Uncoupling Language and Religion: An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature 9781644695807

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Uncoupling Language and Religion An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature

Ottoman and Turkish Studies Series Editor Hakan T. Karateke (University of Chicago)

Other Titles in this Series Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu’s Istanbul and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Ülker Gökberk The Ottoman Twilight in the Arab Lands: Turkish Memoirs and Testimonies of the Great War Selim Deringil  Disliking Others: Loathing, Hostility, and Distrust in Premodern Ottoman Lands Edited by Hakan T. Karateke, H. Erdem Çıpa and Helga Anetshofer Waiting for Müteferrika: Glimpses of Ottoman Print Culture Orlin Sabev Investigating Turkey: Detective Fiction and Turkish Nationalism, 1928–1945 David Mason For more information on this series, please visit: academicstudiespress.com/ottomanandturkishstudies

Uncoupling Language and Religion An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature L a ur ent M ig non

BOSTON 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mignon, Laurent, 1971- author. Title: Uncoupling language and religion: an exploration into the margins of Turkish literature / Laurent Mignon. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: Ottoman and Turkish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058688 (print) | LCCN 2020058689 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644695791 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644695807 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644695814 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Turkish literature--Minority authors--History and criticism. | Turkish literature--19th century--History and criticism. | Turkish literature--20th century--History and criticism. | Literature and society--Turkey. | Religion and lit-erature--Turkey. | Orientalism. | Baha Tevfik, -1914--Crtiticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PL209.5.M56 M54 2021 (print) | LCC PL209.5.M56 (ebook) | DDC 894/.35--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058688 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058689 Copyright © 2021 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by PHi Business Solutions. Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Man Carrying a Goat, 1956 Silkscreen on paper, 18 1/4 × 15 in. (46.4 × 38.1 cm). Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.243 Courtesy Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements A Note on Conventions Introduction: In the Footsteps of Baha Tevfik PART ONE Rethinking Literature in Turkish 1. The Revolution of the Letters 2. The Roses of the Anatolian Garden 3. The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History 4. Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion 5. “La  lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here” PART TWO Challenging Orientalism

vi ix xi xiii 1 3 27 51 71 93 113

6. Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism 7. Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert 8. Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the East

115 142 161

Conclusion: To Do or Not To Do God: On Transgression, Literature, and Religion Bibliography Index

176 189 209

Preface

A

s storm Mortimer was battering the island of Wangerooge, one of the East  Frisian islands on the North Sea, where I was spending a few days and cherishing the opportunity to delve into my manuscript, I started to question the necessity of a chapter devoted to the poet Nâzım Hikmet. Was my book not meant to focus on writers who had been written out of the history of literature? While Nâzım, who was stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 1951, might once have had the status of a pariah in Turkey half a century ago, this is far from being true today. It is undeniable that for decades his works were banned and could only be circulated clandestinely. To be found in possession of one his books could even be used as evidence for far-left political sympathies in court cases against progressive militants in Turkey. But this was long ago and, since the 1990s, people from all spectrums of political life have been appropriating the poet. Indeed, in October 1994, Alpaslan Türkeş, the leader of the religious ultranationalist Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party) referred in positive terms to Nâzım Hikmet and read out one of his most popular poems, namely “Bu Memleket Bizim” (This Country is Ours), during the party’s congress, in an attempt to achieve a Turkish version of a Querfront uniting left and right-wing nationalists. In May 2007, the Ankara-based literary monthly Hece, with roots in Islamist literary circles, published a special issue devoted to the poet with the title “Türkçenin Sürgün Şairi: Nâzım Hikmet” (The Exiled Poet of the Turkish Language: Nâzım Hikmet), putting emphasis on his contributions to Turkish poetry beyond ideological differences. In those years, the poet was also included in the curriculum for Turkish literature classes in secondary education, which was equivalent to his canonization. In 2009, his citizenship was restored posthumously after much back and forth. So, had he not become too much part of the mainstream? Another problem was that I had already written on him on various occasions—mainly in French and Turkish, but also in English—addressing some of the issues at the heart of the chapter that was tormenting me. ­Somehow

Preface

the chapter seemed increasingly redundant. And now I was also starting to have doubts about the previous chapter on Namık Kemal and Samuel Hirsch. It was as if the seams of the whole book were starting to unravel. Meanwhile, the storm had cut off the island from the mainland. And yet, I could not let it go. The very first novel written by a Turkish author that I read, more than thirty years ago, had been a German translation of Nâzım Hikmet’s Yaşamak Güzel Be Kardeşim (Life’s Good, Brother), so I had an emotional attachment to his presence in the book, as well as—I won’t deny it— political sympathies for his lifelong struggle. Furthermore, I tried to convince myself that the aspects of his works which I had chosen to focus on were perhaps not so well known—his critical engagement with orientalist representation and his exploration of themes and topics that made sense in the context of post-colonial theory—and that they fitted the problematics discussed in the second part of the book. In other words, the chapter had to stay. This momentary crisis was an opportunity to rethink the purpose of the book. I was struck, more than when I originally conceived it, that the book’s two parts represented the two “great” themes that had marked my teaching of and writing on Turkish literature over the last two decades in Ankara at ­Bilkent University and at the University of Oxford. These two themes were, on the one hand, what I had called in an earlier book “the footnotes of literary h­ istory”1— authors and works that had been kept out of the great narrative of literary history; and, on the other, the problematization of the idea that the history of modern Turkish literature was a history of its Westernization—a ­questioning that occurred in that book through a focus on some authors’ (among whom was Nâzım Hikmet) critical engagement with what is today known as orientalist representation. In other words, the two problematics were the question of the “others” within the late Ottoman Turkish literary field, that is to say non-­Muslim authors, women writers, and political undesirables, as well as the problem of Turkey as the “other” of the West. This sensitivity to the problem of othering and Western supremacism stems from my discovery, back in my teenage years, of the absolute horror of the Shoah and of how the history of antisemitism is a continuous call for vigilance and a constant reminder of the dangers of othering and its consequences. This made, at least in my eyes, the chapter on Kemal and Hirsch an absolute necessity. 1 See Laurent Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar: Türk Edebiyatı ve Kültürlerarasılık Üzerine Yazılar [Footnotes Moving to the Main Text: Writings on Turkish Literature and Intercultultutalism] (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2009).

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As I have noted above, some of the material that served as a basis to the chapters of this book has been previously published and my thanks go here to the journals, publishers, and editors that have given me the opportunity to explore these ideas, publish them, and then make use of them in this book. Details of these works can be found in the footnotes and bibliography. Further, there is no doubt that many of the ideas here were first tested on students. I will be always extremely thankful to my students at Bilkent University in Ankara and at the University of Oxford, with whom I so often had engaging discussions. Giving a list of all the colleagues and friends to whom I am also deeply indebted for sharing their insights would be too long. They know who they are. However, I cannot help but mention by name my daughters İdil and Leyla, who, more than once, had to tolerate the grumpiness of their father and my partner Katja, without whom I would never have been able to finish this book. In the end, as she knows, not all was bad with Mortimer.

Acknowledgements

A

s I mentioned in the preface, this book engages with some of the themes  that have marked my teaching and writing over the years, including in my Turkish-language essays. They have been collected in five volumes, namely Çağdaş Türk Şiirinde Aşk, Âşıklar, Mekânlar (Love, Lovers, Spaces in Modern Turkish Poetry, 2002), Elifbalar Sevdası (The Passion for Alphabets, 2003), Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar (Footnotes Moving to the Main Text, 2009), Hüzünlü Özgürlük (A Sad Freedom, 2014), and Edebiyatın Sınırlarında (In the Borderlands of Literature, 2016), where early traces of my elucubrations can be observed. Chapter 1 develops material first discussed in “The Literati and the Letters: A Few Words on the Turkish Alphabet Reform” (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20, no. 1 [2010]: 11–24). Chapters 2, 3 and, 4 integrate material from “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Armenian and Kurdish Literatures in Turkish and the Rewriting of Literary History” (Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 2 [2014]: 182–200); “Lost in Transliteration: A Few Remarks on the Armeno-Turkish Novel and Turkish Literary Historiography” (in Between Religion and Language: Turkish-Speaking Christians, Jews and Greek-Speaking Muslims and Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez [Istanbul: Eren, 2011], 111–123); “Minor Literatures and their Challenge to ‘National Literature’: The Turkish Case” (in Turkey and the Politics of National Identity: Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation, ed. Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog [London: I. B. Tauris, 2014], 194–214); and “Πάτερ bizim: Notes on the Nature of Karamanlı Literature” (in Cultural Encounters in the Turkish Speaking Communities of the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez [Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2014], 137–148). Chapter 5 develops ideas first investigated in “Avram, İsak and the Others: Notes on the Genesis of Judeo-Turkish Literature” (in Between Religion and Language, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Sönmez [Istanbul: Eren, 2011], 71–83); “From İshak to İsak: The Birth Pangs of Jewish Turkish Literature”

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(in Turkish Jews in Contemporary Turkey, ed. R. Bali and Laurent-Olivier Mallet [Istanbul: Libra Books, 2015], 257–282; and “Ringen mit Dämonen: Gibt es eine jüdisch-türkische Literatur?” (in Ni kaza en Turkiya: Erzählungen jüdischer Autoren aus Istanbul, ed. and trans. by Wolfgang Riemann [Engelschoff: Auf dem Ruffel, 2018], 125–144). Chapter 6 develops material from “Of Moors, Jews and Gentiles” (Journal of Turkish Studies 35, no. 1 [ June 2011]: 65–83). Chapter 7 explores material from “Venger Aziyadé,” in Regards sur la poésie du 20ème siècle, ed. Laurent Fels [Namur: Les éditions namuroises, 2009], 251–270).

A Note on Conventions

T

he problem of transliteration is always challenging when working on ­Ottoman Turkish texts. When dealing with a relatively common word of Arabic origin in an Ottoman Turkish text that is, however, rarely used in modern Turkish, such as the broken plural ‫( أسباب‬reasons), should one follow the rules for Arabic romanization and transcribe it as ’asbāb or should one follow a transliteration closer to modern Turkish pronunciation and orthography, an approach nowadays favored by most Ottomanists, and go for esbāb, esbâb, or even esbab? My strategy in this book has been, as far as possible, to stick closely to modern Turkish orthography as defined by the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Institute). As a consequence, I transliterate ‫ أسباب‬as esbap, in line with orthographical rules reflecting final-obstruent devoicing. However, were the final consonant to be followed by a vowel, as for instance in ‫( أسبابى‬her reasons), it would retain its voicing as esbabı. I have also applied this rule when it came to transliterating the names of people throughout my text, thus following contemporary orthography. Hence ‫ أحمد‬is Ahmet and not Ahmed. I have also followed those rules when transliterating Armenian, Greek, and Jewish names. This approach is not born out of a desire to Turkify or modernize the Ottoman literary field. But, as this book mostly deals with authors from various ethno-religious backgrounds who wrote in Turkish, but have often remained unmentioned in standard historiographies and in the canon, I believe that it is important, at this stage of the discussion on Turkish-language literature, not to create additional estrangement by following the different transliterations system developed for Armenian, Greek, and the other Ottoman languages. Another problem is the question of surnames. The Surname Law which enjoined all citizens of the Republic of Turkey to take a (Turkish) surname was adopted on June 21, 1934. Hence, most of the authors discussed in this book never had, or only adopted, a surname in the later part of their lives. For matters of convenience and standardization I will only indicate the surname in square brackets at first mention and refer to the authors using what the Turkish law

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referred to as the “öz ad”—the original name. Hence the novelist Halide Edip [Adıvar] will be referred to as Halide Edip and not as Adıvar in the main text. In the footnote references and the bibliography, I refer to their surnames, adding between square brackets the names under which they have published. Hence, Avram Galanti Bodrumlu, who published under the names Abraham Galante, Avram Galanté, and Avram Galanti will be found under Bodrumlu in the footnote references and the bibliography. Another challenge is posed by the publication years of some of the works under discussion. The Republic of Turkey has been using the Gregorian calendar since January 2, 1926. The Ottoman state replaced the lunar Islamic calendar, or hicri calendar, by the solar Rumi (Roman) calendar for civic matters on March 13, 1840, in the context of the Tanzimat reforms. Both the hicri and the Rumi calendars begin with the year 622 AD, when the prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina with his followers. In the publishing world, both calendars continued to be used, and, unless a full date is indicated in a published work, it is often difficult to establish whether the publication year refers to the hicri or the Rumi calendars. In order to solve this problem, I have in most cases relied on M. Seyfettin Özege’s seminal five-volume catalogue Eski Harflerle Basılmış Türkçe Eserler Kataloğu (Catalogue of Turkish Works Printed with the Old Letters, 1971) when referring to works published in the Ottoman Turkish script. In footnote references, the publication date is indicated according to the Gregorian calendar, followed by the hicri (abbreviated to h.) or Rumi (abbreviated to r.) year in square brackets. Gregorian years indicated between square brackets refer to the year of first publication. For Armeno-Turkish works, I have relied on Hasmik Stepanyan’s bibliography of Armeno-Turkish publications; and for Greco-Turkish (Karamanlı) works I have used the catalogues established by Sévérien Salaville and Eugène Daleggio that were reviewed and expanded by Evangelia Balta.

Introduction: In the Footsteps of Baha Tevfik “It is necessary to free oneself of every form of tyranny. The past, just like nationhood, is tyranny.”1 Written on the eve of the First World War, at a time when the nationalist Ottoman Turkish ruling elite, still traumatized by the defeats suffered during the previous Balkan conflicts, was nurturing revanchist proclivities, Baha Tevfik’s condemnation of nationalism and his conceptualization of the past as a burden were out of the ordinary. These were the years when nationalist intellectuals were in the process of vanquishing on the ideological battlefields the proponents of supranational ideologies, such as Ottomanism, Islamism, or, more rarely, socialist internationalism. Baha Tevfik (1881–1914), a philosopher and publisher, was not the first Ottoman intellectual writing in Turkish to question nationalism and denounce historiographical mythmaking. As early as 1862, İbrahim Şinasi (1826–1871), a reformist publisher, poet, and playwright, had written a verse celebrating the unity of humankind—“Humankind is my nation, the earth my homeland”— inspired by Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) Romantic vision of world citizenship.2 Half a century later, Tevfik Fikret (1867–1915), who was himself a promoter of Enlightenment ideals and in many ways Şinasi’s spiritual heir, endorsed the 1 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Fert (Istanbul: Giteun Bedrosyan Matbaası, 1915 [h.1332]), 86. 2 Şinasi, “Mesari,” in Müntahabât-ı Eş’ârım: Divân, ed. Muallâ Anıl (Ankara: Akba Kitabevi, 1945), 37. The verse was inspired by the final sentences of the foreword that Victor Hugo, the French Romantic poet and author, had written for his play Les Burgraves in 1843: “One day, let us hope, the entire globe will be civilized, all points of the human abode will be enlightened, and then the magnificent dream of intelligence will be fulfilled: to have the world as your homeland and humankind as your nation” (Victor Hugo, Les Burgraves: Trilogie [London: Courrier de l’Europe’s Office, 1843], 25).

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idea that “the earth is my homeland, humankind my nation”3 in “Haluk’un Amentüsü” (Haluk’s Credo) a poem celebrating the creed of a new generation. In this way, Fikret was paying tribute to Şinasi and the Ottoman progressive tradition. Tevfik Fikret would go even further, as he believed that history was an impediment to the coming of a new enlightened age. “Tarih-i Kadim” (Ancient History), a poem composed in 1905 and published posthumously in 1924, denounces human history as a litany of wars, destruction, and corruption.4 However, Şinasi and Fikret, unlike Baha Tevfik, were embraced by republican literary historiography. In Edebî Yeniliğimiz (Our Literary Renewal), a revised edition of his groundbreaking 1921 Türk Teceddüt Edebiyatı Tarihi (History of New Turkish Literature), published by the State Press in 1930, İsmail Habib Sevük (1892–1954) argued that Şinasi had been “the father of our literary renovation” who had “taught the nation the language of observation and negotiation.”5 Tevfik Fikret, whose works were much admired by Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] (1881–1938)6 also fares well in Sevük’s worldview, though the literary historian chose to focus more on the poet’s social realist verses than on his revolutionary outbursts. Unsurprisingly, both Şinasi and Fikret were among the authors whose complete works were listed for transliteration into the new romanized Turkish alphabet, adopted in 1928 by the Turkish Language and Literature Department of the Ankara-based Faculty of Language, History-Geography (Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi) at the First Turkish Publishing Congress (Birinci Türk Neşriyat Kongresi) in 1939. The aim of this meeting was to consider the crisis in the publishing world and the consequences of romanization.7 Though Baha Tevfik could arguably be seen as a radical follower of the Enlightenment ideals promoted by the two poets, his name was not to be found on this list. It is true that his literary achievements were minor: he only published a few short stories and prose poems that did not make a major impact. Prose poetry was fashionable at the turn of the century and there is no doubt 3 Tevfik Fikret, Bütün Şiirleri, ed. Nurullah Çetin and İsmail Parlatır (Ankara: Türk Dil ­Kurumu, 2011), 541. 4 Ibid., 639–645. 5 Quoted by Elif Baki in Ulusun İnşası ve Resmi Edebiyat Kanonu (Istanbul: Libra Kitap, 2010), 60. 6 Zeki Arıkan, “Türkiye’nin Çağdaşlaşmasında Tevfik Fikret ve Atatürk,” Atatürk Yolu Dergisi 6, no. 22 (1998): 123–125. 7 [Anon.], “Ankara Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesince Türk Harfleri ile Neşri Teklif Edilen Eski Eserler,” in Birinci Türk Neşriyat Kongresi: Raporlar, Teklifler, Müzakere Zabıtları (­Ankara: Maarif Vekilliği 1939), 299. For a discussion of the congress, see chapter 1.

Introduction

that the hybridity of the genre was attractive for someone like Baha Tevfik who was uneasy with boundaries of any kind. Thematically, it might be tempting to see those short narratives that focus on objects and had, in spirit, some vague resemblance with British eighteenth-century it-narratives as expressions of the author’s materialist outlook. Yet it is doubtful that a prose poem such as “­Domino Taşları” (Domino Tiles, 1907), about the jealousy felt by domino tiles towards each other could easily be integrated into any philosophical agenda. Nonetheless, it seems that he considered his short stories as opportunities to explore philosophical ideas. There were noteworthy exceptions, namely “Ah Bu Sevda” (Oh This Passion, 1910) and “Aşk, Hodbinî” (Love, Selfishness, 1910) which discussed homoerotic themes at a time when a controversy about homosexual themes in literature divided the Ottoman literary world after the publication of Şahabettin Süleyman’s (1885–1921) play Çıkmaz Sokak (Dead End Street, 1909), which dealt with a lesbian relationship.8 In a couple of journalistic pieces, Tevfik also took aim at Raif Necdet [Kestelli] (1881–1936), a critic who had been leading the charge against Süleyman’s play which he denounced as morally harmful and foreign to Ottoman mores.9 The context of the publication of the two short stories that Tevfik published in his own magazine Piyano (Piano) show that they were political statements about the right of the artist to complete freedom of expression. Baha Tevfik’s main accomplishments as a writer, however, were in the field of nonfiction. By 1914, the year of his untimely death, the thirty-three-year-old writer had published no less than fourteen books on a variety of topics, ranging from an essay on feminism to literary criticism.10 Together with Ahmet Nebil [Çıka] (d. 1945) and Memduh Süleyman, two kindred spirits with whom he coauthored books and articles, Tevfik promoted a radical form of materialism heralding the advent of a moral society cleansed of religion and superstition, a discourse that departed from materialists such as Abdullah Cevdet [Karlıdağ]

8 Since the 2000s, there has been increased interest in the study of homoerotic themes in modern Turkish literature. See, e.g., Priska Furrer, “The Problematic Tradition: Reflections on Ottoman Homo-Eroticism in Modern Turkish Literature,” in Ghazal as a Genre of World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, ed. Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag et al., 2005), 383–393 and Laurent Mignon, “Roses et barbelés: Notes sur un amour apatride,” Inverses 10 (2010): 267–284. 9 For a summary of the controversy and Baha Tevfik’s stance, see Rıza Bağcı, Baha Tevfik’in Hayatı Edebî ve Felsefî Eserleri Üzerine Bir Araştırma (Izmir: Kaynak Yayınları, 1996), 50–53. 10 For an exhaustive list of his publications, see ibid., 232–243.

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(1869–1932) who still believed that Islam, albeit secularized, had a role to play as a set of moral principles for a future society.11 Indeed, in 1911 Tevfik translated with Ahmet Nebil some popular works of materialist philosophy, including Ernest Haeckel’s (1834–1919) 1892 profession of faith “Der Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft: Das Glaubenbekenntnis eines Naturforschers” (Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: The Credo of a Naturalist) under the Turkish title “Vahdet-i Mevcut: Bir Tabiat Aliminin Dini.” Interestingly, he chose to translate the term “credo” (Glaubensbekenntnis) as “religion” (din), even though the Ottoman Turkish “amentü” could have been used to signify “profession of faith,” as in the case of Tevfik Fikret’s abovementioned “Haluk’un Amentüsü.” The same year, both of them also published a translation of Ludwig Büchner’s (1824–1899) Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter, 1855), as Madde ve Kuvvet (Matter and Force). Hence Tevfik’s contributions to the history of materialism in Turkish as well as his activities as a publicist should have earned him at least a footnote in the history of Turkish literature: did Ahmet Hamdi [Tanpınar] (1901–1962), the acclaimed novelist and poet, but also an influential literary scholar whose Ondokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (History of Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature) is still unsurpassed in its field, not argue that a history of literature also had to be a history of ideas, because “the study of nineteenth century literature [revealed] intellectual and social change”?12 Baha Tevfik, however, went too far for many. He questioned some of the principles that were to become the building blocks of the Turkish republic. Like Şinasi and Fikret, he was a promoter of the Enlightenment and an advocate of Westernization, but he went further. He did not simply chant the universality of the Enlightenment in all its abstractness and the consequent world citizenship, he also directly attacked Turkism which he considered to be essentially reactionary. “Turkishness might have had some characteristics that were seen as appropriate in the past, but today they are extraordinary defects. One should not try to revive them, they should be destroyed. Rather than lifting them up to the domain of implementation, we should bury them in the depths of history,”13 he wrote in “Millileşmek Emeli” (Nationalization as a Goal), an article 11 Şükrü Hanioğlu, “The Second Constitutional Period 1908–1918,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4, Turkey and the Modern World, ed. Reşat Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 105. 12 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s lecture notes from 1953/54, quoted by Turan Alptekin in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar: Bir Kültür bir İnsan (Istanbul: İletişim, 2001), 139. 13 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Fert, 83.

Introduction

published in May 1913. He would include this article in his major political work Felsefe-i Fert (The Philosophy of the Individual, 1914),14 an eclectic collection of articles, loosely bound around the themes of individual freedom and emancipation. The book reflected the author’s own libertarian convictions15 and explored themes central in anarchist philosophy, such as the critique of power, nationalism, and the state.16 These were sensitive issues—and his conclusion that humanity had evolved in stages “from slavery to proletarianism” and “from proletarianism to socialism” and would finally “reach anarchism, where it would experience the complete independence and the whole greatness of the individual” was a direct challenge to the established order.17 Tevfik was a free thinker and cannot easily be categorized into any anarchist school. In his work, one would look in vain for references to the classics of anarchist thought. Nonetheless, he engaged with authors who were close to anarchist ideas: he cowrote, with Ahmet Nebil and Memduh Süleyman, a monograph on Friedrich Nietzsche (1840–1900)—Nietzsche: Hayatı ve Felsefesi (Nietzsche: His Life and Philosophy, 1912) and he translated, with Hüseyin Kami (1878–1912), Leo Tolstoy’s (1847–1910) Voskreséniye, known in English under the title Resurrection (Ba’sü Bade’l Mevt, 1910), a staunch condemnation of man-made laws and the corruption of the church. In the early years of the Republic of Turkey, there was no room for an author who openly rejected most of the principles on which the new state was being built and who heralded the advent of a communalist, anarchist society. 14 While it is easy enough to translate felsefe as “philosophy,” the concept of fert is more complex. The most common translation is “individual” and many scholars have classified Baha Tevfik as an “individualist” thinker. However the semantic range of the word fert is broad enough to encompass the concept of “person.” Baha Tevfik’s advocacy of a communalist anarchism—the ultimate stage of society—leads me to think that he believed that the fulfillment of the individual could only be achieved in communion with others. From that point of view, Tevfik shares, in this late work at least, some common traits with forms of nontheistic personalism. That for some French personalists, i.e., those who gathered around the journals Esprit (Spirit) and Ordre nouveau (New Order), a society organized along the lines of Proudhonian anarchism was the most appropriate for personal development is another invitation to start thinking of Baha Tevfik in terms of proto-personalism. However, this is a subject which requires more research, as does the history of Turkish personalism in general. For that reason, I have kept the more traditional translation “individual.” 15 I use the term “libertarian” in its original European leftist meaning, as a political stance that is fundamentally egalitarian and critical of capitalism, private property, and the power of the state, before its co-option by supporters of laissez-faire capitalism in North America. 16 For a discussion of anarchist themes in Felsefe-i Fert, see Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan ­Dipnotlar, 25–34. 17 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Fert, 119–120.

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After the alphabet change, the works of Baha Tevfik, the author and thinker, disappeared from the public eye and Turkish readers would have to wait until the 1990s for new editions of his works.18 His exclusion from literary history would not have surprised or overly upset him. On the one hand, he shared with Nietzsche a critical, quasi-nihilistic, approach to traditional historiography and its lack of engagement with the present. On the other hand, his own iconoclastic views on literature and literary criticism invite a radical rethink of official histories of literature and of the literary canon. A great lover of polemics, Tevfik argued in a series of articles that literature, in particular poetry, had a damaging influence on society and was the product of sick minds. Poetry, he maintained, was written in a heightened state of emotionality at a time when a human being was not fully in control of their intellectual faculties—an argument that drew, perhaps, on Plato’s poor view of poets: If we were to analyze, even superficially, our literary and social history, we would be struck by the fact that all our poets are a legion of lunatics who lack self-control and suffer from the strangest manias. Can you name a single poet of ours who is not drunk? Which author of ours has a private life about which we could talk about without blushing? Which artist of ours can you mention who has not authored a Hamam-Name19 or a similarly

18 The interest in Baha Tevfik’s works was sparked by Burhan Şaylı’s edition of Felsefe-i Fert ­under the title Anarşizmin Osmanlıcası 1: Felsefe-i Ferd (Istanbul: Altıkırkbeş, 1992). A new edition by Alper Çeker was published in 2017 with the same publisher: Felsefe-i Ferd: Anarşizmin Osmanlıcası (Istanbul: Altıkırkbeş, 2017). There are no less than four editions of Tevfik’s monograph on Nietzsche, coauthored with Ahmet Nebil and Memduh Süleyman. The first edition was prepared by Burhan Şaylı and published by the Istanbul-based publisher Karşı Kıyı in 2001. In 2002, Ali Utku and M. Abdullah Arslan prepared a new edition for Birey publishers in Istanbul. Şaylı’s version was reedited in Istanbul by Babil publishers in 2004, while Utku and Arslan’s edition was republished by Çizgi publishers in Konya in 2013. Çizgi publishers have played a major role in promoting the works of Baha Tevfik, publishing Muhtasar Felsefe, edited by Güler Eren in 2014; Felsefe-i Edebiyat ve Şair Celis, edited by Kemal Kahramanoğlu and Ali Utku in 2014 and Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî, edited by Veli Kılıçarslan in 2016. They have also republished Tevfik’s translations of Louis Büchner’s ­Madde ve Kuvvet, co-translated with Ahmet Nebil and edited by Kemal Kahramanoğlu in 2012, of Ernst Haeckel’s Vahdet-i Mevcut: Bir Tabiat Aliminin Dini, co-translated with Ahmet Nebil and edited by Remzi Demir and Bilal Yurtoğlu in 2014, and Odette Laguerre’s Feminizim: Alem-i Nisvan, edited by Ali Utku and Kemal Bakır in 2015. Notably, the Ministry of Culture in Ankara published an edition of Yeni Ahlak ve Ahlak Üzerine Yazılar, prepared by Faruk Öztürk in 2002. 19 The Hamam-Name or hamamiye is a genre of Ottoman Turkish divan poetry exploring the pleasures of the hamams, the Turkish baths, often with an homoerotic dimension.

Introduction despicable work? Or spoken passionately about women and love, these outmoded important literary topics, akin to chronic diseases.20

These were extraordinary words to flow from the pen of a published poet and short story writer who had himself provocatively explored the theme of homoerotic love in some of his stories. To argue that his views changed over the years and that he grew disillusioned with literature is not convincing. The very year that he published his homoerotic stories, Tevfik stood in court defending the view that literature was a sickness of the mind. Indeed, the young philosopher practiced what he preached. His views on literature became the building block of the defense at a court hearing where some members of the Fecr-i Ati (Future Dawn) neo-Symbolist literary movement were being tried for having roughed up Hüseyin Nazmi, the publisher and owner of Eşref, a satirical magazine. Nazmi had allowed the publication of pieces that were critical of what he considered to be the immorality of the works of one of the members of the group. The controversy, that would lead to violent exchanges, was triggered by two plays by Şahabettin Süleyman that deeply shook the socially conservative strands of the literary world: The first one, entitled Siyah Süs (Black Ornament), a love story between a black eunuch and a white concubine, dealt with taboo themes in Ottoman Turkish society, such as sexuality, gender, authority and race. The second one was the above-named Çıkmaz Sokak, exploring the consequences of a lesbian relationship on a family. The future novelist and diplomat Yakup Kadri [Karaosmanoğlu]’s (1889–1974) defense of Çıkmaz Sokak is noteworthy. He argued that writing a play on “a platonic love that has entered ancient Greek philosophy, reached its most beautiful expression in a quasi-mythical woman poet’s verses named Sappho and even entered sacred books with the story of Sodom and Gomorra in the Torah” was natural for someone versed in classical literary culture.21 These were not, however, the arguments that convinced the judge to discharge the overly enthusiastic neo-Symbolist mob. Baha Tevfik’s intervention as a witness called by the plaintiff tipped the balance in favor of the defendants, to the great distress of the owner of Eşref.

20 Baha Tevfik, Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî (Istanbul: Müşterükü’l-Menfaa Osmanlı Şirketi Matbaası, 1911 [r.1327]), 128. 21 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Gençlik ve Edebiyat Hatıraları (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1969), 45.

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Introduction Respected delegation of judges; before giving my testimony, I would like to present you an issue. There is a psychological disease called the illness of literature. Those who suffer from it—and I am one of those—somehow cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. In consequence, did I see these people (pointing to the accused) in the office of the Eşref periodical, or in some other place? Who said what? Who attacked whom with a walking stick? I do not know. All of my recollections of this event dance in my brains.22

The judge then interrupted the proceedings and after a short consultation with his colleagues reached the verdict that “the grounds for the accusations consisted of illusions” and the accused were acquitted, while the plaintiff had to pay for the court costs. That Baha Tevfik should have been the managing director of Eşref—that he was Hüseyin Nazmi’s employee in other words,—adds yet more spice to this extraordinary anecdote that Yakup Kadri related in his literary memoirs. The whole story provides us with useful information when it comes to make sense of Baha Tevfik’s attacks against the literary world. His disrespect for the court proceedings and his refusal to endorse his employer’s version of events in his farcical intervention are in line with the criticism of power and authority that underpins his Felsefe-i Fert. And, to say the truth, the literati—whether they envisaged a didactic role for literature and proclaimed themselves the teachers of the nation or whether, hailing from an ivory tower, they advocated an elitist aestheticism detached from the social realities of their day—were certainly in a position of authority and wielded considerable symbolic, and even sometimes, political power. Baha Tevfik, indeed, was one of the very first authors who condemned intellectuals’ unhealthy longing for state employment (memuriyet) and recognition.23 Celebrated authors often worked for the state that they wished to reform, Yakup Kadri being a case in point as he would become an MP for the ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party) after the establishment of the Republic, and later a diplomat. Unlike Tevfik, the novelist is recognized as a staunch pillar of liberation war literature and is part of the modern T ­ urkish canon. His youthful flirtation with neo-Hellenic thought and aesthetics in the

22 Ibid., 47. 23 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Fert, 31–45.

Introduction

context of the Nev-Yunani group, which he cofounded with the poet Yahya Kemal [Beyatlı] (1884–1958), is explained away as the folly of a young man who would write his major works after having embraced nationalism, albeit keeping a critical distance to the Kemalist project.24 Moreover, the novelist lived long enough to take care of his literary legacy after the alphabet change and render his works available for later generations. Tevfik did not have such an opportunity. He died at the young age of thirty as a consequence of hepatic insufficiency. His views condemned him to the footnotes of literary history and he did not have the opportunity to dig himself out. His staunch rejection of nationalism and questioning of authority is an invitation to rethink the history of Turkish literature. A first step on this path is to switch the focus from the ethno-nationally demarcated concept of Turkish literature (Türk edebiyatı) to a language-centered understanding of “literature in Turkish” (Türkçe edebiyat), which, as will be seen in the following pages, enables the incorporation of a wide range of texts written in Turkish and of authors who might not have necessarily defined themselves as Turks, yet used the ­Turkish language in their work.25 This being said, when writing in English on modern literature in T ­ urkish, one must not underestimate the importance of the pioneering studies of scholars who engaged in English with the history of the Turkish novel, such as ­ odern Ahmet Ö. Evin26 and Robert Finn,27 or wrote introductory essays on m

24 That this is not the whole story and that traces of his neo-Hellenism can also be found in his later works can be gathered from Şevket Toker, “Edebiyatımızda Nev-Yunanilik Akımı,” Ege Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Araştırmaları Dergisi 1 (1982): 135–163. 25 The use of “Türkçe edebiyat” (literature in Turkish), rather than “Türk edebiyatı” (Turkish literature), remains very controversial in Turkey. The Cypriot poet Mehmet Yaşın, who writes in Turkish, started the debate in a series of articles which he published between December 1994 and September 1995 in Adam Sanat, one of Turkey’s leading cultural magazines of the time. Since then, the debate has been regularly rekindled, not the least in the context of discussions led by Kurdish authors and poets writing in Turkish. For an overview of those discussions see Mesut Varlık, “Tartışılmayacak bir Tartışma: Türkçe Edebiyat,” K24, November 1, 2020, accessed on December 30, 2020, https://t24.com.tr/k24/yazi/tartisilmayacak-bir-tartisma-turkce-edebiyat, 2920.. 26 Ahmet Ö. Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983). 27 Robert P. Finn, The Early Turkish Novel 1872–1900 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1984).

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Turkish poetry such as Orhan Burian (1914–1953)28 and Talat Sâit ­Halman (1931–2014),29 at a time little material was available on the topic in the ­English-speaking world. While those scholars, just like their colleagues writing in Turkish, espoused a view of “national literature” in line with Western European understandings of the “nation,” their very focus on a non-Western literature was an invitation to scholars to look beyond the narrow borders of Western literature and think of literature as a global phenomenon. Evin was conscious that his monograph was “the first attempt in English to offer a critical introduction to the development of the Turkish novel” and he reached out beyond Turkologists and specialists of the Middle East to “comparatists in general,” thus situating Turkish literature among the literatures of the world.30 However, as will be seen in chapter 2, histories and studies of Turkish literature have generally excluded the works of the non-Muslim writers—­ Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Jews—who contributed to the development of Turkish-language literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even in more recent years. Those scholarly volumes and articles, unwillingly perhaps, contributed to an incomplete, and incorrect, picture, of the literary field in the Turkish-writing world. Thus, it is important to create spaces for the discussion of Armeno-Turkish, Greco-Turkish, Judeo-Turkish, Syro-Ottoman and, as will be seen, missionary literatures and their role in the field of literature in Turkish. While this is not the aim of this book, there is also much to be said in favor of a comparative history of the various literatures of the Ottoman Empire as envisaged by Johann Strauss in his remarkable article “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Centuries)?” which explores the possibilities and opportunities of intercommunitarian and interlinguistic literary exchanges.31 Strauss is indeed a pioneer of a new type of literary history and has been one of the first scholars to look at the various minority literatures of Ottoman Turkey in relation to each other, thus questioning nationalist narratives of literature.

28 See, for instance, Burian’s 1951 essay “Modern Turkish Poetry,” Journal of Turkish Literature 1 (2004): 31–43. 29 See, e.g., the relevant articles and reviews collected in Talat S. Halman, The Turkish Muse: Views and Reviews, 1960s–1990s, ed. Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006) and Talat S. Halman, Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature, ed. Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007). 30 Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, 7. 31 Johann Strauss, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Century)?,” Middle Eastern Literatures 6, no. 1 (2003): 39–76.

Introduction

His criticism32 can be read in parallel with those recent studies that discuss the social and economic relations between ethno-religious communities and look at the experiences of those communities as preponderant aspects of ­Ottoman Turkish history, and that question, in Nora Lessersohn’s terms, “post-­ Ottoman nationalist historiographies that dominate both academic and popular discourses.”33 Nineteenth-century Istanbul was a cultural center in which one language, such as Turkish, could be written and printed in five different ­alphabets—namely, the Ottoman variant of the Perso-Arabic script, the Armenian script, the Greek script, and more rarely the Hebrew and Syriac scripts; while one and the same alphabet—for instance, the Arabic script—could be used to print material in the various languages of the Muslim populations of the empire. The Ottoman capital was also an important center of Western Armenian, Greek, and Ladino literary cultures. What does engagement with Baha Tevfik mean for the study of literature in Turkish? While his anti-nationalist stance is an inspiration to revise the nationalist dogma in literary studies and make use of concepts such as “literature in Turkish,” his writings on literature also provide much food for thought in the more general context of revisionist historiography. He attacked both the classical divan tradition and post-Tanzimat literature (including so-called Tanzimat literature in itself), the later neo-Parnassian Servet-i Fünun (The Treasure of Science) and Fecr-i Ati and the nationalist Millî Edebiyat (National literature), denouncing some major figures who would become part of the canon: the eighteenth-century poet Nedim (1681–1730), the novelist Halit Ziya [Uşaklıgil] (1866–1945), and the poets Tevfik Fikret and Cenap Şahabettin (1870–1934), among others. Hence, someone wishing to recover his spirit of irreverence should look beyond those names and open up a discussion on literary figures such as Hovsep Vartanyan (1815–1879), Zafer Hanım, Ali Kemal (1868–1922), and Nezihe Muhiddin [Tepedelengil] (1889–1958), all of whom have largely been disregarded in the numerous histories of Turkish literature. 32 See, e.g., beside the abovementioned article, “The Millets and the Ottoman Language: The Contribution of Ottoman Greeks to Ottoman Letters (19th–20th Centuries),” Die Welt des Islams (New Series) 35, no. 2 (1995): 189–249, and “Is Karamanli Literature Part of a ‘Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) Literature’?,” in Cries and Whispers in Karamanlidika Books, ed. Evangelia Balta and Matthias Kappler (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz Verlag, 2010), 153–200. 33 Nora Lessersohn, “‘Provincial Cosmopolitanism’ in Late Ottoman Anatolia: An Armenian Shoemaker’s Memoir,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 2 (2015): 556.

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In short, the aim of this book is to present and study authors, poets, and literary traditions that have been marginalized or pushed into the footnotes by literary historians in Turkey and in Western academia. The book, however, also questions the reduction of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Turkish literature to a history of its “Westernization,” by discussing essays and literary texts that question orientalist scholarship, orientalism in literature, and self-orientalization. In so doing, it reevaluated more canonical authors and poets like Namık Kemal (1840–1888) and Nâzım Hikmet [Ran] (1902–1963). While Nâzım Hikmet nowadays receives unconditional praise from all spectrums of political life in Turkey, this has not always been the case. The poet, a Marxist socialist, spent most of his adult life in jail or in exile, and ownership of his books, banned during decades, could be used as evidence during anti-left crackdowns. Uncoupling Language and Religion: An Exploration into the Margins of Turkish Literature is organized into two parts, “Rethinking Literature in Turkish” (chapters 1 to 5) and “Challenging Orientalism” (6 to 8). The first chapter, “The Revolution of the Letters,” discusses how the 1928 Turkish alphabet change created ideal conditions for the creation of a national literary canon, excluding women and politically subversive intellectuals such as Baha Tevfik. Furthermore, it looks at the views of authors, from different political backgrounds, about this dramatic event. Chapter 2, “The Roses of the Anatolian Garden,” in reference to the Karamanlı novelist and journalist Evangelinos Misailidis’s (1820–1890), who called his readers to embrace their Greco-Turkish intellectual heritage,34 looks at how the literary contributions of Armenian and Greek authors who wrote in Turkish in their communitarian alphabets were sidelined by literary historians and critics in the second constitutional period and throughout most of the republican period. Chapter 3, “The ‘Refuse and Ruins’ of Literary History,” pushes the investigation further and considers the status in the history of literature of works translated into Turkish by Christian missionaries, such as John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) The Pilgrim’s Progress, Hesba Stretton’s (1832–1911) Jessica’s First Prayer, and, of course, the Bible. Taking into consideration the often Christian subtext of literary works translated into Ottoman Turkish, such as Fénélon’s (1651–1715) Télémaque, Abbé Prévost’s (1697–1763) Manon Lescaut, and Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe, as well as the many contributions made by Armenians and Greeks of various Christian denominations to literature in Turkish, this chapter also 34 Evangelinos Misailidis, Seyreyle Dünyayı:Temaşa-i Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş, ed. Robert Anhegger and Vedat Günyol (Istanbul, Cem Yayınevi, 1986), 329.

Introduction

d­ iscusses whether space should be created for a concept of cultural Christianity in the history of literature in Turkish. Chapter 4, “Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the R ­ omantic Rebellion,” is a case study on two marginalized novels that explore themes which are at the heart of nineteenth-century literary history in Ottoman ­Turkey: forbidden love and slavery. Arguing that the shadow of the French Romantic Chateaubriand (1768–1848) hovers over both of them, the chapter looks at how Hovsep Vartanyan in Akabi Hikâyesi (The Novel of Akabi, 1851), written in Armeno-Turkish and Zafer Hanım in Aşk-ı Vatan (The Love of the ­Homeland, 1877), written in Ottoman Turkish, challenged societal norms on a large range of issues, including religious sectarianism and the definition of human dignity. Chapter 5, “La lengua ke se avla aki: Jewish Literature in the Language Spoken Here,” focuses on the development of Jewish Turkish literature. Jewish Turkish literature is of a different nature to Armeno-Turkish and Greco-Turkish literatures, as in the two latter cases the authors had Turkish as their mother language. However, well into the twentieth century, the Jewish community of Ottoman Turkey mostly spoke Judeo-Spanish. The adoption of Turkish as a written and literary language in the second half of the nineteenth century was a decision taken by community leaders and intellectuals in order to promote a greater integration of the community in Ottoman society and challenge rising antisemitism.35 The second part of the book starts with an excursus that discusses, comparatively, the Young Ottoman author Namık Kemal’s response to Ernest Renan’s (1823–1892) claim that Islam was an impediment to progress and the Luxembourgish chief rabbi Samuel Hirsch’s (1815–1889) Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik ( Judaism, the Christian State and Modern Critique, 1843) which denounces the Young Hegelian philosopher Bruno Bauer’s (1809–1882) stance on Jews and Judaism. Entitled “Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism,” this chapter shows how the arguments used by Kemal and Hirsch to counter their opponents are strikingly similar and point to the common roots of antisemitism and anti-Arab and Islamophobic discourses. Bringing the Ottoman Kemal and the Luxembourgish Hirsch together is a way to pay tribute to Baha Tevfik’s internationalism, but it also responds to Ahmet 35 Concerning the spelling of the term “antisemitism,” which will come up several times in the course of this book, I follow the spelling favored by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The hyphenated spelling “anti-Semitism” suggests the existence of “Semitism,” a pseudo-scientific racial classification, but also waters down the original meaning of the term that signifies hatred toward Jews.

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Hamdi Tanpınar’s abovementioned injunction to literary historians to engage with the history of ideas. Indeed, by debunking orientalist tropes Hirsch and Kemal prepare the ground for later critics of essentialist discourses in relation to Jews, Muslims, and Arabs. It is notable that the poet, playwright, novelist, and publicist Namık Kemal is one of the few established literary figures who escaped Baha Tevfik’s wrath. In a critique of Celalettin Harzemşah, Kemal’s most influential play, Tevfik, having expressed elsewhere his reservations about the originality of Kemal’s poetry,36 stated his admiration for this groundbreaking figure of nineteenth-century Turkish literature, even though he was not quite convinced of the literary merit of the play. Writing in Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî (The Scientific and Literary Renewal, 1911), Tevfik underlined Kemal’s love of freedom and his innovativeness, thus somehow co-opting the playwright into his own worldview.37 Namık Kemal would become one of the more fought-over figures of post-Tanzimat literature as his heritage was claimed by both secular nationalists and progressives, seduced by his populism and constitutionalism, and by conservative Muslims who pointed to the emphasis that he put on Islam in his calls for reform. It is odd that Tevfik, so keen on breaking the idols of his contemporaries, should have chosen to appropriate him. The fact that Kemal, who had paid a heavy price for his political beliefs, had composed a “Hürriyet Kasidesi” (Ode to Freedom) might explain this: “How enchanting you are, o vision of freedom/We have been captured by your love, yet we are freed from slavery.”38 Chapter 7, “Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert,” builds on Namık Kemal’s critique of anti-Arab racism and examines the controversial novelist and essayist Ali Kemal’s interest in Arab culture by focusing on his early novels and writings on Arabic literature. Chapter 8, entitled “Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the East,” then looks at literary responses to Western orientalist discourse by focusing on the poet Nâzım Hikmet’s critique of colonialism and eurocentrism in his epic poetry and his rejection of both orientalist mystification and religious mysticism. Finally, the conclusion, “To Do Or Not To Do God: On Transgression, Literature and Religion,” explores the question of how some of the more subversive discourses developed by ­minorities and 36 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat ve Şair Celis (Istanbul: Necm-i İstikbal Matbaası, 1914 [r. 1330]), 96. 37 Bağcı, Baha Tevfik’in Hayatı Edebî ve Felsefî Eserleri Üzerine Bir Araştırma, 102 and Tevfik, Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî, 169–170. 38 Namık Kemal, “Kaside,” in Batı Tesirinde Türk Şiiri Antolojisi, ed. Kenan Akyüz (Istanbul: İnkılâp, 1986 [1953]), 63.

Introduction

marginalized intellectuals survived into republican literature by looking at a gothic novella by the feminist writer Nezihe Muhiddin which discusses necrophilia and murder—an early example of what can best be characterized as transgressive literature. The issue of literary historiography was also at the heart of Baha Tevfik’s own reflections. This is to be expected as critical engagement with the past and the problematics of authority and power were important aspects of his philosophy. It comes as no surprise that the young philosopher and literary critic made his own contribution to an alternative history of Ottoman Turkish literature by devoting a seventy-six-page monograph to a poet who had remained unknown, even during his lifetime. The work was published in the Ottoman capital in 1914 and carried the title Felsefe-i Edebiyat ve Şair Celis (The Philosophy of Literature and the Poet Celis). Towards the end of his book, the author explains to his readers that Celis had no impact at all on the development of contemporary literature as his true value went unappreciated in his days. “That is the case for every new thing,” the philosopher continues, “as the people, under the influence of ancient habits, remain connected to what is old, to ancient practices, and find it difficult to get used to something new.”39 Tevfik knew very well that literary recognition did not depend on appreciation by the “people” alone, when literacy rates were, according to most estimates, lower that ten percent of the male Muslim population.40 Thus, it was the literary establishment’s fault that a talent such as Celis had gone unnoticed and that Celis’s “attractive and humane style appeared and disappeared with him.”41 Baha Tevfik was on a crusade against the literary establishment—against scholars of literature and critics who wielded too much power. He had a poor opinion of literary critics, though he dabbled in criticism himself. He believed that Celis was unknown because he did not respond to the expectations of the literary pundits of his age whom Tevfik considered to be incompetent. In his 1911 Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî, an earlier work that caused much resentment at the time, Tevfik argued that criticism existed only to harm writers and for critics to achieve personal fame.42

39 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat ve Şair Celis, 72. 40 For a discussion on the very thorny issue of literacy in the late Ottoman Empire see, ­Benjamin Fortna, Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 20–21. 41 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat ve Şair Celis, 72. 42 Baha Tevfik, Teceddüd-i İlmî ve Edebî, 143–144.

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As published critics could not be relied upon, Tevfik proposed to circumvent their authority and write an alternative history of the reception of Celis’s works by referring to the reactions of his readers—all of them friends and acquaintances—in what could perhaps be described as a rudimentary form of reader-response theory. Tevfik’s reader-focused approach was essentially a challenge against authority, as it implicitly questioned the opinions of the literary authorities of his time. Tevfik argued that Celis’s readers ranged from a physician who cared little for poetry43 to a poet and scholar,44 an indicator of whom constituted the reading class in Ottoman Turkey. Yet, despite their differences in background, all recognized “an original literary personality”45 in Celis. The philosopher’s revolutionary iconoclasm was further apparent in the connections he drew between Celis’s poetry and the works of some of the literary greats of the Western canon, starting with Shakespeare (1564–1616), whose reputation was well established in literary Istanbul at the time Tevfik was writing.46 Indeed, he was one of the rare literary figures whose status was largely taken for granted. By comparing Celis to the Bard, Tevfik subverted the whole notion of literary classics and the canon, as he suggested that an ordinary Ottoman coffee shop poet could reach the same heights as the man who was considered by many as the pinnacle of English-language literature. Indeed, claiming that just like Shakespeare who had foreseen “the eternity of the matter,” Celis’s works also contained great philosophical insights,47 Tevfik not only challenged the norms and the authority of scholars and critics of literature. He also used the opportunity to put forward his reading of Shakespeare as a proto-materialist thinker, hence promoting his own philosophical agenda. Tevfik espoused Ludwig Büchner’s view, expressed in Kraft und Stoff, which he had translated with Ahmet Nebil, that Shakespeare held that “matter as such is indestructible, it cannot be annihilated; no grain of dust in the universe, can vanish from, and none can enter it.”48 Tevfik then went on to link Shakespeare’s verses 43 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat, 39. 44 Ibid., 73. 45 Ibid. 46 On the translation and reception of Shakespeare in Turkey, see İnci Enginün, Türkçede Shakespeare: Çevirileri ve Etkisi (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2008). 47 Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat, 21. 48 Ludwig Büchner, Force and Matter or Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe (London: Asher and Co, 1884), 18–19. Büchner based this claim on the following lines from Hamlet, which he quoted: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay/Might stop a hole to keep the wind away/O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe/Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!”

Introduction

to the chemist Antoine Lavoisier’s (1743–1794) famous maxim “nothing is created, nothing is destroyed.”49 Tevfik’s aim was to stress the scientific foundation of his worldview. Indeed, evoking Shakespeare allowed Tevfik to establish his materialist pedigree once again, as the complete plays of the Bard were being translated at the time by Abdullah Cevdet, another militant materialist. Tevfik’s extravagant comparisons served to clarify his own ideological position. Hence, when writing that Celis shared an ability to reveal the unexpected in few words with the French writer and short story writer Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893),50 he knew that he was citing an author who had counted among the most outspoken advocates for Emile Zola (1840–1902)—one of the major proponents of Naturalism, but also, towards the end of his life, a socialist. That the Turkish literary world should have been tearing itself apart in a debate on Naturalism, originally instigated by another militant materialist and Zola aficionado, Beşir Fuat (1852–1887), was probably key here, as it allowed Tevfik to showcase his ideological lineage. Again, as in his comparison of Celis with Shakespeare, Tevfık was also pointing to the shortcomings of those critics and scholars of literature who failed to notice the Turkish Maupassant. Tevfık was no mere agitator. He was attempting to undermine the literary establishment— authors, critics, and scholars alike. Beyond provocations such as the above, writing on Celis also gave Tevfik a chance to clarify his views on Ottoman Turkish literary history: in the opening pages of the book, he repeated his views on poetry and rejects both the classical divan tradition—which, like so many others, he saw as mere imitation of the Persians—and contemporary poetry which, he argued, copies the Europeans. These were mainstream ideas at the time and had a certain nationalist bent. What made Tevfik’s claim different, though, was that he maintained he had found a poet who could lead literary Turkey out of the one-way street it was stuck in, a poet who advocated views that challenged the religious and nationalist status quo. According to the author, Celis was a pioneer, too daring for his contemporaries. Tevfik implied that Celis’s philosophical views, which were close to his own, were the main reason behind his (Celis’s) rejection by the mainstream literary world. The poet was a pacifist and expressed his views in lines, such as the following: “The snake bites, but a snake it is and should be forgiven/The leech leeches, but a leech it is and cannot help it.”51 For Celis, Tevfik 49 Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat, 21. 50 Ibid., 39–40. 51 Ibid., 29.

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proposed, humans have an ethical responsibility, whereas animals do not: “He shows that humankind should refrain from such acts; that drinking blood and murdering people is the remit of leeches and snakes.”52 Similarly, Celis’s verses condemned nationalism, which was nurtured by emotions and not reason. Lastly, the poet was a champion of the Enlightenment, contributing actively to the disenchantment of the world by exploring the idea that the concept of the “eternity of the soul” is an invention to help humans cope with the ephemerality of existence.53 After the humiliating Ottoman defeats in the Balkan Wars and on the eve of the First World War, when revanchism, nationalist fervor, and religious feelings were dominating public debate, Tevfik’s portrayal of Celis as a herald of progressive causes was thought-provoking. Reading Tevfik’s monograph, one cannot help but notice that the only named intellectual who openly endorsed Celis is Tevfik Fikret, himself a towering figure among Ottoman Turkish progressives. Tevfik reproduced a letter from Fikret in his monograph: I see the seeds of the art that will dominate the future in your works. Appreciation is the product of accustomedness. You are so full of novelties which are beyond our accustomedness that I do not believe that someone will appear in our times who claims that they really appreciate your works. But be sure of one thing: the future is yours.54

Yet Celis’s poetry is not all about ideals of progress and reason. His engagement with the themes of love and desire recall Tevfik’s own exploration of queer themes. In some bucolic verses, the beloved requires the presence of a second male, beside her lover: “My love, are we not in need of a third spouse?” To her proposal, the speaker ambiguously responds: “Let’s turn naturalness into a third spouse/Come, drink and let’s enjoy ourselves.”55 This shows that even when Tevfik discussed Celis’s love poetry, he situated him beyond the borders of mainstream heteronormativity. Despite devoting some space to Celis’s love poetry, Tevfik mainly considered him to be a philosophical poet. Leaving aside his more incendiary statements, Tevfik was clear that he thought interesting ideas rarely make good poetry. Among all the praise he lavished on the poet, Tevfik also wrote— 52 53 54 55

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 57.

Introduction

sharply criticizing the poet’s aesthetics—that “some of his poems were too full of details and unnecessary verses.”56 Tevfik’s readers, on the evidence of the numerous excerpts he provided, would hardly have disagreed with this statement. And yet Tevfik kept on emphasizing the importance of promoting Celis’s work. In the final sentences of his book, he made an appeal, heard many more times in the coming years, but in particular after 1928 and the alphabet change: “I very much hope that a benevolent person will come out to publish a divan, or with the new term, a collection (mecmua) which contains the complete works of this poet.”57 Indeed the publication and thus dissemination of the works of little-known or marginalized poets remained a major issue, and contributed to shaping the history of Turkish literature. Years after the philosopher, in 1955, in one of the earliest republican recensions of the works of the Jewish poet İsak Ferera Efendi (1883–1933), the poet and painter Jozef Habib Gerez (b.1926) also asked for financial support to publish a transliteration of Ferera’s complete poems, as he had barely sufficient money to cover the publication of his own works: “I hope that I can convince the wealthy among us to make sacrifices out of inclination for such an initiative.”58 His call was never answered. It is notable that the financial constraints of the publishing world did not only impact the publication of transliterations of pre-republican poets. Like Tevfik unable to find the funds to publish the works of a radical poet such as Celis, the socialist novelist Suat Derviş (1903–1972) was unable to publish two novels, namely Hiç (Nothing) and Çılgın Gibi (Like Mad), which she wrote between 1940 and 1945,59 war years during which Turkey suffered from great penury, though it was neutral during most of the conflict and only joined the Allies against the Axis powers once the Allied victory had been secured. As in the case of Celis, factors such as poverty and the price of paper were combined with political undesirability. Examples could be multiplied. Tevfik wanted to emphasize that the publication of a literary work required certain material conditions and political acceptability. These two conditions had an impact on how the history of literature would be written. An ­unpublished 56 Ibid., 47. 57 Ibid., 76. 58 Jozef Habib Gerez, “Türk Yahudileri Hakiki Vatandaşlıklarını Türkçe Eser Vermek Suretiyle Göstermelidirler,” La Luz de Türkiye, September 21, 1955, reproduced in Nesim Benbanaste, Örneklerle Türk Musevi Basınının Tarihçesi (Istanbul: Sümbül Basımevi, 1988), 72. 59 Yeliz Kızılarslan, “Münevver bir Osmanlı Kadını: Suat Derviş ve Kara Kitap,” bianet.org, March 1, 2008, accessed March 28, 2020, http://bianet.org/biamag/kadin/105276-munevver-bir-osmanli-kadini-suat-dervis-ve-kara-kitap.

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book hardly had a chance to go down in history. Of course, he did not seriously expect that a reader would come out and offer to print the works of this unknown poet. Had it happened, the philosopher who had such a poor opinion of the literary world, might have played the ultimate joke on the intellectual bourgeoisie. But in what would the joke have consisted? In his monograph, the philosopher provides his readers with only scarce details about the biographical identity of his object of study. Indeed, he informs them that his “aim is not to write a biographical document.”60 He has not “tried to find his date of birth,” but only notes that he died of tuberculosis aged “about 35–40 years during the autumn of 1913.”61 Though Celis was originally from the Black Sea town from Giresun, he grew up in Istanbul and attended military colleges. He seems to have been a rather poor student who “was not strong in science, learning and foreign languages.”62 He served in various regiments in the Balkans and was eventually promoted to the rank of captain. Having been wounded in Albania, during the First Balkan War, he retired to Istanbul where he lived isolated in the neighborhood of Sirkeci. He did not have any contact with his sister, who had been residing with her husband in Egypt for more than ten years. He increasingly suffered from tuberculosis, yet spent most of his time in smoky coffee shops, where he wrote most of his poems.63 More important than these vague pieces of information is the fact that Tevfik suggested that he himself introduced Celis to the literary world by publishing his poems in a variety of “magazines such as Eşref, Hale, Tenkit, Teşvik, Zeka—publications that were mine more or less, or had a connection with [me].”64 It is he, Tevfik, who gave him, Rahmi, his pen name “Celis,” a pseudonym that the philosopher himself had used in the past in some local gazettes. Even stranger, the philosopher wrote that “it is as if the poet Celis, was born by my hand and died by my hand.”65 So who was Celis? Was he real—the Rahmi Celis referred to in bibliographical dictionaries—or was he just a fiction, a joke played on the literary world by one of its most unruly actors? Perhaps the answer to this question is of little importance. Baha Tevfik achieved his aim: by turning someone such as Celis, a footnote in the history of the literature of his era, into the object of a 60 61 62 63 64 65

Baha Tevfik, Felsefe-i Edebiyat, 13. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17.

Introduction

book, he revealed that the history of literature and the canon are nothing but constructs. This was a political stance, and his monograph, like many scholarly books, merges scholarship and intellectual autobiography. Indeed, in this case, the reader learns more about the author than about his subject. As for the author, he invites the reader to challenge the authority of the literary establishment and to turn the forgotten and downtrodden into the main substance of literary historiography.

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Part One Rethinking Literature in Turkish

CHAPTER 1

The Revolution of the Letters

W

 hile an exploration of some of the footnotes of literary history is at the heart of this book, it is important not to forget that in the 1930s, T ­ urkey’s intellectual elite and bureaucracy were less concerned with canon formation and historiography—the establishment of what some, like the minister for education Hasan Âli [Yücel] (1897–1961) called the millî kütüphane (national library)— than with the very fact that there was no reading culture among the ordinary people they were meant to enlighten. In the early years of the republic, reading largely remained a ruling class phenomenon.1 Bizde halk gazete, kitap okumaz (Our people do not read newspapers and books),2 was and remains a much-­ repeated trope. The novelist Reşat Nuri [Güntekin] (1889–1956) devotes one essay in Anadolu Notları (Anatolian Notes, 1936 and 1966), a collection of sketches about his travels in Asia Minor, to this question. Reşat Nuri was part of the new republican establishment and was, already during his lifetime, recognized as a pillar of the new literature that the republic wanted to promote. His first novel Çalıkuşu (The Wren, 1922), translated into English in 1949 by ­Wyndham Deedes (1883–1956), a retired British army officer, under the title The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl,3 became a standard introduction to modern Turkish fiction in Turkey and abroad. Reşat Nuri considered that the absence of a well-organized distribution network for newspapers and books in 1 For a history of reading in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey see ­Benjamin Fortna, Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic. See also, Johann Strauss, “Romanlar, ah! Ô Romanlar! Les débuts de la lecture moderne dans l’­Empire ottoman (1850–1900),” Turcica 26 (1994): 125–163. Concerning the impact of the alphabet change on reading practices, see Hale Yılmaz, “Learning to Read (Again): The ­Social Experiences of Turkey’s 1928 Alphabet Reform,” International Journal of Middle ­Eastern Studies 43 (2011): 677–697. 2 Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Anadolu Notları 1–2 (Istanbul: İnkılâp Yayınevi, 1991 [vol. 1, 1936 and vol. 2, 1966].), 52. 3 Reşat Nuri Güntekin, The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl, trans. Wyndham Deedes (­London: D. Allen & Unwin, 1949).

