TC EGE ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ İngiliz Dili ve [PDF]

T.C. EGE ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı

TURKEY AND TURKS IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING FROM 1850 TO THE PRESENT

DOKTORA TEZİ

Atalay GÜNDÜZ

DANIŞMANI : Doç. Dr. Dilek DİRENÇ

İZMİR-2007

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: Background 1.1. A Brief History of British Travel Writing ………………………………………….. 23 1.2. Turkish Westernization and Modernization as a Quest for the Western Writers…..... 35 CHAPTER 2: “The Politics of Representation” 2.1.

Why

should

travel

accounts

be

taken

seriously,

examined

and

questioned? …………………………………………………………………………...… 41 2.2. Raj Revivalism …………………………………………………………………..… 49 2.3. Orientalism and Empire: Discourse and Power ………………………………….... 53

2.4. Four Principle Orientalist Dogmas ………………………………………………..... 57 2.4.1. The Politics of Difference: “Inferior East,” “Superior West”

or “La Mission

Civilisatrice” …………………………………………………………………………….. 59 2.4.2. The Orientalist Textual Attitude ………………………………………………… 64 2.4.3. “The Eternal and Uniform Orient, Incapable of Defining Itself” ……………….. 67 2.4.4. “The Other” as the Threat: Clash of Civilizations or Definitions? …………….. .. 67 CHAPTER 3: Representations of Turkey in American and English Travel Writing 3.1. Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1991) as a Touchstone ……………..……. 75 3.2. Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984): “Politics of Not Belonging” ………. 82

3.2.1. Journey to Kars as a “Raj Revivalist” Account ………………………………... 85 3.2.2. Stereotyping ……..……………………………………………………………… 87 3.2.3. Discourse of Primitivism: Nomadic Turks …………………………….…….…. 96 3.2.4. Asiatic Turks: The Other of the European Identity …………………………...... 99 3.2.5. Inter-textuality: Victorian Travelers …………………………………………… 103 3.2.6. Turks as a Threat to Europe …………………………………………………... 106 3.2.7. Christianity v. Islam …………………………………………………………... 112 3.3. Eric Lawlor. Looking for Osman ………………………………………………. 118 3.3.1. Osman the Historical Turk ……………………………………………………. 119 3.3.2. Selim the Imposter: A Representative of Turkish Modernization ……………. 125 3.3.3. Contesting Atatürk’s Heresy: Ercuman as a Representative of the Revival or the Return of Islam in Turkey ……………………………………………………………. 129 3.3.4. The Crescent and the Cross …………………………………………………… 130 3.3.5. Drawing “Symbolic Boundaries”: Muslim Women Depicted as a Strategy of Dissociation …………………………………………………………………………. 134 3.3.6. Lawlor’s Love for Meltem and his Textual Attitude ………………………….. 144 3.3.7. Touts and Degenerate Turks ………………………………………………….. 146 3.3.8. Turkish Fatalism ……………………………………………………………… 148 3.4. A Complex Rewriting of Turkish Modernization: A Fez of the Heart by Jeremy Seal ………………………………………………………………………………………… 151 3.4.1. Intertextuality …………………………………………………………………. 152

3.4.2. Stereotyping and Constructions of the Other as “Strategies of Symbolic Containment and Risk” ……………………………………………………………………………… 169 3.4.3. Turkey as a Threat: The Third Vienna Siege ………………………………..…. 173 3.4.4. Forging a Nation and National Character: Imposed Change ………………..…. 181 3.4.5. Rise of Turkish Nationalism: End of Cosmopolitanism ……………………..… 190 3.4.6. Shallow Change: What Turks Understand from Modernism ……………..…… 196 3.4.7. The Politics of Denigration …………………………………………………..…. 199 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….... 205 Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………….… 225 Works Consulted ………………………………………………………………….…. 238 Background ……………………………………………………………………...….. 244 Özet …………………………………………………………………………………… 245 Abstract …………………………………………………………………………….. .. 246

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Introduction In our age, the World Wide Web, satellite TVs and telephones connect us to each other with a synchronization that has never existed in the world before. Fast trains and jets travel distances at a speed which could not be dreamed of a century ago; our world is rapidly becoming a “global village.” Within this small world millions of people move from one country to another, and millions of others work and study in countries where they were not born. Today, people enjoy such a diversity of possibilities that one may order Indian food from the local restaurant, read English editions of Turkish papers, watch the English Premier League, learn Japanese and do all these without ever leaving one’s living room. We may take all these things for granted and assume that it has always been so, whereas societies used to have less interaction in the past. For example, it took Europeans centuries to learn and use Chinese inventions such as gunpowder, paper and printing. Although compass was used in China as early as the eleventh century, it was only in the fourteenth century that the European navigators started to use it.1 Travel was also much slower than it is today. Compared to the four hour-flight on Turkish Airlines or British Airways, the organ maker Thomas Dallam’s 1599 six-month voyage from London to İstanbul reveals the extent of change in terms of transportation technology. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century İstanbul was hard to reach. In August 1834 Alexander William Kinglake2 traveled on horseback from Belgrade to İstanbul in fifteen days. Yet with the completion of the railtrack between Paris and İstanbul in 1889, the trip from London was only four days. Thus more and more Europeans could travel to Turkey and diminish the authority of those who previously held the privilege of being one of the few who had been in the Ottoman lands. 1 2

. The author of the much acclaimed travel book Eothen (1844).

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Today, in a world moving with such a speed and with such easy access to information about different cultures, one may presume that binary oppositions like the West-East, Christendom-Islam, and Europe-Asia would not predominate the field of intercultural representations. Moreover, one may presuppose that travel writers represent the countries they have visited without falling into the pitfalls of the centuries-old prejudices and preconceptions. Although we take it for granted that human learning and understanding of other cultures get “better,” more “refined” and politically more correct by time, unfortunately, this is hardly the case (Said, Orientalism 202). In his “The Historical Resilience of Primary Stereotypes: Core Images of the Muslim Other” (1997), Karim H. Karim traces back the binary oppositions like the WestEast and civilized-barbarian. Karim states that the process of othering the Easterners started as early as the fourth century BC with Aristotle. The eleventh century marked the scholastic depictions of the Muslims in Christendom since they posed a great threat to the existence and survival of Christianity in Spain and some parts of Italy and France.3 In that context, “Easterners were thought as everything that the Self was not” (Karim 160).Despite the fact that negative notions about the East existed long before the rise of Islam, “European reactions to this religion from the seventh century onward certainly have accentuated the repertoire of negative imagery about the Orient” (160). Travel writing is a rich source which demonstrates the predominant discourses of their times. George Sandys was one of the first English travelers to the Ottoman Empire. The similarity between his discourse and Pope Urban II’s call for the first Crusade reveals 3

In his Cultures in Conflict Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery (1995), Bernard Lewis states that from its emergence in the seventh century till the end of the seventeenth century Islamic armies threatened the sovereignty and independence of the European lands with Christian majorities. According to Lewis, Islam was not only a political and military but also a religious threat. Lewis maintains that among the first converts to Islam Christians had a notable share. To be able to stop this current the Christian intelligentsia had to construct a counter-discourse against Islam.

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how travel writers rely on the “repertoire of negative imagery about the Orient.” In his, A Relation of a Journey Begun Anno Domini 1610 (1615), Sandys gives us a typical example of the discourse of his time. He describes the Ottoman lands in these words: . . . receptacle of wild beasts, of theeues, and murderers; large territories dispeopled, or thinly inhabited; goodly cities made desolate; sumptuous buildings become ruines; glorious Temples either subuerted, or prostituted to impietie; true religion discountenanced and oppressed; all nobility extinguished; no light of learning permitted, nor Vertue cherished . . . . (qtd. in Haynes 21) Sandys sees the Ottoman rule as a force which destroys civilizations. It will be appropriate here to reflect on how the same barbarian, non-civilized and destructive stereotype has recurred through history since the beginning of the Crusades. When we read Sandys’s remarks on Turks with that of the discourse of the Crusaders we come across a striking similarity between these two representations.4 In 1095, Pope Urban II called for the first Crusade with these words: From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth and has -repeatedly been brought to our ears; namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God, a generation that set not their heart aright and whose spirit was not steadfast with God, violently invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part have they

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Also interesting to find a similar discourse in Glazebrook’s account: “Everything that the educated European valued ⎯ all that his civilization was based upon or had produced ⎯ was regarded by the impassive Turk with indifference, and was allowed to become a heap of ruins” (233).

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have killed by cruel tortures. They have either destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of their own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness. . . . The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and has been deprived of territory so vast in extent that it could be traversed in two months’ time. This quotation shows us how Sandys’ discourse had its roots in a tradition of more than five hundred years. Philip Glazebrook’s, Eric Lawlor’s and Jeremy Seal’s travel accounts reveal that the same argument is still in currency. Furthermore, it is not only the travel writers who use such a discourse, people who lhold posts which should require more responsibility do also concur with it. In spite of all the outrage and fervent demonstrations all around Europe against the Danish cartoons5 which were published in December 2005; on 12 September 2006, the present Pope made a speech implying that Islam is a religion of violence and “compulsion.” Quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel II (1391-1425), the Pope argues that, contrary to Christian faith which prioritizes reason and humanism, Islam attributes no importance to these values: Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the “infidels”, he [Manuel II] addresses

5

For the cartoons see . This cartoon from D. Kennedy titled “Religion of Peace” is a typical example representing Islam and Muslims as the sources of violence:

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his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The resemblance between Urban II’s and Benedict XVI’s speeches demonstrates how the instituitions preserve certain ways of talking about a subject in such precision. Both speeches, in spite of the 911 years that had passed between, refer to the violence of Islam and the confrontation between Islam and the Greek Byzantines. They also associate Muslims with “evil and inhuman” characteristics. Benedict elaborates on this quotation and argues that: The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. ”God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably . . . is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . . .” Considering the fact that, the “clash of civilizations” or the constructed Islam-West dichotomy is the predominant paradigm of our time we would expect that the Pope would make a call for peace overlooking the past conflicts and emphasizing the common features. In fact, his speech highlights the difference between Islam and what makes the Cristian

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faith superior to Islam. According to Benedict XVI, behind all the bloodshed between the Muslims and the Christians, it has always been the Muslim “sword” which is responsible. He concludes his argument with these words: The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. The only difference between Urban II’s and Benedict XVI’s speech is that while the first one is a call for a military campaign against the “infidel” the latter one is ironically a call for dialogue. It is difficult to grasp what kind of a “dialogue” Benedict XVI desires between cultures. He does not openly declare who his partners in the dialogue of cultures are but the previous paragraph makes it explicit that Islam is the entity that the Pope defines and constructs the Christian identity against. Thus the Biblical faith becomes what Islam is not. His quotation from Manuel II is also meaningful here. The Pope does not distantiate himself from Manuel II’s argument. In fact, he uses it as an evidence to support his own argument. It is also worth noting here how the Pope assumes an air of superiority over Islam and criticize it for being violent and unreasonable. Furthermore, his words imply that the West which rely on reason and logos are open to dialogue and have no

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problem with modernity but expects others (Muslims) to learn how to be reasonable. Supposing that these are discussions among the religious leaders (thus do not represent the civil society), we may expect that we will come across more secular representations free from prejudices and bias. Yet Karim notes that the rise of secularism in the West did not erase these prejudices at all; they “have remained extant in collective cultural memories” (163). Claude Farrere made a similar observation in 1925: “Turkey, patriarchal in its naïve and smiling simplicity, would amaze our benighted romantics; it would astonish many among us who have lost their Christian faith, but have preserved their anti-muslim prejudice” (qtd. in Pope and Pope 1).6 Talking of that same “anti-muslim prejudice,” Nicole and Hugh Pope point out the fact that it took them a long time to “learn to overcome our [their] own cultural and political prejudices about the Turks, which although not realizing at the time, we [they] had brought with us [them] as a part of the baggage of our [their] Western education” (3). Nicole and Hugh Pope’s reflection reveals how invisible and common sensical are the collection of prejudices for the individual Westerners who heve been raised not in the age of Crusades but in an age of secular democracies. Antonio Gramsci’s observation on how ideological positions are formed gives us a very useful insight in understanding this phenomenon: For his own conception of the world a man always belongs to a certain grouping, and precisely to that of all the social elements who share the same ways of thinking and working. He is a conformist to some conformity, he is always man-mass or man-collective. The question is this: of what historical type is the conformity, the man-mass, of which he is a part? (58-59) 6

Keeping in mind that Turkey was considered to be the leader of the Islamic world because of the Ottoman sultans’ title of Caliph which they held for more than four centuries. Jane Hwang Degenhardt maintains that on the Elizabethan stage “turning Turk” meant converting to Islam (3). Thus we can conclude that Muslim and Turk were used interchangeably for a long time in the West.

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As conformity determines people’s perceptions of the world, it is crucial to trace back to what conformity our arguments belong. As far as representations of Turks or Muslims are concerned we see that these hegemonic perceptions of the East or Islam have been used to legitimize wars and campaigns.7 Edward W. Said is the leading scholar who has drawn our attention to the close connection between the Orientalist discourse and the way the imperialist powers have used it. Said notes that Islam plays an important role in keeping the European identity intact and justifying for their imperial operations in the Islamic lands, the last of two being Afghanistan and Iraq. Said writes “where Islam was concerned, European fear, if not always respect, was in order” (Orientalism 59). He also adds that “for Europe Islam was a lasting trauma” (59) and still is. Louis Wann’s “The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama” (1915) demonstrates what kind of a trauma the Ottoman Empire created in sixteenth-century England. Wann reveals how the Turks were represented as the villains as early as Elizabethan times. The number of the Turkish characters on the Elizabethan stage surpasses the number of Arabic, Persian or characters of other ethnic origins: Turks were represented in 31, Westerners in 27, Moors in 18, Eastern Christians in 12, Tartars in 5, Persians in 8, Jews in 6, Arabs in 4 and Egyptians in 4 plays (439). Wann’s findings clearly suggest that Turks and other Muslim nations were the constitutive Others of not only England but also the European identity. Invoking the towering figures of Western literature, Stephen Kinzer remarks the commonsensicalness of representing Turks as “the other”: “Europeans considered the Ottomans cruel sinners even after the tide of history began to turn against them. ‘I shall always hate the Turks’, Voltaire wrote . . . ‘What wretched barbarians!’ Jane Austen mused . . . ‘the 7

One recent example of this reasoning can be found in the “clash of civilizations” paradigm Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington defined, or prescribed, in the early nineties and engendered (or rather created a pretext for) “the global war between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ previously scripted as that between capitalism and communism . . . as that between the Christian and Islamic societies” (Karim 165).

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turban’d Turk who scorns the world’” (5). However, Kinzer also notes that the Turkish image in Europe is far from being uniform. He cites those who have very different opinions about Turks. He gives Lady Montagu, whose letters constructed a very positive image of Turkey and Turks in her audience, as an example (6). Another traveler, French philosopher Jean Bodin, writes about the religious tolerance at the Ottoman court (6). Benjamin Disraeli’s words about Turkey are quite positive and draw an admirable picture of the superior lifestyle of Turkish people. Disraeli even suggests that, given the choice, he would prefer the “simple” Turkish life rather than the western-lifestyle (7). The examples above reveal that Western representations of Turkey are far from being homogeneous. As there are writers who paint Turkey with darkest colours possible, there are also those who use brighter colours. The details and examples travel writers use in their travelogues to represent Turkey give us quite a rich material to discuss the ongoing contestation. Especially, the synchronic and diachronic patterns that emerge in this process are significant. These patterns reveal the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discursive practices in their cultures. The historical stretch this study aims to cover provides us with an opportunity to mark these discourses in their historicism. Edward W. Said’s groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978) plays a crucial role in grasping the patterns of these discourses. Many of the cultural assumptions and preconceptions analyzed by Said can also be detected in modern travel writing. As Said persuasively argues, despite the belief that there is always a progression with regard to representation of other cultures, we see that Orientalism’s “scope as much as its institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present” (44). When we read modern travel writing we see that there is a strong discursive affiliation8 in these accounts 8

“Coherence” in in George Canguilhem’s terms; “adjacency” in Said’s; and “family resemblance” in Noam

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with that of Pope Urban II’s 1095 call for the first Crusade, Wann’s and Degenhardt’s observations on the Elizabethan drama regarding the representations of Turks and Kinzer’s examples from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western writers’ discourses. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, in their “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002), pinpoint Said’s Orientalism as an extremely significant development in the history of the study of travel writing. According to Hulme andYoungs Orientalism was the first work of contemporary criticism to take travel writing as a major part of its corpus, seeing it as a body of work which offered particular insight into the operation of colonial discourses. Scholars working in the wake of Orientalism have begun to scrutinise relationships of culture and power found in the settings, encounters, and representations of travel texts. (8) Affirming Said’s significant contributions to the study of travel writing, Mary Baine Campbell adds that Orientalism has “initiated for the English reading public an epistomological shift that would transform the study of culture and cultures” (265). In his “Between Orientalism and Historicism,” Aijaz Ahmad draws our attention to the fact that Said=s Orientalism has inspired a significant number of scholarly works (294). A. L. Macfie calls this influence an “explosion of interest in the intercultural relations of East and West, Orient and Occident, Europe and Asia” (Orientalism 148).9 As Michael Kowalewski rightly observes in his editorial “Introduction” to Temperamental Journeys: Chomsky’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (qtd. in Bove 55). 9 Some of the major works which analyse “intercultural relations” following Said=s example are Ronald Inden’s Imagining India (1990), Richard King=s Orientalism and Religion (1990), Louis Mary Pratt=s Imperial Eyes (1992), Rana Kabbani’s Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (1994) and J.J. Clerk=s Oriental Enlightenment (1997).

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Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel (1992), just like an Orientalist, a travel writer is a scholar who studies “the habits and customs and dimensions of other peoples’ lives and surroundings . . . flora, topography, climate, animal and insect life, foodstuffs, and local sexual customs” (5). Therefore Said’s analysis on Orientalism is relevant to this study because his analytical approach can be applied to travel writing consistently. Owing to the fact that representation, discourse and stereotyping are the three most important concepts in Said’s Orientalism it will be worthwhile giving a brief description of these terms and how they have been used in this study.10 The concept of representation plays a crucial role as a starting point in Said’s work. In his discussion of Orientalism as a discourse, Said draws heavily on Nietzsche’s conceptualization of language and its strength of representing the truth as it is. What Friedrich Nietzsche suggests in his “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873), is very helpful in understanding the relation between language and reality. Nietzsche argues that meaning and reality are constructed to serve our ends. For him, as long as human beings rely on words to relate the reality “they will for ever exchange illusions for truth” (876). According to Nietzsche, a word is just Athe copy of stimulation in sounds” (876). He elaborates his idea: The “thing in itself” (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp. . . . He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express 10

Among the secondary theoretical works which contribute to the discussion are Rana Kabbani’s Europe’s Myths of Orient (1986), Sara Mills’s Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (1991), H. Karim Karim’s “The Historical Resilience of Primary Stereotypes: Core Images of the Muslim Other” (1997), Stephen Harold Riggins’s “The Rhetoric of Othering” (1997), Reinhold Schiffer’s Oriental Panorama :British Travellers in Nineteenth Century Turkey (1999), Michael Pickering’s Stereotyping: Politics of Representation (2001) and Ussama Makdisi’s “Mapping the Orient: Non-Western Modernization, Imperialism, and the End of Romanticism” (2003).

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them he avails himself of the boldest metaphors. The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere. (877) In that sense, writing becomes a third metaphor. Hence, any kind of writing is three times away from the the thing in itself. Said derives his conceptual frame for the relation between discourse and power from Nietzschean sense of language. He maintains that “in any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend on the Orient as such” (Orientalism 21). Since anything written on the Orient is bound to language, Orientalism does nothing but express Orientalists’ notion of what their discourse about the Orient is, not the real Orient.11 Yet, for him, the European representations of the Orient are not coincidental, but have their motivations in the workings of the imperialist discourse. For Said, the writer representing the East in his work has to assume a certain “strategy” to deal with the problematics such as “how to get hold of it [the Orient], how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions.” (20) Therefore, on one hand, the writer makes preferences on “the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes,

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Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought and vision that I have been calling Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism: anyone employing Orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. Rhetorically speaking, Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative: to use its vocabulary is to engage in the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts. Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge. (Orientalism 72)

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motifs that circulate in his text—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally representing it or speaking in its behalf” (20). On the other hand, he does not construct his narrative in an intellectual vacuum where he is totally independent, he has to “assume some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and he relies” (20). Doing that “each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with instituitions, with the Orient itself” (20). Following Said’s example, this study which has mainly focused Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s travelogues aims to demonstrate “the ensemble of relationships between works” (20) using earlier travelogues and intercultural representations to trace back the inventory of narratives which influence the ways of writing on Turkey. Because travel writers are influenced by contemporary attitudes, popular prejudices and earlier travelers, they do not simply transcribe what they see into their accounts. They select and evaluate the reality and information they come across. In his Cultural Representations of China (1997), Shi-xu gives us a very useful explanation of the relation between travel writing and discourse. Shi-xu writes: Discourse is necessarily selective about reality. . . . Think of the approximately 7,500,000 shades of color that the human visual system can detect but the restricted number which discourse is used to express. Needless to say, social, cultural, institutional, linguistic, interactional factors all constrain the form of discourse. So what usually happens in everyday discursive activity is that people attend to certain aspects of reality and omit others. Thus, we may find under the general heading of selectivity such processes

as

transformation,

generalization,

particularization,

categorization, and classification. . . . From a different perspective, it may

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be asserted that there is no single absolute description of a reality; there are likely to be several possible, perhaps equally plausible, characterizations. (34) As in the example of millions of colours, the world is full of infinite numbers of details. Yet language draws limits to our perception of all these colours and details. Therefore, representation requires “attending to certain aspects of reality and omitting others.” In this context, categories are useful for us to understand the world, whereas this discursive selection, which involves “transformation, generalization, particularization, categorization, and classification” is not an arbitrary process but a “device in the ideological construction of social groups” (Pickering 1).But can we say that as long as we make sense of the world and people in terms of categories, there is no way to avoid stereotyping and one is most likely to be a victim of stereotyping or being stereotyped? Are stereotypes a natural outcome of human tendency to categorize? In his discussion of stereotyping, Pickering states that “thinking in relation to categories is a necessary way of organizing the world in our minds, creating mental maps for working out how we view the world and negotiating our ways through it in our everyday social relations and interactions” (2). Nevertheless, he insists on making a clear distinction between categories and stereotypes. Categories “are not fixed for all the time,” but “can be used flexibly and their designations can be disputed,” whereas stereotyping “attempts to deny any flexible thinking with categories” (3). He argues that stereotypes are derived from categories when they lose their flexibility and considered to be the facts. For Pickering, this inflexibility provides a certain comfort and political advantage as stereotyping guarantees and justifies the “existing relations of power” (3). Mary Louise Pratt draws our attention to a different aspect of stereotyping. While

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Pickering notes that stereotyping is a means of othering and dehumanizing, Pratt describes the process of othering under a different light stating that: The people to be othered are homogenized into a collective ‘they’, which is distilled even further into an iconic ‘he’ (the standardized adult male specimen). This abstracted ‘he’/’they’ is the subject of verbs in a timeless present tense, which characterizes anything ‘he’ is or does, not as a particular historical event but as an instance of a pregiven custom or trait. (qtd. in Mills 88) This othering through homogenization occurs incessantly in travel writing. Especially in the case of Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal, Turks are not homogenized only as a racial group, but they are also homogenized under the categories of “Asiatics,” “nomads,” “Muslims” etc. The tendency to rely on “pregiven customs and traits” leads us to question the dogmas that the Orieantalist discourse generates. Said maintains that there are certain beliefs which are taken for granted by all the Orientalists, which he calls “the Orientalist dogmas.” He addresses these predominant and naturalized assumptions under four headings: 1. Absolute and systematic difference between the West and the Orient. The West is rational, developed, humane, superior, while the Orient is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. 2. Abstractions about the Orient are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. 3. ‘The Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself’ (or speaking for itself: it must be interpreted). 4. The Orient is to be feared (‘Yellow Peril’, ‘Mongol hordes”) or to be

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controlled. (300-301) These four dogmas correlate with four important concepts discussed in this study. The first dogma has a strong relation with the concept “la mission civilisatrice” since the civilizing mission presupposes an uncivilized and inferior East which should be civilized and enlightened. The second dogma is closely related with “Raj Revivalism” as this longing for Empire assumes a rather selective textual attitude which constructs the myth of benevolent Empire while overlooking the experience of the colonized and what they lost in the process. The third dogma directly leads to the absolute denial of Turkish modernization because it presumes an “eternal and uniform” Orient which does not have the potential to change. The last dogma with its preconception of the East as a source of constant threat corresponds to “the Clash of Civilizations” paradigm. Though their priorities and emphasis vary, Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s travelogues share the following issues as their central themes: firstly, the confirmation of “The Clash of Civilizations”12; secondly, the “Raj Revivalist”13 tendencies; and finally their interest in Turkish Westernization. In these travelogues, Turkey is depicted as the Other of the European civilization and her difference is interpreted as a threat. Within this frame, all the relations between Europe and Turkey are read in terms of “clash.” The points of enmity and conflict are highlighted while examples of tolerance and alliances are suppressed. Thus Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts align with “the Clash of Civilizations” paradigm. Their common admiration for nineteenth-century British travelers marks their “Raj Revivalist” tendencies. As Salman Rushdie notes, there was a strong “Empire 12

This concept is discussed in detail starting from page 67 under the heading “’The Other’ as the Threat: Clash of Civilizations or Definitions?” 13 In her “Travel Writing within British Studies” (1999), Susan Bassnett describes this concept as “an expression of nostalgia for a lost era, for the end of Empire” (11). It is also discussed on page 36.

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Revivalism”, or borrowing Susan Bassnett’s words, “an expression of nostalgia for a lost era, for the end of Empire” (11) in Britain in the early 1980s. There was a boom in cultural productions which celebrated the Empire and represented it under a very positive light. Starting with Glazebrook, we witness an immense admiration for the agents of the Empire, such as Frederick Burnaby, Armenius Vambery and Edward Mitford. Along with the confirmation of the clash of civilizations paradigm and raj revivalist tendencies, Turkish Westernization is also one of the recurring issues in modern travel writing on Turkey. In his The Turkish Transformation: A Study of Social and Religious Development (1935), Henry Ellisha Allen notes that Turkish Westernization is “one of history’s most significant phenomena” (2) which has always been an interesting topic for the Western audience since the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. The question of whether all the Westernization efforts have made Turkey a European country has recently become a significant point of discussion because of Turkey’s application for full membership to the EU. Travel writing holds a special place in this argument as the genre holds a rather important advantage over novels and scholarly and historical accounts. With its claim to verity on one hand and its use of all the narrative techniques of fiction, travel writing can use the benefits of fiction and scholarly writing. In her “Travel Writing within British Studies” (1999), Susan Bassnett states that the popularity of travel accounts is a British phenomenon. She also puts forward the idea that travel writing as a genre relies heavily on stereotypes. Owing to the fact that the study of stereotypes is central to any form of area studies, travel writing is a rich field to explore. As Bassnett sees it, stereotypes rely upon a relationship between the insider and the “other.” Understanding the origins of such relationships and the ways in which stereotypes continue to dominate is vital in any form of intercultural work. According to Bassnett, the

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ways in which travel writers construct images of otherness for a particular readership at a given moment in time need to be mapped out and analyzed (12). She explains: A study of the historical antecedents of today’s travel writing takes us straight into the combined histories of literature on the one hand and society on the other hand. Travel texts provide an immediate way of accessing a great body of material that might otherwise be impossibly wide to cover. Significantly, a great many travelers deliberately follow the path of travelers from previous times, so there is strong sense of this kind of writing presenting itself as a kind of continuity. (13) Bassnett’s reflections on the intertextuality of travel writing give us an important insight into the most important common characteristic in Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s travelogues.14 Since travel writing as a genre forms its own traditions and conventions, the limits and restrains these impose on writers play a significant role in the formation of the modes of representation and the discourse. To trace back this continuity and the recurring discourses, in the first chapter of this study travel writing as a literary genre is introduced and a brief history of the British travel writing is addressed. In the second chapter, first of all, the politics of travel writing is discussed. The 14

Along with these three primary accounts, this study employs the following secondary sources as touchstones to mark the “continuity” in terms of Orientalist discourse and its counter-hegemonic discursive practices: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan : And Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 (1837), Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (1844), Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross, or Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel (1848), Arminius Vambery’s Travels in Central Asia (1864), Capt. Frederick Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877), Lucy Mary Jane Garnett’s Home Life in Turkey (1909), Marmaduke Pickthall’s With the Turk in Wartime (1914), J.A..Spender’s The Changing East (1926), Lino Linke’s Allah Dethroned (1937), Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond (1956), Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), Mary Lee Settle’s Blood Tie (1977), Brian Sewell’s South from Ephesus: An Escape from the Tyranny of Western Art, Fragments of Autobiography (1988), John Ash’s A Byzantine Journey (1995), Tim Kelsey’s Dervish (1995), Paul Theroux’ The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (1995), Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (2001), Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent and Star: Turkey between Two Worlds (2001), Tony Perrottet’s Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (2002) and Tom Brosnahan’s Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea (2005).

