Multi-Purpose Empire: Ottoman History in Republican Turkey

Abstract

This article examines popular, academic and political perceptions of the Ottoman Empire in Republican Turkey, challenging the widespread assumption that there has been a continuous clash between pro-Ottoman Islamists and secular, anti-Ottoman, Kemalists. It argues that in the Republican period Kemalists effectively appropriated the Ottoman past for use in their nationalist narrative, not only through using a ‘theory of fatal decline’ but also by simply defining positive cultural or political symbols from the years 1299 to 1923 as ‘Turkish’ rather than ‘Ottoman’. This serves as a backdrop for the article's main argument, that the 1940s and 1950s saw a thorough Kemalist appropriation of the Ottoman past, celebrating the empire's golden age as secular, pro-western and Turkish. The 500th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul in 1953 gave the Turkish government an opportunity to showcase this new interpretation of Ottoman history as well as to use the relatively new rhetoric of ‘Ottoman tolerance’ to claim for Turkey a place among its new allies in the democratic, anti-communist West. At the level of domestic politics, the Democratic Party sought to wrap its modernization policies in the mantle of a progressive, democratic Fatih Sultan Mehmet II, while the Republican People's Party condemned the Democrats for betraying Fatih's memory and the nation's honour by downplaying the Ottoman past in order to placate potential anti-communist allies in Greece and the Arab world. Ultimately, the article argues that it is impossible to understand contemporary Islamist and liberal uses of the Ottoman past without understanding the way the empire was incorporated into the dominant Turkish nationalist narrative between 1923 and 1953.