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Rethinking Literature in Turkish

Anatolia was one of the major reasons behind the lack of interest for reading in Asia Minor. In entertaining anecdotes, he related that even in a large town such as Konya in central Anatolia, new works of fiction were unavailable.4 Most sellers, he observed, make no distinction between the commercialization of soap and sugar and the sale of books, reaching the conclusion that “selling books, just like writing them, requires brains.”5 This characteristic belittling of Anatolian country folk, the object of his and his companions-in-arms Enlightenment proselytism, did not prevent him from proceeding with his great project. “The publication of books and newspapers is at the heart of our struggle,” he writes, and he is encouraged by the fact that the First Press Congress (Birinci Basın Kongresi), held in 1935,6 which took place between March 25 and 27, recognized that resolving the distribution problem is an important way “to make the people read what we write.”7 The fact that not even one fifth of the population was literate according to the census of 1935 was, of course, a much more fundamental problem.8 The low literacy levels of the Muslim population of the empire had been a recurring issue in debates about modernization since the nineteenth century. That non-Muslims had had a much higher level of literacy, as a result of a rise in modern Jewish and Christian educational institutions and the increased number of missionary schools which mainly addressed the needs of the Armenian and Greek communities, only rubbed salt into the wounds of nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish intellectuals.9 Reşat Nuri believed that large congresses, such as the First Press Congress could play a role in identifying the causes of the bibliophobia affecting the Muslims of Anatolia. How it would be cured, however, remained unclear: “Should the state be involved, or should it be a private company commissioned by the state? To say the truth, there are some slight tensions and disagreements on this 4 Güntekin, Anadolu Notları, 53. 5 Ibid., 56. 6 The proceedings of the Congress were published in 1936: Basın Genel Direktörlüğü, Birinci Basın Kongresi (Istanbul: Devlet Basımevi, 1936). The volume was prepared by Server Rifat İskit (1894–1975), the journalist and press historian (Ali Birinci, “İskit, Server Rifat,” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 22, ed. edited by Halis Ayhan and Ahmet Yılmaz [Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi Genel Müdürlüğü, 2000], 584). 7 Güntekin, Anadolu Notları, 51. 8 Fatih Tuğluoğlu, “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin İkinci Nüfus Sayımı: 20 İlkteşrin 1935,” Çağdaş Türkiye Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi 12, no. 25 (2012): 75. 9 Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 169.

The Revolution of the Letter

point. Yet I do not believe this to be of any importance. What truly matters is that the problem has been identified.”10 Among the large congresses that were to promote the spread of a printing and literary culture was the First Turkish Publishing Congress held between May 1 and 5, 1939. As the then minister of education Hasan Âli [Yücel] stressed in the foreword of the proceedings of the congress, the aim of the conference, which brought together authors, publishers, educators, researchers, artists, civil servants, and scientists, many of whom fitted into more than one category, was to establish “what initiatives were necessary to provide as soon as possible the means of learning and promote civilizational advancement such as journals, books, dictionaries and encyclopedias—cultural nourishment—to the one million of literate people schooled in educational institutions.”11 But there was more to it. The minister also emphasized that “as a nation and as a state, we have taken the decision to establish a perfect and complete national library by means of writing and translating.”12 The form that this “millî kütüphane” would take was thus high on the agenda. That the need to establish a national library, in other words a collection of works considered representative of Turkish literature,13 was so acute, was due to the 1928 alphabet change and the switch from the modified Perso-Arabic alphabet, used to write Ottoman Turkish, to the modern romanized Turkish alphabet. The implementation of this radical reform, one of many changes that deeply transformed Turkey’s political, legal, economic, social, and educational 10 Güntekin, Anadolu Notları, 51. 11 Hasan Âli Yücel, “Önsöz,” in Birinci Türk Neşriyat Kongresi: Raporlar, Teklifler, Müzakere ­Zabıtları (Ankara: Maarif Vekilliği, 1939), 1. 12 Yücel, “Önsöz,” 2. 13 This is one possible definition of the literary canon. While the existence or absence of a literary canon in Turkey, or even the existence of various rival canons, has been at the heart of debates on canonicity in the Turkish literary field throughout the 2000s, it is difficult to deny that works dealing with post-Tanzimat literature, be they historiographical, scholarly studies, anthologies, or school curricula have integrated discussions of common works such as Şinasi’s 1860 play Şair Evlenmesi (The Poet’s Wedding), Namık Kemal’s “Hürriyet Kasidesi” or indeed, Halit Ziya [Uşaklıgil]’s 1899 Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love) and thus shaped a canon. For discussions on the canon in Turkey see, e.g., the special dossier in issue 68 of the literary monthly Kitap-lık ( January 2004) and the special issue of the journal Pasaj 6 (2008). Individual articles of interest are Orhan Tekelioğlu, “Edebiyatta Tekil bir Kanonun Oluşmasının İmkansızlığı Üzerine Notlar,” Doğu Batı 22 (2003): 65–77 and, for a conservative perspective see Selçuk Çıkla, “Türk Edebiyatında Kanon ve İnkılâp Kanonu,” Muhafazakâr Düşünce 13–14 (2007): 47–68. In English, for a discussion about the canon and language reform, see Jale Parla, “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the Novel,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 27–40.

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Rethinking Literature in Turkish

f­ ramework, was about to render Ottoman Turkish literature inaccessible to people who had not been trained in reading the “old letters.” However, the inaccessibility was not only caused by the new alphabet, but also by the transformation of the written language, purged of Arabic and Persian elements in the name of simplification and nationalization. The new readers consisted not only of the new generation entering primary education after the alphabet change, but also of the millions of illiterate citizens who were exposed to literacy—and ­Turkification— campaigns. The so-called “Revolution of the Letters” (Harf İnkılabı) was not simply a typographical revolution, it was also a revolution in the field of belles lettres in more than one sense. As Nergis Ertürk noted in her Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, the phonocentric turn, the preference of the vernacular over the hitherto written language, in the post-Tanzimat era, which was accompanied by a debate on representation which culminated in the adoption of a phonetic alphabet, had a deep impact on the ways some major writers and poets, such as Peyami Safa (1899–1961), Ahmet Hamdi, and Nâzım Hikmet explored new avenues of critical engagement with the literary language, producing some of the great classics of Turkish literary modernity.14 The other revolution in the field of belles lettres is in many ways a counterrevolution. While the new “national library” was being established, as we will see in later chapters, non-Muslims were not considered as actors within the field of national literature. Their works were not transcribed into the new alphabet and were thus marginalized in literary history and scholarship. Similarly, early woman writers, socialist and anarchist literatures, and Islamist writers, as well as alternative genres such as science-fiction and literary works that could be categorized as lowbrow or popular literature were also sidelined. The presentation and discussion of lists of works to be translated from foreign, mostly Western, languages into Turkish and of Ottoman Turkish works to be transliterated into the newly adopted romanized Turkish alphabet were important aspects of the First Turkish Publishing Congress. The ideal library of modern Turkey was being defined. The Ankara-based Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography, founded in 1935 with the support of the president of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal, presented the list of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works that ought to be transliterated. This was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: promote literary culture and write literary history, as works that were not mentioned and retained had little chance of recognition and would, as a consequence, end up in the footnotes of literary history. 14 Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Revolution of the Letter

With the notable exception of Celal Sahir [Erozan] (1883–1935), the list consisted of authors and poets who would constitute the backbone of the Turkish literature curriculum for decades to come, combining Enlightenment ideals with nationalism: İbrahim Şinasi, Namık Kemal, Ziya Pasha (1825– 1880), Abdülhak Hamit [Tarhan] (1852–1937), Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem (1847–1914), Samipaşazade Sezaî (1860–1936), Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895), Ahmet Vefik Pasha (1823–1891), Tevfik Fikret, Cenap Şahabettin, Süleyman Nazif (1870–1921), Mehmet Rauf (1875–1931), Müftüoğlu Ahmet Hikmet (1870–1927), Ahmet Rasim (1864–1932), Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920), and Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924).15 No living writer was on the list, as they themselves could look after the republication of their works. The absence of woman writers, however, is striking: not even Nigâr Hanım (1856–1918),16 who published no less than six poetry, prose, and essay collections, as well as a play, and Fatma Aliye [Topuz] (1862–1936),17 who published five novels and several essays and studies, are mentioned on the list. 15 “Ankara Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesince Türk Harfleri ile Neşri Teklif Edilen Eski Eserler,” 299. 16 Nigâr Hanım has attracted relatively little interest from the publishing world and scholars alike. Beside her memoirs, edited by her son Salih Keramet Nigâr (1885–1987), Hayatımın Hikâyesi (Istanbul: Ekin Basımevi, 1959), one comprehensive biographical study was published by Nazan Bekiroğlu: Şair Nigâr Hanım (Istanbul: İletişim, 1998). Her complete poems Toplu Şiirleri have been published by Refika Altıkulaç Demirdağ (Rize: Salkımsöğüt, 2005). 17 From the 1990s onwards, Fatma Aliye and her works started to be rediscovered in Turkey. Beside new editions of her works, her status as a writer and intellectual attracted much attention. Her rediscovery, culminating with her depiction on fifty lira notes in 2009, started with Mübeccel Kızıltan’s Fatma Aliye Hanım: Yaşamı, Sanatı, Yapıtları ve Nisvan-ı Islam (Istanbul: Mutlu Yayıncılık, 1993) which provided a bio-bibliographical overview and a transliteration of her 1892 monograph about the great women of Islam Nisvan-ı İslam (Women of Islam). While a whole range of articles dealing with aspects of her work appeared after that, Firdevs Canbaz published the first systematic study of her complete works Fatma Aliye: Fatma Aliye’nin Eserlerinde Kadın Sorunu (Ankara: Timaş, 2010), two years after Fatma Karabıyık Barbarosoğlu published her biographical novel of the author: Fatma Aliye: Uzak Ülke (Ankara: Timaş, 2008). Both Canbaz and Karabıyık Barbarosoğlu brought to the fore the dialectics of women’s rights and traditional religious leanings and Fatma Aliye’s attempt to resolve this dichotomy within Islam. Notably the first biography of the author had been written by her mentor, the novelist and kingmaker in literary circles Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912), namely Fatma Aliye Yahut Bir Muharrire-i Osmaniyenin Neşeti (Istanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1893 [h. 1311]). There has also been increased interest in her life and work outside Turkey, see e.g., Carter Vaughn Findley, “La soumise, la subversive: Fatma Aliye, romancière et féministe,” Turcica 27 (1995): 153–176; Hülya Adak, “Gender-in(g) Biography: Ahmet Mithat (on Fatma Aliye) or the Canonization of an Ottoman Male Writer,” Querelles: Jahrbuch für Frauen und Geschlechterforschung 10 (2005): 189–204; Nagihan Haliloğlu, “Translation as Cultural Negotiation: The Case of Fatma Aliye,” in Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700–1900, ed. Gillian Dow (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 159–174 and Elif Ekin Akşit, “Fatma Aliye’s Stories: Ottoman Marriages Beyond the Harem,” Journal of Family History 35, no. 3 (2010): 207–218.

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Rethinking Literature in Turkish

Beside the gynophobia prevalent in academic studies then, the ideas promoted by these two outstanding writers might have been another factor in their exclusion. Nigâr Hanım had been critical of the attempts to reform the Turkish literary language and purge it from Persian and Arabic elements. In an interview with journalist Eşref Edip [Ünaydın] (1892–1959), she maintained quite controversially that “Persian and Arabic genitive and adjectival constructions should be kept.” Moreover, she also added that “the elite should not be lowered to the level of the populace, but that the populace should be raised to the level of the elite. If this is not possible, then, let there be a literature for the populace, but without affecting or attacking the literature of the elite.”18 With such words, expressed at the end of the First World War, she went against the spirit of the last decade and the rise of “millî edebiyat”—national literature— which advocated a focus on the spoken language, the study of folk literature and the representation of Anatolia in literature.19 Indeed, she even denounced the hece—syllabic—verse of the folk tradition, whose use was advocated by the promoters of national literature, as no different to prose.20 Fatma Aliye, on the other hand, promoted a reformist vision of Islam which clashed with the secularism of the republic. Her advocacy of women rights based on her interpretation of traditional Islamic sources challenged the official discourse promoted by advocates of authoritarian secularism and top-down feminism. For the new ruling elites, she was no doubt best left forgotten. The case of Celal Sahir forms a striking contrast with the two women writers. Though he too started, like Nigâr Hanım, as a poet promoting art for its own sake, he later embraced the syllabic meter of the folk tradition and the simplification of literary language advocated by the nationalists. He became a founding member of the Society for the Study of the Turkish Language [Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti] in 1932, later to be renamed the Turkish Language Institute [Türk Dil Kurumu], which spearheaded the language reform. Towards the end of his literary career, he even experimented with free verse. His credentials as an advocate of nationalist modernization were impeccable—his poetry less so. Yet his involvement with the language engineering at the heart of the Kemalist project might also explain why this rather minor figure of the history of Turkish poetry received such preferential treatment. 18 Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın [Ruşen Eşref], Diyorlar ki (Istanbul: Kanaat, 1918 [r. 1334]), 30–31. 19 See Laurent Mignon, Neither Shiraz nor Paris (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2005), 77–80. 20 Ünaydın, Diyorlar ki, 30.

The Revolution of the Letter

The patriarchal, ideological, and ethno-religious cleansing of the “national library” was collateral damage in the “Revolution of the Letters” of 1928. As will be seen later, while some of its advocates might have viewed the cleansing as beneficial, it had, of course, not been the primary aim of the alphabet change. Indeed, debates on the need to reform the Ottoman Turkish alphabet in order to promote literacy had been on the agenda for seventy-five years before the change was implemented.21 Although most advocates of reform considered romanization to be an overly radical response, throughout those years, and thus probably counterproductive, everyone agreed that the alphabet had to reflect the phonology of Turkish in order to facilitate the alphabetization of the largely illiterate Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. Addressing Cemiyet-i İlmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Scientific Society) in May 1862, Münif Pasha (1830–1910) famously showed his audience that the sequence of four letters kef, vav, re, and kef—‫—كورك‬could be read in six distinct and meaningful ways,22 namely gevrek (crisp), görün (the second person plural imperative of the verb to see), körük (bellows), körün (the blind with a genitive suffix), kürek (oar), and kürk (fur). There is no need to point out that homographs did not facilitate alphabetization. During the years that followed the westernizing Tanzimat reforms, talks about the alphabet were part of a greater debate regarding the need to bridge the gap between the elaborate written language, heavily reliant on Arabisms and Persianisms, and the spoken language. Intellectuals and bureaucrats considered alphabetization and the simplification of the written language as sine qua non conditions to fulfil their roles as self-appointed educators of the nation. The debate regarding the alphabet evolved according to the political conjuncture. One standout suggestion was the proposal by the Azeri writer Mirza Fethali Ahundzade (1812–1878) to the Ottoman Scientific Society in 1863 for two reformed alphabets. Further groundbreaking developments in the early twentieth century were the adoption of the Latin alphabet by Albanian ­Muslims after the Manastir Congress in 1908, the design of a simplified alphabet to facilitate military communication by the Young Turk leader Enver Pasha 21 There is a considerable, and growing, literature available on various aspects of the T ­ urkish language reform. Nonetheless, in Turkish, Agâh Sırrı Levend’s Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1972 [1949]) and, in English, Geoffrey Lewis’s The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) remain unsurpassed as introductions to the history of and debates surrounding language reform in late Ottoman and early republican Turkey. 22 Levend, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri, 154.

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(1881–1922) in 1914, and eventually the presentation of a motion in favor of the adoption of the Roman alphabet at the economic congress in Izmir by three worker-delegates in 1923. As Mustafa Kemal had always been interested in the alphabet debate, it was not surprising that the discussions should gain a new impetus after the establishment of the republic. All the main arguments concerning the reform had already been formulated during the nineteenth century. The advocates of the alphabet change argued that the Ottoman version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet was not suited to the peculiarities of Turkish pronunciation and, thus, a reform of the script was needed. Such a move would also, they argued, facilitate alphabetization and literacy. Those opposed to the reform countered that better schooling policies and infrastructure would help to improve literacy levels, while reforming the Arabic alphabet and especially romanization would estrange younger generations from the Ottoman Turkish literary and intellectual heritage. Even literate people would have to be alphabetized anew, if they did not know the Roman alphabet. Debates on romanization, moreover, focused on the symbolical meaning of the alphabet and its power of evocation. Did the Latin script symbolize modernity and progress or Christianity? Nonetheless, despite those disagreements, there was a general consensus that reform was needed.23 On May 23, 1928, the Council of Ministers set up the Language Commission [Dil Encümeni] with Mustafa Kemal’s approval. Its aim was to “explore the possibility and the ways of applying the Latin script to the [Turkish] language.”24 Literatis had considerable sway in the commission. Among the nine original members were three members of parliament with literary pretensions—Yakup Kadri, the chronicler and essayist Falih Rıfkı [Atay] (1894–1971), and the essayist Ruşen Eşref.25 The commission was later enlarged: the poet and essayist Ahmet Rasim (1865–1932) and the abovementioned poet Celal Sahir were among the new members. On August 1, 1928, Falih Rıfkı submitted a report to Mustafa Kemal which introduced the romanized Turkish alphabet, proposing two alternative plans for its implementation. The first plan foresaw complete romanization within five years. The second plan was more moderate and proposed a gradual introduction of the Latin script over a period of fifteen years. 23 The major texts about the alphabet debate can be found in Hüseyin Yorulmaz, Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1995). 24 Quoted in Levend, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri, 401. 25 The complete list of members can be found in Bilâl N. Şimşir, Türk Yazı Devrimi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1992), 88.

The Revolution of the Letter

The Turkish president considered both, but then rejected them, arguing that romanization should be implemented within three months. He thought that a gradual introduction would lead to the failure of the project. Even Falih Rıfkı who defined himself as a “radical revolutionary” and was a staunch supporter of the reforms was stunned.26 The decision to swiftly implement the reform took everyone by surprise. On the evening of August 9, 1928, Mustafa Kemal introduced the new T ­ urkish alphabet to the people who attended the yearly gala of the ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası (Republican People’s Party) at Gülhane Park in Istanbul. The choice of Gülhane for the announcement was enormously symbolic. The edict proclaiming the Westernization reforms of the Tanzimat in 1839 had also been read out there. One could argue that, to a certain extent, Mustafa Kemal aimed at putting emphasis on the continuity of reformist policies while announcing a final reform which, in practice, would cut off new generations from the literary heritage of past centuries. During the speech, Mustafa Kemal asserted that the promotion of the alphabet was every citizen’s duty: “Citizens, quickly learn the new Turkish script. Teach it to the whole nation, to the peasant, the shepherd, the porter and the boatman. Consider this as a patriotic and nationalistic duty.”27 The extent to which this aim was fulfilled in the first years after the reform is debatable. In the first general census undertaken in republican times. in 1927, 1,111,000 people out of a population of about 12,000,000 claimed to have reading skills in Turkish. This did not necessarily mean that they had writing skills.28 A few years later the level of literacy was only slightly higher—and probably largely because of improvements to the schooling system and the establishment of schools targeting elder pupils and adults, the Schools of the Nation [Millet Mektepleri] in 1929, rather than because of the alphabet change. However, romanization did have a considerable impact on the publishing world. Not only did publishers and printing presses have difficulties obtaining the new typesets, they had also lost their readers. As the reform rendered ­illiterate the majority of the ten percent of the population who had reading skills, newspaper sales dropped drastically.29 In Asmalımescit 74: Bohem Hayatı (74 Asmalımescit Street: A Bohemian Life), a vaguely autobiographical 26 Falih Rıfkı Atay, Çankaya (Istanbul: Pozitif, 2004 [1961]), 479. 27 Şimşir, Türk Yazı Devrimi, 161. 28 İlker Aytürk, “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1 (2010): 115. 29 For an analysis of the impact of the reform on the press see Şimşir, Türk Yazı Devrimi, 225–228.

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n­ arrative published in 1933, Fikret Adil [Kamertan] (1901–1973), a journalist and essayist, confirms that the alphabet reform damaged the economic standing of those who lived by writing: “The crisis that suddenly emerged because of the adoption of the new alphabet had torn us apart. I was now obliged to work simultaneously as an investigator and translator in two or three newspapers in order to earn my life.”30 Though there are no reliable book sale numbers for the era, memoirs of authors and publishers provide interesting indications. In his travelogue Büyük Avrupa Anketi (The Great Europe Inquest), published in 1938, Peyami Safa evoked information that he obtained from “Aziz the bookseller”: after fourteen years, about 500 copies of Abdülhak Hamit’s play Eşber (1924) were still unsold even though only 2000 copies had been originally printed. This, however, was a high output for a play, which can be explained by the playwright’s status as the şair-i azam, the great poet. Only 600 copies of Süleyman Nazif ’s (1870–1927) Malta Geceleri (Maltese Nights, 1925) had been sold. Only about half of the 3000 copies of Halide Edip [Adıvar]’s (1884–1964) novels Dağa Çıkan Kurt (The Wolf That Escaped to the Mountain, 1922) and Vurun Kahpeye (Hit the Bitch, 1928) had been sold, even though the novelist was one of the heralds of liberation war literature. The play İlk Gözağrısı (First Love, 1924) by Faruk Nafız [Çamlıbel] (1898–1973), another semi­official writer, was not yet out of print, even though only 1000 copies had been printed. According to Safa, the status of books was “ten times worse now, than ten years ago.”31 In an earlier article published in Tan (The Dawn) newspaper in July 1935, he had denounced the lack of consideration for books, which were considered less valuable than “cigarette butts, old shoes, empty bottles and even pieces of broken wood and metal extracted from rubble.” The article was entitled “Kaldırımda Kitap” (Books on the Pavement) and protested against the depreciation of books printed with the Ottoman Turkish alphabet prior to the reform.32 Safa’s pessimistic assessment should be tempered here by adding that there was a considerable rise in printed books in the years between 1928 and 1938. More than sixteen thousand books were published, whereas only 6,376 had been printed between 1918 and 1928. This dramatic

30 Fikret Adil Kamertan, Asmalımescit 74: Bohem Hayatı (Istanbul: İletişim, 1988 [1933]), 76. 31 Peyami Safa, Büyük Avrupa Anketi (Istanbul: Kanaat Kitabevi, 1938), 160. 32 Quoted in Besir Ayvazoglu, Peyami: Hayatı, Sanatı, Felsefesi, Dramı (Istanbul: Ötüken, 1998), 105.

The Revolution of the Letter

rise was to be expected as schoolbooks in the new alphabet had to printed as well as other standard reference works.33 In the years immediately after the alphabet change, experienced authors had little to look forward to. Their works, published for the most in an alphabet which was now illegal, were becoming inaccessible for the new generations. Many had expressed their doubts about the alphabet change when romanization was only one of many exciting topics on the agenda of the chattering classes. Writers with knowledge of literary history had openly questioned the usefulness of a reform that would cut the country from its literary past. In a survey with the title “Latin Harfleri Kabul Etmeli mi Etmemeli mi?” (Should the Latin Letters be Adopted or Not?), published in the daily Akşam (The Evening) in 1926, a majority of interviewees opposed the move.34 Among them were Halit Ziya, one of Turkey’s leading novelists, and Ali Ekrem [Bolayır] (1867–1937), the son of the famous Young O ­ ttoman poet and reformist Namık Kemal. Though they were otherwise in favor of Westernization, both authors were against romanization. Halit Ziya reminded readers that non-Muslim communities, mainly Catholic Armenians and more rarely Jews, used to write in Turkish using their own alphabets—the Armenian and the Hebrew scripts, respectively. Referring to Armeno-Turkish journalism and literature, he argued that the Armenian script was probably best adapted to represent all Turkish sounds. He was not the only one, as Ali Ekrem’s father had argued almost half a century before him that “the Greeks’ and the Armenians’ letters are certainly a thousand times more perfect than the Latin letters.”35 Halit Ziya furthermore maintained that the Latin script would have to be modified, just like the Arabic script. Hence it would make more sense to reform the current Arabic script. The novelist also doubted that romanization would foster alphabetization. What was certain was that it would cause headaches to all those who were trained in the old script.36 In this context, it is also important to note

33 Meral Alpay, Harf Devriminin Kütüphanelerde Yansıması (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1976), 52–53. 34 The texts of the responses are available in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Alfabe Tartışmaları, 194–232. 35 Quoted by Murat Cankara in his overview of Ottoman Turkish intellectuals’ engagement with the Armenian alphabet, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet,” Middle Eastern Studies 51, no. 1 (2015): 1–16. 36 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, “Latin Harfleri Kabul Etmeli Mi, Etmemeli Mi?” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 206–213.

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that even though the reception of his elaborate prose would be harmed by the simplification movement in literature, Halit Ziya supported the simplification of the Turkish language and later took an active part in the romanization and the Turkification of some of his works. In a letter to the editor Yunus Nadi [Abalıoğlu] (1879–1945), the founder of the pro-government Cumhuriyet (Republic) newspaper and an ardent defender of linguistic purification, he noted that “if there is beauty in the foundation and the structure of a text,” it would not be damaged by the use of the new literary language, an act which he compared to repainting it in other colors37—an unexpected statement coming from someone for whom linguistic aestheticism had been such an integral element of his understanding of literature. The question of the transliteration of the works written in the Arab script was a source of concern for many, including Ali Ekrem.38 His worries were quite understandable. The complete works of his father, Namık Kemal, had only started to be published ın 1909 after the instauration of the second constitution. Some of them had been censored during the ruthless reign of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1842–1918) who ruled from 1876–1909. The alphabet change could potentially condemn them once again to partial oblivion. Even though the transliteration of Kemal’s complete works was foreseen at the 1939 publishing congress, this did not happen for many years. Turkified versions were published, though, meaning that his elaborate Ottoman prose was translated into modern Turkish to fit the tastes of readers not schooled in Ottoman. Indeed, not only was the language adapted, but Namık Kemal’s worldview was also changed to make it fit within a republican framework. The alterations were clear in his two novels İntibah (The Awakening, 1876) and Cezmi (1880).39 When the poet’s views were preserved, footnotes were added to correct them.40 In other words, his son’s concerns had been legitimate. 37 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil [Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil], Aşka Dair, ed. Özlem Nemutlu (Istanbul: Özgür Yayınları, 2007 [1935]), 75. 38 Ali Ekrem Bolayır, “Latin Harfleri Kabul Etmeli Mi, Etmemeli Mi?,” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 195–197. 39 Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 175. 40 This is the path followed by the scholar Abdürrahim Küçük in his 1992 edition of Namık Kemal’s essay Renan Müdâfaanâmesi: İslâmiyet ve Maârif (The Refutation of Renan: Islam and Knowledge). Whereas Namık Kemal denounced Renan’s racism in his response to the French scholar and considered any philosopher writing in Arabic as an Arab philosopher, Küçük intervenes in a footnote to remind the readers that al-Farabi (872–950) and Avicenna (980–1037) were ethnic Turks, thus going against the spirit of Namık Kemal’s defense of Islam (Namık Kemal, Renan Müdâfaanâmesi, ed. Abdurrahman Küçük [Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1988], 111). On the Renan Müdafaanamesi, see chapter 6.

The Revolution of the Letter

Yet after the implementation of the reform, there was little space to express dissent. Mustafa Kemal’s Gülhane speech put an end to all discussion. He adopted a new persona as the teacher of the nation and traveled widely throughout the country to familiarize the population with the new script. And finally on November 1, 1928, less than six months after the announcement, the Turkish parliament confirmed the Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet (Türk Harflerinin Kabul ve Tatbiki Hakkındaki Kanun), which imposed the romanized script for official and private purposes by June 1929. Contesting the policies and the figure of Mustafa Kemal was a rather temerarious enterprise. The the ill-famed Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükun Kanunu), passed on March 4, 1925, was still in force and allowed the government to silence the opposition by banning the press and other publications and by trying writers deemed unsympathetic to the regime in Independence Tribunals (İstiklal Mahkemeleri).41 The opposition was largely silenced. Islamist writers who feared that romanization would lead to a break with the rest of the Islamic world were gagged, effectively. Stringent censorship made it impossible for them to freely express their views on the reforms, including the alphabet change. The journal Sebilürreşat (The Path of the Righteous), which was the flagship of the Islamist movement, had been forbidden in 1925. One of its leading writers, the poet Mehmet Akif [Ersoy] (1873–1936), who had supported the liberation war and the broad nationalist coalition led by Mustafa Kemal, had grown disenchanted with the westernizing reforms and the secularist revolution and he had emigrated to Egypt in 1925, arguably in order to escape police surveillance.42 From Egypt, he chose to observe his homeland with silent dismay. There were expressions of discontent, though, albeit few and rather timid. The novelist Halide Edip was one of the authors who questioned aspects of the alphabet reform, but her criticism was not directly aimed at romanization, which she approved of,43 but at its speedy and authoritarian implementation. She maintained that “the martial way it was rushed into effect, the martial orders given for the time limit by a mentality which was purely that of a staff officer, indicated a lack of understanding of the most far-reaching change ever carried 41 Dilruba Çatalbaşı, “Freedom of Press and Broadcasting,” in Human Rights in Turkey, Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat (Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 2007), 22. 42 Dücane Cündioğlu, Âkif’e Dâir (Istanbul: Kaknüs 2005), 12–15. 43 Halide Edip Adıvar [Halidé Edib], Turkey Faces West (New Haven: Yale University Press 1930), 232–233.

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through in modern Turkish history.”44 That the novelist objected to Mustafa Kemal’s dictatorial ways is well known. It should be stressed, however, that she chose to express her concerns in Turkey Faces West (1930), an English-language publication, and not in Turkish.45 Yahya Kemal, the neoclassical poet, seems to have expressed serious doubts about the change even though he did not set them out openly in ­writing. According to the standard biography written by Sermet Sami Uysal (1925–2016), a disciple in whom he confided, the poet was asked about his views on the reform in 1928 or 1929 by the Turkish president. Uysal writes that Yahya Kemal answered with “the passion of the poet”: “But Your Excellency, what will happen to the great Turkish library, to Turkish culture?”46 The president did not bother to answer. In the early twenties, the poet had been convinced of the need for orthographic rationalization and standardization, which also required a reform of the alphabet. Yet, in a piece that he had written in January 1922 for the journal Dergâh (The Lodge), a meeting place for Bergsonians, he had argued that it was too early for both, because “the writers of the current generation were still at an [early] stage of the reform of the orthography.” Indeed, he maintained that “our orthography will only be mended, once our language is and our language once our mentality is.”47 While recognizing the need for change and reform, Kemal had reservations regarding the consequences of romanization. His close disciple Ahmet Hamdi also seems to have been pessimistic about the impact that the alphabet change would have on literature. Even though he did not publish anything negative on the topic after the promulgation of the alphabet law, he openly expressed his doubts during his lectures at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Istanbul. According to the lecture notes taken between 1953 and 1954 by Gözde Sağnak, he claimed that the alphabet change was one of five instances when Turkish culture was uprooted: “Turkish literature does not feed on itself. Folk literature

44 Adıvar, Turkey Faces West, 234. 45 For an exhaustive discussion of Halide Edip’s politics, see Hülya Adak, Halide Edib ve ­Siyasal Şiddet: Ermeni Kırımı, Diktatörlük ve Şiddetsizlik (Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2016). 46 Sermet Sami Uysal, Şiire Adanmış bir Yaşam: Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (Istanbul: Yahya Kemal’i Sevenler Derneği, 1998), 200. 47 Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Edebiyata Dâir (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1971), 95–96.

The Revolution of the Letter

is all that is left. That is just a handful. That is not sufficient,”48 he complained in class. Although Yahya Kemal’s and Ahmet Hamdi’s literary projects, which explored the Bergsonian concept of continuity, clashed with the vision of the Kemalist elite advocating a rupture with the Ottoman past, it should be stressed that both were faithful servants of the new state.49 Their concerns about access to the written heritage of Ottoman Turkey was also at the heart of Avram Galanti [Bodrumlu]’s (1873–1961) disagreement with the alphabet change. It should be noted that he did not participate in the alphabet debates in his capacity as an author of creative literature. Though he published a not uninteresting Ladino play with the title Rinyo o el amor salvaje (Rinyo or Savage Love, 1906)50 about the forbidden love between a young woman and a married man, both Greek Orthodox, on the island of Rhodes, he joined the controversy in his capacity as an academic and scholar. He expressed his doubts about romanization which would not only lead to a rupture endangering Turkish intellectual and cultural continuity, but would also provoke a transformation of the scientific language by abandoning words, concepts and expressions with Perso-Arabic roots in favor of “European expressions” (Avrupai tabirler) leading to further discontinuities.51 Galanti, in fact, published no less than two short books on the topic, namely Türkçede Arap ve Latin Harfleri ve İmla Meseleleri (Arab and Latin Letters and the Orthography Problems in Turkish, 1925) and Arap Harfleri Terakkimize Mani Değildir (Arab Letters are not an Obstacle to our Progress, 1927). Like Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Hamdi, Galanti, a specialist in ancient languages and philology, taught at the University of Istanbul until 1933, when his stance on the alphabet change and the language reform might have cost him 48 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Edebiyat Dersleri: Gözde Sağnak, Ali F. Karamanlıoğlu ve Mehmed Çavuşoğlu’nun Ders Notları, ed. Abdullah Uçman (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2003), 214–215. 49 Yahya Kemal was ambassador for the newly founded Republic of Turkey in Poland ( June 14, 1926-March 14, 1929), Spain (May 22, 1929-March 25, 1932), and Pakistan ( January 13, 1948-December 27, 1948). From 1934 to 1943 he was a member of parliament for the ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi. After three years as “advisor on aesthetics” (estetik müşavir) for his party, he was reelected in 1946. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, on the other hand, was a member of parliament for the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi in 1941 and broadly supportive of Kemalist policies throughout his life. 50 For a study and transliteration of the play, see Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Avram Galanté], Rinyo o El amor salvaje: Una obra teatral en judeoespañol de Abraham Galante publicada en 1906, ed. and trans. Michael Studemund-Halévy (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 2010). 51 Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Avram Galanti], “Arap Harfleri Terakkimize Mani Değildir,” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 129–133.

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his post during the great reshuffle of the universities in 1933, despite his support for the ruling party.52 While he advocated the Turkification of scientific language, his understanding of the concept of “Turkification” was different and he was not in favor of neologisms and the revival of antiquated terms. Instead, he defended the use of Persian words and Arabic roots to preserve the unity of the language of scholarship. Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi, and Avram Galanti’s stances show that even writers and poets, who looked favorably at the modernizing reforms undertaken in the early years of the republic, were far from convinced by the need to change the alphabet. Not everyone believed, like Celal Nuri [İleri] (1877–1939), that the Ottoman literary heritage “should be destroyed, not preserved.”53 Remarkably, writers, who in the past had promoted an autotelic and elitist understanding of literature and thus might have questioned the need for a measure such as the change of the alphabet which was thought to promote the democratization of education and culture, remained silent after the institution of the law. Many joined the chorus of defenders of the change. For some, praising the reform was a way to gain the clemency of the authorities after they had been politically discredited because of their opposition to Mustafa Kemal’s postwar nationalist rebellion. Others were sincerely convinced of the rationality and legitimacy of romanization. Sometimes both reasons intermingled. The poet Cenap Şahabettin is a case in point. An exponent and fervent practitioner of neo-Parnassianism, Şahabettin had advocated elitist principles in literary matters and fought several wars of words with the representatives of the nationalist neo-folk movement who favored the use of the spoken language and the syllabic meter of the folk tradition in poetry. He was fiercely opposed to the democratization of the literary ­language—its simplification and Turkification. His position, however, was original. Even though he argued that the suppression of Arabic and Persian vocabulary would lead to an irremediable impoverishment of the Turkish written language, he was in favor of the adoption of the Latin script. This is because his point of reference was not classical Ottoman literary culture but French poetry of the nineteenth century. As early as 1919, he argued in an interview that “the adoption of the Latin alphabet was the shortest way to reach the Western circle 52 Avram Galanti was nonetheless elected as a member of parliament for the ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi for the central Anatolian town of Niğde between 1944–1946. 53 Celal Nuri İleri [Celal Nuri], “Latin Harfleri Meselesi,” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 299.

The Revolution of the Letter

of civilization.”54 In later years too, he continued to defend the adoption of the Latin script, as in “Lisanımızın İhtiyaçları” (The Needs of our Language), an article published in the influential Servet-i Fünun on August 27, 1925.55 Even if Şahabettin had not been an early advocate of romanization, it is doubtful that he would have been in a position to express antagonist views on the issue. Always wary of populist movements, he had contributed to the Anglophile liberal Ali Kemal’s Peyam-ı Sabah (The Morning News) newspaper in the years that followed the occupation of Istanbul by the powers of the Entente and written several articles against the Kemalist resistance movement. One, in particular, appalled his readers. As the Kuva-yı Milliye—the National Forces—were about to launch a major spring offensive in the plains of Bursa, in northwestern Anatolia, the poet wrote a piece denouncing what he saw as a “foolish crime against beauty, against the laws of nature, against the earth and the sky.”56 His celebrations of the beauties of spring, as young men were giving their lives for the independence of their homeland, made him sound aloof, if not straightforwardly treacherous at this key moment of the liberation war. After a late, and not quite convincing, conversion towards the end of the war, he spent the rest of his life trying to be accepted by the new regime. The case of Hüseyin Cahit [Yalçın] (1875–1957) also deserves more scrutiny. Known as an advocate of radical Westernization,57 he too was close to the Servet-i Fünûn journal and the Edebiyat-i Cedide (New Literature) group that propounded an elitist conception of literature which owed much to French Parnassianism and Symbolism. A prolific polemicist and journalist, he was also a novelist and short story writer who introduced the concept of utopia into modern Turkish fiction with his short story “Hayat-ı Muhayyel” (Life Imagined) and he was one of the very first devotees of prose poetry in Ottoman Turkey. He was also a leading figure in the İttihat ve Terraki (Union and Progress) party that led Ottoman Turkey into World War I and he was sent into exile to Malta by the Allied forces after the Ottoman defeat. He only returned to Turkey in July 1922, although he had been released in April of the previous year. 54 Quoted in Rekin Ertem, Elifbe’den Alfabe’ye (Istanbul: Dergâh, 1991), 167. 55 Cenap Şahabettin [Cenab Şehabeddin], “Lisanımızın İhtiyaçları,” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat‘tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 187–193. 56 Quoted in Şükran Kurdakul, Çağdaş Türk Edebiyatı, vol. 1, Meşrutiyet Dönemi 1 (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi 1994 [1976], 51. 57 On radical advocates of Westernization see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Garbcılar: Their Attitudes Toward Religion and Their Impact on the Official Ideology of the Turkish Republic,” Studia Islamica 86 (1997), 133–158.

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After the reestablishment of the republic, Cahit became one of Mustafa Kemal’s staunchest critics as the editor of the oppositional Tanin newspaper, and, despite his conviction that westernizing policies were necessary, he attacked some of the reforms, including the abolition of the caliphate.58 His concern was not religious, but he believed that the suppression of the caliphate would harm the standing and influence of Turkey as the leader of the Islamic world and thus diminish the country’s importance in the eyes of the major European states. His stance on the caliphate would lead to his trial by the Independence Tribunals in 1924, though he was eventually acquitted. However, in matters of the alphabet reform, Cahit seems to have been in agreement with Mustafa Kemal. In September 1922, during a meeting between the Turkish leader and the press, he even encouraged Mustafa Kemal to undertake the alphabet change. The latter responded that it was too early.59 A year later, having been invited by the editor of Resimli Gazete (The Illustrated Newspaper) who opposed romanization, Cahit published an article entitled “Latin Harfleri” (The Latin Letters) in which he argued that romanization was a key condition for a successful alphabetization policy. Moreover, he stipulated that there were neither religious nor national impediments to the use of Latin characters.60 Thus he too referred to the major problematics highlighted during the earlier alphabet debates: education and civilization. Being even more fervent in his belief in the need for romanization than he was in his criticism of Mustafa Kemal, Cahit could not be expected to attack the president on this particular question. And yet a remarkable paradox arose here. His radical pro-­ romanization stance led to progressive works such as his “Hayat-ı Muhayyel,” that explore the possibilities of non-nationalist communal social arrangements, to be condemned to the footnotes of literary history.61 The case of Ahmet Haşim (1887–1933), one of the last masters of the aruz metrical prosody of the classical tradition is more curious. Author of a neoSymbolist manifesto entitled “Şiir Hakkında Bazı Mülâhazalar” (A Few Considerations on Poetry), published in his 1926 collection Piyale (The Chalice), 58 Ö. Faruk Huyugüzel, Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın’ın Hayatı ve Edebi Eserleri Üzerinde Bir Araştırma (Izmir: Ege Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1984), 35. 59 Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform, 32. 60 Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, “Latin Harfleri,” in Yorulmaz, ed., Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Alfabe Tartışmaları, 94–97. 61 Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın [Hüseyin Cahit], Hayat-ı Muhayyel (Istanbul: Kanaat Kütüphanesi, 1910), 3–17. For a discussion of the story, see Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 148–149.

The Revolution of the Letter

Haşim had shown little sympathy for the various attempts to “Turkify” or “simplify” the literary language. At one time, he had been close to the Fecr-i Ati literary group which favored an elitist conception of literature. He was opposed to populist attempts to “nationalize” poetry. In his manifesto, he argued that intelligibility was the concern of minor poets, whereas major poets were in quest of music, not meaning.62 There is no need to mention that he had little time for the debates on the democratization of the literary language. He believed that poetry was the preserve of higher spirits and should remain so. The populace would be content with the verses of Mehmet Emin [­Yurdakul] (1869–1944), the father of neo-folk poetry, whose “short breath, flat spirit, mediocre sensitivity, [and] lack of imagination”63 he noted in “Les tendances actuelles de la littérature turque” (The Current Tendencies of Turkish Literature), a French-language article on Turkish poetry which he published in the prestigious Mercure de France in July 1924. Unlike Şahabettin, Haşim was concerned with issues related to continuity with the Ottoman tradition. Hence it is surprising that he should have become one of the fiercest defenders of romanization in his columns after Mustafa Kemal’s Gülhane speech. A possible explanation for his stance might be that he wished to draw the attention of the government to his own fate. Ostracized throughout his life because of his Arab origins, he had only found employment in institutions such as the Office of the Tobacco Monopoly [Tütün Rejisi] financed with foreign capital and later the Office of the Public Debt [Düyun-ı Umumiye İdaresi] and after its suppression the Banque Ottomane. These were institutions which were eyed suspiciously by the nationalists. He craved financial stability and might well have hoped that an openly Kemalist stance would secure him government favor. While his poetical universe consisted of shades and shadows, Haşim turned into the herald of industrial modernity in his journalistic writings. Once an elitist aesthete, he did not tolerate the advocates of the Arab script who were only “interested in the beauty of calligraphy.” They were like those “maniacs who complained that the train had replaced the caravan, the transatlantic, the sailing boat and the car, the horse,” he wrote in a piece entitled “Harf İnkılabı” (The Revolution of the Letters) on August 22, 1928.64 To be against 62 Ahmet Haşim, Piyale (Istanbul: İlhami Matbaası, 1926), 4–13. 63 Ahmet Haşim, Bütün Eserleri, vol. 3, Gurabahâne-i Laklakan ve Diğer Yazıları, ed. İnci Enginün and Zeynep Kerman (Istanbul: Dergâh, 1991), 196. 64 Ahmet Haşim, Bütün Eserleri, vol. 2, Bize Göre ve İkdam’daki Diğer Yazıları, ed. İnci Enginün and Zeynep Kerman (Istanbul: Dergâh, 1991), 152.

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romanization meant to be against progress. One of his articles on the issue was particularly virulent and reminded readers that he was one of Turkey’s most talented polemicists. Published on September 12, 1927, “İntikal Devri” (The Era of Transition) foresaw that the suppression of the old script would lead to the disappearance of antiquated knowledge. Hence the population, alphabetized thanks to the reform, would be spared the danger of reading the “piles of worthless books that had been produced until now.”65 It is not clear whose works he had in mind, but his words echoed the stance of some radical defenders of the alphabet change. Celal Nuri too had argued a few months earlier that the works that might be condemned to oblivion by the change were insignificant and that their destruction could potentially be more advantageous than their preservation.66 But history is full of cruel ironies and literary history is no exception. It is interesting to note that Celal Nuri’s, Cenab Şahabettin’s, Hüseyin Cahit’s and, to a lesser extent, Ahmet Haşim’s works were hit by the alphabet reform. Apart from Haşim’s poetry, publishers had shown very little interest in their works before the end of the twentieth century. Haşim had transcribed and reedited his poems in 1933, the year of his death. However, critics were not optimistic regarding the reception of his poetry in republican times, because the literary language had changed so dramatically. Nurullah Ataç (1898–1957), an influential critic, wrote that once [his generation] has passed away, probably nobody will read books such as Göl Saatleri [Hours of the Lake] and Piyale [The Chalice], because nobody will understand the language. … Tomorrow’s youth will think that it is strange. It would not make sense in translation either.67

It is not clear whether Ataç was receptive to this ironic turn of events. Haşim, the pioneer of modernist verse, was rendered illegible by reforms made in the name of modernization—the language reform and the alphabet change. While vocal opposition to the change seemed difficult, there were other ways to express dissent. The fact that Mehmet Akif and Refik Halit [Karay] (1888–1965), two men of letters who were among Mustafa Kemal’s most prominent critics, continued to publish their new works after 1928 with the 65 Ahmet Haşim, Bütün Eserleri, vol. 2, Bize Göre ve İkdam’daki Diğer Yazıları, 161. 66 İleri, “Latin Harfleri Meselesi,” 298–299. 67 Nurullah Ataç, Günce:1953–1955 (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 1972), 16.

The Revolution of the Letter

Ottoman script is significant. Refik Halit was one of 150 people banished from Turkey after the formation of the republic because of their collaborationist stance during the occupation of Istanbul. He was not only a leading journalist, but also a celebrated short story writer and novelist whose realist works and use of plain Turkish had been groundbreaking. Until he was granted a pardon in 1938, he lived in Beirut and then in Aleppo, where he published a play Deli (The Madman, 1929), two collections of short essays and columns entitled Bir İçim Su (A Sip of Water, 1931) and Bir Avuç Saçma (A Handful of Absurdities, 1932), and a novel Yezidin Kızı (The Daughter of the Yazîdî, 1937.) These works were printed with the Ottoman script by Araks printing house in Aleppo. As he was persona non grata in Turkey, he did not have an opportunity to publish his works in his homeland, even though he had authored a few articles that were in favor of the Kemalist reforms in Vahdet (Unity), a Turkish-language newspaper in Aleppo.68 Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder whether the publication of works with the Ottoman script was due to technological constraints—the unavailability of a press which could print the romanized Turkish script—or a conscious political choice. The case of Mehmet Akif is different. Throughout his voluntary exile in Egypt, he kept in close contact with his brothers-in-pens in Turkey. Moreover, the Turkish government asked him to write an authorized translation of the Qur’an in Turkish, which he agreed to do after much hesitation, although he never delivered the finished product to the Presidency of Religious Affairs [Diyanet İşleri Reisliği] which had commissioned it.69 Nonetheless, this incident shows that he was in regular communication with officials and their emissaries. While little is known about his attitude towards the alphabet change after 1928, it is easy to imagine that he did not support the reform. In April 1924, Sebilürreşat published an article that harshly condemned the proposal about the alphabet change made during the Economy Congress in Izmir. The article also mentioned General Kâzım Karabekir’s (1882–1948) view that the Latin alphabet did not represent Turkish sounds appropriately. A few weeks later, the journal printed another anonymous article regretting romanization in 68 Aktaş, Refik Hâlid Karay (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları,1986), 35. 69 For a discussion of this issue, see Ertuğrul Düzdağ, Mehmet Akif: Mısır Hayatı ve Kur’ân Meâli (Istanbul: Şûle, 2005), 176–179. Even though the consensus was that the translation had been completely destroyed, parts of it were found and published by a team of scholars and Akif specialists in 2012: Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Kur’an Meali: Fatiha Suresi-Berae Suresi ed. Recep Şentürk and Asım Cüneyd Köksal (Istanbul: Mahya Yayıncılık, 2012).

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Azerbaijan and described it as “an expected catastrophe.” The piece also warned against the adoption of the Latin alphabet in Turkey.70 Hence, Mehmet Akif ’s decision to release his poetry collection Gölgeler (Shadows), the seventh volume of Safahat (Pages) in 1933, in the Ottoman Turkish script, was a clearly political statement. The collection was put out in Cairo by the Shabâb printing house. As he had kept in touch with literary circles in Turkey and received regular visitors from his homeland, he could have organized its publication with the new script in Turkey, had he wanted to. The perpetuation of the Ottoman alphabet could be interpreted as a cry of protest. Indeed, for the poet, the Arabic alphabet in all its forms was a fundamental symbol of Islamic unity. It seems that the Turkish authorities interpreted the poet’s stance accordingly. On August 25, 1936, the governor of Istanbul wrote to the minister of the interior to inform him that 2,175 copies of Gölgeler, “in the old Arabic script,” had arrived at the customs from Egypt and were addressed to the poet, who had come to Istanbul for health reasons. The ministry responded by ordering the confiscation of ten copies and the destruction of the remaining ones according to the fifty-first article of the Publishing Law (Matbuat Kanunu) that enabled bans on works published abroad. However, though the collection was published in the Ottoman script and “contained reactionary propaganda,” at least some of the books were not destroyed and were sent back to Alexandria.71 Yet proscribing books was not as important for the state than publishing books that addressed the needs of the new generation that was growing up ignorant of the Ottoman Turkish script after the implementation of the alphabet change. This was a source of worry for writers too. A 1930 series of interviews in Vakit newspaper, “Ne Okuyacağız?” (What Are We Going to Read?), reveals the concerns of leading intellectuals regarding the state of publishing and reading. The novelist Peyami Safa expressed the fears of many when he stated that “it is not possible to republish the most necessary works for future generations. The publishing budget of the Ministry of Education for twenty years would not be sufficient. … The library that we will leave to future generations will only consist of a few school manuals and a few decent literary works. I feel pity for

70 Zeki Sarihan, Mehmet Akif (Istanbul: Kaynak Yayınları, 1996), 204. 71 Murat Bardakçı, “Mehmed Âkif Devlet Tarafından ‘İrtica-906’ Diye Kodlanmış, Ölüm Döşeğinde Yatarken Bile İzlenmiş ve Safahat’ı da İmha Edilmişti!,” Habertürk, November 19, 2018, accessed December 29, 2020, https://www.haberturk.com/yazarlar/muratbardakci/2225662-mehmed-akif-devlet-tarafindan-irtica-906-diye-kodlanmis-olumdoseginde-yatarken-bile-izlenmis-ve-safahati-da-imha-edilmisti.

The Revolution of the Letter

those future generations who will inherit such a destitute culture.”72 Nonetheless he remained convinced of the necessity of the change and maintained in his Türk İnkılabına Bakışlar (Approaches to the Turkish Revolution, 1938), that the alphabet reform was one of several necessary requirements for catapulting Turkey into modernity.73 The debate went on for years. Often the tone was condescending toward pre-republican literature, as can be seen in Ahmet Haşim’s following words: “I am convinced that once the content of the ancient library … [is] transliterated into the new script for the new generation, only [a] few works will successfully cross the line of divide.”74 The question was then to determine which works were to cross this divide. Authors who had published before the romanization law and had remained literarily active after it, such as the novelists Halit Ziya, Hüseyin Rahmi [­Gürpınar] (1864–1944), and Halide Edip played an active role in the transliteration of their own works and used the opportunity to revise the language and, sometimes, even the plots of their works. The language issue was central to their considerations. Exacerbated by the alphabet reform, the move towards the “Turkification” of the literary language that had started during the Tanzimat period, but went through a series of ups and downs, took a dramatic turn in the thirties and rendered early twentieth-century works not only undecipherable but even unintelligible for the new generation of readers who studied in republican schools. But what about the others? Falih Rıfkı Atay evoked the necessity of establishing lists of books.75 Yet the government did not have a program of transliteration, nor did it have had the economic means to pursue it. Transliteration and translation would be the important issues discussed during the First Turkish Publishing Congress in 1939. As seen above, lists of works—including translations and transliterations from Ottoman Turkish—to be released were drawn up, but no concrete measures were taken. In the early years after the reform, the focus was on the translation of works from Western literatures, not on the transliteration of Ottoman-Turkish classics. In the years between 1928 and 1938 only fifty works were transliterated. However, about 215 works were translated into Turkish, mainly from French and English.76 72 Ergun Göze, Peyami Safa Nâzım Hikmet Kavgası (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Yayınları, 1991 [1969]), 80. 73 Peyami Safa, Türk İnkılabına Bakışlar (Istanbul: Kanaat Kitabevi, 1938), 98. 74 Ahmet Haşim, Bütün Eserleri, vol. 2, Bize Göre ve İkdam’daki Diğer Yazıları, 161. 75 Ertem, Elifbe’den Alfabe’ye, 359–360. 76 Ibid., 362.

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The alphabet change that had so divided the literary world ended up providing literary historiographers and canon makers with huge opportunities. Devising what “national literature” is, writing its history and establishing a “national” literary canon are phenomena that interact closely with nation building. Hence the tabula rasa in literary matters that resulted from the reform was a dream come true for those who wanted to construct the library of a modern Turkish nation. There is little doubt that a proper understanding of the literary field in late Ottoman Turkey could not have been achieved by the exclusive study of the authors proposed by the Faculty of Language, History, and Geography at the 1939 First Turkish Publishing Congress. Even Mehmet Fuat [Köprülü] (1890–1966), arguably the father of modern Turkish literary historiography, conceded in his 1913 Bilgi Mecmuası (The Knowledge Journal) article “Türk Edebiyat Tarihinde Usul” (Method in Turkish Literary History), that “average literary products” were more representative than the masterworks of the era they were written in.77 While he did not discuss the status of minority literatures in this influential essay, as it is more than probable that he would not have considered non-Muslims as part of Ottoman Turkish averageness, it is clear, from his standpoint, that a literary history reduced to a few names selected by a government-appointed commission, would not be sufficient to understand and analyze a particular literary period.

77 Mehmet Fuat Köprülü [Köprülüzade Mehmet Fuad], “Türk Edebiyat Tarihinde Usul,” Bilgi Mecmuası 1, no. 1 (November 1913 [Teşrin-i Sani 1329]): 48. A translation of the article is available in English, see [M. F. Köprülü], “Method in Turkish Literary History,” trans. Gary Leiser, Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no 1 (2008): 53–84.

CHAPTER 2

The Roses of the Anatolian Garden

W

 hen asked by the daily Akşam in 1926 about his views on the romanization of the Turkish alphabet, the novelist Halit Ziya argued that “if Turkish must be written with a foreign alphabet, the Armenian alphabet is the one which will fulfil this task perfectly.”1 The reason that led him to make this statement was that the use of the Armenian alphabet had become “standardized” and “stable” because of the relatively long history of Armeno-Turkish writing. As the debate on the necessity of an alphabet reform in Ottoman Turkey was raging, the author of Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), Kırık Hayatlar (Broken Lives), and other masterpieces, felt the need to remind his readers that writing Turkish with an alphabet that was different from the Ottoman version of the PersoArabic script was not a novelty: You know very well that the Armenian Catholics would give more importance to Turkish than to Armenian to distinguish themselves as far as possible from the Orthodox and be closer to the Turks. However, in order to read and write this language with ease they would use the [Armenian] letters. They even had a famous newspaper named Ceride-i Şarkiye (The Eastern Journal) which was in the Armenian alphabet and the Turkish language. We know that the Orthodox Armenians too used this system.2

In Halit Ziya’s view, Armeno-Turkish printed culture was not a marginal phenomenon. It was important enough to be spoken of during one of the major intellectual debates that shook the early years of the Turkish republic. Yet it is also striking that by the time he responded to the queries of the Akşam journalists, he was very conscious that Armeno-Turkish was a thing of the past, 1 Uşaklıgil, “Latin Harfleri Kabul Etmeli Mi, Etmemeli Mi?,” 207. 2 Ibid.

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that those Catholic and Orthodox Christians—and the Protestants he did not mention—who made use of the Armenian alphabet to write Turkish had disappeared. He talked about them in the aorist past tense, commonly used to refer to a past that will never come back. Making sure that this past would not come back to haunt them seems to have been high on the agenda of scholars who studied the literature of Ottoman Turkey in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Only a few mentioned the existence of Armeno-Turkish literature. Some scholars engaged with Armenian contributions to Turkish literature, even though Armeno-Turkish literature itself—that is to say, literary works in Turkish in the Armenian script—largely remained unmentioned.3 It was Mehmet Fuat who pioneered this area of research. 3 It is only since the 2000s that there has been an increased focus on Armeno-Turkish literature in the context of a critical reassessment of the nationalist historiographies of Turkey and Armenia. Sebouh Aslanian notes the role of the Workshop for Turkish/Armenian Scholarship discussion group, founded in the late nineties by University of Michigan professors Fatma Müge Göçek, Stephanie Platz, Kenneth Church, Kevork Bardakjian, and Ronald Suny, the 2005 Armenian genocide conference held at Bilgi University in Istanbul, at a time when referring to a “genocide” could still be a cause for prosecution in Turkey, the reactions to the assassination of the journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, and the importance of the Istanbul-based publisher Aras, as well as the Armenian Turkish weekly Agos in spearheading this development (Sebouh Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites’: Abbot Mkhitar’s 1727 Armeno-Turkish Grammar of Modern Western Armenian,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 25 [2016]: 55–56). In addition to the abovenamed events, one should note the pioneering role of private universities such as Bilkent in Ankara, Bilgi, Koç, and Sabancı in Istanbul in creating spaces of academic freedom which enabled both established and young scholars to engage with hitherto obscure or obscured aspects of Turkish literary history. As a consequence, there has also been an increase in English-language academic literature on Armeno-Turkish literature. Beside Johann Strauss’ “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Centuries)?” and Sebouh Aslanian’s abovementioned article, see Börte Sagaster “The Role of Turcophone Armenians as Literary Innovators and Mediators of Culture in the Early Days of Modern Turkish Literature,” in Between Religion and Language: Turkish-Speaking Christians, Jews and Greek-Speaking Muslims and Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez (Istanbul: Eren, 2011), 101–110; Garo Aprahamyan, “A Note on the Bibliographic Catalogues of Armeno-Turkish Literature,” in Balta and Ölmez, eds., Between Religion and Language, 147–152; Murat Cankara, “Reading Akabi, (Re-)Writing History: On the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of ArmenoTurkish Fiction,” in Cultural Encounters in the Turkish-Speaking Communities of the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2014), 53–75 and his Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet.” See also my articles “Lost in Transliteration: A few remarks on the Armeno-Turkish novel and Turkish Literary Historiography,” in Balta and Ölmez, eds., Between Religion and Language, 111–123 and “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Armenian and Kurdish Literatures in Turkish and the Rewriting of Literary History,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 2 (2014): 182–200.

The Roses of the Anatolian Garden

In his article “Türk Edebiyatının Ermeni Edebiyatı Üzerindeki Tesiratı” (The Influence of Turkish Literature on Armenian Literature), a study published in the journal of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Istanbul in March 1922,4 he laid down the framework of investigations for decades to come. As the founding father of Turkish literary historiography, his judgements remain unquestioned, at least on the sensitive topic of Armeno-Turkish relations. He discusses the close relations between Turkish Muslim and Armenian folk minstrels, which, he argues, consist solely of Turkish folk poets—the âşıks—influencing Armenian ashughs. The ashughs, the term being a cognate of the Turkish âşık, were itinerant Armenian poet-singers, predominantly male, who recited their works usually accompanying themselves on a traditional lute. A one-sided analysis is warranted, Mehmet Fuat contends, because the Armenians “had no choice but to adopt Turkish culture as the Turks were more numerous, politically hegemonic and superior to the Armenians in matters of civilization.” He goes even further, maintaining that there had been no “Armenian or Christian” influence on Turkish âşık literature.5 He cites the enigmatic case of Mesihi-i Ermeni, an Armenian poet who grew up in Diyarbakır, a ­Kurdish town on the shores of the Tigris in the southeast of today’s Turkey, who then emigrated to the Italian port city of Venice and composed poetry in Persian and Ottoman Turkish.6 He also mentions Valerian Grigorovich Mamedov, an Armenian general in the Russian army who composed poetry in Azeri ­Turkish with the pen name Mirza Can and the popular nineteenth-century ashugh Sarkis Zekiyan (1836–1888) who wrote folk songs in Turkish. However, none of those poets published works in Armeno-Turkish and Mehmet Fuat’s article did not directly refer to Armeno-Turkish written literature. Despite the flaws of his piece, it was significant that he showcased the existence of a shared literary culture between Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians, at least in the domain of folk literature. 4 Mehmet Fuat Köprülü [Köprülüzade Mehmet Fuat], “Türk Edebiyatının Ermeni Edebiyatı Üzerindeki Tesiratı,” Darülfünun Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmuası 2, no. 1 (March 1922 [Mart 1338]): 1–30. 5 Ibid., 29. This view was to be influential and was largely appropriated by later nationalist scholars such as Fikret Türkmen in his monograph Türk Halk Edebiyatının Ermeni Kültürüne Tesiri (Izmir: Akademi, 1992). 6 Köprülü’s reference to Mesihi-i Ermeni is most probably based on Âşık Çelebi’s (1520–1572) sixteenth-century Meşâ‘irü’ş Şu‘arâ. As noted by Selim Kuru, Âşık Çelebi is the only biographer who mentions his existence. See Selim S. Kuru, “The Literature of Rum,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 2, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603, ed. Suraiya N. ­Farooqhi and Kate Fleet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 590.

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Zekiyan was much talked about in his own time. In a long piece dedicated to “Zeki the folk-poet” published in Türk Yurdu (The Turkish Home) on the eve of the First World War, the nationalist publicist İzzet Ulvi [Aykurt] (1880–1957) declared him to be “a Turk by feeling and by soul.”7 Surely meant as praise, this statement too rejected the possibility of the recognition of ­Armenian influence on Turkish folk literature. Yet, Mehmet Fuat’s comparative study, despite its bias, kept alive the heritage of Armenian folk literature in Anatolia in a post-genocide context, even though he wrote his article primarily as a reaction to Arshag Tchobanian’s (1872–1954) Les Trouvères Arméniens (The Armenian Troubadours, 1906).8 It would be wrong, however, to reduce his attitude to his nationalist shortsightedness. He complained about the lack of sources and noted quite rightly that folk poetry in general had been neglected by Ottoman chroniclers and scholars, and that the lack of information about ashughs was a logical consequence of this more general dearth of information. Engaging with the folk tradition, with what the nationalist thinker Ziya Gökalp called in his 1923 manifesto-like Türkçülüğün Esasları (The Principles of Turkism), the “living museum of the people,”9 was of foremost importance for literary historians as folk literature and its subgenres were among the sources that would generate national literature.10 As one of the poles in the debate on “national literature” dealt in particular with the problem of “authenticity” and the rejection of Persian and the later post-Tanzimat French influences, the idea that Turkish folk literature, the depository of authentic Turkish values according to Gökalp, was a cultural hybrid merging Turkish, Armenian, and Kurdish influences was not welcome in the age of nation building. The poetry of the ashughs would have been a tough topic for a scholar wishing to write a history of literature on nationalist lines. It was common for itinerant Armenian bards to perform in more than one language, such as ­Armenian, of course, but also Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kurdish, Persian, and Turkish and their dialectal variants in accordance to the region of origin of the 7 Quoted in F. Ahsen Turan, “Âşık Geleneği İçinde Ermeni Âşık Sarkis Zeki,” Millî Folklor 60 (2003): 182. 8 Edmond Khayadjian, Archag Tchobanian et le mouvement arménophile en France (Alfortville: Sigest, 2001 [1986]). 9 Ziya Gökalp, Türkçülüğün Esasları (Istanbul: Varlık Yayınevi, 1968 [1923]), 44. For an ­English-language translation of this fundamental work of Turkish nationalism, see Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, trans. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968). 10 Gökalp, Türkçülüğün Esasları, 127–128.