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central issue of why travel accounts should be taken seriously, examined, and challenged is argued. Then the “four Orientalist dogmas” are addressed and their significance is laid out. Among these four dogmas the (superior) West-East (inferior) paradigm is discussed and its politics of difference is related to the French concept of la mission civilisatrice, which is used as a justification for colonization of the non-Western world in the nineteenth century. The second Orientalist dogma which is the assumption of a textual attitude to the Orient is a selective attitude constructed on the myth of benevolent Empire. The presumption that there is an eternal and uniform Orient is the next dogma that Said points out. According to this assumption, as said observes, Orientals are not allowed to represent themselves since they can never grasp their own circumstances and constantly try to deceive the Westerners with false claims. We see that same tendency in Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts in their efforts to represent Turkey around the centralized question of whether or not Turkish Westernization has made Turkey a European country. In this representation we see that Turks are not allowed to define or represent themselves. As has been discussed earlier in the examples of the two popes, Sandys’ seventeenth century account and Kennedy’s cartoon, the last dogma shared by all the Orientalists is the tendency to see the Orient as a threat. This is read under the light of Samuel Huntington’s famous paradigm “Clash of Civilizations.” This dissertation does not aim to argue that travel writing is only “a vehicle for the expression of Eurocentric conceit or racist intolerance” (Porter 5). Mary Lee Settle’s balanced travelogue Turkish Reflections: A Biography of a Place (1991) testifies that travel writing can also be “an effort to overcome cultural distance through a protracted act of understanding” (5). The discussion of Settle’s book precedes the analysis of Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts. Unlike these writers, Settle does not locate

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her narrative in the Orientalist discourse. In the light of Said’s four principal Orientalist dogmas, Settle’s account forms a counter-discursive practice. First of all, she does not rely on age-old stereotypes in her representation of Turkey. Moreover, her account does not take the ineradicable difference between the Orient and the West as a starting point. Then instead of assuming the narrative voice of the nineteenth century English travelers who emphasize the distance of Turkish culture from that of the Western or European culture, she contests these presumptions and prejudices. Lastly, she does not construct her travelogue on the confrontations between Turks and the European nations or Muslims and Christians. The second account that is analysed in this chapter is Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984). The celebration of the nineteenth-century British travelers to Turkey marks the intertextuality and the Raj Revivalist attitude of Glazebrook’s account. His secondary concern, the ineradicable difference and the constant recalling of the conflicts in the past between Turkey and Europe, brings the “Clash of Civilizations” paradigm to the forefront. Unlike Lawlor’s and Seal’s travelogues, Turkish Westernization is only a minor issue in his work. His travels in the Balkan states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, which were once ruled by the Ottoman Empire, reveal that though these countries are divided from the Western Europe by the Iron Curtain (Glazebrook’s journey takes place in 1980), they have better grounds to claim themselves European.15 In Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993), we see that the central question is whether or not Turkish Westernization efforts have made Turkey a European country. Lawlor’s search for Osman, or the exotic Turkey, starts with a disappointment but ends in the writer’s victorious claim that Osman, the exotic Turk, has his extension in modern 15

Accepting the once Iron Curtain countries as members with less resistance than they have shown to Turkey the EU confirmed Glazebrook’s attitude.

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Turkey in every way and everywhere. Turks try in vain to persuade themselves and the Europeans that they have been Westernized, thus they deserve to be regarded as Europeans. Lawlor’s emphasis on the revival of Islam and his selective references to works like Eliot Warburton’s The Cross and Crescent (1848) and Frederick Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877) draw a picture in which Turkey can only be regarded as an impostor in her claims. Affirming Lawlor’s argument on the groundlessness of Turkish claims to European identity, Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995) is a complex rewriting of the Turkish Westernization efforts. Seal looks for the “fez,” which symbolizes “the death of the cosmopolitanism,” (Mango, “From Atatürk to Erbakan”).16 The way Seal represents Islam as a sign of non-belonging puts Seal’s alignment with Glazebrook’s discourse. As a consequence, we see that the “Clash of Civilizations” paradigm predominates Seal’s account. Finally, his affirmation of Glazebrook’s discourse and his attribution of a strong authority to the nineteenth-century British travelers foreground his nostalgia felt for the lost hour of the Empire. Although travelers have a certain advantage over natives with their fresh perceptions which have not been dulled by habits and overexposure to the same environment, as Chinua Achebe reminds us “travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves” (1792). Said argues that the Orientalist discourse is never a mere question of misrepresentation or inaccuracy. In his view, “ . . . erasing every possible variety of human plurality [is] to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this is accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it says, don’t suffer—they are

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Mango draws our attention to the close connection between Seal’s travelogue, Tim Kelsey’s Dervish : The Invention of Modern Turkey (1996) and Jonathan Rugman,’s Ataturk's Children: Turkey and the Kurds (1996) in terms of their interpretation of Turkey’s poblems as signs of non-belonging.

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Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you’ve just been using” (Orientalism 154-55). Therefore, as Salman Rushdie points challenging these misrepresentations carry an utmost importance. Rushdie convincingly argue that “ . . . stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype” (88). Accordingly, this dissertation attempts to reveal how stereotypes that Orientalist discourse has generated since the first interactions of the Turks with the Europeans still inflict 1980s and 1990s travel writing. All through their travel accounts, modern British travel writers, compare modern Turkey with that of the nineteenth-century travelers. Wherever they go in Turkey, nineteenth-century travelers accompany them. They see Turkey through the imagery and vocabulary that they have inherited from nineteenth-century travelers. In other words, their discourse is determined by previous writers. Following the assumption that discourse is determined by the previous writers, it is worth providing here a brief account of the history of travel in British cultural context.

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CHAPTER 1: Background 1.1. A Brief History of British Travel Writing Since memoirs and personal diaries were not written by Ottomans until the late nineteenth century, these foreign descriptions give us the kind of personal observation that cannot be found in any of the Ottoman sources available to us. . . . [A]uthors exhibit a sense of superiority in viewing the Ottomans, so that even when the veil came off on the Ottoman side, the European veil of prejudice persisted to cloud many of their judgments and observations. (Shaw 13) Although the English were a traveling nation even before the sixteenth century, we do not come across many travel accounts in English literature until the Reformation. It was partly because, as Sara Warneke points out in her Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (1995), travel mostly had a religious motive, similar to designs of painting and other arts. Eric J. Leed states that during the Middle Ages, theologians like St. Augustus, St. Bernard and St. Aquinas, among others, considered curiosity toward the material world a “venial sin.” According to the hegemonic world view of medieval Christian Europe, to be too curious about the material world indicated a misleading love for a non spiritual world, which was getting away from one=s real aim in this life: the salvation through an inner journey into one=s soul and spirit. Even pilgrimage was considered suspicious; Thomas a Kempis’s reflections on pilgrimage epitomize the way travel had been conceived before the sixteenth century: “Many run to sundry places to visit the relics of the Saints. . . . Oftentimes seeing those things, men are moved with curiosity and the novelty of the sights, and carry home but little fruit of amendment” (qtd. in Warneke 22).

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Leed argues that it was only in the sixteenth century that the “motive of curiosity was first legitimized, then deified and even sacralized” (179). According to the historian Christian Zacher, with this legitimation, people felt free to “admire the mountain=s peaks, giant waves in the sea, the broad courses of rivers and the circuits of the stars” (qtd. in Leed 179). Renaissance brought a redefinition of travel and traveler, which made him “a conscious and disciplined observer of nature and humanity.” Furthermore, “the new cannons of objectivity and methods of observation deified the traveler who swore allegiance to them, thereby becoming endowed with a higher purpose and a heroic cultural dimension” (184). Another important development Leed sees in the sixteenth century, which contributed to the legitimization of “curiosity as an appropriate motive of travel,” was the great development of printing. This development led to the publication and circulation of travel accounts which revealed the value and profits of travel as part of one’s education. Apart from that, the more people read travel books, the more curious they became about seeing foreign lands. England was not the only Western country who had grasped the value of travel. There was such a competition and rivalry about traveling that it had become a matter of national pride. In his “Stirrings and Searchings (1500-1720)” William H. Sherman notes that Richard Hakluyt’s motive to publish travel accounts by British travelers17, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), was “to challenge European perceptions of English inaction and to promote new initiatives by showing that the English had been ‘men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world’” (19). Hulme and Youngs pinpoint the relation between empire building and travel accounts in the sixteenth century and maintain 17

Hakluyt gathered ninety-three accounts of voyages spanning 1,500 years which he published in 834 folio pages.

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that documentation had become “an essential part of traveling” and “an integral aspect of the activity” (3). They note that travel accounts were used by political and commercial sponsors of voyages to attract investment and settlers to the colonies. In that historical context, “rivalry between European nation-states meant that publication of travel accounts was often a semi-official business in which the beginnings of imperial histories were constructed” (3). According to Sherman, the first Englishman who traveled for the sake of travel writing was Thomas Coryate, also called “Topographical Thomas,” who walked through Western Europe and traveled to India in the 1600s (20). Before the seventeenth-century travel was mostly for the sake of business or official errands. Two of the most notable travelogues written on Turkey in the sixteenth century are Ogier Ghiselin Busbecq’s18 Turkish Letters and Thomas Dallam’s19 An Organ for the Sultan. Both Busbecq and Dallam visited Turkey on official errands. Busbecq was the Hungarian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and in his letters he wrote about the customs of people living under the Ottoman rule, İstanbul of his time, the departure of Sultan Suleyman for military expeditions and his reflections on Suleyman the magnificent. Dallam was the maker of the organ Queen Elizabeth sent to Mehmet III. In his account Dallam gives us details about his voyage, his presentation to the Sultan and his reception. Both accounts focus on aspects of the Ottoman Empire which were unknown or unfamiliar to the West. Sixteenth century was the beginning of the Grand Tour in England. The classical itinerary of the Grand Tour included cities like Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, and Amsterdam (Buzard 39). As Barbara Korte, in her English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000), states Turkey was “beyond the traditional 18 19

Austrian-Hungarian imperial ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1554-1562. He brought the organ he made as a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Mehmed III in 1599.

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domain of a Grand Tour.” It was a destination for travelers “whose curiosity was not satisfied by the standard trip” (Korte 44). Sir Henry Blount of the seventeenth century was a man “whose curiosity was not satisfied by ”the Grand Tour of Italy, Spain and France. He wanted to know more about Turkey and Turks who, according to Blanton were “the only people, great in action, and whose Empire so suddenly invaded the world, and fixed itself such firm foundations as no other did” (Early Tales of the Orient 176). Contrary to the scholastic idea (hegemonic in his time) that whatever worth knowing can be learned through books, Blount was aware of the value of the firsthand information. He “would not sit down with a book” and learn about Turkey and Turks. Despite all the dangers and travail of the road, he preferred eye-witness since he believed that “above all other senses, the eye, having the most immediate and quick commerce with the soul, gives it a most touch to the rest, leaving in the fancy somewhat unutterable; so that an eyewitness of things conceives them with an imagination more complete, strong, and intuitive” (176177). Lady Montagu is one of the most famous travelers who visited Turkey in the eighteenth century. Billie Melman points out that her Turcophile account “suggests a cultural relativism that challenges Orientalist essentialism” (112). She was probably the first Western traveler to gain access to the Turkish harem and to describe it with a really fond sympathy. Montagu defies previous travelers and contests the idea that Turkish women of the time did not have any freedom and they led the lives of slaves. She describes the pleasures of Harem life and the dignity of the Turkish women. She cites Turkish poems and compares Turkish music with Western music. She is one of the first Turcophiles who challenged most of the assumptions that were built by previous travelers such as Rycaut. She blames them for inventing stories about places like the harem to which they could not

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possibly have had access. It was not until the nineteenth century that Turkey became a really important travel destination for the British travelers. As Said maintains “the capacity to represent, portray, characterize, and depict is not easily available to just any member of just any society” (Culture and Imperialism 95). Nineteenth-century British subjects were capable of traveling to oversea lands under the protection of the British Empire. The proliferation of British travel accounts on Turkey and other countries can be best understood within these terms. The Empire enabled the British travel for official errands, business or just for pleasure and education. The travelers knew that they would be welcomed and protected. Turkish historian Uygur Kocabaşoğlu draws our attention to the fact that starting with the seventeenth century the concessions the European countries such as France and England gained in Turkey reached such a point after the Balta Liman convention20 that there emerged an imperium in imperio or “state within a state” situation (51). Foreign subjects who were protected by these capitulations could not be held responsible for anything at the Ottoman courts. They could only be judged at consular courts. Kocabaşoğlu notes that while there were only 19 British consulates in the Ottoman Empire in 1834, in 1846 there were 36 of them.21 If we keep in mind that Busbecq’s, Rycaut’s and Lady Montagu’s accounts owe their compositions to these diplomatic missions, we see that the increase in the number of consulates also brings the proliferation in travel accounts. The officials and their dependents did not only write accounts but also hosted travelers under their consulates. When Burnaby arrived in Ankara, for example, he did not have to look for a hotel or an inn. He knew that he would be cared for and protected under the roof of his 20

Signed between the Ottoman Empire and England (1838) and the same rights granted to other European countries in the following a few years. 21 The largest number of consulates England had in the world. The other countries that hosted British consulates: Spain (15), France (14), the USA (10), Portugal (9), China (9) etc. (Kocabaşoğlu 58),

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country’s mission. Nineteenth-century British travelers to Ottoman Turkey play a crucial role in our understanding of the three travel accounts which will be examined in this study, Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984), Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993), and Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995). All three writers share one most significant feature: the admiration and respect they express for nineteenth-century British travelers. Glazebrook states that he wants to write a novel about nineteenth-century travelers. He takes his journey to be able to imagine himself like a nineteenth-century traveler. His account is full of references to travel writers like Warburton, Kinglake, Vambery, Burnaby, Wolff, Austen Henry Layard etc. In Looking for Osman, Lawlor is in search of Osman, Frederick Burnaby’s Turkish servant in his On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877). What Jeremy Seal claims is that he is searching for the origins of the fez; which was in fact used only as a symbol of Turkish modernization efforts. He attempts to understand to what extent Turkey has changed since the nineteenth century. In this comparison, Seal uses nineteenth-century travel accounts to reconstruct the previous century. Thus he aims to highlight the similarities between nineteenth and twentieth century Turkey and Turks, implying that they have not changed as much as they claim. Reinhold Schiffer’s Oriental Panorama: British Travelers in Nineteenth Century Turkey (1999) can be considered as the most comprehensive work on the nineteenthcentury British travel writers to Ottoman Turkey. To give us a broad “panorama” of the era, Schiffer uses one hundred and sixty nineteenth-century travel accounts on Ottoman Turkey. He notes that negative representations of Turkey occurred especially at times of conflict between Turkey and England. He states that during the Greek Independence War, 1822-1829, these representations were predominantly negative. Yet with the end of the war

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they improved significantly. Schiffer’s observation epitomizes how travel accounts are influenced by the contemporary political issues. Frederick Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877) is an interesting travel account which conveys the conflicting discourses of his time and demonstrates how political issues may determine the politics of representation. He states that in England, Turkey was usually represented as the persecutor of the Eastern Christians; the Bulgarians, Armenians and the Greeks. Burnaby maintains that these misrepresentations were so widely believed that there were people who genuinely suggested that Turks should be expelled to Central Asia, to their homeland from where they had set off some nine centuries before. Burnaby’s account gives the hope that as travelogues can be used as a weapon to blacken the image of a people, they can also be used as an apparatus to contest misrepresentations. His travelogue reveals that the representations which give a distorted account of what had been happening in the Ottoman Empire were used for political ends in the nineteenth century. Burnaby draws our attention to the tensions between Turkey and Russia. According to him, all the misrepresentations of Turkey were used by the Russian Empire to rob Turkey of England’s support. In the winter of 1876, when Burnaby arrived in the cities where allegedly Eastern Christians were being massacred by the Turks, he saw that nothing was as reported in England. Burnaby’s account is a constant contestation of ideas that were held in England of his time: Those people in England who have declared that it is impossible to reform the Turks would do well to learn the Turkish language, and travel in the Sultan’s dominions. Human nature is everywhere much the same. There is more good in the world than bad, or otherwise, as a French philosopher

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once said, the bad would have destroyed the good, and the human race would no longer exist. (323) Unfortunately, Burnaby and a few writers like him stand as exceptions in the predominantly biased, othering and stereotyping field of travel writing. According to Said, for anyone who writes on the Orient, it is almost impossible to avoid the heavy racist, chauvinist, imperialist and Eurocentric vocabulary of Orientalism. Said maintains that influential writers like Nerval, Flaubert and Burton determine the way to talk about, for example, Egypt. Though Schiffer agrees with Said as far as Egypt is concerned, he notes that travel books written on Turkey are not under the influence of such writers. Reinhold argues that there are only a few “determining individual writers existed” as far as Ottoman Turkey is concerned. He maintains that from the eighteenth century Lady Mary Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) and Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) can be considered as the two most significant works from these two centuries. Schiffer furthermore observes that Eothen “set a fashion for young men giving themselves an air of imperviousness to the East” (2). Yet he underestimates the influence of other nineteenthcentury travelers on the twentieth-century travel writers. Kinglake’s Eothen is only one of the nineteenth-century travel accounts whose influence is still traceable on the modern travel accounts. The fact that some of these accounts are still in print indicates that they are still read and circulated. Thus their influence on the readers-travelers-writers of the modern times is prevalent. The superior West-inferior East paradigm is one of the Orientalist assumptions that Said severely criticize, in his Orientalism. Schiffer agrees with Said on the point that most of the nineteenth-century British travelers “shared a set of cultural assumptions (questionable naturally) as regards superiority: Christianity over Islam, British institutions

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over Ottoman ones, British morals over those of the Turk” (2). Schiffer also maintains that “Orientalist attitudes were neither altogether dominant in the course of the nineteenth century nor an inevitable part of the cultural baggage of individual travelers” (2). He adds: “The number of contrasts, fractures, differences, modulations and nuances of the ‘Ottoman experience’ is equally surprising and not to be denied. Varieties of judgment and attitude possess their synchronic extent and diachronic extension” (2). In other words, as the nineteenth-century travel accounts consolidate the hegemonic ideas of their time on Turkey “synchronically; they still, “diachronically” extend their influence to our age through modern travel writers who are in constant conversation with the previous travel writers. According to Schiffer, the Victorian travel accounts can be classified under three main groups: Those who look at Ottomans with possibly too much eighteenth century enlightenment confidence that human beings are universally similar; those who revel patent Victorian honesty in grappling with the vices and virtues of a Muslim society, and those who know (throughout the nineteenth Century) that British is the best and are proud to flaunt their belief. (2) Though Schiffer quite persuasively puts forward the diversity of opinions and representations regarding the Ottoman Turkey in British travel accounts, it is difficult to make clear-cut distinctions between these attitudes. As far as Victorian travel accounts on Turkey are concerned, it is clearly seen that the first and the second groups are intertwined most of the time. Burnaby’s account is a good example of how these two tendencies meet. Burnaby, on the one hand, reveals the “vices and virtues” of the Ottoman society; on the other hand, with “eighteenth century enlightenment confidence” he argues that the vices that are inherent in the Ottoman society can be found anywhere else in the world. His

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mostly anti-Russian, pro-Turkish attitude leads him to focus more on similarities than differences between cultures. He recognizes the differences between the cultures, but we also see him trying to understand these differences by giving them the voice to speak in his account. Moreover, he tries to gain an insight into these different cultures. For example, he does not simply declare the “Yezeeds” as devil worshippers; Burnaby explains the Yezeeds’ “structure of feeling”22 setting forth why they attribute more importance to the devil than God.23 Despite his strenuous efforts to give a balanced account of the people he represents in his travelogue, Burnaby still holds an imperialist attitude. At some point he says that “There is one thing which would be very popular with all classes, and that is, an English army of occupation in Constantinople” (9). He is not against the Russian expansion for the reason that Central Asian peoples would lose their independence, but because England’s imperial existence in India could fall under threat. He was a captain in the English army at the time of his visit to Turkey so, in a sense, his travels in Turkey can be regarded as intelligence work. Nevertheless, unlike Warburton’s or Kinglake’s accounts, Burnaby’s account is not dominated by superior West-inferior East, Islam-Christendom paradigms. Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross, or Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel (1848) is a good representative of how Schiffer’s second and third group of observers may go together in some accounts. In Warburton’s account, on one side we come across the representations of many vices like the maltreatment of women, laziness and fatalism that are attributed to the Islamic society; there are virtues such as camaraderie,

22

Raymond Williams explains “structure of feeling” as “the shared values of a particular group or society” (53). 23 According to the Yezeeds’ belief, Burnaby reports, as God is good there is no need to be afraid of Him, but the devil is to be feared for its wickedness; it should not be provoked (293-96).

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piousness and contentedness with one’s circumstances, on the other. Meanwhile, Warburton takes it for granted that “British is the best” and he is “proud to flaunt his belief” on that. There is, however, one point that Schiffer does not mention and it is the role of religious consciousness. For example, Warburton structures his account on this Islam-Christendom dichotomy and, as Schiffer puts it, he takes it for granted that Islam, or the East, is inferior to the West or Christendom. He does not try to understand what appeals to Muslims in Islam. He draws such a picture of Muhammed that it is impossible to suppose that his followers could be in their right minds. According to him, Muslims are under the influence of the spell that Muhammed cast over them. Visiting Egypt, he suggests that Egypt is too precious to be left to the mercy of Mehemmet Ali Pasha, but England should get involved taking care of this strategically important country. Then in Palestine, referring to Crusades, he laments that those good old days were gone while he identifies himself within Christianity and resents Muslim rule over this land. Kinglake’s account, read in the light of these three groups, would fall into the third group since his account starts as an escape from the Western civilization and ends as the recognition of the superior nature of British institutions and values. In Kinglake, we observe a less religious tone, but still the account emphasizes the difference of the East from the West. As Schiffer justly phrases, it “sets a fashion for young men giving themselves an air of imperviousness to the East,” which is quite closely imitated by Glazebrook in 1984. Kinglake represents the people he visits in such a backward and noncivilized way that we do not feel surprised when he suggests that the only decent way to treat “the Orientals” is to use the power of the authority on them (115-19). One more important point about the nineteenth-century travel accounts is that in spite of their constructedness and politically charged narrations, they are considered to be

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the transcription of the nineteenth-century reality about the Ottoman Empire. Selecting the parts which best befit their arguments while suppressing the counter-discourses, the modern travel writers attribute a great amount of authority to these accounts. Thus this reconstruction built on the nineteenth-century narratives is used as a testimony of “the survival or reemergence” of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkey’s conflicts in the secular Turkish Republic (Schiffer 4). For Schiffer, there are mainly two major problems Turkey faces today. The first problem he notes is “how governments should deal with the ethnic minority of the Kurds” (4). The second is the Islamist movements which contest the secular identity of the Republic of Turkey as they try to turn Turkey into an Islamic state. He draws our attention to “what foreign observers then and today recognized as symbols of the opposing parties” (4): the headdress. Prohibiting the turban, Sultan Mahmud II introduced fez as a symbol of reform in 1826. Almost a century later in 1925, introducing European caps, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk banned the fez since he considered it a symbol of Islamic fanaticism. In today’s Turkey, Schiffer sees the reemergence of the same issue in the “fight” started by Islamic female students to be permitted to wear headscarves inside the universities. Just like Schiffer who sees the roots of modern Turkey’s two important problems in the nineteenth century, Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993) and Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995) (as well as Tim Kelsey’s Dervish (1996)) reveal that British travelers are highly interested in the tensions that Turkish Westernization and modernization have created.

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1.2. Turkish Westernization and Modernization as a Quest for the Western Writers In the imagination of these inhabitants whose identity as Europeans was still in the making, the Ottomans (them) were described as possessing qualities which civilized persons (we) did/could not possess. In the world of the European mind, the Ottoman alternately were terrible, savage, and “unspeakable” and the same time sex-crazed, harem-driven, and debauched. Even in the nineteenth century, European imaginings marked the Ottoman East as the degenerate site of pleasures supposedly absent or forbidden in the civilized and vigorous West, where Europeans by contrast allegedly were restrained, sober, just, sexually controlled, moderate and rational. (Quataert 7) Almost all travel writers have a quest or an itinerary which shapes their quests. They try to follow the itineraries of previous writers and compare their experience with these writers. In his The Pillars of Hercules (1995), Paul Theroux follows the itinerary of Roman travelers and visits places like Gibraltar, Spain, Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, İzmir and İstanbul. In Travels with a Tangerine (2001), Tim Mackintosh-Smith tracks Ibn-Batutah’s itinerary and compares his impressions of contemporary cities with the fourteenth-century account. In his Route 66 A.D.: on the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists (2002), Tony Perrottet tries to reconstruct Roman travelers’ experience and reflects on his impressions in terms of ancient Roman travel accounts. Glazebrook’s, Seal’s and Lawlor’s accounts show the same tendency of following the itineraries of ancient travelers. Lawlor and Seal differ from Glazebrook in one aspect; they both discuss the central question of to what extent Turkey and Turks have changed after the Cultural Revolution that took place in the 1920s and 1930s. Both Lawlor and Seal question whether Turkey has really become a part of the

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European civilization or she still belongs to “the East.” Lawlor and Seal were not the first Western travelers looking for Turkish experience of Westernization and modernization which reached its peak with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s leadership in 1920s and 1930s. Western writers have always been strongly interested in the Cultural Revolution Turkey undertook during this era. In his Turkey: A Modern History (1993), Erik J. Zürcher points out the interest that the Westerners have shown in Turkey: “The fact that a non-Western and Muslim country chose to discard its past and seek to join the West made a huge impression in the West, where the fact that an entirely new, modern and different Turkey had sprung up was generally accepted” (201). In his The Turkish Transformation: A Study of Social and Religious Development (1935), Henry Ellisha Allen notes the change Turkey aspired to achieve. He reflects on the relationship between Islam and Christianity, Turkey’s significant role in this relation, and what her efforts for transformation mean: When one remembers the centuries of bitterness and bloodshed, of jealousy and misunderstanding, in the relations of Islam and Christianity, and when one realizes that Turkey, long the champion of Moslem orthodoxy and most redoubtable aggressor for the faith of Mohammed, is now making herself into a Western nation according to the very pattern of those European states which for so many years she despised and feared, he cannot deny that he is witnessing one of history’s most significant phenomena. Here before our very eyes is occurring a transition of civilizations, the abandonment of practices which originated in Arabia, based upon union of religion and politics, the adoption of patterns which developed in Europe based upon separation of religion and politics. Far-reaching consequences of this

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transition may be observed in government, law, education, and social structure. (1-2) It is highly interesting that Allen does not see imperialism as a significant figure in this paradigm. In Allen’s representation of the conflict between the Ottoman Turkey and Europe, all the conflicts had arisen out of religious clash. Still, Allen’s main focus is on the comprehensive picture of Westernization in Turkish history. He discusses the reasons that led to this transformation and describes what these changes mean for Turkish society. He gives an extensive account of the difference that the Turkish Cultural Revolution created in education, in the legal system, in the lifestyle and social organization of the Turkish society. One aspect that distinguishes Allen from most of the Western travel writers and gives him a better and more comprehensive understanding of Turkish cultural life is that, along with the Western sources and authorities on Turkey, he also uses Turkish sources. He gives Turkish intellectuals’ points of view on the issues like Westernization and modernization of Turkey.24 Unlike Lewis or Huntington, the Turkish intellectuals of the 1930s saw the Western and European civilization as an entity free from any kind of religious association. They dissociated concepts like the West and Europe from their Christian connotations and believed that these concepts existed in a secular vacuum. Allen highlights how the Turkish intelligentsia saw the issue in the 1930s: “Turkey disregards any religious rivalry in the steps she is taking. Since Christianity is regarded as more influenced by than influencing Western civilization, Turkey, in accepting ideas from the West, is merely profiting from a set of secular circumstances to which the Christian religion is indebted” (50). Furthermore, he foreshadows the Turkish desire to become a 24

As early as the 1930s, long before the European Union issue, we see that whether Turkey belongs to the West or not was already a point of discussion.

