‘From hunter to hunted’: (temporary) marginalisation in Muslim men’s memories of the allied occupation period in Turkey (1918–1922)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I study memories of the Allied occupation of Maraş, Mersin and İzmir that were published in local newspapers between the 1920s and 1960s. The narratives were published when Muslims had re-gained political hegemony and forced both the occupying armies and most local non-Muslims to leave the country for good. The texts I use were published in the dailies Sebilürrreşad in 1921 (in Istanbul), in Ahenk in 1926, in Ege Ekspres in 1958 (both in İzmir), and in the late 1960s in Kuvayi Milliye, a monthly veterans’ magazine published in Mersin. Their authors were ordinary insofar as they were relatively low ranking clerks, former reserve officers, and readers of the İzmir papers. As literate Muslim males able to pen their own memories, however, they certainly held a certain degree of privilege over less educated and illiterate people, women and non-Muslims. In order to analyse their narratives, I use concepts developed by Maurice Halbwachs [Halbwachs, M., 1992 (1939) On Collective Memory: Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, collective memory] and Jan and Aleida Assmann [Assmann, A., and Assmann, J. 1994. Das Gestern im heute. Medien und soziales Gedächtnis. In: K. Merten, S. J. Schmidt and S. Weischenberg, eds. Die Wirklichkeit der Medien: Eine Einführung in die Kommunikationswissenschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 114–140.]. The loss of Ottoman sovereignty also brought about that of Muslim supremacy, which privileged Ottoman Muslims experienced as a massive threat for themselves. As I show throughout, all the stories recount experiences of humiliation and distress that resulted from the reversal of social roles under occupation: Being Muslim was no longer an advantage or even a privilege: the privileged had become ordinary. Memory was gradually securalised, and the use of allusions facilitated forgetting.