic Greeks are called Laz (Lazoi) by other Greeks, just as Black Sea Turks are called Laz by other Turks, and the term carries the same mildly derogatory meaning in Greek that it carries in Turkish. Like the Black Sea Turks, the Pontic Greeks are famous for what have been identified as Caucasian characteristics — blood feuds, interest in and dependence on weapons, sensitivity to question of honor, and a more careful separation of men and women in public life. Other Greeks regard them as being more primitive and unsophisticated, and their accent is ridiculed, just as the accent of the Black Sea Turks is ridiculed by other Turks. On the other hand, Pontic Greeks also have a romantic aura about them. Like the Maniots of Morea, they are thought to live by the older, more heroic virtues, and to be uncorrupted by the Frankish customs which have influenced other Greeks. The term 'Laz' is not primarily associated by Greeks with Turks or with the Lazi but, on the contrary, is explained in terms of a folk etymology which asserts that it is especially Greek. 'Laz' is said to be a mispronunciation of 'Greece lives!' and honors the Pontic Greeks' resistance to the Turks. The etymology involves a tradition that the Turks cut off the tongues of all the males of one generation of Pontic Greeks. This resulted in their bad accent in Greek as well as their peculiar pronunciation of 'Greece lives!'. It is interesting that these associations revolve around violence and differentiations of male and female (the women's tongues were not cut, but ^Many of the Pontic Greeks settled in the area of Salonika after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.

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they are said to slur their words anyway). Such matters are closely connected with the Laz reputation among both Turks and Greeks.1 Many other similarities between Pontic Greeks and Black Sea Turks can be traced even to the details of folklore and dress, but their exact origins, whether Greek, Turkish, or predating either of these ethnic groups, are difficult to establish. They are at least partly related to the older Caucasian traditions already outlined. Both peoples have similar dances accompanied by the threestringed fiddle. Both used to wear tight-fitting black 'baggy pants' (zipka), a black vest, and a black cloth tied around the head. Even today this dress, embellished with cartridge belts (but not cartridge pockets sown on the clothes as in the Caucasus), knives, and pistols can be seen both in Greece at festivals of Pontic Greeks and in Turkey during national festivals on the Black Sea. 2 An apron of broad stripes, unusual among Turkish peasants in general, is worn by Turkish women of the eastern Black Sea and Pontic women, and a photograph of Matzoukan women in Archeion Pontou illustrates that the large baskets used for carrying loads were just as much a feature of the Pontic Greek peasants as the Turkish peasants of today.3

A Sketch of the Ethnic History of Turkey's Eastern Black Sea Society The Caucasian characteristics of the eastern Black Sea Turks can easily be oversimplified or exaggerated. Some writers have proposed or implied that the population of Turkey's Black Sea coast is simply a Turkicized Lazi population; 4 one might better describe it as a Caucasianized Turkish population. In fact, neither of these statements is an accurate reflexion of the history of Turkey's Black Sea peoples. This is not merely because ethnic groups other than the Lazi and the Turks have left their mark on the region. It I am grateful to Mr Stavros Deligiorgis of the University of Iowa who explained to rne the reputation of the Pontic Greeks and the tradition and associations of the word Laz. Also see Anthony Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXIII-XXIV (1967), p. 167, for remarks on the Pontic Greeks. 2 S e e D. S. Koutsogiannoupoulos, 'Oi Pontiakoi Horoi', Archeion Pontou, vol. XXVIII (1966-7), pp. 72-123, where pictures of the traditional Pontic Greek dress are shown. Undoubtedly there are many details of dances, songs, and dress which Pontic Greeks and Black Sea Turks would say completely distinguish one from the other, but for outsiders they bear a strong resemblance. E. Oikonomides, 'Peri Amphieseos', Archeion Pontou, vol. II (1929), pp. 3-48. A picture included in this article shows two Greek peasant women carrying fodder in baskets on their backs, while knitting with their hands. This is still a common scene in the villages of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. In the district of Of, the large baskets for carrying fodder are called kofin in the vernacular, a word for basket in Greek. 4 Rickmers, The Geographical Journal, vol. LXXXIV (1934), pp. 465, 471-2; Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Königreichs Pontos (reprint of the Leipzig, 1879, ed.; Chicago, Argonaut Inc., 1968), p. 10; and W. E. D. Allen, A History of the Georgian People, pp. 55-6.

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is also because ethnic categories themselves are not entirely sufficient to account for the cultural changes which have taken place over the centuries. Unfortunately, too little is known of the region's past to provide an alternative to these categories, but in the account which follows an attempt is made to use terms like Greek, Laz, Turk, etc., with the distrust they deserve. Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast, called the Pontos since classical times, was usually part of the Mediterranean empires of this era — the Roman, then the Byzantine, and finally the Ottoman. 1 This consistent participation in the Mediterranean empires differentiates the Pontos from the neighboring western Caucasus which was more often an autonomous or marginal territory on the borders of either the eastern or western empires. 2 Only when the Mediterranean empires were strong did they extend deep into the Caucasus and around the eastern bight of the Black Sea coast; at other times their authority was limited to the coastal area just east of Trebizond. 3 Although included in the successive Mediterranean empires, the Pontos with Trebizond as its principal city was more distant from the center of empire and something more of an outpost than the neighboring western Black Sea coast of Asia Minor (Bithynia and Paphlagonia). Unlike the western coastland, many of the Pontic valleys were relatively isolated from the land routes of the Anatolian interior, and access to them was not easy, even from the coast. As a result, imperial society and culture were consistently an important factor in the region's history, but local customs and a tradition of local independence have also persisted among the region's peoples. From the seventh century B.C. a number of Greek colonies were founded along the southern shores of the Black Sea. These were located in the midst of numerous indigenous Pontic tribes, some extremely primitive and most judged as savage by the Greeks. 4 Over the centuries the tribal diversity of the Pontus, unlike that of the western Caucasus, was gradually broken down and a more uniform society and culture, highly influenced by the Greeks, took its place. This was in part the direct result of successive imperial policies aimed at subduing the tribes and assimilating them into the general imperial population. Glimpses of this evolution of Pontic society are provided by some of the classical writers. '•[ he Greek empire of Trebizond (1205-1461), a more or less independent state, is a notable exception to this generalization. 2 Tibor Halasi-Kun, "The Caucasus: An Ethno-Historical Survey', Studia Caucasiaca, no. 1 (1963), pp. 1-47. 3 Ibid. "^Theodore Reinach, Mithridate Eupator (Paris, Librairie de Firmin-Didot et Cie., 1890), p. 15, and E. Meyer, Geschichte des Königreichs Pontos (1879), pp. 10-12, list these tribes and give references to the classical writers who mention them.

THE

BLACK

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TURKS

37

When Xenophon and the Greek mercenaries passed through the Pontus in the fifth century B.C. they came into contact with a number of the indigenous peoples, some of whom at this time were in alliance with the Greek colonies. The Greek mercenaries agreed that one tribe, the Mossynoeci, was the most barbaric in manners and the least Greek of any peoples they met enuring their entire expedition:1 They [the Mossynoeci] showed them some boys, sons of the richer sort of people, extremely fat (having been fed on boiled chestnuts [hazelnuts]), very soft and fair skinned, and not far from being equal in height and breadth, painted also on their backs with various colors, and tattooed all over their foreparts with flowers. They wanted to have intercourse in public with the mistresses that the Greeks had with them; for such is their custom ... For they do those things in a crowd which other men would do in private or would not venture to do at all; and they acted, when alone, just as they would have acted in company with others; they talked to themselves, laughed to themselves, and stopped and danced wherever they happened to be, as if they were exhibiting themselves to others.^

The Mossynoeci were living in the lands between ancient Cerasus and Cotyora, a region somewhere between modern Trebizond and Ordu. 3 They made wine from wild grapes, bread from boiled hazelnuts, and pickled the flesh of dolphins. Xenophon described a war party of Mossynoeci arriving in large numbers of dug-outs by which they moved along the coast. In the dense forests they built wooden towers which served as forts for their chiefs and in which they stored their provisions. Their settlements were scattered about the hills, distant from one another by foot, but owing to the precipitous terrain, so close that their inhabitants could call out to one another. 4 The primitiviness of the Mossynoeci together with their thorough and skillful exploitation of the virgin products of the forest and sea suggest that they had lived in this region for many centuries, perhaps millenia. Although the sexual mores of the Mossynoeci were exotic, resemblances exist between them and the present-day Black Sea Turks, who have become adapted to the same environmert. In one area or another, Turkey's Black Sea people still grow hazelnuts, fish for dolphin, are the most skillful boatmen and

1

Xenophon, Anabasis, V. iv. 34. ^J. S. Watson, The Anabasis, or Expedition of Cyprus, and the Memorabilia of Socrates (London, Bell and Daldy, 1867), pp. 158-9. Xavier de Planhol, 'Geographia Pontica, I-II,' Journal Asiatique, vol. CCLI (1963), pp. 293-309, has shown that the correct translation for the word translated as chestnut should be hazelnut, one of the important cash crops of the region today. ^Xenophon, Anabasis, V. iv. 1-2, V. v. 1-3. 4 Ihid.V, iv. 11, V. iv. 26-31.

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boatbuilders in Turkey, are among the most skilled lumbermen, live in scattered settlements, and until recently had a reputation for piracy.1 Writing several centuries after Xenophon and not long after the Pontos had been included in the Roman Empire, Strabo (died A.D. 24) still described the mountain tribes as completely savage.2 One of these, the Heptacomitae, which he identified with the Mossynoeci, was condemned as much worse than the others. This tribe had cut down three maniples of Pompey's army, first tricking them into eating Pontic 'mad honey', and then attacking them while they were too ill to defend themselves. Six centuries later the account of Procopius indicates that the independence of the mountain tribes had been restricted and their savagery blunted. Procopius referred to the people along the coast from Sinop to the east of Trebizond as the Romans (Rhomaioi) who are called Pontics, and in this category he included the population around Susurmena (Siirmene) and Rhizaeum (Rize).3 In contrast to Strabo and earlier writers, he did not mention savage tribes within the Pontos, but on its borders there were peoples partially and fully independent of the Romans. Between Rhizaeum and the Acampsis (£oruh) River, the area very nearly coinciding with the location of the presentday Lazi, he placed an unnamed people who were not subject to the Romans.4 Beyond the Acampsis in Colchis were found the Lazi who had their own kings and oppointed their own priests.5 Another more primitive people, the Tzan, were living in the remote mountain areas of the Pontos, where they were neighbors of the Armenians living on the plateau.6 When Procopius wrote, the Tzan were on their way to being absorbed in the general Pontic population Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), p. 175, and Allen, A History of the Georgian People, p. 55, have pointed out the close similarity between reports of the Mossynoeci and the Lazi and have suggested a connexion between them. While an identification of the Lazi as the modern Mossynoeci seems tenuous, the case for an ample measure of cultural continuity in the Pontos and a close relationship between Pontic and Caucasian societies is more substantial. One Caucasian feature which the foregoing authors do not mention is the Mossynoecis' construction of towers. These towers bring to mind those of nineteenth-century Caucasian villages which were also used for storage of provisions and for defense. 2 Strabo, Geographia, XII. iii. 18. 3 Procopius, Wars, II. xxix, 14-19, VIII. ii, 1-3. 4 Ibid. II. xxix, 14-19, VIII. ii, 10-19. In these two citations, Procopius apparently contradicts himself. In the first he writes that the land between the Roman Pontics and the Lazi was uninhabited but controlled by the Lazi. In the second he writes that the inhabitants of the area, whom he did not name, were independent of both the Romans and the Lazi. 5 lbid. For a summary of the relationships between the Colchian Lazi and Byzantium, see Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 176-7. 6 Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 174, 187-95, has pointed out the frequent confusion of the Tzan with other groups designated by similar names. He accepts Procopius' account of the homeland of the Tzan and traces elements of the Tzan among the principal figures of Byzantine Trebizond.

THE

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TURKS

39

as a result of the extensive measures which had been undertaken to subdue and incorporate them into the Empire. By later medieval times they are no longer mentioned as a distinct people. 1 With the gradual assimiliation of the primitive Pontic tribes into the Byzantine Empire, the older usage of such terms as 'Laz' and ' R o m a n ' , I Would suggest, acquired new meanings. The term ' L a z ' , when used by outsiders, differentiated fully Byzantinized Greek-speaking Pontics (Rhornaioi) fi;om those who had failed to acquire some acceptable degree of Byzantine culture (Lazoi). In short, the term Laz was probably analogous to the same term that is used by Turks today. Consistent with this interpretation, Trebizonde and the Pontos were associated with the Laz from the late Byzantine period, even though the Lazi were merely one minority in the region located at its extreme eastern edge. The Arab geographer Abul Feda (died 1332), quoting Ibn Said, noted that most of the inhabitants of Trebizond were Laz. 2 Several Byzantine authors, among them Trapezuntines, viewed the Greek empire of Trebizond as a Laz border state. 3 In the seventeenth century Evliya Chelebi called Trebizond 'the former Lezgi vilayet'; only then the latter had been largely converted to Islam. 4 And today many Turkish and Western scholars, together with the rural Turks of Ainatolia, associate the provinces of Ordu, Giresun, Trebizond, Rize, and Artvin with the Laz. Despite this association, it is likely that no people closely connected with the present-day Lazi were ever extensively settled west of the town of Pazar. Certainly there is no firm evidence to suggest the contrary. 5

^Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 188, 191. ~[J.-T.| Reinard, trans., Geographie d'Aboulfeda, 2 vols. (Paris, l'lmprimerie Nationale, 184883), vol. 2, pt. 2,146. 3 Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), p. 179. 4 Evliya Chelebi, Narrative, vol. II, p. 49. Evliya Chelebi refers to the Laz as the Lezgi and states that the former was a corruption of the latter. The Lezgi, however, are still another people, not connected with the Pontos, but located in southeastern Daghestan and in northern Azebaijan. Evliya Chelebi distinguishes various groups among the Laz, giving support to the idea that the term 'Laz' as he used it included many people besides the Lazi. He located Chichu Laz near the district Of (Kalipravuli) and also mentioned the Chifta Laz. 5 W e s t of Pazar, most of the old village names have Turkish, Greek, and Armenian etymologies. East of Pazar, the names of the Lazi villages are of a clearly different, presumably Lazi, structure. W. E. D. Allen, A History of the Georgian People, p. 55, and idem., The Geographical Journal, vol. LXXIV (1929), p. 141, attributes a Lazi etymology to the names of the principal towns as far west as Samsun, but the evidence for this seems slender.

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This interpretation of the term 'Laz' also explains the difficulty with which the Pontic Greeks of the late Byzantine period are distinguished from the Pontic Laz. 1 Probably there was no fixed distinction, but like categories of Turk and Laz today, these terms represent a continuum along which various people taking various points of view drew lines of social differentiation. Such a situation would be expected. By the late Byzantine period, two millennia had passed since the Greeks had begun colonizing the region. For a clear difference between the Greeks and the indigenous population to be preserved over such a long time would have been extraordinary even without the policy of assimilation pursued by succesive empires.

The Turkish Settlement of the Pontos The Greek Empire of Trebizond was the last Byzantine state to fall to the Ottomans, and the Pontos was one of the last regions of Asia Minor to receive large numbers of Turkish settlers. The Turks plundered in the mountains above Trebizond as early as 1057 and were in the suburbs of the town in 1073-4, 2 but several centuries were to pass before any extensive settlement of the Pontos took place. The considerable number of Turks who did eventually settle in the Pontos are thought to have entered the region from the western coast rather than from the southern interior. 3 By the late thirteenth century there were many (,"epni Turks living far to the west near Sinop. During the fourteenth century these £epnis were moving into the forested areas east of Samsun up to the neighborhood of Giresun, and at the end of that century one of the Turkish Beys took Giresun from the Greek Empire of Trebizond. Fifty years after the fall of the latter an Ottoman census (c. 1515) indicates that the Muslims still did not exceed 10 per cent of the population in the immediate vicinity of Trebizond and in the districts to the east, 4 but a region to the southwest of the town had become so

Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), p. 180, suggests an economic distinction rather than an ethnic distinction between Laz and Greek, in which the former were more transhumant and the latter were more permanently settled. He notes that even on these grounds there was an overlap between the two groups. 2 Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, trans. J. Jones-Williams (London, Sedgwick and Jackson, 1968), pp. 70,73. 3 Faruk Siimer, s.v. 'Cepni', Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd ed., Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1954.—). Also see Faruk Siimer, Oguzlar (Ankara Universitesi Basimevi, 1967), pp. 318-20, 322-3. The following account of the Turkicization of the Pontos is drawn, except where noted, from these two sources. 4 M . Tayyib Gokbilgin, 'XVI. yiizyil baglannda Trabzon livasi ve dogu Karadeniz bolgesi', Belleten, vol. XXVI (1962), pp. 293-337.

THE

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41

populated with Turks that it was known as the vilayet of the (,'cpnis. Finally, during the remainder of the sixteenth century, the number of Muslims, and by inference the number of Turks, in the eastern districts steadily increased. 1 In the district of Of, for example, 2 per cent of the households were Muslim c. 1 ¡515, but c. 1583 their proportion had risen to 24 per cent. 2 Turkish settlement in the easternk Pontos very likely continued in later cfcnturies, although no good documentation of this is now available. Conflicts between the Cxpni and the settled population were reported in the seventeenth atid eighteenth centuries in the Trebizond area. 3 Michael Defner, who visited Of in the late nineteenth century, found the villagers of Zisino much frightened of the 'Chepni', a word he equated with bandit, against whom an armed force of 300 men had been sent. 4 The traditions of many families living in the district of Of also indicate that Turks were continually settling in the coastal region over the past two centuries. Accounts of migration into the coastal region during the nineteenth century are especially common and convincing, but they usually assert that the area was entered by crossing the Pontic chain rather than by coming from the west along the coast. This migration from the highlands to the lowlands of Of is still taking place today and has probably accelerated in recent years. The families that have migrated within the past 100 years or so are called mountaineers (dagh) by the older families and constitute about 10 per cent of the population in the district. The early comers among the mountaineers have become almost indistinguishable from the natives (yerli) in their customs, so much so that disputes arise over whether certain families should be considered as mountaineers or not. The latecomers, on the other hand, are more Anatolian in their customs, and refer to the natives as Laz.

The Formation of Black Sea Turkish Society There is little doubt that the influx of Turkish nomads in the earlier centuries was a cataclysmic event for Pontic society. The increase in the proportion of Turks led to large-scale displacements of the settled population 'See the analysis of population movements in the district of Of for a further examination of this inference. 2 See Table 2. 3 Siimer, s.v. 'Cepni', Encycl. of Islam (2nd ed.). 4 Michael Deffner, 'Pente Hebdomades para tois arnesithreskois en Ophei', Hestia, year 2, vol. IV, no. 87 (August 1877), pp. 547-50.

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in many parts of the Pontos. As early as the thirteenth century the situation for Greek agriculturalists in the Ma§ka valley near Trebizond, pressed by both Laz and Turks, was desperate: Almost every spring the Trapezuntines had to fight (as they still do) for their grazing lands, and in the summer the Turkomans came down into the valley as well. The warlike qualities of the Matzoukans, of which several contemporary sources speak, must have been dearly bought ... The evidence of a thirteenth century survey of almost a whole village, and of entire families carried off by marauders, and the number of donations to the monastery in which a widow states that she can no longer work her gonikeion because her menfolk have been captured or killed, is impressive. 'The Captive' (Aichmalotos) even became a Matzoukan surname.'

While the disruptions and conflicts which accompanied Turkish settlement should not be underestimated, the effects of the Turkish advance were very likely mitigated by a number of factors. First, the Pontos had a considerable non-Turkish population, while areas of central and eastern Anatolia had been devastated even before the Turkish nomadic tribes ever arrived.2 Secondly, the fighting traditions of the rural Pontic peoples probably made them more than equal to the task of defending themselves against the newcomers. 3 Thirdly, the coastal terrain, in contrast to the open Anatolian steppes, is well suited for defense, and many isolated high mountain valleys offer an excellent refuge. 4 Fourth, the Pontic mountain barrier and forested highlands restricted the sudden movement of large nomadic tribes into the Pontos, making the invasion of Turks a more gradual and less catastrophic event than was the case for parts of Anatolia.5

^Bryer, 'Rural Society in the Empire of Trebizond', Archeion Pontou, vol. XXVIII (1966-7), pp. 159-60. The surname which Bryer mentions is surely connected with the present-day Esiroglu sub-district of Maçka. Esiroglu in Turkish means 'son of the captive'. 2 F o r an account of Asia Minor before the Turkish invasion see Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, pp. 64-6. ^This still holds true today. Some lowland villagers of Of have a pasture in the high Pontic mountains that is 30 miles distant from the coast. Anatolians who live on the southern slopes of the Pontic mountains also claim the pasture, but they have been unable to gain possession of it even though their villages are only a short distance away. The men of Of insist that their superior fighting abilities were decisive in enabling them to resist the Anatolians' claims. Conflicts still occur between the two groups. 4 F o r a brief account of the Greek Santalis who, isolated in such a refuge, preserved their independence from both Turks and the Ottoman government down to modern times, see Bryer, 'Nineteenth-century Monuments in the City and Vilayet of Trebizond', Archeion Pontou, vol. XXIX (1968), pp. 108-14. 5 Xavier de Planhol, Bulletin de l'Association de Géographes Français, nos. 311-12 (1963), pp. 10-11. My own argument is an extension of a similar one developed by de Planhol, who traces the high population density of the Pontos to the absence of a devastating Turkish occupation like that which occurred in parts of Anatolia. According to de Planhol, the main factor was the Pontic mountain barrier and the thick vegetation which made it impossible for large nomadic tribes to move freely and quickly into the region.

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43

Although the Pontic peoples were able to maintain themselves before the incursions of the Turks, large numbers of them were eventually inclined to accept Islam, and in time they and the Turks merged to form the Black Sea Tbrkish population. By the late nineteenth century about four-fifths of the population of the eastern coastal region were Muslim and of these the very large majority were Turkish-speaking.1 The course of this process of Islamization and Turkicization is not well documented, but something is known of three groups that retained more of the older Pontic culture than the majority of Black Sea Turks. These are the Lazi in the districts of Pazar, Arde§en, Findikh, Arhavi, and Hopa; the Armenian speaking Hemgin in the valleys above the Lazi ; and the Greek-speakers in the old district of Of. All three of these groups are located east of Trebizond, and the villagers of the last two groups are in the upper reaches of the most inaccessible coastal valleys. The lazi are though to have turned increasingly to Islam after 1580, and the Hernsin, may have begun to take up Islam in the early fifteenth century.2 The Greek-speakers of Of are relatively late comers — their conversion is usually placed in the late seventeenth century.3 The process of Turkicization which followed these peoples' acceptance of Islam is still in progress. The Lazi precariously maintain their identity with a distinct but heavily Turkicized language.4 The Hem§in are probably farther along in becoming no more than a specific regional community of Turks. Many of the Western Hem§in today speak no other language than Turkish. One of them whom I met was aware of some possible Armenian connexion, but he did not know that Armenian had ever been spoken by them. He derived the word 'Hem§in', which has an Armenian etymology, from the Turkish hem-§en, meaning 'all of the same cheerfulness'. Farther east, near Hopa, ^Vital Cuinet, La Turquie d'Asie, 4 vols. (Paris E. Leroux, 1890-5), vol. I, p. 10. Cuinet estimates that the population of the late nineteenth-century sancaks of Trebizond and Lazistan was 607,700. Of the total, 473,795 were listed as Muslim, 107,000 were listed as Greek Orthodox, and 26,535 were listed as Armenians belonging to various Christian sects. These two sancaks included more or less the territory which comprises the modern provinces of Giresun, Trebizond, Rize, and the coastal section of Artvin. The judgement that most of the Muslims were Turkish-speaking is my own conclusion derived from my work in the area. 2 Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 181, 194. ^Kemal Karadenizli, Trabzon Tarihi (Ankara Basim ve Ciltevi, 1954), p. 46, gives the date of the conversion as 200 years after the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond, i.e. the late seventeenth century. His source is §akir §evket, Trabzon Tarihi (Istanbul. Umran Matbaasi, 1294, A.H.). Deffner, Hestia year 2, vol. IV, no. 87 (August 1877), pp. 547-50, was told in 1876 during his stay in Of that the Greek speakers of the western valley of the district had been converted about 180 years earlier. An Ottoman almanac of 1869 (Salname-i Vilayet Trabzon, 1286 ¿^.H.) concurs with these figures. Also see the discussion of Of in Bryer, Archeion Pontou, vol. XXIX (1968), pp. 109-10. 4

Bryer, Bedi Kartlisa, vols. XXI-XXII (1966), pp. 184-5.

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some Hem§in villages are reported to have retained the Armenian language more perfectly than those to the west. 1 There are fewer traces of the pre-Turkish Pontic languages west of Pazar. The Greek-speakers near (.iiykara in the old district of Of constitute by far the largest group. Today, all mature males among them speak Turkish fluently, and their Pontic Greek is highly Turkicized. Other groups of Greekspeaking Muslims can be found throughout the modern province of Trebizond, though their numbers are quite small. A few live in the lowland villages of Of, and others are reported in the districts of Arakli and Magka. A number are also said to live in Tonya, a district west of Trebizond that is known for its blood feuds. The people of Of are better known to me than the Lazi or Hemshin, and in what follows I examine the course of Turkicization in this district as an example of what may have happened in many other parts of the Pontos. Three sixteenth-century Ottoman censuses for this district have been transcribed by Hasan Umur. 2 These censuses list the number of Christian and Muslim households in each village of the district for the years 921 A.H. (c. 1515), 961 A.H. (c. 1554), and 991 A.H. (c. 1583). The censuses are summarized in Tables I and 2, where the total number of Christian and Muslim households in four separate areas of the district are given. 3 The four areas consist of the upper and lower portions of the two large valley networks which make up the district. The lower eastern valley is denoted as Ei 0 , the upper valley as E h ;, the lower western valley as Wj 0 , and the upper western valley as W^j. A few villages could not be located in any specific area and the totals of their Christian and Muslim households are listed separately.

1 l-'or comments on the background of the Hemgin and an analysis of their language, see Georges Dumézil, 'Notes sur le parler d'un Arménien musulman de Hemgin', Académie Royale de Belgique, Classe des Lettres et des Sciences morales et politiques, Mémoires, vol. LVII, no. 4 (1964). Dumézil gives the date of the conversion of a number of Armenian Christians near Hemgin as the early eighteenth century. 2 Hasan Umur, OfTarihi (Istanbul, Giiven Basimevi, 1951), pp. 5-62. ^ According to Hasan Umur, the 921 A. H. census is document no. 52 in the Istanbul Bagbakanhk Dairesi; the 961 A.H. census is document no. 288 in the same location; and 991 A.H. census is document no. 53 in the Kuyud-i Kadime dairesi of Ankara. The 921 A. H. census appears to be the same as that treated by Gdkbilgin, Belleten, vol. XXVI (1962). The names of the heads of households are listed in the censuses. The Christian names are in Greek and the Muslim names are in Ottoman. This does not mean that Christians and Muslims were Greek- and Turkish-speaking, respectively, but I am inclined to believe that these two languages were the important ones in the district during the sixteenth century just as they are today.

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The figures show that during the sixteenth century the number of Muslim households, and by inference the numbers of Turks, grew from a negligible 2 per cent to a substantial 24 per cent of the total number of households in the district. During the same period the total number of Christian households increased considerably, indicating that the Christian population of the district was not at all overrun by the Turks.

Table 1. Number of Christian and Muslim households

in Of by area and year of

census 921 A.H.

E|o Ehi

Wio Whi Unlocated localities Total

Chr. 979 0 988 288 97 2.352

961 A.H.

991 A.H.

Mus. 26 0 22 2 0

Chr. 1,039 61 1,078 427 124

Mus. 187 7 128 27 10

Chr. 908 200 1,160 646 201

Mus. 551 16 264 95 50

50

2,729

359

3,115

976

Table 2. Total number of households

Total no. of localities Total no. of households Muslim household as % of total Christian households as % of totäl

and localities in Of by year of census 921 A.H. 58 2,402 2 98

961 A.H. 64 3,088 12 88

991 A.H. 73 4,091 24 76

The incursion of the Turks did, nevertheles, coincide with some disruption of the Christian population. An examination of these figures indicates that the Turks were settling primarily in the lower eastern valley, a choice area for agriculture and pasture. In this same area the Christian population was decreasing over the course of the sixteenth century, the only area in which such a decrease occurred. Meanwhile, the Christian population was increasing sharply in the upper western valley, the area where one finds the largest number of Greek speakers today. The uper western valley is also the area in which most of the new villages (see Table 2) appeared during the last two censuses, indicating that the Christians were moving from the lowlands to the highlands. This interpretation is further confirmed by the situation in the lower western valley. The number of Turks settling in this

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area represented a smaller proportion of the population than in the lower eastern valley and correspondingly its Christian population appears to have been more stable, increasing modestly in each census. There are alternative hypotheses that could explain the census figures. They might, for example, reflect conversions among the indigenous Pontics and conflicts between the converts and those who remained Christian. In such a case the inference that the category Muslim denoted Turks would be entirely mistaken. 1 From the present-day situation in the district, such an alternative hypothesis seems doubtful. The lower eastern valley is recognized by the people of Of as an area which has constantly received new settlers in the past. The people of this area are said to be more 'mixed' than the people of the western valley and the former are all Turkish-speaking. It is the people of the western valley who are known for their preservation of the 'old customs' and among whom one finds finds the only Greek-speakers in the district. In addition, the eastern valley is also adjacent to the valley network of the river presently called the Iyidere and formerly known as the Kalapotamos. This valley network is known in Of and in the province of Rize as the corridor by which new settlers have entered the coastal lowlands from the Pontic mountains and from Anatolia. 2 The people called 'mountaineers' in Of, for example, have usually migrated through this corridor to the lowlands. Finally, there is evidence from other districts to the west that the Turks there also settled in the lowlands, while the Pontics moved to the higher elevations. 3 The conflicts which produced the population movements in Of eventually subsided, presumably with the conversion of the indigenous Pontics. Today it is not possible to view the Turkish-speakers and the Greek-

Alternatively, the newcomers might not have been Turks. While there have been newcomers to the district who did not speak Turkish in recent centuries (some Kurdish people were present in small numbers) it would be difficult to explain why most of the population today is Turkishspeaking if the new settlers had not for the most part been Turks. 2

T h i s is an important exception to the generally accepted view that the Turks entered the Pontos from the west. G. Stratil-Sauer, 'From Baiburt via Ispir to Lâzistan', The Geographical Journal, vol. LXXXVI (1935), pp. 405-6, noted that a natural road led f r o m Ispir along the Chapans River (Chepni ?) through the Chapans Pass into the Iyidere Valley and thence to Rize. A motor road now runs along this route. The village names in the western part of the province of Rize which lies open to this corridor are the most clearly Turkish in etymology of any village names east of Giresun. See the T.C. Ba§bakanlik, 23 Ekim 1955 Genel Ntifus Sayimi, Istatistik Genel Mudurliigii, Yaym no. 412 (Ankara, 1961), for a list of the old village names. ^Xavier de Planhol, Bulletin de l'Association de Géographes Français, nos. 311-12 (1963), p. 8, points out that the highest villages on the northern slopes of the western Pontic mountains were Greek. After the exchange of populations, the Greek villages became summer residences for the Turks. Anthony Bryer has more extensive views and materials on this matter, but they have not yet been published.

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speakers as two separate social groups. Those who call themselves natives (yerli) include both; intermarriage, close friendships, and business undertakings link the two. In late Ottoman times, both groups were locally referred to as Ottoman (Osmanli), and now both consider themselves and one Another to be Turks. The merging of the Turks and the Pontics in Of was not at all times and in all places a simple one-way process. One man told me of a patrilineal descent group of Turks that had settled in Çaykara and had acquired the Greek language, while another branch of the same group had settled west of Trebizond and remained Turkish-speaking. That some Turks who settled in the Pontos may have become Greek-speaking does not seem altogether improbable. Eventually the Greek-speakers could claim that they were better Muslims than the Turkish-speakers, since their villages became the most famous producers of religious teachers. Even today some of these teachers tutor their students using Pontic Greek as a language of instruction. This example, in which non-Turkish-speakers were the representatives of Islamic orthdoxy, may well have been more than an isolated case in this region of Turkey. As has been mentioned, the eastern Black Sea Turks are known for their Sunnite conservatism, and it is the townsmen and villagers east of Trebizond who are especially outstanding in this regard. The people of this eastern area, it will be recalled, are also those who have inherited most from the older pre-Turkish way of life; that is, they are the most Laz-like. There is another significant aspect of this pattern of orthodoxy among the Black Sea Turks. Sunnite Islam not only prevails among the townsmen and villagers east of Trebizond, but there are extremely few, if any, Turkish Alevis in this area. In almost every other part of Turkey one finds at least a small minority of Alevis. What makes this absence of Alevis particularly notable is the fact that the Çepni Turks who are credited with having settled the Pontos were usually extreme Shi'ites. 1 This again suggests that the native Pontics, rather than the Turks, were the principal force behind Sunnite Islam, and that it was the Pontics who converted the Çepnis from their heterodox beliefs. The Islamization and the Turkicization of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast must therefore be distinguished as two separate processes which may even have run counter to one another in some places and at some times.2 ^Siimer, Oguzlar, pp. 318, 323. ^Claude Cahen, 'Le problème ethnique en Anatolie', Cahiers d'Histoire Mondiale, vol. II (1954), p. 356, has analysed the Islamization and Turkicization of Asia Minor as two separate processes, sometimes concurrent and sometimes not.

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If this interpretation is correct, another problem is immediately raised. Why should the Pontics have become such enthusiastic converts and why should their religious practices have become so thoroughly orthodox ? The invocation of the usual explanation — that converts are often exceptionally orthodox and devout — seems inconclusive. More to the point, the late Islamization of the Pontos during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be underlined. At this time the orthodoxy of the Ottoman Empire was at its height and the earlier Ottoman period of Gazi march warriors and religious syncretism was past. According to this view, the Sunnite orthodoxy of Turkey's eastern Black Sea peoples is a reflexion of the imperial orthodoxy at the time of the Pontic conversions. One might further speculate that the Ottomans had much to offer the less-Byzantinized Pontics. Very likely, the latter were deeply impressed with a victorious and exuberant Islam that was ready to accord them full honors for their military virtues. In closing, 1 would like to emphasize that the uniqueness of the eastern Black Sea Turks has been explored. Much more can be said about what the Anatolians and the eastern Black Sea Turks have in common than can be said about what distinguishes them from one another. Both, after all, speak a common language. Their familial relationships, while not identical, are broadly the same. They share similar folktales, proverbs, and superstitions. Their moral evaluations have different stresses, but they are very similar. Most important of all, the Black Sea Turks see their fate as closely intertwined with the Anatolian Turks of central and western Anatolia. They resent and reject any suggestion that their customs have connexions with the peoples of the Caucasus. This feeling, in one form or another, is probably a very ancient one in this region, for the lot of its peoples over the past two millennia has consistently been cast with the peoples of Asia Minor rather than those of the Caucasus.

MEANING AND SOCIETY IN THE NEAR EAST: EXAMPLES FROM THE BLACK SEA TURKS AND THE LEVANTINE ARABS (1) KNOWLEDGE ... Yes, He knows the creeping of the black ant upon the solid rock in the darkest night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in the midst of the air. He knows the secrets and that which is more shrouded in secrecy than secrets; he has knowledge of the suggestions of the mind, of the movements of the thoughts, and of the concealed things of the inmost parts by a knowledge which is ancient from eternity and by which He has not ceased to be described through the ages, not by a knowledge which renews itself and arises in his essence through experienced AL-GHAZZALI

At the turn of the century the societies of the Near East provided materials for some of the most pressing anthropological and sociological issues of the day. W. Robertson Smith, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, to name only one representative of three national traditions, all devoted considerable atteniton to Semitic societies. Since that time, fewer sociologists and anthoropologists have had a background in Semitic languages and literatures, and new materiels from outside the classical and Semitic cultures have seemed to offer fresher, more challenging problems. In recent decades, Near Eastern societies have come to play a minor role in the development and discussion of anthropological problems. In general, only the tribal societies have maintained any prominence, and even these societies have only been test cases for a theory that was formulated by Evans-Pritchard for the Nuer of subSaharan Africa. Today, the societies of the Near East seem destined to continue to play their minor role, for structuralism and symbolic analyses have had as yet few repercussions in the anthropology of this part of the world. Surveying recent anthropological writings on the Near East, one can cite an impressive number of very fine athnographies, but there is at the same time a noticeable lack of any pressing theoretical issue to associate with these ethnographies. The one exception, perhaps, is the question of father's brother's daughter (FBD) marriage, but this is a problem more embarrasing to Near Eastern specialists ^Nabih Amin Faris, trans., The Foundations Ashraf, 1963), p. 4.

of the Articles of Faith (Lahore : Sh. Muhammad

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than a matter for pride. FBD marriage is found among various peoples of the world, but only Near Eastern specialists have become obsessed wtih it.1 Yet, they have never arrived at any resolution of this problem which has consequences for anthropology in general. Only a few years ago, this unflattering assessment of the state of Near Eastern anthoropology would have seemed inappropriate. At that time the volume Honour and Shame, with important articles by Julian Pitt-Rivers, Pierre Bourdieu, Julio Caro Baroja, and others, seemed to promise new developments for the study of Near Eastern as well as Mediterranean societies.2 In this paper, I hope to indicate how the features of Mediterranean societies discussed by the contributors to Honour and Shame have a direct bearing on a number of current anthropological issues. To do this, a perspective different from the social structuralist position generally adopted by the contributors has been taken, but many of the problems which they originally raised are touched upon. This change in perspective has required me to deal briefly with a number of ethnographical matters, rather than to treat any one in an exhaustive fashion. Consequently, it has not been possible to provide enough material to present a conclusive case for any one ethnographical problem; something much longer than a paper would have been necessary. This will not, I hope, prevent a sympathetic reader from realizing that a shift in perspective away from a preoccupation with social structure enables us to see the old issues in a fresh light. The perspective that I have in mind is the interpretation of the features of two rural Near Eastern societies in terms of structurings that derive from a cultural system of meaning. This system of meaning is directly related to the concept of honor in the Near East. Among the Turkish- and Arabic- speaking peoples to be compared, related words (Arabic : sharaf, Turkish: §eref) refer to the category of 'honor' in its broadest, most encompassing sense. Both words are transcribed as sharaf in this paper. Different words among these two peoples refer to the more restricted category of 'sexual honor' (Arabic: lard; Turkish: namus). In Part I of the paper a system of meaning related to the categories of sharaf and namus is presented, citing examples from the Black Sea district of Of in Turkey. Some general interpretations of concepts of honor in the Mediterranean and lr The Tswana of South Africa and the Balinese are perhaps the best examples of societies with FBD marriage which have not been strongly influenced by the Near Eastern tradition. 2 J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965).

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near Eastern areas follow. In Part II, the system of meaning in Of is compared with a similar but differently structured system of meaning among rural Arabs with clans (hamula) in the Levant. In this respect, I have drawn upon the distinguished work of Hilma Granqvist and Abner Cohen for the purposes of the comparison. 1 Neither of these authors presents a direct analysis of the categories in question, but both of them give many details that are closely related to it. An orthographic convention has been used to differentiate two ways of discussing a society. When a sociological term is used to refer to some aspect of Near Eastern society, double quotation marks signal the reader to this fact. When an English word is used primarily to gloss a cultural category in near Eastern society, single quotation marks signal the reader to this fact. This convention is employed to underline the disjunction between a sociological discourse and a discourse in terms of Near Eastern meanings.

Sharafin the District of Of Like the older meaning of our word honor, sharaf is a grand and weighty term in Of and the rest of Turkey. The most common usage of the term is in reference to events or persons of great importance in the context of national or islamic affairs. The sharaf of these events and persons denotes that same aspect of their significance is fundamental and ultimate. This does not mean that events and persons with sharaf are above the ordinary man, but rather something of the opposite. Events and persons with sharaf carry a significance that transcends the mere event or person in question and makes them "stand for" a historical community which includes, ordinary men as well as men with sharaf. The phrase, "historical community" denotes thait the category of sharaf pre-supposes that something is known about the shape and course of events in the world (hence the word history) and that what is known gives meaning to the connections between persons (hence the word community). This example represents only one kind of relationship between ordinary men and national or Islamic sharaf. There is another more direct relationship. When a villager undertakes military service, when he finds himself called to ijjijma Granqvist, Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village, Part I. Commentaiiones Humanarum Litterarum, vol. 3, no. 8 (Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1931); ibid. Pan II, vol. 6, no. 8 (1935); Abner Cohen, Arab Border-Villages of Israel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965).

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serve in a war or some border incident, when he goes on the hadj, or even when he prays in the mosque, his own acts and person acquire an aspect of sharaf more modest than the sharaf of a celebrated army general, a popular prime minister, or a learned mufti, but sharaf none the less. In the background of the ordinary villager's sharaf, one can again perceive a recognition of a historical community. For the villager performs his military obligations as a Turk, and he performs his religious duties as a Muslim. Indeed for most Turkish villagers the examples of military service and religious duties are almost indistinguishable in their significance, just as the two historical communities, the Turkish nation (ulus) and the Muslim community (millet) of Turkey, are almost indistinguishable for him. These two examples allow us to elaborate the notion of a historical community. The existence of a historical community implies the existence of a sacred historiography. This sacred historiography provides a historical significance by which men's acts are measured. At the same time and as a corollary, those men who "accept" and are "included in" the sacred historiography are the community. Such descriptions of Islamic society are not unfamiliar to near Eastern specialists. Islam implies a sacred historiography that provides the significance by which men's acts are measured and defines a community of 'believers', men who have 'faith'. Here, however, I am suggesting that these familiar comments on the nature of Islam can be generalized to constitute a cultural system of meaning which, oddly enough, includes many Near Eastern societies and social aspects regarded as imperfectly Islamic or non-Islamic, as well as Islamic societies and social aspects. In this paper, I refer to a sacred historiography (either Islamic or nonIslamic) as a 'historical significance' (or simply as a 'significance'). I refer to to a sacred communality as 'interconnections' which refer back to and are made possible by the existence of a 'historical significance'. These concepts represent glosses of a system of meaning that enables us to interpret "processes" and "institutions" in the Near East. This interpretation provides an alternative to a sociological understanding of the "processes" and "institutions" and seeks to overcome some of the difficulties that such an understanding presents. With this statement of position, we can now return to the analysis of some features of the Black Sea Turks.

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Actually, the ordinary villager in some parts of Turkey and especially in the Black Sea region has a third link with sharaf. This link is somewhat more difficult for us to understand than the preceding examples. It results from the existence, or to be more precise, the possibility of clanship. For example, a m a n ' s ascendants may be known f o r their heroic exploits in local wars, further back they may have taken part in the victorious Ottoman expansion into Europe, and even further back they may have participated in the conquest of Asia Minor by the Muslims. Pious acts on the part of ascendants also become part of the clan sharaf. Ascendants may be known to have constructed local fountains and bridges for pilgrims and travelers. They may be known to have participated in building mosques. Or they may be reputed to have acquired exceptional religious knowledge, or performed the hadj. In Of, some ascendants are even said to have taken part in th|e conversion of local peoples to Islam during the early Muslim conquest. But the sharaf of a clan should not be viewed as consisting of any set of piecemeal accomplishments. The sharaf of a clan is a totality of significance derived f r o m acts accomplished by its ascendants. It stands for a kind of uniqueness which represents the clan, but the character of this uniqueness, the historical signifiance by which it is measured, is in terms that make sense to everyone. In these examples, the 'signifiance' of clan sharaf is largely the same as the 'signifiance' of national or religious sharaf, even though its structure is different. Clan sharaf connects with a person through ascendants, while national and religious sharaf connects with him through a community. Later we shall see that the 'significance' of clan sharaf is not always the same as the 'significance' of national or religious sharaf, nor is it always possible to resolve these different 'significances'. Thus, clan sharaf is direct and intense whereas the first example of the national and Islamic sharaf of great men touches the people only indirectly and the second example of the sharaf of an ordinary man touches them only weakly. Clan sharaf is also more detailed and richer for a villager than any "individual" connection with sharaf through personal, military, or religious duties, and it implicates him with an immediate "collectivity". After all, what one villager accomplishes in his lifetime must usually pale before the accomplishments of his ascendants. But these last observations merely make the issue seem reasonnable. It is a more difficult question, and one beyond the aims of this paper, to explain just why such an alternative as clan sharaf is necessary.

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Clan Sharaf in Of A particular example from Of will provide an illustration of some aspects of clan sharaf. There are hundreds of clans in the district of Of. Several of these clans are quite large and include thousands of men, women, and children. Most of them are much smaller with a population of fifty or so. Some of the larger clans, not all of them, are more important in the district as a whole than most clans. It is difficult to specify sociologically just how they are important. The question might be dismissed by saying that the large clans are more "powerful" by virtue of their numbers and hence more important. I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that none of the clans are "corporate groups". 1 At least they are not "corporate" in any sense of the word which does justice to the original purposes for which this concept was formulated. This fact makes it very difficult to talk about them as having power and especially as having power by virtue of their numbers. It also makes extremely difficult the description of just how clans enter into local politics; for the attention accorded the clans seems to rise and fall with a capriciousness that makes any analysis in terms of clan "social organization" very dubious. Yet, the clans are there, and from time to time they assert their presence in the discussion and cares of the people. One can say with absolute certainty, however, that the larger more important clans do have more sharaf even though they cannot have "power" as a group. Coordinate with their greater sharaf, some of the larger clans claim to have played a more intimate and glorious role in the significant events of the past, and these claims, even if sometimes secretly denied by enemies, are publicly recognized throughout the district. One can conclude that the importance of these clans in the present is of exactly the same quality as their publicly recognized importance in the past. That is, these clans are seen to have a kind of relation with district affairs of 'significance' and they are looked to when clan sharaf comes to the fore in events. Recognizing that clans in Of are not corporate groups and recognizing that the important clans are not more powerful in the empirical sense of this term frees us to consider just what are the fundamental elements of clanship. The answer to this question is simple, but disturbing to anyone who insists on seeing "lineages" and "patrilineal descent groups" in the Near East. Clans 1 Michael E. Meeker, 'The Great Family Aghas of Turkey', in Richard T. Antoun and Iliya Harik, ed., Rural Politics and Social Change in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972).

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exist in Of in so far and whenever clan sharaf comes into play. Clan sharaf is not simply a Turkish idiom f o r talking about a sociological group, the lineage, rather it is the category of sharaf which gives certain groups (in so far and whenever they might seem to be a "group" to the ethnographer) their peculiar characteristics. 1 This is just as true for the small clan of fifty as for the large clan of several thousand people. An understanding of clans, therefore, must focus on a history that makes them possible. A brief digression is necessary to clarify this position. Over the past three decades, anthropologists have turned their attention to a few Near Eastern and North African tribes in which an elaboration of a segmentary category of sharaf has brought a remarkable number of features within its domain. II am referring to the Cyrenaican Bedouin, the Somalis, and the Berber tribesmen. 2 A m o n g certain parts of these societies, land boundaries, ownership of waterholes, the organization of herding, reflect the segmentary structure. The conclusion was that the genealogical system was a design of corporate groups, forming relatively with respect to "interests" which emerge in situations of conflict. The reason for the segmentary structure had to be located in the nature of a corporate theory of society; therefore they saw segmentation as providing a "Balance of Power" in what was otherwise a "State of Nature". 3 The connection of the concept of honor with the form of lineages is not at all new. Most of the papers in Peristiany, Honour and Shame, mention this. In this paper, however, a futher step has been taken. Honor is interpreted not as a way of talking about a social group, rather the social group is seen as an expression of honor. Most, if not all, of the papers in Honour and Shame adopt the contrary view that a form of social structure determines the quality of its concepts and values. Peristiany writes: 'What do these groups have in common? This, it seems to me, is the crux of the problem. The papers collected here may allow the formulation of a tentative, an exploratory, answer. Honour and shame are the constant preoccupation of individuals in small scale, exclusive societies where face to face personal, as opposed to anonymous, relations are of paramount importance and where the social personality of the actor is as significant as his office' (p. 11). In contrast with this, the view of this paper is more nearly a development of Evans-Pritchard's formulation of segmentation in relation to "situations and values." See 'The Nuer of the Southern Sudan', in M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed., African Political Systems (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 286. 2

T h e principal references are E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica ( O x f o r d : Clarendon Press, 1949); Emrys Peters, 'The Proliferation of Segments in the Lineage of the Bedouin of Cyrenaica', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 90 (1960), 29-53 ; I. M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Ernest Gelner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); and David M. Hart, 'Clan, Lineage, Local Community and the Feud in a Riffian Tribe', in Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East, Vol. 2, ed. Louise E. Sweet (New York: The Natural History Press, 1970). For a different view of these societies, see Jacques Berque, Structures Sociales du Haut-Atlas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1955), and Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). The latter writers examine a wider set of phenomena than those considered by the corporate segmentary theorists, and the approach of this paper may recall some aspects of their treatments. Still, these writers, like the corporate segmentary theorists, maintain in essence a social structuralist position that is rejected in this paper. 3 T'hese phrases are used explicitly by Ernest Gelner, Saints of the Atlas, pp. 35 and 44. The^ have the value of pointing out the connections of segmentary corporate theory with modern Western political thought. In other words, it is a theory of society in Western terms with little or no relation to indigenous conceptions of the significance of "political" action.

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Later when anthropologists turned to other kinds of rural societies, all of these assumptions and interpretations were kept intact even though landholding, water rights, pasture rights, and herding organization did not reflect at all a lineage or segmentary structure. Instead, a detailed investigation of "political processes" was undertaken and the "shadow" of a segmentary structure was found to cut through these processes. At least the shadow was there in some places some of the time. 1 Now that Emrys Peters, a distinguished analyst of one famous segmentary society, has shown that the "Balance of Power" could never have worked, given the facts of the genealogical reckoning, and added to this the observation that it was never seen to work except in the most desultory fashion, a weaning away from the comfortable assumptions of the segmentary corporate theory seems appropriate. 2 It can no longer suffice to interpret the significance of "patrilineal descent", which is common to most rural areas in the Near East and North Africa, in terms of the occasional properties of some parts of a few tribal societies. In any case, it is clear now that the sociological interpretation does not work any better for at least one of the tribal examples than it does for other kinds of rural societies. Returning to the previous argument, it has been said that the category of clan sharaf should be the focus of our attention, not the often ephemeral "groupness" of the lineage or segment. Or turning this around, the "groupness" of lineages, and segments is ephemeral because of the meaning and structure of clan sharaf. In other words, the system which makes clan sharaf possible is what Near Eastern "descent groups" have in common among themselves and what differentiates them from "descent groups" in other societies. Adopting this point of view, some important facts about clans become clear, facts which corporate analyses have never recognized. Oddly enough, the sharaf of a clan (or segment) is not something that is its own affair in any of these Near Eastern societies, rather the sharaf of a clan denotes its relationships vis-à-vis other clans (or segments). This is related to another property of sharaf. It is not enough for an ascendant to have performed a significant act; the significant act must be recognized by the community which is the context of the 'significance' that endows the act with sharaf. ' One of the best studies of such processes among rural Near Easterners is Abner Cohen's Arab Border-Villages of Israel. 2 Emrys Peters, "Some Structural Aspects of the Feud Among the Camel herding Bedouin of Cyrenaica', Africa, 37, 3 (1967), 261-81.

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Here then we have a glimpse of an important property of the sharaf of clans (or segments). That is to say, clan sharaf cannot exist except in the context of a 'community' which transcends the clan (or segment) itself. Sharaf is a property of a person or of a collectivity, but simultaneously implies a connection between the person or collectivity, and a wider community. One's sharaf cannot be simply accomplished, it must be recognized. To complete the circle, one need only add that the community itself is nothing more than those who recognize the 'historical significance' from which sharaf is derived. An example may help clarify this matter. In Of, among the men of the large clans with sharaf, and only among these kind of clans, there are men called aghas who represent a kind of "leader". Here again the sociological term represents only a caricature of these men. They "lead" at most only a handful of men, but their actions are felt and recognized by thousands. 1 Within any one clan, the lineage of the agha usually has more sharaf than other lineages, and the agha himself can be said to have more sharaf than other living members of his lineage who are not aghas. One feature of the genealogies of clans gives a notion of the properties of sharaf. As a man recedes in the genealogy away from the present, he at some point acquires the title "agha", wihether or not he was an agha when alive. All the ascendants of the lineage a$d the uppermost ascendants of the entire clan therefore are given the title "agha". With respect to the small clans, there are no living aghas, only dead ones. Ascendants in their most essential nature are persons with sharaf. The living aghas are quite concerned about their clan's sharaf. They often keep genealogical records and 'historical" accounts of their ascendants' exploits. They are attentive to any trace of scandal that attaches itself to the clan name. So great is their concern that killings have resulted from an insult given a member of an important clan even when the offended members did not feel inclined to seek vengeance. The aghas are the men who see to these matters. Sharaf is, in a manner of speaking, their business. Again, in this last example, the aghas seem to be a kind of "clan leader" taking us back to the corporate point of view. No doubt they are some kind of "leader", but this observation obscures everything that is crucial. The sharaf of the agha and the sharaf of his clan (categories that are inseparable) include and are based on the notion of the historical community, that is, the entire district of Of. The ascendant aghas of the large clans were those men who first conquered the district for Islam, they later had contact with Ottoman officials, they helped draw the boundaries of the district, they led the local militia against the Russians in World War I, they dealt directly with Ataturk when he formed the Nationalist movement, and so on. 1

Meeker, 'The Great Family Aghas of Turkey'

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Therefore, to say that the large clans with aghas play a prominent role by virtue of their power misses the essential connection between clan sharaf, the figure of the agha, and the conception of a definite historical unfolding. The language of power and leaders is content with the concepts of domination, submission, alliance, and interest. The language of sharaf and aghas is bound up with the recognition of a kind of history, a history in which men recognize peculiar kinds of truths. The large clans have more sharaf by virtue of their accepted claims to have taken a very visible role in this historical unfolding, but the small clans also have a lesser sharaf fomulated in more modest but identical terms. An agha of a large clan, for example, is known to have led the local militia, while an ascendant of a small clan is known only to have served in the militia. The people of Of cannot give up their recognition of the aghas and the great clans without giving up their history as well. By history, I do not mean a tale people tell or read in books, but a form and content of meanings without which no one is anyone, there is no life to live, and there is nothing to be said. In particular, the example of the agha's vengeance should at least hint at the naïveté of sociological theories that interpret feud as "self-help" or a "balance of power". Vengeance and feud are not simply a way of defending rights to property, although they may be frequently entangled with such a question. They are not an assertion of power in a simpleminded way. They are, as any Turkish villager can tell you, tied up with the question of sharaf and especially with the peculiar 'significance' of clan sharaf. Similarly, the form and logic follows the principles of sharaf rather than the principles of a balance of power. The killing of a man who has given an insult is not aimed simply at preventing him or his cohorts from doing so again; it is a public statement which provides redress to a public quality, that is, the quality of sharaf. If vengeance were taken and no one heard of the matter, vengeance would not be worth taking. O c c a s i o n a l l y , it is not enough that requited vengeance be bruited about the village, but there is a compulsion to let the whole world know about the affair. So it is that vengeance killings not infrequently occur in public buildings, in public ceremonies, or involve some other special outrage such as killing a man at his prayers. All this leads to special notoriety complete with national coverage in the newspapers. There is also a reverse logic in all this. Even if the agha was not involved in the killing, it will be attributed to him (because of his sharaf) and even if the killing did not involve any outrage, its reportage tends to develop such details.

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A man with sharaf is not a man who has simply performed certain acts, hp is a man who, the community (some community) believes, has performed siich acts and believes in the glory of these acts. The idea seems maddening to us only because we, as modern men [and women], have an equally strange conception of persons and events. We believe that there is a social reality which actually happened and which is itself divorced f r o m opinion. We construct this reality by objectivity and the scientific method which we imagine as a cold, clear exercise of the mind upon the data of experience. The people of Of, on the other hand, emphasize the communal context of what is known with regard to affairs of sharaf. Putting it in Islamic terms, what the community accepts as known is the Truth. But there is no need to embroil the argument in Islamic theology. The observation serves only to demonstrate that the problem emerges at other levels.

Sharaf and

Segmentation

These peculiarities in Of suggest a generalized interpretation of clan and segmentary societies in the Near East. W e have seen in the ideology of sharaf a system of meaning that has not been apparent to those analysts of Near Eastern clans and segments as corporate groups. Sharaf involves a way of attributing meaning to events, their participants, and their context. Sharaf is possible because of the existence of a historical signifiance. "Acceptance of" and "inclusion within" that historial s i g n i f i c a n c e c o n s t i t u t e s the interconnection between the members of the community. The sharaf of a person or collectivity in turn results from recognition by the members of the community. This system of meaning is not a logical structure. It can be used to structure, even though it is not itself a structure. To make this point clearer, the problem of sharaf and segmentation will be examined to illustrate how the system of meaning becomes structured in a segmentary form. The work of I. Goldziher on the pre-Islamic Arabs, completed in the late nineteenth century and neglected by the analysts of Near Eastern lineages, provides all the necessary points for the analysis of segmentation in terms of a structured sharaf. Turning to his study of Arab muruwwa, we find a set of virtues which can be identified as a historical significance or standard which makes sharaf possible:

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By muruwwa the Arab means all those virtues which, founded in the tradition of his people, constitute the fame of an individual or the tribe to which he belongs; the observance of those duties which are connected with family ties, the relationships of protection and hospitality, and the fulfillment of the great law of blood revenge ... 'If one in my care is harmed I tremble because of this injustice, my bowels are moved and my dogs bark.' ... It would be wrong to suppose that the exercise of this virtue had its source merely in the semi-conscious instincts of a half savage people; it was regulated and disciplined by perfectly fixed traditional legal ideas. T h e relationship of muruwwa

and the genealogies is then described by

Goldziher as follows: This fame [of ancestors] was also of importance in the claim to individual esteem, as it was more than a genealogical ornament to Arabs but had great individual relevance to each man. Just as thè Arabs took for granted the inheritance of physical characteristics, they also assumed that moral attributes were handed down in the same way. Virtues and vices being passed on from the ancestors, the individual could prove his muruwwa best by being able to point out that the virtues which make the true muruwwa were transmitted from noble ancestors ... The virtue of ancestors is usually compared to a high and strong building, which they built for their descendants and which it would be shameful to destroy. Their fame is a continuous incentive to emulation by their descendants.^ From this, we see the first crucial aspect of segmentary sharaf. Unlike national sharaf based on a national community or religious sharaf based on an Islamic c o m m u n i t y , segmentary sharaf is unique because it is "mediated" through "ascendants" in t h e "idiom of descent". In addition, the f a m e of ascendants, being based on a measure of each ascendant's acts, makes possible the e m e r g e n c e of a "collectivity" w i t h r e s p e c t to any a s c e n d a n t . T h i s "collectivity" represents those w h o are connected with the f a m e (sharaf) of the ascendant, that is, his descendants. R e t u r n i n g to Goldziher's a c c o u n t w e f i n d a description of another feature of sharaf associated with tribal f a m e based on muruwwa.

This is the

equation of acts of war and words of war : Quarrels between the tribes are therefore accompanied by mutual satire (hijd') recording all that is shameful in the character and the past of the enemy group while making much of the boasts of one's own clan. The satires which concerned themselves even with the inner life of the family ^Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, Vol. I (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 22. Ibid., pp. 46-7.

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were a particularly important part of the conduct of war. Waging war in poetry is considered as the serious start of hostilities between two tribes just as the cessation of fighting coincides with putting an end to the satires. The assurance of peace concerns security not only from hostile attacks but also from boasting provocation....*

In this quote, warfare between tribes or segments does not appear as a balance of power, but as the context of "significant" events and acts which are possible. That is to say, the Bedouin are not simply protecting their herds and territory with a parabureaucratic system in the form of segmenting lineages, they are "making history" in the same sense in which an imperial power, or a revolutionary egalitarian movement is "making history". But they are making history mutually "against" each other. We can be assured that violence in tícese societies is very often unassociated with the seizure of territory and herds or protection from massacre. For sharaf is not necessarily achieved by such acts even though they would be expressions of power. And when such acts occur they must be masked over, hidden, and denied, ¿/they break the standard of sharaf. This clarifies the second and final crucial aspect of segmentary sharaf — its mutuality. In Of we have seen that the content of national or religious sharaf can be mediated through the idiom of descent, but in the case of muruwwa, we have the more essential and "pure" aspects of the content of segmentary sharaf. That is to say, muruwwa, involves military exploits, hospitality, generosity, vengeance, and so on. All these matters involve a mutuality. They are not simply performed, they are performed on a receiver, namely an opposing segment, who recognizes them. These are all values of clan sharaf in Of, but for complicated reasons they are currently in the background and mildly expressed, just as the segmentary aspects of Of clans are currently in the background and mildly expressed. In another place, Goldziher emphasizes the close interconnection of warfare and the poets, tthis time bringing out strongly the other side of mutuality in segmentary sharaf, that is, reputation and recognition. To "differentiate itself" a collectivity must make history against opposing segments just as the opposing segments must recognize its making of history: The tribal poet boasted that he was no mere composer of verses but an instigator of war, who sent forth mocking verses against those who scorned his tribe; and this mockery was so effective because it 'had wings' l

Ibid., p. 48.

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and 'its words were circulating,' i.e. it toured all the encampments and was known everywhere and was even more dangerous because it stuck and could not easily be wiped out — 'a bad saying clinging like lard which makes the Copt woman ugly,' ' burning like a mark made with hot coal,' 'sharp as the tip of a sword' and 'alive even when the inventor has long been dead/'

The necessary public recognition of sharaf is apparent from this quote. Both having sharaf and lacking sharaf depend on recognition by others who accept the same historical significance. The poet is an "instigator" of war and his words are like the "tip of a sword". The act and the renown of the act are inextricably bound up one with the other. From these quotes and from what Evans-Pritchard has taught us of the logical structure of segmentary systems, we can now interpret Near Eastern segmentary systems in terms of the structuring of a system of meaning. That is to say the system of meaning is not the same as the logical or oppositional structure formulated by Evans-Pritchard, which is more or less applicable to all segmentary systems. The system of meaning is structured in this case to fit the logical relationships implicit in a segmentary system. Consider the elements of a segmentary system as represented in Fig. 1. The totality of a segment is expressed by the sharaf of Ali. This is what the descendants of Ali have in common and what no one else shares with them. The descendants of Ali are represented as the descendants of the two sons of Ali, Mahmud and Mehmet. But what is the differentiated sharaf of the descendants of Mahmud and Mehmet? This must be expressed in terms of the mutuality embodied in the code of muruwwa. The descendants of Mahmud express their sharaf in raids, generosity, hospitality, and vengence directed against the descendants of Mehmet. The descendants of Mehmet, in turn, are those who recognize the sharaf of these acts. And of course the descendants of Mehmet express their own distinctiveness in acts against the descendants of Mahmud who recognize these acts.

hbid., p. 50.

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Unity

Sub-unity FIGURE 1. The sharaf of collectivities represented differentiate themselves 'rtecognition,' giving rise respectively.

sub-unity

Ali represents the 'significance' of the unity of the two by Mehmet and Mahmud. These two collectivities by virtue of their mutual 'significant' action and to the sharaf of Mehmet and the sharaf of Mahmud,

In the segmentary structuring of sharaf we also see why the descendants in the upper ranges of tribal genealogies frequently split into pairs, for no more than a pair is needed for an expression of "segmentary history", while a single ascendant expresses only an undifferentiated 'community', a formless unity. Corporate theorists, however, interpret pairing as balancing, but they are at a loss to explain a greater number of divisions than pairs, a fact that offers no dificulty to this interpretation. Also we can understand why the rhetoric is "elevated" as one rises in the genealogy. For two neighboring lower segments may express their sharaf in feud, but the greater, more glorious sharaf of tribal segments must be expressed on a larger scale, that is, warfare. The corporate theorists on the other hand see this escalation of rhetoric as the escalation of "interests". One merely dislikes covetous neighbors, but one wars with other nationalities because one has more at stake.1 The interpretation of segmentation in this paper also cuts the link between segmentation on the one hand and ecology and segment population on the other. The latter issues posed difficult problems for segmentary corporate theorists, since the balancing of segments could only obtain with respect to relatively stable ecological conditions and segment populations (see Peters, 'The Proliferation of Segments'). On other grounds, it seems questionable to derive ideological categories, that is, native segmentary thinking, from a possible empirical result of this thinking. This position would require one to posit an "accidental" origin to such thought whenever it occurs since its persistence is rooted in a functional result. The existence of a similar segmentary ideology over a vast contiguous area would not be expected from such a theory, nor would one expect the constant reformulation of segmentary systems after periods of latency unless such reformulations were a result of a native realization, and conscious application of the empirical results. All these points have become academic since Peters ('Structural Aspects of Feud') has shown that the empiricial result of balancing does not obtain and cannot obtain given the character of segmentary ideologies and their typical context.

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Unity of historical significance Action

Recognition Sub-unity

Sub-unity

FIGURE 2. A society composed of seemingly discrete clans features two blocs. Each bloc is made up of a set of clans which form a 'community'. The existence of these blocs turns on a mutual relation of 'significant action' and 'recognition' as in the case of the two descendants of Ali in Figure 1. This mutuality presupposes a grand unity which recognizes the 'historical significance' that make the blocs possible.

Segmentary sharaf is based on the structural principle that the only way of stating the existence of meaningful interconnections and separations among men is by means of the 'significance' of actors. Therefore, actors designate all possible unities and all possible divisions of any unity. Given this position, mediation is necessary in order to connect a collectivity of men with the 'significance' of an 'actor', that is, an ascendant. Any differentiation of this collectivity must be stated in terms of different mediations with the common ascendant, a fact stated by 'significant' opposition between the immediate descendants of the former, and so on. The requirements of 'significant' opposition are in turn related to the first principle mentioned above, the attribution of all 'significance' to 'actors'. The logic of this artificial discourse results from the juxtaposition of the system of meaning and the logical relations of segmentation. It does not apply to segmentation outside the Near East. Another example of the system of meaning, one step removed from a rigid segmentary structure, is revealed by the peculiar form of dualism which crops up again and again from the Maghreb to the Hindu Kush. Locally one finds a group of clans or some other type of collectivity divided into two larger and loosely defined blocs. Such blocs have been described among the

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Berbers in parts of Morocco and Algeria. 1 They also exist among the hamula Arabs of the Levant, and they are found in the district of Of in Turkey. 2 Fredrik Barth has also described such blocs among the Swat Pathans. 3 These dual blocs seem most frequently associated with clan societies in the near East rather than with tribal societies having total genealogies. 4 Such dual blocs are usually interpreted as the result of alliances whose function is the maintenance of the social order. Without denying that such a "function" can be attributed to these blocs some of the time, one can also see in the blocs a structure that again reflects the structured meanings of sharaf (Fig. 2). Both blocs adhere to a similar historical standard which involves a mutuality similar to muruwwa. Bloc A opposes B in terms of this historical standard, but in the nature of this opposition they are recognizing their interrelationship. The existence of dual blocs, then, is connected with the observation that a clan cannot exist except in the context of a "community". Are we then to conclude from these examples that segmentation in the Near East is yet one more example of dualism and exchange which LéviStrauss has attributed to the structure of the mind? Certainly there is a great deal of grist for the exchange theorists' mill here, but so far as I am aware Only a few articles and comments have been devoted to the subject by the structuralists. 5 My purpose, however, is not to suggest that exchange theories provide a fully adequate interpretation of Near Eastern segmentation. Corporate theorists have been criticized for using sociological meanings to interpret processes that turn on cultural meanings. Exchange theorists could be criticized for using logical principles to interpret these processes, again falling short of the understanding of cultural meanings. There is an extensive literature on such blocs among the Berbers by French sociologists. In addition to brief discussions in Berque, Structures Sociales, and Bourdieu's, The Algerians, there is an exhaustive study by Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhzen dans le Sud du Maroc (Paris, 1930). I have not been able to consult the latter. Berque mention the Berber blocs in relations to the theories of Levi-Strauss.

ry

"Tor the hamula Arabs, see Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, p. 14. n. 4. For the Black Sea Turks, see Michael E. Meeker, 'The Black Sea Turks: A Study of Honor, Descent, and Marriage' (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1970), p. 73. 3 Fredrik Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans, London School of Economics, Monographs on Social Anthropology no. 19 (London: Athlone Press, 1959). ^Barth's Swat Pathans have a total geneaology, but in this case the 'total society' is a group of landholders in the midst of a large majority of landless men excluded from the total genealogy. This occurrence of blocs in such a situation is understandable in terms of the generalizations in the text, since the blocs in Swat have more to do with all the people of Swat while the genealogies are the affair of the Pathans alone. So again the blocs are an expression of a structure not included in a total genealogy, as in the case of clan societies. 5 S e e Jean Cuisenier, 'Endogamie et Exogamie dans le Mariage Arabe', l'Homme, 2 , 2 (t96T), 80-105. For a criticism of the Structuralist approach as well as an evalution of sociopolitical interpretations of parallel cousin marriages, see Joseph Chelhod, i e Mariage avec la Cousine Parallèle dans le Système Arabe', l'Homme 5, 3-4 (1965), 113-173.

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While I believe that this paper does reflect shortcomings in the position of the corporate theorists, it does not provide an equally strong case against what could be clled "logical structuralism". This is because logical structuralism may counter any argument that rests on an interpretation of meaning with the claim that the meaning itself can be reduced to a "meaningless" structured code. Despite the capability of logical structuralism to locate the problem on another level, a number of features of the Near Eastern system of meaning are illustrated in this paper which do at least present this theory with difficulties. I conclude this section with one such difficulty. The word 'history' has been used to refer to the 'significance' by which events and acts are known. This is not history as modern men [and women] think of it, a process that progressively molds and changes the world through the meshing of complex forces. This 'history' never recognizes any fundamental change in the affairs of the world, because it represents a fundamental Truth. Modern men [and women] see history largely as a set of forces lying beyond any individual man. These forces with time take on new shapes and forms to produce new truths which each individual recognizes in his [or her] own experience. Modern men, therefore, save their freedom to think and to choose by affirming that the forces of history are meaningless in themselves. The type of Near Eastern thinking being considered here prefers to affirm a Truth in 'history' and sacrifice the freedom to think and to choose. The sacred historiography therefore never recognizes any change in the significance of events and acts, it merely gives one a way of recognizing and comprehending events and acts. We can see this aspect of a sacred historiography in relation to some features of the Islamic tradition. Western scholars have termed Islam the most historical of the great religions. Yet this observation itself is frequently misunderstood because of the very traits of a sacred historiography which have been outlined above. That is to say, our view of history as a process and the Near Eastern view of history as an emanation of Truth are quite distinct and unreconcilable. A simple example illustrates how this is so. Some modern Western scholars, examining the Koran, soon asked the question, "What was the true historical sequence of the revelation of the Suras?" This question was partly a simple result of their Western historical viewpoint and partly a response to what they perceived as the historicity of the Islamic faith. But the early Muslims had not taken this question so seriously and had never been inclined to expend the immense scholarly effort necessary to arrive at an

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Answer. They had arranged the suras in a formal way with the longest Sura first, followed by successively shorter Suras. The reason for this formal arrangement is clear. There was nothing to be learned f r o m the process of revelation. Indeed, such a viewpoint would have been preposterous, for the revelation represented a Truth from beginning to end. The formal arrangement of the Suras therefore is a testament to this Truth. The same problem arises in the differing attitudes of Western scholars and Muslims to the Hadiths, reports of sayings and acts of the Prophet Muhammad. For some Western scholars, the question of whether the Hadiths were historically true became the issue. This question has resulted in a great deal of scholarly activity. More than a few disdainful comments have been made about the naïveté of the Muslim historical seense which led them to accept plainly fabricated Hadith, but such a viewpoint for the Muslims would be a contradiction and a sacrifice of principle. Again they established formal criteria for the evaluation of the Hadith. These formal criteria were based on an adequate knowledge of the Truth, Islam itself, not on an adequate knowledge of a process of history. The latter viewpoint would have been a direct attack on the heart of Islam. We see in these brief and all too inadequate examples an indication of the properties of a sacred historiography in an Islamic context. Islam represents a sacred historiography, a Truth, which gives significance to men's acts. The sacred historiography is structured in relation to a community, a community of believers in the historical significance. One might say, as the Muslims do say, that the community itself is marked by sharaf, and that men who acquire significance do so for the community and by virtue of the communal sharaf. In the Islamic context, crucial problems arise with regard to establishing just what the community is and who is a part of it. These problems largely revolve around mediating between a historical significance and the community itself. In brief, the historical significance becomes a Truth which the community preserves and realizes in its own history. It also becomes a source for determining the very shape of the community itself. Returning to segmentary societies, we see a different kind of example where the mediation between a historical significance and a society is more restricted in its structure. Ascendants acquire sharaf by certain kinds of acts and this sharaf is then mediated by ascendants to living men in the idiom of

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descent. 1 Again there is a sacred historiography, a changeless Truth, which determines a significance in the world and which is structured to shape a society. When anthropologists approached these societies, they made the same "mistakes" as some of the Orientalists who approached the Koran and the Hadiths. They asked themselves why the genealogies did not lengthen in time, since they were clearly part of a historical process. Then they pointed out that the genealogies were not really true as a biological record, but only a fiction of the historical past. Again these problems arose from asking, "What really happened?" Finally, and at best, they interpreted the ascendants as acting persons whose name and historical acts "represent" the unity of a group of descendants, an error that is made in the preceding paragraph. What we fail to appreciate is that the descendants of Ali can enhance the sharaf of Ali long after he is dead, for the unity of the descendants of Ali is the sharaf of Ali. In other words, the present can enhance the past, a phenomenon which seems inconceivable to the processual perspective. As we might say in perplexity, the "person" of Ali is the sharaf of Ali, and this "person" does not die. The genealogies then are not a record of the past, a tradition that draws men together because of accidental copulations and births, they are very much alive. They are alive because they represent the display of the Truth of a sacred historiography. Once this is realized, the problems of processual history become artificial, even though the scholarship devoted to them remains very valuable to us. These observations suggest that a system of meaning — a sacred historiography — is a fundamental part of widely disparate kinds of societies in the Near East, societies that have persisted over many centuries, perhaps millennia. Corporate theorists have no interest in this problem and no way of dealing with it. Logical structuralists attribute coherence and persistence in meaning to an underlying "meaningless" code, and in doing so retreat from any attemp to understand the coherence and persistence of meaning itself. The foregoing examples suggest that over a large portion of the world and over a long stretch in time there is a peculiar pattern in meaning. Logical structuralists must attribute this pattern of meaning to an "accident of history". 2 The position of this paper is that the coherence and persistence of Near Eastern meaning must be sought on the level of meaning itself, not as a lln the Near East, other meanings besides 'significances' are mediated in the idiom of descent. For example, 'love' is also mediated but this broaches a matter that has been carefully skirted in this paper, since it introduces many other problems (see Part II). 2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 8.

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reflection of an underlying social structure, empirically induced, nor as a reflection of an underlying code logically derived. In the next section, the problem of 'sexual honor' is explored, and these issues are pursued further.

Namus in the District of Of Namus has a rich set of connotations in Of and the rest of Turkey, but for the present purposes only its more narrow and more powerful reference to 'sexual honor' need be considered. In this sense, namus refers to that very special relationship between a man and his women which prevails in Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies. Sociologically, the problem is explained by saying that a m a n ' s "reputation", "social standing", or "social legitimacy" is tied to the chastity of specific women. For the present we can say that namus implies that men 'control' the "sexuality" of "their women", and men have namus when their 'control' is socially "legitimated". The quotes are all necessary to indicate that these observations are rough equivalents which if taken literally would substitute sociological meanings for what are cultural meanings. Namus is said by the people of Of in no uncertain terms to be a part of arid included within sharaf. Here, we have returned to the generalized concept of sharaf and are no longer considering the structured instance of segmentary sharaf. Like sharaf, namus is a kind of sacred quality, but some differences are immediately apparent. Namus can be used to refer to the quality of a person or a collectivity just as sharaf can, but it most frequently is applied to individuals or small groups of persons. This is partly because the idea of 'control' over women is very important in namus and the problem of 'control' most frequently emerges in the context of a family or a small knot of kinsmen. Nevertheless, one can refer to the namus of a clan, of a village quarter, of a village, even the namus of a nation or of the Muslims. Unlike sharaf, namus is never used to refer to acts or events in which a person or collectivity participates. Instead, namus refers to a "state" of the person or collectivity. While sharaf is derived f r o m the existence of a historical significance, namus is derived from the existence of a common "static" measure. We have seen that the sharaf of a person or collectivity has unique qualities, even though these qualities are made possible by a communal

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historical significance. For example, one man may have served in the Dardanelles with the Ottoman army and performed acts of heroism, another may have led guerrilla bands against the Russian occupying force in the East, another may have served as a provincal governor, another may have performed the hadj, and so on. Each of these events or acts lends the person who participated in them a "uniqueness" or "character", albeit a very different sense of uniqueness and character than our own. A man's namus, unlike his sharaf, does not have uniqueness or character, since it is a measure of his 'state' in terms by which every other man's "state" is measured. To talk about a man's sharaf requires some kind of explanation: "What kind of sharaf and what is its special significance?" There is no more to be said about his namus than that he has it or he does not. There are similar concepts in the West that could be compared to sharaf and namus. For example, we can speak of a man's greatness or a man's honesty where greatness is analogous to sharaf and honesty is analogous to namus. Julian Pitt-Rivers, harking back to a former European distinction, has compared the sharaf-like component of Spanish honor to our concept of honor and the namus-like components to our concept of virtue. In place of these analogies, I would like to continue my previous comparisons which contrast a "centrality" in our own culture, the idea of the self and self-consciousness, with sharaf and namus which form a kind of "centrality" in Near Eastern culture. 1 It will be seen that sharaf and namus reverse what seem to us selfevident propositions. In Of character and uniqueness lie in that part of the person that seems least personal, that is, publicly acknowledged sharaf, while namus, which we erroneously interpret as a standard of moral conscience and therefore the locus of individuality and uniqueness, is instead a connection between person and a common measure. Namus seems a mysterious quality to modern Westerners for a number of very good reasons. We may begin to understand it by observing that it represents a kind of "social fact" in the Durkheimian sense. That is to say, the control of women's chastity is not a question of control by a male moral conscience. Men do not have a conscientious concern for their women's chastity, they have a social concern. Similarly, a man's namus is not achieved by a keen moral conscience and the best of intentions, it is rather reflected, 1 There are concepts of the self and conscience in Of, but they are not, curiously enough, related to the present issues. Conscience is not associated with a moral law, and the self is not associated with personal character.

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like sharaf, in "communal opinion" and "communal validation". This lends a precariousness of a peculiar kind to the quality of namus. This precariousness is related to an attentiveness to potential threats to namus. In this respect, insults and slander can be even more threatening than outright physical attacks and the fact of chastity slides into the background before the weight of "tommunal opinion". How can it be that a man can control his women's chastity if namus is communally validated ? This is a crucial question. Control is made possible, not through the guide of a moral conscience, but through the guide of communal convention. N a m u s is communally validated by communal standards. Men apply communal standards to insure their namus. It is easy for us to understand such an idea, but it is difficult to realize its "centrality". Namus, it must be remembered, is a sacred quality somewhat akin to our own idea of "self-respect". As modern men [and women], we imagine that we can carry our self-respect with us wherever we go. Namus, on the other hand, is not possible except as the mirror of community. A man in Of, therefore, cannot measure "himself" (i.e. his namus) with "himself", he can only measure 'himself" (i.e. his namus) in terms of a community. The people of Of, of course, cannot agree about any living man's namus or sharaf. They do not even agree on the namus and sharaf of such a man as Ataturk. How can this be true if namus and sharaf rest on communal opinion? The difficulty only arises if one looks at the problem with an empirical mind. The community does not refer to the actual sum total of all those people in a village, in Of, or in Turkey, and the sum total of their opinions. That would result in nothing but chaos. The community is, in fact, a concept relative to the meanings of a particular significance (sharaf) and measure (namus). In other words, we are in the midst of a different and not quite graspable frame of mind. By pointing out the disjunction between an empirical community and the 'significance' of community, I only hope to give my readers a glimpse of the existence and concreteness of this frame of mind instead of rooting it in a sociological design of society.