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part of the European civilization in Yunus Nadi’s words: “We must learn in Europe, work like Europe, and with Europe” (52). Allen notes that because the Ottoman Sultans were also the Caliphs, Turkey had been considered as the leader of the Islamic civilization. After Turkey abolished the Caliphate in 1924, she still existed as a significant country in the Islamic world, for most of the Islamic countries in the world took Turkish victory of independence as an inspirational source to fight against imperialism. Moreover, countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran took Turkey as a model in their Westernization efforts. J.A. Spender’s The Changing East (1932) is a travel account about the change Turkey undertook after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. In this account, Spender reflects on the change in Turkey, Egypt and India, examining the British involvement with them. When Spender visited Turkey in 1926, Turkey and Britain had a great disagreement on Mosul and Kerkuk, two provinces in Iraq with large Turkish majority of population. Spender says that he wants to observe the response of Ankara, the new capital of the Turkish nation, to the ongoing talks of the League of Nations. When Spender arrives in İstanbul, the first thing he notes is the fact that nobody is wearing a fez. According to Spender this is confusing, for the government in Ankara is known to be a nationalist government but they ban the best-known symbol of Turkishness, the fez. He then gives a brief account of what İstanbul was like in 1926 and the importance of İstanbul both economically and politically. In Spender’s eyes, moving the capital from İstanbul to Ankara is a “bold” action. He interprets this change of capital as a sign of the nationalist government’s desire to dissociate itself from the Ottoman Empire and its traditions. Looking at this strange world of conflicting passions and ambitions, my sympathies were very mixed. I saw character and determination in one part

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of the movement, ruthlessness and overweening conceit in another. Only a man of strong will and unflinching purpose could have uprooted the Turk from Constantinople and reconciled him to the trek into Asia Minor. The idea is Oriental and reminds one of the sudden flittings of which one sees traces in the deserted cities of India. Yet behind it is an intention which is not only intelligible but worthy of respect and sympathy. One must sympathize with a man who declares boldly for a clean cut with the corrupt and bloodstained tradition of the Ottoman Empire and is ready for any surgery that will accomplish that purpose. One must sympathize with the enthusiasts who follow this lead and grimly turn their backs on the life and gaiety of the old capital to found the new one across the water. I talked to the eager spirits of the movement and could not doubt their zeal or sincerity. They spoke glowingly of their ideals and of their contempt for all material and commercial interests that stood in the way. They wanted they told me a Turkey purified and made new, standing on her own feet, developing a civilization of her own, clear of the barbaric fringes and foreign parasites who have sucked her blood and preyed on her vitals. (Spender 39-40) On one hand, the young Republic of Turkey arouses respect with her aspirations and zeal and with what she had achieved in a relatively short time. On the other hand, the inexperience and experimentalism do not look viable to the writer. When he says that “the idea is Oriental” he refers to the strong stereotypes about “the Orient” that “Orientals” are despotic and they would enforce anything to achieve their goals. Spender sees the ideas of the new government in Ankara as noble but questions how these ideas are to be applied and put into action. In the final analysis, he reads all these efforts as another Oriental

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despotism. Lino Linke’s Allah Dethroned (1937) is another travel account which discusses Turkish cultural transformation. Linke visits places as diverse as İstanbul, Yozgat, Sivas, Erzurum, Artvin, Kayseri and Sivas. She presents Turkish portraits from 1930s Turkey and gives accounts of how these people fare under the rule of the new regime. Linke’s title suggests that the reforms that the Republic of Turkey had undertaken were seen as the secularization of Turkey. Yet the way Linke phrases the change in Turkey in her title “Allah Dethroned” suggests how radical the change was. Linke seeks to understand how Turks take the Cultural Reforms and Revolution which had “dethroned Allah” and adopted European institutions. As Allen’s, Spender’s and Linke’s works reveal the Turkish cultural revolution has been of great interest since the Atatürk’s rule. Their accounts demonstrate the amount of energy put into this project in Turkey. They try to represent the process in its making. In Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s account we come across a representation of how this efforts are interpreted after more than fifty years of investment in the Turkish modernization.

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CHAPTER 2: “The Politics of Representation” 2.1. Why should travel accounts be taken seriously, examined and questioned? The translation of difference into otherness is a denial of dialogue, interaction and change. (Pickering 49) Travel writing is highly prone to be influenced by the hegemonic ideologies of the time, and capable of influencing them as well. Holland and Huggan state that “travel writing, however entertaining, is hardly harmless, and that behind its apparent innocuousness and its charmingly anecdotal observations lies a series of powerfully distorting myths about (often, ‘non-Western’) cultures” (8). One might easily dismiss travel accounts as trivial reading material claiming that they are not actually to be taken seriously, but travelogues are not read solely by travelers who want to learn about the places they are about to visit or they have already visited; or by readers who are curious about the world but who cannot afford to.25 Travel essays are also read by novelists to reconstruct past times and distant lands. Since travel accounts are also seen as historical documents, social scientists, political advisers etc. use them in their studies as primary sources of past events. Bernard Lewis and Samuel H. Huntington are typical examples of these social scientists who read travel books as documentary evidence to historical characteristics of people and events in the past.26 As noted above, Lewis and Huntington are significant figures not only with their scholarly works, but they are also the best embodiment of the close relation between “knowledge and power,” to which Foucault draws our attention to. Their outstanding 25

Coleridge notes that his poem “Kubla Khan” was written in his dream after he read a travel book. Bernard Lewis, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Prof. Samuel Huntington of Harvard University are two scholars who are known for their affiliation with the White House. According to Time magazine, Lewis is one of the most important and influential persons in terms of policy making regarding the issues about the Middle East. His expertise on Islam and Middle East help to determine the White House’s policies on the region. Samuel Huntington actively worked at the White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council during 1977 and 1978. 26

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academic achievements make them prominent figures in the political arena as well as the academia. We see that through their works travel writing which might presumably look like a rather innocuous genre finds its way to serious mechanisms which determine the lives of millions of people. In Orientalism Said blames Lewis for being “the perfect exemplification of the academic whose work purports to be liberal objective scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material” (316). Lewis’s Atlantic Monthly article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990) reveals how true Said’s claim in Orientalism was. In this article, Lewis argues that since the emergence of Islam, Christendom and Islam have seen each other as “the other” and most of the relations between these two civilizations have been in the forms of “clash” which Lewis terms as “clash of civilizations.” According to Lewis, in some periods Islam “inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence.” He also claims that “the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.” Three years after Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations” Samuel Huntington27 published his article “The Clash of Civilizations”28 as a continuation of the article in the previous issue of Foreign Affairs, “Is Islam a Threat?” According to Huntington, with the end of “the Cold War,” “the clash of civilizations” started. Especially after 9/11 the term replaced and gained the status of the old “Cold War” paradigm, and it has been used to explain the major conflicts in the world. In a sense, the 9/11 attacks were

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In an interview he gave to Alexander Cockburn in 1995 Edward W. Said draws our attention to the fact that Huntington was also the theoretician of “the Cold War” and that Huntington had to “carve out a new role for himself” using “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. Said also points out the enthusiastic acceptance of Huntington’s paradigm in the American academia stating that as early as 1995 there were a lot of symposia and conferences on “the clash of civilizations” which were being held all around the United States. 28 The article created such a huge impact that Huntington extended the article and made it into a book in 1996.

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accepted as a perfect confirmation of the paradigm. When George W. Bush addressed the Nato Summit in İstanbul on June 29, 2004, he asked European Union to show solidarity to Turkey and accept Turkey as a member into the EU. According to Bush this “would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion; it would “expose the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a passing myth of history.” In her May 12, 2002 The Observer article “A Matter of Death and Life,” Mary Riddel suggests that Bush legitimized “islamophobia” which was “explored” by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations. Lewis and Huntington have had great impact on the policy making of the White House and the way the American government sees the world. One of the sources of information Lewis and Huntington employ is travel narratives which they have used to support their arguments as reliable historical documents. For example, in What Went Wrong? (2003) Lewis uses Ogier de Busbecq’s sixteenth-century work Turkish Letters as a testimony of how Turks do not value time. We come across another example in Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996) where he uses Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon29 (1937) as an authority on Bosnians and how they were seen by the Americans at the time. We find a more explicit expression and concern on how misrepresentation works in Frederick Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1878). Burnaby points out the influence of the unchallenged, unfair accounts on Turkey and how those accounts were used: Ladies, like Madame de Lievens . . . went from salon to salon and extolled 29

In his Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan also uses Rebeca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a document that sheds light on history. He constructs his account on Balkan States on this narrative. Kaplan attributes such authority to West’s travel account that he finds West’s account more reliable than the Balkan people’s accounts. Kaplan is suspicious of the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Albanians, the Bosnians, the Serbians and the Croatians in terms of objectivity. According to Kaplan the nationalist mindset of the people of the Balkan states makes their accounts highly subjective and chauvinist. Therefore, he prefers relying on someone with less personal interest.

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the Christian motives of the Tzar. This feminine eloquence proved too much for a few of our legislators, who, like Lord Grey in the year 1829, entertained some old opposition opinions of Mr Fox’s that ‘the Turks ought to be driven out of Europe.’ (ix) It was 1876 and the war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia was about to break. What Russia wished for was to leave the Ottoman Empire without the English support. Burnaby’s observation suggests that there were two contrasting opinions about Turkey in England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The dominant one in 1876 was based on letting the Ottoman Empire survive. The “old opposition opinions of Mr Fox” were based on driving Turks out of Europe.30 Furthermore, Burnaby underlines the fact that those anti-Turkish opinions are mainly based on “Christian motives.” After the end of World War I, the dominant opinion in England was not only to drive Turks out of Europe but also out of Anatolia, Asia Minor.31 Not quite explicitly maybe, but implicitly we can see the traces of the same discourse in Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984). His insistence on associating Turkey and Turks with nomadism and Central Asia can be read as an echo of the same argument. So when need emerges, the rarely contested hegemonic literature of Turkish stereotypes which uses a painfully condescending discourse against Turks is recalled and tailored once more. At every other opportunity these claims are recalled and any unfair treatment is justified through them. Said points out the responsibility that the scholars and writers need to consider as 30

After the end of World War I, the dominant opinion in England was not only to drive Turks out of Europe but also out of Anatolia, Asia Minor. 31 As the Turkish novelist Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu states, these sorts of claims were used against Turks at the end of World War I, when the European powers wanted to partition the Ottoman territory. In her Turkey Faces West (1930), Halide Edip Adıvar once more draws our attention to the arguments which suggest the Turkish people’s withdrawal to Central Asia, the lands that they left some nine centuries ago.

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far as the representation of other cultures is concerned. He addresses some of the possible outcomes of representation and the ethical responsibility of studying other cultures: Modern thought and experience have taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the Other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the socio-political role of intellectuals, in the great value of a skeptical critical consciousness. Perhaps if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political, consequence in either the best or worst sense, we will not be indifferent to what we do as scholars. And what better norm for the scholar than human freedom and knowledge? Perhaps we should remember that the study of man in society is based on concrete human history and experience, not on donnish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems. (Orientalism 327-28) In his Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Said addresses the same issue once more, quoting Wright Mills’s views on the responsibility of artists and intellectuals who are . . . among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity to continually unmask and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications [i.e. modern systems of representation] swamp us. These worlds of massthought are increasingly geared to the demands of politics. That is why it is in politics that intellectual solidarity and effort must be centered. If the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he

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cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience. (qtd. in Said 16) Said furthermore elaborates on this idea of intellectual responsibility claiming that being an intellectual is “a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready made cliches, or the smooth ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do” (Representations 17). Intellectuals constantly challenge what is taken for granted, question the legitimacy of common sense perceptions. Thus they “maintain a state of constant alertness . . . a perpetual willingness not to let halftruths or received ideas steer one along” (17). For Said, intellectuals and artists can make huge contributions to the maintenance of peace in the world through contesting discourses that promote differences that help politicians justify wars. In the model Said offers, intellectuals are expected “to unearth the forgotten, to make connections that were denied, to cite alternative courses of action that could have avoided war and its attendant goal of human destruction” (17). In his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” of Orientalism, Said assesses the last 25 years in terms of the changes in the representation of the Other in American media. What Said sees is “warmongering expertise . . . omnipresent CNNs and Fox News Channels . . . myriad numbers of evangelical and right-wing radio hosts’s innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journals, all of them recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up ‘America’ against the foreign devil” (xx). In Said’s view, misrepresentations of Arabs and Islam have the most significant role in justifying the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. In his Gramscian perception of the intellectuals, Said maintains that intellectuals, especially those who study other cultures, should be alert on many points. For they are consulted as experts and what they say on intercultural issues are regarded as objective

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information. Therefore, the students of other cultures play a crucial role in the peace building process in the world. As Said sees it, this demanding task cannot be performed unless the writer divides his or her loyalties between his or her own culture and the culture s/he studies. According to Said this division of loyalties naturally leads to the student’s “identification by sympathy” with the culture s/he studies. Said maintains that this had already been achieved by the eighteenth-century “historicism” established by Vico, Herder and Hamann. The backbone of this eighteenth-century historicism is the belief that “all cultures are organically and internally coherent, bound together by a spirit, genius, Klima, or national idea which an outsider can penetrate only by an act of historical sympathy” (118). In that sense, one of the eighteenth-century works Said admires is Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit (1784-1791) which gives “a panoramic display of various cultures each permeated by an inimical creative spirit, each accessible to an observer who sacrificed his prejudices to Einfühlung” (118). Said also sees “identification by sympathy” in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio which “locate a particularly magnanimous form of humanity in the Orient” (118). As far as Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts are concerned, it is true that they do not justify a physical war like the one that is underway in Iraq. However, their representation of Turkey still makes peoples of Turkey more vulnerable than ever before. What makes them so callous to the peoples of the country they write on is their lack of loyalty or “identification by sympathy” (118) to their subject. In that sense the lack of “identification by sympathy” is quite a crucial marker of the Orientalist discourse. If we consider a writer’s relation with his subject and reader as a triangle, we see that Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s loyalties entirely go with the reader who is supposedly from the UK, USA or another Western country but definitely not from Turkey.

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If we discuss the workings of this triangular from different perspectives, we can draw an analogy between the workings of other triangular relations like doctor-patient-hospital, teacher-student-school administration, restaurant owner-wait(er)ress-patrons. In any of these relations, the absolute devotion of loyalty to only one side and complete lack of it to one of the sides (say, the teacher’s to his students, all of it devoted to school administration; or doctor’s lack of loyalty to his patients; likewise a restaurant owner’s to his waiter) would create a sense of injustice.

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2.2. Raj Revivalism Travel writing, when taken in its broader sense to include explorer’s texts and narratives by missionaries, settlers, traders and administrators, has often been associated with the rise and spread of empire, and much modern travel writing with a lament for its decline. (Youngs 13) The admiration Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal feel for nineteenth-century English travelers is one of the most important common characteristics of the three travel accounts examined in this study. In her Discourses of Difference (1991), Sara Mills sees this admiration of the travel writers of 1980s and 1990s for the nineteenth-century travelers as a part of the “Raj Revival” (2). According to Mills this is the “transposition” of “ideological positions of the colonial period . . . onto British cultural forms of the 1980s and 1990s” (2). Salman Rushdie is the first writer who coined the expression “Raj Revival.” In his “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie firstly criticizes the representations of the Indians and British-Indian relations in 1984 fiction, movies and TV serials. Rushdie sees these productions as the “refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image” (91) at the expense of the distortion of history through the misrepresentation of the Indian people and their history. He labels the discourse which these productions have in common as the “Raj revivalism,” or “Empire-revivalism.”32 For Rushdie, “the rise of Raj revisionism, 32

Holland and Graham note that Martin Green detects the same tendency in British travel writing in the 1980s: “In the nineteenth century…travel narratives were among a plethora of adventure tales that energized the myth of Empire: they reinforced prevailing notions that the world was ripe to conquer. Their twentieth century counterparts might be . . . many twentieth century travel writers still arrogate the rights of mobility and representation that once accrued to Empire. In a postcolonial world, they thus fight a rearguard action, concealing beneath their patronizing language and their persistent cultural nostalgia a thinly disguised desire to resurrect the imperial past.” (4-5) Holland and Huggan also draw our attention to Charles Sugnet’s “Vile Bodies, Vile Places: Traveling with Granta” (1991) Sugnet criticizes the best-selling compilation of travel narratives and he maintains that the main purpose of the articles published in Granta is to “restore the lost dream of empire in a way that allows young-fogy readers to pretend that they’re still living in the nineteenth century. . . . A curious fusion of the1880s and the 1980s is what keeps all those Granta travel writers up in the air, afloat over various parts of the globe, their luggage filled with portable shards of colonialist discourse” (qtd. in Holland and Huggan 5).

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exemplified by the huge success” of these cultural productions is “the artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain” (92). He accuses the Thatcherite government of the period of “encouraging” the British “to turn their eyes to the lost hour of precedence” (92). According to Rushdie, there are two options open to an intellectual in such a case, where s/he feels his people and history are misrepresented. The first one, presuming that you are “inside the whale,” is to choose quietism and do nothing about it. The other option is to be aware of the fact that nobody is “inside the whale” and that there is no “whale” to protect us. Rushdie discusses political “quietism” or passivism in terms of George Orwell’s 1940 article entitled “Inside the Whale.” He states that Orwell criticizes intellectuals (like Henry Miller) who try to get into the whale like Jonah, trying to escape from the responsibility that they should undertake. These writers presume that they can find protection in the whale’s belly that might make them immune to the effects of the political turmoil and physical destruction of World War II.33 Whereas, for Rushdie, there is no

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Telling an anecdote to illustrate Henry Miller’s attitude towards the Spanish Civil War, Orwell states that he finds Miller’s “extreme pacifism, an individual refusal to fight, with no apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion—practically, in fact, a declaration of irresponsibility.” Orwell reads Henry Miller’s attitude in his Tropic of Cancer (1935) and Black Spring (1936) in the light of this “irresponsible” approach. According to Orwell, Henry Miller’s importance comes from the fact that there is a general tendency that can be best observed in Miller’s work. In that sense, Orwell sees Miller’s work as a possible “starting-point of a new ‘school’.” A school of writers who do not feel any responsibility for the world around them. Orwell expresses his objection to this attitude: “Where Miller’s work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the majority of ‘revolutionary’ writers; only he does not feel called upon to do anything about it. He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.” Orwell draws an analogy between Jonah’s and Miller’s attitudes “For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale’s own movements would probably be imperceptible to you.” For Orwell “there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most

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whale to protect anyone and now that the weapons which are the products of super high technology are so destructive, there is nowhere to hide. Hence everyone is outside the whale and needs to do something to change their circumstances. It has become impossible to say that “I am inside the whale. I do not need to be concerned.” Rushdie argues that though the movies, TV serials and fictions produced on the British Raj are not high culture or serious productions of art and even though they are not taken seriously by critics, he still thinks that these productions have a huge audience and they are highly popular in Britain. He discusses the reasons why it is crucial to contest these productions: It would be easy to conclude that such material could not possibly be taken seriously by anyone, and that it is therefore unnecessary to get worked up about it. I would be happier about this, the quietist option if I did not believe that it matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it. I should also mind less, were it not for the fact that [it] is only the latest in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East. The creation of a false Orient of cruel-lipped princes and dusky slim-hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword, has been brilliantly described by Edward W. Said in his classic study Orientalism, in which he makes clear that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.”

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the Asiatic. Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype. (88-89) According to him, as long as unfair and stereotypical, misrepresentations of “the Other” go unchallenged, they keep their legitimate status in the cultural arena and they pass for objective information. There are two significant points in Rushdie’s article that are directly relevant to this study. The first one is the idea that any kind of misrepresentation should be contested and these texts should be (deconstructed34) examined to reveal how the stereotyping and misrepresentation works. In most of the cases it is difficult to detect any misrepresentation unless one examines them carefully through analyzing and questioning the workings and intertextual connections of the details in the account. In Glazebrook’s travelogue it is relatively easy to see his bias and his lack of interest in giving a fair account of Turkey and Turks. In Lawlor’s narrative it becomes more difficult to see how the structure of the account hides what he is really looking for. In Seal’s account we see that the biased nature of the discourse is hidden even deeper and his use of the stereotypes and techniques of exclusion and othering are more implicit. The second relevant point is that all of these three accounts can be considered as a part of the Raj Revivalism in spite of the fact that they are not about India but Turkey. In all these accounts we see that Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal find nothing wrong with identifying themselves with the nineteenth-century travel writers who celebrated the imperialist ideologies of the Victorian England.35 34

In her “Introduction” to Deconstructing Images of the Turkish Woman (1998) Zehra F. Arat states that she uses the term “deconstruction” not in Derrida’s sense of the concept but to refer to revealing the constructedness of the texts and the accounts through addressing their structure and how this structure influences the accounts and their representations. 35 See pg. 19 on Burnaby’s imperialist discourse. In his Crescent and Cross (1848), Eliot Warburton echoes the same discourse.

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2.3. Orientalism and Empire: Discourse and Power All through his introduction to Orientalism, Said draws our attention to Michel Foucault=s “knowledge and power” and Antonio Gramsci=s “culture and hegemony” relations. He builds his work essentially on these two paradigms. “Discourse,”36 which he uses to talk about a dominant and unavoidable cultural code of speaking about the Orient and the Orientals, is a key term in Said=s work, For Said, the ideological, cultural and political way of speaking about the Orient, while asserting to be objective and scientific, is “discourse.” Within this context, Orientalists become the organic intellectuals37 of the states who legitimize the rule and the ideology of the states, by using the authority of their academic and intellectual credentials. According to Said, intellectuals like Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Ruskin, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, among other liberal intellectuals, had “definite views on race and imperialism” (14). What Said means by “definite” is the Gramscian idea of hegemonic views, views or ideologies that have become so taken for granted that they become invisible. Consequently, they are considered as the things are, the reality, as a great amount of intellectual authority is invested in them. Since Said sees Orientalism as an ideologically motivated field, he points out some of the political questions that Orientalism raises: “What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like 36

Said lays out what he understands from Foucault’s conception of “discourse” with these words: “A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual and arising out of circumstances . . . is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the reality they appear to describe. In tiem such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. This kind of text is composed out of those preexisting units of information . . .” (Orientalism 94). 37 Renate Holub defines the Gramscian term “organic intellectual” as “agents within cultural and social instutions (who) mediate between the interests of power and those social groups who serve the interests of the class in power” (165).

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the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism=s broadly imperialist view of the world?” (15). As these questions reveal, Said=s condemnation of Orientalism is mainly based on his Orientalism-imperialism relation: “Orientalism is involved in worldly, historical circumstances, which it has tried to conceal behind an often pompous scientism and appeals to rationalism” (110). Using Gramscian terms, Said sees Orientalism as the legitimizing and justifying apparatus of imperial power. In his Islam and West (1993), Bernard Lewis, who is in the very forefront of the polemic that Said has instigated, defends his field and contests Said’s assertion on the origins of Orientalism. As Lewis puts it, European or Christian encounter with Islam starts some one thousand years before Said=s claim. According to Lewis, the way the Christian Europe sees Islam as the ”Other” starts as a religious matter long before the European imperialist expansion. Lewis draws our attention to the Islamic threat that Europe had experienced from the late seventh century with the Islamic conquest of Iberian Peninsula up to the second Vienna siege of the Ottoman Empire: “For almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second siege of Vienna, Europe was under the constant threat from Islam. In the early centuries it was a double threat—not only of invasion and conquest, but also of conversion and assimilation” (13). Therefore, Lewis argues, Oriental studies cannot be explained through the European Imperialist expansion, it has its roots deeper in history: It was this fear, more than any other single factor, which led to the beginnings of Arabic scholarship in Europe, to the discipline which centuries later came to be known as Orientalism. In the monasteries of Western Europe, studious monks learned Arabic, translated the Qur=an, and

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studied other Muslim texts, with a double purpose—first the immediate aim of saving Christian souls from conversion to Islam and, second, the more distant hope of converting Muslims to Christianity. (13) Lewis points out that a second phase of the study of “the East” started with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottoman Empire grew stronger, European scholars tried to analyze the power and the system of this new enemy and tried to exploit the opportunities of this new power. Lewis mentions Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks (1603) which “was able to draw on a considerable body of literature in several different languages” (15). Knolles’s work was not the only work written in the seventeenth century; Sir Richard Rycaut=s 1670 book The Present State of the Ottoman Empire is another work which mainly aims to analyze the power of “the Other.” Yet Said does not assert that Orientalism just started at the moment of European imperial expansionism: My point is that the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty

into

a

capacity

for

managing

political

movements,

administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man=s difficult civilizing missionB all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one of all concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality and open-mindedness. In fact, what took place was the very opposite of liberal: the hardening of doctrine and meaning, imparted by “science,” into “truth.” For if such truth reserved for itself the right to judge the Orient as immutably Oriental in the ways I have indicated, then liberality was no more than a form of oppression and mentalistic prejudice. (254)

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Thus Said infers that the authority attributed to Orientalism as a scholarly field constructs a reality under the presumption that it produces objective information while the field has been under the influence and the patronage of the real politics and political institution.