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bard. Within Armeno-Turkish literature, the tradition of the ashughs was of particular interest as Turkish literature in the Armenian script addressed primarily, but not exclusively, an Armenian Christian readership. However, the ashughs had a considerable number of Turcophone Muslims in their audience as orality defeated the alphabet barrier and, more importantly, the high levels of illiteracy among the Muslim Turkophone population. Notably, the ashugs shared a common repertoire with the Turkish âşıks which included epics such as Köroğlu and Kerem ile Aslı (Kerem and Aslı), poems and folk songs. They appealed to an audience bridging ethnic and religious divisions also by performing personal compositions that followed the rules of Turkish classical and folk prosody. The interaction between the Armeno-Turkish folk poets and their Muslim counterparts was facilitated by the latter often being affiliated with nonconformist brotherhoods such as the Bektaşi or with Alevism.11 In her memoirs, the Armenian novelist and short story writer Zabel Yessayan (1878–1942) remarks that her grandfather Hagop, an acclaimed folk poet, was much appreciated by Muslim Turks. Based on information that she gathered as a young woman from the “older residents” of Üsküdar on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, she writes that “the Turks held him in such high regard that many hoped to become his students. From what I have heard, he used to write down his songs in Turkish with Armenian letters.”12 Such gatherings were far from extraordinary. In a study on the institution of the “Semai Kahve,” the coffee shops where bards performed, the ethnologist and literary scholar Mehmet Halit [Bayrı] (1896–1958) notes that some of the coffee shops were owned by Armenians and encouraged the participation of ashughs: It was an Armenian named Dolmacı Mihran who managed [the musical café in Halıcıoğlu]. The Armenians among the meydan poets would gather here. As can be seen from their works, there were some who were experts in the mani genre. Dolmacı Mihran, the manager of the café, was one of them. Dolmacı Mihran and the other poets would beautifully interpret the semai in a tempo known as the “Armenian style.” Those who remember

11 For a bibliography on ashugh literature, see Laurent Mignon, “Ashugh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Third Edition), Brill Academic Publishers, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15733912_ei3_COM_27633. 12 Zabel Yessayan, The Gardens of Silihdar, trans. Jennifer Manoukian (Boston: Armenian International Women’s Association Press, 2014), 11.

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In these few lines, the ethnologist does more than acknowledge the destruction of Armenian culture in Ottoman lands. He recognizes that there was also a distinct Armenian contribution—the Ermeni ağzı—to the semai and mani genres of âşık poetry and more generally the meydan tradition. Even today, whether the ashugh tradition brought a particular cultural Armenian input into the Azeri and Anatolian Turkish folk traditions or whether they were mainly the transmitters of an islamicate tradition, as claimed by Mehmet Fuat and his disciples, remains a question that continues to divide Turkish, Azeri, and Armenian scholars. The written contributions of Armenians to Turkish literature and ­publications attracted less attention than folk literature. One of the earliest semi-­ academic articles from the republican era that engaged with Armenian contributions to Turkish written culture was pedagogue Mehmet Cevdet [İnançalp]’s (1883–1935) study of the scientific activities of the Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist14 Saint Lazarus academy in Venice, printed in the Muallimler Mecmuası (Teachers’ Journal), in 1923.15 The author used the pen name Muallim Cevdet, “Cevdet the teacher,” and was known for favoring the establishment of archives. However, he hardly mentioned literature in his article, apart from Mihran Boyacıyan’s (1861–1938) 1912 translation into Ottoman Turkish of Shakespeare’s Othello and İstepan’s 1881 translation into Ottoman Turkish of Alain René Lesage’s (1668–1747) picaresque novel Gil Blas. He could have mentioned several more of Boyacıyan’s Shakespeare translations, such as his Ottoman Turkish versions of Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Comedy of Errors, all published in 1885. Significantly, he did not refer to any original literary works by Armenians in Armeno-Turkish or in Ottoman Turkish, even though Armeno-Turkish writers figured prominently among the early pioneers of the novel in Turkish. 13 Halit Bayrı,“Semai Kahveleri,” Türk Folklor Araştırmaları 1, no. 11 (1950): 163–164. Similarly in Diyarbakır, Armenian bards were present at celebrations and performing in Turkish. See, Turan, “Âşık Geleneği İçinde Ermeni Âşık Sarkis Zeki”: 181. 14 Founded in 1717, the Mekhitarists are a congregation of Benedictine monks of the Armenian Catholic Church involved in philological research and the promotion of Armenian culture. See, e.g., Kevork Bardakjian, The Mekhitarist Contributions to Armenian Culture and Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1976). 15 Muallim Cevdet İnançalp [M. Cevdet (İnançalp)], “Ermeni Mesâî-i İlmiyesi: Venedik’te (Sen Lazar) Dervişleri Akademisi,” trans. İsmail Akçay, Müteferrika 10 (Winter 1996): 201–210.

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During the years when the “national literature” was being invented by intellectuals, who were published authors and nationalist ideologists, writing by Armenians and other non-Muslim ethno-religious groups was either ignored or reduced to a minor phenomenon lacking originality and mostly in the domain of oral literature. Characteristically, the “famous Sarkis,” most probably the abovementioned Zekiyan, was reduced to a taverna singer who animated Istanbul nightlife, as mentioned by Ahmet Rasim (1864–1932) in his 1922 memoirs Fuhş-ı Atik (Ancient Prostitution).16 Moreover, reducing the importance of the Armenian contribution to Turkish literature, either in the Armenian or the Ottoman script was convenient for the new Turkish elite which did not wish to address the responsibility of the Ottoman Turkish state for genocide, that is, the destruction of the A ­ rmenian communities of Anatolia and Istanbul a topic which would have been difficult to avoid. Muallim Cevdet’s ambivalent approach is clearly marked by this latter approach. On the one hand, he regretted “that, though it was essential, we [the Turks] have always neglected to learn about the institutions and the working methods of this industrious people [the Armenians].” He noted that this was a missed opportunity which would not come back and in a schoolbook example of genocide denial—that of blaming the victims—he continued by stating: “Deceived by the European diplomats, this zealous people behaved in such a dreadful way and they caused us much harm and we were forced to put an end to their presence in Anatolia and in Eastern Thrace.”17 For scholars of the period who did not wish to address the political reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Turkey—the Armenian genocide and later the Greek population exchange—two choices remained: either denial or silence, which in the end, amounted to denial. Some literati chose not to be silent, such as the poet Ahmet Haşim who accused Cemal Pasha (1872–1922), one of the three military commanders who ruled over Ottoman Turkey with an iron fist during the years of the First World War, of “having fed Turkishness with human corpses as if it were a Moloch” in an open letter to Halide Edip who had been vocal in her denunciation of the Armenian massacres, but had, according to the poet, remained silent on the mass executions of Arab civilians.18 But theirs were isolated voices. 16 Turan, “Âşık Geleneği İçinde Ermeni Âşık Sarkis Zeki”: 181–182. 17 İnançalp, “Ermeni Mesâi-i İlmiyesi:Venedik’de (Sen Lazar) Dervişleri Akademisi”: 210. 18 However, this open letter was only published on November 7, 1918. See “Halide Edib Hanımefendi’ye,” in Ahmet Haşim, Bütün Eserleri 3: Gurabahâne-i Laklakan ve Diğer Yazıları, 102–104.

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The “wall of unspokenness,” to borrow a term coined by the novelist Bilge Karasu (1930–1995),19 surrounding non-Muslim literary contributions was not limited to Armeno-Turkish. During the republican period, literary historians dealing with late Ottoman Turkish literature excluded all non-Muslims, including Greeks and Jews who were the authors of original literary works in Turkish and literary translations into Turkish, from scholarship on late Ottoman Turkish literature. Most literary historians and scholars in Turkey, as well as most foreign Turkologists dealing with pre-republican Turkish literature seem to have adopted, consciously or not, the definition of Turkishness, established after the independence war (1919–1922) and imposed it retrospectively on the heterogeneous Ottoman literary world: Only Muslims, notwithstanding their ethnicity and their mother tongue, living within the borders of the newly founded Turkish Republic, were considered “Turks.” Non-Muslims were excluded of the definition.20 History loves irony, and in the country which became the first secular republic in the Islamic world a religious criterion held the upper hand over ethnic and linguistic criteria. Similarly, ethnic differentiation was not used as a selection criterion when establishing the canonical texts of Turkish national literature. Among the major literary and intellectual figures of pre-republican literature, Şemsettin Sami (1850–1904), the novelist, playwright, and linguist, was Albanian. Ziya Gökalp, the father of Turkish nationalism, who also had literary pretensions, was Kurdish on his mother’s side.21 Ahmet Haşim was born in Baghdad and his 19 Karasu explained that his works were surrounded by a “susma duvarı,” a “wall of unspokenness” in the world of literary criticism (Bilge Karasu, Haluk’a Mektuplar, ed. Haluk Aker [­Istanbul: Kalkedon, 2007], 194). Beside the homoerotic subtext of his narratives, his Greek and Jewish heritage might have had a role in the early dismissal of his works. See Laurent Mignon, “Se préoccuper de Judas,” Inverses, Hors série 4 (2016): 67–76. 20 Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (London: Hurst and Co., 1997), 94. 21 The question of Ziya Gökalp’s Kurdish origins was already a matter of debate during his lifetime—see Jean Deny, “Zia Goek Alp,” Revue du monde musulman 61, no. 3 (1925): 2–4. Gökalp is not an exception among early Turkish nationalist theoreticians, as several nationalist thinkers had a “cosmopolitan” background. His great rival, the secularist Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), the author of the groundbreaking Üç Tarz-ı Siyaset (Three Types of Politics, 1904) was a Tatar from Kazan, in today’s autonomous republic of Tatarstan in Russia. Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939) who authored Üç Medeniyet (Three Civilizations, 1927) emigrated from Russian Azerbaijan to the Ottoman Empire in 1908. As for the author of Kemalizm (1936), Munis Tekinalp (1883–1961), he was born Moiz Kohen. His intellectual journey led him from Pan-Turanism to Kemalist nationalism. However, unlike the previous thinkers, he remains mostly unmentioned in the pantheon of nationalist thinkers in Turkey, despite having authored the “Ten Commandments of Turkification” addressed to the Jewish community. The fact that he kept the faith of his forefathers might explain this exclusion.

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mother tongue was Arabic. In contradistinction, the Armenian Hovsep Maruş, who published one novel in Turkish, namely Bir Sefil Zevce (A Miserable Wife, 1868), a few years before Sami whose Taaşşuk-ı Talat ve Fıtnat (The Love of Talat and Fıtnat, 1871) is recorded as the first Turkish novel, is mentioned nowhere. Examples could be multiplied. In Ottoman and later republican Turkey, major literary figures had been actively promoting the concept of nationhood. There are similarities to Greece as shown by Gregory Jusdanis’s discussion in relation to the key role of literature and the literary world in the creation of modern Greek national identity in his milestone study Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture.22 However, unlike the case described by Jusdanis, Turkish-language nationalist writers played a central role in the shaping of not one but several competing and largely irreconcilable definitions of Turkishness which had as sole common ground the othering of the non-Muslim populations of the remains of the empire.23 The “ethno-religious” purification of Turkish literary historiography and scholarship had already started in the late Ottoman period, perhaps even as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Bibliographies are a case in point. Mehmet Süreyya’s (1845–1909) four-volume Sicill-i Osmani, the Ottoman Who’s Who, published between 1890–1893, includes an appendix which lists non-Muslim civil servants, some of whom had participated in literary activities such as Artin Pasha Dadyan (1830–1901), who authored an Armenian translation of Silvio Pellico’s (1789–1854) Le mie prigioni (My Prisons) in 1851.24 Mehmet Süreyya felt the need to rationalize “his inclusion of exclusively Muslim names” in the main text of his dictionary by explaining that apart from rare exceptions in the early period of Ottoman history, in Wallachia, Moldavia, Hungary, and Transylvania, there had not been any non-Muslim civil servants except for translators 22 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 23 For a discussion of the reception and academic criticism of pre-republican literary works in Turkish produced by non-Muslim Ottomans, see Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 121–132. Apart from rare exceptions such as some articles by the independent scholar Turgut Kut, it is only in the 1990s that academics have started to explore in Turkish-language publications the impact of non-Muslims on the development of Turkish-language literature. This approach, however, has been characterized by the ghettoization of non-Muslim literatures, its marginalization, and its instrumentalization as evidence of Ottoman tolerance towards religious minorities. It must be stressed that literary scholars who cannot be suspected of chauvinism have ignored non-Muslim literary contributions in their works too, probably because they were not aware of those texts whose existence was silenced by mainstream literary historiography and which had not been transliterated into the new romanized Turkish script adopted in 1928. 24 Strauss, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th–20th Centuries)?”: 62.

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“whose names are not to be seen in history books in a regular manner.”25 The absence of non-Muslim names, arguably equivalent to the erasure of individual and communal contributions to Ottoman history, is also a significant aspect of Bursalı Mehmet Tahir’s (1861–1925) otherwise exhaustive three-volume biographical dictionary of literary figures Osmanlı Müellifleri (Ottoman Writers, 1914–1923). There would be rare exceptions in early republican times such as Sadettin Nüzhet Ergun (1901–1946). He mentions non-Muslim Turkish poets such as the Jewish poet and lyricist Avram Naon (1878–1947) in Türk Şairleri (Turkish Poets, 1936), a dictionary of Turkish poets. Naon was far from being a lonely figure and several non-Muslims used Turkish as their tongue of literary expressions in the last century of the Ottoman Empire. Literary texts published in Turkish by Armenians, Greeks, and Jews in the years following the Tanzimat reforms were of two types: publications in “communitarian” alphabets, that is, the Armenian, Greek, Hebrew (both square and Rashi), and Syriac scripts, as well as publications in the Ottoman script. The first Turkish book in the Armenian alphabet could be regarded as an early example of a text which challenged nationalist historiographies: entitled Dur.n k‘erakanut‘ean askharhabar. lezuin hayots‘ (Gate to the Grammar of the Vernacular Language of the Armenians), this grammar written by Mkhitar Sebasdatsi (1676–1749), the founder of the Mekhitarist order, was published at Antonio Bortoli’s printing office in Venice in 1727. Its self-explanatory subtitle pointed to the existence of a world too often obscured: “Written in the Turkish language for those Armenians who know only Turkish and would like to learn vernacular Armenian.”26 By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, a considerable part of the Armenian population of the western provinces of Ottoman Turkey had Turkish as their main language. From the eighteenth century up to 1967 about 2,000 works were published in Armeno-Turkish, ranging from, mainly, religious to scientific works. In the second half of the nineteenth century, modern literary works too were published, but, unsurprisingly, literary translations both from French popular novels and classical Armenian literature were much more common than original works in new genres such as the novel and the short story which were being developed in those years. 25 Mehmet Süreyya [Mehmed Süreyya], Sicill-i Osmani: Osmanlı Ünlüleri, vol. 6, ed. Nuri ­Akbayar (Istanbul: Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 1996), 1816. 26 Aslanian, “‘Prepared in the Language of the Hagarites’”: 54. For an exhaustive list of ­Armeno-Turkish publications, see Hasmik A. Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Süreli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (1727–1968) (Istanbul: Turkuaz, 2005).

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The first novels in Turkish, namely Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi (The Story of Akabi, 1851) and Boşboğaz bir Adem Lafazanlık ile Husula Gelen Fenalıkların Muhtasar Risalesi (The Misadventures of Bigmouth, 1852), Hovhannes Balıkçıyan’s (1833–1898) Karnik, Gülünya ve Dikran’ın Dehşetli Vefatları Hikâyesi (The Story of the Terrible Deaths of Karnik, Gülünya and Dikran, 1863), Hovsep Maruş’s Bir Sefil Zevce and Viçen Tilkiyan’s Gülünya Yahut Kendi Görünmeyerek Herkesi Gören Kız, (Gülünya or the Girl Who Saw Everyone Without Being Seen, 1868), were published in the Armenian alphabet, years before the first novels in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. While until now creative Armeno-Turkish literature had mainly consisted of the oral works of the ashughs, the works of early fiction writers, often educated in Mekhitarist institutions, hurled Armeno-Turkish literature into modernity and made the challenges of the nineteenth century the very theme of literature. The authors of these Armeno-Turkish texts would be faced with issues similar to those troubling their Muslim peers. The nineteenth century was a profoundly challenging era in which ­Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals researched ways to restructure the state and enable the survival of the empire. Leading writers, often closely linked to the state apparatus, were convinced that literature could play a major role in spreading a reformist yet also “moral” message among readers. Though they did not disregard aesthetic concerns, advocates of European literature appropriated Western genres, that is, various forms of fiction, but also drama, largely because they believed that those genres better suited the engaged form of literature for which they advocated than the classical tradition. Namık Kemal, perhaps the most outspoken promoter of literary and political change, famously wrote that some of the works of Walter Scott (1771–1832), Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), and Charles Dickens (1812–1870)—all of them his contemporaries except Scott—were considered as “reasons to be proud in our century of civilization,”27 implying that they ought to be emulated. The didactic approach was also common among the intelligentsia of the non-Muslim ­ethno-religious communities28 whose encounter with Western, mainly French, 27 Namık Kemal, “Mukaddime-i Celal,” Celaleddin Harzemşah, ed. Hüseyin Ayan, (Istanbul: Hareket Yayınları, 1969 [1875]), 12. 28 As far as possible, I have avoided using the term “millet” when referring to the non-Muslim ethno-religious and confessional communities of the Ottoman Empire. “Millet” has become a very loaded term. As noted by Murat Cankara and others, references to the “millet” and the “millet system” have been instrumentalized, either to emphasize the cultural and social impermeability between the various communities of the empire or to promote a discourse on

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literature had already taken place in the Christian schools of the empire and beyond.29 Indeed, Armeno-Turkish intellectuals who, just like their Muslim counterparts, considered themselves the nation’s teachers adopted a utilitarian approach to literature. They believed that the novel should play a central role in the education of the people and the promotion of morality and new ideas. Though authors were concerned by aesthetic and narratological issues too, the educational value of narratives was central. Even the translatability of a foreign novel could be judged by this criterion. In a foreword that he wrote for an Armeno-Turkish translation of Xavier de Montepin’s (1823–1902) novel La porteuse de pain (The Bread Seller, 1886), translated by H. Tolayan with the title Ekmekçi Hatun, the publisher Garabet Biberyan maintained that “he dared to lay the foundation for the publication in a language that could be understood by the populace of the novel The Bread Seller because it was interesting and promoted morality.”30 Telling a good story while spreading a moral message was the difficult balance that the Ottoman advocates of the roman à thèse were also trying to achieve. Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912), the most prolific novelist of his age, wrote that the “aim of novels is to prepare the grounds for morality the tolerance of the Ottoman state. See, e.g., Cankara, “Rethinking Ottoman Cross-­Cultural Encounters: Turks and the Armenian Alphabet”: 1 and Laurent Mignon, “Minor Literatures and Their Challenge to ‘National’ Literature: The Turkish Case,” in Turkey and the ­Politics of National Identity: Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation, ed. Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 194–214. The term “millet” in reference to autonomous confessional communities in the empire only started to be used systematically in the nineteenth century (Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 61–62). However, as indicated by Johann Strauss in his study of the translations of the 1876 Ottoman constitution, ethno-religious communities seem to have been reluctant to refer to themselves with this term ( Johann Strauss, “A Constitution for a Multilingual Empire: Translations of the Kanun-ı Esasi and Other Official Texts into Minority Languages,” in The First Ottoman Experiment in Democracy, ed. Christoph Herzog and Sharif Malek [Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2011], 21–51). Furthermore, a semantic switch took place in Turkish from ethno-religious or confessional community to nation which has emphasized the differences between the various communities. 29 On the role of the religious minorities and the Christian schools, see Andreas Tietze, “Ethnicity and Change in Ottoman Intellectual History,” Turcica 21–23 (1991): 385–395 and Roderic H. Davison, “The Millets as Agents of Change in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire,” in Christian and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1, The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 319–337. 30 Garabet Biberyan, “İfade-i Mahsuse,” foreword to Ekmekçi Hatun, by Xavier de Montépin, trans. H. Tolayan (Istanbul: K. Bağdatlıyan, 1886), 3.

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and spirituality [maneviyat],”31 yet many of his readers were undeniably entertained by his numerous narratives. Not all intellectuals of the era considered translation to be the best medium to promote this new genre and moral messages. In the introduction of the novel İki Kapı Yoldaşları Yahut Hakk ü Adaletin Zahiri (The Story of Two Neighbors or the Appearance of Right and Justice, 1885), the author Hovsep Kurban (1847–1903) argued that “although it [was] a source of perfect satisfaction that more and more chosen works and delightful stories [were] published, most of them [were] translations from foreign languages and relate[d] events in European countries. Hence it [was] obvious that the children of the nation [could] not properly make use of and fully enjoy them.”32 The concern for greater locality and the impact that estrangement could have on the proper comprehension of a literary work was shared by Muslim authors as well. Indeed, Ahmet Midhat Efendi chose to adapt European novels, rather than translate them, precisely because he believed that a work offered to Ottoman Turkish readers had to be a “neither a translation nor an imitation,”33 as noted in the opening pages of his Hasan Mellah Yahut Sır İçinde Esrar (Hasan Mellah or the Secret inside the Mystery), his adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s Le comte de Monte Cristo, published in 1874.34 The concerns of the early Armeno-Turkish novelists made their writing, despite the alphabet barrier, very much part of the literary mainstream. Though set mainly in the Catholic Armenian community, early Armeno-Turkish fiction dealt with issues that were also of central concern for later Muslim authors: the impact of Westernization, the condition of women, forced marriage, and the place of religion in modern society. Plots usually focused on a story of forbidden love which merged themes from Turkish and Armenian classical and 31 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Yeryüzünde Bir Melek, ed. Nuri Sağlam (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 2000), 97. 32 Hovsep Kurban, İki Kapı Yoldaşları Yahut Hakk ü Adaletin Zuhuru (Istanbul: N. Berberyan, 1885), 5. 33 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Hasan Mellâh Yahut Sır İçinde Esrar, ed. Ali Şükrü Çoruk (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 2000), 5. 34 For an in-depth discussion of Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s views on adaptation see, Murat Cankara, “Ahmet Mithat Efendi ve Beşir Fuat’a Göre Gerçekçilik” (Masters thesis, Bilkent University, 2004). Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s approach is in line with what Olga Borovaya calls “rewriting” in reference to novels in her ground-breaking study of the development of Judeo-Spanish print culture. See Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), 140–41.

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t­raditional literatures and, of course, from the newly discovered French roman populaire. Some of the issues explored by Armeno-Turkish writers, such as Vartanyan’s discussion of the Catholic-Orthodox divide or of the principles of the Armenian enlightenment were specific concerns of the Armenian community. Likewise, Muslim Turks problematized issues such as the Islamic legitimacy of slavery, which was only of indirect interest to Armenians. The fact that women characters in Armeno-Turkish novels were strikingly more outspoken than most of their Muslim Turkish counterparts was another significant difference, even though authors such as Vartanyan painted a rather pessimistic picture of the condition of women both in the Armenian bourgeoisie and the Armenian working class. Still, from Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s cross-dressing Ulviye in his 1882 Dürdane Hanım (Madam Dürdane) to Fatma Aliye’s assertive characters, strong and unusual women were not absent from the Ottoman Turkish novel either. Unlike Armeno-Turkish texts, original works in the Greek script are rather rare. As shown by Evangelia Balta in her study of the characteristics of 628 Karamanlı books published between 1711 and 1935,35 fifty-four percent of them, that is to say 340, were of a religious nature.36 Even though the number of secular publications rose in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is remarkable that Protestant missionary publications, published between 1821 and 1921, represented twenty-eight percent of all Karamanlı publications, no less than 181 books and pamphlets.37 Yet, Karamanlidika did not only cater for the religious needs of the Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox and also Greek Protestant communities, but also included translations of literary, scientific, and philosophical texts.38 The novel Temaşa-ı Dünya: Cefakâr ü Cefakeş (The Contemplation of the World: The Tormentor and his Victim, 1870–1871) by the polymath Evangelinos Misailidis (1820–1890) was considered an original composition after its transliteration into the modern Turkish alphabet and ­publication by Robert 35 Evangelia Balta, “Karamanlıca Kitapların Dönemlere Göre İncelenmesi ve Konularına Göre Sınıflandırılması,” Müteferrika 13 (Summer 1998): 3–19. 36 Ibid., 7. 37 Ibid., 8. 38 Evangelia Balta has published extensively on the topic, see among others, Evangelia ­Balta, ­Beyond the Language Frontier: Studies on the Karamanlis and the Karamanlidika Printing (­Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2010). She is in the process of publishing a new exhaustive bibliography of Karamanlidika which merges the three early volumes by S. Sévérien Salaville and Eugène Dalleggio, originally published in 1958, 1966, and 1974, and the three supplements which she published in 1987 and 1997, as well as new findings. See Evangelia ­Balta, ­Karamanlidika Bibliographie Analytique, vol 1, 1718–1839/Karamanlıca Kitaplar Cilt I: 1718–1839 (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2018).

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Anhegger (1911–2001) and Vedat Günyol (1912–2004) in 1986.39 However, it later turned out that this rocambolesque Bildungsroman was an adaptation of Grigorios Palaiologos’s (1794–1844) novel O Polypathis (The Tormented Man), a Greek novel published in Athens in 1839.40 Besides Temaşa-ı Dünya ve Cefakar u Cefakeş, whose originality is a matter of contention and about twenty novels which were mostly translated from French,41 the contribution of Karamanlı authors to the novel in Turkish was limited. In her study of these translations, Ioanna Petropolou rightly remarks that they—fiction ranging from Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) to Eugène Sue (1804–1857)—should not be regarded as escapist works, but that the translations from French opened a gate to a new world, “a foretaste of what was to come,” namely “the daily life of city dwellers, the mysteries of the city, wealth and poverty, social contradictions and the power of new ideas.”42 Nevertheless, the fact that Karamanlı translators did not disregard the entertainment value of the works should not be underestimated. Just like their Muslim peers they wanted to educate and entertain. As will be seen in the next chapter, the fact that most of Karamanlı book production was of a religious nature should not necessarily be seen as an obstacle to literary and cultural exchanges. Judeo-Turkish literature is a more peculiar development. Unlike the cases of Armeno-Turkish and Greco-Turkish literatures, where native speakers of Turkish, as well as missionary organizations, produced texts in communitarian scripts, Judeo-Turkish writing was the consequence of a conscious decision by leaders of the mainly Ladino-speaking Jewish community to express themselves in Turkish, in a complex political and social context marked by endemic poverty in the Jewish community, increasingly militant Christian antisemitism in Ottoman lands, new opportunities in the Ottoman civil service for Turkish-speaking non-Muslims, and later the spread of Enlightenment ­principles advocated by 39 Evangelinos Misailidis, Seyreyle Dünyayı: Temaşa-ı Dünya ve Cefakâr u Cefakeş, ed. and trans. Robert Anhegger and Vedat Günyol (Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi, 1986). 40 For a comparative study of those two novels, see Anthi Karra, “From Polypathis to Temaşa-i Dünya, from the Safe Port of Translation to the Open Sea of Creation,” in Cries and Whispers in Karamanlidika Books, ed. Evangelia Balta and Matthias Kappler, 201–218. See also Sula Boz, “Paleoloğos/Misailidis/Favini: Üç İsim, bir Akrabalık,” Milliyet Sanat Dergisi 242 (1990): 36–37. 41 For a list of those translations, see Ioanna Petropoulou, “From West to East: The Translation Bridge, an Approach From a Western Perspective,” in Ways to Modernity in Greece and Turkey: Encounters With Europe, 1850–1950, ​ed. Anna Frangoudaki and Caglar Keyder (­London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 111–112. 42 Petropoulou, “From East to West: The Translation Bridge,” 108.

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the newly founded Alliance israélite universelle schools.43 Judeo-Turkish publications tended to consist of ephemeral Turkish periodicals, mostly bilingual with Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Turkish parts, which were primarily printed into the Rashi script. The only success story was Moiz Fresko’s (1859–1912) Üstat (The Master), which started to be published in Izmir in 1889 and survived for two years until 1891.44 The aim of these periodical publications was the promotion of Turkish among Ottoman Jews and no books in Judeo-Turkish seem to have ever been printed. While it is far from clear when Turkish in the Syriac script emerged, “Syro-Ottoman” printed periodicals were common by the beginning of the twentieth century. İntibah (The Awakening), Hayat (Life), Mürşid-i Asuriyun (The Assyrian Guide), Kevkeb Mednho (The Star of the East) and Bethnahrin (Mesopotamia), which came out until the 1930s, were published entirely or partly in Syro-Ottoman.45 Such periodicals also published texts of a literary nature, mainly poetry.46 Naum Faik (1867–1930), a founding father of Assyrian nationalism and a leading publicist was among the poets. In 1917, in exile in the United States as the ethno-religious cleansing of the Ottoman-Turkish heartland continued, he published a collection of poems entitled İntibah Neşideleri yahut Millî ve Vatani Terennümler (The Verses of Awakening or National and Patriotic Songs). As can be gathered from the title, his aim was political. The point was stressed in the introduction: “Verses composed about the nation and the people are the most effective vehicle to awaken patriotic feelings in the hearts.”47 And yet, as noted by Benjamin Trigona-Harany, Syriacs “were probably still more comfortable reading and writing Ottoman Turkish in the Arabic alphabet” than in Syriac script in the early twentieth century.48 In the early years of the twentieth century, an increasing number of non-Muslim writers, such as the Jewish poet İsak Ferera (1883–1933) and 43 Chapter 5 is devoted to the emergence of Judeo-Turkish and Jewish Turkish literature. 44 Moïse Franco [M. Franco], Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de l’empire ottoman (Paris: Librairie A. Durlacher, 1897), 278–279. 45 For a bibliography of the Syro-Ottoman Press, see Benjamin Trigona-Harany, “A Bibliography of Suryani Periodicals in Ottoman Turkish,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 287–300. For a study of the Syro-Ottoman press, see Benjamin Trigona-Harany, The Ottoman Süryani from 1908 to 1914 (Piscataway: The Gorgias Press, 2009). 46 On the topic, see, for instance, Mustafa Kılıçarslan, “Süryani Harfli Türkçe Bir Şiir Ve Şark Yıldızı Gazetesi,” Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi 8, no. 39 (2015): 179–187. 47 Benjamin Trigona-Harany, “A Description of Syro-Ottoman,” in Balta and Ölmez, eds., ­Beyond Language and Religion, 37. 48 Ibid.,” 22.

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the Armenian prose poet Garbis Fikri, published their works in the Ottoman Turkish script, a phenomenon that could arguably be interpreted in the context of the emergence of a common Ottoman Turkish cultural identity. But the phenomenon was not new in itself since non-Muslims, such as Vasilaki Efendi (d. 1854), the Greek author of a Turkish translation of Lucian’s contentious Peri Parasitou named Dalkavuknâme (The Book of the Jester, 1870)49 and Teodor Kasap (1835–1905), the publisher and translator of Molière and the two Alexandre Dumas, father (1802–1870) and son (1824–1895),50 or indeed the abovementioned Mihran Boyacıyan and İstepan, had already contributed literary translations into Ottoman Turkish.51 Some scholars and critics refer to the alphabet barrier and issues of cultural impermeability to legitimize the exclusion of non-Muslims from the 49 Johann Strauss, “The Millets and the Ottoman Language,” Die Welt des Islams 35, no. 2 (1995): 215–218. 50 Ibid. 51 Ottoman minority literatures are potentially of great interest for literary theoreticians as the study of pre-republican non-Muslim Turkish literature, in particular Armeno-Turkish, could also make a noteworthy contribution to ongoing debates on the concept of “minor literature.” The concept was developed by Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992) as an interpretative tool to challenge conventional readings of Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) works, partly based on the latter’s reflections on what he called “kleine Literatur” (Franz ­Kafka, Tagebücher 1909–1912, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch [Frankfurt am Main: F ­ ischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008], 253). In Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: T ­ oward a Minor Literature, 1975), their groundbreaking work on the topic, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that a “minor literature,” defined as the literature of a minority in a major language, displays three characteristics: “The deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], 16–18). At first reading, such a description fits the Armeno-Turkish novel like a glove. However, there are two aspects of the Armeno-­Turkish novel which add new dimensions to the debate on minor literature: The alphabet difference—the choice of a communitarian alphabet being an identity marker—and the fact that Armeno-Turkish novelists did not write in a well-established narrative tradition but created the first instances of a genre in Turkish that did not exist in the Ottoman Turkish literary tradition—the novel. If a minor literature represents, as argued by Deleuze and Guattari, the “revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 18), generic innovation is arguably as revolutionary as it gets. Non-Muslim minor literatures of Ottoman and republican Turkey represent not only a challenge to traditional Turkish literary historiography but also to the Eurocentric focus, at least language-wise, of much of contemporary literary theory and thus offer an opportunity for the study of a wider range of linguistic, literary and, cultural experiences in theoretical reflections on literature. See Mignon, “Minor Literatures and their Challenge to ‘National Literature’: The Turkish Case,” 210–211.

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great narrative of literature in Turkish. The principal argument for sidelining Turkish literary texts in communitarian alphabets is that the use of these alphabets indicated that they were exclusively addressed to their own communities and would not, or could not, have been read by Muslim Turks or members of other ethno-religious communities. Hence these literatures remained marginal and had no impact on the literary mainstream. The critic Atilla Özkırımlı’s (1942–2005) comments on the Karamanlı novel Temaşa-ı Dünya: Cefakâr ü Cefakeş are representative of this position. In an interview given on June 29, 1986 to Nokta (Period), a left-leaning Turkish weekly, when literati discovered this unusual narrative for the first time in modern Turkish transliteration, he claimed that the narrative language of the work is Turkish, but it was written by a Greek [Rum] from Turkey in the Greek script. The intended reader is not ­Turkish. Moreover, everything is reflected in the context of the adventures of a hero who considers himself as Greek [Yunanlı] and who stresses this emphatically; and from his point of view. This is why, [Missailidis’s novel] has no place and no influence in the general picture of the Turkish literature of the time.52

Leaving aside the fact that there are strong reasons for reading and interpreting literary history in the light of developments which had “no place and no influence in the general picture of the Turkish literature of the time,” the arguments regarding the alphabet barrier and cultural impermeability are dubious in themselves. With the changes that followed the Tanzimat reforms and the granting of citizens’ rights to non-Muslims, the areas of cultural and literary contact increased in the various official institutions and offices founded to promote the translation of Western, mostly but not only, scientific works into Turkish, in schools open to multiconfessional pupils and students, in the civil service and, of course, in the world of theatre and of printing where Armenians played a predominant role. Ziya Gökalp went so far as to argue that so-called Tanzimat intellectuals had taken most of their knowledge from the Levantines.53 As suggested by Roderic Davison, there is a strong possibility that in Gökalp’s view the term “Levantine” incorporated all non-Muslims living in Istanbul.54 52 Engin Ardıç, “Seyreyle 19. Yüzyılı,” Nokta 25 (1986): 56–57. 53 Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp. (­London: Harvill, 1950), 75. 54 Roderic H. Davison, “The Millets as Agents of Change in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire,” 322 and 334.

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Hence there are good reasons to believe that Ottoman bureaucrats, often published writers themselves such as İbrahim Şinasi and Namık Kemal, who had interaction with non-Muslims, grew at least superficially familiar with the literary interests of their counterparts. Moreover, as seen above, the oral tradition of story tellers, both in urban and rural contexts was still quite popular in the nineteenth century. The ­Austrian Turkologist Andreas Tietze (1914–2003) wondered in an article published in 1991, to what extent “the peculiar writing systems” of the Christian minorities had really been an obstacle for Muslim Turks. He underlined that written literature still spread orally too, as printed stories, perhaps also novels, were being retold by professional storytellers.55 Obviously, the scripts of the original Turkish texts were of no concern to their storytellers’ audience. It is notable that the Istanbul-born Mekhitarist monk, Mikael Çamcıyan (1738–1823), the author of a landmark three-volume history of Armenia in Armenian, stressed in the introduction of the abridged Armeno-Turkish version Gülzar-ı Tevarih: Hay Milletine Dair Hikâyelerle Donatılmış (A Florilegium of History: Enhanced With Stories About the Armenian People, 1823),56 that he had written his work in the language of the common people in order to increase the oral intelligibility of his prose, thus suggesting that Turkish was the shared language of ordinary Anatolian folk.57 Alphabets constituted no obstacles for an audience ­listening to a text read aloud. This was not only true for folk literature, but also for the development of Turkish-language theatre where Armenians were greatly involved.58 The importance of the oral transmission of written literature, at a time when illiteracy was widespread, is confirmed by various sources. In his seminal history of nineteenth-century Turkish literature, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar describes how listeners would gather in private houses around readers in order to listen to their rendition of Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s novels: 55 Andreas Tietze, “Ethnicity and Change in Ottoman Intellectual Life”: 394–395. 56 Eli Smith, Researches of Rev. E. Smith and Rev. H. G. O. Dwight in Armenia (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1833), 15–16. It is notable that Smith used the Armeno-Turkish version of Çamcıyan’s history for his own “Historical Sketch of Armenia.” 57 Cankara, “Reading Akabi: (Re-)Writing History—on the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of Armeno-Turkish Fiction,” 58. 58 Based on the scholarship of Metin And (1927–2008), Turkey’s foremost theatre historian, Hasmik Stepanyan lists 366 plays in the Armeno-Turkish script ranging from a transliteration of Namık Kemal’s Akif Bey (1874) to an Armeno-Turkish version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in her bibiography of Armeno-Turkish literature (Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Süreli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası [1727–1968], 415–425).

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Rethinking Literature in Turkish Suddenly with [Ahmet Midhat’s] books, a time for resting entered the life of the working people. The hour that was devoted to reading. This is what he contributed to our society. This transformed the life of the common people. In the small wooden houses, the hours spent around the lamp gained a new significance and nature. The family would gather around the one person who could read and would discuss that which was read. This is what the little Ahmet had been longing for since childhood.59

The alphabet barrier did not only disappear in the oral context, but some Turkish intellectuals, and by no means minor figures of Turkish literature, chose to jump over it. When skimming through the autobiographical writings of Ottoman Turkish writers there is concrete evidence of cross-alphabetical readings in Turkish. In his absorbing Matbuat Hatıralarım (A Publisher’s Memoirs, 1930–1931), Ahmet İhsan [Tokgöz] (1868–1942), the publisher of the renowned Servet-i Fünûn journal and a translator, referring to his school years at the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, the school for civil servants, explains that before properly understanding French, I had been captivated by the newspapers and novels published in Turkish in the Armenian script. I had learnt the Armenian alphabet in a few lessons from Armenian classmates. I fluently read the Manzume-i Efkâr and Ceride-i Şarkiye, which were published in Turkish in Armenian letters. I read most of Xavier the Montépin’s crime novels in the Armenian script.60

A few pages later the author of Matbuat Hatıralarım further reveals that he also contributed articles to an Armeno-Turkish magazine Cihan (The World) which was published between 1888–1890.61 His was not an isolated case. In Kırk Yıl (Forty Years, 1936), his voluminous memoirs, Halit Ziya, who had been a student at a Mekhitarist school in Izmir, describes his awe when he discovered the richness of the Armeno-Turkish publishing tradition.62 As we have seen, this was an experience which he did not forget. A third figure which should be mentioned is Ahmet Midhat who spoke highly of the works of Hovsep Vartanyan and Garabet Panosyan (1826/28–1905), another leading 59 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Ondokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Istanbul: Çağlayan Kitabevi, 1997 [1956]), 59–60. 60 Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz, Matbuat Hatıralarım, ed. Alpay Kabacalı (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, [1930–1931]), 35. 61 Tokgöz, Matbuat Hatıralarım, 41. 62 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil, Kırk Yıl (Istanbul: İnkılâp, 1987 [1936]), 119.

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Armeno-Turkish author and publicist.63 He was also familiar with the works of Evangelinos Misailidis. Usually keen on fighting in the boxing ring of literary Istanbul, Ahmet Midhat was full of praise for the Karamanlı author’s output. Having commended his journalistic and literary achievements in an obituary written in 1889 in Tercüman-ı Hakikat (The Translator of Truth) newspaper, he noted that even Turks “would listen to his style of expression with great delight”—a reminder that differences in alphabet were not always an obstacle to the appreciation of texts. In the same article, he also stressed the intelligibility of Misailidis’s prose,64 an advantage when read aloud. In view of the prominence of, and influence exerted in, their own, mainly pre-republican, times by Ahmet İhsan, Ahmet Midhat, and indeed Halit Ziya, it seems obvious that knowledge of the existence and perhaps even familiarity with the writings of non-Muslims in communitarian alphabets must have spread fairly widely among the admittedly small Ottoman Turkish reading public. It is thus unsurprising that Armeno-Turkish was regularly mentioned in the context of the debates concerning the need to reform the Ottoman alphabet, as seen in Halit Ziya’s interventions. But the novelist was not the only one to refer to the Armenian alphabet against the backdrop of the alphabet controversy. Reporting in August 1883 on discussions within the Armenian community concerning the possible adoption of the Roman alphabet, the newspaper Vakit (Time) maintained that Abdullah Macit Pasha (1841–1917), a senior bureaucrat who had been in and out of the Matbuat Müdüriyeti (Directorate for Publications), had proposed replacing the Ottoman script with the Armenian script, having allegedly claimed that “as Armenian letters are quite perfect to read, works in Turkish composed with those letters can be read easily.” While he confirmed in a response to the newspaper that he believed the Armenian alphabet could “reproduce every sound appropriately,” he vehemently denied calling for the adoption of the script.65 The ensuing debate showed that Armeno-Turkish— and also Greco-Turkish—writing were far from unknown to Ottoman Muslim intellectuals and bureaucrats at the time. The argument about the alphabet barrier is thus far from convincing. Had the alphabet barrier been the main reason for literary historians to exclude Armeno-Turkish, Karamanlı, Judeo-Turkish and Syro-Ottoman authors, poets, 63 Ahmet Midhat Efendi [Ahmet Midhat], Müşahedat (Istanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1891 h. 1308]), 35–36. 64 Quoted in Turgut Kut, “Temaşa-ı Dünya ve Cefakâr ü Cefakeş’ in Yazarı: Evangelinos ­Misailidis Efendi,” Tarih ve Toplum 48 (1987): 23. 65 See Ertem, Elifbe’den Alfabe’ye, 125–127.

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and translators from their works, they would still have had to engage with Armenians, Greeks, Jews and Assyrians writing with the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. However, this engagement happened only rarely. The argument regarding cultural impermeability and the lack of cultural exchanges between the different ethno-religious communities deserves to be revised too. Critics, focusing on Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi (The Story of Akabi, 1851)66 were struck by the quasi-absence of Muslim characters in the novel. Critics and literary historians have interpreted this fact in various ways. The literary historian İnci Enginün puts a rather cavalier emphasis on the absence of non-Armenian characters in Akabi Hikâyesi,67 whereas the Turkologist Börte Sagaster sees the one occurrence of Turco-Armenian exchange in the novel as evidence for private social relations between Turks and Armenians.68 Though it might be tempting to interpret the rarity of interaction in this particular text as symptomatic for the general state of nineteenth-century ­Ottoman society, one should refrain from reading the Armeno-Turkish novel simply as a mirror of societal developments. As he was already touching on the very sensitive topic of the Orthodox-Catholic divide. A representative of the embattled Armenian Catholic community, Hovsep Vartanyan might have felt that it was better not to deal with relations between Ottoman Armenians of various persuasions and Ottoman Turks and Muslims to avoid possible state interference and censure. When looking at the themes developed by Vartanyan in his novel, among others Westernization and cultural change, outdated traditions, and the place of religion in society, as well as women’s rights, one could argue that his novel was indeed a prototype for the later didactic novels published by ­Muslim Turks. There are eerie resemblances between Hagop Ağa and Rupenig 66 Akabi Hikâyesi was the first Armeno-Turkish novel which was romanized and thus made accessible to scholars of modern Turkish literature unfamiliar with the Armenian alphabet. Edited by Andreas Tietze, it was published in Istanbul in 1991. Notably, an Armenian translation by Karnik Stepanyan had already been published in 1953 (Andreas Tietze, “Önsöz,” in Hovsep Vartanyan [Vartan Paşa], Akabi Hikyayesi: İlk Türkçe Roman (1851), ed. Andreas ­Tietze (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1991), x. A French translation was published in 2018 by Haïk Der Haroutiounian: Hovsèp Vartanian, L’histoire d’Akabi: Le premier roman turc (1851), trans. Haïk Der Haroutiounian (Paris: Edition de la Société des études arméniennes, 2018). Hovsep Vartanyan’s second novel Boşboğaz Bir Adem, was edited and transliterated by Murat Cankara and published by Koç University Press in 2017. 67 İnci Enginün, Yeni Türk Edebiyatı: Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete, 1839–1923 (Istanbul: Dergâh, 2006), 171. 68 Sagaster, “The Role of Turcophone Armenians as Literary Innovators and Mediators of Culture in the Early Days of Modern Turkish Literature,” 107.

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Ağa, the two central male characters in the book and the heroes of Ahmet Midhat’s famous novella Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi (Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi, 1876).69 Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi, published in 1875, gained iconic status. By contrasting Rakım Efendi, a studious self-made man, to Felatun Bey, the archetypical spendthrift westernized dandy, the text captured the imagination.70 Whether Ahmet Midhat borrowed, without acknowledgement, the central narrative device of the novel—the opposition between a character embodying a successful synthesis between “East” and “West” and an alafranga ignoramus—from Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi—is open to discussion. However, Vartanyan’s tragic love story is much more sophisticated. Though not without humor, the Armeno-Turkish novel does not leave much room for hope. Ahmet Midhat, on the other hand, believes in a brighter future and the differences between the heroes of the novels are too many to list. Indicative for the success of this formula and the existence of literary exchanges between the communities was the transliteration and publication of Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi into Armeno-Turkish in 1879.71 There is more concrete evidence that non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire showed interest in Ottoman Turkish literature. Indeed, one of the arguments put forward by Moiz Fresko in a letter requesting permission to publish Üstat in 1888, was the “overwhelming keenness for Ottoman literature and education” of the Jews of Izmir.72 The nationalist principles of twentieth-century historians and critics were not shared by earlier authors. In a postscript to Sarkis Serents’s Ermeni Edebiyatı Numuneleri, an anthology of Turkish translations of Armenian short stories, published in 1912, the critic and playwright Şahabettin Süleyman put emphasis on a common Turko-Armenian culture: Even though I share the same religion as the Arabs, I find it hard to socialize with them, I find it easy to mingle and become close to you. In regard of traditions, needs and way of life, and in particular from a linguistic point of 69 Laurent Mignon, “Tanzimat Dönemi Romanına Bir Önsöz: Vartan Paşa’nın Akabi Hikâyesi,” Hece: Roman Özel Sayısı 65–67 (2002): 538–543. 70 The novel has been translated into English: Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi: An Ottoman Novel, trans. Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016). 71 Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Süreli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (1727–1968), 192. 72 See Moiz Fresko’s petition letter dated 15 October 1888 (3 Teşrinievvel 1304) filed under İ.DH. 1115/87229 lef 1a at the Başbakanlık Arşivi (Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office).

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Rethinking Literature in Turkish view—because you all speak our language—we are very close and resemble each other.73

Leaving aside that he overlooked the fact that not all Arabs were ­Muslims, he seemed to cherish the idea of a shared Armenian and Turkish culture which went beyond religious boundaries, at a time when the specters of ethnic cleansing and genocide were looming large. This longing was shared by many. In a passage that is probably not the most readable in Temaşa-ı Dünya, Evangelinos Misailidis provides a long catalogue of Greek scholars—he uses the term alim—who lived in Anatolia and admonishes his readers to embrace their heritage: “These are your fellow citizens,” he writes, “the roses of the Anatolian garden, whose charming fragrance has scented the world and fought back the putrid smell of ignorance.”74 Halit Ziya, Fresko, Vartanyan and all the others could not have agreed more.

73 Şahabettin Süleyman, “Ermeni Edebiyatı,” in S. Serents, Ermeni Edebiyatı Numuneleri (Istanbul: Ahmet İhsan ve Şürekâsı Matbaacılık Osmanlı Şirketi, 1912 [r. 1328]), 174. 74 Misailidis, Seyreyle Dünyayı, 329.

CHAPTER 3

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

I

n his controversial 1940 essay on historical materialism, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History,” referred to in English as “­Theses on the Philosophy of History”), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) discusses the role of the chronicler who, in contradistinction to the historian, “narrates events without distinguishing between the great and the small, takes account of the truth, that nothing which has ever happened should be considered as lost for ­history.”1 Referring to this passage in Walter Benjamin: Sentinelle messianique (Walter Benjamin: Messianic sentinel, 1990), an insightful work on Benjamin as a political thinker, the French Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010), invites those who wish to write about the past to “collect preciously the refuse and ruins of history in order to construct a sumptuous mosaic.”2 How should a researcher respond to Bensaïd’s—and Benjamin’s—­ invitation when reflecting on the history of literature in Turkish? The two previous chapters have shown that there is much refuse and many ruins, be it Armeno-Turkish literary texts or the writings of authors whose views did not embrace the ideology of the dominant class. To avoid becoming “refuse and ruins,” a simple footnote in the history of literature, has always been a concern of marginalized authors in Turkey. In a letter dated March 11, 1965, which he wrote to Attilâ İlhan (1925–2005), one of the beacons of socialist poetry in Turkey, the Marxist poet and novelist Hasan İzzettin [Dinamo] (1909–1989) protested that socialist authors were not “mentioned in the literary histories written by reactionaries … and will not be mentioned in those written by … the

1 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften Band, vol. 1.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 694. 2 Daniel Bensaïd, Walter Benjamin: Sentinelle messianique (Paris: Les prairies ordinaires, 2010), 56.

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new sultans of Turkish literature,”3 the latter being a reference to the followers of the Garip movement.4 This should not be read as a complaint, but instead as a statement of fact. Conservative historians of history, usually academics in Turkish language and literature departments in state universities, and critics close to the Kemalist establishment largely ignored the works of Marxist writers. Islamists had similar grievances with the leftists, the Kemalists, and the more liberal ­publishing world. This situation forced them to follow the example of the socialists— set up their own publishing houses and journals and write their own history. For instance, the avant-garde poet and Islamist cultural critic Nuri Pakdil (1934–2019), walking in the footsteps of Necip Fazıl [Kısakürek]’s (1904–1983) Büyük Doğu (The Great East) and Sezai Karakoç’s (b. 1933) Diriliş (Resurrection), established his own press and periodical Edebiyat (Literature). Yet mainstream distributors and bookshops would not handle the works of Islamist intellectuals and writers. As Mehmet Çetin wrote in his 2002 four-volume Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türk Şiiri Antolojisi (Anthology of Turkish Poetry from the Tanzimat to the Present Day), “the supremacy of ideological preferences, feelings of sympathy and antipathy have continued to dominate the [Turkish] artistic world”5 and made anthologies, literary criticism, and historiography that reflect the ideological pluralism of the literary world the exception, not the rule. Some things, however, have changed since Çetin published his remarks in 2002. The recognition of Turkey as a candidate for full membership in the European Union in 1999 and the beginning of full membership negotiations in 2005 promoted greater intellectual freedom which, in the context of K ­ urdish demands for cultural rights, allowed a more systematic engagement with minority issues in the cultural sphere, a taboo in the centralized republican state. Moreover, profound changes affecting academia in Turkey—the founding of private universities that put greater emphasis on academic freedom—as well 3 Quoted in Attilâ İlhan, Ufkun Arkasını Görebilmek (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1999), 80. 4 Hasan İzzettin had little sympathy for the not-always-talented disciples of Garip, the avant-garde poetic movement founded by Orhan Veli [Kanık] (1914–1950), Melih Cevdet [Anday] (1915–2002), and Oktay Rifat [Horozcu] (1914–1988). Not only did he consider that they had “in its fullest sense degenerated Turkish poetry” (quoted in İlhan, Ufkun Arkasını Görebilmek, 80), but also denounced their apolitical stance at a time when socialist intellectuals, like himself, were arrested, prosecuted, and jailed. 5 Mehmet Çetin, Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türk Şiiri Antolojisi (Ankara: Akçağ, 2002), 14. Çetin’s anthology, however, was a welcome attempt to produce a politically pluralist anthology of modern Turkish poetry. See Laurent Mignon, “Mehmet Çetin: Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türk Şiiri,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 2 (2003): 264–266.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

as the belated impact of so-called French theory in the humanities and social sciences contributed to the emergence of revisionist scholarship in the field of Turkish literary historiography. During the first decade of the 2000s, there was less ideological polarization in literary journals, as conservative magazines opened their pages to liberals and leftists and secular publications to religious conservative authors. That said, the second half of the second decade has been marked by a return to increased animosity between secularists and religionists in the literary sphere and elsewhere. Despite the considerable changes that took place in the early 2000s, there are still aspects of the literary tradition in Turkish that are not considered part of its history and remain among its refuse and ruins: these are the missionary publications, aimed primarily at the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire, and written in Armeno-Turkish and Karamanlı. Some would question whether such publications are part of “the tradition of the oppressed” that Benjamin referred to, the tradition of “those who are lying on the ground” and being tread upon by “those who rule today.”6 The socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet, for instance, maintained in a piece entitled “Millî Marş” (The National March), written in the context of the Spanish Civil War, for Tan on March 6, 1937 that the missionaries had always been the avant-garde of the colonial armies: We know very well what [General Franco] means by Christian civilization. Even in the Middle Ages, the Crusades aiming at destroying emerging Arab civilization and at transferring the treasures of Andalusia and the gold mines of the East to their countries, were not a war of religion. They wanted to loot the wealth of the Arab, Muslim, Eastern, Chinese and Asian peoples. Even today, the churches built next to Chinese temples, the missionary schools spreading all over Asia and the propagandists of the Gospel are the pioneers of this rising army. They are the first to arrive and shortly afterwards they are followed by the colonialist exploiters.7

This was a dangerous generalization,8 though it did have a kernel of truth. However, if we do not focus on the foreign organizations which promoted and 6 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 696. 7 Nâzım Hikmet Ran [Nâzım Hikmet], Yazılar 5: Yazılar (1937–1962) (Istanbul: Adam Yayınları, 1992), 21–22. 8 On the complex relationship between the Turkish left and Christian minorities in Turkey see, Laurent Mignon, “Sol ve Hristiyanlar: Yok Oluş ve Sessizlik,” Agos, March 22, 2013 http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/4641/sol-ve-hiristiyanlar-yok-olus-ve-sessizlik.

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diffused that literature, but on those to whom it was addressed and who consumed it, another picture appears. It cannot be denied that little is left of the presence of the readers and addressees of missionary literature but refuse and ruins. For some of the readers who consumed the publications of missionary societies, the proselytizing aims of the publishers had less importance than the pleasure provided by the literary nature of the books they were reading. A popular novel translated from French could be as much a source of enjoyment and edification as a book of the Hebrew bible translated into the Turkish vernacular. Reminiscing on their reading habits, a Greco-Turkish reader from Cappadocia, whose written recollection is preserved at the Archives of Oral Tradition at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens9 draws a revealing picture of this reality: I also did not neglect to read the novel Le Comte de Monte-Christo (1882), Etmekçi Hatun (1885) and I was taught other books, Bios Agioun (Lives of Saints). Since I enjoyed reading them, I imprinted them and all the fine things that I read, in my mind, and made them my own … if only I could become like the heroes who demonstrated those virtues! I may have read the Proverbs of Solomon five times in 1886. I memorized most of them and all my life they have protected me from the intoxication of youth and kept me on the straight and narrow.10

This unnamed reader mentions, side by side, Alexandre Dumas the elder and Xavier de Montépin with a hagiography and the Proverbs of King Solomon. While the emphasis is clearly on the didactic nature of those works, there is little doubt that the pleasure provided by those texts must have been similar. The reader seems to consider Le comte de Monté-Cristo, an Ottoman bestseller, translated into Karamanlı, Armeno-Turkish, and Ottoman Turkish, as well as in other languages of the empire and the Greco-Turkish translation of Montépin’s popular La porteuse de pain (The bread seller) in the same category as the biblical collection of proverbs and sayings.11 This is indicative of a crossing of 9 The Centre for Asia Minor Studies was established in 1930 by Melpo Logotheti-Merlier (1890–1979) in order to preserve the history and culture of the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia after the population exchange between the newly founded Republic of Turkey and Greece. 10 Quoted in Ioanna Petropoulou, “From West to East: The Translation Bridge,” 102. 11 On the Karamanlı translation of “La porteuse de pain” see Aude Aylin de Tapia, “De ‘La Porteuse de pain’ (1884) à l’Etmekçi Hatun’ (1885). Un roman populaire français chez les Karamanlis,” in Cultural Encounters in the Turkish-Speaking Communities of the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2014), 223–256.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

boundaries between sacred and secular literatures, a crossing enabled by the translation of biblical texts into the vernacular through missionary societies. A dual process is taking place, most probably equally unwanted by the missionaries. Sacred books are secularized by being read in the vernacular and literary works are raised to the same status as biblical books. At least in the eyes of the above reader all these works were part of literature. Yet the question remains: To what extent were the “sacred” and the “secular” spheres blurred when these translations were being consumed by readers? This deserves closer attention in the context of Karamanlı literature and discussions about its place within the literary sphere in Ottoman Turkey. The lack of original works in Karamanlı, noted by Turkologists such as János Eckmann (1905–1971) in his entry for the second volume of the 1964 Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, has been used as an argument in favor of the marginalization of Karamanlidika in the study of the history of Turkish literature. However his statement that it consisted mostly of “translations and compilations from Greek works” with a “religious and moralistic” content should not dishearten researchers who wish to explore the contribution of Karamanlı authors to Turkish literature.12 Eckmann concedes in his remarks on nineteenth-century literature that, besides translations from Greek, “profane narrative literature” also consisted of transcriptions into the Greek alphabet of Ottoman Turkish works.13 This shows that some Karamanlı readers and publishers were familiar with the mainstream of Ottoman Turkish literature and leaves a door open for the possibility of literary exchange. The groundbreaking works of Evangelia Balta and Johann Strauss have opened up new ground for the study of Karamanlı literature and enabled reconsideration of the place of the Karamanlı literary field within the larger context of ­Ottoman literatures in Turkish by questioning nationalist preconceptions of literary history. As Strauss notes, Karamanlı (and Armeno-Turkish) authors did not remain totally outside the mainstream of Turkish literature.14 It is worthwhile remembering that at the very time missionaries from the United States and the United Kingdom were hoping to disseminate their brands of Christianity among the Christian and Jewish populations of Ottoman Turkey by printing and distributing biblical translations, back at home some philosophers and scholars, such as Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), argued that 12 János Eckmann, “Die karamanische Literatur,” in Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, vol. 2, ed. Louis Bazin et al. (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1964), 822. 13 Ibid., 833. 14 See Strauss, “Is Karamanlı Literature Part of a ‘Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) Literature’?,” 193.

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the biblical God was mostly “a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness, a literary term, in short”15 and that “the personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations [were] no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations.”16 The Bible was literature. Without being as radical as Arnold, the attitude of the above reader suggests that—­ independently from matters of faith—reading a sacred text, such as the proverbs attributed to King Solomon, could be a source of literary pleasure and was thus, at least in the vernacular, literature. This is nothing new. Already in 1888, Ioakeim Valavanis (1858–1921), the Cappadocian scholar and educator noted that the appearance of Karamanlı books in Asia Minor, including the various religious publications, played a fundamental role in infusing a love of literature in a population that, in the past, had only felt disdain for it.17 Questioning the “literariness” of the language of these translations, a “literariness” which cannot be straightforwardly defined in the context of the new literature of Ottoman Turkey and the appropriation of new literary genres in the nineteenth century, is certainly not illegitimate. However, it is difficult to make any generalization on this topic. The 1886 edition of Solomon’un Meselleri Yani Paroiamiai (The Proverbs of Solomon That is to Say the Pariomaiai), published by the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Boyacıyan18 printing office, and perhaps the translation referred to by the Cappadocian reader, is not devoid of aesthetic qualities. Parts of it would have catered for the didactic and the more aesthetic cravings of readers by combining the simplicity and compactness of the language of folk poetry with the powerful imagery of the biblical text. In lines 8 and 9 of chapter 31, which include the sayings of the enigmatic King Lemuel, a mother enjoins her son to be a righteous ruler who speaks out for the oppressed and the downtrodden: 8.  Ağzını dilsiz için, Çöle terk olunmuşların davası için aç. 15 Emphasis in the original quote. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (New York: MacMillan Company, 1924 [1873]), 10–11. 16 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible: A Review of Objections to ‘Literature and Dogma’ (New York: Macmillan, 1893 [1875]), xx. 17 Balta, “Karamanlıca Kitapların Dönemlere Göre İncelenmesi ve Konularına Göre Sınıflandırılması”: 19. 18 On Hagop Boyacıyan, see Laurent Mignon, “Boyaciyan, Arşag Agop,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Third Edition), Brill Academic Publishers, 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ 1573–3912_ei3_COM_24354.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

9.  Ağzını aç, doğru hüküm eyle, Ve fakir ile biçarenin davasını gör.19 Curiously the Karamanlı translation refers to “the cause of those who were abandoned in (or to) the desert” (çöle terk olunmuşların davası), whereas the biblical text, in the 1611 King James translation, remaining close to the Hebrew original, mentions “the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.” The creativity of the translator is certainly worth noticing, though one cannot help but wonder at the reasons behind the alteration of the original text. The minimalist translation of perplexing lines, such as chapter 30, lines 15–16, would have delighted readers in quest of wisdom with a touch of folk Surrealism: 15.  Sülüğün iki kızı var, ver, ver, derler. Bu üç şey doymaz, Dört şey yeter demez. 16.  Mezar ve kısır rahim, ve suya doymaz toprak, ve yeter demez ateş.20 The Proverbs are certainly not the only biblical translation into Karamanlı that would have catered for both the spiritual and literary needs of the readers. Examples of translated biblical texts that might have led to literary and aesthetic pleasure can be multiplied. The opening verses of the 1905 Karamanlı translation of the Gospel of St John, are powerful lines in their own right: 1. 2.

İptidada idi kelam, ve kelam Allah’ın katında idi, ve kelam Allah idi. Bu iptidada Allah’ın katında idi.

19 Solomon’un Meselleri Yani Paroimiai (Istanbul: Boyacıyan, 1886), 83–84. The King James Version of the passage reads as follows: “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31:8–9). 20 Solomon’un Meselleri Yani Paroimiai, 81. The King James version reads: “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough” (Proverbs 30:15–16).

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3. 4. 5.