The Relationship

of Sharaf and Namus

All Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies, it seems, have a concept of honor which includes both a sharaf-like component and a namus-like component, even though some may not designate the two categories with

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different terms. There also seems to be a shift in emphasis or weight accorded sharaf-like honor or namus-like honor which varies from one society to another, from one historical period to another, and from one social class to another. 1 Two questions arise about this state of affairs. First, what is there in the meaning of honor that requires that these two kinds of honor, sharaf and namus, be repeatedly connected? For the notion of sharaf in no obvious way implies the notion of namus, or vice versa. Second, why is sharaf emphasized in some contexts and namus emphasized in others? A sociological explanation of these questions has been provided by Julian Pitt-Rivers. 2 Sharaf-like honor in Spain, Pitt-Rivers argues, is about precedence, power, and social status. People who have power assert their precedence and thereby claim sharaf-like honor. They ignore, even flaunt, namus-like honor which is based on a code of "morality", primarily sexual morality. They can do so because their power forbids anyone from taking them to task for it. Namus-like honor, that is, "virtue", is the honor of plebeian society. Having no power, and therefore unable to assert precedence, the men of plebeian society express their egalitarianism in the idiom of sexual morality. In plebeian society, one either has virtue or one does not, one is either worthy or unworthy, and one is either accepted or rejected by all. There is no question of coming before or coming after, therefore no need of the uniqueness or character which marks sharaf-like honor. Power implies powerlessness therefore sharaf implies namus. Among the powerful look for sharaf, among the weak look for namus. In this way, Pitt-rivers provides an argument that ingeniously and neatly answers our two questions. Unfortunately, like so many sociological explanations, it is limited to one social context and doesn't fit the facts in other Mediterranean societies. It would be difficult to mistake sharaf for precedence in Turkey. Sharaf, apparently unlike the modern Spanish case, is endowed with meaning and purpose. It is entangled with what we perceive as power but hardly reducible to it. In Turkey, the "powerful" may very well not have sharaf, while the "powerless" are sometimes highly endowed with sharaf. This is the way Turkish nationalists perceive the Ottoman Sultan (powerful, but without sharaf) and Mustapha Kemal (powerless, but with sharaf) at the beginning of 1 For a description of such variations in Spanish society and history see Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'Honour and Social Status', and Julio caro Baroja, 'Honour and Shame: A Historical Account of Several Conflicts', in Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame. 2 See Julian Pitt-Rivers, 'Honour and Social Status'.

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the War of Independence. And indeed, it is hard to believe that Spanish honor, \vhose intricacies Pitt-Rivers has laid out for us in marvelous detail, can be seen in the end as nothing more than a language of social status. Such a rich and elaborate concept could hardly be about no more than "who comes first". In what follows, an alternative explanation for the relationship between sharaf-like honor and namus-like honor is presented. I do not intend the argument to be a full answer to the fascinating analysis of the Spanish case by Pitt-Rivers, rather it is only a suggestion that we still have much to learn from the cultural category of honor. I have sought to explain sharaf and namus as categories, sacred categories, one might say, which emerge from the structuring of a historical significance in relationship to a social world. Sharaf represents the active aspects of a historical unfolding, an idiom of event and change. Namus represents the static aspects of a past history in relation to a fixed present, an idiom of convention and changelessness. Both of these idioms are dialectically related aspects of a discourse, the shaping of a social world by means of a historical significance. One cannot have sharaf, the possibility of history, without also having namus, the possibility that a past history has shaped the present. If event is made the basis for social definition, then event must at some point be transposed into convention. The discourse therefore necessarily contains a contradiction which appears as an alternating insistence on change and changelessness. So it is that all Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies recognize in their discourse of honor a quality that is sharaf-like and a quality that is namus-like. One can never be found without the other. On the other hand, the discourse of honor can be filled out, or elaborated — however one might want to express it — in different ways. In other words, sharaf and namus are necessary emergent categories, where a sacred historiography is meaningful, but they may be composed in various ways. For example, it is reasonable to expect that in some societies the idiom of sharaf might be emphasized and the idiom of namus suppressed. Such societies are what have been termed "segmentary societies". In other societies the idiom of namus might be emphasized and the idiom of sharaf suppressed. Such societies will be termed "communal societies", since they stress communal convention or custom. In the Near East, peasant societies tend to elaborate the discourse of a sacred historiography in this last way. In the Near Eastern tradition, however, one will not find a pure idiom of event or a pure idJom of convention. Instead, one will find an unstable movement between

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these idioms, and I would suggest that Cohen's study of Arab border-villages could be interpreted as one example of just such a movement. Consider the relation of sharaf and namus in the two ideal types that have been proposed above. In the world of segmentary societies, there is one kind of elaboration of sharaf. Every man has a direct connection (his line) with the total sharaf of the society, and the uniqueness of this connection (his own ascendants) represents his own unique sharaf. Namus is relegated to the problem of establishing continuity in sharaf, that is, the mediation of sharaf between any ascendant and a descendant. From this we can understand why muruwwa, according to Goldziher, also involved "family ties" and the "inner life of the family". These matters did not turn upon sharaf itself but upon any claim to continuity of sharaf.1 We see then that the genealogy "exists", so to speak, because it mediates sharaf more or less like a transmission line in which the father-son connections represent the nodes of this transmission line. In terms of this metaphor, sharaf represents the power transmitted and namus represents the connections that allow power to flow from one point to the next. Note that namus is not related directly to communal convention, but to the legitimation of paternity, since receiving paternal sharaf represents in these societies the entire problem of social definition. An extension of society is possible only by an extension of a genealogy. Taking another example, we can turn to the common elaboration of sharaf and namus in Of and among rural peasants in Turkey in general. Such societies have been termed communal societies to contrast them with segmentary societies. In communal societies, there is a focus on namus. Namus, we have seen, implies a social definition in terms of convention and custom. It does not, like sharaf, involve the unique and dynamic aspects of men's acts. An elaboration of namus then leads to the notion of a community of custom. The historical significance is seen as a background to custom which potentially makes custom meaningful in terms of past events. Here, the historical significance is not primarily in terms of acting persons and collectivities, but of the career of the entire community. Men or collectivities with sharaf come into the purview of this exaltation of the community — they act for the community. Sharaf, in a sense, represents historical evidence for the existence of the community, not for the definition of its parts.

^Goldziher, Muslim Studies, I, 2 2 , 4 8 .

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This elaboration of namus has consequences at another level. In segmentary societies, family life becomes subject to a standard for the establishment of connections in sharaf. In communal societies the standards of family life are blown up in size, related back directly to the historical Significance, and represent the common measure of men. In segmentary societies, we have the notion that the essential aspects of men are their acts: rhilitary exploits, bravery, generosity, vengeance, and so on. In communal societies, we have the notion that the essential aspects of men are their subjection to communal conventions derived from a historical significance in which men no longer directly participate. In other words, the historical significance is only a source for the structuring of namus in terms of custom and rules, and the result is an extraordinary "moralism" in attitude and opinion. Such a relationship brings to mind the Koran and Hadith and the work of the sacred Doctors who derived a sacred Law from these sources. Here, I would only like to point out that namus is invariably derived from the same sources spontaneously by illiterate Turkish villages even if their methods are far from the formal ones developed by the Doctors. The reverse phenomenon is also familiar to anyone with experience in Near Eastern rural communities. Village custom (Mel) frequently becomes the source for deriving conclusions about the Koran and the Hadith. That is, the historical significance is given shape by the immediacy of convention. 1 From these last examples of the elaboration of sharaf and namus, we see how the system of meaning is in a sense "floating". 2 Sharaf and namus, that is concepts of honor, have seemed to be immediate and fundamental to ethnographers. Their immediacy derives from this "lack of direction" inherent in the system of meaning. A man in the Near East may be foggy about the historical significance which lies behind his sharaf — he probably is foggy about it. Yet, he is most concerned about his sharaf because he "knows" that In particular, this is true in the limited case of 'sexual honor' (namus), that is, conventions concerning the control of women. In Of, for example, these conventions are associated with the customs of the early Muslims and their ability to prevail in the Holy War. More generally, namus can also apply to all village custom, but this sense of the word has not been explored here. All customs are attributable to some saying of the Prophet, a tradition of the early Muslims, an event that occurred among them, or some passage in the Koran. There are even explanations of why one lays a spoon with its face down after use rather than up, or vice versa according to the custom. 2 I have borrowed the metaphor from C. Lévi-Strauss, 'Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss', in Sociologie et Anthropologie by Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. xlix. The analysis of mana as a "signifiant flottant" is not unrelated to the present problem of sharaf, I believe, but a thorough analysis would require the introduction of the problem of baraka and a considerable elaboration of the present argument.

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his person does have some kind of 'significance', even though he may not be able to rationalize its terms. This floating aspect of the system of meaning and its lack of direction also signals to us the fact of its undetermined relationship with history. For as events swirl around men, they confront these events with this system of meaning, and in making this confrontation the system of meaning acquires direction, is rationalized, elaborated, and structured. We can now make a provisional interpretation of a contrast between honor in Of, as well as in other communal societies of the Islamic Near East, and honor in Spain as described by Pitt-Rivers. There is a tendency in most Islamic societies for persons and collectivities with sharaf to emphasize in turn their namus. The later Ottoman Sultans, in particular, were preoccupied with elaborate statements about their namus: a harem filled with scores of women, guarded by two corps of eunuchs and the Janissaries as well. Such magnificence is usually regarded as an expression of the enormous "power" (better still, sharaf) of the Sultan, but it should be observed that this "power" is expressed by the admission that the same "moral" precariousness attaches to the Sultan as attaches to the most modest man in his realm. His sharaf does not exempt him from the problem of namus; on the contrary it requires more elaborate statements of namus. Thus, in the most magnificent aspect of the Sultan's palace, one locates the principle that the Sultan is a man like every other man. The same relationship between sharaf and namus can be observed at other levels of Turkish society. In Of, an agha will be more attentive to the statement of his namus than the brother of an agha. These two men will be more attentive than other men of their lineage. The latter lineage will be more attentive than other lineages of the clan. And the clan with an agha will be more attentive to stating their namus than other clans without aghas. Nothing so mechanical occurs in fact, but there is a distinct tendency for this to happen. In other words, the more sharaf a person or collectivity acquires, the more "public-viewed" the person or collectivity becomes. This has been shown to be inherent in the ideology of sharaf. Being more "public-viewed" then results in the tendency to state more scrupulously one's attachment to the common static standard, that is, namus.

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Pitt-Rivers observed the reverse tendency in Spain. The more honor (sharaf-like) a man has in Spain, the less he need attend to his virtue (namuslike), ending in the state of affairs which led Voltaire to comment that it is precisely at court where there is least honor (virtue). Why should persons and collectivities with sharaf in the Islamic spcieties feel obliged to state scrupulously their namus and thereby recognize the common standard of the community, while Spanish aristocrats feel obliged to emphasize their honor (sharaf-like) even to the point of denying their connection with the common measure of the community? Surely we are very near to the core of the issue which has led Pitt-Rivers to emphasize the hierarchical aspects of honor in Spain and Europe, while Islamicists have been led to emphasize the egalitarian aspects of honor in Islamic societies. There is the indication in these facts that a similar system has been worked out and elaborated in different directions. I do not mean to suggest by this that there is a structural transformation of logical categories which, computer-like, flashes different permutations of a limited set of solutions among the societies of the Near East. Rather these different elaborations are the results of various meaningful responses in terms of a limited universe of meaning, what we usually refer to as a "tradition". The system of meaning, in other words, is in the flux of history, and the structurings that result in society are the outcome of a historical process. In any case, the sociological characterization of an entire society as "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" will provide no adequate solution to this problem, but in the system of meaning itself, there is the possibility of a richer, and more complex solution not available to a behavioral typing of "social relations".

Namus and "The Place of Women" The preceding problem will be left hanging with only the hope that doubt will be left in the place of a former satisfying, but illusory, certainty. I would like now to focus on namus and give an indication of how the properties of such a category enable us to understand some well-known features of Near Eastern societies, that is, customs regarding the "place of women".

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Namus, we have seen, implies a common measure which applies to all men and reflects a state of each man. Male 'control' of women's sexuality is appropriate for such a universal measure, and it neatly fits with the problem of continuity whereby the sharaf of a father, and hence the signifiance of a community, become transferred to a son. These observations do not fully explain or justify the 'control' of women. They merely point out how such 'control' is appropriate to the problem of sharaf and namus. We have seen that namus requires some relationship between a person and community not in the moralistic terms of conscience but in the terms of communal convention. Thus, we have immediately a way of comprehending the elaborate and varied conventions all over the Near East which relate to the control of women. The veiling of women, the wearing of shapeless sacklike garments, the institution of the harem and eunuchs, a man's presumed ability to divorce at will, seclusion of women from public life, the importance attached to virginity, circumlocutions for referring to various sets of female kin, and myriads of other beliefs and practices are a few of the necessary conventional statements about women's chastity that the conception of namus entails. 1 Namus is, as I have said, a sacred quality, mirrored in communal opinion, modeled on communal convention. Without conventions there can be no namus, and without conventions there is no statement of community. This way of understanding customs regarding women in the Near East also allows us to comprehend other aspect of the 'control' of women in relation to communal custom. For we should expect that these customs concerning the control of women can become almost the very definition of community and a means of the differentiation of one community from another. This is indeed the case in the Near East. Customs regarding the control of women vary subtly from one community to the next. In casual conversion, they frequently become the basis of explanations of what separates "them from us". Sometimes, in the context of hostility, these differences become the basis for claiming that a neighboring community consists of nothing more than cuckolds and whores as anyone can see from their corrupt conventions. That is, they hardly merit recognition as human beings, but border on animality.

ÏOf course, what has always shocked or mystified Westerners is precisely that the "handling of woman" involves convention and not a moral conscience. For a concise catalogue of many such conventions, see Richard T. Antoun, 'On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Study in the Accommodation of Tradition', American Anthropologist, 70 (1968), 671-97, and Tewfik Canaan, 'Unwritten Laws Affecting the Arab Woman of Palestine', Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, II (1931), 172-203.

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But there is another aspect of this. Differences in conventions do not necessarily imply conflict, division, and turmoil. They are sometimes the recognition of a complex social world which is directly reflected upon the persons of this world. For example, consider the question of women's dress in Turkey. A w o m a n ' s dress, a matter that is assumed to be regulated by her husband, is not simply a statement about communal origins, but a statement about the recognition of a communal context. The way in which a woman's dlress shifts as she moves from the village to the town to the city is striking. Tfiese changes of dress are not changes of "styles" but changes in the acknowledgment of context. 1 The same woman, therefore, may wear a white cloth over her hair (yazma) in her village quarter, a shawl over head and face in the village market (kegan), a black sacklike garment in the town (gargaf), and a long black coat in the city (manto). These different dresses do not necessarily reflect conflicts over how women are dressed, but reflect something very peculiar about the connection between persons and the multiple significances of multiple communities.

Conclusions Features of Near Eastern society have been interpreted as a structuring of a system of meaning in relation to a social world. This system of meaning provides one of the principal ways by which events and acts can be attributed a meaning and by which interconnections among persons and collectivities can be made. These last observations should not be understood as universal phenomenological problems in all societies. Such a conclusion is undoubtedly false. Rather events, acts, and interconnections emerge as elements in a structuring only because of the nature of Near Eastern meaning. In particular, the meaning of "person" in these societies has been partly revealed as a concept very different from our own by virtue of its peculiar structuring. Similarly, the meaning of history and society in the Near East has been shown to be a peculiar kind of relationship not suitably described by the observation that Near Easterners are mindful of history as a process.

There is a conscious realization of this difference. Villagers in Of who have experience in the cities discuss the logic of custom (adet) and the logic of style (moda). They see the former as appropriate to the village and the latter as a feature of high society in Istanbul. Women talk about what they may wear in their natal village, what they may wear in the town where they live, and what they may wear when visiting relatives in the city. The discussion proceeds in terms not related with preferences, but with the appropriate communal custom. For a few pietists, these matters are strictly defined by a religious interpretation of village, town, and urban society.

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Second, an attempt was made to provide some notion of how structurings of the system of meaning move in different directions. The contrast between segmentary societies and communal societies was sketched to provide two examples of structurings. This possibility of movement in the structurings of the system of meaning is aimed at avoiding the freezing of a social analysis into concepts of a social or cultural system, lying dormant and ready to respond to any situation with which it is confronted. Instead, this approach recognizes that situations do not simply activate latent ideas and groups, but call forth forms of thought and organization of very different kinds. In this respect, the analysis seeks to account for the layerings and transformations of social structure described by ethnographers of the Near East such as Jacques Berque and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, a limited understanding of the multiple 'significances' of any Near Eastern society has been achieved. Sharaf has been observed in connection with religious 'history', with national 'history', and with clan 'history'. Each world has been associated with a specific 'significance", yet each is intertwined one with another and each is based on the same system of meaning. To understand the respones of a society to any given situation, the structurings of these 'significances' and their interralationships must be sorted out. This provides us with a new understanding of why social organization is so ill-equipped to deal with the problem of process. For we have seen that the "organizational response" is always relative to the 'significance' of the situation. In addition, the "organizational response" also bears the stamps of the character of the system of meaning. This stamp is not adequately understood by any analysis of social organization which seeks to solidify social relationships. In this respect, we can turn to the observations of Pierre Bourdieu who provides us with some ethnographic details of the peculiar relationships of "groups" to 'significances' among Algerian peoples : The name [of a group] is a power in itself. In the formation of the tribe of the Ouled Madhi the main role appears to have been played by the Athbedj of the Riyah confederation, the advance-guard of the Hillalian Arabs. In other tribes it was the moral and religious ascendancy of the marabouts that served as a cementing bond. Within the vicinity of the most venerated zaoia, "maraboutic" tribes have been formed whose members consider themselves to be descendants of the saint and who, in addition to adopting the name of the marabout, have considered themselves as belonging to a religious nobility. In all these cases it is not at all surprising to find that the names conserved by tradition are those of the victorious clans or of the principal families whose protection was sought

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by the other different groups. Nor is it surprising to find that the names vary from one period to the next. Sometimes, from a previously constituted group, an influential family will emerge which imposes its name and authority upon the tribe. The result is that quite often the various elements which make up the tribe have nothing in common but a name and the history of this name. "Sometimes, even, there is no dominant group. The tribe, properly speaking, is only a confederation, an assemblage of heterogeneous elements joined together under a collective appellation and under an illustrious name to which one of the member families has the sole right" (G. Mar^ais).1 I must disagree with the conclusion that the name is "a power in itself", despite the preliminary insight this affords. The "power" resides in the existence of a closed world of meaning and in the inexorable shape that the recognition of a meaning imposes upon the possibilities of human society. The "power" results from a lack of alternatives. I do not mean to suggest by this that the system of meaning consists of a limited n u m b e r of combinations. The variety of Near Eastern society in the present and the past certainly proves that this is not so. I seek to indicate that in spite of an unlimited variety of social expressions, there is still a boundedness to the possibilities of expression. In this sense, a lack of alternatives is a necessary condition for the continuity of social life.

^ Pierre Bourdieu, The Algerians, p. 89.

MEANING AND SOCIETY IN THE NEAR EAST: EXAMPLES FROM THE BLACK SEA TURKS AND THE LEVANTINE ARABS (II)

Je suis devenu Celui que j'aime, et Celui que j'aime est devenu moi! Nous sommes deux esprits, Infondus en un (seul) corps! Aussi, me voir, c'est Le voir, Et Le voir, c'est nous voir. Al-Hallâj

In this part,2 the concept of honor among Black Sea Turks is compared with the concept of honor among clans (hamula) of Levantine Arabs. The system of meaning among the Arabs is similar to that among the Black Sea Turks, but the cultural structuring of this system of meaning is different. First, the differences in cultural structuring are explained in detail. Then, the two contrasting structurings are shown to provide an understanding of a number of contrasts between the two societies with regard to "marriage" and "laffinal and maternal relationships." The two peoples that are compared have been selected to make the contrasts more striking. The people of Of, like most of the eastern Black Sea peoples of Turkey, have "strong" clans, whereas the clans of most of the Turkish speakers of rural central and western Anatolia are "weak." 3 The hamula Arabs of the rural Levant also have "strong" clans, which is undoubtedly not the case for many Arabs of that region. The presence of "lineages" among both these groups, however, is not absolutely essential to the argument, but for complicated reasons it results in a clearer definition of custom and an opportunity for more extended comparisons. Unless otherwise indicated, a reference to "Turks" and "Arabs" refers only to these particular Turkish and Arabic speakers.

1 Louis Massignon, ed. and trans., Le Diwan d'al-Halläj (Paris: Librairie Orientalisie Paul Gieuthner, 1955), p. 93. 2 Part I of this paper appeared in IJMES, VII, 2 pp. 243-270. 3 Paul Stirling, Turkish Village (London: Weidenfeld, 1965), and Michael E. Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks: A Study of Honor, Descent and Marriage" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1970).

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In Part I, the discussion focussed on sharaf and namus in Of and to some extent in Turkey in general. Among the hamula Arabs of the Levant sharaf and 'ard are not elaborated in quite the same way as the corresponding categories in Turkey. The clans in the Levant, for example, have been reported to be segmentary, whereas the Of clans are only vaguely segmentary. 1 The hamula Arabs recognize the payment of blood money and the Turks in Of do not. 2 Among the Arab village elders there may be no equivalent to the Turkish agha in Of. Such a figure does not appear in Cohen's recent study of politics in an Arab village of Israel.3 Despite all these differences, and there are many more, the system of meaning of sharaf among the hamula Arabs and the Turks of Of is at least very similar. Arab sharaf, like Turkish sharaf, is the ultimate and most encompassing category of honor. Arab sharaf is associated with the hamula and with hamula segments just as Turkish sharaf is associated with clans and lineages in Of. 4 Arab sharaf also includes the category of 'sexual honor' ('ard) just as Turkish sharaf includes the category of namus. 5 At this point, however, a complication arises that was carrefully avoided in giving the account of sharaf and namus in Of. This problem, which is termed the problem of 'love,' must be partly explained in order to make the Arab case comprehensible.

' For a comment on hamûla segmentation together with an example of the qualifications made necessary by a social structuralist theory, see Abner Cohen, Arab Border-Villages of Israel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), pp. 108-11. For comments on clan segmentation in Of, see Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks", chap. IV. 2

S e e Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, pp. 68-71, for a detailed case. The Turks in Of see a payment of blood-money as barbaric and uncivilized, but the lack of such a means of solving a killing sometimes leads to tragic results. 3 T h e principal leaders in Cohen's study are generally men of wealth or office. For comments on the relationship between aghas and wealth or office, see Michael E. Meeker, "The Great Family Aghas of Turkey," in Richard T. Antoun and Iliya Hârik (éd.), Rural Politics and Social Change in the Middle East (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). 4 Among the Arabs of the Levant, nâmûs refers to a general moral code. This is the broader meaning of namus in Turkey, too. Among the Turks, the word irz which is derived from the Arabic 'ard refers specifically to a woman's chastity, a particular meaning of the word 'ard in the Levant. The same set of words can be found in both areas, but the semantic boundaries are slightly shifted. I am indebted to Mr. Awni Habash, a sociology student of Hebrew University and Cornell University, with whom I have discussed the meaning of Arabic sharaf, nâmûs, and 'ard. Mr. Habash is not responsible for my conlusions regarding these categories, however. Also see Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, pp. 105 and 110, where there are passages indicating a close relationship between sharaf and a patrilineal kin group. For an explicit connection of sharaf with tribe, lineage, and group among the Bedouin, sec A. M. Abou-Zeid, "Honour and Shame among the Bedouins of Egypt," in J. G. Peristiany, Honour and Shame (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). Also see Bichr Farès, L'Honneur chez les Arabes avant l'Islam (Paris: Librairie dAmérique et d'Orient, 1932). 5 This observation is amply demonstrated by many passages in Cohen, Arab Border-Villages. In particular see "The case of K M l i d and Fâtima," pp. 71-93. The latter is probably the best description and analysis of a particular case involving 'sexual honour'.

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COMMUNITY AS SIGNIFICANCE AND COMMUNITY AS LOVE Unlike the sacred historiography, 'love' has no story to tell, no order to impose on the world, no differentiation to make between those who 'love'. 1 It makes possible the expression of 'community' in a way that is quite distinct from the definitive quality of sharaf and namus discussed in Part I. Sharaf and namus, it has been suggested, derive from a 'significance.' Sharaf represents the active aspects of a historical unfolding and namus represents the static aspects of a past history in relation to a fixed present. The two qualities of honor are two sides of the dialectical relation within a sacred historiography. Sharaf recognizes the necessity for events, if history is to be possible. Namus recognizes the necessity for static conventions, if history is to shape society. There is similarly a dialectical relationship between these two qualities of a 'significance' and the meaning of 'love'. 'Love' expresses only a positive connection among men, but does not provide a definition of this connection. Instead, 'love' has a contagious, unbounded quality. 'Community' therefore can always be expressed in two ways, but these two expressions, 'significance' and 'love,' are contrary and incompatible idioms. There is always a connection between them, but they seem to lead in different directions.2 For the present purposes, I wish the reader only to accept two principles. First, community can be based on two distinctive systems of meaning, a historiography and a love. Second, community is always based on both these principles, but they are not altogether compatible in their meanings. Therefore we may look for points where 'signifiance' becomes emphasized to the detriment of 'love' and other points where 'love' becomes emphasized to the detriment of 'significance.'. This mechanical way of stating the problem will eventually be seen to be quite inadequate, but it will not be possible to move very far beyond it in this paper. The concept of 'love' pervades Islamic religious thought, is closely related to concepts of legitimate rule, is a theme in common everyday expressions, and is at the core of the Near Eastern customs of hospitality. Certainly the failure of social structuralist analyses to mention the problem of 'love' indicates a serious omission. The omission undoubtedly results from the disassociation of 'love' from what the social structuralists view as "structure," and the tendency to see 'love' as a sentiment. In this paper, it is acknowledged that 'love' represents a concept of "sentiment," as we say, but this concept is interpreted as a meaning, not as a "sentiment" per se. In the Near East 'love' can be a fundamental part of interpretations of the social world, and it therefore can be a fundamental aspect of the sweep of events. ^It is impossible to express anything but interconnections and unity by 'love', therefore A is in this sense structureless. It is possible to express a structure with 'significances,' because they state a definition and purpose and thereby set off those who believe one thing from those who believe another.

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Consider, for example, 'love' in relation to the 'community' of kinship ties. Ties of kinship are simply one form of 'community' in the Near East and any kinship relation can be said to be based on a tie of 'love'. In the terms of social structuralists, 'love' is "bilateral" (an indication of its contagious quality) while 'significance' is "patrilineal" (an indication of its structured quality). This means that some kinship relations, such as the tie between father and son (and other agnatic ties), involve both ties of 'love' and ties of 'significance.' A delicate balance is required in such complicated relationships, and we may expect that the balance varies from one regional society to the next and from one moment in history to the next. 1 These observations on 'love,' 'kinship,' and 'community' correctly imply that giving and taking of women in marriage by two collectivities in the Near East is the recognition of a bond of 'love', 2 Therefore, a marriage means that at some level the two intermarrying collectivities are part of one 'community' and stand identically with respect to some one 'significance.' This does not necessarily mean that the two groups are of the same sharaf "by descent." It only means that the two groups share some kind of sharaf at some level; otherwise marriage is not possible. Marriage also potentially contradicts the 'significance' of some level of community. It stresses one 'significance' at the same time that it minimizes another kind. To marry an agnate is to de-emphasize fellow villagers; to marry a fellow-villager is to de-emphasize agnates, and so on. But in addition to this, to marry an agnate of one degree does not erase the distinction that some agnates are closer than others. To marry a fellow-villager does not erase the This fact sometimes makes ethnographers appear to be the seven blind men examining the elephant. We hear reports that fathers are loving and nurturing, followed by conflicting reports that father are authoritarian. Saddled with a rigid concept of "role," social structuralists can only ask themselves which view is "true." A related problem, the puzzling transformation of female unities into male unities, constitutes the central issue of W. Robertson Smith's Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (Boston: Beacon Press n.d.). Only one argument is mentioned: "... it was often not settled whether a tribe should have a male or a female eponym, though the tide was running toward the former" (pp. 22-3). And in another place, "And in general the system of male eponyms everywhere triumphed over the grammatical rule that tribes are feminine collectives" (p. 34). And later, "There is no tribe with a female eponym in which the main groups have not male eponyms ..." He concludes that patrilineality was replacing an earlier form of matrilineality. What his argument reveals in fact is that there are essentially two interrelated but independent ways of attributing a meaning to collectivities among these peoples. Maleness 'signifies' and femaleness 'unites.' Maleness is active and structures, while femaleness is a formless overarching unity of 'love.' It is ironic that W. Robertson Smith's evolutionary approach, unsatisfactory as it was, is able to take into its scope more of the essential elements of Arabian society than the later social structuralists who devastated the evolutionary approach. Social structuralists cannot face the possibility that a collectivity might have more than one meaning and in their view this one meaning must be related to "interest." 2 This is implied by the "bilaterality" of ties of 'love' in kinship and by the indistinguishability of the 'significance' of kinship collectivities and other types of collectivies.

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distinction that fellow-villagers are divided by clans. When two collectivities recognize a 'love' between themselves by intermarrying, it should not be forgotten that at another level they recognize themselves to be separate. There is only one quality of 'love' among men, but there are many 'significances.' So it is that the rituals of marriage ceremonies express contradictory idioms, at one point violence and division and at another love and solidarity. 1 Marriage brings to the fore certain problems that can never be resolved. Rituals, far from expressing order and continuity, are an expression of things coming apart at the seams. These generalizations hold not only for segmentary societies where the different 'significances' are the honor of different ascendants, but also f o r peasant societies where clanship, communalism, Islam, and nationalism coexist in an uneasy relationship. Now let us turn to the problem of the cultural structuring of sharaf, namus, and 'ard in connection with the specific relationship between a woman, her husband, and her brother (see Fig. 3a). In the Near East, the husband-wife tie is expressed in relation to the conventional control of a husband over his wife. The husband administrates his wife in the idiom of conventions, often popularly derived from an Islamic 'Significance.' From the segmentary point of view, this administration achieves the legitimacy of the m a n ' s sons, the passage of paternal sharaf to sons. From the communal point of view, it achieves the legitimacy of the husband as a member of the 'community' of custom. For these reasons, the husband-wife tie will be glossed as a tie of 'control' which will be contrasted With a tie of 'love.' Indeed, the husband-wife tie is frequently rationalized in the rural Near East as a tie that excludes the possibility of ' l o v e ' and emphasizes a purely conventional 'control' of the husband by the wife, a remarkable situation that has been insisted upon by some ethnographers. 2 The

'Affinal relationships" often appear to be divisive and hostile, but this appearance is a reflection of two separate sharafs (significances) being juxtaposed. As one moves to modern urban society, clan sharaf plays less and less a role and is replaced with Islamic and nationalist 'significances' of a 'community'. The result is that in this context kinship ties are expressed more completely in the idiom of 'love', that is, as an amorphous solidarity radiating outward from individuals. 2 The male 'control' of female 'passion' has been described in impressive detail by Richard T. Antoun, "On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: a Study in the Accommodation of Tradition," American Anthropologist, LXX (1968), 671-97. His neglect of the other elaborations of male-female 'love' embodied most clearly in the brother-sister tie, among other things, has led to a spirited attack on his analysis by Nadia M. Abu-Zahra, "On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Reply," American Anthropologist, LXXII (1970), 1078-88. For comments on the comparison of the 'love' between husband and wife and the 'love' between brother and sister, see Hilma Granqvist, Marriage Conditions in a Palestinian Village. Part ]. Commentationes Bumanarum Litterarum, vol III, no. 8 (Helsingfov?/. Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1931), Part I. pp. 60-2, Part II, pp. 202-3, 252-6. Granqvist uses the same English word for both kinds of love', but nevertheless clearly establishes a contrast between the two: passionate love and true love.

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'control' of a wife is therefore a direct statement of the namus of the Turkish husband, and the Arab husband's 'ard is in the same way related to the conventional 'control' of his wife. Turning to the question of the brother-sister tie, the appropriate gloss for the expression of this tie is 'love' and not 'control.' In other words, just as the 'community' is elaborated in terms of the two systems of meaning, specific social ties, too, are elaborated and contrasted in terms of these systems of meaning.

Love

Control

FIGURE 3 (a) Glosses on the meaning of the husband-wife and brother-sister tie among both Turks and Arabs.

Sharaf

Sharaf «

//

Mediation

A

Response

Ì t

FIGURE 3 (b). Two aspects of sharaf with which there is associated a state of namus or 'ard. One aspect of sharaf involves the problem of mediation whereby a 'significance' is passed from one person to the next, in this case from the father to the son. The other aspect of sharaf involves the capability of a particular person to act with 'significance', in this case the capability of agnates to respond to an attack or slander.

Husband and wife contrast with brother and sister just as 'control' through conventions contrasts with 'love.' So far, the situaton is identical among both Turks and Arabs. The difference between them lies in 'the distinctive structuring of sharaf in relation to the husband-wife and brother-sister tie. Among the Turks, a disgrace of a married woman or a slander touches directly the sharaf of those who

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'controlZ1 The husband, his brother, his father, and by extension his agnates and clan must 'respond' because their sharaf is implicated. Among the Arabs, a disgrace of a woman or a slander touches directly the sharaf of those who 'love.' the woman's brothers, her father, and by extension their agnates and clan must 'respond.' 2 Thus, the active aspect of sharaf, 'response,' stresses convention among Turks and love among Arabs. Now there is another static aspect of sharaf, the problem of mediation by which man receives sharaf accomplished in the past. Among both Turks and Arabs, sons receive the sharaf of their father and his ascendants through the father's 'control' of their mother. Sharaf implies these two structural problems, response and mediation (see Fig. 3b), and there is a quality of namus or 'ard related to each of these structural problems. Summing up the results of the comparison, the namus of the Turkish husband reflects both the response and mediation of sharaf while the Turkish brother has no namus in relation to his married sister. The 'ard of the Arab husband reflects only the problem of mediation of sharaf whereas the 'ard of the Arab brother reflects only the problem of response of sharaf (see Fig. 3c) Now, it would be a crucial error to see this contrast between Turks and Arabs as a logical contrast, a simple mechanical switch between two structural possibilities. Quite the contrary, the connection of response with 'control' by the Turks and with 'love' by the Arabs reflects an attempt to elaborate two different kinds of meaningful coherence. This raises again the intriguing problem of the difference between communal societies and segmentary societies discussed in Part I. The Turkish alternative is stressing convention, changelessness, and definition. The Arab alternative is tressing activity, historicity, and inspiration. The former is more communal and the latter more segmentary. Is it too outrageous at this point to recall naive, but popular, contrasts in the national character of these two peoples? The Turks are said to be dour, dependable, and more psychologically transparent. The Arabs are said to be more effervescent, capricious, and psychologically complex.

*See Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks," pp. 192-8. See Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part II, pp. 254-5 ; Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, p. 123; Antoun, "On the Modesty of Women," pp. 691-2. 2

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TURKS

A

a I Control Sharaf

Namus

6

Love

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respect to the husband and by extension to his agnates. In the case of Arabs, the problem of mediation and an 'ard of 'control' is structured with respect to the husband, while the problem of 'response' and and 'ard of 'love' are tied to the brother, father, and by extension to their agnates.

One must be cautious here, but I believe that this contrast in the structuring of sharaf is a product of much deeper and more fundamental currents of the Near Eastern tradition, certainly not the mere reflection of different possibilities of social organization.

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CONTRASTS IN MARRIAGE PATTERNS, AMONG TURKS AND ARABS Unfortunately this intriguing problem takes the discussion away from the issues at hand, which deal more directly with the mechanical formulation of 'significance' and 'love'. Let us examine how these contrasts in the structuring of sharaf lead to contrasts in marriage patterns among Turks and Arabs. Among both the Turks and Arabs, the young unmarried daughter is 'loved' by her older brothers and father, but as she reaches puberty they are faced with a state they cannot 'control,' that is, their daughter's or sister's sexuality. The girl must therefore be married, and among both rural peoples, marriage normally occurs promptly after the onset of puberty. 1 The marriage, however, requires a restructuring of categories in different ways among the two peoples. For the Turks, the husband becomes the man who both 'controls' the girl and 'responds' to any scandal in which she is involved. Her brothers merely continue to 'love' her, a i o v e ' that after her marriage is no longer clearly related to any aspect of their sharaf or namus. A problem involving the girl is the complete affair of the husband. He may call upon her brothers and father to assist him with such a problem, and they may do so through their 'love' for their kinswoman and through the 'communal love' which made the marriage possible. But the father and brother of the girl cannot intrude or rather, they have no reason to intrude into the affair. 2 Later, some extraordinary examples which appear as a "lack of involvement" between Turkish fathers and brothers and their married daughters or sisters will be presented. In the Arab case, the husband likewise becomes the man who 'controls' the girl but he is not the man who must 'respond' to any scandal in which she may be implicated. Instead he only, as the Arabs say, 'covers' the girl, an expression not current among Turks where husbands are more deeply implicated with their wives. Marriage solves the inability of the Arab father or

^For the Arabs, see Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, p. 38. The contrasting ways of making this point represent the difference between an interpretation based on "rights and obligations" and an interpretation based on meaning. By the expression, "have no reason to intrude," I seek to underline the lack of any 'significance' for their intrusion. In some cases, fathers and brothers do intrude, but this results from a complication of the situation outlined here and is not relevant. 2

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brother to 'control' the sexuality of his daughter or sister, but it does not sever her from their sharaf. 1 Why then does the husband also have 'ard in relation to his wife if his sharaf is not tied to her? In fact, his sharaf is tied to his wife and therefore he has an 'ard with respect to her. But it is not tied to her in the same way as it is tied to his sister. As stated above, the 'ard of the wife represents the problem of continuity of sharaf. The sons of a man receive their father's and ascendants' sharaf by virtue of their father's 'ard in relation to their mother. 2 A disgrace threatens this connection, but it does not affect in a direct way the sharaf of the husband or of his agnates. This more complex structuring in the Arab case is the reason why the generalizations about which man does what on the occasion of a w o m a n ' s disgrace are so confusing. 3 The Turkish case in contrast is relatively clear. A woman's disgrace robs a man's sons of their name, threatens his namus, and obliges him to respond in order to preserve his sharaf. Meanwhile, the w o m a n ' s brothers and father may be considerably perturbed; they may eventually be drawn into the affair, but their sharaf and namus are not directly touched. There are, of course, complications when a husband and his agnates fail to respond, but that is another matter. 4 From all this we can draw our first conclusion with regard to contrasts between these relationships among Turks and Arabs. Among Turks, a man and his sister's sons are tied to one another in a relationship of 'love' through their sister and mother, respectively. Among Arabs the same thing is true, but now the sharaf of these two men, while distinct, is related to the state of the woman through whom they are related. The mother's brother and the sister's son among Arabs have a very serious matter in common that the same two men among Turks do not have in common.

^For the idea of a 'covering', see Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, pp. 67, 81, n. 3, Part I, p. 253; and Antoun, "On the Modesty of Women," p. 692, where he gives the proverbs, "The death of girls is a covering" and "A man (husband) is a covering." 2 This structural distinction between brother and sister has never been clarified in the literature of hamula Arabs or Arab Bedouin. Abou-Zeid's account in his article, "Honour and Shame, among the Bedouins of Egypt," in Peristiany, Honour and Shame, p. 257, is almost faultless, except for his omission of the relationship between the husband's 'ard and his sons' sharaf. Fuat Khuri, "Parallel Cousin Marriage Reconsidered," Man, V, 4 (1970), 597-618, takes Abou-Zeid to task for this omission, but generally confirms the gist of the latter's description. See also Antoun, "On the Modesty of Arab Women," p. 692. 3 The loss of 'ard is serious for both husband on the one hand and father and brothers on the other, but it is serious in different ways. 4 Even when a husband fails to 'respond,' a father and brothers may fail to take up the case in Turkey, but the question is complicated when one considers that the tie of 'love' between a married woman and her natal kinsmen in Of is one that "normally" can be developed (recognized) or attenuated (ignored). The Arabs do not have such an alternative at their disposal.

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The second conclusion that may be drawn from the contrasting cultural structuring is the following: among Arabs there is a strong mutuality between "affines" which does not exist among Turks. An Arab brother depends upon the husband of his sister to serve as a 'covering' by 'controlling' her. At the same time, the husband depends upon the brother to 'respond' to sexual and advances and slanders directed at his wife. The brother, by protecting his sharaf, protects the 'ard of the husband. The husband, by protecting his 'ard, 'covers' the sharaf of the brother. A breakdown in this mutality, it may be asserted, leads to divorce or a "cutting-off" of the brother-sister tie. Both situations lead to serious difficulties. A third conclusion follows from this. The necessity of a mutality between "affines" among Arabs means that "closeness" between those who intermarry is desirable and satisfying because it represents a resolution to certain problems posed by the cultural structuring. In other words, we should expect that Arabs should be concerned to marry their children to the children of other men who are "close" to them. By "close", I mean to say that the two intermarrying sides are connected either by some strong significance or some strong 'love.' 1 Otherwise, if the two sides were not close, a father or brother would be placing his daughter or sister (and therefore his sharaf) in the hands of a man who had not the slightest concern for her (his 'ard). Likewise, the husband would be marrying a woman for whom no one would be able to provide protection. Some stark examples of these situations and their consequences are presented in the following pages. Corresponding, but different conclusions can be reached about marriage among the Turks. Turkish marriage involves only a weak mutuality between "affines" from which 'control' and 'response' are excluded. This mutuality rests only on passive 'love'. 2 The word, passive, is in truth misleading; for love can be explosive in the Near East. This problem is largely ignored in this paper where the focus is on the sharaf which results from 'significance.' Because the analysis is restricted to these situations, the Turkish "affinal 1 Among the hamula Arabs, this is best expressed in the concern to marry "endogamously." See Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, pp. 63-7, where the general fastidiousness of Arab marriage arrangements is described. Also see Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, pp. 122-3. Among Arabs is general, where it is clear that the important brother-sister relationship is identical with that among hamula Arabs, one frequently finds an intense concern for marriage among those "equal in status", a concern that has crept into Islamic tradition. See, for example, Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, vol. I (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 115-25. See the later discussion of the mother's brother and sister's son. ^Unlike the Arab case, there is no special concern to marry endogamously among Tuiks m Of and social rank is not terribly important in marriages. Also see Stirling, Turkish Village, pp. 2018, for a case similar to that in Of. See the later discussion of the mother's brother and sister's son.

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relationship" of love appears passive and weak. In other words, the Turkish "affinal relationship" is purely a reflection of, a recognition of, and an expression of 'communal love.' Among the two clan societies being examined, "communal love' ordinarily, but not necessarily, retreats before the 'significance' of clan sharaf, and 'communal love' only exceptionally moves to the forefront in events. In contrast with the Arab case, Turks solve no pressing problem with respect to their sharaf by marrying their children to the children of men who are "close" to them, because the cultural structuring of sharaf and namus does not pose a problem. Indeed, there are strong "reasons" for marrying daughters to men with whom one has only a weak 'communal love.' This is because the emphasis on the husband's 'response' and 'control' with respect to his wife is limited if his father-in-law or brother-in-law are "close" to him. For example, a father-in-law who is also a father's brother has authority over his nephew; therefore he has the potential of directing his nephew's 'control' of his wife. In other words, a man's 'control' of his wife is restricted where his father-in-law is also his father's brother. There are, however, other "reasons" among Turks for marrying as the Arabs marry, that is, with the children of men who are close. Two examples are given. First, the Turkish father may wish to express his 'love' for his daughter. He may feel that he cannot face seeing her given to a stranger. He wishes to keep her near to him. These are not uncommon sentiments, and we can understand their "appropriateness" from the cultural structurings. One cannot bear to see daughters go, precisely because one 'loves' them. The father then "chooses" to marry his daughter to a man who is close to him. At this point, we cannot say what his exact choice will be, for the 'significance' of his relationship with any man depends on a historical context. If we do say, however, that the Turkish father is living in Of, that clans are currently "important" in Of, and that the father comes from a large important clan, then we can understand why he might very well marry her to a close agnate or to some other clansman. Still, we must admit that given all these conditions, he has other alternativess. The system of meaning does not permit us to freeze and mechanize a "social system" in the artificial manner of social structuralists. As a second example of Turks marrying close, the preceding case will be turned around. Let us say that the father of a girl is living in Of, that clans are currently "important" in Of, and that the father comes from a large

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important clan. In this situation, the ties of 'communal love' retreat before the 'significance' of clans. Clan sharaf brings agnatic relations to the fore, and they become the context of expressions of ' l o v e ' . Simultaneously, the expression of 'communal love' is made more difficult by the divisions created by clan sharaf. In such circumstances, marriage among the Turks tends to become focussed within the clan. That is, clan sharaf is reflected by focussed ties of 'love.' The father therefore marries his daughter to one of his fellow dansmen just as he did in the first case, but for different "reasons." The second example illustrates how the first example is really subsumed within it; for the father who wishes to express his 'love' for his daughter must think within the context outlined in the second example. Neither example explains marriage by means of a psychological balance of motives and sentiments, for the latter are seen merely as reflections of a culturally structured context. 1 Despite this explanation of why Turks may marry their daughters with men who are close, we can understand why the focussing tendency, that is, the tendency to intermarry with men who are close, is stronger and more clearly expressed among Arabs. A better term than a "focussing tendency" for this response among Arabs would be a "reactive tendency." The enhancement of the 'significance' of clan sharaf among Arabs makes the sister or daughter a "hostage," as it were, for she carries with her the sharaf of her father's and brothers' clan. Knowing this, the Arabs with clans are likely to marry their daughters to fellow clansmen even when the clan significance is not currently important, anticipating that it might become so. That is to say, an enhanced clan significance merely affects the "choice" of marriage among Turks, and previous marriages outside the clan are no burden in the new circumstances. A m o n g Arabs, the "choice" of marriage is affected by an anticipated importance of clan sharaf as well as by any current importance. This discourse in motives and reasons is meant as no more than an artificial illustration. The argument of the paper conceives the action in question as not analyzable in terms of motivation and reason, but in terms of meanings of another kind.

That is, the father can only 'love' his daughter, otherwise he must treat her as though she were not his daughter. I am not trying to describe how the father feels, only to point out the way that "fatherness" is expressed in relation to "daughterness." This relation is not totally structured in terms of 'love', of course. The father partly 'controls' his daughter before her marriage, later he 'protects' her, but this is shifting the problem of meaning to the microscopic problem of fatherness and daughterness and away from the relationships of meaning involved in marriage. Brother-sisterness, for example, is a 'love' not so complicated by 'control' and this tie commonly receives the most explicit attention among Arabs as a bond of 'love'; see Antoun, "On the Modesty of Arab Women" p. 677, for an example of ritual brother-sisterhood between unrelated men and women. On the other hand, father-daughterness sometimes is developed into a theme of protective 'love' that exceeds the 'love' of brother-sisterness; see the later discussion of female infanticide in this paper.

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OF

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A very diverse set of well-known and typical contrasts between our examples of Turkish and Arab rural societies can be understood in terms of the foregoing cultural structuring. In carrying this out, materials are drawn largely from the two peoples examined, the Turks of Of and the hamula Arabs of the Levant. Where other material is used it is explicitly mentioned.

Rates of endogamus marriage and FBD marriage If the rates of endogamous marriage among the hamula Arabs and Of Turks are compared, a sharp contrast is aparent. Table I shows some examples of these rates as given by Grandqvist, Cohen, Stirling, and myself. 1 Rates of endogamy vary from 0 to 100 percent among the Arabs with an endogamous rate of 50 percent being quite common. Rates of endogamy among the Turks vary from 0 to 36 percent with the average somewhere between the two. Likewise, the rates of father's brother's daughter (FBD) marriage among the Arabs range up to 20 percent whereas these rates among the Turks range to about 5 percent. The variation makes sense in terms of the cultural structuring. The Arabs tend to resolve a difficult problem with endogamous marriage. In marriage with the daughters of agnates, 'control' of the woman is turned over to a man whose sharaf in agnatic terms is the same as that of the brother and father of the girl. In the case of FBD marriage, 'control' is turned over to the man whose sharaf is almost identical with the girl's brother and father (since their ascendants are almost identical). The cultural necessity for a mutuality between "affines" is resolved by relying on the connections of clan or segmentary sharaf.

^Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, pp. 81, 192-4; Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, pp. 93III, 123; Stirling, Turkish Village, pp. 202-4 ; Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks," pp. 258, 269.

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TABLE I Rates of FBD marriage and endogamous marriage* (In percent)

FDB marriage Granqvist Low High Average (Artas) Gohen Low High Average (Bint el-Hudud) Stirling Average (Sakaltutan)f Average (Hlba§i)t Meeker Low (small clans):j: High (a large clan)t

Endogamous marriage Arabs

0 17 13

0 45 34

?

0 100 51

22 13 Turks 4 4

11 ?

0 6

0 36

*The rate of endogamy is defined roughly as the percentage of all marriages that are marriages between a man and a woman of the same clan. Likewise, the rate of'' FBD marriage is the percentage of all marriages that are marriages between a man and his FBD. The statistical methods and samples are not strictly comparable from one author to the next, but such precision is not necessary to reflect the gross cqntrasts in rate. Percentages listed under Low and High are the lowest or highest rate for any clan mentioned in the entire study, for example, the totally endogamous clan cited by Cohen is not included in his averages for Bint el-Hudud. •("Stirling's comments indicate that no one clan departed greatly from the average for all clans. $The high rate is the rate for one of the largest clans in the district of Of. This clan has a reputation for marrying endogamously at an exceptional rate. Smaller clans frequently, but not invariably, married endogamously at a very low rate.

In other words, the cultural structuring makes marriages with men who are "close' necessary. Given the fact that the daughters of fellow hamula members are marriageable, it is not surprising that they are married frequently in terms of what we know of the cultural structuring. In times and conditions where the hamula becomes "important" (the case represented by Cohen's data) some hamula are even totally endogamous. Surely we must interpret this condition as being one in which there is no possibility of "closeness" except between fellow hamula members, although this paper has not provided us with an understanding of why such a situation should emerge.

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The Turks, who are not constrained in the same way to marry their sons and daughters to families who are "close," do marry their daughters to their fellow clansmen some of the time, but at a markedly lower rate. We have seen that the cultural structuring among Turks does make the alternative of "marrying close" attractive for preserving and expressing the tie of 'love' with the daughter and for recognizing the 'community' of the clan, but the absence of problems of 'control' or 'response' with respect to the sister weakens the "attractiveness" for this form of action. This is reflected in the lower rates. This explanation tells us nothing about why Arabs or Turks accept marriage with the daughters of agnates as a possible alternative. It only gives us an understanding of why they choose this alternative at different rates given the cultural possibility of the choice.

Divorce rates A similar contrast between Turks and Arabs with respect to divorce rates might be possible. This contrast cannot be demonstrated with clarity using the data of Granqvist, Cohen, Stirling, and myself. Divorce rates are relatively low among the peoples in all four cases. Nevertheless, we do have frequent reports of high divorce rates among some Bedouin and many Arab townsmen, where the evidence indicates that the people involved have a cultural structuring of sharaf and 'ard very similar to the hamula Arabs of the Levant. 1 At the same time, divorce in most of central and eastern Turkish Anatolia, rural and urban, is reported to the low. In this region the cultural structuring, from what I know of the matter, is very similar to the description given in this paper for the Turks of Of. 2 This contrast in divorce rates also makes sense in terms of the contrasting cultural structuring. The Arab marriage, involving a delicately balanced mutuality, is more likely to go awry than the Turkish marriage where everything is placed in the hands of the husband.

^The best description of a situation where divorces are frequent among Arab townsmen is C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1931), pp. 86-93. Such a situation seems bizarre and outlandish to Turks and there are no reports f r o m Asia Minor of equivalent conditions among Turkish townsmen. There are scattered reports of high Bedouin divorce rates in much of the literature concerning them but no reliable statistics so far as I am aware. 2 F o r a geographical display of official divorce rates in Turkey, see Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks," p. 238. Official rates must be approached with a measure of skepticism, but they are not without value.

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Cultural structuring and explanations ofFBD marriage The contrasts in rates between Turkish and Arab endogamous marriages do not empirically prove the interpretation of cultural structuring; rather the cultural structuring leads us to have a new understanding of a set of facts. Endogamous marriages and FBD marriages are two types of marriage, sociological types, that are possible among both Turkish Anatolians and Arabs in the Levant. They are not culturally isolable institutions or rituals. As Abner Cohen has pointed out with respect to FBD marriage, there should be just as many sociological explanations of FBD marriage as there are sociological problems in which FBD marriage becomes a factor. 1 "Economic, political, and domestic problems" (that is, sociological problems) change from village to village and from year to year in the Near East and so the functional role of FBD marriage with respect to these problems changes. This does not mean, however, that FBD marriage cannot be explained in cultural terms in the Near East. That is to say, FBD marriage might represent a special case of the expression of a cultural structuring which is the same throughout the time and space that the Near Eastern cultural tradition encompasses. In this respect, FBD marriage in the Near East expresses something that is not and cannot be expressed by FBD marriage among the Tswana, the Balinese, and others who also practice this sociological type of marriage. Men eat food everywhere and eating can be interpreted as having a functional role, countless changing functional roles, in all societies. This does not mean that eating might not have precise and unique cultural meanings in diverse societies. This issue provides the occasion to specify just how the position of this paper differs from previous analyses of marriage in Near Eastern societies. A brief digression at this point will make clearer the analysis of further Turkish and Arab contrasts that follow. Some previous arguments analyze the occurrence of FBD marriage in the Near East in terms of "motives." Given the fact that FBD marriage is a possible form of marriage these arguments ask why Near Easterners choose some of the time to marry this way, and why some go further and express a "preference" for this type of marriage. An early argument saw FBD marriage 1Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, p. 120: "There can be no single sociological explanation of this kind of marriage. ... Furthermore, a sociological explanation is relevant to a specific sociological problem which, as in this case, implies the consideration of only a specific aspect of parallel cousin marriage, such as economic, political, or domestic."

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as preserving the inherittance of the woman within the family line. Fredrik Barth rightly rejected this explanation because women in the Near East often do not inherit, and typically they do not inherit precisely where FBD marriage rates are very high. He replaced it with another argument of a similar type. Kurds, he reasoned, choose to marry their daughters to a brother's son frequently because of the extreme segmentary aspects of their lineages. Such a marriage solidified the minimal lineage at the "first potential lines of fission." 1 When conditions allayed the extreme degree of segmentation (e.g., bureaucratic government), FBD marriage rates declined. Another more recent article with many fine points and an impressive display of intimate details concerning Arab kinship presents a similar motivational argument and reaches other conclusions. Fuat Khuri criticizes previous arguments based on factors of inheritance, power, and culture that aimed at explaining the motives for FBD marriage.2 He demonstrates that the same result obtained by marrying a FBD may be obtained by marrying some other woman, an observation with which the argument in this paper is in complete agreement. Nevertheless, he concludes his paper with another argument in terms of motives. Arabs marry their FBD and prefer to do so because of the character of roles and sentiments in the Arab family. There is perhaps nothing wrong with motivationalist arguments, taken in their own terms as a kind of piecemeal, on-the-spot empiricism. But Cohen has advised those who advance such explanations that they will never reach the end of finding motives for FBD marriage. Every sociological change in perspective involves a different structural-functionalist view of the society, which consequently brings into focus new interpretations of motives. To claim that a motive explains FBD marriage is to mistake a particular sociological perspective as the one possible and concrete perspective on the society. Another type of argument analyzes FBD marriages and in general all parallel cousin marriages in the terms of social structure. Murphy and Kasdan criticized the foregoing motivational arguments and outlined the social structuralist approach as follows: "Most explanations of patrilateral parallel cousin marriage are of a causal-motivational kind, in which the institution is explained through reference to the consciously felt goals of the individual role players. We have not attempted to explain the origin of the custom in this paper but have taken it as a given factor and then proceeded to analyze its 1 Fredrik Barth, "Father's Brother's Daughter Marriage in Kurdistan," Southwestern Anthropology, X (1954), 164-71. 2 Khuri, "Parallel Cousin Marriage Reconsidered".

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function, i.e., its operation within Bedouin social structure." 1 They argued in social structuralist terms that parallel cousin marriage "contributes to the extreme fission of agnatic lines in Arab society," by turning affinal ties inward and "making each minimal sized agnatic unit ... self-contained and encysted." 2 They concluded from this that endogamy was closely related to the lack of bounded corporate groups among Bedouin. Here they had in mind the tendency for Arab genealogies to embrace almost a total society rather than to be limited to clans. As a result, the lack of external marriage ties produces agnatic fission. Murphy and Kasdan had in view a science of society in terms of the canons of social structure based on a functionalist causal analysis. This objective would enable them to explain just how patrilateral parallel cousin marriage would interlock with other social structural aspects of Bedouin society. They went so far as to state that their approach would arrive at a general theory of endogamy." 3 This is a much more ambitious aim than the motivational arguments, and it is an aim that still awaits fulfillment. They have failed to mention that the Turks (and other Near Eastern peoples) have bounded clans and parallel cousin marriage — a type of society that should not occur according to their arguments. Moreover, the hamüla Arabs of the Levant approach very closely, too closely, a society with bounded clans that practices endogamy at rates comparable with the Bedouin. On the other hand, the Northern Somalis have segmentary lineages very similar to the Bedouin, with all the puzzling characteristics of total genealogies and the appearance of relative ' c o r p o r a t e n e s s ' at various levels of the genealogies. Yet the segmentary Somalis do not practice endogamy or F B D marriage. 4 In other words, every case that Murphy and Kasdan exclude occurs full blown, not just somewhere in the world, but next door to their Bedouins. Another social structuralist explanation more common in the literature presents a curious contrast with the preceding argument. This theory interprets patrilateral parallel cousin marriages as contributing to the solidarity of an agnatic group. To measure the solidarity of any level of agnation, according to 1 Robert F. Murphy and Leonard Kasdan, "The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage," American Anthropologist, LXI (1959), 17-29. The quote is on p. 27. hbid. rt J Robert F. Murphy and Leonard Kasdan, "Agnation and Endogamy; Some Further Considerations," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XXIII (1967), 1-14. M. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). The problem of lineage segmentation is, of course, a principal concern of Lewis in this book. Some commesAa on Somali lineage exogamy are found on pp. 5-6, 180. The only way to sustain the social structuralists' connection of Bedouin-like segmentation and marriage endogamy is to rule the Somali to the hors concours.

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this view, you count the number of endogamous marriages at that level. 1 Notice that this theory is approximately the opposite of that advanced by Murphy and Kasdan: the presence of external marriage ties produces agnatic fusion. Indeed, these two variants of social structuralist theories illustrate how such interpretations are inevitably caught on the horns of a dilemma. Near Eastern segmentary societies are rarely totally endogamous at any level of segmentation, and where clans occur, the clans are rarely totally endogamous. Thus, the more the social structuralist theorists stress that endagamous marriage contributes to the solidarity of some level of agnation of the clan, the more they are forced to admit that marriage beyond that agnatic level or outside the clan splits and fragments the group. Likewise the more they stress that marriage leads to fission of the agnatic group, the more they must admit that at another level it contributes to solidarity. Great confusion arises in these analyses over when the solidarity of agnates prevails and when the solidarity of affines prevails. In other words, the two variants of social structuralism are different ways of talking about a single view of Bedouin society, but stressing alternatively two aspects of the same set of facts. Implicit in social structuralist theories is the notion that all social relations between men in society are of a similar kind, that is, they involve some kind of "political solidarity." This is the great fallacy of social structuralism as a description of all social orders, and it is a view that is patently absurd to anyone not steeped in its assumptions. The difficulties of such theories, then, stem from their inability to see social relations in terms other than "political solidarity," implicitly based on conscious awareness of "common interest." An analysis in terms of this type of theory is inevitably forced to emphasize the segmentary aspects of Near Eastern society. Only in this way can the mindless "fizzing and fusing" resulting from their alternating interpretations of first "affinal ties" and then "agnatic ties" as the basis of "common interest" be accounted for. 2

'This is generally the interpretation of Cohen, Arab Border-Villages. See, for example, pp. 123 and 178. For such an interpretation of Bedouin social structure, see Emrys Peters, "The Proliferation of Segments in the Lineage of the Bedouin of Cyrenaica," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XC (1960), 42-3. 2 F o r a more general criticism of this kind of social structuralism, including comments on the interpretation of caste as well as on the interpretation of segmentation, see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (n.p.: University of Chicago, 1970), chap. II.

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A third form of explanation has been less developed in the literature. It is a version of logical structuralist theory (see Part I). This theory interprets Near Eastern societies in terms of a logical segmentary system and provides a way of analyzing Near Eastern society in terms of the theories of exchange relationships developed by Lévi-Strauss. 1 Instead of moieties or a series of clans practicing exchanges of women, one has in segmentary society the logical possibility of "clanship" arising at any level. Therefore exchange is possible even down to the level of brothers or up to the level of two or more maximal segments. Such a theory, being based on purely logical categories of relative totalities and exchanges, is elegant and enables us to analyze segmentary societies in purely structural terms of logical relationships. 2 It is surely too early to assess the contribution of logical structuralist theory to the study of Near Eastern society, but some difficulties that this position must face can be mentioned. Logical structuralist theory in its original formulation rests on the principle that units that are separate, for example, descent groups, mediate their separateness (hostility) by virtue of exchanges (marriages) that result in alliances. This principle made the dual societies of Southeast Asia, North America, and South America and their accompanying feature of cross-cousin marriage crucial to the development of the theory. These societies reflected an elementary f o r m in which the properties of the principle could be studied. Much of this theory seems to fly in the face of Near Eastern segmentation and endogamy. For the special peculiarity of these Near Eastern segmentary societies is that they refuse to countenance a final duality in their society but always search for an overarching unity. That is to say, opposition of any two segments is always resolved in common descent (sharaf) and even in those societies with multiple clans a duality of clan alliances, as we have seen in Part I, is a way of recognizing anoverarching community a m o n g the clans. Yet logical structuralist theory, like the two preceding social structuralist theories, must stress segmentation, albeit on a logical rather than a political level. It can provide no understanding of why it is always possible to resolve divisions into an overarching unity, except to posit another level of division at the higher level of unity.

^Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). This represents my interpretation of Jean Cuisenier, "Endogamie et Exogamie dans le Mariage Arabe", l'Homme, 2, 2 (1962), 80-105. Consider the following quote: "C'est la pensée indigène elle-même qui met sur la voie d'un modèle explicatif. Celle-ci se représente en effet les alliances nouées dans un groupe à partir d'une opposition fondamentale entre deux frères, dont l'un doit se marier dans le sens de l'endogamie pour maintenir au groupe sa consistance, et l'autre dans le sens de l'exogamie pour donner au groupe des alliances. Cette opposition des deux frères se trouve à tous les niveaux du groupe agnatique..." (p. 104). Cuisenier points out the connection between this interpretation and that of Murphy and Kasdan, "The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage."

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The contrast between the principles of logical structuralism and the principles of Near Eastern society can be expressed as follows. Exchange theory rests on the principle that alliance (exchange) unites what descent (hostility) divides. 1 A brother must renounce his sister in order to gain a wife and ally. Near Eastern society expresses the contrary principle. 'Significance' divides what i o v e ' unites. This last principle is not simply the converse of logical structuralist theory because the latter assumes a differentiation which must be mediated through exchange. In Near Eastern meaning, a unity is assumed, but this unity must be differentiated. The key is not the decision to renounce the sister, but the necessity of hostilities with one's brother. A refusal to oppose one's brother is a refusal to recognize any 'significance' and to be satisfied with the undifferentiated unity of 'love'. This dilemma has not been ignored in Near Eastern myth. The contrast between the principles of logical structuralism and the structure of Near Eastern meaning is not merely a logical contrast. Logical structuralism has interpreted descent and alliance in terms of a logical structure, while the structure of Near Eastern meaning has been formulated in terms of a semantic distinction between 'signifiance' and iove.' Perhaps the logical structuralist can incorporate and convert these principles into a logical structure. Even so, the objections to such a conversion stated in Part I would still hold. The similar difficulties of these structuralist theories, a stress on segmentation, suggest that the intensive interest in segmentary systems in the Near East might be attributable to more than interest in a crucial test case. For if these criticisms are correct, all three theories can hope to resolve their difficulties only within the contexts of the "fizzing and fusing" of extreme segmentation. Yet they are dealing with properties of Near Eastern societies which are characteristic of much of Near Eastern society, not simply those rare and controversial "segmentary societies." It seems only reasonable to insist that any successful analysis of segmentary systems in the Near East be able to account for all that these segmentary systems share in common with the rest of Near Eastern society. In other words, segmentary societies must surely be not simply a test case but a special case. In this paper I have tried to show that the cultural structurings closely related to the meaning of Near Eastern marriage have hardly been discussed in the literature on FBD marriage or parallel cousin marriage. In addition, I have ' See Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures,

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tried to show that there are important similarities and contrasts in these cultural structurings. The contrasts are certainly serious enough to throw doubt on any analysis of marriage where they are not carefully determined. For i:t must not be assumed that all Arabs, even all Levantine Arabs, have the same cultural structurings as the hamula Arabs discussed by Granqvist and Cohen, even though this structuring seems at least typical for many central Near Eastern Arab peoples. Likewise, it should not be assumed that all Turkish speakers in Anatolia have the cultural structurings of the Turks of Of, even though this pattern does seem typical of many central and northeastern Anatolian village Turks. Leaving this argument, let us turn then to an interpretation of FBD marriage as a consequence of cultural structuring and to some illustrations of the peculier properties of Near Eastern "endogamy" and "exogamy." I wish to interpret FBD marriage, not as a key institution in Turkish and Arab society, but as one case among many others that reveal to us peculiar aspects of Near Eastern culture which are not readily reconcilable with other cultures in other parts of the world. An explanation can be formulated as follows. First of all, we must recognize that not all Near Eastern societies practice endogamy or FBD marriage. The Circassians and Somalis are two such examples. The Circassians have a cultural structuring of sharaf and namus identical with what has been described in Of, with one important exception. They do not consider FBD marriage, nor do they countenance endogamy. 1 I. M. Lewis's work on the Northern Somalis suggests that these people have a cultural structuring of sharaf and 'ard similar to that of the hamula Arabs or, more appropriately, similar to that of the Bedouin described by Abou-Zeid. 2 Again there is an important difference. The Somalis, when

In general, ray comments with regard to the Circassians derive from conversations with Circassians in Turkey. Similar points have also been made with respect to Circassians in the Caucasus. See, for example, J. A. Longworth, A year among the Circassians, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1840), II, 129-30. For a Circassian description of seref and namus, see Jabagi Baj, (¿erkesya'da Sosyal Ya§ayi§-Adetler (Ankara: Fon Matbaasi, 1969), pp. 15-16. Also see Karl Koch, Reise durch Russland nach dern Kaukasischen Isthmus in den Jahren 1836, 1837 urtd 1838, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Tubingen: J. G. Cotta, 1842), esp. vol. 1. 2 See Abou-Zeid, "Honour and Shame among the Bedouins of Egypt," and I. M. Lewis, Marriage and the Family in Northern Somaliland, East African Studies No. 15 (Kampala: East African Institute of Social Research, 1962). I have concluded this from similar aspects of betrothal, marrige brideprice, dowry, and the concern for the control of women among hamula Arabs and the Northern Somali. This is not to say that all these matters are absolutely identical. Lewis interprets all these matters social structurally. Although he provides an immense amount of material, the "ideological side" of these matters is not well filled out. The case must rest, of course, on the ultimate determination of cultural formulations rather than on deductions from an abstracted social structure.

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they form their blood-money groups, draw up contracts stipulating that they shall not marry one another's women. 1 One can draw many other parallels between Turks and Circassians on the one hand and Bedouin and Somalis on the other. The societies of the former tend to be "communal societies" in the sense of the phrase used in Part I whereas the societies of the latter tend to be "segmentary societies." This comparison is worth pursuing, but a paper does not offer the space. Recall now that in our discussion of namus (and by extension 'ard of 'control') we saw that this cultural category required the existence of conventions regarding the handling of women. What we are observing in noting that some Near Eastern societies permit "endogamy" and others require "exogamy" is varying conventions for the handling of women. Recall too that namus (and by extinson 'ard of 'control') was a concept related to a common measure which marked a 'community.' Near Eastern "endogamy" and "exogamy," we can conclude, are not like "endogamy" and "exogamy" everywhere, but reflect the cultural category of namus (and 'ard of 'control'). Among the Turks and Arabs we have the rule that men who are "close" may assume 'control' over one another's women, that is, they have "sexual access" to one another's women. Among the Circassians and Somalis we have the diametrically opposed rule than men who are "close" may not assume 'control' over one another's women. It will be noted that the cultural structuring described for Turks and Arabs never required the specification of which women were marriageable, thus it is possible for the Turks to resemble the Circassian except for the switch in the definition of marriageability. Something very similar is true for the Bedouin and Northern Somalis. That is, the cultural structuring of namus and 'ard of 'control' require conventions, but they do not determine what these conventions are. FBD marriage then is a "reaction" which results from the combination of a cultural structuring in the context of one alternative definition of a marriage rule which is tied to the concept of namus-'ard. Among the Arabs, this combination results in a tendency for marriage to be most frequent where 'community' is strongest. This last tendency is not itself the "rule" or a "preference" but the result of a combination of a marriageability rule and cultural structuring. When the hamula sharaf is emphasized, then marriage focusses in the hamula. When the village community is emphasized, marriage focusses in the village, and so on. This same close association 1

Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy, p. 180.

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between 'community' and marriage obtains more weakly among Turks, who have the same 'rule' but a contrasting cultural structuring. Marriage among Turks tends to be more evenly distributed at all levels in which any concept of community exists, and political "crises" tend to shift the level of marriage only weakly. To speak of the "definition of marriage" and "rules of marriage" seems tp indicate a drift back to a normative view of social organization or some point of contact with logical structuralism, but this is not so. The issue of the "definition of marriage" or "rules of marriage" has not arisen from a normative sociological theory of the Near East, but from an attempt to conventionalize a 'significance' on the part of Near Easterners. If there is a resemblance between this and normative sociology, it is the Near Easterners that have arrived at this point. It is not a foregone conclusion that their marriage patterns must fit a normative sociology. In fact, we see the difference between these "rules" and sociological norms because the "rules" attempt to express a problem that lies behind them, that is, the relationships of 'significance' and 'love'. Among the Turks and Arabs the "rule" is actually a "statement" that men who share 'significance' and 'love' may assume 'control' over one another's women. Among the Circassians and Somalis, the "statement" is almost, but not quite, tike opposite: men who share 'significance' may not assume 'control' over one another's women. Let us reexamine Circassian and Somali "exogamy" to uncover the details of marriageability among them. The Circassians not only refuse to marry a FBD or any other daughter of their lineage or clan. They refuse to marry a daughter of an immediate relative of their mother, and they even refuse to marry a daughter or sister of a friend. They have described to me how intermarriages between villages slowly lead to a sense of unity and identity between the two villages at which point marriage becomes disapproved. The two villages must then turn elsewhere for wives, sometimes to Circassian villages in distant parts of Turkey. Circassian marriage, it seems, must occur at the fringes of 'community' rather than at the center. 1 Wherever there is a strong 'significance' or a strong 'love' with other men, the Circassians hesitate to intermarry with them. Yet marriage still takes place within some recognition of community, albeit at the fringes.

'These observations about the marriage practices of Circassians are also drawn interviews with Circassians in Turkey.

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Exogamy among the Somalis is also not categorically defined, but seems to be an attempt to keep separate two kinds of relationships that cannot be perfectly separated. In this case, unlike the Circassians, the Somalis, I would suggest, intermarry only with those men who are tied to them primarily by 'love' and seek to avoid intermarrying with those men tied to them primarily by a "significance.' Intermarrriages occur and are approved with distant agnates. These men, among the Somalis, share descent from saint-like ascendants who represent all-encompassing unities of a high order and are endowed with a religious "power" which unlike the "power" of sharaf seems more like a power of iove.' Marriage also occurs with maternal kin. Yet intermarriage is disapproved and occurs rarely among men of the same primary lineage (who share a nonreligious 'significance') and intermarriage is forbidden and does not occur among men of the same blood-money group, whether they are close agnates or not. 1 It is clear that marriage "rules" among the Circassians and Somalis are not explicable in terms of agnation and affinity. In addition to this, I hope to have indicated that there are no other categories of marriageability among them which would satisfy these facts. Rather, marriage reflects an attempt to "order" and "separate" relationships in terms of their meaning, or more exactly, to express these meanings in a partiular way. Among the Circassians, women are sought from men with whom one has a minimum of i o v e ' or common 'significance,' and all Circassian marriages are staged as abductions. Among the Somalis, ^One should not quibble with an account that provides such a rich mine of information, but it must be said that Lewis does not deal adequately with this problem. Lewis states that men of diya paying groups do not intermarry and that men of primary lineages (six to ten agnatic generations) tend not to intermarry (Lewis, Marriage and the Family, p. 25). The vagueness of these boundaries of marriageability is never satisfactorily explained: "Marriage within this prohibited range, however, is not regarded as incestious nor is it subject to ritual sanctions" (p. 25). Affinal relations, he says, are associated with the roots of a tree (agnation) (p. 26). We have here the suspicious connection of affinity with roots-nourishment-milk-mothers-love, common associations throughout the Near East. He also states that the religious leaders of tariqa (organisations of 'love') "make full use of affinal connections (as of other ties) to attract adherents" (p. 23), a principle that contradicts segmentation and agnation in a suspicious context. Matrilateral marriage is also left vague: "While there is no enjoined or even preferred marriage with the mother's brother's daughter, men sometimes marry from their mother's lineage..." (p. 26). In addition to this, we may observe that distant agnatic ties among the Somali come under the purview of remote ascendants who are seen as saints, have tombs, and express unity (Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy, pp. 129-30). Again these are features connected with i o v e ' and a different situation from Bedouin or Berber tribes, where saints have separate lineages altogether. There is then the possibility that marriage occurs where 'significance' is weak and i o v e ' is strong. Lewis has given us no explanation of this problem other than the rationalization of a social structuralist: "Because it [the primary lineage] is so strongly integrated in agnation, although it has no formally installed leader, its members feel little need to supplement their already strong agnatic ties by subsidiary links through marriage" (ibid. pp. 56).

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intermarriage occurs with men who are tied by 'love' but not with men who are tied more by a 'significance,' even though all Somalis are tied in some degree by both iove' and 'signifiance.' Rejecting a solution of marriageability in terms of rules and classification, allows us to ask just what is "meant" by these peoples' ordering of their relationships in this way. This question points in the direction of a more thorough understanding of Near Eastern thought. This is a topic that seems to me to be a promising one, but it is beyond the scope of this paper. It should be noted that rejecting a solution in terms of rules and classifications is necessarily a rejection of the concept of "social organization," itself, at least in relation to these aspects of society. From these examples and contrasts of marriage among Arabs, Turks, Circassians, and Somalis, we can conclude that FBD marriage in the Near Hast is not at all tied to the character of the lineage or segment as a structure or to the fabled "strength or weakness" of descent. It is not a feature of family role conflicts or lack of conflicts. It is not related to any other social structural feature of Turkish or Arab society. FBD marriage and other socalled endogamous marriages are one possibility that arises in the structuring of a particular tradition. It is the cultural categories of 'significance' and iove' which give the structuring its peculiar character — a character not resolvable with the sociological or logical categories of "exogamy" or "endogamy." This understanding of agnatic marriage allows us to take a further step. Social structuralists have worried themselves with understanding how marriage With agnates is "different" from marriage with nonagnates. The "difference" has been located typically in the tendency of agnatic marriage to increase "solidarity." The proper approach to this problem is the opposite point of view. We must accept the fact that the possibility of marrying agnates as well as non-agnates means that there is something about agnates and non-agnates that is the same. We understand what is the same by turning to the concept of a historical community with its two principles of 'significance' and iove.' In Of we saw that there was national sharaf, religious sharaf, and clan sharaf all corresponding separately to a community and therefore to a iove.' Social structuralists interpret clan sharaf as "kinship" and therefore not comparable with national and religious sharaf. This is a crucial error. By adopting the point of interpreting the meaning of these societies rather than constructing an empirical model of social organization, we can understand that clan sharaf is no different in meaning from national or religious sharaf; it is only different in content and structuring. The crucial point then is that all "unities" in the Near East are based on iove' and refer to 'significances.'

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The "preference" for FBD marriage and other agnatic marriages The contrast in the cultural structuring among Turks and Arabs enables us to understand characteristic attitudes and rationalizations related to marriages. The Arab sister or daughter carries in her person the sharaf of the father and brother as well as the sharaf of their agnates. When the Arabs say they "prefer" to marry their FBD or some other agnates' daughter, they are not expressing a liking for a form of marriage itself. They are instead trying to state a "significance," and in this case, they are acknowledging their agnatic sharaf. For them to say that they do not like to marry their daughters to agnates is to say that the sharaf connection with their brothers or more distant agnates is meaningless to them. Thus, we can predict that wherever agnatic sharaf ceases to be rcognized, agnatic marriage is not "preferred." But since the tie between brothers is recognized even in an urban situation, the "preference" and perhaps the "practice" of these two men marrying their children continues so long as parents decide marriages in the Arab world, even in urban situations. Likewise, the so-called 'right' of the FBS to marry his FBD is in reality a recognition of agnatic sharaf and its connection with the daughters of agnates. It is not a "legal or normative right." The latter are no more than inaccurate and misleading sociological glosses. Among the hamula Arabs the so-called agnatic marriage "right" extends outward agnatically. Cohen observed during a period when the hamula were "strong" that the first agnatic cousin must first give up his "right" to a girl and assent to a marriage, then the second cousin, and so on. 1 In some cases, Granqvist observed that money had to be paid to several degrees of agnates on the occasion of a girl's marriage outside the hamula. 2 All these assertions of "rights" are reflections of agnatic sharaf, and they are expressed only when agnatic sharaf becomes "significant.' The latter condition is perhaps true almost all the time in an isolated tribal society, but true only in relation to certain historical events among the h a m u l a Arabs. This variability in the intensity of a legal rule is incomprehensible in terms of social organization. Is it really possible that a clan can be weakly corporate or strongly corporate? A sociology free of utilitarian fallacies must deny this. In terms of meaning, however, the 'significance' that clans represent can indeed be more or less important in relation to historical events, and this provides an explanation for what appears to us as clans and segments emerging, then disappearing. 1

Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, p. 121. ^Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, pp. 123-4.

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Turning to the Turks in Of, we find that the "preference" for F B D marriage and other types of agnatic marriages is very ambiguous. Their cultural structuring enables us to understand this. In the Turkish case, men do not deny their connection with the sharaf of their brothers or other agnates when they say they do not like FBD marriage. They do not do so because the sharaf of these men is not in question; for the married daughter is not tied to the sharaf of her natal agnatic kinsmen. So they have no need to express a preference for agnatic marriage. Yet in Of, recognition of the need to consult agnates on the occasion of a marriage occurs. This is because giving a woman in marriage is the responsibility of those with a common sharaf. Still, the "right" of a FBS to marry a F B D is not recognized; it is only "agnatically" recognized that he has a relation with the decision of her marriage. In Of, there are many reasons to intermarry with agnates, but there are many reasons not to intermarry with agnates. If you ask questions about the matter in any coffeehouse you will get an earful of both sides. Ordinarily, the Turks are not "compelled" to state a preference for these types of marriages, they are free to "evaluate" them. Many ethnographers in Turkey have felt a keen disappointment in their search for marriage "preferences." We have felt that, since Turks do marry their FBD, they should be enthusiastic and assertive about this unusual practice just as the Arabs seem to be. This Turkish even-mindedness is not a lack of enthusiasm f o r a supposedly borrowed institution, but a consequence of a different cultural structuring. 1 Another contrast in attitudes between Turks and Arabs with respect to F B D marriage is interesting. The Arabs sometimes say that they like to marry their FBD because their FB will then aid in the control of their wives. 2 The Turks often say that they dislike to marry their FBD because they are unable to control their wives since their uncles will interfere on the side of their daughters. These conclusions are reached relative to the situation that Turks and Arabs face in other types of marriages. Since an Arab must be deeply involved with his father-in-law, no matter who he is, he prefers a father-in-law who is close to him. Since a Turk who does not marry a F B D need not be deeply involved at all with a father-in-law, he balks at placing himself in the situation where his father-in-law is a man to whom he must submit. These attitudes therefore are rationalizations w h i c h stem f r o m the cultural structurings and are understandable only in their context. l][t should not be understood from this argument that Arabs have no "reason" for stating a dislike for FBD marriage or for marrying women who are distant. Such statements and practices occur among Arabs, and I do not wish to deny that this is so. Rather, I have been pointing out the unavoidable meanings of such statements and practices and thereby providing an understanding of why Arabs typically eschew them in opinion and practice. Circumstances frequently require that an unsatisfactory arrangement must be tolerated. 9 Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, p. 54.

