Abstract
Ottoman pan-Asianist sentiments were widely shared among people in the Empire. Images of the Japanese nation supported an alternative, pan-Asian, Ottoman doctrine uniting various sectors of society in the face of Western imperialism in a more inclusive fashion that would not violate Islamic or other previous affiliations while suggesting the construction of a future nation. This ideology could be understood to incorporate all members of the Empire into a functional Ottoman political solidarity whose identity was now to be redirected and expanded into the larger entity of the “East.” Solidarity with Japan and its accomplishments informed a kind of “horizontal mediation” among all Ottoman citizens regardless of religion, ethnicity, or other orientation, so that Muslims, Christians and Jews, Druzes, Kurds, Arabs and Turks, modernists, traditionalists, and secularists, statesmen, provincial notables, middle-class professionals, and even the illiterate were attracted by this rationale of “modern Easternism.” In addition, pan-Asian solidarity with Japan could provide ideological support for Ottoman institutions and policies that governed relations between state and civil society in a process of “vertical mediation.” Japanese imagery arbitrated between the Ottoman Sultan and his bureaucrats in conceptions of leadership, monarchical rule, and scientific advance; between the Sultan and his subjects in a merging of Abdülhamidian pan-Islam and pan-Asianism, between members of the Young Turk movement attempting to reinstate the constitution, and generally between Ottoman officialdom and its newly conceived citizenry through justification of modernizing policies, reform initiatives, and other efforts by the state to centralize and/or exert administrative control over society.
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Notes
Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 213.
M. Sükrü Hanioglu, “The Young Turks and the Arabs before the Revolution of 1908,” in AA Khalidi, et al. (eds.), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 31–49, and other articles in this volume.
Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–10, 30–31, differentiates between Turkish nationalism as an ideology pertaining to Ottoman Turks in the Empire, and pan-Turkism as a by-product of their interest in and contact with those Turkic peoples outside the Empire who shared an historical, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heritage. Earlier pan-Turanism of the nineteenth century emerged outside the Ottoman Empire. It employed a much broader definition of what and who comprised “Turan”— bounded geographically by China, Tibet, India, and Iran, it included Mongols, Tatars, Üzbeks, Hungarians, Finns, and Estonians.
“Üç Cereyan,” Türk Yurdu III:35(Istanbul 1913), from Niyazi Berkes, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays of Ziya Gökalp (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), 76.
See also Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp (London: Luzac and Company Ltd, 1950);
Jacob M. Landau, Pan-Turkism in Turkey: A Study in Irredentism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, 2nd ed., 1995).
From Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, trans. by Robert Devereux (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 15.
M. Sükrü Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 209–210. See also
AA Hanioglu, “Turkism and the Young Turks, 1889–1908,” in Kieser, Hans-Lukas (ed.), Turkey beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-Nationalist Identities (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 3–19.
M. Sükrü Hanioglu, Preparation for a Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 295–297.
Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 87–89. See
Erik J. Zürcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics 1908–1938,” in AA Karpat (ed.), Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 150–179, for a nuanced discussion of the linkage between “Ottoman Muslim” and “Turk” in forming identity during the Young Turk era.
Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 24–25.
See Usama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107:3 (June 2002), 768–796 for application of Orientalist theory to the Ottoman political center’s view of its “Arab Other.”
Ömer Lütfi Fikri, Dersim Mebusu, Lütfi Fikri Bey’in Günlügu: “Daima Muhaalefet,” in Yücel Demirel (ed.) Istanbul: Arma Yayinlari, 1991), 38 commenting on “Ottomanness” having become obsolete “nonsense” by 1913.
See AA Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Arslan, a member of the elite, maintained strong Ottomanist attitudes. His close relationship to Arabists and to Cemal Pasa (in late 1916 Arslan was editor-in chief of al-Sharq, the Ottoman State’s propaganda paper in Syria espousing Islamic solidarity and support for the Caliph) indicated he saw no discrepancy in supporting both the Ottoman polity and the Arabs’ distinct place within the Empire until the hangings of Arab nationalists. See William Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 37–38.
Shakîb Arslan, Limadha Ta’akhkhar al-Muslimun wa Limadha Taqqadam Ghayruhum? (1st ed., 1939 after appearing in al-Manar, Beirut, 1965 edition.) English transl., M.S. Shakoor, Our Decline and Its Causes (Lahore: 1962), 80.
William Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati’ al-Husri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 37.
Sâṭiè al-Ḥuṣrî, Mā Hiya al-Qawmiyya? Abḥāth wa Dirāsāt ‘ala Ḍaw’ al-Aḥdath wa’l-Naẓariyyāt (Beirut: 1963, 2nd ed.), 26–27, mentions Japan as an example. He stated that Eastern capacity obliged Europe and America to concede the right of nation formation (independence) to all peoples. See also Tib ī, Arab Nationalism, 144.
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© 2014 Renée Worringer
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Worringer, R. (2014). Politics, Cultural Identity, and the Japanese Example. In: Ottomans Imagining Japan. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384607_7
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