Published by: H-Turk (April, 2003)
This new work on the image of the "Turk" in European sources joins a scholarly tradition on the Muslim "other" that extends back more than three hundred years. As soon as the Ottomans no longer threatened Eastern Europe, ca. 1700, if not earlier, European scholars felt the need to catalogue the ways in which the inhabitants of the empire were represented and misrepresented by their contemporaries. Çirakman's work resembles that of historiographers such as Raymond Schwab, Samuel Chew, Robert Schwoebel, Norman Daniel, and more recently Brandon Beck and Nabil Matar, to mention just a few.[1] Her selection of titles is largely drawn from those published in English, hence my selection of her cohort. Çirakman acknowledges that "the study is not all embracing" (p. 1), but she does include translations from other languages, notably from French texts that she explores as part of eighteenth-century trends. She has relied on Rouillard's monumental study for the pre-1700 period in identifying those texts. Granted that the intellectual life of the French and English was largely available to the rest of educated Europe in the eighteenth century, most of the debate concerning the nature of the Ottoman state occurred in pre-revolutionary France, as demonstrable in some recent work.[2] As we know, Orientalism as a discipline and a mode of thought was equally active in other parts of Europe.
Çirakman's two main chapters form the heart of the work. Chapter 2, "The Ottomans: Public Calamity or Interesting People?" discusses Renaissance views, while chapter 3, "Prejudices Rationalized: Images of the Turks in the Age of Reason," focuses on the eighteenth century.[3] Chapter 4, "From Opinion to Facts: Turkish Character and Society," takes a more thematic approach and considers views from all eras on the Turkish character, on slavery, and on Ottoman politics. A conclusion (pp. 213-17) is followed by an extensive bibliography (pp. 219-29) and index, both of which contribute to the work’s usefulness as a reference tool for pre-modern writings on the "Turks."
The work began as a dissertation in political science, hence the emphasis of the author on the transformation of European ideas concerning the nature of Ottoman government. The real contribution of Çirakman's book, though, lies in the chapter on the eighteenth century, which focuses on European debates concerning tyranny and despotism through the texts of diplomats, historians, and philosophers of the Enlightenment. The cast of characters writing in English and French is large, and well known to those who have followed the Orientalism debates. A short, representative list may suffice: Montesquieu, Francois de Tott, Constantin Volney, William Eton, and a host of lesser lights. James Porter, Ambassador to Istanbul, and Elias Habesci (Alexander Ghica), member of an elite Orthodox Greek family, and Ottoman bureaucrat, are included. Çirakman also traces the considerable influence of James Rycaut, British Consul to Smyrna (Izmir), and historian, whose Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1688) was foundational to the subsequent debate (see especially pp. 111-14). Some biographical and situational information is supplied, but by and large, this chapter constitutes a selection of quotations thematically arranged. Anyone wishing a quick reference to a whole host of commentators on the Turkish/Ottoman Empire and civilization will find ample material in these pages; those looking for a well-developed and coherent narrative should look elsewhere.
Çirakman's initial aim was to confine her analysis to “the intellectual roots of those images that convey various opinions, beliefs, prejudices and ideas on Ottoman society and politics" (p. 1)--and elsewhere, "to show how ideas on the Ottoman politics and society emerged and changed over three centuries" (p. 2). Her hypothesis was that "the origins of Euro-centrism emerged in the eighteenth century with the development of rationalistic thought and that there was no Europe-wide version in the earlier period" (p. 5). She concludes that Europeans produced a full range of diverse observations on the Ottoman Turk, even in the eighteenth century, while essential and pre-determined characteristics came to reside in the Oriental form of government, despotism. (pp. 214-15).
Why, then, does she take issue with Edward Said in an extended critique of Orientalism in chapter 1, "Orientalism and its Dilemmas"? As she notes, the basic problem is "that [he] reduces an enormous variety of texts written in an immense period of time to an ensemble of thought and practice that has emerged in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century" (p. 31). She takes exception not only to his faulty chronology and its universal application to diverse locales, but also to the circularity of the argument about knowledge and power derived from Foucault, where "the Orientalist and the Oriental are subject to the same discursive domain." Hence, "Orientals remain the object of information, never a subject in communication" (p. 25). The debate about Said has produced its own primers at this point, so many of these objections concerning Orientalism should sound familiar.[4]
My own objections to this worthy effort by Çirakman are derived from frustrations with such "catalogues of civilizational characteristics" which, I believe, further the "essentialism" which Said brought to our attention. First, I find the lack of definitions in a work that aims at clarity concerning an ethnic/racial/cultural stereotype most disappointing. What is a "Turk"? What is "east," or "The East"? What is "west," or "The West"? What is "Ottoman"? Whose "Europe" are we speaking of?
Secondly, arguing throughout for the necessity of contextualizing such ideas, as the author does, a work of such breadth scarcely affords her the time to investigate and distinguish between the possible motives (or audience) for the works (from the examples above) of the diplomats (Porter), polemicists (Eton, Ghica), and ideologues (Volney, Tott) and political philosophers (Montesquieu) who theorized about the Ottoman Empire as the seat of despotism.
Finally, the effort of recovery of one civilization explicitly and deliberately through the eyes of another, especially in such a broad manner, inevitably frames the subject under consideration, and lends itself to manipulation by those fond of value-laden binaries, such as the "clash of civilizations," or the "why didn’t they" polemicists of the English-speaking (American) world. I do not feel myself (or Asli Çirakman) to be in service of the empire, as Said would have it, but I do sometimes wonder at the particular historiographic resilience of stereotypes of the Middle East, tragically playing themselves out on our nightly news shows.
Notes
[1]. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880 (New York, 1984), first published in French in 1950; Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York, 1965); Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453-1517)Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960), and Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh, 1966); Brandon Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York, 1987); and Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999), one among many he has published in the last few years. (New York, 1967); Norman Daniel,
[2]. Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, 1520-1660Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 6-34; Virginia Aksan, "Breaking the Spell of Baron Francois de Tott: Reframing Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760-1830," International History Review 24 (2002), 253-77; Thierry Hentsch, Imagining the Middle East (Montreal, 1992), which has a chapter on Bodin; and Henry Laurens, Les origines de l'expédition de l'Egypte: L'orientalism Islamisant en France (1698-1798) (Istanbul, 1987), which includes a discussion of the debates among the ideologues and the influence on Napoleon. (Paris, 1938). As in the work of Thomas Kaiser, "The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture,"
[3]. A precis of many of these issues appeared in Asli Çirakman, "From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened Image of the Turks," International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001), 49-68.
[4]. A. L. MacFie, Orientalism (London, 2002), and Orientalism: A Reader (New York, 2000); Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (London, 1994); and Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, eds., Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford, 1999), to mention just a few.
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