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2.4. Four Principal Orientalist Dogmas According to Said, there are four principal dogmas that mark the Orientalist discourse. In other words, the existence of these assumptions in a text manifests whether or not a writer uses an Orientalist discourse. Although they have been already given in the introduction it is worth while citing them here once again as they are crucially important in the discussion. In Said’s words, these four dogmas are: 1. Absolute and systematic difference between the West and the Orient.’ The West is rational, developed, humane, superior, while the Orient is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. 2. Abstractions about the Orient are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. 3. ‘The Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself’ (or speaking for itself: it must be interpreted). 4. The Orient is to be feared (‘Yellow Peril’, ‘Mongol hordes”) or to be controlled. (300-301) The first point Said draws attention to in the Orientalist dogmas is the EasternWestern division. In Orientalism, Said contests the idea that Orientalism cannot be simply defined as a disinterested academic field of teaching, researching, or writing about “the Orient,” “the East,” regardless of whether the writer or researcher is a sociologist, an anthropologist, a historian or a philologist. In Said’s redefinition, Orientalism is a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident” (6). According to Said, it is impossible to talk about a natural distinction between the East and the West. If we can ever talk about a distinction, this is merely an ideological construction of geography. Therefore, the

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distinction which is presupposed by the Orientalist discourse is not valid. For in Said’s view, . . . cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous . . . so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality. How can one speak of “Western civilization” except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their mixed identities? This is especially true of the United States, which today cannot seriously be described except as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course major cultural and political achievements. (347) In that sense, Orientalism is the “acceptance” of the “basic distinction” between the East and the West “as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs and mind. In the light of this description, Orientalism can “accommodate” writers like Aeschylus, Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx in spite of the fact that these writers did not research or write on “the East” (3). What makes them Orientalist is their basic assumption of the Orientalist paradigms and binary oppositions such as Islam-Christianity, East-West and Asia-Europe. Accordingly, travel writers who structure their accounts of Turkey on Turkey-Europe, Asia-Europe or Islam-Christendom dichotomies can be regarded as authors who employ an Orientalist discourse. Said is against this Eastern-Western distinction as he sees that there is no natural,

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geographical differentiation which exists between the East and the West, like the one between the North and the South. Even the concept Orient has different connotations at different “Western” lands. What Americans associate “the Orient” with is quite different from what the Europeans associate it with. Said maintains that in America the Orient has connotations like Japan, India and China; whereas in Europe it is different, “more adjacent” (1-2). For Europe, the Orient is the place of its “richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1). “Orient” is usually used to refer to lands where Muslims live. According to Said, Islam and Islamic people are not only the lands and people that are colonialized but also the civilization that the Christian West defines its identity against. He argues that: AOrientalism is premised upon exteriority” (20). 2.4.1. The Politics of Difference: “Inferior East,” “Superior West” or La Mission Civilisatrice For Said, Orientalism is a constraining discourse. He adds that, despite its obviously constructed structure, Orientalism, as a scholarly field, has been very little questioned in terms of its political function and objectivity: In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. What bound the archive together was a family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective. These ideas explained the behavior of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a geneaology, an atmosphere; most important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics. Orientalist notions influenced the people who were called Orientals as well as those who called

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Occidental, European or Western; in short, Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine. If the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, then we must be prepared to note how in its development and subsequent history Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction. (Orientalism 4243) In his Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said, once more focuses on “the politics of difference” and opens his work with this epigram from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . . What was this “idea” which was “at the back of” “taking away” lands from people who have different racial characteristics? As noted above, the first Orientalist dogma is based on the “absolute and systematic difference” between the East and the West, between Christendom and other world religions, especially Islam, in this context. Moreover, this paradigm of difference presupposes the superiority of the West, Europe and Christendom over the rest of the world. According to Said, this feeling of superiority which presumes the inferiority of others is not a random preconception but an ideological apparatus which has been used in the imperialist and colonialist expansion of Europe in the last five

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hundred years. The “enlightenment” which started with Renaissance in Europe did not only bring material advantages and riches to Europe but also the belief that while Europeans have become “enlightened” and left the dark ages behind, the rest of the world has still been in darkness since they have not had the “enlightenment.” Therefore, the enlightened Europeans have seen it as their mission to civilize the rest of the world. The European, especially the French imperialism used la mission civilisatrice as a justification for their expansionism. The civilizing mission was the idea which was used to gain the consent of those who had to do the imperial job of colonizing and governing the subject races and also those of the colonized and subjected locals. Hence, they saw the relation between the colonized people and themselves in terms of the civilized-noncivilized paradigm. They were the superior Westerners who were willing to enlighten the inferior and noncivilized Americas, Australia, Asia and Africa. The qualities attributed to the European civilization by the Orientalists made la mission civilisatrice a legitimate claim for European powers. They thought themselves as the leaders of the world. It was their duty to enlighten the rest of the world and to help them in their development, sometimes even against their own will. As the Orientals were childlike, ignorant and uncivilized, someone needed to care for them and bring them civilization38 (Orientalism 169). According to Said, Rudyard Kipling’s well-known poem “White Man’s Burden” is a typical example of how the discourse of la mission civilisatrice had become the hegemonic discourse in the British Empire as well. Kipling’s poem is interesting, in the sense that it gives a quite clear picture of the “structure of feeling” of the agents of empire:

38

In his Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said uses the quotation below by Jules Harmand, the French advocate of colonialism in 1910. Harmand’s words epitomize the structure of feeling of his time: “It is necessary, then to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilization, still recognizing that, while superiority confers rights, it imposes strict obligations in return” (17).

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Take up the White Man's burden-Send forth the best ye breed-Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. (1-8) Kipling voices the general belief that it is the Europeans’ “executive responsibility towards the colored races” to help them have a better life, whereas “willingness to use force, to kill or to be killed” are not mentioned in this discourse (Orientalism 226). Although the era of high imperialism has come to an end, Said emphasizes the point that Orientalist discourse is still predominant in the representations of the Eastern peoples in the Western mass media. According to Said, behind the ongoing invasion of Iraq, it is still possible to detect that same civilizing mission discourse.39 He maintains that “every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that the circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, bring order and democracy, that it uses force as a last resort” (xxi). Said also adds that “there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires” in spite of “the misery and death brought by the . . . mission civilizatrice [Said’s italics]” (xxi).40

39

In his “Self-Deception and Selective Expertise: Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quagmire” Gilbert Achbar maintains that “the ‘mission civilisatrice’” has now become “the ‘democratizing mission’-of the U.S. empire.” 40 We can see that approach in works such as Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West (1993) or Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996). Both of these books take concepts like Islam or the West as

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Following Said’s argument on the political consequences of the East-West paradigm, it can be said that the binary oppositions which might seem as naïve preconceptions of the travel writers cannot be simply dismissed as an indication of the trivial bias of an individual writer. As far as travel writing is concerned, travel writers may not have direct relations with political institutions, but the texts they produce have direct political influence on shaping the opinions of their readers and public in general. Within these terms, we can raise several questions: What kinds of behaviour, what models of practices, does this work seem to enforce? Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling? Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I’m reading? Upon what social understanding does the work depend? Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work? What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected? (Greenblatt 226) The last two questions are directly related to the contemporary politics in terms of Turkey’s admission into the European Union. The way European nations see Turkey and themselves, in other words, Turkey’s image and European nations’ self-image, will play a significant role in this process. If peoples of the European Union come to the conclusion that Turkey is not that different at all from Europe, and that difference could be a benefit rather than a problem, Turkey will be accepted as a member. If the European Union if they are homogeneous entities. Both also mark a political standing which presume “clash” as an inevitable and ineradicable element between “the East” and “the West.” In contrast, for Said, dividing the world into camps like “the East” and “the West” is using “falsely unifying rubrics.” Said regards paradigms like these as “simplified views of the world” which are used to demonize an unknown enemy (xxvi). These dichotomies should be challenged as they are used to lead people to war and destruction, justifying imperialist designs.

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nations decide that Turkey is different in a negative sense and not a part of the European civilization, and Turkey’s difference, in Michael Pickering’s terms is “translated into otherness,” Turkey will be denied membership. 2.4.2. The Orientalist Textual Attitude According to Said, the coverage of the 1975-1976 Civil War in Beirut by a French journalist is a typical example of Orientalist textual attitude. What Said criticizes in this approach is to give priority to texts even when there are more vital issues to deal with. For the journalist, for example, the loss of the “Orient of Chateubriand and Nerval” is the most significant aspect of the war (1). Said, furthermore, describes Orientalist tendency to favour text over reality with these words: It may appear strange to speak about something or someone as holding a textual attitude, but a student of literature will understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts— say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin. (92-93) Likewise, in most of the cases, rather than contesting the authority of texts, people prefer to yield to their authority. As a consequence: Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth century Arab poet multiplied itself into a

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policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. (Orientalism 96) This textual influence is so high on the Orientalists that even when they visit the host country they have been studying, they cannot see the place but with “unshakable abstract maxims” (Orientalism 52). Their research is so predetermined with their preconceptions, the heavy tradition and education they pass through that they are hardly ever “interested in anything except proving the validity of these musty ‘truths’ by applying them, without great success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate, natives” (52).41 In this context, travel writing as a literary genre welcomes a textual attitude. For Said, there are two reasons behind this tendency to rely on texts. Firstly, it is assumed that travel writing is a non-fictional genre and that the writer is telling the truth by transcribing what has really happened before her/his eyes (Orientalism 93). Another reason Said offers is the fact that, travel books really help in some cases. If you find a travel book useful in one single context, and the information provided within it helps one to avoid a big problem that one might encounter otherwise, then one tends to attribute a high authority to travel and guide books. Thus these texts “create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe” (Orientalism 94). For Said, Orientalism is not only an invisible ideology which has become common sense in time but it is also “a set of constraints and limitations of thought” which is much

41

Similarly, it is also possible to observe almost the same attitude in some travel writers who stick to their own “unshakable abstract maxims” and interpret everything through these preconceived notions.

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more than a “positive doctrine” (Orientalism 43). He notes that no matter how creative and marginal a writer is, it is almost impossible for him/her to free his/her thinking of these Orientalist restraints. Even the works of towering figures like Flaubert, Nerval and Scott are invalidated by this Orientalist influence. In their Tourists with Typewriters (1998), which analyzes the travel writing in the 1980s and 1990s, Holland and and Huggan observe that “travel writing in the late twentieth century continues to be haunted by the specter of cliché: its catalogs of anomalies are often recorded in similar terms . . . the same words and phrases . . . the same myths and stereotypes, the same literary analogies” (5-6). The constraints that Orientalism put on writers are not the only outcome of the textual attitude; the tendency to use abstractions also restrains the writer from talking about individuals. As Said sees it, “Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals” (Orientalism 154); likewise, broad distinctions such as Europe- Asia or the Occident-Orient “herd beneath very wide labels every possible variety of human plurality, reducing it in the process to one or two terminal, collective abstractions” (154). Said sees enormous negative results that have emerged out of these “oversweeping generalizations” and abstractions. What they have done is to . . . stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this was accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it said, don’t suffer—they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you’ve just been using. A wash of sentiment therefore disappeared as it encountered the unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist science, supported by “Oriental” lore. (154) It is this tendency that prevents Glazebrook from getting in touch with Turks in his Journey to Kars. He insistently calls Turks Asiatics, “herding” them into one single entity and

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identity with more than 3.5 billion people; almost 60 % of the people living in the world. Thus he erases their individuality, an act which robs them of their humanity. 2.4.3. “The Eternal and Uniform Orient, Incapable of Defining Itself”42 One of the things Said observess about the Orientalist attitude and criticizes severely is the Orientalist disposition to see the Orient as an eternal and unchanging entity: “to the Orientalist, who believes the Orient never changes, the new is simply the old betrayed by new” (Orientalism 104). In that, the Orientalists deny Orientals the possibility of change. All the three travel accounts, that constitute the focus of this study, share this denial of possibility of change. The central question in all these three travelogues is “Has Turkey changed as the Turks claim she has?” None of the accounts come up with an affirmative answer to this question. Since Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal do not bother to give the structure of feeling of the Turkish society and more concerned with forging an “imagined” European identity by defining it against Turkey and Turks, none of these writers let Turks define themselves in their accounts. Whenever a Turk speaks, the writer interprets her/his words, thus distorts and denigrates the authentic voice. 2.4.4. “The Other” as the Threat: Clash of Civilizations or Definitions? In his “Canadian Bacon” (1995), the American director Michael Moore draws our attention to the abyss created by the end of the Cold War. The only super power America feels the lack of an enemy so desperately that the government has to invent one immediately. With the help of the media the new enemy is created within a short time: Canada. In their “The Empire of Fear: The American Political Psyche and the Culture of Paranoia” (2004), Simon Clarke and Paul Hoggett maintain that “the more powerful the USA has become the more that paranoia seems to mark its relation to itself and to others” (89). They also argue 42

The third Orientalist dogma which assumes that “the Orient is eternal, uniform and incapable of defining itself (or speaking for himself)” is criticized by Said many times in Orientalism.

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that “there is a connection between [the USA’s] denial of its own destructiveness, selfidealization expressed in the belief that America represents the end point of the civilizing process towards which all other societies are drawn, and the paranoid conviction that an enemy Other (communism, Islam) aims to corrupt or destroy 'God's chosen people'” (89). As we have discussed the “self-idealization” in connection with the civilizing mission, we will point out how fear is used as an ideological apparatus in the Orientalist discourse. The fourth Orientalist dogma, “the Orient is to be feared” (Orientalism 301), is another common feature Orientalist writers use in their representations. The way the American media have been emphasizing Islamic concepts like “jihad” and “dar’ul harb” (the house of war, non-muslim lands) is an indication of this fear-arousing (Pipes). We can say that these two concepts owe their popularity to Bernard Lewis’s writing on Islam and why Islam has been becoming a threat for America. According to Said, though “Indian Orient could be treated by Europe with such propriety hauteur . . . a sense of danger” has been “reserved for Islam” in the Orientalist discourse (75). We encounter the same discourse in the ongoing invasion of Iraq. Iraq has been presented as a potential threat to the world peace. The Bush government claimed that the Saddam regime was on the threshold of making nuclear weapons. Therefore, the American civilizing mission should take Saddam down, saving the world from such a (“stereotypical”) Oriental despot. That was also good for the Iraqis as they would find the peace and democracy, which they have long missed through America’s help. The Orientalist imagery and vocabulary ready to be used in times of crisis helped the Bush government justify their act. Said, in his “The Clash of Definitions” (2000), convincingly argues that the

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paradigm which is known as “the clash of civilizations”43 has also been carved by Orientalism. He draws our attention to the fact that the concept was first used by Bernard Lewis in his 1990 The Atlantic Monthly essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Furthermore, Said notes the close relation between Lewis’s and Huntington’s work which departs from Lewis’s assumptions and paradigm. According to Huntington, with the end of the Cold War a new type of “clash” which he calls “the clash of civilizations” started to dominate the inter-cultural relations. He argues that there are mainly six civilizations in the world (Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox and Western) and all through the history these civilizations have been hostile to one another. Huntington echoes Lewis’s pattern of the main rivalry between Islamic states and Christendom. For Lewis, with the emergence of Islam, Islamic states became the major rival of the Western Christendom and kept Christendom under constant threat until the second Vienna Siege by the Ottoman Empire in 1683. Lewis concludes that concepts like jihad, crusades, conquest and reconquest are indications of the clash that exists between Islam and Christendom (19). Huntington emphasizes the Islamic identification and solidarity in the case of discords at diverse places such as the Moro-Phillipine, Sudan, Palestine, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Azerbaijan. He suggests that alliances and support are provided in terms of civilization affinities. In the conflict that emerged after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, for example, on the one hand Serbs were assisted by Orthodox countries like Romania, Greece and Russia; Croatians were, on the other hand, aided by countries that have a large Catholic population 43

After 9/11 the “clash of civilizations” concept became such a widely used term that when Turkish Minister of State, Mehmet Aydin gave his opening speech for the Cultural Studies Symposium in May 2005, at Ege University, he could not help referring to the same concept a couple of times. To contest the term, even an “Alliance of Civilizations” summit took place in Spain, Palma de Mallorca on 27-29 November 2005.

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like Austria and the German Catholics; while, Bosnians were supported by countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Another conflict which drew a similar pattern of support, alliance and identification was the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia was supported by Russia which identified themselves with the Orthodox Armenians. Whereas, Azerbaijan was backed by countries like Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia which share the same religious beliefs, and which consequently see themselves Azerbaijan’s natural allies (267-291). According to Huntington, “for peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations” (20). For him, the Cold War years created a deceptive, temporary alliance between civilizations against the communist “bigger evil” (20). However, with the end of the Cold War the old hostilities replaced Cold War concerns and worries. The conflicts between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina are all indicators of this “clash of civilizations” in Huntington=s point of view. When we read The Clash of Civilizations in the light of the four points Said makes on Orientalist dogmas, we see that Huntington’s work is obviously an Orientalist work. In his “The Clash of Definitions” (2000), Said criticizes Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations for using overgeneralizations like the West, Sinic, Hindu or Islam and making these a starting point. In Said’s view, all the classifications and paradigms Huntington introduces are “undesirably vague and manipulable abstractions” (573). He also emphasizes the point that these kinds of “separations” are “belligerent, constructed and situational” (577). For him, “to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fecund” (578). Furthermore, he states that

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concepts like Islam cannot be thought as homogeneous identities: Islam contains within itself an astonishing variety of currents and counter currents, most of them undiscerned by tendentious Orientalist scholars for whom Islam is an object of fear and hostility, or by journalists who do not know any of the languages or relevant histories and are content to rely on persistent stereotypes that have lingered in the West since the tenth century. (580) If we recall the second Orientalist dogma about the preference of “abstractions about Orient” to “direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities” we gain a useful insight into The Clash of Civilizations. Because Huntington builds his argument on Lewis’s assumption in “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990), it is inevitable for him to fall into the pitfall of using these abstractions. Huntington can talk about Islam as if there is a homogeneous and fixed thing as an Islamic character or thought. In that sense, Said states that Huntington inherits Lewis’s “lazy generalizations, the reckless distortions of history, the wholesale demotion of civilizations into categories like irrational and enraged” (572). The third point in The Clash of Civilizations is the tendency to see “the Orient” as “eternal, uniform and incapable of defining itself.” In “Torn Countries: The Failure of Civilization Shifting”44, Huntington examines Turkey’s Westernization reforms and he declares that all these reforms did no good but created a culturally and politically “torn” country (138). Moreover, the “recipient” (148) civilization’s unwillingness to accept Turkey into their club puts Turkey into the “frustrating and humiliating role of a beggar” (178). Therefore, Turkey should give up all her Westernization efforts and assume a much more honorable role which he defines as becoming the “core” state of the Islamic world 44

A chapter in The Clash of Civilizations.

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(179). For him, as long as Turkey aspires to become a European, or Western state Islamic countries will not accept Turkey’s leadership. Within these terms, Huntington’s pessimistic and negative evaluation of Turkish Westernization is an indication of his belief that “the Orient” in that context, Turkey’s culture is “eternal” and trying to change it can only create a “torn country.” As for uniformity, he sees all the rest of the 50 countries that have a Muslim majority as a uniform entity who rejects Turkey as an ally because she is trying to become Western, and who will be ready to embrace her leadership if she gives up her Westernization efforts. Huntington does not let any Turkish voices “define” how they feel and think about Turkish modernization and Westernization.45 Huntington highlights how Turkish Westernization is contested, but he does not refer to any voices which defend and support the gains of the revolutions. What Said finds striking about The Clash of Civilizations is Huntington’s emphasis on “Islam than [on] any other civilization, including the West” (“Clash of Definitions” 569). In that, Said sees a deliberate attention since Huntington’s work points towards Islam as a target for the policy makers at the White House. According to Said, the beginning of the twenty first century marks Europe’s and USA’s tendency to use the “discourse of Orientalism” against Islam, which he describes as a “construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and antipathy against a part of the world that happens to be of strategic importance for its oil, its threatening adjacence to the Christian world, and its formidable history of competitiveness with the West” (“Clash of Definitions” 586). In his “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Lewis notes that the Jihad, the Muslim religious war and the spirit of 45

He cites two Turks: Duygu Bazoğlu Sezer’s “Turkey’s Grand Strategy Facing a Dilemma” (1994), Bahri Yilmaz’s “Turkey’s New Role in International Politics” (1994); and he refers to interviews given by Tansu Çiller, the Turkish Prime Minister from 1993-1996, to papers like Financial Times and New York Times. A process which had taken 73 years, (if the Ottoman Westernization reforms are also taken into account 170 years), by 1996 can be understood and evaluated and a road map could be suggested listening to the voices of 1992-1994, of only three people from that country.

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Crusades (though seemingly dormant at times) are implicit determining factors in terms of relations between the Christians and the Muslims.46 With 9/11 Lewis’s and Huntington’s prediction became more popular. Today “the clash of civilizations” has become one of the most frequently referred political terms. In Said’s view this “clash of civilizations” paradigm poses a threat to world peace. He criticizes Huntington for not being “an arbiter between civilizations,” on the contrary an “advocate of one so called civilization over all others” (“Clash of Definitions” 572). Said asks these sensible questions: Does not this method in effect prolong, exacerbate, and deepen conflict? What does it do to minimize civilizational conflict? Do we want the clash of civilizations? Doesn’t it mobilize nationalist passions and therefore nationalist murderousness? Shouldn=t we ask the question, Why is one doing this sort of thing: to understand or to act? To mitigate or to aggravate the likelihood of conflict? (“Clash of Definitions” 573) Said explains the responsibility of the intellectuals thus. On the other hand, the idea of “clash of civilizations” is not a recent or modern one. It existed long before Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington carried it to the attention of the academic circles. When we look at the major British travel writing of the nineteenth-century England, we see that these works abound with the same Orientalist discourse which emphasizes the difference,

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In his Islam and the West, Lewis notes that with the emergence of Islam as a power, Islam became a threat for Christendom. Lewis states that Islam was both a threat in terms of conversion and the integrity of land for Europe. Lewis notes that as early as the eighth century Muslim armies conquered Spain and Spain could only free itself from the Muslim rule in the fifteenth century. All through this time the whole Europe felt herself under the threat of the Islamic armies. When Spain got under Christian rule again, the Ottoman Empire started to become a big power and starting with the fourteenth century and reaching its peak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Ottomans became a really serious threat for the Christian existence in Europe. Lewis also refers to Crusades and notes that Western Christian armies fought against Islam for centuries under the banner of Christianity. What created the cohesion of these armies was the shared enemy; the rising Islamic powers. Therefore, for Lewis, the normal state of affairs between the West and the East could only be one of war.

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represents the “Oriental” as an inferior race compared to “civilized” Europeans who have had to endure the ordeals of “White Man’s Burden.” In fact this discourse which depicts the Other as a constant threat can be traced back to Pope Urban II’s 1095 call for the first Crusade that I have mentioned in the introduction.

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CHAPTER 3: Representations of Turkey in American and English Travel Writing 3.1. Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1991) as a Touchstone In Martin Scorcese’s Academy-Award-winning movie “The Aviator” (2004), the young film maker Howard Hughes wants to shoot an epic war movie using the latest technological developments in aviation in 1920s. Hughes rents 67 planes, a record number of planes for this purpose. Although they are the fastest vehicles of the time, their speed cannot be discerned in the open sunny sky. They look slow and ineffective since the only touchstone to give a clue about their speed is the other planes which also have the same speed. Then he realizes that he needs a slower moving touchstone to measure, to give the sense of speed and he shoots the same scene using the clouds as his touchstone. Only then, the pace of the airplanes are could be discernible. In Anna Karenina (1877), Tolstoy uses a similar technique. He uses two main male characters: Levine and Count Vronsky. At the beginning of the novel both of these characters make love to Kitty, who is a Moscow high society girl. Levine is depicted as a higher class young gentleman who lives in the country. He despises the urban higher class culture which imitates the Western European culture and looks down on the traditional Russian culture. He wears traditional Russian clothes, which makes him look quite strange in Moscow high society circles so he is seen as an eccentric. He is a serious man who does not enjoy small talk on trivial matters. Furthermore, he would not compromise on his views just to please others or not to sound impolite. Therefore, he is not considered to be one of the favourites of the high society circles in Moscow, while Count Vronsky is a favourite of all the Moscow and St. Petersburg salons. In contrast to Levine, Vronsky likes to please woman; however, whether his words are meant or not does not carry any significance for him. He makes love to Kitty one day and the next day she does not exist

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for him. He follows the latest Western European fashions. He associates himself with gamblers, rakes and dishonest people. Quite expectedly, he never cares about what will become of people. Consequently, his carelesness and lack of moral motives ruin his lover, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy uses both of these characters as touchstones. The reader can measure Levine’s honest conduct through Vronsky’s frail character and vice versa. Following these examples, to give a more discernible assessment of how biased, misrepresentative and Orientalist Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts are, it will be appropriate to set a touchstone to reveal how fair, understanding and mediating travel writing could be. Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1991) is a typical exampe of to what extent travel accounts are not doomed to use stereotypes, other the peoples of the land and dehumanize them. She is a counter-hegemonic voice in terms of representing Turkey in the Western travel writing for four reasons. First of all, she contradicts the idea that there is an ineridicable difference between the East and the West, Islam and Christianity, etc. Secondly, instead of using abstractions and “sweeping generalizations” Turks are depicted as individuals in her account. Thirdly, Turks exist as a constantly changing people in her account. Lastly, her Turkey is not to be feared but loved and welcomed. For all these traits, Settle’s account aligns itself with works like Lady Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Captain Frederick Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877), Sidney Whitman’s Turkish Memories (1914), Marmaduke Pickthall’s With the Turk in the Wartime (1914) and Grace Ellison’s An Englishwoman in Angora (1923). The first point which makes Settle’s account different from those of Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal is that Settle does not attribute a taken-for-granted superiority to the “Western” culture. In fact, she does not make such a distinction throughout her account. Turkey is Turkey; it is neither the East nor the West. When she does mention herself as a

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Westerner that does not lead to a boasting, or a sense of superiority. She does not see the difference between Christianity and Islam as an issue that might prevent people of these two religions from making friends. The scene that takes place in Seyitgazi is remarkable as a very good example of how she depicts the inter-religional and inter-cultural relations of Turkish people: We were the only Westerners, and probably the only ones who recognized that a baptistery from the Byzantine church had been built into the corner of the courtyard, and that the columns were Roman. At the tomb of Seyit Battal Gazi women in their salvar and their head scarves moved slowly around the twenty-foot-long catafalque and kissed along its sides. Then they kissed along the small tomb beside it where a Christian princess is buried. (Turkish Reflections 198) Settle reminds us that Turks have inherited from the other cultures that have lived in Anatolia. The mention of Byzantine Church, Roman Columns and Christian Princess in a Turkish sanctuary signifies how Turks venerate non-muslim Anatolian cultures. Another example which illustrates how she regards the intermingling of different civilizations and how they borrow from each other notes that: Nothing, neither a belief nor a piece of stone nor a memory, was wasted there, and never has been. . . . All along the Aegean coast, when the Roman Empire became Christian, some of the old temples were allowed to fall, some torn down in a religious passion, some made into quarries and lime pits. Their outer walls, their classic columns were incorporated into the new churches, then into mosques. (Turkish Reflections 16) In Glazebrook we see the quite contrary approach in terms of the representation of cultural

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and religious difference. The story she tells us about why she left Kos,47 is another incident Settle uses to argue that religion is not the most important issue which determines the way you would get along with the peoples of a land.48 While Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts contain quite a large number of abstractions about “Turks,” “Asiatics,” “Orientals,” “Muslims,” “Muhammedans” and so forth, in Settle’s account what really counts is the individuals. Even when she makes generalizations we see that these generalizations are not derived from old stereotypes, which have their roots as far back as the twelfth century Crusades. Instead of using expressions like “Turkish houses are . . . ” or “Turkish streets are . . . ” she prefers phrasing her generalizations in that way: “Some of the Turkish houses were so old that they still had the ladders that could be withdrawn, in time of siege. . . . Some of the streets were wide, for easy movement in battle, or so narrow that they were easily defended” (18). When she makes observations about Turks and draws conclusions she uses this tone: The young polite Turkish boy bows to the older man, kisses his hand, and touches his own forehead with it because his parents have taught him to honor age, not because he is consciously following the manners of tribal Islam. The indigenous politeness, the courtly manners, the pride . . . the dignity . . . are all there, more in the poor than in the rich who tend to follow our less formal Western manners. (Turkish Reflections 70) The first thing to note in this account is how Settle notes exceptions. The difference in manners between the rich and the poor that Settle underlines implies the notion that it is 47

A Greek Island which is 6 miles from Bodrum. She has been living in Kos for nearly three months when her friend, her protector, Vangeli leaves Kos for Athens. As soon as he leaves she becomes the victim of teenager boys of the island. They throw stones at her for fun. As for their parents, they only watch the scene. The next day of the event she sees the eighteen-year-old leader of the pack as holding the cross at the Easter processions. But when she gets to Muslim Bodrum she is welcomed like a “long-lost sister” (8). 48

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difficult to make generalizations and that in any case many other distinctions could exist. The second significant point worth mentioning is how Settle reads bowing and kissing hands. She does not condemn them as lacking self-dignity. She reads these cultural codes as a connection between the past within Turkish society.49 The Change in the Meaning of Words: Gazi and Crusades A crusade is, historically speaking, “a military expedition undertaken by the Christians of Europe in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.” But in the seventeenth century, the word was transformed into “any war instigated and blessed by the Church for alleged religious ends, a ‘holy war’; applied esp. to expeditions undertaken under papal sanction against infidels or heretics.” After the nineteenth century the word crusade gained even a more secular meaning and it was reduced into “a series of actions advancing a principle or tending toward a particular end” (OED). When George W. Bush stated that the U.S. would start a crusade to find and punish the terrorrists who were behind the 9/11 attacks, we witnessed an interesting contest on the meaning of the word. The word crusade was translated by anti-American Turkish media as “haçlı seferi”50 which means “Christian holy war against Muslims” in the medieval sense of the word. This aroused such a serious reaction in Turkey and all around the world that the White House spokesperson had to make clarifications on the way Bush used the word. He said that it was used in the modern sense and not in its medieval sense (Carroll). In the Turkish context, in defining the meaning of gazi we see a similar 49

In his “The Rhetoric of Othering” Stephen Harrold Riggins criticizes the woman writer49 of the Globe and Mail article “Kayaking the Ganges: Sacred Trip?” (1993) for “making no efforts to reach out to understand the religious sentiments of Hindus or to convey them to readers” (25). This point taken into account, we see that Settle does her best to understand Turkish culture and customs to share them with her readers. Her “identification by sympathy” of the young Turkish boy is an illustration of her concern about conveying the insight she has gained of Turkish life. 50

See “Bush: Bu Bir Haçlı Seferidir.” Milliyet İnternet: Güncel Haberler. 18 Sep. 2001. 20 Jan. 2007 .