Her şey onun ile oldu ve hiçbir olmuş şey onsuz olmadı. Onda hayat var idi ve hayat ademlerin ışığıydı. Ve ışık karanlıkta ziya verir idi ve karanlık onu anlamadı.21

The minimalist wording, partly explicable with the translator’s reliance on words with Turkic roots, make it a more attractive translation than the wordier 1886 Ottoman Turkish version co-published by the American and British Bible societies: 1. Kelam ibtidada mevcut idi ve Kelam Allah’ın nezdinde idi ve Kelam Allah idi 2. Bu Kelam ibtidada Allah’ın nezdinde idi 3. Her şey onun vasıtasıyla vücuda geldi ve vücuda gelmiş olanlardan onsuz bir şey vücuda gelmedi 4. Hayat onda idi hayat dahi adamlarn nuru idi 5. Ve nur zulmette ziya verir zulmet dahi onu idrak etmez idi.22

For instance, the compactness of verse 3 in the Karamanlı version in contradistinction to the same verse in the Ottoman Turkish version (nineteen syllables in contrast to thirty-four) and the use of alliterations in “o” make the GrecoTurkish version a much more attractive text, which in the context of the debates on the simplification of the language of literature and the need to bridge the gap between the language spoken by ordinary people and the language written by literati might have presented possible allays to pursue for linguistic reformers. The wish of reformists such as the diplomat and poet Mustafa Sami Efendi (d. 1855) to “exclude and limit some redundant and unnecessary words and expressions”23 was not simply an approach found in foreign tongues—it was an approach that could be witnessed in missionary translations.

21 İncil: İoannes Mucibince (n.p., n.d.), n.p. 22 “İncil: Yuhanna’nın Tahriri Üzere,” Kitab-ı Mukaddes Yani Ahd-ı Atik ve Ahd-ı Cedit (Istanbul: Hagop Boyacıyan Matbaası, 1886), 867. The King James version reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” ( John 1:1–5). 23 Mustafa Sâmi Efendi, Avrupa Risâlesi. In Bir Avrupa Bürokratının Avrupa İzlenimleri: Mustafa Sâmi Efendi ve Avrupa Risâlesi, ed. M. Fatih Andı (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1996), 79.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

Some missionaries who acted as translators were very conscious of the seriousness of their task. William Goodell (1792–1867)24 described his endeavor to translate the complete Bible into Armeno-Turkish in the following terms: It is not like giving the Scriptures to the destitute heathen, where haste is required rather than extreme accuracy, and where, the idiom not being supposed to be perfectly understood, a more critical examination of difficult passages may be reserved for a future edition, when the language itself may have to be revised and made more idiomatical. Nor is it like giving the Scriptures to the ignorant and unenlightened, who will never of themselves find out any of those mistakes and defects which the translator can himself correct in some future edition, when more time may be devoted to the work, more experience acquired in it, and better helps obtained for it. But it is preparing the Scriptures for those who are comparatively enlightened; who as a nation have access to them in at least two languages already, though neither of them generally understood, and the learned and influential of whom have in many cases become great pedants in criticism, and captious beyond endurance,—being much more inclined to compare for the sake of finding discrepancies than to read with a prayerful desire to understand the meaning, and be guided into all truth.25

Quite clearly, Goodell did not only have theological accuracy on his mind, but also desired to produce a text which was inspired and literarily pleasing. His endeavors were not limited to the translation of the Holy Book: he also worked on an Armeno-Turkish dictionary and grammar “which would have proved invaluable to the oriental student,” but those manuscripts were unfortunately destroyed during a fire which ravaged the district of Pera in 1831.26 However, he also managed to prepare Armeno-Turkish translations of popular Protestant tales, namely Legh Richmond’s (1772–1827) The Dairyman’s Daughter and The Young Cottager, both of which were printed at the American press in Malta under the direction of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.27 24 On Goodell, see Cemal Yetkiner, “Istanbul’da bir Cemaatin Doğuşu: William Goodell ve Amerikan Protestan Misyonu,” Akademik Orta Doğu 3 no. 1 (2008): 133–164. 25 Edward D. G. Prime, Forty Years in the Turkish Empire or the Memoirs of Rev. William Goodell, D. D: Late Missionary of the A. B. C. F. M. at Constantinople (Cambridge: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875), 267. 26 James Ellsworth De Kay, Sketches of Turkey in 1831 and 1832 by an American (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), 85. 27 Prime, Forty Years in the Turkish Empire, 225.

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Works such as Sütçü Kızının Nakliyeti (The Story of the Dairyman’s Daughter, 1829) and Galipe Sakini Jane Nam Genç Kızın Nakliyeti (The Story of the Young Girl Named Jane Who Lived in a Hut, 1829) were in a grey zone between religious pamphlets and literary fiction. Indeed, activities of missionary societies were not limited to the dissemination of translations of the Bible and religious pamphlets. Literary texts that were deemed to be suitable for the promotion of Christian teachings were also translated. While such texts were translations of literary works, they have generally been ignored in Turkish literary historiography. One of the most translated literary works in Turkish, in fact, was the reformed Baptist preacher John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) masterwork The Pilgrim’s Progress, originally published in 1678. The first translation into Turkish dates from 1864 and was printed in the Armeno-Turkish alphabet in Istanbul by Harutyun Minasyan’s press. It is notable that it was among the earliest Western literary works to be translated into Turkish.28 In 1876–1877, two short pamphlets summarizing episodes of Bunyan’s magnum opus were published in Izmir, a large cosmopolitan port city on the Aegean Sea, again in an Armeno-Turkish translation.29 In 1879, Hagop Boyacıyan’s (1837–1914) printing office published a Karamanlı translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It bore the title Hristiyan Yolculuğu (The Christian Journey) and not Kristiyanın Yolculuğu (Christian’s Journey) as had been the case for the 1864 Armeno-Turkish translation.30 Perhaps the omission of the genitive suffix on the title page of the Greco-Turkish version, which turned “Christian,” the name of the main protagonist of Bunyan’s masterwork, into the adjective “Christian” was a way of emphasizing the allegorical nature of the text. Not only were the readers invited to imitate Christian, but they were also called upon to be Christians, preferably of the Protestant denomination. Boyacıyan’s press specialized in the publication of books and other printed material of the American and British missionary societies that subsidized them. There is no doubt that Bunyan was translated and distributed because his work

28 John Bunyan, Kristiyanın Yolculuğu: Bu Dünyadan Gelecek Dünyaya, Rüya Şeklinde Yapılmış (Istanbul: H. Minasyan, 1864). 29 John Bunyan, Kristiyanın Gelecek Şehre Doğru Olan Yolculuğu (Izmir: Dedeyan, 1876) and Kristiyanın Gemiyle Ahrete Doğru Olan Yolculuğu (Izmir: Dedeyan, 1877). 30 John Bunyan, Hristiyan Yolculuğu (Istanbul: A. Hagop Boyaciyan, 1879). See also Strauss, “Is Karamanli Literature Part of a ‘Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) Literature’?,” 180. Note that in the absence of apostrophes in the Armeno-Turkish script, the title was ambiguous, as it could be read as both “Christian’s journey” and “The journey of the Christian” in line with Bunyan’s original intention.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

was believed to have a profound spiritual value and was considered as a useful medium to spread Protestantism in the Ottoman lands. This being said, the blurb on the front cover of the Karamanlı edition suggests a more complex story. The short description of the work emphasizes that the text is essentially an interesting story, the troubled journey of a fellow Christian with whom the reader can empathize. The text is presented as a translation of the book that John Bunyan wrote in order to describe and explain, in the form of a dream, the lifetime of the one who enters upon the path of life and his experiences, through the example of the believer’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City.31

Religious edification was clearly not the translators’ sole aim. The entertainment of readers also played a role. Hagop Boyacıyan’s press reprinted the ­ urkish 1864 Armeno-Turkish edition with a revised title in 1881.32 Ottoman T translations were soon to follow: The first one was printed in Shumen, in today’s Bulgaria, in 190533 by the convert Abdülmesih Yuhenna Avidaranyan (1861–1919) and was reedited in Plovdiv in 1908.34 The second one was published in Istanbul in 1923 in Mustafa Necati’s translation which was reedited in 1932 in the Latin script after the alphabet reform and again in 1967.35 In 1961 an abridged version was published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Istanbul, co-translated by Nurhan Acar and Paul Nilson and illustrated by Sevinç Tiryakigil.36 Bünyamin Candemir published another in 1987.37 The latest translation, this time by Umut Alper Ceylan, was published by İnkılâp Publishers, one of Turkey’s leading publishers, in 2003 and reedited in 2018.38 31 Bunyan, Hristiyan Yolculuğu, [front cover]. 32 John Bunyan, Kristiyan Yolculuğu, Yani, Müminin Helak Şehrinden Semavi Şehre Seyahatı (­Istanbul: A. H. Boyacıyan, 1881). 33 John Bunyan, Yolcunun Azimeti, Bu Dünyadan Gelecek Dünyaya, trans. Abdülmesih Yuhenna Avidaranyan (Shumen: Avidaranyan Press, 1905). 34 John Bunyan, Mesihin Seyahatnamesi: Bu Dünyadan Gelen Dünyaya (Plovdiv: Avidaranyan Press, 1908). 35 John Bunyan, Hac Yolunda: Bu Dünyadan Öteki Dünyaya, trans. Mustafa Necati (Istanbul: Hagop Matyosyan, 1923), (Istanbul, 1932 and Istanbul: Redhouse Yayınevi, 1967). 36 John Bunyan, Müminin Yolculuğu (Istanbul: American Board Neşriyat Dairesi, 1961). 37 John Bunyan, İnanlının Yolculuğu, Yeruşalim Yolculuğu, trans. Bünyamin Candemir (Istanbul: Doyuran Matbaası, 1987). 38 John Bunyan, Çarmıh Yolculuğu (Yeruşalim Yolculuğu), trans. Umut Alper Ceylan (Istanbul: İnkılâp, 2003).

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Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book which has had an extraordinary life. Not only is it considered the progenitor of the English novel and a key text in the English literary canon, but it is also a Christian allegory whose Protestant theological background made it a quasi-perfect missionary text for Protestant proselytizers. Bunyan’s major work thus ended up being one of the most translated English literary works. Still, the missionary zeal to promote the evangelical message in Ottoman Turkey should not hide the fact that the Pilgrim’s ­Progress is also a great work of literature “as original as anything can be,”39 not least because Bunyan’s exploration of the complexity of human nature and his rich characterization extended the boundaries of traditional allegories and heralded the advent of a new genre: the novel. As Isabel Hofmeyr reminds her readers in her groundbreaking reassessment of Bunyan as a transnational author, The Pilgrim’s Progress, “as a near-Bible, … was both secular and sacred; serious and pleasurable, fictional yet also ‘true.’”40 The rationale behind translations into ­Turkish, whether in Armeno-Turkish, Karamanlı, Ottoman, or modern T ­ urkish, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and even twenty-first centuries is equally blurred. And the motives of translators and readers are mixed. It is true that religious motivation seems to have had the upper hand: Yuhenna Avidaranyan, born Muhammet Şükrü Efendi, who converted to an Armenian evangelical church and preached to Turkish-speaking Muslims in Bulgaria, prepared his translation by transliterating the Armeno-Turkish translation which “the American missionaries [had] intended for the Turkish-speaking Armenians.”41 Similarly Mustafa Necati’s 1923 translation was commissioned by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Nevertheless, at a time when the intellectual elite of ­Ottoman Turkey had turned their face towards the West and were promoting Western literatures as models for the rejuvenation of Turkish literature, there is little doubt that readers who grabbed a copy of the translation of Bunyan’s work read it above all as a literary work, as what the literary critic and intellectual Murat Belge called “Defoe’s ancestor”—that is to say, a proto-­novel.42 For authors such as H ­ ovsep Vartanyan or Ahmet Midhat Efendi, pioneers of the novel in ­Turkish who explored ways of bridging ­traditional ­storytelling with 39 Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958 [1954]), 32. 40 Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 12. 41 John Avetaranian, A Muslim Who Became A Christian, ed. Richard Schäfer and trans. John Bechard (Hertford: Authors OnLine Ltd, 2002), 136. 42 Murat Belge, Edebiyat Üstüne Yazılar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000), 56.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

modern fiction, B ­ unyan’s text had the potential to be inspirational on literary grounds. It had one particularity that rendered it quite distinct from translations of other works of English literature which were popular at the time, such as Robinson Crusoe: The Pilgrim’s Progress had been directly translated from English, whereas other translations were based on French versions or had an even more complex origin. Despite this long history of translations into Turkish, the absence of John Bunyan’s work in the histories of Turkish literature, which usually include a chapter or two on literary translations and even in scholarly volumes that deal with the history of translation in Turkish is daunting. Whether translations of Bunyan have been deliberately edited out of the history of literary activity in Ottoman Turkey is open to debate. The fact that the Armeno-Turkish, the Karamanlı, and Ottoman Turkish translations were promoted by Protestant missionary organizations that mainly aimed at converting the Christian communities of the empire and, more rarely, and even less successfully, heterodox Alevi and orthodox Sunni Muslim communities, might explain why scholars and critics have decided to leave those texts outside literary history. Be that as it may, such an attempt at justification is unsatisfactory, as the texts, once published, existed also as literature, independent of the missionary organizations’ original aims. As a result, it is difficult to legitimize ignorance of Bunyan’s work on literary and historical grounds: the translation of “Defoe’s ancestor” was printed in 1864, the very year Ahmet Lütfi Efendi’s (1817–1907) Turkish rendition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published. Potentially, the coevality of these two translations could have given historians and critics a great opportunity to study in parallel the reception of these two founding texts of the English novel—the progenitor and its generic descendant—in a nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literary world which was profoundly shaken by the discovery and appropriation of new literary genres. There were also other semi-religious works besides The Pilgrim’s Progress which had reached a certain level of popularity in the English-speaking world and were then translated into Karamanlı Turkish and Armeno-Turkish: Hesba Stretton’s Jessica’s First Prayer, originally published by the Religious Tract Society in 1867, translated as Cesika’nın İlk Duası and published by the American Board of Missionaries at the Aramyan Printing Office in Istanbul in 1883, is another example.43 This evangelical bestseller, that pioneered the genre of ­Victorian 43 Strauss, “Is Karamanli Literature Part of a ‘Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian) Literature’?,” 181.

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childhood poverty narratives, never gets a mention in the histories of literary translation into Turkish. Here too, its disadvantages are similar to those of ­Bunyan’s work. Beside its publication in Karamanlı and Armeno-Turkish, that is to say in alphabets other than the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, the fact that it was published by a society with a missionary aim continues to play a role in its marginalization, as it is perceived like Bunyan’s masterwork as a Christian text. The perception of this novella as a religious tractate is confirmed in the writings of the missionary societies that promoted Stretton’s work in Ottoman Turkey. The Religious Tract Society, an evangelical interdenominational Protestant organization founded in the British capital in 1799, is a case in point as it supported the publication of its material “in Armenian, Armeno-Turkish and Greco-Turkish, via grants given to the American Mission in Constantinople.”44 In the same breath, Samuel Gosnell Green (1822–1905), the author of an early history of the Religious Tract Society, mentions Jessica’s First Prayer, which had been “a great message of good to several girls,”45 and Frances Ridley Havergal’s (1836–1879) Little Pillows. While Green’s emotional reference to Havergal’s devotional miniatures for children is touching,46 Stretton’s short novel is of a different genre altogether. In a major study of Stretton’s works, Elaine Lomax invites her readers to reassess the place of the novelist in nineteenth-century literary and cultural life. She criticizes the fact that, like other evangelical writers, Stretton has been denigrated by the critical establishment that neither paid any attention to the literary qualities of her works, nor to the questions she raised, and that reduced her novels to religious didactic literature.47 Yet, Jessica’s First Prayer helped to introduce the image of urban childhood poverty in Victorian times into literature.48 In view of the debates on social realism and the depiction of poverty that would rip apart the Ottoman literary establishment in the late nineteenth century, this work might have had something to contribute to the debate. Indeed, in an age that pitted the advocates of Realism—the hakikiyun—against the proponents of Romanticism—the 44 Samuel G. Green, The Story of the Religious Tract Society For One Hundred Years (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1899), 104. 45 Ibid., 202. 46 The author tells us that “one bright interesting boy of fifteen years, slowly wasting by incurable disease, being given Little Pillows, in Turkish to read, found from it such help and peace that the very mention of the book to his friends now brings tears to their eyes, as they remember the comfort it was to him on his dying pillow” (Ibid.). 47 Elaine Lomax, Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2009), 63. 48 Jan Susina, The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 2011), 108.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

h­ ayaliyun or illusionists—Stretton’s translation might have indicated a new path. Ahmet Midhat Efendi denounced Emile Zola’s (1840–1902) and his Ottoman Turkish disciples’ understanding of Realism which focused, according to the Ottoman Turkish novelist, on wretchedness and ugliness as if “those things called goodness and beauty did not exist in the world, in Europe and in Paris” anymore.49 Stretton’s worldview was much closer than Zola’s to what Ahmet Midhat was seeking. In any case, it is worthwhile remembering that some of the earliest translated texts, even if they had not been published by missionary organizations, had a strong religious connotation. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is a representative case. It was translated by Çelebi Dimitrakis in Karamanlı Turkish and published in 1853 with the title Robinson Krusos Hikâyesi (The Story of Robinson Crusoe). The Armeno-Turkish translation by H. Topalyan was published in 1879 with the title Hikâye-i Robenson (The Story of Robinson). The French priest Fénélon’s Télémaque (1699) is another significant text in this context. It was published in Karamanlı in 1887 with the title Sergüzeşt-i Telemak (The Adventure of Télémaque) in a translation by Pavlos Misailidis. The Armeno-Turkish translation by B. Z. Garabedian with the title Telemak dates from 1892. Even the Abbé Prevost’s Manon Lescaut, with its strong Jansenist polemics, was translated into Karamanlı by I. Panayotidis and published in 1898. Although there seems to be no Armeno-Turkish translation of this novel, an Armeno-Turkish translation, probably of the dramatized version by Théodore Barrière (1823–1877) and Marc Fournier (1818–1879), was made by Güllü Agop [Hagop Vartovyan] (1840–1902).50 All these narratives were deeply entrenched within the Christian tradition and promoted different visions of Christianity. Some of these texts were also translated into Ottoman Turkish. Fénélon’s Télémaque, translated in 1859 by Yusuf Kamil Pasha (1808–1876) and printed in 1862, was not only a pioneering text that bridged the gap between the romance and the novel, it was also a narrative that imagined a utopian Christian state, thus making it a strange choice for a Muslim translator. Robinson Crusoe too was not quite an obvious alternative. While this didactic novel about a castaway and cannibals had all that was needed to seduce an audience thirsting for 49 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Müşahedat, 4. For an introduction to aspects of the debate on literary realism, see Evin, Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, 173–220. 50 Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Sürekli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (1727–1968), 422 and Metin And, Osmanlı Tiyatrosu: Kuruluşu-Gelişimi-Katkısı (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları, 1976), 192.

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tales of extraordinary adventures, its colonialist and missionary subtext made it problematic for a mainly Muslim readership. The more so as biblical quotations and references, as well as its explicit emphasis on Christian values, abound in the novel. However, abridged to merely 114 pages, Ahmet Lütfi Efendi’s translation partly purged it of its Christian dimension.51 The various Turkish versions of Robinson Crusoe, though heavily cut, preserved the combination of moralistic didacticism and entertainment that was also characteristic for The Pilgrim’s Progress. In their foreword for the 1853 Karamanlı translation, Evangelinos Misailidis and Ioannis Laziridis maintained that the novel was a “delightful and pleasant, instructive and illuminating story.” They reminded the reader that “patience is salvation” and showed the dangers of not submitting to paternal authority, while also stressing the power of the human will—the ability to achieve “impossible things through resourcefulness.”52 Their message was rather confused: The paternalistic call to filial obedience seems to clash with man’s ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. Was this ability not triggered by the consequences of his disobedience? However, this message and the emphasis on the religious value of patience, which is rarely a motor of progress, do not lessen the fact that the two publishers wished to emphasize the moral-educational and also the recreational values of the work. A similar ambivalence also existed in the reception of the work in the English-speaking world and rendered its religious instrumentalization difficult.53 In his prologue, the translator noted that he had translated the book for his “Christian countrymen in Anatolia.” Having mentioned that the scholars of Europe had decided that every social class ought to read the novel, he indicated that it had even been translated “by the ancient Armenian people into their own language.” Thus a translation into “the Turkish we used” had become necessary.54 References to an Armenian translation of Robinson Crusoe and to 51 Johann Strauss surmises that the Turkish version was probably based on an anonymous ­Arabic translation published by the Jesuits in Malta in 1835 (Strauss, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire [19th–20th Centuries]?,” 46). 52 Quoted in Bülent Berkol, “133 Yıl Önce Yayımlanan Yunan Harfleri İle Türkçe (Karamanlıca) bir ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Çevirisi,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Konferansları Dergisi 21, no. 1 (1986): 143. 53 The novel was morally divisive precisely because it could be read as glamorizing filial disobedience to parental authority. See Bill Bell, “A Castaway among Cannibals: 300 Years of Robinson Crusoe,” Times Literary Supplement 6061 (May 31, 2019): 7. 54 Quoted in Berkol, “133 Yıl Önce Yayımlanan Yunan Harfleri İle Türkçe (Karamanlıca) bir ‘Robinson Crusoe’ Çevirisi”: 145–146.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

an Arabic translation published in Egypt55 are indications of the translator’s awareness of literary developments in different Ottoman languages. Dimitrakis was probably referring to the 1817 translation into Armenian by Minas Pejeshkian (1777–1861), published by the Mekihitarists at the St Lazarus monastery in Venice, a work also mentioned by William Hazlitt (1778–1830) in his edition of the complete works of Defoe56. Whether Ahmet Lütfi Efendi, who authored the first of several Ottoman Turkish translations of Robinson Crusoe knew about Dimitrakis’s translation is unknown. Another text that deserves to be mentioned in this context is Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s translation of Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni in 1874. In it ­Pellico, a Carbonari rebel57, related his experiences in the Austrian jails, making it one of the earliest examples of literary memoirs translated into Ottoman Turkish. The autobiographical text explored some Christian themes such as the patient enduring of suffering and the forgiving of wrongdoers, which partly explains why Namık Kemal, the Young Ottoman intellectual and activist, who himself had endured his own share of exile and imprisonment but had little time for what he considered to be Christian themes, was so enraged by it and attacked both the translator and the translation.58 Fénélon, Defoe and Pellico’s texts could easily have fitted into a Christian literary canon in their respective literary traditions. The extent to which their translators were aware of this dimension is obviously open to discussion. One thing is sure however. Avidaranyan, who transliterated Bunyan into Ottoman Turkish because he did not want Muslims to believe that “Voltaire, Rousseau or the French novels, [were] products of Christian literature,” did not need to worry too much.59 Alternatives to the secular Enlightenment tradition were readily available, though, by the time the Turkish convert was writing, Emile Zola, the Naturalist novelist, and Ludwig Büchner, the exponent of scientific materialism, were p­ robably more influential among part of the progressive intelligentsia in Ottoman 55 Ibid., 154. 56 William Hazlitt, The Works of Daniel Defoe with a Memoir of his Life and Writings, vol. 2 (­London, John Clements, 1841), 13. 57 The Carbonari were a secret revolutionary society which played a major role in the struggle for Italian unification and the rise of Italian nationalism in post-Napoleonic Italy. 58 For a transliteration of Namık Kemal’s famous article, see Namık Kemal, “Mes Prisons Tercümesi Üzerine Muaheze,” in Namık Kemal’in Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Üzerine Görüşleri ve Yazıları, ed. Kâzım Yetiş (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1989), 236–258. For a succinct introduction to Christian themes in Turkish literature, see Laurent Mignon, “Türkçe Edebiyatta Haçın Gölgesi,” Varlık 1247 (August 2011): 16–18. 59 Avetaranian, A Muslim who Became a Christian, 144.

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Turkish than François René de Chateaubriand, the founder of French Romanticism and author of Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity), which included his novella Atala (see chapter 4) and Antoine Lavoisier, the great ­pioneer of modern chemistry who upheld his Christian beliefs. In Ottoman Turkey, the nineteenth century was an era of great literary upheavals. Breaking with the tradition of divan poetry, Ottoman Turkish authors were appropriating new literary genres such as the novel, the short story, and drama and were thus in search of a new literary language. The growth of the press in Ottoman Turkish too required the development of a language which was intelligible to a broader audience. Could translations made with religious aims in the post-Tanzimat period have contributed to the development of the Turkish literary language? The question regarding the language is not as farfetched as it seems. The language of Bible translations in Armeno-Turkish and Karamanlı, compact and avoiding Persianate grammatical constructions, and the learned Arabic and Persian vocabulary of contemporary Ottoman Turkish texts could potentially have been of interest to reformist writers—those who strove to bridge the gap between the spoken language and the language of Ottoman prose and poetry and worked towards the simplification and democratization of the language of literature. While it is true that, as noted by the American traveler James Ellsworth De Kay (1792–1851) when he was in Ottoman Turkey in 1831–1832, “that few Turks are acquainted with the Armenian characters,” his judgement that “religious Armeno-Turkish tracts are of no use to them” might be a little cavalier.60 Armeno-Turkish and Greco-­Turkish translations of literary and biblical texts provided examples of prose in a language close to that spoken by the people. Similarly, the translation of a p­ roto-novel like The Pilgrim’s Progress was attractive for writers who themselves were exploring ways of moving beyond traditional narratives, such as the “hikâye” in the context of folk literature and the “mesnevi” in the context of classical Sufi literature, towards the realist novel. And with regard to Realism, the translation of a text such as Jessica’s First Prayer and its humane yet realist depiction of poverty might have attracted the attention of authors in search of ways to explore social concerns in fiction in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. The fact that alphabet differences were not necessarily impediments to the diffusion of literature, as seen in the previous chapter, forces us to ask those questions. Looking at missionary translations and more generally at ArmenoTurkish and Karamanlı literatures does not only give rise to questions 60 De Kay, Sketches of Turkey, 148.

The “Refuse and Ruins” of Literary History

concerning the genesis of modern Turkish literature. Scholars of Turkish literature such as Johann Strauss have argued the case convincingly for the concept of Christian Turkish literature, to parallel Christian Arab literature.61 While recognizing the differences between these two traditions—beside historical developments, mainly the question of the alphabet and the lack of interest for the Christian past of Turkophone peoples—he maintains that there is no justification for the inexistence of “Christian Turkish studies.” Unlike Georg Graf in his monumental five-volume Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur (History of Christian Arab literature, 1944–1953), who only includes works “which have a connection to the Church, which reflect the teachings of the Church, which are witness to and interpret the rites of the Church and promote proselytization,”62 Strauss advocates the inclusion of secular literature under the umbrella of Christian Turkish literature. This, however, leads us to a number of questions. Reducing Christian literature to religious literature is problematic indeed, as creative writers with a Christian background also explore biblical motives in their works or use an imagery that has Christian connotations. However, it is doubtful that Teodor Kasap who was very much part of the literary mainstream of his era would have defined himself as a Christian in matters of literature. Would a poet such as Hristaki, who published his works in leading literary periodicals of the time such as Malumat (Knowledge), have necessarily wanted to be categorized as a Christian poet, even though he wrote some verses with a clear Christian message such as these opening verses for an ode written about a monastery devoted to the Virgin Mary, established on Mount Gümüşhane: “Present your reverence, a sublime sanctuary this is/The beautiful seat of the Messiah’s munificence and grace.”63 Perhaps the German concept of Kulturchristentum, which one could unsatisfactorily translate as “Cultural Christianity,” may be a useful concept in this discussion. In a German context, Kulturchristentum is referred to as a post-­Enlightenment development. It is a concept used to categorize cultural products that engage with Christian culture and more specifically the Christian imaginaire. Importantly, as noted by Wilhelm Gössman in his study 61 Strauss, “Is Karamanlı Literature Part of a Christian-Turkish (Turco-Christian Literature)?,” 153–200. 62 Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, vol. 1, Die Übersetzungen (­Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944), 3. 63 Hristaki, “untitled,” in Arayışlar Devri Türk Şiiri Antolojisi, ed. M. Kayahan Özgül (Ankara: Türk Diyanet Vakfı Yayınları, 2000), 409.

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­ ulturchristentum: Religion und Literatur in der Geistesgeschichte (Cultural ChrisK tianity: Religion and Literature in Intellectual History, 2002), those who participate in the production of cultural Christianity, in its broadest sense are “those persons, who are more or less disconnected from any church, who are even agnostics.”64 He argues further that “cultural Christianity is a modern concept which could be used to describe secularizing processes in a culture determined by Christianity.”65 The question needs to be asked whether in the wake of the Tanzimat and the rise of nationalisms, which were often secular but instrumentalized religion for identitarian reasons, it is not legitimate to use the concept of Kulturchristentum to incorporate the whole breadth of intellectual and literary works produced by Turkish-writing authors with a Christian background. Would it not even be legitimate to argue that some authors, with a Muslim background, through their translations and their works with biblical references, participated in a plural interpretation of a Turkish ­Kulturchristentum?

64 Wilhelm Gössman, Kulturchristentum: Religion und Literatur in der Geistesgeschichte (Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 2002), 15. 65 Gössman, Kulturchristentum, 21.

CHAPTER 4

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

A

mong the monuments of the European Kulturchristentum translated  into Turkish, Atala, ou Les Amours de deux sauvages dans le desert (Atala, or The Loves of two wildlings in the desert), the French Romantic writer ­Chateaubriand’s novella originally published in French in 1801, has a particular place. Indeed, this short narrative deeply moved Turkish-writing literati in the ­Ottoman Empire. The tragic story of forbidden love between two native Americans— Atala, a Catholic young woman and Chactas, a captive tribesman who is faithful to the religion of his forefathers—struck a chord with readers. Beside the conflict between religious aspirations and individual longings, the novella also included reflections on slavery, a hot topic among the Ottoman chattering classes. Not only was this short novel translated in 1872 by Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem—who was later to become one of the leading lights of nineteenth-­ century literature—but it was also adapted by the same author for the stage with the title Atala Yahut Amerika Vahşileri (Atala or the Wildlings of America) in 1873. Such a creative appropriation and rewriting of a French work of fiction for the Ottoman Turkish stage was far from unusual.1 Several theatrical adaptations of Atala were published in France too, many of them parodies of this Romantic classic.2

1 Metin And, Osmanlı Tiyatrosu: Kuruluşu-Gelişimi-Katkısı (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları, 1976), 192. 2 Sarga Moussa, “Atala au théâtre,” Bulletin de la société Chateaubriand 38 (1995): 23–29.

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Yet, it is not only the play that the Ottoman author adapted. The 1872 translation was also partly a rewriting of the novella. Indeed, in a “special comment” added to his introduction to the translation, Ekrem noted that some of the sections in some parts of the book that I translated were shortened. Some others were entirely removed and others were changed and transformed. This was due to the natural differences in worldviews of the author of the book and the translator’s.3

This comment has led various critics and scholars to argue that “the natural differences in worldviews” were of a religious nature and that those changes amounted to removing the openly Christian references in the text in order to make it more tolerable for a largely Muslim audience.4 Such adaptations were encouraged and considered acceptable by readers and translators. Ahmet Midhat Efendi, who invested significant efforts in theorizing the legitimacy of such adaptations, argued in a short piece that he wrote as an introduction to Fatma Aliye’s novel Muhadarat (Useful Information, 1892) that any translation required a fair level of adaptation in order not to alienate the reader.5 However, it is questionable whether the Turkish translation and the dramatic adaptation of Atala were entirely “de-christianized” and Islamized.6 It is true that some obviously Christian references to the “Cross,” Jesus, and missionary activities were edited out of the texts, as were entire passages only understandable and acceptable within a Catholic theological framework. And yet, father Aubry who is mostly referred to as “the old man” (ihtiyar) in the Ottoman Turkish translation of the novella, is nevertheless called “the missionary” (misyoner) in the play—a term which is associated in Turkish with ­Christian proselytism. The translation too preserves some positive references to actions of the Catholic missionaries referred to as papaslar—the priests— who as part of their ministry in far away lands “came and sacrificed many things 3 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem [Mahmut Ekrem], “Mukaddime-i Mütercim,” in Atala, by Chateaubriand, trans. Mahmut Ekrem (Istanbul: Terakki Matbaası, 1872 [h. 1288], 7. 4 See, e.g., Nihayet Arslan, “Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’in Atala Çevirisini Biçimlendiren Kültürel ve Estetik Kaygılar,” bilig 81 (Spring 2017): 139–163. 5 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, “Kariîn-i Kirâma” in Fatma Aliye Hanım, Muhâdarât, ed. H. Emel Aşa (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1996), 15. 6 See Fatih Altuğ, “19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Edebiyatında İmparatorluk, Medeniyet, Yerlilik ve Din,” in Tanzimat ve Edebiyat: Osmanlı İstanbul’unda Modern Edebi Kültür, ed. Mehmet Fatih Uslu and Fatih Altuğ (Istanbul: Türk İş Bankası, 2014), 74 and Arslan, “Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’in Atala Çevirisini Biçimlendiren Kültürel ve Estetik Kaygılar”: 145–151.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

in the name of pure humanity.”7 This reference disappears from the play, probably for dramaturgical reasons, as the frame story—the elder Chactas narrating his adventures to René—is not integrated into the dramatic version. Atala was a pioneering text of French Romanticism. However, it was also part of Chateaubriand’s lifetime project of defending Catholicism against the onslaught of secularism and rationalism. He included it with its sequel René in his apologetic Génie du Christianisme (1802). This proselytizing dimension emerges in two aspects of the novella’s conclusion: the conversion of the pagan hero Chactas to Christianity—an aspect that was duly edited out of the Turkish translation and play—and the fidelity of the virgin Atala to her vow of celibacy. While Chactas’s conversion is not a topic of the Turkish versions of the text, Atala’s vow remains central in both the translation and the play. In Ekrem’s play readers learn that, having conceived Atala out of wedlock with a Spaniard, her mother, after a trying pregnancy and birth, dedicated Atala to the Virgin Mary: “So that I do not die, my mother dedicated me. She dedicated my virginity to Holy Mary,”8 explains Atala during her long agony. Even though she considers this to be a “cursed vow,” she is faithful to it and sees her self-inflicted death, while still a virgin, as a way to redeem her sinful mother: “[I committed] a sin! O father, a sin! However, I only loose myself. But I save my mother.”9 Though this Marian vow of celibacy imposed on a daughter might be construed as inhuman and thus, reading between the lines, as a condemnation of Catholicism, the missionary in the play promises to free Atala of the vow, because “there is no religion in the world that imposes conditions on humans which go beyond their strength.”10 Just like in the French text, the emphasis remains on the fact that it is not religion—in this case Catholicism—that is the problem, but rather the way humans interpret it. By upholding her vow in order to redeem her mother, Atala almost reaches the status of a martyr. Almost— because while her suicide may be the ultimate sacrifice, it is still a mortal sin. Implicitly, the narrative condemns the promoters of an understanding of religion which is only synonymous with abstinence, asceticism, and selflessness. While not denying that these are virtues, it advocates a faith which is ultimately 7 Chateaubriand, Atala trans. Mahmut Ekrem, 40. 8 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem [Recaî-zade M. Ekrem], Atala Yâhût Amerika Vahşileri in Recaîzade M. Ekrem, Bütün Eserleri 1, ed. İsmail Parlatır et al. (Ankara: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1997), 128. 9 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Atala Yâhût Amerika Vahşileri, 133. 10 Ibid., 132.

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humane and benevolent, incarnated in the missionary in Ekrem’s play and Father Aubry in Chateaubriand’s novella. As such, Atala continues to be a very Christian narrative, even in Ottoman Turkish, and a rather odd choice for an Ottoman Turkish Muslim translator. The reception of the play was accordingly mixed. Abdülhak Hamit, Ekrem’s comrade in arms when it came to promote literary innovation, appreciated the exotic dimension of the play. He argued that “the attitude and actions of Atala reveal[ed] the social mores of a tribe unknown to us,”11 in the afterword of his 1875 drama Duhter-i Hindu (The Indian Daughter). This was an approach that was “more significant, more accomplished” than many “national play[s]” which were simply “morality plays.” Even Namık Kemal, who as a literary critic was not so easy to please, congratulated Ekrem on writing a drama “that was among the works which embellish the library of progress of our new literature,”12 though he was uneasy with the playwright’s introduction and a series of stylistic infelicities. There must have been more critical reviews which Ekrem took on board. Indeed, in a foreword he wrote for a later play, he noted that he wished to rewrite Atala Yahut Amerika Vahşileri and review its “vocabulary and expressions, ideas and emotions,” which had all been pinpointed for criticism, yet had not yet found the time to do it.13 While this attitude indicates the insecurities of the young author, it also shows the importance that he granted this early play and the story of Atala as part of his oeuvre. This is the more remarkable as Chateaubriand himself had not really captured the imagination of Turkish-writing authors in the Ottoman realms until then. From the point of view of translation, there had been little interest, even among Catholic Armenians, where the sole translation of his works, published in book form, seems to have been Kirkor Çilingiryan’s 1860 translation of Les aventures du dernier Abencérage (The adventures of the last Abencerage, 1821).14 Its subject matter, yet another tale of doomed love because of religious differences, this time in Granada after the fall of Islamic Spain, captivated readers and the work was republished in 1863 and 1877.15 Unsurprisingly, the Andalusian 11 Abdülhak Hamit Tarhan [Abdülhak Hamit], Duhter-i Hindu (Istanbul: Tasvir-i Efkar ­Matbaası, 1875 [h. 1292]), 197. 12 Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları I: İstanbul, Avrupa ve Magosa Mektupları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1967), 288. 13 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem [Recaî-zade M. Ekrem], Vuslat yahut Süreksiz Sevinç, in Recaî-­ zade M. Ekrem, Bütün Eserleri 1, 141. 14 François-René de Chateaubriand, Son Abenserajın Sergüzeşti (Izmir: Dedeyan, 1860). 15 Stepanyan, Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Sürekli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (1727–1968), 116.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

theme also attracted Muslim readers and the book was translated into Ottoman Turkish by A. Tahir four years later16 and again in 1913 by Kadri Mesut.17 René, the sequel to Atala, was only published in Ottoman Turkish translation in 1894 by Mehmet Celal (1867–1912), himself a prolific novelist and poet.18 Several editions were to follow during the republican period, the religious dimension of the novellas being recognized and appreciated, sometimes even from unexpected quarters. Nihad Sâmi Banarlı (1907–1974), for instance, a disciple of the poet Yahya Kemal, saw in Atala and René, and more generally Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, a possible model for a more spiritual Turkish literary culture. Though Banarlı upheld a religious-nationalist view of culture and society, his article with the revealing title “Allah’sız Sanat” (Godless Art), published in the daily Hürriyet on December 21, 1957, pointed solely to Christian authors in whose works the “light of an openly faithful art” burned brightly.19 More than the references of critics and scholars, Atala’s occasional appearance in the hands of characters from Ottoman Turkish novels points to the popularity of the text in the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, heroes in the novels of Armenian Catholics are particularly keen on Chateaubriand’s Romantic classic. In the first ever novel in the Turkish language Akabi Hikâyesi the Orthodox Akabi and the Catholic Hagop discover their affinity when they discuss the ordeals of Atala and Chactas, which they read in the French original. They are not the only ones. Indeed, Gülünya, the unfortunate heroine of Hovhannes Balıkçıyan’s (1833–1898) novel Karnik, Gülünya ve Dikran’ın Dehşetli Vefatlari Hikâyesi cites both Atala and its sequel René among the works she appreciates. This passion for Romantic fiction is not encouraged by her father who threatens to “throw them out of the window” when he finds her reading such books.20 Yet Atala also turns up in the works of Muslim authors. It will come as no surprise that it is a work that enchants the doomed lovers of Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Vuslat Yahut Süreksiz Sevinç (Vuslat, or Transitory Joy, 1874), a play 16 François-René de Chateaubriand, İbn-i Serac-ı Ahir, trans. A. Tahir (Istanbul: Mihran ­Matbaası, 1881 [h. 1298]). 17 François-René de Chateaubriand, Son Safha: Son Endülüs Şehzadesi, trans. Kadri Mesut (Trabzon: İkbal Matbaası, 1913 [r.1329]). 18 François-René de Chateaubriand, René, trans. Mehmet Celal (Istanbul: Safa ve Enver ­Matbaası, 1894 [h. 1311]). 19 Nihad Sâmi Banarlı, Edebiyat Sohbetleri (Istanbul: Kubbealtı Neşriyatı, 2007 [2004]), 302. 20 Quoted in Murat Cankara, İmparatorluk ve Roman: Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Romanları Osmanlı/Türk Edebiyat Tarihyazımında Konumlandırmak (PhD diss., Bilkent University, 2011), 336.

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that he published two years after his translation of Chateaubriand’s novella and one year after his play exploring the same plot. In a key passage of the drama, Vuslat, a young slave, reads out passages of Atala to the son of her mistress. Her love is requited but doomed, which is perhaps why the two young lovers empathized so deeply with the characters of the Romantic narrative: “It is only five days ago since I went to his room at night. He asked me to read him Atala. We both cried until the morning,”21 Vuslat reveals in a long monologue. It is notable that Vuslat was one of many slave narratives published at the time. In those short stories, novels, and plays, the theme of doomed love allowed the author to engage critically with the sensitive question of slavery in Ottoman Istanbul. This was a difficult theme for reformist intellectuals who needed to navigate between the principles of human dignity and freedom that they espoused, inspired directly or indirectly by the Western Enlightenment, and the Qur’an and the hadith which, albeit on strict conditions, condoned slavery. It was not a topic which was debated much in the press of the day.22 Literature seems to have been the medium which was favored by social critics who wanted to discuss the place of slavery and manumission in Ottoman society. From Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Esaret (Captivity, 1870) to Mehmet ­Celal’s (1867–1912) Bir Kadının Hayatı (The Life of a Woman, 1890) and Emin Nihat’s (1838–1880) Faik Bey ile Nuridil Hanım’ın Sergüzeşti (The Adventure of Faik Bey and Nuridil Hanim, 1875) to Samipaşazade Sezai’s (1859–1936) Sergüzeşt (An Adventure, 1889), several works of the era explored the topic.23 Yet, the fact that slavery was legitimate within an Islamic legal framework limited the scope for discussion in the press and literature. In response to European denouncers of slavery in the Islamic world, ­Ottoman progressives focused on the differences between slavery in Europe and the United States and practices in the Islamic world, bringing to the fore what they considered to be the more humane Islamic approach to slaves. Indeed, they were very much conscious of the fact that it was not so easy to separate the abolitionist discourse that was gaining ground from other imperialist demands towards the Ottoman Empire. For most writers in the post-Tanzimat period the problem was less the Islamic legality of slavery than its implementation. They espoused the discourse that the arguably “humane” approach to slaves 21 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem [Recâi-zade M. Ekrem], Vuslat yahut Süreksiz Sevinç, 175. 22 Börte Sagaster, Herren und Sklaven: Der Wandel im Sklavenbild türkischer Literaten in der Spätzeit des Osmanischen Reiches (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1997), 19. 23 On the topic, see Börte Sagaster, Herren und Sklaven and İsmail Parlatır, Tanzimat Edebiyatında Kölelik (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1992).

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

preached by the prophet of Islam was too often ignored and his encouragement of manumission rarely practiced. Yet slavery was not only a problem for Ottoman advocates of change. For Chateaubriand too slavery was an uneasy topic. His family’s wealth was partly built on the slave trade, as his father, René-Auguste, had been a shipowner and slaver. Rarely does the author address the issue in his works, except for saying that the Christian faith “brought solace to the poor negro, and secured him in another life the kind of deliverance which one found on the side of the Mender of all injustices, the Father of all mercies.”24 There is also a reference to slavery in Atala. Chactas raised the question of the role of Christian missionaries in promoting the adoption of “a mild form of slavery” to replace the brutal execution of war prisoners by burning.25 This particular passage reveals Chauteaubriand’s ambivalent attitude toward slavery—torn as he was between religion, tradition, and a Romantic desire for absolute self-realization—and his implication that enslavement is a preferable state to local traditions and conditions in the slaves’ homelands. This argument would not have displeased authors such as the logician Ali Sedat (1857–1900), the elder brother of novelist Fatma Aliye, who argued that Muslims rendered slaves of African origin a great service as they preserved them from a violent life in their homeland and gave them the opportunity to live within the peaceful realms of Ottoman Islamic civilization.26 The civilizational mission of religion and the acceptability of slavery were thus brought to the fore in both cases. Chateaubriand’s Atala brings together themes that were dear to Ottoman authors who wished to promote social and religious reform while advocating the liberation of the individual from outdated traditions and political oppression. By discussing forbidden love in terms of religious traditions and addressing the question of slavery, it touches upon issues that were at the heart of what can be characterized as the Romantic rebellion in Ottoman Turkish literature. The phrase “Romantic rebellion” in the context of post-Tanzimat literature is not unproblematic. Arguably, the nineteenth century was the era when Ottoman thinkers explored some of the principles of the Enlightenment and engaged, like İbrahim Şinasi, with rationalism.27 However, one of the features 24 Nelly Schmidt, Abolitionnistes de l’esclavage et réformateurs des colonies 1820–1851: Analyses et documents (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2001), 99–100. 25 François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala in Chateaubriand, Atala-René, ed. Pierre Reboul (Paris: Flammarion, 1992 [1964]), 84. 26 Quoted in Sagaster, Herren und Sklaven, 36. 27 See, for instance, Laurent Mignon, “Bir Rasyonalistin Romantik İsyanı: Şair Evlenmesi,” Tiyatro Araştırmaları Dergisi 29, no. 1 (2010): 55–64.

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of Ottoman intellectual life in the final century of the Ottoman Empire was the creative appropriation of, sometimes, seemingly irreconcilable Western strands of thoughts. Hence “Romantic rebellion” does not refer here to a revolt against rationalism, but rather to the slow birth of the “fert”—the person or individual28 in literature, and their rebellion against oppressive traditions. The theme of love, of forbidden love in particular, was quite productive, then, both from a narrative and political point of view. In the second half of the nineteenth century, heterosexual love was still a relatively new subject in Ottoman Turkish written literature. Hence love stories in early Ottoman novels were something novel for a readership that was, perhaps, more used to the homoerotic imagery of much of the classical divan tradition29 than the heteronormativity of the European novel. For a writer who wished to spread a message, telling a story about the love between a man and a woman was thus an efficient way to catch readers’ attention. From Şemsettin Sami’s Talat, who dressed up as a woman to secretly meet the woman he loved in Taaşşuk-ı Talat ve Fıtnat (The Loves of Talat and Fitnat, 1872), to Mehpeyker, Namık Kemal’s ambiguous but deadly courtesan in İntibah (The Awakening, 1876), to Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Ceylan, a confused young woman and reader of early feminists, who date-rapes Nurullah, a tormented intellectual, in the novel Jöntürk (1908), a wide range of characters and complex amorous relationships titillated the imagination of readers. By focusing in particular on forbidden love relationships, authors could explore topics such as the condition of women in Ottoman society, forced and arranged marriages, oppressive traditions, and slavery. The rebellion of lovers arguably symbolized a rebellion against social and religious conventions and enabled the emergence of the individual/person in Ottoman Turkish literature. Chateaubriand’s Atala and the humane teachings of the ihtiyar (the old man) or misyoner (the missionary) 28 See introduction, footnote 14. 29 The short story writer and nationalist intellectual Ömer Seyfettin (1884–1920) wrote that “one needed to be as naive as a boy about to be circumcised” not to notice that the object of desire in classical Ottoman poetry was male. See Ömer Seyfettin, “Yeni Lisan,” in Genç Kalemler Dergisi, ed. İsmail Parlatır and Nurullah Çetin (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 1999), 76. A variety of English-language scholarly works deal with the homoerotic dimension of classical Ottoman poetry and culture. See, for instance, Kemal Silay, Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), and also, concerning culture as a whole, Dror Zeevi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East 1500–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

were a reminder that it was possible for humans to reinterpret what was acceptable for religion and tradition. Two early texts, often ignored in standard narrations of the history of Turkish-language literature—namely Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi and Zafer Hanım’s Aşk-ı Vatan—are of particular interest in this context. Forbidden love is at the heart of both plots, even though the social issues they deal with are different: religious sectarianism is at the heart of Akabi Hikâyesi; slavery is the major theme of Aşk-ı Vatan. While Vartanyan advocated religious reform and a solution to the problems within the framework of a reinterpreted Christian faith, Zafer Hanım seemingly went one step further and defended a solution that was outside the bounds of Islamic law. The ethno-religious origin of the one and the gender of the other may provide an explanation for their marginalization. Yet, one cannot help but wonder whether the radicalism of their discourses was the reason for the disregard. As rightly remarked by Johann Strauss, Vartanyan remains “one of the great unknowns of Turkish language literature.”30 The most extensive information on the first novelist of the Turkish tongue is available in Kevork Pamukçiyan’s (1923–1996) Biyografileriyle Ermeniler, an anthology of biographies of prominent Ottoman Armenians.31 A Catholic, Vartanyan was educated at the Bezciyan school in Kumkapı in Istanbul and then went to secondary school to the Mekhitarist monastery in Vienna in 1827. Upon his return to the capital, he worked as a teacher at the Nersesyan school in the Hasköy district and as a private teacher in Hovhannes Dadyan’s (1798–1869) home. Dadyan was none other than the barutçubaşı, the director of the Imperial gunpowder factory. In 1837 Vartanyan became a translator at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs [Umur-ı Bahriyye Nezareti] and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a pasha, either late in 1857 or early in 1858. In the meantime, he had been appointed as an external member of the Academy of Sciences (Encümen-i Daniş) founded in 1851. Having left military employment and received the title of Bey, he worked for a short period for the Council of Judicial Ordinances (Divan-ı Ahkam-ı Adliye), either in 1868 or ’69. He was elected as a member of Cevdet Pasha’s calendar commission in ­January 1872. Being a prominent figure in the Armenian Catholic community—he was among others a member of the executive council of the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate in 1851—Hovsep 30 Johann Strauss, “Préface,” in Hovsep Vartanian, L’histoire d’Akabi, trans. and ed. Haïk Der Haroutounian (Paris: Edition de la Société des études arméniennes, 2018), xi. 31 Kevork Pamukçiyan, Biyografileriyle Ermeniler (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2003), 373–4.

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Vartanyan took on a dual identity, typical of several Tanzimat intellectuals: he was both a prominent bureaucrat and a leading intellectual, publishing on a variety of topics and actively engaged in various progressive societies ranging from the Hamazkyats (National Unity) society of which he was a founding member in 184632 to the Ser (Love) masonic lodge33 established in 1866 and placed under the patronage of the Grand Orient de France.34 A journalist, he founded and edited the Armeno-Turkish Mecmua-i Havadis (The News Magazine) from 1852–1877, piloting its transformation from a periodical to a daily newspaper. He then became the chief editor of another Armeno-Turkish paper Tercüman-ı Efkar (Translator of Ideas)— remaining in the role until his death—at the same time contributing to Garabet Panosyan’s Manzume-i Efkar (Line of Thoughts). With Andon Alik and Püzant Keçiyan (1859–1927) he launched the short-lived daily Mamul (The Press, 1870–1872) and, according to the information provided by Johann Strauss, also wrote for Mikayel Ekserciyan’s Sada-yı Hakikat (The Voice of Truth).35 It was in the literary field that Vartanyan left a lasting mark: He authored the first two novels in the Turkish language, Akabi Hikâyesi (1851) and Boşboğaz bir Adem (1852), the latter a satirical work that he illustrated himself. He translated French popular novels such as Alain-René Lesage’s (1668–1747) Le diable boiteux (The Devil upon Sticks, 1707) which he titled Topal Şeytan Hikâyesi in 1853, Alexandre Dumas’s Gerdanlık Hikâyesi (The Story of a Necklace, 1871), most probably Le collier de la reine (1849–1850), as well as an extensive biography of Napoléon Bonaparte, which would also make it into Ottoman Turkish, albeit in a revised shortened version. He also translated works on history, on the constitution, and the telegraph,36 as well as also publishing two short monographs on the latter two subjects in Armenian. Unfortunately, there is not the same wealth of information about Zafer Hanım. The little which is known can be found in Mehmet Zihni Efendi’s

32 On the founding and membership of the Hamazkyats society, see Onnik Jamgocyan, Les Francs-Maçons arméniens et la constitution de l’Arménie ottomane, Constantinople 1863 (Paris: Editions du Bosphore, 2017), 123–141. 33 Strauss, “Préface,” xii. 34 About Ser, see Jamgocyan, Les Francs-Maçons arméniens et la constitution de l’Arménie ottomane, Constantinople 1863, 91–107. 35 Strauss, “Préface,” xiii. 36 For a complete bibliography, refer to Stepanyan’s Ermeni Harfli Türkçe Kitaplar ve Sürekli Yayınlar Bibliyografyası (1727–1968).

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

(1846–1913) bibliographical dictionary Meşahirü’n-Nisa (Famous Women, 1877–1879), which records that Zafer Hanım was a relative of Fuat Pasha (1814–1869), one of the most prominent statesmen of the Tanzimat era, and that her husband was Ali Kabuli Pasha (1812–1875), an Ottoman diplomat and former mayor of Istanbul.37 Thus, it can be surmised that she came from a ruling-class background, open to modernization and that, as a result, she had received a good education, most likely tutored at home. Engaging with social questions in their work, it was necessary for both authors to interrogate the religious status quo in their communities—and the theme of forbidden love was the narrative device that allowed them to do this. Indeed, at the heart of Akabi Hikâyesi is a longing for a different type of spiritual authority, a priest whose vision befits the new age of change and liberation. Akabi, the main female character of this tragedy is deeply moved when she reads about Father Aubry’s compassionate attitude in Atala and “the favors that the priest bestowed upon Chactas.”38 The French priest’s actions could not be more different than the intrigues of Father Fasidyan, the Catholic priest who opposes the union of the Catholic Hagop and Akabi, a member of the Armenian Apostolic Church.39 Reflecting on the status of the priest in this novel is of importance as it enables discussions about a conception of Christianity in which compassion and individual freedom are more important than communal belonging and church hierarchy. The status of the priest in Akabi Hikâyesi shows also that the parallels that some scholars have drawn between Vartanyan’s novel and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are not so relevant when assessing the significance of the text.40 That said, it is true that forbidden love, families at odds, intriguing characters, lost letters, and the tragic death of the lovers can easily lead to the conclusion that the novel is a free rewriting of the Shakespearan text in an Ottoman Armenian context. 37 Mehmet Zihni Efendi, Kitab-ı Meşâhîrü’n-Nisâ, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Daru’t-Tıbaati’l-Amire, 1878–1879 [h. 1294–1295]), 438. 38 Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, 57. 39 The Armenian Apostolic Church is one of the “Oriental Orthodox” churches, which include the Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian Orthodox churches, that refused to accept the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. For matters of convenience members of the Armenian Apostolic Church are occasionally referred to in this chapter as “Orthodox” in contradistinction to “Catholic.” 40 See, Andreas Tietze, “Önsöz,” in Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, xi and Cankara, “­Reading Akabi, (Re-)Writing History—On the Questions of Currency and Interpretation of ­Armeno-Turkish Fiction,” 56.

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Yet in Romeo and Juliet, the figure of the priest, Friar Lawrence is different from that of priests in Akabi Hikâyesi. Friar Lawrence, whose deep connection to nature and knowledge of poisons makes him a rather unorthodox Franciscan, is the one figure who works to bring the Veronese lovers together and unwillingly becomes the instrument of tragedy. This character, no less intriguing than Fasidyan, instrumentalizes the couple’s love in order to facilitate a reconciliation between the two families—reconciliation being the one thing that Fasidyan deeply opposes. One could argue that Hagop and Akabi would have needed a priest in the image of Lawrence.41 However, they longed for a priest in the image of Father Aubry. That Vartanyan wishes to look beyond sectarian boundaries in this quest is exemplified by the fact that the only priest who plays a constructive role in the novel is a member of the Armenian Apostolic Church—Der Vahan, who had secretly performed the marriage of Akabi’s Orthodox mother Anna and her Catholic father Boğos and was lambasted for this by the Armenian Apostolic patriarch.42 Vartanyan’s message is unambiguous: Unlike what the ignorant Rupenig claims—“aren’t we [Catholics] more sophisticated and refined?”—justice and decency are not the exclusive remit of one community, but can be found among both Catholics and members of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Indeed, in response to Rupenig’s comment, Hagop, very much Vartanyan’s voice in matters of communal politics, replies: “Codswallop, [such attributes] are common among us as well as among them.”43 Arguably, the novel promotes a vision that is based on post-confessional humanism rooted in a universalist interpretation of Christianity. The conflict reflects the tensions existing among Armenian Catholics, between those close to the Mekhitarists and later secular organizations who advocated closer links beyond the sectarian divide and a common Armenianness and those in the image of Father Fasidyan and his allies who promoted closer links to the ­Vatican and doctrinal clarity. 41 It should be noted that Vartanyan might have known Shakespeare’s play through JeanFrançois Ducis’ (1733–1816) translations which were, according to the Soviet theatre critic and scholar Rouben Zarian, popular among the Mekhitarists (Rouben Zarian, Shakespeare et les Arméniens, trans. N. Haroutounian and Vahé Godel [Geneva: Perret Gentil, 1973], 37). Ducis removed the figure of Friar Lawrence from his adaptation of the play. Other translators turned him into a physician, a more suitable character for an enlightened age. See Bernard Franco, “Roméo et Juliette: Traductions, adaptations, réceptions au tournant du XVIIIe et XIXe siècle,” Revue germanique internationale 5 (2007): 203–221. 42 Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, 102 43 Ibid., 59.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

In the novel, the opponents to the rapprochement also reach beyond their own ranks and seek allies beyond the confessional boundaries. Fasidyan does not hesitate to ally with his archenemies. He is conscious that there will be people opposing the union of the two lovers within the Apostolic Church too. Hence he looks for allies and finds one in Akabi’s uncle, a man “very hostile to the Catholics” who will do all he can to stop the reunion.44 On the Catholic side, his allies are a heteroclite group that includes Viçen, Hagop’s loving but credulous father, Hampartsum, a repentant lowlife who bears a grudge against Hagop, and Rupenig who hopes for Fasidyan’s help in his courtship of the very unwilling Fulik. While the latter two pursue personal gain, Viçen wishes the best for his son and sees Hagop’s desire to marry a member of the Apostolic Church as endangering his son’s eschatological future. As his spiritual guide, Fasidyan nurtures the anguish of a father living “with the fear that his son will go to hell.”45 Vartanyan does not depict Fasidyan as an evil man and he describes the rationality of his acts. The priest is a pious leader who wants to preserve the unity of his community. At his first appearance, about midway through the novel, ­Fasidyan is described as a young-looking fifty-year-old, “whose eyes revealed that he was a hard and uncompassionate man and whose face had traits that showed that he never revealed his thoughts.”46 Nevertheless, his sincerity is not in doubt when he explains to Hampartsum that he should not collaborate with him out of revenge against Hagop, but out of Christian mercy—not “turn him over to Satan,” as the fisherman would like to, but to free Akabi’s lover from the grip of the devil: “If he committed an injustice towards you, you must try to respond with benevolence. This is what the holy books teach us. Let us start right away and whatever the difficulties we will have, for the love of God, facing them all, let us retrieve this young man from Satan’s embrace.”47

Still, from the outset, it is clear that Fasidyan’s motives are not only spiritual. A major concern of his is to impede the collaboration of the Catholic and Apostolic Armenian Churches. He also opposes the struggle of the laity to achieve recognition as one “nation” and not merely as ethno-religious communities. Such a development would marginalize the role of religious leaders 44 Ibid., 100. 45 Ibid., 83. 46 Ibid., 78. 47 Ibid., 79.

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as community interlocutors with the Ottoman state. Hagop is a proponent of this rapprochement and while the novel does not reveal much of these sensitive developments, his readers would have known the significance of “Hagop’s involvement for the last two years with national [millet] affairs and his closeness to the Armenians.”48 It is worthwhile remembering here that the author of Akabi Hikâyesi had been a founding member of the Hamazkyats society which pursued an educational and cultural agenda aiming at bridging the religious divide and strengthening the Armenian national bond on a progressive-nationalist basis. Not only did he pursue Mekhitarist cultural and educational ideals, but he was also a Freemason devoted to “union, love, enlightenment, toil and freedom.” These were the principles imprinted on the emblem of the Ser lodge that he would join.49 Hagop promotes progressive ideas that are shared too—by Akabi, significantly. Both lovers are conscious that the impediments their love faces are the same as those faced by their ideas. With emphasis on the importance of “reason” (akıl) and the agency (idare) of man, Hagop notes: “When God created man, what did he give him as a way of guidance, but reason? Do good and evil not derive from our acts? So are our happiness and misery not a condition brought about through our own agency? This is why we must oppose those who struggle to make us miserable and demand our rights and not allow them to instrumentalize us in order to realize their arrogant aims.”50

While it could be claimed that Hagop is mainly discussing their own predicament as lovers doomed by sectarian feuds, the earlier words spoken by Akabi, who as a learned young woman has, not less than her male counterpart, reflected on the questions of individual freedom and communal division, show that their struggle is also political: “‘The laws established by men have often caused the person’s misery. … Has there ever been in this world compassion in the face of misery, the dignity of welfare, a demand for justice.’”51 More pessimistic about 48 Ibid., 82. Throughout the novel, the members of the Armenian Apostolic Church are refered to as Ermeniler—the Armenians. 49 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 76. 50 Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, 76. 51 Ibid., 75.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

the future and human nature than Hagop, she identifies man-made laws as an impediment to human emancipation, a highly political message. In this narrative, when mental and physical violence against women is denounced on various occasions, it is significant that Akabi’s voice should be heard as much as Hagop’s when it comes to expression of philosophical and political ideas. Akabi talks and Hagop listens, an attitude that could be contrasted to Rupenig’s view of his unwilling wife-to-be as his own property (mal) and his wish to force her to wear a veil with Father Fasidyan’s blessings. Akabi’s outspokenness is noteworthy. Vartanyan’s ideas as articulated by the lovers were inspired by both Mekhitarianism and Free Masonry. Yet these two organizations in the nineteenth century had an uneasy relationship with female agency, making Akabi’s presence as a thinker all the more remarkable. Indeed, Mekhitarianism, despite all its reformist endeavor, remained first and foremost a Roman Catholic brotherhood. There is no doubt that Fasidyan is a reactionary, advocating ideas that were anathema to the author whose own engagement was rooted in the Mekhitarist and Masonic engagement with modernity. Yet, the priest’s actions are rationalized by the author through references to the historical context and the particular hardships suffered by the Armenian Catholic millet. Indeed, the official recognition by the Ottoman state of this community as a separate millet dated only from 1830. While this granted Armenian Catholics a level of protection that they did not have before, it did not heal the rift between those who advocated closer links to the Vatican and those who were more favorably disposed to a rapprochement between the Catholic and Apostolic Churches. Hence community building through demarcation would still have been high up on Fasidyan’s agenda. In a meeting with Viçen, he does not hide the fact that, were Hagop and Akabi to marry, this would not only set a bad example for the community at large, but that the reunion of Catholics and Gregorians would mean “the struggle of our predecessors for so many years and our own would have been in vain.”52 The collaboration between the Armenian patriarchate and the Ottoman sultan in the repression of Catholics in the 1820s, culminating in the eviction of Catholics from their homes in Istanbul and deportation in 182853 was still a vivid memory, as can be seen in Anna’s recollection of it. Such suffering explains, but does not legitimize, Fasidiyan’s sectarianism, in the author’s 52 Ibid., 82. 53 Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 258–259.

