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CHapter 6 Mustafa keMal atatÜrk and MehMed the Conqueror: negotiating a national historiCal narrative All of a sudden the entire world is carefully noting with surprise, envy, and appreciation your military prowess and iron character. For as long as human communities have been nations, history—which began with you—has recorded as its most glorious moments of the world’s story the times when you established dominion over Asia, Europe, and Africa. You continue to perpetuate your entire history in these great countries, where you wandered on the backs of horses, with steps that cannot be erased. Even at the most difficult moments you forced those enemies bent on destroying you to accept the Turks’ power with awe. Today your heroics, produced by self-sacrifice almost unequaled in history, for the sake of humanity, virtue, and freedom, have proven to friend and foe alike that the Turkish strength cannot be defeated. The children of Genghis Khan, Attila, Timur, and Atatürk are demonstrating their enthusiasm and willingness to write in world history, personally and as a nation, a new triumph, to keep burning that torch of the glorious history of their forefathers. yenIyoL (antakya), deCeMber 9, 1950 Just as our children visit Atatürk’s tomb, so too they will visit the tomb of Fatih Sultan Mehmed. tahsin banoğlu, Minister of eduCation, MarCh 1, 1950 after tHe turkisH suCCess at Kunu-ri in Korea in November– December 1950 the Antakya daily Yeniyol reminded readers that the cost of participating in the Korean War was not without reward. Not only did the war offer Turkey the opportunity to resolve its ambiguous relationship with the West in the context of the emerging Cold War; but, understood within the framework of their nation’s glorious history , Turkish heroism in Korea once again affirmed the continued im- 174 how happy to Call oneself a turk portance of the Turkish nation to world history. Just as popular identification with that nation was predicated upon an appreciation of its present place in the world, so too it was intimately related to popular awareness of their nation’s past. This was a past of which they could be justly proud. Individual and collective identities derive not only from establishing the self as distinct from “others” but also from a need to understand the present in terms of the past: identity must have a history. A sense of identity is intimately connected to a projection of current difference over time.1 Mustafa Kemal’s adopted daughter, Afet Inan, recalled after his death that he had set out to create a history for the Turkish nation in response to the evident prejudice against the “Turk” then current in Europe.2 It was necessary to claim a distant past far greater than the recent past from which the new Turkey had broken away: thus it was essential not only to do away with Ottoman Islamic institutions but to produce a narrative justifying Turkey’s place in the new world order that did not hearken back to images such as the “Sick Man of Europe,” “Oriental Despotism,” or the persecution of Christian minorities. The result was a nationalist narrative that cast the modern Turkish nation as a primordial and eternal nation predestined for greatness ; at the same time, this narrative downplayed, even denigrated, the lengthy but relatively recent history of the Ottoman Empire. Ironically, Mustafa Kemal hoped to instill in the people a national identity by bestowing on the nation a glorious but distant legacy while downplaying the very history with which they themselves were familiar by virtue of their own lived experiences. Inscribing a nation’s history, however, is not so easy: nationalist narratives cannot negate lived memory. Instead the two must be brought together to forge an inclusive narrative of the nation’s past that includes elements of each: the nationalist must give way to the national. In the case of Turkey, this involved the merging of the Kemalist historical narrative—established during the single-party period—with a popular wish to recognize the importance to the present of the Ottoman past. Again the new national print culture that emerged in the decade after 1945 was integral to the process while at the same time bearing witness to it after the fact. The theatre of the nation to which its pages testify included not only vital debate concerning the efficacy of laiklik and the place of Islam in Turkey as well as a concern with defining Turkey...

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