Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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Early twentieth-century writers of the Ottoman–Turkist transition formed,

styled and changed the country’s language. The Republican writers who fol-

lowed them after the alphabet change (1929), which separated Ottoman lan-

guage from modern Turkish, did so as well. Due to the effects of the half-

century of Turkist linguistic engineering that began in about 1930, the language

currently plays in various registers including Perso-Arabic vocabulary, collo-

quial Turkish, pure Turkish (

oz T

urkc¸e) and the mixed style of what might be

termed ‘lived language’. The lexical changes provide an apt metaphor for social

and political changes in the name of modernity and progress.As early as the late

nineteenth century, simple, direct sentences were advocated so that messages

of equality and freedom, and new literary forms representing ‘civilisation’ such

as novels and plays, could reach a wider audience. With the ﬁrst rumblings

of cultural nationalism around the turn of the century, this transformation

developed gradually into a call for Turkiﬁcation; in short, freedom from – in

the widely used term – ‘linguistic capitulations’ imposed by Persian and Ara-

bic, whose vocabulary and some grammatical constructions were integral to

Ottoman rhetoric and expression. In essence, the goal was to make the spoken

idiom the basis for the written language. The process of ‘linguistic engineering’

and the principle of one people, one nation, one language took hold shortly

thereafter. The push for a nationalistic pure Turkish began with the change

to the Latin alphabet in 1928/9 and the purging of non-Turkish words from

the vocabulary and/or their replacement by Turkic and Turkish sufﬁxes and

neologisms. This was also symbolic of a process of secularisation and national-

isation in the wake of the partition of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states,

mandates and kingdoms. From the establishment of the Turkish Language

Society (TLS) in 1932, this process continued until the TLS was privatised, and

thereby marginalised, in 1983. Since then, there has been a return to the ‘lived

language’ and a resurgence in the use of Arabic and Persian words, with a par-

allel increase in the inﬂuence of English. As a result, the language and diction

used by any author writing in Turkish will often indicate a political stance. It

will come as no surprise that many dedicated leftists applauded the work of the

TLS as vital to visions of secularism and populism and those with an interest in

tradition and Islam ridicule it as being extremeandunnecessary.Language itself

is a microcosm of the social engineering (and violence) inﬂicted by the state

on national identity. The way language is articulated is just one expression of

modernity in the Ottoman and Turkish context. Presently, most young writers

mix all registers in their works: Perso-Arabic (and Ottoman), pure Turkish,

colloquial Turkish and foreign words (French and English). This new aes-

thetic began in earnest in the 1980s and continues today, marking the idiom of

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The novel in Turkish

Turkish literary production for the twenty-ﬁrst century as being trans-

national – indeed, post-national.

The basis of this new ‘mixed style’ might be traced back to the historical

starting point of this introduction, to the nineteenth century, and the increas-

ing cultural inﬂuence of Europe that grew in proportion to its colonial incur-

sion into North Africa and the Middle East. This incursion institutionalised

persistent textual attitudes towards the ‘East’ in British, French and Russian

literary traditions, establishing and disseminating stereotypical orientalist atti-

tudes towards Muslim cultures, including the Ottoman. As stated, the ﬁrst

translations of European ﬁction into Ottoman were made from the French,

introducing an outsider’s gaze into the narrative authority of the novel form.

A doubling of narrative perspectives arose from seeing oneself and one’s local

society from the ‘outside’ as well as from the ‘inside’. Beginning with their

earliest novels, Ottoman and Turkish author-intellectuals struggled within a

divided sense of self and identity. That is, they experienced a division result-

ing from an ‘internalised Orientalism’, which in turn set the ground over

decades, for an array of aesthetic, nationalist and/or socialist responses. These

responses, as much as possible, recast modernisation and identity formation

from the perspective of the local population. In short, the progressive forces

of modernity from a Western perspective were linked to orientalism (the cul-

tural logic of colonialism) and from a Republican perspective to nationalism

or socialism (local self-determination).

Outsider perspectives tended to view Ottoman and Turkish literature as

‘belated’, imitative and derivative of other traditions (i.e. Persian or European),

whereas insider perspectives emphasised an originary and unchanging group

essence (Turkishness) that could be traced from ancient times to the present.