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The mother's brother and the sister's son The contrast between the mother's brother and sister's son relationship among the Turks of Of and the Arabs of the Levant can also be understood in terms of structured meanings. The mother's brother (MB) and sister's son (ZS) are tied to the same woman by ties of 'love' among both Turks and Arabs, and likewise the mutual relationship of a MB and ZS is marked by 'love.' This is most clearly expressed among the Arabs. The mother's brother is a friend and confidant of his sister's son, a refuge from paternal and agnatic wrath, a supporter when agnates have turned against him, a contributor to brideprice and blood money, not through the demands of blood but through 'love.' Arab proverbs express the singularity of this relationship of i o v e , ' untroubled by the requirements of "agnation."1 Among the Turks, the relationship of MB and ZS is of the same quality, but is less clearly expressed and of less interest to them. Here, the stress is on the mutual relationship with the mother and sister rather than the direct i o v e ' between MB and ZS. The MB and ZS are described as confidants (.mahrem) by a word that emphasizes the "incest" relation with the mutual sister and mother. Both, it is said, may be allowed to enter the seclusion of this woman. Both may sleep in the same room as the woman's daughters. This is a change in emphasis and it is accompanied with a distinct lack of interest between mother's brothers and sister's sons. Mother's brothers may indeed sometime and somewhere serve as a refuge, but no one in Of brought up this fact. Mother's brothers somewhere may have contributed to a brideprice or aided a man in vengeance but no one spoke of this as something typical of mother's brothers. Mother's brothers also fail to make their appearance in Turkish proverbs as singular figures. This lack of "activity" and "interest" between MB and ZS is again a result of the structure of sharaf. Among the Turks and Arabs, the MB and ZS have only i o v e ' between them. But among the Arabs, the i o v e ' of the MB and ZS also has a connection with their respective, distinct sharafs. The MB's sharaf is tied directly to his sister. The sharaf of the ZS, that is, the sharaf he received from his father and father's ascendants, is therefore passed to him by virtue of the MB's protection of his mother. The consequences of these relationships leads to a strong expression of the i o v e ' o f the MB-ZS relationship. Among the 1 Ibid,., p. 113. For the Bedouin, see Peters, "The Proliferaiton of Segments," p. 46. At some level, of course, the MB and ZS may be tied by "significance' due to the possibility of "endogamy." The case analyzed represents an instance where the 'love' between MB and ZS is relatively untroubled by 'significance.'

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Turks, the MB-ZS tie does not involve the distinctive sharafs of the two men; there is only 'love' between them. The expression of the 'love' between MB and ZS is not "problematical" and therefore it is attenuated and more difficult to detect.

The mother's brother and inter-status

marriage

The structuring of the tie between a man and his mother's brother is also at the root of a subtlety of Arab kinship recently touched upon in a discussion concerning the importance of a man's maternal kin. It has been observed that the sons of the Ottoman Sultans by concubines were considered rto less legitimate than sons by their legal wives. 1 Many of the Sultans did indeed have mothers who were concubines. This fact is not unrelated to the cultural structuring of sharaf and namus described for Of. Good evidence exists that a similar cultural structuring prevailed among the Ottoman Sultans. 2 Assuming this to the case, it would be clear that the maternal origin of a Sultan's son was irrelevant in determining his legitimacy. His sharaf was mediated only by his father's control over his mother. The concubine mother needed only to be kept safely within the confines of the Sultan's harem. Other than this her own lineage or status was not an issue. Again among the Arabs, the matter is not so clear cut. Somehow, Arab mothers do matter. In historical documents, maternal kin are frequently mentioned in order to detract or enchance the reputation of a man or some tribal group. 3 Arabs also have a predilection for marriage between families of equal status, a predilection that their Turkish cousins do not share. Nadia M. Abu-Zahra has used these facts to attack Richard T. Antoun's interpretation of Arab honor in terms of the example of the Ottoman Sultans. 4 Here we see how careful we must be in attempting to understand Near Eastern materials. The cultural structuring which I have tried to outline among certain groups of Turks and Arabs must be taken into account when interpretations of Near Eastern kinship are undertaken. From the analysis of this paper we can understand that an Arab mother matters because her "protection" by a father ^Antoun, "On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages", pp. 687-8, and idem, "Antoun's Reply to Abu-Zahra," American Anthropologist, LXXII (1970), 1088-92. 2 S e e Edward Seymour Forster, trans., The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Buspecq (.Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554-1562) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 289, 117-18, for some provocative remarks about the Sultans, their wives, and the relations between married women and their natal kin among Ottomans in Istanbul. 3 Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, vol. I (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp. 115-25. 4 Abu-Zahra, "A Reply," p. 1084.

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and brothers matters. Among the Arabs, a woman who has no important natal kin is unprotected and irreparably tainted by this fact. Even though the husband of a woman is a man of great sharaf, the woman's sons must carry the mark of their maternal kin in the eyes of the Arabs. For a man's maternal kin are necessary to determine that he is the son of the Sultan, while among the Turks this problem is completely in the hands of the Sultan himself. AbuZahra, detecting a distinction that Antoun overlooked, follows many other social structural analysts of Arab kinship and attempts an explanation by invoking concept of bilaterality. Such arguments then must face other conflicting evidence seemingly indicating that Arabs are unilineal. An understanding of the cultural structuring allows us to see the large gap between our crude theories of structural unilineality or bilaterality with their political undertones and the precision with which in this case the meanings of Arab kinship can be established.

Marriage

exchanges

Now let us turn to a problem for which exchange theory has provided an explanation. A m o n g the hamula Arabs, Granqvist has described an elaborate pattern of marriage exchanges. In beginning her discussion of these practices, she lays to rest the theory that such exchanges are carried out merely in order to cancel out brideprice expenses: One is tempted to see merely a concealed exchange in many cases of brideprice; but the women were strongly opposed to calling this [brideprice] exchange. "Head for head — hair for hair — is necessary for [marriage] exchange ...," they say.1 and in another passage: An exchange can also have its difficulties for the man. "The exchanged ones are as co-wives...," people say and mean that they must be treated in the same way. If for example a man with an exchanged wife ceases to give the customary gifts at the great feast to his sister, he can be certain that his wife's brother will also cease to give the customary gifts to her, i.e., to his sister. And if his sister is offended and leaves her husband in anger... the latter has the right to demand his sister back again. 2

^Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part I, p. 119. hbid., p. 117.

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Such exchanges can be incorporated into the segmentary model of logical structuralism, since they occur not only between clans but between all degrees of agnates and even between brothers who exchange their daughters in marriage to their sons (double FBD marriage). For every level of segmentation, there is a possibility of exchange. Granqvist gives a number of extraordinary examples of such exchanges involving "triple exchanges" and "quadruple exchanges" in which women circulate in complicated patterns.1 Of tie 264 marriages in her sample, 70 were exchange marriages. Exchange theory allows us to see the "logic" of exchange but it fails to clarify the '^meaning." The meaning lies in the particular terms of the mutuality of Arab marriage. That is, the Arab husband 'controls' and therefore 'covers' what the Arab brother 'protects' and 'loves.' The 'ard of each person depends on the other man. Exchanges then are another way of solving the same problem that FBD marriage solves. In FBD marriage, a brother's son whose sharaf is Almost identical with his father's brother's sharaf serves as the 'cover' for the letter's daughter. In exchange marriages, one man 'covers' a second man's sharaf (i.e., his sister). In this sense, exchange marriages cannot occur among Turks because a man's sharaf is "detached" from his sister upon her marriage. We can, however, reformulate the terms of exchange so that they hold for both Turkish and Arab marriage. The reformulation proceeds as follows: what the brother cannot 'control,' but can only 'love,' is given over to another man who in turn gives back what he can only 'love,' but cannot 'control.' This mutuality holds for both Turkish and Arab marriage and so we should expect exchange "to work" for the Turks and Arabs. This is indeed the case. The Turks of Of recognize that the exchange of women in marriage creates a relationship different from simple marriage. Two women exchanged in marriage are like co-wives, they say. If one gets a dress, the other must have a dress. If one husband mistreats his wife, the other mistreats his wife in retaliation. And if one marriage ends in divorce, the other is likely to end also. Now let us return to the formulation of exchange in terms of sharaf. What effect does this different aspect of exchange have among Turks and Arabs? First of all, the Arabs express great pleasure with such marriages and indulge in them frequently. The mutuality of marriage exchange solves the l

Ibid„ pp. 109-19, 193.

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Arab problem created by the necessity to give to others a sister who represents one's sharaf. The Turks, on the other hand, usually express extreme distaste for such marriages. Accordingly, they do not often practice them. Of the 194 marriages that I recorded in Of, only two were exchange marriages (one exchange). The mutuality created-by-marriage exchange, we can see, not only fails to solve the Arab problem of sharaf (since such a problem does not exist among them), it creates a problem where previously there was none. For now the 'control' of the Turkish husband is brought into mutuality with the 'love' of a brother. This is a situation that Turkish husbands do not face even when they marry close agnates. It represents a compromise of a principle that their cultural structuring seems designed to insure, the thorough and complete 'control' of the husband over his wife. There is no need for Turks to involve themselves in this rat's nest. A man can simply marry a sister of a fellow-villager, a sister of a fellow-district resident, or a sister of a fellow-Muslim. None of these marriages poses a problem for his sharaf as they do for the Arab. Of course, occasionally we do find a set of circumstances which makes marriage exchange attractive to Turks, but these circumstances are far more specialized and involved than those which make marriage exchange among Arabs a common affair. We have seen that the Turks of Of express distaste for marriage to a FBD because it makes the women literally difficult to control. Their objections to marriage exchanges are of the same kind but even more forceful. The Arabs on the other hand like FBD marriage because it makes wives easy to control (through the uncle, her father) and provides for the safe preservation of the FB's sharaf. So too, Arabs like marriage exchanges because they make wives easy to control and sisters easy to protect. Turning to another rationalization, we find that sisters among the Arabs see their marriage by exchange as a reflection of their brother's love for them. As Granqvist put it, "it is the brother, and especially the brother who has had the advantage of getting a bride by means of his sister, who has obligations toward her in the future." 1 But among the Turks, sisters see their marriage by exchange as a matter of shame, because it indicates that their husbands were too poor to pay their brideprices (that is, too poor to 'control' them). These examples of individual attitudes and feelings can be understood as consequences of a particular cultural structuring in each society.

l

lbid„ Part II, p. 254.

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The logical structuralists have taught us how to understand exchange as a relationship, but they have not interpreted it in the contexts of cultural categories. Therefore, I believe, they would not be able to explain this contrast irt Turkish and Arab marriage. The cultural structuring among Arabs whereby 'control' and 'response' are related to husband and brother, respectively, presents a serious difficulty which demands that exchange marriages occur between men who are related 'significantly.' Exchange marriages allow a "tightening" of mutuality among men who are already related 'significantly.' Or it allows men who are not of common descent (common clan sharaf) to intermarry safely by forming a mutuality. In this last respect, it also becomes a way in itself of underlining a 'significance' among those who exchange when there is no 'significance' in terms of common descent. These interpretations allow us to view parallel cousin marriage and marriage exchange not as institutions, customs, or preferences, but as different ways of resolving problems posed by the cultural structuring.

Marriage by abduction The same contrast between the Turks of Of and the Arabs of the Levant can be seen with respect to their different reactions to marriage by abduction. In this case, what the Turks practice the Arabs refuse to countenance. Among the Arabs, a woman who has been removed from her brother or father by marrying far away from them is looked upon with a mixture of pity, disgust, and fear. She is called a 'stranger bride' and is said to have a potent curse.1 The deplorable condition of the stranger bride is exceeded by the 'cutoff woman' who is not merely far away from her fathers and brothers but for some reason 'cut-off' from them as well. They may be dead, they may have disowned her, or they may have "sold" her into marriage. The 'cut-off woman' has no protectors and nowhere to go for refuge. She is a 'stranger' to her husband's people, and they are not inclined to give her respect. In such a situation, her position can possibly approach that of a concubine. The condition of women removed or cut-off-from their brothers or fathers is understandable in terms of the structuring of sharaf. Such a woman is 'controlled' but she has no one who 'loves' and 'protects' her.

X

lbid. Part I, pp. 68, 93-109; Part II, pp. 248-56.

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The other side of the coin, a tendency for women to be too attached to their brothers, or father, is equally developed among the Arabs of the Levant. Granqvist was obliged to devote a full chapter of her ethnography to the "harddne woman," a woman who has temporarily left her husband and has gone to live with her brother or father. 1 In connection with this, she also describes an extraordinary romanticization of the brother-sister tie. The women say: "A husband may (always) be had; a son can (also) be born; but a beloved brother, from where shall he come back (when he is once dead)." 2 Granqvist adds, "The love between sister and brother finds expression in many ways and is most beautiful and attractive. According to the conception of thefellahtn it is more beautiful than the love between wife and husband, because [it is] not founded on passion,"3 We have seen that the tie between brother and sister among Turks is also a tie of pure i o v e , ' but, unlike the Arab case, it is a i o v e ' unassociated with sharaf. Therefore, this i o v e ' is not a matter of worry, rationalization and frequent expression. Unassociated with sharaf, it becomes unproblematic. Indeed, the Arab concern about "stranger brides" and "cut-off women" would only be vaguely understandable by the Turks of Of. Turkish fathers, mothers, and siblings suffer remorse on the occasion of a woman's marriage just as the woman herself does, but they all accept the distancing of these ties of i o v e ' as inevitable. In the Arab sense of the word, all Turkish women are "stranger brides" and "cut-off women"; for all are removed from their natal kin to a degree that Arabs tolerate only in the face of dire circumstance. As a result, there is no concept of the "stranger bride" or the "cut-off woman" in Of although some women are married more distantly than others. Indeed, the line between a marriage that is a "proper" marriage and a marriage that constitutes the "selling" of the daughter is very difficult to draw in Of and most of the rest of village Turkey. Only gross examples condemned by everyone where the woman is sold into prostitution or a truly miserable circumstance are clearly instances of "selling." There is also no name for the "harddne woman," although women do occasionally flee back to their fathers or brothers. When such an event takes place, either the woman is promptly sent back or a divorce and remarriage to another man are quickly arranged.

1

2

Ibid„ Part II, chap. IX.

Ibid., p. 253. 3 M y italics. Ibid., pp.

253-4.

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Instead of the romanticization of the brother-sister tie, a m o n g unmarried girls in Of there is a romanticization of the man who will someday take them away from their fathers and brothers, perhaps by stealth and force. Even very young village girls, ten years old and younger, realize that their future lies somewhere outside their natal household. Their thoughts and plans range to the world beyond their fathers and brothers. As they approach marriage, a certain coolness and formality typically grows between brother and sister as each person anticipates the approaching break. This is not to say that the Turks do not recognize a tie of love between brother and sister, but only that they also recognize this tie of love must be shaped by the eventual assumption of namus ('control') over the woman by her husband. Then, after marriage, the romanticization focusses on the tie between a woman and her sons, a relationship that becomes far more important than the increasingly remote and inconsequential tie with her fathers and brothers. The contrast between Arabs and Turks is most striking, however, in the different attitudes toward marriage by abduction and the different consequences that such an event entails. Among the Arabs, abduction is an extremely serious matter which almost certainly leads to violence against the abductor. Abduction in itself denies the essential relationship between a Woman and her natal kin. It is not only a blow against the sharaf of the latter; it is an irreparable blow. Only an enemy abducts a woman. Were he not an enemy he would either not take her or she would be given to him. As long as the woman remains in the hands of the enemy, there remains a mark against the sharaf of her natal kinsmen. Here is what Granqvist has to say about the rare occurrence of abduction among the hamula Arabs: It is a different thing when a man flees over Jordan with a woman whom he loves and whom he would not otherwise be able to marry. Then he has broken the laws of society and endangers his life by returning home. The woman's own people are entitled to avenge the dishonour and shame which he has brought upon them and their house. For a woman especially it means that she has broken forever with her own people and made it impossible to return to her birthplace. To attempt to come back under such conditions would mean death, because her brothers, in response to the demand of society, would kill her—the only way in which they could re-establish their lost honour (il-'ard). Elopement is therefore a rare exception. But even otherwise, it difficult to imagine that a woman would flee from her father's house, because she would thus lose all moral and material support as well as her legal rights. *

I Ibid., p. 219. Also see Cohen, Arab Border-Villages, situation precipitated by a semi-abduction.

pp. 71-93 for an example of a serious

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In contrast, among the Turks of Of and Asia Minor in general, abduction is not rare, and it is an affair of high, fascinating adventure. 1 The occasions on which violence occurs are relatively few, although the high frequency of abduction may well result in more total violence over women among Turks than among Arabs. Most abductions involve a prior agreement between the abductor and the girl to be abducted, but this is a detail. The rates of abduction vary drastically from time to time and from place to place, as one would expect. What does not vary is that people see abductions not as a scandalous event but as one that is more interesting and more expressive of the daring aspects of masculinity. The "reasons" for this acceptability of marriage by abduction can be traced again to the cultural structuring of sharaf and namus. Marriage entails a transfer of sharaf and namus from father to husband. In turn, a brideprice, typically a high brideprice in Near Eastern terms, is given over by the groom's side to the bride's side. The money represents an exchange for the 'responsibility' and 'control' (sharaf and namus) over the girl. Turkish weddings can be analyzed to show how this is so, but a great deal of space would be required to demonstrate this.2 Abduction among Turks is therefore resolvable. Even if a girl is carried away from the father and brothers, the payment of a brideprice restores their sharaf. They may be angry with their son-in-law. They may sometimes say they never want to see him or the girl again. But not so much is lost because their sharaf and namus remain intact. There is nothing to 'respond' to and no remaining threat to their 'control'. This situation in fact means that with the passing of years all will be forgiven, since only 'love' is at stake. Another aspect of marriage among Turks will heighten this contrast. A form of marriage associated with abduction involves no "initiative" on the part of the husband's side at all. This is the form of marriage called "sitting and waiting" (otura kalma). Here the girl simply leaves her father and brother and ' For a complete study of abduction in Turkey, see Ibrahim Yasa, Tiirkiye'de Kiz Kagirma Gelenekleri ve Bununla ilgili idart Meseleler, Tiirkiye ve Orta Dogu Amme tdaresi Enstitiisii, Koy Ettidleri Serisi, No. 3 (Ankara: Ajans-Tiirk Matbaasi, 1962). 2 For an analysis of marriage festivities and ceremonies in Of, see Meeker, "The Black Sea Turks," chap. VII. This can be compared with the account in Granqvist, Marriage Conditions, Part II, chaps. I-VI. Arabs also pay a brideprice, but this brideprice does not have the same meaning as it does in Of. It allows the groom to become a huband of the girl, but it does not transfer her so completely to him.

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goes to the house of a boy with whom she is enamored. There, she "sits and waits." This action on the part of the girl precipitates a crisis. The namus control of the father and brothers has been broken. Their daughter and si ster is in the house of a stranger, that is, she has come under his namus (control). The event becomes known and therefore a scandal. 1 The sharaf and namus of the father and brother of the girl are compromised. Has the girl been raped? Why was the father so careless that he allowed this to happen? Did the boy encourage the girl to do such a thing? Will he be a man and assume responsibility for the girl? Or will he be a coward and attempt to wriggle out of the affair? Both sides are trapped in the situation. The father of the girl is driven to force the boy, who may be unwilling, to marry the girl and to pay a brideprice. The boy himself is driven to marry the girl and pay the brideprice or to leave an insult on the sharaf of the girl's father which may provoke vengeance. The situation reflects the "public" quality of the meaning of sharaf and namus. Curiously, Turks have to worry not simply about the namus of their own women but also about being forced to assume the namus of women not their own. The structuring of sharaf and namus, then, gives women a peculiar "transferability" in Of and much of the rest of Turkey. They are largely, but npt completely, alienable in the sense that sharaf and namus over them is alienable, but i o v e ' is not. There are other subtleties that mark this contrast between Arabs and Turks. Among Arabs, a man cannot abduct a wife (without violence). But if his wife is disgraced, he can send her back to her brothers and divorce her, sacrificing the brideprice. Among Turks, a man can abduct his wife and avoid violence if he agrees later to a brideprice. But if his wife is disgraced, he cannot send her back unavenged to her natal kin without the threat of v i o l e n c e . 2 Abduction usually takes places within the boundaries of community in Turkey. That is, the recognition of the acceptability of abduction is the recognition of some level of communal tie, some possible link in 'love.' If a Christian abducted a Muslim girl in Turkey, there could be an immense scandal, and a refusal to accept a brideprice. 'Love' cannot be sold off.

' Sec Yasa, Turkiye'de Kiz Kagirma, pp. 4-6. ^Sending a woman back does not rid the Turkish husband of the disgrace as it does to a degree, the Arab husband. Sending a woman back only serves to insult the woman's natal kin by "improperly" forcing upon them a fallen woman. In the Arab case, the disgrace of the woman is already in the laps of her natal kin.

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These contrasts could go on endlessly to include minute differences in details between Arab "custom" and Turkish "custom." Arabs have long betrothal periods; sometimes they betroth their children before their birth. 1 Turkish weddings take place promptly after an agreement to the payment of a brideprice. Arab women "retain the name of their father." 2 They can be said to have sharaf, the sharaf of their fathers. Turkish women have no "clan names" and after their marriage they are usually referred to as the wife of so and so or the mother of so and so. Women in Turkey are not associated with a sharaf of their own. Instead of cataloguing these contrasts, one last feature of Arab society which has intrigued Westerners and Muslim Arabs alike is examined. This is the pre-Islamic idealization of female infanticide. This "custom" is a result of the working out of clan or segmentary sharaf among the Arabs. It is explicitly contrary to the meaning of religious (Islamic) sharaf. For this reason, it serves as a warning for us not to confuse the content of Islamic sharaf and the content of clan or segmentary sharaf. Therefore the example throws doubt on any attempt that tries to trace Arab custom directly to their piety or attachment to the Koran, even though it demonstrates how Islam has suppressed a tendency in clan and segmentary sharaf.

Female infanticide Orientalists have for some time been aware of the relationship between female infanticide and the concept of honor among Bedouins. 3 This ideal of the pre-Islamic Bedouin, which is commonly interpreted by Westerners as a contempt for females, reflects instead an excessive valuation of women. This valuation is one that is strange and repulsive to us, but that does not excuse our converting it into contempt. Richard T. Antoun has recently recalled this connection between the concept of honor and female infanticide. 4 In doing so, he quoted a current Arab proverb: "The death of girls is a covering." 5 The proverb reveals that similar sentiments prevail in a milder form today, although female infanticide is no longer expressible as an ideal.

^Granqvist,Marriage Conditions, Parti, pp. 31-41. 1bid., p. 146. 3 Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 90-1. 4 Antoun, "On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages," p. 692. -'Ibid. 2

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The Turks of Of, of course, cannot comprehend the killing of daughters. A poor man simply marries off his daughter and improves his condition with a handsome brideprice. The quality of the girl's marriage is not likely to be strongly affected by his conditions of poverty. For them, the practice of female infanticide is something connected with the irrational and Savage period of the "time of barbarism" of pre-Islamic Arabia. The severing of the tie of sharaf between father and married daughter makes all these attitudes possible. The cultural structuring of sharaf and 'ard among the Arabs reveals the situation that forces a very different view upon them. An Arab can never divest "himself" (his sharaf) f r o m "its" connection with his daughter. Therefore, an honorable man who has become weak, who is cut off from his kin, who is without friends and allies, faces an awful predicament. A daughter's marriage does not alter his responsibility, and his condition itself determines that the marriage would be unsatisfactory. A poem translated by R. A. Nicholson presents us with such a man agonizing over the fate of his daughter. In this poem, the man is forced to wish himself a long life, even though it must be a miserable one, for the Simple reason that only he affords protection for his daughter. At the same time, he is forced to wish his daughter's death: The Poor Man's Daughter But for Umayma's sake I ne'er had grieved to want nor braved Night's blackest horror to bring home the morsel that she craved. Now my desire is length of days because I know too well The orphan girl's hard lot, with kin unkind enforced to dwell. I dread that some day poverty will overtake my child, And shame befall her when exposed to every passion wild. She wishes me to live, but I must wish her dead, woe's me: Death is the noblest wooer a helpless maid can see. I fear an uncle may be harsh, a brother unkind, When I would never speak a word that rankled in her mind. ^ The passion of the original version is reflected in a literal translation of the line with the word shame: "And tear the veil from (her as though she were) flesh on a butcher's board." 2 The father, absurd as it seems, would kill his daughter out of love for her. 1 Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, pp. 91-2. The poem dates from the ninth century. hbid.

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Islam offered an alternative to these severe requirements of clan (tribal) honor, and female infanticide could no longer be expressed as a high ideal. Nicholson quotes f r o m the Koran, "Kill not your children in f e a r of impoverishment: we will provide for them and for you: verily their killing was a great sin." 1 Islam then provides a 'significance' parallel to that of clan sharaf. The elaboration of the clan sharaf leads to an expression of sentiments and ideals related to female infanticide. The elaboration of Islam as a 'community' of believers in relation to the 'significance' of God does not however pose the problem. This e x a m p l e provides us with a f a i n t understanding of the separateness but also the relatedness of Islamic 'significance' and clan 'significance.' The interesting and difficult question of how one understands those societies where both 'significances' are possible is posed. I have offered the preliminary suggestion that we cannot understand such a relationship formally and statically, but that we must look to some historical context which calls forth the contradictions and compatibilities of diverse worlds of 'significance.'

Conclusion The argument of this paper has been critical of theories of social organization in the social structuralist tradition. A number of problems which these theories fail to explain or fail to perceive have been explored. T h e difficulties with such theories, I believe, is that in assuming a universal form of order in society, they implicitly assume a universal form of meaning. That is, they constrict too narrowly our ability to understand social meaning and therefore they constrict too narrowly our understanding of different forms of order, not to speak of different kinds of chaos, in society. In other words, these theories assume that basic concepts in our sociological tradition — corporateness, office, status, role, norm, rights and obligations, and so on — can be used innocently to analyze a universal, natural order in society represented by the concept of the social system. Coupled with this, such theories go on to make a parallel analysis of a cultural system which is somehow interrelated, worked in, and adjusted to the first analysis of the social system. The consequence of such a program inevitably leads to the interpretation of culture as little more than the dress or decor of the social system. This is because the cultural system is given the minor functional role of making the natural order (the social system) comprehensible and meaningful to the people of the society. l

Ibid.

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Another equally fundamental objection to this program can be made. Our basic concepts of cultural analysis, such as belief, idea, value, world view, ideology, the self, identity, cognition, and so on are deeply implicated iln the preceding presupposition of a sociological order. These concepts directly reflect our view of society as a collection of cognizant actors making Sense of the world in terms of a rational means-end scheme within a framework of norms or rules. This is again a view that sees society as a natural order, and these concepts of cultural analysis must necessarily become Suspect insofar as the preceding sociological concepts are thrown into doubt. They may all work perfectly well in contexts where they closely correspond to the fundamental design of social thought and action, but they are likely to prove an encumbrance where this is not the case. There is a harsher way of putting this. Social structuralists see social organization as a reality, a natural reality, and in the same idiom they see Culture as representing ideas about this reality. Culture in this view is an ideology — a representation of the natural social world. It is admitted that everywhere there are different cultures, but different only to the degree that they are different versions of a similar natural order. In short, theories of social organization advance our representations of a natural order, as the reality (or a dlose approximation of reality), while the representations of analyzed societies are seen as ideologies. Faced with understanding a society, we make constructs in the idiom of theories of social organization by "observing behavior" and by "making empirical tests." What we are doing, of course, is constructing our dwn representation of a natural social order, but relating this construct closely with what truly is some kind of order in the society. Having done this, we then pit our own terms of meaning, heavily invested with the view of society as consisting of a natural order, against the terms of meaning of the analyzed society, which are then conveniently defused by a cultural analysis that converts these terms into beliefs and values. No wonder that this program results in an interrelation between the social system and the cultural system, and no wonder that the two systems are in their very nature irresolvable. The exercice constitutes a sleight of hand in which no one is more deluded than the magician himself. The French tradition of sociology, I believe, has escaped this particular problem. In this tradition, the i m p o r t a n c e of a correspondence or "isomorphism" between any construct of social organization and a construct of mind has been pressed since Durkheim. Thus, a society that consisted of entities (groups) demanded a model of thought equivalent to this kind of social

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structure. The result was the work of Durkheim and Mauss on primitive classification and the later synthesis of this view of mind in Durkheim's work on Australian religion. Later, the problem of mediations between discrete, classified entities was developed into the theory of exchange by Mauss, and the relationship between this second form of organization and its implication for a form of mind received his attention without being fully resolved. Finally, Lévi-Strauss has formulated what can be seen as a culmination of this task of French sociology. He gives us a theory of mind in which natural mental properties form an "isomorphism" with a social organization of groups mediating their separatenesses by exchanges. Here, however, the sociology of Lévi-Strauss seems to pose a problem for those of us who are not so committed to its task. In the social structuralist tradition of sociology, the understanding of a society tends to be limited by the adequacy of the concept of a natural social order to match the forms of order and meaning inherent in the analyzed society. In the loggical structuralist tradition of sociology, the understanding of a society tends to be limited by the adequacy of the concept of a natural mental order to fulfill the same task. The first then constricts an understanding of meaning and society with a preconceived notion of a universal, natural social order. The second constricts an understanding of meaning and society with a preconceived notion of a universal, natural order of the mind. Both represent an attempt to denude meaning of any importance and to find a cause in nature itself. The project itself rests on a contradiction, since a turn to nature constitutes a particular, specialized search for meaning. In this paper, I have tried to indicate some ways of understanding aspects of Near Eastern society without reducing them to consequences of our own belief in a natural social order or a natural mental order. The focus has been on demonstrating the connections between what we perceive as forms of order in these societies and the possibilities of meaning in these societies. The terms of the argument have necessarily been shaped by our sociological presuppositions. First, a number of contrasts were made in Part I between our sociological terms of meaning and the terms of meaning of Near Eastern society. This involved demonstrating the incompatibility of a sociological view of history as a process and of persons as self-centred and certain Near Eastern views of history and persons. Next, Near Eastern forms of social order, which we imperfectly perceive as groupnesses, kinship relations, types of marriages, and so on, have been shown to be directly related to structurings of Near Eastern meaning. In this respect, the disjunctions that appear in our

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own thinking that is, our insistence on seeing a dichotomy between belief and action, theory and practice, meaning and social order, have been collapsed with respect to those particular aspects of Near Eastern societies that have been examined. The argument has largely focussed on the system of meaning of 'significances' in Near Eastern society which has been shown to be closely connected with Near Eastern forms of social order. This close connection has made possible the detailed comparisons of interpretations in terms of the principles of social structure and interpretations in terms of meaning. For in striving to match and represent forms of order in the Near East, social structuralists developed sociological constructs which reflected the character of Near Eastern social order, even if an adequate articulation of just what they were seeking to represent is still problematic. Perhaps our highest priority is an adequate understanding of why our sociological concepts can do so well in accounting for a social order that is not constructed in its terms. That is to say, the similarities of our sociological thinking and Near Eastern social thinking must be as carefully examined as the differences. Another important problem of meaning, the problem of iove,' has received less attention in the argument of this paper. This is a problem that has often been ignored by the social structuralists, and the reasons are clear. 'Love' in the Near East has a clouded relationship with the ordered aspects of Near Eastern society and so has an ambigious relationship with any model of society as a static social organization. Social structuralists, when they have turned their attention to 'love,' have interpreted it as a specialized and exceptional charismatic attribute of events or persons. In contrast, the comparison of Turkish and Arab kinship in Part II suggests that 'love' is a pervasive and fundamental meaning, winding its way through the most precise details of social relations in Near Eastern society. In particular, it has been indicated that the structuring of Near Eastern meanings involves a kind of balancing between meanings in terms of 'significances' and meanings in terms of 'love.' This problem of the relationship between 'significances' as the basis of forms of social order and i o v e ' as the basis of another kind of energy or potentiality in the Near East has not been carried very far here. All that I have been able to say is that these two meanings are distinctive idioms, but also somehow interrelated. It has been indicated in this respect that an emphasis on either 'significance' or 'love' seems to lead in turn to a de-emphasis on the

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other. Readers familiar with Islamic traditions will have recognized that 'significance' and iove' are closely related to two central Islamic concerns: knowing God and loving God. These concerns have divided orthodox Muslims in their interpretations of Islam, and they are deeply intertwined with issues that divide one sect from another. They seem to present a problem with regard to which each writer and each sect has felt pressed to take some position. The fact that similar meanings have been essential for understanding some microscopic problems of descent, kinship, and marriage is, I believe, of the utmost importance. Here, I shall easily be misunderstood. It is not my intention to suggest that Near Eastern theology represents the solution to Near Eastern kinship. Nor am I suggesting that Islam represents little more than an elaboration of Bedouin family life. Rather, this connection of religious meanings with similar meanings in the realm of kinship is simply a confirmation that some common possibility of meaning is cutting through the different worlds of Near Eastern society. The establishment of this connection, (and something more than a paper would be required to confirm it) would provide the opportunity of understanding the relationship between 'significance' and 'love' not only through a more extensive analysis of social forms but also through an analysis of the literary materials of the Islamic tradition. In particular, it would seem that the problem of 'love' in Near Eastern society might best be understood through the writings of those Muslims who have professed to know most about this matter, the Sufis. The Sufis assure us that 'love is not a purely "intellectual" way of knowing or understanding. They make their case with stories whose point confounds reason and by writing poetry which appeals, they would say, not to the head but to the heart. This might seem a hopeless bog for someone who hopes to analyze society, but this is not necessarily the case. The exponents of 'love' in Islam may deny its connection with reason and knowing, but they do not typically retreat into wordlessness. On the contrary, they have offered us an abundance of poetic expression. An understanding of these expressions, I believe, promises a better understanding of the problem of meaning at every level of Near Eastern society. I would like to express my gratitude to David M. Schneider, James Siegel, and Nur Yalman whose guidance and criticisms over the past few years have brought about a number of drastic revisions in my original treatment of the problems raised in this paper. There seems to me to be almost no part of the paper that does not derive from a suggestion that one of them has made, but I am sure that they would not always approve of the use to which I have put their criticisms.

SECTION TWO SOCIETY AND STATE IN THE DISTRICT OF OF

THE GREAT FAMILY AGHAS OF TURKEY: A STUDY OF A CHANGING POLITICAL CULTURE*

Introduction [The original 1972 publication is unrevised except for the following changes and additions: I have replaced the fictive name for the district and town, Ye§ilyurt, with real name, Of. The fictive names of families and individuals have been changed so that they conform with the fictive names used in my recent book, A Nation of Empire. Karahasanoghlu has become Selimoglu, Hadjimehmetoghlu has become Muradoglu, Mahmut Bey has become Mehmet Bey, etc. I have also appended bracketed comments to a number of paragraphs indicating how my later research, as reported in my book, led me to rethink some of the views expressed in this article.]

The word "agha" (aga) appears with diverse meanings as a kinship term in a number of Turkic languages (Bowen 1954). The Anatolian term for elder brother is "agha-lord" (agabey), and "my agha" (agam) is commonly used by villagers to address elder male relatives, including the father. In Ottoman times agha was used as a title for the highest offices of the standing army and for non-secretarial positions of the imperial household. After the abolition of the Janissaries (1826), it became a title for illiterate lower-ranking officers only, and with the declaration of the Republic of Turkey, agha not only disappeared f r o m official use, but b e c a m e f o r m a n y T u r k s a term of o p p r o b r i u m . T h e w o r d

is usually glossed as "chief" or "master," which correctly designates its intimate connection with a concept of authority. As its kinship usages indicate, this conception of authority is direct, personal, not formally delimited, and in general, deeply intertwined with the fundamental values of Turkish social relationships. The history of the term "agha," from its origins in the Central Asian Turkic languages, to its later use for high offices of the Ottoman Empire, and finally to its rejection by reformist Turks, might be interpreted as parallel to the history of this conception of authority. In any case, the eventual relegation of the term to the lower official positions within the Ottoman army and its outright rejection in recent decades are related to the conscious attempt of Turks to reorganize their society. One might speculate that the rationalization *

The fieldwork on which this paper is based was made possible by the National Institute of Mental Health. I would also like to express my appreciation to the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, where a portion of the research leading to this paper was performed.

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of the state organization pursued by the Ottoman bureaucrats, and then later by the Turkish reformists, made the personal and informal ideal of authority that the agha represents an anachronism. While no longer an official title, the term "agha" remains a word whose meaning is important for understanding Turkish social relationships. Among the townsmen and urban elite of Turkey, it is rarely used as a term of respect, but there are notable exceptions. Officers of the Turkish army in recent years referred to one of their generals by his first name, followed by the title "agha." The precedent that this usage has in the official titles of the Janissary officers was not offered to explain the practice. Instead, it was said that the general was called agha because the term expressed the affection and nearness that the officers felt for their leader. Today it is in the rural areas of Turkey where the term retains its currency. Not only have the values of Ottoman society been more nearly preserved in these areas, but also the need for intermediaries to bridge the gap between the formal structure of government and the informal and diverse structures of village society is especially acute. In many parts of Turkey, villagers still speak of rural notables, village leaders, and large landowners as aghas and so address them to demonstrate their respect and submission. In turn, local leaders, sometimes explicitly and sometimes unconsciously, base their personal authority on the older forms of leadership that were typical of the aghas. Reformist Turks in the towns and cities also call these same men aghas, not as a compliment, but as an insult. Once an ideal model of Turkish authority, the agha has now become for reformist Turks, just as he was for many nineteenth-century European travelers, a symbol of the backwardness and injustice of the rural Anatolian hinterland. The most famous of these present-day aghas are the large landowners of eastern Turkey. Known as land aghas (toprak agasi) and popularly compared with feudal lords, they are said to wield influence over numerous villages in their respective territories. Lesser known are the sea aghas (deniz agasi), who exercise some kind of control over fishing territories in the Aegean Sea. In southern Turkey, sociologists have reported men called aghas who are no more than settlers of disputes among villagers. A recent study has described traders along the western Black Sea coast, locally addressed as aghas, who have extensive economic and political control over their village customers (Kiray 1964, pp. 61-63).

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The aghas who are the subject of this paper are of another variety. They are a type of leader found in the districts along the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. An important aspect of their power and influence is the support they receive from their own large patronymic groups. During Ottoman times, these large patronymic groups spawned local autonomous rulers and were referred to as "great families" (hanedan).

Thus, the term "great family aghas" is used in

tihis paper to distinguish the aghas of the eastern Black Sea coast from those in other parts of Turkey. The great family aghas are here examined as a case study in the persistence and change of political culture. An historical perspective will be used; the leaders who are discussed cover a time span of over a hundred years, t h e historical perspective places in relief two closely related problems that Will be of principal concern. First, the local political culture cannot be analyzed in isolation. The formulation of the political process that occurs at the center, formerly the court of the Sultan and now the National Assembly in Ankara, must be taken into account. The new models of leadership that have emerged on the local level are not simply the result of the direct imposition of a political system on the local society, but are in part the result of the penetration of the new national political culture into the local society. Second, the historical perspective provides a representation of the "living history" of the local society. Most men are aware that their region has been governed by a number of regimes that affected the local society in different ways. Some older men have first-hand experience with the Ottomans under Sultan Abdiilhamit II, with the military dictatorship that preceded the Ottoman collapse, with the Russian occupation during World War I, with the Atatiirkist one-party regime, and with the recent multi-party parliamentary democracy. Not surprisingly, I found that political discussions often involved detailed comparisons of these various systems. More important, the styles and models of local leadership associated with the various periods of local history also serve as a repertoire of political alternatives from which ambitious men can attempt to construct a following. On a more general level, these two problems are related to two aspects of cultural systems that will be considered in the analysis of political culture. The first aspect concerns the place of beliefs and values in the analysis of social processes. Men understand political situations in terms of cultural categories; likewise they design their strategies in response to these situations in terms of cultural categories. The second aspect concerns the degree to which

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a political culture can be said to be a coherent set of beliefs and values accepted by all members of the society. In a situation of change, for example, new beliefs and values are likely to conflict with older conceptions and evaluations. The result is some uncertainty both in the interpretation and in the conduct of politics. In a sense, people are not sure what is happening or what to do. 1 The leaders discussed in this paper were prominent men in the administrative district of Of, on Turkey's eastern Black Sea Coast. In size and in terms of administrative level, this district roughly corresponds to a county in the United States. The county seat or administrative center, which enters into the discussion in later sections, is referred to as the municipality (belediye). The population of the district is presently about sixty thousand, divided among somewhat less than one hundred villages. The population of the municipality is approximately three thousand. 2 Before examining the leaders of Of, the great family aghas of the early nineteenth century are described. The early nineteenth century was the last period in which they were autonomous rulers, and the earliest period for which the Black Sea Turks still have extensive accounts and traditions.

The Black Sea

Valley-Lords

From the early eighteenth century much of Asia Minor was ruled by valley-lords (derebey), who were virtually independent of the Ottoman Sultan. On the southern Black Sea coast one of the three great dynasties of valley-lords, the Canikh Ali Pasha family, controlled Trabzon and parts of northeastern Anatolia (Mordtmann and Lewis 1954). By the early nineteenth century this dynasty had collapsed, but for many years the Ottomans were unsuccessful in extending their control over much of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast (Bryer 1969). Numerous local chieftains, styling themselves after their more illustrious predecessors and also called valley-lords by historians

1 The theoretical issues that are raised by these properties of cultural systems have been discussed elsewhere. See Geertz 1965, pp. 202-06, for a discussion of the analysis of cultural categories in social processes. Another approach to the problem is presented in Geertz 1964, pp. 47-76. See Fallers 1955 for a discussion of the relative integration of beliefs and values in a social system. 2 At the turn of the century the population was almost 75 percent of this figure, and, an early nineteenth-century Ottoman estimate placed the population at about a third of that of the present. The last estimate was very likely low, since the interior of the district was not easily accessible and the local population did not welcome government interference in the district. The highly mobile transhumant population of the time was very likely adept at escaping detection by the government, which based taxes and tributes on total district population.

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and travelers of the time, still resisted the central government and ruled their own districts. Like the Ali Pasha family before them, these petty valley-lords were able to force the Porte to grant them official titles. In return, they furnished the Sultan with soldiers when he went to war and on occasion paid taxes or tributes to the Pasha of Trabzon (Koch 1855, p. 90). The name "valley-lord" is particularly apt for these chieftains of the Black Sea districts, since they quite literally were lords of valleys. Geographically the coastal provinces make up the northern slopes of the Pontic Mountains, whose peaks rise to heights of over fourteen thousand feet, running parallel to the coastline some twenty to forty-five miles inland. Deep yalleys, whose streams flow northward to the sea, cut into these mountains and provide a more temperate climate for village settlements. The traditional pattern of transhumance, which required agreements concerning grazing rights in mountain pastures and arrangements for seasonal movements of herds through the valley, brought together people within one valley, while geography separated them from their neighbors to the east and west. Each valley formed an appropriate unit for the hegemony of the valley-lord. On the whole, the valley-lords are deemed by historians to have been good rulers in comparison with the tax-farming Ottoman officials of the time. The officials had no stake in the provinces that they administered and were often driven to reap large profits during a brief tenure in office. The valleylords had a deeper interest in the welfare of their districts' population, upon whose support they often depended. All the same, their rule was far from ideal in this particular region of Asia Minor. Travelers of the period describe devastated villages and burned crops, a result of the local wars between the chieftains, for some of whom raiding and piracy were a way of life (Koch 1855, p. 97, and 1846, p. 31; also Bryer 1969). The petty valley-lords of the Black Sea coast differed from the great dynasties of the eighteenth century in more fundamental ways than merely being smaller in scale. The great dynasties controlled important towns, markets, trade routes, and sometimes vast territories that were relatively productive in cereals. They maintained professional armies and doubtlessly a considerable administrative staff (Mordtmann and Lewis 1954). In contrast, the Black Sea districts of the petty valley-lords, especially those between Trabzon and Batum, had no towns, the overland trade routes by-passed them at Trabzon, and the local markets merely served the people of a particular vaWey. The local agriculture, perhaps best termed horticulture, held little promise for

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achieving large surpluses. The main subsistence crop, American corn, was grown on tiny hand-plowed fields, and production was so meager that additional supplies had to be imported from Georgia and Mingrelia to feed the population (Koch 1855, p. 109). 1 In addition, there was the problem of controlling an armed population, with a long history of raiding and warfare. In light of these conditions, it is not surprising that a feudal system based on social classes and the organization of agriculture around estates never emerged in this region as it did in many other parts of the nearby Caucasus. The Georgians, Circassians, and Ossetes, whose territories included productive agricultural areas and towns, maintained elaborate social systems, with a staggering assortment of social classes in the case of the Circassians. 2 Other Caucasian societies, such as the Lezghian and the Chechen, more closely resembled the rural society of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast in terms of their social organization as well as their ecology (Allen 1929). These societies were composed of patronymic groups, usually called clans in the literature. The precedence of the leaders in these societies is said to have been directly correlated with the size of their patronymic group (Luzbetak 1951, p. 59). The petty valley-lords of the eastern Black Sea coast who are mentioned in the nineteenth-century materials have patronyms that can be traced to the large patronymic groups of today, and their old mansions (konak), still inhabited by their descendants, can still be seen in a number of places along the coast. With wings outflanking entrances, slit lower windows and barred upper windows, these semi-fortified houses arc often located on hills or promontories in the midst of the patronymic group's territory (Winfield I960). 3 A traveler of the period, Karl Koch, described the Black Sea chiefs as hunting with falcons, receiving wandering minstrels in their konak, and leading their followers into local wars (Koch 1855, pp. 93, 97, 110).

1 Lumber, while included in tributes, was under export restrictions of the Porte, perhaps because it was such a likely source of wealth. Other products, such as honey, beeswax, animal products, and linen, were probably never produced in substantial quantities. The poverty of the region, together with its access to the sea, was spurring the villagers to seek work in various parts of the Ottoman and Russian Empires as laborers and craftsmen. See Ritter 1858, pp. 91719. 2 For an account of a type of autonomous local chieftain who was an estate owner, had tenants, and could raise an army from a section of the population, see Spooner 1969. It is interesting to compare the social complexity of the Iranian case with the relative homogeneity and egalitarianism of Turkish Black Sea society. A situation similar to that described by Spooner may have existed in parts of the Caucasus among the Georgians, Circassians, and Ossetes. 3 Many of the konak are said to have been destroyed by the government during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to tradition, when Osman Pasha, who conducted many campaigns against the valley-lords, saw one of the large konak in Of he was set in a rage and asked to whom it belonged. Its owner, standing nearby, mollified him by answering, "My Pasha, some fool had the thing built and now only the owls are hooting in it."

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During the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans were able first to limit the power of the valley-lords and finally to abolish them altogether. In the early part of the century, the valley-lords were forcing the government to grant them titles as district governors (miitesellim), even though they did not so much as pay a regular tribute in return. By the middle of the century, the valley-lords between Rize and Trabzon were paying annual taxes based on the population of their districts, and only the Lazi valley-lords further east were able to refuse any tribute whatsoever (Koch 1855, pp. 88, 90). Sometime after 1850, however, the Ottomans began to succeed in appointing members of the bureaucracy rather than local leaders as administrators of the rural districts, and travelers began to refer to the valleylords as figures of the past. Despite the progress made by the Ottomans in bringing the eastern Black Sea districts under control, there are indications that they were never able to administer these areas without the close support and cooperation of local leaders. Travelers of the later Ottoman period described these local leaders as essential for carrying out government directives and referred to them as aghas, a title that had also been appended to the names of their valley-lord forerunners (Bryer 1968, p. 14). Some older men in Of claim that even until the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, the district was policed by the aghas and their armed supporters. Situations closely recalling the former valley-lord period also persisted in the late nineteenth century. One man from a large patronymic group managed to have himself appointed district administrator and another konak appeared on a promontory. Eventually it was necessary for the government to dismiss this man from his post and to exile him from the Black Sea districts. [Meeker comment: The last two sentences are inaccurate. The man in question served as an administrator of another district, not the district of Of, but he did build a large house in the konak style just outside the town of Of.] The people of Of do not refer to any of their chiefs of the Ottoman period as valley-lords, a term they would probably judge much too grandiose, but instead they are all remembered simply as aghas. Unlike the historians of the period, they do not see the fall of the valley-lords as the passing of an old order. Rather, they interpret the entire late Ottoman period as one in which the central government was sometimes strong and the aghas were weak, while at other times the situation was reversed. Thus, when attempting to characterize the most significant aspects of the local politics of that time, they refer to the pre-Republican period as the "agha period" (aga devresi).

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The Aghas of Of The patronymic group in Of consists of a set of men who acknowledge patrilineal descent from a single male ascendant. They use the name of this ascendant, in the form of a patronym, to designate themselves as a group. Thus, one set of men might call themselves "the sons of Blond Mehmet" (,Sarimehmetogullari). All these men say they are descended from Blond Mehmet, even though none of them or only part of them can trace descent from Blond Mehmet. The men, moreover, do not acknowledge any wider set of men with whom they share descent from some more remote ascendant. Today the largest patronymic groups include many hundreds of households, and even in the nineteenth century, when the population was sparser, there are good indications that the larger groups included well over a hundred households. In the district of Of, roughly 15 percent of the population is divided among a dozen or so large patronymic groups, while the remainder of the population belongs to patronymic groups that number well under a hundred households.1 The larger size of a few patronymic groups, the fact that they often cut across several villages, and the possibility of leaders mobilizing the support of such groups give them a political importance for entire districts rather than for a single community. The households of the largest patronymic group in Of, the Muradoglu, are located along the eastern half of the district's coastline at the foot of an eastern valley network that extends into the high mountains. Many of the households of the second largest patronymic group, the Selimoglu, are located along the western half of the district's coastline at the foot of a western valley network. All the dozen or so large patronymic groups are thought to have been divided in the nineteenth century between two parties or alliances (firka) designated by two corps (ocak) numbers that are supposed to have been related to the corps of the Ottoman army in which the men of each party served. The leaders of each party are said to have come from the Muradoglu and the Selimoglu, respectively. Each of the larger patronymic groups also had smaller patronymic groups associated with it, but it is said that many small patronymic groups, as well as entire villages, remained unaligned. From their unique position on the coast, the leaders of the Muradoglu and the Selimoglu were able to act as intermediaries between their kinsmen and allies on the one hand and the government on the other hand, a function 1

These are rough estimates that are not based on complete census materials.

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that they have maintained to this day. Since the only convenient means of traveling east and west was along the beaches, their coastal settlement also facilitated the formation of close relations with the peoples of neighboring coastal districts. These two large patronymic groups were, and are today, interlocked within a set of marriage exchanges with other large groups in the neighboring districts. Opposed groups in one district intermarry with opposed Neighboring groups, so that rivals do not generally receive women from the same patronymic group in another district. On at least two occasions during the nineteenth century, one of the powerful valley-lord families of the region was able to raise most of the coast in rebellion against the Pasha of Trabzon, and these "marriage alliances" may have provided a basis for such concerted action. They may also have been important in inter-district conflicts, events that are said (by locals) to have been common in Ottoman times. 1 So far this description might evoke an image of the agha as the chief of a corporate descent group who has constructed an alliance with other minor aghas of other descent groups who all unite to oppose similar alliances. This is far from the actual state of affairs. Even though they rose in large part by means of the support derived from their own patronymic group, the aghas of Of were not tribal chieftains of descent groups; neither were they, as aghas, holder's of an office that existed formally apart from its occupant. The agha must be seen as representing a leadership status within the political culture of Turkey's eastern Black Sea districts. There are no specifically defined jural rights and duties in law or custom that characterize the agha. There is no unambiguous sense in which one agha can succeed another, since their status is not an office separate from the occupant. 2 [Meeker comment: The analysis in this paragraph is inaccurate. During the imperial period, the agha was always an individual recognized by state officials. In this regard, "agha" can be regarded as an official title that was associated with official duties. Thus, the agha was part of the imperial state system even if he was not formally a state official. See A Nation of Empire.]

Bryer 1969 mentions one case of a marriage tie between two important leaders (p. 205), and also cites a traveler's description of a wedding attended by the "beys" of Ardahan, each of whom had brought with him from six to eight hundred retainers (p. 207). ^ In the area of the municipality of Of important aghas of past decades were alternately men of two different agnatic lines of the Selimoglu. The men of a third agnatic line have been attempting to assume the role of aghas and claim that some of their forebears were aghas. Such claims arc not accepted by others, however.

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In addition, the patronymic groups of Of are not, if the term is to retain any sociological significance, corporate groups. They own no property in common, even though they are associated with a territory. Their members are not obligated to take vengeance for the killing of a man of the same descent. There is no institution of blood payment. Patronymic groups do not control, as a group, the marriages of their men and women. They perform no ritual as a group. They do not regularly assemble as a group for any purpose. As for alliances between patronymic groups, there is no formal way in which such an alliance is made or broken. Alliances may or may not include intermarriage of the two groups. An alliance does not entail definite obligations on the part of the allies. Instead, an alliance is said to be a "friendship," but a friendship between patronymic groups, not individuals. Some of these friendships can be traced back a century or more.1 The agha then is not an institutionalized office of leadership in a system of formally interrelated corporate descent groups. The rise to power of the aghas is sensitive to particular factors in the political and economic environment and to variable factors in the local social organization. During some periods of history there were few aghas or they were especially weak and unimportant. During other periods aghas became the virtual rulers of large stretches of territory and many villages. Some villages in Of do not have aghas, and so far as is known, have never had aghas. Although aghas generally arise from large patronymic groups, a few large patronymic groups have apparently never been a base for aghas. [See A Nation of Empire (Chap. 1) where this analysis is revised and sharpened by the following generalization: Aghas made large family groupings; large family groupings did not make aghas.] The aghas can be described as leaders of unstable and informal alliances, whose composition is based largely, but not exclusively, on kinship ties, whose purposes are mainly political, and whose cohesion is marginal and often fleeting. The people of Of seem to imply such a description when they use the Turkish term agalik, which refers abstractly to the system of organization under the aghas. The word can be heard in the coffeehouses of Of today as men assess whether the times are more or less favorable for the rise of the aghas. 1 This description of the agha, the patronymic group, and alliances is an adequate one for the present state of affairs in Of. As a result of my work with older men and what could be gleaned from nineteenth-century travelers, I believe it to be adequate at least for the latter half of the nineteenth century, if not for remoter periods.

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This situation suggests that an analysis of groups of leaders and followers in Of as factions might be appropriate. Professor Raymond Firth has observed that factions "are not part of the formal official machinery of Government, but they may be operationally active to a high degree, even to the extent of engulfing the formal machinery of Government" (Firth 1957, p. 292). In outlining the most notable characteristics of factions he has stressed that they are mainly political groups, they are mobilized through "an authority Structure of leaders and henchmen," members are recruited by leaders on the basis of diverse principles, and they tend to reveal themselves most clearly in disputes (ibid.-, also Nicholas 1965). The agha and his followers fulfill all these requirements. Each agha is the leader of a small group of men from his own and other patronymic groups who make up a more or less permanent following. In the course of events— the location of a market, a quarrel over land, the organization of a cooperative, or the occurrence of an election—the agha and his permanent associates may recruit other men temporarily into his active following. The interpretation of the agha as no more than a factional leader, however, would be a serious mistake. The agha represents a leadership role in terms of the local political culture. A s a leader, he is closely associated with the reputation and prestige of his own large patronymic group. He has an authority that transcends the specific dyadic agreements made with particular men and that is recognized within a wide social field. This social field can be roughly defined as all the patronymic groups or villages that participate in the alliance of the agha's patronymic group. Numerous villages and thousands of adult men may be involved. The agha does not know many of these men personally, but they know of him and defer to his authority. This distinction between the agha as a factional leader and as a leader in terms of a political culture would appear to pose problems for some recent theories of factional conflict. These theories have justifiably tended to stress the transactional aspect of politics and to study political processes, but occasionally one feels that the cultural context of transactions is seriously under-defined or misunderstood. To more fully elaborate what it means to be an agha in Of, the legitimacy of the agha's authority will be briefly examined.

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The Legitimacy of the Aghas Tales of the older men in Of and the reports of nineteenth-century travelers picture the aghas of the eastern Black Sea coast undertaking a wide variety of activities. The aghas were leaders of armed followings engaged in the protection of women, herds, and land and in the extension of their own holdings at the expense of opposing groups.1 There are numerous reports of the aghas struggling against one another to gain control over markets from which taxes were collected. Routes to the high mountain pastures and passes were controlled, tolls were collected, and enemies were denied the right of passage. Some men claimed that the aghas attempted to regulate the marriages of the villagers who came under their authority. Aghas also undertook missions for the government, which was powerless to apprehend fugitives without their aid during certain periods. One agha who was supposed to have been a trader is said to have gained the support of large numbers of villagers by giving loans to be repaid in kind. 2 There are also vague reports of aghas gaining allies by granting them rights to land, but this practice seems to have been limited. In terms of legitimacy, however, only certain characteristics or activities of the agha were essential. Some of these have already been mentioned. The agha was an older man and generally was a member of a large and prestigious patronymic group; he was very likely, but not necessarily, the son or grandson of an agha; and he was a man with a following; a specific group of men who were his personal attendants and cohorts. All these aspects of an agha were more or less taken for granted in Of, but others served as a basis for the evaluation of the agha's leadership and authority. These were the measure of popular support that an agha could achieve, the measure of coercion to which he resorted, and the nature of his relationship with the formal hierarchy of the Ottoman state. The "good agha," whose passing is sometimes looked upon with nostalgia, is supposed to have derived his authority from the first of these alternatives; the direct support of his authority by the people. Such a man is portrayed as having been an able leader, concerned with the protection of his 1 Southgate 1840, p. 158, described an agha in the early nineteenth century as follows: "Soon after sunset we received a visit in the coffeeshop where we had taken our lodgings, from one of the Ayans [aghas] of the neighboring valleys. He was stuck round with pistols, and appeared as wild and uncultivated as the scenery amidst which he dwells. About twenty attendants followed at his heels, who were even more wild and uncultivated than himself." 2 Such practices, while common today in the rural areas of the western Black Sea coast, do not seem typical of the aghas of the eastern Black Sea coast. See Kiray 1964, pp. 60-63.

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area from greedy pashas, and involved with the maintenance of order and respect for the religion. He cultivated a reputation for honor and piety and practiced the customary rules of hospitality and generosity. 1 The good agha was also a man who knew the affairs of his district and took a direct interest in people's problems. He might vouch for the integrity of a man seeking a girl in marriage, help a man obtain a title for land or a passport for work in Russia, or simply offer advice for the settlement of a family quarrel. In contrast, the "bad agha" was a leader who relied excessively on violence and coercion to maintain his authority. He was called a tyrant (mutegallibe), one who usurped the rights of others. He was a cudgeler or killer (patakgi, vurucu), one who had his way by violence, and his followers were called sycophants (ktilahgi), those who hoped to reap advantage by participating in the suppression of the people. If the present day is an accurate reflection of the past, the followers of an agha represented their own leader as a good man and a legitimate leader, while aghas who opposed him were said to be bad men and illegitimate. 2 A few men seem to have styled themselves on this violent model of the agha and based their authority on terror rather than popular support. They attempted to convince others of their ruthlessness and had a number of killings associated with their name, killings supposedly carried out by them personally. Such aghas do not seem to have had large followings, and one man objected to their being called aghas at all, saying they were nothing but raiders and looters (gapulcu, yagmaci). The same man, however, had been a close associate of one of the few living men who could be considered as this variety of agha. The third aspect of an agha's legitimacy, the nature of his relationship with the formal hierarchy of the state, was not considered either good or bad in itself but was significant in determining the extent of the agha's authority. An agha sometimes held formal titles or formal offices in the government administration. Sometimes he held no offices or titles but exerted great influence over government officials. All that can be said is that the people recognized that one feature of the agha's role as leader was his activity as an

Aghas in the nineteenth century ran coffeehouses where their followers and allies congregated. This arrangement seems somewhat unusual for Turkey, where aghas are generally understood to maintain guest rooms in their houses for similar purposes. The legitimacy of the agha might be compared with the "precarious" legitimacy of the Mexican cacique. See Friedrich 1968, part 3, chap. 12.

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intermediary between the government and people. 1 [Meeker comment: The issues mentioned in this paragraph require more attention than they are given here. See A Nation of Empire.] While the agha sometimes held one or more formal offices, it must be emphasized that his authority as an agha could not derive exclusively from such formal offices. Some aghas served as mayor of the municipality in Of, but not all mayors of the municipality were aghas. When a man's authority did derive primarily from his position with the government, rather than from his leadership of the people, then he came to be referred to as a bey (bey) and not an agha. Thus, all the high ranking state officials who serve in Of and have no local kinship connections are addressed by the title bey. Likewise, an ascendant of the Selimoglu, the district administrator who built a konak in the late nineteenth century, is given the title bey to underline his official, and not his popular, authority. With this analysis of the late Ottoman aghas as a background, a number of more recent cases of leaders in Of will now be examined.

Mehmet Bey and the One-Party Regime With the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, an entirely new political situation was brought about in the districts of Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. According to local reports, the central government solicited the support of the more powerful aghas of the Black Sea coast and took steps against some of those who seemed less than enthusiastic about the new regime. As the government consolidated its position, the local bureaucracy and the national police (jandarma) were expanded and strengthened in the district of Of. By the early 1930s at the latest, it had become possible, as never before, for the central government to directly administer the district and in particular to insure that those government reforms unpopular in the area were not openly flouted. This extension of the government was inevitably accompanied by a head-on collision with the aghas. The armed men of the aghas were now no longer needed to keep the peace but had instead become a threat to public order. The aghas themselves, being older men, little understood the goals of the new regime and were an obstacle to reform. 1 The aghas as popular leaders who were simultaneously concerned with their recognition by legal authorities contrasts in this respect with the Mexican caciques described by Friedrich (1968, p. 247) as follows: ". . . Most although certainly not all referents of 'cacique' imply detachment or freedom from the normative, formal, and duly instituted system of government."

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In the 1920s, at least one Of agha, who had held an important administrative position first under the Ottomans, then under the Russian occupation forces, and finally during the troubled period following the Russian withdrawal, had to be removed f r o m his position by a show of force on the part of the Republican district administrator (kaymakam). Later, in the 1930s, the government was openly and vigorously moving against the aghas, urging the villagers to defy them, and directly harassing them. Writing in a local newspaper, a townsman f r o m Trabzon described events he had witnessed in one of the rural districts. The district administrator was congratulating a member of the national police for resisting the aghas' wishes: They and their supporters do not want you here, but you are going to stay and continue your good work. We shall beat down the aghas. We shall save the simple and honest folk from their influences, their execrable acts, and their deviousness. If an agha were to present himself before you, do not move from your place, but if an ordinary villager comes to you, stand at attention.' Although the newspaper article makes it clear enough that aghas existed, it is also evident that they were in bad repute with the powerful government administrators of the period and were looked upon as a backward form of leadership, standing in the way of progress. While the government was attempting to suppress the aghas, it was also fostering a new type of political leadership as part of the extensive reforms of the period. National leaders adopted new forms of dress and new styles of political rhetoric, and dealt with the people in a new way. Part of this rhetoric exhorted the people to participate actively in new reforms and national politics, and various organizations were established to make this participation possible. 2 In the municipality of Of a man named M e h m e t Bey had an o u t s t a n d i n g s u c c e s s in s e i z i n g the o p p o r t u n i t i e s that the new political situation offered. An intelligent and literate man, he was able both to 1

Yeni Yol (Trabzon), April 22. 1939. As is well known, the government of Atatiirk had explicitly adopted the goal of transforming Turkey into a country modeled on the more attractive aspects of Western democracies. The Republican People's Party was one organization whose role was to provide the government with a measure of popular support and lay the groundwork for eventual popular participation in government. In this paper, I do not intend to evaluate the considerable success of the Party in achieving this goal, nor do I intend to imply that the events in Of can be generalized to fit Turkey as a whole. On the contrary, Of is in many ways exceptional. 2

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understand the significance of the changes that were occurring and to shape his political career to take advantage of them to an extent that was unequaled by any other man in the district. Although he was a member of the second largest patronymic group in the district and the one from which the last agha of the municipality had come, he renounced his patronymic group (the prestigious Selimoglu) and openly supported the new movement against the aghas. In 1935 he had conspicuously taken a new surname, different from that chosen by all the men of his patronymic group. His close friends and associates were not villagers or kinsmen, but the bureaucrats who came from other parts of Turkey and the more ambitious traders who were becoming important in the affairs of the municipality. These were also the groups in Of who were participating in new ideas and reforms that were being pursued at the time. Mehmet Bey began to be the moving force in the local chapters of at least four national organizations that had been founded to enlist the people directly in the new programs and goals of the government. By the late thirties, he had also become active in local government, serving as the mayor of the municipality, the manager of the ferry agency, the controller (inspector) of the new agricultural loan cooperative, and the party chairman for the district. Perhaps the list of Mehmet Bey's offices could be duplicated by many men in other districts who dedicated themselves to the reforms. What was peculiar about Mehmet Bey, and what makes one wonder whether he should be termed a completely new type of leader, is that he held almost all of these offices (at least seven in number) at the same time and for almost a decade. Later developments, and Mehmet Bey's response to them, underline more strongly the fact that the traditional model of leaders and followers was far from dead. As Mehmet Bey pursued his career, he tended to move upward in the hierarchy of government and further away from local organizations, a logical plan for an ambitious man of the time. In the middle of the forties he was selected to run for congress, and with his victory he was faced with a disturbing dilemma. Who could be entrusted with his offices? To whom could he hand the reins of power that he had held for so long? In many parts of rural Turkey there was a growing number of professional men and businessmen who saw themselves as the carriers of the reforms and responsible for building the country along the new ideals in their own communities. A number of such educated men had been Mehmet Bey's associates in Of and would have been well suited to take over his offices. In spite of this, the offices went not to them, but to his agnates. By the late 1940s the members of the coastal section of his patronymic group held, with only a few exceptions, all the elective

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offices of the municipal government and the head positions in all public organizations, which by this time had been increasing in number. Some years later, when Mehmet Bey ran in contested elections facing the candidates of the opposition party, his name began to appear in newspapers, not with his surname adopted in 1935, but with his full patronym in its traditional form (Selimoglu), a sign that support by a following was again assuming importance. Mehmet Bey came to resemble the older aghas in a number of ways. His personal monopoly of public offices, his close relationship with government authorities, and his eventual reliance on the support of his patronymic group strike some men in Of as especially ironic, when they recall his ideological rejection of agalik. Nevertheless, changes had been brought about by the reforms of the early Republican period. New limits had been placed upon the authority of local leaders. The presence of the national police and the strengthening of the formal organization of district administration meant that aghas could never again become extensions of the central government. A local leader could now become politically powerful only through his ability to influence the administrative apparatus of the central government or through his control over the administrative offices open to local men. But it would be a mistake to see the central government's control over the district as the most significant development that had occurred in these years. The Ottomans may never have achieved as much, but they at least approached it on some occasions. The really important change in Of was on another level. A different idea of political leaders and political process had begun to take hold. The agha's legitimacy as a local leader was successfully tarnished by the Republicans, and over the years more people became convinced that a new kind of leadership was both necessary and possible. 1 In other words, a new political culture was evolving in the district.

Three Leaders of the Multi-Party

Period

In 1950 Turkey entered a period of multi-party politics and relatively free and open elections. With astonishing rapidity, rural Turks became interested and involved in the new political process. Many observers have since noted with surprise that Turkish villagers, sometimes in relatively 1 I was told that the sons of a powerful Ottoman agha were dressed in rags as a result of their penury during the thirties. It was also said that a man who recommended a local youth to a Of craftsman as an apprentice during this period would say, "He is not of the aghas," because no one wished to take on the latter's kinsmen.

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remote provinces, quickly came to believe that the government was concerned with their opinions, responsive to their needs, and shaken by popular opposition. The rural area of the Black Sea coast was by no means tardy in its participation in the new politics. In Of the election of 1950 provided an illustration of the concrete results of multi-party politics. The new opposition party gained about half the provincial popular vote even though it won only three of the ten seats in the National Congress, due to electoral technicalities. One of the losing candidates of the old party was Mehmet Bey, and the Of opposition had the pleasure of seeing him turned out of office as a result of their efforts. With his agnates occupying all his former posts, Mehmet Bey was a man without offices for the first time in almost two decades. Politically he never recovered from the defeat and soon after moved permanently out of the district. While the importance of popular support and local organization had been demonstrated in the election, the full consequences of the new multiparty government were far from clear. The fifties were a period of particularly complex political developments as some of the new patterns gradually evolved. Many more men became involved in the political process than had formerly been the case. A number of new men emerged as local leaders in this political activity. Cleavages between groups became more apparent because they could be expressed openly in political competition. Only one aspect of the excitement of those days was the tendency for the Muradoglu and the Selimoglu, who had previously headed the two "parties" of the nineteenth century, to align themselves with opposing national political parties. Other developments in the economic sphere added to this complexity and increased the stakes involved in political contests. Before 1940, Of had been one of the poorest districts in Turkey, with little livestock and land per capita, no significant cash-crop economy, and no local industry (Helling and Helling 1958, pp. 24-27). 1 Since the late forties, the development of tea agriculture has provided villagers with a valuable cash crop. This has involved considerable government investment, the establishment of government tea factories, and the organization of more agricultural cooperatives. Traditional agriculture-hazelnuts and maize-has also received some government assistance, and the construction of roads and bridges has connected most villages with the main coastal road. Migrant labor, always an important feature of the district economy, has increased with the number of jobs available in the cities of Turkey.

1

See the figures for the provinces of Giresun, Trabzon, and Rize.

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The leaders who were active in the new politics of the fifties practiced an unusually wide variety of techniques and styles in their attempts to build followings and to gain influence. This, I think, was closely related to the uncertainty that characterized the political process. Most men realized that changes were taking place, but no one was sure what the changes would be. Neither leaders nor people knew just what kind of man would meet with political success. As a result, leaders of this period illustrate very clearly how different men interpreted events in different ways and designed their behavior and strategies in terms of different cultural models. The three cases that will be examined include two men who became important figures in district politics and a third who failed. All three men were among the most important thirty or so men in the district, who could be termed leaders. HARUNAGHA One of the men who attempted to assemble a following and increase his influence brings to mind the more coercive and tyrannous aghas of the nineteenth century. Harun Agha was a member of the largest patronymic group of the district, the Muradoglu. He is said to have killed six men in an ambush in the high Pontic alps just before World War L Some say he was attacked by villagers of the area who did not accept the explanation that he had come there to attend a wedding. Others say it was Harun Agha and his cohorts who were raiding traders using the remote passages during the summer months. According to tradition, he went into hiding after the killings, later became a fierce guerrilla harassing the Russian occupation troops, and was eventually pardoned for the ambush murders after the War of Independence. A large man, with a full trimmed beard, a penetrating stare, and an authoritarian manner, he is known to be intelligent, literate, and a good speaker with what is locally regarded as an Istanbul accent. When he steps into a coffeehouse in the territory of his patronymic group, the young men come to attention like soldiers before an officer, and at a wave of his hand they again seat themselves. He orders the younger men to carry his goods to his house, to hail a truck to take him to the city, or to perform other similar services, and they respond without hesitation. In confidence they say that no one obeys him out of love, but rather as a result of their fear.

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In the early fifties Harun Agha became the district head of a conservative party that was protesting the reformist curbs on religion. This was a matter that evoked considerable interest in this area of Turkey, and there seemed to be a chance of drawing together a large number of people on such an issue. During the two elections of the early fifties, Harun Agha toured the villages to build support for his party. On these trips he carried a large stick, known locally as a bastinado, a famous accouterment of village elders in Turkey used to beat impudent youths. His bastinado is said to have enhanced what was already a fearsome appearance. A partner of his described to me what he felt was a typical incident reflecting the problems of their party activities. One day, upon arriving at a village for an election rally, the driver, in whose truck Harun Agha had come, requested his fare— a very small sum. Harun Agha, in anger at the man's lack of respect, threatened him with his bastinado, refused to give the fare, and created an unpleasant scene before a large number of people. According to the older patterns of deference, Harun Agha was only demanding his proper due and correctly disciplining a youngster who had failed to show him deference. In the new scheme of things, Harun Agha had clearly demonstrated his attachment to an older order that most men were not anxious to revive. The man ended his story with the comment that Harun Agha had not understood how to win the votes of the people, but had tried to beat them into submission with his stick. At the time, many people in Of believed that Harun Agha might become a successful leader, and in the cities some reformists feared that popular elections would lead directly to the rise of such leaders in rural areas. Events proved otherwise in Of. The party of Harun Agha received only a small percentage of the district's vote in 1950 and a handful in 1954. Perhaps the local election defeat cannot be attributed to Harun Agha alone, for the pattern of voting in most of Turkey was similar. It is significant, nonetheless, that he was so spectacularly unsuccessful as a leader in all other respects as well as in elections. By the middle fifties, when almost no one supported him and his party had been disbanded, even his close partner deserted him after a bitter quarrel. The old-style coercive agha had not been a viable form of leadership in over two decades. Harun Agha demonstrated that such leaders were also not likely to be a feature of the new party politics.

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HAUL Another man of the Muradoglu, Halil, had a greater success in establishing a following and building his influence. Mehmet Bey had been able to adapt himself to the requirements of the one-party period by becoming a "nation-oriented" leader. Halil exemplified the new political processes of the multi-party period in his role as a "community-oriented" leader. 1 Like all the members of his patronymic group, he lived in a village, rather than in the municipality. He followed village customs in his manner and dress, and asserted with pride that he was a villager and not a townsman. In the fifties he had taken up tea cultivation, like many men of the district, and eventually came to derive a moderate income f r o m his gardens. This success in an activity toward which more and more men were turning, his position as an elder of the Muradoglu, and his own personal qualities were factors in his rise to a position of leadership. Of course, much more than the combination of fortuitous events coupled with personal likeability is necessary to become a leader in Of. A great deal of conscious effort and ambition is needed to lead what is often a demanding and sometimes dangerous style of life. One essential requirement is a thorough knowledge of the district's affairs and an acquaintance with the important men of many villages. Only an older man who has devoted much attention to such matters can achieve this. Social organization in Of is not structured to the extent that any man may easily determine who are key individuals and groups in a particular village. On the other hand, there is enough structure f o r an astute man, with a wide knowledge of kinship relations and an awareness of the old feuds and quarrels that divide families and villages, to have a distinct advantage over less informed men. To acquire such information and experience, one must be located at a crossroad, so to speak, and this is another way in which the coastal patronymic groups have been able to dominate the affairs of the district. On most days Halil could be found in one of the coffeehouses of a secondary district "center" near his village. Located a few miles down the main coastal road from the municipality, it has the second largest district market and is near the two tea factories and a state lumber works. Men from all over the district 1 The words "nation-oriented" and "community-oriented" are taken from Wolf 1956, but the usage here is somewhat different. Wolfs political brokers mediate between nation-oriented and community-onented groups. I am using Halil as an example of a broker principally oriented toward his community, and Mehmet Bey as a broker principally oriented toward the nation. In Wolfs terms both are '"brokers' between community-oriented and nation-oriented groups" (p. 1075). The brokers whom Wolf discusses, I believe, are more like Mehmet Bey.

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pass through this center and can be found in its coffeehouses and, aside from the municipality, it is an ideal location to keep abreast of district developments. Besides being informed, Halil was also actively using his knowledge and understanding of the district to widen his influence. People who needed advice about handling some problem with the district administration, a man facing a court dispute over his wife who had run away to her father's house, a man planning to invest savings earned in Germany, or someone needing a connection in Istanbul or Ankara might come and ask for his help. The help did not all go in one direction. Halil was occasionally inclined to seek repayment for the services he had performed. Once the idea of making an investment in the booming real estate business of Istanbul took his fancy, and he attempted to collect several hundred Turkish pounds from the men who valued his friendship and who had received a favor from him. One man, who considered himself an ally of the Muradoglu, turned down his request for a thousand Turkish pounds (about one hundred dollars) and told me with a grin that Halil was "looking for fools." He continued, "Men always think they will gain something by doing favors for the aghas, but they end by doing more for the agha than the agha does for them." The system of elections and competing parties gave such men the possibility of building their influence even further as political brokers. It was said that Halil could swing seven thousand votes in a national election. This seems an exaggeration, but whatever the precise number, his influence could not be discounted by men who hoped to win office. But Halil was not simply a machine captain with a package of votes to deliver to the highest bidder; he was the spokesman for a large number of villagers. He worked to understand district problems and local opinions and communicated these matters to the nation-oriented politicians, who normally have little or no knowledge of the district. Like many other leaders in Of, Halil occasionally traveled to Ankara, where he met with provincial representatives, government officials, and the Of contingent of businessmen in the capital. An incident with regard to the construction of a new tea factory illustrates the high level of political interest in Of and the local tendency to interpret many events in terms of the political maneuvers of brokers like Halil. A tea factory in ones' territory offers the opportunity to gain favor with the factory's administrators, and a good chance of occasionally influencing who is hired. Payrolls are given out at the factory and markets are encouraged

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by their presence. A larger market draws more people from the villages, and the area is enhanced as a district gathering place. This, in turn, allows the leaders of the area to gain more influence. Just as in the old days patronymic groups quarreled and fought over market locations, they now contest for the location of new government investments. The first tea factory in the district was built on the land of the Muradoglu. It was assumed by locals that this was the result of this patronymic group's influence on government decisions. One man told me an incredible story about the Muradoglu, who one day moved the construction materials from a plot of land near the municipality to a location nearer their village, where they insisted the factory be built. I was unable to verify this story, and it sounds a little ridiculous. The second factory was begun during my stay and was a fresher topic. Since the first factory had been built on the land of the Muradoglu, it was thought by many that the Selimoglu had an excellent chance of securing the second on their own territory by demanding equitable treatment from the government. Their particular political party, moreover, was in power at the time and things looked promising indeed for the Selimoglu. Instead, to the astonishment of many, the second factory was built again on the land of the Muradoglu. The explanations of this event were complex and can only be sketched. The Selimoglu alliance was said to have divided into factions and quarreled over exactly who should have the privilege of selling their land at a high price to the government. During this confusion they made a tactical error. One of the Muradoglu (not Halil) casually announced one day in the coffeehouse that he was off to Istanbul to look after some kind of minor business affair. As the story goes, he did not go to Istanbul at all, but stopped in Ankara. After several days of lobbying he secured the government's decision to build the factory on the Muradoglu's land, which was sold for a low price. By giving the land cheaply, the Muradoglu had won a permanent political advantage, so it is told. The point of this account is not that all these events actually took place. It may even be that none of them took place, although I seriously doubt this. The land of the Selimoglu is extremely mountainous and offers no suitable site for a factory. One suggestion, so it is said, was that the factory be built on a stream bed near the municipality, but it is a known fact that the

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stream bed is periodically subject to catastrophic flooding. In short, the government authorities would have been mad to build a factory on the Selimoglu land and decided to build again on the flat plain owned by the Muradoglu, the only rational course of action. The possible rational basis of the decision is overlooked. Instead, the result is seen as the climax of a desperate political contest. The old bloody contests over land, still a subject of many tales recounted by older men, are now acted out by similar groups with similar leaders in the context of the new, more civil politics. Whether or not the intricate series of maneuvers that were supposed to have led to the construction of the factory actually took place, leaders like Halil did not hesitate to encourage the belief that they had achieved a dramatic victory against the machinations of their opponents in the affair. HUSEYIN The third and last leader of the multi-party period to be considered is Hiiseyin, a man who derived his style and techniques of leadership from Mehmet Bey. Like the latter, Hiiseyin belonged to the Selimoglu, and was the grandson of a powerful Ottoman agha. Unlike Mehmet Bey, Hiiseyin was never able to establish a close relationship with district administrators and was obliged to spend more time in cultivating local support. All the same, he was just as devoted to the holding of offices and derived much of his power and influence in this way.1 There was another difference between the two men that follows from the preceding. Mehmet Bey had captured his offices through his close relations with nation-oriented groups, rather than through popular support. Hiiseyin, on the other hand, amassed his offices through the support of his agnates and their allies in the municipality. In some ways it is not enough to say that Hiiseyin derived his style of leadership from his predecessor, for he was almost a parody of Mehmet Bey. He collected offices almost obsessively and at least one or two must have come into his hands through the sheer lack of interest of other men. From Mehmet Bey he had received the chairmanship of the equivalent of the Red Cross and of the local branch of a national organization. In the fifties he had become the publisher of a two page weekly newspaper that supported a 1 District administrators in Turkey are today required to avoid any outright political partisanship, and in my experience they follow this rule quite closely. This does not mean, of course, that administrative decisions are not politically influenced, as indeed they must be to some extent in a party system.

