Abstract
Even though modern Turkey has been built on the core component of the Ottoman Empire, the relationship of the Turks of the Turkish Republic to their Ottoman ancestry are complex. Turks in the Ottoman Empire did not emphasise their identity since the term “Turk” was used to denote only one component of a multi-ethnic Empire. It is also difficult to state who would have been a “real” Turk in the Empire. Should the Bosnian who had converted at an early age and entered state service, acquiring a mastery of the Turkish language and rising to be grand vizier, be taken to be more of a Turk than the Turcoman tribesman who had little role to play in the decision-making process of the Ottoman Empire?
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Notes
Ibn Khaldun, the North African sociologist has provided a model of this succession of dynasties and worked out its dynamics. The model worked as follows: tribal federations which acquire a solidarity based on kinship, crystallised by a new religious fervour, conquer the town and its inhabitants and destroy the ruling dynasty. A new dynasty then emerges which is drawn from the conquerors. This new dynasty then sinks into well-being and luxury. It can no longer draw support from its subjects: solidarity has evaporated among tribesman taken into the civilisation of city dwellers. The entire urban enterprise then becomes prey to another federation of tribes and so on ad infinitum. Ibn Khaldun mentioned an exception to this cyclical pattern, that of dynasties established on large scale agricultural land with no menacing tribal groups. Though the predecessors of the Ottomans, the Sel-juks, established in Anatolia an even more favourable ecology than that described by Ibn Khaldun, they were nevertheless destroyed by quasi-Khaldunian developments. The Ottomans had transcended this pattern by what they considered to be the excellence of their governmental arrangements and they took pride in having escaped this wheel of fate.
Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, 1982), see especially pp. 1–18.
For de Rochefort, Müteferrika and de Bonneval, see Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal, 1964), pp. 30–50.
Cf. Berkes, pp. 62–63.
The lavish style of Ottoman statesmen at the time of the Ottoman Empire was often symbolic of the position occupied by the official, and was accepted as such. The new 19th century state of affairs and the scandalous expenditures it brought with it were represented in the image of the westernised fop which appears in so many of the lirkish novels of the time. Cf. Serif Mardin, “Super Westernization in Tur-key in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century”, in P. Benedict, et.al., ed., Turkey: Geographical and Social Perspectives (Leiden, 1973).
While Atatürk was fighting what he himself labeled as “western imperialism”, he did not lose faith in the promise of what he called “contemporary civilization”. Nevertheless, his attitude is exceptional and much of the contemporary Islamic attitude towards modernization has to be explained in terms of the “survival” of the ahistorical attitude.
Mehmet Ali Birand, Tiirkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Macerasi (Istanbul, 1985), pp. 55–182, provides a comprehensive survey of EC-Tbrkey negotiations, 1959 – 63.
Mehmet Ali Birand, Tiirkiye’nin Ortak Pazar Macerasi (Istanbul, 1985), p. 175.
Reinhard Bendix, “Social Stratification and the Political Community”, in Embattled Reason: Essays on Social Knowledge (New York, 1970), p. 232.
The discussion of the historical factors behind community structures in Turkey is derived from my earlier essay, “Communitarian Structures and Social Change”, in Ahmet Evin, ed., Modern Turkey: Con¬tinuity and Change (Opladen, 1984).
Halil Inalcik, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest”, Studia Islamica II (Paris, 1954).
Serif Mardin, “Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (June, 1969), p. 266.
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© 1990 Leske Verlag + Budrich GmbH, Opladen
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Mardin, Ş., Evin, A.O. (1990). Cultural Issues in Relations between Turkey and Europe. In: Evin, A., Denton, G. (eds) Turkey and the European Community. Schriften des Deutschen Orient-Instituts. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-01422-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-01422-5_2
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