The Ottomans. - book reviews

National Review, August 15, 1994 by Herb Greer

First of all the Turks are brutes, right? Oriental. Sub-human, cruel. Remember Midnight Express? And those poor Kurds - the Terrible Turks deny them their Human Rights. And of course Turks are priapic - "Oh, those Turks!" Nudge nudge, wink wink. As is the way with such cliches, the ferocious and/or super-sexy Turk exists side by side with the "typically" fat, corrupt, entropic pasha wallowing in luxury and bum-boys.

Andrew Wheatcroft's book traces these and other wall-eyed views of the Turks back into the Ottoman culture from which they were distilled by ignorant and sometimes vicious opinion-formers in the West. He begins on a worrying note, when his own introduction teeters toward such a cliche. He claims to know what the real inner attitudes of Ottoman Turks were and asserts that these have persisted "almost unalloyed" since the 1920s, when Kemal Ataturk all but single-handedly forged a modern nation from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Few Westerners are aware of what a change that was. Social and administrative novelties had been imposed more than once under the Ottoman sultans. But what had never happened before 1923 was the severing of the traditional links between Islam and government; Ataturk installed a new parliamentary system resting on secular citizenship in the new Turkey. With this astonishing coup he forcibly set his country on the road to a Western style of democratic government. The new system was further reinforced by discarding the Arabic alphabet, so ill-suited to Turkish, and replacing it with a Roman-based system, while abolishing the mandarin Ottoman idiom, incomprehensible to most Turks, in favor of a flexible and demotic form of Turkish. These changes began a new Turkish relationship to politics and authority, in which government and citizen inhabited, so to speak, the same world. This was not true before, and it is inconceivable that such a transition could have taken place without affecting the inner lives of a people. Neither Mr. Wheatcroft nor any other Western expert I know of has made any serious effort to analyze and gauge the present depth of that effect. (But see Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which makes clear the break between the old non-national imperial Ottoman tradition and the new secular nationalism in Turkey today, expressed in Ataturk's motto Ne mutlu Turkum diyene, "How happy is he who calls himself a Turk" - as opposed to an Ottoman. In Ottoman times the epithet "Turk" was almost entirely a Western conceit.)

The "persistent" Ottoman attitude which Mr. Wheatcroft calls "supple rigidity" is no more than a habit of bowing to authority externally while remaining internally resistant. There is, however, nothing peculiarly Ottoman or Turkish about this, as Mr. Wheatcroft would know if he had toured, say, the American South after the Civil War, or explored the social fabric of any number of Iron Curtain countries during the Cold War. His solecism is the more interesting because the central theme of The Ottomans is the persistence of a crudely racist and almost entirely obsolete Western image of Turkey and the Turks.

Mr. Wheatcroft begins with the Western shock at Sultan Mehmed II's capture of Constantinople in 1453 on "the world's last day," followed by the steady advance of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, halted at last in 1529 when the forces of Suleiman I were defeated at Vienna. This was not, however, the end of the Ottoman presence west of the Bosporus. The Ottomans were to try again to take Vienna in 1683 (though again without success) and the empire's grip on a large part of the Balkans continued into the twentieth century, leaving seeds of anti-Turkish hatred which are sprouting now in the genocidal butchery of Muslims by Serb fascists in Bosnia.

Mr. Wheatcroft sketches brilliantly the growth, over the centuries, of a stereotypical Western view of "the Turk," and its apparent ossification about 150 years ago. The story has its amusing side, particularly in the list of faults that were supposed by arrogant Westerners to be especially Turkish.

The Ottoman practice of buying military rank was held in contempt by the British at a time when their own commissions could be and were purchased. The Turkish treatment of women was widely sneered at in countries such as Britain, where women were denied the right to their own property until the nineteenth century, and refused the vote until the twentieth century.

As an example of Turkish cruelty, execution by strangling or even impalement (the latter mostly carried out on dead bodies) hardly matched the English method of hanging a traitor, cutting him down for disembowelment while still alive, and then chopping him into quarters. The famous massacres of Armenians, still remembered, were in fact carried out mostly by their traditional enemies - the Kurds, for whom so many tears are shed today. At that time there was no publicity and no tears for the many Turks, including women and children, who were being slaughtered in the Morea by merciless Greeks.