Nostalgia for the Empire

by M. Hakan Yavuz

Technically, this is a book about how the memory of the Ottoman Empire shapes the politics of modern Turkey. More interesting, however, is the great example of utilitarian historiography that it provides us to analyze. The truth about recorded history, which any rational person must acknowledge, is that a lot of it is imaginary. The record is dubious and politicized even in modern times, and the further back you go the more imaginary it all becomes. Contemporary standards of historiography only came into being over the past century or so, and even then it can rarely deliver us a consensus about what has actually taken place in the world. Up til very recently the definition of what even constituted “truth” varied widely across time and geography and making up records was considered acceptable in many places as long as it produced a social good. If you are reading premodern history as a literal record of events you might as well also believe that Harry Potter was your ancient ancestor and that the Chronicles of Narnia describe the origin story of the human race. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

History is less about knowing what actually happened in the past, and more about creating sociological tools for shaping people’s perspectives about how they should think about both the present and future. Most people will not think of it this cynically, which is good because if they did it wouldn’t work. Turkey and its shifting the relationship with its imperial past is a great example of how politics and historical memory intersect. In modern Turkey, the Ottoman Empire has been depicted in two major ways. For the Europeanizing “Kemalist” heirs of Ataturk, who had been in charge of the place for awhile, the empire was an embarrassing Asiatic relic that people should study only to learn everything that they should not do. Everything about it was bad, despotic, ugly, and Asian, which was all they had to say about what was ultimately their own history. The more conservative Turks have responded to this with a view of the Ottoman Empire that is basically a negative image of that put forward by the Kemalists. They depict the Ottoman period as a Golden Age when proper values were upheld and Turks were esteemed by the world. The empire in their records was just, beautiful, glorious, and Asian, but in a good way. Both sides genuinely believe what they’re saying and usually draw upon real scholarship to make their points, yet their ultimate arguments are largely a product of their own psychological and political needs.

M. Hakan Yavuz writes that he was prompted to write this book by his own political awakening during the Bosnian Genocide in the early-1990s. The genocide was largely the outcome of a similar utilization of history by Serbian leaders, whose nation was formerly a subject of the Ottomans and who decided to treat Bosnian Muslims as surrogate Turks in order to vent their collective frustrations and carve out a new state for themselves from the wreckage of Yugoslavia. Yavuz was a secularist who had been taught to be dismissive of the Ottoman period. Yet seeing secular, educated, European Muslims being killed for being Ottoman “Turks,” awakened in him a desire to interrogate the memory of that history. As Yavuz notes, you can’t really escape history, real or not, but instead must treat it as a constant battleground. There is absolutely nothing apolitical about the historical record. That it is written by the victors is a truism, but aiming at a neutral appreciation of the past would be a fool’s errand anyways because that past has left us only fragmentary pieces to work with that are heavily open to interpretation. The logical thing then is to just view it all instrumentally. I’ve noticed that many Israeli historians, for example, often take a ruthlessly mercenary approach to history, creating scholarship that is aimed at furthering the present-day interests of their state and little besides. Turks have also done this with their own past, which continues to be a zone of contestation between different factions within Turkish society, including secularists, Nakshbendi Sufis, and the ruling AK Party.

As someone who reads a lot history, I’m inevitably pained by the truth of its deep politicization. But that’s just the reality, which, once acknowledged, also grants one a greater intellectual freedom to interpret the historical record in a constructive manner. Were the Ottomans good or bad? Should one be nostalgic for them or glad to never see their influence again? The answers to these questions are being invented and reinvented as we speak. People are doing that work for the purpose of shaping the future, which is what really matters.