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contestation in travelogues. According to Settle, Turkey is a land which is welcoming rather than threatening and Turks are friendly, amiable and hospitable people. Whereas, in A Fez of the Heart (1995), Seal draws a different picture. He construes the Turkish word gazi as a title which means “destroyer of Christians” (119). Settle, on the other hand, expounds the same word in a different fashion: A ghazi is classically an Islamic fighter against the infidel, but it has come to mean, in Turkish, the honourable name for a hero, a survivor of a war, a leader. Turkey has always been a land ruled by ghazis, aslans, lions, those soldiers who represented to the Turkish people what they thought and hoped they stood for themselves. To tap that archetype of the ghazi within them was always to gather them together, as did the Seljuks of Alp Arslan in the eleventh century, Aladdin Keykubad in the thirteenth century. . . . Then in the twentieth century came the latest ghazi . . . the most astounding of Turkey’s ghazis . . . Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. (Turkish Reflections xiv-xv) The difference between how Seal explains the word to his readers and Settle does it is quite obvious. Seal’s definition aims to bring up antagonism between Turks and his readers by showing that Turks, who call their most highly regarded leader gazi are still threatening non-Muslims. However, Settle’s definition points out the shift in the society and culture through referring to the change in the word gazi. Unlike Seal’s fear-arousing definition, Settle’s definition, which refers to Atatürk among other Turkish leaders and his role in the Turkish Independence war, suggests that Turks were not the threatening side all the time but they were also threatened by European powers at times. One more counterdiscursive representation we come across in Settle’s account is the way she depicts Turkish soldiers. Most travel writers refer to Turkish soldiers as

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barbarians who destroy cities and kill innocents. We see a similar approach in Glazebrook’s work; he depicts Turkish conscripts as “Mongol overlords crushing rustics under armed heels” (Turkish Reflections 117). Settle, on the other hand, pictures them under a very different light: “ . . . the cutting of a tree, even on your own land is a crime in Turkey. All along the roads of Turkey, I saw soldiers, the young village boys. . . . They were being taken to plant trees. It is one of the main jobs of the conscripts. That love of plants was a part of our kinship” (Turkish Reflections xvi). The passage underlines the common good in human nature. Her account makes the conscripts, Turkish soldiers individuals, not the oppressor of the people but a part of the same community. Moreover, being in the army does not only mean having military training but also gaining values like planting trees and caring for nature. In Glazebrook’s account we will see that the same conscripts will be depicted as the oppressors of the nation who feel a sort of weird pleasure from having guns to threaten the people. To conclude, Settle’s account is a contestation of movies and other cultural productions like Midnight Express. Her work, which is free from binary oppositions like West-East or the Christendom-Islam, reveals that these dichotomies are not inevitable. Her open-minded and receptive attitude help her reach out to Turkey and her history. Another point worth noting about her book is the way the narrator identifies (by sympathy) herself with Turks and render their structure of feeling. Finally, contrary to the Orientalist discourse, her arbitration of the past conflicts and giving the point of view of the Turkish side of the history paves the way for a better understanding for her readers and Turkey.

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3.2. Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984): “Politics of Not Belonging” Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984) is a typical example of how nineteenth-century British imperialist discourse is still dominant in representing “other” cultures in our modern age. Using “strategies of dissociation” and symbolic boundaries” (Pickering 109), Glazebrook’s account is an attempt to reveal that Turkey does not belong in Europe. Glazebrook suggests that he takes his trip to Kars just because he wants to be able to imagine himself as a nineteenth-century British traveler. His project is to follow the itineraries of the Victorian travelers who, leaving their countries which they loved “chauvinistically,” set off for the East “in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery amongst Asiatics whose morals and habits they despised, in lands which, at best, reminded them of Scotland” (9). In his efforts to imagine the past, or the Victorian travelers to Turkey, Glazebrook uses the accounts of the travel writers to Ottoman Turkey to reconstruct the nineteenthcentury Ottoman Turkey. Glazebrook’s boundless admiration for the nineteenth-century travelers is not a mere coincidence at all. It was the golden age of British imperialism and during Queen Victoria’s reign, England would boast of being the Empire where the sun never sets. There was a great demand for travel books as the world was of great interest to the British at the time. Thus, why Vambery got his Travels in Central Asia (1864) published in England instead of his native country Hungary can be better grasped. Glazebrook applauds Vambery’s words which praise Britain. For Vambery Britain is the “real embodiment of the European spirit—the rightful civilizer of Asia” (qtd. in Glazebrook 240). During the Victorian eraTurkey was of interest to British travelers mainly for two reasons. First of all, Ottoman Turkey contained sites that were of great importance to the

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West. In the nineteenth century, Ottoman rule stretched from Belgrade in the West to today’s Israel and Egypt in the Southeast. Nearly all the Biblical cities were a part of the Ottoman Empire. Also, the Ottoman Turkey had Roman and Greek ruins under its control. Therefore, the Ottoman land was the land where the Western civilization was born; nineteenth-century travelers traveled through Ottoman land looking for their intellectual and religious roots. That is how we can explain Eliot Warburton’s, Alexander Kinglake’s and Sir W. M. Ramsay’s visits to Ottoman Turkey. Their itinerary consisted of the Biblical, Greek and Roman sites such as Jerusalem, Cairo, İstanbul, İzmir, Ephesus and so on. Although they have a Eurocentric attitude, they still remain in the intellectual domain as they do not very often get involved in political issues directly. In the second group, there were travelers whose main concern was to observe the situation of the “Sick Man of Europe” and report it back home. During the nineteenthcentury, as the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman Empire posed the Eastern Question51 in Europe. It was certain that the Empire would fall, but the big powers like England, France and Russia were not sure about how to share the remains of the Empire.52 When we read the nineteenth-century accounts of British consuls in Anatolia, we see that they were just documenting blueprints for a possible occupation of Ottoman Turkey (Gatheral 226-261). They were full of details about the demographic situation of the region, the mineral resources, the loyalties of the local people, the future prospects of the region etc. For

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In his The Eastern Question 1774-1923, A. L. Macfie states that “For more than a century and a half, from the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74 to the treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923, the Eastern Question, the question of what should become of the ottoman Empire, then in decline, played a significant, and even at times a dominant, part in shaping the relations of the Great Powers” (1). Macfie explains French occupation of Egypt, the Greek independence war, the Crimean War and many other important conflicts in the nineteenth century European, Asian and North African scenes in terms of the Eastern Question. For further information see J.A.R. Mariott’s Eastern Question (1924) and M. .S. Anderson’s The Eastern Question, 1774-1923: A Study in International Relations (1966). 52

Some historians suggest that World War I was fought for the influence on the remains of the Ottoman Empire.

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writers like Frederick Burnaby and Arminius Vambery, Turkey was a remarkable country for her geopolitical position. Burnaby, for instance, does not visit any of the ancient cities around İzmir; he never refers to any of the Greek or Roman ruins. During his journey, he investigates whether there has been a massacre of Armenians or other Christian minorities on the Ottoman lands or not. His main concern was to draw British public attention to Russia’s expansionist ambitions. He discussed the possible outcome of a most likely Russian invasion of Turkey and what that would mean for England. As has been noted before, Journey to Kars is a highly inter-textual travel account. Glazebrook uses many nineteenth-century British travel accounts to reconstruct the Ottoman Empire of the time. While doing this, he makes decisions on issues such as which writers to cite, which aspects to highlight, which texts to quote, under which light to present these writers and accounts. His explicit asoociations with the imperialist discourse make Glazebrook’s account something more than a practice, a sketch on his work that he was planning to write. It becomes a significant political text which really deserves our attention. Therefore, we cannot just simply dismiss it as a novelist’s sketchbook.53 Apart from his focus on the nineteenth-century Ottoman lands, his account is full of references to the time that he travels in Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Roumania, Hungary, Austria and Switzerland. If we consider that countries like Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Roumania and Hungary were socialist states during his stays in these countries, his account also becomes an arena where socialist system and the lifestyle it imposes is discussed. 53

Even when they do not intend them to be pieces of works to be displayed or published, artist’s and writer’s sketchbooks have been an object of interest for those who want to know the writer from a closer perspective. This winter for example, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York organized an exhibition which highlighted Van Gogh’s sketches. Another museum which finds artists’ sketches significant in terms of gaining an insight into an artist’s creative process is New York Guggenheim Museum. During their David Smith exhibition they displayed the sculptor’s sketches and drafts in special display along with his sculptures. In Glazebrook’s case, he does not keep his sketchbook to himself but he publishes it, which gives Journey to Kars a status more significant than a draft or sketchbook. Its publication gains the work a name of its own.

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3.2.1. Journey to Kars as a “Raj Revivalist” Account Drawing on Said’s Orientalism, in her “Travel Writing within British Studies” (1999), Susan Bassnett highlights the relation between travel writing and its subject. According to her: Orientals and their culture are . . . packaged for consumption by Western readers. Moreover, the underlying assumption is that the presentation of the Oriental (or perhaps we should simply say the Other) is that of negative comparison with the known. Hence the emphasis in so much travel writing on the contrast between the civilized traveler (and by implication, the civilized readers for whom s/he is writing) and the uncivilized inhabitants of other cultures. (6) Bassnett also draws our attention to how the nineteenth-century imperialist discourse has not ended with the end of the British Empire. Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars is likewise an elegy in the form of a travel account which laments the end of the Empire paying its due respect to the nineteenth-century imperialist discourse. It is an Orientalist work since the text has been built upon stereotypes and dichotomies which nourish fears that have already been present in its readers’ subconscious. Glazebrook introduces the idea that Asia and Europe are irrevocably different from each other. The Asiatics as “the Other” who are associated with “discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery” and “whose morals and habits they despised” help Glazebrook establish his touchstone to measure the comfort, safety, cleanliness, health and prosperity of England and superior moral conduct of the traveler. As we will see, Glazebrook never comes up with imperialism as the real motive of his Victorian middle-class travelers. He never regards them as the agents of British imperialism. He rather sees them as selfless and

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obliging adventurers whose sole ambition was to serve their country in a heroic way. Glazebrook suggests that the British Empire gave her subjects advantages and prestige: “In 1850, Palmerston compared the British subject to the Roman, who ‘held himself from indignity when he could say civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong’” (159). Although these words belong to Palmerston, when we read the whole account we see that Glazebrook’s tone and alignments are consistent with Palmerston’s discourse. When he gives an account of how the Russian officers and civil servants saw their posts in Kars as unfortunate exile, Glazebrook notes that “had it belonged to the British Empire, it would have had the brisk social life of an Indian or African station, where pining was not regarded as setting the proper tone, and where at any rate, the middle-class administrator was sufficiently content with the prestige and comfort of his life” (135). With these words, Glazebrook addresses the nineteenth-century British imperialism as a commonly shared and celebrated British enterprise. “The middle-class administrators” see their duty neither as a burden on their shoulders nor as an unpleasant obligation, but as a way of serving their Empire as the post would give them prestige and comfort. For Glazebrook, the nineteenth-century imperialist politics of England made “the East an attractive field to these middle-class ‘gentlemen’, for in the East, as well as placing themselves in the highest rank of society, they found opportunities . . . to prove a knightly character through Ordeal by Travel, and to put themselves before the public in this character as the hero of a book of travels” (98). Here, Glazebrook explicitly refers to the direct connection between imperialism and travel writing. Because British imperialism aimed to “conquer” the East and take it under her control, the travelers’ tales which

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brought this world to their readers had a crucial role in the realization of this project in the nineteenth century. They stood as imperialist heroes and role models in conquering the world--54 heroes that left the comforts of their homes for their Queen, their schools, their newspapers, their intellectual interests and took a long and dangerous journey.55 3.2.2. Stereotyping In the imagination of these inhabitants whose identity as Europeans was still in the making, the Ottomans (them) were described as possessing qualities which civilized persons (we) did/could not possess. In the world of the European mind, the Ottoman alternately were terrible, savage, and “unspeakable” and at the same time sex-crazed, harem-driven, and debauched. Even in the nineteenth century, European imaginings marked the Ottoman East as the degenerate site of pleasures supposedly absent or forbidden in the civilized and vigorous West, where Europeans by contrast allegedly were restrained, sober, just, sexually controlled, moderate and rational. (Quataert 7) While Glazebrook idealizes nineteenth century English travelers and culture, he uses stereotypes to depict Turks and Turkey. When he refers to people in Turkey as “nomads” he does not use the term as a “particular historical event,” he draws on Sir John Malcom’s travels to Persia as an ambassador. Malcolm’s nineteenth-century Persian observations are 54

In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King (1888), Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, the two main characters are motivated with this design. They want to go to Kafiristan, a country which had been visited by few travelers, to conquer the land for the queen, thus enlarging the Empire. The heroes in “The Man Who Would be King” are good examples of the discoverer-conqueror-imperialist hero. The same issue is also raised for Christopher Columbus: “What was the legacy of Christopher Columbus? Was he a valiant explorer who opened a new world to the benefits of European civilization? Or, was he a narrow imperialist, motivated by greed to plunder and enslave the native peoples of America?” . 55 Just like Odyssey and Gilgamesh. That’s why Don Quixote wants to undertake a heroic journey in spite of his old age, weak body and lack of training in knightly arts.

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used to explain why Turkey had “an efficient, widespread and cheap system of travel” (92). Thus nineteenth-century Persia and the twentieth-century Turkey are homogenized and frozen in time and space; they are reduced into a stereotypical character, in this case Turks as “Asiatic” “nomads.” Some of the most important stereotypes that Glazebrook uses in his account are that Turks are an immature, noisy56, childlike and irresponsible people. Secondly, they are noncivilized as they are uneducated compared to the British. As a consequence, they neither have any civic pride to make their cities more beautiful nor do they have any notion of preserving what is old and aesthetic since they are non-settled nomads. Lastly, Glazebrook draws on historical stereotype of the cruel, barbarian Turk. Assuming the ineradicable distinction between Turks and Europeans, Glazebrook reflects on the use of sound amplification on the reading of Ezan (call for prayers): Never was an invention so abused as the electric amplification of sound abused by Asiatics, an example of the fact that a culture like Islam, which has never invented anything, is sure to misapply the inventions of other races. Like the garish colors they dote upon, this pining for loud noises and sweetmeats makes the Turks seem to have the tastes of children. (102) Here Glazebrook firstly denies the right to use technology which has been invented by “us” to “them.” Although “they” did not invent it they use it for their own purposes, to call for prayers. It is also worth noting here how he reduces Ezan into “loud noises.” Turks are immature, firstly because they are “Asiatics” and then because they practice a religion 56

In fact, the Turkish stereotype in the nineteenth century is more like Julia Pardoe’s description (also keeping in mind what Lord Byron says on the difference between the English and Turks “we talk much, and they little”). Pardoe writes: “If occasionally some loud voice of dispute, or some ringing peal of laughter, should scare the silence of night, it is sure to be the voice of the laughter of an European, for the Turk is never loud, even in his mirth; a quiet internal chuckle, rather seen upon the lips than sensible to the ear, is greatest demonstarion of enjoyment . . . ” (63).

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“which has never invented anything.” It is not only the ezan which is noisy, Turkish children are also annoying in terms of their manners in Glazebrook’s account: “noisy little Turks in miniature grown-up clothes . . . who clattered round and round the planking, screaming loudly. Their parents had made no preparations whatever to entertain children by bringing toys or games or drawing books to ward off boredom; instead they sat sipping drinks” (162). We do not only read what Glazebrook sees in Turkey, we also need to know what the (superior and refined) British attitude would be in such a context. As Pickering points out, “the infantilizing trope had a significant role in the nineteenth-century colonialist discourse” (49). He also notes that the stereotype of the black African in Victorian writers’ tales of adventure for youth was the depiction “of black people’s ‘low’ instinctual savvy and unphilosophic mind, their live-for-today improvidence, their rudimentary social organization, their cowardice combined with their irrational tendency to cruelty and violence, their laziness and duplicity and above all, their childishness” (127). When we read Glazebrook’s account, we see that he attributes some of these stereotypes to Turks as well, especially in the case of Turkish “childishness.”57 Apart from being “noisy” and “childlike” Turks are also represented as irresponsible and non-principled people in Glazebrook’s account. When they are shop owners they cannot be treated as one could treat a British shop keeper. There is nothing 57

Another example of the childlike Turk is Alexander Kinglake’s “whir-whir-whizz-whizz” pasha whom Kinglake meets in Belgrade. Kinglake asks a serious question about the present and future circumstances of the Ottoman Empire and the pasha answers: “The ships of the English swarm like flies; their printed calicoes cover the whole earth; and by the side of their swords the blades of Damascus are blades of grass. All India is but an item in the ledger-books of the merchants, whose lumber-rooms are filled with ancient thrones!—whir! whir! All by wheels!—whizz! whizz! all by steam!” (8-9). Here the Pasha, the governor of Belgrade is depicted as a man who cannot hold a serious conversation. His admiration for British technological achievements and the empire is followed by his silly and childish “whir” and “whiz” which is an indication of how superior and efficient the British are and how inferior and unqualified the Ottoman governor is for such a serious duty.

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wrong with describing all the Turkish civil servants in terms of “incompetence, corruption and cowardice” (85). One of the most striking examples to that stereotype that Glazebrook uses is the way he narrates the 1877 Kars siege. It is worth noting here how he dissociates the British officer from Turks even when they are allies. Even though they fight against the Russians together, the English officer still finds himself closer to the enemy Russian officer than the ally Turkish soldiers: “The life of a Turkish ally (as may be seen from the following account) counted for less than the life of a Russian enemy” (129). He underlines that assumption before he quotes the military attache’s story to reveal that although the Victorian England formed alliances with Turks during the nineteenth century they never accepted them as “mon frere,” as equal partners or friends: The battle was at its thickest and hottest, when three Turkish soldiers pushed a wounded Russian officer back from the parapet, and followed him over it to dispatch him with their bayonets. Major Teesdale, seeing this act of barbarity, vaulted over the breastwork, cut down the foremost Turk with his sword, and called on the Russian, in French, to surrender as a prisoner of war. . . . Major Teesdale most deservedly received the Victoria Cross for this exploit, as well as the thanks of General Muravief which were publicly offered him . . . for his chivalrious humanity towards a wounded enemy. (129) The dichotomy that this representation of the war scene puts before us is firstly between the civilized and the noncivilized. In spite of the fact that they battle against each other, speaking French and having chivalrous principles about how to treat a wounded enemy soldier, the English major and the Russian general are “mon-frere.” Turks are totally dismissed, in Glazebook’s account because we do not hear their voices on the issue.

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All the depictions above connote that Turks are an uncivilized, uneducated and ignorant nation. In addition, they do not have any sense of aesthetic values. They have dirty and ugly cities which do not reveal any sign of civic pride. In addition, they do not preserve historical sites that they have inherited from the older civilizations which had emerged in Anatolia. The discourse of “Islamic darkness” (141) prevails in such a way that Glazebrook never believes that they can look at things with curiosity in their eyes: “Few looked out, and if they do there isn’t interest in their eyes, there is disdain” (89). Turks are the opposite of the Victorians in terms of education and learning as well. Glazebrook establishes the role of travel in the Victorian intellectual values: “The virtues which the Victorians professed to admire most, and which the classical education dinned into their heads and hearts—resolution, independence, steadiness under stress, courage, endurance of hardship, scholarship—could all be displayed in a book of travels through classical lands inhabited by wild tribes” (20). The binary opposition which presumes British intellectual and moral superiority serves as the justificication of taking them away from “wild tribes,”

who cannot possibly value the precious remains of ancient

civilizations. Thus Glazebrook justifies the plundering of the classical sites. A further example which demonstrates Glazebrook’s attitude on the issue is his argument on the Elgin Marbles. Glazebrook represents the issue with these words: “Lord Elgin rescued for Europe the Parthenon frieze with the feelings of a man rescuing his own ancestor from the flames of destruction” (234). According to Glazebrook, Turks are the main responsible party for the destruction of ancient ruins in Turkey because “as a race Turks don’t care a jot for preserving what is beautiful” (75). He sees Turks as people who are destroyers of the ancient ruins: “Half the world’s most famous antiquities had to be rescued from lime-kilns, or pulled out of houses,

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or taken in some way out of common use to be preserved in museums . . . travellers . . . liberated what they found” (62). Here, Glazebrook echoes the discourse which justifies the removal of ancient ruins from where they belong. In his South from Ephesus (1988), Brian Sewell draws our attention to a similar debate on Xanthus. Sewell narrates how Xanthus was “marauded” by Charles Fellows : The unfettered enthusiasm for the city and its monuments and inscriptions expressed in his journal of 1838 brought a marauding British battleship to Xanthus four years later and for two months Fellows, Lieutenat Spratt and Captain Graves urged British sailors (hardly qualified archeologists, even by the standards of the day) to ravish the site, dismantle and pack its monuments . . . It is even fair to suggest that a better impression of Xanthus is to be had in Bloomsbury than in Lycia, and that the belated rage of the Greeks over their loss of the Elgin marbles seems absurdly histrionic (as well as wholly unjustified) when compared with Turkish losses from Xanthus—to say nothing of the worst loss of all, the Pergamon altar in East Berlin. It is now impossible to share the full Fellows’ excitement—nothing can detract from the beautiful situation of the city above the wide sweep of the Xanthus river, and nothing can remedy the effect of earthquake or the Byzantine depredations as they stripped the theatre and other monuments to build their defensive wall, but he found the city full of tombs, inscriptions, reliefs and free-standing sculpture, and he ripped them from their settings and carried them off to London. D.G. Hogarth in an account of Xanthus written in 1911 uses the word ‘robbed.’ (140) When we compare Sewell’s representation of the destruction of ancient ruins in Turkey to

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that of Glazebrook, we see a clash of two opposite discourses. While Glazebrook justify the removal of the ancient artifacts through condescending and belittling the native people, Sewell does not see the issue from the same point of view. Instead of the word “liberated” he prefers the word “ripped,” “robbed” and “removed.” On getting help or letting the Austrians excavate Ephesus, Glazebrook remarks that “it doesn’t offend Asiatics, who possess no instinctive reverence for old stones, having always sold them to foreigners, or burned them for lime, or throw them down in the search for treasure” (50). Although Turks are the only people blamed for the contemporary situation of the ruins in Glazebrook’s account, we see that Sewell refers to natural catastrophes and the Byzantine use and destruction of the ancient cities. In Glazebrook’s account people like Fellows are depicted as romantic saviors of ancient ruins from people who do not have the level of culture or civilization to value and protect them: “A solitary Englishman practicing the qualities he had been schooled to prize, and to watch the rising of the moon over the ruins of some Imperial city where the Bedouin now grazed his flocks” (Journey to Kars 66). They had to be saved from the noncivilized Bedouins as well as from Turks, whereas for Sewell these “solitary” Englishmen are robbers, marauders and cheaters: High up amongst those sea-cliffs of that promontory of Knidos, which he was exploring whilst Acting Consul on Rhodes in the 1850s (with the duty of “watching over British Museum’s interests in the Levant”), Charles Newton discovered an enormous marble lion. It was ten feet long, by six high, and weighed eleven tons. But he could not persuade any of his Turkish or Greek laborers to see a lion in what, to them was a familiar white boulder amongst the purplish crags above the sea. With much difficulty, and several accidents, Newton crated the lion and lowered it off the cliff into a

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warship for removal to England together with the Mausoleum from Halicarnassus which he also excavated. On this promontory Newton discovered too a creature much more unusual than a Hellenic lion: a Turkish squire. The life of this Aga of Datscha Newton58 describes with much satisfaction—his fishing and partridge-shooting, the shoe-making and gun-making and carpentry going on around his house, as well as his lively interest in history and foreign countries—as though the existence of a country gentleman after the pattern of Squire Hastings, on this wild promontory, proved that all the world tended if it could towards the English way of doing things. To see a squire in a Turkish bey—to make out the English pattern behind foreign ways—required equally trained perceptions as it took to see a marble lion in a white rock. The combination of hardihood with scholarship, a particularly English mixture which Newton possessed in a high degree, made him value the least trace of such a combination in this desolate land where he found himself. (35-36) According to Glazebrook, having discovered the lion gives Newton all the legitimate rights to claim the lion as his. The use of the warship to steal the marble lion is ironic as far Glazebrook’s discourse is concerned. Glazebrook tries to draw Newton’s portrait as a civilized and most refined man who has an exceptional vision which helps him make discoveries. On the other hand, his means of transportation says a lot about how he also uses the raw power and how the British Empire makes it possible to excavate in Bodrum. But what is more interesting comes with the comparison Glazebrook tries to establish between the discovery of the marble lion and Newton’s seeing an Englishman in a Turkish 58

Charles Thomas Newton (1816-1894), British archeologist who discovered Halicarnassus mausoleum.