These orientalist and nationalist perspectives, equally reductive, overlooked

the complexity of forces that interacted to produce literature and stripped

authors, in their reception, of the agency to create, question and qualify form,

theme and content. Most surveys of Turkish literature, literary histories and

anthologies, intentionally or not, are plagued by a persistent distortion based

on the dominance of these two lenses of modernity. That is, most surveys

divide Turkish literature into two distinct hemispheres as derivative, an imi-

tation or copy, or as a measure of the essence of Turkishness. Both poles of

this ‘orientalist–nationalist binary’ are linked, ironically, by certain underlying

commonalities: (1) timelessness or ahistoricity, which indicates the incapacity

of Turks to progress or change, on one hand, and ascribes to them unchanging

qualities, on the other; (2) transcendent characteristics (whether positive or

negative) such as the ‘terrible Turk’, the ‘lustful Turk’, or the ‘brave Turk’;

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and (3) ethno-racial categorisations that elide ‘other’ identities of the populace

based on gender, community, geography and religion.

As such, literary modernity, for the purposes of this survey, is not simply

‘Westernisation’ (mimicry of Europe) nor nationalism or national essence; it

is rather the attempt, as captured through the medium of literature, to create

new aesthetic expressions, to hear voices that have not been heard before,

and to recast ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures from new perspectives as being

interrelated and interdependent. It is the attempt to inscribe alternative sites of

identiﬁcation beyond the incarcerations of the orientalist–nationalist binary, a

challenge with which many Ottoman and Turkish writers have struggled and

continue to do so – one that constitutes a profound and persistent crisis for

them. The novel in this context is, in one sense, a vehicle of modernisation

that reveals Ottoman and Turkish experience as human experience, connected

to and contingent upon other human experiences. The predicament of the

orientalist–nationalist binary, contrastingly, is the inability to address, subvert,

or even engage the essentialising functions of ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ clich

es. So

many local authors have struggled with this cultural crisis that it has become a

dominant trope in Turkish letters and intellectual life, more generally known as

the ‘East–West problematic’. But, as will become evident,the most provocative

encounters of modernity and the novel do not tread well-worn routes of

orientalism and nationalism.

Theforces of modern thought and literature in whichthe ‘old’ and emerging

‘new’ are locked in an ongoing struggle are signiﬁcant to the understanding of

Ottoman and Turkish literary culture in the twentieth century. Local engage-

ment with European colonialism as it threatened the Ottoman state released

various forces of modernisation, a political and cultural engagement that later

became formative in the establishment of the Republic. History reveals that

beginning with the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the mod-

ernisation of the Ottoman state and later of the Republic (after its founding

in 1923) occurred in the top-down manner of a European ‘civilising mission’.

However, the novel tells a more complex and contradictory story: the novel

was arguably ‘Ottoman’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Turkish’ and ‘European’ all at the same

time. Moreover, as a space of representation and contestation, it was in itself

a part of an alternative modernity that did not simply imitate Europe, but

experimented with its innovations in multiple ways. To be sure, ‘Turkey’ did

not just translate and receive the novel from Europe, it rewrote the novel based

on its own social and historical contingencies.

A historically sensitive periodisation of Turkish literature would reveal that

the novel is a cultural force anticipating and inﬂuencing greater political and

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The novel in Turkish

social change through the development of conscience and the raising of social

consciousness. However, the commonly accepted periodisation of Turkish

literature has shortcomings that arise from the distorting effects of the above-

mentioned orientalist–nationalist binary. The periodisation advocated in this

survey attempts to reinterpret these persistent distortions, among them: (1) the

anachronistic classiﬁcation of major movements of late Ottoman and Republi-

can literature as part of a continuum of secular ‘Turkish’ literature that projects

the vision of the Turkist cultural revolution (1922–38) back in time so it connects

with golden ages of pre-Islamic Turkic history; (2) the denial of the inﬂuence

of socialism on early national projects and of its widespread currency through

most of the twentieth century; (3) the acknowledgement of a formative role of

tradition and Islam, at the very least with regard to ethics and morality, in nar-

rative production rather than its repression; (4) the granting of creative agency

to local authors as being more than ideologues or imitators of Western mod-

els; and (5) the narrow deﬁnition of literary periods by the life of magazines

representing particular trends or schools. The following periodisation of seven

dominant world views and cultural trends, to be elaborated below, covers a

period of about 125 years. This new periodisation marks generations by impor-

tant social and political upheavals. The aim is to contextualise authors of the

late Ottoman state and Republic of Turkey and their works while emphasising

the interrelation between literary transformation and historical change:

