The Ottoman Empire from Present to Past: Memory and Ideology in Turkey and the Arab World

The Ottoman Empire died in 1923 with the disestablishment of the sultanate and the proclamation of a new Turkish republic. For some years the empire had led merely a shadow existence. Defeated in World War I, shorn of its sovereignty, occupied by foreign armies, wracked by civil war, torn by ethnic conflict, and stained by state-led massacres of Armenian citizens, the empire ended badly and was little mourned. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, one could accurately have said that the empire was dead to begin with. There was no doubt about that.

But as the articles in this collection reveal, the death of the empire involved a creative rupture. This rupture involved both a dramatic break from each successor state's imperial past as well as a continual reference to it, through successive iterations of what the Ottoman legacy could or should mean.

Initially, elites in the Ottoman successor states wasted little time disowning the memory of the multinational state that they once had served. Political leaders, educators, and governments promoted ethnic nationalist ideologies (especially Turkish and Arab) as new, modern sources of political legitimacy. The Ottoman past, packaged as a story of political oppression, cultural stagnation, and long military decline, served mainly as a foil for the nationalist narrative, as an antithesis to the nation's glorious past and its imminent rebirth.

Yet so many centuries of history could not easily be tucked away. Nationalist narratives were, themselves, based on selective remembering and on wholesale suppression or forgetting. At moments of national crisis, or during episodes of acute power struggles within successor states, the Ottoman past broke its silence. Sometimes this past was invoked (negatively) as a "ghost" haunting the present, and other times as a rich reservoir of historical experience. Either way, the empire and its legacy proved not to be as dead as once imagined.¹

The articles collected here highlight a number of themes in understandings and evaluations of the Ottoman past from some of the empire's successor states along the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores, areas conventionally lumped together as part of the "Islamic World." Yet as these contributions demonstrate, they are areas that exhibit a fascinating diversity of issues and impasses associated with the Ottoman past. Contributors discuss contemporary and subsequent writers' and opinion makers' responses to and attitudes toward Ottoman rule in the lands of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. What emerges in the aggregate is a complex picture, lending itself neither to nationalist triumphalism nor to escapist nostalgia. These multivalent readings of the Ottoman experience point to the relevance of this multinational or nonnational past for a critical understanding of the subsequent colonial period and of present-day ideological movements and nation-states. Whatever is deemed or understood to be "Ottoman" continually evolves, is subjective, and is contextually dependent on who is authoring this understanding of history at any given moment. As these articles demonstrate, an "Ottoman legacy" is actually produced in very different and sometimes in totally opposing ways.

Historical Narrative and Memory as "Elite Projects"

A recurrent theme in these articles is that individuals or groups constructed the Ottoman legacy in particular ways to sustain the specific social interests they represented. North African and Egyptian historians, Lebanese ideologues, displaced Turkish writers, and advocates of different political agendas in Istanbul all have represented the Ottoman Empire in a manner that reflects upper-class worldviews and social positions. The extent to which elite memories or assessments of the Ottoman Empire reflected or molded popular opinion is an unsolved question. Notably missing in the discussions here—as well as in the "Ottoman memories" literature more generally—is an examination of how the Ottoman legacy was assessed "from below." For now, it is clear that the ways in which writers have dealt with Ottoman reality or memory are embedded in power relations and in particular elite worldviews, usually linked to the propagation of social or political agendas. This theme in the articles thus exposes the ways in which the Ottoman imperial past does...