Reality with a Moral Twist: Ahmed Midhat's Müşahedat as an Image of an Ideal Ottoman Society

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Notes

⁵⁷ In that sense she is an exception since Midhat equates lack of father to bad education. For a good analysis of Midhat's approach to the father figure in his writings, see Jale Parla, Babalar ve Oğullar: Tanzimat Romanının Epistemolojik Temelleri (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993). For this particular claim, see p. 29.

⁵⁶ It is important not to read this critique as a racist one directed at the non-Muslim population. Midhat does not judge his heroes and heroines based on their religion or ethnicity. There are good and bad Muslims just as there are good and bad non-Muslims.

⁵⁵ Midhat consciously differentiates native—yerli—from national—milli—in his preface.

⁵⁴ Midhat uses the term ‘tatlı su frengi’ for him. The literal translation of this would be ‘white-water European.’

⁵³ Okay, Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında, p. 97.

⁵² Ricoeur argues this both in Time and Narrative and in his article ‘Narrative identity.’

⁵¹ My emphasis. Midhat's association of Islam with generosity and humanity becomes more interesting considering that this generosity and humanity was used to prevent a shameful event occurring between two Christians.

⁵⁰ Güzel esmer herifi döğüyordu ha? (p. 24).

⁴⁹ Who is actually ‘an Eastern Armenian desirous to look European’ (p. 25).

⁴⁸ Midhat talks about their beauty for four pages (pp. 14–17), proving, at the same time, his familiarity with the latest fashion in women's clothing.

⁴⁷ ‘Karinle Hasbıhal.’

⁴⁶ Hande Birkalan, ‘Müşahedat'a Etnografik Bakış,’ Tarih ve Toplum, 34(203) (2000), pp. 289–297, uses Müşahedat as a source for an ethnographic analysis of Istanbul and Ottoman society at the end of the nineteenth century.

⁴⁵ Berna Moran, Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış: Ahmet Midhat'tan A. H. Tanpınar'a (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1983), p. 57.

⁴⁴ I adopt Partha Chatterjee's use of the terms ‘problematic’ and ‘thematic’ here. Thematic can be defined as the basic principles of an ideological system—such as nationalism—expressed in terms of epistemology and ethics. The problematic of nationalist ideology, according to Chatterjee, ‘consists of concrete statements about possibilities justified by reference to the thematic’; see further Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 38–39.

⁴³ Tuncer, Tanzimat Edebiyatı, p. 275.

⁴² Findley, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe,’ pp. 21–22.

⁴¹ Okay, Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında, pp. 4–5; Tuncer, Tanzimat Edebiyatı , p. 271.

⁴⁰ Özön & Kabacalı, Türkçe'de Roman p. 147.

³⁹ Özön & Kabacalı, Türkçe'de Roman, p. 146.

³⁸ The newly formed province in Ottoman Bulgaria of the 1860s served as an experimental ground for the reform ideas of Midhat Paşa, leader of the reform movement and the first governor of the Danube province. See Maria Todorova's ‘Midhat Paşa's governorship of the Danube Province,’ in: Cesar E. Farah (Ed.) Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire (Kirksvill, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1993).

³⁷ He had a French tutor aside from the high scho.ol he attended. For more details on his early education years, see Özön & Kabacalı, Türkçe'de Roman, pp. 145–146; Okay, Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında, pp. 2–3; and Tuncer, Tanzimat Edebiyatı, p. 270).

³⁶ Ahmet Midhat, Menfa (Istanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1876), p. 6.

³⁵ This couplet, by Nigar Hanım, was inscribed on Midhat's tombstone (Tuncer, Tanzimat Edebiyatı, p. 273).

³⁴ Jean Greisch, ‘Testimony and attestation,’ in: Richard Kearney (Ed.) Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), p. 86.

³³ Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (Ed.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Trans.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 333.

³² Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist (Ed.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Trans.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 271–272.

³¹ Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , Michael Holquist (Ed.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Trans.) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 428.

³⁰ Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture , Richard Nice (Trans.) (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977), pp. 30–32.

²⁹ Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative identity,’ in: David Wood (Ed.) On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 188.

²⁸ Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrative identity,’ in: David Wood (Ed.) On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 198.

²⁷ Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , I, Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer (Trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 52.

²⁶ Ahmet Midhat, Müşahedat (Istanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1891), p. 5.

