Dispatches from the present
Turkish historians have long engaged in a delicate dance with autocrats. Ottoman sultans shuttled scribes to foreign campaigns on the condition that their glories be praised. And they were: Selīmnāmes were hagiographies devoted to Selim’s wars and massacres. Selim and the sultans that followed him were ruthless, and did not hesitate to banish from their court historians who inadequately mythologized dynastic victories. Given the absence of alternate religious or academic patronage systems, most chroniclers chose to oblige rather than die in intellectual obscurity.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, was no different. In 1932, scholars devoted to the Father (“Ata”) of Turks devised the “historical thesis,” which proposed that Turks were descendants of Central Asia’s white Aryan inhabitants who, after migrating to China and Europe, created some of the world’s greatest empires—the Trojans, Hittites and Sumerians, among others. This pivot to Turkishness benefited the republic’s founding generation: the recent demise of the Ottoman Empire and its caliphate mattered less because the new, Turkish-centric republic could single out precedents that predated the emergence of Islam and granted them civilizational achievements equal to the West’s. A year later, under the pretense of “university reform,” historians who did not subscribe to Atatürk’s Turkish historical thesis and opposed his race-centered view of history were purged from academia.
The critique of nationalist historiography finally broke through in the 1990s, and one shining example of it was Turkey: A Modern History, by the Dutch Turkologist Erik-Jan Zürcher. After Atatürk’s party, the CHP, fell from power in 1950, historians no longer faced expulsion from academia for diverging from the Turkish historical thesis. Instead, the flurry of right-wing parties that succeeded the CHP made Marxist scholars the target of the state’s fury throughout the 1970s and 1980s. After a military junta came to power in 1980 there was an exodus of scholars and intellectuals to the U.S. and Europe; increasingly, the finest works of Turkish studies were produced overseas. With the partial liberalization in the public sphere in the 1990s, numerous scholars returned to Turkey, becoming chairs of history departments; it was at this time that works by Zürcher became popular in private universities. Those professors soon found positions in public colleges in Turkey, too, and Zürcher’s post-Kemalist history became the classic text on modern Turkey for countless history undergrads.
Where most twentieth-century Turkish historiography leaned heavily on great-man theory, Zürcher was careful to keep a scholarly distance from Turkish leaders. In one crucial chapter, he establishes a link between the Young Turk movement and Atatürk’s Republican Party. While this framing was not unprecedented, Zürcher used it to make a daring critique of the entire Turkish republican project: the Young Turks rose to power via a coup, established themselves as ruthless autocrats and exterminated Ottoman Armenians in 1915. This European-rooted, muscular nationalist worldview, Zürcher argued, is at the heart of modern Turkey. Departing from Orientalist readings of Turkish history that trace an arc from Ottoman ignorance to Republican enlightenment, Zürcher emphasized that it wasn’t so much the Ottoman reformists who were violent but modernity and its proponents.
This interpretation was exemplary of “post-Kemalism,” a vein of critical scholarship that emerged in the 1990s. In the wake of the 1980 coup, many scholars traced Turkey’s ills to Kemalism, and throughout the Eighties and Nineties Zürcher and like-minded intellectuals established historical associations and journals to explore alternative narratives. Islamist intellectuals grew interested; so too did politicians like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the mayor of Istanbul who became prime minister in 2002. Erdoğan abhorred Atatürk’s abandonment of the country’s imperial legacy for a secularized Turkish identity rooted in the idea of Turkishness. Erdoğan devoted the first decade of his political career, from 1994 to 2004, to forming, however unreal it may sound today, a pious-liberal-leftist coalition against Kemalist nationalists. Many hoped Turkey would enter the European Union under his stewardship.
Zürcher, like scores of liberal scholars in Turkish academia, initially praised the Europeanizing ambitions of Erdoğan’s party, the AKP. In his first years as prime minister, it seemed to Zürcher, Erdoğan was “democratizing Turkey at breakneck speed.” But by the 2010s, the mirage of a reformist Erdoğan had evaporated. Most scholars working on contemporary Turkey now see little difference between his authoritarian instincts and those of the Young Turk leaders, whose legacy they initially thought Erdoğan would counter.
Zürcher, too, took note, and in 2016 returned a medal he had received for advocating for Turkey’s integration into the EU. He called Erdoğan a “de-facto dictator” and stated that Turkey could no longer be a legitimate member of the European bloc: “I ignored warnings from secularist Turkish friends that Erdoğan was only using the EU and the accession process to destroy his internal enemies and gradually to increase the role of Islam in society, seeing them as short-sighted fear mongering,” Zürcher admitted. “I was wrong, however, and they were right.”
Seven years after this confession, Zürcher is back with A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments, a book he co-edited with the political historian Alp Yenen. The volume, whose publication marked the republic’s centenary in October 2023, aspires to be “a fragmented illustration of historical complexity.” Each of its hundred fragments offers “a glimpse into the workings of a partial historical reality that is part of a larger whole that could not have been illustrated in its entirety and diversity by any other means.”
The volume is an antidote to the shortcomings of post-Kemalist scholarship, and its witty medicine is a joy to imbibe. Each section distills a moment in modern Turkey’s history: an earworm pop song; a failed coup attempt; a bohemian, gambling, anti-Semitic Islamist poet. There is a section by Gözde Kırcıoğlu on a law that placed the Turkish Republic in the position of custodian of “abandoned properties” of Armenians and Greeks, which it went on to exploit by stealing those properties through confiscation. There is a close reading by Petra de Brujin of the typography of a communist poem, originally published in Arabic script, by Nazım Hikmet. Didem Yerli offers a capsule history of Turkey’s crypto-Jews; Müge Özoğlu’s article on “Male Beauty Kings” ponders gender, biopolitics and pageantry in Istanbul. Yavuz Köse’s “The Turkish Queen of the Hippies” considers Perihan Yücel and her adventures in Istanbul, the first stop for numerous Americans and Europeans along the “hippie trail” to Kathmandu.
There is not one central story in these pages, nor a nationalist arc that a politician might use to plot a ruthless ascent to an imperial presidency. Instead, A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey uses the centenary as an “opportunity to pause and reflect on the resilience of Republican Turkey.” The editors say they are “fully aware of the fact that the history of Turkey has had both bright and dark pages”—their volume is neither a celebration nor a condemnation. If these fragments share anything in their assembled account of the past century, it’s a strong suspicion of reform in general. Most prominently, the reformists’ attempt to reforge Turkish identity as a modern melting pot, initially promulgated widely by the country’s Jewish minority, has failed to halt Islamic fundamentalism. Instead, after coming to power in 2002, Islamists refashioned the modern Turkish identity not as secular but Islamic to its core.
It’s fitting, then, that this new history takes the form of a mosaic. In place of a single arc about modernity and democracy, we get a plurality of viewpoints considering a wide array of cultural and political themes, personalities, events and trends from Turkish history. Turkey holds these irregular pieces in place, but no color or pattern dominates its composition. Like Turkey: A Modern History before it, A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey offers a welcome corrective to the great-man framings of Turkish politics, updated through the mosaic form for today’s political moment. After all, the illusion of the early 2000s was that a reformist prime minister could democratize Turkey solely by interrogating its foundations. In recent years, as that reformist has revealed himself to be a scheming autocrat, Turkish intellectuals may have decided that the role of the reformer itself is the problem. As for the Turkish government’s support of their scholarship in the past, it was a poisoned chalice.