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eyes. Indeed, there is a history of dialogue and friendship between communities that precedes Akabi and Hagop’s passion. There is the love and marriage of the Catholic Anna and the Orthodox Boğos. Even more significant is Boğos’s friendship with Krikor, Akabi’s father. Not only do they consider sectarian hatred to be “ignorance” (cehalet), but “the differences between their Churches [mezhep] did not separate them, it contributed to the growing of their friendship, more than common ideas.”54 This shows that the model of society advocated by the likes of Boğos, Krikor, and most probably the author, did not favor the reunion of the Armenians under a single church—as both Catholics and members of Apostolic Church wished for—but it was an attempt to bridge differences to create space for diversity. Hagop too promotes such a vision. His enemies report him to be defending the idea of a common Armenian identity beyond religious divisions: “Are we not one nation [millet]? Why would we be enemies to each other? Even if our Churches [mezhep] are separate, did the Gospels [Avedaran] not teach us to love?”55 From that point of view, it can be argued that Vartanyan believed that the love of Hagop and Akabi could grow beyond human love to become the symbol of an all-encompassing love for humanity. The fact that their love should be forbidden shows that this humanist ideal requires a struggle that questions the authority of the churches, community leaders, and even the state. While Akabi was not as optimistic as Hagop who believed that “human power could never separate [them],” she was quite outspoken when identifying their adversaries who opposed their love as “enemies of science, union and love.”56 Science (ilm) representing here modernity, union (ittifak), the reunion of the Armenian nation beyond religious divisions and love (muhabbet), their passion. Despite all their high ideals, they would fail in their desire to unite their communities. Their tragic death at the end of the novel does not trigger a reconciliation between their people as does that of Romeo and Juliet. To write any other outcome would have been too big a gamble for Vartanyan. Indeed, the success of lovers rebelling against religion, family, and social conventions would have been a dangerous message whose universality would have resonated beyond the Armenian Catholic and Apostolic communities. Indeed, the novelist was an influential figure whose works were also read outside his

54 Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, 99. 55 Ibid., 116. 56 Ibid., 77.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

community. No other than Ahmet Midhat Efendi praised Vartanyan as one of the greatest writers in Turkish.57 Throughout the novel, Vartanyan is very careful not to upset the ­Ottoman authorities. Even though it is a captain of the newly founded police organization who arrests Hagop, denounced by Hampartsum as a thief, and thus sets in motion the tragic events that lead to the death of the protagonists, the narrator stresses in a footnote that the officer should not be held responsible as he was only performing his duty.58 Yet Vartanyan had achieved his aim and managed to make his readers reflect upon the challenges faced by Armenian and Ottoman societies in the nineteenth century, and without hiding his own views. Rebellious lovers rarely live happily ever after in Ottoman Turkish novels, as they are defeated, in Akabi’s terms, by the enemies of “science” and “love.” Yet there is one novel, exploring the themes of forbidden love, forced marriage, and slavery—themes that are central in Ottoman Turkish fiction and also in Chateaubriand’s Atala—that proposes an extraordinary outcome in the form of a successful rebellion against the convention, religion, and the social status quo: Zafer Hanım’s 1878 Aşk-ı Vatan (Love of the Homeland). Unlike most works at the time—that are critical of slavery—slaves in this novel are treated well. This can only mean that for Zafer Hanım the problem was not the relationship between master and slave, following the Qur’an which enjoins kindness towards and ultimately the manumission of slaves, but that the very institution of slavery was not compatible with the principle of human dignity. The exceptional nature of Zafer Hanım’s text lies here. Despite living unabused, the slave girl rebels and succeeds in escaping. Rewarding the rebellious was unusual in the literature of the time. Unlike contemporary male authors, she embraced a truly liberationist discourse. This affected her approach to the question of arranged marriage as well: She underlined that the question of forced marriage, the oppression of women, and the curtailment of individual aspirations are not limited to Ottoman Turkey or the Islamic world. Indeed, the heroine Gülbeyaz, a slave of Spanish origin, is forced to marry Roberto, the lover of her best friend Maria, whereas the latter is forced into a marriage with Gülbeyaz’s father, Ferdinando. There may have been more to Zafer Hanım’s choice of Spain than a desire to underscore the universality of these issues. For many reformist 57 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Müşahedat, 35–36. 58 Vartanyan, Akabi Hikyayesi, 137.

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intellectuals in the post-Tanzimat period, Islamic Spain—Endülüs—was of increasing intellectual interest.59 Arguably, it all began with Ziya Pasha’s (1829–1880) 1859 translation into Ottoman Turkish of Louis Viardot’s (1800–1883) Histoire des Arabes et des Mores d’Espagne (Paris: Pagnerre, 1851). Ziya Pasha’s rewritten text is credited with ushering in a literary fashion with authors as different as Şemsettin Sami, Abdülhak Hamit, and Muallim Naci (1850–1893) exploring Andalusian themes in their work.60 Without underestimating the appeal of the exotic— and tenth-century Granada was indeed exotic for a nineteenth-century ­Istanbul-based author—and possible parallels between the collapse of Islamic Andalusia and the long agony of Ottoman Turkey, it is European scholars’ view of Islamic Spain as a lost golden age when religious tolerance merged with scientific and cultural progress that was readily embraced by Ottoman reformists. As such, it became a powerful symbol of the progressive nature of Islam and the reformability of the Ottoman state. It is highly significant, then, that Zafer Hanım demystifies Spain and reduces North African descendants of the Moors to mere pirates and slave traders, in a novel that seeks a solution to the slave question outside the legal boundaries of Islam. For her the “de-romanticization” of Andalusia was a necessary step to look beyond Islamic solutions. Unlike other authors of the era who searched for solutions to the question of slavery within the rather flexible boundaries of Islamic law, Zafer Hanım subverted this discourse. As a consequence of British pressures, from the 1840s onwards various measures were taken to limit the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire, ultimately leading to its formal abolition.61 Even though her owner, Laz Ahmet Pasha, treats Gülbeyaz with decency and respects her as a person, 59 See Beşir Ayvazoğlu, “Edebiyatımızda Endülüs,” in Endülüs’ten İspanya’ya (Ankara: TDV, 1996), 79–85; İnci Enginün, “Edebiyatımızda Endülüs,” in Araştırmalar ve Belgeler (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2000), 32–41 and Sema Uğurcan, “Türk Edebiyatında Endülüs İmajı,” İslamiyât 7, no. 3 ( July–September, 2004): 89–104. 60 Works such as Şemsettin Sami’s Seydi Yahya (1875), Abdülhak Hamid’s plays dealing with Islamic Andalusia, namely Nazife (1876), Târık yahut Endülüs’ün Fethi (Tarik or the Conquest of Analusia, 1879), Tezer yahut Melik Abdürrahmani’s-Sâlis (Tezer and King Abdürrahman the Third, 1880), İbni Musa yahut Zatü’l-Cemal (Ibni Musa ot Zatu’l Jamâl, 1917), Abdullahü’s-sagîr (Abdullah the Little, 1917), and Muallim Naci’s rhymed epic Musa b. Ebi’lGazan yahut Hamiyet (Musa b. Ebi’l-Gazan or Patriotism, 1882) were examples of new literature inspired by the Andalusian hype. 61 On slavery in the Ottoman Empire, see, e.g., Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and its Supression, 1840–1890 (Princeton: Princeton Legacy Library, 2014 [1983], and Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its Demise, 1800–1909 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997).

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

going as far as allowing the slave to reside in a separate mansion, and offering her jewelry to meditate on his marriage proposal, the girl rejects his offers and longs for her beloved in Spain. The narrator states that she is in the “happiest state a slave could be in,”62 and yet Gülbeyaz does not accept her servitude and rebels. Ultimately, she manages to escape with the help of her brother Lorenzo, her friend Roberto, and her confidante Refia, Laz Ahmet Pasha’s other adopted slave. Gülbeyaz’s successful escape legitimizes her disobedience in the eyes of readers: “Her uncombed hair having taken the form of wings, she flew away like a bird,” the narrator tells us.63 Nevertheless, nothing is said about one particularly sensitive issue: the suffering of slaves after their abduction and during transportation. Zafer Hanım’s silence is inevitable, as the slave-owning elite in the great urban centers were unaware of the cruelty of the trade and the high death toll during transportation.64 It is also likely that they chose to remain ignorant. Readers learn that Refia was abducted by four Algerian Arabs while she was taking a stroll on the Andalusian coast and was “brought to Algeria within a month with all forms of difficulties.”65 After a year-long imprisonment she was sold to Selim in Istanbul. There is no account of her ordeal between her abduction and her arrival in the Ottoman capital, though. Similarly, the novel says little about Gülbeyaz’s abduction and sale. While walking together, Gülbeyaz and her father were attacked by an Algerian horseman. Her father was killed during the struggle and the girl was captured. She was taken to Algeria— a one-month journey—and sold to a slave trader named Ahmet Bican who brought her to Istanbul. The narrator mentions that she was “tormented”66 and experienced “pain and anguish on the road”67 and leaves it at that. The risk of censorship might have been on Zafer Hanım’s mind: years later, Samipaşazade Sezai’s (1860–1936) 1888 novel 62 Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan, ed. Zehra Toska (Istanbul: Oğlak, 1994), 98. 63 Ibid., 128. 64 Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 272. A notable exception in the ­Ottoman Turkish literary context is Emin Nihat’s (1838–1880) Faik Bey ile Nuridil Hanım’ın Sergüzeşti (The Adventure of Faik Bey and Nuridil Hanım), a novel that is included in his collection of stories Müsameretname (The Book of Entertainment, 1872–1875). Indeed, Emin Nihat relates in detail the calvary of Beycuk, a twelve-year-old Circassian boy taken across the Caucasian mountains in the snow and freezing cold by slave traders. See Emin Nihat, “Faik Bey ile Nuridil Hanımın Sergüzeşti,” in Müsameretname, ed. Sabahattin Çağın and Fazıl Gökçek (Istanbul: Özgür Yayınları, 2003), 278. 65 Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan, 34. 66 Ibid., 82. 67 Ibid.

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Sergüzeşt (Adventure) was banned by Abdülhamit II’s censors, even though its criticism of slavery is more moderate.68 Despite the somewhat implausible nature of the novel and its more than one deus ex machina, Zafer Hanım is a subtle storyteller when she refers to the sea. She approaches Gülbeyaz’s trauma obliquely: the girl at the sea and when Laz Ahmet Pasha offers the slave and her friend Refia an entire mansion to live in she chooses a room that looks out onto a side street, and not one with a sea view. Looking at Beykoz hills, “she cried for her homeland and could not be consoled.”69 However, her home is beyond the sea, not the hills. She glimpses the sea and feels only pain,70 whereas other characters—in particular, the wealthy, slave-owning woman who narrates the novel—find solace in its contemplation.71 The peace of mind felt by a free human being when facing the sea cannot be shared by a slave who was abducted by slavers and brought over the sea. For Gülbeyaz, the sea can only signify separation and sorrow.72 The opposing feelings the slave and master have about the sea are also explored in terms of gender. Roberto, who has been forced into an arranged marriage with Gülbeyaz, escapes from his fate and from his father by studying at a maritime college in England and becoming a sailor. For him, taking to the sea signifies liberation from the yoke of his family. For the slave girl, however, it is a symbol of her imprisonment. It is only when Gülbeyaz manages to escape with the help of her friends that she is ready to face the sea. In other words, it is only as a free woman that she can give the sea new meanings: liberation and freedom. Thus, the author creates a new dichotomy: Masters view the sea as motionless and quiet, the object of silent contemplation; it is a symbol for the social status quo. However, for the rebelling slave, the sea represents change, movement and finally liberation. Yet it is important not to overinterpret the narrative and turn Zafer Hanım into a revolutionary firebrand. Gülbeyaz is not an ordinary slave. She is not

68 Şerif Mardin, “Super-Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the 19th Century,” in Religion, Society and Modernity in Turkey (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 137. 69 Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan, 84. 70 Ibid., 90. 71 Ibid., 24 and 32. 72 For possible parallels with the image of the sea in other slave narratives such as Olaudah Equiano’s (1745–1797) autobiography and Esteban Montejo’s (1860–1973) Biografía de un Cimarrón, see Edebiyatın Sınırlarında, 29–30.

Beyond Atala: Vartan Pasha, Zafer Hanım, and the Romantic Rebellion

one of the “wild” tribeswomen from the North Caucasus and Africa who were being civilized in Ottoman Istanbul, as those intellectuals and bureaucrats who defended slavery as an institution argued.73 Gülbeyaz is an educated member of the Spanish aristocracy. It is likely that the novelist needed to give her character this background in order to tell her tale of a slave girl who does not submit and escapes from her benevolent owner. In this way, she invited her readers to reflect on bondage and freedom. The successful flight of a Sudanese nanny or of a concubine from the Caucasus might have been too close to home for the often slave-owning reading classes. Up to a point, Gülbeyaz’s class and ethnicity made her disobedience acceptable. Nevertheless, Aşk-ı Vatan remains a narrative which is much more radical than other contemporary novels and short stories which engage with the slave question—one of the great questions de société at the time. This is why it is much more than a “typical romance”74 about separation.75 It is also more than a novel about women and patriotism.76 Although Zafer Hanım notes in her foreword, written during the Crimean War, that she is “a weakling deprived of the honor of bearing arms”77 and promises to donate all her earnings from the book to supporting the soldiers,78 this might have been a strategy to publish under her own name a text that invited her readers to rethink the legitimacy of a controversial institution which had the blessing of the religious establishment. It is worthwhile remembering here that Fatma Aliye, the most prolific woman novelist of the pre-Republican period, signed her first works with pennames emphasizing her womanness such as “bir hanım” (a lady) and “bir kadın” (a woman), but only used her real name once she was established as a writer.79 Strikingly, unlike Fatma Aliye, who looked for reform from within the Islamic tradition, Zafer Hanım found the reformist Islamic discourse insufficient in matters of slavery and did not hesitate to sign her work with her own name. Her creation, Gülbeyaz, just like Akabi, is an extraordinary character who can only conceive happiness once the religious authorities, religion itself, and social conventions are disputed. That in both novels women should play such a prominent role as revolutionaries is highly significant, as women were largely 73 Sagaster, Herren und Sklaven, 36–37. 74 Zehra Toska, “Zafer Hanım ve Aşk-ı Vatan,” in Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan, 14. 75 Toska, “Zafer Hanım ve Aşk-ı Vatan,” 15. 76 Sagaster, Herren und Sklaven, 89. 77 Zafer Hanım, Aşk-ı Vatan, 20 78 Ibid., 22 79 Canbaz, Fatma Aliye: Fatma Aliye’nin Eserlerinde Kadın Sorunu, 26–27.

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disempowered by the very religious institutions and hierarchies, be they Islamic or Christian, that caused their misery. Chateaubriand, perhaps the father of all Romantics, expressed a deep dissatisfaction with the norms of his time —a dissatisfaction that gave birth to a kind of nonconformism. A refusal to accept societal norms is also what gives rise to Vartanyan and Zafer Hanım’s exploration of Romantic rebellion in their novels. Through the ceaseless pursuit of forbidden love, their characters create spaces for the suggestion of radical ideas, just like in Atala. Truly, Chateaubriand, Vartanyan, and Zafer Hanım proposed markedly different ideas: Chateaubriand engaged in an aesthetic and emotional defense of the Christian faith against the rationalism of the Enlightenment; Vartanyan hoped for a return to the principle of love preached in the Gospels that would bridge the confessional divide, an approach that he would also pursue through Masonism;80 and Zafer Hanım advanced a liberationist discourse that simply ignored religion, in her case Islam. For all the above, falling in love with the wrong person was the motor for an emancipatory struggle. The fight for freedom from religion could not have been furthest from Chateaubriand’s concerns when penning Atala and the other parts of his Génie du Christianisme. In France, he was the representative of a worldview which had been condemned, if not to the rubbish bin, at least to the recycling bin of history. He had been marginalized and he knew it. As noted by Bernard-Henri Lévy in L’Esprit du Judaïsme (The Spirit of Judaism, 2016) this led him, “the great proscribed and fallen writer, who had seen so many of his kin perish under the guillotine, [to] identify with this cursed people”81—the “cursed people” being the Jews. However, whether Ottoman Jewish intellectuals who were struggling for reform in their community and emancipation in broader ­Ottoman society would have appreciated the reference to this kinship, is another question ­altogether.

80 In the Ottoman context, even in lodges affiliated to the liberal Grand Orient de France, belief in the existence of a divine being remained much more prevalent than in lodges in Western Europe. The Flourens affair is a case in point. The affair is named after the French revolutionary Gustave Flourens (1838–1871), a militant atheist, who was initiated into the Istanbul-based Union d’Orient lodge. This led to vocal protests by other masonic brethren, among others by the venerable master of the Ser lodge, Serovpe Aznavur, who rejected the idea that the belief in God should be reduced to a mere superstition. See Thierry Zarcone, Le croissant et le compas: Islam et franc-maçonnerie: De la fascination à la détestation (Paris: Editions Dervy, 2015). 81 Bernard-Henri Lévy, L’Esprit du Judaïsme (Paris: Grasset, 2016), 213.

CHAPTER 5

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

I

f we are to believe his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, the travelogue relating his journey to the Near East undertaken between July 1806 and June 1807, Chateaubriand did not pay any attention to the Jewish community of Istanbul during his sojourn there. Other Western travelers, however, recorded events interesting to scholars wishing to study the ethno-religious diversity that defined the ­Ottoman Turkish literary world in the nineteenth century, including the genesis of Jewish Turkish literature. Indeed, in his Sketches of Turkey, an entertaining travelogue published in 1833, the American zoologist and physician James Ellsworth De Kay relates an encounter with a charismatic figure called “Ees Hawk Effendi.” According to De Kay, this learned man was the principal of an academy established in the district of Hasköy, not far from the Golden Horn. Furthermore, the American traveler informs his readers that “gentleman Isaac, as we would translate it, [is] a worthy Hebrew who has renounced the faith of his forefathers. The change from Judaism to Islamism is effected with small violence to their previous opinions, for both sects reverence the one true God, and their ceremonials have a striking similarity.”1 De Kay’s awareness of religious differences seems not to have been as deep as his knowledge of the New York fauna about which he wrote in his groundbreaking multivolume Zoology of New York or The New York Fauna a decade after his visit to Ottoman Turkey. Nonetheless, he provides fascinating information about this Ottoman scholar who appeared to be “of much consideration among the Turks” and whom he describes as learned yet impolite, because “he even forgot to offer the customary pipe and coffee, which the poorest Turk never fails 1 De Kay, Sketches of Turkey, 138.

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to present to his visitor.”2 It did not occur to De Kay and his companion Reverend William Goodell (1792–1867), the American missionary encountered in chapter 3, that the fact that they had just interrupted Ees Hawk Effendi’s lecture might be the reason for the lack of consideration that they were granted. Ees Hawk Effendi was none other than İshak Efendi (d. 1836), often referred to as Hoca or Başhoca İshak Efendi, the chief instructor at the Imperial School of Military Engineering (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i Hümayun) whose origins went back to the Imperial School of Naval Engineering founded during the reign of Sultan Mahmut III (1717–1774) in 1773. He was also a pioneering scientific author who contributed to the development of modern science in Ottoman Turkey.3 According to Avram Galanti, the orientalist scholar and historian of Ottoman Jewry, İshak Efendi was also known as the “rabbi of the docks” among Jews and he remained supportive of the Sephardic community of Istanbul, in spite of his conversion.4 Some authors also consider him the founding father of Jewish Turkish literature. In his still indispensable Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de l’empire ottoman (Essay on the history of the Israelites of the Ottoman Empire, 1897), the educator Moïse Franco (1864–1910) notes that “apart from the works of Ishak Effendi, [an] Israelite who converted to Islam …, never have the Jews of Turkey produced a text in Turkish.” 5 De Kay too describes the head teacher as a fine author of scientific works in the Turkish language. İshak Efendi showed his guests a four-volume work that he had written and had just been published by the Imperial Press. De Kay described the book as “a clever compilation from the French, embracing elementary introductions to the sciences; a sort of Turkish Encyclopedia, which served as a textbook to the students.”6 This compendium of texts on astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, mathematics, mineralogy, physics, and zoology, which must have consisted of volumes of his Mecmua-i Ulum-i Riyaziye (Collected Works on ­Mathematical Sciences, 1831–1834), was not İshak Efendi’s only published 2 Ibid., 139. 3 Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu has written extensively on İshak Efendi. See his monograph Başhoca İshak Efendi: Türkiye’de Modern Bilimin Öncüsü (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1989) and a shortened English version “Başhoca İshak Efendi, Pioneer of Modern Science in Turkey,” in Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Caesar E. Farah (Kirksville: The Thomas Jefferson University Press 1993), 157–68. 4 Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Avram Galanti], Türkler ve Yahudiler: Tarihî, Siyasi Araştırma (Istanbul: Gözlem, 1995), 145. 5 Franco, Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de l’empire ottoman depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, 277. 6 De Kay, Sketches of Turkey, 140.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

work. He ­published books and manuals on topics as diverse as geography, fortifications, and the casting of cannons between 1826 and 1835.7 Undeniably, Moïse Franco’s inclusion of İshak Efendi in his multilingual list of Jewish authors in the Ottoman Empire raises questions as to the definition of Jewish Turkish literature. Franco makes use of a broad definition of the term “literature,” by which he means any written work published in a separate form. Hence, he lists books, brochures, and pamphlets. His bibliography of nineteenth-century Ottoman Jewish literature includes rabbinical literature in Hebrew8 and Ladino publications ranging from popular novels to religious brochures,9 Protestant missionary publications,10 and school manuals in Turkish published by teachers of the Alliance israélite universelle.11 That such books in Turkish, together with publications in French, were listed under the heading “Foreign Literature” reveals the level of estrangement to the Turkish language that was still the norm within the Jewish community towards the end of the nineteenth century. Franco also mentions the principal of the Imperial Engineering College in this category, having also evoked him in earlier pages of his book.12 On ethno-religious grounds too, İshak Efendi might seem an odd candidate for the title of pioneer of Jewish Turkish literature. The question as to what extent a convert to Islam can be considered, in Franco’s terms, an “auteur israélite de Turquie”13 is open to discussion.14 On literary grounds, however, İshak Efendi’s creative engagement with the Ottoman Turkish language, his passion for words, and the originality of some of the terms he coined, show that Franco was right to mention him. İshak Efendi was not a poet, but he was a wordsmith of another kind. New terms and concepts which had no equivalent in Ottoman Turkish represented one of the main challenges that he had to face as a translator of scientific 7 For a list and discussion of İshak Efendi’s works, see İhsanoğlu, Başhoca İshak Efendi: Türkiye’de Modern Bilimin Öncüsü, 33–43. 8 Franco, Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites, 266–269. 9 Ibid., 269–275. 10 Ibid., 276. 11 Ibid., 277. 12 Ibid., 142. 13 Ibid., vi. 14 Indeed, the definition of Jewish literature remains in itself a highly debated topic. See, e.g., Hana Wirth Nesher, ed., What is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1994). For one specific definition strategy in the context of Jewish Turkish literature, see Laurent Mignon, “Ringen mit Dämonen: Gibt es eine jüdisch-türkische Literatur?,” in Ni kaza en Turkiya: Erzählungen jüdischer Autoren aus Istanbul, ed. Wolfgang Riemann (Engelschoff: Auf dem Ruffel, 2018), 125–144.

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works. İshak Efendi needed to develop a new language. Rather than taking the easy path—to transliterate the French and Latin words into the Ottoman Turkish script—he reflected on the Ottoman Turkish language and, relying on his knowledge of Arabic roots and rules of word formation, and, more importantly, on his feeling for the language, he created a new scientific vocabulary. Among his neologisms were terms and concepts that were not devoid of poetic verve, similar to the Greek and Latin etymologies of the scientific vocabulary in Western languages, such as “hava-i memati”—the air that kills (azote)15 and “üss-i müvellidü’l mâ”—the foundation that gives birth to water (hydrogen).16 Many of his neologisms continued to be used until the 1930s when they fell foul of the Turkish language reform which aimed at purging Turkish of Persian and Arabic elements and replacing them with Turkic neologisms. Still, including İshak Efendi in a list of Jewish authors must have been a predicament for Franco. The lack of authors who might have fitted the bill more closely can be explained by the fact that Jews did not use Turkish as their primary language of communication during the Ottoman period, unlike large segments of the Armenian and Greek communities. Literacy in Turkish in the nineteenth century among Jews in the Ottoman Empire was the exception, not the rule and its expansion to the community was only achieved during the Republican era. Accordingly, Franco was forced to stretch the definitions of literature and Jewishness in order to complete his section on the contributions of the Jews in the various fields of Ottoman intellectual life. The poor status of Turkish among Jews as late as the last quarter of the century is well exemplified by the situation of the twelve-year old Avram Galanti, who would later become one of the sternest advocates of linguistic Turkification and write some of his most important scholarly and journalistic works in Turkish. In a letter he wrote to his father while at a progressive Jewish boarding school in Ottoman Rhodes in 1884, he expressed his delight that soon he would be taught “la lengua ke se avla aki” (the language spoken here), in other words the language of the state, thus indicating that as a teenager he knew little Turkish.17 Though unknown to Franco when he was writing his history, there is an anonymous manuscript in Turkish in the Rashi script dating from the sixteenth century, which could have been mentioned in the list of works in Turkish in 15 İhsanoğlu, Başhoca İshak Efendi: Türkiye’de Modern Bilimin Öncüsü, 77. 16 Ibid., 78. 17 Quoted in Albert E. Kalderon, Abraham Galante: A Biography (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1983), 9.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

the Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de l’empire ottoman. According to the orientalist and historian of the Ottoman Empire Franz Babinger (1891–1967), this text, bearing the title Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman (History of the People of Osman), is an incomplete transliteration of the anonymous Ottoman Turkish Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman, which was edited by Friedrich Giese (1870–1944) in 1922.18 The Judeo-Turkish text covers the period from the genesis of the Ottoman state to Murat II’s ascension to the throne in 1421.19 Notably, the text does not have a distinctly Jewish linguistic repertoire,20 unlike works in languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, or Judezmo. While the transliterator preserved the original author’s critical stance towards developments within Ottoman realms, such as the oppression and corruption of the danişment—the religious scholars,21 he shortened the text and removed versified passages, headings, and the sebeb-i telif—the introductory section presenting the author’s motivation. This is unfortunate because a new or an edited sebeb-i telif might have provided important information about the identity and motivation of the author of the transliteration and his public. As suggested by Franz Babinger in his short 1932 article about the manuscript22 and Ugo Marazzi in his 1980 critical edition of the book,23 interest in Ottoman history existed among Jewish scholars in Europe and the Ottoman territories. Works such as Rabbi Elijah Capsali’s (1483–1555) Seder Eliyahu Zuta (The Minor Order of Eliyah),24 Yosef ha-Kohen’s (1496–1575) Sefer Divre ha-Yamim 18 The text can be found in Friedrich Giese, Die altosmanischen anonymen Chroniken in Text und Übersetzung, vol. 1 (Breslau [Wroclaw], 1922). Volume 2, which consists of Giese’s German translation, was published in Leipzig in 1925. The introduction was published separately in the Mitteilungen zur osmanischen Geschichte in 1921/22 with the title “Einleitung zu meiner Textausgabe der altosmanischen anonymen Chroniken tewârih-i âl-i osmân.” Reproduced in Friedrich Kraelitz-Griefenhorst and Paul Wittek, Mitteilungen zur Osmanischen Geschichte (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1972), 49–75. 19 Franz Babinger, “Eine altosmanische anonyme Chronik in hebräischer Umschrift,” Archiv Orientální 4 (April 1932): 108, 108–111. 20 I am borrowing the expression from Sarah Bunin Benor, “Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’? A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness,” The Jewish Quarterly ­Review 99 no. 2 (Spring 2009): 232. 21 Tülay Çulha, “İbrani Harfli Anonim Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman Üzerine,” in Between Religion and Language: Turkish-Speaking Christians, Jews and Greek-Speaking Muslims and Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Evangelia Balta and Mehmet Ölmez, 90. 22 Babinger, “Eine altosmanische anonyme Chronik in hebräischer Umschrift”: 109 23 Ugo Marazzi, Tevarih-i Al-i Osman: Cronaca anonima ottomana in trascrizione ebraica (­Napoli: Istituto universitario orientale, 1980), ix. 24 On Capsali see Aryeh Shmuelevitz, “Capsali as a Source for Ottoman History, 1450–1523,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 9, no. 3 (1978): 339–344.

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le-Malkhe Sarefat u-vet Otoman ha-Togar (Chronicle of the Kings of France and the Dynasty of Osman the Turk), and Yosef Sambari’s (1640–1703) Divre Yosef (The Words of Joseph),25 as well as the Salonican rabbi Moses Almosnino’s (1515–1580) Crónica de los reyes otomanos (Chronicle of the Ottoman Kings), an introduction for the Jews of the Iberian peninsula to the Ottoman Empire,26 are evidence of Jewish interest in the history of the Ottoman State and the situation of Jewish communities within its borders. Yet nothing is known about the author of the Tevarih-i Âl-i Osman. Adolf Neubauer, who compiled a catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian library, noted that it was “written in Turkish, apparently by a Muhammedan beg,” though he did not substantiate his claim.27 More plausibly, Babinger believes the author to have been a Sephardic Jew, as the transliteration indicates that he had no knowledge of Arabic. He also maintains that it was written in one of the great Ottoman Jewish centers, either in Istanbul, Salonika, or perhaps even Izmir,28 conclusions that are also shared by Marazzi. The latter also adds that the author must have been interested in the history of the people who had offered refuge to his fellow believers.29 The fact that there are very little variations between the Ottoman Turkish history edited by Giese and the Judeo-Turkish text is an important obstacle to it being considered as an original work, even though, as Babinger notes, the minor variations could warrant consideration of the work as an “independent version.”30 The question as to why a Sephardic scholar, at a time when knowledge of the Turkish language was not widespread in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman realms, would have transliterated such a work 25 For a detailed study of these three works, see Martin Jacobs, Islamische Geschichte in jüdischen Chroniken: Hebräische Historiographie des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). See also Uryel Heyd, “Osmanlı Tarihi İçin İbranice Kaynaklar” in VI. Türk Tarih Kongresi: Ankara, 20–26 Ekim 1961: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1967), 295–303. 26 Olga Borovaia, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2012), 10. See also her “The First Ladino Travelogue: Moses Almosnino’s Treatise on the Extremes of Constantinople,” Journal of Modern Iberian Studies 10 no. 1 (2018): 106–126 and Pilar Romeu Ferré’s translation into Spanish of the chronicle, Moisés Almosnino, Crónica de los reyes otomanos, trans. Pilar Romeu Ferré (Barcelona: Tirocinio, 1998). 27 Adolf Neubauer and Arthur Ernest Cowley Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, vol. 2 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1906), 357. 28 Babinger, “Eine altosmanische anonyme Chronik in hebräischer Umschrift”: 109. 29 Marazzi, Tevarih-i Al-i Osman, ix. 30 Babinger, “Eine altosmanische anonyme Chronik in hebräischer Umschrift”: 109.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

is fascinating, but it cannot be answered in a satisfactory manner. Perhaps it was just a linguistic experiment for the author—an attempt to write Turkish in the Hebrew script. The idea that a ludic temptation might have been the motive behind the genesis of Jewish Turkish literature is indeed attractive. However, to talk of a genesis, properly speaking, some continuity would be necessary, but this is not the case.31 Notwithstanding the unusual case of Hoca İshak Efendi, it is only against the background of the tremendous changes and transformations which affected Ottoman society and the Jewish communities in the post-­ Tanzimat era that the use of Turkish by Jews, and consequently its literary use, started to become objects of debate among the Jewish intelligentsia. The granting of greater political rights to non-Muslims in the wake of the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, including the possibility of employment in the civil service, had had only a limited effect on the life of the Jewish community. The condition to be able to profit from those new opportunities was fluency and literacy in Turkish. This had allowed Christian Armenians and Greeks to achieve employment in the state apparatus. Foreign visitors were struck by the fact that the Jewish community seemed to have benefited little from the reforms. When visiting the Ottoman capital in 1840 with Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880), who a few years later would found the Alliance israélite universelle, Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) identified the lack of literacy in Turkish as a key impediment to the progress of Jews. He noted that there was a need to promote the study of the Turkish language. According to an entry in his diary, he asked Chief Rabbi Hayyim Moşe Fresko (1780–1850) to “issue an order that every school should have a well-qualified master, to teach the children to read and write the Turkish language.”32 The chief rabbi followed Montefiore’s advice and issued a trilingual edict in Hebrew, Ladino, and Turkish to that effect. Montefiore’s initiative seems to have been well received in government circles. He 31 Despite references in scholarly literature about the possibility of the existence of other Turkish texts in the Hebrew script, such as György Hazai’s mention of the existence of “Turkish records in Greek, Armenian, Cyrillic, Syriac, Hebrew, Latin and Georgian scripts” in 1979 (Kurze Einführung in das Studium der türkischen Sprache [Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 1978], 31) and Marazzi’s mention of “Turkish texts in Hebrew characters currently being studied at the Hebrew University” in 1980 (Tevarih-i Al-i Osman, xi) no new manuscripts seem to have emerged. 32 Louis Loewe [L. Loewe], ed., Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Comprising Their Life and Work as Recorded in Their Diaries From 1812 to 1883, vol. 1 (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890), 270.

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reports that Mustafa Reşit Pasha (1779–1858), the minister for ­foreign affairs and architect of the Tanzimat reforms, told him that “if you had done nothing else in Constantinople than that, you ought to consider yourself amply compensated for the trouble and fatigue you have undergone, by the consciousness of having been instrumental in affording your brethren the opportunity of raising their position, by a knowledge of the Turkish language.”33

Reactions in the community to the introduction of “the study of the ­Turkish language and its literature” too were positive, largely because it “would raise the Jews in the estimation of both Moslems and Greeks.”34 Montefiore, Crémieux, and the delegation of European Jews were in Ottoman Turkey in order to plead the cause of Ottoman Jews in the context of the Damascus and Rhodes ritual murder accusations. Communication problems with the ­Ottoman authorities proved to be a major cause of the helplessness of the community when facing medieval Christian calumnies and rising antisemitism in Christian-majority territories in the Balkans, where the rise of nationalism led to an increased marginalization of ethno-religious minorities. The European delegation that visited Istanbul was also struck by the poverty of the community. During his visit to the Jewish neighborhood of Hasköy, Montefiore noted that “he had never in any other place witnessed so much poverty and distress.”35 Such views were still being echoed decades later by travelers such as the Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831–1896) who wrote in a letter dated December 9, 1873 announcing a donation to the Alliance israélite universelle, that during my repeated and prolonged stays in Turkey, I was painfully impressed by the misery and ignorance of the majority of Israelites who inhabit this empire. There is progress everywhere in Turkey, but the Israelites hardly benefit, because of their poverty and lack of enlightenment. Responding to the educational needs of youth, that is the most efficient remedy against this ailment.36

33 Ibid., 280. 34 Ibid., 275. 35 Ibid., 276 36 Maurice Hirsch [M. Hirsch], “Lettre à l’Alliance,” Archives israélites 35 (1874): 74.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

Of course, poverty in the community was not a new problem and the issue was regularly addressed in Sephardic ethical, so-called musar literature.37 In Shevet Musar, one of the most influential texts of the genre, Rabbi Elijah ha-Kohen (d. 1729) drew a moving portrait of the case of a destitute man who was forced to beg for the sustenance of his family. The rabbi concluded in terms that called for greater empathy with the underclass: As all this happens to the poor man, it is impossible to accuse [this man], for if he does not know how to behave and does some bad things, it is because he is distraught. Know that the acts of the poor man seem wrong and reprehensible, but they are just nevertheless; the rich man does not understand the grievance of the poor, for he has not experienced it.38

Though this text was originally published in Hebrew in Istanbul in 1712, the fact that it was translated into Ladino and reedited several times in the nineteenth century indicates that it was dealing with issues which were vivid concerns for the Ladino-reading population. For Montefiore and later Ottoman Jewish reformers, political marginalization and poverty were issues that could be changed through the promotion of the Turkish language in the community: in other words, they believed that learning the language would contribute to communal empowerment. The extent to which Montefiore’s abovementioned intervention in favor of Turkish and the chief rabbi’s initiative resulted in concrete improvement of the standing of Turkish within the Jewish community is disputed. Avram Galanti, who, admittedly, cannot be suspected of any sympathy for the Jewish religious authorities and whose views must accordingly be treated with some caution, claims that it had none at all because it was only many years after the rabbinical decree that a Jewish school introduced Turkish on its curriculum, that is, the newly founded “modern” Piri Pasha school in 1854.39 The opposition of the rabbinate and religious conservatives to modern education also affected the Alliance israélite universelle schools which were established from 1874 onwards.40 The Alliance’s attempts to teach Turkish were halfhearted: Turkish was only the third language beside French and Hebrew 37 Matthias B. Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), 103–120. 38 Quoted in Lehmann, Ladino Rabbinic Literature & Ottoman Sephardic Culture, 110. 39 Bodrumlu, Türkler ve Yahudiler, 171–172. 40 Ibid., 175.

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taught to the mainly Ladino-speaking pupils.41 Initially, only two hours per week in boys’ schools and none in girls’ schools were dedicated to Turkish.42 A report on the circumstances of Istanbul’s Jews notes that in 1886 only sixty-six Jewish children at primary school were being formally taught Turkish in the Ottoman capital.43 The curriculum of Alliance schools in Edirne at the turn of the century records that only five of thirty-eight teaching hours were allocated to Turkish. The teaching of Hebrew for religious purposes was allocated six hours, whereas the remaining twenty-seven hours were taught in French.44 At least as important in the school’s partial failure as the lack of enthusiasm of some members of the Alliance who were far from convinced that students needed anything else but French, the language of the Enlightenment, was a lack of teachers, and a dearth of appropriate teaching material addressing the needs of these multilingual students. By the end of the nineteenth century, of 300,000 Jews living within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, only about 1,000 were literate in Turkish, even though 100,000, at least according to one Alliance teacher, had learnt French.45 Leading intellectuals at the time, such as Avram Galanti, were critical of the achievements of the schools and noted that they should put more emphasis on Turkish and the concrete needs of the community.46 He reprimanded the community for its dependence on the Alliance and other “foreign” schools, an issue also highlighted in an article by the lawyer and poet İsak Ferera.47 Meanwhile, the spirited secular Ladino press,48 disliked by the religious authorities, also continued to promote the need for the study 41 On the Alliance israélite universelle schools in Ottoman Turkey, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the politics of Jewish schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 42 Ibid., 86. 43 Paul Dumont, “Jewish Communities in Turkey During the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century in the Light of the Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle,” in Christian and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, vol. 1, The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 215. 44 Erol Haker, Edirne, Its Jewish Community, and Alliance Schools 1867–1937 (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2006), 62–63. 45 Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (London: MacMillan, 1991), 165. 46 Kalderon, Abraham Galante, 18–19 and Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 133. 47 Bodrumlu, Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, vol. 1, 313–314 and İsak Ferera, “Fikr-i Teşebbüs Hakkında bir Konferansımdan,” Mirat 1 (14 February 1909 [1 Şubat 1324]): 12. 48 On the Ladino Press, see Sarah Abrevaya Stern, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) and also Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theatre in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

of Turkish49 and contributed to the debate on the development of Ottoman citizenship.50 The publication of school manuals to teach Turkish was part of that lukewarm attempt to familiarize pupils with the Turkish language. In his Essai sur l’histoire des israélites de l’Empire ottoman, Moïse Franco mentions works such as Moïse M. Dal Médico’s Muallim-i Lisan-i Osmani: Méthode théorique et pratique pour l’enseignement de la langue turque (Ottoman Language Teacher: Theoretical and Practical Method to Teach the Turkish Language), published in 1888 by the Bağdatliyan Press in Istanbul, Selim Gurdji’s Ecnebilere Mahsus Elifba-yı Osmani: Aliyans Mektepleri Tarafından Kabul Olunmuştur (The Ottoman Alphabet for Foreigners: As accepted by the Alliance Schools), published in 1891 by the Kasbar Press, and S. Altabev’s Yeni Usul Kıraat (Reading: A New Method) published at the Nişan Berberyan Press in 1897. He could have added to this list other school manuals in Turkish such as Selim Gurdji’s Nevsal-ı Baytari (Veterinary Yearbook), which was used in Alliance schools and had also been published by the Kasbar Press in 1891. Another important development in the early history of Jewish Turkish literature was the emergence of newspapers which were partly or entirely in Turkish in the Rashi or Hebrew scripts. Central to this development was the decision by Moiz Fresko, the director of the Tac-ı Muhip school in Izmir, to publish a bilingual Ladino and Turkish newspaper in the Rashi script in 1888. Writing to the authorities to obtain the necessary permission to produce the publication, he maintained that the Jews of Izmir were desirous to study the Ottoman Turkish language and eager to learn about Ottoman Turkish literature and culture. He further suggested that they could not fulfil this wish because they were unable to read and write Turkish even though they had an oral command of the language. Fresko continued by stressing that he wished to found a “newspaper with the name Üstat discussing politics, literature, the arts etc. in Turkish and Ladino [the author uses the term Musevice—Jewish] in Hebrew characters which would familiarize the community [millet] I belong to, as far as possible, with the official language of the eternal state 49 David M. Bunis, “Modernization and the Language Question Among Judezmo-Speaking Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire,” in Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 232. 50 On the citizenship debate within the Ottoman Jewish Community, see Julia Philip Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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The authorization was granted on condition that the paper would not “engage in publishing anything that was contrary to the interests of the Ottoman State.”52 From the beginning, the newspaper project responded to two distinct needs: educational—promoting the Turkish language and a better knowledge of mainstream Ottoman culture among Jews—and patriotic—encouraging the integration in and thus showing the attachment of the Jewish community to the Ottoman state. This had already been the central concern of similar earlier publications mentioned by Franco and Galanti such as Şarkiye (The Oriental, 1867), Zaman (The Times, 1872) and Ceride-i Tercüme (The Translation ­Magazine, 1876).53 One of the pioneers of the Ladino Press, Yehezkel Gabay (1825–1898), quoted by Avram Galanti in Türk Harsı ve Türk Yahudisi (­Turkish Culture and the Turkish Jew, 1953), wrote to the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, that dealt with minority affairs, to ask for permission for the Jewish community to publish a newspaper in Turkish with “Hebrew letters” with the name Şarkiye (The East), because “the Jews of Arabia and Turkistan are unable to read the newspapers published in Istanbul as they do not know the language of Istanbul and are unaware of ancient events, and because the Jews of Istanbul would like to speak and write good Turkish.”54 While such newspapers provided interesting samples of Turkish in the Rashi script, they did not contain literary texts. The wish to disseminate knowledge about Ottoman Turkish literature expressed by Montefiore, Gabay, and Fresko was not concretized in the pages of these papers. It is striking, for instance, that in Üstat, which managed to survive for almost two years between 1888–1890, Jewish news, such as short pieces on religion and festivals, and even a series of articles lasting over several months on the Jews of Tétouan were not in Turkish but in Ladino. Articles in Turkish, on the other hand, can broadly be divided into short world news, national and local news, and a variety of mildly 51 Moiz Fresko, petition letter dated October 15, 1888 (3 Teşrinievvel 1304). Başbakanlık Arşivi (Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office of the Republic of Turkey). İ.DH. 1115/87229 lef 1a. 52 See document İ.DH. 1115/87229 lef 6 at the Başbakanlık Arşivi (Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office of the Republic of Turkey). 53 Franco, Essai sur l’histoire des Israélites de l’empire ottoman depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, 278. 54 Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Avram Galanti], Türk Harsı ve Türk Yahudisi: Tarihî, Siyasî, İçtimaî Tetkik (Istanbul: Fakülteler Matbaası, 1953), 17.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

amusing anecdotes. Unsurprisingly, the Turkish texts do not really showcase a distinctly Jewish linguistic repertoire and there are no linguistic features distinguishing the language of the newspaper from that of standard Ottoman Turkish publications. The uncomplicatedness of the syntax is the only obvious difference with the language of coeval Ottoman Turkish newspapers. It is thus difficult to legitimize the use of a term such as “Judaeo-Turkish,” a language that can be placed alongside Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino), Judaeo-German (­Yiddish), or a Judaeo-Arabic—languages that are distinctively Jewish varieties of the ­languages of their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors. Referring to the alphabet as an identity marker would be appropriate here. However, it is worthwhile noting that the alphabet is not always a sufficient criteria to mark ethno-religious difference, as Ahmet İhsan’s pieces for Armeno-Turkish publications show. In any case, the “Judaization” of the ­Turkish language would have contradicted the basic aim of the publishers: to teach readers a simplified standard written Turkish. It is notable that while editors mostly followed Ladino conventions when it came to the transliteration of consonants, they went to considerable lengths to represent the eight vowels of the Istanbul koine within the limitations of the Hebrew script. Editors aimed above all at creating a Jewish readership for Turkish publications. They were paving the way for the emergence of a Jewish Turkish literature. That such newspapers did not go unnoticed by non-Jewish readers is important. During the debates preceding the alphabet change of 1928, the Mekhitarist-educated Halit Ziya observed that “the Jews had in Izmir a newspaper which was written in Turkish with the Hebrew script.”55 From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, new Turkish-language periodicals published by Ottoman Jews appeared. In the spirit of Ottomanism, they aimed at a broader readership and were partly or entirely in Turkish in the Ottoman Turkish script. While later short-lived publications, such as Nisim Masliyah’s İttihat (Unity, 1908–9), Bohor Israel’s Ceride-i Felsefiye ( Journal of Philosophy, 1912),56 and Moïse Kohen alias Munis Tekinalp’s (1883–1961) İktisadiyat Mecmuası (The Magazine of Economics, 1914–1918)57 did not have a specific Jewish identity, Alexander Ben-Guiat’s El Meserret (The Joy) was 55 Uşaklıgil, “Latin Harfleri Kabul Etmeli Mi, Etmemeli Mi?,” 207. 56 On Bohor İsrael and this publication, see Mehmet Alkan, “Bilinmeyen Bir Felsefe Dergisi: Ceride-i Felsefiye ve bir Yahudi Sosyalist: Bohor İsrael,” Tarih ve Toplum 77 (1990): 50–56. 57 On Kohen, see Jacob M. Landau, Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot, 1883–1961 ([Leiden]: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1984) and Rıfat N. Bali, Bir Günah Keçisi: Munis Tekinalp (3 volumes) (Istanbul: Libra, 2012).

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a bilingual Ladino-Turkish periodical published twice a week in Izmir between 1897–1922.58 The Ottoman Turkish pages mainly aimed at promoting petitions of the Jewish community to the authorities.59 They were also a testimony to the secular elite’s wish to take part and be heard in Ottoman public life. However, the space devoted to Turkish language articles was reduced over time. El Meserret became a completely Ladino publication in the years that followed the proclamation of the second constitution in 1908.60 Societies for the promotion of the Ottoman Turkish language gained impetus during those years, while outspoken intellectuals such as Galanti and Kohen took on the Jewish establishment to make a case for a more systematic dissemination of Turkish in the community. By then, Kalb-i Şikeste (The Broken Heart, 1899), the first poetry collection in Turkish written by an Ottoman Jew had already been published. Its author was a young man who was known to be engaged in the promotion of Turkish in the Jewish community: Avram Naon.61 With Avram Leon, he had copublished the short-lived bilingual Ceride-i Lisan (Language Magazine) in 1899, a periodical that served such an aim.62 Naon, who was responsible for the Turkish pages of this short-lived magazine, was emblematic of a new generation of Jewish intellectuals who did not wish to remain constrained to community roles, but who wanted to be active in Ottoman society in general. A lawyer, who had studied at the prestigious Imperial Civil High School and the Law School, Naon supported the promotion of Turkish and community rights in his journalistic writings. This commitment to Jewish empowerment is also clear from his participation in humanitarian societies such as the Ottoman Red Crescent and, during the republican period, from his unsuccessful political career as a member of the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Liberal Republican Party) and later as an independent candidate. Naon believed that the publication of literary works in Turkish would contribute to a better acceptance and integration of Jews within the Ottoman

58 For a list of those publications see Nesim Benbanaste, Örneklerle Türk Musevi Basınının Tarihçesi (Istanbul: Sümbül Basımevi, 1988), 60–61. 59 Amelia Barquin, “Un periódico sefardí: El Meseret de Alexandr Ben-Guiat,” Sefarad 57 no. 1 (1997): 28. 60 Ibid.: 28. 61 On Naon see Laurent Mignon, “Naon, Avram,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (Third Edition), http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573–3912_ei3_COM_27646. 62 Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Abraham Galante], Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Editions Isis, n.d.), 93.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

nation. Yet, like other poets of his generation, his poetry was autotelic.63 This is not surprising in the years of heavy censorship that characterized the reign of Abdülhamit II—the period of istibdat (oppression). Influenced by the neo-­ Parnassian poetry of Tevfik Fikret and Cenap Şehabettin, two leading lights of the Servet-i Fünun movement, his sole collection of poems and prose poetry marked a turning point in the development of Jewish Turkish literature. In his foreword, Naon noted his wish to collect in one volume “some of his modest literary works which had been included and printed in literary magazines.”64 He contributed to a variety of periodicals of the time such as Malumat, Musavver Terakki (The Illustrated Progress), Pul Mecmuası (The Stamp Magazine), İrtika (Advancement), Mecmua-i Edebiye (The Literary Magazine), and Musavver Fen ve Edep (The Illustrated Science and Literature).65 Yet it is not in printed form that Naon’s poetry now attracts most attention. His works survive in a different context: the repertoire of Turkish classical music. Signed “Avram Naum,” some of his verses were put to music by popular composers such as Leyla Saz (1850– 1936), İsmail Hakkı Bey (1865–1927), Lemi Atlı (1869–1945), Bîmen Şen (1873–1943), Mısırlı İbrahim Efendi (1879–1948), İsak Varon (1884–1962), and Artaki Candan (1885–1948) and remain staples of alaturka music.66 Naon considered it to be his duty to promote literary creation in Turkish by Ottoman Jews and to spread their writing in one periodical publication. In this endeavor he found a keen ally in the person of İsak Ferera, another lawyer and poet, with whom he shared a similar intellectual outlook.67 Ferera too, after completing his primary education in modern Jewish schools, pursued his secondary education in a secular institution before studying at the Law School and pursuing a doctorate in law in Paris. Like Naon, he put out a collection of neo-Parnassian poems. Entitled Ebr-i Bahar (Clouds of Spring), it appeared in 1904. The quest for beauty and formal perfection, associated with 63 For a study of his poetry, see Oğuz Karakartal, Tevfik Fikret’in İzinde İki Şair: Avram Naon ve İsak Ferera (Istanbul: Eren, 2006). 64 Avram Naon, Kalb-i Şikeste (Istanbul: Asır Matbaası, 1899 [h. 1317]), 3. 65 For a list of those publications and the poems published see Karakartal, Tevfik Fikret’in İzinde İki Şair: Avram Naon ve İsak Ferera, 131–134. 66 The cosmopolitanness of this list of composers is striking. Leyla Saz, İsmail Hakkı Bey and Lemi Atlı were Muslim Turks. Bîmen Şen and Artaki Candan, Armenians whereas Mısırlı İbrahim Efendi and İsak Varon were Jewish, an indication that classical Turkish music or “Türk sanat müziği” (Turkish art music), as it is usually referred to, was one of the last bastions of Ottomanness in republican times. 67 On Ferera, see Karakartal, Tevfik Fikret’in İzinde İki Şair and Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 11–24.

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­ arnassianism, contained, however, in its Turkish version intense emotional P outbursts. This synthesis of Romantic and Parnassian influences was representative of the eclecticism of late Ottoman Turkish poets. Just like their Muslim peers, Naon and Ferera avoided politically sensitive themes during the period of istibdat. Nonetheless, one could argue that the very act of writing in Turkish was political, as at the time most agents of modernization had an openly Francophile agenda. The use of Turkish was part of a critical engagement with what could be perceived as French cultural imperialism at a time when France was a major colonial power, as much as it was part of an emancipationist project aiming at the empowerment of Jews within the ­Ottoman realms. Notably, however, their poetry avoids open references to Jewishness or Judaism, even in the months that followed the declaration of the second constitution in 1908. Their prose, however, was much more forthcoming when it came to engage with Jewishness. Ten years after Ebr-i Bahar, Ferera published a second collection Aşina Sesler: Meşrutiyetten Evvel-Meşrutiyetten Sonra Eski Şeyler (Familiar Voices: Old Things from Before and after the Constitution), which allowed readers to discover the more political tone of some of his verses after the fall of Abdülhamit II. The second constitutional period and its newly gained, but short-lived, freedom made it possible for Naon and Ferera to start publishing a journal with the title Mirat (The Mirror, 1909) which aimed to showcase the literary and intellectual production in Turkish of Ottoman Jews to both Jewish readers and “the other Ottoman brethren.” The editors addressed two audiences. On the one hand, they wanted to motivate young Jewish writers and asked them to commit their pens to the development of Jewish Turkish literature. In a call to Turcophone Jewish intellectuals, listed in an open letter, the editors invited them “to prove with the works of their pens” that the complaint that the Jewish community, more than any other community, had been slow in embracing the Ottoman Turkish language “was meaningless and inappropriate slander.”68 ­Ferera and Naon were adamant that they wanted Mirat to be a Jewish voice in the Ottoman publishing world. This was made clear in Naon’s first editorial which underlined that the publication would not publish the works of non-Jews: Our newspaper will be a show window exclusively for the works of Jewish writers writing in Turkish. Or, to be more precise, it will be a balance sheet of the current and future abilities and developments in this field among the 68 Untitled open letter by the Editorial Board, Mirat 2 ((2 March 1909 [17 Şubat 1324]): 17.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here” members of the Jewish community. No work will be accepted that is from the outside, from a writer who is not Jewish. We should not be subject to blame because of this. Because this signifies a turn towards an accepted system which consists of encouraging the study of the Ottoman language among the Jews and preparing an appropriate medium for the publication and promulgation of their linguistic and scientific productions.69

This restriction should not be read as an attempt to entrench communal sectarianism in the literary field. The editors were conscious that the rise of concurring forms of nationalism, including its Turkish variant, was already threatening their newly gained Ottoman identity. They understood that this was not only a theoretical threat, even though, as Ferera noted in an article, Jews in Ottoman land continued to live in relative safety unlike their coreligionists in Russia, Germany, and Romania.70 Ferera and Naon wanted to create “a space of freedom”71 to provide their coreligionists with a publishing venue, without risking being rejected on sectarian grounds. In three separate articles, in fact, Ferera and Naon claimed that they had been the victims of anti-Jewish discrimination when they tried to publish their poems.72 Their persecutors ranged from magazine editors to publishers and officials of the state. Ferera relates how İbrahim Hıfzı Bey (1862–1905), one of Abdülhamit’s chief censors, had threatened him and tried to prevent him from using his Jewish name to sign his work,73 events which he also mentioned in the introduction to his 1914 collection.74 Even though Mirat was not the only Ottoman Turkish magazine put out by Jews in the second constitutional period, Ferera and Naon’s publication was the only one which openly advocated an Ottoman Jewish identity while also placing emphasis on literary production. Some readers were quick to respond to their call. In a short piece with the title “Mirat’ı Alkışlayalım” (Let us applaud Mirat), Alber Feridun underlined the importance of the project for the “scientific and linguistic progress” of the Jewish community and also, unsurprisingly, he asserted that the publication

69 Avram Naon [Avram Naum], “Arz-ı Meram,” Mirat 1 (14 February 1909 [1 Şubat 1324]): 1–2. 70 Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler,” 21. 71 Naon, “Arz-ı Meram”: 1. 72 Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler,” 22–23 and Avram Naon [Avram Naum], “Aşiyan ve Muhit Risâle-i Edebiyeleri Muharrirliklerine,” Mirat 1 (14 February 1909 [1 Şubat 1324]): 3–4. 73 Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler”: 22–23. 74 İsak Ferera, Aşina Sesler: Meşrutiyetten Evvel-Meşrutiyetten Sonra Eski Şeyler (Istanbul: Kanaat Matbaası, 1914 [r. 1330], 7.

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would “proclaim and prove our national honor and the heartfelt connection to the motherland.”75 The journal was also designed as a vector of progressive Jewish thought. Described on its cover as “an Ottoman literary, scientific, political, social and ethical journal serving the progress of the country and the enlightenment of the ideals of Ottoman Jewish writers,” it hosted a series of articles that dealt with challenging ideas concerning ancient Jewish history, contemporary societal debates, Jewishness and Ottoman identity,76 and the spirit of enterprise.77 The editors recommended a historicist approach to the history of religion and favored liberal and progressive interpretations of the faith. Some articles, such as “Kadim Musevilerin Suret-i İdareleri ve Meşrutiyet” (Government among the Ancient Jews and Constitutionalism) by Mahir Ruso, another lawyer, contended that the Sanhedrin was an assembly and a legislative body and could be seen as a predecessor of modern-day parliamentarianism which thus was legitimate from a religious point of view.78 Such ideas were not uncommon among Muslim progressives either. Namık Kemal, whose writings inspired the struggle against Abdülhamit’s oppressive regime, had also referred to the religious tradition to justify democratizing reforms. Indeed, in an article published in Hürriyet (Freedom) on July 20, 1868, that meaningfully took its title from a Qur’anic verse—“Wa shâwirhum fi’l-‘amr” (And seek their council in the matter)—he defended democratic reform, drawing from and reinterpreting the traditional sources of Islam.79 Avram Naon’s March 2, 1909 article on the death penalty deserves particular consideration. Entitled “İdam Cezası Tatbik Olunmalı Mı Yoksa Lağvedilmeli Mi?” (Should the Death Penalty Be Implemented or Should It Be ­Abolished?), the essay reviews various positions favor of the death penalty and discards them on philosophical, religious, and pragmatic grounds. R ­ eferring to 75 Alber Feridun, Genç Musevi Vatandaşlarıma: Mirat’ı Alkışlayalım, Mirat 2 (1 March 1909 [17 Şubat 1324]): 27. 76 İsak Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler,” Mirat 2 (1 March 1909 [17 Şubat 1324]): 21–23. For a discussion of the text see Laurent Mignon, Hüzünlü Özgürlük: Yahudi Edebiyatı ve Düşüncesi Üzerine Yazılar (Istanbul: Gözlem, 2014), 105–111. 77 İsak Ferera, “Fikr-i Teşebbüs Hakkında bir Konferansımdan,” Mirat 1 (14 February 1909 [1 Şubat 1324]): 11–13. 78 Mahir Ruso, “Kadim Musevilerin Suret-i İdareleri ve Meşrutiyet,” Mirat 2 (1 March 1909 [17 Şubat 1324]): 28–30. 79 For a translation into English of the article see, Namık Kemal, “And seek their council in the matter [Qur’an, Sura 3, Verse 159],” trans. Şükrü Hanioğlu in Modernist Islam, 1840–1940, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 144–148.

“La Lengua ke se avla aki”: Jewish Literature in the “Language Spoken Here”

Cesare Beccaria, the eighteenth-century pioneer of criminology, Naon writes that “the killing of an individual is only acceptable in self-defense.” Since a court sentence can hardly be considered self-defense, he continues, killing in the name of the community or the state is unacceptable. The poet also made the religious claim that since life is a gift from the Almighty, it was a rebellion against divine wisdom to kill a human being—a view representative of the progressive stance of the periodical in matters of faith. Mirat’s more worldly minded readers would have been satisfied with the notion that in countries where the death penalty was applied, the crime level did not fall and, therefore, the punishment was not an effective deterrent against violent crime. The irremissibility of the death penalty in case of a judicial error was another classical argument that he used to further his case.80 Naon’s discussion was part of a sensitive debate at a time when the state was going through deep reforms. The ideas put forward by Naon and Ruso were underpinned by Ferera’s emphasis on the idea that Judaism was not only compatible with political progress but that it was a vector of progress in itself. Though, admittedly, there was no reform movement in Sephardic Judaism, similar to the one that reshaped Ashkenazi Judaism in the nineteenth century, one could argue that secular Ottoman Jewish intellectuals, influenced by the teachings of the Alliance israélite universelle themselves adopted a vision of Judaism which embraced the society in which they were living and argued that, far from being an impediment to development and progress, it aided them. That such articles were not only addressed to a Jewish readership is obvious. In his first editorial, Naon had written that the journal aimed at being an “anthology of products that we wish to present to our Ottoman brothers having plucked them from the gardens and vineyards of our labour.”81 Some of the published pieces, such as the serialization of a translation of the French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s (1842–1912) philosemitic Israël chez les nations (Israel among the nations, 1893) also offered information about Jewish history to a non-Jewish audience. The choice of Leroy-Beaulieu was significant as he was known as someone who both fought against antisemitism and as someone who “since [his] youth liked to be on the side of the oppressed.82 This led him also to engage with the question of Armenian emancipation and the Hamidian 80 Avram Naon [Avram Naum], “İdam Cezası Tatbik Olunmalı Mı Yoksa Lağvedilmeli Mi?,” Mirat 2 (1 March 1909 [17 Şubat 1324]): 23–27. 81 Naon, “Arz-ı Meram”: 1. 82 Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Les Arméniens et la question arménienne (Paris: Imprimerie ­Clamaron-Graff, 1896), 3.