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national party, then he added the chairmanship of the Parent-Teachers Association of the district junior school, the chairmanship of the district tea cooperative, and finally the district chairmanship of his party. Like Mehmet Bey, once he had an office in his hands it proved difficult to wrest it from him. Eventually he too was able to run for a seat in the National Congress, a very unusual development for a local man who resided in Of. The greatest part of his energy went into support for his party, to which he was genuinely devoted. He wore his hat more like an insignia than a headpiece, pulled defiantly around his ears with the brim sloping downward on all sides. In the evenings he sat in the back room of the same coffeehouse where his grandfather had sat fifty years before, a room that was still a symbol of the Selimoglu hegemony in the vicinity of the municipality. There he would meet with the members of his following, sometimes simply for fellowship, sometimes to discuss organization for a coming election, quick to ridicule any member of the opposition who might stray into the coffeehouse, and always ready to buy a tea or coffee for any friendly visitor passing through the municipality. Some of Huseyin's opponents looked upon his obsessive office holding as a j o k e and called him "crazy Hiiseyin." Only the j o k e was on his opponents. His offices did allow him to establish contact with the nationoriented groups of the cities and to be more informed about regional politics. Even such an office as the chairmanship of the local Red Cross enabled him to make trips to Ankara and to have excerpts f r o m his speeches printed in journals. No one could be sure about which powerful men he knew in Ankara and how much influence he might bring to bear on some local administrative decision. These were uncertainties that Hiiseyin was very ready to turn to his own advantage by dropping numerous hints about this or that connection in Ankara. As a result, when election time came around, it was to Hiiseyin that men would go and discuss the problem of organizing the vote in the villages. When a speech had to be made, it was to Hiiseyin that they turned, in spite of his habit of giving very long and fairly opaque speeches. Some of the men in his own party might doubt that he was the best man for the job, but most men saw that he had important connections, was the head of many organizations in the municipality, and therefore demanded respect and recognition as a leader. For the men of the city, where he frequently represented his district, he was another of the mysterious aghas of Of, who seemed especially powerful simply because n o one knew precisely in what way he was powerful.

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Huseyin's candidacy for the National Assembly was the culmination of a great deal of effort. As it turned out, it was almost the culmination of Huseyin's career as a leader as well. In his own district the voters of his party gave Hiiseyin their vote almost to a man. 1 He gained another large number of votes in the district of the Selimoglu affines, a reflection of the interlocking alliances of patronymic groups along the coast. In the other districts of the province Hiiseyin made a miserable showing and lost the election in a decisive fashion. He had duplicated Mehmet Bey's career too precisely. The election defeat was a serious blow to Huseyin's office-holding "charisma," and many people began to question his methods and abilities. In the following years a series of crises resulted in a steady erosion of his political authority. Eventually he lost his position as party chairman and then his chairmanship of the Parent-Teacher Association. But the first and most serious result of the election defeat was within Huseyin's own faction, with which he had captured the tea cooperative. A short time after Huseyin's election defeat, the faction divided into two opposing groups. After several years, the anti-Htiseyin faction withdrew from the cooperative, formed a new competing cooperative, and won many members away from Huseyin's organization.

Conceptions of Social Organization in Of The cases of various leaders that have been presented span a period of time during which far-reaching changes took place in Of. The strengthening of the bureaucracy and the national police, the reformist one-party regime, the increasingly rapid development of a cash-crop economy, the participation of more and more people in the wider national economy, and the multi-party regime have all had great effects on the district political system. One could say that politics have never really come to an equilibrium in Of during the twentieth century. During this period the more important district leaders have been constantly pressed, not from day to day, but almost from year to year, to face significant changes in the way politics is conducted. This has led to the formulation of different political styles and techniques on the part of leaders who attempt to deal not only with changing conditions but also with changing systems of political concepts and values. Despite their differences, however, there is a sense in which all local leaders resemble one another and can be classed, by the people of Of, as aghas.

1 Electors can vote a straight party ticket, but they can also designate specific candidates. Since the candidates with the most votes become representatives, it is not sufficient to be on the list of the party receiving the majority of votes.

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In the analysis of the aghas 1 legitimacy, aspects of their leadership were mentioned: their popular support, their use of coercion, and their government connections. While these aspects are structurally significant, they are also "native categories," the terms in which the people of Of themselves scrutinize the position of leaders and evaluate their authority. Perhaps it has not been clear that while Halil, Harun Agha, and Hiiseyin concentrated on each of these aspects, respectively, in attempting to increase their authority, in reality all leaders use a combination of the three. Today one still hears rumors about "toughs" who stand behind popular leaders and are ready to use violence should the need arise. Occasionally a man is threatened, and once in the forties a party office was ransacked. Halil, who concentrates on popular support, holds no office, but other agnates control the cooperatives in their patronymic group's area. Hiiseyin, besides holding offices, sits in the coffeehouse each evening apd seeks to play the role of a popular leader on a more limited scale than Halil. Many men, aware of the activities of these present-day leaders and knowing the traditions of the aghas of the old days, feel that in many ways very little has changed in Of. They say that history in Of is simply a cycle of strong aghas and strong central government. The rise of the aghas during the turmoil that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is still a vivid memory, and the local traditions of strong nineteenth-century pashas in Trabzon who, like Atatiirk, put down the aghas for various lengths of time are still recalled. Mehmet Bey, who began by denouncing the aghas and ended by bringing his patronymic group to power and readopting his old surname, is given as a more recent example. Indeed, with every change in the district administrator, men are aware that local leaders either become a little more or a little less able to exert their authority. One stoic felt that the local leaders were becoming too powerful and confidently asserted that soon enough another strong central government would put them down once again. The case made by these men does not stop with the assertion that aghas, or men very much like aghas, still run the affairs of the district. They see the Muradoglu and the Selimoglu as the vanguard of two large alliances that are, among other things, associated with two national political parties. The association of the two patronymic groups with opposing parties is thought to have become more distinct as the multi-party period has progressed. The large coastal patronymic groups still intermarry, and the vote of Hiiseyin's affines is only one example of the role they play. The officials of the cooperatives and other local organizations in other districts are also often

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drawn from the members of large coastal patronymic groups, which results in a coastal network of influential families. Most men are aware of these facts and consider them characteristic of their society. Elections are the occasions when this view of Of society is most convincing. During the pre-election period, leaders attempt to activate the ties of agnation and to use the notion of alliance in order to recruit support. Factions are mobilized for a show of strength, and leaders' reputations are at stake while the issues recede into the background. In the local newspapers in the fifties, much space was given to partisan announcements of fresh defections of individuals, families, and villages. The opposing party was portrayed as being in complete disarray, and the favored party was said to be strongly unified. Ideology enters into these contests on a superficial level. A leader of the Muradoglu proudly announced to me that all his people were "capitalists" and later in confidence nervously asked a friend of mine if I was also a "capitalist." On the other side, the Selimoglu say they are "of the left," and one enthusiastic leader assured me he was "left of the left" He did not mean to emphasize that he was extremely left wing, only that he was totally behind his party. The ideological significance of these words was not great for the men using them. The words were used more as banners of affiliation than as references to political programs and reflect local alignments more than currents of opinion. These and many other events confirm for the people of Of that their local society consists of agha-like leaders backed by patronymic groups, exerting influence over alliances with other patronymic groups, and opposing similar alliances. Such cultural categories enter discussions of local affairs in Of, and as a model of political organization they are even extended to world politics. One popular metaphor pictured the leaders of the U.S.A. as the aghas of one alliance, while those of the U.S.S.R. were the aghas of an opposing group. People spoke of an affinal alliance (hisimlik) between the United States and Great Britain, comparing it with the affinal alliances between two patronymic groups. When one influential man of the Selimoglu complained about the American government's unswerving attention to American interests, and its weak perception of the interests of others, another man responded: "Why is it you don't understand such things? The U.S.A. treats Turkey in the same fashion as the large families like your own treat the smaller families here. Do you not expect the powerful nations to take advantage of the weaker?"

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My point, however, is not that these cultural categories are an entirely adequate sociological description of either the society or its politics. Just as some events and processes seem to verify the preceding cultural categories of Of society, other matters could have been selected to illustrate how poorly these categories apply. Elections are not entirely non-ideological and based on personal and group alliances. Many national issues are of great concern at the local level and do play an important role in national elections. Many men, possibly most men, are never attached to any of the large alliances that involve the great families. A sizeable number of patronymic groups do not vote for a single national party, but are split between two and even three parties. The agha himself is not a formal leader and men most frequently describe leaders not as aghas, but as "like aghas." The truth in the model of aghas, patronymic groups, and alliances is in terms of the designs of men, rather than the organizations that are achieved in fact. While the patronymic group is not a corporate group, on occasion it is capable of a high degree of political unity. While an alliance between two patronymic groups does not bind the two groups or their respective members in terms of some set of formal duties, it is sometimes the basis for cooperation and support. A complete understanding of how and when a patronymic group unifies or an alliance is activated involves an examination of concepts and values related to descent in Of. For the purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to observe that the agha is the person who works to realize this social organization in terms of patronymic groups and alliances. His activity as a political leader of a following is largely responsible for the occasional consolidation of a patronymic group or the activation of an alliance. [Meeker comment: This paragraph is inadequate. It suggests that the agha was simply an intermediary between two entirely different orders: the centralized state system and the local social system. In A Nation of Empire, I have argued that the local social system cannot be understood apart from its place in the centralized state system.] Again, it is the conception of the agha that guides ambitious men who wish to become leaders and the same conception of the agha that leads other men to respond to these ambitious men in specific ways. That is to say, the agha is a form of leadership within the local political culture, even though not an institutionalized office of leadership. In Of the situation is analyzed in just these terms when people refer to the "agha mentality" (aga zihniyeti), a phrase frequently heard in the coffeehouse discussion of district affairs. The "agha mentality," as the phrase is used, not only applies to men who strive to

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become aghas, but also and more often applies to men who expect leaders to behave as aghas and respond to them as aghas. The "agha mentality" as a way of thinking complements agalik, a term that refers to a successful and operating system under the leadership of aghas. [Meeker comment: The analysis in this paragraph is inadequate because it fails to examine how the local political culture is a product of a relationship of state and society.] These cultural categories can be compared with another ideology of social organization—the lineage system of the Cyrenaican Bedouin. The Bedouin interpret the social relationships between their corporate tertiary segments in terms of a model of segmenting lineages. To illustrate the model they use a political metaphor of groups combining and opposing one another in armed conflicts (Peters 1967). Recently Peters has shown that this model is inadequate and incorrect as an account of Bedouin political organization, even though it "is a fact of their social life, and in relation to some problems it is an important fact" (ibid., p. 279). The cultural categories of aghas, patronymic groups, and alliances in Of are one step further removed from the reality of social organization. They are, so to speak, a design for a system of corporate groups that is never realized. As a potential form of political organization toward which people's aims are directed, these categories are essential for the understanding of political behavior, but like the lineage model of the Bedouin, they are also inadequate for a sociological model of their political organization. [Meeker comment: This analogy with segmentary lineages systems is rejected as misleading in A Nation of Empire (Chap. 1).]

Conclusion The last section has demonstrated the persistence of certain categories of Of political culture from Ottoman times to the present. Leaders still have the same political designs as their Ottoman predecessors. They attempt to consolidate the support of their own large patronymic group and then to activate traditional alliances between their own and other patronymic groups. In this sense, the present-day political leaders of the district remain great family aghas, and in this sense the people of the district see their leaders as great family aghas. At the same time, there have been changes in the local political culture. During the nineteenth century the aghas constructed mansions, married polygynously, were entertained by minstrels, hunted with falcons, in

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some cases made dynastic claims, and demanded an uncompromising obedience from their followers and "subjects." This was not a result of local eccentricity, nor was it the product of ecological constraints. It was because the aghas sought to model themselves on the Ottoman ruling lineage and to draw their legitimacy from this model. The aghas were, in fact, miniatures of the grand valley-lords, such as the Camkli Ali Pasha family and even of the Sultan himself. With the establishment of the Republic, the Sultanate was abolished and discredited. In its place a new model of leadership was formulated by the Turkish Republicans in Ankara. Today this Republican ideal of political leadership has in large part been adopted by all the great family aghas of Of. Harun Agha, a notable failure, was the exception that proves the rule. Accordingly, the Of leaders stress their equality with their followers, not their authority over them. They consult with their supporters and serve as their spokesmen; they do not command them. Leaders see themselves as public servants attentive to the needs of the people and sacrificing their own selfinterest for the common good. It needs hardly be said that this is not always the case in fact. The point, however, is that this is what leaders and others feel Should be the case. The general acceptance of this model of leadership, both by leaders and other men, has been secured only since the onset of multi-party politics in 1950. Curiously, in the same period new life was infused into the role of the great family agha as an organizer of popular political support. As a result, the leadership status in Of presently combines aspects of two political cultures that are in many ways mutually contradictory. Leaders are at once both aghas and Republican civil politicians. I must stress that this is not simply a matter of leaders being political middlemen, mediating between disparate political systems-the national and the local. The two political cultures have become fused, as it were, on the level of local politics. Both operate alternately or simultaneously in the political process. It is tempting to compare the Of leader to a chameleon that assumes the color dominating the context in which it finds itself at the moment. The simile is appropriate if one understands not only that the leader assumes a character according to his context but that other men also attribute a character to him according to the context in which they place him.

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While in the field, I was struck by the same men making contradictory statements from one day to the next. At first I took this to be subterfuge, but with time it became clearer that they were really unsure or undecided about aspects of their local politics. Leaders in particular were looked upon with mixed feelings and judgments. Sometimes, in confidence, a man might label certain men as aghas. On another day he would demur and say they were only in some ways "like aghas." Some men would refer generally and mysteriously to the aghas, but refuse to designate anyone man by the term. On another occasion they would deny that aghas had existed in the district since Ottoman times. In the market place one could observe leaders addressed as "agha" by villagers and given the deference traditionally accorded such a status. Yet the same leaders would never openly claim to be aghas, even though some clearly relished the intimation that indeed they were just that. This was not simply a mindless confusion over terms. The contradiction between the leadership status in the two political cultures also resulted in confusion about the actual framework of the political process. An example best illustrates the point. During two religious festivals (§eker Bayrami and Kurban Bayrami) men visit their friends and relatives to acknowledge their closest social ties. On the first day of these festivals, officials (the mayor of the municipality, the chairmen of cooperatives, the managers of tea factories, and others) receive visits in their offices from their friends and supporters. Local popular leaders like Halil can also be found in the coffeehouses of their area, where followers and members of their alliance come to demonstrate their solidarity and friendship. As a man wishes a leader a "Holy Festival," he can greet him in one of two ways. Either he clasps the leader's hand with both of his own or he takes the leader's hand, bows, kisses it, and places it to his forehead. The first is more or less a greeting between equals, the second is an act of homage and recognition of the leader's authority. In Of the act of homage is directly associated with agalik. Many men condemn its practice, and a leader who openly allowed others to greet him in this fashion would be severely criticized. Occasionally during these festivals one sees a man who attempts to kiss the hand of a leader, while the latter attempts to raise his hand to greet him as an equal. A "tug of war" momentarily results as the hands are pulled up and then down again. The uncertainty of the moment is directly related to the uncertainty about the correct form of social relationships.

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In closing, I would like to raise the issue of the eventual fate of the Of leaders in the context of Republican Turkey. Will it ever be possible for them to reconcile their status as great family aghas with the political ideals of the Republic? At present the answer is not obvious. The leadership status of the 4gha is still anathema to the Turkish reformists. In addition, the importance of descent groups as a basis of a leader's support, even on a subtle level, would be branded as backward and primitive tribalism. How, then, are the modern aghas ever to make a legitimate and permanent place for themselves in the present political system of the Republic? Whatever the answer to this question, it can be said that the great family agha persists in the multi-party system because he is an effective mobilizer of popular support. Until other kinds of leaders are able to bring equally large numbers of people into the political process, or until men can achieve more of their ends outside this process, it seems likely that the great family agha will continue to be a feature of Of society for some time to come.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, W. E. D. 1929. "The March-lands of Georgia." The Geographical 74: 151-152.

Journal

Bowen, H. 1954. Agha. Encyclopedia of Islam. Second edition. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Bryer. Anthony. 1968. "Nineteenth-century Monuments in the City and Vilayet of Trebizond, Part II." Archeion Pontou 29: 89-132 Bryer, Anthony. 1969. "The Last Laz Risings and the Downfall of the Pontic Derebeys, 1812-1840." Bedi Kartlisa 26: 191-210. Fallers, Lloyd A. 1955. "The Predicament of the Modern African Chief: An Instance from Uganda." American Anthropologist 57: 290-305. Firth, Raymond. 1957. "Factions in Indian and Overseas Indian Societies: Introduction." British Journal of Sociology 8(#4): 291-295. Friedrich, Paul. 1968. "The Legitimacy of a Cacique." In Local-level Politics, edited by Marc J. Swartz. Chicago: Aldine. Geertz, Clifford. 1964. "Ideology as a Cultural System." In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David E. Apter. London/New York: Free Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1965. The Social History of an Indonesian Town. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Helling, Barbara and George. 1958. Rural Turkey: A New Socio-Statistical Appraisal. Istanbul: Fakiilteler Matbaasi. Kjray, Miibeccel. 1964. Eregli. Ankara: Bagbakanhk Devlet Planlama Te§!»la.U.

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Koch, Karl. 1855. Editor. Die Kaukasischen Länder und Armenien. Leipzig: C. B. Lorck. Koch, Karl. 1846. Wanderungen in Oriente während der Jahre 1843 und 1844. Vol. 2: Reise im Pontischen Gebirge und Türkischen Armenien. Weimar: Druck u. Verlag des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs. Luzbetak, Louis J. 1951. Marriage

and the Family in Caucasia. Vienna: St.

Gabriel's Mission Press. Meeker, Michael E. 2002. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mordtmann, J. H. and Lewis, B. 1954. "Derebeyi." Encyclopedia of Islam. Second edition. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Nicholas, Ralph W. 1965. "Factions: A Comparative Analysis." In

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Systems and the Distribution of Power, edited by Michael Banton. A.S.A. Monograph. No. 2. London: Tavistock Publications. Peters, Emrys. 1967. "Some Structural Aspects of the Feud Among the CamelHerding Bedouin of Cyrenaica." Africa 37 (July): 261-282. Ritter, Karl. 1858. Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen. Part 8. Berlin: Reimer. Spooner, Brian. 1969. "Politics, Kinship and Ecology in Southeast Persia." Ethnology 8(April): 139-152 Southgate, Horatio. 1840. Narrative of a Tour in Turkey and Persia. Vol. 1, New York: D. Appleton and Co. Winfield, David et al. 1960. "The Yakupoglu Konak." Anatolian Studies 10: 197203. Wolf, Eric R. 1956. "Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico." American Anthropologist

58: 1065-1078.

CONCEPTS OF PERSON, FAMILY, AND STATE IN THE DISTRICT OF OF (REVISED)

I. Introduction East of Trabzon, the Turkish rural population is composed of peoples who are now, or have very recently been, Greek, Kurdish, Armenian, Georgian, Laz, and Turkish speakers. At the same time, neither ethnic consciousness nor ethnic antagonism have been a prominent feature of this area since it was Islamized, a process that was more or less complete by the late seventeenth century. 1 In the district of Of, for example, a large fraction of the population — perhaps the majority in one of its two main valleys — was both Greek-speaking and Sunni Muslim from the time of a purported mass conversion in the late seventeenth century until the Republican period when Pontic Greek began to be rapidly abandoned in favor of Turkish. 2 Nonetheless, ethnic identifications and traditions in Of have not played a role in political alignments or social organization in recent memory. Turkish and Greek speakers are linked by marriages, friendships, and alliances and have been since the last century. This pattern, in which speakers of different languages do not represent ethnic groupings, has to be understood, I think, as a feature of the ottomanization of local political culture. After sketching the way in which the district of Of had a place in the Ottoman regime, I shall consider concepts of person, family, and society which reflect the dimensions of this political culture.

II. The konak/kahve complex in Of At the beginning of the nineteenth century, state officials in the capital of the old province of Trabzon were entirely dependent on local lords for the 1 The rural peoples east of Trabzon had a reputation for internal dissentions and frequent rebellion during the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. However, the earliest British and French consuls, who often commented on these disturbances never suggest that they were even indirectly related to ethnic conflicts. In particular, see the reports of Pierre Dupre MAE, CCC, Trabzon, Book 1 (1801-1811) and Book 2 (1812-1824), and the writings of V. Fontanier (1829, 1834). 2 Bryer and Winfield (1985) summarize the Greek and Armenian traditions of a mass conversion in the district of Of. There are traditions of a mass conversion in the district of Of itself where it is believed that the Christianized descendants of Turkic settlers reconverted to the religion of their forefathers. [Also see Poutouridou (1997-1998) and Meeker (2002).]

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governing its coastal districts. 1 Accorded the title of bey {bey) or agha (aga), the local lords levied and collected taxes, oversaw legal proceedings, imposed punishments, apprehended fugitives, imposed corvée, and assembled conscripts. During certain periods of time, when representatives of the governor of Trabzon were weak, some of these local lords were virtually autonomous governors of their areas. Sometimes called (,derebeyler)

valley-lords

by state officials and foreign consuls, they maintained armed

followings, forwarded little or none of their revenues to the provincial capital and made war on their neighbors to extend their spheres of influence. 2 In the early 1830s when the local lords were on the verge of being put down for good, the Vice-Consul for France in Trabzon, V. Fontanier, wrote the following in his consular report: The pashalik [province] of Trabzon has for a long time been divided into small feudal domains {petites féodalités) whose chiefs {chefs) resided in fortified strongholds, some of which were located in the city itself. The most important of these chiefs were situated at Trabzon, §atiroglu and [illegible} oglu; at Tonya, a town twelve hours from Trabzon, Haci Salihoglu; at Rize, Tuzcuoglu; at Of, Selimoglu and Cansizoglu; and finally at Gônye [between Hopa and Batum], Fatzanoglu. Other less important chiefs were affiliated with these and provided their clients. But as often happens in governments of this sort, they made war on one another and sought the good graces of the pashas [provincial governors at Trabzon] and the Sublime Porte [imperial government at Istanbul]. Your Excellency can see from the excellent reports of M. Dupré [a former consul in Trabzon], that these chiefs combined to form formidable coalitions, and that they sometimes managed to drive the officers of the Ottoman sultan from the sandjak [sub-province]. On several occasions, the Imperial Divan [imperial government] attempted to destroy them by setting them against one another but was never strong enough or capable enough to achieve this end. The patronage of these lords {seigneurs) gave the inhabitants of this region a sense of liberty that flattered their pride, and the protection that they received from these lords served to shelter them from the exactions to which other Turks were subjected.-'

1 [Meeker Comment: The old province of Trabzon consisted of coastal districts approximately running from present-day Batum in the east to present-day Ordu in the west.] 2 The term derebey is usually translated as "valley-lord" and assumed to refer to the fact that such individuals often ruled over a specific river valley. According to Sakaoglu (1984: 5), the term signifying "valley" (dere), which comprises part of the expression, is a corruption of a term signifying "well-known" or "recognized" (derre). By this claim, the proper translation of derebey should be something like "accepted" or perhaps "putative" lord. 3 MAE CCC, Trabzon, Book 3, Fontanier, 27 January 1831.

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The quote mentions most of the important features attributed to the local beys and aghas by the earliest western European consuls in the old province of Trabzon. 1 These are as follows: 1) They governed their districts in the place of state officials. 2) They lived in semi-fortified mansions ( k o n a k ) f f o m which they could withstand extended siege. 3) They were able to mobilize coalitions of allies and followers against their enemies. 4) They sometimes received the support of the local population in their areas. To sum up these four features of the beys and aghas, the earliest consuls frequently compared the local system of government with the feudal system of medieval Europe. Fontanier obliquely refers to "feudal domains" in the above quote, but elsewhere he is far more explicit: The pasha of Trabzon is appointed by the Porte and placed under the command of the chief of staff in Erzurum; his authority is not great owing to the division of his territory among several chiefs who for the most part are hereditary, and in open revolt against him. These chiefs have the title of aghas, and were formerly called derebey, but the Porte, desiring to seize their fiefs, has suppressed this last denomination. This institution is precisely the feudal system of thirteenth century Europe; the aghas reside in fortified mansions, sometimes equipped with canons, where they preserve their families and treasures; they go about surrounded by servants and armed partisans, impose laws, raise taxes, and take refuge in their retreats, from where they defied the authority of the Pasha, even the fermans [decrees] of the sultan. [Italics mine] 2 The concept of feudalism, so favored by the earliest consuls, can be read in both a positive and negative way.3 First, the consuls preferred it over other available models. That is to say, they did not describe the local system of government in terms of a collective organization of clans, tribes, or peoples, as they might have done, if they had they been reporting (or to be more exact, misreporting) from elsewhere in the Middle East or North Africa. Their use of the term feudalism is therefore itself an indication that ethnicity or language was not a leading factor in the political formations of the eastern Black Sea coast. Secondly, the earliest consuls consistently mention other features of the local beys and aghas, as well as the populations who supported them, that are more or less inconsistent with their concept of feudalism. If the

' I am referring to the consular reports and travel narratives of Dupre, Fourcade, and Fontanier. 2 Fontanier (1829: 17-18). J Western Europeans appear to have commonly compared local lords in the Ottoman Empire to the feudal lords of medieval Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the Utest. Consul Fourcade, who served in Sinop, may have been the first to make such an analogy in regard to the local lords of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor. See MAE, CCC, Sinope, folio 5, 16 Brumaire, An 11 (1804).

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latter was their only available model for fixing an image of the beys and aghas in the minds of their ministerial correspondents, it was nonetheless a poor one. From many other observations that appear in the earliest consular reports, the local beys and aghas, as well as the populations who supported them, accepted the legitimacy of, and even participated in, Ottoman military and religious institutions. They did so, however, on their own terms, not on the terms of the official Ottoman system. The consuls describe the beys and aghas as sometimes replacing and sometimes assisting state officials in the performance of their administrative, military, and judicial duties. They confirm the eagerness of the beys and aghas to be included in official deliberations and ceremonies and to be appointed to official positions as district governors, commandants, or notables. They mention that the beys and aghas were enrolled as janissary officers, that the members of their coalitions belonged to a specific janissary regiment, and that the rivalries of their coalitions reflected the rivalries of their different regiments. They notice that local associations and solidarities are underpinned by Islamic belief and practice. They even claim that Islamic convictions are a chief obstacle to the reform of the local system of government. They also notice the existence of numerous professors (;mliderris) and academies (medrese), particularly in those districts where a diversity of languages was spoken by the local populations. This deep involvement of the local populations with Ottoman military and religious institutions, even if it had come about by corruption of their official purposes and functions, suggests that the local system of government was indebted to Ottoman thinking and practice. The local beys and aghas of the eastern Black Sea coast had emerged in the course of a weakening or breakdown of centralized Ottoman government. This trend, which has been described as a process of "decentralization," begins in the later seventeenth century and encompasses almost all the central Ottoman provinces of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor. 1 Although the beys and aghas were often accorded official titles and appointments from an early date, provincial and imperial officials also described them as "usurpers" (,mutegallibe) since the local lords assumed powers that should have been reserved for provincial and imperial officials (taxation, conscription, punishment, and corvee). The process of decentralization involved then the migration of power from state officials to local elites. I suggest that this migration of power from the upper to the lower levels of the imperial system worked through the migration of the tactics of power from the upper to the lower levels of the imperial system. 1

Inalcik (1977).

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The local beys and aghas could not defy the power and authority of the central government without consolidating a body of local partisans and entrenching themselves with local support. To do so, they could not turn to "local," "ethnic," or "tribal" traditions, since these traditions had been eroded in the course of early Ottoman rule. They therefore relied on classical Ottoman tactics for converting social association into political power. This consisted of a specific system of household recruitment and organization and interhousehold alliance and friendship. In effect, the local lords did not invent anything new in the field of either society or politics, but were inspired by the example of Ottoman thinking and practice. They were not revolutionaries who would challenge the legitimacy of the Ottoman system. They were entirely conservative in their orientation, even as they resisted and challenged state officials. They were therefore quite precisely "usurpers" and therefore "Idecentralizers," not just with regard to political power but also with regard to social practices and cultural concepts. While addressing an entirely different matter in his discussion of the character of Ottoman government, Fontanier incidentally reveals the way in the beys and aghas of the coastal region emulated the sultan and his pashas: As we are ordinarily inclined to make judgments by analogy, we might guess that the Ottoman Empire is run by ministers with specifically defined abilities who are able take the department assigned to them in whatever direction they might wish. This would be a serious misperception, because a ministry is nothing but the organization of each family applied to the state. Thus, the agha of a village, the bey of a district, and the pasha of a province all have their houses set up exactly like that of the sultan, so that they are surrounded by officers who fulfill the functions analogous to those of the ministers. Just like the Great Lord, they have their own steward, judge, treasurer, etc., whom they choose from among their relatives or friends. It's just the same way in the case of the Imperial Divan itself. Accordingly, it is clear that the ministers are merely domestic servants without any particular standing in their own right whose power depends solely on the favor of their master. [Italics mine|' Even though exaggerated, these observations hold a grain of truth. The local beys and aghas were able to usurp the power of state officials and reign supreme over their separate areas because their households resembled the Imperial Palace, in their political tactics, even if not in their ceremony and

1

Fontanier (1834: 38).

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protocol. They had learned how to adapt methods of social ascendancy and solidarity that were at the root of classical Ottoman thinking and practice.1 The Palace in Constantinople is located on a hilltop at the meeting of two continents and two seas. The Palace was not merely a residence of the sultan. It was a physical infrastructure where a social elite of men and women were recruited by levy, purchase, and choice, and then produced by rearing, training, and educating. As such an infrastructure, it was not itself the actual locus of power but an engine for creating and disseminating a ruling social elite throughout the strategic centers of an imperial domain. Techniques for generating social solidarity and ascendancy were at the foundation of imperial institutions, and hence the key to Ottoman power and authority. The mansions of the local beys and aghas along the eastern Black Sea coast in the old province of Trabzon were different only in their diminished local scale and material resources, hence also in the spit and polish with which they pursued the very same techniques to accomplish the very same objective. They, too, were located on hilltops near strategic points of commerce: marketplaces, crossroads, trade routes, and anchorages. They, too, were a physical infrastructure necessary for recruiting and producing a body of servants, partisans, allies, and followers. They too were but the most visible and pretentious evidence of a network of social relations which extended downward from the lord to the agha and outward from the lords and aghas to the coffeehouses (kahve) they sponsored and the villages they ruled. 2 The decentralization of the Ottoman system had taken place along the eastern Black Sea coast as upstarts imitated their betters. They usurped the political power of the center by usurping the tactics of political power of the center.

III. The "mosque/medrese" complex in Of In the course of the period of decentralization, social ascendancy and solidarity became principles of political power and political authority. In time a distinctive ottomanist socio-political culture emerged in the districts of the eastern Black Sea coast. In making such an observation, however, I do not mean to suggest that social relations were reducible to political power, on the contrary. The mosque (cami) and religious academy (medrese) were places where social identity and social relations were conceived prior to political 1 These observations take for granted that the beys and aghas could imitate either the sultan and his pashas in some respects but did not wish or attempt to imitate them in other respects. 2 [See Meeker (2002) where this idea is formulated more precisely and developed in some detail.]

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authority and influence. By way of contrast, the mansions and coffeehouses were places where social identity and social relations were converted into the currency of political authority and influence. The possibility of political power and authority depended on social ascendancy and solidarity. So the legitimacy of political power and authority was always inseparable from social identity and social relations. At the same tjime, the Islamic tradition was itself strongly affected and transformed by its interconnection with political power and authority. The Islam of the late Ottoman Empire is a peculiar kind of Islam without its exact counterpart wherever the conditions of decentralization and usurpation did not prevail. In the district of Of, a local tradition of Islamic literacy and learning seems to have evolved in coordination with the role of bey and agha. This implies that local Islam in the district of Of was very much shaped by the processes of decentralization and usurpation which reigned there virtually unchallenged from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. The local tradition of Islamic literacy and learning was most important in the higher reaches of the western valley of the district where a majority of the population was Greek-speaking. In some villages, the title for a religious tjeacher (hoca) was so common that it was practically a term of address for senior males. Nineteenth century Ottoman registers list about forty official academies ( m e d r e s e ) and eighty professors (miiderris) in Of and over two thousand students. 1 Though these numbers greatly exceed the number of academies and students in any other eastern Black Sea districts, they should be seen in their proper perspective. An academy consisted of little more than a small room by the side of a village mosque in which a man regularly met with four or five students during the winter months. All the same, the presence of so many teachers and students in Of illustrate the way in which Ottoman Anatolia consisted of a religious culture, which was separate from, but coordinated with a political culture. The academies played an important part in reinforcing Sunni religious beliefs and practices in Of so that this somewhat remote and isolated district became as "officially" Sunni as any popular quarter of a large Ottoman town or city.

[These numbers correct the original published version of this article. The Trabzon yearbook (salname) of 1869/1286 lists 350 religious academies in Of. Comparison with Trabzon yearbooks of later years suggest that a "0" was inadvertently added to the number "35."]

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The Of academies were also of some significance, not just for the propagation of Islam in Of, but for the propagation of Islam in all Anatolia as well. During the nineteenth century, the graduates of the academies of Of represented a source of prayer leaders (imam) for many Anatolian villages and towns, and after the declaration of the Republic, when religious instruction was severely curtailed, they became a source of prayer leaders for prestigious religious institutions. Having played such an important role in sustaining religious tradition in Turkey, it is not surprising that the epithet, "hodja from Of" (Oflu hoca), came to be a term of opprobrium in urban Turkey, one which signified a reactionary and ignorant fanatic. Nonetheless, during both the late Ottoman and early Republican period, individuals of genuine learning consistently issued from the high mountains of Of. More recently, the tradition of literacy and learning in upper Of has gradually become increasingly secular. The western valley is now less known for its religious teachers and students than for professors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and writers. According to rumor among outsiders, many of the academies in the western valley have their origins in the Byzantine period when the people of Of produced large numbers of Christian priests rather than Muslim imams. No evidence is ever offered to substantiate this opinion which has the appearance of a convenient secularist inference, designed to stigmatize exceptional piety. Far more likely, the Greek-speaking villages in upper Of, which were not fully settled until after the Ottoman conquest, turned to religious teaching and service as a means for supplementing the meager resources of their mountain fastnesses. A local tradition states that missionaries from Mara§ converted all the Greek-speaking villages in upper Of to Islam not long after the Ottoman conquest. However this tradition may well commemorate, not a mass conversion, but the work of learned individuals from eastern Anatolia who trained the first religious teachers and established the first religious academies. 1 In any case, by the middle of the eighteenth century at the latest, the district of Of was well known for its local academies and professors. Thus, the two basic institutions of Ottoman society, Palace Complex and Mosque Complex, were very much present in Of. The example of Of illustrates how the ottomanization of Anatolia proceeded beyond the walls of Topkapi or Siileymaniye, or for that matter, beyond the walls of their counterparts in other great cities of Anatolia. 1 [Meeker comment: See Meeker, "Greeks Who Are Muslims: Counter-Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Trabzon" (in press).]

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IV. Concepts of person, family, and state in Of I shall now discuss some concepts that were fundamental ones in district of Of during the late Ottoman period and are still of considerable importance today. These are the concepts, irz, namus, and §eref. They are usually translated as concepts of female chastity, moral probity, and male honor and equated with similar concepts that are to be found in most other Mediterranean countries. I shall argue that they are more properly seen as a philosophy of citizenship which was characteristic of local societies in Ottoman Anatolia. The concepts in question, irz, namus, and §eref are concepts involving the personal status of a male household head. They refer to the chastity of the women of his family, to the propriety of his personal behavior in the community, and to positive attributes which distinguish him or his family line, respectively. They can be roughly glossed as chastity, honesty, and honor, respectively. As concepts of personal status, they are not of an individual's own making, but derived from the opinion of others in the community. Though they refer to personal qualities, the personal qualities in question are derived from social norms and validated by public opinion. They are not therefore concepts of personal identity, but rather part of a philosophy of citizenship. They do not stand alone as independent concepts but are constantly merged and sometimes confused with one another. If you ask someone to explain one concept, they will inevitably make references to the other two. A question of §eref is also a question of namus and vice versa. A question of namus is also a question of irz, and vice versa.1 As concepts of personal status, the three terms make reference to a hierarchy of three different levels: state, community, and family. §eref is frequently associated with state service and appointment or with religious learning or distinction. These matters refer to a level that is beyond the family and the community. Thus, §eref indicates that the concept of personal status in Anatolia, even among common-folk, includes a recognition that local affairs have a place in a larger world. At the same time, there can be no honor, §eref, without honesty, namus, a concept which designates the communal level. When used in such expressions as, "an honest man" (namuslu bir adam), or alternatively "a shameless and therefore dishonest man" (namussuz 1 It is interesting that this philosophy is more or less the same all over Anatolia even though familial and communal customs variable considerably.

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bir adam), the concept of namus refers to a standard of normative personal behavior toward others in the community and beyond that in society at large. This standard is described as one of open talk, straight dealing, keeping one's word, and conformity with communal norms of politeness and dress. But when used alone, namus refers to issues of men's responsibility for women. Just as the base of §eref is namus so the base of namus is irz. Irz, which refers to female chastity, designates the family level. Just as the male household head has a general responsibility for the moral uprightness of his family grouping so he has a particular responsibility for the sexual purity and chastity of its women members. In fact, men's protection of the chastity of women is symbolic of their moral uprightness. In this sense, irz is a kind of foundation of namus.

V. State and family in the philosophy of citizenship The three concepts, §eref, namus, and irz, denote then a hierarchy of high and low: personal status in relationship to state, community, and family as validated by communal opinion. At the same time, this is a hierarchy in which the upper criteria are based on the lower criteria. The best illustrations of this principle are the way in which questions of state authority and legitimacy are linked with issues of irz. I shall cite some contemporary examples which exemplify this traditional outlook. Some of them are taken from Of and others are taken from outside the district. 1. A threat to the state is a threat to namus as irz. When Atatiirk and the nationalists appealed to the people to oppose the European occupation after the Great War, they described the threat as a threat to namus and irz. More recently, some opponents of Westernization have claimed that foreign powers seek to undermine the namus and irz of Turkish families so that the state might be more easily dominated and controlled. 2. The integrity and stability of the state rest on family morality. Some time ago, a member of the Faculty of Religion of Ankara University, who happened to come from the eastern Black Sea region, told me that namus as irz was more important than the sacred Law of Islam (§eriat). The significance of this remark, I think, is that he was looking at the sacred Law of Islam as the foundation of family morality and in this sense seeing it as secondary to a primary moral objective. Likewise, those individuals who call for the restoration of sacred Law of Islam in Turkey often see this possibility

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as a move toward a state that would protect and insure family morality. They see this as one of the primary justifications for the existence of the state at the same time as they see the secular Republic as neglecting, if not undermining, family morality. 3. The requirements of namus as irz, if violated, lead to the degeneration of state functions. In Of, during the 1960s, I was told more than once that the court system of the Republic was corrupt because women were practicing as lawyers. The reasoning behind this opinion was as follows: The judge cannot act equitably in the presence of a woman lawyer because of the influence of sexual desire, if not the outright proffering of sexual favors. Therefore, a good system of justice is not possible when officers of the court are females. This kind of reasoning is inspired by the principle that namus as irz requires the exclusion of women from public life. When this exclusion is not upheld, then public institutions, including state institutions, do not function properly because moral uprightness is undermined by uncontrolled sexuality. 4. The requirements of namus as irz are part of a concept of moral authority which is at the same time a concept of political authority in general, including state authority. Only recently, I was told of a discussion which took place at a higher level of the government. This discussion involved the question of whether a woman could serve as a district officer (kaymakarn). So far as I know, a woman has never held this position in the district of Of, despite the fact that women are commonly active in almost all the professions in contemporary Turkey. One of the parties to this discussion advanced a point of view that astonished his interlocutors. A woman could never be a district officer, he claimed, for if this were to come about, her husband would be "screwing" the state. Here again, by a series of mental associations, the path of which is as obscure as the conclusion is obvious, the issue of state authority is linked with the concept of namus as irz. 5. In Of, the resident medical doctor in the 1960s was given to philosophical and historical speculation. On one occasion, he lectured me about the principles of the rise and decline of great states. The idea may have owed something to a dip into Spengler, but the mechanics of his views were traditional. The fortunes of civilizations, he assured me, was all a matter of namus as irz. To prove his point, he cited the instances of Sukarno in Indonesia, Profumo in Britain, and the later Ottoman sultans. In each instance, sexual profligacy was seen by him as the prelude to political decline.

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VI. The philosophy

of citizenship

implies an ideal of

CULTURE

authority

Why is there a merging and fusion of concepts of state and family in Of in particular and in Turkey in general? This can be understood by considering another aspect of the concepts of §eref, namus, and irz. These concepts reflect an ideal of authority. This is why they refer specifically to the personal status of the male household head instead of all males in general. They reflect his authority over a family group, and they are validated by public recognition of the moral quality of the family group. The father is the representative of a social group which he administers according to the norms of the community. This social group is designated as a household (hane). The character of the father's authority in the household features four qualities: It is absolutist, normative, providing, and intimate. 1. Absolutism: The father represents and speaks for the household. His sons do not express themselves to others in his presence. They are the instruments of his will and act according to his dictates. They have no identity of their own. He is the captain, they are the crew. He is the general, they are the soldiers. The father and no one else, holds title to the resources and controls the wealth of the household. He alone designates expenditures and regulates consumption. 2. Normative: The absolutism of the father is based on the realization of a social ideal, not an ideal of domination or subordination. The authority of the father, which precludes free will or action on the part of his sons, also precludes the possibility of competition, antagonism, division, and conflict within the social group. Absolutism is therefore the criterion of a moral ideal. In the shadow of patriarchal authority, a perfect solidarity is possible. It is not that the group is the instrument of patriarchal will, but rather that the unity of patriarchal will is the essential counterpart of the unity of the group. The father assigns tasks and determines careers of his sons. He gives his daughters in marriage to the sons of other men and receives the daughters of other men in marriage to his own sons. It is for him to decide these matters, not his sons and his daughters. 3. Providing: The absolutism of the father is not unlimited or capricious. The legitimacy of the normative order he represents rests on its status as a providing order. The members of the group are spiritually loved and materially supported by the father, the guardian of family wealth and

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resources. To rebel against the will of the father would involve an egoistic rejection of the love of the family, one that would be seen as a move to appropriate the share of other members of the group. 4. Intimacy: The authority of the father is associated with family relationships in a household interior. The surrender of egoistic desires is not for the purpose of achieving a rational or abstract order but for the purpose of identifying with a group and receiving the affections of the group. This means that the group itself is one that is close and familiar, a narrow interior world that is set apart from an unfeeling and threatening exterior world. These four qualities are not necessarily qualities of real fathers, nor are they qualities which are always consistent with actual family relationships. In Of, as in Turkey in general, the role of the woman in the family, especially the role of the mother, is crucial. It might even be claimed that women are more essential to the happiness and welfare of most families in Of than men, simply because men often spend so little time with the family, sometimes through necessity, sometimes as a result of choice. But our concern here is not with the full texture of everyday life, but only of one aspect of it, a philosophy of citizenship implicitly suggested by the concepts of §eref, namus, and irz, a philosophy of citizenship that is thoroughly patriarchal in character.

VII. The authority ideal implies a social

ideal

I have passed quickly over the dimension of the middle term, namus that refers to the "honest man" (namuslu adam) and that is associated with a standard of personal behavior in the community. Re-examining this level, it is possible to see how an ideal of patriarchal authority is closely linked with an ideal of social relations in general. When I asked people to explain the qualities of an honest man (.namuslu bir adam), they would usually say that he is open and direct in his relationships others, that he is respectful of others, and that he gives them a place in his heart. These explanations seemed diffuse and vague until I witnessed instances of such behavior in specific social contexts.

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While the words and actions of the honest man are to be heard and seen in mosque, market, or coffee-house, he is preeminently a creature of a specific household interior. In many houses in Of, a special area is designated as the "room" (odd). This area is also more formally known as the misafir odasi or selamlik. It is the preeminent context of social relations. In the last century in Of, the oda was a feature of the house of a man who was more prominent and prosperous than the ordinary townsman or villager. If such a man were an important bey or agha, he might have a largish oda worthy of the name selamlik. Walls and ceilings would be covered with carved molding and panels. Wooden cabinets would be set into the walls. Seating benches would stretch along one or more walls. There would be a small conical fireplace decorated with floral designs, and windows along one or more walls would overlook verdant mountainous landscapes or sweeping vistas of the sea. Otherwise, the average oda would be a more ordinary room in the house, more or less reserved for receiving guests. Even today, some houses still do not have such an oda, but this is more and more unusual. Even modest families make an effort to set aside one room for the reception of guests into the house. The design and furnishing of the oda has changed in all kinds of ways since the last century, but its social function more or less endures. Traditionally, the oda was a social space for the gathering of men, not women. The men who would be welcomed into this room would include individuals who would not necessarily be permitted into the inner house itself. The oda is then part of the house, but not among the rooms of the family interior itself. It is an in between space where individuals from the outside are welcomed into the house, but not taken into the very bosom of the family. There is a need for an ethnography of the oda. What is the design of its space? How has the design changed since the last century? How is it continuing to change in Turkey today? What are the ceremonies of the oda? How are they conducted? Above all, what are the verbal forms and usages of this social scene? How do they vary in different regions and among different classes? How are these verbal forms and usages evolving in Turkey today? In the absence of such a detailed an ethnography, some generalizations are possible. The men who gather in the oda have come to participate in a social occasion. They speak with one another and eat together. If the time of prayer is at hand, they may pray together in the oda itself, but the gathering is

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essentially a social occasion. The norms of behavior in the oda are accordingly those defining the honest man (namuslu adam). Two of the most important dimensions of these norms are summarized by paired concepts which exist in both an Arabicized or Turkicized form: hiirmet and muhabbet or saygi and sevgi. The first tem of each pair means "respect" or "submission," the second term, "affection" or "conversation," the Arabic and Turkish forms expressing these meanings in different shades and balances. Rituals of refreshment and conversation are both essential, but the latter is naturally more eloquent than the former. The talk involves an art of anecdote. The subjects are relatives and friends or events and experiences held in common. These matters are not discussed in general or abstract terms. The anecdote reports what some individual did or said or what the speaker saw or heard on some occasion. These reports are sometimes humorous and sometimes judgmental, but they are invariably narrow in their focus, addressing as they do specific personalities and contexts. Ideally, the oda is not a place for business or intrigue, and calculation or provocation are not properly part of the spirit of its conversation. The setting of the room is consistent with the intimacy and familiarity of its social exchanges. The only social distinctions are ideally those of age. Individuals sit with legs uncrossed and their hands out of their pockets. Elders occupy the seats at the center of the group. Juniors defer to the elders to the extent that they are often content with just listening rather than speaking. The atmosphere of the male assembly is softened by textiles, the work of absent women. There is a tapestry on the wall, carpets on the floor, curtains on the windows, and cushions and coverings on the benches. Food is served on a round table (sofra). The dishes are pushed in through the door by the women or brought in by a young boy. Those present sit around the table and eat from a common bowl. The room is light and open. Its spaces are uncluttered. It has windows and a view. Like the honest man himself, the oda is an honest space without pretension or calculated design. The behavior of the individuals who gather in the oda is in strict conformity with the ideal of absolutist authority, as represented by the father. When sitting in the oda and participating in its easy congeniality, good humor, and quite repose, one tends to forget that this social occasion is closely regulated by normative standards. There is no heated argument. Everyone speaks in turn. No one interrupts another. Body movements are limited to the delicate hand gestures of the speaker and an occasional adjustment of sitting position on the part of the audience. The table is

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eventually brought out. The food is brought in and placed upon it. The gathering of men slowly and quietly gathers around the table. Bread (pide) is torn in to pieces. With deliberate movements and sometimes in silence each man begins to eat. The meal ends and tea or coffee is served, all in good time. The talk resumes. Everyone has a place. Everyone participates. Everyone is satiated. It is almost a paradise of solidarity and affection, one that is made possible by respect and submission. The oda is an ideal social space in between the public square (meydan) and the household (hane), but it has a connection with both. Even though the oda is part of the house, the social occasions which take place within it are an ideal of public life. This is a somewhat strange proposition from a modernist perspective where the distinctive between public and private is more or less coordinate with outside and inside the family. But without a grasp of this proposition it is impossible to understand Ottoman political culture in the Anatolian provinces. The gathering in the oda is not part of family life, since it is pointedly set apart from the household interior. The gathering in the oda underlines the fact that the ideal of public life is associated with patriarchal authority and household organization. This means that it is pointedly set apart from the planning, bargaining, plotting, competition, coercion, provocation, and hostility that are part of the exterior world. The ideal of public life consists instead of a normative and providing social scene of familiarity and intimacy, one that is close to the family even though not a part of the family itself.

VIII. An ottomanist political

culture

Concepts of personal status in Of, §eref, namus, and irz, imply both an ideal of authority as well as an ideal of society. This raises the possibility that the household head and guest room are themselves low level institutions of a philosophy of citizenship which also had its upper level institutions. The series, father (baba) and household {hane), agha (aga) and mansion ( k o n a k ) , sultan (padi§ah) and palace (saray), points in this direction. Like the father, the sultan was himself a head of a household while the state he represented was itself a household organization. This similarity between sultan and father could be easily elaborated. It would be possible to examine ceremonies of state to determine the character of the sultan's authority and its relationship to Imperial Palace inside and outside. If this were done, the equivalent of the guest room (misafir odasi), would be the audience room (arz odasi), within

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the third court of the Imperial Palace at Topkapi. The structural difference between house and palace is the entry into this interior. As one enters the guest room of the house, formalities consist of little more than a welcome, the removal of one's shoes, and donning of slippers given by the host. Entry into the sultan's audience room involved passage through spaces in which the hierarchy of an imperial state was ceremonially represented by thousands of officers and servants. But perhaps, the best way to see that the father and the guest room are the lower level expressions of an imperial political culture is by means of the local chieftain in early nineteenth century Of. Like the sultan, the agha was also a ruler, only in miniature. He, too, had a grand house, many wives, many children, many followers, armed supporters, a resident imam, a resident mosque, a hospital, and a jail. On the other hand, the agha was very much a father, in fact, a kind of super-father. His house and his guest room were large and imposing. His hearths and his cooks could prepare meals for many not j u s t a few. His relatives were many, sometimes including hundreds of households. Because the agha stands so neatly between sultan and father, he suggests that sultan and father have something in common with one another. A continuous political culture in Ottoman Of, one that is visible in basic principles that are shared by saray, konak and hane, even though these principles are elaborated in very different ways. The existence of a common political culture does not tell us anything about the workings of the Ottoman political system. But presumably the latter would be difficult to comprehend without an awareness of the categories of this political culture. BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives MAE CCCS: Republic of France. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance Consulaire et Commerciale. Turquie, Sinope. SANS: 18011811. MAE CCCT: Republic of France. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance Consulaire et Commerciale. Turquie, Trébizonde. Publications Bryer, Anthony and David Winfield. 1985. The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Fontanier, V. 1829. Voyage en Orient, entrepris par ordre du gouvernement français de 1821 à 1829. Paris: Librairie Universelle.

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Fontanier, V. 1834. Voyage en Orient, entrepris par ordre du gouvernement français de 1830 à 1833. Paris: Librairie de Dumont. Înalcik, Halil. 1977. "Centralization and Decentralization in the Ottoman Empire." In Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, edited by Thomas Naff and Roger Owen, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Meeker, Michael E. 1976a. "Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples from the Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs (I)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 7: 243-270. Meeker, Michael E. 1976b. "Meaning and Society in the Near East: Examples from the Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs (II)," International Journal of Middle East Studies 7: 383-422. Meeker, Michael E. 2001. "Greeks Who are Muslims: Counter-Nationalism in Ottoman Trabzon," proceedings of the Hasluck Conference, Lampeter University, Wales. Meeker, Michael E. 2002. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Poutouridou, Margarita. 1997-1998. "The Of Valley and the Coming of Islam: The Case of the Greek speaking Muslims." Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikan Spoudon 12: 47-90. Sakaoglu, Necdet. 1984. Anadolu Derebeyi Ocaklarindan Kose Pa.¡a Hanedani. Ankara: Yurt Yayinevi.

THE MURADOGLU FAMILY LINE

The Local Elites of the Period of Decentralization From the first decades of the eighteenth century, an oligarchy of local elites emerged in the coastal districts of the old province of Trabzon. Eventually, these local elites came to play an essential role in carrying out the functions of provincial government, such as collecting taxes, assembling conscripts, and enforcing court orders. 2 By the second half of the eighteenth century, leading individuals from among the local elites sometimes ruled their Own domains resisting any interference by the provincial government. On Several occasions, from the 1750s until the 1830s, coalitions of leading individuals joined together to force the resignation of the provincial governor, sometimes by setting siege to the provincial capital. The political authority of these leading individuals resists generalization since the character of their local support and their position in the provincial government were variable. Nonetheless, one pattern was particularly common. A leading individual resided in a large semi-fortified residence. He was backed by a following of servants and followers that included a substantial number of men in arms. He dominated a certain number of villages where he collected taxes, imposed corvée labor, and settled disputes. While the imperial government might consider his rule to be corrupt and illegal, the leading individual sought official recognition for himself and official approval of his policies, sometimes resorting to bribes and extortions to attain such an end. He held a position in military regiments of the regular or irregular army so that he was able to assemble troops or launch expeditions, sometimes in defiance of the provincial government. He had links with members of the learned class and aligned his policies with the sacred law of Islam, sometimes by occupying the courts and threatening judges. Strangely, the leading individuals of the socalled period of decentralization (from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century) acknowledged their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire by their assiduous efforts to break its laws and suborn its officials. 3 The quest of

1 At the time, the province of Trabzon consisted of a series of coastal districts, running from Batum in the east to Ordu in the west. 2 Meeker (2002). a For the concept of the period of decentralization and an analysis of its causes and structure, see Inalcik (1977).

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legality through illegality might be understood as a consequence of an imperial system that was based on hierarchy and centralism but had come to depend on local support and participation. The result was a kind of political schizophrenia best exemplified by leading individuals. In general, a leading individual was able to rule, that is, to exercise sovereign powers in a specific domain, by a combination of official appointments and local support, where the former was a sine qua non for the latter. That is, one cannot say that a large number of local supporters was the means for attaining official appointment and recognition; rather, official appointment and recognition were the means for assembling a large number of local supporters. Ordinarily, someone who had been appointed chief notable was also a descendant of a family line of chief notables. Over the years, a succession of leading individuals from the same family line worked to surround themselves with a large body of kinsmen, friends, and allies. Eventually, the provincial governor was obliged to return to the leading individuals of the same family line since chaos and anarchy would be the result of an attempt to ignore them. Accordingly, the notables and aghas of the old province of Trabzon were typically linked with family names and groupings. The family names were patronyms in a "son of so-and-so" form, such as "son of Murad," or in Turkish, "Muradoglu." The family groupings — whether emergent or existing — were comprised of individuals with the same patrilineal descent. A leading individual relied on the support of his family grouping; however, his family grouping was but the core of a larger body of relatives, friends, and allies. Furthermore, not all leading individuals were supported by a large family grouping, but all leading individuals were backed a collection of relatives, friends, and allies. The provincial governor sometimes attempted to bring a leading individual to heel by punitive measures, such as military occupation of his district or holding his sons as hostage. Sometimes the provincial governor attempted to suppress a leading individual altogether by recognizing a son or cousin as his successor. More exceptionally, the provincial governor might attempt to bring a family line to ruin, burning houses, confiscating treasury, and deporting entire families. When a provincial governor did succeed in displacing a family line, he might provide one of his own protégés with military and financial backing and dispatch him to a certain district or subdistrict. Once in place, this man might himself set about consolidating a local

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group of relatives, friends, and allies, and in time, he might be able to resist his recall by mobilizing large numbers of men in arms. After one or two generations, the descendants of the protégé might succeed in establishing a new family line of notables and aghas. This situation should sound familiar. President Bush père chose to leave Saddam Hussein (along with all his relatives, friends, and allies) in power judging the cost and trouble of replacing them too high. President Bush fils decided to remove Saddam Hussein (along with all his relatives, friends, and allies) judging the cost and trouble of their continuing rule too high. 1 The provincial governors of Trabzon constantly faced the dilemma of the Bushes as a normal circumstance of government. Among the two or three score of leading individuals in the coastal districts, the provincial governors must have always considered some to be intolerable nuisances. However, they did not always attempt to remove and replace them, knowing that such a policy was but a palliative measure that led to temporary rather than permanent change, given the instruments of centralization that were available to them.

The Local Elites and the Close of the Period of

Decentralization

The Muradoglu aghas in the district of Of are a revealing example of leading individuals in the old province of Trabzon. 2 They illustrate the pattern of outsiders with official appointments being transformed into insiders with large followings. However, they are a remarkable instance, since this transformation took place after rather than during the period of decentralization. That is to say, the aghas of Muradoglu illustrate the continuation of the social and political processes of the period of decentralization during the later periods of imperial and national modernization. The leading individuals were able to use their official standing to generate a large local group of relatives, friends, and allies long after the close of the period of decentralization. Before turning to the aghas of the Muradoglu, I must first provide some information about the local elites during the final decades of the period of decentralization. 1 Interestingly, the possibility of replacing Saddam Hussein with a close relative never received public mention, so far as I am aware. We can be sure that such an alternative was discussed in the Departments of State and Defense. 2 The family names, Muradoglu and Selimoglu, are pseudonyms. All other names of family lines, such as Tuzcuoglu, Hazinedaroglu, and Cansizoglu, as well as all personal names of leading individuals, such as Suleyman Pasha, Osman Pasha, Omer Agha, and Memi§ Agha, are the actual names. For more on leading individuals and their family groupings, see Meeker (2002).

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From the early nineteenth century (if not earlier), Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu represented an oligarchy of leading individuals in the eastern districts of Rize, Of, and Stirmene. By the advantage of this position, he was constantly asserting the independence of the eastern coastal districts from the provincial government in town of Trabzon. His motivation for doing so arose from the combination of economic opportunity and political capacity. The overland and oversea trade routes of these eastern districts by-passed their counterparts in the vicinity of the town of Trabzon. In some respects, the trade routes of the eastern districts were superior to those of the provincial capital since the distance was shorter from their shorelines to the markets of the interior highlands. In addition to this, the oligarchy of local elites in the eastern districts enjoyed unusually large followings of a military character. The local elites of the eastern districts therefore had both a commercial interest in asserting their independence from the provincial capital and the military resources for mounting a challenge to the provincial government. Most of the provincial governors of Trabzon let the leading individuals of the Tuzcuoglu family line have their way, probably because they had no choice about the matter. But two unusually strong provincial governors of the Hazinedaroglu family line, Suleyman Pasha père (1811-1817) and Osman Pasha fils (1827-1842), sought to curtail the independence of the eastern districts by crushing the Tuzcuoglu. The result was two separate rebellions, from 1814-17 and from 1832-1834, during which a leading individual of the Tuzcuoglu organized a siege of the provincial capital before being taken prisoner and executed. Osman Pasha's successful military pacification of the eastern districts during the second Tuzcuoglu rebellion marks the end of the period of decentralization in the province of Trabzon. Afterwards, the local elites would never again dare to come together to mount a military challenge to the provincial government. 1 After 1834, the local elites continued to play an essential role in provincial government but their activities were subjected to some greater measure of bureaucratic inspection and regulation. For at least a decade, and perhaps for three, they were still appointed to an office (ayan) and given the title of agha (a g a). In this capacity, they were assigned responsibility for groups of villages where they collected taxes, assembled conscripts, and arrested fugitives. As such, they reported to district governors

1 For an account of the pacification of eastern districts of Trabzon by Osman Pasha Hazinedaroglu together with an analysis of the French and British perceptions of this pacification, see Meeker (2002: Chaps. 7 and 8).

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who were probably outsiders rather than insiders to the districts. Nonetheless, the local elites retained a measure of power and influence beyond any official appointment, if for no other reason than their prominent position in local networks of relatives, friends, and allies.

Ismail Agha Muradoglu The founder of the family line, ismail Agha Muradoglu, appears to have arrived in the district of Of about the time of the first Tuzcuoglu rebellion. When Stileyman Pasha Hazinedaroglu became provincial governor in 1811, there were probably no members of the Muradoglu family line in the district of Of. When Osman Pasha Hazinedaroglu completed the pacification of the local elites in 1834, there were probably only a few members of the Muradoglu family line in the district. If these facts are correct, and they are in accord with social memory in the district of Of, the largest patronymic group in the district of Of today (comprising some seven hundred families in 1970) came into being and continued to grow after the close of the period of decentralization. According to family tradition, Ismail Agha Muradoglu was the ascendant of all the members of the patronymic group of the same name. He is said to have arrived in the district of Of, coming from the province of Van, sometime during the reign of Mahmud II (1808-1839). 1 He is said by some to have been one of three brothers who migrated into the coastal region at that time, the other two going to Hopa (where the family did not increase as in Of) and to Vakfikebir (where the family did increase as in Of), respectively. 2 By the dates on his tombstone, which are consistent with these family traditions, he was born in 1788/1202 and died in 1840/1255. 3 * Although I was unable to carry out a census of the Muradoglu patronymic group, I have been assured that all the elders in this family were able to trace their descent from one of the six sons of Ismail Agha. On one occasion, I was given a paper which listed the prominent contemporary members of the family under the names of one of the six sons of Ismail Agha. These local traditions are consistent with the documents transliterated and summarized by Umur (1949, 1951) in that none of them refer to any members of the Muradoglu family line before the nineteenth century while other family lines, such as the Selimoglu and Cansizoglu, are so mentioned. The local traditions are also consistent with British and French consular reports in that the Muradoglu family line is never mentioned, while the other leading agha-families in Of are so mentioned. I did not attempt to determine if these local traditions could be considered plausible. It is conceivable that they are recent rationalizations of the fact that individuals named Muradoglu happen to be prominent in the three districts at some time in the past, the (actual) family name being relatively common in Turkey. 3 The putative dates were read from a refinished tombstone in the Muradoglu cemetery not far from the old mansion of Ismail Agha. When a source indicates a Hijri date, I cite both Gregorian and Hijri dates, respectively, separated by a slash.

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In all likelihood, Ismail Agha was at some time recognized by the provincial government as a chief notable and agha in the lower eastern valleysystem. Once he was so recognized, he sooner or later came to hold sway over nearly two score villages in this segment of the district. In the paragraphs that follow, I summarize the indirect evidence for the timing of Ismail Agha's rise to prominence in the district of Of. It consists of contemporary oral traditions, a date inscribed on the fireplace of an old Muradoglu mansion (,konak), a court document describing a claim against the heirs of Ismail Agha Muradoglu, and official correspondence addressed to one of his sons after he had succeeded his father.1 Contemporary oral traditions circulating in the coastal region in the 1960s associated ismail Agha Muradoglu with the events of the first Tuzcuoglu rebellion, led by Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu and conventionally dated as 1814-1817. The oral traditions convey the following kind of information: When Siileyman Pasha Hazinedaroglu gained the upper hand over the aghas of the coastal districts, he dispatched troops to Rize for the purpose of capturing the leader of the rebellion, Mcmi§ A g h a T u z c u o g l u . In response, Memi§ Agha abandoned his fortified residence and escaped to the district of Of. There he asked the aghas who had supported his cause to give him sanctuary. Ismail Agha Muradoglu, one of these aghas, is said to have received him as a guest for a few days in the course of his flight. When a ferman for the execution of Memi§ Agha was issued by the Palace, Ismail Agha informed him he was unable to protect him openly.^

The story of the meeting of the two aghas is more or less consistent with the consular reports of the French consul from the period. In November, 1816, Consul Dupre reported that the provincial governor had dispatched troops to Rize for the purposes of moving against Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu who was in a fortified position. In February, 1817, Consul Dupre reported that Memi§ Agha had managed to escape the troops and had reached the district of Of where he was given protection by some of the local aghas. These aghas

1 A member of the Muradoglu family kindly allowed me to photograph seven official Ottoman documents in his possession, dated variously from 1834 to 1847. I refer to these as the "Muradoglu documents," referencing each by the date it bears. ^ Ismail Agha is said to have advised Memi§ Agha to move into the mountains where he might be able to protect him secretly. Memi§ Agha declined the advice, preferring to stay near the coastline. Taking his leave, he was captured sometime later near Qufaruksa [Ugurlu] village, beheaded on the spot, and buried in Alanomakot [Aga?li] village where his grave is said to be still existent. Memig Agha is also said to have remained as a guest in the village of Maki [Pmarca, Taflancik, Dereyurt] for 53 days where a destan he sang is still recalled (Umur 1949: 21-22). All three villages are in the eastern half of the district of Of.

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refused the demands of the provincial governor that they turn the fugitive over to him. The consul does not name any of the aghas of Of. 1 By another contemporary oral tradition, Ismail Agha is said to have constructed a great mansion (konak) a number of kilometers away from the coast in ( ¡ M e k [Siraagaf] village. 2 This tradition is supported by various kinds of evidence, including a court document that refers to the estate of the son who succeeded him. 3 During the 1960s, this mansion was still standing and still inhabited at which time I was able to visit it. The mansion consisted of three stories. The ground floor was constructed of cut stone. The upper two stories were half-timbered. According to its residents, the mansion was the "government" (hiikiimet), a term that is now applied to the building that houses the district official, judges, and bureaucrats in the town of Of. I was told that the ground floor was not used as a stable for the household animals as would have been the case in other ordinary houses. There were two large hearths there, each about three meters across, where large servings of food could have been prepared. Another place on the ground floor, it was said, was used as a jail for the confinement of fugitives. Other areas in the first upper floor were said to have served as an accounting room, a hospital, a place of worship (mescit), and a salon for receiving guests. There were also numerous bedrooms and storage rooms. The south side of the mansion featured a massive covering, a kind of movable wall, which could be raised with pulleys and ropes, converting the back of the house into an open-air veranda that overlooked the surrounding countryside. The salon, which could be reached from this veranda, was outfitted with cupboards, doors, posts, and ceilings of carved wood-panels. It also featured a stone conical fireplace inscribed with floral designs as well as the date 1822/1237. Presumably this furnishing would not have been put in place until the overall structure had been more or less finished. Pierre Dupré, French Consul in Trabzon, reports the following events over the course of several months. In 1816, Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu, Chief Ayan of Rize, responded to the threats of Suleyman Pasha Hazinedaroglu by leading the aghas of the eastern province of Trabzon in a revolt against this provincial governor. The aghas of Of and Surmene are specifically named as the supporters of Tuzcuoglu. When Suleyman Pasha at last gained the upper hand over the rebel aghas in early 1817, he set siege to the Tuzcuoglu residence in Rize. Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu managed to avoid capture and became a fugitive. Reaching the district of Of, the local aghas gave him their protection, refusing to surrender him to the governor for seven months. After Suleyman Pasha ordered a military invasion and occupation of the district of Of, the aghas there revealed where Tuzcuoglu was hiding. As he was being surrounded by government troops, Tuzcuoglu attempted to escape, but he fell from his horse, was taken prisoner, and beheaded on the spot. See MAE, CCCT Bk 2, No. 20, May 1816- No 25 July 1816; No. 26, Aug. 1816; No. 27, Sept. 1816; No. 32, Nov. 1816; No. 41, Feb. 1817; No. 43 June 1817; No. 47, July 1817; No. 49, July 1817; No. 50, Aug. 1817. 2

When a name is followed by another name in brackets, the first is the old name (oftentimes of Pontic Greek origin) and the second is the new name (usually of Turkish organ) adopted. 3 Umur (1956: 80-81, No. 89). See the comment on this document in a later footnote.

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Ismail Agha would not have begun to construct this very large mansion until after he had risen to prominence. This suggests he had been a chief notable of the eastern segment of Of for sometime by 1822. An official document of the court in Trabzon indirectly indicates that Ismail Agha was the chief notable in the lower eastern valley-system sometime around 1825/1241.1 An individual, Omer (,-avus (Tophane-i amire gavu§larindan), originally of Konu [Giilderen] village won a judgment against the sons of Ismail Agha in 1843/1259, accusing their father of having illegally seized lands and vines in Konu village eighteen years previously. Ismail Agha was likely to have been responsible for this village as part of his government assignment (agalik or ayanlik), since one of his sons (Memi§ Agha Muradoglu) became responsible for it when he succeeded him. 2 If Ismail Agha had been appointed chief notable, he would have been officially subject to the authority of the district governor ( m i l t e s e l l i m ) of Of. Before the close of the period of decentralization, however, he might have enjoyed broader discretionary powers as a "valley-lord" (derebey). The court case therefore simultaneously points to such powers of ismail Agha but also the eclipse of these powers during the time of his son, Memi§ Agha Muradoglu, when it was possible for subjects to seek restitution in the courts. By the preceding review of evidence, oral traditions, consular reports, and official documents, it is likely that Ismail Agha Muradoglu was appointed to the district of Of before Siileyman Pasha Hazinedaroglu ceased to be the provincial governor in 1818. On the other hand, it is not likely that Ismail Agha had been appointed before Siileyman Pasha first became provincial governor in 1811, since he would have been only twenty-three years old at that time. By this reckoning, one can estimate that Ismail Agha probably rose to prominence during the governorship of Siileyman Pasha (1811-1818). Whenever and however Ismail Agha came to his position, he would not have been an agha like most of the other aghas in the district of Of at this time. He was a newcomer among the local elites and so did not yet represent a family line, did not enjoy the support of a large family grouping, and had not developed a social network. This is consistent with his comparative "invisibility" in the historical record of this period. Ismail Agha held sway over one of the most fertile and populated segments of the coastal region east of Trabzon and resided very near to the entry point of a major overland route 1 Hasan Umur (1956: 72-73, No. 75, 1843/1259). In the summary of the court case, Omer Qavug claimed to have legally purchased the land from Ismail Agha three years before the latter seized it from him, that is, 1823/1239. 2 In the Muradoglu document dated Aug. 14 1834/1250, the village in question is among thirtythree villages assigned to Memig Agha.

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from the coast to the highlands. And yet, the name of his family line, unlike the names of others, such as the Cansizoglu and Selimoglu family lines, is not mentioned in earlier Ottoman official documents referring to Of and entirely absent from British and French consular reports. This could be because he was not counted among the local elites with large followings who were inclined to challenge the government. If Ismail Agha Muradoglu had indeed been appointed during the governorship of Siileyman Pasha (as appears to have been the case), he would have probably been a protege of the latter, since he was not one of the local elites with a large following. It is indeed difficult to detect any clear sign that Ismail Agha was involved in the first Tuzcuoglu revolt (1814-17). 1 Suleyman Pa§a eventually dispatched many thousands of troops to the district of Of, apprehended and beheaded the Rizeli, then resettled those aghas who had most stubbornly supported the Rizeli's cause (Gologlu 1975: 148). But ismail Agha remains untouched and even prospered in the midst of these disasters. As we have seen, he began construction on his great mansion even in the midst of the several rebellions taking place between 1814 and 1822 as indicated by the date on the hearth of his salon. The contemporary oral tradition itself may provide indirect evidence that Ismail Agha was close to the government by the following suppositions. Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu may have asked Ismail Agha for his protection during the winter of 1816-1817 precisely because the latter had a close relationship with Suleyman Pa§a. Ismail Agha Muradoglu refused to provide him protection at the moment he learned that an official ferman had been issued, allowing the execution. This step, which set him apart from other notables and aghas in the district of Of, would be consistent with a closer tie to the provincial government.

Memi§ Agha

Muradoglu

Some years later, as the period of decentralization came to a close, Memig Agha Muradoglu, successor to his father, also enjoyed some special favor with the provincial government, at least by comparison with many of the other aghas of Rize, Of, and Surmene. During the last Tuzcuoglu rebellion of 1832-1834 (led by the sons of the Memi§ Agha Tuzcuoglu), Osman Pasha Hazinedaroglu sent large numbers of troops into Surmene

1

He is not mentioned in Bilgin (1990: 282-91), Aktepe (1951-52: 21-33), or MAE CCCT Bk 2.

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(1832) and later into Of (1834). 1 Many of the aghas were punished and their mansions burned. On the other hand, Memi§ A g h a Muradoglu remained relatively unscathed. While the mansion of his father, still alive at that time, was spared the torches and cannons of the Pasha's troops, he was himself able to build his own formidable, stone-cut mansion. Unlike his father's residence, Mem is Agha.sited his own mansion very near the coast in Balek [Kiyicik] village. This location suggests that it was built at a time of relative governmental security. I will return to this issue below. According to official documents, Memi§ A g h a Muradoglu was officially recognized as an agha no later than March, 1834, when the Tuzcuoglu rebellion was in full swing, and then officially appointed as a chief notable in August, 1834, when the rebellion had been definitively suppressed. 2 The first of these two documents is strong evidence for the case that the Memi§ Agha was close to the provincial government. It calls on aghas friendly to the government for assistance in putting down the revolt, warns them not to believe the lies being spread by the rebels, and promises them generous rewards for their support. 3 The second of the two documents would appear to be that very reward. As chief notable, Memi§ Agha is given responsibility for thirty-three villages in the lower eastern valley-system of the district of Of, the very same area over which his father had held sway. 4 Memi§ Agha enjoyed a long tenure as an officially appointed agha in the lower eastern valley-system of the district. He was still serving during the years 1846 and 1847. 5 Unlike his father, Memi§ Agha Muradoglu had come of age in the district of Of and was a member of a family line that was growing in numbers. He was therefore in a position to consolidate his position as one of the local elites in the district of Of. He could assemble a substantial number 1 Fontanier (1834: Chap. 23); PRO FO 524/2 p. 19, May 1832, report by Brant; PRO FO 524/1, p. 23, Aug. 1832, report by Brant; Bilgin (1990: 299, 303); and Gologlu (1975: 162). 2 if t h e dates (b. 1788/1202, d. 1840/1255) on the refurbished tombstone of Ismail Agha Muradoglu are correct, he became an agha and ayan at a young age, perhaps his late twenties, and then died at a young age, perhaps his late forties. By the same measure, Memi§ Agha Muradoglu, his son, also became agha and ayan at a young age and died at an young age. 3

Muradoglu document dated March 25 1834/1249 Muradoglu document dated Aug. 14 1834/1250. A Muradoglu document, dated Oct. 25 1834/1250, calls on Memi§ Agha to effect an arrest of a fugitive. 5 Other Ottoman documents, addressed to Memis Agha Muradoglu (dated Sept. 24 1846/1262; March 16 1847/1263; April 15 1847/1263; and April 21 1847/1263) confirm that Memi§ Agha was assigned an agalik in the district of Of from Sept. 1846, to April 1847. These documents refer to the power of Mcmi§ Agha to collect taxes and assemble conscripts. Two of them (dated March 16 1847 and April 21 1847) refer to his responsibility for two widely separated villages, Kolenli [Kiyiboyu], which is near the coast, and Konuhorum [Yayvanoba], which is much further inland.

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of local followers, and he could insinuate himself into social networks of the eastern districts. So Memi§ Agha, in comparison with his father, Ismail Agha, was probably somewhat less of a protégé of state officials and somewhat more of a leading individual with a large following. On the other hand, the central government was more assertive during the time of Memis Agha than it had formerly been during the time of Ismail Agha. Osman Pasha had curtailed the prerogatives of the aghas by the later 1830s, so that the son would have been under closer supervision and inspection by state officials than the father. Memi§ Agha was therefore under pressure to submit himself to the provincial government to a far greater degree than the local elites during the period of decentralization. For example, Osman Pasha had imposed extraordinary taxes on the Oflus as punishment for their support of the rebels once he had suppressed the last Tuzcuoglu rebellion of 1832-1834. 1 In 1843, Abdullah Pasha, his brother and successor, refused to rescind these taxes. 2 Local elites, like Memi§ Agha, were not only having to forward taxes, which previously was not always the case, they had to raise a more substantial proportion of local wealth for the benefit of the central government. Even more tellingly, as we have seen, an individual in the year 1842 had won a judgment against the sons of Ismail Agha Muradoglu, among them, Memi§ Agha. This court case alone (it is not known if the judgment was actually enforced) speaks volumes about the new circumstances of local elites.

Other Leading Individuals of the Muradoglu Family Line I do not have any direct information about the leading individuals of the Muradoglu family line who succeeded Memi§ Agha; however, the existence of other mansions of the family line give us some indication of their changing relationship with the provincial government. As we have seen, Ismail Agha built the first mansion of his family line (circa 1822) in the interior, and Memi§ Agha built his own mansion near the shoreline after succeeding his father (circa 1834). When I resided in Of during the 1960s, two other mansions, ostensibly of nineteenth century origin, were situated in the vicinity of the residence of Memi§ Agha in Balek [Kiyicik] village. One of these two mansions was attributed to Ahmet Agha Muradoglu, supposedly the son and successor of Memi§ Agha (d. 1859/1275). In all likelihood, it would * It is not certain that the punitive taxes applied to all the villagers of Of. It is possible that the taxes may have been applied only to those sections of the district that openly supported Mem\§ Agha Tuzcuoglu. 2 Hasan Umur (1951), No. 77, 1843/1259. Representatives from Of appeal to the governor to lower their taxes, and the governor refuses their request, citing their participation in the revolt against Osman Pasha.

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have been built no earlier than 1847 (since official documents confirm that Memi§ Agha was still serving at that time) and no later than 1864/1280 (when a tombstone confirms the death of Ahmet Agha). The other of these two mansions was attributed to Siileyman Agha Muradoglu, supposedly the son and successor of Ahmet Agha. The four mansions indicate that four generations of the Muradoglu family line served as chief notable (or the reformed equivalent) in the lower eastern valley-system of Of. By inference, this means that Ahmet Agha would have risen to the position of ayan and agha (or their reformed equivalents) and built a new coastal mansion no sooner than the very year in which the regulations of the Reordering (Tanzimat) were belatedly applied to the old province of Trabzon (1847). 1 How long Ahmet Agha remained in a position of authority and exactly how his authority was defined is not known to me, but he may have held a position of official or non-official prominence until the year of his death (1864). After this, he may himself been succeeded by Siileyman Agha whose birth and death date are unknown to me. In any event, it appears very likely that there were aghas and mansions of the Muradoglu family line in the lower eastern valley-system from the 1810s to the 1860s at a minimum. In this respect, the founding and growth of the Muradoglu patronymic group were largely the artifacts of the period of imperial modernization rather than the period of decentralization. The designs and styles of the Muradoglu mansions point to the evolving relationship of local elites and provincial officials during the early period of imperial modernization. Ismail Agha's mansion (the first) was very much a structure of the period of decentralization. In this respect, its exceptional size, massive hearths, open veranda, and sweeping vistas, bring to mind the imperial Palace in Istanbul. Ismail Agha viewed the countryside of the Baltaci Valley much as the Ottoman Sultan looked upon the Golden Horn and Bosporus Straits. 2 The mansion, like the Palace, is the residence of a sovereign. From his residence, the sovereign surveys the lands and peoples subject to his rule. Even though he was an outsider, Ismail Agha would have had household staff and armed supporters. His great mansion was attended to announce and confirm this fact. Sometime after the close of the period of decentralization, Ismail Agha's great mansion was misinterpreted retrospectively. Its imperial style was assumed to have been the work of an ambitious valley-lord who had set 1 PRO FO 195 261, Jan. 29 1846. Consul Stevens anticipates application of the Reordering in Trabzon on the occasion of the succession of Halil Pasha to the governorship. Bilgin dates the application of the Tanzimat in the province of Trabzon to 1847 (1990: 164). 2 Cf. Meeker (2002: Chap. 4).

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out to consolidate his local position and defy the provincial government. But if this had been the case, why did Osman Pasha fail to order its destruction? A contemporary oral tradition has been composed to address this problem. Osman Pasha is said to have visited the district of Of sometime after his troops had succeeded in suppressing the last Tuzcuoglu rebellion. This would have presumably been sometime during the latter part of 1834. The contemporary oral tradition was recorded by Hasan Umur, a local historian of the district of Of: Following the pacification, Osman Pasha came up as far as Kalant [Kóycegiz] village in the Baltaci Valley. Upon seeing from there the great mansion that ismail Agha Muradoglu had built, he demanded angrily, "What is that!" (Since these kind of large buildings were considered the work of usurpers and oppressors, he had ordered that they be destroyed). Memi§ Agha Muradoglu replied, "My Pasha, this building has been set up by some kind of fool; at the moment, there is nothing within but hooting owls." This remark calmed the nerves of the Pasha, and so the building was saved. (Umur 1951: 24). The story correctly identifies Memi§ Agha, not Ismail Agha, as the person who would have received Osman Pasha during his putative tour of the eastern valley-system. As we have seen from an official document, the son had indeed succeeded to the place of the father. Otherwise, the story is obviously fabulous. It is not credible that the great mansion was either built or preserved without the knowledge of the provincial governor. The great mansion remained standing because first Ismail Agha, and then later Memi§ Agha, had supported the provincial government more than many of the other local elites of the district of Of. They were obliged to do so because they did not have as strong a local base in the district of Of as other aghas, such as those of the Cansizoglu and the Selimoglu family lines. 1 By way of contrast with Ismail Agha's great mansion, the three later mansions, attributed to Memi§ Agha, Ahmet Agha, and Süleyman Agha, confirm a further change in the relationship of the local elites to provincial state officials, and progressively so. The coastal mansions, unlike their 1 The leading individuals of the Selimoglu and Cansizoglu family lines, respectively, appear in oral tradition as the two most prominent aghas of the district of Of during the period of decentralization. They were said to be the chiefs of the "5" and "25" parties, respectively. These numbers probably refer to military regiments, see Meeker (2002). Oral tradition suggests that the leading individuals of the Muradoglu replaced the Cansizoglu as the leader of the "25" party after the close of the period of decentralization. The oral traditions are more or less consistent with the French and British consular reports. With the successful pacification of the district by Osman Pasha during the 1834, Cafer Agha Cansizoglu, leading individual of his family line, became a fugitive in the mountains while Ómer Agha Selimoglu made his peace with the provincial government. See MAE CCCT Bk 3, No. 11, Jan. 1831, Fontanier; PRO FO 195/101, Sep. 12 1837, Suter; Gologlu (1975: 163); and Bilgin (1990: 303).

