The Ottoman Empire from Present to Past: Memory and Ideology in Turkey and the Arab World

Abstract

he Ottoman Empire died in 1923 with the disestablishment of the sultanate and the proclamation of a new Turkish republic. For some years the empire had led merely a shadow existence. Defeated in World War I, shorn of its sovereignty, occupied by foreign armies, wracked by civil war, torn by ethnic conflict, and stained by state- led massacres of Armenian citizens, the empire ended badly and was little mourned. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, one could accurately have said that the empire was dead to begin with. There was no doubt about that. But as the articles in this collection reveal, the death of the empire involved a creative rupture. This rupture involved both a dramatic break from each successor state’s imperial past as well as a continual reference to it, through successive iterations of what the Ottoman legacy could or should mean. Initially, elites in the Ottoman successor states wasted little time disowning the memory of the multinational state that they once had served. Political leaders, educators, and governments promoted ethnic nationalist ideologies (especially Turkish and Arab) as new, modern sources of political legitimacy. The Ottoman past, packaged as a story of political oppression, cultural stagnation, and long military decline, served mainly as a foil for the nationalist narrative, as an antithesis to the nation’s glorious past and its imminent rebirth. Yet so many centuries of history could not easily be tucked away. Nationalist narratives were, themselves, based on selective remembering and on wholesale suppression or forgetting. At moments of national crisis, or during episodes of acute power struggles within successor states, the Ottoman past broke its silence. Sometimes this past was invoked (negatively) as a “ghost” haunting the present, and other times as a rich reservoir of historical experience. Either way, the empire and its legacy proved not to be as dead as once imagined. 1 The articles collected here highlight a number of themes in understandings and evaluations of the Ottoman past from some of the empire’s successor states along the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores, areas conventionally lumped together as part of the “Islamic World.” Yet as these contributions demonstrate, they are areas that exhibit a fascinating diversity of issues and impasses associated with the Ottoman past. Contributors discuss con