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“bey” (gentleman). Glazebrook’s presumption on the absolute superiority of the English over the Turks is so conclusive that a Turkish bey’s having cultivated tastes or curiosity sound incredible to him. In fact, almost all the nineteenth-century Western travel accounts picture Turkish gentlemen contrary to the way Glazebrook puts before us. As Said maintains, Orientalist’s study is “far from being merely additive or cumulative, the growth of knowledge is a process of selective accumulation, displacement, deletion, rearrangement, and insistence” (176). What Glazebrook tries to present as an extraordinary instance and exception was the common image of the Turkish gentlemen in nineteenth-century travel accounts. Even in a highly racist account like Arminius Vambery’s Travels in Central Asia (1864), Vambery praises the manners of the Turkish ambassador and his staff in Tehran: “The superiority of Osmanlı results from the attention he is paying to the languages of Europe, and his disposition gradually to acquaint himself with the progress that European savants have made in physics, and chemistry” (23). In his On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1877), Frederick Burnaby draws portraits of many respectable, honest, sensible, and welleducated Turkish gentlemen. Ishak Paşa, for example, is depicted as a just governor who deals with people’s problems regardless of their ethnicity or religious beliefs. When Burnaby relates an Italian widow’s problem to him, he states his concern on the subject but points out the legal difficulties. Upon Burnaby’s suggestion for a way out, he does not hesitate to put it into action. Other Eastern nations are also more fairly represented. James Creagh, another nineteenth-century travel writer Glazebrook refers to, in his A Scamper to Sebastopol and Jerusalem (1865) depicts his Tartar hosts: “The manners of the Tartars are generally very dignified, and the high opinion that a respectable man has of his own

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importance teaches him how to be very gracious towards people whom he wishes to please. He is neither servile nor familiar, and no English gentleman could have done the honors of his house more agreeably than my old host” (205). These are only a few examples out hundreds of others from the nineteenth-century writers. Although Glazebrook refers to all these three writers, it does not influence his depiction. He selects, deletes and uses the parts which best fits his ends. 3.2.3. Discourse of Primitivism: Nomadic Turks For Glazebrook, Eastern cities are just the magical, fabulous creations of travel writers. He thus reasons for the exaggerated fantasy and high expectations that travelers hold for them; in reality, they are ugly cities full of dirty streets. He describes what the early travelers experienced in entering İstanbul and other eastern cities as “the dissolution of the distant magic . . . into dirty lanes between blank walls, and heaps of offal poisoning the air” (171). In Erzurum, he does not even leave the bus station to see the city (120-124). There is almost nothing in a Turkish city which might appeal to him. Even when he feels a kind of liveliness about a Turkish city, he attributes it to animals such as goats, sheep and cows that he comes across in Kars. Glazebrook sees three reasons behind why Turkish cities are so underdeveloped, ugly and dirty. Firstly, he assumes that Turks are a nomadic race and for him this “nomadic lack of attachment, most obvious to a stranger in their indifference to buildings—makes the settled peoples of Europe uneasy” (151). As a result, they cannot build cities like European cities because “water and shade, not fine buildings, satisfy a nomad’s needs” (88). The second reason why Turks cannot build cities, for him, is that unlike the Europeans, they do not have “any tradition of civic responsibility or civic pride” (87). The third reason is the “lack of continuous development from past into present” (87).

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Glazebrook notes that there are not many civil houses left from the eighteenth or nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Glazebrook depicts Turkish towns: “Every horizon is dominated by high-rise blocks of concrete, and what is not in process of being built appears to be falling into ruins. There is a universal shabbiness not found elsewhere” (87). When he comes across a beautiful building in Kars he knows that it is un-Turkish as Turks cannot build anything good-looking. The building “stands out like British building in India: frock coat and top hat picking its way through the bazaar” (132). In this simile as well, Glazebrook once more emphasizes the difference between Turkey and England through equating Turkey with India and England with Russia. In that dichotomy, civilized superior England and Russia hold the right to rule noncivilized, inferior India and Turkey. So, erecting beautiful buildings is read as an indication of being civilized which makes them superiors of the uncivilized. Glazebrook draws Turks as an unsettled people who have not been used to urban life. In his Oriental Panorama: British Travelers in nineteenth Century Turkey (1999), Reinhold Schiffer examines over 160 late eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel accounts. On the other hand, Schiffer does not mention even once that one of the stereotypes prevalent among the Western travelers of the time was “Turks as nomads.” At some point he compares the representation of the moral characters of the metropolitan, mainly İstanbul and İzmir, to provincial and rural Turks, when it comes to rural he only mentions nomadic Turks in a few sentences and focuses on the nomadic Kurds and how they are represented in the nineteenth-century accounts. The Turks represented in Lady Montagu, Baron de Tott, Kinglake, Burnaby, Ramsay and many other eighteenth and nineteenth-century accounts are hardly ever nomadic people. Travelers rarely mention spending some time in a Turkoman’s tent. In almost all of the cases, travelers spend their

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night on their trips Turkish village or town houses in Anataolia. Nomadic Turkic tribes usually emerge in nineteenth-century accounts that were written on Central Asia. Vambery’s account abounds with them. Another one is Frederick Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva (1877). Kinglake mentions nomadic Arab tribes, so does Eliot Warburton. In that we see Glazebrook’s insistence of “denial” or “evacuation” of history because Glazebrook’s insistence on calling Turks nomads is, in Pickering’s words, “history in drastic reverse” (49). For it deliberately ignores and erases the Turkish experience of contributing to the construction and maintenance of cities like İstanbul, Bursa, Edirne, Konya, Sivas, Kayseri and many others. Pickering explains this phenomenon in these terms: The stereotypical Other is a denial of history. It works as an obstacle to change and transformation. The representation of cultural signs as essential types has a morally normative effect in rendering them as natural, absolute and invariable. To see them in this way is to evacuate history and the possibility of change from them and so protect existing structures and relations of power behind the shield of “safe legitimacy.” When a social category becomes a stereotype it takes on the aura of myth in this sense. Stereotypes are history in drastic reverse. . . . Stereotypes operate through myths because both involve the combined repressions of politics and history. Condensing these repressions in particular representational figures perpetuates social exclusion and economic inequalities and can serve as a way of rationalizing bigotry, hostility and aggression. Yet the damage caused by stereotyping practices applies not only to the objects of stereotypical regard, but also to those who advance any particular stereotypes as definite truth, if only because stereotypes create barriers

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across their social interactions and relations, over both time and space. Stereotyping is both boundary-maintaining move inward, rather than an emancipatory movement outwards. (49) This “denial” and “repression” of history we come across in Journey to Kars is an “obstacle to change” in terms of Turkey, her peoples and their relations with other European countries and their peoples. The damage caused by this “stereotypical Othering” creates “barriers across social interactions and relations, over both time and space” (49). As Pickering convincingly argues, the study of stereotypes is not the examination of the accuracy of the accounts that are scrutinized but is the question of “who is speaking of whom, at what cost and in what terms” (49). He also adds that “in tackling such questions, we need to understand where those terms come from” (49). Pickering notes that, the empire building process of the nineteenth century “profoundly altered the ways in which people in Europe thought about cultural difference” (52). For Pickering, Western societies based these “stereotypical forms of non-European peoples . . . on the generalized construct of the Primitive” (52). He calls the Western tendency to “decivilize” the stereotyped societies as “primitivism” and states that this discourse depicts the primitive as “nomadic rather than settled into a territorial state” (52). 3.2.4. Asiatic Turks: The Other of the European Identity In his Orientalism, Said bases his assumptions on the relation between language and how well it can convey the truth on the Nietzschean model. This model suggests that language is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and antropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (878). Said

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holds that Orientalist accounts, which attempt to construct the Oriental reality, are restricted by the language they use. This language has been predetermined by the tradition, that is to say, by the authority of the previous writers. According to Said, the vocabulary and the ways of talking about the Orient have been formed by the implicit and explicit interests of the Western imperial, commercial, military and missionary concerns: “For any European during the nineteenth century . . . Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (Orientalism 204). On the other hand, Said also states that it is a hardly inevitable situation for the nineteenth-century writers of the Orient since “the more advanced cultures have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures” (204). Therefore, as a part of rationalizing and legitimizing imperialism, Orientalism exaggerated, promoted, rewrote, and distorted “the sense of difference between the European and Asiatic parts of the world” (204). In other words, Orientalist attitude “masks and perverts” the Orient’s basic reality by depicting it as an “evil appearance—of the order of malice” in Jean Baudrillard’s terms (1736). Said maintains that Orientalism, as an ideological position aspiring to the reflection of reality, is based on the structure which furthers “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)” (204). He also observes that the Westerners have had a certain advantage and “privilege” over the Oriental as “his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery . . . [relying on] the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege and [being invalidated by] the comparative limitations of

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such a vision . . .” (44).59 Drawing Turks as an inferior and undeveloped, incomprehensible people; Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal address “the conceit of nations and scholars” (53); they affirm the Orientalist presumption which presupposes a homogeneous Turkish entity. Thus they can talk about a general Turkish character and they can use abstractions without a second thought on the subject, ignoring all the individual differences. When we read Glazebrook’s account we never come across any mention or implication of the way Euroepans mixed with other cultures and how much they owe to other cultures. In that sense, the way Glazebrook tries to depict the Turkish character is essentially a culturally biased account which holds a political commitment in view to redefine a European identity using Turkey as the Other, the opposite of the Self. This is how he constructs his “ideological fiction” which explicitly and arrogantly declares the “detached superiority” of the British (Orientalism 347). “Europe” is not the only entity that has been constructed rather than a geographical entity. In his Islam and West60 (1993), Bernard Lewis argues that not only Europe but also Asia and Africa are European inventions. For the people who lived in these continents did not feel themselves a part of Asian or African entity, nor did they know that these words existed until the nineteenth century which marked European supremacy in terms of technology, commerce, political and military power (3). Lewis also claims that the 59

In today’s world with the control of the worldwide mass media the world listens to more of the Western side of the story than it used to, say a century ago. I have seen dozens of American movies on the Vietnam War, but I have never had the chance to see a Vietnamese movie on the subject. I believe that neither have millions and billions of other cinema goers or television viewers. In terms of travel, there is no comparison to the West’s privilege. As the Westerns are the travelers, the ones who have had the privilege of knowing both of them, they have had the opportunity to authorize and to determine the identities, differences and similarities. 60 In this book, Lewis defends Orientalism against Said’s attacks in his Orientalism. Lewis argues that Orientalism as a scholarly field cannot be held responsible for the enmity that has been going on between the West and Islam. For Lewis, the rivalry started with the advance of Muslim armies to the southern coast of Europe. Words like jihad and crusades are indicators of the long-lasting conflict between these two rival religions.

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boundaries of “Europe” were firstly determined by the Muslim advance in the southern and eastern Mediterranean coast of Christendom. With regards to this Muslim advancement and Christian loss of lands the peninsula “on the Western edge of Asia became . . . Europe” (9). In his Exploring European Frontiers (2000), Brian Dolan affirms that Europe has never been easily defined by geographical reference. For Dolan, especially after the collapse of the Eastern states, Europe has become “synonymous with concepts of homogenization, political conformity and economic standardization” (4). He also adds that “while always arbitrary . . . concerns over who counts as European—geographically or historically—have an intellectual, political and artistic history” (5). One more point Dolan makes is that “through the dialectics of travel and encounters with the Other, both self and foreign identities have been, and are continuously, reconstructed” (5). This reconstruction occurs in Glazebrook’s account in his use of the term “Asiatics” for Turks. Once more, Said’s analysis of Orientalist discourse helps us understand Glazebrook’s strategy. According to Said, “To speak of someone as an Oriental, as the Orientalist did, was not just to designate that person as someone whose language, geography, and history were the stuff of learned treatises: it also was often meant as a derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being . . . a sweeping historical generalization” (Orientalism 340). In Glazebrook’s narrative we do not come across the word “Orientals” as much as the “Asiatics.” And when he uses the “Asiatics,” he does not refer to people who belong to a certain area of the world; he is making a sweeping generalization. Asiatics as a word is loaded with the nineteenth-century imperialist connotations like the equation of the word with inferiority, backwardness, otherness, the non-Europeanness and non-Christianness. His insistent use of “Asiatics” is

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both demeaning and “derogatory.” Even Asian is better in comparison. It is not like “Europeans” or “Americans;” his use of the word is a kind of othering and humiliation. Glazebrook’s use of these words crystallizes his attempts to homogenize Turks: “. . . Asiatics preserve a kind of unchippable wholeness in a crowd” (54). Thus Turks as Asiatics are depersonalized and dehumanized. Said argues that the main reason that lies behind the Orientalist tendency to deindividualize through “erasing every possible variety of human plurality” is “to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this is accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it says, don’t suffer—they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you’ve just been using” (154-55). At some point Glazebrook uses the same sentiments: he states that it is impossible to treat a Turkish shopkeeper the way you treat an English shopkeeper. Glazebrook’s statement is in alignment with Alexander Kinglake’s remarks on how to treat Asiatics: “It isn’t possible to behave quite as you would to an English shopkeeper; because of the necessity of altering natural behaviour, it is an easy descent into becoming arrogant and rude, mistaking the Asiatic’s bargaining posture for actual humility” (Journey to Kars 83-84). 3.2.5. Inter-textuality: Victorian Travelers As Heather Henderson, in her “The Travel Writer and the Text: ‘My Giant Goes with Me Wherever I go’” (1992), observes “sometimes travelers’ imaginations are so fired by what they have read that their entire journey attempts to follow in the footsteps of another traveler, real or fictional” (231). Glazebrook takes this textual attitude to such an extreme that, near the end of his account he remarks that he could have written Journey to Kars without ever leaving Dorset, “except to travel to the London Library” (240). He also notes that most of the nineteenth-century travelers to the Ottoman lands were motivated by the

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Holy Bible and the classical education they had. In her Discourses of Difference (1991), Sara Mills observes that “…most travel writers portray members of the other nation through a conceptual and textual grid constituted by travel books” (73). As texts have a significant role in the formation of traveler-writers’ itineraries, they also have a great impact on the formation of the expectations and the way travelers see countries visited. Captain James Abbott’s Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and Petersburg (1843), Sir Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara in 1831 (1839), Lt. Arthur Conolly’s Journey to the North of India (1838), George Fowler’s Three Years in Persia, J. A. Macgahan’s Campaigning on the Oxus, and the Fall of Khiva (1874) and W.G. Palgrave’s Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia (1865) are some of the travel accounts Glazebrook refers to in his account. In most of the cases he uses these accounts to construct a kind of equation between Turkey and places like Heraut, Khiva and Persia: “Captain Abbott in the deserts of Khiva, or Vambery under the stars of the Kizil Kum, . . . Lieutenant Wood . . . on the shore of Sir-i-kol lake, . . . [suffered from] loneliness and isolation as Asiatic travel offers” (133-134). Glazebrook finds a similarity between the isolation he feels in Kars, “amongst strange scenes” (133) and the Western writers he mentions above. Just a few pages later, he tries to establish another analogy between how he draws all the attention on a Turkish bus and how Edmond O’Donovan was being looked at while he was a prisoner of the Tekke of Turkomans at Merv in the nineteenth century. The names like Heraut, Khiva, Oxus, Kizil Kum and Merv and the analogies the writer is striving hard to establish suggest that Glazebrook’s account is an attempt to deny Turks any possibility of cultural change. He relocates Turks into Central Asia erasing their migration to the West, to Anatolia and the Balkans in a period of time that lasted almost a

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thousand years. Thus he rejects the potential for change, adaptation to new situations and interactions between cultures. The Great Game Although Glazebrook does not acknowledge his admiration for the excitement of the “Great Game,” the accounts he mentions or quotes are largely “Great Game” books. In his The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia (1990), Peter Hopkirk draws our attention to the fact that during the nineteenth century, Russian expansion to the south was one of England’s main concerns in the foreign policy. Hopkirk states that although the distance between Russian frontiers and India was 2000 miles at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the end of the century it was 20 miles at some places and mostly as close as 100 miles. According to Hopkirk there were mainly two approaches to this threat: the first group argued that Russian expansion would swallow India as well and it would not stop at the border of India. Thus England would lose her most precious “possession.” For this group England should stop Russian expansion before it reached India. The second group argued that Russian expansion could not go as far as India. Even if it did, any Russian army which managed to reach India would be so exhausted at the end of such a journey that the settled, fresh British Army could easily defeat them. Hopkirk notes that both of these ideas gained dominancy from time to time. Regardless of which group’s views were dominant at the time, there was always an intensive intelligence activity in Central Asia. The success of Arminius Vambery’s Travels in Central Asia (1865) and Frederick Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva (1876) can be better understood in the Great Game context. Hopkirk also notes that the term was coined by a British officer, Arthur Connoly, whose book Glazebrook mentions. It is worth noting that Captain Connoly was killed in Bokhara trying to rescue another British officer Colonel Charles Stoddart, who had

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obviously been on intelligence duty in Central Asia. In that sense, the support England gave to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War (1854-1856), can be grasped in terms of a part of the Great Game. In Glazebrook’s account British involvement in the defense of Kars citadel in 1855, during the Crimean War, has a significant role. It is this involvement and the uncertain but crucial position of the point that has brought Kars to the writer’s attention (Hopkirk 1-8). Thus the English imperial history becomes a stimulant as far as Glazebrook’s itinerary and the motive of his travel is concerned. The yearning he feels for that imperial past and its celebration in his account conforms to the imperialist discourse and aligns Journey to Kars with other Raj revivalist works. 3.2.6. Turks as a Threat to Europe Before arriving in Turkey, Glazebrook visits Yugoslavia and Greece. When he leaves Turkey, this time, he travels to other Balkan states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, which were once under the Ottoman rule. Glazebrook reflects on the impact of Ottoman rule on these countries comparing them with Switzerland: In Switzerland for the first time since entering Yugoslavia on my way eastward, I was in a land which had never fallen under Turkish rule. Not only when the Sultan’s outlandish armies welled northward to the walls of Vienna, but also in their long outflow which left first Hungary, then Romania, then Bulgaria, under the debris of fallen buildings, and corrupt government, and oppressed peoples—during all those centuries, since the fall of Constantinople, the Turk had been the ogre of Europe’s nightmares. Everything that the educated European valued—all that his civilization was based upon or had produced—was regarded by the impassive Turk with indifference, and was allowed to become a heap of ruins. The Turkish

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language contains no word meaning ‘preservation.’ Whatever fell into their hands became the ‘undrained marsh, the sand-choked river, the grass-grown market-place, the deserted field, the crumbling fortress, the broken arch. Stagnation, death-like stagnation, has ever characterized the rule of the race of Othman.’ These indignant words preface one of Edmund Spencer’s books of travels in the 1850s. The very buildings and ornaments which Pericles had set up at Athens to celebrate Europe’s turning back of the invading tide of Persia at Palatea, in the fifth century before Christ, had tumbled into ruins under the sway of another invasion by the Ottomans. (233-234) The first point to make about this paragraph is Glazebrook’s presumption that for everything going wrong in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary can be better understood if their involvement with the Ottoman Empire is taken into account. Where the Ottomans reached, their barbarian impact did not let civilization prosper any longer. Where she could not, it flourished. The Persian invasion of Greece in the fifth century BC and the Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century imply a pattern of threat from the East which might be dormant for the time being but may come to life any time in the future. The other point is related to how Glazebrook contradicts himself homogenizing the nineteenth-century opinion on Turkey. Earlier on page 198, Glazebrook puts forward two different positions that had divided the British public opinion into two, regarding Turks. He states that the middle classes condemned Turkey for not having a bourgeoisie and saw Turks as descendants of Genghis Khan, mere “barbarians” who persecute Christian minorities living under their rule. On the other hand, English upper class did not “seem to

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have felt themselves threatened by Turkish manners and morals.”61 Glazebrook goes on homogenizing European views on Turkey: “Underneath the scolding and the disdain of Europeans for the Turk there remained, I think, a little flutter of fear that would not quite go away . . . the Englishman’s denunciation of the Turk has a ranting tone which suggests fear—fear of darkness, of unreason, of evil powers” (234). This sweeping generalization disregards voices like Lady Montagu, Frederick Burnaby, David Urquhart, Lord Byron and many others.62 Long before Glazebrook arrives in Turkey, he starts to remark that the fact that he is going to Turkey makes him feel anxious and uncomfortable. However, he does not let us know what makes him feel so worried. At times he tries to rationalize his worries, but every time he tries to do so, he cannot come to a definite conclusion as to the source. In his narrative, all through his journey in Turkey he tries to create an atmosphere of terror. It is only at the end of his journey that he unfolds the sources of his terror and horror: You may remember that when I was sailing along the Turkish coast before having set foot upon it . . . I found that I was frightened, and dreaded what lay ahead. I believe it is an ancient fear. Out of Asia by way of Turkey have come not only the Persians turned back by the Greeks, but Atilla and Timur the lame and Cenghis Khan, forces of darkness and disorder which threaten the stability of the European world. To the Victorian traveler the reservoir 61

It is worth noting here that while Glazebrook reflects on the two positions, he is far from being impartial. His sympathies obviously go with the anti-Turkish camp. For when he talks about the two arguments although he lets anti-Turkish camp’s voice and quotes from them, presenting their argument in 12 lines, the second camp has to do with 2.5 lines (Glazebrook 198). 62 In his “Turks and Britons over Four Hundred Years” (1984), Geoffrey Lewis highlights the longlasting good-will and friendship that has existed between the British and Turks in the four centuries of Anglo-Turkish relations. He states that even though Lord Byron was as fervent a Phil-Hellenic as to give his life for the freedom of Greeks from Turks, he still gives a fair account of Turks. What Lewis quotes from Byron is: “I see not much difference between ourselves and the Turks, save that they have long dresses, and we short, and that we talk much, and they little. . . . They are sensible people” (134).

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of such malevolent powers lay in the hidden khanates beyond the Kizil Kum, behind Bukhara, beyond the Oxus and Kashgar, in a howling wilderness of dust and sand to be pictured something like the smoking rent in the earth’s crust from which arose “the gloomy monarch of the realm of the woes”—the Lord of Tartarus, a domain confoundable with Tartary, whose ravishing of Persephone laid the land under blight of perpetual winter, just as the lords of misrule rode out of Russian Tartary to waste the West. Turkey is the Western outpost of this adversary. Entering Turkish territory, an English traveler braved the destruction of all that he valued in this world and the next…To scold the Turks for letting their houses fall down, as Europeans always have done, is to fix upon a superficial aspect of an elemental dread, like complaining of the sea for destroying sandcastles. (234-235) Glazebrook tries to associate and equate today’s Turkey and Turks with Central Asia, distorting and ignoring the one thousand years of history of, not only of wars and conflicts, but also of interactions and intermingling. In this account, history is blurred and invoked to reinforce a future threat that might come from Turks to Europe. Expressions like “Turkey is the Western outpost of this adversary” suggest hat the adversary is still valid. The last sentence is the crystallization of how Glazebrook depicts Turks as a natural force of destruction. The analogy also implies that it is in Turk’s nature to destroy so they cannot be expected to change and become “civilized”. Glazebrook uses narrative strategies like arousing his readers curiosity through foreshadowing. For instance, is puzzled with two pictures which were hung on the wall of an “eating house” in Kars. One of the pictures is called “The Hay Wain” and the other is

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the view of a Swiss mountain. He remarks that he finds “the fatness of the one and the tidiness of the other, being at all points the antithesis of Turkey” (135). Then he reflects on the reasons why these two pictures might appeal to Turks: “Is it the idealized forms of shade and water, those promised essentials of a Muslim paradise, which make the appeal?” (135). It is only a hundred pages later, when Glazebrook narrates his time in Switzerland that the writer finds out what the appeal is: The Turks themselves would probably prefer it if their houses didn’t fall down. Swiss scenes at the train window reminded of the pictures on the wall of the eating-shop in Kars, of views Swiss in their neatness, amid all the shabbiness and disintegration of Turkey at the door. Had the Turk invader ever reached Switzerland he might have altered, like the pilgrim reaching the paradise whose picture he carries in his heart; on reaching his goal he might have given up his nomadic ways, repaired his house, mended the clock, settled down. But it appears that the Turks were doomed only to rule over lands that were racked by earthquake; at the Swiss border, where neatness and order begin, the threat of the Turks and the threat of earthquakes run out together, as though the power of the race of the Othman were indeed linked in some sense with the forces of the underworld. (235) “The Turk invader” tried to reach Switzerland a couple of times in the past, but they could not. He reads the picture that gives a view of a Swiss mountain on the wall of a modest “eating-shop” at the most eastern city of Turkey, Kars. According to the writer these pictures are the symbols of of how “the Turk invader” has not forgotten all about “reaching” Switzerland. In his view, Turks “carry” the picture of their “promised paradise,” Switzerland, in their hearts. Turks are not depicted only as a “threat” to

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Switzerland, but as a “threat” to whole “neatness and order,” i.e., civilization. The destruction metaphor which is first established by “sandcastles destroying sea” is now invoked through the “earthquake.” The analogy explicitly denounces Turks of being as destructive as earthquakes. Using natural phenomena in the analogy, Glazebrook once more emphasizes his rejection of the idea that cultures and societies are organic entities which are subject to constant change. All through his account, Glazebrook represents Turks with a sense of terror. He depicts the restaurant owner and the shepherd who are trying to sell him fake relics as “the First and Second Murderers” (73) as in a Shakespearean play; they are villains. How he describes a general atmosphere in a Turkish town square is: “The dark vociferous men in their rabbit-hutch booths round the meidan seemed rather contemptuous of foreigners. Nor did the carters, or shepherds, who peered fiercely into my face, look any more friendly” (134-135). On the other hand, the real fear arousing element in the Turkish society is the Turkish army. When Glazebrook arrived in Turkey, the September 12, 1980 military coup had been in action for almost two months. Consequently, there were strict controls on the inter-city roads and frequent curfews in cities. He describes the Census Day in Urgup and how the military acts: . . . like a shepherd counting his flock: at the same time, despotic power is required to cause silence and stillness to fall upon the whole land. It had taken this decree of daytime curfew to show me what the Turks knew already, that the underpinnings of the military power—the armed troops, the public address system rigged to lampposts, the jeeps parked at street corners—were omnipresent. Usually masked by the rush and noise of everyday life, the harsh bedrock of dictatorship was revealed today like the

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stones in a river-bed when the flow of water is dammed off above. You saw people’s apprehension in their absolute obedience: in streets emptied of all but soldiers. (75) The army is pictured as if it is an “invading army” which distances itself from the people and operates not for the people but against them. When his bus is stopped and searched by the military, the alienation of the military from the people becomes clearer: The shaven skulls and Germanic helmets of the guards behind their weapons made them into another race from the passengers, Mongol overlords crushing rustics under armed heels. There were young men of military age in the bus; how do you turn them from subject race into soldier? Is there in every crushed rustic a Hun tyrant longing to get out? The officer had adopted the “dashing” style of the pre-war Nazi in films, a style running to cigarette holder and loosely tied white silk scarf. (117) Glazebrook’s discourse suggests, on one hand, the dictatorship of the army on the people; on the other hand, it associates Turkish army with “Nazi Germany,” “Mongolian hordes” and “Hun tyrant.” This association conveys the past threats that the Nazi Germany, the Ottoman Empire, the Huns and the Mongols caused in the past to the present. Depicting Turkish army as an evil force and as a strong element of terror, the historical pattern of the threat from the East which Glazebrook invokes through mentioning the Persian invasion of Greece and the Ottoman invasion of Eastern Europe is implicitly carried into the present 3.2.7. Christianity-Islam In Glazebrook’s account, Islamic identity of Turkey and Turks is not as important as “Turks as Asiatic nomads” construction. On the other hand, there are still allusions to Islam and Islamic culture. His representations on this issue are also a compilation of the

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extremely biased voices of the Victorian travel writers. He maintains that there was an “ambiguous attitude” towards Islam in the nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts. He mentions some of the conventions of talking about Islam and then notes that these travelers rarely favor the Christian Ottomans, over the Muslim Ottomans, doing that “simply by recording the facts” (113). Glazebrook’s attitude is far from that because he tries to construct a Christianity-Islam dichotomy in his account. Although he does not like the American travelers on the minibus to Ladociea, when they offer him some of their food he accepts this “…as a gesture of solidarity with Christendom” (58). When he associates himself thus with the American tourists, he clearly disassociates himself from the “Others” in the minibus constructing a Christian-Muslim binary opposition. Glazebrook shows no sympathy whatsoever for Islam. His view is fixed and he is not interested in changing it at all. We see that he depicts Islam and Muslims as a threat to Christians. Glazebrook suggests that Muslims refer to Christians as “giaour,” or infidel (90). His representation of Konya and the time he spends there is a typical example of Glazebrook’s attitude which draws our attention to how he suppresses any possible positive account on Turkey, Turks, and Islam. Glazebrook finds Konya the ugliest city in the world.63 As this study does not aim to discuss accuracy of the writer’s representations, we will focus on and analyze how his biased cultural conceptions determine his account in terms of selecting details, giving voices to certain arguments and silencing others which do not agree with his argument. 63