1) Ottoman modernism (1876–1908): object lessons

2) Ottoman Turkism (1909–21): narrative identity

3) Turkist social nationalism (1922–49): national allegories

4) Anatolian socialist realism (1950–70): village novels

5) Feminism and existentialism (1971–80): marginalised voices

6) Post-Kemalism and neo-Ottomanism (1981–99): meta-ﬁctions

7) Transnationalism and transgression (2000–present): writing beyond the

nation

Ottoman modernism (1876–1908): object lessons

The late nineteenth-century Ottoman modern was an urban ﬁgure seduced by

the trappings of European culture (including dress, French language and new

2 Principal authors and representative works (novels unless speciﬁed):

Ibrahim S¸inasi (1826–71), The Wedding of a Poet (S¸air Evlenmesi), 1860, play

Ziya Pas¸a (1829–80), Zafern

ame S¸erhi (Book of Victories), 1868?, humour

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modes of consumption). This was a period when the Ottoman state ruled a

mixed population in territories that included the south-eastern Balkans and the

Arabian peninsula, though cosmopolitan, revealed a defensive stance towards

the growingcultural, political and military power of Britain, France and Russia.

The dilemma, in short, was one of Ottoman Islam on the cusp of European

colonisation, and the response of Ottoman intellectuals, which at this stage

had nothing to do with the ethno-nationalism of the early twentieth century.

Popular novelist Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Fel

atun Bey ile R

akım Efendi (Fel

atun

Bey and R

akım Efendi, 1875) is an iconic novel of this era that describes pos-

itive and negative engagements in the late Ottoman modernisation process

through its display of the lives of two opposing characters. Similar themes

are taken up in Recaizade Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (Carriage Romance, 1896)

and H

useyin Rahmi G

urpınar’s S¸ipsevdi (Love at First Sight, 1911). In Ahmet

Mithat’s novel, the proﬂigate dandy Fel

atun Bey manifests his vision of moder-

nity through blind imitation of Europe. Born to a wealthy family, he peppers

his conversations with French words and phrases, whose meanings he does

not know, and spends his money randomly in the pursuit of foreign women.

Ultimately, he goes broke and is forced to leave the city. In marked contrast

to the passive mimicry of Fel

atun Bey, Rakım Efendi is born into humble cir-

cumstances. He, however, demonstrates a strong work ethic. Through slow,

hard, concerted work, he amasses some wealth. With the opportunities these

funds provide, he oversees the education of a young woman who is destined

to be sold in the cariye slavery system. The novel revolves around this object

lesson: the spendthrift squanders not only his inheritance, but the opportunity

to become a model member of modern nineteenth-century Ottoman society;

S¸emsettin Sami (1850–1904), Taas¸s¸uk-u Tal

at ve Fitnat (The Romance of Tal

at and Fitnat),

1872

Namık Kemal (1840–88),

Intibah (Awakening), 1874

Ahmet Mithat Efendi (1844–1912), Fel

atun Bey ile R

akım Efendi (Fel

atun Bey and R

akım

Effendi), 1875

Abd

ulhak H

amit Tarhan (1852–1937), Sahr

a (Desert), 1878, poetry

Bes¸irFuat(1852–87), Bes¸er (Humankind), 1886, articles

Samipas¸azade Sezai (1859–1936), Serg

uzes¸t (Adventure), 1888

Mizancı Mehmet Murat (1854–1917), Turfanda mı Yoksa Turfa mı? (The Good or Bad Seed),

1891

abız

ade N

azım (1862–93), Zehra (Zehra), 1894

Recaiz

ade Mahmut Ekrem (1847–1914), Araba Sevdası (Carriage Romance), 1896

Fatma

Aliye (1862–1936), Muhazar

at (To Keep in Mind), 1891

Nig

ar Hanım (1862–1918), Aks-i Sad

a (Echo), 1900, poetry

Halit Ziya Us¸aklıgil (1865–1945), As¸k–ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), 1900

Mehmet Rauf (1875–1931), Eyl

ul (September), 1901

useyin Cahit Yalc¸ın (1875–1957), Hayal

Ic¸inde (Within a Dream), 1901

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The novel in Turkish

rather, he is seduced by a Europe which destroys him. On the other hand, the

hard-working ‘self-made man’ engages in the local economy, provides jobs

for others, advocates the education of local women and leaves a legacy: the

synthesis between Europe and tradition that is also a working model of mod-

ernisation. Ahmet Mithat, as author-intellectual-cum-narrator, thus assumes

the role of arbiter of modernity for Ottoman society, advocating a vision of

synthesis that responds to orientalist stereotypes about Muslim society. He is

one of the ﬁrst to address the modernity/tradition problematic in an overtly

synthetic way, whichother intellectuals later take up. He sees his role as novelist

as the ‘protector’ of society through education, revelation and frank talk.