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predecessor, are not associated by contemporary oral traditions with the period of decentralization. So there is no story that explains why they were spared the torch and cannon. On the contrary, the exposed coastal location of these mansions indicates that they were built at a time of increasing governmental security and centralization. The earlier of the two, probably constructed a few years before or after 1840, is a still formidable stone structure with a hint of fortifications. For example, it has embrasures (mazgal) which are set in such a way as to protect its entrances. The other mansion, probably constructed sometime after 1847 but before 1864, is a half-timbered structure, with corners outflanking its entrances but no visible embrasures. The third residence was presumably less solidly built since it collapsed into ruins some years ago. So the succession of residences seem to reflect a gradual change in the position of their occupants who would have been increasingly subject to governmental regulation by provincial officials. But here there is a kind of paradox. The successors of Ismail Agha, founder of the Muradoglu family line, were increasingly subject to the controls and inspections of the centralized government with each successive generation. On the other hand, they were also surrounded by more and more agnates, had more and more relatives, and were more and more ensconced in district social networks. The aghas of the Muradoglu family line were therefore more and more like other local elites with large followings even as local elites with large followings were more and more integrated within centralized provincial government. In other words, the processes of "westernization" and "ottomanization" of state and society were going forward hand in hand.

Karl Koch Meets Ismail Agha Karl Koch, a German botanist, ethnographer, and explorer, may have encountered Memi§ Agha Muradoglu during a visit to the district of Of in 1844. 1 In any case, his account of his brief stay is virtually unique as a firsthand description of the district of Of before the belated application of the Reordering (Tanzimat) in the province of Trabzon. Sailing westward, Koch's party made brief stops along the coast between Batum and Trabzon. In each place, Koch made inquiries about and was received by leading individuals of the old family lines. In his account, he describes them as "valley-lords" 1 Koch travels east from Trabzon in 1843 or 1844 (Koch 1846). He then visits Of on his return from Redut-Kaleh traveling west in 1844 (Koch 1855: 65-114).

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(Thalherren) of the eastern province and compares them to the lords and knights of medieval Germania. At the time, the British and French consuls in the provincial capital believed that Osman Pasha Hazinedaroglu had suppressed the local elites of the eastern coastal districts altogether during the year of 1834. In contrast, Koch claims that the eastern province was still ruled by valley-lords and only nominally under the control of the provincial governor. 1 The truth lay somewhere between these two extreme views. Many of the leading individuals of family lines served as ayans and aghas appointed by the provincial governor with defined responsibilities for groups of villages. As they had done during the period of decentralization, they still collected taxes, assembled conscripts, and arrested fugitives, but these activities were more than even circumscribed by centralized bureaucratic regulations. Koch's party put to shore somewhere along the eastern coast of the district of Of not far from an important local river, the Kalapotamos [Iyidere]. After landing their boat, Koch's party reached the residence of a man whom he describes as the valley-lord of the eastern district of Of and to whom he accords the title of district governor (miiteseUim). This man may well have been Memi§ Agha Muradoglu. At the time and place in question, he would have been the most likely person to leave the (false) impression that he was lord and governor of Of. Koch initially refers to the residence of his host as a "house" (Haus) but then later as a "castle" (Burg). He describes this structure as situated on a pleasantly elevated spot (lag auf einer freundlichen Anhdhe) and featuring stairs leading to a kind of balcony (eine Treppe fuhrte von aussen auf einer Art Balkon). These remarks do not fit the location or appearance of Memi§ Agha's stone-cut mansion on the coastal flatlands, but they are more or less consistent with Ismail Agha's hilltop mansion, although not obviously so. Perhaps Memi§ Agha was living in his deceased father's mansion during the warmer months to escape malaria-bearing mosquitoes near the shoreline. 2 Or perhaps Memi§ Agha was living in a now non-existent summer residence

f Koch specifically mentions Gonye, Atine, Hems in, and Rize, as well as the route up the Iyidere to Ispir, counting from 12 to 15 valley-lords in all this area. 2 At the time of the death of Memi§ Agha Muradoglu in 1859/1275, the settlement of his estate indicates he had a 1/7 share in the great mansion in Qalek [Siraaga?] village (Umur 1956: 8081, No. 89). Most of the remaining 6/7 share may have been held by his siblings. His father is said to have had six sons. He may also have had some number of daughters although married daughters did not always inherit land or houses from their fathers in this district.

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situated on the rise in the land just a few hundred meters back f r o m the shoreline. 1 Here is a translation of that portion of Koch's account that describes the behavior of his host and the inhabitants of the districts: The house of the Miitesellim was situated on a pleasantly elevated spot, a stairway led from the outside to a kind of balcony, from which one arrived inside the dwelling. The owner sat here, with a beautiful hunting falcon on his hand. When he saw the strangers, he rose and welcomed us, at the same time asking what he could do for us. Upon our answer that we were traveling Firengi [western Europeans], coming from Redut-Kaleh, a town of the Uruss (Russians), and were going to the much praised Trebizond, he clapped his hands as a sign to his servants that the should prepare a meal and supply us with food and drink. In the meantime he led us into an airy, fairly large room, invited us to take a seat on the Diwan, and had a cup of coffee brought to us by the Kahvedji, that is, the servant having no other duties than always having coffee ready. We drank the black, very bitter unsweetened drink and tried to engage in conversation in order to learn something about the inland parts of the mountains. In the meantime the small cups were taken away and we were offered long pipes. All the surroundings, the architecture of the houses and balconies, the falcon and various other things, reminded us of our knights of the Middle Ages. When we recalled that the knights of the Pontic Mountains made war upon each other and that only the harsh Abdullah Pasha [Here, Koch seems to confuse Osman Pasha Hazinedaroglu with his brother and successor, Abdullah Pasha] in Trabzon was able to impose some restraint on these internal battles, so indeed, the resemblance was even greater. We had also encountered minstrels earlier in our travels, so that all the elements of the knightly legends which depict the ancient times of our fatherland was once again vividly brought to mind. 2 In all the mountains, the land of Of is the most feared and avoided because of brigandage. Earlier in our journey, even as far away as Batoum, its inhabitants had been described to us as wild and gruesome men who remained on the lowest rung of human culture. It is extraordinary that in the course of our journeys in the Orient it happened to us several times that the 1 If Koch visited the great mansion, he would have been obliged to travel seven kilometers inland, but it is an easy walk. If he did so, he would have most likely passed the stone-cut mansion near the shoreline that is attributed to Memig Agha Muradoglu. He does not mention it but it may not have yet been built. ^ Koch (1855: 110). Koch's account of minstrels along the eastern coast seems confused. Before reaching Of, he is entertained by a zither-playing singer at the house of Selim Bey in Hopa (1855: 100-103); however, he describes Selim Bey as a cultured man who has been exiled there from Istanbul. This suggests that the entertainment on this occasion was in the fashion of the Ottoman court tradition rather than representative of the folk traditions of the Lazi-speakers. Koch further scrambles this incident by identifying the zither-playing singer with wandering minstrels that he had encountered among both Christian and Muslim Georgians in the Caucasus. In any case, he is not entertained with singers in the district of Of at all but misidentifies his experiences there with other occasions during his trip.

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worse the portrayal of the inhabitants of a region, and the more they had a reputation for brigandage, the better we found our reception to be when we succeeded in reaching them. Just such areas, which are little or not at all visited, are on the average more prosperous. This seeming contradiction can be explained to some degree. An area in such ill repute is [of course] skirted by all and seldom or not at all visited. Even the Turkish officials, who are supposed to collect tribute or taxes, resist going there, especially if they have already once found a bad reception there. This is exactly the reason why the inhabitants, because of their resulting independence, are able to cultivate the ground in such a way as to get a higher return. Furthermore they are not pressed or in all possible ways fleeced, as is otherwise the case. In the same way it is not necessary for them fearfully to hide their products, so that the rapacious officials don't find out about it. Furthermore, they don't hesitate about showing their feelings of superiority to their weaker neighbors, by raiding both them, as well as travelers. As much as such robbers are to be feared from outside their area, so, in contrast, do they show themselves to be hospitable toward strangers inside their area. The lord of Of was in no way a friend of the Pasha of Trabzon. He had, it is true, agreed to a tribute, but he in no way tolerated any Turk [Ottoman] coming into his lands and told us this quite frankly. We learned from him that his lands consisted mainly of the valleys of the Kalapotamos — again a Greek name which has survived — and extended from approximately 4 hours in width and 8 to 10 hours upward to the heights of the mountains. He probably concealed the number of inhabitants for fear that Abdullah Pasha might discover it and consequently demand a higher tribute. [My wife's translation, my comments in brackets]. 1 Koch's account is not reliable in some of its details. He exaggerates the political autonomy of the local elites. H e c o n f u s e s Abdullah Pasha with Osman Pasha. He mistakenly believes his host is the district governor

1

Koch (1855: 110-111).

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(mutesellim).1

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He is not aware of the differences between the Georgian or Laz

speaking local elites further east in Adjaria and the Turkish speaking local elites further west in Rize, Of, and Siirmene. Still, as one of the very few outsiders to have ignored official advice to stay clear of the district of Of, his remarks on the relative prosperity and civility of its otherwise fearsome inhabitants are interesting, and by my own combination of experience and intuition, altogether accurate. Let us suppose f o r a moment that Koch is indeed describing an encounter with Mcmis Agha Muradoglu. If this is the case, what does his account tell us about this leading individual of a new family line in the district of Of? First of all, Memi§ Agha announces that he is not the friend of Abdullah Pasha. This does not refute the possibility that Abdullah Pasha's father (Siileyman Pasha) had appointed Memi§ Agha's father appointed (Ismail Agha) several decades earlier. Rather, it would be consistent with a gradual transformation. The father had been closer to the government since he was a new arrival and not part of local social networks. The son was now further from the government since he was surrounded by a group of relatives, friends, and allies. Finally, Memi§ Agha may have claimed to rule his domain without interference from the provincial government but the facts of the matter may have been otherwise.

1 Two of the earlier Muradoglu documents in ray possession, dated March 25 1834/1249 and Aug. 14 1834/1250, call on Memig Agha to conform to the orders of the district governor (mutesellim) of Of. So he was not district governor at this time. After 1834 (if not before), the individuals appointed district governor in the district of Of appear to have been outsiders rather than insiders to the district of Of. Consider the following two entries of French and British consuls: 1) MAE CCCT Bk 4, No. 15, June 1837, Consul Outrey reports, "Osman Pasha names Ismail Agha [no family line mentioned] District Governor of Siirmene and Of. The supporters of the former District Governor, now disgraced, revolted against ismail Agha by opening fire on his boat (galère à dix paires de rames) forcing him to go aboard a Turkish commercial brig and await new orders. Osman Pasha is taking steps to deal with this situation." This particular Ismail Agha is not ismail Agha Muradoglu, father of Memi§ Agha. Appointed District Governor, this Ismail Agha leaves Trabzon by boat and is greeted with a revolt upon his arrival in the districts. At this time, when Memi§ Agha is the ayan and agha of thirty-three villages, Osman Pasha was still obliged to back up his district officials with troops in the districts of Of and Siirmene. 2) PRO FO 195 173, F. Stevens, June 17 1842, "As soon as the death of Osman Pasha was known in that district, the inhabitants [of the district of Of] surrounded the residence of the Mutselim who was named by the late Pasha, and threatened to put him to death. He however succeeded in effecting his escape. Abdullah Bey immediately took measures to [seize] the leaders of the disorder and several individuals have been brought hither for punishment. Abdullah Bey proposes to send a small force to Oph under the command of Uzunoglu Mehmet Agha to insure future tranquility." Again the District Governor is not one of the local elites, but a representative of the governor who had come from Trabzon. Again, these events take place at a time when Memi§ Agha was the ayan and agha of thirty-three villages.

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The Muradoglu Family Line During the Late Empire and the Early Republic The evidence that I have considered suggests that leading individuals of the Muradoglu family line held official appointments and assignments well into the period of the Reordering, perhaps until the later 1860s. I do not have any further evidence of the status of the family line until the first years of the twentieth century. During the Young Turk Revolution (1908), an advisor to the provincial governor was dispatched to the district of Of to deal with local disturbances. Many years later, Faik Hiirgit Gtinday, the advisor, included an account of his efforts to restore calm in a memoir. 1 He describes how leading individuals of large family groupings led factions who controlled and corrupted the local government. He describes these leading individuals as aghas who maintained salons in the town of Of and had the backing of large numbers of men in arms. He refers to the Selimoglu aghas of the Solakli River valley as the most powerful faction and to the Muradoglu aghas from the Baltaci River valley as the second most powerful faction. He also names a specific individual from each of these family lines who were part of an "association" that illegally extracted fees from local businessmen. He tells us that civil servants were also members of this association, including the district officer and census officer. Gtinday's recollections confirm that leading individuals of the Muradoglu family continued to play a dominant social and political role in the district even after the period when they were formally appointed as aghas by the provincial government. They also suggest that there were more than one leading individual of the family line by 1908, and so, that the family line was steadily growing in numbers. During my residence in the district of Of during the 1960s, the Muradoglu family line was reported to number some seven hundred households that included some four thousand individuals. Leading individuals were still playing an important role in the social and political affairs of the district of Of, especially in the lower valley of the Baltaci River.

Conclusion The example of the Muradoglu illustrates the problem of understanding processes of imperial and national modernization. The leading individuals of 1

Giinday (1960). See my translation and discussion of his account in Meeker (2002: 278-82).

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the Muradoglu family line readily adapted older tactics of political authority and social solidarity to new forms of governmental legitimacy and technology. In this respect, the history of the family line indicates both processes of change and continuity. Over the course of 150 years, its leading individual came to prominence by relying on some combination of governmental support, family solidarity, and social networks but by different techniques and under different conditions. Governmental institutions were always changing. Marriage practices and reproduction rates were always changing. Social relations were always changing. And yet, the state orientation of local social formations, a feature of the older Ottoman system, remained the same. Historiographies of the later Empire and early Republic based on concepts of modernization and development oftentimes overlook the role of a state oriented society in provincial Turkey and so miss the way in which these older social devices became an essential part of the new nation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscripts Muradoglu Documents. Official Ottoman documents in the possession of family members, and available in photocopy. No. 1 dated March 25 1834/1249, No. 2 Aug. 14 1834/1250, No. 3 Oct. 25 1834/1250, No. 4 Sept. 24 1846/1262, No. 5 March 16 1847/1263, No. 6 April 15 1847/1263, No. 7 April 21 1847/1263. Archives MAE CCCT: Republic of France. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance Consulaire et Commerciale. Turquie, Trébizonde. Books 1-13: 1800-1901. BPMT: Bulletin Politique et Militaire de Trébizonde. An official characterization of some of these consular reports. MAE CPCT: Republic of France. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance Politique des Consuls. Turquie, Trébizonde. Books 1-6. 1848-1895. PRO FO: United Kingdom. Public Record Office. Foreign Office. Consultation of consular reports classed under 195/ 4, 101, 173, 225, 812, 1238, 1329, 1381, 1420, 1521, 2135; 524/ 1, 2; and 526/ 8. Publications Aktepe, Munir. 1951-52. "Tuzcuogullari isyani." Tarih Dergisi. Istanbul Universitesi Edibiyat Fakultesi. 5-6: 21-52. Bilgin, Mehmet. 1990. Surmene. Istanbul: Siirmene Belediyesi Kiiltur Yayinlari. Gologlu, Mahmut. 1975. Trabzon Tarihi: Fetihten Kurtulu$a Kadar. Ankara: Kalite Matbaasi.

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Günday, A. Faik Hiirgit. 1960. Hayat ve Hatiralarim. N.p.: Qelikcilt Matbaasi. tnalcik, Halil. 1977. "Centralization and Decentralization in the Ottoman Empire." In Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, edited by Thomas Naff and Roger Owen, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Koch, Karl. 1846. Wanderungen im Orient während der Jahre 1843 und 1844, Volume 2: Reise im Pontischen Gebirge und Türkischen Armenien. Weimar: Druck u. Verlag des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs. Koch, Karl. 1855. "Reise von Redut-Kaleh nach Trebizond." In Die Kaukasischen Länder und Armenien, edited by K. Koch. Leipzig: C.B. Lorck. pp. 65-114. Meeker, Michael E. 2002. A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley: University of California. Meeker, Michael E. 2001. "Greeks Who Are Muslims: Counter-Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Trabzon." Conference Contribution: Anthropology, Archaeology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia or The Life and Times of F.W. Hasluck (1878-1920) University of Wales, Gregynog, 3rd6th November 2001. Urnur, Hasan. 1949. OfveOfMuharebeleri. Istanbul: Giiven Basimevi. Umur, Hasan. 1951. OfTarihi: Vesikalar ve Fermanlar. Istanbul: Güven Basimevi.

MICHAEL DEFFNER'S "FIVE WEEKS AMONG THE ABJURERS OF OF," TRANSLATED BY ALLAN TAYLOR1

[In 1844, Karl Koch observed that the Oflus had a fearsome reputation outside the district but proved to be congenial and welcoming hosts. 2 Several decades after his visit, officials in Trabzon still regarded the Oflus as a dangerous people and advised travelers to stay clear of them. Michael Deffner's report of a research trip to Of made by a young Greek man from Trabzon can be read as an example of an outsider's view of the district and its people. When the young man made his trip, the Ottomans were in open conflict with the Russians, the result of which would be the loss of substantial territory in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The crisis of international relations partly explains why the district officier of Of jumped so quickly to the conclusion that the schoolteacher might be a Russian spy. MEM]

Three weeks after that I was staying in Trebizond [Trabzon] during harvest time of last year (1876) when one afternoon there came to my house a young man who introduced himself as a teacher. He told me that he was a native of Trebizond, that he had finished the local school, which goes as far as the third year of high school [gymnasium (A.T.)], and that after that he had gone to the Of, where he taught in the school of a village called Zesino [Boliimlii], inhabited by a goodly number of Christians.3 He added that since he had learned that I had come there in order to study the dialects of the Pontus, he had decided to help me, since he knew not only the dialect of his own region, but also that of the Of, very different from the former; he indicated that during his stay there he had collected some songs and proverbs and that he had begun the outline of a small dictionary. As he said this he pulled from his pocket some notebooks from which he read some verses to me. I realized then that the young man was well acquainted with studies of that kind and that he was sufficiently versed in ancient Greek; moreover, his face inspired confidence in me. I told him to come back the next day, since he could be of use to me as a teacher during the period of my stay in Trebizond. I 1 [Allen Taylor is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder. All texts in brackets are additions by Meeker, except those indicated by (A.T.), which are additions by Allen Taylor). Turkish terms in brackets that follow Greek terms refer to contemporary terms for villages and rivers. Most of these are of recent origin.] ^ See Meeker, "The Muradoglu Family Line in the District of Of," this volume. 3 |The village of Zesino is located in the lower segment of the western valley of the old district of Of.]

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spent the rest of the afternoon very pleased with my lucky find, while in the evening I was moved to drink for the same reason a few more glasses of wine with my dear friend, Napoleon Betsou, the Greek consul, with whom I was staying. We Germans truly have the weakness of giving an outlet to our joy in drinking beer or wine. From then on the young teacher spent afternoons and evenings with me. Above all I wanted to learn from him the dialect of the Graecophone Moslems of the Of. That district lies about 14 hours east of Trebizond and stretches southward about the same distance from the coast into the interior. Two rivers, separated from each other by ranges of mountains which peter out toward the coast, run through it in parallel courses. The westernmost of these bears since time immemorial the name Ophis, because of its serpentine course, from which the entire district is called Ophis; the easternmost [river (A.T.)] is called Baltatsi-dere [Baltaci-dere] (Greek: 'Cold River' [Turk. Axman's River]). On the banks of these two rivers as far as the slopes of the mountains are the many villages of the Ophli people, of which over half [of the villages] have always borne Greek names. Of these, those on the river Of, which is the longer, come to 45, while those on the Cold River come to about 20. In them dwell form 10 to 20 thousand originally Greek families, of which however only 150 have remained Christian until today, scattered through 8 different villages. According to tradition, which is closely guarded by them, the Greeks who came here ages ago as immigrants from the different Greek cities of the southern shore of the Black Sea settled on the banks of the two rivers. It is not surprising that they have kept identical traditions, of which one hears from their own mouths the story of Odysseus against the Cyclops, exactly as Homer tells it. The villagers of the Of embraced Islam 180 years after the fall of Trebizond, while those of Cold River were persuaded much sooner immediately after the city's capture. Consequently those living on the river have preserved not only the Greek language, but also both Greek and Islamic customs and ways, while those on the other river became entirely Turkish, losing utterly all traces of their Greek heritage. How I had wanted to learn the Greek dialect of the abjurers of the Of from the young man from Trebizond, at least to the extent necessary for understanding so that I would be able, living alone with them, to continue my

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studies of their language. A few weeks of training gave me a good feel for the matter. Therefore I made plans to undertake a trip to that place with the teacher, accompanied because of the circumstances by country police. I went then to the governor of Trebizond, Ahmet Rasim Pasha, an excellent and well educated man who has left an esteemed memory in Epeirus, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction from the Grand Vizier, that I planned to go to the Of and spend some weeks there; I begged him to give me letters of introduction to the kaymakam [district officer] of that region and some guards for protection. The governor answered me in Greek — he had learned the language from his mother, and had been educated in a high school [on the island (A.T.)] of Syros — that he greatly regretted hindering me f r o m traveling. He spoke to me as follows, "The unrest in the district," he told me, "is so great, that it is impossible for you to go there; and the guards, if I should give you four or even six of them, would be more likely to harm than to help you. However, if you really do want to put yourself in danger, I can do nothing else than to tell you plainly that I take no responsibility. You will help me with your decision, but I shall try as hard as I can to free you from the hands of those people. Stay here. Language is not a thing which is transformed or corrupted form one year to another. Work here as long as you can, and come back next year, and, if the unrest is quieted, you will be able to undertake your trip to the interior." The consuls also dissuaded me, so that I gave up, finally, my great desire to obtain permission for a tip to Of. It is beautiful and glorious to die for the sake of science, but it is not bad to live for it too, especially when one has a wife and two children. Perhaps many would then say, "What a shame! He died so young. He was still able to make a contribution to science." But the majority would say, "Who advised him to go over there? W h y didn't he consult people more knowledgeable than himself?" But the real reason for my decision not to go to the Of was that I had seen some hundreds of new conscripts f r o m that and neighboring districts coming into Trebizond, madly waving their scimitars in the air, dancing about, and shouting, "Death to Infidels!" In all of this, my teacher, seeing with what regrets I put off my trip, made a compromise proposal concerning the question. He spoke to me as follows, "Since you cannot go, I will go for both of us. I lived there two years; the people know me, not only the Christians of Zesino, but also the Moslems of that village, whose children were sent to my school. If I go there I will run no risk. I know f r o m our association up to now what you are looking for."

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I accepted the proposal, but before I let him set out, I instructed him for two weeks as to what it was necessary to collect over there. Then, having given him enough money and all of the supplies needed for such a tip, I sent him by ship to Solakle [Solakli], the port and market center of the region, whose name (sol-akle = the left stream) shows that it lies on the right bank of the Of river. 1 As traveling companion he had the new teacher of Zesino, whom the Christian inhabitants of Zesino had called from Trebizond for 2,000 kuru§ or 500 drachmas per year. The two young men completed the four hour trip on horseback from the coast to the place of their destination. They had loaded on to the horses all of the trip supplies of my teacher and the possessions of the new teacher. The Moslems that they met on the road, however, seemed to consider this great luxury and as arrogance, so to speak, of the infidels, for those who met them on the road showed this by their fierce looks; one of them indeed said, "Miserable Infidels, that magnificence of your won't last much longer." In Zesino our teacher spent there three weeks; there he got along very well with the Christians, and he busied himself with his work in complete tranquility. Apparently his courage grew there, for he decided to go eight hours' distance into the interior to a village called Saracho [Uzungol], since he had learned that the Greek dialect of the Moslems inhabiting this and neighboring villages differed greatly from those of the closest villages. 2 He put on the local costume and set off, having as companions a Christian from Zesino and a Mohammedan from Saracho to whom he was introduced on the way by the Christian. During all of his short stay there, from this Moslem and some of his relatives, whom he paid by the day for their sessions with him at which they recited stories, he was able to make out the idioms and the differences of that dialect and to collect stories and proverbs, etc. But from the very second day the other Moslems of Saracho began to instill fear in their kind coreligionist and to threaten him. An agha himself incited them, saying, "This man, who came to write down our manner of speaking, is a Russian spy. Remember what I say. He measured the extent and the depth of our lake, (for there is one there, formed by the Of river) in order to report on it to the Moskov-giaour (Russians)." And other Moslems, surrounding the house of the hospitable one sheltering the teacher, shouted, "Get rid of that man, or otherwise both of you will catch it!" 1 The town of Of now includes a Solakh quarter (mahalle). The town is located on the right bank near the mouth of the Of River. 2 [The village of Saracho (Turk. §erah) is located in the upper western valley of the old district of Of. It is now a tourism and vacation center in the new district of Qaykara.]

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Seeing these things, the hypothetical spy wisely decided to leave Saracho and its lake, rather than partake of its waters by force. Therefore that evening he asked his host to accompany him back to Zesino, giving him a sufficient amount of money. They got ready, then early in the morning of the fourth day, and the teacher having persuaded the Moslem, they reached there around noon. In the meantime a letter of mine had reached there in which I asked him, if he were able to do so, to survey and describe the ruins of ancient Greek cities lying along Cold River. These ruins lie at the tip of a forest of pines, beeches, and different thick shrubs, bearing the name since time immemorial of Antzimacho, from which I have concluded, that there must have been some city there called Antimacheia, which, after its destruction, gave its name to the surrounding county, and particularly to the forest. But the teacher was not able to carry out my proposal, for in those very ruins a renowned robber had hidden with his band, on the very day that the teacher returned to Zesino, and the news had arrived that that dreadful chieftain had killed the officer who had been sent with thirty soldiers in his pursuit. Because of this event, the teacher did not undertake the inspection of the ruins, but after four weeks stay he went to Solakle, in order to sail to Trebizond. At that point, however, matters began to sour. No sooner did he arrive at Solakle than he was arrested by police officials, accompanied by other insolent Moslems; they seized his traveling bag which contained (more than anything else) notebooks and printed glossaries, which I had given to him as aids. They took him to the courthouse, which is also the residence of the kaymakam. When the latter saw him, he set upon him in the most violent way, as savagely as a wolf on a lamb. He shouted, "Yes, yes, 1 know you. You are an evil person. People are right when they say that you are running around the district spying, that you make sketches and diagrams and sell them to the Russians so that you can earn money." Saying these and other like things rather than calming the tigers around him, he aroused them more, threatening, "I'll throw you into prison, and after that I will send you in irons to Constantinople, and they will kick you out of the country." Saying these things it did not occur to him in his rage that the teacher was not a peasant [reaya (A.H.)]. After that he began to examine the notebooks and books with a knowing expression on his face. Now there was among the things a scrap of paper wrapped around a plant giving off a pleasant smell, and when the

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enraged official saw it, he uttered the following memorable words, "Ah! This is really old. That you would really sell for a lot!" An only too characteristic phrase, showing the extent of mental development of this employee of the Sublime Porte. In the meantime one of the Turks surrounding him noticed the teacher was carrying a revolver, and he reported it to the kaymakam. This provoked a new outburst. Taking it, he said, "Infidel, how do you dare to carry a pistol? Don't you know that only we have that right! Straight to jail!" he said, beside himself with rage. But a Greek, Mr. Kantartzides, until recently the interpreter of the Greek consul in Trebizond, who was staying in that place at that time because of a Greek ship which had arrived in Solaklé three months since, saved the teacher from peril. Learning of the events he ran at once to the courthouse and explained the matter to the kaymakam, and posted a bond for him. The tyrant of Of then called a council over this marvelous happening and composed a memorable report on it, which he sent the next day to the governor of Trebizond. 1 The report began as follows, "A certain man, unidentified, claiming to operate under employ of a certain Prussian and the Greek consul, etc., etc." The teacher, finding himself in the street, wanted to proceed directly to the port to hire a boat for Trebizond; but it was necessary to wait for the decision of the Pasha. So he went to a hotel, but he was as incarcerated there as in the prison, not daring to appear in the street because of the great excitement in the whole town. He therefore wrote me a letter and sent it by ship to Trebizond. The letter concluded, "I beg of you with all my heart to go together with the consul to the Pasha, and that you represent to him the position in which I find myself, which is truly desperate. My life is not secure for even an instant." I went immediately to the Pasha, who dictated a letter in my presence to the kaymakam, in which the latter was commanded to free John and to send his books and notebooks under seal to Trebizond. One day had to pass, however, before the letter could reach the Of, until the orders it contained could be carried out, even more time had to pass. Then another letter arrived, even more desperate than the first. I simply sent that one 1 [When I asked for the Pontic Greek term for "agha" in the district of C'aykara in 1967, the reply was tyrannos. About this time, the head of the municipal council would probably have been a member of the Selimoglu family line and so an individual with the title of agha. See Meeker, ' T h e Muradoglu Family Line in the District of Of," this volume. Here, however, the phrase "tyrant of O f ' appear to refer to the chief district officer who headed his own district council. Locally he would have been accorded the title bey. He was almost certainly not a local person.]

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in my own envelope by the doorman of the Greek consul to the Pasha. The latter replied that I should be at ease, that the teacher would arrive soon, but I awaited his release in vain for two more days. Then a soldier brought me a scrap of paper with handwriting I recognized, on which was written, "I have been here in the prison of Trebizond for several hours. Go to the Pasha and try to put an end, once and for all, to my torment. Ionnis Parcharides." The following course of events had happened. The kaymakam of Of, entirely persuaded that this man was dangerous, a Russian spy at the very least, sent him by boat, escorted by a guard who brought the books, notebooks, and the scented paper to the courthouse of Trebizond. When the boat reached Daphnounta (the port of Trebizond) the teacher wanted to go to his residence, but a loyal subordinate of the kaymakam arrested him as they were disembarking and brought him to the palace. Since the Pasha was away (it was the second day of the bayram), he locked him in the jail pending his release. I then hurriedly informed the Pasha of this, who saw to his release. A few minutes before the teacher reached the Greek consulate, his old mother, breathless with running, came and appealed tearfully to the consul and to me to ransom her son. Then suddenly the door opened and we were witnesses of the indescribable joy of that woman. Now that good young man is staying here with me.

SECTION THREE WRITERS AND WRITING OF THE ISLAMIC RESURGENCE

THE NEW MUSLIM INTELLECTUALS IN THE REPUBLIC OFTURKEY

Introduction During the last decade, a new kind of columinst and essayist, the 'Muslim intellectual' (miislUman aydin) or 'Islamist intellectual' (islamci aydin) has attracted a considerable audience among Turkish believers. The term 'Islamist intellectual' is preferred by observers, while 'Muslim intellectual' is preferred by these writers themselves. For the latter, the important point is that they write as believers, not that they write from an Islamic perspective. They therefore see themselves as Muslim rather than Islamist intellectuals. I have used the term Muslim intellectual in line with an anthropological preference for categories of self-reference. However, it should also be noted that some of the writers designated as Muslim intellectuals accept this label only reluctantly, since they see it as tinged with a Westernist outlook. 1 The Muslim intellectual is a critic of republican political and cultural institutions who calls for re-Islamization of the way of life of believers in Turkey. While he is more or less indebted to a century of Islamist criticism of Westernization, the new Muslim intellectual is very much the product of the post-1950 secular Turkish Republic. This background differentiates him from earlier Islamist thinkers in Turkey. The kind of language he uses, the literary works he cites or analyses, the stance he takes toward Westernism and secularism, together with less tangible features of his discourse, are unprecedented, even though much of his thinking falls more or less squarely within what might be called a tradition of Islamist resistance and opposition. In general, the new Muslim intellectual in Turkey is always a writer who has published columns in newspapers, short articles in journals, or books consisting of collections of short essays. His prose is contemporary Turkish. His writings arre critical and reflective. He addresses an audience whose social and educational background is similar to his own. He often appeals to personal experiences which his readers are likely to have shared, and he often attempts *See the note on the Turkish terms for "intellectual" below.

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to reach conclusions which serve as an orientation for personal thought and action. He may prononce on political events past or present or insist on the principle of political activism, but he does not generally speak for specific tactics, groupings, or parties. He sets himself apart from earlier Islamist thinkers by rejecting the question of how an accommodation is to be reached between Islam and the West. He rejects specifically the problem to which earlier writers devoted to much attention: how Western science and technology are to be integrated within an Islamic society. He argues instead that science and technology, as practised in the West, contradict and are therefore incompatible with Islam. More importantly, the Muslim intellectual is sensitive to any attempt to justify Islamic principles from the standpoint of a Western perspective. This, he argues, was the basic mistake of Islamist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Out of a feeling of lowliness before the power of the West, he contends, they lost touch with the distinctiveness of an Islamic outlook as they attempted to develop Islamic versions of Western concepts and institutions. From the blurbs on the jackets of their books, the following social portrait of the Muslim intellectual emerges. He is somewhere between thirty and fifty years old and lives in Istanbul or Ankara. 1 He was born to a family of provincial townsmen or officials and attended provincial primary and middle schools. Later, after coming to Ankara or Istanbul, he completed one or more programmes of secular higher education in Turkish universities. Following this, he became a permanent resident of Ankara or Istanbul. He knows one or more European or Middle Eastern languages other than Turkish. He has had a serious, longstanding, interest in Western literature, philosophy, or social history, and there are more references in his work to Western writers and Western scholarship than to Islamic authorities or sources, although the latter are not infrequently mentioned and are sometimes discussed in detail. One suspects that this portrait also applies to the reading audience of the Muslim intellectual, save that the ages of readers extend downwards beyond thirty years, and their residences are not restricted to the metropolitan centres of Turkey.

'There are many Islamist women writers in Turkey today. I have not scanned the journals and newspapers to determine if any of them takes the stance of the men who are identified in this chapter as Muslim intellectuals. None were brought to my attention by male writers or readers. Similarities and differences of stance between Islamist women and men writers might be a very revealing indication of the experience of believers in contemporary Turkey.

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Any further generalization about the writings or backgrounds of the various individuals known as Muslim intellectuals is more difficult: 1 some occasionally address questions with a direct bearing on doctrinal belief and practice and make frequent references to Koran and Hadith, but others rarely do so; some usually write as columnists in newspapers or publish short articles in journals, others also publish book-length studies; some have attended religious schools or institutes, others have not; some have spent one or more years in Europe or America, others have not. Like most writers in Turkey these days, they must make their living in a variety of ways other than by writing alone: one has had appointments at a fairly high level of the government. Another teaches in a private school; another is active in editing and publishing; another holds an academic appointment; another works for a private company. The very term 'Muslim intellectual' indicates how these writers have adopted a new style and stance that has no exact precedent in the Republic. In recent decades, the term 'intellectual' (aydm) has implied a secular writer. The intellectual was perhaps a humanist, a rationalist, a liberal, a Marxist, a nationalist, but he was certainly not an Islamist. For Turkish secularists, then, it must seem a contradiction in terms that an individual who sees himself as debunking humanism, rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism should be called 'intellectual'. But in fact, the term 'Muslim intellectual' is appropriate, for he writes in a conceptual and semantic field that has considerable overlap with his secular counterparts. The cultural problems he addresses, the historical incidents he cites, the stereotypes of Turkish society to which he refers, fall within the boundaries of the political and cultural discourse of the urban, educated Turkish élite of the 1960s and 1970s. This fact explains in part why Muslim intellectuals have tended to become spokesmen for the Islamic opposition in public fora and in the mass media. They appear on panels discussing political and cultural issues ranging from art, literature and drama to politics, economy and communications, and they are interviewed or quoted by reporters of secular newspapers and weeklies. When such a reporter wants to know 'What are the Muslims thinking?' he ¡Here are the names that have come to my attention: Ali Buia?, Rasim Ózdenòren and ìsmet Òzel (the three writers considered in this chapter), Ilhan Kutluer, Ersin Giirdogan, Abdurrahman Dilipak and Hiiseyin Hatemi. Most of these writers are mentioned by Binnaz Toprak in an article which places them in the context of the role of religion in Turkish party politics: 'Islamic intellectuals of the 1980s in Turkey', Current Turkish Thought, 62, Istanbul, Redhouse Yaymevi, 1987. This item is not a periodical. T h e Redhouse Press irregularly publishes little booklets on aspects of Turkish life. This is one of them.

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naturally consults the Muslim intellectual who is able to represent the Muslim viewpoint, not only in language that the secularist can understand but in a way that speaks directly, even if more or less antagonistically, to him. (I would not like to leave the impression, however, that educated readers of a secularist persuasion in Turkey are generally familiar with the thinking of those individuals who have come to be known as Muslim intellectuals. Name and face recognition is one thing; actually reading their columns, articles and books is quite another. M y impression is that exceedingly few readers of a secularist persuasion either know what the Muslim intellectuals are writing or understand their different orientations.) Neither the neighbourhood imam or hoca, who may be in closer contact with the ordinary believer, nor the believing religious scholar, who may have a more perfect mastery of Islamic tradition, can play such a role, but the Muslim intellectual is more or less comfortably in his element in the public fora and mass media of Istanbul. In effect, the Muslim intellectual is a believer who is now, perhaps more than ever before in the history of the Republic, responding to the same problems and experiences as the secular intellectual. While the Muslim intellectual is quite conscious of an overlap, he is also careful to make a distinction between himself and secular intellectuals who are in a sense his principal antagonists. He sees secular intellectuals as symptomatic of the ills of Western society, in that they base their reflections on appeals to science and reason alone, without any reference to revelation. The Latinate term 'intellectual', he points out, implies purely abstract mental capacities, as opposed to sentiments and convictions. But purely abstract mental capacities are likely to fall into vicious error if they are left unframed by religious conviction. They therefore cannot attain the truth. The Muslim intellectual accepts science and reason but only so long as their practice is guided by fear of God (takva) and the recognition of God's oneness (tevhid). This means he unequivocally rejects humanism and secularism, the cultural ambience which results f r o m appeals to reason and science as sources of absolute truth. Accordingly, the Muslim intellectual rarely if ever refers to himself by the Turkish cognate entelektiiel, but instead by the term aydin, another modern neologism whose connotation of 'enlightened' is more

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ambigously linked with the West. 1 Beyond this, the Muslim intellectual also has a sense of how his thinking has been directly influenced by contemporary conditions. He sees himself as living in a Westernized, humanistic, and secularized society. This means that he is not in the same position as the late-nineteenth-century Islamist thinker whose experience was framed by a more or less Islamic society. Thus the concerns and interests of the Muslim intellectual naturally overlap with those of his antagonists, secular intellectuals, in a way that was less typical of earlier Islamists. As a consequence, the Muslim intellectual is often in an uncomfortable position and required to perform a difficult balancing act. While he must engage secularist intellectuals on their own ground to develop a strong case for the Muslim point of view, he risks losing contact with the ordinary Muslim as he traffics in the concepts and problems of his secular counterparts. Often the ordinary Muslim, who is inclined to seal himself off from any alien social environment, sees the Muslim intellectual as similar to, rather than different from, his secular antagonist. Among more conservative believers in Turkey, the Muslim intellectual may well be denounced as 'modernist', 'radical', 'leftist', 'Khumaini-ist', or even 'Shi'ite'.

The Approach Before I review the writings of three Muslim intellectuals, however, I must say something about my approach to their work. Since the authors, I discuss have all written a thousand pages or more of essays, it will not be possible to give exhaustive accounts of their thinking. I shall try instead to locate their writing within the framework of contemporary Turkish social and cultural life. To do this, I shall argue that Muslim intellectuals are responding to the 'constructedness' of social relations and personal identity in contemporary Turkish experience.

For some Muslim intellectuals, aydin is just as unacceptable a term of self-reference as entelektiiel. The modern Turkish term aydm is the successor to the later Ottoman term miinevver. The latter, an Arabic cognate, signifies 'enlightened' and points at one and the same time to the traditional Islamic concept of divine enlightenment as well as to the humanistic values of the Western Enlightenment. As such, the term mttnevver is an instance of the way late Ottoman thinkers represented Western concepts in the guise of Islamic concepts. Such practices are attacked by Muslim intellectuals as having facilitated the breakdown of Islamic ideals and values during the nineteenth century.

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To explain what I mean by this will require a brief digression into a sociological distinction, that between society as Gemeinschaft and society as Gesellschaft. Society as Gemeinschaft designates a community which consists of face-to-face relationships with known persons, many of whom are related by blood or marriage. The members of the community accept a common moral convention which is more or less unquestioned, and their experience of social relations involves many occasions on which the individual is able to identify strongly with social others. Society as Gesellschaft designates, in contrast, organizations, associations and arrangements which are based on formal institutions, legal statuses, or passing fashion. It includes not only government, bureaucracy, army and school, but also corporations, clubs and partnerships. Society as Gesellschaft is based on devised contracts, legal fictions and popular fancies. It is not experienced as morally given but as subject to revision, revocation, or transition. So society as Gemeinschaft is experienced as enduring and constraining while society as Gesellschaft, which has a more or less temporary and provisional dimension, is experienced as 'constructed'. The latter is made, and can be unmade or remade. This sociological distinction was first developed to describe social changes in nineteenth-century Europe, but it has also been used to describe similar changes that have been taking place in contemporary Third World societies. For example, social change in post-1950 Turkey, as in nineteenthcentury Europe, has generally brought with it a shift in emphasis from society as Gemeinschaft to society as Gesellschaft. Not so very long ago, the identity of most individuals in Turkey was largely determined by the social positions and social constructions of their parents and the community and region in which they were born and grew up. The individual had a family and a place of origin which more or less told you everything about him. After 1950, this kind of personal identity began to be eroded by many factors. Some of the most important of these were the move of many people from provincial to metropolitan areas, the steady growth of large urban conglomerations, and the increasing numbers of people educated beyond primary and middle schools. In particular, young people who moved from provincial to metropolitan areas and acquired some higher education increasingly found themselves in a constructed social environment that had less definite normative foundations than they were accustomed to. In contrast to their experience of a given personal identity in a moral community, they were faced with choosing who to be, with whom to associate, what to think, even with choosing how to dress, what to eat, where to go and what to see,

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all matters that were more or less socially given in Anatolian villages and towns. Consequently, these young people were pressured to work out for themselves a new form of personal identity, one that required the ideologization of experience. As they left behind their provincial identity, which was not chosen but determined as a fait accompli, mental maps of social reality became all the more important to them. And because they were moving from a given to a constructed social environment, these mental maps tended to take the form of ideologies, often only tenuously related to social realities past and present. While the ideologization of identity and relationships was the means for them to regain a sense of grounded experience, this process did not simply replace their traditional social moorings. Often their experience of society as Gesellschaft brought with it an intimation of a void, a sense that identities and relationships were artificial and abstract and hence meaningless and inconsequential. While this feature of contemporary Turkish experience has its direct counterparts in Europe and America, the recent Turkish case has at least three special features. First, an unusual degree of social mobility in Turkey in recent decades has led to a fairly impressive erosion of the personal ties and roots of individuals at many levels of Turkish society. This has not been a matter of rural-urban migration alone, but of a broad top-to-bottom transformation of Turkish society which has changed the very character of villages, towns and cities as social conglomerations in a relatively short period. Secondly, Turkish social traditions, somewhat more than European and much more than American social traditions, could be said to be designed to minimize the sense of 'constructedness' of social relations and personal identity. In Turkey, the importance of group loyalty and group norm resolutely casts the fictional or contractual dimensions of social relations and personal identity into the shadows. The result is a stronger tradition of Gemeinschaft than of Gesellschaft. Thus, experience of the emptiness of 'constructed' society has been a more emphatic feature of social change in Turkey. The third factor, however, sets the Turkish case apart altogether from both Europe and America. In contemporary Turkey, the culture of Gesellschaft is secular and Western while the culture of Gemeinschaft is Islamic and Eastern. This observation is only basically accurate rather than absolutely true; nevertheless, it pinpoints a distinctive factor in the Turkish social equation. As large numbers of individuals have moved from the environment of Gemeinschaft to that of Gesellschaft in Turkey, they not only face the loss of social moorings and the need to ideologize their identity and relationships, they are also faced with a cultural divide.

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The sociological distinction just outlined has a close kinship with the analysis of Muslim intellectuals themselves. They also make the case that the Western and secular Gesellschaft in contemporary Turkey is artificial and abstract in comparison with the Islamic Gemeinschaft. Furthermore, in my interviews with them, they have acknowledged, two explicitly and one implicitly, that their own careers involved the problem of identity associated with a shift from Islamic Gemeinschaft to Western Gesellschaft. At the same time, they are very much at odds with the theory of modernization implicit in this distinction. Social scientists have usually seen the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft as a process of social evolution, and have attempted to understand this process in Third World countries by comparison with nineteenth-century Europe or America. In contrast, the Muslim intellectuals — and here I find the case they make a very forceful one — see Islamic civilization as basically different from Western civilization. In the former they see the contractual and fictional side of society (Gesellschaft) to be more perfectly rooted in moral conventions and moral solidarities (Gemeinschaft). For the Muslim intellectuals, Islam is a social discourse which represents an alternative to the Western and secular Gesellschaft in contemporary Turkey, one which would be free of the emptiness and injustice that they attribute to modern society. The notion of an alternative social discourse is perhapss a unique feature of the Muslim intellectuals as writers in contemporary Turkey. They resemble in this respect the Westernists and secularists of the late Ottoman and early republican period, who were intent on the introduction not simply of new ideas but of new paradigms of thinking and behaving. To confirm this novelty on the part of the Muslim intellectuals, compare their writings with those of two recent republican ideologists who see Islam as an important factor in Turkish identity : Alpaslan Tiirke§ and Nurettin Topgu.1 In the work of the latter two, one finds an arid discussion of Turkish identity in terms of general concepts such as 'culture', 'nation', 'religion', 'tradition', rather than a search for a distinctive outlook and attitude through discursive or graphic practice. I shall now turn to a brief review of three of the most prolific of the Muslim intellectuals and attempt to make an assessment of their different writing projects, all of which aim at the mobilization of Islamic discourse as an effective address of contemporary Turkish experience. ^ A l p a r s l a n Turkeg, Milliyetgiligimizin Esaslari, Istanbul, D e r g a h Y a y i n l a n , 1975. Nurettin Topgu, Temel Goriisler. Istanbul, Dergah Y a y i n l a n , 1978.

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ALI BUI A C Biography Ali Bui ay was born in 1951 in the southeastern town of Mardin, where he attended primary and middle school. Later he moved to Istanbul, where he graduated from the Istanbul Higher Islamic Institute (1975) and from the Sociology section of Istanbul University's Department of Literature (1980). Of the three writers, he is the only one with a religious education. He studied for seven years in a medrese, probably before he left Mardin for Istanbul. He knows Arabic and is familiar with the classical Islamic sources. From the middle 1970s, Bula? has been active as a writer and editor in connection with different journals, newspapers and publishing houses. He has published articles in various magazines, including Hareket, Dugiince, Girisim, ilim ve Sanat, and others, and has written columns in various newspapers, including Yeni Devir, Milli Gazete, and Zaman. He is also the author of a number of books, which discuss various aspects of contemporary Islam from a historical or sociological point of view. His first book, Concepts and Orders of Our Times, which came out in the later 1970s, 1 can be seen as a kind of manifesto of the Muslim intellectuals. Having sold over 40,000 copies, it must be one of the most, if not in the most successful of their publications — sales of between 10,000 and 15,000 would normally be considered a thumping success for any book, secular or religious. He has since published two other books which address contemporary issues and others which discuss aspects of the Koran and Hadith. 2 The two different types of books reflect his interest in developing an Islamic intellectual position while also addressing matters of religious belief and practice that are often the more immediate concern of ordinary Muslims.

Analysis The appeal to Turkish youth. Ali Bulag's writings are a good place to begin. His work illustrates how the Muslim intellectual is responding directly to the ideologization of identity among Turkish youth during the 1960s and Kavramlar ve Duzenler, Istanbul, Pinar Matbaacihk, ca. 1978, rev. 1987. islam Dunyasinda Dii$iince Sorunlari, Istanbul, tnsan Yayinlari, 1985; islam Dunyasinda Toplumsal Degi$me, Istanbul, Nehir Yayinlari, 1987. Kur'an-i Kerim'in Turkge Anlami, Istanbul, Pmar Yayinlari, 1983. Kur'an ve SUnnet Uzerinde, Istanbul, Beyan Yayinlari, 1985. 2

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1970s. Bula§ tells us that he conceived his first and most successful book, Concepts and Orders of Our Times, during the early years of his higher education, that is, sometime in the first part of the 1970s, when he was a little over twenty years old. This was a very difficult time for any serious young man concerned with what was taking place in Turkish society. Bulag addresses himself to the problems that he and others were facing. On the back cover of the most recent edition he writes: The book is written for the young generations who feel the need for understanding the cultural and social environment in which they live, especially for those students who are in the course of their lycee and higher studies, and for researching and investigating intellectuals. Its aim is to provide them with true, realistic and healthy information regarding the socio-economic orders which make up the modern world, and concepts which underline them and give them life, and in doing so to offer criticism and open up alternative avenues of research.

In the preface, the author tells us that the book was taught to the senior class of three different lycees attended by children of three different social segments, and their opinions regarding the book were sought out. Taking into account the viewpoint, criticisms and proposals of almost 300 students, the book was rewritten and at each printing reviewed once again. *

In the book, Bui a? analyses what many Turkish youths held to be the only available political alternatives: capitalism, scientific socialism and fascism, each of which is seen as representing both a regime and an ideology. To understand these political alternatives, Bulag argues, it is necessary to understand the problem of class conflict in Western society. Class conflict is a social ill. In the West, it has its origin in the corrupt form of Christian spiritual authority; however, the cruelty and injustice associated with class were enormously intensified by the development of capitalism. In his later writings, Bulag presents the argument that capitalism itself has its origins in the Protestant reaction to the illegitimate spiritual authority of the Church. Revising the Weberian thesis here and there, he maintains that the Protestants spiritualized the attainment of wealth so that they might escape the authority of a corrupt priesthood. In turning to the accumulation of power and wealth as a cure to a spiritual ill, the Protestants multiplied rather than resolved the problems of a sick civilization. This argument has a distinct appeal for believers who are caught ^£agda§ Kavramlari ve Diizenler, p. 10.

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up in debate over modernist political ideologies, since it traces the latter to features of Christianity which have been the target of Muslim criticism since the time of Muhammad and his Companions. One of the by-products of the capitalist intensification of class cruelty was the launching of colonial ventures, the result of which was to propagate capitalism, as well as the social maladies it engenders, to all the world. As a consequence, class has become a focal problem of the modern age, one that is a concern of all peoples. Scientific socialism, as regime and ideology, emerged in the course of a search for a solution to the crisis of class conflict. Having failed as such, scientific socialism inevitably led to social problems even worse than those spawned by capitalism. Fascism, like scientific socialism, was also an attempt to find a solution to the crisis of class conflict. As regime and ideology it emerged in underdeveloped, capitalist societies as a reaction to the threat of scientific socialism. Because such societies were politically vulnerable and economically backward, fascism was even more pathological than either capitalism or scientific socialism. Thus capitalism, a highly expansive and exploitative system, gives rise to a vicious circle of political reactions and counter-reactions which do not alleviate but instead exacerbate the social ills from which they arise. The result is the worldwide demoralization of society: individuals have become dissolute, family life has disintegrated and women have been reduced to wagelabour. This moral degeneration is accompanied by a pathological form of foreign relations. Countries are ruthlessly pitted against one another ideologically, politically and economically. In the final sections of this book, Bula§ argues that Islam provides a means for coping with these contemporary conditions. He begins by refuting the secular stereotypes of Islam as a mediaeval religion that has been bypassed by modern life. Islam is not traditional, conservative or reactionary. It is a religion for all times and places which stands outside of history. Islam is itself not implicated in the vicious circles of Western political regimes and ideologies; it is the basis of a moral social order in which property rights are recognized but the rich become the willing guardians of the poor. The regeneration of the social order by a return to Islam will have the further benefit of resolving international tensions since these have their causes in internal conflicts within all the world's societies.

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To draw upon the resources of Islam to deal with contemporary problems, believers will have to do more than passively embrace Islamic beliefs and practices. They must also, Bulag explains, engage in a struggle which has an important mental dimension. This is where the work of the Muslim intellectual is of significance. Westernization has divided the community against itself and led to a war of ideas. The result is a vast array of false concepts which result in confusion among believers. Notions like civilization, democracy, art, secularism, socialism, morality, spirituality, holiness, conservatism, rightism, feudalism, feminism, nationalism, communalism, class, science, modernity, progress, nation, liberty, freedom, culture, tradition, backwardness, development and so on have all come from the West and are alien to an Islamic outlook. The Muslim intellectual will subject these concepts to systematic examination from an Islamic perspective. When this is done, believers will be able to arrive at a proper understanding of contemporary life and to work out Islamic remedies to contemporary problems. According to Bula?, this project was not accomplished by earlier Islamist thinkers who confronted the Western challenge. They were too often ready to incorporate Western principles and institutions into their thinking, giving them an Islamic veneer as they did so. In this way, they themselves contributed to the mental confusion which was part of Westernization, rather than enabling Muslims to resist the intrusion of foreign notions and attitudes. In Concepts and Orders of Our Time, it could be said, Islam becomes one more mental map in an urban society and mass culture, one more alternative that stands alongside free market, class struggle, or national essence ideologies. However, in drawing Islam itself into the net of constructed experience, Bulag intends to demonstrate that Islam leads the believer away from modernisms back to the truth and justice of an authentic community. The Muslim intellectual is, then, a new kind of believer who arises in response to the special challenges of contemporary life. His task is not to rework Islam so that it takes the form of yet one more modernist construction, but to show how its beliefs and practices remain a sufficent foundation for community in contemporary life. Secular intellectual, Muslim intellectual and Muslim scholar. In his second book, Intellectual Issues in the Islamic World, Bula§ shifts from the analysis of ideologies and regimes to a more reflexive stance. How does the contemporary believer understand his situation and communicate it to others? How is his thinking divided from Western science and philosophy? How is it joined with Islamic belief and practice? Though the answers to these questions are prefigured in his first book, they are articulately developed and provocatively illustrated in the second.

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Bulag begins by comparing Judaism, Christianity and Islam in order to show how the principles of the oneness of God ( t e v h i d ) and fear of God (takva) endow the Muslim with a perspective quite different from that of the Jew or Christian. This allows Bula? to draw a clear line between Muslim thought and that of its historical antagonists. In the second section of his study, he sketches how an intellectual crisis in the Islamic world followed upon the rise of the Western imperial powers. His account of the virtual collapse of Muslim thought in Turkey after the founding of the Republic is of special interest. During this period, he notes, Islam was sustained only on the level of ritual belief and practice, largely as a consequence of the efforts of provincial women who refused to countenance that their children should be raised as unbelievers. In the following section, Bula9 explains how the Muslim intellectual is participating in the revival of Muslim thought in contemporary Turkey. Here he compares the secular intellectual (entelektuel), the Muslim intellectual ( a y d i n ) and the Muslim scholar ( a l i m ) . Both the secular and the Muslim intellectual analyse history and society out of a concern with contemporary social ills; however the two are otherwise very different. The secular intellectual is inspired by the Western image of a Prometheus w h o challenges divine authority, makes man the measure of everything and rises above the common people as a superman. In contrast, the Muslim intellectual is guided by a belief in the oneness of God and fear of God as he considers contemporary problems. This is where the Muslim intellectual and the Muslim scholar resemble one another. The first seeks to apply lessons of history at the front lines of contemporary experience; the second keeps secure the foundations of Muslim belief and practice through the study of the Islamic sources. Bula? concludes his book with a case-study that exemplifies the kind of problems with which the Muslim intellectual is concerned. He discusses a family of 'progressive' and 'enlightened' concepts, such as modernism, atheism, civilization and humanism, in order to show how they are implicated in imperialism, itself a product of the ills of Western society. Because of the worldwide effects of Westernization, the mental confusion inspired by these concepts is not an affliction restricted to the Muslims, but one suffered by all the world's believing peoples, including Buddhists, Hindus and Confucians. He concludes that believers will be able to cope with contemporary problems because Islamic principles provide them with a clear insight into the true nature of contemporary life. Intellectual

Issues in the Islamic World illustrates how in the present

age the work of the Muslim intellectual complements the work of the Muslim scholar. While the Muslim intellectual looks primarily to contemporary life,

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the Muslim scholar looks primarily to the Koran, Hadith and Sharia. Working together, they will be able to harness contemporary life to right-thinking and right-acting. The special role and task of the Muslim intellectual, a thinker and writer who was not heretofore part of the Islamic community, is thereby conceived in terms of the project which inspired Concepts and Orders of our Time. The Muslim intellectual is responding to the peculiar challange of contemporary experience, a time when believers have been misled by all manner of modernist concepts and principles. The Muslim intellectual will serve to re-connect contemporary life with Islamic belief and practice, making possible a rebirth of the Islamic community. Bulag's third book, Social Change in the Islamic World, reveals his ability to tackle very different kinds of materials, proves his intution for appropriate polemical strategy, and offers a further poignant illustration of the character of his project. In this study, Bula? analyses cultural, political and economic changes in the later Ottoman Empire, a period which has recently become crucial in Turkish assessments of contemporary social and cultural life. In a prelude, he reminds his readers of the intellectual potential of Islamic civilization by evoking the ascendancy of Islam over Europe during the Middle Ages. He then engages in a lengthy analysis of the travails of the latter-day Ottoman Empire, aimed at demonstrating the inadequacy of Westernist solutions for an Islamic society. In his conclusion he expresses the hope that secular intellectuals will be moved by the historical truth of the Islamist analysis he offers, and looks to the time when all intellectuals might come together to understand Islamic, Ottoman and Turkish history. Once again, Bula$ is confident that the Muslim intellectual will be able to sweep away the confusions of modernist ideologies. Just as the Muslim intellectual should be able to aid believers to understand contemporary experience by means of Islamic beliefs and values, so too he should be able to unravel historical and social problems which meet the most exacting standards of secular intellectuals. From modernist ideologies to canonical belief and practice. Bulag's argument is an attractive one for Turkish youths caught up in, but troubled by, the constructedness of modern Turkish life. Foremost among these are educated, middle-class young people in cities who are children of conservative families with provincial backgrounds. Bulag is telling these individuals that an aspect of their background which sets them apart from the majority of their peers offers an appropriate, if not an ascendant, response to contemporary life. In this respect, the appeal of Bula§'s studies is similar to the appeal of the

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writings of other Muslim intellectuals. What sets him apart is the specific way in which he sees Islam as having a place in contemporary life. In each of his three major studies, he argues that the social injustices and cultural conflicts of the modern age have their origins in the West, where they are the inevitable consequence of a corrupt form of spiritual authority. If believers reexamine contemporary life from an Islamic perspective, they will be able to dispel the confusion that has accompanied Westernization and to understand how Islamic beliefs and values provide a firm foundation for a society free from the manifold ills of modernity. Judging from his writing alone, there seems to be a difficulty inherent in this stance. Even as he anticipates a restoration of Islamic community, Bulag writes as an inhabitant of twentieth-century urban society and mass culture. His subject matter is modernist ideologies and regimes, how they are all of a piece even though they are nonetheless in conflict with one another. To make the point that Islamic beliefs and values are the basis for putting right what has gone wrong in the modern age, he is obliged to draw Islam itself into the polemical terrain of these modernist ideologies. Accordingly, his books are similar in various ways to those written by secular intellectuals. They have the character of historical monographs. Their covers feature, provocative modernist representations. Their texts are equipped with footnotes, cited references, statistical summaries and bibliographical lists. Has Bulag underestimated the problem of modernity? Is a constructed personal identity as much the attribute of the believer as of the non-believer in the present day? If this is the case, is it not necessary for the believer to place more importance on how he will express himself than on how to escape from the condition of modernity itself? While I could not say how Bulag might respond to these questions were they directly put to him, a passage in his second study suggests that he has not yet thought through the issues they raise. In a discussion of tradition, culture and intellectuals, B ulac observes that a revival of artistic and literary activities is especially important for Third World peoples because of the way their colonial experiences have served to weaken their powers of imagination. However, when he considers whether believers should not begin to engage in graphic and literary experimentation, he insists that such endeavours should be postponed until concepts appropriate to contemporary life have been worked out by Muslim intellectuals. He defends this view by claiming that graphic and literary experimentation may lead believers away from reality into artificiality and abstraction, the main dangers of modern experience. Having stated a key problem — how is the

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contemporary Muslim to express himself? — Bulag turns away from it. He resumes his argument that the Muslim intellectual will aid believers to work their way out of modernity back to Islamic belief and practice. But if the Muslim intellectual must rely on discursive and graphic practices firmly rooted in the modern age, how is he ever to attain the Islamic community which makes these practices unnecessary? RASIM OZDENOREN Biography Rasim Ozdenoren was born in 1940 in the southeastern town of Mara§. He attended primary and middle school in Mara§, Malatya and Tunceli. During the 1960s he graduated from Istanbul University's Law Faculty and Journalism Institute. In 1967 he joined the State Planning Organization, and in 1970 he was sent to the United States where he completed a Master's Degree in Development Economics. From 1975 he served for three years as an advisor and inspector in the Ministry of Culture. Leaving state service, he worked for two years as a writer for the newspaper Yeni Devir. In 1980 he returned to the civil service once again, and he is now an assistant general secretary in the State Planning Organization. Ozdenoren has had a long-standing interest in literature, literary criticism and philosophy. He has been publishing articles on these topics since the early 1960s, usually in literary journals with an Islamist connection. As a writer, however, he is best known in Turkey for his fiction. He has published a novel and five volumes of short stories. 1 Two of his stories have been adapted for television and screened by TRT, and one of the adaptations won an international prize. Here, however, our interest is in his essays on Western culture and contemporary Islam. Ozdenoren has recently been focusing his attention on this topic, publishing seven volumes of essays in less than three years. Some of these have been well-received, selling between 15,000 and 20,000 copies. 2 He has also published a translation of Orwell's ^The novel is GUI Yelistiren Adam, Istanbul, Akabe Yayinlari, 1979. Hastalar ve Isiklar, Istanbul, publisher unknown, 1967, Qozulme, Istanbul, Akabe Yayinlari, 1973, Qok Sesli Bir Oltim, Ankara, publisher unknown, 1974, and Qarpilmi^lar, Ankara, publisher unknown, 1977, Denize Apian Kapilar, publisher unknown, 1983. 2 T h e volumes of essays, most of which appeared in either Yeni Devir or the literary journal Mavera, are iki Dunya, 1977, Muslumanca Dugunme Uzerinde Denemeler, Istanbul, Insan Yayinlari, 1985, Ya§adigimiz Gunler, Istanbul, Insan Yayinlari, 1985, Ruhun Malzemeleri, Istanbul, Risale, 1986, Yeniden tnanmak, Istanbul, Nehir Yayinlari, 1986, Yumurtayi Hangi Ucundan Kirmali, Istanbul, Akabe Yayinlari, 1987, Kafa Kari^tiran Kelimeler, Istanbul, Insan Yayinlari, 1987, Qapraz ili§kiler, Istanbul, Risale, 1987, and Muslumanca Ya§amak, Istanbul, Akabe Yayinlari, 1988.

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Animal Farm, written plays (at least one of which was adapted for television) and been closely associated with the literary journal Mavera. Analysis Cultural differences: West versus Islam. In his later essays Ozdenoren has been successful in analysing distinctive features of Western culture and explaining how they are at odds with Islamic principles. He brings to this project the skills of a good story-teller and an entertaining essayist. This enables him to discuss literary, philosophical and other cultural issues in a way that can be easily grasped. With equal facility he can draw a parable from T.S. Eliot's analysis of Hamlet, Bertrand Russell's attitudes towards piety, the relationship of automobiles to pedestrians in Istanbul and America, or draw contrasts in the designs of pitchers and bowls in the West and in Turkey. But there is also something more to his accomplishment than writing skill. For many years he has taken the question of cultural identity very seriously, not only in his writing but in his personal life. It must also be kept in mind that his most recent books were written at a time when he was able to take advantage of the trail-blazing efforts of other Muslim intellectualss, such as Ozel and Bula?. Some years ago, Ozdenoren published a collection of about sixty essays which had first appeared between 1962 and 1983. These essays, which are listed with the date of their original publication, exhibit an interesting evolution over this period. In his earliest pieces he is preoccupied with a feature of Western literature that he alleges to be absent from contemporary Turkish literature: this is an explicit concern with a spiritual dimension. Ozdenoren finds this dimension even in the work of Western authors who profess no religious convictions, but it is lacking, he maintains, in the fiction of modern Turkish authors. Fairly early, in the 1960s, he links this spiritual preoccupation of Western authors with their clear sense of cultural identity, a sense which he claims is missing from the work of the Turkish modernists. Later, after his trip to the United States in the early 1970s, he is able to articulate his perceptions of cultural difference with all the expertise of an academic sociologist or anthropologist. He begins to write persuasive essays about the character of Western culture in general, about differences in the cultural traditions of different Western countries and about the confusion of cultures in contemporary Turkey. When reading his work, I convinced myself

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that he must have had courses in the social sciences at some point during his education; but he tells me this is not the case. He describes instead a period of personal uncertainty in which he was struggling to understand his own confusion about his Islamic and his Turkish identity. This led him to examine critically seemingly insignificant incidents, such as newspaper headlines, street behaviours, family custom, and so on. This approach is very well exemplified by his recent book, At Which End is the Egg to be Broken?, in which he presents a model of Western culture and then, in a series of analyses of a wide range of Turkish and Western writers, illustrates how the problems of Western culture surface in their thinking. In the essays written in the later 1970s, Ozdenoren begins to address more specifically the way in which Western culture differs from Islam. In this respect he views Islam not as a compendium of dogmatic beliefs and practices, but as a religion which inspires in the believer an active attitude and outlook. 1 Later, in the early 1980s, he begins to stereotype Western culture as the antithesis of Islamic tradition, and his analyses of Western authors and works become more disapproving than approving. While he never ceases to write pieces illustrating how Muslims can learn from Western fiction and analysis, he is more inclined to uncover contradiction, exhaustion and dead-ends in Western literature and philosophy. The theme of suicide in Western literature, for example, has been one of his special interests. The striking feature of Ozdenoren's most recent work is his notion of reconstructing Islamic tradition in Turkey. Part of his efforts is clearly aimed at restoring the believer's pride and dignity in the face of the urban stereotype of him as backward, ignorant and irrational. References to a Muslim 'feeling of lowliness', which occur in the writings of most Muslim intellectuals, are especially prominent in his work — the concept of a Muslim or Turkish 'inferiority complex' (agagilik duygusu) is a time-honoured one dating back to the beginnings of Westernization during the nineteenth century. According to Ozdenoren, the project of renewing an Islamic outlook and attitude in social life cannot be accomplished by simple dogmatic assertions of Islamic belief and practice. When the Ottomans first turned to the West they did so uncritically, with the result that there was a confusion of Western culture and Islamic tradition. This confusion has to be sorted out and understood. Contemporary Turks have to know very clearly what is Western and what is Islamic if they are to rebuild Islamic society in Turkey.

^See the recent books Words Which Confuse Our Thinking (Kafa Kari§ttran Kelimeler, Istanbul, Insan Yayinlan, 1987) and Essays on Muslim Thought (MUslumanca Du^iinme Uzerinde Denemeler, Istanbul, Insan Yayinlan, 1985).

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differentiation of Western culture and Islamic tradition is based on the absence and presence of religious conviction. For the Muslim, 'fear of God' (takva) has a decisive effect on his thought and behaviour. At the same time, the distinctiveness of Western culture is derived from the absence of this essential Muslim attribute. In this respect, modern secular culture in the West is but the final outcome of an imperfect understanding of the relationship of God and man, one which dates back to the corruption of scripture by Saint Paul. Ózdenóren explicates numerous contrasts between Western culture and Islamic tradition by reference to 'fear of G o d ' . For example, science, rationality and philosophy all have an important place in Islamic tradition; however, religious conviction serves as a f r a m e within which they are developed. In the West, the absence of the frame, or its faulty formulation, means that science, rationality and philosophy all have pathological dimensions. They must always be shaped by a set of givens and are not methods which themselves lead to the truth. In Islam, revelation is given by God, but in the West man himself is the source of all values. In the West man is made the measure of all things: the result is madness and savagery. Rationality leads to absurdity. Philosophy strays into all kinds of formal intellectualisms and baseless fictions which have no intimate relationship with human experience. Science is worshipped as a source of knowledge. It is taught as dogma and ultimately leads to human destruction. Humanism is also a direct consequence of the absence of a 'fear of God'. The West is obsessed with the virtues of heroism, the extraordinary accomplishments of the Great Man. But humanistic virtue, which involves an extreme individualism, is wild and out of control. The result is the adulation of all kinds of cruel and barbaric behaviours and accomplishments. Ungoverned by fear of God, the development of human powers has led to imperialism, colonialism and slavery on a worldwide scale. Moreover, the internal contradictions of Western culture are a clear indication of its pathological development. There is an intimation of the absurdity of life and an obsession with suicide. An extreme cultural relativism in the West lies behind its progressive demoralization and decline. According to Ozdenoren, the contrast between Western culture and Islamic tradition can be seen on the gross level of differences between the histories of Western and Islamic societies. Western society is a scene of interclass and inter-ethnic conflicts of the worst kind, an extreme ethnocentrism

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which views other peoples as primitive and savage, the ruthless exploitation of weak peoples in distant lands, the destruction of the environment and the development through science of monstrous weapons and techniques that threaten the destruction of humankind. In a number of essays on Western writers, Ôzdenoren is able to show how intimation of the absurdity of life, the obsession with self-destruction, and blindness to religious sentiments and sensibility are characteristic of modern Western literature and philosophy. While Ôzdenoren provides many lively illustrations of how Western culture is at odds with Islamic tradition, this very project limits the extent to which he is able to develop a reflective and critical perspective on contemporary Turkey. The portrayal of Western culture as composed of fantasies and inventions, the attribution of all that is good to Islam and all that is bad to the West, the idealization of Islamic history and the vilification of Western history, are more or less prominent features of the writings of all Muslim intellectuals. However, Ôzdenôren's ultimate dependence on such stereotypes is especially significant. He is a writer who understands very well the complexity of cultural and historical differences, and yet he finds himself — especially in his recent work — in the grip of black and white stereotypes. Along with this, he is moving more and more to a conception of Islam in terms of Asri Saadet, the time of Muhammad and his Companions when an ideal Islamic society was realized. Thus there are signs that he is adopting a position in which a stereotype of the West signifies all that is bad in human experience, while an ideal of an Islamic Golden Age signifies all that is good. In so far as this is the case, he is not directly addressing the issue of how an Islamic outlook and attitude are to be brought to bear on contemporary Turkish experience. ÎSMET ÔZEL Biography Ismet Ôzel has born in 1944 in the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, the sixth child of a police official. He attended primary and middle school in Kastamonu, Çankin and Ankara, and he finished lycée in Çankiri. He studied for a period at the Political Science Faculty of Ankara University, and later graduated from the French Language and Literature Faculty of Hacettepe University. He speaks and reads both French and English, and is familiar with a wide variety of Western authors. Ôzel is identified with the 1960s generation of Turkish poets, a group that came to be recognized as

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unusually innovative and accomplished, and he is now considered to be one of Turkey's outstanding poets. He began to publish his poetry in a variety of journals when he was not yet twenty years old, and from the later 1960s, he was recognized as a prominent poet of a leftist persuasion. Later he began to turn to Islam. This shift is assumed by public opinion to have taken the form of a conversion from Marxism, but Ozel himself, who is reluctant to discuss this period in his life, minimizes the extent to which he changed his thinking. He hints that Islam had always been of some importance to him personally, even if it has become increasingly significant, and says that he has always remained concerned with the dignity and honour of the people and with finding practical solutions to their problems. In the 1970s, he says, he had begun to conclude that there was no solution, when his turn to Islam was accompanied by a renewal of hope. During the period f r o m 1977 to 1979 and from 1981 to 1982, Ozel wrote columns in the newspaper Yeni Devir, in which he explored and defended the possibility of a return to Islamic sources as a basis for coming to grips with contemporary problems. His first book of essays, Three Problems: Technique, Civilization, Alienation, is seen by some as a new departure in Islamist thought, and it very likely had an important influence on other writers such as Bula§ and Ozdenoren. In this book, Ozel sets aside the issue of how Western science and technology can be integrated with Islamic belief and practice. This is one important way he and other Muslim intellectuals differ from Islamist writers of the late Ottoman and early republican periods. He insists instead that the central problem of contemporary Muslims is the reconstitution of an Islamic way of life, an objective that begins with the individual reconstituting his personal thought and practice. When an Islamic way of life is achieved, he argues, Muslims will have no difficulty in developing theoretical and practical sciences that fulfil their needs. In recent years, half a dozen books consisting of collections of his daily newspaper columns have appeared, and he has also continued to write and publish poetry. 1 While his books are not as widely read as those of some other Muslim intellectuals — they sell between 10,000 and 15,000 copies ^Ozel's poetry has been published in the following volumes: Geceleyin Bir Ko^u (1966). Evet, isyan (1969), Cinayetler Kitabi (1975), Celladima Gultimserken (1984), publishers unknown, but see Erbain: Kirk Yihn §iirleri, Istanbul, Iklim Yayinlari, 1987, for collected poetry. Uc Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancila$ma, Istanbul, Dergah Yayinlari, 1978, §iir Okuma Kitabi (1980), Zor Zamanda Konu$mak, Istanbul, Risale, 1984, Ta§lan Yemek Yasak, Istanbul, Risale, 1985, Bakanlar ve Gorenler, Istanbul, Risale, 1985, Faydasiz Yazilar, Istanbul, Risale, 1986, irtica Elden Gidiyor!, Istanbul, Iklim Yaymlan, 1986, Surat Asmak Hakkimiz, Istanbul, Risale, 1987, Tehdit Degil, Teklif, Istanbul, Iklim Yayinlari 1987. More recently, he has published an extended autobiographical essay, Waldo Sen Neden Burada Degilsinl, Istanbul, Risale, 1988.

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— some authorities consider Ozel to be the most original Islamist thinker of the republican period and anticipate that his views will have a lasting influence. Furthermore, he is the one Muslim intellectual who is taken seriously by believers and secularists alike. It is even likely that a sizeable number of his readers are of a secular, if not a leftist, orientation.

Analysis

The reaction to modernist ideology. Ozel's turn, or return to Islam can be understood as closely linked to his sense that the ideological alternatives of the 1960s and 1970s had come to a dead-end. In this respect, he looks to Islam for something that was missing from these ideologies, and attempts to articulate his discoveries in these essays. He does this, not by reviewing Islamic principles of belief and practice, but rather by what might be termed an Islamic discursive practice. Ironically, this makes him a more difficult writer for ordinary believers to understand than other Muslim intellectuals like Bula9 or Ozdenoren, but at the same a writer whose import is more easily appreciated by secular intellectuals. Before discussing this aspect of his work, however, some qualifications are necessary. Ozel writes with a consciousness of his place in the community of believers. He has a respect for the opinions of Muslims, and he asserts the justice of their cause at all times and places without qualification. He refers with approval, either directly or indirectly, to the hard-line stereotypes which appear in the work of all the Muslim intellectuals, and he writes, like most of them, with the conviction that he stands at a crossroads of history. Like other Muslim intellectuals, one finds in his writing the same peculiar combination: a warm personal modesty before others and events that follows from the principle of recognition of God's oneness (tevhid), and a sense of pride and dignity, occasionally verging upon stiltedness and pomposity, that follows from a sense of being close to what is essential and unchanging in human experience. It has been suggested to me that Ozel writes in the tradition of the Ottoman diplomat who felt no need to bow or defer before the West. Perhaps the stance of the Ottoman diplomat was also influenced by the two factors of a Muslim identity that I have mentioned. On the other hand, there are features of his writing that are not to be found in the work of other Muslim intellectuals. Reading his essays, one has the impression of being able to follow the writer thinking things through on

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his own, fully aware that others who share his religious convictions will see the matter differently or take exception to his conclusions. Thus, his religious convictions do not free him from taking responsibility into his hands as someone who must think and act for himself; rather they enjoin it. This gives Ozel's stance a fresh quality. If we were to search for his equivalent in the West, we might say that his writing is reminiscent of the early Protestants in that there is an emphasis on the conscientiousness of a believer with serious, sometimes overwhelming, moral responsibility. And indeed, he has on at least one occasion drawn a parallel between himself, as a Muslim intellectual, and Christian evangelicals. Ozel makes this point in the course of a denunciation of Binnaz Toprak's characterization of him as bearing a likeness to Christian adventists who anticipate a return to the golden age. 1 In the final analysis, however, Ozel must be seen through the lens of Turkish, if not Islamic, intellectual and religious history, a point which all Muslim intellectuals are keen to make. He is a distinguished poet who discovered in the Islamic tradition a response to contemporary experience rather than the dead principles of a mediaeval dogma. Ozel's move from Marxism to Islam explains in part, I think, why he was able to set aside, as a matter of secondary importance, the question of the relation of technology and science to Islamic belief and practice. The question for late-nineteenth century Muslims was how a social tradition could be reconciled with the necessity to respond to Western modernism. A century later a Marxist poet, living in a secular urban milieu and faced with the culs-de-sac of modernist ideologies, could rediscover the active power of a tradition that existed for the most part only as passive social practices and cultural transmissions. In this respect, Ozel's essays explain the appearance of the Muslim intellectual in the 1980s more satisfactorily than do the writings of Bulac or Ozdenoren. When the secularist reads the latter two authors, he might sometimes wonder why intellectuals with a taste for reflection and criticism would be attracted to religious dogma. Since Ozel's essays are more successful in demonstrating that what we perceive to be dogma makes possible a distinctive intellectual outlook and attitude, he enables us to understand better what inspires, but is not always realized by, the writings of other Muslim intellectuals.

Amaf dogruya yaklagmaksa', Gosteri, October 1986, p. 31. Toprak's characterization appears in 'Iki Musliiman Aydin: Ali Bui a? ve ismet Ozel', Toplum ve Bilim, 29-30, 1986. Toprak's reply to Ozel is 'Ismet Ozel'e cevap', Gosteri, November 1986, pp. 34-5. This is a fairly rare example of an interchange between a 'Muslim' and a 'secular' intellectual in the 'highbrow' secularist press. It is conducted with a fair degree of strong feelings.

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SOCIAL P R A C T I C E AND POLITICAL The scene of Ozel's

Problems:

Technique,

CULTURE

writing. The aim of Ozel's first book,

Civilization

and Alienation,

Three

is to construct a Muslim

way of thinking. 1 This is achieved by critiques of the three aspects of the contemporary Western world view denoted in the book title. Alienation is an integral part of the definition of man in the West. It is a dimension of Western humanism, the attempt to make man the focus of social and cultural life rather than to found it on divine revelation. Alienation is a problem for all peoples, but it is an unusually exaggerated phenomenon in the contemporary West. Civilization, which is equated with culture, can be understood as the institutional elaborations which are part of complex social structures and power hierarchies. It is not peculiar to the West, but has also been a feature of the history of Muslims. In the West, however, the concept of Islamic society has been confused with Ottoman, Abbasid and Umayyad civilization. This is a mistake. Islam is not itself a civilization although it has the potential to engender one which is free of class differentiation and power hierarchy. Technique or technology is an inevitable dimension of the material framework of our lives; in the contemporary world, however, technology is out of control. This is a consequence of the failure to accept any moral limits on technological developments and exploitation. These limits are only to be found in Islam, but they are denied in principle by Western humanism. These arguments of Three Problems Intellectual

Problems

are the forerunners of Bula§'s

in the Islamic World and Ózdenóren's Words

which

Confuse our Thinking. A t the same time, Ozel's work exhibits features which place it in a class apart from Bula? and Ozdenoren. In his essays, the scene of writing is the writer speaking to the reader. While the reader to whom the essay is addressed remains anonymous, a sense of intimacy arises from the writer's reflection on his own experiences as he attempts to reach conclusions consistent with Islamic principles. The fact that his conclusions are not necessarily consistent with popular Muslim opinion lends the essay an atmosphere of frankness and sincerity, and on some occasions confession. The result is a distinctive discursive practice that is reminiscent of the dialectical thinking of the French intellectual but conveys none the less the peculiar Muslim atmosphere of moral concern and personal restraint.

^In the preface to the first edition of Uf Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancila§ma, he notes that he originally thought of giving the book the title, 'Introduction to the Muslim Way of Thinking' (Musliimanca IXijiinmeye Ba§langi9).