Glazebrook describes the modern architecture in Konya: Nothing there to serve either for a basis or for a model when the rush of development building began; no strong framework of streets and squares to hold the place together and set the style; no continuity of development: mud huts and ruins, then suddenly the leap to high-rise concrete. . . . Concrete makes impossible the embellishments—fantastic balconies and carved facades—which the Turkish taste wrought upon their houses in wood or stone. The Asiatics’ love of bright colors, too, is betrayed by the plastic paint they slap on everywhere, which flakes and peels as the colors of their native fabrics and tiles never did . . . . (87)

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Therefore, his depiction of Konya as an ugly and dirty city does not say much on its own unless we compare how he depicts the other Konya, which has attracted visitors for centuries. There is another side to Konya to which Glazebrook shows very little interest. Konya was the home of the great mystic Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi. The only Seljuk building Glazebrook mentions is “the Mevlana64 mosque-museum of the whirling Dervishes” which “appears to him so like a great-aunt’s drawing room—all carpets and chandeliers and glass cabinets and hushed gloom” (88). When it comes to talking about the ugliness of the modern Turkish buildings, the hostility he felt without any reason, the rudeness or offences that the nineteenth-century travelers encountered, Glazebrook’s voice is as loud as possible; on the other hand, any message of compatibility of all religions, 64

Mevlana, or Rumi as he is known in the West, is one of the most renowned mystique poet of the Islamic world in the West. In her Sep. 30, 2002 Time review “Rumi Rules!,” Ptolemy Tompkins reveals the extent of Rumi’s popularity in the USA: …Madonna set translations of his 13th century verses praising Allah to music on Deepak Chopra's 1998 CD, A Gift of Love; that Donna Karan has used recitations of his poetry as a background to her fashion shows; that Oliver Stone wants to make a film of his life; and that even though he hailed from Balkh, a town near Mazar-i-Sharif situated in what is today Afghanistan, his verse has only become more popular with American readers since September last year, when HarperCollins published The Soul of Rumi, 400 pages of poetry translated by Coleman Barks. September 2001 would seem like an unpropitious time for an American publisher to have brought out a large, pricey hardback of Muslim mystical verse, but the book took off immediately. It has a long road ahead, however, if it is to catch up with a previous Rumi best seller, The Essential Rumi, published by HarperCollins in 1995. With more than 250,000 copies in print, it is easily the most successful poetry book published in the West in the past decade. Below is a selection from Rumi bibliography which I have reached on-line (http://www.khamush.com/bibliography.htm). A selection from this bibliography consists of a list of books published on Rumi before Glazebrook visited Turkey in 1980. As he published his Journey to Kars in 1984 he could have reached some rich shelf on Rumi’s work and his philosophy. The way he dismisses him reveals how he suppresses any voice that might provide any sympathy for Islam: Arasteh, A. Reza. Rumi, the Persian: Rebirth in Creativity and Love. Lahore, Pakistan: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1965. Arberry, A. J. The Rubaiyat of Jalal al-Din Rumi. London: E. Walker, 1949. Immortal Rose: An Anthology of Persian Lyrics. London: Luzac, 1983.. Tales from the Masnavi. Surrey, Curzon Press Ltd, 1961. More Tales from the Masnavi. Surrey, Curzon Press Ltd, 1962. Hastie, William. The Festival of Springs, from the Divan of Jelaluddin. Edinburgh: McLehose, 1903Nicholson, R.A. Tales of Mystic Meaning, Being Selectiong from the Mathnawi of Jalalud-Din Rumi. London: Chapman and Hall, 1931. Rumi, Jalaluddin. Sun Of Tabriz: A Lyrical Introduction to Higher, Johnston & Neville, 1964. Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders of Islam. Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 1971.

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sects, nations, and cultures in terms of living together in harmony (which he might have done referring to Mevlana’s philosophy and to some of the literature that has been published on him) is simply discarded. The example reveals the discourses he promotes and draws our attention to and the discourses he rejects to include in his own account. In Journey to Kars the idea of the hostility of Muslims to Christians mostly emerge as an issue during Glazebrook’s stay in Konya. Glazebrook states that he “knew that Konya had been the centre of religious fanaticism before the military coup, and this combination struck a significant note” (80). Konya seems hostile to him from the very beginning.65 Although he reflects on why he finds Konya so hostile to him, he cannot find an answer to this question. He feels such a “hostility,” “a general uneasiness, a lack of amity, which put distrust into every eye” that these remind him how the nineteenth-century travelers were despised and humiliated by these “Asiatic races” (82). He feels himself threatened by the “heavily decorated baroque minarets” which to him are the symbols of “impending Islamic banners, with something of the menace of the old Turkey” (82). To Glazebrook this religious difference has made İstanbul and cities like Konya look threatening to the European travelers: “ . . . the faint unease of the European at finding so Eastern a city encamped on his own Mediterranean . . . became in Konya, for me, a

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There is an alternative, a counter-discourse that exists in the nineteenth century British travel writing which states that Turks are tolerant in terms of religion. In her The City of the Sultan (1837), Julia Pardoe observes that “Turks are extremely tolerant with regard to religious opinions; their creed being split into as many sects as that of the Church of England; and each individual being left equally free to follow, as he sees fit, the dictates of his conscience, . . . they not only tolerate but even respect the Christian monks and regard their monasteries as holy places bearing the names of saints, and inhabited by men wholly devoted to God” (40-41). On the harmony that existed among the people from different religions in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, Pardoe observes: Among about five thousand boatmen, artisans, and soldiers, not a blow was struck, not a voice was raised in menace, among the conflicting interests, feelings, and prejudices of Christians, Musslemans and Jews, not a word was uttered calculated excite angry or unpleasant feeling; while I am bound to confess that a female, however fastidious would have found less to offend her amid the crush and confusion of that mighty mass of commonly called semi-civilized human beings than in a walk of ten minutes through the streets of London and Paris. (82)

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realization that I was now in a remote Asiatic town inhabited by men from many Eastern lands and races and traditions” (82). But more than that how these people supposedly see the English, or the Christians as “giaour,” is the source of uneasiness.66 The meaning Glazebrook attributes to the word is quite different from Schiffer’s interpretation of the word. Glazebrook argues that the word is used as a way of dehumanizing the Christians so that any kind of ill-treatment could be justified: “It is disquieting, even to me, to know what contempt exists in those faithful minds for myself and all ‘Christians’; unbelievers, pig-eaters, infidels, giaours, dogs. The cup you have drunk from is broken. It is a new view Islam makes you take of yourself, that you defile what you touch” (114-15). He goes on associating the word with threat to Christians. This is the passage he quotes from Dr Sandwith’s account: ’The Giaour has been, or will be, killed’ was muttered by one of these ruffians . . . I felt a strong sympathy for him, and admiration for his gallant bearing; although he had succumbed to numbers, he had yet sold his life dearly, and taught these Paynim hounds that a Giaour of the West is not the spiritless, cringing, Christian of the East, degenerate from ages of 66

In her Oriental Panorama: British Travelers in Nineteenth Century Turkey (1999), Reinhold Schiffer notes that although British travelers were humiliated and scorned at times and bad names were called to them, it was not the term “giaour” which was frequently used for abuse. The offensive words which Turks mostly used to abuse the non-muslims, according to Schiffer, were “pezevenk’ (whoremaster), or “kopek” (dog). On the use of the word “giaour,” Schiffer remarks “It would, however, seem that the term “infidel” (giaour) was less an insult than a rather neutral form of appellation. Non-muslims speaking of themselves used it” (57). Another explanation of the expression can be found in Abdur Raheem Kidwai’s Orientalism in Lord Byron’s “Turkish Tales” (1995). Kidwai mainly reflects on the terminology of the word and how Lord Byron uses the expression in his poem entitled “The Giaour”: The Arabic word “jaur,” literally meaning deviation, is the basis for the Turkish word “gaovur” which was applied in Turkey to non-Muslims, for being outside the mainstream religio-cultural Islamic tradition. The expression seems to have caught Byron’s fancy, for, in addition to its frequent use in several of his poems, it supplied the designation of the central character of the poem entitled “The Giaour” itself . . . throughout the action of the poem the Giaour appears as an outsider, aloof and totally cut off from human relations. Neither does the Giaour gain any spiritual comfort from his long sojourn in the monastery . . . . (94-95)

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oppression. (143) It is most worth noting here that Glazebrook himself never encounters any hostile attitude towards him in Konya or elsewhere in Turkey, or neither has he been called “giaour” all through the time he spent in Turkey. Invoking the most terrible instances of the nineteenth-century British travelers in Turkey, he puts another brick on his construction of the collage of the worst moments of the nineteenth-century travel not only in Turkey but also in the other Ottoman, Turkic and Persian lands of the time.

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3.3. Lawlor, Eric. Looking for Osman. In her Discourses of Difference (1991), Sara Mills argues that there are lots of different constraints on a writer’s work and that a work can hardly exist free of these restrictions and constraints other works have created. Mills cites the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who wrote his first books in English and then shifted from English to his own native language Gikuyu in 1986. According to Ngugi, language determines the way people think and see the world and themselves. For that reason, even though he had a very successful writing career with his books in English, he preferred to write his plays, poems and short stories in Gikuyu after 1977 and non-fiction after 1986; he assumed that writing in English had meant erasing his own native culture and language. Ngugi reflects on how language determines and shapes the way people see the world: Over the years I have come to realize more and more that work, any work, even literary creative work, is not the result of any individual genius but the result of a collective effort. There are so many inputs in the actual formation of an image, an idea, a line of argument and even sometimes the formal arrangement. The very words we use are a product of a collective history. (qtd. in Mills 67) Ngugi’s argument suggests that any travel account is bound to the images, metaphors, words and the vocabulary created about the country or place described. What Mills contributes to this argument is her use of “discursive constraints;” drawing on Foucault she explains them as “factors which limit discourse” and “those which enable discourse to take place” (69). Hence “all texts can be seen to be heterogeneous, and the product of multiple constraints” (69). In that sense, Lawlor’s Looking for Osman is also a “product of multiple constraints.”

Lawlor is constrained by the nineteenth-century travelers’ imperialist

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discourse which others Turks and exists in a vocabulary and imagery that constrains the writer in terms of representation and her/his quest. Within these terms, inter-textuality induces the writer to produce texts which are “repetitive and restricted in the range of their structure, tropes, language choice, tense, statements, events and narrative figure” (69). Therefore, according to Mills, travel writing is not only a “simple account of a journey, a country and a narrator, but must be seen in the light of discourses circulating at the time” (70). Mills also highlights the relation between travel writing and imperialism and how imperialist discourse influences the conventions of travel writing. Moreover, she draws our attention to “textual features which constitute . . . the travel writing genre” (72-73). She relates Foucault’s ideas of “power and resistance” to texts: “Textual power is not to be seen as a reflection of some other form of power, whether economic or political, but rather as a manifestation of power itself” (73). In her view, “certain regularities of discourse” construct “textual constraints on travel writing” (73). She also argues that most travel writers represent “members of the other nation through a conceptual and textual grid constituted by travel books” (73). Mills’s “conceptual and textual grid” can be extended to topics or quests which were undertaken by travel writers. 3.3.1. Osman the Historical Turk The title of Lawlor’s account tells us that this work is obviously a search for a Turk whose name is “Osman.” Just like Samuel Beckett’s Godot, the reader never meets Osman in person. Therefore, Osman becomes a symbol, a representative of someone or something larger than himself. The first Turk to mention Osman to the writer is Ercuman, who helps Lawlor in his search for the exotic Turkey, the Turkey of the nineteenth-century traveler. After seeing an

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old Turkish man in his oldish style, Lawlor thinks that he has found someone untouched by modernity who has the absolute characteristics of the exotic Turkey. On the other hand, when the same old man asks them if they could repair his watch, the writer loses all his hopes to find any Turk who still holds tightly to his nineteenth-century roots (34). At this point of his narration Lawlor is at the point of giving up all his hopes to find the Turkish characters that he has read in Victorian travelers’ accounts. Ercuman’s introduction of Osman revives the writer’s spirit and appetite to find the exotic Turkish character. I would not mind a fate worthy of Walter Scott: permanent exile, madness, retreat to a monastery. And if not that, what? At the very least, I’d have an adventure or two. Among the books in my backpack were several written by earlier visitors to Turkey: David Urquhart’s Spirits of the East (1838), Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross (1845), Joseph Wolff’s Travels and Adventures (1860), and Fred Burnaby’s On Horseback Through Asia Minor (1876). Theirs was the Turkey I was seeking. The Turkey of a century ago. Were I just to have a fraction of their adventures, I’d leave this country a happy man. (38) All through his account Lawlor is looking for a kind of “challenge” and “ordeal.” He goes to towns like Kars and Kahta, which are not visited by many tourists but are destinations for travelers who are looking for a kind of “illumination,” who really want to learn more about Turkey and her history compared to tourists whose main aim is to enjoy the sun and the beach in Turkey and who for that reason prefer southern and southwestern Turkey. Another interesting point worth noting is Lawlor’s admiration for the nineteenthcentury travelers. All through his narrative Lawlor refers to writers like Warburton, Kinglake, Wolff and Burnaby. He compares his own feelings and experience with those of

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the nineteenth-century travelers. According to Bassnett “[it] cannot be accidental that the previous great age of travel writing was the nineteenth century, the period when Britain was the greatest power in the world, both economically and politically saw itself as the hub of a great empire that stretched around the world” (6). Seal and Lawlor structure their accounts around the nineteenth-century travelers’ books.67 For Lawlor, Osman and exoticism are both nineteenth-century Turkey which Lawlor knows through nineteenth-century travel accounts. Then Osman stands for Turkey in the nineteenth century, exoticism and the Ottoman Empire. On the other hand, the way Lawlor delineates Osman is quite confusing: “Osman epitomized İstanbul’s freebooting ways. He was a dissembler in a city of dissemblers, a knave where knavery was king. Osman had pulled off a whole series of confidence tricks . . . ” (34). Thus, what Osman stands for becomes a quite complicated matter in Looking for Osman. As the title of Osman’s travelogue suggests, it is vitally important to find out who Osman is and what he stands for. It is only after one reads Frederick Burnaby’s On Horsebak Through Asia Minor (1877) that Osman in Lawlor’s Looking for Osman starts to make sense. For Burnaby, Osman is the embodiment of not only Turkish but also the Oriental inefficiency, fatalism and knavery. Burnaby employs Osman as his servant in İstanbul. From the very beginning of his introduction, Osman is drawn as an imposter. He constantly shams an air of hardworking servant: “I am not like other Turks—I like working; I have been running all over Constantinople, for I heard that Effendi was in a hurry to start” (20). When it comes to work, he usually neglects his duty or does not do it properly and consequently causes accidents. Osman does not neglect his duties only as an imposter; he also deceives 67

See page 44 for a more detailed explanation of Bassnett’s observations on the point can.

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Burnaby and the others that get involved with him. Although Burnaby discovers that Osman is telling him lies about the prices of things and gets the difference for himself, he does not fire Osman. However, when he discovers that Osman is also being dishonest to other Turks, he makes his mind to dismiss him: I at once made up my mind to get rid of Osman. Vankovitch’s remarks about the Turk’s dishonesty also recurred to my memory. Osman was undoubtedly a rogue; I determined to procure another servant. “Osman,” I said, “you have robbed a Mohammedan, a follower of Islam, and one of your own religion. If you had confined yourself to robbing me, I could have understood it, for you might have reasoned to yourself as follows: ‘The Effendi is a giaour, and there is gold in his purse.’ But to rob a brother Mohammedan, and a poor man; to rob him of the pittance which I had given him. –this I can only understand by the assumption that you are a greater scoundrel than I thought you were! You are no longer my servant. You darken the threshold no longer!” (125-126) Here Burnaby condemns all Turks for dishonesty by addressing to Osman as “the Turk” instead of calling him just “Osman.” The writer prefers to associate Osman with his nationality, thus extending Osman’s dishonest conduct to the whole nation. While Burnaby draws Osman as the darkest of characters, he draws himself as a tolerant and good-willing character. Burnaby says that he might forgive a wrong done to himself; on the other hand, a misdeed committed against a poor man cannot be pardoned. Within these terms, Osman is a shameless robber, a man without any morals. Along with his dishonesty and dissembling, Osman is also an embodiment of “Oriental” inefficiency. Just after Burnaby and his servants set off for their travels in

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Anadolu, on the ferry from the European side of İstanbul to the Asian side, because Osman is praying instead of keeping an eye on the horses of the party, one of the horses gets out of control and almost causes a disaster. Burnaby’s Scottish servant Radford describes the accident, and Osman’s and other Turks’ reaction to the accident: “Obadiah upset his packsaddle and then stamped on the cartridge-box; some of them have gone off. Hosman left off praying and began to swear, that’s all he did; and as for them there Turks in charge of other ‘orses, they did nothing. Obadiah slipped up and I sat on his head to keep him quiet” (26). In this description Osman and all the other Turks present are depicted as inefficient and helpless bodies who do not know what to do at the times of crisis. On the other hand, Radford is depicted as the only one reliable at times of crisis. Just a few hours after the accident on the ferry, another accident happens due to Osman’s negligence. He does not adjust the saddles of the horses and causes a terrible turmoil on the road. On the other hand, Osman does not see any relation between the way he does his job and the accident: “’Our fate is a bad one,’ said Osman. ‘The horse—curse his mother—has gone, what shall be done? Praise be to Allah, that the Effendi is not hurt’” (28). Osman’s fatalism is presented as the cause of all the accidents that happen on the road. His inefficiency is also an outcome of his lack of responsibility. Osman is the most grotesque character in Burnaby’s account but there is also room for Turkish characters who exhibit the most honest conduct in their moral obligations. In Burnaby’s view, despite the fact that Ottoman Empire got poorer by time and “descended the steps of civilization, and not ascended them like European nations,” there still exists the hospitality of its glorious days with the people: “though mud hovels have replaced the marble palaces of the Turk’s ancestors, the Turks themselves remained unchanged” (85). To give the reader an idea about how generous Turks are, Burnaby states that “Sometimes

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after having admired a horse, I have been surprised to find that the steed has been sent to my stable, with a note from the owner, entreating my acceptance of the animal” (75). Then Burnaby comments on the misrepresentations of the Turks in England and he suggests that if all those writers who “abuse” and “accuse them with every vice under the sun” traveled in Turkey and met Turks from whom “in many things writers who call themselves Christians might well take a lesson” (75). One more incident Burnaby realates to gain sympathy for the Turkomans reveals how he carries the Turkomans’ structure of feeling to his readers who know the events of the time only through the Russian point of view. After relating the bitter reflections of a Turkoman on the possibility of a war against the Russian Empire which finds its expression in these words: “Should not you like to cut the throats of all the Russians?” (88). With the next comment, he brings sympathy to his account: “This was rather a strong way of dealing with the question. However, if I had been a Turkoman, and my own sisters had been treated by the Russians in the way the Turkoman women have been, I should have looked upon the matter from a Turkoman point of view” (88). There is a big difference between how Osman functions in Burnaby’s account and how Lawlor uses him in the structure of his narrative. Although Burnaby draws Osman as a very negative and almost as a flat character, he draws many loveable, hospitable and generous Turkish characters; hence Osman does not stand for the general stereotypical Turkish character in his account. Lawlor’s account, however, makes Osman the focus of the quest and associates the general Turkish character with him. What is drawn as an exception in Burnaby is generalized and extended to all the Turks in Lawlor’s travelogue. All the major Turkish characters in Lawlor’s account carry some traces of Osman. For example, Selim, who is the first Turkish character Lawlor introduces us, is in some ways Osman. His inefficiency

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and his fatalism that the writer discloses as a narrative strategy at the end of his account typifies Selim’s Turkishness. Other characters also symbolize Turkishness: Ercuman with his piety and fatalism, Ahmet with his knavery, Erek with his knavery and inefficiency, Meltem with her fatalism and all the other Turkish drivers with their carelessness, irresponsible driving and fatalism. 3.3.2. Selim the Imposter: A Representative of Turkish Modernization As fiction writers create characters and use them as metaphors, personification of types and general qualities, Lawlor draws his characters in the same manner. Among all the Turks Lawlor meets in Turkey four characters have been examined. Lawlor makes most of his points using these characters as representatives of the general Turkish character. His first Turkish friend, Selim is a “journalist” who blocks nipples of women printed on his newspaper. The second Turkish friend he makes is Ercuman, a rather conservative and pious university student who works at the hotel where Lawlor stays in İstanbul. Another important Turkish character in the book is the corrupted, immoral, irresponsible and unreliable Erek whom the writer meets as the driver of the minivan he takes from Adiyaman to Kahta. Meltem, whom the writer meets in Antalya and almost falls in love with, is the last character to be discussed. For Lawlor, Meltem represents all Muslim Turkish women. The writer introduces topics like women’s status in Islam, double standards concerning man and woman in Islamic society and freedom of women in Islamic society. All these four young people have one thing in common that makes them Turkish and that is they are all fatalists in their own ways. The first Turk Lawlor introduces us is the “modern” Selim whose job as a “journalist” involves blocking the nipples of the women “taking the sun in Italian beaches” (3). Why Lawlor calls Selim a journalist satirically implies that in Turkey the serious,

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respectable and prestigious occupation of journalism finds its equivalence only as a demeaning occupation. This becomes a sign of how little Turks have been successful in their Westernization efforts. The titles and posts exist but with little respect, prestige or meaning in them. Lawlor remarks on the point that Selim knows nearly everyone in İstanbul and wherever Selim goes he gets everything for free. Dinner was provided free. (He knew the waiter.) And then we went to a club for raki, also free. (He knew the barman.) There was no end to the people he knew. At various times over the next few weeks, we were admitted free to cinemas, got free rides in taxis, and had free magazines thrust on us at newsstands. Once, when, like Byron I lost the key to my backpack, a locksmith opened it and refused any payment. (8) Selim is treated almost like a national hero. There is no reason given as to why Selim is so popular and why all these men are so willing to do favors for him. Taken in the general context of his account, the social respect and esteem that Selim enjoys can be read as Turkish men’s unhealthy and perverted interest in looking at photos of naked women in newspapers.68 The social respectability that Selim enjoys can be interpreted as the recognition and legitimization of the paper he works for. Another point Lawlor introduces in Selim’s character is what Turks understand from modernity. According to Lawlor, Selim represents modern Turkish youth owing to the fact that Selim is an admirer of Atatürk and his decrees. He is against everything that is not modern and by modernity he means America. Lawlor once more emphasizes that even what Turks understand from modernity has some kind of sexual connotations since for 68

For Lawlor’s account abounds with Turkish male characters with rather bizarre sexual perverseness: the man who wants the writer to masturbate in a cave near Antalya, the shopkeeper Ahmet who likes German prisons because of the Playboy magazines he gets there, the nice hotel owner in Ürgüp who wants to touch Lawlor’s nipple etc.

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Selim, “In America, a man who applied himself might do anything he pleased: amass a fortune, bed a starlet, occupy the White House” (6). The rest of the account also abounds with other instances where Lawlor implies that Turkish men associate modernity with sexual freedom.69 Lawlor constructs a binary opposition between Selim and Ercuman. In this binary opposition Selim represents the young Turkish men who have adopted a Western lifestyle and who are admirers of Atatürk and modernity; on the other side is Ercuman who does not like modernity or Atatürk and who is strongly bound to pre-modern side of Turkish culture, which, for the writer mainly consists of three main things: an uncritical admiration for the Ottoman Empire, a strong devotion to Islam, and fatalism. According to Lawlor, Selim is an outcome of Atatürk’s decrees like banning the fez, introducing the European weekends and switching to Roman alphabet. Lawlor depicts Atatürk as a dictator and the cultural reforms as an imposition of a tyrannical leader on his people: “Such was his enthusiasm for la vie occidentale, his countrymen are lucky that he did not insist on their converting to Christianity and learning French” (7). How Selim sees Atatürk’s ideals is also problematic: “Atatürk hadn’t believed in God, and neither should I” (7).

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Selim is not the only Turkish man in Lawlor’s account who sees in the West some kind of sexual freedom. Ahmet, who runs his father’s grocery shop in Van, asked by the writer how he liked the prison in Germany, Ahmet says that he really enjoyed it thanks to Playboy magazines he could easily get there. Another example is Meltem’s cousin Omdi, whom the writer meets in Antalya. Omdi always yearns for summer, for then European tourists fill the beaches. And unlike a Turkish girlfriend, European girlfriends would not mind sleeping with Omdi without the bond of marriage. Even though the Turkish men are desperately unhappy about the sexual restrictions in Turkish society, they are depicted as quite selfish about sexual freedom: they do not ask it for their sisters as well. Although Omdi condemns the restrictions in Islam concerning pre-marital sexual intercourse when Lawlor asks his opinion on Meltem’s father’s restrictions on Meltem’s freedom to go out with her boyfriends, Omdi becomes one of the others who support restrictions on women: “It (Meltem’s father) had no choice, said Omdi. Turkish women were a wanton lot. Without surveillance, they would go to the dogs” (189). Athough the society expects women to be so loyal and disciplined, in Lawlor’s account, Turkish men are depicted as free of any moral or ethical restrictions regarding their loyalty to women.

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Lawlor implies that what Selim understands of modernity is only a shallow sense of what modernity really is. Selim constantly criticizes Turkish politics, manners and customs; if these work for him he does not see any moral restraint about his personal gain he gets from these customs. Lawlor depicts Selim as a young man who has lost his cultural values and has not been able to replace these with new ones. Selim refrains from associating himself with Turkish or Islamic values; whereas, he knows very little about what European cultural and moral values are about. His main concern is to show Lawlor that, contrary to her image as a backward Oriental country, Turkey is a modern Western country. To convince the writer, Selim takes him to night clubs and to restaurants where they drink with other Turkish men. He invites Lawlor to Lions Club meetings and an amateur production of Chekhov’s “The Proposal.” Selim has such a vague idea about what it is to be European and Western that he presumes that having leftist tendencies and hating the police are indispensable elements of Western civilization. He proudly introduces Lawlor to his leftist friends and presents his hatred towards the police as a sign of how Western and modern he is (21). One of the best ways of portraying one’s lifestyle and culture is seen through describing that person’s home. Providing a picture of Selim’s apartment, Lawlor takes us into Selim’s privacy and reveals us most of his secrets, giving the reader a vivid picture of what sort of life Selim leads. When the writer cannot find a taxi to his hotel after another night out with Selim, he has to spend the night at Selim’s apartment. This is how Lawlor describes Selim’s apartment and how he uses it: Nothing in it worked. The telephone was disconnected—he had neglected to pay the bill; there was no water—the city was experiencing a drought; and the television had been broken for years—”I keep meaning to get it fixed.”