In contrast to the moral didactic novels of Ahmet Mithat and the ﬁrst gener-

ation of Ottoman novelists (Namık Kemal, S¸emsettin Sami and Samipas¸azade

Sezai), Halit Ziya Us¸aklıgil’s As¸k-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love, 1900) is a realist,

dramatic tragedy played out in the estate of the wealthy Adnan Bey. It, too,

contains an object lesson, but one that is dramatised rather than overtly stated.

As¸k-ı Memnu is an account of Ottoman moderns concerned with their own

individual and insular lives. A widower, Adnan Bey, lives quietly with his son

ulent and daughter Nihal. When he decides to take a much younger wife,

Bihter, the established order of the household changes. Now the lady of the

house, Bihter does her best to be a good wife and mother, but circumstances

work against her. Nihal accuses her of separating her from her father, her

brother (sent to boarding school), and the household staff. Bihter, soon bored

by her older husband, becomes sexually involved with Adnan Bey’s nephew

Behl

ul, a philanderer. When Bihter later learns that Behl

ul and Nihal are to be

wed, she reveals their illicit affair and commits suicide. The household returns

to its state at the start of the novel, yet forever changed by Bihter’s tragedy.

The conﬂicts and dilemmas of this novel are important in Ottoman literature,

because they are internal, individual and psychological and focus on the plight

of women of the upper classes. This is in marked contrast to the social con-

cerns of Ahmet Mithat, whose focus on women is morally guided, and who

concentrates on the lower classes and the downtrodden, including prostitutes,

as in Hen

uz On Yedi Yas¸ında (Only Seventeen, 1881). More to the point, both

novels indicate that the rareﬁed life of Ottoman moderns is in crisis in different

ways: Ahmet Mithat by drawing attention to misguided lifestyles inﬂuenced

by Europe and Us¸aklıgil by subtly revealing the alienation and desperation

caused by rigid morality and social hierarchies.

Ottoman modernism corresponds to the reformist political movements of

the Young Ottomans and Young Turks, and is delineated by the two constitu-

tional periods beginning in 1876 and 1908, respectively. An attempt to reconcile

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Islam with modernity preoccupied many intellectuals of the period, and repre-

sented a regional movement that spread from Afghanistan to the Balkans and

from Arabia to North Africa. Namık Kemal’s polemical Renan M

udafaanamesi

(Rebuttal to Renan, c. 1885) is a representative example of a text that champions

modernist Islam as it targets the orientalist thinking of European intellectuals

such as Ernest Renan about Muslim societies.

Understanding ‘Ottoman modernism’ as a distinct period emerging out of

the Tanzimat reforms begins to correct the distortions of Eurocentric oriental-

ism as well as the anachronistic projection of secular Turkist nationalism back

into the nineteenth century. Traditional literary histories divide this period

into two main movements. The ﬁrst is labelled Tanzimat literature (1860–96),

beginning with the works of

Ibrahim S¸inasi and Namık Kemal. This is fol-

lowed by the Servet-i F

unun school, or Wealth of Sciences (1896–1901), also

known as Edebiyat-ı Cedide, or New Literature, represented by Halit Ziya

Us¸aklıgil, Mehmet Rauf, H

useyinCahit Yalc¸ın, N

abiz

ade N

azım and Recaiz

ade

Mahmut Ekrem. The former represents a romantic and romanticist inﬂuence

in late Ottoman letters with aspects of social engagement, whereas the latter

advocates naturalism and realism focusing on aesthetic concerns and indi-

vidualism. However, the over-arching themes of morality and modernity in

both do allow these two periods to be linked under the broader category of

‘Ottoman modernism’.

Many works of this era focus on various representations of urban charac-

ters representing ‘Occident’ (Europe and French culture) and/or ‘Orient’ (the

Ottoman state and Muslim ethics). The plots reveal a confrontation or syn-

thesis between Ottoman Muslim values and European positivism that leads

to a persistent cultural dualism. In terms of content, romances and morality

plays are often presented as allegories on the status of Muslim identity in the

face of ‘Westernisation’. Rather than being explicit, Islam often appears in

these works as a cultural subtext or part of the general context or setting.

