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NAMIK KEMAL: OTTOMAN HISTORY Title: Osmanlı Tarihi (Ottoman History) Originally published: Istanbul, Mahmud Bey Press, 1910 Language: Ottoman Turkish The original Ottoman text was used for the translation provided in this volume (pp. 1–49). Osmanlı Tarihi was republished in modernized Turkish form in 1971 by Hürriyet Yayınları, Istanbul. About the author Namık Kemal [1840, Tekirdağ (Rumelia) – 1888, Chios (Tur. Sakız)]: journalist, writer and bureaucrat. The son of the court astrologist, Namık Kemal received a thorough education in traditional Islamic studies and was exposed to Islamic mysticism as well as popular poetry. He also travelled extensively in the early years of his life. In 1858, he joined the Translation Bureau of the foreign ministry, a seedbed of the most progressive minds of the Tanzimat, where he learned French. At this period, he also came into contact with romantic French literature, Enlightenment political philosophy and social sciences. In 1862, Namık Kemal started writing in the Tasvir-i Efkar (Account of Opinions), which was among the earliest non-official Turkish newspapers published by the eminent intellectual İbrahim Şinasi. He soon became the intellectual figurehead of the first (yet loosely organized) modern political opposition , the Young Ottoman movement in the 1860s. He fled to Europe in 1867, where he edited the newspaper entitled Hürriyet (Liberty) which acted as an organ of the Young Ottoman opposition. Namık Kemal returned to Istanbul in 1870, but was exiled to Cyprus in 1873. In 1876, following the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz by a military coup, he was recalled to help draw up the first Ottoman constitution. Yet, shortly after the promulgation of the 1876 constitution, the new sultan, Abdülhamid II, banished him again, this time to the island of Lesbos. He served as governor in Lesbos, Rhodes and Chios until his death in 1888. Namık Kemal’s career reflects the transformation of a believer in Enlightenment political ideals into a fiery romantic nationalist. While his initial orientation was towards grounding a theory of natural rights and representative political institutions in Islam, through the 1870s and 1880s he was fully engaged in forging a Muslim Ottoman identity through works of history and biographies of old heroes. A prolific writer, Kemal produced works in almost all genres of literature, including novels and plays that were amongst the first of their kind in Turkish. He was a revolutionary figure in the development of Turkish prose, going far beyond his precursors in using the vernacular language, and writing NAMIK KEMAL: OTTOMAN HISTORY 95 with a powerful style devoid of the circumlocutions of nineteenth-century written Turkish. Main works: Devr-i İstila [Age of Invasion] (1867); İntibah [Awakening] (1873); Vatan yahud Silistre [Fatherland, or Silistra] (1873); Kanije (1874); Gülnihal (1875); Cezmi (1880); Celaleddin Harzemşah (1881); Tahrib-i Harabat [Destruction of debris ] (1886); Osmanlı Tarihi [Ottoman history] (1910); Renan Müdafaanamesi [Reply to Renan] (1910). Context While drafting his major work on Ottoman history, the Osmanlı Tarihi, the Young Ottoman apostle Namık Kemal revealed in a letter to one of his friends that his current intellectual preoccupation was “not literature itself but investigation,” through which, he claimed, he was “reconstituting Ottoman history.” Indeed the period known as the Tanzimat witnessed a gradual transformation in the Ottoman practice of history writing whereby the novel standards of ‘objectivity’ and documentary accuracy were eagerly espoused by a new generation of Ottoman authors. In fact, the task of “reconstituting” Ottoman history to which Namık Kemal alluded not only pertained to the novel investigative procedures he claimed to have observed himself, but also to an altogether new role assigned to the discipline of history. With the advent of modern historiography, the predominantly dynastic framework of Ottoman history was expanded to fit the new demands of the Tanzimat’s peculiar ideology of ‘dynastic nationalism.’ The new historical narrative, nurtured above all by the proliferation of textbooks prepared for the new secular institutions of learning, helped define and legitimize the idea of a continuous and progressive Ottoman nationhood in history whose terms of collective identity were, nevertheless, generated and safeguarded under the infallible dominance of the dynastic entity. Namık Kemal’s Ottoman History reveals the genuine concern of Late Ottoman historians with the novel comparative and analytical perspectives developed by their European counterparts. Kemal’s original plan was to supplement his major historical work with a prolegomena that would stand as a separate volume, entitled Roma Tarihi (Roman history). This study was intended to...

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