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Didacticism versus discursive practice. Many of Ozel's essays seem at first to be motivated by a didactic purpose. This in itself would imply that they are a more traditional form of Islamic prose, akin to the sermon if you like. Speaking frankly to the reader, the writer raises questions about various unfounded hopes that are current among believers. He refuses to look to the state, whether the present Atatiirkist state or a future state based on Islamic principles, f o r a solution to the problems of believers. He refuses to nourish the expectation of radical or Utopian solutions, and he explicitly rejects force and terror. These are all elements of the power game of the modern ideologist. Islam is not about triumph and victory over others; it springs from personal convictions on the part of individuals. These convictions will have important political consequences because they are true. He insists on political actions and organization, but not for the purpose of revolutionary hopes, and not for the purpose of establishing regimes. He also recommends against any illusions about the future. Muslims are invariably on the side of what is right and just, but they cannot expect that the future of Turkey lies in their hands. This is a matter that will be decided, in the short run at least, by the power game. He also declines to idealize the Ottoman past and is reluctant to engage in tendentious comparisons of Western and Islamic civilizations. The problems of imperialism, exploitation, colonialism and class are not a monopoly of the West, but inevitable features of all civilizations. That is why one must not confuse Islam with civilization as Western Orientalists are wont to do. He expresses the same distrust of Turkish parliamentary democracy that one finds in the writings of other Muslim intellectuals, but he reminds his Muslim readers that they have fared better under a multi-party than a one-party regime. He discounts the popular belief that a wave of conversions is sweeping certain groups or classes in Europe or America, and he warns Turkish Muslims to look upon advice offered by Western converts with scepticism, since the latter rarely understand conditions in Turkey. He even discounts the frequent claim that the overwhelming majority of people are devout Muslims. He places the numbers of genuine believers at 6 per cent of the population, but he adds that this small proportion is a crucial one. But should we see Ozel as a thinker who is attempting to raise the level of the political maturity of Muslims by demolishing false hopes? Perhaps at one level this is the case, but the issue of authors and audiences is not one-dimensional. I would suggest that Ozel, in raising questions about so many of the myths current among believers, is also diverting their attention away from dogmatic consensus and towards an active outlook and attitude. The poetry of tevhid, if I might be allowed to put it that way, is made possible by

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religious convictions even though this poetry is not itself dogma. As Ozel himself remarks, his essays are sometimes presented, not in order to arrive at firm conclusions, but for the style and manner of thinking that they exhibit as well as for the occasion which they make possible between writer and reader. Three Problems is organized as a book-length study, but it largely consists of essays which had earlier appeared as daily newspaper columns. Since then, Ozel has not felt the need to organize his columns in the fom of a book-length study. He has allowed them instead to appear as collected essays, unorganized by topic. In effect, then, Ozel is not really the author of books. His prose has been almost always limited to the format of a 500-word newspaper column. He has recently remarked that he will no longer continue to write as an essayist, but the import of this intention is not clear. That he has been recognized as an original Islamic thinker on the basis of such a restricted form is remarkable, but it is also possibly not accidental. His prose may take the form of brief essays because of its underlying kinship with poetry. This conclusion is consistent with points Ozel has made himself about the characterization of Islamic social discourse. It involves, not a matter of a rationalizing organization and scientific demonstration, but a kind of harmony, a harmony that Turkish Muslims are privileged not so much to perpetuate as to rediscover. A kind of prose close to poetry would seem an appropriate form in which this rediscovery could be worked out.

Conclusion The question of why Muslim intellectuals made their appearance in the later 1970s, and succeeded in attracting a large audience in the 1980s, is partly explained by restrictions on Islamic authors which only began to be eased in the 1970s and by the policies of 're-Islamization' which were favoured by the military authorities during the 1980s. I would suggest, however, that the Muslim intellectuals also make their appearance in the wake of a period of ideological exhaustion precisely because Islam is perceived as an alternative to the conflicting constructions of modernity. But when they speak of Islam, they do not have in mind the traditional beliefs and practices of the Turkish Gemeinschaft; rather they envision an Islam that was never perfectly realized in Turkey, one that is based on divine revelation and orthodox practice, not on past customary practices in the Ottoman or any other Islamic Empire.

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In this respect, the Muslim intellectuals are not unwilling urban residents yearning to return to the security of the rural town or village where there was no need to think through who one was and what one was to do. They are very much creatures of the contemporary Turkish city, like their secular counterparts. The difference is not that they do not traffic in ideology, and hence inevitably in social constructs, but rather than they have committed themselves to an Islamic outlook which aims uncompromisingly at the moral grounding of personal identity and social relations. To understand what they are trying to achieve and the appeal of their writings, we have to recognize that the Islamic alternative of which they write is a very real one. The Islamic tradition, among many other things, embodies a powerful criticsm of the mainsprings of Western civilization. In the Islamic tradition, the relationship of Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft is conceived and instituted quite differently from how it is conceived in the Western tradition. In fact, the Gesellschaft of the Republic itself is on close inspection not entirely secular and Western, but has always had, and will always have, aspects that are rooted in Turkey's Islamic traditions. So the Muslim intellectuals are not writing about a blurry ideal which appears only in sacred texts rather than in the real world. They are bringing into focus an important side of Turkish political and social culture. At the same time, this does not mean that just anyone at just any time is going to be successful in bringing Islamic tradition to bear on contemporary experience. What the Muslim intellectuals want to say and do is not the same as what they are able to say and do, given their individual capacities and circumstances.

ORAL CULTURE, MEDIA CULTURE, AND THE ISLAMIC RESURGENCE IN TURKEY

The role of religion [in Turkey] as a societal "cement" has a natural foundation ... the expansion of the interactive patterns of society and the widening scope of social relations does not necessarily bring with it the secularization of these relations. (Mardin 1989:168) The resurgence of Islam in Turkey is better understood as a transformation, rather than a revival, of religiosity. The propagation of new forms of urban Muslim identity by Islamist mass media is one feature of this transformation. Two examples are discussed in this paper:

A new kind of public

culture

In the villages and towns of provincial Turkey, the conduct of interpersonal relations involves a "local and oral" Islamic language of being. With rapid urbanization this language of being has been imported into the larger Turkish cities where it has become the basis of new urban Muslim identities. Since 1980, Islamist publicists, using print, film, and video, have assisted and channelled the adaptation of local and oral Islam to urban life. As this process continues, a new Islamist public culture is being invented in metropolitan areas.

A new kind of

intellectual

The expansion of higher education combined with rural to urban migration brought many youths of provincial origin into the lycées, institutes, and universities of the Republic. After 1980, a group of writers began to appeal to the underlying Muslim identity of these educated individuals. Addressing and re-evaluating the same problems that are preoccupying their secular counterparts, these new Muslim intellectuals call for the reclamation of a Muslim "interior" within the individual as the first step toward reconstructing an Islamic society.

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Both examples illustrate how Islamists have succeeded in colonizing what was previously the stronghold of the nationalist movement. Vehicles and techniques of mass communication, once monopolized by secular reformers during the first decades of the Republic, are now deployed by representatives of new forms of urban Islam. The paper concludes with a qualification of Anderson's analysis (1983) of the relationship of media capitalism and nationalist movements.

Official public culture and the inhibition of local and oral Muslims After the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the National Assembly adopted measures aimed at the "disestablishment" of Islam (Lewis 1961). The sacred Law of Islam was repealed, and the Caliphate and the Sultanate were abolished. Religious teaching was restricted, religious schools and organizations were closed, and religious endowments placed under government control. 1 Many Turkish nationalists hoped such measures might reduce religion to a matter of personal idiosyncrasy; the most radical anticipated that religion might wither away altogether (Yalman 1969; Mardin 1989:166-68). But three decades later, during the first phase of the multi-party period, the disestablishment of Islam had produced a very different result in many aresas of provincial Turkey. By 1950, the nationalist movement had succeeded in establishing an official public culture of the nation-state fromwhich Islam was marginalized, when not excluded altogether; however, an Islamic language of social being still thrived in most provincial villages and towns. In these communities, individuals learned this Islamic language of interpersonal relationships at an early age from relatives, friends, and neighbours. They learned nationalist ideology only later in the more formal and less nurturing context of secondary school or military service. For many citizens in provincial Turkey, such as bureaucrats, teachers, army officers, judges, and other professionals, official nationalism had indeed brought with it a new form of social life, but for others its influence was much less pervasive. Where the latter came into touch with the institutions of the nation state — its schools, military, bureaucracy, and courts, — they may ' A k^it (1991:161) has provided an account of the effects of the secular reforms on religious education. During the War for Independence, the nationalists discussed reform of the existing religious schools (medrese). Later in 1924 they abolished these schools but opened new ImamHatip schools "to train enlightened (aydin) imams", and reopened the Faculty of Theology which had been closed in 1919. By 1933, however, both the Imam-Hatip schools and the Faculty of Theology had been abolished. See my later note for a summary of this account of the gradual re-opening of religious schools after 1950.

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well have come to think of themselves as Turks, but at the level of everyday familial and communal relations, they continued to think, speak, and act as Muslims. For much of the provincial population, official nationalism stood to Islamic social culture as "printed" to "oral". 1 The former involved written documents: newspaper, histories, novels, school books, birth certificates, induction notices, court petitions, and marriage licences. The latter involved the verbal conventions and ritual behaviours of intimate association. Because of this provincial pattern of nationalism in public affairs and Islamism in social affairs, some nationalists feared that electoral competitions might lead to the relegitimization of Islam as a dimension of the Turkish polity. Looking to the near future, they saw a nightmare vision: a revival of religious commitment that would sweep away secularist principles. As it happened, the dominant position of official public culture was challenged, but not by the resurgence of Islam. During the first decades of the multi-party period, the channels of secularist and Westernist influence multiplied. Official nationalism became an increasingly restricted segment of Turkish public life as media capitalism and mass consumerism gradually took hold. If there is a peculiar feature of the early multi-party period, it is not the revival of Islam but rather the painfully slow emergence of any Islamist alternative to official public culture. 2 This retardation testifies to the place of religion in Turkey after three decades of secular reform. In Turkish villages and towns, an Islamic language of social being still flourished, but this lacked the intellectual resources and concepts with which to contemplate public life in the new order of nation-states. A kind of inhibition weighed upon the minds of believers. The words they spoke and the gestures they used in social interaction had not been greatly affected by the nationalist programme of

While it is possible to draw a more or less clear contrast between official public culture and Islamic social traditions, the two often interpenetrated among many social groups, especially in the Western areas of the country, cf. Olson (1985: 166); Tapper & Tapper (1987, 1991). Citing the mutual influence of both nationalism and religion, Tapper and Tapper have argued that the two are actually part of a single social ideology which the Turks themselves mistakenly see as two different belief systems. While their ethnography of middle level, social groups in the Isparta region is not to be questioned, their account does not examine the way in which nationalism and religion in Turkey have a different ideological dynamic, a different place in the life experience of individuals, and ultimately refer to very different cultural traditions (Western versus Islamic). 2

It was not until the 1970s that an overtly religious party, the National Salvation Party, was able to gain seats in the National Assembly, at which time it polled only about a third as many votes as either of the two major parties. The National Salvation Party polled 11.8 % of the popular vote in 1973 and 8.6 % in 1977. The other two major parties, Justice Party and Republican People's Party, polled 29.8 %, 36.9 %, and 33.3 %, 41.4 %, respectively (Toprak 1981:99). Toprak concludes her evaluation of the role of religion in elections through the 1970s: "religion, by itself, is not a sifficient factor for mobilization" (ibid. 1981:101).

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reforms; nonetheless, these words and gestures could not be immediately translated into an alternative to official public culture. 1 It was not until the later 1970s or early 1980s that this situation changed substantially as Islamist mass media began to address a new audience of believers of provincial origin in the cities of Turkey. Before examining the formation of this new audience, we must have a clearer picture of the "local and oral" form of Islam to which it ascribed. The next section of the paper describes a scene in a provincial coffeehouse c. 1970.

A local and oral language of social being The setting is the coastal Black Sea town of Of in the northeastern province of Trabzon. A male friend meets me and we go together to the "Town Square" (meydan) coffeehouse. We cross the large front room to reach a smaller enclosure that has windows to the front room. As we enter the enclosure, two men, junior relatives of my friend, put out their cigarettes. Another, the son of my friend's brother, rises from his chair and leaves. My friend addresses those present, "selamun aleykiim", and receives in return "aleykum selam" from the dozen or so middle-aged men sitting in chairs at tables. One person signals us to join him, asking his two companions to surrender their chairs to us. We sit down and address each individual in the room separately, looking each one in the eye in turn and saying, "merhaba" and receiving "merhaba" in return. Our host taps on the window of the room and calls out to the owner for two teas. The walls of the room are bare except for several brimmed hats hanging from hooks, a map of Turkey placed in the centre of one wall, and a portrait of Atatiirk placed near the ceiling at the centre of another wall. 2 A single bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling and illuminates the room brightly. Most of the men are wearing suits and dress shirts. A few, including our host, have ties. They sit with their legs uncrossed and their hands out of their pockets. 3 A conversation begins. Its precise ^During interviews with Islamist writers and readers during the 1980s (Meeker 1991, 1994), I was sometimes told a story of the precise moment in the life of my interlocutor when he was no longer afraid to look to religion as an intellectual resource for thinking about history, science, law, art, language, and literature. 2 T o be more precise, there were three portraits from left to right, Cemal Gtirsel, ismet Inonii, and Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk. To the right of the portraits, there was a large placard inscribed with the words, "Halk Evi". The map illustrated Turkey at the time of victory in the War for Independence. The occupation zones of different national powers, Britain, Greece, Italy, and France, were indicated on it. 3 O n some occasions the wives of the men in the room were simultaneously meeting in a house. Kiray (1981:268-69) notes that town women's house visits and gatherings are equivalent to men's groups in the coffeehouse.

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subject could not be predicted, but one could expect it to turn at some point to a story of some individual known to those present. The individual's motives and behaviour would be discussed and evaluated in a variety of ways. In all probability, those present would not agree entirely with one another about the significance of the story. If I were to meet one of those present several days or weeks later, he might well remark to me, recalling the occasion with pleasure, "we drank tea, we conversed (gay igtik, muhabbet ettik)". The coffeehouse scene would easily lend itself to thick description. Those present are related and divided by kinship, patronage, debt, and enmity. Classes of persons (children and women, for example) are excluded from the room. Certain individuals would choose not to attend (district bureaucrats, judges, and bankers, for example). Similarly, what is not said in conversation is as significant as what is said. And of course the room has a history, as it happens, one that very well exemplifies social hierarchy and political structure in provincial Turkey. During the late Ottoman period, a district agha (ago) sat in this room, surrounded by armed supporters, receiving the homage of his allies, and acting as de facto administrator of the district. Some of those present in the coffeehouse scene see themselves as his political descendants and seek to emulate him in small ways. All these matters, — the tacit, the excluded, the unspoken, and the remembered — are the underpinnings of a "showing". The rituals and conventions that are heard and seen are part of the enactment of a language. This form of language, inspired by a dream of being, would display and confirm social identity and relationship. Greetings, room size and location, deference gestures, seating arrangements, the offering of hospitality, lighting, wall decoration, dress styles, body posture, are not incidental occurrences but the elements of a grammar that enables a language game. The individuals in the room obey constraints that would enable them to speak and hear with conviction. To play the language game, it is not enough to pretend to follow a set of social conventions. There is no question of each person living a secret whole existence masked by an exterior facade, presenting himself to others according to a calculated strategy. Each person in the coffeehouse is not himself save through the language game. In principle, an ethnographic project would confirm that this is so. Interviews of those in attendance would uncover an elaborate set of psychic supports standing behind what is heard and seen in the coffeehouse: personal cleanliness rituals (temizlik), rules of respect for others (hiirmet), ethnotheories of subjectivity ( a k i l / n e f i s ) , ideas of personal status ( § e r e f n a m u s , irz), and linguistic idioms based on specific visual and aural channels of

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communication. And, of course, a commentary on gender similarities and differences would run through all this material. We could persue this ethnographic project further. Some of those in the room have been struck by the evil eye or possessed by jinn and require treatment with several readings from the Koran. These performances of divine speech, they would affirm, have the power to restore individual self possession. The illnesses suggest that participation in the language game involves high stakes. One has to invest oneself in it not by pieces but as a whole. What we see and hear in the coffeehouse is in effect the tip of an iceberg of affirmations and prohibitions. But now let us look once more at the coffeehouse scene from another angle, examining it as if it were one of those puzzles which asks, "what is wrong with this picture?" The "mistakes" in the picture are the fedoras (gapka), the Atatiirk portrait, the suits, the cravats (kravat), the map of Turkey. My host who offers us tea is the district head of the Republican People's Party. Most of the men present are ardent RPP partisans. If provoked, some would heartily espouse the party principle of secularism (.layiklik). Why are these mistakes? The language game in the coffeehouse is one of intimacy, loyalty, interpersonal transparency and affection. This is the langauage of local and oral Islam in Turkey. The portrait, the suits, the ties, the hats, and the map, are the symbols of secularist nationalist ideology, another contradictory language game, that is represented by signs. Secular nationalist ideology is not being played out in the talk and action of those present in the coffeehouse, but has nonetheless had an impact on their lives. As the district head of the RPP once told me, "My party has moved to the left of centre, and I am left of the left of centre." His statement was intended to affirm that he was an enthusiastic party partisan, but it would have been taken for gibberish by party officials in Ankara.1 The same individual was capable of a ringing defence of the principle of secularism, abruptly concluding by excusing himself so that he might perform one of the five daily prayers at the central mosque. Face-to-face and person-to-person, a language derived from an Islamic ethic of identity and relationship is instinctively performed. But the ideology of nationalism and secularism remains nearer the surface of cognition.

1 During the same period, c. 1970, I also visited another coffeehouse in a nearby town where : was received by the local leadership of the Justice Party. In this different setting, the samf contradiction between religious social practice and political ideology prevailed. While less fonc of the symbols of Kemalist nationalism, such as hats and ties, my hosts were nonetheless eage: ideological partisans of free enterprise. As my host told me there, "We are capitalists like yoi Americans. The RPP [with whom you usually sit] are socialists." As in the "Town Square' coffeehouse, all those present were pious Muslims who performed their prayers in a nearbj mosque.

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During the last two or three decades, specific social changes served to erode the inhibitions that kept Muslim identity out of public life. This set the stage for the representation of local and oral Muslims in a new Islamist media culture. I shall describe two of the most important of these social changes: the two-directional urbanization of society and the deflation of secularist ideologies.

Preconditions for an Islamist mass media One of the most striking social changes in Turkey can be described as two-directional urbanization. Only a few years ago, most Turkish citizens lived in villages, many of which were isolated by the lack of adequate roads, transport, and communication. Over the last two decades, the village has been reached by urban Turkey after vast improvements in road networks, bus and truck transport, the electricity net, and telephone installations. And correspondingly, the city has also been reached by rural Turkey. After years of residential migration, most Turkish citizens now live in large towns, cities, or in one of the Turkish megalopolises (Adana, Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, or Konya). Two-directional urbanization has so affected Turkish social life that the old categories of "villager", "townsman", and "urbanite" no longer have the precise meaning they had twenty years ago; nonetheless, no rough generalization of the shift in relationship among these different social categories is possible. The social life of the provincial town, rather than that of the village or metropolis, has prevailed in the course of two-directional urbanization. In large Turkish cities, where the economic welfare of most families has modestly improved, the first steps taken are in the direction of becoming "proper" provincial townsmen: the abandonment of peasant costume in favour of suits and dresses, sending children to school for a longer period of time, and having a furnished living room in the house. In rural villages and small towns, less isolation means more cash income, and many families have been able to alter their life style in the direction of the standards of the provincial town. It is not unusual to find washing machines, refrigerators, and television in towns and villages that were remotely located only a few years ago. The residents of many smaller communities are now able to wear better clothes, keep a cleaner house, and stay in closer touch with regional centres. Unlike the early 1950s, when it was sometimes said that the heart of Turkey was in its 40,000 villages, all of Turkey today has become a town, one great provincial complex. Two-directional urbanization has resulted in an

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invigoration of provincial society and along with it, a "renaissance" of provincial propriety (cf. Mardin 1978, 1989:182; Sunar & Toprak 1983). 1 Although economic development and residential mobility have favoured provincial propriety, individual experience is everywhere more differentiated. More than ever, Turkish citizens are required to adjust their outlook and behaviour according to context: family space as opposed to social space, social space as opposed to public space, school as opposed to work, weekend as opposed to weekday, community of origin as opposed to community of migration, and, not infrequently, Turkish residence as opposed to foreign residence in Germany, Belgium, Saudi-Arabia, or Libya. "Ataturkism" was one of the early casualties of this differentiation of personal experience. During their lycee years, Turkish youth are still well schooled in nationalist ideology. By the 1960s, however, the gap between nationalist ideology and vivid experiences of social hierarchy, difference, and conflict in the urban environment was unbridgeable. 2 Many Turkish young people looked elsewhere for the simple answers that official Ataturkism promised but failed to produce, turning to a variety of left-right political ideologies which provided a more dialectical analysis of social fact than official doctrines. By the later 1970s, Turkish universities were sometimes closed for extended periods of time because of conflicts among student groups. In the larger cities, some young men formed paramilitary organizations, conducted running vendettas agains their opponents, and engaged in campaigns of political assassination. After the 1980 military coup, what Turks had come to call the "anarchy" was quickly suppressed but at the price of a suspension of national politics. Political parties where shut down, their leadership was banned, large numbers of people were imprisoned, and the educational system was subjected to a purge. In the wake of the anarchy and coup, many secularist Turks lost their enthusiasm for all forms of ideology and conflict. They entered the new decade disenchanted with politics, more pluralist and tolerant in outlook, and interested in restoring and developing the institutions of civil society. For those citizens with religious inclinations, however, the same events served to confirm a social identity anchored in the ethic of local and oral Islam. In effect, the secularists entered the 1980s without any easy answers, and the Islamists with a formula for the future.

1 [- or Turkey, a centre/periphery contrast may be more appropriate than the class contrast used by Fischer (1982) for analysing the Islamic resurgence. The range of individuals with Islamist sympathies in politics and business seems too wide to restrict it to the petit bourgeoisie. 2 Mardin (1978) has noted how the Republican People's Party abandoned its "elitist" stance in the middle 1960s to become the "champion of the underprivileged and the foe of elitism whether cultural or hierarchical". Mardin has noted that the students involved in the clashes during this period were from rural areas and small towns. He suggests that student violence was a cultural feature of the Turkish periphery that had been imported into the city.

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Print, film, and video representations of local and oral Islam The burgeoining population of provincials in the larger Turkish cities and the new interest in Muslim identity were the preconditions for a mass media explosion in the 1980s. 1 Islamist book publishers, recording studios, and video/film makers succeeded in finding an audience among urban believers. The variety of the Islamist mass media, which is impressive, mirrors the variety of Islam in Turkey. Their products now include traditional Islamic literature (Koran, Hadith, tefsir, hutbe, ilmihal), religious stories and poetry for children, biographies of famous Muslims, catalogues of the tombs of holy men and women, studies of religious folklore in the cities and towns of Turkey, religious music and drama on cassette and video, educational material for learning Arabic and Persian in the form of books and cassettes, biographies of Islamic scholars and rulers, literary, historical, and political magazines, science education books and magazines, women's family and cultural magazines, novels about contemporary believers, and movies about the tribulations of believers. As the monopoly of media culture by secularists has come to an end, Islamists have regained a voice, which now speaks New Turkish (yeni ttirkge), a hand, which now writes in roman letters, and an eye, which now composes in film and video. The Islamist mass media are produced by a wide variety of groups with different projects, viewpoints, and resources. 2 While different segments of Turkish believers are addressed in different ways, many of their products are aimed at a readership and viewership of local and oral Muslims living in urban settings, perhaps the largest single audience among believers. These media products have the following distinctive features. (1) The morality of Muslims, conceived in accordance with the Islamic social ethnic of provincial Turkey, is praised and defended. Some of the markers of local and oral Islam include a concern with rules of cleanliness, respect for others, interpersonal loyalty and affection.

In her study of the role of religion in politics, Toprak (1981:91) observes that the older pattern in the Republic of Turkey of a cultural dichotomy between a Kemalist elite and an Islamic mass had come to an end by the 1970s. An Islamic counter-elite had emerged that did not espouse Kemalism or Westernism, replacing the elite-mass gap with an elite-elite gap. 2 T a p p e r (1991) includes essays by Ay§e Saktanber, Ay§e Guneg-Ayata, and Feride Acar which, taken together, provide an excellent picture of several types of Islamist publications, including children's literature, magazines published by the major religious orders (tarikat), and women's magazines.

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(2) The proper form of gender relations, conceived again in accordance with the social ethic of provincial Turkey, also receives a great deal of attention. The role of women as mothers, and the home as the place for women, are stressed. Measures for adopting this Islamist standard of gender behaviour to urban life are of special concern. (3) The consumerist economy is condemned and household frugality, one of the most important elements of the social ethic of provincial Turkey, is recommended. This social ethic is a necessary condition for reciprocity, the very cement of provincial social relations. (4) Muslim morality is invidiously compared with a stereotype of the West as a civilization of prostitution, addiction, extravagance, pollution, and mental illness. This stereotype of the West is correlated with a reaction to segments of urban life which are themselves identified as extensions of Western society. Anti-Westernism is therefore closely linked with a process of adaptation to urban life. 1 Media representations give local Muslims a sense of themselves as a public mass that transcends interpersonal, face-to-face relationships. They are able to see themselves as "we", the Muslims of Turkey who think and act in such and such a way different from other citizens. The media artifact itself, as an object of display, also stands as evidence in the eyes of believers that they are not, as the secularists have stereotyped them, "backward" (gerici), but represented by the very kinds of cultural productions that have heretofore been accorded so much prestige in the nation-state: books, magazines, newspapers, films, cassettes, and videos aimed at a mass audience. 2 The Islamist media, in representing local and oral Islam, promote new patterns of Muslim identity. New Islamist standards of personal dress and manners, home use and furnishings, leisure and work, etc., are emerging in urban Turkey and have been strongly influenced by mass media vehicles. Lacking the state monopolies previously enjoyed by the nationalists, however, these new urban life styles remain heterogeneous, varying according to organizational affiliation and socio-economic level. 1 My own personal impressions are primarily based on a two-year residence in Istanbul f r o m June 1986 to August 1988, during which time I regularly visited religious books stores, attended book fairs, spoke with some publishers and writers, reviewed and collected catalogues of Islamist publishers, and irregularly read pieces in Islamist magazines and newspapers. I also did a rough survey of the availability of Islamist publications during trips to Ankara, Antalya, Diyarbakir, Edirne, Erzerum, Kayseri, Konya, Trabzon, and Urfa in the spring of 1988 and the summer of 1989. I am not well informed about Islamist film, cassette, and video. From a brief visit to Istanbul in 1991, I had the impression that they have expanded in availability since the summer of 1988. 2 T h e "we" effect of representation in the mass media may also have the paradoxical effect of anchoring Muslim identity in the Turkish nation-state by giving believers visibility in national media.

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The Islamist media also provide believers with pictures of city life that assist and sustain religious commitment in a socially differentiated urban environment. The Islamist novel has played an especially important role in this regard, and at least one of them has enjoyed an extraordinary success. The Islamist novel generally tells a story of a believer who, much threatened and embattled, manages to prevail despite horrible forms of political oppression, physical beating, verbal insult, and sexual and material temptations. The alltime best selling Turkish novel may no longer be one of the nationalist classics, some of which have been in print for decades, but an Islamist novel, Minyeli Abdullah by Ismail Hekimoglu. First published in the early 1980s, it had run through about 30 printings by 1988, implying a sales volume in the six digit range. Minyeli Abdullah was recently made into a film and has been issued in video format. 1 Another novel that is widely distributed in Islamist bookstores is Huzur Sokak by Yuksel §enler. The two volume novel begins with a romantic idealization of an urban Muslim quarter and moves on to describe the way its inhabitants cope with the multiple threats of a morally corrupt urban environment. The heart of the local Muslim is in interpersonal, face-to-face relationships, not in the media artifact that testifies to the existence of these relationships as a mass phenomenon. This secondary role of the Islamist mass media is evident from the mediocrity of Islamist fiction. The Islamist story, novel, and drama do not in themselves bring to life a Muslim imagination but merely serve as secondary representations. 2 Similarly, many Islamist publications are impressively repetitive. It is not likely that the constant reiteration of the same principles in Islamist literature actually inspires believers, and it is very possible that many books and magazines aimed at local Muslims are seldom read but acquired purely as "symbolic capital". 3 The low quality of these Islamist cultural products, freely acknowledged by Islamist intellectuals, does not mean, however, that local Muslims are lacking in imaginative interests or passions. It only means that these interests and passions are to be found, not on page, tape, or film, but in those experiences that are most central for them: face-to-face, person-to-person relationships.

In 1991 I saw the video, Minyeli Abdullah (Director, Yticel (Jakmakli, Istanbul: Feza Filmcilik, n.d.), on display in the bookstores of the State Ministry of Religious Affairs. Another film, Minyeli Abdullah 2, is advertised on the back of the video cassette. 2 I n assessing the staying power of the Islamic resurgence, Mardin (1989:184) sees the iack of "entertainment" value of Islamist media vehicles as their weak point. The observation has gained in significance after the recent filming of the novel, Minyeli Abdullah, a clear attempt by Islamists to lend dramatic value to a fairly leaden narrative. "Vor example, Giine§-Ayata (1991:267) notes that followers of the Sheikh of the iskender Pa§a Dergahi of the Nak§ibendi order are each obliged to buy several copies of the magazine islam which they distribute as gifts. The same practice holds for a wide range of both secularist and religious publications in Turkey, some of which never appear on the shelves of booksellers.

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The rediscovery

of a Muslim interior by Muslim

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intellectuals

Much of the Islamist mass media seeks to assist and support local and oral Muslims in their attempts to adapt to an urban way of life, but a small group of Islamist writers have sought to address a very different audience of urban believers whose links to local and oral Islam had become more tenuous. Instead of lending a voice and identity to existing face-to-face, person-toperson relationships, they call for the recovery of a Muslim "interior" within the individual, one that has been inhibited by a process of Westernization. By the 1980s, some of the Muslim intellectuals had captured a sizeable audience of young, educated believers by devising original and inventive writing strategies. The emergence of this second example of new urban Muslim identities can also be understood against the backdrop of recent social changes in Turkey, in this instance, the combination of an expansion in higher education and continuing urban migration. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the number of individuals who attended higher institutions of learning in Turkey multiplied several fold with the opening of new lycées, institutes, and universities. 1 This led to a new mass media audience for intellectual products. A larger proportion of young people read books and newspapers, listened to cassettes, and watched televison, and, in the larger cities, attended concerts, plays, exhibitions, films, and poetry readings. Political activism also served to stimulate both the production and consumption of intellectual culture. University and lycée students came of age in an environment of left-right ideological confrontations. Many joined groups directly involved in political strategy and polemics, and most spent many hours discussing politics, culture, and history in student hostels and cafeterias. Until the later 1970s, the new mass audience for intellectual culture was almost exclusively secularist and Westernist in orientation (cf. Mardin 1989). In the fields of literature, the graphic arts, philosophy, and history, what was read or seen by Turkish youth was either a translation or reproduction of a Western original or deeply influenced by a Westernist model (Ôzel 1988-20-25).2 Furthermore, Turks of all social backgrounds were I j h e expansion of higher education included the reopening of religious middle schools, lycées, and institutes. According to Ak§it (1991:147), a new Faculty of Theology was opened in Ankara in 1949, and the first new Imam-Hatip schools began to be opened in 1951. By the 1980s, there were nine faculties of Theology and 376 middle-level and 341 lycée level Imam-Hatip schools enrolling about a quarter of a million students. In 1985-86, there were 4,400 middle level and 1,206 lycée level secular schools with 2.6 million students. Islamist essays and books with an intellectual orientation are usually attributed to this expansion. I have not insisted on the point since some of the most accomplished Islamist authors to be discussed are graduates of secular universities rather than the religious education track. 2 See Meeker (1994) for a translation of the Turkish reference.

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coming to know Europe and America more intimately. By the early 1970s, many Turks had spent one or more years in Europe themselves or had relatives and friends who lived for several years in Europe. With the gradual natonwide extension of the television network, the Turkish public was treated to doses of Western programming that far exceeded what had reached them earlier through the cinema. 1 All these developments had the effect of breaking down the control of Westernist contact by the proponents of secular nationalism. The new generation of educated Turkish youth had more direct knowledge and understanding of Western intellectual and cultural fashions. Not surprisingly, in the course of having more direct contact with the West, a segment of Turkish youths discovered their Islamic identity. The increase in the consumption of intellectual culture which accompanied the expansion of higher education was taking place in the context of a shift in population from provincial to metropolitan areas. Consumers of intellectual culture who had been born in the Turkish provinces sometimes harboured, even if more or less unconsciously, Islamist sentiments. After spending their early years in provincial towns and villages, where communal customs with Islamist underpinnings still prevailed, they had moved to the city to complete their high school or university education. In the city, the logical inconsistency and emotional disparity between their Westernist and Islamist experiences rose to the level of a conscious problem. Individuals who thought that they were Turkish nationalists, or even Marxist revolutionaries, sometimes discovered, to their own surprise, that they were Muslims. These young people, whose involvement in Westernist intellectual culture precipitated an awareness of their inner Islamist identity, can be styled "Republican Muslims". The Muslim intellectuals, themselves Republican Muslims, have succeeded in becoming the spokesmen of this second new kind of urban believer (Toprak 1987; Meeker 1991). From a survey completed in the spring of 1988, the following social portrait of the Muslim intellectual emerges. He is somewhere over thirty and less than fifty years old and lives in Istanbul or Ankara. 2 He was born to a family of provincial townsmen or officials and ' ' I h c boom in tourism which brought large numbers of European tourists to some regions of Turkey did not occur until the 1980s. 2 There are also Islamist women writers in Turkey today. I have not scanned the journals and newspapers to determine if any of them take the stance of the men who are identified in this paper as Muslim intellectuals. In the spring of 1988, none were brought to my attention by male writers or readers. Similarities and differences between the stance of Islamist women and men writers should be a revealing indication of the experience of educated believers in contemporary Turkey. In the fall of 1991, when I visited Istanbul for a week, I had the impression that there were more books by Islamist women writers than a few years earlier.

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attended provincial primary and middle schools. Later, after coming to Ankara or Istanbul, he completed one or more programmes of secular higher education in Turkish universities. His studies were concentrated in the humanities or social sciences rather than in science or engineering. 1 Following this, he became a permanent resident of Ankara or Istanbul. He knows one or more European or Middle Eastern languages other than Turkish. 2 He has had a serious, long-standing, interest in Western literature, philosophy, or social history, and there are more references in his work to Western writers and scholarship than to Islamic authorities or sources, although the latter are not infrequently mentioned and are sometimes discussed in detail. Although the Muslim intellectuals are not striving to adapt a local and oral way of life to an urban environment, their essays and books are nonetheless another example of the roots of the Islamic resurgence in Turkey in local and oral Islam, and in that respect, a heritage of the disestablishment of Islam by the secular nationalists. The project of the Muslim intellectuals involves the recovery of a Muslim interior within the individual. The concepts and values that they associate with this interior are derived, not so much from canonical Islam, as from the local and oral Islamic language of being in provincial Turkey. In the next section, excerpts from the writings of two of the most successful Muslim intellectuals will be examined.

The writing projects ofRasim Ozdenoren and tsmet Ozel Rasim Ozdenoren Rasim Ozdenoren was born in 1940 in the southeastern town of Mara§. He attended primary and middle school in Mara§, Malatya, and Tunceli. During the 1960s he graduated from Istanbul University's Law Faculty and Journalism Institute. In 1967, he joined the State Planning Organization and in 1970 he was sent to the USA where he completed a Master's Degree in Development Economics. Since 1975, he has worked in different government ministries while also writing as journalist, playwright, and essayist. Over the years he has published a prize-winning television play, a novel, scores of essays on Western literature, and, since the later 1970s, numerous books advocating an Islamist outlook. has been noted that Muslim radicals often have a technical education (cf. Sivan 1985). The background of the Muslim intellectuals does not conform to this pattern. ^This potrait very likely applies to the reading audience of the Muslim intellectuals, save that the ages of readers extend downward below thirty years and their residences are not restricted to the metropolitan centres of Turkey.

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Excerpt One The excerpt is taken from the introduction to Concepts

Which

Boggle

the Mind (1987a: 12-14), a book that is intended to unmask the obscurity of conventional Turkish thinking during the Republican period. In his writing, Ozdenoren often adopts a perspective closer to cultural anthropology than the classics of Islamic learning. He discussion of words and mind in the selection are a good example of this taste for cultural analysis. Ozdenoren claims that words have the power to create a distinctive inner experience of the individual. He begins by describing the way children only gradually learn to speak a language competently: Concepts are created and become fixed with experience in the minds of human beings. For a concept to be acquired by us, it is probably necessary for it to be a matter of our personal experience on several occasions. If you examine the talk of children, especially children of two to three years old who have just learned to speak, you will see that they do not use words altogether appropriately. For if a child has learned a new word, it will often use that word incorrectly or inappropriately. Elders will listen to this kind of talk on the part of a child with amusement. The child may commit a gaffe by using words incorrectly, but the child eventually learns how to use the word by experience. In this way, the concept which is indicated by the word is fixed in the mind of the child. Ozdenoren next claims that every language has a distinctive inner logic. A speaker of any language becomes aware of this inner logic when exposed to the alien concepts of a foreign language. This point is designed to bring to mind the Turkish experience of Westernization. Ozdenoren would have his readers consider that they might have become even more sensitized to their Muslim identity by exposure to the West: Every language has a special inner logic that is peculiar to itself. To understand that inner logic requires a long period. Beyond this, it even becomes apparent that one has to refer to other foreign languages in order to understand the whole of this inner logic. Someone who is capable, after he has begun to learn a foreign language, can easily perceive the distinctiveness of the inner logic of both his mother language and the foreign language that is being learned. There is nothing surprising in the fact that human beings can even understand their mother tongue more intimately and deeply by means of such a comparison. It is not an exaggeration to say that human beings have, in this way, re-experienced their mother tongue and brought it to life once again.

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Ozdenoren now compares acquiring a religion with acquiring a language. Knowing the doctrines of a religion is like the child who does not yet know a language, but once the religion is deeply experienced by the individual it is like a mother tongue. Those things which require an understanding of what Islam has decreed and forbidden are learned through experience. By conforming to things that are learned out of a book without having them transferred to our personal experience means that what we have learned may have the value of an object in our minds but also that a problem remains about the degree we have actually been able to appropriate what we have learned for ourselves. To determine the extent to which we have appropriated a concept for ourselves, we have to examine whether or not we are able to manage that concept in every phase of our lives and under every condition that we confront. For us to be able to be the master of our concepts is contingent on our having gone through various physical and mental tests in our personal experience. Failing this, the concept will have the status of a doctrine in our minds. It is like a loan that we will one day have to pay back. That is, even if we want to, we will not be able to manage it as possession.

Ozdenoren has suggested that his fellow believers are not really Westerners or Europeans, as the secular nationalists might claim, because they have an inner experience of an Islamized language. And yet at the same time, he also argues that a return to Islam, and therefore a turn away from the West, must involve a new inner experience of religion, not just the formal embrace of its doctrines. The consistent feature of these two contrary views its the evocation of a distinctive "interior" within the individual. An interior based on the Turkish language and the Islamic religion is what makes the believer different from the Westerner, and the renewal of this same interior comes about as the believer re-experiences his own distinctive language and religion.

Excerpt Two The second excerpt is a short essay, "Culture(s) and Standards of Behaviour" which appeared in a collection of essays, At Which End Should the Egg Be Broken (ibid. 1987b: 28-30). Ozdenoren begins by describing the

phenomenon of culture as divided between objective behaviour and internal experience. It appears that the entire extent of the concept of culture is formed by two elements. One of these is the objective world and the other is the interior world of humankind, or in other words, the mind structure or mentality of humankind. Every sort of object which comes to the mind — such as the material things used by a people and the apparel that they wear

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— forms the objective world, that is, the exterior world in which that people live. Separately, the standards of a people's behaviour are an image of their culture which are reflected in the external world. The way in which we shake our heads upward or downward when saying yes or no, the way in which we sit, and the manner in which we walk, are all objective images of these standard of behaviour. For example, while we say "no" by moving our heads upward, the Americans shake their heads left and right. Likewise, the gestures that are made with the hands, and which are used to relate different situations, vary greatly from culture to culture. Ozdenoren concludes that the objective behaviour of a people are an "image" of the internal structure of their minds. To illustrate the point, he next cites the example of the difference between "Western" and "Turkish" bathing practices: We are coming to this: whether it be our standards of behaviour, the shape of the things we use or the style of the appared that we wear, all these matters are images of our mind structure, that is, our mentality, reflected in the external world. Based on this, we can say that the essential and fundamental factors that manifest a culture are rooted in our mind structure. We insist that a bathtub be installed in the bathrooms of our houses which today take the form of apartments. But I think that the numbers of us who actually use these bathtubs, really as bathtubs, are very few. We don't wash ourselves by filling up the bathtub with water and then getting into the water. What do we do? We put a stool in the bathtub, place a large basin before the faucet, and wash ourselves as the water flows into the basin. Because, if we fill up the tub and get into the water, we know that the water has immediately become "polluted" (mekruh) according to Islam. Water that has been used once cannot be used again according to Islam. However, given that the concept of "pollution (filthiness) has a different meaning for Westerners, they can fill up the tub or lavatory with water and wash themselves in it without its continually flowing. Having argued that external behaviour is an image of internal experience, Ozdenoren now draws a conclusion that is designed to disturb his readers. As Turks adopt elements of their behaviour from the West, they are unconsciously engaged in altering the structures of their minds. Just as behaviour reflects the interior of the individual, so changes in behaviour potentially alter his or her internal experience in a decisive way. Ozdenoren concludes by calling for critical awareness of the implications of blindly following foreign fashions. We are able to detect that there is an organic link between our standards of behaviour and our culture. To adopt the standards of behaviour of another culture, even if only in a purely formal way, is essentially related to the adoption of the mind structure that is part of that culture. Because of this, we have to help people understand the implications of their efforts to adopt

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new standards of behaviour. Today, by means of the press and of television, all kinds of singers, actors, and mannikins are coming before us and presenting us with "new models of humankind". Even if it is difficult work, we have to analyse this phenomenon in the course of our studies. Once again the issue is the "interior" of the individual. Ozdenoren suggests to his readers that they might discover in ordinary everyday practices, to which they had previously given very little thought, the signs of a distinctive inner experience. This evocation of a deep structure "within" would have an especially salient meaning for urban residents with a background in local and oral Islam. At the same time, he warns that casual acceptance of foreign behaviours, even in a piecemeal fashion, threatens a loss of personal identity.

ismet Ozel Ismet Ozel was born in 1944 in the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, the sixth child of a police official from the Aegean town of Soke. He attended primary and middle school in Kastamonu, (Rankin, and Ankara, finishing lycee in Rankin. He studied for a time at the Political Science Faculty of Ankara University and later graduated from the French Language and Literature Faculty of Hacettepe University in Ankara. He speaks and reads both French and English and is familiar with a wide variety of Western authors. Ozel is identified with the 1960 generation of Turkish poets, a group that came to be recognized as unusually innovative and accomplished, and he is now considered to be one of Turkey's outstanding poets. He began to publish his poetry in a variety of journals when he was not yet 20 years old, and was soon recognized as a prominent poet of a leftist persuasion. Later, he began to turn to Islam. This shift is assumed by public opinion to have taken the form of a conversion from Marxism to Islam.

Excerpt One The following essay, "Is it Necessary to Be Free?", is taken from It Is Forbidden to Eat Stone (1985:18-20) and given here in its entirety. In the essay, Ozel devises a surprise for his readers. He begins by challenging the distinction: He West stands for liberty of the person; Islam stands for obedience to divinity. He claims instead that the Muslim discovers freedom through belief while the Westernist runs the risk of enslavement by seeking

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out the satisfaction of insatiable passions. The surprise follows in his etymology of two c o m m o n Turkish words: He discovers an Islamic significance in the New Turkish (yeni tiirkçe) word for freedom (ozgtirltik) and a Western significance in the Arabic word for freedom (hiirriyet). This is an innovative argument that would astonish his readers. New Turkish is the invention of radical secularists who were sponsored in their projects by the Ataturkist state. How is it possible that its vocabulary retains a purity of meaning that is found to be lacking in an Arabic word, given that Arabic is itself the language of the Koran? I think that my placing of the words "Islam" and "freedom" side-byside in my writings has made some readers a little anxious. Such an anxiety is entirely justified. Previously, those who took pleasure in using the word "freedom" were solidly Westernist in orientation and members of groups unfamiliar with Islamic thought. Afterwards, we got the idea in our heads that the concept of God's servant in particular was in direct contradiction with the concept of freedom. All of this gave rise to our not undertaking to think through these issues in a more basic form. Why is it that I do not use the word "hiirriyet" [freedom", Arabic root] but resort instead to use the word that has so much pleased the Westernized intellectuals in Turkey, that is, ozgtirltik ("freedom", Turkish roots). I do so because hiirriyet has come into Turkish as the translaton of a Western concept. In order to explain the word "liberté" in French or the words "liberty" or "freedom" in English, Turkish intellectuals used the word hiirriyet in the nineteenth century. The word hiirriyet has a philosophical and political meaning. With respect to this meaning, moreover, it is a concept that challenges Islamic concepts. But in my view, the word "freedom" (ozgtirltik )— which was invented with the aim of Turkifying the word hiirriyet — has been purified of this defect. To speak Turkish means to think Turkish. Of course, whoever so chooses can continue to use the word as though it had remained within the same framework as that expressed by the word hiirriyet, simply by making a rapprochement between the word ozgtirltik and the Western concept of "freedom". But this newly invented word remains Turkish, and it will therefore have its own peculiar meaning for us. Ôzel argues that the New Turkish word for freedom, even though a neologism, retains its authenticity precisely because it taps into the interior experience of the Turkish speaker. In contrast, the Arabic for freedom has reached the Turkish language only after being tainted by Western ideology. Examining its etymology, Ôzel argues that the Turkish word for freedom implies a distinctive sense of an "abundant" inner self altogether incompatible with the Western concept of liberty.

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The word oz-giir-liik expresses for us "abundance" (giir) of "genuine self" (dz). With respect to the subject of a person, when we say genuine self (dz), we refer to a person's core individuality. Because a person is not an object, the word oz has an essential and fundamental meaning. That which is pure, that which is an essence, we describe as "dz"- Among human beings, we consider the most desirable of characters to be one in which "his self and his word are one (dzii sozu bir)." To describe something as abundant (giir), is to mean that it comes forth into the open as being plentiful and powerful. That is, ozgUrliik is the coming forth and into being of the thing which is found at our core, in our pure essence and nature as a person. Of course, the yeast of the person reveals a double peculiarity. The person is halfway between angel and beast. To have "abundance of a pure essence" (oz-giir-liik) is to achieve consciousness of being a person and is a sign of being saved from both the desire to emulate an angel and the pain of being an animal. Unbelievers choose to take only one thing from the word "self" (oz). This is the meaning of the word "passion" (nefs). That is, according to the unbelievers, ozgUrliik is realized only by giving to the passions whatever they desire. In the same way, whether they use the word hurriyet or prefer instead the word ozgUrliik, salvation consists for them of nothing more than the satisfaction of the passions (nefs). The preceding discussion of freedom and self resonates with the values of local and oral Islam in provincial Turkey. The ideas of an essence deep within the self, an ethic of matching words to feelings, and a generosity of spirit are all drawn f r o m the common language of personal identity and social relations in Anatolia. So too are the observations that humans are creatures halfway between angels and beasts, that the passions threaten to enslave the individual, and that canonical Islamic sources provide release f r o m the tyranny of desire. In effect, Ozel has excavated a Muslim identity in the very meanings of the Turkish language itself for his readers. This enables him to redefine "freedom" as the recovery of an authentic "interior" through belief rather than as liberty of individual choice. But for us, to be free means to rescue from oppression those interior peculiarities, our genuine, unadulterated, pure qualities, which insure our humanity. However, in order to understand to what kind of oppression they might be subject, we have to be familiar with exactly what they are. Thus, in this respect, from the point of view of their giving us knowledge of what we are, the Koran and the Tradition are not obstacles to our "freedom" (dzgiirliik). On the contrary, they are the very sources which lead us to an understanding of how our "freedom" (ozgUrliik) is possible. Western civilization is a serious obstacle in the road which leads to "freedom" (dzgiirlUk) because it seeks to redefine what humankind is, and what attributes it has been given, by means of a concept which stands outside of and opposed to religious knowledge. Thus, to make these definitions invalid, the necessary condition of being "free" (oz-gUr) comes to the fore.

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Ozel concludes by evoking the preservation of an "interior" experience against misleading and confusing signs in the outer world. The existence of a believing "interior" is the condition for contact with "the reality of humankind" rather than following the requirements of a world under "political oppression and ideological siege". We who have become Muslims by different paths are people who have read the signs of our being free. But it is also possible to lose one's way at the moment when these signs are discovered. If we sacrifice the abundance (giirluk) of our essence (07.) for the sake of aims which have been suggested to us by the outside world, or even if the aims which the outside world shows us are realized, we will remain strangers to the meanings and blessings of these aims. Because he whose essence is not abundant cannot possibly be in contact with the reality of humankind. He is one who has chosen to be applauded only in worldly life and has chosen to be numbed by all those satisfactions which have been exalted by worldly life. Free Muslims, in the face of the poverty which does not give freedom of movement to them in worldly life and in the face of political oppression and ideological siege, choose a path of action which does not resemble that of the unbelievers. What is this path? In order to understand this path, we have first of all to understand the people, the Muslims, who have been able to walk along it together. I believe that our path is a path of thinking; that those who walk along this road will be able to be "free" (ozgiir) Muslims; and that free Muslims — after they have become familiar with their own human qualities, have considered accompanying one another, and have chosen to do so — will be able to take the first step by becoming familiar with the human qualities of Muslims. If the Turkish believer looks to signs in the outside world, he or she will not be able to come into contact with the reality of humanity. If, however, the individual looks within, he or she will discover essential human qualities, recover a genuine understanding of others, and thereby re-establish contact with the reality of humankind.

Excerpt Two The second excerpt is from an essay, "Turkey's Important Position" which appeared in Friday Letters (1989:58-60). Ozel claims that Turkey has a special role to play in the Islamic resurgence, but for surprising reasons. He begins by describing the problem of colonial penetration and the heritage of psychological dependency which has afflicted so many Muslim countries.

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Other than Turkey, all Muslim countries (the people being Muslim, but the administration being non-Islamic) were countries which were either directly colonized during the nineteenth century or countries which were set up by colonialists who occupied Ottoman lands at the end of the First World War. To say that a country has been colonized is to say that the country has accepted a foreign population which has penetrated into the very recesses of that country. The very horizons of such a country have been limited by ideals sketched out by colonialists. In so far as the colonialist has implanted specific educational institutions and specific professional opportunities in that country, then he has also implanted the idea that these are useful, thanks only to the healthy functioning of the [Westernist] metropolis. Because of this, the Pakistanis cannot quite think of themselves without the English, and the Algerians cannot quite think of themselves without the French. But in so far as a "frankacized" segment of the population in Turkey is the bearer of a worthless fascination with the West, they are the receiving end of a channel that has been opened up by the colonialist. Because of this, the probability of their coming to their senses is higher than Westernists elsewhere who have been brought up in a colony. Another peculiarity of all those countries with a Muslim population which have experienced a period of colonization is the phenomenon of governments which still respect the condition of having been able to govern by virtue of having become the direct proxies of the colonialists. From this point of view, in countries that have gone through a phase of colonialism, a minority government has come to be accepted as a principle. Ozel next claims that the situation of Turkey is different because a nonIslamic administration was accepted by its own ruling elite with the consent of a majority of citizens. The relative independence of Turkey features a difference in two respects. A foreign population has not penetrated into the recesses of the country, and a governing cadre, even while according the recommendations of foreigners full respect, is not a board of proxies, but rather carries out its duties as a segment of the majority in the society. Thus, because of a process which has brought about these special conditions, an Islamic revival in Turkey can achieve a structure which will not be subject to manipulation by foreigners. This is a sufficient reason to attribute to Turkey a special importance. Because there is no Islamic revival in the world that is worth the trouble if in the end it is to foster a form of life which develops as nothing more than a standby for the world powers. For it could be said that an Islamic life that merely remains in the conscience has not uttered a sound and even has supported the world system. A sense of its sovereignty has been preserved in Turkey and this will be an invaluable psychological resource as the Turks work their way back to Islam. Ozel now takes another step. T h e disestablishment of Islam has meant that believers in Turkey are not confused by false compromises left over f r o m a colonial administration. In Turkey the Islamic resurgence therefore takes the form of a reconstruction of an Islamic society f r o m the ground up.

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From my point of view, the second reason that Turkey occupies an important place with respect to an Islamic movement has to do with certain lived experiences with regard to Islam. Of all those Islamic countries that endured the colonial epoch, an Islamic identity of the state was never so openly rejected as in Turkey. Therefore, social life in these other Islamic countries never passed through a phase of being organized by means of a coercive power which followed a logic of being un-Islamic or even hostile to Islam. Nonetheless, in these same countries, just as was the case in Turkey, everything was done in the interests of preserving the world system. In all the countries that experienced the colonial period, it was therefore easier to muddy the views of the people with all kinds of Islamic theses than it was in Turkey. Perhaps in the face of external political power and hegemonic forces, from the point of view of attitudes to be adopted, parallel evidence can be cited that argues for similar programmes of persuasion in other Muslim countries and in Turkey as well. But there are some things which can be said only in Turkey with respect to the matter of reconstructing an Islamic life. Because only in Turkey are we confronted with a problem which takes the form of the reconstruction of an Islamic life. In other colonialized countries the specter of an internally corrupt Islamic social life continues to prevail. Ozel concludes that Muslim identity in Turkey potentially has a clarity of meaning that it lacks elsewhere because of the outright opposition of secularism and religion. He concludes with a description of Muslim identity as the basis of a distinctive "historical outlook, ... social approach, ... political position, and ... cultural preference". To be Muslim in Turkey, to make the choice of Islam, is a manifest fact and a distinctive form of behaviour. What has brought this about is the experience of un-Islamic coercive power in social life. Whereas in colonized countries, there are no perceptible limits on the exercise of Islamic preferences, even as the tiller remains completely in the hands of un-Islamic forces whose coercive power remains invisible. A Moroccan or Egyptian communist who cites the Koran and Hadith while working for his own special ends is a commonplace matter. But in Turkey, anyone who declares himself a Muslim has made his political position quite clear. For this reason, it has come about that rightists have a fear of the word "Muslims". (For this development, Turkey is indebted to those post-1970 movements which demonstrated the power of Islam being an independent political alternative.) In Turkey, to be a Muslim is the manifestation of an identity which sketches the framework of an historical outlook, a social approach, a political position, and a cultural preference. Because of this, there is a possibility of seizing the opportunity of saving ourselves from the deceptive practices of both right and left.

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In this essay, Ozel draws a picture of an external political world that is devoid of Islamic meaning, leaving the believer with the challenge to reclaim his or her Muslim interior. 1 From this position, the believer would move outward to develop a distinctive worldview that points toward a new form of Islamic social life. The striking aspect of the essays and books of Muslim intellectuals is precisely their focus on the issue of interior experience. They have managed to evoke a vision of a new Islamic way of life without being specific about its details. This has been possible because they speak for believers who have a sense of personal experiences that are not synchronized with the official public culture of the Republic of Turkey. These personal experiences spring from an Islamic language of social being that has continued to thrive in the villages and towns of provincial Turkey even as application of the secular reforms proceeded.

Conclusion In his provocative study of the origin and spread of nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1983) has brought to our attention incidental links between capitalism and print technology which gave birth to nationalism. The mass marketed book and newspaper served to fix specific languages as a medium of mass exchange, to instill in reading audiences an experience of homogenous time, and to enable them to conceive an intimate relationship with anonymous others. Eventually, the chemistry of these elements corroded older concepts of the polity that preceded them. A sacred language of community, a society organized around a single centre, and the identification of history with cosmology, all fell to the idea of a nation of people speaking the same language and charting their course through history. According to Anderson, the imaginative effects of print capitalism worked at first like a hidden hand as early nationalist movements were spawned across Europe. By the late nineteenth century, however, its mechanisms were understood all too clearly: The hidden hand had become an iron first of the nation-state. During the first decades of the Republic of Turkey, for example, regulation of the printed page was one of the most powerful and effective tools of the programme of secular reforms. By means of the adoption of roman letters and the purge of words with Arabic and Persian roots, standard printed Turkish ^Elsewhere Ôzel (1986) has described the movement in which he participates as a movement of "reclamation" (revendicatif).

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became an instrument for distancing the Turkish citizenry from their strong attachment to Islamic tradition and a vehicle for new conceptss of self, society, world, and time. 1 The two examples of Islamist media culture presented in this paper illustrate how pieces of the medieval polity were not definitively displaced by the idea of nation but now ride piggy-back on some of the very institutions of its creation. In recent years, mass media instruments, originally developed and once controlled by nationalists, now serve to support and to reinvent local and oral Islam in Turkish urban life. Some believers, such as new provincial migrants, adapt a local and oral Muslim identity to the urban environment with the assistance of Islamist media products. Other believers, such as Muslim intellectuals schooled in the universities of the Republic, seek to recover a local and oral personal interior through innovative writing practices. The less than definitive passage from medieval to the national polity in the modern Turkish city demonstrates that the mass media are only part of the message. The scene of face-to-face and person-to-person relationships in Turkey has been reshaped by the fact of mass communications, but mass communications are also potentially deployed in the service of a local and oral outlook.

References Acar, Feride 1991. "Women in the Ideology of Islamic Revivalism in Turkey". In Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: LB. Taurus. Ak§it, Bahattin 1991. "Islamic Education in Turkey: Medrese reform in late Ottoman Times and Imam-Hatip Schools in the Republic". In Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. Anderson, Benedict 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Fischer, Michael 1982. "Islam and the Revolt of the Petit-Bourgeoisie". Daedalus, vol. 111(4): 101-125. Gtine§-Ayata, Ay§e 1991. "Pluralism versus Authoritarianism: Political Ideas in Two Islamic Publicationss". In Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. ' See Tachau (1964) for an overview of the ups and downs of language reform in Turkey. See Perry (1985) for a comparison of language reform in Turkey and Iran.

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Kiray, Miibeccel 1981. "Small Town Women". In Nermin Abadan-Unat (ed.) Women in Turkish Society. Leiden: Brill. Lewis, Bernad 1961. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press. Mardin, §erif 1978. "Youth and Violence in Turkey". Archives Européennes de Sociologie, vol. 19:229-54. 1989. "Culture and Religion Towards the Year 2000". In Turkey in the Year — 2000. Turkish political Science Association, Ankara: Sevinç Matbaasi. Meeker Michel E. (1994). "The Muslim Intellectual and His Audience: A New Configuration of Writer and Reader Among Believers in the Republic of Turkey". In Cultural Transition in the Middle East, edited by §erif Mardin. Leiden E. J. Brill. 1991. "The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey". In — Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. Olson, Emelie A. 1985. "Muslim Identity and Secularism in Contemporary Turkey: 'The Headscarf Dispute". Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 58:161-71. Özdenören, Rasim 1987a. Kaja Karistiran Kelimeler [Concepts Which Boggle the Mind]. Istanbul: insan Yayinlan. — 1987b. Yumurtayi Hangi Ucundan Kirmahl [At Which End Should the Egg Be Broken?]. Istanbul: Akabe Yayinlan. Özel, Ismet 1984 [1978]. Ûç Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancilaçma [Three Problems: Technology, Civilization, and Alienation]. Istanbul: Dergâh Yayinlan. — 1985. Ta§lari Yemek Yasak [It Is Forbidden to Eat Stones]. Istanbul: Risale Basim-Yaym Ltd. — 1986. "Amaç dogruya yakla§maksa". Gösteri, October 1986:31. — 1988. Waldo Sen Neden Burada Degilsinl [And Why Are You Not Here Waldo?]. Istanbul: Risale Basim-Yaym Ltd. — 1989. Cuma Mektuplari [Friday Letters]. Istanbul: Çidam Yayinlan. Perry, John R. 1985. "Language Reform in Turkey and Iran", International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 17:295-311. Saktanber, Ay§e 1991. "Muslim Identity in Children's Picture Books". In Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. Sivan, Emmanuel 1985. Radical Islam, Medieval Politics, and Modern Politics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Sunar, Ilkay & Binnaz Toprak 1983. "Islam in Politics: The Case of Turkey", Government and Opposition, vol. 18(4): 421-41. Tachau, Frank 1964. "Language and Politics: Turkish Language Reform", Review of Politics, 1964: 191-204.

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Tapper, Richard 1991. Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. & Nancy Tapper 1987. '"Thank God We're Secular!' Aspects of — Fundamentalism in a Turkish Town," In Lionel Caplan (ed.) Aspects of Religious Fundamentalism, pp. 51-78. London: Macmillan. — 1991. "Religion, Education, and Continuity in a Provincial Town". In Richard Tapper (ed.) Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State. London: I.B. Taurus. Toprak, Binnaz 1981. Islam and Political Development in Turkey. Leiden: E.J. Brill. — 1987. "Islamist Intellectuals of the 1980s in Turkey". Current Turkish Thought No. 62. Istanbul: Redhouse Yayinevi. Yalman, Nur 1969. "Islamic Reform and the Mystic Tradition in Eastern Turkey". European Journal of Sociology, vol. 10:41-60.

THE MUSLIM INTELLECTUAL AND HIS AUDIENCE: A NEW CONFIGURATION OF WRITER AND READER AMONG BELIEVERS IN THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY

A New Kind of Believing Writer in Turkey 1 During the last fifteen years, a new kind of columnist and essayist, the "Muslim intellectual" (miisliiman aydin) or "Islamist intellectual" (islamci aydin) has attracted a considerable audience among educated Turkish believers. 2 The Muslim intellectual is a critic of Republican political and cultural institutions who calls for the re-Islamization of the way of life of believers in Turkey. While he is more or less indebted to a century of Islamist criticism of Westernizaton, the new Muslim intellectual is very much the product of the post-1950, secular, Turkish Republic. This background differentiates him from earlier Islamist thinkers in Turkey. The kind of language he uses, the literary works he cites or analyzes, his stance on Westernism and secularism, together with less tangible features of his discourse are unprecedented, even though much of his thinking falls more or less squarely within what might be called a tradition of Islamist resistance and opposition. In general, the new Muslim intellectual in Turkey is always a writer who has published columns in newspapers, short articles in journals, or books consisting of collections of short essays. His prose is contemporary Turkish. His writings are critical and reflective. He addresses a reading audience whose social and educational background is similar to his own. He often appeals to personal experiences which his readers are likely to have shared, and he often attempts to reach conclusions which serve as an orientation for personal thought and action. He may pronounce on political events past or present or insist on the principle of political activism, but he does not generally speak for specific tactics, groupings, or parties. He sets himself apart from earlier

IjVIost of this section is taken from an earlier paper, Meeker (1988). "The term "Islamist intellectual" is preferred by observers while the term "Muslim intellectual" is preferred by these writers themselves. I have used the term "Muslim intellectual" in line with an anthropologist's preference for terms of self-reference. However, it should also be noted that some of the writers designated as Muslim intellectuals accept this label only reluctantly since they see it as tinged with a Westernist outlook.

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Islamist thinkers by rejecting the question of how an accommodation is to be reached between Islam and the West. He rejects specifically the problem to which earlier writers devoted so much attention: how Western science and technology are to be integrated within an Islamic society. He argues instead that science and technology, as practiced in the West, contradict and are therefore incompatible with Islam. More importantly, the Muslim intellectual is sensitive to any attempt to justify Islamic principles from the standpoint of a Western perspective. This, he argues, was the basic mistake of Islamist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Out of a feeling of inferiority before the power of the West, he contends, they lost touch with the distinctiveness of an Islamic outlook as they attempted to develop Islamic versions of Western concepts and institutions. From a survey completed in the spring of 1988, the following social portrait of the Muslim intellectual emerges. He is somewhere over thirty and less than fifty years old and lives in Istanbul or Ankara. 1 He was born to a family of provincial townsmen or officials and attended provincial primary and middle schools. Later, after coming to Ankara or Istanbul, he completed one or more programs of secular higher education in Turkish universities. His studies were concentrated in the humanities or social sciences rather than in science or engineering.2 Following this, the became a permanent resident of Ankara or Istanbul. He knows one or more European or Middle Eastern languages other than Turkish. He has had a serious, long-standing, interest in Western literature, philosophy, or social history, and there are more references in his work to Western writers and scholarship than to Islamic authorities or sources, although the latter are not infrequently mentioned and are sometimes discussed in detail.3

' There are many Islamist women writers in Turkey today. I have not scanned the journals and newspapers to determine if any of them take the stance of the men who are identified in this paper as Muslim intellectuals. In spring of 1988, none were brought to my attention by male writers or readers. Similarities and differences between the stances of Islamist women and men writers should be a revealing indication of the experience of educated believers in contemporary Turkey. 2 It has been noted that Muslim radicals often have a technical education (cf. Sivan, 1985). The background of the Muslim intellectuals does not confirm this pattern. 3 One suspects that this portrait also applies to the reading audience of the Muslim intellectual save that the ages of readers extend downward below thirty years and their residences are not restricted to the metropolitan centers of Turkey.

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Any further generalization about the writing or the background of the various individuals who are known as Muslim intellectuals is more difficult. 1 Some occasionally address questions that have a direct bearing on doctrinal belief and practice and make frequent references to the Qu'ran and the hadlth, but others rarely do so. Some usually write as columnists in newspapers or publish short articles in journals, but others also publish book-length studies. Some have attended religious schools or institutes but others have not. Some have spent one or more years in Europe or America but others have not. Like most writers in Turkey these days, they must make their living in variety of ways other than by writing alone. One has had appointments at a fairly high level of the government. Another teaches in a private school. Another is active in editing and publishing. Another holds an academic appointment. Another works for a private company. The term Muslim intellectual indicates how these writers have adopted a new style and stance that has no exact precedent in the Republic. In recent decades, the term "intellectual" ( a y d i n ) has implied a secular writer. The intellectual was perhaps a humanist, a rationalist, a liberal, a Marxist, a nationalist, but he was certainly not an Islamist. For Turkish secularists then, it must seem a contradiction in terms that individuals who see themselves as debunking humanism, rationalism, liberalism, Marxism, and nationalism, should be called "intellectuals" (aydin). But in fact, the term "Muslim intellectual" is appropriate, for the Muslim intellectual writes in a conceptual and semantic field overlapping that of his secular counterparts. The cultural problems he addresses, the historical incidents he cites and the stereotypes of Turkish society to which he refers fall within the boundaries of the political and cultural discourse of the urban, educated Turkish elite of the 1960s and 1970s. This fact explains in part why Muslim intellectuals have become spokesmen for the Islamic opposition in public forums and in the mass media. They appear on panels discussing political and cultural issues ranging from art, literature, and drama to politics, economy, and communications, and they are interviewed or quoted by the reporters of secular newspapers and weeklies. W h e n such a reporter wants to know, "What are the Muslims thinking?" he naturally consults the Muslim intellectual who is able to represent the Muslim viewpoint, not only in language that the secularist can understand but in a way that speaks directly, even if more or less 1 Here are the names that have come to my attention: Ali Bula?, Rasim Ozdenoren, ismet Ozel, ilhan Kutluer, Ersin Gurdogan, Abdurrahman Dilipak, and Hiiseyin Hatemi. Most of these' names are mentioned fay Binnaz Toprak in an article which places these writers in the context of the role of religion in Turkish party politics (1987). For a review of the writings of Ali Bulaij, Rasim Ozdenoren, and Ismet Ozel, and a partial bibliography (complete through the first months of 1988), see Meeker (1991).

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antagonistically, to the secularist. 1 Neither the neighborhood imam

or

hoca,

who may be in closer contact with the ordinary believer, nor the believing religious scholar, who may have a more perfect mastery of Islamic tradition, can play such a role, but the Muslim intellectual is more or less comfortably in his element in the public forums and mass media of Istanbul. In effect, the Muslim intellectual is a believer who is now, perhaps more than ever before in the history of the Republic, responding to the same problems and experiences as the secular intellectual. While the Muslim intellectual is quite conscious of an overlap, he is also careful to make a distinction between himself and secular intellectuals who are in a sense his principal antagonists. He sees secular intellectuals as symptomatic of the ills of Western society in that they base their reflections on appeals to science and reason alone, without any reference to revelation. The Latinate term "intellectual", he points out, implies purely abstract, mental capacities as opposed to sentiments and convictions. But purely abstract, mental capacities are likely to fall into vicious error if they are left unframed by religious conviction. They therefore cannot attain the truth. The Muslim intellectual accepts science and reason but only so long as their practice is guided by fear of God (takva) and the recognition of God's unity (tevhid). This means he unequivocally rejects humanism and secularism, the cultural ambience which results from appeals to reason and science as sources of absolute truth. Accordingly, the Muslim intellectual rarely, if ever, refers to himself by the Turkish cognate entelektuel but instead by the term aydin, another modern neologism whose connotation of "enlightened" is more ambiguously linked with the West. 2 Beyond this, the Muslim intellectual also has a sense of how his thinking has been directly influenced by contemporary conditions. He sees himself as living in a Westernized, humanistic, and secularized society. This means that he is not in the same position as the late nineteenth century would not like to leave the impression, however, that educated readers of a secularist persuasion in Turkey are generally familiar with the thinking of Muslim intellectuals. Name and face recognition is one thing, actually reading their columns, articles, and books is quite another. My impression is that exceedingly few secularist readers either know what the Muslim intellectuals are writing or are aware of their different orientations. 2 F o r some Muslim intellectuals, aydin is just as unacceptable a term of self-reference as entelekttiel. The modern Turkish term aydin is the successor to the late Ottoman term munevver. The latter, which is an Arabic cognate, signifies "enlightened" and points at one and the same time to the traditional Islamic concept of divine enlightenment as well as to the humanistic values of the Western Enlightenment. As such, the term munevver is an instance of the way in which late Ottoman thinkers represented Western concepts in the guise of Islamic concepts. Such practices are attacked by Muslim intellectuals as having facilitated the breakdown of Islamic ideals and values during the nineteenth century.

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Islamist thinker whose experience was framed by a more or less Islamic society. Rather, his concerns and interests overlap with those of his antagonists, secular intellectuals, in a way that was less typical of earlier Islamists. A s a consequence, the Muslim intellectual is oftentimes in an uncomfortable position and required to perform a difficult balancing act. While he intends to engage secularist intellectuals on their own ground to develop a strong case f o r the Muslim point of view, he risks losing contact with the other Muslims as he traffics in the concepts and problems of his secular counterparts. The conservative believer, who is inclined to insulate himself or herself from alien social environments, sees the Muslim intellectual as similar to, rather than different from, his secular antagonist. 1 He distrusts the Muslim intellectual's fluency in new Turkish, his analyses that sometimes seem to draw upon Western fashions, and his grappling with the problems of European political philosophy and literary criticism. At the same time, he is also uneasy about the Muslim intellectual's concern for discovering a radical difference between Western and Islamic culture since this inevitably leads to implicit, if not explicit, attacks on what is most dear to the conservative: traditional norms of piety in both provincial and urban Turkey and the glory of the Ottoman regime and culture during those times when the Empire was at the peak of its power. Reacting to his uncompromising cultural critiques, the more conservative believer may well denounce the Muslim intellectual as "modernist," "radical", "leftist," "Khomeynist", or even "Shi'ite." Although the Muslim intellectual is portrayed as an extremist by some conservative believers, he is not the "radical Islamist" that appears in Western studies of contemporary Muslim fundamentalism. For the radical Islamist, the West is little more than a figure of evil. Taking an apocalyptic and desperate view of the contemporary scene, he sees the West as a civilization gone mad with power, lust and greed, a civilization which harbors a special hatred for the Muslims who are an obstacle to its legitimization of the cruelty, poverty, and sickness among the weak and innocent. In the magazines and tracts of the radical Islamists, one discovers a sense of outrage at the violation of the family, the corruption of social relations and the vicious tyranny of the state. This outrage is coupled with a keen interest in the martyrdom of individual Muslims who attempted to counter the colossal force of Western colonial powers such as Great Britain or France in the past, the United States and the ' ' t h i s concludes the section excerpted from an earlier paper (Meeker 1991); see the first footnote on the first page of this article.

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Soviet Union more recently, or their latter-day colonial surrogates as represented by contemporary nationalist regimes in the Third World. Among Islamist radicals in Turkey, as among the Islamist radicals in Arab lands, these notions of state illegitimacy are linked with the hope for Islamic revolutions leading to the founding of new Islamic states. 1 The first step to be taken in bringing down the existing nationalist order conceived as a contemporary form of jahiliyyah is the formation of an Islamist counter-society, conceived as a contemporary form of hijrah?While the thinking of the Muslim intellectual and the radical Islamist overlap, the former does not see the West as evil per se. Appealing to basic Islamic principles, he would analyze the Western civilization as having taken shape through a process of history, a process which Muslims are obliged to understand as the first step in a project for opposing it. Given his involvement in this thought project, it would be a mistake to see the Muslim intellectual as merely the upper ideological tip of a radical Islamist iceberg. The Muslim intellectual generally writes within the Ottoman and Turkish tradition. He poses problems of personal thinking and action, not of revolution against the state and the seizure of state power. As such, the Muslim intellectual sees himself as living in the most recent phase of an epoch in which a Muslim society is confronted by the non-Muslim West, an epoch that represents virtually all of Turko-Muslim experience in Asia Minor. Although all Muslim intellectuals must work with limited time and resources, they would sorely like to be recognized by accomplished secularist intellectuals. In effect, they seek legitimacy within the larger scene of Turko-Muslim civilization in Asia Minor. Furthermore, the Muslim intellectual is not given to the gloom and doom of radical Islamists. Even if he has no confidence in an imminent victory of the Muslims, he looks to the future with confidence, eagerly anticipating the near-term reconstruction of an Islamic society in Turkey.

A New Kind of Believing Audience in Turkey Why should Muslim intellectuals in Turkey be different f r o m their counterparts in other Islamic countries? The answer to this question can be

' For a description of Islamist radicals in Arab countries, see Sivan (1985). ^ Arabia before Islam is referred to as the Time of Ignorance (jahiliyyah). This term is applied metaphorically to any age in which the people have turned away from the Quar'an. The departure of Muhammad from Mecca to join his followers in Medina is referred to as the Emigration (hijrah) and is applied metaphorically to an act of leaving a Godless society that prevents the following of an Islamic life.

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sought in elements of their life experience that they share with their readership. Over the last few decades a new kind of believer has emerged in Turkey. These are individuals whose religious outlook is Islamic but whose biographies have been significantly affected by the institutions of the Turkish Republic. In this section I shall sketch some of the social processes that have been most important in the formation of these new believers. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the number of individuals who attended higher institutions of learning in Turkey multiplied several fold with the opening of new lycées and universities. 1 This led to a new mass media audience for intellectual products. A larger proportion of young people read books and newspapers, listened to cassettes and watched television, and, in the larger cities, attended concerts, plays, exhibitions, films and poetry-readings. Political activism also served to stimulate both the production and consumption of intellectual culture. University and lycée students came of age in an environment of left-right ideological confrontations. Many joined groups directly involved in political strategy and polemics, and most spent many hours discussing politics, culture and history in student hostels and cafeterias. Until the later 1970s, the new mass audience for intellectual culture was almost exclusively secularist and Westernist in orientation.2 In the fields of literature, the graphic arts, philosophy, and history, what was read or seen by Turkish youth was either a translation or reproduction of a Western original or deeply influenced by a Westernist model. 3 Furthermore, Turks of all social backgrounds were coming to know Europe and America more intimately. By the early 1970s, many Turks had spent one or more years in Europe themselves or had relatives and friends who lived for several years in Europe. With the gradual nationwide extension of the television network, the Turkish public was treated to doses of Western programming that far exceeded what had reached them earlier through the cinema. 4 All these developments had the effect of breaking down the mediation of the Western contacts by ' The expansion of higher education included the reopening of religious middle schools, lycées, and institutes, which continued apace through the multi-party period. According to Akgit (1991:147), a new Faculty of Theology was opened in Ankara in 1949, and the first new ImamHatip schools began to be opened in 1951. By the 1980s, there were nine Faculties of Theology and 376 middle-level and 341 lycée level Imam-Hatip schools enrolling about a quarter of a million students. In 1985-6, there were 4,400 middle level and 1,206 lycée level secular schools with 2.6 million students. Islamist essays and books with an intellectual orientation are usually attributed to this expansion. I have not insisted on the point since some of the most accomplished Islamist authors to be discussed are graduates of secular universities rather than the religious education track. 2 C f . Mardin (1989). Music is the one art form in Turkey where Westernist influence is less systematic arid overwhelming. ^The boom in tourism which brought large numbers of European tourists to some of Turkey did not occur until the 1980s.

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nationalist ideology. The new generation of educated Turkish youth had direct knowledge and understanding of Western intellectual and cultural fashions. Perhaps, not surprisingly, in the course of having more direct contact with the West, some Turkish youths discovered their Islamic identity. The expansion of higher education was taking place in the context of a rural to urban shift of population. Those new intellectual consumers who had been born in the provinces sometimes harbored, even if more or less unconsciously, Islamist sentiments. After spending their early years in provincial towns and villages where communal customs with Islamist underpinnings still prevailed, they had moved to the city to complete their high school or university education. In the city, the logical inconsistency and emotional disparity between their Westernist and Islamist experiences rose to the level of a conscious problem. Individuals who thought that they were Turkish nationalists, or even Marxist revolutionaries, discovered, sometimes to their own surprise, that they were Muslims. For these young people, involvement in Westernist intellectual culture precipitated an awareness of their inner Islamist identity. Thus, the latest phase of modernization has brought with it a restaging of the classic problem of Turkish identity for some Turks: to be caught in a cultural divide between "East" and "West," or more precisely, to be caught in the question of how to be Muslim in Europe. The Muslim intellectuals have managed to give a voice to these young people and, in doing so, to make them aware of themselves as a distinct group among Turkish believers. Across the range of traditional, neo-conservative, radical and extremist opinion, it is the Muslim intellectuals who have argued the need to think through the consequence of a European existence, that is, an existence touched by politically competing cultural identities which separate Muslim from Muslim as well as Muslims from non-Muslims. The audience of the Muslim intellectuals, which did not exist in any appreciable numbers only a few decades ago, is itself a product of the Westernizing policies in Turkey. Like the Muslim intellectual himself, his reader is a believer who is likely to have had a secular education, may hold a higher degree, may know something of a European language, may have visited Western Europe, has read bits and pieces of Westernist literature, philosophy, and social history, and is familiar with progressivist and modernist ideologies. In effect, both writer and reader are "republican Muslims," believers whose outlook has been decisively shaped by the secularist institutions of the Republic and the Westernizing of Turkish society.

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ismet Ôzel: The Cultural Politics of the Muslim Intellectual Of the score of writers who could be classified as representative of Muslim intellectuals, one in particular has become relatively well-known by the reading Turkish public. This is ísmet Ôzel, once a figure among Bohemian intellectuals in the cafés of Istanbul and Ankara, now acknowledged by both secularists and Islamists to be the most original of the Muslim intellectuals. 1 ísmet Ôzel was born in 1944 in the central Anatolian province of Kayseri, the sixth child of a police official from the Aegean town of Soke. 2 He attended primary and middle school in Kastamonu, Çankiri and Ankara, finishing lycée in Çankiri. He studied for a period at the Political Science Faculty of Ankara University and later graduated from the French Language and Literature Faculty of Hacettepe University in Ankara. He speaks and reads both French and English and is familiar with a wide variety of Western authors. Ôzel is identified with the 1960 generation of Turkish poets, a group that came to be recognized as unusually innovative and accomplished, and he now is considered to be one of Turkey's outstanding poets. He began to publish his poetry in a variety of journals when he was not yet 20 years old, and was soon recognized as a prominent poet of a leftist persuasion. Later, he began to turn to Islam. This shift is assumed by public opinion to have taken the form of a conversion from Marxism to Islam. Ôzel minimizes the extent to which he changed his thinking. He claims that Islam has always been of importance to him personally, even if it has become increasingly significant. During the period of 1977-79 and 1981-82, Ôzel wrote columns in the newspaper Yeni Devir. In these columns, he explored the possibility of a return to Islamic sources as a basis for coming to grips with contemporary problems. His first book of essays, Three Problems: Technique, Civilization, Alienation (1978), is seen by some as a new departure in Islamist thought. It has had a strong influence on the writing of other Muslim intellectuals and could be considered a manifesto of this new religious

' ismel Ozel's poetry has been published in the following volumes: Geceleyin Bir Ko§ (1966), Evet Isya (1969), Celladima GtilUmserken (1984). His essays, virtually all of which have appeared as columns in newspapers have been collected and published under the following titles, U( Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancila$ma (1978), §iir Okuma Kitabi (1980), Zor Zamanda Konugmak (1984), Ta§lari Yemek Yasak (1985), Bakanlar ve Gorenler (1985), Faydasiz Yazilar (1986), trtica Elden Gidiyor! (1986), Surat Asmak Hakhmiz (1987), Tehdit Degil, Teklif (1987). More recently, he has published an extended autobiographical essay, Waldo Sen Neden Burada Degilsin (1988). Acquaintances of Ozel have emphasized the Soke origins of the Ozel family. The town is said to have a more distinct class structure and to be more secular in orientation than most Anatolian towns of the same size.

