Читать книгу Staging the Ottoman Turk - Esin Akalın - Страница 6

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Ottoman state was a world empire which influenced directly or indirectly the lives of millions in the Mediterranean, in East Central Europe and the Middle East. Its geopolitical position, vast territory, ample human and economic resources, its magnificently efficient administration and its army, one of the best organized military machines of the early modern period, gave the Ottoman Empire the status of a world power

(Agoston 126).

Since its publication in 1978, Edward Said's account, in Orientalism, of the Western approach to the Orient has been both pivotal and a major incentive for the growth of work on colonial discourse. In seeking to trace the interrelations of culture, history and textuality, Said, in his widely read and greatly influential book, ultimately leaves the reader with the observation that: "Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant" (Said 57). Said separates East and West from a wide range of perspectives—political, religious, economic, historical, cultural, etc.—which go back as far as Aeschylus' The Persians and conclude with Kissenger, and claims that Orientalism is a "broadly imperialist view of the world" (Said 15). In discussing the East/West relationship from a "general and hegemonic context" (Said 9) Said draws attention to a "geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, historical and philosophical texts" (Said 120). He claims that Western political and intellectual domination over the East has defined the nature of the Orient as weak and that of the Occident as strong. Said's model of "'fixity' in the ideological construction of otherness" (Bhabha 8) is for Bhabha[9] a "historical and theoretical simplification" (Bhabha 25). This applies to the Ottoman case from the point of view that Said's ahistorical and ageographical approach to the Orient does not do justice to the historical realities of the Ottoman Empire as a world power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

What is essentially problematic in Orientalism is that it tells the reader nothing about centuries-old Ottoman imperial order. In exploring the relations of knowledge and power, and of culture and politics as the determining elements in defining the worlds of Islam and Christianity, Said refers to the Ottomans only in passing. In his introduction to Orientalism, which has widely informed studies of Western encounters with Islam from the time of the Crusades to the present, Said defines his premise with precision and clarity by stating that he will deal with the Near East with occasional reference to Persia and India. He indicates that in his work "a large part of the Orient seem[s] to have been eliminated" such as "Japan, China and other sections in the Far East—not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been)" (Said 17). In his amply documented book, Said begins by confronting the domination of Britain and France of "the Eastern Mediterranean from about the seventeenth century on" (Said 17). He is almost apologetic about the fact his discussion will "not do justice to the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia and Portugal" (ibid). Ironically, in his apparent chronological account of Orientalist/imperialist[10] exploration and expansion, Said, as he focuses on the British and French experience of the East, makes a conscious choice not to talk about the Ottoman Empire, historiographically documented as "the Orient". The problem here is that the semantic domain of the concept of power includes the concepts of appropriation and domination, which turn up frequently in Said's characterizations of the will to power. Paradoxically, however, based on Said's own appropriation of the domain of the Orient, the six hundred years of the imperial experience of the Ottoman Empire is discarded outright or "when mentioned, is rendered unrecognizable or irrelevant" (Zilfi 4). However, the Ottomans who had excelled in statecraft and administration, financial policies, land and military organization, were a "centralized and self consciously imperial state" (Kafadar xi). As Francis Robinson writes in The Illustrated History: Islamic World:

After taking Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Emperors Mehmet the Conqueror (r.1444-46/1451-81), Bayazid II (r.1481-1521), Selim (r.1512-20), and Sulayman the Magnificent (r.1520-66) conquered the fertile crescent, Egypt, and the Hijaz, thus gaining control of Mecca and Medina, Yemen, and North Africa up to Morocco (Robinson 65).

In 1453, the capture of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul, was seen as the realisation of the "apocalyptic prophecies circulating" (Robinson 58) about the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul, the location (previously besieged by the Arabs in 668) between Europe and Asia, symbolized the beginnings of the Ottoman Sultan's religious and political power in both the West and the East. In 1500s the Ottoman armies not only began to penetrate Eastern Europe, but with the conquest of Egypt in 1517, the office of the caliphate—reaching back to the Islamic Prophet—which was previously claimed by Mamluk Sultans, officially passed to the Ottoman Sultan.[11] This meant that from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, that is, until the 1922 abolition of the caliphate by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the secular Turkish Republic, it was the Ottoman Sultans who, as the heads of Islam, were the sovereigns of the Muslim world. As Lord Kinross writes:

Of more tangible significance was the transfer to Istanbul of the standard and cloak of the Prophet, relics whose possession symbolized the status of sultans as protectors of the holy places of Mecca, Medina and the pilgrim routes of the Hejaz, hence Islam in general (Kinross 170).