²⁵ The Turkish writers of the late nineteenth century often did not make any distinction between the two (Evin, Origins, p. 98). Midhat was no exception.

²⁴ Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another , Kathleen Blamey (Trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 21.

²³ Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6. Although recently authors such as Bahriye Çeri (‘Orhan Okay ile Ahmet Midhat Üzerine …’), Orhan Okay (Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında Ahmet Midhat Efendi) and Jale Parla (‘Karnaval Sürüyor …,’ Tarih ve Toplum, 34(203) (2000), pp. 266–270) have considered Ahmet Midhat as the ideal representative of the Tanzimat literature, until the last decade the more politically oriented authors of Tanzimat literature—who preferred to write for the elites—were considered to be more significant.

²² Findley, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe,’ p. 19.

²¹ Carter V. Findley, Ahmet Midhat Efendi Avrupa'da (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1999), p. v.

²⁰ Şerif Mardin, ‘Super Westernization in urban life in the Ottoman Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,’ in: Peter Benedict, Erol Tümertekin & Fatma Mansur (Eds) Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 430.

¹⁹ Şerif Mardin, ‘Super Westernization in urban life in the Ottoman Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,’ in: Peter Benedict, Erol Tümertekin & Fatma Mansur (Eds) Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 403.

¹⁸ Findley, ‘Knowledge and Education,’ p. 140.

¹⁷ Hayati Baki, Tanzimat Edebiyatında Roman ve İnsan (Ankara: Promete Yayınları, 1993), pp. 17–18; Nihat Özön & A. Kabacalı, Türkçe'de Roman (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1985), pp. 111–112.

¹⁶ Şerif Mardin, ‘European culture and the development of modern Turkey,’ in: Ahmet Evin & Geoffrey R. Denton (Eds) Turkey and the European Community (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1990), p. 17.

¹⁵ For a general analysis of the changing intellectual vistas of different groups within the Ottoman Empire see Carter V. Findley, ‘Knowledge and education,’ in: Cyril E. Black & L. Carl Brown (Eds) Moderniazation in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire and its Afro-Asian Successors (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1992).

¹⁴ The novel, as a form, did not evolve as a consequence of economic and historical developments in the Ottoman Empire. Between 1859 and 1868 a very limited number of translations that included novels as well as some poetry and philosophical texts were published in Istanbul, yet their influence on the Ottoman literature is considered to be insignificant. See further Bahriye Çeri, ‘Orhan Okay ile Ahmet Midhat Üzerine …,’ Tarih ve Toplum, 34(203) (2000), p. 255.

¹³ Orhan Okay, Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında Ahmet Midhat Efendi (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1991), p. 408.

¹² Ahmet Kabaklı, Türk Edebiyatı (Istanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1968); Seyit Kemal Karaalioğlu, Resimli Motifli Türk Edebiyatı: Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete (Istanbul: İnkılap ve Aka Kitabevleri, 1973); Ahmet Ö. Evin, Origins and Developments of the Turkish Novel (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983); Hüseyin Tuncer, Tanzimat Edebiyatı, Arayışlar Devri Türk Edebiyatı, vol. I. (İzmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1992).

¹¹ See, for example, Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); Findley, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe’; and Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

¹⁰ Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism,’ American Historical Review , 107(3) (2002), pp. 768–796.

⁹ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 31–39.

⁸ Carter V. Findley, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmet Midhat meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,’ American Historical Review, 103(1) (1998), pp. 18–19.

⁷ Carter V. Findley, ‘An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmet Midhat meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,’ American Historical Review, 103(1) (1998), pp. 15–49.

⁶ Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, pp. 5–17.

⁵ Prakash, Another Reason.

⁴ Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

³ Patrick Wolfe suggests focusing on the concept of ‘social formation’ in the case of the settler colonies of Australia, which ‘enables us to specify material conditions that favor the currency of particular colonial conditions’; see his ‘History and imperialism: a century of theory from Marx to postcolonialism,’ American Historical Review, 102 (1997), p. 419.

² For an elaborate discussion of this see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

¹ In their article ‘Beyond “identity”,’ Roger Brubaker and Frederick Cooper aptly point out the confusing nature of the term ‘identity’ as it is used in the social sciences and humanities; their article is in Theory and Society, 29(1) (2000), pp. 1–47.