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orientation in Turkey. From the later 1970s until the middle 1980s, he regularly published a weekly column in various religious newspapers. In his column, he examines the conflict between Westernist and Islamist outlooks and compares their suitability for addressing the problems of Turkish society. Ôzel's weekly columns were periodically republished as collections of essays, some of which have appeared in more than one edition. Like other Muslim intellectuals, Ôzel does not make a living from his writing alone. He currently teaches French in a lycée in the Istanbul metropolitan area. Ôzel's personal transformation — conversion is perhaps too strong a term — from secular, leftist poet to Muslim advocate and analyst puts him in a good position to comment on the relationship of Islam to the Republic of Turkey. In his brief essays, many of which do not exceed five hundred words, he examines his own personal experience and evaluates himself as a product of Turkish society and history. This approach enables him to place his Islamic convictions in the immediate context of contemporary events. He sees a special role for those Muslims who, like himself, have been deeply affected affected by Westernist influences. He argues that the fate of Islam in Turkey points to the future of the Muslims precisely because Turkey has been more drastically effected by Westernization than any other Muslim country. This orientation gives Ôzel's essays a freshness that is lacking in the writing of other Islamist apologists. He writes, not as a representative of traditional Islam citing Qur'ân and hadïth, but as an insider to Republican society, enabling him to make provocative comments on art, music, literature, and history in Turkey. He may be at his best in his essays when he addresses the secularist criticisms of Islamic institutions by unmasking the hypocrisy, condescension and authoritarianism that oftentimes motivates them. He is also a master of the Muslim intellectual tactic of ridiculing secularist predictions of a coming social Utopia by counting up the losses that were occasioned by the suppression of Islamic institutions. As a disillusioned leftist, Ôzel is also inclined to see Islam as an escape from the left-right ideological debates and struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. He encourages his readers to adopt a Muslim identity as a third way, distinct from the alternatives offered by the Western or Eastern blocks. In his essays, religiosity appears both as a serene refuge and as an active response to the intense political antagonism that is part of Turkish society. At the same time Ôzel does not hesitate to challenge the convictions of many conservative Muslims: the Muslims in Turkey cannot rest easy, he warns, with the notion that somehow everything will come out right because

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God is on their side. They must engage in self-examination and arrive at a program for individual action. This will require their recognition of some unpleasant facts. The Muslims are a small minority, not an overhelming majority in Turkey. The Muslims are not united in Turkey, and there will never be one kind of Turkish Muslim. Such statements flatly contradict the most favored clichés of Muslim conservatives and raise problems about the place of Islam in Turkey that few of them would dare to consider. Ózel also challenges the widespread assumption among committed Muslims that the restoration of an Islamic state with an Islamic law is their immediate goal. The project to seize the state will inevitably draw the believers into a quest for power, he observes, and this quest will prove fatal to the principless of truth and justice that Muslims hold most dear. This leads him to a more subtle analysis of the place of Islam in Turkey than is found in the writings of other Muslim intellectuals. Even if the true Muslims are a small minority in Turkey, he declares, Islam is indeed a latent dimension of belief and practice of the vast majority of the people of Turkey. An Islamic movement can, therefore, potentially act in the n a m e of the people insofar as it is representative of these deeper, cherished values. But this possibility presents the Muslims with a problem as much as an opportunity. It means that religion is a primary target for state manipulation and exploitation. The believer should therefore not be seduced by politicians who promise a return to Islamic principles or by intellectuals who glorify Ottoman institutions. Even if Muslims in Turkey cannot be ardent defenders of the democratic order, they nonetheless have a stake in democracy. This is a regime, he observes, that has given them far more than the one-party system of the early Republic. Six excerpts from the work of ísmet Ózel follow. The excerpts were published over a period of ten years or so. No attempt is made to represent the changes in Ózel's thinking over this time.

Translations from the Works of Ísmet Ózel1 Excerpt

One

In his first collection of essays, Three Civilization,

Alienation

Problems:

Technology,

(1984 [1978]), Ózel was attempting to address the

unique situation of Turkish believers. The following excerpt exemplifies this effort. During the last century. Muslims lost their self-confidence in the face translations are by Michael E. Meeker.

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of the overwhelming power of the West and felt compelled to reach some accommodation with Western culture. They suffered an acute "feeling of lowliness" (a§agilik duygusu). The observation has been made again and again by Muslim polemicists for a century or more both inside and outside of Turkey. 1 The essay does, nonetheless, make an original point that appeals to young believers in Turkey. Ozel claims that Muslims in Turkey are in a special position precisely because they now live in a society that has been thoroughly incorporated within the orbit of the West. As a consequence, Turkish believers are no longer distracted — as are the members of many other semi-traditional Islamic societies — by half-measures aimed at preserving the remnants of an Islamic cultural heritage. Ozel concludes with an appeal characteristic of contemporary Islamists. Today, Muslims are left with new other alternative but to return to the Islamic sources to reconstruct a new Islamic way of life. Ozel does not pursue the question of just how Muslims will return to the sources since he is not himself an expert in Islamic tradition. As an Islamist writer, his aim is to diagnose the condition of Westernization. This explains why there are far more explicit references to Western thinkers than Islamist thinkers in his essays. 2

The Feeling of Lowliness (From Three Problems, pp. 56-8) The rapid development of European capitalism in the nineteenth century, followed by its appearance as a great mechanical and material power on a world scale, spread a terror among those peoples outside this system. Not only in Islamic countries, but in all the countries of Asia and Africa, people were overcome with a feeling of lowliness before the superiority of European power. The weapons and affluence which were in the hands of the Europeans (even if they were only the attributes of its bourgeoisie) came in the company of a deception: that they were also better thinkers. Certainly the cultural accumulation, which Europe had amassed by means of its distinctive intellectual orientation, was a fact that could not be belittled. Most strikingly, the West presented all humankind with dazzling products of art and philosophy even as it attained a high level of scientific knowledge and accomplishment. 3 ' For an account of the thinking of Islamic modernists and reformers in the late nineteenth century, see Esposito (1988:127-52). 2 Ozel begins his collection of essays with quotes from the writings of two Europeans, R.H. Tawney and Marechal F. Foch, rather than with citations of Islamic tradition. 3 The concept "man" (insan) is ungendered in Turkish. I have usually translated this concept as "humankind."

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In the countries outside of Europe, a rational individual had no other recourse than to bow down in astonishment before this body of cultural accumulation and material equipment so foreign to their own traditions and conventions. So it was that even those individuals who were against the West felt themselves obliged to undergo acceptance of the West. The character of the Asian or the African in this period is distinguished by the yearning he felt for an alien structure outside of his own tradition even as he was still living with that tradition, however corrupted it might be. 1 The oriental individual therefore perceived himself as though obliged to stand with each foot on two separate lands. Thus, in this period we find the rational person (just for what he had achieved rationality is a matter of debate of course) experiencing a deep feeling of lowliness. This feeling of lowliness was inevitably apparent to those social classes beneath him and, going beyond this, was eventually transmitted as an inheritance to the generations which succeeded him. As for our own nation's intellectuals, we find that Tanpinar was one of those who experienced deeply — and even at an especially high level — such a feeling of lowliness. 2 Tanpinar was fully aware of the fine points of both Ottoman and Western culture. He made his basic choices in favor of the West, to be sure, but he was not ready to take his own culture lightly nor to reject it radically. This conflict made him vulnerable to an acute case of a feeling of lowliness. What could be done to compel the Western mentality to accept that we too were a part of humankind. This was his problem. On the other hand, the feeling of lowliness of his friend, Ata?, even exceeded his own. For Ata?, the preservation of his native culture was not a desirable thing at all. Considering himself completely European, Ata? adopted a European outlook toward both the Ottoman and himself. He had an acute sense of history and of his own time, but he was ready to dismiss all this with the mere stroke of a pen. 3 1 Personal pronouns are not gendered in Turkish. This has been lost in the translation where the ronouns "he" and "his" appear. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is recognized as one of the greatest writers of the Republican period. Unlike many of the writers of his generation, he was deeply interested in the Ottoman and Islamic background of Turkey at the same time as his reference point was the Western literary tradition. His novel, Huzur (1949), examines the interior psychological conflicts of its characters in terms of their being at once both "Western" and "Eastern" in their sensibilities. See Beh?et Necatigil, Edebiyattmizda isimler Sozlugu, p. 314. % u r u l l a h Ata? (1898-1957) is now best known as a translator of European classics into Turkish. His own essays and criticism advocated the Westernization of Turkish literature and attacked the use of traditional forms. He was an exponent of such extreme stylistic innovations as the "inverted sentence," the accommodation of Turkish to a word order that was perceived as Western. See Belief Necatigil, Edebiyatimizda isimler Sozlugu, pp. 52-3.

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In our day, the props for the feeling of lowliness experienced in those former times have been swept away. We have become the West, and the West has come to us. Neither the decor, the understandings, nor the conditions of the world in which we live carry any longer the stamp of tradition. If there are a few traces, these are not serious enough to serve as an obstacle to our being persons of the capitalist world. We are different from a European, an American, or a Soviet, but, nonetheless, we are beset by the same tribulations as they and subject to the same conditions of struggle. Today, like those individuals of the preceding century, we also understand the West as great: but great as calamity rather than as achievement. For that matter, this same conviction is now embraced even by a segment of humankind in the West itself. So today we are not able to assess our own problems by insisting that it is one way here among us and another way over there among them. Moreover, we are no longer left facing the choice of accepting or rejecting submission to the West. Now, the vitality of any concern for preserving our cultural structures and artifacts, and for saving that side of our humanity not yet corrupted, has entirely dissipated. We find ourselves at a disturbing and confusing — but also at a higher — position: to address directly the Qur'an, to inform ourselves by means of the Qur'an, and to take the power for living a life from the Qur'an.

Excerpt Two The following excerpt is taken from the final pages of Three Problems. The later 1970s, now remembered as the time of anarchy, were years of weak coalition governments, left-right polarization of Turkish society, and terror tactics on the part of illegal paramilitary organizations. By the time his book of essays had appeared, the Turkish public was exhausted by ideological dispute and longed for an end to the spiral of political assassination. In concluding his book, Ozel denounces the search for radical solutions and Utopian formulas as a disease of Westernization. 1 Muslims who are entranced with radical or Utopian solutions, he observes, are themselves afflicted by the disease of Westernization. He recommends radicalism in bitter exchange took place between Binnaz Toprak and Ismet Ozel in the pages of the culture magazine Gosteri (October 1986: 31 and November 1986: 34-5). In a review of the works of Ali Bulag, and Ismet Ozel (Toplum ve Bilim 29/30), Dr. Toprak had discussed these two writers as calling for a Utopian return to an Islamic Golden Age. Ozel replied by rejecting the label of utopianist, preferring instead the label "reclaimant" (revendicatif).

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concept but condemns radicalism in practice. The argument may strike the non-Turkish reader as unpersuasive, but it is a significant step in Islamist polemics. Ozel takes a stance that is not at odds with the mainstream of Turkish society, accepting the majority norms of pragmatism and tolerance. At the same time he poses the question of a private, personal identity uncompromisingly centered on Islamic belief and practice. The result is a kind of Turkish, Islamic Protestanism. 1 For those believing youths who were appalled by the political violence, it was a refreshing message to hear. In Conclusion: Radicalism and Utopia (From Three Problems, pp. 185-9) The reading of Three Problems seems to carry us at first glance toward certain definite conclusions: technological wildness, degenerated civilization, and alienating thought are features of an excessive pride, and, as we have seen, in taking a stand that rejects technology, civilization, and alienating thought as evils, we are placed in a radical ("rootist") position whether we like it or not. To reject technology, civilization, and alienating thought pushes us outside the world in which we find ourselves toward another place different in regard to both its values and conditions. That is, radicalism will carry us to a place which is nothing other than Utopia. But if we fall into the net of radicalism and Utopia, we have in large measure determined that the Three Problems have no solution whatsoever: because experience shows that to propose radical and Utopian solutions for the problems of the modern world is to invite, in advance, every kind of failure. Essentially, one of the peculiar sicknesses of the modern world takes the very form of proposing radical solutions for oppression, wrong-doing, and everything that is accepted as harmful. The "directive" elements of the modern world have insured the construction of the enslaving, impoverishing, sick, painful, and deathly "biosphere" in which we all live precisely by setting out with the pretension of eliminating slavery, poverty, sickness, pain and even death at their very roots. This being the case, as Muslims, we have to say that we must escape being caught in the trap of confronting one set of modern pretensions by taking up still another set of modern pretensions.

Ozel has himself drawn a similar parallel in an exchange with Binnaz Toprak (see the footnote above). Dr. Toprak had charged Muslim intellectuals with dreaming of a return to an Islamic Golden Age and made a reference to Judeo-christian Adventists awaiting the millennium. If a comparison were necessary, Ozel replied, he might be more aptly compared to Christian Evangelicals than to Adventists. The comment is interesting because other Turkish Islamists often cite their experience with Christian movements as a turning point in their religious commitments. For many years, the West was seen as verifying the thesis of Turkish secularists that modernity and religion did not go together. It has been a surprise for Turkish believers to learn that religion is still an important aspect of personal identity in Western societies.

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But the first question that comes to mind is whether or not we may have opened the door to opportunism, compromise with impiety, and cooperation with the executioners in rejecting radicalism and Utopia. Having arrived at this point, we have to be careful to distinguish clearly between two separate issues. We are obliged to proceed radically in the conception of problems, investigating carefully each problem, taking into consideration all the elements that have opened the way to its growth, and doing everything possible to go into the very depths of the matter. But conceiving of a problem in terms of its very roots is very different from trying to achieve a root solution to the problem. Our radical approach on a conceptual level is an attribute that stems from our praise and gratitude [toward God as Muslims]. Over and against this, however, proposing radical solutions is a priestly pretension. The person who conceives the problem radically in its reality is also the person who has conceived that the final solution is not in his own hands. At the same time, the conception of a problem from a radical perspective keeps us from being enmeshed in it, from being implicated in the misfortunes and violations which are consequences of it. He who cannot be radical in conception will not be able to move in the right direction for himself either. In rejecting Utopia, the necessity of making a further distinction is also incumbent upon us. The Utopias that Western thought has created according to its own standards are represented by predefined forms of life or by social and world models which are limited by an existing imagination. This is the Utopia that we have rejected, a dreamed-of "nevernever land" which will cause every step we take toward it to meet with failure. Because no matter with what good intentions the project might be taken up, the work of organizing a Utopia always carries with it the pretension: "We know what is good for us." Every Utopian pretension, since it is necessarily set off against what has been created as well as the process of creation, is nothing more than a confession of ignorance in regand to powerlessness before what is created and being created. From the point of view of the Muslim, the positive side of a Utopia would be its being conceived with a consciousness of not having to submit to the rule of unbelief, to know definitely and from deep down that it is possible to live by not compromising with unbelief, and finally in this way, to have faith in the realization of God's promise. Our Utopia is to desire with prayer what is proper for us. To think about the Three Problems comes to the meaning of thinking about the bases of the global rule of unbelief. Alienation is a thought which is invented as one sets out with the hypothesis that the highest form of existence concerns the matter of what the son of Adam is able to know and do.

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Because of this, all positive values are assumed to be achieved by means of the perfection of humankind. But this acceptance and contemplation of the inevitable superiority of man will bring with it the inevitability and legitimacy of a civilization which is considered a developed stage of what man is and what man can do. This inevitable and legitimate civilization will in turn endow the means which sustain its vitality with legitimacy, immunity, and eventually necessity. A compulsory technology will make a civilization compulsory, and humanism will sustain its sovereignty over men as an oppressive thought. Against this trinity of powers, the single thing that we have as Muslims is that we are in the position of defending the morality of Islam. Morality against force? Such a contradiction is not novel. The life of the Prophet is full of examples of this same contradiction. And in any event, the good and benevolent (salihler) have met with the anger of those who hold power in all cultures. In every age, the good and benevolent have always made known to those who were powerful that the crossing of limits would bring disaster to everyone. But as those who were powerful did not hear these voices or did not want to hear them, they set out to blame the good and proper when their warnings irritated their ears. In Plato's Gorgias, Callicles has this to say: in my view, moral laws are the invention of weak men. This being so, they are only suitable for such men and only serve their interests. It is precisely from this point of view that they praise them or condemn them. In order to intimidate those who earn more and those who are stronger, in order to prevent their gaining a still greater advantage, they say that wanting more than what falls to one's due share is ugly and not right. They say that this is nothing other than immorality itself. The logic on which Callicles depends is the logic of all cruel oppressors: to live well, it is necessary not to suppress the passions but to do everything possible in aid of their development. And once the passions have come to their most mature state, it is necessary to bring into place with courage and expertise every desire which arises. But I don't think that this is a job for just anyone. This being the case, those who do not unleash their passions condemn those who are impassioned in order to conceal their shame and lack of skill. Saying that exceeding limits is a bad thing, they want to tie down those whose natures have been created more richly endowed, and because they have not satisfied their own passions, they praise being right and measured as a consequence of their own baseness. In effect, is there anything less appropriate than being "measured," for him who has come into the world as the son of the king or for him who has attained the power of an officer, oppressor, or emperor.

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We can say that the problems which confront us in our time, in the form of alienation, civilization and technology, even as they are in every age clothed in a different outfit, are nonetheless found in their essence before all men who are in a situation which shelters the contradiction of being mighty and being moral. Those who held power in Mecca proposed giving money, women, respect and wealth to the Messenger of God in exchange for his giving up his declaration of Islamic morality. Because they, like Callicles, considered a call to morality not only as a sign of weakness but also a desire for being powerful. As for my part, I would say that the mighty ones were not completely wrong to look at the matter from this point of view. Those appeals for a return to morality which are not other-worldly in their intent are not really directed against oppression, but instead against oppressors. As a consequence, those who have attempted to bring down a regime by proposing a return to a non-religious morality have easily become tyrants who have overturned and taken the place of tyrants, once political power has passed into their hands. So it is that those Western thinkers, who have taken up the problems of technology, civilization, and alienation as separate problems, have been able to accomplish nothing more by the solutions which they have proposed than the establishment, along a new unexpected dimension of the oppression which rises out of this trinity. The idea that the problems which arise from technology, civilization, and alienated thought can be solved on the same specific plane as technology, civilization, and alienated thought is like the idea of wanting to take back a little kiss. I believe that we will be able to find the solution of the Three Problems outside of these problems in faith and in worship. And perhaps beyond this, to conceive of these problems in a radical and profound way will carry us to the more advanced stage of reaching the consciousness of service to God.

Excerpt Three The extent to which personal identity and social relations in Turkey might be expressed by, and even rooted in, traditional forms of rhetoric, style, and emotion is rarely considered by Turkish reformers. To raise this issue is to raise the possibility that new cognitive standards — nationalist ideology, scientific procedure, and rational thinking — might leave some of the deeper levels of Turkish character unchanged. As a poet-critic of the Republic, Ôzel has noticed the divide that separates nationalist ideology from the "poetics" of

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social life in Turkey. In the following essay, he posits a connection between music and thought. This essay exemplifies how the Muslim intellectual advocates a form of cultural politics, and it is one of Ozel's most successful attempts to make culture itself a key aspect of political activity and commitment. Ozel argues that there is a connection between music and thought. Every society is based on a specific form of harmony in social relations, and this harmony serves as the foundation for intellectual clarity and achievement. The West has attacked the non-West through the destruction of the harmony of indigenous societies, and this destruction brings with it intellectual confusion and degeneration. To defend themselves, Muslims have to engage in cultural politics.

Music and

Thought

(From To Speak in Difficult Times, pp. 43-5) It seems likely that a link exists between the kind of harmony ( a h e n k ) that a person prefers and the kind of thinking he adopts. In its most obvious form, harmony arises from the relationship that a persons has with music. Someone who is not comfortable with listening to Itri is hardly able to enjoy the architecture of the Sulemaniye mosque. 1 If someone should praise Eastern civilization (or more exactly Ottoman civilization) but lack any familiarity with Hafiz Post, then doubtlessly this is a person who is not fully aware of what he is doing. 2 A simple observation is enough to confirm a close correlation between the level of harmony and the level of thought that a person espouses. For example, someone who favors the harmony of dolmu§ songs and gazino music will conceive the world in very similar terms. 3 The level of his thinking and conceiving is of a quality that will serve to keep alive this music and insure that this music will be sustained. Such a person will be incapable of either understanding or communicating at a high level of thought. ^Itri, Mustafa £elebi (Buhurizade), was a composer, musician, and singer (d. 1711) who won favor at the Ottoman court. See Ttirk Dili ve Edebiyati Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4, pp. 313-4. 2 Hafiz Post (d. 1693) was a composer and poet who served at the Ottoman court. Turk Dili ve Edebiyati Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4, p. 166. 3 Urban taxis which run along specific routes, picking up and letting off passengers until no sitting space remains, are called "stuffed" (dolmuq) in Turkey. The drivers of these taxis are known for their preference for new forms of popular music. Educated Turks, whatever their political or religious persuasions, generally frown upon this music, seeing it as evidence of the debasement of the musical tastes of the people. In the larger cities of Turkey, nightclubs (gazino) feature a wide range of musical entertainment. While these nightclubs are commonly rented on the occasions of weddings, family gatherings, club celebrations, and regional associations, they are also associated by most Turks with drunkenness, easy money, the underworld, women of questionable virtues, the nouveau riche, etc.

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Although someone who has coarse tastes is easily susceptible to coarse thinking, someone who has acquired a refined taste at a high level cannot for certain adopt a high level of thought with ease. That is, it cannot be pretended that someone who has a developed taste for visual and aural harmony is at the same time someone whose intellectual works have been designed in close touch with the lofty and the sublime. Refined taste is in large measure a matter of temperament. Some people have a predisposition for those gifts which are prominent in the field of art and can easily develop and refine their tastes. But it is also possible that these same people are left behind when it comes to conceptual analysis and that they lack the ability to work out explanations on an intellectual plane. At the same time, we can also say that those who have developed their capacity for discriminating taste will also be those who have increased their conceptual powers. There is a high probability that such individuals will be able to distinguish that which is profound in its qualities. On the other hand, a high intellect is never found in association with coarse taste. Coarseness of taste has a deleterious effect on the nobility of thought. If we see the signs of a simple and coarse harmony in a person who espouses high level intellectual analyses, we must hold suspect the value of such a person's intellectual analyses. If we look again, we will see that he is the master of a deceptive sparkle in his manner of thinking. The foundations of his thought will prove to be weak and without a link to the roots of existence. As far as I know, the most effective way to reduce a people (millet) to slavery is to reduce to coarseness the harmony (ahenk) by which that people lives. Those who lose their language also lose their intellect. If, however, a people are able to preserve the underlying harmony of their language, then the power to regain possession of it can be recovered. But if their harmony has been reduced to coarseness, then they will even have difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that they must regain possession of their intellect. In Turkey, the victory of Arabesk1 and the victory of the bankers goes hand in hand. If today in our country a pushcart-goods type of thinking is in demand, if to speak clearly and fluently has lost its importance, it is because the harmony of our intellectuals has degenerated as much as that of our people. To accustom the people living in Turkey to coarse taste and to low forms of harmony has *Arabesk is a relatively new style of music in Turkey which has been influenced by the popular music of Arab-speaking countries. It is generally seen in a dim light by Turkish intellectuals of all persuasions.

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to be understood as nothing short of the sabotage of the honesty (namus) and dignity ( h a y s i y e t ) of thought, the absolute precondition of an honorable (§erefli) life in this country. 1 For those for whom the adoption of a Muslim attitude and behavior is a first priority, I believe it is absolutely necessary that they realize the importance of the harmony that they possess and that they continually try to raise the level of this harmony. Failing this, it will not be possible for them to acquire the refined thinking that f o r m s a major part of the Islamic intellectual tradition. The believer is a whole without division. Foir the believer to aspire to live by a sublime belief while submitting to a simple and worthless taste is a serious disorder of this whole. This serious disorder must be brought to an end by taking the shortest path possible and adopting the most effective means. There is no doubt that social constraints and mass communications have brought under attack the tastes and sensitivities of the Muslims, as much as everyone else. Our educational system is oriented toward the formation of an individual who is "good for the task at hand." This individual's own personal characteristics are not given a high priority. A f t e r succeeding in making him one cog in a wheel, no one is interested in whether or not his humanity ( a d a m l i k ) has a heart. If we see an insufficiency in ourselves in this regard, we should look for a way of rectifying it without any loss of time.

Excerpt

Four

The Atatiirkist reforms drastically transformed many areas of social life in Turkey. Nonetheless some of the most basic features of Turkish society endured even if in a new guise. One example of social continuity is the importance of learning as a claim to elite status. The Ottoman elite were the carriers of a Palace culture, a system of tastes and manners that could only be acquired by a limited few. Similarly, the early Republican elite were the carriers of Western culture, again a system of tastes and manners that was also possessed by only a small minority of citizens. 2 The following essay attacks

I j h e condemnation of dolmu§ songs and Arabesk music might suggest an elitism on the part of Ozel very similar to the elitism of secularist intellectuals. However, the Turkish vocabulary of this particular sentence makes it clear that Ozel conceives of refined taste and intellectual discrimination as a traditional popular virtue. The concepts of namus, haysiyet, and ¡eref refer to the basic moral standards of both Turkish townsmen and villagers. 2 Cf. Mardin (1969).

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the new form of Western cultural elitism. Ozel argues that the educated believer is able to achieve a precision in thought and expression because he has the potential for addressing the real problems of experience directly. In contrast, the minds of Westernized Turkish intellectuals are clouded by passing fashions and pretentious abstractions that have little relevance to the social problems of Turkey. This essay is another example of Ozel's engagement in cultural politics. He is intent on showing that the foundations of social status and power in Turkey are linked with certain forms of knowledge. In turning to Islam, he has found a new kind of knowledge that will undermine this link. In the previous essay, he suggested that the Muslim has the potential to think more clearly because he is in contact with the underlying harmony of his society. Here he calls on those who adopt an Islamist position to resist the lure of Westernist intellectual fads and develop an approach that forthrightly addresses Turkish social experience.

The Duty Which Awaits the Muslim Intellectual (From To Speak in Difficult Times, pp. 205-7) The modernization of Turkey was dished up by an educated elite as the result of a collaboration between state officials and intellectuals. There are, of course, many aspects of this process that have been debated and will be debated, but all of us know that all this talk will not change what happened. Today we are at a clearly defined cross-roads. Whatever it is that we might accomplish, we can only do so by taking this cross-roads into account. The first of several conditions necessary for our achieving a mental enlightenment is that we must refuse to make a distinction between an Eastern and a Western mentality in Turkey. Although there are still Easternist and Westernist intellectuals among us, this political division is useless as a description of any real difference in theoretical procedures and methods. Instead, to account for this political division one is usually obliged to distinguish choices of direction, choices aimed at the future. From our primary education until our mastery of a specialized profession, all of us who are enlightened and educated have been trained within the same intellectual framework, that is, the procedures of knowledge that are characteristic of modern civilization. Even those institutions that are reserved for religious education in our country conform to Western-style learning.

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The form of modern knowledge which has taken the place of traditional education relies essentially on transferring specific, conventional information to many individuals within a bounded slice of time. In large measure, learning depends on written texts and most importantly on the gradual attainment of rational faculties through them. From primary school forward, the education to which a person is exposed conforms to a specific form of thinking. In the final analysis, this form of thinking is the logical system which conceives of "science" only insofar as it accords with Western civilization. From this perspective, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say that intellectuals and educated individuals in Turkey, even though they are divided into political camps, are really separate and different from the point of view of their manner of thinking. The opinion that no separation can be made between an Eastern and Western mentality in Turkey might encounter the objection that the "advanced" learning processes and instruments of the metropolis are not to be found in the "provinces." Indeed, this objection really places a heap of problems before us. But here we are not considering the educational quality in developed and backward areas. We are only saying that education — from the point of view of the principles on which it depends and of its fundamental logical system — is monotonously invariant even on a world scale. Difficulties arise, of course, as a consequence of the great variation in the sheer quantity of information that is available to different individuals, variations that persist despite the widespread participation in exchanges of information, both within our country and between countries. As a consequence, some individuals are inclined to adopt the strategy of preserving their superiority by posing as exceptionally learned (malumatfurug) when dealing with others. The methods of our rational faculties are shared by all of us on a world scale and are certainly sufficient for a clear grasp of what someone has said. Nonetheless, some enlightened individuals are strongly inclined to adopt a manner that insures that they cannot be understood so that they can use knowledge as a means of oppression and hegemony. There are those intellectuals out there who, even though they have always lived and written in Turkey, take care to render themselves esoteric by specializing in the terminology of Western countries. These intellectuals, even though they may speak quite distinctly, hope to get somewhere by presenting judgments in a roundabout way when they could be stated directly, and, as a consequence, either be accepted or rejected. If these intellectuals who indulge

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in such counterfeit mannerisms are able to become persons of importance in both the field of literature and philosophy (du§unce), this is only because those who are in a good position to oppose them have strayed into games and counterfeits of their own. That is, in a milieu in which one can be considered a profound thinker by mere showiness alone, he who parades an intellectual showiness can easily achieve a sparkling reputation for exceptional mental powers. I am of the opinion that every Muslim, especially those who have had the chance to achieve the level of being an intellectual, is face-to-face with a duty in this matter: insofar as they have been able to develop a capacity for explicit, open, understandable, and crystal-clear narrative, they must try to make such an expression the medium of their relationships and of their intellectual circles, even when it is a matter of dealing with the opposition or with antagonists. One must not be intimidated by pedantry (malumatfurugluk). The specific value of any theoretical position which is put forward must be known, investigated, and applied in accordance with its relationship to the society in which we live. 1 In brief, we must vigorously declare ourselves to be the enemies of faddishness in the domain of the intellect. We will not accept any form of knowledge which does not have a function, and those who are in the position of acquiring such functionless knowledge must be informed what we will not pat them on the back.

Excerpt Five In the following essay, Ozel resorts to the parable, a form of story frequently heard in conversations at all levels of Turkish society. The device of the parable is particularly appropriate since the essay examines a key dilemma of Turkish politics. The nationalist and secularist elites of the Republic have seen themselves as the caretakers of a poorly educated people who are not fully cognizant of their own interests. For Ozel, these same elites have been more adept at manipulating and confusing the masses than informing them of their needs and interests. The parable is designed to raise this issue by telling a "folk story" in which two individuals with expert knowledge deal differently ' Ozel has argued elsewhere that those who hope to work for the good of all the people in Turkey should abandon Westernist ideologies and turn to an Islamist position. An Islamist position is more promising, he maintains, given the tradition of the country. This argument is clearly not directed at believers who subscribe to Islam because they accept it as divinely revealed. It is presumably directed at secularist intellectuals who have been involved with Westernist, progressive ideologies, but who have been frustrated by their inability to recruit the Turkish majority to their views.

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with an ignorant and irrational group of villagers w h o have a fear of watermelons. The interesting feature of the essay is its surprising outcome which defeats the lesson that the parable would seem to teach. Ozel's readers may be Islamists in their orientation, but they are also themselves marginal members of the Turkish elite whose basic instincts they sometimes share. Consequently, his Islamist reader will be likely to see the first expert who ridicules the fears of the villagers as the Turkish Westernist who has nothing but contempt for the people. And by the same logic, he will also be likely to identify himself with the second expert who uses the ignorance of the villagers to serve their best interests. However, Ozel uses the parable to set a trap that will force the Islamist intellectual to become aware of those tendencies he shares with his secular opponents. At the very moment when the Islamist reader will have identified with the second expert, Ozel exposes the unreliability of the lesson the parable would seem to teach, The second expert has also behaved in the typical fashion of elites in Turkey. He has turned away f r o m the truth in order to make the best of the villagers' ignorance. The assumption that the masses are badly informed comes especially easy to a Westernized elite living in a country with Islamist social traditions. Ozel warns that even those of an Islamist persuasion easily fall into the bad habits of their Westernist counterparts. The essay, therefore, has an effect on three levels. It argues that deceit is inevitable when a social elite ascribes to one kind of knowledge and the social mass ascribes to another. It awakens the Islamist intellectual to his own unconscious participation in this dilemma. And finally, it suggests that an Islamist intellectual elite can provide an analysis of social problems that is consistent with the thinking and sentiment of the social mass.

The Murderer

of the

Watermelon

(From To Speak in Difficult Times, pp. 324-6) Once upon a time, there was a person who lost his way and came to a country he did not know: this was the "Country of Fools." He saw before him some men who were waiting together in a state of anxiety and fear at the side of a field. Asking the villagers why they were waiting and what made them so fearful, he received this reply: "We want to harvest the crop, but there is a monster in the field. Because we are afraid of it, we cannot enter our fields and

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harvest our wheat." The stranger, casting an eye toward the field, saw the "monster" which frightened the villagers. It was nothing more than a great watermelon lying majestically in the field. "I do not fear this monster", he said to the villagers and added, "If you like I will kill it for you." Thereupon, he entered the field, took a knife from his sash, cut a slice from the watermelon, and proceeded to eat it. The villagers were immediately struck with terror by such a spectacle. The inhabitants of the Country of Fools were now no longer afraid of the watermelon but of the stranger who had cut open the monster and was now devouring it. This man, they said to themselves, was a creature who was capable not only of killing the monster but of eating it as well. Immediately, they swung into action and drove the stranger away with their rakes, sickles, and pitchforks, throwing him out of their country entirely. A little later another stranger who had lost his way came to the Country of Fools. Again the same situation came about. There was a monster in the field, and the villagers were unable to harvest their crops out of fear of it. This second stranger did not undertake to help the people of the country. He understood that they saw the watermelon as dangerous and were afraid of it. So he pretended to share in the fear of the villagers and did not go near or approach the vicinity of the watermelon. The people of the Country of Fools understood that this stranger was a man like themselves. They put their trust in him. They accepted him among them and lived together with the stranger for many years. This second stranger, who knew that the thing lying in the field was a watermelon and not a monster, explained to the villagers, step-bystep and over many years, that there was no need to fear the monster. At long last, he was successful. The people of the Country of Fools overcame their terror and were no longer obliged to fear the watermelon. They even began to grow watermelons. In telling this tale, I am not trying to evoke a moral sentiment by a shortcut. Because in my view the behavior of both strangers was incorrect. There is no basis for preferring the actions of either one. The mistake of the first stranger who entered the Country of Fools was to consider himself as the only person who was in touch with a single truth and therefore as someone who was above all the other people around him. While he was aware that the watermelon was not a monster, he was not aware that he was mistaken in considering himself superior. After all, the fools were human just like him. Beyond this, he was very arrogant in his actions of

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cutting and eating the watermelon. He chose to demonstrate his own cleverness by exploiting a small difference in his own favor. If the villagers had not been afraid of him and driven him away, he would have undertaken to have exploited this ability in order to assume a select place among them. He was in fact himself a candidate for becoming a monster, one that would take the place of the watermelon. As for the mistake of the second stranger, he undertook to go along with the people in their error for the sake of gaining their confidence. Although in our story, the people of the Country of Fools finally overcame their fear of watermelons and succeeded in growing watermelons, this result might have been completely unproductive. According to my way of thinking, this would indeed have been the case. Someone who accepts an embroidery of the truth is not likely afterwards to find in himself the power to abolish this embroidery. So a person who shows himself amenable to insincerity and lying in the interest of tactic and strategy — and in the case in question it is not only that he shows himself amenable to the lie but also that he persuades others of it — will never achieve the right and privilege to explain the truth. Reality and truth are not established in the hearts of men by means of slyness. A person who knows the truth must not express a lie in its place, providing he is not obliged by force to do so. And if he does indeed follow such a course, who can be sure whether tomorrow he will, or will not, tell us the truth? There is certainly a danger in explaining the truth by rubbing people's noses in all the silly nonsense in which they believe. A person who chooses such an alternative merely out of his personal pride cannot be excused, but there is sometimes no other remedy available. I do not know any more valuable quality than being true to oneself. And as for the very opposite of this behavior, we encounter it in the form of rejecting the truth because of the conditions at the moment. But conditions may prevail which insure that it is never the right moment to say the truth. Because of this, one must adopt an attitude for oneself that clarifies the line between truth and lie, between existent reality and imagined fear. If this cannot be done, then one must certainly not participate in the lie.

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Excerpt Six The following excerpt it taken from the initial pages of a brief autobiography that was recently published by Ozel, And Why Are You Not Here Waldol. In the selected passage, Ozel reflects on his early childhood memories of his life in a small provincial town. The title of the biography refers to Thoreau's reply to Emerson. Thoreau had gone to jail for his protests against the Mexican-American war. Visiting his friend, Emerson had asked, "Why are you here, Henry?" The excerpt has the quality of a confession. Ozel examines what part of his childhood might have led him to become a poet. The concluding paragraphs, which have a Heidiggerian ring for the Western reader, exemplify the strong emphasis on language which colors Ozel's discussions of personal identity and experience.

From And Why are You Not Here Waldo?, pp. 20-5. During the years in which I was growing up, I became aware that the path before me would lead me to some kind of artistic activity. But what kind of art? The practice of music and painting required considerable resources. Resources that involved more than money alone. Together with the essential characteristic that they would have required considerable resources, these artistic activities would have also required me, in order to make my way, to say "Whatever you wish, whatever you say", to someone or anyone at a very young age. In contrast, the field of literature had the attribute of permitting me a relative independence during the years in which I was growing up. Because it does not compel one to comromise one's personality in order to clarify one's existence as a person, any work in the field of literature that is worthy of the name has the power to reveal something of oneself. It cannot be said that present conditions are like those of twenty-five years ago, but today just as twenty-five years ago, poetry is still that branch of literature that can be practiced with least expense. Turkey is a place in which those who are possessed with the desire to write poetry abound in astonishing numbers compared with other countries. In Turkey, everyone considers himself a poet. I applied myself to the task, not because I thought that I was a poet, but rather thinking that I had to be a poet no matter what, and accepting that no real accomplishment could be carried out in this field without establishing that poetry was itself essential. I was prepared for this task by an understanding that at each stop in the road, the distance that I had covered

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would be short in comparison with the distance that I had ventured to traverse. I did not bring this disposition with me from birth. I received it f r o m the world around me. Its two special characteristics, which continue to sustain me and to frame my mental outlook, are as follows: an appreciative disobedience and an uninherited nobility. In my childhood years, I had grasped the fact that the elders who figured prominently in my life did not appear to be sufficiently competent, f r o m the point of view of intelligence, knowledge and morality, for one to turn oneself over to them completely and unconditionally (kayitsiz sartsiz).' Perhaps all children grasp this fact. Even though elders are not perfect, they are able to have their way. Using this against children, they are able to assert the privilege of precedence which they hold in their hands. But our relationships with elders during childhood are not reducible to this circumstance alone; for at the same time they are doing many things for their children. The strange part of the matter is that the things which they do for us are also done by asserting their privilege of precedence. There is no justifiable reason for obeying elders; because they are not able to understand a lot of things, they do not know a lot of things, and they do not do a lot of things correctly. At the same time, children have no justifiable reason for behaving antagonistically toward elders, because the latter manifest toward them a helpful friendship. With such an outlook, I was always careful throughout my childhood not to bring injury to my parents, my teachers, and other elders, but at the same time I accepted that they were beings who were not qualified to reach decisions regarding myself. My aim was to give to them loving service in exchange for their proferred aid, but essentially not to obey them, in effect, to reject any proffered aid whose acceptance would require obedience and to know the value of the positions that such persons occupied. I do not know just how such sentiments spread their roots in my identity during my childhood. Although there are hundreds of events in my consiciousness that might explain such a thing, it might well be that other individuals who were affected by similar events and retained a memory of them like me did not arrive at the same conclusions as I did. Why is this the way things are? I do not know. To whatever extent I might trace the foundations of my appreciative disobedience to an attribute of my personality, so to the same extent I have to trace the foundations of my uninherited nobility to the effects of social values. ( T h e Turkish words that are translated as "completely and unconditionally" appear in Republican slogans ("hegemony belongs to the people completely and unconditionally" (egemenlik kayitsiz ¡¡artsiz. milletindir)) and are commonly invoked elsewhere as a standard for submission to legitimate authority.

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The feeling of nobility is not something that I carried in myself, but something that was inspired in me by an environment. The reason for this is very plain: being the child of an official in the provinces. My family of origin does not feature any special attribute that would foster a feeling of superiority. My mother was the daughter of a share-cropper. My father was the son of wagon-makers. The air that I breathed could be described as that of the family of a minor official with many children, where the main preoccupation was how to make ends meet. So I did not find myself in a life-situation that would have encourged in any way my having any sentiment of privilege. But then outside of my private life there was a state, a state that added a certain meaning to my personal existence. The Republic of Turkey, by means of a police-like authority vested in its bureaucracy, had laid siege to an entire society. To be a representative of the regime of the Republic therefore reinforced the personal sentiment that one was an influential member of society. If one adds to this the circumstance that the local people kept their distance from officials, the perspective of a false lineage emerges. Throughout my childhood, I tasted the bitter flavor of this false lineage. Schools, state offices, libraries, cinemas, and newspaper columns, these were all the proper places of those like me with countless levels of attitudes in craven imitation of the West. In reality, these places were supposed to be for everyone, but some believed they were different from all the others. They sought support in these places for their superiority, for example, by not watching any indigenous films, because appreciating unoriginal foreign films with sub-titles was considered a special talent. But the matter does not begin and end here. Being aware of certain things, the sense of novelty acquired from reading certain texts and the strong sentiments related to the achievement of various goals, these were among the peculiarities (even if they were not always fully apparent) of the "derivative" people of the regime. As the child of an official, I was not able to see the difference between me and the local people — whether I liked it or not — as an opportunity to achieve a more advantaged life. So far as I could see, there was really no difference at all. Nonetheless, I experienced the day-to-day deepening of a difference as a great opportunity for myself which served to enrich my mental life. The superiority of a bureaucracy which intimidated the people was of course a false superiority without quality or foundation, but at the same time the possibility of a person experiencing the idea of himself as an aristocrat endowed his spirit with great breadth.

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As the years advanced, my appreciative disobedience came to be directed, not against the people whom I confronted one by one, but against social institutions. My uninherited nobility also changed its direction: it was not that I considered myself as an autonomous unit vis-à-vis

the society in

which I willy nilly found myself, but rather that I came to see myself as a candidate for carrying out the defense of the "good" that I had freely chosen in a spirited and uncompromising manner. If lineage were a real value, it was necessary for it to be my own personal treasure. Given this situation, I could have no other preoccupation than poetry. Seeing social institutions as corrupting elements to which I could not submit, I wanted to direct myself toward work in a field which would not be linked to such superfical dealings. I did not want those who composed my social environment and who had the means to be much greater than me to be of help in my work. And was there anyone who wanted to be of help to me? There was not, but if there had been, they would have made me accept the legitimate superiority of social institutions in exchange for each act of assistance. The best thing to do was to turn to something that required no assitance from anyone. For this, what more promising field could there be than that of poetry? In my youth, I thought of poetry as occupying an essential place in our lives, not because it expressed important and valuable things, but rather because it made us feel the existence of important and valuable things. I did not know what was important and what was valuable, but I did want to know. In poetry, words did not attain a significance for me as a consequence of what they explained. Words in the form of poetry attained a significance for me because they achieved the power of being intrinsically an expression. In such a state, poetry was an expression which succeeded in being valuable and important in its own right. This was a road down which I could travel. The verse of Fuzuli which we find in our lesson books and which many people have set to memory: Who else would burn for me other than the fire of passion. Who else opens my door other than the morning breeze? 1

Mchmetl Fuzuli (d. 1556) was a poet of the classical Ottoman period who had an important influence on the Turkish poetic tradition. A resident of Iraq, he received recognition from Suleiman the Magnificent when the latter conquered the region. See Behçet Necatigil, Edebiyattmizda isimler Sozlttgu, pp. 143-4, and Turk Dili ve Edebiyati Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3, pp. 249-58.

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is one that loses all its importance and meaning when one tries to explain it by translating it into prose. I wonder if those elements of this verse which enable it to touch us can be restricted to its meter, its choice of words, or the creativity of its word-craft? I have not been able to give a positive response to this question. Because who can allege that the poet has done anything more in this verse than express the terrible loneliness that he has felt? Does not the meaning of the verse come down to this alone? Surely, if a certain meaning is to be drawn from these words, it would not be possible to get out of them anything more than this. And yet, it is clear that there is something different and excessive in these words. Poetry creates a shelter out of words and under this shelter the riddle of man's creation assumes a form that can be tasted. (Much later I would characterize this not as the riddle of man's creation but rather the riddle of being found created). In order to engage in this tasting, preappointed forms alone do not prove useful. Thus, the verse of another poet (Omer Bedrettin), although he did not live through the same experiences, succeeded for me in approaching the creation of man: I am in love, my throne set up on the mountains Branding my breast, shepherds come and go.1

^Omer Bedrettin Ugakli (1904-1946) was a poet of the Republican period. See Bel^et Necatigil, Edebiyatimizda isimler Sozlugu, p. 336.

SECTION FOUR INTERPERSONAL EXCHANGE AND POLITICAL AUTHORITY

THE DEDE KORKUT ETHIC

The Book ofDede Korkut is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the Book of Dede Korkut consist of two manuscripts copied sometime during the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. 1 According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14thcentury campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, and the written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for several centuries, had come to call themselves "Turcoman" rather than "Oghuz," had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether. 2 Since the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Book of Dede Korkut has attracted a great deal of attention in that country. Just as in Europe a century before, when nationalism was coupled with the study of folklore (Herzfeld 1982), nationalist sentiments have inspired interest in the manners and customs of Turkic peoples, especially those of the ancient Oghuz who have come to be seen as the original founders of the Turkish nation in Asia Minor. Turkish scholars have commented on the Book of Dede Korkut in numerous articles for learned journals. Critical editions of the earliest extant manuscripts have been published. Modern translations in prose and in verse have been undertaken, the most successful of which have run into numerous !

Tfie two manuscripts are usually referred to as the Dresden manuscript and the Vatican manuscript. The first includes twelve stories, the second only six of these twelve. 2 Lewis's views are in accord with other authorities. (Boratav 1983b; Bryer 1975; Planhol 1966Siimer et al. 1972; Woods 1976).

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printings. Some of these translations, accompanied with illustrations, have become a staple of children's literature. A few of the stories have been adapted for the stage, and at least one has been recorded on cassette and marketed in state bookstores. 1

The Origin of the Odyssey and the Book of Dede Korkut Curiously, European interest in the Book of Dede Korkut antedates modern Turkish interest by almost a century. The Dede Korkut tale of a oneeyed, man-eating giant named Tepegoz bears a striking resemblance to the story of Polyphemus in book 9 of the Odyssey. When this resemblance came to the attention of H. F. von Diez (1815) in the early 19th century, he proposed that the Greek story of Polyphemus had been borrowed from oral traditions current in the East, perhaps among the ancient Oghuz Turks of Central Asia. Von Diez thereby initiated a controversy that was to be sustained for more than a century. 2 Was the story of Polyphemus an original? Or was it borrowed from more ancient folk variants? By the turn of the century, over a hundred folktales of a one-eyed, man-eating giant had been collected among different peoples all over the world (Hackman 1904). However, the progressive classification and comparison of these tales did not lead to a definitive resolution of the problem. As late as the 1950s, D. Page (1955) maintained that the story of Polyphemus was certainly derived from earlier folk variants, while C. S. Mundy (1956) argued that some episodes of the Oghuz story of Tepegoz, the very tale which had begun the controversy, had been taken directly from book 9 of the Odyssey.

Gokyay (1973: 5-15, 23-32) lists most of the Turkish editions of the Dede Korkut stories through the 1960s. His bibliography, supplemented by a search of current holdings at the University of California, uncovered over a dozen different Turkish editions of the Book of Dede Korkut, four adaptations of all or some of the stories to verse, numerous editions of a few Dede Korkut stories in newspapers, journals, and anthologies, three adaptations of stories for the stage, and five different editions of stories adapted for children. Several of these publications were listed as second printings. One version of the twelve stories in new Turkish has recently run into nine printings. The first modern Turkish edition of the Book of Dede Korkut listed by Gokyay (1973) was published in 1916. The first children's edition was published in 1929. Most of the first editions held by the University of California were published in the late 1930s or the late 1960s. These two decades appear to be peaks of activity among Dede Korkut scholars in Turkey while the 1980s were a period of re-editions of previous studies and adaptations. Since 1950, the Book of Dede Korkut has also been translated into modern Azerbaijani, English, German, Italian, and Russian. There are two recent English translations by Sinner et al. (1972) and by Lewis (1974). Modern Dede Korkut scholarship has also inspired the docmuentation of contemporary folktales that are similar to the stories in the Book of Dede Korkut. For examples of Anatolian tales of a man-eating, sheep herding giant, see Yiice (1970) and Brendemoen (1989). 2

T h e controversy included contributions f r o m Wilhelm Grimm and A. van Gennep. The account that follows is drawn from Mundy (1956). See Gokyay (1973) for further comments on non-Turkish scholars' views of the Book of Dede Korkut.

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This controversy over origins aligned the story of Tepegoz with the category of "folktale," encouraging appraisals of the Books ofDede Korkut as a written variant of oral traditions circulating among the ancient Oghuz of Central Asia. As a consequence, the question of why and how an author subjected these oral tales to written redaction at a given time and place has received less attention than it deserves. Among western European scholars, Mundy is perhaps alone in his attempt to discover the hand of an author in the Book ofDede Korkut, but his analysis is more destructive than constructive. Mundy attempted to show that episodes from the Odyssey had been inserted into the story of Tepegoz, the rest of which he considered to be based on an Oghuz folk tale. Deconstructing (avant la lettre) the story of Tepegoz, he tracked down a series of gaps and sutures in its episodes. He thereby saw the work of an author in illogicalities and inconsistencies that had been introduced into a previously coherent oral version. Mundy evaluated the Turkish story by comparing it with the Greek story, expecting that the former should follow the same logic and convey the same message as the latter. Finding that this was not the case, he concluded that the story of Tepegoz had been spoiled here and there. If the story is read instead as one of twelve comprising the Book ofDede Korkut, however, the work of its author appears in a different light. All the Dede Korkut stories emphasize a distinctive ethical problem underlying personal identity and social relations. It is never explicitly stated, yet it serves as an organizing theme of each tale. Of the twelve, moreover, the story of Tepegoz is perhaps the most artful expression of this ethical problem. If some of its episodes have been borrowed from the story of Polyphemus, they are nonetheless designed to convey an outlook on person and society very different from what one finds in book 9 of the Odyssey. In what follows, the Dede Korkut ethic will be analyzed as an espect of Oghuz pastoral tradition. The story of Tepegoz will then be compared to the story of Polyphemus in order to confirm the distinctiveness of this ethic as an argument about the relationship of person and society. This carries the discussion of the Book ofDede Korkut to a new ground: Why did an author choose to present a cycle of oral tales as a statement of a Turkic outlook on personal identity and social relations? And given the intense interest in the Book of Dede Korkut in Turkey today, what is the significance of this statement for Turkish national identity?

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The Dede Korkut Ethic and Oghuz Pastoral Tradition The Dede Korkut ethic has two sides: one concerning personal values and another concerning social values. On the one hand, personal identity is established by a heroic performance. Every story tells how an individual (usually a man rather than a woman) proves himself by overcoming an opponent on the field of battle. The titles of eleven of the twelve stories refer to the name of some specific individual, implying that his name and the related exploit are inseparable. 1 The stories are said to be told and sung by Dede Korkut, who, as keeper of Oghuz tradition, upholds the task of commemorating Oghuz heroes. The hero's victory is assumed to be the basis of his personal renown and reputation among all the Oghuz. The principle, that personal identity equals heroic performance, is expressed on other sublevels as well. In some of the stories, a young man is named at an early age when he performans an amazing feat like overpowering a bull (no. 1, p. 31) 2 or a horse (no. 8, p. 140). In these stories, the individual's name itself alludes to the feat. One story refers to an ancient Oghuz custom in which "until a boy cut off heads and spilled blood they used not to give him a name" (no. 3, p. 60).

On the other hand, the actions of the individual must be consistent with the affective unity of society. Every story concludes with the restoration of the emotional bonds of family and society after the latter have been disrupted by internal deceit or external attack. Virtually every story begins with an incident when two closely related individuals are set apart from one another, usually by kidnapping and imprisonment, more exceptionally by insult or slander. Later, at the end of the story, these separated individuals are reunited. This reunion usually consists of an emotional embrace of son and father, more exceptionally of son and both parents, brother and brother, groom and bride, or husband and wife. Here is an example: "Then Yigenek went up to his father and fell at his feet. The father clasped his son to his heart and kissed his eyes and embraced him. They withdrew to a place apart, they clung together, they who had longed for each other talked together and howled

1 Nine of the twelve narratives have titles that refer to the name of a young man and his father (nos. 1, 2, 4-7, 9-11). One refers to the name of a father but not the son (no. 3), one refers to the name of a son but not the father (no. 8), and the final narrative refers to the rebellion of the Outer Oghuz but not any specific individual (no. 12). The numbers refer to the order of the stories in the Dresden manuscript. 2 Any page numbers refer to the Penguin edition of Geoffrey Lewis's translation of the stories (1974). The order of the stories follows the order in the Dresden manuscript with one exception: Lewis puts the introduction that precedes the twelve stories at the end in a thirteenth chapter.

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together like wolves of the wilderness" (p. 139). 1 In other stories, the reunion is supplemented with a wedding, sponsored by the father. It may be a great one, attended by all the Oghuz nobles and lasting many days. In one story, the reunion also brings lord and prince back together and unites all the Oghuz after a period of division and strife. In another, almost all the preceding events take place: a son is reunited with his father and mother, a lord with his prince, a great wedding feast is offered, and the Oghuz assemble to celebrate. 2 The two sides of the Dede Korkut ethic constitute a problem. The individual establishes his personal identity by contesting others in deadly combat on the field of battle. The individual is therefore the locus of an explosive force and energy for purposes of aggression. At the same time, the individual must have a capacity for affection for others in the context of family and society. The individual is therefore the locus of sentiments of devotion communicated through conventional restraints. How are these different personal responses reconciled with one another? While none of the stories explicitly asks this question, each implicitly provides an answer to it: heroic feats are of value only as acts of self-sacrifice that lead to the emotional reunion of family and society. The problematical relationship of person and society in the Book of Dede Korkut reflects a structural feature of a pastoral ecology, one that was especially prominent among mounted, pastoral nomads like the Oghuz. Because of the character of their wandering way of life, pastoral groups found themselves competing with one another for scarce grazing and water resources and drawn into mutual raiding and warfare. Such circumstances privileged the aggressive role of the fighter, especially among younger men. Other aspects of pastoralism determined that the fighter was conceived as a heroic identity, an autonomous and independent individual. The pastoral patriarch, as an owner of flocks and herds, was master of considerable resources, and the wandering way of life placed considerable responsibility on his shoulders. The ideal of an autonomous and independent patriarch was therefore basic to the pastoral way of life, and the heroic identity was a version of this same ideal of the person in the domain of fighting and warfare. have followed the spelling for Turkish names used in Lewis (1974) except for the name of the one-eyed monster where I have preserved the Turkish, Tepegoz, in place of Lewis's "goggle-eye." 2 A son is reunited with his father (four occurrences), a son with his father and mother (two), a younger brother with his elder brother (one), a prince with his lord (one), a husband with his wife (one). The hero is married to his bride (two occurrences), the hero and his brothers are married (one), the hero and all his companions are married (one), all the Oghuz assemble and celebrate (two).

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Despite the concept of an autonomous and independent individual, pastoral nomads were nonetheless crucially dependent on norms of mutual cooperation and solidarity. Precisely because scarce resources — herd, pasture and water — could not be perfectly controlled or defended, pastoral families and groups were keenly dependent on their relationships with one another. This gave weight to an ideal of submission to family and group norms and of honoring the contracts and agreements between families and groups. Among pastoral peoples, there is a clear concept of individual identity in opposition to others, but also a contradictory concern with the way personal force and passion must be circumscribed by familial and social restraints. Typically a segment of the oral traditions of pastoral, nomadic groups directly reflects the two contrary sides of pastoral experience. These are oral compositions that can be styled as "self-representations." Usually in the form of poetic declamations, these self-representations depict strong personal passions as well as lay claim to a heroic identity. At the same time, they reveal a strong pressure to reconcile the hero's aggressive energy with the constraints of familial and social norms. Very commonly, these two contrary sides of pastoral tradition are portrayed by conflict in the relationship of son and father or in that of younger brother and older brother. The son or younger brother is identified with the aggressive qualities that enable him to confront and oppose others. The father or older brother is identified with conventions that make possible a cooperative and sociable way of life. While tension between person and society is a typical feature of the experience of many pastoral peoples, the institutional coding of this tension varies widely in accordance with different historical and ecological factors (Meeker 1979, 1980, 1988, 1989; Meeker, Barlow, & Lipset 1986). For our purposes, it is not necessary to work out the specific way in which tension between person and society was a key aspect of Oghuz pastoral institutions. The essential point is rather that the Dede Korkut ethic is based on a structural feature of pastoral ecology, not that it is directly drawn from pastoral experience. On the contrary, the Dede Korkut stories may well have been composed and written by an individual who did not lead a pastoral way of life. As Boratav (1983a) noted fifty years ago, the character of the stories suggests that an organizing intelligence has reworked preexisting narrative topics and tropes: In all likelihood the writer [of the Book of Dede Korkut] heard and learned a set of stories which had been transformed as they were nativized with the place names of the new Turcoman homeland. He then determined

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the final form of his topics in the course of reworking these stories according to his own artistic standards ... In any event, it is certainly not correct to interpret the Dede Korkut stories as a totality which came into being through an act of gathering together anonymous epics which had an indefinite relationship to one another... Rather the writer must have melded together a few motifs and themes from old stories and epics in order to form a collection of entirely new stories.'

In all probability the Dede Korkut storiess do not address the implications of the real time and places of pastoral experience. They feature an idealized representation of person and society that is derived from pastoral experience but presented as a cultural heritage.2 The Dede Korkut Ethic in the Stories

While each of the twelve Dede Korkut stories is plotted differently, a dominant paradigm is clearly evident: One of the Oghuz is treacherously separated from loved ones and subjected to imprisonment by an infidel prince. After many years, he is liberated from confinement by a hero who defeats infidel forces on the field of battle. The defeat is accomplished with the support of all the Oghuz warriors. A reunion of loved ones concludes the tale. This occasion is accompanied by feasting and celebration among all the Oghuz. (author's summary)

As the plot unfolds, the individuality of the hero is amply portrayed. He speaks through a series of poetic declamations. His adventures are related, and his accomplishments are extolled. But his heroic feats are endowed with a moral value. They are acts of self-sacrifice for others, which lead to the joyous and happy reunion of family and society. The hero, his identity, experiences, and feelings, always point toward family and society as a mutually loving and affectionate group. Six of the stories are about sons and fathers. 3 Four of these six have the most basic form of the pattern: separation of son and father by capture and 'Text is from Boratav (1983a: 94-95), translation is mine. This conclusion is consistent with the processes of sedentarization that were taking place at the time the Book of Dede Korkut was being written down (Lewis 1974). % o r a discussion of how sexual fantasies and revolt against the father are prominent in the plot structure of contemporary Turkish romances, see Baggoz (1976). Baggoz identifies the romances with postnomadic Turkish culture and society. He argues that a revolt against the father would not have been countenanced where tribal traditions were still in force. While it may be the case that Turkish romances are more explicit about the matter, tension between patriarchal authority and heroic individualism is characteristic of pastoral societies and is evident from the focus of the Dede Korkut stories on the son-father relationship (cf. Meeker 1989). 2

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imprisonment, heroic feat of self-sacrifice, reunion of son and father. In two of the four, father saves captive sons (nos. 2 and 4). In the two others, son saves father (nos. 7 and 11). In the remaining two of the six, a son performs heroic feats in battle to aid his father, but there is no capture and imprisonment (nos. 1 and 9). In one of these two, the son is divided from his father by jealous associates who then attempt but do not succeed in selling the father into captivity (no. 1). In the other, the son restores the position of his injured and disgraced father by repulsing the enemy in battle (no. 9). All six of the stories end with the reunion of son and father. In two, the mother is included. A seventh story tells of a younger brother who rescues an elder brother who has been captured and imprisoned (no. 10). Since elder brother stands to younger brother as father to son in Oghuz (as in Turkish) tradition, it is structurally equivalent to the preceding stories of father and son. The emotional reunion in this story is described as follows: "The two brothers embraced. Egrek kissed his younger brother's neck, and Segrek kissed his elder brother's hand.... Prince Koja came to meet his sons. He dismounted and greeted his sons, embracing them. 'Are you all right, are you well my sons?'" (p. 170). Of the remaning five stories, two are about a hero who would win his bride from a brother or father who is preventing the marriage. These two stories are of special interest because in each the hero refuses a marriage that violates, in different ways, the Dede Korkut ethic. In one (no. 3) the hero must sacrifice himself for his imprisoned companions rather than marry at long last his sweetheart of many years. In another (no. 6), the hero cannot marry the bride he has won from an infidel prince because her assistance has compromised his reputation for self-sufficiency in battle. In most of the Dede Korkut stories, no such conflicts appear in connection with marriage. Husband and wife are usually portrayed as father and mother of a son who wins fame and honor. Accordingly, marriage is set in the context of a child's attainment of a personal reputation by fulfilling his social obligations. Proper biological reproduction is made one with proper cultural reproduction. In the two stories of heroes who would win their brides, however, marriage contradicts the ethic of person and society.

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In one (no. 3), the hero eventually convinces a recalcitrant brother to give his sister in marriage. Then the hero and his companions are captured and imprisoned by an infidel prince on the eve of the marriage. After sixteen years, the hero escapes just in time to prevent the marriage of his bride to another; however, he refuses to proceed with his own wedding until he has rescued his companions who remain imprisoned. Accomplishing this, he then marries, not his long awaited bride, but the daughter of the infidel prince who helped him to escape and save his companions. In the second story (no. 6), the hero wins his bride, the daughter of an infidel pirnce, by performing heroic feats. When they are treacherously attacked by infidel forces as they return to the Oghuz, the princess herself takes up arms and helps him win victory. The hero then feels obliged to kill the woman for fear that she will later taunt him with his dependency on her during the battle. When the heroic bride declares that she will die at his hands out of love for him, he spares her. In the first story, the hero does not take the bride he has won at great cost, even though he is urged by others to do so. He must sacrifice his own narrow personal desire to save his companions. In the second story, the heroic bride is ready to sacrifice herself for her groom even though she is fully able to defend herself against him. Despite the different outcome, each story consistently affirms the principle of heroic sacrifice out of devotion to others. The plots of the three remaining stories do not focus so uniquely on the relationship of two individuals (father and son, brother and brother, or groom and bride). Two of them, the story of Basat (n° 8) and the story of Wild Dumrul (n° 5), could be described as "myths" of the Oghuz heroic identity. The first of these tells of a young man who saves all the Oghuz from the oneeyed, man-eating monster named Tepegoz. The structure of this tale is more elaborate than the others. It will be analyzed in the next section of the article. The second story is the only one of the twelve to depart from the form of separation, heroic feat, and reunion. It nevertheless features the same ethical problem as the other stories. In the story, God sends Azrael, the angel of death, to take the life of Wild Dumrul, a rough young hero who had become known throughout the land for his readiness to fight all other men. Learning of the greatness of God through his struggle with the angel of death, the young man brashly expresses his readiness to submit to God, but requests the favor of continued life. Impressed by the complete submission of this otherwise defiant hero, God agrees to spare his life if Wild Dumrul can find someone to take his place. His

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father and mother refuse, but his wife agrees out of love for him. 1 Wild Dumrul cannot bear to see his wife suffer and asks that God either take or spare both their lives together. In recognition of their mutual devotion to one another, God grants the young couple a long life and instructs Azrael to take Wild Dumrul's aged parents in their place. While Wild Dumrul defies all men, he submits to God in admiration of his superior power. This submission fulfills the law of readiness for self-sacrifice (here not to others but to God's higher authority) that is incumbent on the otherwise defiant hero. The final story (no. 12) describes how the rebellion of a jealous prince is put down by the Oghuz khan. Provoked by a personal slight, an Oghuz prince murders an aging, beloved hero of the Oghuz and calls on his followers to rise against the Oghuz khan. After loyal Oghuz warriors come to the support of their khan, the traitor prince is defeated in battle, and the unity of the Oghuz is once again restored. In each story the contradiction between the two sides of the Dede Korkut ethic is concealed by the plot design. The aggressive attributes of the hero are "naturalized" as a response to savagery and violence. The emotional reunions that are part of familial and social relations are naturalized by a long period of separation and imprisonment. But this work of naturalization is easily undone by considering the experiential background of the stories. The story theme of long confinement by an infidel ruler is correlated with several patriarchal norms of self-restraint among a people who also value autonomy and independence: pressure to conform to domestic and communal rules inspires interest in tales of heroic individuals forcefully contesting a cruel tyrant who captures and imprisons. And conversely, the story theme of personal sentimentality is correlated with individual norms of autonomy and independence among a people for whom solidarity and cooperation are essential: Pressure to act and speak for one's self inspires interest in tales of reunion in which intense individual passions find legitimate expression in family and society. Seen against the backdrop of the two contradictory sides of pastoral experience, the plotting of the Dede Korkut ethic unravels. Among the Oghuz pastoralists, contrary aspects of individual behavior and attitude communicated with one another, mutually infecting and shaping one another. The Book of Dede Korkut converts these pastoral experiences into an ethical outlook on person and society. What was once part of life has become an idealized cultural complex of individual action and disposition. The story of "How Basat Killed Tepegoz" best illustrates how this is so.

1 [.ike the daughter of the infidel prince, who is ready to die for her hero (n. 6), the wife of Wild Dumrul behaves according to heroic norms.

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Tepegdz"

Episode 1: The Coming of Age of the Hero Basat. The first episode is a story within a story. It tells how the infant child of Uruz Koja, an Oghuz noble, was separated from his family by an enemy attack, nurtured by a lioness, and then brought back, with some difficulty, to live among the Oghuz. 1 It is related, my Khan, that once while the Oghuz were sitting in their encampment the enemy fell upon them. In the darkness of night they broke and scattered. As they fled, the baby son of Uruz Koja fell. A lioness found him, carried him off and nursed him. Time passed, and the Oghuz came back and settled in their old home. One day the horse-drover of Oghuz Khan brought him news. "My Khan, there is a lion comes out of a thicket roaring, but he walks with a swagger, like a man. He attacks the horses (at urur) and sucks their blood." Said Uruz, "My Khan, maybe it is my little son who fell that time when we scattered." The nobles mounted their horses and came to the lair of the lioness. They drove her off and seized the boy. Uruz took him to his tent. They held a celebration, there was eating and drinking. But for all that they had brought the boy home he would not stay; back he went to the lion's lair. Again they seized him and brought him back. Dede Korkut came and said, "My boy, you are a human being; do not consort with wild beasts. Come, ride fine horses, amble and trot in company with fine young men. Your elder brother's name is Kiyan Seljuk, your name shall be Basat (has at, attack horse). I have given you your name; may God give you long life." (p. 140) The episode points to two sides of the person. One is animal desire and strength; the other is human intelligence and sociability. Nurtured by a lioness, the child behaves like a wild predator who stalks and attacks his prey. This animal behavior is deep-seated. The child feels compelled to return to his lair even after discovery by his father and inclusion in a celebration. Finally, through the counsel of Dede Korkut, the child is persuaded to take his place in society. He is invited to adopt the customs of other young nobles and join in their companionship. He is told the name of the man who is immediately senior to him, given a name of his own, and placed under the protection of God. The episode does not suggest that human and animal existence are opposed to one another, but rather that they are closely related. The animal desire and strength of the child who has been fostored by a lioness are unduly exaggerated. Nonetheless, the lion boy is still human. He has a manly swagger as he bursts out of the bushes roaring like a lion. Since the lion boy ^ have used Geoffrey Lewis's translation (1974: 140-50) while conssulting Muharrem Ergin's (1964: 85-92) and Orhan §aik Gokyay's (1973) transcriptions.

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is the son of an Oghuz noble and would ordinarily be a rider of horses, even his attacks on horses, like his manly swagger, reveal something of his suppressed human origins. After the lion boy is taken to the tent of his father, he is not successfully socialized by an occasion of feasting. Social eating and drinking are an essential part of his humanity, but they are that part closest to the animal side of the person. The lion boy is humanized only when Dede Korkut, the keeper of Oghuz tradition, appeals to his intellect, instructs him in social custom, and places him under the protection of God. The boy then acquires the ability to control his bodily passions and strengths. The episode tells us that the animal side of the person must be channeled through an understanding of social practices and beliefs. Episode 2: the Coming of Age of the Monster Tepegoz. The ministory of Basat is followed by a second ministory of another child that is similar and yet also different. Going ahead of the Oghuz during their annual migration to mountain pastures, a shepherd of Uruz Koja, the father of Basat, chances upon a group of peris (fairies) at a famous spring. The peris begin to fly away when they are discovered, but the shepherd captures one of the beautiful creatures, and desiring her (tama' idtip), couples with her (cima' eyledi). Beating her wings and flying away, she says: '"Shepherd, you have left something in trust with me. When a year has passed, come and take it. But you have brought ruination on the Oghuz.' Fear fell on the shepherd's heart and his face turned pale with anxiety at the peris words" (p. 141). The ministory of little Basat tells how bodily passion and strength are channeled by tradition and religion. The second ministory begins with a marginal infraction of this lesson. A common shepherd in a distant mountain pasture violates a supernatural being. Supernaturals like peris, and jinns have certain powers not well understood by humans. They should be carefully respected and are best left to themselves. The warning of the peri indicates that the lapse of propriety on the part of the shepherd will have devastating consequences for all the Oghuz. Time passes, the Oghuz return to their summer pastures. Finding himself once again at the distant spring, the shepherd makes a discovery: "He saw a brightly glittering shape lying on he ground. The peri appeared and said, 'Come, shepherd, take back your property. But you have brought ruination on the Oghuz.' Seeing this shape, the shepherd was seized with dread" (p. 141).

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As the story continues, the treatment of the mysterious shape is described in terms that are inversions of the proper form of infant nurturing and child socialization: [The shepherd] turned round and began to rain stones on it from his sling. As each stone struck it, it grew bigger. The shepherd abandoned the shape and fled, and the sheep followed him" (p. 141). The shape is subjected to abuse, but this only causes it to grow in size and in strength. The Oghuz Khan and nobles now come across it and discover its terrible quality: "Now it happened that at that time Bayindir Khan and the nobles had gone out riding, and they chanced on this spring. They saw a monstrous thing lying there, its head indistinguishable from its arse" (p. 141). The creature's head is indistinguishable from its body. It is not a normal human, part mind and part body, but a monster human whose mind has collapsed into its body. In the scene that follows, the storyteller takes the first step in "elevating" the significance of the monster human. Having originated in a marginal indiscretion on the part of a shepherd, the creature is now surrounded by Oghuz nobles and warriors. Here it will be accorded a "relationship" with the hero Basat. They surrounded it (gevre aldilar), and one warrior dismounted and kicked it. At every kick it grew in size. Several other warriors dismounted and kicked it, and still it grew at every kick. Uruz Koja also dismounted arid kicked it. His spur drove into it and the shape split down the middle, and out came a child. Its body was that of a man, but it had one eye at the top of its head (tepesinde bir gozii var). Uruz took this child, wrapped it in the skirt of his garment and said, "My Khan, give this to me and I shall rear it (besleyeyim) together with my son Basat." "Take it," said Bayindir Khan, "it's yours." Uruz took Tepegoz and brought him to his house, (p. 141).

Once again there is an inversion of proper nurturing. The heroes kick the shape and it grows in response. Then the father of Basat "delivers" a child with more kicks and the blow of a spur. Like the shape from which he issues, the child is one whose head, the seat of the intellect, is imperfectly differentiated from his body, the seat of passion. He has but one freakish eye. Representing rapacious bodily desires, this freakish eye marks him as a monster human. This bodily mark will also provide him with a name: he will be called tepegoz, literally "top-eye." 1 ^The monster is named after his body. The name of Tepegoz is first mentioned just after his physical monstrosity is described: "At the top [of his head], there was an eye" (tepesinde bir gdzu var). The symbolism of the eye and vision is especially complex in both old and new Turkish tradition. The root for the eye and for vision, goz., appears in many expressions with a wide range of meaning. Among these notions of the eye and vision as representing an interior self of desire and longing are especially prominent, and among these notions, the eye and vision sometimes represent desire and greed. In Modern Turkish, the "eye" can refer to the evil eye, and an "open eye" can refer to a selfish or greedy person. The expression "to have one's eyes opened" is a common reference to someone becoming aware of his self interest after being exploited by others.

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The "birth" of the monster human takes place in the midst of the Oghuz warriors. It is accomplished by Uruz Koja, father of Basat, and overseen by the Oghuz khan. The monster child, Tepegoz, has some kind of relationship with the heroic Oghuz and some especially intimate relationship with the lion-child Basat. The two boys will have the same father. They will be raised in the same family. Although not natural brothers, a kind of fraternal kinship will exist between them. As the ministory of the coming of age of Tepegoz continues, the bodily desire and force of Tepegoz prove to be extraordinary. Uruz took [Tepegoz] and brought him to his house. He ordered a wetnurse to come, and she put her nipple into the child's mouth. He gave one suck, and took all her milk; a second suck, and he took her blood; a third, and took her life. Several other wet-nurses were brought and he destroyed them. Seeing that this was impossible, they decided to feed him on milk, but a cauldronful a day was not enough. They fed him and he grew; he began to walk, he began to play with the little boys. He started to eat the nose of one, the ear of another. The upshot was that the whole camp was greatly upset at him, but there was nothing they could do. They complained and wept in chorus before Uruz. Uruz beat [Tepegoz], he abused him, he ordered him to stop it, but he paid no attention. Finally, he drove him from his house, (pp. 141-42)

The cannibalistic acts of Tepegoz are initially tolerated. The family of Basat makes every effort to nurture the monster and to include him as part of the family and the camp. After he consumes his wet nurses, they provide huge amounts of milk. Even when he begins to gnaw on the body parts of his fellows, they attempt to punish him and correct him. But it is no use. The behavior of the monster child, his inability to restrain his bodily desires, afflicts the camp with anxiety, complaint, and dissension. The ideal of a mutually loving and affectionate society has been destroyed. The next incident parallels, again by way of contrast and inversion, the concluding scene of the coming of age of Basat. Dede Korkut succeeded in taming Basat by instructing him in Oghuz tradition. He invited him to ride horses and associate with young men. He told him the name of his brother, gave him a name of his own, and commended him to God. Tepegoz is also counseled by a mentor, his peri mothers, as he comes of age: "[Tepegoz's] peri mother came and put a ring on her son's finger, saying, 'My son, this is so that no arrow will pierce you or sword cut you.'" Tepegoz is given, not instructions in tradition and religion, but a magic charm by his peri mother. The ring will make his body invincible, enabling him to fight against all men and consequently to express his bodily passion and force with impunity.

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After Dede Korkut tamed Basat, the boy became a young Oghuz hero ready to engage in raiding and warfare among the infidels. Similarly, but also differently, Tepegoz becomes a terrible "heroic" fighter who afflicts, not alien unbelievers, but the Oghuz themselves. [Tepegoz] left the Oghuz land and came to a high mountain. He infested the roads, he seized men, he became a notorious outlaw. Many men were sent against him; they shot arrows, which did not pierce him; they struck at him with swords, which did not cut him; they thrust at him with lances, which did not penetrate him. No shepherd, no herd-boy was left; he ate them all. Then he began to eat people from the Oghuz. The Oghuz assembled and marched against him. Seeing them, [Tepegoz] was angered; he uprooted a tree, threw it, and destroyed fifty or sixty men. He dealt a blow at the prince of heroes, Kazan, and the world became too narrow for his head. Kara Gone, Kazan's brother, became helpless in [Tepegoz's] hand. Alp Rustem son of Duzen was killed. So valiant a man as the son of Ushun Koja died by his hand. His two pure-souled brothers perished at his hand. So too did Bugduz Emen of the bloody moustaches. White-headed Uruz Koja he made vomit blood, and his son Kiyan Seljuk's gall-bladder split with terror, (p. 142).

The monster child has become a monster hero. The tropes that refer to his feats in battle are the same that elsewhere refer to the strength and force of Oghuz heroes. 1 The monster hero subdues the most famous of the Oghuz warriors — Kazan and Kara Gone — and kills still others — Alp Rustem and Ushun Koja. He even assault his own foster family, Uruz Koja and Kiyan Seljuk, the father and elder brother of Basat, respectively. Furthermore, the injuries of the latter two indiviuals are not so much external, as internal injuries: "White-headed Uruz Koja he made vomit blood, and his son Kiyan Seljuk's gall-bladder split with terror." Those with whom a normal child should be united by love and affection he besets with extreme fear and anxiety. In the case of the elder brother — we later learn — these psychic injuries prove fatal. Finally the Oghuz can resist no more and are obliged to submit to Tepegoz. As they do so, they are reduced from the status of humans to the status of animals. The Oghuz could no nothing against [Tepegoz]; they broke and fled. [Tepegoz] hemmed them and in barred their way, he would not let them go, he brought them back to where they were. In all, the Oghuz broke seven times, and seven times he barred their way and brought them back. The Oghuz were totally helpless in [Tepegoz's] hand. (p. 142).

For example, "he who made so-and-so vomit blood" is a heroic epithet that occurs at least three times in the Book of Dede Korkut; see Baggoz (1978:13), and later in the story the hero Basat will also wield a tree in combat against Tepegoz just as the giant uses a tree here against the Oghuz.

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Tepegoz has become a monstrously exaggerated version of his shepherd father. He is not just a "sheepherder" but a "manherder" who corrals and consumes the Oghuz people. Finally the Oghuz send Dede Korkut to the giant to make terms. Tepegoz insists that the Oghuz provision him with sixty men each day, but Dede Korkut argues that the supply will soon be exhausted. He suggests they provide instead two men and five hundred sheep each day. The giant agrees but requires that the Oghuz also furnish two cooks to prepare his meals of human and animal flesh. The levies proceed day by day until all the Oghuz have turned over one of their sons in turn. Then a second round is necessary, and each family must now offer up a second son. As it was the turn of one family to give the last of their two sons, "the mother screamed and cried and lamented." The horrible depredations of Tepegoz have the effect of revealing the sentiments that bind together family and society among the Oghuz. In the next episode, these sentiments will motivate the hero Basat to engage in a self-sacrifice. Episode 3: The Sentiments of Family and Society. At this point, Basat returns from raiding the infidel, bringing with him both booty and captives. Hearing the news, the miserable woman who is faced with giving up her second and last son determines to ask the hero for one of his infidel prisoners as ransom for her son. She goes to him and tells him of the terrible ravages of the monster. Basat is greatly moved when he learns of the death of his elder brother. As "his dark eyes filled with tears," he declaims: Your tents, pitched in a place apart, Can that pitiless one have overthrown, brother? Your swift running horses from their stalls Can that pitiless one have stolen, brother ? Your sturdy young camels from their file Can that pitiless one have taken, brother ? The sheep you would slaughter at your feasting Can that pitiless one have slaughtered, brother? Your dear bride I proudly saw you bring home Can that pitiless one have parted from you, brother? You have made my white-bearded father mourn his son; Can this be, O my brother? You have made my white-skinned mother weep; Can this be, O my brother?

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Brother, pinnacle of my black mountain yonder! Brother, flood of my lovely eddying river! Brother, strength of my strong back! Brother, light of my dark eyes! I have lost my brother. So saying, he wept and lamented greatly, (p. 144)

Loss and separation have served to reveal the emotional tie between brother and brother, and soon after, between son and parents. Granting the woman a prisoner, Basat rejoins his father and mother: "Basat kissed his father's hand and they cried and wept together... His mother came to meet him and pressed her dear son to her heart. Basat kissed his mother's hand, they embraced and wept together." The inverted parallel of Basat and Tepegoz is now complete. As we have seen, both hero and monster are portrayed as powerful fighters who engage in raiding and warfare, but this similarity is intended to highlight a difference between them. In taking booty and captives, Basat's acts of violence are truly heroic because they are performed against infidels in devotion to his own family and people, a devotion that is overtly expressed in the preceding scenes of his agony and distress. Tepegoz's own acts of violence are only "heroic" in form since they are wholly carnal acts performed against his own family and people in the service of his bodily desires. When the hero announces to the Oghuz that he will meet the giant, "for my brother's sake," Kazan warns him of the monster's ferocity and counsels him: "Do not make your white-bearded father cry! Do not make your white-haired mother weep!" But Basat is resolved. Girding himself for battle with the giant, he kisses the hands of his parents, makes peace with all, and leaves, saying "Goodbye!" (p. 145). Episode 4: Basat Blinds Tepegoz and Escapes from His Cave. This next episode of the tale brings to mind the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus in book 9 of the Odyssey. Basat proceeds to the crag of Salakhane where Tepegoz lives in a cave. 1 Approaching from behind, he lets fly his arrows. At first, the monster mistakes them for biting flies as they break upon striking his back. Then, catching sight of an arrow, Tepegoz realizes what is happening. He grabs the hero, stuffs him into a boot, and instructs his cooks ' Ixwis (1974:206) tells us that the name "Salakhane" suggests "slaughterhouse" to a Turkish ear.