The problem of a synthesis between European and Ottoman cultural logics

was depicted as a crisis through didactic stories meant to warn of ethical and

moral dangers. Paradoxically, Europe was also seen as a model of progress.

The resulting cultural duality became a theme that persists in Turkish letters

to this day.

Ottoman modernism, emphasising that tradition held the spiritual aspects

of culture and the West material and technological aspects, forecast an ideal

synthesis whose realisation was made impossible by the continued rise of Euro-

pean colonialism (culminating in the First World War). The accommodating

aspects of a ‘modernist Islam’ were no longer viable in the face of European

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The novel in Turkish

encroachment, aggression and occupation. In place of such a hybrid ideal,

ethno-nationalism became the political norm of resistance. Much later, the

movement provided the foundations for a resurgence in religious faith after

the end of the Cold War, manifesting as ‘liberal Islam’ and ‘political Islam’ as

reﬂected in the cultural sphere through the contemporary growth of Islamic

novels (hidayet romanı).

Ottoman Turkism (1909–21): narrative identity

Woman, as politically involved and often in the role of a teacher or nurse,

recurs throughout this period as a character symbolising the ideals of nation-

alism and the transition between an identity based on elite class and Islam

(Ottomanism) to one based on education and ethnic culture (Turkism). The

ideological changes brought about by the Second Constitutional Revolution

(1908) and the decade of war between 1912 and 1922, which resulted in a violent

remapping of Ottoman territory based on ethno-religious categories, led to

the politicisation of the ﬁgure of the Ottoman modern and the birth of the

socialist-minded Turkist modern. This version of Turkism continued to incor-

porate aspects of tradition and Islam as an element in its cultural synthesis

meant to foster modernisation and democracy. The famous slogan, ‘Turkify,

Islamicise, Westernise’ by the father of Turkism, Ziya G

okalp, summarises

this new ideology, one that advocates new sites of identiﬁcation and implicitly

accepts the division of multi-ethnic Ottoman society along ethno-religious

lines in its vision of modernisation.

The heroine of Halide Edip Adıvar’s Yeni Turan (New Turan, 1913), Kaya

(lit. ‘rock’), is politically devoted to the community to such a degree that she

has no individual desires. In fact, this leads her to sacriﬁce herself for the

greater good of Turkism by agreeing reluctantly to marry the leader of the

3 Principal authors and representative works:

Ebubekir Hazım Tepeyran (1864–1947), K

uc¸

uk Pas¸a (Little Pasha), 1910

useyin Rahmi G

urpınar (1864–1944), S¸ıpsevdi (Love at First Sight), 1911

Ahmet Rasim (1865–1932), S¸ehir Mektupları (Letters from the City), 4 vols., 1912–13, anec-

dotes, articles

Halide Edip Adıvar (1882–1964), Yeni Turan (New Turan), 1913

Ziya G

okalp (1876–1924), Kızıl Elma (Red Apple), 1914, poetry

uﬁde Ferit Tek (1892–1971), Aydemir (Aydemir), 1918

Omer Seyfettin (1884–1920), Efruz Bey (Efruz Bey), 1919, novella

Aka G

und

uz (1885–1958), Kurba

gacık (Tadpole), 1919, novella

Reﬁk Halit Karay (1888–1965), Memleket Hik

ayeleri (Stories from the Homeland), 1919

Ahmet Hikmet M

uft

glu (1870–1927), G

ul Hanım (Miss G

ul), 1920

Halide Nusret Zorlutuna (1901–84), K

uller (Ashes), 1921

Res¸atNuriG

untekin (1889–1956), Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (C¸ alıkus¸u), 1922

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opposition Ottomanist political party, which will in turn result in the release

of the leader of the Turkists from prison. Halide Edip’s novel is an account

of romantic intrigue set against a pitched political battle between two polit-

ical parties with historical parallels. The novel, in a sense, contains within

its plot and characterisation the ﬁssure between Ottoman modernism and

Ottoman Turkism in terms of gender, class and identity. In this interpretation,

the former is characterised by patriarchy, the upper class, and Muslim rather

than Turkish identiﬁcation; the latter demonstrates female protagonists who

challenge the traditional patriarchy, reveals the plight of lower classes and

exhibits Anatolian and Turkish identities. In Yeni Turan, two political parties –

the New Ottoman, based on a platform of federalism, and the New Turan,

dedicated to strengthening the central government – are struggling for power.