In this context, it is crucial to emphasize that it was only from the nineteenth century onwards that the Ottoman Islamic world system was overwhelmed by forces from the West, driven by capitalism and empowered by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. As for 1798, it was a symbolic moment when not only did the leader's standards pass to Europe, but when Western standards, Western armies and Western capital overran the Ottomans with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which had been an Ottoman province since 1517.

The Ottoman success in withstanding the Western challenge had continued until the end of the seventeenth century. Yet, the Ottoman defeat at the second siege of Vienna (1683) against a combined Habsburg-Polish army and the subsequent treaty of Karlowitz (1699) marked the beginnings of the long and slow retreat of the Ottoman Sultanate from their European conquests. By the close of the eighteenth century, Western Europe, with its gun-power revolution and superior naval technology was invulnerable to the Ottoman power. Ultimately, as the Ottomans became politically and economically dependent on Europe, they began to adapt themselves to the challenge of Western superiority (Inalcik 1994, 3).

Although Said's main focus is on the post-Napoleonic period in which the European powers have begun the process of imperialism and colonization of the East, his work has been applied to the studies of Western encounters with Islam of different periods. In this respect, his overgeneralization of the Orient is problematic and his general claims, made through a rough historical overview, are misleading. Said's binary opposition of the East and West through configurations such as weak and strong, inferior and superior, etc. should be more "complex and multifaceted" as Vaughan has shown in her historicist analysis of Othello, which exemplifies the English concern about the power of Ottoman Islamic imperialism (Vaughan 27). Renaissance curiosity and anxiety about the Ottomans produced an outpouring of texts in the form of travel narratives, historical and political studies, polemical and religious tracts, ballads, poetry, fiction and drama, perhaps the best way of conveying ideas and knowledge about the Turks, who inspired fear and fascination in Europe.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the Christian West was conquering indigenous populations in the New World, the Ottoman power had already pushed beyond the Mediterranean, as far as the walls of Vienna and had even crossed the English Channel. After Columbus' conquest of America, while the Europeans ventured across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and "took possession" (Greenblatt 9) of the peoples they encountered, the Ottomans with their formidable army held power over Europe, conquering, capturing and converting Christians to Islam in large numbers. If Christian Europeans, as Greenblatt asserts, "felt powerfully superior to virtually all the peoples they encountered" because of their conviction that they had the "absolute and exclusive religious truth" (Greenblatt 9), there were similar attestations to the Muslim sense of certitude and superiority over the Western world. By a curious irony, Said's radical theory and views about the Orient are clearly evident in the following statement, which represents a construct, not a reality, and his own stereotypical and mythic East of the past:

The other feature of the Orient was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically…the essential relationship, on political, cultural and even religious grounds, was seen—in the West, which is what concerns us here—to be one between a strong and weak partner (Said 40).

Considering the political significance of the Ottoman-European trade relations and "the fierce competition among" (Naff 100) European countries to appear in treaties as the Ottomans' "most favoured nation", the essential relationship between the East and the West was one in which the Ottomans were "in a position of strength". Ultimately, in Eastern and Western commercial relationships, it was the Ottoman sultan who was the "strong partner" as he ruled the Ottoman lands that extended from Istanbul to Aleppo, a crucial link in the silk route that led to China. Among these lands were Cairo, a trade centre; Jerusalem, the Holy Land; Algiers, "the whip of the Christian World, the wall of the Barbarian, terror of Europe" (Purchas 278) to name just a few. As the Englishman, Thomas Fuller wrote in awe:

[I]t is the greatest and best-compacted (not excepting the Romane it self in the height thereof) [Empire] that the sunne ever saw. Take sea and land together (as bones and flesh make up one bodie) and from Buda in the West to Taris in the East, it stretches about three thousand miles: little lesse in the extent thereof North and South. It lieth in the heart of the world, like a bold champion bidding defiance to all his borders, commanding the most fruitfull countreys of Europe, Asia and Africa: Onely America (not more happy in her rich mines then in her remoteness) lieth free from reach thereof.[12]