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to prepare "the Oghuz spring lamb" for his supper. Later Basat escapes from the boot, learns from the two cooks that the eye of Tepegoz is the only soft spot on his body, and succeeds in blinding the giant by driving a kitchen spit into his eye as he sleeps. As the giant awakens in terrible pain, Basat hides in the cave among the sheep. Somehow aware that Basat is hiding among his flock, the giant stands at the entrance of the cave, a foot on each side, and calls for his animals to pass through one by one. As the favorite ram of the giant rises up, Basat seizes it, cuts its throat, flays it, and hides himself in the skin with the head still attached. Although the giant realizes what Basat has done, the hero succeeds in escaping by handing over the head of the ram into the hands of the giant as he passes through his legs. Mistaking the muzzle for the hero, the giant is left grasping the skin of the slaughtered ram. The motif of a hero who blinds a cannibalistic monster shepherd and then escapes from his cave disguised as a ram is found in folktales all over Eurasia. Here, the two essential characteristics of the motif, the blinding of the giant and the escape from the cave, have been carefully designed to convey a particular meaning consistently from start to finish. The blinding of the monster. Tepegoz's magic ring protects his body from the swords and arrows of the Oghuz heroes, but a kitchen spit, an instrument of the hearth (a key symbol of family love and affection among the Oghuz), has the power to inflict injury upon the monster. Before plunging the red-hot spit into the fleshy eye of the giant, Basat "invoked blessings on Muhammad of beautiful name" (p. 146). Acting in the name of the Prophet of Islam — the religion in the Dede Korkut stories that legitimizes Oghuz social practice and belief — Basat is able to overcome the protective power of the giant's magic ring. The inflicted wound is an especially terrible one for the monster since his eye, the symbol of his bodily desires, is as dear to him as family and society are dear to the Oghuz: "So loud did he scream and bellow that the mountains and rocks echoed." Tepegoz now suffers for the loss of his eye just as the Oghuz who have lost their sons. Thus, on the symbolic level, the Oghuz version consistently opposes bodily force and passion to familial sentiments and social constraints.1

lln the Homeric version, the elements of the blinding of the one-eyed giant are designed to be part of a different symbolic contrast between the cunning devices of Odysseus and the stupid unsociability of the giant. Odysseus takes the giant's olive staff while he is sleeping, hardens it in the fire, and plunges it into his one eye. Beidelman (1989) pointed out that the olive staff signifies cultivation, a craft given to humanity by Athena, daughter of Metis, and a form of production by technique and labor. Polyphemus is ignorant of the craft of cultivation which is absent from the island of the Cyclops. He "misuses" an olive branch for "laborless" and "craftless" pastoral production. In brief, the symbolism of the olive staff in the Homeric version parallels but contrasts with the symbol of the kitchen spit in the Oghuz version. Both the Greek and Turkish versions feature a subtext of symbolic organization but each with its own distinctive message about social identity.

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The escape from the cave. When Basat dons the skin of the flayed ram, Tepegoz is not taken in by the disguise in the way that Polyphemus is deceived by Odysseus. The monster knows exactly what Basat has done. He even knows which of the approaching animals is really the hero wrapped in a skin: "Now [TepegozJ knew that Basat was inside the skin" (p. 146). But the monster is nonetheless unable to capture Basat. His failure to do so shows that he is unable to distinguish human from animal. 1 This debility has been insisted upon in the tale again and again in the description of the way in which the giant consumes his wet nurses, eats his playmates, corrals the Oghuz like sheep, and lives upon the meat of their finest which he orders prepared by his two cooks. This failure of Tepegoz to distinguish human and animal is the consequence of his monstrosity. The giant is not without the power of knowing or even of reasoning as he relentlessly pursues the satisfaction of his appetite. But as a creature who is all bodily desire, he lacks that side of human intelligence that enables the person to understand tradition and to become a member of society. Thus, he cannot tell the difference between animal and human, a failing that allows the hero to hand him the skin of the ram and slip through his legs. After Basat has escaped from the cave, the monster asks him, "Boy, have you escaped?" and the hero replies, "My God has saved me" (p. 146). Basat is in some ways like an animal — he has been nurtured by a lioness after all — but it is Basat's recognition of divinity that complements his animal side with a human side. The story continues with further confrontations of hero and monster. These incidents are not part of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, but they do appear in similar stories found in many parts of Eurasia. 2 Again, however, what is at issue here is the way these motifs have been designed to make a point about the Oghuz heroic identity. Here Lewis's translation is touched by the influence of the Homeric story. He correctly translates the line: "[Tepegoz] knew (bildi) Basat was in the cave" but then deviates from the meaning of the Turkish text when he translates the line "Now [Tepegoz] guessed (bildi) that Basat was inside the skin" (Lewis 1974:146). In the Odyssey, the giant is blinded so that the Greeks will be able to escape from the cave holding to the underside of the sheep as they go out in the morning to their pastures. That Odysseus would trick and deceive the giant is an important feature of his character, so it is essential that the giant does not know Odysseus is beneath the live ram. In the Turkish tale, the giant is also blinded to enable the hero to conceal himself. But later Tepegoz knows that Basat is covered by a ram's skin; nonetheless, he fails to distinguish the human from the animal. This failure, along with Basat's recognition of divinity (which is what makes him human rather than simply animal), is the crucial part of the tale. Mundy argued that the story of "How Basat Killed Tepegoz" must be descended from the account of Odysseus and Polyphemus because the connection between the blinding of the giant and the escape from the cave has been lost in the Turkish version. This argument cannot stand. The blinding of the giani and the escape of the hero in the Turkish version are connected, but in a way that is different from the Greek version. 2

M u n d y (1956) discusses and revises a paradigm for giant-killer tales. The paradigm was developed by Hackman (1904) in a survey of over 120 oral variants.

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Episode 5: Like the Monster, the Hero also Has a Body. After Basat escapes from the cave, Tepegoz addresses him as a child, calling him "boy" (.oglan). This suggests a filial relationship between monster and hero on a symbolic level. Hero, like monster, is a creature of unusual bodily desires which were fostered in extreme by his infancy as a lion child. When the monster addresses the hero as "boy," he raises the problem of the authority of bodily desire as it applies to the person of the hero. Basat, in his reply to the monster, responds to Tepegoz by invoking that side of his person differentiated from bodily desire. He responds, "My God has saved me." Tepegoz addresses Basat once again as "boy," offering to make the youth his client: "Boy take this ring which is on my finger and put it on your finger and arrow and sword will have no effect on you." As peri mother stands to monster so now Tepegoz would stand to Basat. Basat takes the ring and puts it on his finger. Tepegoz asks him if he has the ring and and is wearing it. When the hero replies that he has, the monster charges him and attempts to kill him with a dagger. Basat jumps away from the giant and sees the giant standing on the ring, which has fallen from his finger. Again Tepegoz asks, "Have you escaped" and again Basat replies, "My God has saved me." Basat has been saved partly by his personal prowess, an attribute of his person that is part of his animal existence and bodily capacities. But more decisively he has been saved by his trust in God. And on the symbolic level, what he has been saved from, as he fails to keep the ring from the giant, is the patronage of bodily passion and strength, which carries with it the threat of death. The monster tries once again, this time by proposing an alliance with the hero whom he again addresses as a child: '"Boy, do you see that vault?' 'I see it,' he replied. [Tepegoz] said, 'I have a treasure; go and seal it so that the cooks don't take it'" (p. 147). Entering the vault, Basat is faced with heaps of gold and silver. The spectacle of wealth serves to awaken his passion and hence to scramble his consciousness: "Looking at it, he forgot himself." The monster now closes the door of the vault and begins to shake it so as to crush the hero within. This time Basat's escape from death involves no element of his animal prowess at all: There came to Basat's tongue the words "There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God." Straightaway the vault split and doors were opened in seven places, through one of which he came out. [Tepegoz] put his hand against the vault and pushed so hard that the vault crumbled to bits. Said [Tepegoz], "Boy, have you escaped?" Basat replied, "My God has saved me." Said [Tepegoz], "It seems you can't be killed." (p.

147)

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More decisively than the two previous occasions, Basat has escaped death, not by means of his heroic strength and courage, but by regaining consciousness of his humanity. He turns to God. A crucial point has been made in three steps. The monster cannot tell human f r o m animal because he is nothing but bodily power and desire. He therefore fails to seize Basat as he passes through his legs. Next the hero is saved in part by his own prowess — he j u m p s away to avoid the attack — but also more decisively by God who causes the ring to fall and the monster's dagger to miss. But in the final analysis, it is trust in God that differentiates the human from the animal. Basat is saved not by any action of his own other than his pronouncement of the Muslim witness of faith. This crucial point having been made, the true significance of Basat's heroic capacities can be demonstrated in a fourth step. His feats in battle are under the sponsorship of God. They are a sacrifice of self out of devotion to others. Tepegoz next reveals to Basat how the monster can be killed, hoping that the youth will not survive the performance of the awesome task: "Do you see that cave?" "I see it," said Basat. "There are two swords in it," said [Tepegoz], "one with a scabbard and one without. The one without a scabbard will cut off my head. Go fetch it and cut off my head." (p. 147) Basat goes into the cave and sees the sword without scabbard and is obliged to demonstrate his powers of intelligence, courage, and strength. "I shan't get hold of this," said he, "without a bit of trouble." He drew his own sword and held it out, and the moving sword split it in two. He went and fetched a tree and held it against the sword, which split it in two also.1 Then he took his hand, and with an arrow he struck the chain by which the sword was suspended. The sword fell and buried itself in the ground. He put it into his own scabbard and held it firmly by the hilt. He came out and said, "Hey [Tepegoz]! How are you?" (Tepegoz] answered, "Hey boy! Aren't you dead yet?" "My God has saved me," replied Basat. "It seems you can't be killed," said [Tepegoz]. (p. 147, italics mine) The hero has special bodily powers of intelligence, strength, and courage, but they are practiced in recognition of God. This recognition makes the hero invicible against the monster and the monster vulnerable to the hero.

Recall that earlier in the tale, Tepegoz killed many of the Oghuz by tossing a tree at them; see n. 15. The name of the father of Basat is said to be "mighty tree," kaba agaf, in the closing declamations between hero and monster.

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Realizing that Basat cannot be killed, Tepegoz despairs. This initiates an exchange of declamations between monster and hero, concluded by Basat's beheading of Tepegoz and the celebration of this victory by all the Oghuz.

Episode 6: The Declamations of Tepegoz and Basat. In their exchange of declamations, monster and hero declare their identity and feelings. Tepegoz begins by declaring his devotion to his destroyed eye: My eye, my eye, my only eye! With you, my only eye, I once routed the Oghuz. Man, you have robbed me of my chestnut eye; May God Almighty rob you of your sweet life! Such pain I suffer in my eye, May God Almighty give no man pain in the eye. (pp. 147-48)

As we have seen on the occasion of the blinding, the monster's lament for his eye, the symbol of his bodily passion and force, seems to stand in opposition to the Oghuz laments for their killed and captured. Any doubt that this is so will soon be removed, but leaving the issue aside for the moment, let us read on. Tepegoz continues his declamation. He asks Basat to declare his identity by asking whence he hails, by whom he swears, under what khan he serves, who leads him to battle, the name of his parents, and his own personal name. In his response, Basat answers each of the question in turn, identifying himself as one of the Oghuz and naming himself as "Basat son of Uruz." Hearing the name of his opponent, the monster replies, "Then we are brothers!" and appeals to Basat for mercy, "Spare me!" Tepegoz now speaks in the name of the very sentiments of mutual love and affection of which he has been so ruthlessly destructive. Infuriated, Basat honors these sentiments and affirms his intention to kill the monster: You filthy scoundrel, you have made my whitebearded father weep, You have made my old white-haired mother cry, You have killed my brother Kiyan, You have widowed my white-skinned sister-in-law, You have orphaned her chestnut-eyed babes; Shall I let you be? Till I have wielded my pure black steel sword, Till I have cut off your pointed-capped head, Till I have spilled your red blood on the ground, Till I have avenged my brother Kiyan, I shall not let you be. (pp. 148-49)

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Tepegoz is now certain of his death. He declaims again, confessing his intentions to oppress the Oghuz, to consume their young, destroy their forces, and put an end to his own life as he does so. For the monster, clearly the only alternative to the violent satisfaction of bodily desire is death. As he declaims, he reaches the conclusion that it is the very sentiments he has violated — the social sentiments of mutual affection — that have caused his downfall. I have made the white-bearded old men weep much; Their white beards' curse must have smitten you, O my eye! I have made the white-haired old women weep much; Their tears must have smitten you, O my eye! Many the dark-moustached youths I have eaten; Their manhood must have smitten you, O my eye! Many the maidens I have eaten, their little hands dyed with henna; Their small curses must have smitten you, O my eye! Such pain I suffer in my eye, May God Almighty give no man pain in the eye. My eye, my eye, O my eye, my only eye! (p. 149)

Basat has been ready to give up his life out of devotion to those whom he loves, his father, his mother, his brother, and all the Oghuz. But Tepegoz has no feeling for others. He is only devoted to his eye, the symbol of his bodily desire. This is the meaning of his first declamation. As he is about to be killed by the hero, the monster is aware that the weeping and crying of the Oghuz fathers and mothers has indeed brought him down. It is this weeping and crying for others that lies behind the readiness of the hero to confront him and kill him. At this, hero slays monster: "Basat, enraged, rose up and forced him down on his knees like a camel, and with [Tepegoz's] own sword he cut off [Tepegoz's] head.' All the Oghuz nobles then come to the lair of the monster in the high mountans and his head is taken out of the cave for all to see. Dede Korkut arrives to "play joyful music." He relates "the adventures of the valiant fighters for the Faith" and invokes "blessings on Basat" (p. 150).

Personal Identity in the Odyssey and in Dede Korkut Detecting numerous gaps and sutures in the story of Basat and Tepegoz, Mundy concluded that the tale was a clumsy adaptation of the Homeric story of Odysseus and Polyphemus. He claimed that: (a) Basat's

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boyhood was unconnected with the account of Tepegoz which follows it; (b) the wish of Uruz to bring up the infant giant did not make sense; (c) the gift of the ring to the giant by the peri was an artifical addition; (d) there was no reason for the peri to appear before Konur Koja a second time to announce her vengeance; (e) the passage where Basat returns from raiding the infidels was an awkward addition to the tale ; and (f) the logical connection between the blinding of the giant and the escape of the hero from the cave had been suppressed. The preceding analysis shows that Mundy was wrong on each account. The incidents to which he refers have been carefully calculated to fit into its overall construction, conveying a consistent and well-articulated message about person and society by contrasting Basat as the good self with Tepegoz as the bad self. This says nothing about the question of whether the Dede Korkut tale has been, or has not been, influence by the Homeric story. But if there was such an influence, the elements carried over from the Greek version have been consistently organized to carry a quite different meaning. A brief comparison of the Book of Dede Korkut and the Odyssey illustrates how this is so. In the Homeric version, the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus insists that cunning (metis) is a crucial feature of social identity (cf. Beidelman 1989).1 The story repeatedly contrasts Odysseus's acts of trickery and deceit — by which he forces recognition from his antagonists — with Polyphemus's stupidity, lack of craft, solitary existence, and ignorance of social custom. When Polyphemus asks Odysseus the location of his ship, he misleads the giant with the lie that it was wrecked on the shore. When Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, he replies that he is "Nobody." Later, when the other Cyclops come to the aid of the giant, this deception saves the Greeks. The two central incidents of the tale, the blinding of the giant and the escape from the cave, are also part of an elaborate stratagem, the formulation of which is described in a dramatic form. The Greeks are trapped in the cave that Polyphemus has sealed with a stone so large that they could not possibly move it. Odysseus realizes that if they kill the sleeping giant with a sword, the Greeks will perish in the cave. Blinded, however, the giant cannot find them among his flock. He must therefore remove the stone, call out his sheep, and hope to catch the Greeks as they try to escape from the cave. Likewise, the Greeks escape from the cave by a trick. Odysseus ties each of his men between two sheep so that they might pass by the giant unnoticed. Odysseus himself does not kill the favorite ram of Polyphemus, but clings to its underside by holding fast to its fleece. In both the Greek and Turkish tales, there is a concern for the difference between a human hero and an inhuman 1

See the two longer footnotes in Episode 4 which compare the Greek and Turkish stories.

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giant, but this difference is not construed in precisely the same way. In the Greek tale, the issue is the hero's strategic devices as opposed to the giant's brute force. In the Turkish version, the issue is Basat's recognition of society and religion as opposed to the giant's incontrolled and unlimited bodily desires. Just as the story of "How Basat Killed Tepegoz" conveys a coherent outlook on the relationship of person to society, so too this outlook is consistently expressed in its companion narratives. In the Book of Dede Korkut, the person always stands out clearly as an actor and voice with internal thoughts and feelings. What individuals say, do, and feel are the focus of each story. At the same time, the Dede Korkut stories do not speak for an ethic of individualism. Individuals are always under the constraint of their social and familial obligations. The outstanding feaure of these obligations is devotion to others, a devotion that requires the sacrifice of personal desires and ambition and the suppression of personal fear and anxiety. A hero or heroine is time and again strong, courageous, and intelligent in his or her fulfillment of such a social obligation. They rarely manifest qualities such as cleverness, deception manipulation, inventiveness, originality, or imaginativeness, all of which would undercut a social principle of enduring and unqualified devotion to others.

The Ethic of Dede Korkut in Contemporary

Turkey

As modern translations of the Book of Dede Korkut began to appear in Turkey, their readers were able to recognize some piece of themselves in these medieval tales. This recognition has sometimes (Ergin 1964) been heavily freighted by the arguments of Turkish nationalists: The Book of Dede Korkut, which is one and perhaps the first of the most beautiful masterpieces of the Turkish language, is at the same time ooe and perhaps the first of the fundamental works of Turkish culture. First, as a national epic, which came from and was created by a filtering of the social imagination over the centuries, it is a product of the Turkish national genius. Second, as regards its topic, it has the status of a mirror of Turkish society and national life. In brief, its creator is the Turkish nation, its topic is Turkish national life. 1

^Text is from Ergin (1964: v); translation is mine.

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Like any nationalist perspective, this portrayal of the Book of Dede Korkut

leaves many important, disorderly facts out of its picture. The

population of Turkey is comprised of peoples of Turkic, Kurdish, Albanian, Bosnian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Circassian, Georgian, Laz, Abkhazian, Arab, and Iranian origins, and the social and cultural heritage of this population includes elements of the ethnic spirit, religious beliefs, and intellectual wisdom of these many peoples from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. At the same time, Turkey itself is a land of intense local loyalties that rest on a complex structure of provincial social relations. Since the early Ottoman period, regional social hierarchies and networks have cut across village, town, and city in Anatolia. These social formations were not restricted to their provincial environs but reached into imperial institutions and influenced imperial policies. How was it that a pastoral ethic could have become part of Turkish identity and tradition, given the ethnic and regional diversity of Anatolia? The context in which the Ottomans came to power ensured that their pastoral origins would hae a key place both in their claims to legitimacy as rulers and in their practice of government. For a century and a half, the early Ottoman state was one of a number of successor states — most of them Turkish in their origins and nomadic in their political traditions — who were competing with one another to fill the void left by the collapse of the Mongol world order during the middle of the 14th century 1 (Fleischer 1986). During this period, both the political practices and the ruling ideology of these competing states were based on two not altogether compatible sources: the steppe traditions, which had been brought to the Middle East by the Mongol conquest, and the Irano-Islamic traditions, which had prevailed among the Muslim rulers before the Mongol arrival: The Ottomans had sprung from a nomadic background and had built a polity based on conquest and confederation under a paramount clan. Ottoman succession practice through the middle of the sixteenth century ... diplomatic practice, ... and promulgation of a dynastic law code separate from the Islamic §eriat all suggest that the Ottomans for some time adhered to the political traditions of the steppe at the same time that they created a new regional Islamic polity. Like Timur, the Ottomans, attempted to reconcile their Islamic identity with their nomadic origins and political traditions through the creation of a religiously based ideology in the form of the gazi [warrior for the faith] ideal. 2

1 2

Fleischer (1986:274). Ibid., 275-76.

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The Ottoman reliance on the steppe tradition of government distinguishes their rule from their Turkic predecessors in Anatolia, the Seljuqs of Rum, who, although Turkic in origin, saw themselves more exclusively as the representatives of the Irano-Islamic high tradition. 1 At the same time, Ottoman government (like that of the Seljuqs of Rum) was not the unique work of ethnically Turkish peoples. The personnel of the Ottoman state was polyethnic just as were the territories over which the Ottomans ruled. The perpetuation of the steppe tradition in Anatolia was the accomplishment of administrators, troops, and apologists of diverse ethnic backgrounds, including among them individuals of Turkic, Greek, Frank, Albanian, Iranian, Bosnian, Serb, Kurdish, Armenian and Arab origin.2 The moral outlook of the Oghuz was in this way transmitted across the generations by Ottoman institutions and policies. Over the centuries, Ottoman rule served to propagate a distinctive system of social prestige and rank, involving a specific language of personal identity and social relations, among the variegated Muslim peoples of Asia Minor. The existence of this Ottomanist public culture, with its ancient Oghuz underpinnings, was eventually of crucial importance for the success of the nationalists even though they have not been keen to recognize openly their debt to an Ottoman past. 3 Composed by an individual who was reworking Oghuz tales in a specific time and place, the Book of Dede Korkut itself bears the marks of social and political history in southwest Asia. The presentation of Oghuz heroes and heroines in the Dede Korkut stories is designed to highlight an Oghuz ethical outlook rather than to celebrate the variety and richness of Oghuz narrative tradition. In this respect, the stories reveal that the Oghuz heritage was, at the time of the Book of Dede Korkut, associated with a question about the proper form of personal identity and social relations. This feature of the Dede Korkut stories may itself be a literary reflection of projects of institutional redesign and remaking that had been pursued by Turkic dynasts in Anatolia for several centuries. In any event, the Dede Korkut ethic became part of Anatolian society and culture by virtue of these dynastic projects. Consequently, the modern Turkish reader who is likely to have an Albanian, Circassian, Kurd, or Arab among his or her forebears is nonetheless able to see a piece of himself in the Dede Korkut stories.

^Ibid., 286-92. Ibid„ 156-59, 254-57. 3 By using Ottomanist, rather than Ottoman, public culture, I mean to refer to a provincial social tradition in Asia Minor that emerged out of Ottoman rule but was distinct from palace culture. 2

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References Beidelman, T. O. 1989. Homeric Agonistic Exchange: Reciprocity and the Heritage of Simmel and Mauss. Cultural Anthropology, 4(3):227-59. Ba§göz, ilhan. 1976. The Structure of the Turkish Romances. In Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson, edited by Linda Degh, Henry Glassie, and Felix J. Oinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. — 1978. Epithet in Prose Epic: The Book of my Grandfather Korkut. In Studies in Turkish Folklore: In Honor of Pertev N. Boratav, edited by Ilhan Ba§goz and Mark Glazer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Boratav, Pertev N. 1983a. Dede Korkut Hikayeleri Hakkmda. In Folklor ve Edebiyat (1982). 2 vols., 2:88-108. Ankara: Adam Yaymcilik. — 1983b. Dede Korkut kitabindaki tarihi olaylar ve kitabin telifi tarihi. In Folklore ve Edebiyat (1982). 2 vols., 2:109-40. Ankara: Adam Yaymcilik. Brendemoen, Bernt. 1989. Trabzon £epni Agzi ve Tepegöz Hikayesinin bir £epni Variyanti." In Trabzon Kültür-Sanat Yilligi 88-89, edited by I. Giindag Kayaoglu, Mustafa Duman, and M. Savag §atiroglu. Istanbul: Trabzon Kultiir ve Yardimlagma Demegi. Bryer, Anthony. 1975. Greeks and Türkmens: The Pontic Exception. Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29:113-48. Diez, H. F. von. 1815. Denkwürdigkeiten von Asien, Vol. 2. Berlin und Halle. Ergin, Muharrem. 1964. Dede Korkut Kitabi: Metin—Sözlük. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basimevi. Fleischer, Cornell H. 1986. Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princetor University Press. Gökyay, Orhan §aik. 1973. Dedem Korkudun Kitabi. Istanbul: Milli Egitim Basimevi. Hackman, Oskar. 1904. Die Polyphemsage in der Volksüberlieferung. Helsingfors, Finland: Frenckeliska tryckeri-aktiebolaget. Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lewis, Geoffrey. 1974. The Book of Dede Korkut. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books. Meeker, Michael E. 1979. Literature and Violence in North Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1980. The Twilight of a South Asian Heroic Age: A Rereading of Barth's Study of Swat. Man, n.s. 15:682-701. — 1988. Heroic Poems and Anti-Heroic Stories in North Arabia: Literary Genres and the Relationship of Center and Periphery in the Near East. Edebiyat 1:1-40. — 1989. The Pastoral Son and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religion, Society, and Person among East African Stock Keepers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

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Meeker, Michael E., Kathy Barlow, and David Lipset. 1986. Culture, Exchange, and Gender: Lessons from the Murik. Cultural Anthropology 1:6-73. Mundy, C. S. 1956. Polyphemus and Tepegöz. Journal of the British Society for Oriental and African Studies 18:279-302. Page, Denys. 1955. The Homeric Odyssey. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Planhol, Xavier de. 1966. "La signification géographique du livre de Dede Korkut. Journal Asiatique 254:225-44. Siimer, Faruk, and Ahmet E. Uysal. 1972. The Book of Dede Korkut: A Turkish Epic, translated by Warren S. Walker. Austin: University of Texas Press. Woods, John E. 1976. The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire: A Study in 15th-Century Turko-Iranian Politics. Chicago: Biblioteca Islamica. Yüce, Nuri. 1970. Eine Variante der Tepegöz-Erzählung aus dem Taurus-Gebirge vom Kejli-Stamm. Turcica 2:31-39.

ONCE THERE WAS, ONCE THERE WASN'T: NATIONAL MONUMENTS AND INTERPERSONAL EXCHANGE

The Atatiirk Memorial Tomb and the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara are arguably the two most important monuments of the Turkish republic. The tomb provides for visitations and observances in memory of the founder of the republic; the mosque provides a great place of worship representative of the republican period. Yet their prominent hilltop locations and extensive physical layouts indicate that both are intended to have a much larger significance than these specific ceremonial purposes. The two sites, one Kemalist and the other Islamist, represent the claims of two different "orders" of meanings and values to dominant positions in the public life of the Turkish republic. In this respect, the architecture and ceremonies of each monument separately compose the Turkish past, present, and future. Moreover, standing at similar elevations and in open view of one another, the tomb and the mosque can appear to be in a relationship of challenge and response. The completion of the Kocatepe Mosque in 1987, some thirty-four years after the completion of the memorial tomb in 1953, added one to one in order to make three, not two: a shrine of Kemalism, a shrine of Islamism, and the polemical relationship between the two. By their visible juxtaposition in the landscape of central Anatolia, both the one and the other can be perceived as an argument against its counterpart as much as an argument for itself. If public perceptions of the two monuments were drawn in this direction — and there are some signs of such a trend — the parallel siting of the two would lend support to a fabled but misleading perception of Turkish society. 1 As the Kemalist site stands opposed to the Islamist site, so it might be reckoned, nationalism is opposed to religion, modernity is opposed to tradition, and state is opposed to society. The very separateness of the two monuments as distinct architectural and ceremonial entities seems to suggest the possibility of two clearly defined but the spring of 1994, large crowds gathered at the Atatiirk Memorial Tomb to protest the defamation of Mustafa Kemal's reputation by a member of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi). Other officials of the party disowned these remarks and reaffirmed their respect for the founder of the Turkish republic.

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mutually exclusive alternatives. One would be founded on secular reason, the other on religious faith. One would look to the future, the other to the past. One would rely on top-down strategies of institutional organization, the other on bottom-up strategies of popular mobilization. But have the citizens of the Turkish republic, or, for that matter, the citizens of any modern state, ever faced such a clear set of mutually exclusive choices? In this essay I compare the "alternative" representations of tomb and mosque in order to clarify the common ground that both monuments address. Each of the two sites attempts to compose two horizons of experience closely associated with the nation-state. On the one hand, individuals live within a mass society of anonymous others through the rationalization of public space and time. On the other hand, individuals live among intimate others linked by circuits of interpersonal exchange.1 Interconnected but not entirely compatible, the two horizons constitute a stimulus for anxiety, if not paranoia, among the citizens of potential and realized nation-states. Are not our circles of familiarity and intimacy vulnerable to the order of mass and reason? Is not the order of mass and reason vulnerable to their circles of familiarity and intimacy? The nationalist imagination — so characteristic of the age of mass communication, bureaucratic government, technical knowledge, and rationalized markets — responds directly to these sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken fears. In the nation-state, the order of mass and reason would become but a projection of homogeneous circles of interpersonal relationships. In accordance with principles of a national order, the relationship of the two horizons would be perfectly composed. The allure of such a projection — its practical realization being another matter altogether — is therefore contingent upon a necessary but not sufficient precondition. The prospects of any nationalist movement would depend upon the ^See Jürgen Habermass, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project", in Hal Foster, ed., The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983, 13. In reference to the nation-states of western Europe, Habermas differentiates "the project of modernity" from "the vital heritages of everyday life." See also Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vols. 1 and 2, New York: Vintage Books, 1945. His account of the United States is divided into a study of institutions, laws, and government (vol. 1) and a study of intellectual movements, personal sentiments, social mores, and political society (vol. 2). See also §erif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Turkey: The Case of Bediiizzaman Said Nursi, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 163-64. He differentiates two levels of late Ottoman thinking: concepts of state institutions and social orders and concepts that consisted of a "personalistic view of society." I have also relied on the discussion of the nationalist imagination in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983, and the discussion of circuits of interpersonal exchange in James Siegel, Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986.

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preexistence of a certain minimal amount of raw material at the level of social relations: circuits of interpersonal exchange based on a shared language of familiarity and intimacy. Without such a foundation, any imaginative projection of the nation-state would lack credibility, and hence, also, any measure of practicability. That is to say, if the idea of the modern nation is unthinkable apart from a mass of anonymous others then it is also equally unthinkable apart f r o m a system of face-to-face, personal-to-personal relationships. The nation is therefore truly imaginable only when the former and the latter come into contact with each other. To see how the memorial tomb and the Kocatepe Mosque obey this imperative of the contemporary nationalist imagination, we cannot

begin

straightaway with the monuments themselves. W e must first have some understanding of the cultural weight and structural position of circuits of interpersonal exchange in the Turkish republic. In the section that follows, I discuss a shared language of familiarity and intimacy that is widely disseminated in contemporary Turkey.

A Language of Familiarity and Intimacy In the course of fieldwork in different regions of the Turkish republic, I encountered elaborate vocabularies of personal dignity, intimate exchange, and social relationship. The prominence of such vocabularies, not to mention the large number of conventional greetings, expressions, and proverbs used in everyday conversation, is a direct reflection of the importance of face-to-face, person-to-person association in Turkish society. As an ethnographer, I would have to say that there is not one but many vocabularies of personhood and sociability, such that terms and usages vary from region to region, if not from town to town or even village to village. Yet these differences can also be viewed as local dialects of a common language of familiarity and intimacy. The common language, I would say, is an artifact of the old regime that has passed over into the new regime. Transformed by and adapted to the environment of the Turkish republic, it is now addressed and claimed by the partisans of both Kemalism and Islamism, even though, strictly speaking, it is neither the one nor the other. Rather, it is an implicit philosophy of social thought and action that serves in its own right as a vehicle of family, kinship friendship, partnership, and patronage — indeed, of all kinds of unofficial and

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uncodified associations.1 It gives rise to a specific form of consciousness that is still associated with face-to-face, person-to-person relationships in salons, coffeehouses, workplaces, and offices. Circuits of interpersonal exchange operate more or less autonomously and independently of public institutions even while influencing their character. As my notebooks began to fill with glosses on local idioms, I began to press my interlocutors to comment on the principles of social thought and practice. Occasionally I was rewarded with a kind of philosophical discourse in miniature. One of the most intriguing of these responses, which I encountered on more than one occasion, involved what might be called a "theory" of the constitution of personhood in terms of "passion" (nefs) and "intellect" (akil). I have repeatedly found this theory to be a remarkably effective tool for understanding the way in which relationships of self and other are linguistically registered and constructed. In the paragraphs that follow, I summarize this commentary more or less in my own words. Each individual consists of an essence of "passion," as designated by the Turkish word nefs. This essence has the quality of a life force that energizes both speech and action. It can be conceived of as a core of motivating emotions and desires, and it is very close to the drives that humans share with animals, such as hunger and sexuality. Indeed, the nefs, as an essence of passion, is what humans have in common with animals. In the case of humans, but not of animals, the nefs can be a driving impulse for behavior that is either noble or base. Neither of these distinctions applies to animal behavior because beasts are no more capable of doing "good" than they are capable of doing "bad". To understand this difference, we have to consider a capacity that differentiates humans from animals. This is the faculty of the "intellect," as designated by the Turkish word akil. By means of the akil, the individual is able to know and accept a system of limits, prohibitions, or restrictions, such that the nefs is properly controlled and channeled. This is accomplished during the course of maturation as one passes from childhood to manhood or womanhood, a process that is synonymous with learning how to present

l^For a brief foray into this problem, see my "Oral Culture, Media Culture, and the Islamic Resurgence," in Eduardo Archetti, ed„ The Anthropology of Written Identities, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994.

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oneself to others. 1 The result is a state of being (hal) whereby the individual is able to participate in social relations with other individuals. It is acknowledged as a condition of legitimate personhood (namuslu bir adam, namuslu bir kadin). The acknowledgment of legitimate personhood can come only from social others. It can never be claimed for oneself by oneself. By the akil-nefs theory, the individual's experience of social relations has an erotic quality. We can see this in two ways. First, the system of limits, prohibitions, or restrictions is not abstract or formal in character, but closely identified with intimate social relations. Accordingly, its regulations refer to body, dress, disposition, manner, and speech in a face-to-face, personto-person setting. The individual is not merely demonstrating a learned skill but is also coming to know who he is and how he feels. Second, the constitution of legitimate personhood is accomplished not by suppressing but rather by shaping an interior of desires and emotion. Face-to-face and peirsonto-person relationships are a site of proper pleasures. They are occasions on which one contemplates happiness gained or lost. The personal experience of sociability potentially reaches toward a sublime of personhood achieved through association with others. The language of familiarity and intimacy exhibits a metaphysics of personhood and sociability. A specific form of consciousness is associated with face-to-face, person-to-person relationships. Henceforth I refer to this consciousness as popular inter subjectivity.

Folk Traditions and Imperial

Institutions

The portrayal of personhood and sociability in folktales can be shown to conform to the akil-nefs theory. This means that folktales, insofar as they imagine interpersonal exchanges, stand as artifacts of popular intersubjectivity. In what follows, I examine two types of folktales as evidence of "popular" reflections on the official codes of the old regime. We shall see that the law of the sultan (kanun) and the law of Islam (§eriat) were perceived as high "orthodox" versions of a language of familiarity and intimacy. At the same time, everyday life was the locus of desires and By this explication, the akil is not really equivalent to the faculty of reason, calculation, imagination, or fantasy (although the same Turkish word can be used in most, if not all, of these senses). In contrast to these more active concepts of mental function, the akil (in the specific sense of the word that I am using here) is a passive, if not entirely perceptive, faculty that points toward the existence of externally imposed constraints.

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devices that violated the proper bounds of relationships in the palace and mosque. The folktales point to a low "heterodox" version of a language of familiarity and intimacy in which subversive thoughts and practices implicitly contradict the legitimacy of imperial institutions.

Sultan and Vizier Stories Folktales about the sultan's traveling in disguise with his vizier were commonly told in the old regime. 1 Such stories can be considered popular contemplations of imperial authority. Two mighty and august figures are imaginatively transposed from their official location in the imperial palace to the roadways, markets, and coffeehouses of everyday life. By means of the fabulous imagination — "once there was, once there wasn't (bir varmi§, bir yokmu§)n — the "high" is conjoined with the "low" to produce a shock that provokes laughter. The following sultan and vizier story can be considered in these terms. In this instance, the story does not relate the adventures of the sultan and vizier traveling abroad but rather an incident by which ordinary folk are brought into the confines of the palace to stand before the two. I provide only a summary of the plot rather than the full translated text: T h e sultan calls o n his vizier s a y i n g he w i s h e s to be p r o v i d e d amusement. T h e vizier f i n d s three peasant brothers, each with an itch in a different place on h i s b o d y — a dripping nose, an infected back, and a m a n g y scalp. A s s e m b l i n g t h e m before the sultan, he tells t h e m they will be rewarded with a gold piece if they can resist their irritations f o r an hour. A s the hour passes, t h e three peasants begin to reach the limits of their endurance. Unable to resist their nagging afflictions a m o m e n t longer, but u n w i l l i n g to lose t h e p r o f f e r e d gold p i e c e , they d e v i s e an i n g e n i o u s response. The first brother points to the Bosphorus, saying, "Look at that f i n e boat that is passing," as he runs his sleeve past his sniffly nose. T h e second immediately responds, "Yes, and they are beating a drum on board", as he beats his head with his fists. A n d the third concludes, "And look h o w f a s t they are rowing," as he soothes his b a c k by repeatedly h u n c h i n g himself to ape the action of the rowers. T h e sultan laughs and the three brothers receive their reward f r o m the vizier. 2

1 Sultan and vizier stories are still told in the Turkish republic. I have heard many of them in the province of Trabzon since my first visit in 1965. Warren S. Walker and Ahmet E. Uysal recorded a number of such stories, including the one cited here; see their Tales Alive in Turkey, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966. Many sultan and vizier stories have probably not changed significantly since the collapse of the old regime, but they have more or less lost whatever political bite they may once have had. 2 Walker and Uysal provide two variants of this kind of tale. The first was collected in the ilge of Ceyhan (Adana) during 1962, and the second, in Iskenderun (Hatay) during 1962. See their Tales Alive in Turkey, 142-43.

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On the elevated terraces of the palace, a little drama comically illustrates the constitution of personhood at a primary level of human experience. The urge to relieve an itch ( n e f s ) is blocked by a prohibition against scratching. If desire can be controlled by accepting an imperial constraint, a handsome reward will be forthcoming. The three brothers fail the test because they scratch their itches before the allotted time has passed. Even so, the sultan is pleased and the vizier gives the reward. Why is this the case? As the three peasants call out to one another and perform their gesticulations, they refer as a group to the drummers and rowers in the passing boat. At the same time, their words and acts that describe this scene in the world at large signify their separate personal desires. That is, each response is part of a collective communication even as it is also an expression of individual desire. Hence, personal desires are controlled and channeled in accordance with the imposed constraints of interpersonal communication. If the peasants have violated the artifically conceived imperial prohibition, they have demonstrated the common law of sociability and personhood. Therefore they win the reward even though they fail the test. This is almost right, but not entirely so. The peasants violate the common law of sociability and personhood even as they demonstrate it. Collective representations as expressions of individual desire should be effectively, not artifically, compatible with practical circumstances. From a legalistic point of view, the impracticality of collective representations as expressions of individual desire results in dissension and corruption. But from an everyday point of view, it is common knowledge that norms have to be compromised if sociability is to be sustained. To satisfy the nefs, which appears more as a low animal drive than as a high human ambition, the peasants have subverted the normative akil (intellect) by resorting to a representational akil (cleverness). The story has staged a confrontation between the high imperial and the low plebeian. The palace formulates and enforces regulations that are intended to control and channel common desires. The peasants, who are the targets of these regulations, know that one can get what one wants only by conforming in form but not in fact. The performance of the three brothers is a reminder that imperial ideals are always defeated by everyday realities. The sultan erupts in laughter and the vizier proffers the gold piece.

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The story is an artifact of a language of interpersonal relationship whose propositions are taken for granted. At the same time it suggests that this language is formally articulated in an imperial milieu but subversively manipulated in a plebeian milieu. This aspect of the tale may once have been far more obvious than it is now to citizens of the Turkish republic. The occasion that the vizier devises for the sultan's amusement bears a close resemblance to one of the most grandiose of all the imperial ceremonies staged within the palace grounds.

Palace Protocol and the Council of Victory The ruling institution of the old regime took the form of a household organization. The sultan was a head of state who had the status of a family head. The center of his government took the form of a family residence. High military and administrative officials were often raised in his residence from an early age and were considered his personal servants. The architecture of the palace grounds and ceremonies that were conducted therein were specifically designed to represent an "intimate and familiar" relationship between the head of state and his military and administrative officials. At the same time, these relationships were also rationalized and formalized in accordance with the requirements of a state organization. On the occasion of the so-called Council of Victory celebrations in the Topkapi Palace, thousands of the highest military and administrative officials assembled in its middle court to manifest their personhood before the eyes and ears of the sultan, who was, in symbolism at least, personally present. 1 Positioned and dressed in accordance with the rules of palace protocol (kanun), officials stood silent and still, "as though hewn out of marble" for hours at a time. 2 Staged in part for the benefit of foreign dignitaries, these ceremonies were intended to demonstrate the power and glory of the Ottoman dynasty through the behavior of the officials so assembled. A member of the French embassy described one of these occasions held in 1573: The Ambassador saluted [the highest grandees of the court] with his head and they got up from their seats and bowed to him. And at a given moment all the Janissaries and other soldiers who had been standing ^Giilru Necipoglu, "The Formation of an Ottoman Imperial Tradition: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1986; Gülru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, Boston, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991. ^Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, 66.

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upright and without weapons along the wall of that court did the same, in such a way that seeing so many turbans incline together was like observing a vast field of ripe corn moving gently under the light puff of Zephyr... We looked with great pleasure and even greater admiration at this frightful number of Janissaries and other soldiers standing all along the walls of this court, with hands joined in front in the manner of monks, in such silence that it seemed we were not looking at men but statues. And they remained immobile in that way more than seven hours, without talking or moving. Certainly it is almost impossible to comprehend this discipline and this obedience when one has not seen it. ... After leaving this court we mounted our horses where we had dismounted upon arrival ... Standing near the wall beyond the path we saw pass all these thousands of Janissaries and other soldiers who in the court had resembled a palisade of statues, now transformed not into men but famished wild beasts or unchained dogs. 1 The mass of officials, standing silent and still before the symbolic presence of the sultan, were intended to illustrate the constitution of peirsonhood as defined by imperial regulations (kanun). Similarly, the unruly and boisterous behaviour of the soldiers upon leaving the palace illustrates, by way of contrast, the human energy controlled and channeled in the constitution of personhood. The story of the three peasants required to stand before the sultan and the vizier without scratching their itches is an obvious parody of the Council of Victory ceremonies. Originally conceived to draw an individous comparison between a pretentious imperial ceremony and the subversive practices of everyday life, its point was eventually forgotten in the course of its transmission f r o m the Ottoman past to the republican present. For our purposes, the invidious comparison implies that the palatial and extrapalatial worlds are based on the same language of interpersonal relationship. The difference between the two is also suggested by the simple tale. The palatial world has the properties of a formalized and rationalized construction. The extrapalatial world has the properties of a system of communication and behaviour that is honored by its violation.

Nasrettin Hodja

Stories

Sultan and vizier stories describe scenes in which the high and mighthy come into contact with the low and plebeian. The results often involve ridicule, but the target of the tale is never predictable. Sometimes imperial pomposity and pretension are exposed by an encounter with the realities of ^Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, 65-66.

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everyday life. Sometimes popular hypocrisy and dissimulation are exposed by an encounter with the wisdom of the just ruler. In contrast, Nasrettin Hodja stories more consistently tell of simple people doing ordinary things. 1 By the very logic of this difference, the humor of this kind of story is often at the expense of what is supposed to be right thinking and practice. Nasrettin Hodja stories tell of an individual who, by his very title (hoca), is understood to be an expert in the sacred Law of Islam, the code of proper personhood and sociability. More than a few Nasrettin Hodja stories are staged in, or very near, the mosque where adult men assemble for Friday prayers. 2 These features of the tales are intended to serve entirely mischievous purposes. The wily hodja teaches us that improper, illogical, and stupefying experiences disrupt and confuse what should be proper, logical, and sensible social behavior. One of the best known, and one of the shortest, examples of this type of tale follows: The Hodja's neighbor wishes to borrow his donkey. The Hodja declines the request saying that he has no donkey to loan out. At that very moment, the neighbor hears the bray of the Hodja's donkey coming from the stable and rebukes the Hodja for telling a lie, saying, "Do you not hear the sound/voice (ses) of the donkey?" The Hodja replies, "You do not believe my word (soz), but you accept the word (soz) of a donkey?"3

In this story, the hodja selfishly does not want to lend his donkey and wishes to evade the obligation of neighborly reciprocity. Since he cannot legitimately refuse the request, he denies that he even has a donkey. When caught in this deception, the hodja accuses his neighbor of believing the donkey's sound (ses) in order to fault the word (soz) of the hodja. In effect, the neighbor improperly attends to the donkey, a brute beast wholly lacking in moral qualities. The joke of the story involves the hodja's attempt to invoke the norms of personhood and sociability at the very moment he is caught violating them.

1 Stories that tell of Nasrettin Hodja's encounters with Tamerlane, the great conqueror of the Turko-Mongol world, are exceptions to this rule. 2 See the many examples of this association in the stories presented by K. R. F. Burrill, "The Nasrettin Hoca Stories: An Early Ottoman Manuscript at the University of Groningen," Archivum Ottomanicum, vol. 2,1970,7-114. 3 The text is an English translation of the Turkish given by P. Wittek, Turkish Reader, London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., 1945, 21.

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As in the sultan and vizier story, the akil/nefs theory is an implicit, not an explicit, feature of the Nasrettin Hodja story because its propositions are taken for granted. The contrast between the donkey's bray and the hodja's speech is a contrast between the utterances of living creatures with and without ak.il. The hodja's words should reflect his recognition of the rules of personhood and sociability, a recognition whereby instinctive selfishness would be replaced with affectionate generosity. Once again, we see how the normative akil (intellect), by which one registers social constraints, becomes instead a representational akil (cleverness), by which one conceals motives, evades the laws, and misleads others. Thus, the behavior of Nasrettin Hodja reveals the nefs as an anarchical and disorderly energy that subverts the proper form of interpersonal communication and relationship.

The Sacred Law and Friday

Prayers

Nasrettin Hodja, the hero of stories in which proper communication and relationship are subverted, is simultaneously a pillar of respectability, an expert in the sacred law of Islam, and a leader of Friday prayers in the mosque. He is betwixt and between the everyday utterances (parole) and the orthodox grammar (langue) or a language of interpersonal relationship. As a master of the former, he is a punster and trickster. As the master of the latter, he knows the law, delivers the Friday sermon, and leads the prayers. So the language of interpersonal relationship, which is "at risk" and "in play" in the Nasrettin H o d j a stories, is assumed within the narrative tradition itself to have a connection with the beliefs and rites of Islam. The connection is clearly spelled out in a contemporary "science of being" manual (ilmihal) published to provide instructions for the proper observance of religious obligations. 1 In the section on "Worship," f o r example, the author explains the obligation to perform the five daily prayers in terms that recall the language of interpersonal relationship we have been considering. He begins with the sentence, "Worship is a way of honoring and revering God." 2 Its terms "honoring and revering" (saygi ve ta'zim gostermek) could also be applied to the kind of behavior that is enjoined before the father, elder, patron, lord, or sultan.

^Suleyman Ate§, Muhtasar islam ilmihal, Ankara: K1I19 Kitabevi, 1972. Ate§, Muhtasar islam ilmihal, 50.

2

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In his next sentence, the author describes the relationship of worshiper and divinity as though it were a relationship of client and patron. The believer has the duties of a servant (kulluk gorevi) who has received generous gifts from his august and mighty (yiice) creator. The believer is obliged to return his thanks to God just as he would be obliged to someone "who offers his place on a bus or a glass of water." The author then characterizes worship as a form of spiritual nourishment ( r u h u n gidasi) that is equivalent to bodily nourishment ( y e m e k ve igmek). The theme of the quenching of hunger and thirst leads to a description of prayer as the means for controlling and channeling the nefs: In worship, we always fight with the bad feelings of the nefs and we draw them out of the spirit. We cleanse bad thoughts from our spirit. In this way, we become a completely clean human being both inwardly and outwardly. In the truest sense, someone who performs prayer has become the master of the desires of the nefs. He has become bridled (gem vurmu§). He does everything in its proper place and by its proper measure. The greatest battle is the war with the nefs. The greatest form of bravery is to become the master of the nefs.'

The author concludes by portraying the five prayers as the means for constituting personhood before the presence of divinity. The result is a sublime of personhood achieved through association with God, rather than through association with others: With the five prayers one is able to be nourished by God's great riches, to be purified by contact with his mercy, to present oneself and to humble oneself before the God of man and to come into a relationship with His meaning, and to establish in the body the material and spiritual order in the cosmos.^

The same metaphsics of personhood and sociability that is part of everyday life reappers on the level of state and religion. From the perspective of the language of interpersonal relationship, the Friday prayers and the Council of Victory are paradigmatically equivalent. Believers performs their ablutions and then assemble with their neighbors in the mosque. Standing in ranked formation before the niche (mihrap) oriented toward Mecca (kible), they enact in unison words and deeds that are addressed to God and scripted by the sacred law (seriat). Substitute sultan for God, kanun for §eriat, officials for believers, palace for mosque, and sovereign power for religious truth and the result is the Council of Victory. This means that the imperial palace and ^Ate§, Muhtasar Islam tlmihal, 53. ^Ate§, Muhtasar islam ìlmihal, 54.

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the imperial mosque each stake a separate claim on popular intersubjectivity. Rationalized and formalized as kanun, it is the basis of a ruling institution. Rationalized and formalized as §eriat, it is the basis of divine creation. With this understanding of the cultural weight and structural position of a language of interpersonal relationship, we can now examine the sites of the memorial tomb and Kocatepe Mosque. As in the old regime, representations of state and religion in the new regime stake a claim on popular intersubjectivity. The entirely new environment of a mass society of anonymous others drives these representations in new directions.

The Memorial

Tomb

In the fall of 1922, the Grand National Assembly, at the urging of Mustafa Kemal, resolved that a government consisting of the "sovereignty of an individual had ceased to exist ... and passed forever into history," thereby bringing to an end the Ottoman sultanate. 1 In the spring of 1924, having already proclaimed the republic with its capital at Ankara, the Grand National Assembly, again persuaded by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the caliphate and the sacred Law of Islam. 2 These events recall how the new nation-state was contingent on the suppression of two key institutions, Ottomanism and Islamism — one the sovereignty of an individual, and the other a system of a divinely revealed law. The citizens of the republic would represent their existence in terms of a new past, present, and future. A new way of being would displace the old. Ottomanism would be inoperable because it would have no register in thought or feeling. Islam would remain a matter of private practice and sentiment, rigorously excluded from public life. Soon after Atatiirk's death on November, 10, 1938, the decision was taken to erect a monument in his memory (figs. 10.1, 10.2). From the outset, the Atattirk Memorial Tomb (Amtkabir) was conceived as a great ceremonial center for the Turkish nation. In this respect, it was part of the effort of Turkish nationalists to define, and thereby control, the symbolism of public life. 3 It would be sited on a prominent hill overlooking Ankara and surveying the plains of central Anatolia. Its spaces and buildings would be of exceptional magnificence and grandeur, making it one of the most ambitious architectural ^Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, New York: Oxford University Press 1961 253-54. Lewis, The Emergece of Modern Turkey, 256, 260. 3 Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, New York: Knopf, 1979, 275. Compare his assessment of the shift from late medievalism to early modernism ia Renaissance Italy of the fifteenth century: "The quest for the control of space in architecture, painting, and bas-relief sculpture was not [merely] analogous to a policy for more hegemony over the entire society; it belonged, rather, to the same movement of consciousness."

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projects of the republican period. Its material composition, consisting of marble and stone quarried in dispersed sections of the new national domain, would reflect the territorial integrity of the nation. After a design competition was held in 1941-42, a jury of international membership selected the project of a Turkish team, Onat and Arda, for the realization of the monument. 1 Ground was broken on September 9, 1944, and construction proceeded for almost a decade, during which time the original design continued to be reworked. 2

10.1. Anitkabir, the Atattirk Memorial Tomb, from the Hall of Honor looking toward the central square. (Photograph by the author). ''["he competition for the design of the memorial tomb was opened on March 1,1941, and closed on March 3, 1942. The forty-nine entries included teams from Turkey (20), Germany (11), Italy (7), Austria (7), Sweden, France, and Czechoslovakia. The international jury awarded three first prizes, to entries submitted by a German (Kruger), an Italian (Foshini), and two Turks (Onat and Arda). See Necdet Evliyagil, Atatiirk ve Anitkabir, Ankara: Gazetecilik ve Matbaacihk Sanayii, 1988, 50. ^Ustiin Alsa?, "The Second Period of National Architecture," in Renata Holod and Ahmet Evin, eds., Modern Turkish Architecture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, 99100. Alsag (94-96, 100-1) observes that the memorial tomb, as it evolved during its construction, came to feature both "national" and "modern" elements. The tomb was first designed during a resurgence of nationalism as economic crisis forced Turkish architects to turn to regional building materials and methods of construction. But it was completed over a decade later, after a series of redesigns, when Turkish architects were beginning to favor internationalism once again. The categories of "national" and "modern" are puzzlingly opposed in Turkey. By "national" (a category that was itself throughly modernist in character), Alsag is referring to those traditional materials, designs, or structures that had come to signify a Turkish "folk" or "people" for the Turkish nationalists. By "modern" (a category that is otherwise closely associated with nationalism), he is referring to materials, designs, or structures that were recognized in Turkey as international and therefore not specifically Turkish in character.

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1 10.2. Anitkabir, from the central square looking toward the Hall of Honor. (Photograph by the author).

On November 10, 1953, the fifteenth anniversary of Atatiirk's death, his body was transferred by official state procession from the Ethnographic Museum and laid to rest in a crypt in the Hall of Honor. 1 Since that time, the memorial tomb has served as a site for rites commemorating the founder of the Turkish republic. Official ceremonies are conducted there on the anniversary of Atatiirk's death, during visits to Turkey by foreign heads of states, and on other occasions of state. Members of private and public associations — including schoolteachers, schoolchildrens, military officers, business executives, municipal officials, and club members — may assemble at the tomb to pay their respects to Atatiirk. Groups of ordinary citizens also visit the site to browse through its museum displays, admire the views of the countryside from its walkways and courts, and pause for a moment before the

^See Evliyagil, Atatiirk ve Anitkabir, 37-49.

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founder's resting place. 1 Though completed some thirty years after the founding of the republic, the memorial tomb commemorates the ambitious projects of nationhood so vigorously pursued during its first decades. In this respect, various theses of nationalist ideology, firmly in place by the 1930s, are referenced by the features of its buildings' decors and facades. Thesis: the arts of civilization will flourish in the new Turkish republic. Reference: bas-reliefs and sculptures represent the people of the new nation. Thesis: the Turks have been a nation of Anatolia since ancient times, their earliest representives being Sumerians and Hittites. References: the pathway from the outer wall to the central court is lined with Hittite lions, and the Hall of Honor was intended to resemble a Sumerian ziggurat. 2 Thesis: the Turkish republic is a representative of the Turkish folk of Anatolia. Reference: walls and ceilings feature abstracted motifs of Turkish flatweaves in paint and mosaic. Though such references are encountered, the memorial tomb was designed as a place for solemn visitations and observances rather than for the display of nationalist ideology. During informal and formal visits, citizens of the Turkish republic would recall its founder and pay him their respects. In this regard, the tomb is a site for interpersonal exchange between citizen and founder. Symbolically at least, the citizen can be heard and seen by the founder, just as the founder can be heard and seen by the citizen.

Informal Occasions: The Personhood of Atatiirk On informal occasions, visitors view the sculptures, inscriptions, and artifacts of the memorial tomb as they stroll about its walkways, courts, and museums. Hard-edged-bas-reliefs depict Atatiirk leading the Turkish people during the War of Independence. Excerpts from his speeches, inscribed in the new romanized script, appear in the form of gigantic tableaux. At one corner ' Over the years, the memorial tomb came under the control of military authorities. After its construction by the Ministry of Transportation, it was administered by the Ministry of Education (from 1956) and then by the Ministry of Culture (from 1970). After the military coup of 1980, it was taken over by the General Staff (from 1981) to be administered in the name of the Memorial Tomb Command (from 1982). see Evliyagil, Atiiturk ve Anitkabir, 67. All the presidents of military background have been buried at the memorial tomb, but not the two persidents of civil background, Bayar and Ozal. Two days after his death on December 12, 1973, ismet Inonii, "comrade in arms," "the second president," and "founder of democracy," was buried at the memorial tomb just across from the great square, facing in a direct line bisecting the Hall of Honor. See Evliyagil, Atatiirk ve Anitkabir, 65. 2

S i n c e the Hall of Honor was not completed as originally planned, the resemblance is not plainly apparent.

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of the site, visitors see the cannon carriage that was used to transport Atatiirk's body to the tomb. At another corner, they see his official and ceremonial cars, in which he toured the nation. At another location, designated the Atatiirk Museum, they can view his personal possessions: shoes, suits and hat, shirts, collars, handkerchiefs, cuff links, walking sticks, a stickpin, ties, toiletry articles, his hand mirror, eye-glasses, cigarette holders, military medals, a uniform, a pistol, a desk set, samples of his handwriting, a library, and twinned photographs of himself and his mother. They also find a display of personal gifts f r o m the heads of the newly organized institutions of the republic, such as the Industrial Bank, the Post, Telephone, and Telegraph, and the Grand National Assembly. Going on to the rooms designated the Art Gallery, they see money and stamps with representations of the face and figure of Atatiirk. Eventually, they enter the Hall of Honor itself and approach the symbolic tomb of Atatiirk, located above the actual tomb. Here they contemplate a national leader and founder of the republic against the backdrop of the Anatolian countryside. The informal visitor to the memorial tomb is able to know the personhood of Atatiirk through the lens of national destiny, most coherently by his leadership during the War of Independence, but also, more vividly and intimately, by personal possessions from the period in which he was president of the Republic of Turkey. In this respect, the memorial tomb does not tell the story of national history, refer to attributes of a national tradition, teach the principles of national citizenship, or explain the national constitution. At the most important site of the republic, the nation is not conceived of through its history, ideology, laws, or constitution. Rather, the argument of a language of familiarity and intimacy has been reformulated in the terms of citizen and nation.

Formal Occasions: Assemblies in the Central Court The coordination of architecture and ceremony during formal visits to the Atatiirk Memorial T o m b demonstrates this reformulation openly and explicitly. On state occasions, smaller or larger assemblies pay their respects to the founder of the Turkish republic. Individuals stand in ranked formation in the central court, before the Hall of Honor. They are in the personal presence

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of the national leader and founder. He observes and listens as they stand silent and still.1 Before their eyes, they can see a plinth on the steps leading to the Hall of Honor. On it they can read a message from the founder, inscribed in romanized letters: "Without condition or restriction, sovereignty belongs to the nation" (Hakimiyet kayitsiz $arts 17, milletindir). The message announces not the democratic principle of popular representation but the condition of external constraints that impinges on each individual, not the least of whom would be the founder himself. Personhood is constituted within the space and time of nationhood. Looking to the left, participants can make out the "Address to Youth" behind the frontal colonnade of the Hall of Honor. This address calls for defense of the homeland in the worst of times. Its message concludes with a call for individual sacrifice: "O Turkish children of the future!... save the republic! The power exists in the noble blood that runs in your veins!" Looking to the right, viewers can make out the address to the Turkish nation on the occasion of the "Speech of the Tenth Year," again behind the frontal colonnade of the Hall of Honor. This message concludes with a sublime of personhood achieved through national association: "How fortunate is he who can say, 'I am a Turk.'" The citizen stands before the Hall of Honor in the presene of the leader and founder in order to pay his respects. The three written communications announce the framework within which this interpersonal exchange takes placess. Citizen and founder interact within a framework of constraints imposed by nationhood. In exchange for individual sacrifice there is the promise of the sublime. At the site of the memorial tomb, architecture and ceremony are coordinated in accordance with a paradigm that recalls the Council of Victory at the imperial palace. Tomb substitutes for palace, the symbolic presence of national founder for that of dynastic ruler, a central court (ig meydan) for a middle court (orta yer), high officials of the republic (Cumhur Reisi, B.M.M. reisi, generaller) for high officials of the palace, representatives of a national polity (meclis uyeleri, miilki erkan, askeri erkan, vilayetler, cemiyetler, 1 For example, Evliyagil, Atatiirk ve Anitkabir, 85, includes a picture of the Monument to the Martyrs at Qalkoy in which Atatiirk's eyes appear clearly between the clouds above the site. Moreover, there is a moment during occasions of state when officials inscribe personal messages to Atatiirk in a ledger.

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dernekler ve partiler) for household staff (kullar), diplomatic officials in residence (kordiplomatik) for visiting foreign embassies, and modern dress (§apka, kravat, and kostiim) for imperial sumptuary (fig. 10.3). 1 A narrow loyalty between a dynastic ruler and his household staff has been converted into a broad loyalty between a national founder and a national elite representing a national citizenry. f""1 " T t " * * L « liìi » r ' »•

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10.3. Amtkabir, plan for ceremonies in the central square. (Reproduced from the memorial tomb brochure, Devrim Gengligi ilavesi, ca. 1953.)

Figure 10.3 is adapted from the brochure Amtkabir: Devrim Gengligi ilavesi, Ba§vekalat Devlet Matbaasi, n.a., n.d. This is a free handout that includes maps of the procession and burial ceremony held in 1953. The original figure illustrates how the officials and delegations that I have listed are assigned specific stations during the funeral ceremonies. The brochure, which must have been first published in the 1950s, was still available at the memorial tomb in 1987.

fitters.

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In the Atatiirk Memorial Tomb, we have a ceremonial center of the nation-state, first chosen as a design in 1942 and finally completed in 1953, that parallels a ceremonial center of the old regime, already defunct in 1853. 1 But insofar as this is the case, the imperial legacy in Turkish nationalism does not pass directly from palace to tomb. It detours from palace downward to a form of popular intersubjectivity (engendered by imperial institutions) and then upward to tomb. 2 The paradigmatic similarities between the architecture and ceremony of nation and empire are not intentional; the early Kemalists would have had no interest in imitating the late Ottomans. 3 The similarities result incidentally from the Kemalist effort to stake a claim on the experience of personhood and sociability that was left intact by the nationalist program of reforms. Nationalism was to be presented to the people of the Turkish republic as an official and codified version of a language of interpersonal relationship. The experience of participants in the formal ceremonies held in the central square of the memorial tomb can be easily read from this point of view.

Symmetry, Rectilinearity,

Proportion

The scripting of architecture and ceremony at the memorial tomb emphasizes an interpersonal exchange, rather than the various strands of nationalist history, ideology, or constitutionalism. Nevertheless, the site leaves visitors with a strong impression about the character of public life in Turkey. It does so by means of geometric forms and voids, rather than through myth and symbol.

^In 1853, the Topkapi Palace was abandoned as a residence, and the government was moved to Dolmabah?e Palace. Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, 258. 2 The criteria laid down at the time of the design competition in 1941 are more or less sufficient to account for the similarity between the memorial tomb and the Topkapi Palace: (1) The tomb will be a place of visitation. Visitors will enter a large hall of honor in the presence of the Father (Ata); they will stand before Atatiirk and offer him their respects. (2) The tomb will represent Atatiirk's practical and creative qualities as a soldier, head of state, politician, and scientist. (3) The design of the memorial tomb should be such that its appearance is striking both close up and at a distance. Architectural motifs will be realized in the form of works that will express its power. (4) So that the Turkish state under Atatiirk's name and personality are symbolized, those who want to demonstrate their respect of the Turkish nation will manifest these feelings by bowing before the tomb of Atatiirk. (5) A large Hall of Honor will be located on the site of the memorial tomb and visitations will be made at this hall. See Evliyagil, Atatiirk ve Anitkabir, 50. 3 During the 1940s, the dynastic tradition of the Ottoman Empire was still anathema to Kemalists. Unlike Turko-Islamists of more recent date, they had little nostalgia for the old regime. Even had the architects of the memorial tomb wished to refer systematically to the Topkapi Palace, they would have lacked the detailed information necessary for doing so. Uzunear§ili did not publish his study of the organization of the Topkapi Palace until 1945. Necipoglu did not publish her analysis of architecture and ceremony until 1991.

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By principles of symmetry, rectilinearity, and proportion, the memorial tomb constructs "a unitary space of geometric structure." 1 The result is an arrangement of pathways, courts, and buildings that affirms the possibility of a rational analysis of space. The monument represents a consistent and pervasive intention. The form of the parts always points to the presence of the whole. The overall lack of emphasis on decor and facade at the monument does not allow visitors to miss this point. The relative absence of historical references and aesthetic intentions, given the elaborate ideologies of the nationalist movement, forces visitors to recognize the abstract logic of its geometric rationality. In the Turkish republic, the combined projects of modernity and nationhood involved the planning and construction of a public space and time for a mass society of anonymous others. The principles of reason and science set the new modernist and nationalist regime apart from the old personalist and imperialist regime. The striking feature of the design principles at the memorial tomb is the omnipresence of geometrical frames. Walkways and courts, quotations and bas-reliefs, colonnades and arches, borders and pavements all take the form of rectilinear frames. One is always obliged to walk, to read, and to look through frames set within frames. When the eye shifts toward the capital city and the Anatolian countryisde (and they are constantly visible as one moves about the site), they are always seen through frames set within frames. Frames within frames impose themselves on the movements and perceptions of the ordinary citizen during his or her informal visits to the site. Frames within frames organize the officials who stand in ranked assemblies during the formal occasions of state. In this fashion, architecture and ceremony at the tomb define a space that obeys a consistent and coherent rationale, signifying a consciousness of citizenship defined by limits and boundaries. If this is a modernist-nationalist public space and time, however, it is of a special kind. The memorial tomb does not invite the individual to comprehend his or her status as citizen of a nation so much as it defines subjectivity by limits and boundaries. This is not so much a space of Enlightenment reason and history as a space of akil, a space experienced as a constrained interpersonal relationship. The memorial t o m b is not a Hobbesian, Kantian, Hegelian, or Durkheimian site. Its philosophical underpinnigs are elsewhere.

^Giulio Carlo Argan uses the quoted phrase to describe the squares in fifteenth century Renaissance cities. See his The Renaissance City, New York: Braziller, 1969, 21.

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Designed in accordance with the new techno-scientific norms of rationalized public space and time in the Turkish republic, the memorial tomb takes on a very different meaning in its address of popular intersubjectivity. Brochures about the tomb, featuring a bust of Atatiirk on their covers, represent the site itself as empty of a human presence. 1 Schematics of the site that illustrate the layout of its buildings and museums feature recticulated grids. 2 Pictures of the site usually show its walkways and courts as voids. When one visits the memorial tomb, one should not hold hands. One should not sit. One should not laugh. A unitary space of geometric structure oscillates between national identity and individual sacrifice and death. As a pure representation of the limits and boundaries of consciousness, there is nothing left for interior desire save its extinction in the name of the nation.

The Kocatepe

Mosque

The Atatiirk Memorial Tomb is arguably the most important site of state ceremony in the Turkish republic. Designed and built at a time when modernist influences on the nationalist movement were on the rise, it stands as a monument to the project of replacing an old order with a new order. And yet we have found that the Kemalist encoding of the nationalist imagination cannot be understood apart from its attempt to claim and exhaust the sphere of popular intersubjectivity. Turning now to the Kocatepe Mosque, we find that the tables are turned. This "great place of worship" (ulu mabet), newly completed in 1987, was designed and built during a period of Islamic resurgence and was intended to stand as a monument to the place of religion in Turkish society. If, however, we consider the coordination of architecture and ceremony at the mosque in terms of both the intentions of its architects and the perceptions of its caretakers, we discover that it is locked in an argument with the memorial tomb. The idea of building a mosque in the new capital of the Turkish republic may have been proposed as early as 1934. 3 In any case, such a project was

1 Amtkabir: Devrim Gengligi tlavesi. See also Nurettin Can Giilekli, Amtkabir Guide, n.d. This brochure was published by the Memorial Tomb Association for the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish republic and was still on sale at the site in 1987. 2 Amtkabir: Devrim Gengligi tlavesi. 3 During my visit to the Kocatepe Mosque, I was told that Rifat Borekgi, one of the Ottoman learned doctors (ulema), had first proposed such a mosque. This man would have standing in the eyes of even the most secular nationalists. On May 5, 1920, he had issued a fetva on behalf of the nationalist movement that invalidated an antinationalist/e/ra issued by the §eyhiilislam; see Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 247.

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being discussed shortly after the decision was taken to build the memorial tomb. With the encouragement of officials in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, a building committee was formed in 1944, and a design competition was held in 1947. None of the entries was awarded first place, but the project submitted by Alnar and Ulgen, which proposed a structure in the simple and modest stle of the earliest Ottoman mosques, received considerable support. 1 The initiative then faltered until 1956, when a personal intervention by the prime minister revived it. Now the decision was taken to build a great place of worship in an architectural style that would "reflect the republican period" (Cumhuriyet donemini temsil edecek).2 The site of Kocatepe was chosen so that the structure would be within the urban precincts on a hill "dominating Ankara" (.Ankara'ya hakim)? After another design competition in 1957, the jury awarded a first prize to the project submitted by two Turkish architects, Dalokay and Tekelioglu, but it was not recommended for construction until certain revisions had been undertaken. The winning project proposed a mosque in the form of a sectioned "rind" or "skin" with minarets stationed at each of its four corners. This modernistic structure was to be set among, or coordinated with, other buildings, a practice that otherwise recalled the classical Ottoman "mosque complex" (kulliye). These buildings were to house a library, a conference room, a museum, a two-hundred-vehicle autopark, a tourist market, a kitchen, a polyclinic, the offices of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the campus of an Advanced Islam Institute. Although some of the buildings, such as the offices of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, were eventually completed, the design for the mosque remained controversial. Objections to the structural soundness of the "rind" or "skin" design, which some defenders of the mosque considered entirely specious, eventually prevailed. Yet a third design competition was opened in 1967. The winning project, submitted by Tayla and Uluengin, proposed a gigantic structure that closely resembles an Ottoman mosque of the classical

very small reproduction of the design of the mosque is included in the brochure by Hamdi Mert, Halil Kaya, and Abdullah Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii: 1967-1987, Ankara Diyanet Vakfi, n.d. It shows a mosque somewhat like that of Orhan Gazi in Gebze, but with two minarets and a monumental court, as in the instance of the Sultan Beyazid Mosque in Edirne; see Aptullah Kuran, The Mosque in Early Ottoman Architecture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, 37, 57-59. Kuran (p. 48) classes such a mosque as a "single-unit mosque with complex massing." Mert, Kaya, and Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii, 2. •^Mert, Kaya and Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii.

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period. Construction began on October 30, 1967, and continued off and on for twenty years, owing to periodic shortages of funds. Eventually, in 1981, the Religious Endowments of Turkey took over the financing, and construction proceeded apace. First proposed in the 1930s, debated as a project for thirty years, and fitfully under construction for twenty, Kocatepe Mosque was officially opened on August 28, 1987, as a "national place of worship" (fig. 10.4).

10.4. Kocatepe Mosque, from the stairway leading to the plaza. (Photograph by the author.)

The reference point for the design of the new mosque had shifted back and forth in historical time. In 1947, the mosque proposed for the capital had been one of modest dimensions that drew upon the single-unit mosque of the early, pre-imperial Ottoman period. In 1957, the concept of a national place of worship was explicitly formulated, the projected size of the mosque expanded accordingly, and a post-imperial, modernist design was favored. By 1967, the national place of worship was contemplated in conjunction with a capital city whose population now exceeded one million souls, and the projected size of the mosque complex surpassed the scope of the 1947 and 1957 designs by

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far. 1 The new mosque was to be modeled on the classical Ottoman mosque, the glorious architectural achievement of the high imperial period. Its prototype is said to be the Sultanahmet Mosque, a late Ottoman mosque of the early seventeenth century, save that the scale of the new national mosque is intended to exceed that of the imperial structure it emulates. 2

My Visit to the Kocatepe

Mosque

In the fall of 1987,1 was graciously welcomed at the Kocatepe Mosque by two officials of the Religious Endowment of Turkey. They were enthusiastic about the new mosque, which had been inaugurated little more than a month earlier, an occasion that was attended by many thousands of citizens. During a tour of the site, one of my hosts explained the history of the mosque's construction, its purpose and symbolism, its relationship with the surrounding buildings and landscape, and the significance of what could be seen from its various prospects. Taking me first to the central mosque building, my host claimed that the interior {harem) was considerably larger than that of the classical Ottoman mosque. Whether this is true or not, my host's emphasis on its immensity is impressionistically exact. The space beneath the dome of the mosque seems very, very large in comparison with its classical predecessors. The effect had been achieved, my host explained, by the use of advanced techniques of construction, that is to say, reinforced concrete. Contemporary architects and builders could mimic the form of the classical mosque but free themselves from the limits of a dome system fashioned from stone and mortar. The four inner columns that support the dome in the classical mosque are necessarily huge for structural reasons, but the four inner columns of the Kocatepe Mosque could be reduced in width and yet raise the central dome (ana kubbe) to a greater height. Accordingly, the dimensions of the furnishings and accouterments of the mosque also had to be expanded. The niche indicating the direction of prayer (mihrap) and the staired pulpit (minber) are towering. The galleries ( m a h f e l ) are doubled to fill the space between the floor and the elevated dome.

' iviert, Kaya, and Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii. Mert, Kaya, and Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii, 8. The Kocatepe Mosque would not have six minarets, like the Sultanahmet Mosque, but only four. 2

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Kocatepe Mosque does not just imitate, it also exaggerates its imperial exemplar — but by what logic? As we shall see, the mosque would symbolize the public sphere of the nation, but in a peculiar way. As one might have guessed, the use of advanced construction techniques is supposed to symbolize the modernity of Islam during the republican period. To some degree, this must have been the architects' intention, and it was certainly on the minds of my hosts. They mentioned various features of the mosque building which demonstrated that Islam during the republican period was modernist (gagda$) in the sense of being technically advanced and sophisticated. Each of the four minarets is equipped with an automatic elevator. A centralized heating system warms the floor. A conference room features an intercom system connecting each seat with the podium. Lighting is provided by electrified chandeliers taking the form of large illuminated globes. But my hosts did not consistently argue that the mosque demonstrated the technical prowess of its designers and builders. On the contrary, they justified the abandonment of the "rind" design of 1957 by claiming that it exceeded the capacities of Turkish construction firms. 1 Rather, the logic of the Kocatepe Mosque, which differentiates it from the Sultanahmet Mosque, has to do with its referencing of the nationalist imagination, the experience of a mass society of anonymous others. This is what lay behind my guide's repeated emphasis on numerical quantities and measurements. The Kocatepe Mosque projects an image of a vast throng of believers coming from all over the nation and assembling as a great indivisible unity. Viewing a series of spatial voids and hearing a litany of magnitudes conjured up the presence of an immense crowd of interacting believers. Leaving the interior of the mosque building, my host took me to the adjoining auditorium, where conferences could be held. The seating capacity (six hundred persons) was duly noted, and the intended purpose of the intercom system was demonstrated. We then explored three further floors under the mosque itself, consisting of 15,000 square meters of space. Still under construction at the time, these floors had been provisionally set aside for a vast supermarket with luxury goods. But some were arguing that the space would be better used for cultural and educational purposes, such as book fairs ^They claimed that the collapse of another structure of the "rind" type had contributed to the abandonment of the modernistic design. Turkish construction firms have undertaken a variety of projects requiring advanced technical procedures since the 1960s. There is reason to doubt whether the "rind" type of mosque was beyond their capabilities by the time ground was broken for the Kocatepe Mosque in 1967.

ONCE THERE WAS, ONCE THERE

WASN'T

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or museum displays. 1 Leaving the buildings, we walked about the monumental forecourt, which is bordered by domes the dimensions of which are not very different from those of the largest Ottoman mosques. Then, as we exited the forecourt, my guide's narrative became more animated and acquired a new intensity. A vast, paved space with no exact precedent in the older mosque complexes surrounds the new mosque building. My host claimed that 24,000 people could assemble to perform the prayers within the mosque and 100,000 could be accommodated in the combined space of the interior, forecourt, and surrounding plaza. As the tour continued, he pointed out the various features of the mosque that were designed to accommodate, but also to symbolize, the assemblage of large masses. There are three large, marble-paneled rooms for performing ablutions (gasilhane), two for men, one for women. There are eight marble slabs (musalla ta^lari). set out in a single line, for laying out the corpse on the occasion of funeral ceremonies.2 My host led me through covered passageways lined chock-a block with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little compartments for the depositing of shoes. He took me to view the wide stairways rising to the site where he spoke of thousands and thousands of believers coming and going. He then explained how a main thoroughfare of Ankara (between Kugukcsal and Mithatpa§a) passed directly under the mosque building. This meant that the Kocatepe Mosque was connected with the mass transportation system of the capital city. Descending into the two-story, underground garage, he described how it would enable the efficient massing of believers.3 Large numbers of citizens might arrive by bus or automobile (vehicle capacity 1,200), move quickly by foot to the interior of the mosque, perform their ablutions and prayers, and return to their vehicles to make their way back to their homes or workplace.

At the time of my visit, a final decision had not yet been taken, because this section had not yet been completed. Now a department store and supermarket are located below the mosque. See Aydan Balamir, "Architecture and the Question of Identity: Buildings for Dwelling and Prayer in (Post) Modern Turkey," paper presented at the conference "Rethinking the Project of Modernity in Turkey," March 10-13, 1994, MIT, Boston, Massachussetts. The name of the firm, Befendik ("we were pleased") is further evidence of the attempt in certain quarters to meld consumerist and Islamist desire, but this is another topic beyond the scope of this chapter. 2 I believe the Eytip Mosque in Istanbul has as many as six such slabs. 3 T h e autopark was being used as a garage for ambulances at the time of my visit.

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The classical Ottoman mosque took the form of an intricate structural system of domes, half domes, and small domes. This peculiar structure, achieved only after decades of variation and experimentation, was determined by the objective of raising as large a dome as possible over as large an open space as possible. 1 The result was a magnificent interior where thosuands of believers might assemble on the occasion of the Friday prayers. Such a mosque monumentalized Ottoman support for Islamic society, but it had nothing to do with masses and anonymity. 2 In the late twentieth century, during the age of the nation-state, a replica of the imperial mosque has taken on a new meaning altogether: it is a place of worship in a mass society of anonymous others. As my host took me from one spatial void to another, he always saw them filled with people coming from all parts of the capital and all parts of the nation.3 The brochure, he provided, here translated and quoted verbatim without omissions, makes the same point: "The mosque" ... as its name implies, gathers together ... At the delayed opening of Kocatepe during Ramazan of 1986, this meaning was actually experienced ... Kocatepe was filled to overflowing with tthe faithful who hurried to come from surrounding provinces ill), districts (life), and regions ... [T]his streaming to Kocatepe, the greatest place of worship of the Republican period ... was explaining the yearning of the Turkish nation for growing and uniting.^

Here again is a sublime of personhood achieved through national association, but it has been strangely transformed into a scene of an anonymous nation-state solidarity (complete with references to bureaucratic districts) that nonetheless satisfies a personally experienced yearning ( h a s r e t ) for coming together.

' Kuran, The Mosque in Early Ottoman Architecture, 198. I am told that most Turkish families in Ankara and Istanbul prefer to hold funeral, circumcision, and memorial (mevlit) ceremonies at the smaller mosques in the cities, precisely because the large imperial mosques are too impersonal. 3 The brochure features a similar preoccupation. It includes a full-page photograph of the interior {harem) filled with believers performing the prayers, and it describes the doubled galleries (mahfeller) as places from which one can have a special view of the interior section (harem kismina ozel bir gorunum). See Mert, Kaya, and Manaz, Ankara Kocatepe Camii, 9, 11. ^The quote as it appears in the brochure reads as follows: "'Cami' ... adi iistiinde, toplayan ... 'Kocatepe'nin 1986 Ramazanindaki gecici a