The main characters, Hamid Pas¸a, and his nephew Asım Bey, are the Ottoman

moderns representing the New Ottoman faction. Samiye Hanım, a woman

who has undergone an ideological conversion and adopted the Turkic name

‘Kaya’, and her distant relative O

guz (eponymous name of a Turkic tribe),

are leaders of New Turan. Hamid Pas¸a agrees to have O

guz, who has been

imprisoned, freed on condition that Kaya marries him. His intention is to

fulﬁl his personal desires while weakening the political opposition. For the

sake of her party, Kaya sacriﬁces herself, and agrees to the marriage, which

lasts four years. Later, when Kaya learns that O

guz has taken ill and is near

death, she leaves Hamid Pas¸a and goes to him, but is unable to speak with him

before he dies. This tragic novel summarises ‘Ottomanist’ federal and ‘Turk-

ist’ national debates of the era and includes passages that present the roles

of women with respect to these debates. It is a transitional text that demon-

strates both aspects ofromances from the Ottoman modern era and ideological

debates of the new Turkist ethno-religious national vision. The novel is, fur-

thermore, openly political, ushering in a series of compromised female protag-

onists torn between traditional familial roles and the call of new socio-political

causes.

Related themes are echoed in Res¸at Nuri G

untekin’s Autobiography of a

Turkish Girl (C¸ alıkus¸u, 1922), a popular novel that is signiﬁcant for its use

of Anatolia as a setting, its identiﬁcation of the challenges that await the

‘new’ women of secular Islam and its implicit critique of Istanbul’s mod-

ern society for its ignorance of the lives of Anatolian peasants. The protago-

nist, Feride, is orphaned at a young age. Through the help of her aunt, she

receives a French education at a boarding school in Istanbul. While in high

school, she becomes engaged to her cousin, K

amuran. However, she calls

off the marriage when she learns that he has been involved with another

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The novel in Turkish

woman, and ﬂees to western Anatolia where she serves as a teacher in var-

ious villages and small towns. What begins as a typical Ottoman modern

romance story turns into a single woman’s drama in the patriarchal world

of rural Anatolia. The ideals instilled in Feride through her education are

tested by the traditional customs of small villages and patriarchal landown-

ers or a

gas. Compromised in terms of gender and sexuality, she becomes the

focus of a dilemma of modernisation wherein as an educated woman she

faces the obstacles of Anatolian traditionalism. In a marriage of convenience

to protect her honour, she is married ‘on paper’ to her avuncular friend,

Dr Hayrullah Bey. Upon his death, Feride returns to Istanbul to reunite

with her estranged beloved, K

amuran. Her experiences in Anatolia have

provided her with a vital real-world education in the needs and desires of the

people that will make up the new Republic. The lesson seems clear: knowl-

edge from the West must be complemented by knowledge of the people of

one’s own country. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of state and society to

‘modernise’ rural areas and towns as well as cities. In both these novels, the

battle over modernisation and identity as it changes from Ottoman Islamic to

Anatolian Turkist is played out through the position of women in society who

struggle to be engaged socially in a way that does not conﬂict with traditional

family roles.

The period of Ottoman Turkism, one of almost constant warfare, wit-

nesses the contestation between ideologies meant to consolidate the Ottoman

state and provide a locus of individual and group identiﬁcation. Turkism

(ethno-nationalism) is one of these ideologies, together with Ottomanism,

Islamism, Bolshevism (Bolsheviknationalism) and Westernism. The Tripopoli-

tan/Libyan War (1911), the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the First World War (1914–

1918) and the Greco-Ottoman War (1919–22) resulted in an enormous demo-

graphic change for Ottoman territories that were reduced to the Anatolian

peninsula and Eastern Thrace. By 1922, the Ottoman government was left

to rule a majority Muslim population whose governance was taken over by

Mustafa Kemal in a coup that ousted the sultan and abolished the sultanate.

The ‘problem’ of Muslim rule (from Europe’s perspective) had been handled

through war and a bloody unmixing of peoples as ‘Turkey’, one of the ﬁrst

Muslim nations in the modern era, was born. Turkism was the ideology that

provided an argument for self-determination in a limited territory that avoided

the vagueness of Ottomanism, the expansiveness of Islamism and the colonial

cast of Westernism. Many authors began to dramatise both the ideology and

the identity that Turkism espoused – one that was secular, modern, yet tied to

tradition. Thus Turkism brought with it two major contradictions reﬂected in

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