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massacres in his lecture entitled Les Arméniens et la question arménienne (The Armenians and the Armenian question), which was published in 1896. Naon and Ferera wanted the journal to fulfill two aims: The first one is to be physically among the Turkish publications that honor the world of the press and thus cause an increase of pride for the Jewish community that is a disciple of the culture of the Turkish community. The second one is the realization of our virtuous community’s desire to become a staunch and lofty pillar of Ottoman civilization by promoting and encouraging it.83

Yet, the project failed. The historian Avram Galanti notes “the journal did not become viable as it had no support.”84 Its spirit lived on, even if the editors would largely be forgotten during the republican era, victims of the nationalist rewriting of literary history.85 Literary scholars who mentioned them in their works were very few, a notable exception being Sadettin Nüzhet [Ergun] (1899–1945) in Türk Şairleri (Turkish Poets, 1936) who stressed that Naon was a popular writer of lyrics for Turkish art music and a master of the acrostic.86 Within the Jewish community too, there was little interest in remembering them, as Jozef Habib Gerez, a young Turkish Jewish artist and poet, soon found out when he tried to find the necessary funds to finance a transliteration and new edition of their works in 1955.87

83 Naon, “Arz-ı Meram”: 2. 84 Galanti, Türkler ve Yahudiler, 162. 85 On this topic see, e.g., Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 121–132 and “Minor Literatures and their Challenge to ‘National Literature’: The Turkish Case.” 86 Sadettin Nüzhet Ergun, Türk Şairleri, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Bozkurt Basımevi, 1936), 597–599. 87 Gerez, “Türk Yahudileri Hakiki Vatandaşlıklarını Türkçe Eser Vermek Suretiyle Göstermelidirler,” 72.

CHAPTER 6

Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism

I

n a piece on Jewish identity in Ottoman Turkey, İsak Ferera noted that the Jews of Germany were among those European Jews who lived in worse circumstances than the Jews of Ottoman Turkey. Germans Jews, unlike Ottoman Jews, had to convert to Christianity to obtain high positions in society. Ferera denounced these restrictions, but he was also outspoken in his condemnation of conversion. He referred to conversion as “lower[ing] oneself to the indignity of accepting the Nazarene religion,”1 a way to refer to Christianity which would have been understood by learned people in the Islamic tradition and also by Jews who were familiar with references to Christians in rabbinic literature. The extent to which Ferera and Avram Naon were aware of the variety of circumstances in which Jews lived all over the German-speaking lands is open to debate. French publications as well as the Ladino press were the main sources of information on the topic for the Ottoman Jewish intelligentsia. Yet, without a doubt, the lively debates on the topic of the Reform movement, that were tearing apart Jewish communities in the German-speaking world, would have attracted their attention. One possible forum in which Ottoman Jews could encounter German reformist thought was the Archives israélites de France, a journal founded in 1840 by Samuel Cahun (1796–1862), the French Hebraist and journalist whose 1851 eighteen-volume translation of the Bible into French “exerted a great influence upon a whole generation of French Jewry.”2 Not unlike his controversial translation, the Archives israélites de France promoted a liberal religious

1 Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler”: 21. 2 Isaac Broydé [I. Br.], “Cahen, Samuel,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3, ed. Isidore Singer et al. (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901–1906), 492.

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agenda. Among its causes was also the fight against antisemitism.3 Ottoman Turkey was a regular topic in the journal which was mapping the development of the Alliance israélite universelle schools in the lands of the empire in a language that echoed the propagandists of the French “mission civilisatrice” and that denounced local communities’ adherence to ancient ways.4 This made it an important publication to follow for progressive Ottoman Jews, who might not have appreciated the condescending tone of their French coreligionists, but who were also leading a similar fight against religious conservatism. Avram Galanti was among the international group of francophone collaborators who contributed a few articles to the journal. Indeed, he had written on the status of the Turkish language among Ottoman Jews and put forward his vision for educational reform in the pages of the review in a series of three articles published between April and July 1901.5 The editors of Mirat and their authors knew Avram Galanti well and were not always in agreement with him. They were much more interested in the writings of other advocates of liberal and socially engaged interpretations of Judaism. Leafing through old issues of the journal, Naon and Ferera would have come across many familiar names that might have inspired them in their own struggle. On March 29, 1894, the then chief editor Hippolyte Prague (1856–1935) published a piece that praised the French historian Leroy Beaulieu, “a liberal mind whose much appreciated earlier studies have familiarized him with ­Judaism which he can naturally judge with serene impartiality, the product of scholarly research and of deepened, much pondered knowledge.”6 This was a reference to Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s Les Juifs et l’antisémitisme: Israël chez les nations that Ferera started translating into Turkish a few years later in the ardent belief that it could help combat rising antisemitism in Ottoman Turkey. Had they looked at earlier issues they would have come across a series of texts which would have introduced them to the thought and the struggle of one of the leading lights of the Reform movement in the German-speaking world, who articulated ideas that fitted their own Enlightenment agenda and their unease with French supremacist intellectual discourse— namely, Samuel 3 Nicole Savy, Les Juifs des Romantiques: Le discours de la littérature sur les Juifs de Chateaubriand à Hugo (Paris: Belin, 2010), 177. 4 Félix Bloch, [untitled letter to the editor, dated 29 January, sent from Edirne], Archives israélites 35 (1874): 145–146. 5 Avram Galanti Bodrumlu [Abraham Galante], “La langue turque et les israélites de Turquie,” Archives israélites 62 (1901): 126, 197–198, 211–212. 6 Hyppolite Prague [H. Prague], “La richesse et les juifs,” Archives israélites 55 (1894): 97.

Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism

Hirsch (1815–1889).7 Hirsch’s vigorous response to the French critique of the disunity of a German rabbinate would certainly have attracted their attention as he both advocated unity within diversity—which later became the motto of Ottomanists such as Ferera—and the right to reform rites and reinterpret religion in terms of modernity: “Why would we, the current generation, not have the same rights as our predecessors in the Middle Ages?”8 With this right to reform came responsibilities and the need to tackle social injustices beyond the community. Hirsch’s engagement was based on reflection about the role and spirit of Judaism. After his emigration to the United States, Hirsch condemned slavery in the name of Jewish teaching during a sermon at his Keneseth Israel synagogue in Philadelphia in 1866, at a time the debates about slavery were still an open wound in the United States: “All men were created free, all men are children of God, no one can be their brother’s slave is thus the innermost teaching of Judaism.”9 There is no doubt that this was a spirit that would have appealed to intellectuals who looked to Jewish history and the Bible for arguments in favor of parliamentary democracy and against the death penalty. Both Ferera and Naon, just like Hirsch, were conscious that their political struggle required collaboration with actors and groups outside their ethno-­ religious group. It is not surprising that the two poets looked up to the highly symbolic figure of Namık Kemal10 who was celebrated as a major inspiration for those who led the struggle against the authoritarian rule of Sultan Abdülhamit II and led the revolution that provoked the ruler’s fall and instauration of 7 On Samuel Hirsch, see Gershon Greenberg, “Samuel Hirsch: Jewish Hegelian,” Revue des études juives 129 (1970): 205–215; Jacob Katz, “Samuel Hirsch—Rabbi, Philosopher and Freemason,” Revue des études juives 125 (1966): 113–126, Heinz Monz, “Samuel Hirsch (1815–1889): Ein jüdischer Reformator aus dem Hünsruck,” Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 17 (1991): 159–180 and Elmach P. Ittenbach, Samuel Hirsch: Rabbiner, Religionsphilosophe, Reformer; Rabbi, Philosopher, Reformer (Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich Verlag, 2014). 8 Samuel Hirsch, “Le Rabbinat en France et en Allemagne,” Archives israélites 26 (1865): 716–717. 9 Samuel Hirsch, Die Lehre, die uns Moscheh anbefohlen, ist Erbrecht der Gemeinden Jakobs: Predigt gehalten am Shemini Atseret 5628, in der Synagoge der Ref. Gem. Keneseth Israel, in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Stein & Jones, 1867), 6. 10 Mehmet Kaplan’s Namık Kemal: Hayatı ve Eserleri (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1948) remains a classic introduction to the life and works of this major ­Ottoman Turkish writer. Midhat Cemal Kuntay’s two volume Namık Kemal Devrinin İnsanları ve Olayları Arasında (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1944–56) is another classic work which discusses Kemal’s role in the wider context of nineteenth-century Ottoman socio-political and ­intellectual life.

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a constitutional regime. As noted by Oğuz Karakartal in his monograph Tevfik Fikret’in İzinde İki Şair: Avram Naon ve İsak Ferera (Two Poets in the Footsteps of Tevfik Fikret: Avram Naon and İsak Ferera, 2006), Ferera even dedicated a poem entitled “Ahrar-ı Ümmete Hitab” (Address to the Free People of the Community) to Namık Kemal, quoting famous lines from Kemal’s “Hürriyet Kasidesi” (Ode to Freedom) in his 1914 collection Aşina Sesler.11 The Young Ottoman man of letters, a Freemason like Hirsch,12 paid a heavy price for his political stance, whilst engaging in a radical critique of outdated traditions and mores. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), he defended freedom as the inherent nature of man,13 and his reinterpretation of the Qur’an and the hadith arguably showed the Swiss philosopher’s influence. Hirsch and Kemal were kindred spirits and also shared a concern about the representation of their religions and coreligionists in European scholarship. They were aware that orientalist representations and the essentialization of Jewish and Islamic practices were used as tools to legitimize the deprivation of political rights for Jews in Germany (Hirsch) and colonialism in the Islamic world (Kemal). That on a discursive level, there was a kinship between anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic discourses can be seen in the Young Hegelian philosopher and historian of religion Bruno Bauer’s (1809–1882) 1843 essay “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen frei zu sein” (The Ability of Today’s Jews and Christians to be Free). In this polemical text Bauer argued that granting political rights to the Jews in Germany was synonymous with attempts to “whiten the Moors”: Those who want to emancipate the Jews as Jews are giving themselves needless trouble. It is as if they were trying to clean a Moor in order to whiten him. Moreover they are also inflicting themselves unnecessary torment: By imagining that they cover the Moor with soap, they are actually cleaning him with dry sponges. They are not even wetting him.14

At the time Bauer was writing, Jews were being denied political rights and full citizenship in most of Europe. In Germany, debates on the political 11 Ferera, Aşina Sesler, 24 and Karakartal, Tevfik Fikret’in İzinde İki Şair, 48–49. 12 See Thierry Zarcone, “Freemasonry and Islam,” in Handbook of Freemasonry, ed. Henrik ­Bogdan and Jan A. M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 238 and, e.g., Katz, “Samuel Hirsch— Rabbi, Philosopher and Freemason.” 13 Kaplan, Namık Kemal: Hayatı ve Eserleri, 226. 14 Bruno Bauer, “Die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen frei zu sein,” in Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz, ed. Georg Herwegh (Zürich and Winterthur: Verlag des Literarischen Comptoirs, 1843), 57.

Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism

e­ mancipation of the Jews were raging. Leading anti-Jewish intellectuals, such as Bauer, maintained that Jews should not be granted full citizenship rights because they were an alien, oriental minority. In his earlier Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question, 1843),15 he had argued that Jews should not be given political rights unless they abandoned their “unhistorical” and “chimerical” religion.16 According to Bauer, Judaism had been static for almost 2,000 years, a condition which could be explained by the “oriental essence” (orientalisches Wesen) of their religion. The disciple of Hegel argued further that this stagnancy explained why Jews had not made any meaningful intellectual, scientific, or cultural contribution to humankind since the completion of the Talmud and had thus not participated in the creation of the modern world. In other words, Bauer had been, as argued by Judith Frishman, “orientalizing” the Jews.17 The years Bauer was developing those arguments were also the years the Islamic world had close encounters with varying interpretations of the “civilizing mission” of European imperialist powers. Nations engaged in colonial expansion, such as France and Britain, legitimized the conquest of new territories and the subjugation of native populations in Islamic North Africa and on the Indian subcontinent in the name of the values of the Enlightenment. It is thus not really surprising that intellectuals opposed to the political emancipation of Jews drew parallels between European Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Near East, arguing that their religion was an impediment to embracing modernity. Forty years after Bauer, Ernest Renan (1823–1892), the French historian and philologist, declared that Islam and an ill-defined “Arabness of the mind” (être arabe d’esprit) obstructed the development of science in Islamic Asia and Africa in a famous lecture entitled “L’islamisme et la science,” given at the Sorbonne in Paris on March 29, 1883.18 These legitimized colonial rule and depriving local populations of political rights. Renan referred to the need to spread civilization by means of weapons, rationalism, and science toward the end of his talk, a reference to the civilizing duties of “rational” and 15 Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (Brunswick: Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Otto, 1843). 16 For a discussion of Bauer’s main arguments see, e.g., Nathan Rotenstreich, “For and Against Emancipation: The Bruno Bauer Controversy,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 4 (1959): 3–11; Judith Frishman, “True Mosaic Religion: Samuel Hirsch, Samuel Holdheim and the Reform of Judaism,” in Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation, ed. Judith Frishman, Willemien Otten, and Gerard Rouwhorst (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 195–200, and David Leopold, “The Hegelian Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer,” History of European Ideas 25 (1999): 179–206. 17 Frishman, “True Mosaic Religion,” 196. 18 Ernest Renan, L’islam et la science, ed. François Zabal (Apt: L’archange Minotaure, 2005), 36.

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“­scientific” nations.19 In his less-known La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Intellectual and Moral Reform, 1871), Renan’s vision of the white man’s colonial mission had been pointedly expressed: “Large scale colonization is a primary political necessity. … The conquest of the country of an inferior race by a superior race, which settles there in order to govern it, is not shocking. England undertakes this type of colonization in India, to the great advantage of India, of humanity in general and to its own advantage.”20 Bauer in the Judenfrage and Renan in L’islamisme et la science used essentialist statements and an emphasis on the unchanging nature of these two faiths and cultures, namely Judaism and Islam, to underline the inability of Jews and Muslims to adapt to modernity and deny them equal rights. Bauer’s essay and Renan’s lecture did not go unchallenged. The newly appointed chief rabbi of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Samuel Hirsch in Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik: Briefe zur Beleuchtung der Judenfrage von Bruno Bauer ( Judaism, the Christian State and the modern Critique: Letters for the Illumination of Bruno Bauer’s Jewish Question, 1843)21 and Namık Kemal in Renan Müdafaanamesi (The Refutation of Renan, 1910)22 responded to the arguments put forward in these influential texts. Both authors did not develop a critique of orientalism itself, but they focused on challenging scholarship on their own religious traditions, a collateral benefit of which was the development of a set of arguments to challenge orientalist views in general. Still, Hirsch’s own rare writings about Islam iterated many of the misunderstandings common in Western scholarship on Islam at the time. He knew little about Islam, despite his interest in comparative religious studies. As Hirsch’s main concern was to make a case for citizen’s rights for Jews by establishing the kinship between Christianity and Judaism and enable a fruitful dialogue between those religious traditions, the othering of Islam was arguably a way of drawing together Jews and Christians.23 19 Ibid., 44–45. 20 Ernest Renan, La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1875), 92–93. 21 Samuel Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik: Briefe zur Beleuchtung der Judenfrage von Bruno Bauer (Leipzig: Verlag von Heinrich Hunger, 1843). 22 A romanized version of the text with a short introduction was published by Mehmet Fuat Köprülü in 1962—see Namık Kemal, Renan Müdâfaanâmesi: İslâmiyet ve Maârif (Ankara: Millî Kültür Yayınları), 1962. Abdurrahman Küçük has published a version of the essay in modern Turkish with a substantial introduction and a Turkish translation of Renan’s lecture— see Namık Kemal, Renan Müdâfaanâmesi (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, 1988). 23 Islam remained unmentioned in Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden (The Religious Philosophy of the Jews, 1842), his magnum opus. Yet, in his answer to Bauer, written the following year, Hirsch devoted one and a half page to Islam and its civilization. He painted a bleak

Samuel Hirsch, Namık Kemal, and Orientalism

Hirsch and Kemal were not the only ones who responded vigorously to Bauer’s and Renan’s claims. Progressive Jews who proposed reform in the religious sphere and political liberalization could not afford to ignore Bauer’s work.24 He based his opposition to the emancipation of Jews, a hotly debated topic then, on a radical critique of Judaism, Christianity, and society. His attack on Judaism was strongly worded: Talmudic Judaism was a “chimerical, illusory, soulless development” of Mosaism25 and the Jewish people had an “oriental,” “unhistorical character,” which made them incapable to evolve.26 Bauer’s arguments dealt with issues which constituted the crux of reformist ideology. Bauer’s claims regarding the stagnancy of Judaism and the meaninglessness of Jewish religious practices were fundamental issues, as the advocates of Reform argued that Judaism was a flexible, progressive religion open to change. Bauer draw attention to topics, such as the petrifaction of religious law and segregation, which had also been highlighted for criticism, though for very different reasons, by the Reform movement in their critique of rabbinic Judaism.27 picture. Hirsch established a binary opposition between the abstract spirituality of the church and Islam’s sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) and focus on worldly achievement. Not unlike Renan, he argued that Islamic civilization had been incapable of contributing to the development of science. It had only adopted selected aspects of the Greek heritage. The latter was nothing more than a “toy” in the eyes of Muslims who only wished to “beautify their lives.” Judaism, like Christianity, had needed to counter Islamic worldliness. Yet Jewish intellectual life in the world of Islam had also been restricted through its dependency on Greek philosophy and the Talmud, in a context which had not been conducive to scientific and intellectual investigation. Nonetheless, Hirsch was too honest not to recognize that his discourse on Judeo-Christian intellectual and religious kinship, in contradistinction to Islamic alterity, was called into question by historical facts. He noted that the conflict between Christians and Muslims reached its peak with the church’s desire to “liberate” the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem, a doomed enterprise that caused Jews and Muslims to share a common fate at the sharp end of Christian swords: “Crowds roamed, without order and discipline. Even a bunch of kids joined with the aim of conquering the Holy Grave. How could one now tolerate the infidels in one’s own midst? Butchering the Jews in the cities of the Rhine were the first heroic deeds of the holy crusaders” (Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 93–94). 24 Several leading lights of the Reform movement in Judaism, beside Hirsch, wrote responses to Bauer’s essays, among others, Gotthold Salomon (1784–1862), Wilhelm Freund (1806–1894), Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860), Gabriel Riesser (1806–1863), Gustav Philippson (1814–1880), and Abraham Geiger (1810–1874). For a discussion of their major arguments, see Nathan Rotenstreich, “For and Against Emancipation: The Bruno Bauer Controversy,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 4 (1959): 3–36. 25 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 26. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 See Rotenstreich, “For and Against Emancipation”: 12. The new and revised edition of D ­ avid Philipson’s The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1967) and

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Moreover, Bauer was a much talked about public intellectual. Not only was he a famous and very vocal historian of religions, but his teaching license in the department of theology at the University of Bonn had been revoked the year before the publication of his controversial essay—an incident which had interested the chattering classes. The authorities had, understandably, been uneasy with a professor of theology who taught atheism. Bauer had another characteristic which appealed to liberal Jews. He was a politically engaged Young Hegelian philosopher who could have been a potential ally in the battle for the democratization of the German state, had he not had such a distorted view of Jews and their religion. Renan’s views on the incompatibility of Islam and science, too, elicited several responses in the Islamic world at a time when reformist Muslim intellectuals were making a case for a progressive interpretation of their religion, looking back with pride at the Islamic Golden Age and at Muslim rule in Spain. They needed to counter the claim that Islam was essentially in conflict with scientific progress and that Islamic civilization had made no notable contribution to the history of humankind, as they themselves were justifying their vision of an Islam compatible with a modern scientific outlook and democratic reform, as a return to a more enlightened Islamic past.28 The existence of responses to Renan is significant as it was a reflection of the engagement of parts of the Muslim intelligentsia with intellectual debates in the West. Responding was of particular importance if the controversial ideas were expressed by famous scholars such as the French orientalist and scholar of religion Renan whom Jamâl ad-Dîn al-Afghânî (1838–1897), the controversial ideologist of Pan-Islamism and anti-imperialist activist, described as Michael A. Meyers, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) are two classic introductions to the history and ideology of the Reform movement from its inception in the German-speaking world to its modern-day variants in the United States. 28 The most famous response to Renan’s claims about the incompatibility between Islam and scientific progress is Jamâl ad-Dîn al-Afghânî’s reader’s letter in the Journal des débats on 18 May 1883. Al-Afghânî broadly agreed with Renan, though he did not share the French historian’s racist approach and stressed that religion in general, not only Islam, could be a source of oppression and obscurantism. See “Réponse du Cheik Gemmal Eddine” in Renan, L’islam et la science, 47–59. Turkish-speaking intellectuals in the Ottoman world were particularly keen to reply. Beside Namık Kemal’s famous Renan Müdafaanamesi (Istanbul: Mahmut Bey Matbaası, 1910 [r. 1326]), İbnürreşat Ali Ferruh’s Teşhir-i Ebatıl (Istanbul: Mihran Matbaası, 1889 [h. 1306]), and Gülnar Olga de Lebedef and Ahmet Cevdet’s translation of Ataullah Bayezidof ’s (1864–1911) Redd-i Renan: İslamiyet ve Fünun (Istanbul: Tercüman-ı Hakikat Matbaası, 1892 [h. 1308]) were conceived of as refutations of Renan’s main assertions.

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“the great philosopher of our times … whose fame has filled the whole West and penetrated the most distant lands of the East.”29 But it was not only the possibility of progress and reform within their respective traditions that Hirsch and Kemal wanted to defend. Their engagement was part of a larger struggle that opposed religionists to advocates of secular worldviews. Bauer and Renan were critical of religion in general. According to Bauer no one could be truly free in a Christian state. Real political emancipation required the abolition of all religions, including Christianity, and the establishment of a secular state. Renan also believed that religion was obsolete in the modern age. His lecture on Islam at the Sorbonne ended with a celebration of science and reason, albeit with militaristic and colonialist undertones. Nevertheless, both shared the view, inspired by Hegelianism, that Christianity was, in the French philosopher and historian Marcel Gauchet’s words, the religion which led the way out of religion. They had little good to say about other monotheistic belief systems such as Judaism and Islam, which they considered to be more primitive than Christianity. Underpinning these views on the intellectual superiority of Christianity was a racist conception of the world that Hirsch and Kemal had to counter in their works. Unlike Renan who openly professed his belief in the intellectual inferiority of Arabs, Bauer, at the time he published the Judenfrage, was not yet the post-Hegelian antisemite he later became, even though his contempt for Judaism and his statements on the profound and irrevocable alterity of Judaism paved the way for the modern antisemitic discourse which construed Jews as a fifth column undermining the national state. Faced with similar issues, Samuel Hirsch and Namık Kemal had to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric discourses in debates on Judaism and Islam, while also defending the place of religion against secularist arguments. Yet Hirsch’s and Kemal’s books were quite different. The rabbi’s work was an epistolary essay, dedicated to Leopold Zunz (1794–1886), consisting of six undated letters addressed to an unnamed friend who summoned him to respond to Bauer’s arguments. The use of such a literary device indicated that Bauer’s views had also had an impact among the secular Jewish elite in the German-speaking world. By addressing an anonymous “friend,” Hirsch was perhaps writing to all those who might have been convinced by the Young Hegelian’s arguments. In his response, Hirsch emphasized the historically progressive nature of Judaism and the convergence between the aims of Jewish religious development and the principles of the Christian democratic state; ideas which he would develop 29 Al-Afghânî, “Réponse du Cheik Gemmal Eddine,” 47.

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in a later work Die Reform im Judenthum (The Reform in Judaism, 1843).30 Though Hirsch’s book matched Bauer’s in terms of irony and sarcasm, it is clear that he took his opponent seriously and tried to respond systematically in the knowledge that he would be read by him. Moreover Bauer’s views were based on Hegelian interpretations. Hirsch himself was a Hegelian who in his Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden had questioned Hegel’s understanding of Judaism and proposed an alternative, still Hegelian, interpretation of Judaism as a rational religion which incarnated freedom and moral values, and which had not been surpassed by Christianity whose historical role had been to spread monotheism. The Renan Müdafaanamesi, on the other hand, was a polemical essay. Kemal, who was governor of the island of Lesbos in 1883, was aware that the text of Renan’s conference had been debated in the Ottoman press for some time and he felt the need to join the discussion.31 It was a short treatise, written in difficult circumstances, that he could not publish during his lifetime. Even though Kemal considered the composition of this work, which aimed to show that Islam “promoted science,”32 as a “great act of worship”33 and even wanted to dedicate it to Sultan Abdülhamit II,34 he was unsatisfied with the result. In a letter to his son-in-law, he explained that the editing of the text was proving to be extremely complex: “The Refutation of Renan is finished, but it leads to nowhere. Making corrections is difficult, it is no laughing matter.”35 The problem seems to have been that he did not have access to the necessary works of reference, an issue he mentions in his introduction.36 Nonetheless Kemal’s essay is of tremendous importance. It is one among several works written by Ottoman intellectuals to counter claims by Western orientalists and missionaries. In an era when the majority of Ottoman intellectuals were conscious of the growing threat posed by colonial imperialism to the Islamic world, they ­recognized the 30 On the development of Hirsch’s ideas while in Luxembourg, see Greenberg, “The ­Historical Origins of God and Man: Samuel Hirsch’s Luxembourg Writings”: 129–148 and also ­Frishman, “True Mosaic Religion,” 195–222. 31 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 2. 32 Ibid., 2. 33 Letter to Mustafa Asım Bey, dated 20 July 1883 in Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları 3: Midilli Mektupları 2 (Ankara: Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1973), 305. 34 Letter to Menemenli Rifat Bey, dated 21 July 1883, in Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları 3, 309. 35 Letter to Menemenli Rifat Bey, dated September, 1 1883, in Tansel, Namık Kemal’in Husûsî Mektupları 3, 317. 36 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 2.

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importance of scholarship and knowledge as tools in the Western colonial projects. But unlike al-Afghânî who published his response in French, and Hirsch, Kemal did not write in order to be read by his antagonist, but rather to be heard by his peers in Ottoman Turkey. Quite cavalier in his approach to Renan’s text, he disparagingly noted that “a few hundred volumes” would be needed to correct the factual and interpretation errors contained in Renan’s lecture.37 Kemal, however, settled for fifty-six pages. Hirsch and Kemal put pen to paper because they recognized the authority that Bauer and Renan wielded in their respective fields. It comes as no surprise that both needed to challenge their opponents’ scholarly authority to create a space for themselves in which they could develop their responses. Hirsch reminded his readers of the need to know where Bauer stood ideologically to make sense of his writings. He was aware of and had probably read most of Bauer’s earlier output. He noted in the early pages of his epistolary essay that Bauer’s new stance seemed at odds with his older works which were in line with so-called “old Hegelianism.”38 He referred to the evolution of Bauer’s thought, from his Hegelian interpretation of Christian dogmas, which considered Jewish doctrinal differences as deficiencies, to his open break with Christianity.39 Hirsch argued that Bauer’s philosophical views made a fair interpretation of Jewish history implausible. He went even one step further by calling into question the ability of non-Jews to make objective assessments of Judaism. He suggested that Jews were more scientific in their studies of Christianity because “the Jew does not want to convert the Christian to Judaism, thus his dealing with Christianity will always be unbiased and truthful.”40 Hirsch considered the urge to convert people of another creed and the associated, either religious or Hegelian, belief in the superiority of Christianity as major impediments to the scientific study of Judaism. In his essay, he would strive to show that ­Bauer’s ideological stance hindered an accurate and objective study of his object of investigation. Namık Kemal too reflected on the need to know Renan’s “creed and credo.”41 Having briefly discussed Renan’s standing in French intellectual life and the criticism incurred by his Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863), Kemal argued that, though the French scholar had rightly denounced the religious fanaticism 37 Ibid., 2. 38 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 5. 39 Ibid., 54. 40 Ibid., 117. 41 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 2.

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of the priests and the inquisition in Europe, he mistakenly considered intolerance to be the product of religion in general. Kemal asserted that, unlike ­Muslims who were able to study Christianity objectively because they considered it a genuine and legitimate religion that had become, since the revelation of Islam, obsolete, Europeans could not deal scientifically with Islam. If they were faithful Christians, their studies consisted of objections to Islam. Unbelievers such as Renan, on the other hand, tended to generalize and consider all religions to be similarly oppressive, to be “the heaviest chain of bondage for human thought.”42 Hirsch would have agreed with the latter part of Kemal’s argumentation. Quoting the Qur’an, the sayings of the prophet of Islam43 and reinterpreting Renan’s evidence, Kemal had questioned the French thinker’s statements and argued that Islam was intrinsically supportive of science and knowledge, a vision which was common among Young Ottoman reformists.44 Hirsch and Kemal, despite the fundamentally different circumstances in which they lived, were convinced that progressive interpretations of their respective religions were not only possible, but also necessary. Kemal even celebrated the possi­bility of an Islamic renaissance nurtured by an appropriation of Western science, similar to the European Enlightenment which was engendered by “knowledge taken from the Arabs while resisting against the fire of oppression of the clerical gang.”45 Hirsch too was weary of Bauer’s break with Christianity. Interestingly Hirsch’s concern was motivated by political reasons: The rabbi’s advocacy of political rights within the framework of a democratic Christian state was based on the religiosity, albeit reformed, of the Jews. He warned against the risks of irreligiousness and argued that a state, “penetrated by religion,” ought to emancipate “truly religious Jews” otherwise it would contradict its own principles.46 Hirsch did not want a secular state, but he based his argumentation on the fact that Jews had a place and rights within the boundaries of a Christian state as Jews. He maintained that Jews had always lived according to the principles of Jesus

42 Ibid., 8. 43 Ibid., 21 and 26. 44 On Young Ottoman ideology, Şerif Mardin’s seminal The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000 [1962]) remains a standard introduction. 45 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 49. 46 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 9–10. See also Gershon Greenberg, “The Historical Origins of God and Man: Samuel Hirsch’s Luxembourg Writings”: 143.

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who represented the realization of the full potential of the human being.47 As for the messianic expectation of the Jews, it was “the reality of the ­Christian state, the reality of the reign of truth and virtue on earth.”48 For Hirsch’s religious and political ambitions to be fulfilled, Bauer’s post-Christian views needed to be debunked, because they were Christian and because they were beyond ­Christianity. Both Hirsch and Kemal were conscious that their opponents were writing within a scholarly tradition they needed to engage with. For Hirsch this was less of a problem. He noted that the scientific study of the Bible and of Jewish and Christian histories was a new area of study where both Jews and non-Jews were making significant contributions.49 The rabbi was concerned that his own seriousness in studying and discussing Christian approaches to Judaism should be reciprocated.50 Indeed his vision of a dynamic, progressive Judaism and Christianity having two separate roles, but completing each other, was an idea that could be of interest to Christians as well. However, he was also aware of some common failings that were carried over into Bauer’s work from earlier scholarship. Hirsch maintained that one should stop theorizing about Jewish “laws” (Gesetze) in German texts. The term was too ambiguous and did not reflect the complexity and variety of Hebrew terms: The law is called in Hebrew chok [‫ ;]חק‬the ceremonial law is a mitsva [‫ ]מצוה‬and also edot [‫]עדות‬. However, if one mentions the Pentateuch as a whole, then it is called Torah [‫]תורה‬, “the teaching.” The “Ten Commandments” [Zehn Gebote] are not known to the Pentateuch, there are only “Ten Words,” Aseret ha-Devarîm” [‫]עשרת הדברים‬.51

Hirsch maintained that such terminological distinctions ought to be preserved in translations and scholarly discussions as they were essential for reaching a proper understanding of Judaism. Otherwise, the scholar might end up establishing “a false theory of Judaism,” just like the Apostle Paul who was misled

47 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 92. 48 Ibid., 100. 49 Ibid., 55. 50 Judith Frishman,“Good Enough for the Goyim? Samuel Hirsch and Samuel Holdheim on Christianity,” in Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion and Literature, ed. Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua J. Schwartz, and Joseph Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 278. 51 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 30.

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by the Greek translation of the Torah.52 In other words, Hirsch problematized the adequacy of the German language for the discussion of Hebrew religious terminology. However, he did not entirely reject such a possibility, as Reform rabbis like himself advocated the use of the German language during religious services. What he did was to recommend semantic prudence. Kemal, on the other hand, was all but prudent in his virulent dismissal of orientalist scholarship. He not only questioned the status of the orientalists, but also the depth of their knowledge. The Young Ottoman writer expressed his surprise at how little was known about Islam in Europe. Giving examples of factual errors contained in Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s (1774–1856) monumental Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (History of the Ottoman Empire, 1833) and Barthélémy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s (1625–1695) Bibliothèque orientale (Oriental Library, 1697)53, he complained that though there were scholars “who had exhausted their life in order to identify the smallest species of insects” and made “unthinkable and unimaginable discoveries,” nobody had yet bothered to uncover the truth about Islam.54 Kemal also underlined Western scholars’ insufficient mastery of oriental languages by referring to translation and reading mistakes in Hammer and Renan’s works,55 for instance ­Hammer’s misreading of the Ottoman Turkish ‫ كدى‬as kedi (cat) instead of gidi, an interjection expressing mild abuse, and Renan’s supposed mispronouncing of filsûf (‫)فلسوف‬, the Arabic for philosopher.56 Kemal maintained that the teaching of Middle Eastern languages was inadequate in Europe and consolidated this point with a personal anecdote: “When I was in Paris, I audited a Turkish ­lesson. I did not understand a single word during the teacher’s lecture. If I had not heard three or four Turkish particles, I would have been forgiven for thinking that a language unknown to me was being taught here.”57 There is a certain dose of cheekiness in the above remark and, perhaps, some hairsplitting in his earlier linguistic comments. Nonetheless, they are not only of documentary interest. Kemal’s aim was to undermine the authority of orientalist scholars, and in particular of Ernest Renan, by pointing to their poor scholarship. This weakness was not limited to Bauer and Renan’s improper mastery of the languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish. Hirsch and Kemal 52 Ibid., 30. 53 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 5–7. 54 Ibid., 7. 55 Ibid., 9 and 30. 56 Ibid., 9. 57 Ibid., 10.

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also criticized their opponents’ approach to the history of religions which, they argued, was marred by generalizations and a quest for patterns. Hirsch was ill at ease with Bauer’s tendency to assess Jewish history by comparing it to the history and evolution of other ancient peoples. Hirsch maintained that, according to Bauer, “the life of the Jewish people must have evolved, nolens volens, in line with the categories which shaped the life of the other peoples of Antiquity”58 and he denounced Bauer’s intellectual laziness. The rabbi’s discomfort with Bauer’s general interpretative framework indicated that Hirsch’s own worldview was already outgrowing the universalism of the revised Hegelianism that he was still professing at the time. It found an echo in Namık Kemal’s criticism of Renan for considering the development of Christian societies as a universal pattern which could be used to interpret Islamic societies.59 The poet implied that the imposition of general interpretative frameworks on different cultures could only lead to misunderstandings. He accused Renan of viewing Islam as a religion which was more primitive than the belief-systems of those who “worship fire in China and animals in India” and of “the children of our race who eat human beings on the South Sea Islands.”60 While he considered it “natural” that Muslims, Christians, and Jews should “curse” and “mock” animist and polytheistic belief systems,61 it was not acceptable that anyone should question the divine origin of the three Abrahamic religions. It is as a believer that he expressed his anger at Islam being considered on a par with all other religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. He fully understood that Muslims were put in the same category as all other non-Christian peoples. This had political consequences in the age of colonialism, but was also a significant problem of orientalist scholarship: the perception of and generalizations about colonial “others” and non-European peoples. Thus, his affirmation of Islamic superiority challenged Western discourses on the Orient. While his own approach too perpetuated and encouraged prejudices against non-monotheistic forms of religiosity, it also defied Western supremacist approaches. That the discourse on religion was connected to a discourse on race was evident for the two authors. Hirsch was conscious that Bauer’s conversion of particular practices within a culture into idealized representations of that 58 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 45 59 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 4. 60 Ibid., 13. 61 Ibid., 15.

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c­ ulture were fundamental dimensions of his attack on Jews and Judaism. He criticized the philosopher for using largely discredited sources on Judaism, such as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s (1654–1704) virulently anti-Jewish Entdecktes Judenthum ( Judaism Uncovered, 1700).62 Though Bauer was not yet asserting antisemitic views, nourished by racist theories, Hirsch wondered what ­Bauer’s motives could be when he willingly misrepresented aspects of Judaism such as the significance of the Kashrut, Jewish dietary laws. “If someone, though he knows better, fosters hatred, then one is entitled to call this shameful,”63 wrote the rabbi when discussing Bauer’s transposition of Jewish beliefs regarding dietary impurity to the field of relationships between Jews and non-Jews.64 He derided Bauer’s use of the Shabbat as an example of failed Jewish integration into mainstream society65 and opposed Bauer’s caricature of scholarly disputation (pilpul) by reminding his antagonist that similar disputations existed also among Lutherans, the tradition which had shaped the latter.66 Hirsch also denounced Bauer’s attacks on Jewish “selfish” and “hypochondriacal”67 concerns for self-interest and economic activities such as “moneylending,” “pawnbroking,” and “small retail.”68 He questioned Bauer’s depiction of Jewish economic life and reminded readers of his epistolary essay that these activities were not restricted to Jews. Moreover, he submitted that they performed an important duty in socioeconomic life.69 Contextualizing the living conditions of Jews, something that Bauer refused to do, Hirsch argued that Jews would engage in different economic activities such as agriculture if they were given the opportunity.70 His strategy was to anchor the discussion in concrete reality and reject abstract discussions of a theoretical Jewishness which existed only in Bauer’s text. Hence, the rabbi also questioned Bauer’s portrait of Jewish life in Poland and Galicia, which leaned on the writings of an “enemy of the Jews” and about which neither he “nor Bauer knew the facts from observation.”71 For Hirsch, empirical observation was one way to grasp the whole variety of Jewish lifestyles and experiences and thus to subvert Bauer’s discourse. This 62 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 116. 63 Ibid., 56. 64 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 48 and 57. 65 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 13–14. 66 Ibid., 9. 67 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 49. 68 Ibid., 9, and Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 12–13. 69 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 13. 70 Ibid., 13. 71 Ibid., 21.

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is why he also referred to his childhood experiences in his native Thalfang in the Rhineland Palatinate.72 Hirsch knew that Bauer had crossed the thin line between theological critique and xenophobia, the fear of the stranger. Kemal too was aware that Renan’s attack on Islam was underpinned by a racist vision of humanity to which he could not subscribe. According to Renan, Arabs, as a Semitic people speaking a Semitic language, were inherently incapable of producing science and philosophy.73 The French historian maintained that “Arab science” and “Arab philosophy” were misnomers as they were the labors of non-Arabs, using the Arabic language.74 The idea was unacceptable for Kemal who stated that whoever wrote in Arabic contributed to Arab culture and could be considered an Arab.75 Kemal particularly criticized Renan’s idea that Avicenna (980–1037) and Averroes (1126–1198) were as little Arab as Albertus Magnus (1206–1280), Roger Bacon (1214–1294), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) had been Latin.76 The ­Ottoman writer responded that this claim was dishonest: “It is unacceptable for a person who lectures on philosophy to consider those who share the same religion and education as being similar to people, who, while belonging to a separate nation and speaking its tongue, write in the language of a people that has disappeared.”77 Kemal was a Muslim internationalist by conviction for whom racism was anathema. He challenged Renan’s theory on the existence of “the Arab mind,” with a pinch of sarcasm: “I did not understand what the lecturer meant by ‘Arab of the mind’ and thus I cannot study the correctness of his ideas on the topic. [Does he mean that] every people have a particular way of thinking and another one when they unite with another people? Truly, Monsieur Ernest Renan defends other strange claims as well.”78 While Kemal questioned the racist implications of Renan’s ideas, he did not deny the existence of cultural differences between peoples and responded to Renan’s generalizations about cultural assimilation among people who had adopted Islam. According to the Young Ottoman thinker, people did not lose their cultural specificity by

72 Ibid., 13. 73 For a discussion of Renan’s antisemitism with representative excerpts from his works, see Djamel Kouloughli, “Ernest Renan: Un antisémitisme savant,” Histoire, Epistémologie, ­Langage 29 no. 2 (2007): 91–112. 74 Renan, L’islam et la science, 35–36. 75 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 38. 76 Renan, L’islam et la science, 35 77 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 38 78 Ibid., 38–39.

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a­ dopting Islam, which was something that Renan had paradoxically claimed.79 Kemal used the opportunity to express his belief in values such as peace and human brotherhood: “If Islam had suppressed cultural differences and thus minimized the causes of conflict between the children of humankind, would that not have been appreciable to common sense?”80 Like Hirsch faced with Bauer’s claims, Kemal raged against some of Renan’s stereotypical assumptions. He wondered about the meaning of the “iron ring” which “encircles the head of the believers” and made them fanatical and unwilling to accept progress and science.81 The Ottoman writer maintained ­ he that Renan did not always submit evidence to prove his point.82 Whenever did, he misused it and reached the wrong conclusions. Toward the end of his lecture, Renan quoted a qadi, a religious judge, from Mosul who, asked about the population of the city, argued that such information was unimportant and that science was an attempt to rival God.83 Renan presented the letter as evidence for the “intellectual laziness, lack of precision, the incapacity of precision in Islamic lands.”84 Not only did Kemal wonder about the translation of the text and even the authenticity of the anecdote, but he offered a lesson in methodology to the French scholar. Focusing on the persona of the qadi, he suggested that the religious authority from Mosul was perhaps insane, or senile, or that he simply wanted to conceal the information from foreigners. Without proper information about the author, it was difficult to make sense of a historical document. But to tell the truth, Kemal was not impressed by the qadi’s response, which seemed to be influenced by religious obscurantism; and he went on to argue that in any case one religious scholar’s personal opinion could not be used as evidence for the attitude of Islam towards science, when “the Qur’an, the hadith, and thousands of books” said otherwise.85 Kemal suggested thus that no sound information about Islam’s attitude toward science and progress could be reached by way of a dubious anecdote. Beside religious and racist positions, Hirsch and Kemal were also deeply concerned about the refusal of their opponents to historicize and contextualize developments in the history of Judaism and Islam. Bauer and Renan nurtured 79 Ibid., 23. 80 Ibid., 18. 81 Ibid., 22–23. 82 Ibid., 13. 83 Renan, L’islam et la science, 41–44. 84 Ibid., 42. 85 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 52–54.

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essentialist visions of a stagnant Judaism (since the birth of Christ) and Islam. The refusal to historicize was central to Bauer’s approach and caused the Young Hegelian to lose his focus, according to Hirsch. The rabbi stressed that if Bauer wished to discuss the question of the political emancipation of the Jews, he ought to focus on Jews in Germany in the nineteenth century and not on the Jews of the “tenth, twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose virtues and errors can only be learned about laboriously in books.”86 Such a distinction was irrelevant to Bauer who believed that the essence of Judaism determined the behavior and the actions of the Jews. He considered the oppression suffered by Jews as legitimate and the consequence of their religion, not of political injustice: “They were responsible for the pressure they were submitted to because they called for it by sticking to their law, their language and their whole being.”87 This was an inversion of the arguments used by Reform Jews, who explained doctrinal sclerosis and segregation, issues pinpointed by Bauer but also highlighted for criticism by Reformists themselves, in the context of Christian anti-Judaism, fanaticism, and the discriminatory laws of Christian states which excluded Jews from mainstream society. Hirsch, and the other advocates of Reform who responded to Bauer, were in an awkward position, because in their apologetic works they had to appropriate and legitimize religious practices which they were trying to change. Still, faced with such statements by Bauer, Hirsch did not choose the easy way out by outrightly refusing to consider the defrocked theologian’s arguments. He refused to see oppression as the sole reason for contemporary Judaism’s problems88 and explored the need for doctrinal change and adaptation to the contemporary world. Hirsch called for a liberal interpretation of Judaism, in line with its historical development, based on the study of its history. “The Credo of the Jews is their history and their history is their Credo. Jews perceive history as education,”89 wrote Hirsch, outlining his own Hegelian belief in history as the manifestation of divine revelation. An outspoken historicist, Hirsch considered Bauer’s methodology to be flawed. Bauer’s ahistorical approach led the Young Hegelian to disregard chronology and thus to interpret erroneously the acts of biblical figures. When referring to the sayings of the prophets, which Bauer had characterized as an 86 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 12. 87 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 4. 88 Hirsch Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 112. 89 Ibid., 83.

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“assassination attempt against that which was valid among the people,”90 Hirsch argued with similar verve that “[the sayings of the prophets] might well have been fighting against a condition which we do not know anymore, but they cannot have been assassination attempts against the status quo which is being referred to here, since it did not yet exist at the time of the Prophets.”91 Sarcastically, Hirsch noted that if Jews had, as Bauer stated, only exerted a “­counter-pressure” against history, then they had been part of and affected by history: “True we were pressurized, and one cannot pressurize a nothing.”92 Hirsch’s aim was not simply to score rhetorical points. He questioned the rationality of Bauer’s understanding of Jewish history and ridiculed it. The rabbi wondered how Bauer could possibly accept that Judaism had evolved while in Palestine yet remained stagnant in exile: As long as we really lived in the East, [oriental] natural determination [Naturbestimmtheit] could not stabilize us. We were working hard to develop our principles. But, once we ceased living in the East and were dispersed throughout the world, oriental natural determination affected us and stabilized us and we considered that there was nothing more delightful than to sit under a fig-tree, none of which we had ever seen, and under vines in order to protect us from the oriental sun that did not heat us anymore.93

History was key for Hirsch and he believed that any effort to make sense of Judaism, which ignored history and context, could only lead to a false view of Jewish religious beliefs and practices. He underlined that Jews should not be held responsible for Bauer’s misunderstandings and misrepresentations94 and maintained that Bauer’s version of Judaism was a fantasy (Phantasiegebilde) with little relation to reality.95 One might contend that Hirsch subverted Bauer’s call to Jews to give up their religion by calling upon Bauer to abandon the “unhistorical” and “chimerical” Judaism that he had constructed in his work. 90 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 32. 91 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 108. 92 Ibid. This particular passage was also discussed by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism, their refutation of the Young Hegelians. See Die Heilige Familie oder Kritik der Kritischen Kritik: Gegen Bruno Bauer & Consorten (Frankfurt a.M.: Literarische Anstalt, 1845), 132–133. 93 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 18. 94 Ibid., 30. 95 Ibid., 111.

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Bauer’s insistence on the stagnant character of Judaism was echoed in Renan’s lecture on Islam and science. For Renan too, Islam had essential features that made it impermeable to progress and science. Such a stance was unacceptable for Kemal who, broadly accepting Renan’s assertion that intellectual development in the Islamic world had stopped in the thirteenth century, explained this phenomenon by referring to military and political developments in world history—in other words, by historicizing intellectual stagnancy and Islam. In his essay, he wrote that Islamic lands had suffered more from the Crusades and Mongol invasions than Christian Europe had from the “savage tribes.”96 Moreover, he proposed that there was a continuity between the Crusades and contemporary European imperialism when he asked “when since 1200 … did the Europeans leave any respite to Islamic countries so that they could develop science and education rather than fight the invaders?”97 Though in this polemical exchange Kemal was oversimplifying the complex issue of scientific decline in Islamic culture, he had the great merit of searching for historical explanations and to reject Renan’s essentialist approach. Moreover, he considered that Renan was biased: If Monsieur Renan was more honest he would be forced to admit that the Crusaders and Tatars, who have annihilitated hundreds of thousands of precious books and thousands of scholars by throwing them into the fire, by trampling them under their horses’ feet, in Cordoba, Grenada, Baghdad, Samarkand and hundreds of Islamic cities, were not followers of Islam.98

For Bauer and Renan, intellectual stagnancy explained why Jews and Muslims had not made any meaningful contribution to human development in the last centuries—a situation that underpinned their exclusion from the benefits of modernity such as political rights (Bauer on Jews) and the imposition of modernity by military means (Renan on Muslims). Here, Hirsch identified a greater problem concerning the historiography of the humanities and science. Bauer’s arguments regarding the lack of Jewish contributions to philosophy were a particularly sensitive issue. The Young Hegelian thinker stipulated that Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) had only debated in the context of Jewish theology and that their contributions 96 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 49. 97 Ibid. Renan Müdafaanamesi, 49. 98 Ibid., 36.

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were not of universal value. Mendelssohn, indeed, had not even had any impact on his Jewish contemporaries.99 Bauer also suggested that Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), whose importance he did not deny, ceased to be a Jew when he started to develop his philosophy.100 For Hirsch, this was yet again evidence of Bauer’s carelessness with historical facts. He emphasized that Spinoza had not abandoned Judaism, but that he had been excommunicated.101 Beside the correct interpretation of historical evidence, other issues were at stake in the discussion of Spinoza’s Jewishness. For Hirsch, Judaism was broad enough to incorporate Spinoza’s philosophy, whereas Bauer stuck to a caricatural, misunderstood, traditionalist form of rabbinic Judaism. Hirsch also invalidated Bauer’s appraisal of Maimonides and Mendelssohn by questioning his opponent’s attention to detail. The rabbi noted that though it was true that Mendelsohn’s works had little impact on the Jews of his time, this was to be expected, because his writings were not primarily addressed to them. They were printed in German and referred to the general philosophical debates of the period. Yet, his works, just like Hartwig Wessely’s (1725–1805), indicated a turning point in Jewish thought and had had a huge impact on today’s Judaism.102 Hirsch also dismissed Bauer’s comments on Maimonides and found them unoriginal. He used the opportunity to voice the complaint that most histories of philosophy only mentioned Maimonides “out of curiosity,” but that “nobody ever bothered to read a Jewish philosopher.”103 Thus, the problem was not so much the absence of Jewish philosophy but the refusal of the academic establishment to acknowledge its existence. Even though he knew that Bauer would not accept the point, the rabbi also reminded his interlocutor that scholarship among Jews was more common in times when there was less oppression, a reference to the context of production of knowledge.104 Both Hirsch and Bauer knew that the societies where Jewish minorities had been relatively free were few. Kemal also complained about the lack of recognition of Islamic philosophy in the West. When discussing the Muslims’ interest for Greek philosophy, Kemal implied that this scholarly curiosity was far from reciprocated by those who claimed to be the intellectual heirs of classical Greek thought. Kemal   99 Bauer, Die Judenfrage, 82–83. 100 Ibid., 9. 101 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 26. 102 Ibid., 112–123. 103 Ibid., 116. 104 Ibid., 26.

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c­ riticized Renan’s Eurocentric approach to philosophy, though he did not use this term of course, and put it to him that he should have studied the wisdom of the companions of the prophet, in particular Alî ibn Abî Tâlib’s Nahj al-Balâghah (Way of Eloquence).105 This latter point could be interpreted as a call to integrate such works into a more pluralistic corpus of texts representing the whole variety of human thought. Being a defender of a humanist Islam, Namık Kemal made a passionate case for the universal pursuit of science beyond religious and ethnic boundaries: “Knowledge is such a graceful beauty, that her lovers sacrifice their life in order to unite with her.”106 The use of the metaphorical language of the classical divan tradition was meaningful as it signified a replacement of values. Mystic union with the divine beloved was not part of the Young ­Ottoman writer’s quest, but it was the very knowledge which was also sought for by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473—1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).107 Kemal stressed that the Catholic Church had had a much more difficult relationship with science and freedom of thought than Islam by mentioning the trials and tribulations of Galileo Galilei and Jean Jacques-Rousseau108 and by referring to the massacres of Protestants during the Saint Barthélémy night and the violence of the inquisition,109 facts that Renan condemned likewise. Kemal, however, maintained that, unlike the Church, Islam encouraged scientific enquiry, as was clear from the Qur’an and the sayings of the prophet. Thus, Renan’s claims that science in Islamic lands developed despite Islam and that rulers who had encouraged the study of science and philosophy such as the Caliphs Hârûn al-Rashîd (763–809) and al-Mâ’mûn (786–833) were, in Renan’s words, “barely Muslim”110 were preposterous.111 The question was not simply a matter of interpreting historical evidence or religious doctrine. It could be argued that Renan’s interpretation of Islam was rather fundamentalist. Kemal’s Islam, on the other hand, was liberal. In his refutation, he accepted al-Mâ’mûn’s support of the rationalist Mu’tazilah philosophical school as evidence of the caliph’s faith.112 105 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 21. 106 Ibid. 17. 107 Ibid., 16. 108 Ibid., 30–31. 109 Ibid., 44. 110 Renan, L’islam et la science, 28. 111 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 27–28. 112 Ibid., 28.

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Kemal further rejected, or perhaps did not understand, Renan’s vision of Shi’ism as a distinct religion.113 From the above we can infer that the Ottoman writer believed in the possibility of a plurality of interpretations of Islam: this should come as no surprise. Kemal was trying to create a legitimate space for his own vision of Islam open to Western thought and science. Indeed, his, and other Ottoman reformist intellectuals’ vision for the future of the Ottoman Empire, was partly rooted in a progressive interpretation of Islam, the possibility of which was not only denied by the likes of Renan, but which came also under fire from traditionalist circles in Ottoman Turkey. Against this background, Kemal agreed with Renan’s remark that Christians contributed to the development of Arab philosophy by translating works from Greek. While Renan argued that Arab philosophy was not original,114 Kemal turned the French scholar’s argument around, suggesting between the lines that the contribution of Nestorian Christians was evidence of Islamic tolerance, openness to the world, and support for philosophic and scientific culture. For Kemal, whoever used and developed science and philosophy could rightfully be regarded as its author. Arab appropriation of Greek philosophy and Sassanide science was creative and contributed to the universal development of knowledge.115 Science had no nationality or religion. But here too, there was more to it. The Ottoman writer’s views should also be read in the context of Westernization in the post-Tanzimat period and the attempts to validate openness to Western thought from an Islamic point of view. If such an openness to science and philosophy had been legitimate during the classical age of Islam, surely it was also tolerable in the nineteenth century. Namık Kemal was reclaiming the classical heritage and weaving his own attempts at reform into Islamic tradition. The plurality within Islam promoted by Kemal had a correlative in Hirsch’s defense of Spinoza’s status within Jewish intellectual history. In his essay, Hirsch attempted to exemplify the plurality of Judaisms which had existed throughout history. Mentioning by name a plethora of authors such as the grammarian Elias Levita (1469–1549), the mystics Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and Hayyim ben Joseph Vital (1543–1620), the father of the Jewish enlightenment Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), and Joseph Salvador (1779–1873), the author of Paris, Rome, Jérusalem ou la question religieuse au dix-neuvième 113 Ibid., 18–19. 114 Ibid., 22 and Renan, L’islam et la science, 26. 115 Namık Kemal, Renan Müdafaanamesi, 31–32.

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siècle (Paris, Rome, Jerusalem or the Religious Question in the Nineteenth Century, 1860), he illustrated the contribution of Jews to intellectual culture and thus also showed the variety of Jewish experiences, hence of Jewishnesses in time and space.116 According to Hirsch the comprehension of Jewish history required awareness of this plurality: “Judaism has produced Mosaism and the Talmud and more beside these. All these products, identified and understood all together, not individually, are Judaism.”117 Beside history, Judaism was also affected by the geographical context and surrounding society. Rather than focusing on a distinct Jewish identity, Hirsch argued that “in civilized lands the Jew too is civilized, whereas he is uncivilized in uncivilized lands.”118 Though his terminology was the product of the nineteenth century, Hirsch suggested that there were as many Jewish cultures as there were nations in the world. Such a focus on the contextualization of the Jewish experience was also ­political: it was at the very heart of Hirsch’s view that Judaism was a spiritual identity119 which did not constitute an obstacle to citizenship, a central emancipationist argument. Jews were “a people in matters of religion,”120 not a foreign nation in exile. Despite his awareness of the Christian rejection of both Jews and Muslims, the rabbi did not question the representation of Islam in his own time. Hirsch’s own religious and philosophical beliefs were underpinned by the idea that Judaism and the other monotheistic faiths, in particular Christianity, complemented each other. While Judaism had been revealed to the Jewish people, Christianity (and Islam) played an important historical role by spreading the belief in a unique God among the pagans.121 Just like Kemal forty years later, he maintained that science, philosophy, and also arts were universal and that the religion of those who produced it was irrelevant. He criticized Bauer for not accepting this: “A man less passionate than our critic would not be concerned whether one more Jew or one less had produced something excellent in science and arts, any more than he would bother whether Hegel and Schelling were Protestant or Catholic.”122 116 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 19. 117 Ibid., 28–29. 118 Ibid., 16. 119 Samuel Hirsch, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden (Leipzig: Verlag Heinrich Hunger, 1842), viii. 120 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 23. 121 Frishman, “Good Enough for the Goyim,” 271–272 and 283–284. 122 Hirsch, Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik, 110.

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Hirsch in his exchange with Bauer, and Kemal in his refutation of Renan’s thesis, underlined the diversity within their respective religious traditions and, thus, the need for a scrupulous and careful approach to religion and culture as objects of study. Hirsch’s Das Judenthum, der christliche Staat und die moderne Kritik and Kemal’s Renan Müdafaanamesi contain the seeds of a methodology which could contribute to the deconstruction of essentialist and racialist studies of alterity, here Judaism and Islam. Nonetheless, the two texts were primarily manifestos that included both a political and a theological dimension. Hirsch was not only a man of religion. As a progressive Freemason, he worked for the liberalization of the society in which he lived. Hirsch’s text bore witness to the profound changes that affected the position of Jews in Christian Europe after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For the children of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, it was now perfectly acceptable to engage with secular works and to respond to them. For an Ottoman Muslim and Freemason such as Namık Kemal, the context was different. But at a time when the “Eastern Question” was on the agenda of Western powers, it became important for westernizing Ottoman intellectuals to do more than study Western texts and approaches, a novelty in itself. Responding to Western discourses on Islam and the Orient too was becoming an imperative. Fundamentally, these debates about knowledge and representations of alterity were also about power, citizen rights, independence, and human dignity. Consequently, it was vital to prove that ostracized religious traditions could make a contribution to modernity, hence Hirsch’s emphasis on the concept of freedom in Judaism and his celebration of labor123 in Judaism and Kemal’s presentation of an Islam that promoted science and progress. Another dimension was the debates that were taking place with their respective communities. While sketching his vision of Judaism, Hirsch also rejected the thesis of the traditionalist proponents of rabbinic Judaism and indeed the vision of the more radical Reformfreunde (Friends of the Reform) movement.124 Similarly by outlining an Islamic vision of society with deep humanistic undertones, that could embrace both the rationalist Mu’tazilah and Western science, Kemal also responded to the advocates of various tradition­alist and fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. In his refutation, Namık Kemal had denounced Renan’s racist vision of the Arabs, and Hirsch too had suggested in his own book that Bauer seemed to have a problem not only with Judaism, as a religious 123 Frishman, “Good Enough for the Goyim,” 281. 124 Frishman, “True Mosaic Religion,” 202–214.

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system, but also with Jews as a people. In the versions of antisemitism that were to develop in the years after the publication of the Judenfrage, the idea that Jews were a “people of the desert,” a rootless nomadic Wüstenvolk that threatened the equilibrium of European societies gained ground. For instance, in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 1911), Werner Sombart (1863–1941), the German economist and sociologist, denounced the Jews as a people “who had remained a people of the desert and a nomadic people throughout millennia.”125 Notably, the Ottoman Turkish elite adopted colonialist and orientalist tropes against the Arabs, who were also denigrated as another “people of the desert.” Not unlike the German antisemites who construed the Jews as a threat to the national self, some Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals branded the Arabs as a nomadic desert people that threatened civilization and were in bad need of an Ottoman civilizing mission. This discourse would be opposed by one of Turkey’s most controversial intellectuals who saw himself as the heir of Namık Kemal, namely Ali Kemal.

125 W  erner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1911), 408.

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CHAPTER 7

Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert

I

n official Turkish historiography, Ali Kemal (1868–1922) is mainly remembered as the “treacherous” journalist and politician who opposed Mustafa Kemal national liberation movement and advocated fidelity to the throne and collaboration with the British and French occupiers after the end of World War I. Ali Kemal has the dubious honor of being scorned by Mustafa Kemal in his Nutuk, the famous thirty-six-hour speech held in front of the National Assembly in 1927, that presented his own version of the history of the Turkish independence war. The founder of the Turkish republic showed little sympathy for the controversial writer and the role he played during the years following World War I. He referred to Ali Kemal’s connection with the pro-English collaborator Sait Molla (1880–1930). Having mentioned that Ali Kemal had resigned from his post in government on June 26, 1919, “having rendered great service to the enemies of our country and the Sultan,” Mustafa Kemal quoted from a letter written by Sait Molla to Mr. Frew, the English clergyman who chaired the İngiliz Muhipleri Cemiyeti (The Anglophile Society), indicating that Ali Kemal would “follow [Frew’s] instructions to the letter.”1 Historians and political commentators close to the regime also condemned Ali Kemal’s collaborationist stance and his Ottomanism. Referring to Ali Kemal’s chaotic execution, the novelist Peyami Safa, at the time still a convinced follower of Mustafa Kemal’s radical reforms, wrote in his Türk İnkılabına Bakışlar (Approaches to the Turkish Revolution, 1938) that “the politics of Ottomanism were hanged with Ali Kemal in Izmit.”2 At heart a liberal who cultivated the multicultural heritage of Ottoman history and had already incurred the wrath of both Sultan Abdülhamit II

1 See A Speech Delivered by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1927 (Ankara: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1963), 27–28. 2 Peyami Safa, Türk İnkılâbına Bakışlar (Istanbul: Kanaat Kitabevi, 1938), 87.

