Orientalism Alla Turca: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim 'Outback'

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, a fundamental cultural change took place in the Ottoman Empire resulting from processes of acculturation and self-assertion as against the European expansion.' Although there exists no sharp fault line dividing Ottoman Muslim culture into Or pre-modern and modern, it is a widely accepted view that the modernization processes rapidly accelerated after the middle of the nineteenth century. In this period, European forms of literature were incorporated into the canon of literary genres used by Ottoman authors.2 Among the new literary genres which emerged in the Ottoman Empire, travel literature held a prominent position. Although travelogues formed a well-known genre in traditional Islamic literature, we find 19th century Ottoman intellectuals denying any continuity between the rihla-literature and modern travel books. Ahmed Midhat Efendi (1844-1912), regarded as an outstanding Ottoman publicist and homme de lettre,3 defined travel literature