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(1842–1918) and the Young Turks, Ali Kemal’s vision for the future of Ottoman Turkey was diametrically opposed to that of the nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal, whose intransigence he associated with the radical nationalism of the İttihat ve Terakki (Union and Progress) government. After the occupation of Istanbul, Ali Kemal became one of the founding members of the İngiliz Muhipleri Cemiyeti, which advocated a British mandate. In January 1919, he participated in the re-establishment of the liberal Hürriyet ve İtilaf Fırkası (Freedom and Entente Party) and occupied, albeit for short periods, ministerial posts in the two successive governments of Damat Ferit Pasha (1853–1923), first as minister of education (March-May 1919) and then as minister of the interior (May–June 1919). As minister of the interior, Ali Kemal envisioned radical measures to quench the nationalist uprising. His vociferous columns against the nationalists in Peyam-ı Sabah (The Morning News), the newspaper that he edited, did not go unnoticed by the nationalist leadership. He was arrested in 1922 by the victorious nationalists in Istanbul. While being transported from Istanbul to the new capital Ankara, where he was to be tried for treason, he was lynched in Izmit by young officers from Nurettin Pasha’s (1873–1932) First Army, which was aligned with Mustafa Kemal.3 It is striking that though all major works that deal with the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the independence war mention Ali Kemal’s opposition to the Young Turks, to which he adhered in his youth, and to Mustafa Kemal, his activities as a leading journalist, publisher, critic, and a novelist preceding those fateful years have remained largely under-explored.4 The fact that Ali Kemal’s 3 Mustafa Uzun gives a succinct overview of Ali Kemal’s life and works in his article in the İslam Ansiklopedisi, published by the Directorate for Religious Affairs: İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2, edited by Halis Ayhan and Ahmet Yılmaz (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Yayınları, 1989), 405–408. A more personal and, arguably, sympathetic account of Ali Kemal’s life was published in pamphlet form by his son Zeki Kuneralp (1914–1998): Ali Kemal (1869–1922): A Portrait for the Benefit of his English Speaking Progeny (Istanbul: Z. Kuneralp, 1993). See also Ali Kemal: Belki de bir Günah Keçisi (Istanbul: Doğan, 2009), a more recent biography by the journalist Orhan Karaveli, which is a significant attempt to understand and review Ali Kemal’s stand. 4 In this context it is worth underlining that there is still considerable resentment in twenty-first-century Turkey towards this notorious polemicist of pre-Republican Turkish intellectual life. When the Journalists’ Association of Turkey added Ali Kemal’s name to the list of “Martyred Journalists” on its website in 2005, a controversy ensued in the media. Columnists questioned whether a “traitor” such as Ali Kemal could possibly be considered a “martyr” of journalism. The debate gradually died down when the title of the list was changed from “Martyred Journalists” into “Murdered Journalists.” Ali Kemal was no longer a martyr of press freedom, but neither were Uğur Mumcu (1942–1993), Metin Göktepe (1967–1996),

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work was considered an intellectual no-go area for a long time is further suggested by the fact that, before the 1990s, none of his works, except his early memoirs Ömrüm (My Life), were available in the modern Turkish alphabet,5 even though he had been a prolific writer,6 ground-breaking publisher and or Ahmet Taner Kışlalı (1939–1999), other journalists who were killed because of their political opinions and investigations. See Aslı Sözbilir, “‘Şehit’ Gazeteciler Yerine ‘Öldürülen,’” Hürriyet, October 26, 2005, accessed December 29, 2020, http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/ gundem/sehit-gazeteciler-yerine-oldurulen-3439764. 5 There are two editions of Ömrüm. It was originally serialized in Peyam between November 1913 and July 1914 when the paper was closed down. Ali Kemal republished those instalments with new material in Peyam-ı Sabah from August 1919 to April 1920. The first edition in book form was published with additions by Zeki Kuneralp, Ali Kemal’s son (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1985). The second edition was published, without the additions but with a critical introduction and postscript by M. Kayahan Özgül (Ankara: Hece, 2004). Moreover other works have also been transcribed more recently, namely Ali Kemal’s third novel Fetret (Interregnum) edited by M. Kayahan Özgül (Ankara: Hece, 2003), his Edebiyât-ı Hakîkiyye Dersleri (Lectures on Realist Literature), ed. Bahriye Çeri (Ankara: Hece, 2007), his Paris Musâhabeleri (Parisian Conversations), ed. Kamil Yeşil (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), as well as an earlier selection of his articles on literature published in Peyam-ı Edebî (Makaleler: Peyâm-ı Edebî’deki Dil ve Edebiyat Yazıları, ed. Hülya Pala (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 1997). 6 He is the author of three novels: İki Hemşire (Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1898 [h. 1315]), Çölde bir Sergüzeşt (Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1899 [h. 1316]), and Fetret, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Hayriye ve Şürekâsı, 1913–1914 [r. 1329–1330]). In 1913, Ali Kemal reissued his first two novels in one volume with the title Safha-ı Şebap (Istanbul: İkdâm Matbaası, 1913 [r. 1329]). He also published two texts that could best be classified as narratives, namely Tunus (Paris: n.p., 1900) and Yıldız Hatırat-ı Elimesi (Istanbul: İkbal-ı Millet Matbaası, 1910 [r. 1326]). He also published essays and collections of articles: Sorbon Darülfünunda Edebiyat-ı Hakikiye Dersleri (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1896 [h. 1314]; new editions in 1897 and 1914), Paris Musahabeleri, 3 vols. (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1898 [h. 1315]; new editions in 1913 and 1915), Mesele-i Şarkiye (Cairo: Matbaa-ı Osmaniye, 1900), Muterizlere Ecvibe-i Müskite (Istanbul, 1900 [h. 1316]), Cevabımız (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Kader, 1911 [h. 1327]), Bir Safha-ı Tarih (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1913 [h. 1329]), Rical-i İhtilal (­Istanbul: Matbaa-ı İkdam, 1913 [h. 1329]), and Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi? (Istanbul: Sancakcıyan Matbaası, 1918[r. 1334]). Though no information is available on the number of copies printed, the fact that some of his works were reprinted several times shows that Ali Kemal was a popular author, read and discussed by the Istanbul intelligentsia. He also authored a book on the French language Fransızcaya Dair (no date) and a textbook on morals: İlm-i Ahlak (Istanbul: Sabah Matbaası, 1914 [r. 1330]). He translated Marcel Prévost’s Lettres de femmes as Kadın Mektupları (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1896 [h. 1313]), Le marriage de Juliette as Juliette’in İzdivacı (Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1898 [h. 1315]), and Nouvelles lettres de femmes as Yeni Kadın Mektupları [Istanbul: Muhtar Halit Kütüphanesi, 1914, r. 1330]), and Alexis Bouvier’s Le mariage d’un forçat as Bir Mahkumun İzdivacı yahut İstikat Köprüsünün Altında Cinayet, 3 vols. (Istanbul: A. Asaduryan, 1889–1890)[h. 1306–1307]. Together with Ali Reşat (1877–1929), he published the first volume of Charles Seignobos’s Histoire de l’Europe continentale in two volumes as Asr-ı Hazırda Avrupa (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1908–1909 [r. 1324–1325]). Beside this impressive list of books, there is an even

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influential editor.7 This is not surprising since, arguably, writers whose work did not fit the general aesthetic and ideological framework drawn by the founding fathers of modern Turkish literary studies were less likely to be transliterated after the alphabet change in 1928. However, a detailed study of his work could shed a different light on the intellectual history of those years and tell us more about developments that were later excised in nationalist, whether secular or religious, narratives of the history of Turkish literature. One could say that Ali Kemal’s literary marginalization was because his output was mainly journalistic rather than literary. This view is not totally unfounded, but the same could be said for most politically outspoken post-­ Tanzimat intellectuals. In any case, literary criticism was, beside political journalism and historiography, one of his major areas of interest. His works of ­fiction too deserve more than a simple notice in his impressive bibliography,8 as they prove that creative writing was not a mere hobby for him. Indeed, his varied intellectual endeavors displayed the polymathic interests, characteristic of post-Tanzimat intellectuals. In his articles and essays on literature and history, Ali Kemal pointed to issues that are still at the center of literary and cultural criticism today, such as the nature of literary realism and the status of the historian. It is true that some of his early articles on French literature and culture were not entirely original and turned out to be adaptations from the literary pages of Le Figaro, the French daily, and from lecture notes taken while a student in Paris, but nonetheless they were read with enthusiasm by the Francophile Ottoman literary elite and contributed to literary debates by introducing unfamiliar ideas discussed at the time in the Quartier latin. Referring to the articles he published longer list of his journalistic and critical work which were placed in a wide array of newspapers and periodicals. There are also serialized literary works such as the translation of Marcel Prévost’s La confession d’un amant with the title Bir Muaşıkın İtirafatı in Saadet in 1895. 7 He edited several publications, namely Gülşen (1886), Mütalaa (1888), Mecmua-i Kemal (1901), Türk (1903–1907), Yeni Yol (1909), Peyam (1913–1914), and Peyam-ı Sabah (1919–1922), which printed the works of literary personalities who were later “canonized,” such as Yahya Kemal Beyatlı (1884–1958), one of Turkey’s numerous “national poets.” 8 In Turkey, few academic articles have been published on Ali Kemal’s novels. Among the rare exceptions are Süheyla Yüksel’s “Türk Edebiyatında Taşraya Çıkış: Ali Kemal’in Romanları,” Turkish Studies 4, nos. 1–2 (Winter 2009): 1479–1506, which mainly summarizes the plots of his two Aleppo-novels. M. Kayahan Özgül proposes an analysis of the socio-political ideas advocated in Fetret in his chapter “Ali Kemal’in Fetret’inde Sosyal Fikirler,” in Çağdaş Türk Edebiyatına Eleştirel bir Bakış: Nevin Önberk Armağanı, ed. Mehmet Ölmez (Ankara: Simurg, 1997), 267–293. See also the mostly bibliographical chapter by Faruk Gezgin, “Ali Kemal ve Romanları,” in Türk Dünyasından Halil Açıkgöz’e Armağan, ed. Hayri Ataş (Istanbul: Doğu Kitabevi, 2013), 237–256.

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on literature in İkdam (The Advance), he conceded in 1898 that “most of [his] articles were translations and adaptations from European works and journals [and] some of them were directly transcribed from lecture notes.” Nonetheless, he argued—and rightly so—that “they [were] useful [and] serve[d] an aim.”9 His novels also deserve more credit than the poet Yahya Kemal, who called them “insipid and clumsy,” granted them.10 It is true that İki Hemşire (Two Sisters, 1898) and Çölde bir Sergüzeşt (An Adventure in the Desert, 1899), the two novels that Ali Kemal authored during his years of exile in Aleppo, and Fetret (Interregnum, 1913–1914), his third and last novel that merges a highly autobiographical content with futurological considerations, are far from being accomplished and sophisticated works. Their didactic nature sets those works well within the tradition of the post-Tanzimat novel, even though they were published at a time when authors such as Halit Ziya and Mehmet Rauf (1875–1931), the foremost advocates of Servet-i Fünun aestheticism, had developed a more autotelic theory of the novel. Yahya Kemal also seems to have disregarded the original ideas advocated in Ali Kemal’s novels that inform today’s readers on the variety of political discourses promoted during those years. The poet’s opinion was obviously not shared by Ottoman Turkish readers at the time of their publication. In the foreword he wrote for Bir Safha-yı Şebap (A Youthful Era, 1913), the omnibus edition of his two early novels, Ali Kemal explained that though he did not consider himself a “story teller,” he felt the need to reedit those works because they were almost out of print and were selling at twice their original price.11 Even though there is no information on the numbers printed, the author’s admission indicates that his works were met with interest. More accomplished than its predecessor from a year before, the novel Çölde bir Sergüzeşt displays features of Ali Kemal’s work that do not quite fit into the framework of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ottoman Turkish literature and intellectual life. By portraying a rather unusual desert romance, it subverts various conventions of post-Tanzimat literature and questions the discourse on the superiority of Ottoman civilization to its Arab 9 Ali Kemal, “Ah Mine’ş-Şi’ir ve Halâtihi,” İkdam 1401 ( June 6, 1898 [25 Mayıs 1314]) quoted in Bahriye Çeri “Batı Edebiyatının İzindeki Ali Kemal,” in Ali Kemal, Edebiyât-ı Hakîkiyye Dersleri, 12. Çeri’s introduction gives a good overview of the controversy. 10 Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Siyâsî ve Edebî Portreler (Istanbul: İstanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1986 [1968]), 74. 11 Ali Kemal, “Bir İki Söz,” in Bir Safha-yı Şebap, 3.

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provinces. The fact that in 1913 the author was still declaring his authorship of this youthful work is testimony to the importance that he assigned it: “When I read An Adventure in the Desert, I discovered many similarities between my youthful beginnings and my more mature years.”12 Though he was referring to the emotions that were stirred up by the rereading of the main character’s ordeals, one could argue that he still associated with the ideological subtext of the novel as well. This is of great interest, as Ali Kemal offers a vision of Arab and Bedouin society that does not quite correspond to the rather bleak and biased picture painted by his contemporaries. There is little scholarship on the representation of the Ottoman East in late Ottoman literature.13 Some of Ali Kemal’s literary 12 Ibid., 4. 13 In his article “Ottoman Orientalism,” Ussama Makdisi has discussed the way the Ottoman state and its ruling elite recognized the superiority of Western modernity yet challenged its political and colonialist implications by duplicating the Western orientalist discourse, distinguishing “between a degraded Ottoman self-embodied in the unreformed pre-modern subjects and landscape of the empire—and the Muslim modernized self-represented largely (but not exclusively) by an Ottoman Turkish elite who ruled the late Ottoman Empire” (Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 [2002]: 770). In “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 [2003]: 311–342), Selim Deringil explores how the Ottoman elite developed a civilizational discourse regarding the Arab provinces of the Empire, not unlike the one propounded by European colonialist powers. The way the Ottoman “mission civilisatrice,” as Deringil ironically calls it (Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 [London: I. B. Tauris, 1999], 158), or the “Ottoman man’s burden,” as Makdisi names it with similar verve (Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism”: 782), is reflected in literary texts is an area of study that is still in its infancy. In a more recent piece, Edhem Eldem argues that Ottoman orientalism took a new turn during the republican period which projected onto the Arabs the image of backwardness that the Republican elite associated with Ottoman history and culture (Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism,” Architectural Design 80, no.1 [2010]: 26–31). There was not any mention of a “civilizing mission” anymore, as indicated by Hakan Karateke in a study of the representation of Arabs and Bedouins in the Gurbet Hikâyeleri (Stories of Exile) by Refik Halit [Karay], another writer who would later oppose Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement and be banished after the establishment of the Republic. While Karateke brings to the fore the way Refik Halit perpetuates the dichotomy between the “civilized” Turk and the “barbaric” Bedouin, he also makes a strong case for a reassessment of Ottoman orientalism that looks beyond the Tanzimat era to the earlier stages of Ottoman history (Hakan T. Karateke, “How Distant is Gurbet? Refik Halid’s Representation of Arabs in Gurbet Hikâyeleri—with a note on Ottoman and Turkish Orientalisms,” Turkish Historical Review 4 [2013]: 153–174). As for the representation of the non-Ottoman Islamic lands in Ottoman travelogues, the topic is discussed in Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism Alla Turca: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback,’” Die Welt des Islams 40 no. 2 (2000): 139–195.

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writings are of particular interest here, as they offer a different, more positive, image of Arab nomads. In his nonfiction, he also showed appreciation of pre-­ Islamic and classical Arabic literature, which is unusual among westernizing liberals. He lived on various occasions, not always willingly, in Arab lands—­periods that are well documented in his autobiographic writings.14 Ali Kemal’s works display the whole range of orientalist attitudes from Romantic fascination for the purity of desert life to the Eurocentric critique and condemnation of a supposed “oriental” mindset impeding the development of science and scholarship. The romanticized representation of Bedouin life in Çölde bir Sergüzeşt seems to contradict his later criticism of the “orientalness” of traditional ­Ottoman historiography in his works on Ottoman history and the Eastern question. Though Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt is not a great work of art—its linear plot, lack of psychological depth, and artless language point to the young writer’s ­inexperience—its orientalist approach to the critique of urban civilization makes it rather unique in the context of late nineteenth-century Turkish literature. Written at a time when Ottoman Turkish authors started to move away from Istanbul-centered novels and discovered the periphery, either by sowing the seeds of what would become the Anatolian village novel15 or by indulging in French-­inspired pastoral musings,16 the novelist introduced his mainly 14 From 1889 to 1895, he was sent into internal exile in Aleppo, apparently accused of having founded a subversive student society, and worked mainly as a teacher of history and literature and as a journalist. He also had the opportunity to travel in the region. From 1900 to 1908 he worked as the farm manager of Mahmut Muhtar Pasha close to Cairo in Egypt. En route from Paris to Cairo in 1900, he traveled widely in Tunisia and processed his impressions into his narrative Tunus and then later in his journal Mecmua-i Kemal in a travelogue entitled “Seyahat Hatıraları: Camii el-Zeytune,” Mecmua-i Kemal 1 (1900): 142–159. 15 One could argue that early works that attempted to look beyond the city walls such as Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s novela “Bir Gerçek Hikâye” (A Real Story, 1876) and his novel Bahtiyarlık (Happiness, 1885), Paşabeyzade Ömer Ali Bey’s novel Türkmen Kızı (The Turcoman Girl, 1889), Nabizade Nâzım’s (1862–1893) novela Karabibik (1891) were the forerunners of the later Anatolian village novels. For a discussion of this topic, see M. Kayahan Özgül, “İlk Köy Romanımız Türkmen Kızı (Mı)?,” in Folkloristik: Prof. Dr. Dursun Yıldırım Armağanı, ed. Metin Özarslan and Özkul Çobanoğlu (Ankara: Feryat Matbaacılık, 1998), 280–291. 16 The pastoral verses of poets such as Abdülhak Hamit, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, his nemesis Muallim Naci, and their followers were not merely awkward imitations of French verse, but they also expressed a profound uneasiness with the profound urban, economic, and industrial transformations affecting Istanbul in the late nineteenth century, and with the authoritarian rule of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1876–1909). Nonetheless, neo-Parnassian poets took refuge in imaginary landscapes that had more in common with Normandy or Burgundy than with Anatolia. The latter would be the focus of nationalist pastorals by neo-folk poets, namely Mehmet Emin Yurdakul (1869–1944) and then the Beş Hececiler (Five Syllabists)

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I­ stanbul-based readers to a universe that, until now, had rarely inspired reformist, westernizing, Ottoman writers: the eastern provinces of the empire. The plot of Ali Kemal’s Çölde bir Sergüzeşt centers on Seher, a young woman who travels with her stepmother Saffet, and her three-year-old sister, Nevber, from Istanbul, via Alexandretta, to the Syrian desert where her father, Suphi Efendi, has been appointed as a government official in a salt works close to the ruins of Palmyra, 215 kilometers northeast of Damascus. At the beginning of the novel, Seher perceives her journey to the East as a monotonous ride into the wild: “‘It goes on and on. A bare plain. The only ornaments are telegraphic posts. We have been traveling for days. No brook, no hill, nor forest to be seen.’”17 The locals are depicted as little more than brutes, exchanging “meaningful,” perhaps threatening, glances. Their customs seem barbaric to the young woman from the Ottoman capital and stereotypes abound in descriptions of her rare encounters with them.18 The country which she discovers is a land of desolation and banishment: her father was exiled to the eastern quarries because of grave mistakes committed while employed in Istanbul. Seher realizes that travelling in the desert is far from a pleasant and enlightening journey—and not at all like the experience recorded by Romantic French travelers: “Some time ago when reading articles about the ruins of Palmyra, she had been inspired and emotionally attracted to this world. But now she understood that this attraction had been an illusion provoked by the literary flavor of those texts.”19 It is not only orientalist accounts of the desert which lose their mystique in Seher’s eyes, her own perception of images she associated with desert landscapes changes. Camels, for instance, which in Istanbul were evocative of a fascinating, faraway world, hence a source of enchantment, become uninteresting: “‘When I was in Istanbul, I would run to the window full of joy if a camel passed. I would love to contemplate this sacred animal. But now, having seen rows of camels, I have become bored of this vision. Even the strange-mannered camel calves do not fascinate me anymore. In short I do not like anything about these lands.’”20

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who, under the influence of Ziya Gökalp, one of the founding fathers of modern Turkish nationalism, constructed an opposition between the “national purity” of Turkish Anatolia and the “cosmopolitan” decadence of Ottoman Istanbul. For obvious reasons, the Arab desert could not have been a part of the geography of their idealized literary homeland. This quotation and those following are from the 1913 omnibus edition of Ali Kemal’s novels. Ali Kemal, “Çölde bir Sergüzeşt,” in Bir Safha-ı Sebap, 112. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 113.

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In the opening pages of the novel the author successfully conveys Seher’s growing estrangement when faced with what she perceives to be the underdevelopment and poverty of her new surroundings. She longs for her friends and her life back in the Ottoman metropolis. The narrator rationalizes Seher’s estrangement and lack of empathy by accentuating the strangeness of the landscape and her inability to relate to it. The narrator maintains that the scenery can only be perturbing for Seher because its novelty does not evoke past memories in which she could have taken refuge.21 Besides, perhaps, a vague kinship to Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) celebration of the evocative power of flavors, objects, landscapes, and involuntary memory, this passage, by highlighting Seher’s alienation, makes her future transformation, and rupture with her past, even more remarkable. Seher’s attitude progressively changes and she acquires the “poetic gaze” which is necessary, according to the narrator, to appreciate her surroundings. The exchange of letters between Seher and Hayriye, a friend in Istanbul, plays a major role in conveying her emergent fascination with the desert and its inhabitants, which is partly rooted in her growing disillusion with the Ottoman expatriates and the lifestyle of the Istanbul bourgeoisie. Seher’s despair is provoked by the depravity and debauchery she witnesses at the salt works. Her life is shattered: Her first fiancé, Recep, turns out to be a lecherous alcoholic who has hidden his marriage from her. Her second fiancé, whose name is not mentioned, appears to have syphilis, a disease associated with a corrupt lifestyle. Her manipulative stepmother has an affair with a watchman employed at the plant and her father, Suphi Efendi, is a weak and broken man submitting to the demands of his wife in return for sexual favors. Influenced by his wife, he forsakes Seher and is unable to prevent her beloved sister’s death, likely because of inadequate medical care. But Seher’s disillusion has another source as well— Hayriye’s letters about the misfortunes of her friends in the Ottoman capital: forced marriages, unfaithful lovers, and depression. Seher is gradually isolated from her environment with no hope of a better life back in Istanbul. She slowly finds solace in the contemplation of the desert that she initially despised. Unlike the denunciation of the loose morals of an ultra-westernized elite in the late works of post-Tanzimat authors such as Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Ali Kemal does not problematize issues such as Westernization and the status of women, but does appear to attack both Ottoman urban civilization and its parodic reconstruction in the Syrian desert. His text implies that the debased 21 Ibid., 110–111.

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lifestyle of the Ottoman bureaucrats and Istanbul expatriates whom Seher observes at the quarry has little to offer the Bedouins. It condones the lifestyle of nomadic Arabs at a time when the ruling bureaucracy cultivated and spread the idea that nomadism was anathema to Ottoman modernity.22 Thus, in Seher’s, and the reader’s, eyes there is a clear opposition between Ottoman dissoluteness and the Bedouins’s ancient lifestyle based on chivalric values. Most obviously, no reference is made to religion—an important discursive difference to apologetics such as Namık Kemal’s Renan Müdafaanamesi, which shed a positive light on Arab culture in an Islamic context. The local nomads whom Seher secretly views at night while hiding on a hill close to the ruins of Palmyra point to the possibility of a more fulfilling life: “She was seduced by the Arabs’ understanding of uprightness. There was no filth such as Recep among the Arabs. Naturally there were no poisonous, rotten creatures such as the son of the director among the Arabs. In their world, there was purity and cleanliness; courage and loftiness.”23 Though this kind of desert romanticism was not unknown in Western orientalist literature, it was highly unusual in the Ottoman Turkish context of the 1890s. However, unlike Seher, Ali Kemal does not idealize the desert. The absence of a qualified doctor and the inexistence of appropriate medical care are the main reasons for Nevber’s death. Only a miraculous cure saves Seher from death after she catches malaria. While the scabrous medical conditions at the salt works suggest that Ottoman bureaucrats have proven incapable of alleviating the suffering and problems caused by underdevelopment, thereby undermining the talk of the Ottoman civilizational mission in the Eastern provinces, they prepare the reader for Seher’s metamorphosis. Whereas her three-year-old sister’s death severs her last link to her family, Seher’s unexpected recovery could be interpreted as her submission to the natural order, her acceptance of the desert. Ali Kemal’s choice of the ruins of Palmyra for his work was no coincidence. The translation into Turkish of excerpts from Constantin-François de Chasse­boeuf Volney’s (1757–1820) Les Ruines ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins or meditations on the revolutions of empires, 1789), which starts with a Romantic invocation among those very ruins, had been influential in Ottoman Turkey.24 In a letter to her friend Hayriye, Seher quotes 22 Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in A State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate”: 317–318. 23 Ali Kemal, “Çölde bir Sergüzeşt,” 137–8. 24 On the influence of Fransa Müelliflerinden Volney Nam Zâtın “Les Ruines de Palmyre” ­Unvanıyla Yazmış Olduğu Makalâttan Bazı Fıkraların Tercümesidir, the first Turkish edition of

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the opening lines of Volney’s essay, whose translation she has found among her books. She does not refer to it by name, but only calls it “a work translated from French”: “Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchres and silent walls! You I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments, sublime contemplations. What useful lessons, what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you!”25 Unsurprisingly, however, she cuts the quotation, just before references to tyrants, the “sacred dogma of equality” and the “solitary adoration of freedom.” Seher is no revolutionary firebrand, and she has, as the narrator stresses several times, only a limited understanding of literature. But the abrupt ending of the quotation had a more practical reason as well: being in exile with hopes of returning to Istanbul, Ali Kemal did not want to incur, once again, the wrath of Sultan Abdülhamit’s secret police. Nonetheless, the inclusion of a quotation from, of all authors, Volney whose condemnation of despotism, also in the Ottoman Empire, had been wholeheartedly embraced by the Young Ottomans was certainly not innocent and implicitly sent a strong message, expressed, perhaps, in the unquoted paragraphs. While Seher contemplated Bedouins, who could arguably be seen as “noble savages,” a concept developed by Enlightenment thinkers, Ali Kemal’s readers were reminded by the reference to Volney of another facet of the Enlightenment—the condemnation of tyranny. But these considerations are of no interest to Ali Kemal’s fictive character. One evening, as she hides in the ruins of Palmyra in order to observe a Bedouin camp, she is spotted by a handsome rider. He approaches her and recites verses celebrating her beauty before vanishing into thin air. For the first time in the novel, the inhabitants of the desert are not an object of contemplation and, instead, are subjects seeking communication with the expatriates. Seher is haunted by the apparition for days. Some time after the occurrence, Seher’s father is contacted by an influential local sheikh who wants Seher to marry his son. Though Suphi Efendi is forced by his wife, who uses the opportunity to be rid of her stepdaughter, into accepting the proposal, his anguished ruminations Volney’s work, translated anonymously in 1871, see Tanpınar, Ondokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, 275. The translation has been attributed to Namık Kemal by Mehmet Kaplan in Namık Kemal: Hayatı ve Eserleri, 102. Şerif Mardin discusses Namık Kemal’s appropriation of Volney’s work in The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, 315–317. 25 Ali Kemal, “Çölde bir Sergüzeşt,” 133–134. The English translation is taken from Volney’s Ruins: or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (Boston: Charles Gaylord, 1835), 11.

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are revelatory of the grim view, he—the Ottoman bureaucrat—has of the local population.26 Seher at first also refuses to marry the sheikh’s son. Though she is attracted to him, she turns back into the Istanbul bourgeois girl, deeply estranged from her environment, and strongly rejects the possibility of a life in a world that has fascinated, perhaps even saved, her: “‘Leave me alone. I will go to Istanbul. I will be a housemaid. This would be better than falling into the hands of those savages,’”27 she tells her father. Her fear of “going native,” of becoming part of the landscape she once contemplated with delight, explains her refusal to cross the divide between “civilization” and the “desert,” even at the cost of her social status in Istanbul. Her U-turn could be interpreted as an expression of the author’s desire to question even further the legitimacy of the Ottoman Turkish presence in the region: the Ottoman ruling class could not “civilize” the Bedouins, nor could it be “purified” by them. It is striking that in these final scenes Ali Kemal breaks with the conventions of post-Tanzimat fiction by not opposing love and forced marriage. In Çölde bir Sergüzeşt, Seher is forced into a marriage with the man she is attracted to. In post-Tanzimat novels, the themes of forced marriage and forbidden love emphasized the lack of freedom of the individual, enchained by outdated traditions. Ali Kemal has other battles to fight. Just as he challenges the codes of post-Tanzimat literature, he also criticizes the very concept of civilization and its export. Indeed, as Seher unhappily joins the caravan, the final words belong to Hayriye, Seher’s friend in Istanbul, who condemns urban civilization with the utmost clarity in a final letter: “‘You will become part of the universe of the Bedouins and forget about our little world. Perhaps the Bedouins should teach us, the civilized, the true meaning of prosperity. We are so miserable. … Flee far away from this world. Take refuge into this world of wilderness.’”28 The evolution of Seher’s attitude towards the desert—from utter estrangement to Romantic fascination, covering the whole range of orientalist representations of Arabia—and the final twist of her coercion into espousing the Bedouin way of life, are representative of Ali Kemal’s conscious subversions of orientalist codes while he simultaneously calls into question modern Ottoman urban civilization and values. This subversion is also an expression, then, of skepticism towards the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the region. Though the desert as a symbol of purity 26 Ali Kemal, “Çölde bir Sergüzeşt,” 182. 27 Ibid., 183. 28 Ibid., 196 and 199.

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and loftiness is a cliché of orientalist literature and travel writing, it is highly radical in the context of late nineteenth-century Turkish literature, as it challenges the discourse on the moral and intellectual superiority of the Ottoman ruling elite. The discourse in Çölde bir Sergüzeşt’s conflicts with mainstream narratives referring to Arabs and the Arab provinces of the empire. In most post-Tanzimat literary texts, but mainly in novels and travelogues, the representation of Arabs and Arabia usually consisted of negative stereotypes. In the Ottoman Turkish novel, one will search in vain for a range of representations of Arab characters between the good-hearted, but naïve and barely articulate Arab nanny in Şemsettin Sami’s 1871 Taaşşuk-ı Talat ve Fıtnat (The Loves of Talat and Fıtnat) and the ruthless Syrian procurer in Namık Kemal’s 1876 İntibah (The Awakening). These characters have some human—sometimes even humane traits—but they are never as “civilized” as their İstanbullu counterparts. Travelogues are even more revealing of the Istanbul elite’s attitude. In these works, the traveler, usually male, tries to construct his own Ottoman and Turkish identity and conception of civilization in contradistinction to the landscapes—human or otherwise—that he witnesses during the journey. The eastern travel reports of Cenap Şahabettin, a neo-Parnassian poet, who just like Ali Kemal had little sympathy for Mustafa Kemal’s national liberation movement, constitute interesting examples of the perception of the Arab hinterlands by the Ottoman westernized intelligentsia and ruling class. The dehumanization of the local population by the use of adjectives and similes referring to the animal world is a recurrent feature in Şahabettin’s prose about the East. In his 1909 travelogue about his pilgrimage to Mecca, he compares the dwellings of ordinary Alexandrians to “mole-holes” and views poverty and misery as part of the fundamental nature of the East.29 In Afak-ı Irak (Horizons of Iraq, 1914) a new variation on this theme appears when he describes Baghdadi children as h­ aving the “brains of a roly-poly” and the “intelligence of locusts.”30 Such a description of the Arab provinces could easily be integrated into a discourse on the civilizing mission of the Ottoman state as propounded by the ruling bureaucracy.31 29 Cenap Şahabettin, Hac Yolunda, (Istanbul: Matbaa-ı Ahmet İhsan, 1909 [r. 1325]), 71. 30 Cenap Şahabettin, Âfâk-ı Irâk, ed. B. Yorulmaz (Istanbul: Dergâh, 2002), 99. 31 The orientalist bias of the Ottoman ruling elite is also perceptible in the correspondence of Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), a pioneer of Ottoman archeology and art history. See ­Edhem Eldem, Un Ottoman en Orient: Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak, 1869–1871 (Arles: ­Sindbad, 2010), 69–101. However, as noted by Hakan Karateke, such attitudes cannot be restricted to the post-Tanzimat era and can already be witnessed in earlier travelogues (“How Distant is Gurbet?”: 171–174).

Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert

Paratextual clues pointing to the production background and thus the historicity of the narrative are evidence that Ali Kemal did not want Çölde bir Sergüzeşt to be merely considered as fiction. The novel is apparently based on autobiographical elements set out in Ömrüm. In his autobiography, serialized in Peyam approximately when the new edition of the novel was being published, Ali Kemal recalls that on his way into exile in Aleppo, he met two women and a young child in Alexandrette. They were travelling to Syria but had not been met at the port as arranged. Ali Kemal offered to accompany them to Aleppo. He later learned about the younger woman’s unfortunate experiences and admittedly reworked them in his novel.32 In the postscript to the new edition of the novel, he claims that rereading the novel, the letters written by Seher, the central character, reminded him of his years of exile in Aleppo. In this way, he creates the impression that there are close links between his narrative and experienced reality: “I spent five or six years of my youth in Aleppo, with its deserts, towns and its gardens reaching from the valley of the Euphrates to the shores of the Orontes, I erred in all these strange places. Reading Seher’s letters has woken up those memories.”33 In the same text he explains that while travelling through the desert, he saw a melancholic young woman at a desert well who was absorbed in observing her surroundings. Kemal remembers being haunted by her image throughout his journey and acknowledges that she became an inspiration for Seher.34 A final clue to the alleged reality of the narrated events and hence to the authority of the political subtext can be found in the final pages of the novel when the narrator maintains that he has been inspired to write the story after having found the final letter that had been sent to Seher but never reached her.35 Whether or not Ali Kemal’s testimonies are truthful is not important. However, the author’s desire to anchor central aspects of the novel’s plot in reality is significant.36 The emphasis on real-life experiences could be read as an 32 33 34 35 36

Ali Kemal, Ömrüm, 162. Ali Kemal, “Hatime,” in Bir Safha-yı Şebap, 200–201. Ibid., 202–203. Ibid., 194. Though Ali Kemal mentions in the introduction of the omnibus edition of his Aleppo novels that İki Hemşire had also been inspired by real life events, he does not put a similar emphasis on the reality of the related events. He clearly considered the latter novel a lesser work than Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt: “From a stylistic and formal point of view İki Hemşire is somehow childish; Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt is, to some extent, more valuable from those two point of views.” (Ali Kemal, “Bir İki Söz,” in Bir Safha-yı Şebap, 3). Centered on the experiences of the narrator, İki Hemşire is a dark tale that contrasts the worlds of the diplomats, rich merchants, and

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attempt to counter potential criticism of his idealization of Bedouin life and his depiction of moral decadence among Ottoman Turkish bureaucrats and expatriates in Syria. The autobiographical elements give these scenes greater plausibility. By moving from the sphere of romanticized fiction to that of personal experience, Ali Kemal may well have hoped to increase the credibility and the validity of his subversive discourse. Ali Kemal’s atypical interest in and idealization of Bedouin culture is paralleled by his well-documented interest in classical Arabic literature, at a time when the Ottoman Turkish intelligentsia had turned towards Western-type fiction and poetry. His critical appreciation of Arabic poetry can be witnessed in several of his works. In his 1898 Edebiyat-ı Hakikiye Dersleri, published one year before Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt, he marveled at the Mu’allaqât, the famous pre-Islamic “Suspended Odes” and wondered at “works of such intellectual depth, created in lands inhabited by Bedouins, which provoke joy and envy even among today’s thinkers.”37 In Fetret, his third novel, Selman Bey, perhaps Ali Kemal’s alter ego, believes that his son Fetret, an incarnation of the ideal Turkish intellectual of the future, should take classes in Arabic. Selman Bey is saddened by the fact that contemporary “writers, indeed most of the young … show no fervor at all for learning Arabic.”38 Just like conservative advocates of the cultivation of the elsine-i selase—Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, the three languages of traditional erudition—Ali Kemal had little time for contemporary Arab poets and considered that their works to be pale copies of classical verse. Yet he showed some appreciation of nineteenth-century Lebanese poets, particularly Shaykh Nâsif al-Yâzjî (1800–1871), Jibrâ’il Dallâl (1836–1892), Shaykh İbrahim al-Yâzjî (1847–1906), and Qustâkî al-Himsî (1858–1941), whom he discussed briefly in his memoirs, a rare example of a leading Turkish intellectual referring to contemporary Arab poets by name.39 In Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi? (Is Raşit a Historian or a Poet?, 1918), a revisionist work that questioned Ottoman historiography and attempted to rewrite the history of the early eighteenth century—the so-called Age of the Tulips— he was still concerned with Arabic literature. Towards the end of the essay, he highlighted the Greco-Arab influence on the poetry of the eighteenth-century westernized bureaucrats to the life of poverty and misery in the backstreets of Aleppo and its consequences—corruption and disease. In 1913, Ali Kemal clearly distanced himself from the text by mentioning that he realized “how much he had changed” when reading the text, though he did not develop this point (Ali Kemal, “Bir İki Söz,” 4). 37 Ali Kemal, Edebiyât-ı Hakîkiyye Dersleri, 38. 38 Ali Kemal, Fetret, 83. 39 Ali Kemal, Ömrüm, 197–198.

Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert

chronicler, poet, and ambassador Raşit (d. 1735), and he celebrated the latter as well as the divan poet Nabi’s (1642–1712) introduction of hikmet (wisdom) into poetry, an element that was, according to the essayist, foreign to the Persian origins of Ottoman Turkish court literature. Ali Kemal even argued that it was unfortunate that Ottoman divan poets had modelled themselves on the Persian tradition and not on the Arabic one.40 In these paragraphs, he engaged creatively with classical Arabic poetry and pointed to interesting elements of intertextuality between Raşit and the great tenth-century Arab poet Al-Mutanabbi (915–965),41 thus recognizing the positive contribution of the Arabo-Islamic tradition to Ottoman Turkish culture, an intellectual position that other supporters of European-type reforms would not have defended with the same enthusiasm. At a time when the Ottoman ­Turkish ruling class believed, in Ussama Makdisi’s words, in their mission to “uplift and civilize” the eastern provinces of the empire,42 Ali Kemal’s celebration of classical Arabic literature, his references to intertextual relations between Ottoman and Arabic literature and his appreciation, albeit mild, of a few contemporary Arab poets and intellectuals could be understood as a challenge to claims of Ottoman superiority.43 These comments and remarks were made at a time when Arab nationalism constituted a concrete threat to Ottoman rule. The ideologues of the Nahda—the Arab renaissance—were themselves legitimizing their autonomist claims by, among other things, referring to classical Arabic literary culture which symbolized past greatness. However, Ali Kemal’s position on “orientalness” was ambivalent. Whereas in his devastating critique of the Ottoman bourgeoisie and expatriate community in Çölde bir Sergüzeşt, Ali Kemal produced an orientalist, albeit Arabophile, variation on the myth of the “noble savage” and expressed his appreciation of Arabic literature on several occasions, putting him at odds with other westernizing reformist bureaucrats and intellectuals, he espoused the latter’s rejection of “orientalness.” His claims about Ottoman and Islamic decline were based on an essentialist conception of the “oriental mind.” In Fetret, his partly autobiographical novel published in 1914, the narrator mentions fundamental, even necessary, differences 40 41 42 43

Ali Kemal, Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi?, 89–90. Ibid., 108. See above, footnote 13. In his autobiography, Ali Kemal condemned the ruthlessness of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces. He was well aware of this issue since he had been sent into internal exile to Aleppo in 1889 and had traveled widely in the region taking notes about the living conditions of the local population (Ömrüm, 188).

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between “Western” and “Eastern” children, differences which could be explained “not only by the climate and the milieu, but also by the laws of heredity.”44 He did not, though, delve into the matter and articulate more clearly what he meant by those laws. While he admitted in his earlier Mesele-i Şarkiye that the fear of ruthless authority and the weight of oppression could account for the passivity of the Ottoman Turks—and of Muslim populations in general—he also argued that tyranny was essentially an “oriental” phenomenon and stated in plain words that there was a continuity between the rules of Babylonian tyrants and oppressive Ottoman pashas.45 According to Ali Kemal, Islam tried to reform the East, but it lamentably failed: “The Omayyads and the Abassids turned into oriental rulers. Their way of ruling the country had more in common with the shahs of ancient Persia and the Byzantine emperors, than with the four rightful caliphs.”46 This seemingly contradictory rejection of the East finds one of its clearest expressions in his criticism of traditional Ottoman historiography in his 1918 essay on Raşit on the ground that it was too “oriental” to be reliable. Questioning Raşit’s scholarship and methodology, and writing about the Age of the Tulips from “a European point of view” (Avrupaca), he painted a rather dark picture of the condition of the Ottoman Empire during that period: “For European States the major problem was no longer to defend the Christians from the Turks, but how to share the territories that had already been recovered and would still be recovered.”47 There were obvious shortcomings in Ali Kemal’s approach. Whereas he had subjected Raşit’s work to severe scrutiny, he did not question the reliability of those European historians, diplomats, and witnesses whose works he used to reconstruct the era of Raşit.48 That this perspective cannot simply be ascribed to a change of mind during the final years of his life is obvious: he was still praising Arabic influences 44 Ali Kemal, Fetret, 95. 45 Ali Kemal, Mesele-i Şarkiye, 72 46 Ibid., 73. Unsurprisingly, Ali Kemal also had an ambivalent attitude towards colonialism. Though he admitted that colonialism was a source of oppression for the native population, he stated that it also provided them with an opportunity for modernization and progress, an issue, among many, that he evoked in his abovementioned “Seyahat Hatıraları: Camii el-Zeytune.” He was also aware that traditional Ottoman imperialism had succumbed to the blows of modern-day colonial imperialism. In his essay on the Eastern Question, he maintained that the Ottomans had become “from tip to toe, in economic matters, in industrial matters, in fact, everywhere, the prisoners of the Franks” (Ali Kemal, Mesele-i Şarkiye, 98–99). 47 Ali Kemal, Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi?, 23. 48 On Ali Kemal’s views about Raşit’s history, see Laurent Mignon, “Ali Kemal ile Tarihi Düşünmek,” Varlık (March 2016): 38–42.

Ali Kemal’s Forgotten Adventure in the Desert

on the poetry of Raşit in the last pages of his book. Furthermore, his attack on traditional historiography was not new. In his memoir Ömrüm he had already claimed that a lack of historical consciousness was basically an “oriental” problem: “One of the greatest deficiencies of our East compared to the West is that it has no knowledge of its past, and thus it is unable to comprehend its present state and to foresee its future. Our history is an ocean of ignorance and inexactitude.”49 The writer also denounced the lack of interest in the history and the politics of the West among the Ottoman Turkish intelligentsia and called it, rather amusingly, “the art of not knowing Europe.”50 However, by the time Kemal was writing, criticism of orientalism, both as the study of Near Eastern societies—in particular, the Western discourse on Islam—and as their representation in art and literature, was not unknown in Ottoman Turkey,51 even if reformist and progressive Ottoman intellectuals were still looking towards Europe for guidance in matters of scientific methodo­logy. He himself had been critical of Europeans dealing with Ottoman history in his essay on the Eastern Question: “The Franks have not written a history of the Turks according to the new methods. How could they? None of their historians know Turkish.”52 But by 1918 it was not a concern for him anymore, and he wrote in his essay on Raşit that European historians writing about the Ottoman Empire were more reliable “even though they were to an extent unable to consult [Ottoman Turkish] sources.”53 The desert romanticism expressed in Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt is evidence of Ali Kemal’s unique approach to the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and of his seemingly critical stance toward the Ottoman “civilizational” mission. It is true that some of his other works espoused the common liberal and Eurocentric view that traditional Ottoman scholarship was not suited to the needs of the new age, an opinion intermixed with a profound pessimism regarding the ability of the Ottoman state to be reformed. Yet, texts such as Çölde bir Sergüzeşt show the need to lift marginalized authors such as Ali Kemal from the footnotes and into the main text of Turkish literary history in order to unveil a more comprehensive picture of the variety of works and discourses in the 49 Ali Kemal, Ömrüm, 3. 50 Ali Kemal, Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi?, 38. 51 For a summary and analysis of the critiques of orientalism in Ottoman Turkey, see Laurent Mignon “L’orientalisme revisité,” in L’identité européenne et les défis du dialogue interculturel, ed. Mario Hirsch and Roberto Pappini (Luxembourg: Editions Saint Paul, 2008), 219–232. 52 Ali Kemal, Mesele-i Şarkiye, 65–66. 53 Ali Kemal, Raşit Müverrih mi? Şair mi?, 22.

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literature of the era. This text discloses the complex relationship between Istanbul intellectuals and what they deemed to be the “Orient”—the term “Orient” having two distinct meanings. On the one hand, it referred geographically to the eastern provinces of the empire and, on the other, and in a more abstract sense, to Ottoman Turkish and Islamic traditions and practices. Ali Kemal’s stance was not accompanied by the disdain for the eastern provinces and populations of the empire which had arguably become more prevalent after the Tanzimat with the rise of rival forms of nationalism. To the contrary, Ali Kemal’s open appreciation of classical Arabic literature and his idealization of the Bedouin way of life in his desert novel, which he presented in contradistinction to the moral decline of the Ottoman ruling class, were direct challenges to the official discourse on the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the Arab lands. Perhaps he too felt a kinship with the oppressed Arab masses just like the socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet would decades later in his poem “İstiklal” (Independence): My Egyptian brother In your language For your victory In my villages They recite ancient words.54

54 Nâzım Hikmet Ran [Nâzım Hikmet], Bütün Şiirleri, ed. Güven Turan and Fahri Güllüoğlu (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2007), 1585.

CHAPTER 8

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the East

A

li Kemal was a pioneer in more ways than one. One could claim that he  broke new ground by denouncing orientalist discourse and representations of the Islamic East in his literary works. For example, in Çölde Bir Sergüzeşt, Seher questions the authenticity of the representation of the desert in Western accounts, even though she later succumbs to a similarly romantic interpretation of desert landscapes. Nonetheless, the author invites his readers to reflect on the representation of the Islamic East in literature, an issue he had also hinted at in his first Aleppo novel. In İki Hemşire, the first-person narrator, perhaps Ali Kemal himself, warns a young woman, met at a party, who had been praising Pierre Loti’s works, that they do not reflect the reality of the lands and that they are only “products of imagination.”1 Though the focus of the discussion was on Realism in literature, a very contentious topic at the time, known as the hayaliyun-hakikiyun dispute, the reference to Pierre Loti (1850–1923), the French writer and traveler, was foreseeing a debate on Loti and orientalist representation which deeply divided the Ottoman Turkish literary world in the early twentieth century.2 Loti’s so-called Turkish novels, mainly Aziyadé (1879), Fantôme d’Orient (Ghost of the East, 1892), and Les désenchantées (The Disenchanted, 1906) ignited a controversy and divided the Turkish literary world into supporters and opponents of Kemal’s prose. Some, such as Yahya Kemal, the neoclassicist poet, made the case that Loti was not “a strange foreigner on a luxurious 1 Ali Kemal, “İki Hemşire,” in Bir Safha-yı Şebap, 22. 2 For more information on the Pierre Loti controversy see İnci Enginün, “Loti’nin Türklere Bakışı ve Edebiyatçılarımızın Yorumu” and Zeynep Mennan “Bazı Türk Yazarlarına Göre Oryantalizm Bağlamında Pierre Loti” in the online proceedings of the Pierre Loti Symposium: Pierre Loti Toplantısı Bildirileri, accessed October 20, 2020, https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/ TR-80370/pierre-loti-toplanti-bildirileri.html.

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quest” but a traveler “intoxicated by the mystery of the Turkish climate.”3 Progressive authors had a less mystical interpretation of the French novelist’s take on Ottoman Turkey. The poet Tevfik Fikret was not impressed by Loti’s fiction. He was critical of Loti’s imagery—especially with regard to Istanbul and Ottoman Turkish women—and he mocked the French writer’s supposed knowledge of Ottoman Turkish culture.4 More generally, Fikret aimed at “explaining that Europeans do not know Turkish and Turkishness, that most of the words which they say, whether knowledgeably or not, about [the Turks] are mistaken, even calumnious,”5 a topic also encountered, as seen above, in the writings of Namık Kemal and Ali Kemal. Fikret’s words, however, had a particular resonance as the poet was often accused by his conservative, nationalist, and Islamic adversaries of an internationalism insensitive to cultural arguments. During the Loti controversy, the most interesting development was the production of literature by authors and poets of different aesthetic and political persuasions, who, by way of intertextual allusions and direct references, took issue with Loti’s novels. The conversation in Ali Kemal’s İki Hemşire, mentioned above, was one of the earliest, but it was not the only one. Ömer Seyfettin’s reference to the numbing effect of Loti’s Les désenchantées in the short story “Bahar ve Kelebekler” (Spring and Butterflies, 1911), his parody of the Western traveler infatuated by the East in “Gizli Mabet” (The Secret Shrine, 1919), and Ahmet Haşim’s short narrative “Gurabahane-i Laklakan” (The Shelterhouse of the Storks, 1923)6 are some of these compositions. In the latter, apparently autobiographical text, the narrator questions the sincerity of Grégoire Bay, a Levantine character passionate about Oriental art, who lives in an orientalized fantasy mansion in the former Ottoman capital city of Bursa, which was not unlike Loti’s house in the French southwestern port city of Rochefort, with its Turkish salon and Arab chamber: “I think that your fascination for our works of art is due to your contempt for

3 Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Siyâsi ve Edebî Portreler (Istanbul: Istanbul Fetih Cemiyeti, 1986), 101–102. 4 Tevfik Fikret’s articles on Loti and, what could be called in allusion to Ali Kemal, “the art of not knowing Asia” are: “Ecnebîler ve Türkçemiz” (Foreigners and our Turkish Language) in Dil ve Edebiyat Yazıları, ed. İ. Parlatır (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1993), 98–101 and “Âziyâde” in Dil ve Edebiyat Yazıları, 102–108. 5 Tevfik Fikret, “Âziyâde,” 108. 6 Ahmet Haşim, “Gurabahane-i Laklakan,” Bütün Eserleri 3: Gurabahane-i Laklakan ve Diğer Yazıları, ed. İnci Enginün and Zeynep Kerman (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1991), 7–14.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

our intelligence. We are not fascinating, but we produced beautiful objects, which fascinate.”7 The narrator not only condemns Western arrogance and contempt for the Easterner, but also the fact that the East—in this case Ottoman Turkey—is now considered a depository of ancient art and exotic craft just waiting to be looted by European travelers and explorers. Predictably, there is a direct reference to Loti: Monsieur Bay possesses a marble slab on which the date when Pierre Loti broke the fast with the imams of the Green Mosque, a masterwork of Ottoman architecture dating from the early fifteenth century, is inscribed.8 That in real life Grégoire Bay was the French consul in Bursa, an art lover described by the famous numismatist and byzantologist Gustave Schlumberger (1844–1929) as “very erudite and very distinguished”9 is significant. By ridiculing Bay as “a type of Pierre Loti deprived of genius,”10 Haşim points to the connection between art, scholarship, and the French state. Had Bay’s abode not been praised by “many essayists and poets”?11 If we broaden the discussion about literary responses to Pierre Loti to other languages used in Ottoman Turkey, Melih İzzet’s [Devrim] (1887–1966] 1912 one-act French language play Leïla also deserves a mention. Sharing many of the features of the “Romantic rebellion,” the play explored the issue of the status of women in the Islamic world and in Europe through a story about forbidden love. In the play, the unfaithful husband and his wife agree, despite their obvious estrangement, on the need to reject the characterization of Turkish women as “disenchanted,” an obvious reference to Loti’s Les désenchantées. Yet, the history of literature is also a history of ironies. Pierre Loti was to write the foreword to İzzet Melih’s 1919 French translation of his own novel Sermet.12 Most of the above works of fiction associated Pierre Loti and his novels with Western imperialism and colonialism, but none had the radical edge of 7 Ibid., 13. 8 Ibid., 14 9 Gustave Schlumberger, “Un ‘boullotirion’ byzantin ou appareil à fabriquer les sceaux de plomb de l’époque byzantine,” Compte rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 55, no. 5 (1911): 411. 10 Ahmet Haşim, “Gurabahane-i Laklakan,” 9. 11 Ibid., 9. 12 See Laurent Mignon, “French in Ottoman Turkey: ‘The Language of the Afflicted Peoples’?,” in European Francophonie: The Social, Political and Cultural History of an International Prestige Language, ed. Vladislav Rjéoutski, Gesine Argent and Derek Offord (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 428–431.

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Nâzım Hikmet’s Futurist attack on the French marine officer in his 1924 poem “Şark Garp” (East West), later to be renamed “Piyer Loti.”13 In short, sharp verses, he denounced the “Orient as seen by the French poet.” Hikmet contrasts the “Orient of the books” to “a land/where naked slaves/starve”—the victims of colonial powers and Western imperialists. With Mayakovskian verve,14 he suggests that connections existed between orientalist discourse and the exploitation of Asia and parts of Africa. Loti is nothing but a “charlatan,” a “French officer who forgot his grape-eyed beloved faster than a prostitute” and “who sells rotten French cloth to the East/with 500% profit.” The critique of orientalist representation and the connection between imperialism and culture were inherent parts of Hikmet’s internationalist and Marxist engagement.15 Undeniably, his poetry and journalism display a sensitivity that may appear, anachronistically, “third-worldist”: perhaps he was influenced by the Tatar Bolshevik theoretician Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (1892–1940), whose lectures the young poet attended at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East where he studied during his first stay in Moscow between 1922–1924.16 In a piece entitled “Beyaz Irk, Siyah Irk” (White Race, Black 13 Ran, Bütün Şiirleri, 34–37. 14 This is a sensitive issue. Nâzım Hikmet accused those comparing his early poems to Mayakovski’s of not having read the Soviet poet. Though he conceded that he had been influenced by Futurism during a short period, he denied Mayakovski’s influence altogether: “When I wrote [“Açların Gözbebekleri”] I did not know Russian and I had not even heard Mayakovski’s name” (Sanat ve Edebiyat Üstüne, ed. Aziz Çalışlar [Istanbul: Bilim ve Sanat, 1987], 250–251). “Açların Gözbebekleri” (The Pupils of the Hungry, 1922) had been the poet’s first free verse poem and its step structure irresistibly evoked Mayakovski’s lesenka, stepladder verse. It is worth noting that Mayakovski only theorized his use of lesenka verse in his 1926 pamphlet Kak Dyelat Stikhi (How to Read Poetry), though he had been writing poems in this form for some time. However, the scholarly consensus is that Mayakovski only developed lesenka verse in his poem “Pro Eto” (About This) in 1923, which would be one year after the Turkish poet wrote “Açların Gözbebekleri” (Gerald Janacek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 222–223.) 15 No biography of the poet will be provided here. English-language readers are particularly fortunate as there are two Nâzım Hikmet biographies available. Beside Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantic Communist (London: Hurst & Company, 1999), readers may also want to consult Mutlu Konuk Blasing, The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet (New York: Persea Books, 2003). Besides numerous Turkish language biographies, including Memet Fuat’s insightful Nâzım Hikmet (Istanbul: Adam Yayınları, 2000), readers may wish to look at Dietrich Gronau’s Nâzım Hikmet (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991), the first booklength biography of the poet in a Western European language. 16 On Turkish students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, see İhsan Çomak, “Doğu Emekçileri Komünist Üniversitesi ve Burada Okuyan Türk Öğrenciler Hakkında Bir Rapor,” bilig 76 (2016): 87–115.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

Race) for the daily Tan, part of a series on the Spanish Civil War, he condemned “the white race that pretended to represent civilization and discovered that the lands inhabited by the Blacks were the easiest to conquer and colonize, and that black people were the easiest to exploit as slaves.”17 Read in conjunction with the poet’s Futurist denunciation of Pierre Loti, Hikmet’s journalistic work indicated that he considered colonialism and imperialism to be vast fields of struggle that stretched over many, seemingly unrelated, aspects of socio-cultural life ranging from religion to literature. He was not the only Turkish writer who explored the topic of culture and imperialism. Before his encounter with Marxism, the future communist leader Mustafa Suphi (1883–1921) had written Vazife-i Temdin (The Mission to Civilize, 1912), a trenchant rebuttal of Western colonialist discourse after the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya. Suphi largely wrote his pamphlet as a response to the liberal economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s (1843–1916) apology of colonialism De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (On colonization among modern peoples, 1874). Leroy-Beaulieu was none other than the brother of Anatole whose Israël parmi les nations was being translated by İsak Ferera at the time. One could even argue that some of Nâzım Hikmet’s poetry shows his desire to free Aziyadé, the young Turkish woman from the eponymous novel, from the bondage of orientalist representation, as exemplified in Loti’s prose, and of colonial imperialism, while also challenging mainstream representations of women in the poetry of his time. This comes to the fore in his investigation of the themes of love and desire in his poetry. He worked towards the redefinition of love in the terms of a socialist militancy which hoped to create a new image of the beloved, in clear opposition to the representation of women in nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry in Turkish.18

17 Ran, Yazılar 5: Yazılar (1937–1962), 71. Notably, the theme of Africa would be further developed by other poets in Turkey, such as Hikmet’s contemporary Ercüment Behzad Lav (1903–1984), other socialists, and even some poets of the Modernist İkinci Yeni (Second Renewal) movement. For a discussion of those texts, see, e.g., Laurent Mignon, “‘Ton sang est chaud et noir’: Vers africanisés et Afrique versifiée dans la poésie turque moderne,” in Oublier les colonies: Contacts culturels hérités du fait colonial, ed. Isabelle Felici and JeanCharles Vegliante (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2011): 63–76. For a specific focus on the poetry of the İkinci Yeni, see Fatih Andı, “İkinci Yeni’nin Afrikası,” Kaşgar 27 (May 2002): 38–52. 18 See Laurent Mignon, “Venger Aziyadé,” in Regards sur la poésie du 20ème siècle, ed. L ­ aurent Fels (Namur: Les éditions namuroises, 2009), 251–270 and Türk Şiirinde Aşk, Âşıklar, ­Mekânlar (Ankara: Hece, 2002), 59–77.

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Some of his epic poems seem to have been written in response to the idea of a mysterious and submissive oriental woman, whose subjugation by the white male symbolized military conquest and Western superiority. The poet’s engagement was not limited to the sphere of anti-colonial struggle. He transformed the contemporary understanding of poetry, experimenting with free verse and traditional verse forms as well as exploring new themes. In Jokond ile Si-Ya-U (Gioconda and Si-Ya-U),19 published in 1929 and Benerci Kendini Niçin Öldürdü (Why Did Banardjee Kill Himself), published three years later, Hikmet subverted some of the clichés of colonial literary depictions of women and love. In those epic poems he challenges the representation of the relationship between the colonizer, usually male, and the colonized, usually female, that fundamentally relies on sexualized exoticism.20 The theme of love was less central in a third epic which Hikmet published in 1935 in which he also dismantled and inverted the colonialist discourse—Taranta Babu’ya Mektuplar (Letters to Taranta Babu).21 The latter was a collage of letters written to his wife by a nameless Ethiopian student who went to study fine arts in Italy and analyzed in versified letters the connections between the rise of fascism, capitalism, and imperialism. The letters reflected Hikmet’s own practice, as he himself, while in jail, would regularly write to his wife in verse form, or, sometimes, versify letters that he received. While undermining the clichés of colonial literature, Jokond ile Si-Ya-U is also a text that explores the relationship between political engagement and love. At the crossroad between the fairy tales of the folk tradition and the constructivist poetry promoted by the Soviet Futurists, the poem relates the love story between the Gioconda, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait, and a Chinese communist student named Si-Ya-U. The poem’s complex, estranging structure stuns readers even today and has a surreal dimension that would not have displeased the likes of Paul Eluard (1895–1952), André Breton (1896–1966) 19 An English translation of the epic can be found in Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Persea Books, 2002), 6–31. All English quotations from the epic are from this translation. Amendments to those translations are indicated in square brackets. 20 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1998) [1989], 41. R. J. C. Young describes this discourse as “colonial desire” in his seminal study of colonialist discourse in his Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 21 An English translation of the epic can be found in Nâzım Hikmet, Selected Poems, trans. ­Taner Baybars (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 47–65. All English quotations from the epic are from this translation. Amendments to those translations are indicated in square brackets.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

and other French Surrealists. It might well be that the famous theft of the Gioconda from the Louvre in 1911, of which Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), one of the spiritual fathers of the French avant-garde, had been suspected, were the inspiration for this e­ xtraordinary narrative. Si-Ya-U’s character was based on Hsiao San, a ­Chinese student whom Nâzım Hikmet had befriended in Moscow during his first stay in the Soviet Union. Hsiao San had returned to China in 1924 and the Turkish poet believed him to have been killed by the nationalist Chiang ­K ai-shek’s (1887–1975) men during the wave of anti-communist repression which had shaken China.22 In Hikmet’s poem, the Gioconda is bored in the Louvre Museum and falls in love with a Chinese student named Si-Ya-U, one of her regular admirers. The latter, however, is arrested after a political gathering and deported to China. The Gioconda decides to join him in China and escapes from the museum with the help of the poet, the narrating voice in the epic: Gioconda threw open her window. This poor farmer’s daughter done up as the Virgin Mary chucked her gilded frame and, grabbing hold of the rope, pulled herself up … SI-YA-U, my friend you were lucky to fall to a lion-hearted woman like her.23 After a long and eventful journey, she reaches Shanghai where she witnesses the execution of her beloved. She loses her legendary smile, but recovers it after being sentenced to death for treason at a French military trial. Throughout her barbaric execution she smiles, fully comprehending that she is dying for the freedom of the Chinese people: Moonlight. Night. Handcuffed Gioconda waits. 22 Göksu and Timms, Romantic Communist, 90. 23 Ran, “Jokond ile Si-Ya-U,” in Bütün Şiirleri, 94 and Blasing and Konuk, trans., Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, 19.

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Blow, wind, blow … A voice: “All right, the lighter. Burn [the] Gioconda, burn …” A silhouette advances, A flash … They lit the lighter and set Gioconda on fire. The flames painted Gioconda red. She laughed with a smile that came from the heart. Gioconda burned laughing …24 Thus the love that she had felt for one individual is transformed into love for the Chinese people as a whole. The Gioconda has appropriated Si-Ya-U’s struggle. That love would be strengthened by common political struggle was one of the Turkish poet’s most heartfelt beliefs. As late as 1947, Hikmet told his friend Vâlâ Nurettin (1901–1967) in a letter written in jail, that “life was not worth living unless one was in love with one person and also with millions of people.”25 The link between love of a person and human solidarity was a motif that appears in several of Hikmet’s poems. He shared this approach with other contemporary socialist poets, such as Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) and Paul Eluard. The latter presented the loving couple in his poetry as the founding principle of a loving, peaceful, and humane society. Individual love was strengthened by becoming universal. Unknown to him, perhaps, Hikmet picked up a theme that been evoked in literature in Turkish for the first time in Hovsep Vartanyan’s Akabi Hikâyesi where the Armenian author envisaged that the love between an Orthodox and a Catholic could pave the way towards peace and reconciliation, an all-encompassing love of humanity. The originality of Nâzım Hikmet’s poem—as socialist poetry—lays in its inversion of a central motif of colonial literature and indeed of Loti’s novels: the emotional and sexual conquest of an indigenous young woman by a ­colonialist—a white, European male. However, the Gioconda is not an ordinary European woman who is seduced by an Asian student, betrays her country, and “goes native” by embracing his beliefs and struggle to the point 24 Ibid., 109 and Blasing and Konuk, trans., Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, 31. 25 Nâzım Hikmet Ran [Nâzım Hikmet], Bursa Cezaevinden Vâ-Nû’lara Mektuplar, ed. Vâlâ Nureddin (Istanbul: Cem, 1970), 57.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

of sacrificing her own life for them. She is an incarnation of the Renaissance and thus of Western modernity. The significance of Gioconda’s self-sacrifice becomes apparent in the wake of her dialogue with Si-Ya-U, at a time both of them are still flirting in the Louvre. Si-Ya-U puts the following question to her: “Those who crush our rice fields with the caterpillar treads of their tanks and who swagger through our cities like emperors of hell, are they of YOUR race, the race of him who CREATED you?”26 Gioconda almost cries “no,” raising her hand, but does not know what to reply to this question which infers the existence of a connection between culture and imperialism. If the Gioconda’s acceptance of her execution amounts to her recognition of art’s role in the subjugation of what was to become known as the Third World, the fact that she is executed by Congolese soldiers in the French colonial army points to the complexity of colonial rule. Still, it clearly suggested that no work of art is innocent, that art and politics are intrinsically linked. A similar theme is explored in Taranta Babu’ya Mektuplar. Though the narrator makes a distinction between the art of the Italian Renaissance and fascism, he suggested that Italian colonialism cannot be understood without studying all facets of Italian culture. The Italian merchant who rapes Taranta Babu’s sister at a slave market is called Romulus, just like one of the two mythical founders of Rome whose story the Ethiopian student relates to his wife in his first letter: Oh, but do not weep [TARANTA BABU]; This [ROMULUS] isn’t the same man as that blue-beads merchant signor [ROMULUS] who in broad daylight in the market place of Wal-Wal 26 Ran, “Jokond ile Si-Ya-U,” 87 and Blasing and Konuk, trans., Poems of Nâzım Hikmet, 13.

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raped your fig-bosomed sister. This one is the first Roman, King [ROMULUS].27 Some critics have interpreted the Gioconda’s heroism as evidence for the poet’s engagement in favor of women in revolutionary movements and as a challenge to the patriarchal order.28 This, however, needs to be questioned in the context of the epic. While it is true that the fusion of love and political engagement leading to the self-sacrifice of the Gioconda is remarkable and fits a progressive political narrative, her political stance in favor of the liberation of the Chinese people is not the result of reflection on the nature of imperialism and colonialist oppression. It is the consequence of her love for the Chinese student. Her escape from the Louvre is an act of love rather than politics. A case could be made that Aziyadé is avenged, but that the patriarchal order is not questioned. The honor of Asia and its oppressed people has been defended, but a woman has been instrumentalized to achieve this aim. Benerci Kendini Niçin Öldürdü, published in 1932, explored again the theme of love in the context of anti-colonial struggle. This time Hikmet decided to focus on India, and perhaps to continue there where the legendary Abdülhak Hamit, the şair-i azam, “the sublime poet,” as he was referred to, had stopped. Hamit had written about the relationship between the colonized and colonizer in India in a series of plays, namely Duhter-i Hindu, Finten (1898), Yadigar-ı Harp (A Souvenir from the War, 1917), Yabancı Dostlar (Foreign Friends, 1924–25), and Cünûn-ı Ask (The Madness of Love,1925–26)29 that also took part in a larger debate on the definition of “national theatre” (millî tiyatro) in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.30 The first part of Nâzım Hikmet’s epic poem is based on the complex love story between the Indian revolutionary Benerjee and a nameless young British women who turned out to be a British spy. Unlike in Jokond ile Si-Ya-U, love is presented in this narrative poem as an obstacle to revolutionary activism. The

27 Hikmet, “Taranta Babu’ya Mektuplar,” in Bütün Şiirleri, 440 and Hikmet, Selected Poems, 48. 28 See, for instance, Göksu and Timms, Romantic Communist, 91. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, on the other hand, argues that the epic is “about the transformation of a work of Art, with a capital A, into an active force—not an object languishing in museums but a live force wielding a gun” (Konuk Blasing, The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet, 93). 29 For a detailed study of Abdülhak Hamit’s Indian plays, see Sevim Kebeli, “Sömürgeciliğe Karşı: Abdülhak Hamit Tiyatrosu” (Masters thesis, Bilkent University, 2007). 30 See Mignon, Ana Metne Taşınan Dipnotlar, 136.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

text, a collage of poems and short prose pieces, narrates Benerjee’s struggle. His mistress, whose life he saved, was, unknown to him, a British intelligence officer, who used his indiscretions to secure the arrest of Indian nationalist activists. Benerjee too was eventually arrested, but unlike his comrades, he was not charged and was released: 2.A: As he chaired a secret meeting Benerjee’s caught with six comrades 2.B: Yet for a reason unknown though his comrades are arrested, Benerjee’s released. 3.C: Just as it is for me, that is to say, the author of this novel, for him too, this release remains a mystery that preys on his nerves, his bones, his flesh, a mystery, my dear a massive mystery31 His comrades became suspicious and he was increasingly marginalized within the nationalist movement. Meanwhile, he noticed that his lover was a spy and murdered her in an access of rage: I took her by the shoulders. And hit her head hit it against the wall … Blood on the wall. Hit it against the wall.32 Cleared of the suspicion of betrayal and having restored his honor with blood, Benerjee could rejoin the ranks of the freedom fighters. Imprisoned by the Brit 31 Ran, “Benerci Kendini Niçin Öldürdü,” in Bütün Şiirleri, 275–276. 32 Ibid., 292.

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ish, he eventually became a living legend of the Indian resistance movement against colonialism. In prison, he completed the work begun by his late comrade and friend Somadeva—a “History of India in the twentieth century”: Benerjee does not write with the blood of his wrist. He does not give these writings to a stranger coming from the city suburbs. He writes with a pencil on clean white paper. And those, despite the British attention of the prison guards, he conveys to those outside. HOW? … I am not going to tell how the prisoner of the stone cell has managed to achieve this for years. Even in a novel, I refuse to serve the British police.33

This enterprise was of great symbolic importance. By writing the history of their own country, and by revising and challenging the works of European historians, Somadeva and Benerjee not only freed the history of their country of colonialist discourse, but they also created the independent India of the future. Shaping historiography was part of the fight against Britain’s attempts to justify its colonial presence on the subcontinent. After years spent in jail, Benerjee was freed and received a hero’s welcome. However, for reasons that are not made clear to the reader, the Indian militant, haunted by his experiences and weakened physically by his prolonged stay behind bars, committed suicide. In this epic poem too, Nâzım Hikmet explored and dismantled colonialist discourse. He seemingly denounced fraternizing with women of the colonizing nations. But unlike some colonial authors and theorists who opposed associations between white men and indigenous women, Nâzım Hikmet did not put forward a racist message. He concentrated on the political consequences of such associations within national liberation struggles. Indeed, the epic is not devoid of autobiographical references, as can be seen in the narration of Benerjee’s prison experiences, such as the smuggling of manuscripts and the effect of incarceration on his health. Moreover, Hikmet’s early poetry often looked at the complexities of uniting his love life with the sacrifices required by revolutionary politics, even if in later poems he would praise the fusion of love and politics. In such poems he would turn the beloved, 33 Ibid., 332.

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

modelled on his wife Piraye, into Aziyadé’s nemesis—an effective response to stereotypes about Oriental women propagated by colonial literature and Pierre Loti in particular.34 Unsurprisingly, as Hikmet worked towards infusing a healthy dose of social realism into love poetry, the shadow of Pierre Loti was lurking again in the background. Loti, aged forty-two, was elected to the Académie française in 1891 by defeating Emile Zola whose Naturalism had been championed in Turkey by the likes of Beşir Fuat, Nabizade Nâzım, and other advocates of radical realism. By mentioning “sciatica” and “flannel underpants,” as in the poem “Karıma Mektup” (Letter to my Wife),35 written on November 11, 1933, and not the mysterious Orient mocked in “Piyer Loti,” Hikmet reminded his readers of his philosophical and literary lineage. He was on the side of the “Realists” and against the “Romantics” in Turkey. On the side of Zola, Dreyfus’s champion and against Loti, whose Judeophobia was even evoked by İsak Ferera.36 Nâzım Hikmet’s focus on daily reality was also part of a materialist agenda affirming that nothing existed beyond the matter and human experience. There was neither room for religious mysticism nor for oriental mystique. Just like the poet’s ways of disseminating his work during incarceration provided the inspiration for Benerjee’s own practices, other, more painful, experiences were to provide the stimulus for Hikmet to write a series of poems that take aim at the mystical subtext of Sufi poetry, in yet another blow to the tradition and the perception of Islamicate literatures in the West. While Sufi love poetry had been exploring the longing for the unreachable beloved for centuries—a metaphor for the trials and torments of the Sufi on the path to mystical union with the divine—Hikmet used the form of the rubai, the quatrain of the classical Ottoman tradition, to sing the physical unreachability of his beloved “whose elusive presence he cannot embrace” and yet exists “flesh and bones, real, in my city,” as he writes in the fifth, untitled, quatrain of Rubailer.37 In a letter to Piraye, he explained that he wished to realize “something that nobody had done neither in the West nor in the East”: I will try to convey the essence of dialectic materialism with rubais. I am sure that I will be successful because what Mevlana achieved, trusting the 34 See Mignon, “Venger Aziyadé.” 35 Ran, Bütün Şiirleri, 420–421. 36 İsak Ferera, “İsminden Utanan Yahudiler”: 22. 37 Ran, Bütün Şiirleri, 733.

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Challenging Orientalism love of God and taking strength from it, I will achieve having faith in your love. I will do exactly the contrary of what he aimed at: I will go in search for reality.38

The opposition of the physical beloved, unreachable beyond the walls of Bursa prison walls where he was spending his thirty-five-year prison sentence,39 to the elusive, and according to Hikmet, illusive God of Rumi and the mystics was all but in name a materialist manifesto celebrating the reality and materiality of the world. The subversion of the mystical subtext of the classical and folk traditions had been an important item on the poet’s agenda since he had started engaging with it after his early avant-gardist phase.40 In poems such as “Kerem Gibi” (Like Kerem), published in 1930, the plague of the legendary lover Kerem, consumed by his passion for the unreachable Aslı, turns into the plague of the political poet consumed by the passion to serve the people. The 1948 play Ferhat ile Şirin (Ferhat and Şirin), inspired by Nizami Ganjavi’s (1141–1209) famous mystical love epic, turns Ferhat into a socialist hero who discovers not God, but a desire to serve the people, once he sublimates his love for the unattainable Şirin. The subversion and appropriation of the classical tradition, often perceived as mystical, is an interesting aspect of the work of Nâzım Hikmet and addresses the need to develop a form of literary expression that is both “national” and internationalist, in order to counter essentialism and cultural imperialism. As always with Nâzım Hikmet, poetry feeds on tangible realities. His Rubailer refers to a very concrete actuality of the poet’s life: his imprisonment and the physical impossibility of touching the beloved. That the desire to touch was so central in these verses was in itself significant of the poet’s desire to leave no realm of human experience unexamined. Nâzım Hikmet’s works during the thirties and forties were deeply humanist celebrations of the person, of this “fert” that Baha Tevfik wanted to liberate. Hikmet’s humanism was materialist and internationalist. So it was not only 38 Nâzım Hikmet Ran [Nâzım Hikmet], Nâzım ile Pirâye, ed. Mehmet Fuat (Istanbul: De, 1976), 235. 39 In 1938, Nâzım Hikmet was condemned, on very dubious charges, to thirty-five

years of imprisonment by the Tribunal of the War Academy and the Naval Command for incitement to communism. In 1950, he was released from prison after an international campaign, but he had to escape to the Soviet Union again in order to avoid further political persecution.

40 For a discussion of Nâzım Hikmet’s engagement with traditional literature, see Nedim ­Gürsel, Nâzım Hikmet ve Geleneksel Türk Yazını (İstanbul: Adam Yayınevi, 1992).

Nâzım Hikmet and the Demystification of the Eas

the mystic poets who went by the wayside, but also orientalist authors, such as Pierre Loti with their oriental fantasies that expressed openly or covertly a desire for conquest of the East and produced, perhaps unintentionally, a discourse that served to legitimize the “civilizing” duties performed by Western colonial powers. By questioning tradition and breaking numerous taboos, ­Hikmet’s anti-colonial and anti-mystical poetry prepared the ground for some of the more radical writing in the following era.

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To Do or Not To Do God: On Transgression, Literature, and Religion

I

n 1934, an unusual book appeared on the shelves of the bookstores in Istanbul. İstanbul’da bir Landru (A Landru in Istanbul) by Nezihe Muhiddin [Tepedelengil] (1889–1958) was, perhaps, one of the darkest tales ever written in the Turkish tongue, featuring murder, necrophilia, and fatal attraction against the backdrop of the crumbling former Ottoman capital. The title referred to Henri Désiré Landru (1869–1922), a French serial killer who made the headlines in France by murdering ten women and the teenage son of one of his victims between 1914 and 1919. Landru, a widower in his forties, seduced the women who came to his Parisian villa and killed them once he had access to their assets, burning their bodies in his little oven. The author of the novella was by no means unknown either. An extraordinary figure in the women’s rights movement in Turkey, Nezihe Muhiddin had founded the first political party for women, the Kadınlar Halk Fırkası (People’s Party of Women), on 16 June 1923, at a time when they were still not allowed to vote. One of the explicit aims of the party was to change this status quo. She had already played a leading role in various civil society organizations, becoming a founding member of the Osmanlı-Türk Hanımları Esirgeme Derneği (­Ottoman-Turkish Society for the Protection of Women) and the Donanma Derneği (Association of Support to the Navy) and worked actively in the Müdafa-ı Milliye Osmanlı Hanımlar Heyeti (Ottoman Women’s Committee of the Association of National Defense). Muhiddin continued to promote women’s rights by other means when her party was banned and she participated in the foundation of the Kadınlar Birliği

Conclusion

(The Women’s Union) that she led between 1924 and 1927. An important dimension of the Union’s activities was the publication of the journal Kadın Yolu (The Women’s Path), which actively promoted political rights for women. As was to be expected in an era when the ruling elite had little time for democratic debate, she ended up being labelled as “dangerous” by Mustafa Kemal’s government and was banned from politics.1 She disappeared from the political stage as she would from the pages of the books that related the story of the Turkish revolution. Her struggle for women’s rights and her mobilization of women did not fit the official narrative about women’s suffrage in ­Turkey. Kemalist historiography claimed that the right to vote had been granted to women by the enlightened leader and had not been the result of a political struggle led by women activists against the patriarchy. For many years, Muhiddin also remained unmentioned by literary historians, even though she was a prolific writer. She published no less than sixteen novels and novellas,2 hundreds of short stories, and a famous essay on the history of women in Turkey “Türk Kadını” (1931). It was only in 2006 that her work started to be reedited.3 There is no doubt that any attempt to make sense of the history of literature in Turkish, inspired by Baha Tevfik’s call to challenge political and literary orthodoxies, must engage with at least some aspects of her work and attempt to situate her within the history of literature in Turkish. Istanbul’da bir Landru is a good place to initiate such an investigation. 1 For a biography of Nezihe Muhiddin, see Ayşegül Baykan and Belma Ötüş Baskett, Nezihe Muhittin ve Türk Kadını (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1999), and Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birliği (Istanbul: Metis Yayınlar, 2003). 2 Her works published in book form were: Şebab-ı Tebah (Istanbul: Muhtar Halit Kitaphanesi, 1911 [r. 1327]), Benliğim Benimdir (Istanbul: Sudi Kitabhanesi, 1929), Türk Kadını (­Istanbul: Numune Matbaası, 1931), Güzellik Kraliçesi (Istanbul: Resimli Ay Matbaası, 1933), Bozkurt: Küçük Mehmet’in Romanı (Istanbul: Anadolu Türk Kitabhanesi, 1934), ­İstanbul’da Bir Landru (Istanbul: Numune Matbaası, 1934), Ateş Böcekleri (Istanbul: Hilmi Kitabevi, 1935), Bir Aşk Böyle Söndü (Istanbul: İnkılâp Kitabevi 1939; 2nd edition Bir Aşk Böyle Bitti, 1943), Çıplak Model (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1943), İzmir Çocuğu (­Istanbul: Hilmi Kitabevi, 1943), Avare Kadın (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1943), Bir Yaz Gecesiydi (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1943), Çıngıraklı Yılan (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1943), Kalbim Senindir! (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi,1943), Sabah Oluyor (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1943), Gene Geleceksin (Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1944), Sus ­Kalbim Sus (­Istanbul: Arif Bolat Kitabevi, 1944). For an exhaustive list of her published works, see Nezihe Muhiddin Tepedelengil [Nezihe Muhiddin], Bütün Eserleri, vol. 1, ed. Yaprak ­Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitabevi Yayınları, 2006), XI–XIII. 3 Her works were reedited by Kitap Yayınevi in their Mor Kitaplık series, specializing on women authors. It should be noted that only 600 copies were printed of the four volumes of her complete works of which no new edition has been made since 2006.

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However, it must be noted that Muhiddin is far from being a poster girl for progressive causes. There was also a darker side to her political and literary activities. As hinted at by the feminist scholar Yaprak Zihnioğlu in her groundbreaking Kadınsız İnkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadınlar Halk Fırkası, Kadın Birliği (A Revolution Without Women: Nezihe Muhiddin, The Women’s People Party, The Women’s Union, 2003), a study of Muhiddin’s life and politics, the novelist’s views on race were, to say the least, ambiguous. Zihnioğlu’s attempts to whitewash Muhiddin from accusations of racism and xenophobia are not entirely convincing: In general, we see that she does not reject ethnic pluralism, that she does not speak from within a framework determined by racist anthropology and chauvinistic nationalism. If we consider the word “race” as used in the expressions “racial characteristics” and “Turkish race” in the context of those days, [we see] that it aimed to separate the Turkish element from other ethnic elements and clarify it, not to signify a superiority of the blood and race as is the case in racist anthropology.4

Zihnioğlu is too generous in her assessment of Muhiddin’s approach to the question of race. In August 1939, the novelist approached Franz Frederik Schmidt Dumont (1882–1952), the press attaché of the German embassy in Ankara, to resolve some copyright issues that had arisen after the publication of one of her works in the Illustrierte Blatt, a national weekly published in F ­ rankfurt. While her concern for her lost income was quite understandable, her reference to the antisemitic aspects of her novels in order to convince the attaché that more of her novels should be translated shows that she was not disturbed by the nature of the Nazi regime and acknowledged the racist dimension of some of her works. Her dire financial circumstances might explain her willingness to collaborate with German National Socialism. Indeed, she indicated that she would like the financial benefit to be transferred directly to her daughter.5 It is tempting to read her novella İstanbul’da bir Landru as a nation­ alist work of fiction which somehow fits within the discursive framework of so-called Liberation War Literature, denouncing the decadent cosmopolitan elites and warning against the perils coming from foreign lands. Yet it is more than that. This subsersive tale can be seen as a forerunner of the exploration of 4 Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 72. 5 Berna Pekesen, Zwischen Sympathie und Eigennutz: NS Propaganda und die türkische Presse im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2010), 149.

Conclusion

sexuality which would be significant in the late sixties and even of the advent of transgressive fiction in recent years. It is a text which challenges the boundaries of the acceptable in literary fiction. Still, İstanbul’da bir Landru can be read allegorically as a commentary on the tremendous political and cultural changes which affected Turkish society in the first years after the establishment of the republic. At the turning point of the novella, Nazlı, the main character, reads a newspaper article entitled “Istanbul’da bir Landrô” (A Landrô in Istanbul), about the presence of a serial killer in Istanbul. Strikingly, the victims are from the ethno-religious minorities and from the former Ottoman ruling class whose position was challenged by the new republic: the daughter of a Jewish merchant, the young wife of a rich elderly Hacı, the adopted daughter of a retired Pasha, the daughter of a “rich and polite” merchant whose family were from the gentry of cosmopolitan Izmir, and a young pianist who had graduated from a Paris conservatoire.6 Nazlı quickly surmises that the murderer might be Nils, a tormented northern European she is infatuated with. Of particular interest to our study, it is notable that Nils’s victims are associated with the sections of Turkish literature which were “cleansed” from its h­ istory—its “cosmopolitanism” (such as the literature in Turkish by non-­ Muslim ethno-religious minorities) and the work of those who dared to leave the straight path of accepted behavior and opinion (such as Zafer Hanım and her confrontation with the evils of slavery). That said, Nazlı too is doomed. An adulteress in love with a dangerous stranger, she symbolizes the immorality and decadence of the old ruling class. An Ottoman princess, she represents an endangered species, a social class condemned to the garbage bin of history. Therefore, it is not really surprising that Nils, the necrophilous Adonis, is attracted to her. Is she not an anachronism, a living dead? Nezihe Muhiddin, who read Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)7 and translated him into Turkish, might also have been familiar with what Lisa Downing has named the “nineteenth-century French necrophilic canon”8—a corpus of texts ranging from Charles Baudelaire’s (1821–1867) translations of Poe to George Rodenbach’s (1855–1898) novel Bruges-la-morte (Bruges-the-Dead, 1892). As an author and activist concerned about the condition of women and 6 Nezihe Muhiddin Tepedelengil [Nezihe Muhiddin], “İstanbul’da bir Landru,” in Bütün ­Eserleri 1, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitapyayinevi, 2006), 322. 7 Tepedelengil, Bütün Eserleri 1, xiii. 8 Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth Century French Literature (­Oxford: Legenda, 2003), 12.

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patriarchy, it might well be that Nezihe Muhiddin read with great interest the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s (1840–1902) description of necrophiles in his milestone study of sexual pathology 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. Krafft-Ebing notes that in certain cases necrophiles show a preference for a corpse to the living woman. When no other act of cruelty—cutting into pieces, etc.—is practiced on the cadaver, it is probable that the lifeless condition itself forms the stimulus for the perverse individual. It is possible that the corpse—a human form absolutely without will—satisfies an abnormal desire, in that the object of desire is seen to be capable of absolute subjugation, without possibility of resistance.9

For Muhiddin, it is not only the pathology described here that would have been of interest, but also what it could symbolize within the literary text. While the novelist is a political activist calling on women to stop being passive and take their destiny in their own hands, she creates an anti-heroine who longs to be an “object of desire … capable of absolute subjugation, without possibility of resistance.” Having read about the mysterious disappearances of young women not unlike herself, Nazlı, the Ottoman princess, writes in her diary that “even if the end of those mysterious cases were gruesome murders, I wished I were the heroine of one of these cases.”10 It is not by chance that the serial killer Nils is European. He represents the threat from outside, perhaps the dangers of Western imperialism. Istanbul’da bir Landru had been published barely ten years after the Republic of Turkey gained its independence in the wake of a bitter liberation war against France, England, and Greece. In 1934, some European countries continued to represent a threat to Turkey’s independence, Mussolini’s Italy being a example, as relations between the two countries reached a new low during that year.11 That the threat of Western imperialism, whether political or cultural, was a major topic for writers and intellectuals from the late Tanzimat onwards ranging from Namık Kemal to Nâzım Hikmet has been one of the themes of this book. 9 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, With Special Reference To Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. by F. J. Rebman (London and New York: Rebman, 1899), 91. 10 Tepedelengil, “İstanbul’da bir Landru,” 324. 11 See Dilek Barlas, “Friends or Foes? Diplomatic Relations Between Italy and Turkey, 1923–1936,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 (2004): 246–247.

Conclusion

And yet, there is a kinship between Muhiddin and authors such as Hovsep Vartanyan and İsak Ferera in the sense that not only were they airbrushed out of literary studies and historiography for many years, but also that they challenged the norms of what was socially acceptable. Vartanyan’s denunciation of sectarianism and Ferera’s rejection of both Jewish communalism and Turkish nationalism in the final years of the Ottoman state are cases in point. In particular Vartanyan’s exploration of forbidden love makes him a trailblazer for post-Tanzimat authors ranging from Şemsettin Sami to Halit Ziya, who all explored the role of love in battling the social status quo. Muhiddin arguably built on that tradition. The relations between genders was a major concern in her journalistic work. In an interview she gave to Yeni Sabah on August, 5 1940, she expressed support for coeducation, as the cohabitation of genders would prevent dangerous sexual passions, the very urges that she explored in some of her work: Yes. Facing a stern pulpit, under the sacred roof of the school, the genders getting used to each others, would, up to a point, distance themselves from sexual passions. Accustomedness modulates violent passions. There is an inducement for both sides to show more self-respect, to improve ­themselves.12

Gender segregation had already been rejected by other authors before her, most significantly by Ömer Seyfettin who bemoaned the “immorality of byzantine emotions,” in other words the homoeroticism that marked classical Ottoman poetry and was, he believed caused by the lack of contact between men and women.13 Seyfettin himself went on to write about transgressive sexual behavior in some of his fiction, ranging from the mimicking of oral sex on a gun in “Primo Türk Çoçuğu” (Primo, the Turkish Boy) to sexual violence and necrophilia in “Beyaz Lale” (The White Tulip). This makes him, like Nezihe Muhiddin, a forerunner of transgressive literature in Turkey. An important difference between the approaches of the two authors is that, unlike Seyfettin’s works which do not question the patriarchy, Muhiddin’s İstanbul’da bir Landru and other novels like Benliğim Benimdir! (My Self is 12 Re-Sa, “Maarif Anketimiz: Liseler Neden İyi Randıman Vermiyor?,” Yeni Sabah (August 5, 1940): 3. 13 Ömer Seyfettin, “Yeni Lisan,” 76.

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Mine!, 1934) and Sus Kalbim Sus (Hush, O My Heart, 1944) which deal with sexual taboos such as sadomasochism, thereby contribute to a questioning of societal norms to prepare the ground for women’s empowerment. This is the meaning of her juggling both political activism and exploration of the darker realms of human sexuality. While İstanbul’da bir Landru is a short novel lacking psychological depth, it nevertheless lowers its gaze to view some of the most extreme forms of human behaviors: Nazlı is insatiably curious and self-destructively passionate; the Kara Kartal (Black Eagle) club and its lost souls is grotesque; and Nils is a serial killer and necrophiliac. In the Turkish literary scene of the 1930s, with its deep longing, even on the left, for writing that spoke of the homeland, usually with a didactic tone, Muhiddin’s stance was out of the ordinary, even though she too espoused a nationalist worldview. Hence it is right, then, to see her as a pioneer of the radical strand within what has been called in Turkey yeraltı ­edebiyatı—underground literature.14 In many ways this is a misnomer, as authors such as Hakan Günday, Arif Kaptan, and the older Metin Kaçan (1961–2013), who describe extreme behavior in their fiction, have been published by mainstream publishers and are far from being “underground.” Their works and aspects of Muhiddin’s work fit the framework of transgressive literature, a term coined by Michael Silverblatt in an article for the Los Angeles Times on August 1, 1993.15 According to the American critic, the underlying idea of transgressive thinking “is that knowledge is no longer to be found through the oppositions of dialectical reasoning. Instead, knowledge is found at the limits of experience. The body becomes the locus for the possibility of knowledge.” Silverblatt points to texts that “are filled with violence against women, blood, and depravity.” Today, the concept is taken to mean the work of authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), and William S. Boroughs (1914– 1997), who in Turkey are categorized as “underground” writers and published in translation by independent publishers such as Ayrıntı in their collection Yeraltı, Çiviyazıları in their Aykırı Edebiyat collection, Altıkırkırkbeş and Stüdyoimge, which, while available in mainstream bookstores, are known to have had

14 For a survey of the discussions on the topic, see Fethi Demir and Yunus Kuş, “Türkiye’de Yeraltı Edebiyatı Tartışmaları: Kavram, Ölçüt, Tarihçe,” Turkish Studies 11 no. 20 (Fall 2016): 119–140. 15 Michel Silverblatt, “Shock Appeal/Who Are These Writers, And Why Do They Want to Hurt Us?: The New Fiction of Transgression,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1993.

Conclusion

the occasional run-in with the authorities.16 Yet authors such as Günday and Kaptan are published by major publishing houses which use the label yeraltı edebiyatı as a marketing device to exploit what has now become a literary fashion. While many of these authors continue to shock, it is worthwhile questioning the extent to which they are true heirs to the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) and Allen Ginsburg (1926–1997) whose heritage they are said to be perpetuating. The “divine marquess” and Ginsburg explored extreme behavior because they believed that radical art had a role in the transformation of social norms and the building of a more humane society, issues that were of little concern for their Turkish equivalents, at least at first. Nezihe Muhiddin, on the other hand, quite clearly positioned herself in the more political “Sadeian” tradition. But what is Nezihe Muhiddin’s literary revolution and how does it relate to the focus of this book? Baha Tevfik’s invitation to rethink literary historiography has led to an uncoupling of the Turkish language and Islam. As noted in chapter 1, during the National Liberation War, Turkishness was coterminous with Islam. When it came to writing the history of Turkish literature only authors with a Muslim background were considered part of the tradition. Hence uncoupling religion and literature became necessary to uncover the contributions of non-Muslim authors, mainly Christians and Jews. It must be noted, however, that the philosopher Baha Tevfik would have looked equally down upon the three monotheistic traditions, as he argued that religion was man-made and would slowly vanish as scientific progress rendered it superfluous.17 But this is not our problem here. Looking beyond the Turkish-Islam synthesis, understood here as a discourse that under various avatars mutated from the early years of the republic to the present day, has allowed us to look at Armeno-Turkish, Karamanlı, and Jewish Turkish literatures while also considering the possibility of literary contributions by translations of missionary texts. This said, there were lively debates within each religious community— ranging from Hovsep Vartanyan’s call to renounce sectarianism, to Zafer Hanım’s rejection of slavery, and to İsak Ferera’s, Avram Naon’s and Mahir Ruso’s reformism. Similarly, Namık Kemal’s progressive Islamic apologetics, written in response to Renan’s critique, as well as Nâzım Hikmet’s appropriation of the rubai tradition to refute both orientalist and Sufi worldviews, show the diversity of Islamicate thought and culture during the period this book 16 Laurent Mignon, “La littérature au banc des accusés,” Lëtzebuerger Land ( January 20, 2012). 17 On Baha Tevfik’s approach to religion and God, see Mustafa Ateş, Baha Tevfik’te Din ve Tanrı Problemi (Istanbul: Dün Bugün Yarın, 2019).

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surveys. However, all of these authors were well rooted within the monotheist tradition, even in their denial, as is the case with Baha Tevfik and Nâzım Hikmet, of the existence of the one God. In this context, however, Nezihe Muhiddin’s short novel opens new possibilities. In her important study Kadınsız İnkılap, Zihnioğlu contends that M ­ uhiddin moved away from the religiously inspired liberationist views developed by the novelist and essayist Fatma Aliye to an outlook that was both nationalist and secular.18 Interestingly, these two visions were symbolized by the publication of two books propounding a gynocentric take on historiography— Aliye’s 1896 Nisvan-ı İslam (The Women of Islam) and Muhiddin’s 1931 Türk Kadını (The Turkish Woman). In the course of her evolution, Muhiddin embraced a positivist stance and spoke of the emergence of a “new and enlightened brain cleansed of mumbo-jumbo and superstitions”19 inside every Turk in a piece revealingly entitled “Cumhuriyet’in Yaratıcı Kudreti” (The Creative Power of the R ­ epublic), published on September 15, 1925 in her journal Kadın Yolu. The war against irrational beliefs and outdated traditions that enchained women and the people as a whole had been a central concern of hers for some time. Already in 1918, in an essay entitled “Hüseyin Rahmi Beyefendi’ye” (To Mr. Hüseyin Rahmi), addressed to the novelist Hüseyin Rahmi [Gürpınar], she had praised the role of novelists in guiding youth away from the supernatural towards “progress and civilization.”20 The centrality of Hüseyin Rahmi in this piece as a variation on the theme of the novelist as an educator of the nation deserves more attention from scholars. Though Muhiddin was critical of gender relations and the behavior of some characters in Hüseyin Rahmi’s novels, she was aware that he was also an author at the forefront of the struggle against “mumbo-jumbo and superstitions.” She would have been familiar with his novels, such as the 1912 Gulyabani (The Ghoul) which denounced the instrumentalization of beliefs in djinns and other intermediary beings, greed, and the sexual exploitation of women. As the literary critic Berna Moran observes, after the re-instauration of the constitution in 1908, Hüseyin Rahmi began to advocate “a Western positivist mindset, based on reason and science against the people’s mindset based on

18 Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 76–77. 19 Nezihe Muhiddin Tepedelengil [Nezihe Muhiddin], Bütün Eserleri 4, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2006), 248. 20 Tepedelengil, Bütün Eserleri 4, 291.

Conclusion

traditional beliefs, ingrained thoughts, traditions and religion.”21 Muhiddin could only have applauded the novelist’s stand for science against metaphysical abuse. Yet Hüseyin Rahmi strayed in some of his later novels such as Dirilen İskelet (The Resurrected Skeleton), serialized in the daily İkdam in 1923, and Ölüler Yaşıyor Mu? (Are the Dead Alive?), serialized in the daily Milliyet in 1932. None of them were ever published in book form during his lifetime. While other works clearly denounced the paranormal as a fallacy—in likely an indirect attack on religion—these novels cultivate doubts in the reader’s mind as to the existence of the supernatural. Whether this is evidence of a change in perspective of the ageing author or simply an evolution in his understanding of the role of literature and the concretization of a desire to explore new narrative alleyways is open to discussion.22 In his foreword to Ölüler Yaşıyor Mu?, the novelist still wonders whether God “is but a bogy [heyulâ] invented by religions.”23 It must be stressed that the supernatural phenomena and metaphysical beliefs explored in those two novels do not require the existence of a god and would be frowned upon by upholders of Islamic orthodoxy or any other Abrahamic tradition. Table-turning and hauntings have little place in Islamic theology,24 but these themes indicated increased interest in alternative 21 Berna Moran, Türk Romanına Eleştirel bir Bakış 1 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1999 [1983]), 88. 22 For a discussion of these two novels in terms of the development of the “fantastic” as a subgenre in Turkish literature, see Pelin Aslan, “Spiritüalizm, Materyalizm ve Fantastik Üzerine Farklı bir Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar Anlatısı: Ölüler Yaşıyor Mu?,” Turkish Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 637–644. 23 Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Ölüler Yaşıyor Mu? (Istanbul: Atlas Kitabevi, 1973), 11. 24 They are, however, not entirely absent in the reflections of reformist, in the broadest sense of the concept, theologians. The Egyptian Sunni scholar Muhammad Farid Wajdi (1878–1954) made extensive use of the works of Western scientists engaged in psychic research in his refutation of materialism (Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013], 282–283). This in turn inspired later shi’ite theologians such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) who presented spiritism, magnetism, and hypnotism as evidence of the scientific foundation of the existence of the soul and the possibility of the intercession of imams from beyond the grave (Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam and the Uncanny [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018], 117–121). In a Turkish context, it is notable that Fethullah Gülen makes use of works such as the Turkish translation of 100 Years of Spirit Photography (1965) by Major Tom Patterson (M. Fethullah Gülen, Varlığın Metafizik Boyutu: Ruh, Melek, Cin ve Şeytanların Varlığı ve Mahiyeti [Istanbul: Nil Yayınları, 2008 (1998)], 69–72) and of Ruh ve Kainat (Spirit and of the Universe, 1946) the main work by the founder of Turkish Neo-Spiritism, Bedri Ruhselman (1898–1960) (Gülen, Varlığın Metafizik Boyutu, 95–96) in

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forms of spirituality, in particular spiritism which, for many years, was not seen as opposed to science.25 Did Nezihe Muhiddin similarly entertain a complex relationship with spiritual beliefs after her adoption of positivism? In the first place, it is open to debate whether Muhiddin ever adhered to Islam as some critics have noted.26 It is true that in her 1944 novel Sus Kalbim Sus, the narrator makes a distinction between the “lofty ethics, beliefs and principles” of Islam and “its superstitious and mumbo-jumbo dimension.”27 This sentiment is in line with that of many reformists who pushed for an interpretation of Islam that was synonymous with reason and progress. The fact that Christian characters such as Françoise in Sus Kalbim Sus or Angelika in her 1934 short story “Perili Evin Esrarı” (The Secret of the Haunted House) convert to Islam and, as in the case of Angelika, leave behind a sinful life, strengthens the idea that some of her works have a favorable view of Islam. Yet, one ought not to forget that in her assimilationist nationalism, Islam plays the role of the great equalizer securing cultural homogeneity throughout ­Turkey. Muhiddin may have seen Islam as the ultimate religion for leading the way out of outdated belief systems and towards a civilization ruled by reason and science. Moreover, there is no doubt cultural Islam was a defining aspect of Turkish nationhood for her. Nevertheless, another interpretation is also possible—one that does not necessarily rule out an understanding of Islam as the ultimate rational religion to bring an end to religion and as a national identity marker. Could one not suggest, as Nilüfer Yeşil does in her study Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadin Gotiği ve Gotik Kahramanlar (Nezihe Muhiddin, Female Gothic and Gothic Hero[in]es, 2009) that a novel such as Sus Kalbim Sus exhibits a female narrative strategy that allows the author to denounce religious oppression while seemingly ­presenting the “true”

his Varlığın Metafizik Boyutu (The Metaphysical Dimension of Existence), an engagement with paranormal phenomena which is in line with Said-i Nursi’s (1877–1960) own approach condemning spiritist practices while not denying the reality of communication with spirits. 25 For a discussion of the scientific engagement with the occult see Bernadette Bensaude-­ Vincent and Christine Blonde, Des savants face à l’occulte, 1870–1940 (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). On Spiritism in Turkey see Alexandre Toumarkine, Le spiritisme, un ésotérisme sécularisé dans l’Empire ottoman et en Turquie: Des hommes, des esprits et des livres entre Orient et Occident (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, forthcoming). 26 Nükhet Sırman, “Nezihe Muhiddin’i Tanımak,” in Tepedelengil, Bütün Eserleri 1, xix. 27 Nezihe Muhiddin Tepedelengil [Nezihe Muhiddin], “Sus Kalbim Sus,” in Nezihe Muhiddin Tepedelengil [Nezihe Muhiddin], Bütün Eserleri 3, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2006), 448–9.

Conclusion

interpretation of the faith?28 To add another layer of complexity, it is worthwhile noting that Muhiddin’s İstanbul’da bir Landru, like some of Hüseyin Rahmi’s works that touch on spiritism, unlocks, if not a door, at least a backdoor to alternative forms of spirituality. If we follow the French philosopher George Bataille (1897–1962) in his reflections on religion as a quest for a lost intimacy—the immanence between man and the world—that can be regained through the sacred act of sacrifice, both Nazlı’s and Nils’s longings are seemingly religious in nature. They are representative of a religiosity that has little in common with the monotheistic religions lingering in the background of most of the issues discussed in this book. They yearn for a form of dark mysticism. As seen above, Nazlı wishes she were one of those women murdered by Nils so that he would love her dead body. Bataille is adamant that only something which is valuable can be sacrificed and, arguably, there is little more valuable than one’s own life. Surely one’s own life is the ultimate offering. But a necrophile’s view might be different. The main character of Gabrielle Wittkop’s (1920–2002) scandalous novella Le nécrophile (The Necrophiliac, 1972) describes necrophilia as the only pure form of love as it does not expect reciprocation and is thus the greatest sacrifice of self possible: “Necrophilic love, the only one that is pure, as even amor intellectualis, that great white rose, expects to be paid in return. There is no compensation for the necrophiliac who is in love, his selflessness awakens no impulse.”29 This vision might have been shared by Nils. Both Nazlı and Nils want thus to give and give up. “Don et abandon”, as Bataille put it in his attempt to define sacrifice in an essay written in 1946.30 The sacrifice of the self is a bridge which like other sacrifices “restores to the sacred world that which was degraded and turned profane though servile usage.”31 It signifies a return into the religious domain, even though it is through an approach that even the champions of literary and religious reform encountered in this book would have frowned upon, as it is a form of religion beyond God. Indeed, their struggle had been with the conservatives in their own traditions and with those who believed that the world, just like literature, had to be disenchanted and that in such a world there was no room for metaphysics for God and his prophets. As would later Baha Tevfik and Nâzım Hikmet, Beşir Fuat wrote as early as 1885 in his study on 28 Nilüfer Yeşil, “Nezihe Muhiddin, Kadin Gotiği Ve Gotik Kahramanlar” (Masters thesis, Bilkent University, 2009), 91–92. 29 Gabrielle Wittkop, Le nécrophile (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2006 [1972]), 49. 30 Georges Bataille, Théorie de la religion (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973), 66. 31 Georges Bataille, La part maudite (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1967 [1949]), 94.

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Victor Hugo, that the role of writers was “not to dream, but to look, to analyze and describe and define exactly what they see.”32 Yet Nezihe Muhiddin’s approach is a reminder that the heirs of Beşir Fuat were not the only ones to stand against monotheism. From Ahmet Haşim’s interest in the figures of Pan and Lucifer, to Yahya Kemal and Yakup Kadri’s (1889–1974) fascination with neo-pagan ideals while conceptualizing their own brand of “neo-­Hellenism,” to the attention Halide Edip gave the Buddha, there is extensive evidence that authors in the early twentieth century were looking at ways of re-enchanting the world and literature in Turkish by looking beyond the Abrahamic traditions. The uncoupling of language and religion, of Turkish and Islam, opens up the possibility of discovering connections between literature in Turkish and the occult and alternative forms of spirituality, but that is a story for another time.

32 Beşir Fuat, Şiir ve Hakikat: Yazılar ve Tartışmalar, ed. Handan İnci (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 122.

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Index Abdülhak Hamit, 7, 12, 74, 88, 148n16, 170 Abdülhamit II, Sultan, 14, 90, 107–8, 117, 124, 142, 148n16 Abdullah Cevdet [Karlıdag˘], xv, xxix Abdullah Macit Pasha, 47 Academy of Sciences (Encümen-i Daniş), 79 Acar, Nurhan, 61 Ahmet Hamdi [Tanpınar], xvi, xxvi, 6, 16–18, 45 Ahmet Haşim, 20–22, 25, 33–34, 162, 188 Ahmet İhsan [Tokgöz], 46 Ahmet Lütfi Efendi, 63, 66–67 Ahmet Midhat Efendi, 7n17, 38–40, 45, 49, 62, 65, 72, 76, 78, 87, 148n15, 150 Ahmet Nebil [Çıka], xv–xvii, xviiin18, xxviii Ahmet Rasim, 7, 10, 33 Ahmet Vefik Pasha, 7 Ahundzade, Mirza Fethali, 9 al-Afghânî, Jamâl ad-Dîn, 122 alaturka music, 107 Albertus Magnus, 131 Aleppo, 23, 145n8, 146, 148n14, 155, 156n36, 157n43, 161 Alevism, 31 al-Himsî, Qustâkî, 156 Ali Ekrem [Bolayır], 13–14 Ali Kabuli Pasha, 81

Ali Kemal, xxiii, 141, 140–60, 161–62 Ali Sedat, 77 Alliance israélite universelle, 42, 95, 99–102, 102nn41–42, 111, 116 al-Mâ’mûn, Caliph, 137 Almosnino, Moses, 98 Al-Mutanabbi, 157 al-Yâzjî, İbrahim, Shaykh, 156 al-Yâzjî, Nâsif, Shaykh, 156 anarchism, xvii Anatolia, 4, 8, 19, 30, 33, 50, 54n9, 66, 148n16, 149n18 Anhegger, Robert, 41 antisemitism, vii, xxv, 41, 100, 111, 116, 171n73, 141 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 167 Arabic alphabet, 10, 24, 42 Archives israélites de France, 115 Armenian alphabet, xxiii, 13, 27–28, 31, 36–37, 46–47, 48n66 Armenian script. See Armenian alphabet Armeno-Turkish literature, 28, 31, 37 Arnold, Matthew, 55 aruz, 20 Asia Minor, 4, 37, 56 ashughs, 29–31, 37 âşıks, 29, 31 Ataç, Nurullah, 22 Atatürk. See Mustafa Kemal Atlı, Lemi, 107 Averroes, 131

210

Index Avicenna, 131 Avidaranyan, Abdülmesih Yuhenna, (born Muhammet Şükrü Efendi), 61 Avram Galanti, [Bodrumlu], xii, 17–18, 94, 96, 101–2, 104, 112, 116 Babinger, Franz, 97–98 Bacon, Francis, 131 Bacon, Roger, 131 Baghdad, 34, 135 Baha Tevfik, xiii–xxxiii, 174, 177, 183–84, 187 Balıkçıyan, Hovhannes, 37, 75 Balkan Wars, xxx, xxxii Balta, Evangelia, 40, 55 Banarlı, Nihad Sâmi, 75 Barrière, Théodore, 65 Bataille, George, 187 Baudelaire, Charles, 179 Bauer, Bruno, xxv, 118–40 Beccaria, Cesare, 111 Beirut, 23 Bektaşi, 31 Belge, Murat, 62 Ben-Guiat, Alexander, 105 Bensaïd, Daniel, 51 Beşir Fuat, xxix, 173, 187–88 Bilkent University, vii–viii Bîmen Şen, 107 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 53 Boroughs, William S., 182 Boyacıyan, Hagop, 60–61 Boyacıyan, Mihran, 32, 43 Breton, André, 166 Büchner, Ludwig (Louis), xvi, xviiin18, xxviii, 67 Bunyan, John, xxiv, 60–61, 63 Burian, Orhan, xxii Bursalı Mehmet Tahir, 36

Cairo, 24, 148n14 Cahun, Samuel, 115 Çamcıyan, Mikael, 45 Candan, Artaki, 107 Candemir, Bünyamin, 61 Cappadocia, 54 Capsali, Elijah, Rabbi, 97 Catholicism, 73 Celal Nuri [İleri], 18, 22 Celal Sahir [Erozan], 7–8, 10 Cemal Pasha, 33 Cemiyet-i İlmiye-i Osmaniye (Ottoman Scientific Society), 9 Cenap Şahabettin, xxiii, 7, 18, 154 Ceride-i Felsefiye ( Journal of Philosophy, 1912), 105 Ceride-i Lisan (Language Magazine), 106 Ceride-i Şarkiye (The Eastern Journal), 27 Ceride-i Tercüme (The Translation Magazine), 104 Çetin, Mehmet, 52 Cevdet Pasha, 7, 79 Ceylan, Umut Alper, 61 Chateaubriand, François René, xxv, 68, 71, 73–75, 77–78, 87, 92–93 Chiang Kai-shek, 167 Christianity, xxv, 10, 55, 65, 68–70, 73, 81–82, 115, 120–21, 123–27, 139 Çilingiryan, Kirkor, 74 Cihan (The World), 46 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 137 Council of Judicial Ordinances (Divan-ı Ahkam-ı Adliye), 79 Crémieux, Adolphe, 99 Cumhuriyet (Republic), 14 Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkası (Republican People’s Party). See Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi

Index Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party), xx, 11, 17n49, v18n52 Dadyan, Artin Pasha, 35 Dadyan, Hovhannes, 79 Dallâl, Jibrâ’il, 156 Damat Ferit Pasha, 143 Davison, Roderic, 44 De Kay, James Ellsworth, 68, 93 Defoe, Daniel, xxiv, 41, 63, 65 Dergâh (The Lodge), 16 Derviş, Suat, xxxi Descartes, René, 137 Dickens, Charles, 37 Donanma Derneği (Association of Support to the Navy), 176 Dumas, Alexandre, 37, 39, 43, 54, 80 Eckmann, János, 55 Edebiyat-i Cedide (New Literature), 19 Egypt, xxxii, 15, 23–24, 67, 148n14 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, 130 Eluard, Paul, 166 Enlightenment, xiii–xiv, xvi, xxx, 4, 7, 41, 67, 69, 76–77, 92, 102, 116, 119, 126, 140, 152 Enver Pasha, 9 Ergun, Sadettin Nüzhet, 36 Ertürk, Nergis, 6 Esprit, xviin14 Eşref Edip [Ünaydın], 8 Eşref, xix–xx, xxxii Evin, Ahmet Ö., xxi Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography of the University of Ankara, 6 Faculty of Letters of the University of Istanbul, 16, 29 Falih Rıfkı [Atay], 10–11, 25

Faruk Nafız [Çamlıbel], 12 Fatma Aliye [Topuz], 7–8, 40, 72, 77, 91, 184 Fecr-i Ati (Future Dawn), xix, xxiii, 21 feminism, xv, 8 Fénélon, xxiv, 65, 67 Ferera, İsak, xxix, 42, 102, 107, 112, 115, 165, 173, 181–83 Feridun, Alber, 109 Figaro, Le, 145 Fikri, Garbis, 43 Fikret Adil [Kamertan], 12 Finn, Robert, xxi First Press Congress (Birinci Basın Kongresi), 4 First Turkish Publishing Congress, xiv, 5–6, 25–26 First World War, xiii, xxx, 8, 30, 33 Fournier, Marc, 65 Franco, Moïse, 94–96, 103 Freemasonry, 84, 118, 140 Fresko, Moiz, 42, 49, 103, 104n51 Fresko, Hayyim Moşe, Chief Rabbi, 99 futurism, 164n14 Gabay, Yehezkel, 104 Galilei, Galileo, 137 Garabedian, B. Z., 65 Gerez, Jozef Habib, xxix, 112 Giese, Friedrich, 97–98 Ginsburg, Allen, 183 Goodell, William, 59, 94 Gössman, Wilhelm, 69 Graf, Georg, 69 Granada, 74, 88 Greco-Turkish literature, xxv, 40–41, 55–69, 183 Greek alphabet (script), xxiii, 40, 44, 55 Green, Samuel Gosnell, 64 Gülhane Park, 11

211

212

Index Güllü Agop [Hagop Vartovyan], 65 Günday, Hakan, 182–83 Günyol, Vedat, 41 Haeckel, Ernest, xvi ha-Kohen, Elijah, Rabbi, 101 ha-Kohen, Yosef, 97 Halide Edip [Adıvar], xii, 12, 15, 16n45, 25, 33, 188 Halit Ziya [Uşaklıgil], xxiii, 5n13, 13–14, 25, 27, 46–47, 50, 105, 146, 181 Halman, Talat Sâit, xxii Hamazkyats (National Unity), 80 Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph von, 128 Hârûn al-Rashîd, Caliph, 137 Hasan Âli, [Yücel], 3, 5 Hasan İzzettin [Dinamo], 51, 52n4 Havergal, Frances Ridley, 64 Hazlitt, William, 67 hece (syllabic meter), 8 Hece, vi Hirsch, Maurice de, Baron, 100 Hirsch, Samuel, vii, xxv, 116–127 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 62 Hugo, Victor, xiii, 37, 188 Hürriyet ve İtilaf Fırkası (Freedom and Entente Party), 143 Hüseyin Cahit [Yalçın], 19–20, 22 Hüseyin Kami, xvii Hüseyin Nazmi, xix–xx Hüseyin Rahmi [Gürpınar], 25, 184–85, 187 İbrahim Hıfzı Bey, 109 İbrahim Şinasi, xiii–xiv, xvi, 5n13, 7, 45, 77 İktisadiyat Mecmuası (The Magazine of Economics), 105 İlhan, Attilâ, 51

Imperial School of Military ­Engineering (Mühendishane-i Berrî-i ­Hümayun), 94 Independence Tribunals (İstiklal Mahkemeleri), 15 İngiliz Muhipleri Cemiyeti (The Anglophile Society), 142–143 internationalism, xiii, xxv, 162 İrtika (Advancement), 107 İshak Efendi, Hoca, 94–96, 99 Islam, xvi, xxv–xxvi, 7n17, 8, 77, 88, 92, 94–95, 110, 119–40, 158–59, 183, 186, 188 Islamism, xiii, 93 İsmail Hakkı Bey, 107 Israel, Bohor, 105 Istanbul, xviin18, xxxii, 11, 16, 17, 19, 23–24, 28n, 29, 33, 44–45, 47, 48n66, 60–61, 63, 68, 76, 79, 81, 85, 88–89, 91, 92n80, 93–94, 98, 100–101, 103–5, 143, 144n6, 148–54, 160, 162, 176, 179, İstepan, 32, 43 İttihat (Unity), 105 İttihat ve Terraki (Union and Progress), 19 Izmir, 10, 23, 42, 46, 49, 60, 98, 103, 105–6, 179 İzzet Ulvi [Aykurt], 30 Judaism, xxv, 93, 108, 111, 116–17, 119–127, 130–40 Judeo-Turkish literature, 41 Jusdanis, Gregory, 35 Kaçan, Metin, 182 Kadın Yolu (The Women’s Path), 177 Kadınlar Birliği (The Women’s Union), 176 Kadınlar Halk Fırkası (People’s Party of Women), 176

Index Kaptan, Arif, 182–83 Karakartal, Oğuz, 118 Karakoç, Sezai, 52 Karamanlı literature, (Karamanlidika). See Greco-Turkish literature Karasu, Bilge, 34 Kasap, Teodor, 43, 69 Kâzım Karabekir, General, 23 Kerouac, Jack, 182 Kohen, Moïse (Munis Tekinalp), 105 Konya, 4 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 180 Kulturchristentum, 69–71 Kurban, Hovsep, 39 Landru, Henri Désiré, 176 Language Commission [Dil Encümeni], 10 Lavoisier, Antoine, xxix, 68 Laziridis, Ioannis, 67 Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet (Türk Harflerinin Kabul ve Tatbiki Hakkındaki Kanun), 15 Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükun Kanunu), 15 Leon, Avram, 106 Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 111, 116 Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 165 Lesage, Alain René, 321 Lesbos, 124 Levita, Elias, 138 Loti, Pierre, 161,163, 165, 173, 175 Lucian, 43 Luria, Isaac, 138 Mahmut III, Sultan, 94 Maimonides, Moses, 135–136 Makdisi, Ussama, 157 Malumat (Knowledge), 69, 107

Mamedov, Valerian Grigorovich [Mirza Can], 29 mani, 31–32 Marazzi, Ugo, 97–98 Maruş, Hovsep, 35, 37 Marxism, 165 Masliyah, Nisim, 105 Matbuat Müdüriyeti (Directorate for Publications), 47 Maupassant, Guy de, xxix Mayakovski, Vladimir, 164n14 Mecmua-i Edebiye (The Literary ­Magazine), 107 Mecmua-i Havadis (The News ­Magazine), 80 Mehmet Akif [Ersoy], 15, 22 Mehmet Celal, 75–76 Mehmet Cevdet [İnançalp], (Muallim Cevdet), 32–33 Mehmet Emin, [Yurdakul], 21, 148n16 Mehmet Fuat [Köprülü], 26, 28–30, 32, 120n22 Mehmet Halit [Bayrı], 31 Mehmet Rauf, 7, 146 Mehmet Süreyya, 35 Mehmet Zihni Efendi, 80 Melih İzzet [Devrim], 163 Memduh Süleyman, xv, xvii, xviiin18 Mendelssohn, Moses, 135, 138 Mesihi-i Ermeni, 29 Meserret, El (The Joy), 105 meydan, 31–32 millî edebiyat (national literature), 8 millî kütüphane (national library), 3, 5 Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party), vi Ministry of Maritime Affairs [Umur-ı Bahriyye Nezareti], 79 Mirat (The Mirror), 108–111, 116 Misailidis, Evangelinos, xxiv, 40, 47, 50, 66 Misailidis, Pavlos, 65

213

214

Index Mısırlı İbrahim Efendi, 107 Molainville, Barthélémy d’Herbelot de, 128 Molière, 43 Montefiore, Moses, 99–101 Montepin, Xavier de, 38 Muallim Naci, 88, 148n16 Muallimler Mecmuası (Teachers’ ­Journal), 32 Müdafa-ı Milliye Osmanlı Hanımlar Heyeti (Ottoman Women’s Committee of the Association of National Defense), 176 Müftüoğlu Ahmet Hikmet, 7 Münif Pasha, 9 Munis Tekinalp. See Kohen, Moïse Murat II, 97 Musavver Fen ve Edep (The Illustrated Science and Literature), 107 Musavver Terakki (The Illustrated Progress), 107 Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk], xiv, 6, 10–11, 15–16, 18, 20–22, 142–43, 147n13, 154, 177 Mustafa Necati, 61–62 Mustafa Reşit Pasha, 100 Mustafa Sami Efendi, 58 Mustafa Suphi, 165 Nabi, 157 Namık Kemal, vii, xxiv–xxvi, 5n13, 7, 13–14, 37, 45, 67, 74, 78, 110, 117–41, 151, 152n24, 154, 162, 180, 183 Naon, Avram, 36, 106, 110, 115, 183 Napoléon Bonaparte, 80 nationalism, xiii, xvii, xxi, xxv, xxx, 7, 30n9, 34, 42, 67n57, 70, 100, 109, 143149n18, 157, 160, 178, 181, 186 naturalism, xxix, 173 Naum Faik, 42

Nâzım Hikmet [Ran], vi–vii, xxiv, xxvi, 53, 160, 161–75, 180, 183–84, 187 Necip Fazıl [Kısakürek], 52 Nedim, xxiii neo-parnassianism, 18 Neruda, Pablo, 168 Neubauer, Adolf, 98 Nev-Yunani group, xxi Nezihe Muhiddin [Tepedelengil], xxiii, xxvii, 176–88 Nigâr Hanım, 7–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvii–xviii Nilson, Paul, 61 Nizami Ganjavi, 174 Nurettin Pasha, 143 Ömer Seyfettin, 7, 78n29, 162, 181 Orient, 160, 164 Orientalism, xxiv–xxv, 120, 147n13, 159 Ordre nouveau, xviin14 Osmanlı-Türk Hanımları Esirgeme Derneği (Ottoman- Turkish Society for the Protection of Women), 176 Ottoman Turkish alphabet (script), xii, 9, 12, 24, 37, 43, 48, 64, 96, 105 Ottoman Turkish literature, xxvii, 6, 34, 49, 55, 77–78, 103–104, 146 Ottomanism, xiii, 105, 142 Özkırımlı, Atilla, 44 Pakdil, Nuri, 52 Palaiologos, Grigorios, 41 Palahniuk, Chuck, 182 Pamukçiyan, Kevork, 79 Panayotidis, I., 65 Panosyan, Garabet, 46, 80 parnassianism, 19, 108 Pascal, Blaise, 137 Paul, Apostle, 128 Pejeshkian, Minas, 67 Pellico, Silvio, 35

Index Perso-Arabic script, xxiii, 27 personalism, xvii, Petropolou, Ioanna, 41 Peyam-ı Sabah (The Morning News), 19, 143, 144n5, 145n7 Picasso, Pablo, 167 Piyano (Piano), xv Plato, xvii pluralism, 52, 178 Poe, Edgar Allan, 179 Prague, Hippolyte, 116 Presidency of Religious Affairs [Diyanet İşleri Reisliği], 23 Prévost, Abbé, xxiv, 65 Protestantism, 61 Proust, Marcel, 150 Publishing Law (Matbuat Kanunu), 24 Pul Mecmuası (The Stamp Magazine), 107 Rahmi Celis, xxvii–xxxii Raif Necdet [Kestelli], xv Raşit, 157–59 realism, 64–65, 68, 145, 161, 173 Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, 7, 67, 71–72, 75, 148n16 Refik Halit [Karay], 22–23, 147n13 religion, xv, 39, 48–49, 53, 70–71, 73, 77, 79, 86–87, 91–92, 104, 110, 115, 117–26, 129, 131, 133, 134, 138–40, 151, 165, 176, 183, 185–88 Renan, Ernest, xxv, 14n40, 119, 128, 131–40, 183 Reşat Nuri [Güntekin], 3–4 Resimli Gazete (The Illustrated Newspaper), 20 Revolution of the Letters (Harf İnkılabı), 6, 9 Richmond, Legh, 59 Rodenbach, George, 179 romanticism, 64, 68, 73 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67, 118, 137

Ruşen Eşref, 10 Ruso, Mahir, 110–111, 183 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de, 183 Sadettin Nüzhet [Ergun], 112 Safa, Peyami, 6, 12, 24, 142 Sağnak, Gözde, 16 Şahabettin Süleyman, xv, xix, 49 Sait Molla, 142 Salvador, Joseph, 138 Sambari, Yosef, 98 Samipaşazade Sezaî, 7, 76, 89 Şarkiye (The Oriental), 104 Saz, Leyla, 107 Schlumberger, Gustave, 163 Schmidt Dumont, Franz Frederik, 178 Schools of the Nation [Millet ­Mektepleri], 11 Scott, Walter, 37 Sebasdatsi, Mkhitar, 36 Sebilürreşat (The Path of the Righteous), 15, 23 semai, 31–32 Şemsettin Sami, 34, 78, 88, 154, 181 Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Liberal Republican Party), 106 Serents, Sarkis, 49 Sevük, İsmail Habib, xiv Shakespeare, xxviii–xxix, 32, 45n58, 81, 82n41 Shoah, vii social realism, 64, 173 Society for the Study of the Turkish Language [Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti], 8. See also Turkish Language Institute Solomon, King, 54, 56 Sombart, Werner, 141 Spanish Civil War, 53, 165 Spinoza, Baruch, 131, 136

215

216

Index Strauss, Johann, xxii, 28n3, 38n28, 55, 66n51, 69, 79–80, 168, 181, 183 Stretton, Hesba, xxiv, 63 Sue, Eugène, 41 Süleyman Nazif, 7, 12 Sultan-Galiev, Mirsaid, 164 surrealism, 57 symbolism, 19 Syriac script, xxiii, 36, 42 Tan (The Dawn), 12 Tanpınar. See Ahmet Hamdi Tanzimat reforms, xii, 9, 36, 44, 99–100 Tchobanian, Arshag, 30 Tercüman-ı Efkar (Translator of Ideas), 80 Tevfik Fikret, xiii–xiv, xvi, xxiii, xxx, 7, 107, 118, 162 Tietze, Andreas, 45 Tiryakigil, Sevinç, 61 Tolstoy, Leo, xvii Topalyan, H., 65 Torah, xix, 128 Trigona-Harany, Benjamin, 42 Türkeş, Alpaslan, vi Turkification, 6, 14, 18, 25, 96, Turkish Language Institute [Türk Dil Kurumu], 8. See also Society for the Study of the Turkish Language Turkism, xvi, 30 University of Bonn, 122 University of Istanbul, 17 University of Oxford, vii–viii Uysal, Sermet Sami, 16 Vakit (Time), 47 Vâlâ Nurettin, 168

Valavanis, Ioakeim, 56 Varon, İsak, 107 Vartan Pasha. See Vartanyan, Hovsep Vartanyan, Hovsep, xxiii, xxv, 37, 40, 46, 48–49, 62, 79 Vasilaki Efendi, 43 Vatican, 82, 85 Venice, 29, 32, 36, 67 Viardot, Louis, 88 Vienna, 79 Vital, Hayyim ben Joseph, 138 Volney, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, 151 Voltaire, 67 Wessely, Hartwig, 136 Westernization, vii, xvi, xxiv, 11, 13, 19, 39, 48, 138, 150 Wittkop, Gabrielle Yahya Kemal [Beyatlı], xxi, 16–18, 75, 145n7, 146, 161, 188 Yakup Kadri [Karaosmanoğlu], xix–xx, 10, 188 Yunus Nadi [Abalıoğlu], 14 Yusuf Kamil Pasha, 65 Yessayan, Zabel, 31 Young Turks, 142–143 Zafer Hanım, xxiii, xxv, 79–81, 87–92, 179, 183 Zaman (The Times), 104 Zekiyan, Sarkis, 29–30 Zihnioğlu, Yaprak, 178 Ziya Gökalp, 7, 30, 34, 44, 149n16 Ziya Pasha, 7, 88 Zola, Emile, xxix, 65, 67, 173 Zunz, Leopold, 123