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Several panes of glass were missing from the windows. I fell asleep to Led Zeppelin and awoke the next morning with a terrible hangover to Van Halen singing “Whipping Boy.” . . . We had olives for breakfast. There were pits everywhere by the time we finished, Selim preferring to spit his onto the floor. (8) What Selim sees as modernism is listening to Led Zeppelin and Van Halen. However, he has no idea about how to use modern facilities like the telephone and television effectively because Selim cannot upkeep these modern devices properly. He does not have the right mindset to solve the problems like repair and paying the bills on time. Wearing a ponytail, speaking perfect English, listening to Led Zeppelin and Van Halen, Selim tries to dissociate himself from his Turkish countrymen. On the other hand, the fact that all the city suffers from a drought makes Selim like other Turks—inefficient, awkward, fatalistic, and a failure in dealing with the challenges of nature such as a drought. Just like Selim, the city cannot keep things in a working condition and thus it is neither modern nor efficient. With this account, Lawlor associates Turkish character with general inefficiency as an extension of another nineteenth-century stereotype. Burnaby’s fatalist and inefficient Osman is echoed through Selim, despite all his pretentious claims to being modern and Western. 3.3.3. Contesting Atatürk’s Heresy: Ercuman as a Representative of the Revival or the Return of Islam in Turkey In his The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), Bernard Lewis draws our attention to the revival of Islamic movements in Turkey in spite of a long period of Westernization efforts that have been initiated by the ruling elite. Lewis describes the influence and function of these movements with these words: the deepest Islamic roots of Turkish life and culture are still alive, and the

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ultimate identity of Turk and Muslim in Turkey is still unchallenged. The resurgence of Islam after a long interval responds to a profound national need. The occasional outbursts of tarikats (sects), far more than the limited restoration of official Islam, show how powerful are the forces stirring beneath the surface. (424) Lawlor also reflects on Turkey’s “Islamic revival” and Ercuman as an embodiment of this revival (15). Lawlor constructs one of his major arguments on Turkey according to SelimErcuman binary opposition. As Selim represents the materialist, progressive, modern, proWestern Atatürk admirer, Ercuman is a character who is everything Selim contradicts and tries to dissociate himself from: “The Turks are very confused. The country is changing too quickly. The old values, the old traditions; they’re disappearing. We don’t know what to believe anymore. So we turn to God” (16). He is against Western values and culture as he thinks that Turks do not have anything to learn from the West which is “vulgar and materialistic” and “progress” is only a “myth.” He sees Atatürk as a “ruthless modernizer” who has done the country “only harm” (16). 3.3.4. The Crescent and the Cross Although the Orientalist discourse depicts the relations between the Eastern and Western countries in terms of enmities and conflict, the relations between Turkey and other European states have not always been in terms of clash. As there is a history of wars and conflicts between Turkey and the rest of Europe, there is another history of interdependence and alliance. As early as the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth sent an organ to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire as a sign of her good-will and desire of friendship and alliance between England and Turkey. Turkey gave rights to Italian, French and English merchants to conduct their businesses in Turkey and these merchants and their

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families lived in Turkey for centuries. In the nineteenth century, when Turkey needed help to fight Russia, England formed an alliance with Turkey and supported her in the war. Burnaby’s account is full of references to solidarity between Turkey and England. Arminius Vambery is another writer who supported England-Turkey alliance against Russian expansionism. If we reduce East-West relations to a “clash of civilizations” we simply ignore clashes within Western civilization itself. The First and Second World Wars, the most terrible and deadly of all wars in the human history, did not start due to the “clash of civilizations.” Furthermore, the opposing sides were not determined by civilizations or religions. In World War I Germany formed allegiance with Muslim Turkey to fight Christian Russia, England, France and Italy. In World War II again Christian countries fought against each other getting the allegiance of non-Christian countries. Turkey supported the allies in World War II, though she never entered the war physically. When an English MP suggested that all the Christian States should form an allegiance to finish the war, Turkey who had sided with England and other Allies felt excluded. One of the leading Turkish journalists of the 1940s expresses his resentment for this idea. As Ahmet Emin Yalman suggests, religion cannot and should not be the defining term in relations between nations. What Yalman notes as “common bonds of humanity” is in the same line with Said’s objection to the “clash of civilizations” as a defining term in real politics.70

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Sir,--I have read with great interest, in your issue of September 26, the report of your İstanbul Correspondent concerning the polemic of certain Turkish papers in regard to the recent statement of Sir Samuel Hoare on Christian brotherhood. Our over-sensitiveness regarding the words of Sir Samuel Hoare is not a selfish one created by an exaggerated sense of national exaltation: it is a result of responsibility regarding the future scheme of things. Sir Samuel Hoare’s call for a revival of a Christian brotherhood gave us an impression of potential discrimination. We objected to that, not because we happen to belong to another religion, but because at this delicate period, we want stress laid upon the common bonds of humanity instead of issues being raised which might tend to create a division and

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On the other hand, the “conceptual and textual grid” of “clash of civilization” or of Christianity-Islam dichotomy gives the writer a ready structure to build his account on. Though not in the same degree with Glazebrook’s and Seal’s accounts Lawlor’s account takes the Islam vs.Christianity paradigm for granted. Lawlor “accepts the basic distinction between the East and the West” (Dolan 5) replacing the East with Islam and the West with Christianity. Lawlor’s Turkey is not a “free subject of thought or action” in Said’s terms (Orientalism 3). Lawlor sees the exotic in the present through the old Turks that are described in the former travel accounts through Ercuman. As Ercuman is the embodiment of the nineteenth-century Turkish character, he is also “the Other,” the one who represents the “Crescent” in Warburton’s “the Crescent and the Star” paradigm. In this binary opposition, Lawlor himself represents “the Cross.” In so doing, when Ercuman takes Lawlor to the Eyup Mosque, which is one of the most important religious sites for Muslim Turks, Lawlor suspects that Ercuman is trying to convert him to Islam, as he has also left an English translation of Koran in Lawlor’s room. On the way to the mosque, he asks Lawlor if he believes in paradise and whether he has been circumcised. At that point, Lawlor defends his faith from Ercuman’s attacks through dissent. The common interests involved in this great struggle must be considered as sacred ground, and every one of us must educate himself not to infringe upon it. We are an ally of Great Britain, not for territorial gain, for there were periods when our adherence could have given Germany an easy victory, and there was nothing they would not have promised us at a certain moment to induce us to become faithless to you, but to cooperate in creating a new order of things which will render future wars impossible and unnecessary. We certainly had no intention to commit suicide because we felt friendship and sympathy for England—but we were interested in the ethical side of the conflict…the sole possibility of maintaining independence and security—without which we could not conceive the possibility of an honest existence. We remained faithful because we had confidence in you as the indomitable buttress of certain principles leading to a better worldorder, based on ideas of tolerance and willing co-operation instead of hatred, dissension and insecurity. We have gained valuable experience by losing a large empire: we have become immune against greed, hatred and any appetites for conquest. With this ardent spirit, which is entirely adjusted according to love, tolerance and harmony, we must be excused if we are a little too sensitive regarding potential sources of dissension and discrimination. (Yalman)

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challenging Ercuman. When Ercuman suggests that technology is good for nothing and people would be better off without technology, Lawlor does not even find the topic worth discussing with Ercuman and he tries to change the subject asking Ercuman why he never laughs. Ercuman’s efforts to laugh fail, implying how Islam deprives people of humor. When Ercuman attempts to discuss the after-life, Lawlor asks Ercuman whether he has ever been abroad. Ercuman’s fatalistic reply gives Lawlor the opportunity to reflect more on Turks, Islam and fatalism: “As he never tired of telling me, Islam means submitting to the will of God, and this he did all too gladly” (32). Thus, lack of sense of humor and fatalism are drawn as characteristics of Islam. On the other hand, enjoying life and seeing the world are represented as Christian features, which give the writer a certain pleasure in being worldlier than those of the rival religion. Lawlor elaborates on the Muslim and non-Muslim distinction more by referring to another incident at the mosque. When a girl offers him “lumps of sugar—in gratitude for a prayer answered,” he hesitates, for he is not sure whether “her gratitude extended to an infidel like” himself (32). Although there is no clue about what the girl thinks about him, he reflects his own Othering of the Turkish girl. How he sees the girl is transformed into how the girl sees him in his representation.

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3.3.5. Drawing “Symbolic Boundaries”: Muslim Women Depicted as a Strategy of Dissociation …travel writing is an ‘implicit quest for anomaly’, as if the travel writer were searching for something strange to describe. And yet, he feels that this is only because in describing the anomaly the writer is affirming the societal norms of England, a view surprisingly close to that of Edward W. Said…One of the striking features in all of the descriptions of other countries is that objects are presented only in terms of their difference to objects in Britain…Very little space is accorded to similarities with the British landscape or British people. (Schick 86) In her Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary Montagu contests Sir Paul Rycaut’s account of Turkey and states that although Sir Rycaut had never been in any of the Turkish female environs, he asserts that he has an extensive knowledge on the situation of women in Turkey. Lady Montagu boasts of being the first European who has had the real chance of giving an accurate account of the Turkish Harem. She gives a vivid account of how she visits the wives of the Ottoman Ministers. She suggests that most of these ladies enjoy more freedom and respect than their sisters in the Christian West. Lady Montagu contests most of the prejudices of the time about the Turkish women. She suggests that although Turkish women are known to be prisoners in the West they actually lead a free life and the things that sound like a barrier between them and freedom are not really their imprisonment. She gives chador and veil as an example: Montagu asserts that as long as women wear these, they can go anywhere without being noticed and they are free to see anyone they like. Contrary to preconceptions in the West, one other point Lady Montagu highlights is the power that the Turkish women hold. She draws our attention to:

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. . . the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors . . . ’Tis also very pleasant to observe how tenderly he and all his brethren voyage-writers lament on the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies, who are, perhaps, freer than any ladies in the universe, and are the only women in the world that lead a life of uninterrupted pleasure, exempt from cares, their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing or the agreeable amusement of spending money and inventing new fashions. A husband would be thought mad that exacted any degree of economy from his wife, whose expenses are no way limited but by her own fancy. (134) Another woman traveler who contests the Western conceptions of Turkish women is Grace Mary Ellison whose An English Woman in a Turkish Harem (1915), contests the idea of “harem” in the Western imagination. Ellison states that connotations of Harem in English and in Turkish are totally different. She says that in English Harem is understood as a prison for women where they are kept as slaves in scores to please the master of the house. These women are concubines or odalisques with no power on their owner as they do not have any emotional connection with him as well. Ellison contests this misrepresentation and narrates the account of her own time in a Turkish Harem. She maintains that in Turkish Harem means the women’s quarters of a house where the wife, the daughters, mother, maids, and all the rest of the female relations of a household live. Ellison also contests the idea that all the Turks are polygamous. She states that though polygamy exists it is not as common as it is believed to be in the West. She puts forward some of the politically most powerful men of the Ottoman Empire as examples and states that even these men cannot have more than one wife as they do not want to disturb the harmony of their domestic lives.

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In her “Introduction” to Zayneb Hanum’s A Turkish Woman's European Impressions (1913), which she also edits, Ellison aspires to reveal to her Western readers how different Turkish women are from the widely held belief that they are just merely slaves in the Harem. In that account, Zayneb Hanum criticizes the superficiality of the Western woman and criticizes her circumstances in the society. Zayneb Hanum is quite disappointed with the Western women as she had held a belief that the Western European women live in much better social circumstances than Turkish women. Her account can be read as her disappointment. Another example of counter-discourse to the hegemonic notion that Turkish women are under repression comes from Lucy Mary Jane Garnett (1909). She addresses the same point: Various writers, from Montesqieu downwards, have assumed and asserted—though on what authority it would be difficult to ascertain that the religion of Islam denies to woman the possession of a soul and, consequently, admission to paradise. Although such an assertion could not honestly be made by anyone acquainted either with Islamic religious thought, this assumed Moslem debasement of women has been eagerly seized upon by the “subjection of women” theorists; and it may not, therefore be superfluous to point out briefly how utterly at variance with facts is such an assumption. (126) “Women in Islam” has been a most appealing issue for the Western travel and fiction writers who choose Turkey as a setting for their search and stories. One example to the extent of misrepresentation of Turkish women in the West is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Macaulay introduces her missionary aunt and the priest who

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go to Turkey to improve Turkish women’s notoriously terrible situation. The aunt sincerely believes that women suffer under the ruthless rule of Islam and Christianity can be their only salvation. In her “The Women of Turkey as Sexual Personae: Images from Western Literature,” Irvin Cemil Schick states that women and harems is the topic that excites Western attention the most “when there is question of the Turks” (89). Schick draws our attention to the medieval Christian polemicists who assert that “Islam is a sensuous religion that granted its adherents boundless sexual license, that its prophet was hopelessly debauched and corrupt, and that it is therefore a false faith” (88). Schick, furthermore, suggests that with the “decline of the moral and ideological hegemony of the church,” the medieval discourse which condemns Islam and Muslims for being “sensual, debauched and corrupt” shifted to the publications of books which narrate the sexual stories of the “others.” She observes that the translation of Thousand and One Nights (1884-1886) by Sir Richard Burton, The Scented Garden: Anthropology of Sex Life in the Levant (1934); and Pinhas Ben Nahum’s The Turkish Art of Love (1933) are outcomes of this interest. Schick defines the alterity discourse based on the misrepresentation in the Western stereotypes of Turkish women as a “technology of place” or a way of constructing “Europe’s spaces of otherness by establishing the alterity of the non-European” (98). Meltem is the only Turkish woman with whom the narrator forms emotional ties. Lawlor meets her in Antalya, where he solely reflects on the gender relations in Islam in terms of sex and how different these are from the West. The problematic relation between man and woman in Islam has led Turkish men to queer attitudes; the hotel owner in Ürgüp who wants to “squeeze” the writer’s “nipple” (175), the sexually perverted bootblack who “extends his tongue and whimpers with lust” whenever he sees a woman (176) and the

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man who asks the writer to masturbate together in a cave (179). Lawlor concludes that “Turkish men are a desperate lot, and it’s all the fault of religious stricture. The segregation of the sexes is so Draconian in much of this country that men and women, until they marry, seldom come in contact” (179). A parallel reading of Lawlor’s depiction of Turkish women with Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross (1848) reveals how Lawlor’s narrative is “haunted by the specter of cliché” (5) in Holland and Huggan’s words. All the restrictions and oppression on women make them so conscious of their sex that even the possibility of any contact with men makes them nervous. When the writer sits next to a Turkish woman in a waiting room, she changes her seat. This gesture hurts Lawlor’s feelings so much that he expresses his concern with these words: “To avoid any hint of impropriety, I suppose. It felt odd to be seen as threatening the virtue of another. It did wonders for my self-esteem. For half an hour, I was able to think myself as a bit of a rake” (15). Then he narrates another incident relating to a ten year old Turkish girl and how embarrassed she felt when her skirt is “caught by wind.” Lawlor attributes all this behavior to the revival of Islam: “İstanbul is very chaste of late. Long dormant, Islam is once again astir—which may explain why the descendants of those sirens who filled the Orient of Pierre Loti and Oscar Wilde71 now look so dispirited” (15). Lawlor does not explain the relationship between these two incidents and the 71

Instead of Edward W. Said’s French journalist’s “Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval” (1), with Lawlor we come across a comparison between the Orient Lawlor sees in 1990s and “the Orient of Pierre Loti and Oscar Wilde.” Here it is worth noting the similarity between how the French journalist reflects on Beirut in 1975 and how Lawlor sees Turkey at the beginning of 1990s. Said could have used these words to assess Lawlor’s account as well: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1). It is Lawlor who declares that what he is looking for in Turkey is exoticism, the nineteenth century Turkey of the travel writers and Osman.) On the reliability of travel narratives Holland and Huggan warn us and maintain that “the history of travel writing…reveals a propensity for hoaxes: either pseudointellectual “insights” that are embarrassingly believed in, or tall tales that masquerade as miraculous events” (12-13). Lawlor takes the verity of the nineteenth century travelers’ tales for granted. He neither questions nor contests them.

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“revival of Islam;” he takes the explanation for granted. He assumes that his readers are already aware of the fact that Islam imprisons women. Lawlor draws the portrait of women in the social life and how they go out in Turkey: “When women must venture out, many do so in chador—wrapped in black from head to foot . . . there is a touch of sinister about them. Not even the eyes are visible. There is something chilling about this debasement. These crowlike figures don’t seem human at all” (179). Lawlor furthermore states that Islam does not consider women people with souls. With this statement Lawlor echoes Pierre Loti’s remarks in Aziyade (1879). According to Lawlor, Turkish men believe that women are not human at all and they are on the same level with animals: “When he got to paradise, he said, he no more expected to see his wife than he did his favourite dog” (179). This is the extent of “debasement” and “dehumanization” of women in Islam. Lawlor’s comments and reflections on women in Islam are also direct echoes of Warburton’s ideas and comments on the issue in his Crescent and the Cross, where he emphasizes the differences between Islam and Christianity. According to Warburton, the difference is so wide that while Christianity has brought civilization and humanity to Europe, Islam is an insurmountable barrier before these values. What makes Lawlor’s account Orientalist is the way he presumes that what Warburton observed, through his biased perspective, in 1848 Egypt, can be used as a conceptual grid to understand the situation of woman in Turkey at the end of the twentieth century. Although Turkey has had thousands of women professors, hundreds of women parliamentarians, women pilots and 59 years of rights to vote and stand for elections, Lawlor can still generalize: One sees women in the company of women, but rarely in the company of men—unless they happen to be relatives. And then, the woman’s presence is peripheral. Doomed to do little more than hover, she reminds one of a

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satellite trapped forever in the orbital pull of a more powerful neighbor. Trailing after her menfolk, she doesn’t speak or consulted. These men seem unaware of her. So little heed is paid, they might have forgotten she exists at all. (180) Although there is a great amount of accuracy in this account, Lawlor’s discourse ignores how enormously women’s circumstances have improved in the last a hundred and fifty years.72 Meltem is an embodiment of seclusion, imprisonment and worthlessness of womanhood in Turkey. According to Lawlor, Turkish women owe this harsh treatment to their unfaithfulness and frailty which can be traced in David Urquhart’s, Lord Kames’s, Montesquieu’s, Pierre Loti’s and Lord Byron’s reflections on the “widely held belief: Turkish women are loose” (190). As a consequence, treating women thus can be justified as they deserve this through their dishonest conduct. Although he suggests a certain kind of concern for women’s circumstances, he does not contest any of these writers in his account. On the contrary, he uses Omdi as a witness to convince his reader that what has been “widely believed” by travelers is true since a modern Turkish man also verifies it with his discourse. Representing the Oriental women in degrading terms has a long history in the Western literary canon. In her Europe’s Myths of Orient (1986), Rana Kabbani states that Eastern women were drawn as wanton and lustful as early as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. Kabbani notes that the West stands for wisdom and propriety whereas the East

72

Turkish women were able to get professional training as early as 1843. The first women teacher training school was opened in 1870. They could become civil servants in 1913. They could go to university in 1922. The first Turkish Parliament with women had 18 women members in 1935. In 1950 the first women mayor was elected. In 1971 a university professor became the first woman minister and it was 1993 when a woman became the prime minister. March 21, 2006. .

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stands for sensual pleasures in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony is a great man who has political and economical power; however, his love for Cleopatra, the woman from the East becomes his end and ruins his life. Kabbani suggests that Cleopatra “was the East, the Orient created for the Western gaze” (22). Along with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Virgil’s Dido, Medea, Balqis of Yemen and Salome are some other well known Eastern woman characters in the West. According to Kabbani, the Eastern woman was a “narrative creation that fulfilled the longings of Western imagination” (22). When Scheherazade was created in 1704, there had been a long tradition about how to depict the Eastern woman for the Western reader. Kabbani argues that although Antoine Galland73 had done much more serious and successful translations from Arabic to French before the Arabian Nights, he had never reached a success anything like Arabian Nights. Kabbani suggests that Arabian Nights became so popular in the West because of Galland’s tendency to “see those aspects he expected to see” in the East, which were “the manifestations of violence that were supposedly intrinsic to the East” (25), Kabbani notes that: The violence of the East was often linked in Galland . . . with sexuality. This was a common trope of European travel-writing: the all-invasive seraglio with its crimes of passion was never far from the traveler’s mind. It was the most fascinating and the most disturbing image to him, and he devised endless means of portraying it. His descriptions served to elaborate upon those of previous travelers, sustaining as they did the same fictions. (25) She also argues that the fiction of “wanton,” unfaithful Oriental woman is a recurring 73

The French translator who first introduced the Arabian Nights to European readers.

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image in Western literature. In Arabian Nights, Shahzaman is deceived by his wife: he is further upset when he discovers that his brother’s (Shahrayar’s) wife does the same. Having taken their revenge, the two brothers leave their country to find out if the women in other lands act like their wives. They discover that men are hopeless. The story of Ifrit’s wife reveals the inevitability of this fate: Of a truth this Ifrit bore me off on my bridenight, and put me in a casket in a coffin and to the coffin he affixed seven strong padlocks of steel and deposited me on the deep bottom of the sea that raves, dashing and clashing with waves; and guarded me so that I might remain chaste and honest, quotha! That none save himself might have connexion with me. But I have lain under as many of my kind as I please, and this wretched Jinni wotteth not tha Destiny may not be averted nor hindered by aught, and whatso woman willeth the same fulfilleth however man nilleth. (qtd. in Kabbani 49) Even Ifrit, who keeps his wife “on the deep bottom of the sea” and under “seven strong padlocks of steel,” cannot avoid being deceived by his wife. Ifrit and his wife’s story is a good example of how “fickle, faithless and lewd” the Oriental women are; and how hard the Oriental men try to keep them under control. In this context, Shahrayar and Shahzaman are the embodiments of how cruelly and beastly the Oriental men seek revenge when they are betrayed. As the black, Oriental, different Othello kills Desdemona, the Muslim Egyptian man does not hesitate to murder his wife even only when he has the slightest suspicion. When one of Abbas Pashas hundreds of odalisques, Fatima, is suspected of having a conversation with an “Arnaut,” an Albanian, she is condemned to death by the pasha and drowned in the Nile: “ . . . a white figure glimmered along the boat’s dark crew; there was

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a slight movement, and a faint splash—and then—the river flowed on as merrily as if poor Fatima still sang her Georgian song to the murmur of its waters . . . ” (76) Here it is worth noting that Fatima is presented with a Georgian identity so that the English reader might identify with her and share the sorrow of her tragic end at the hands of the cruel Muslims who know of no mercy. In Warburton’s account, it is claimed that in Islam women are accorded a second rate existence and always treated as worthless slaves of men. He describes the position of Egyptian women within these terms: “ . . . obliged to share her husband’s affection with a hundred others in this world, is yet further supplanted in the next by the Houris, a sort of she-angel, of as doubtful a character as a Muslim paradise can tolerate . . . it is a very moot point among Mussulman D.D.s whether women have any soul at all” (80). Warburton continues to relate how Islam sees women as insignificant and second rate in terms of religious duties as well: Women are not enjoined to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca, but they are permitted to do so. They are not enjoined to pray; but the Prophet seemed to think that it could do them no harm, provided they prayed in their own houses and not in the mosques, where they might interfere with, or share, the devotion of those who had real business there. (81) Warburton infers that as: “The Muslim purchases his wife as he does his horse: he laughs at the idea of honor and of love: the armed eunuch and the close-barred window are the only safeguards of virtue that he relies on” (79). Furthermore, he states that as Egyptians are a nation of “sensualists and slaves,” the Egyptian women have “all the insipidity of children, without their innocence or sparkling freshness” (79). Warburton also draws our attention to the distance between man and woman in the social sphere: “The seclusion of

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the harem is preserved in the very streets by means of an object of mystery; and the most intimate acquaintance never inquires after the wife of his friend, or affects to know her existence” (72). When we read Lawlor’s account of Meltem and other Turkish women, we see that he follows the same textual and conceptual grid that has been used in Arabian Nights and The Crescent and the Cross. Meltem is the jealously protected woman, her father is Ifrit whose efforts are in vain, since she sees Lawlor at night secretly. As for Omdi, his stories about how Turkish men kill their wives can be associated with Shahrayar and Shahzaman’s narratives. 3.3.6. Lawlor’s Love for Meltem and his Textual Attitude Cervantes’s Don Quixote sets off for his adventures inspired by the romances he reads. He invents a lover for himself: Duncinea; he finds a squire: Sancho Pancho; and he challenges and fights against the wind-mills. The quest Don Quixote strives so hard to fulfill is an outcome of his close relationship with the romances where the heroes undertake all the dangers and adventures for their lovers. In these terms, the romances are the escape for people like Don Quixote who do not find much excitement in their lives. The fantasy these works generate becomes an obsession for Don Quixote, thus starts all his troubles with reality and fantasy. Lawlor has a similar relation between the travel accounts of the nineteenth century and what he has been looking for in Turkey. When it does not happen, he tries to invent or manipulate it. He does not only follow the itinerary of the previous century’s travelers but he also creates the scenes that they narrate. As Burnaby goes to a Café Chantant in İstanbul, Lawlor also goes to a restaurant where he listens to Turkish music. Moreover, just like Burnaby Lawlor comments on the Turkish songs and how these songs make Turks

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more and more fatalistic, owing to the fact that Turkish songs take “so dim a view of human nature” (Lawlor 4). Correspondingly, Lawlor tries the Turkish bath and sees for himself what it feels like. At the beginning of his account, Lawlor looks for Pierre Loti’s novel character Aziyade’s grave. He refers to this love at the beginning of his account and when he meets Meltem, Lawlor says “I was another Loti, I convinced myself. I had found my Aziyade” (186). Just like Loti and Aziyade, Meltem and Lawlor can also meet only in secret. As Loti has Samuel as an accomplice, Lawlor has Omdi as his confidant in his affair with Meltem. Both Aziyade and Meltem’s freedoms are restricted; Aziyade’s by her master and Meltem’s by her father. Neither of them sees any way of gaining their independence to do whatever they want. Aziyade feels so desperate about her freedom and restrictions on her that she offers to commit suicide together: ‘She says’ Samuel translated, ‘that her God is not the same as yours, and that she is not sure, from what the Koran says, whether women have souls like men. She is afraid that after you have gone away, she will never meet you again . . . she wants to know if you would mind jumping into the sea with this very minute, so that you may sink to the bottom together, clasped in each other’s arms.’ (Loti 20) Although Meltem is not that desperately hopeless about her future, she still sees no way to free herself and makes her own decisions about her own life. While Meltem is so jealously protected from the other sex, her brother is even encouraged by his family. At that point, Lawlor remarks on how badly the women are treated in Islam. After illustrating how little power Turkish women hold in the society, Lawlor discusses the two different public domains that are occupied by men and women. In

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Lawlor’s account, Turkish men are almost always away from women. Turkish women hardly ever go to teahouses or restaurants and whenever the writer meets his Turkish male friends they never bring their wives. For Lawlor, this distinction between men and women in Turkish society and its reasons are: “Men have come to prefer the company of other men. Their contacts with other males are familiar and comfortable and easy to predict. Not so their contacts with women. Women puzzle them. (Since sexes seldom mix, how could they not?) They regard them as an unknown species—foreign, hard to gauge, difficult to trust” (181). 3.3.7. Touts and Degenerate Turks The third significant Turkish character in Lawlor’s account is the tout Mini-van driver Erek. Erek is more like a cartoon character rather than a life-like character. On the other hand, he obviously represents a type in Turkey. Lawlor introduces Erek after he leaves Van where he meets Ahmet, who runs his father’s grocery shop which sells European food and other Western products. Ahmet has spent some time in Germany and he thinks that he is much more at home in Europe than he is in Turkey. Whereas, Ahmet says that he spent most of his time in Germany in prison as he tried to break into an ATM. His prison experience is surprisingly pleasant. He says that he enjoyed his time there as they had videos and Playboy. On the day Ahmet promises to take the writer to the museum, he comes late and when he arrives at last he takes Lawlor to one of his friend’s rug store although the writer does not want any carpets and expressed his intentions on the point. Erek is a much more sophisticated, unreliable, irresponsible tout. The first time the writer meets Erek, he exploits the writer and his other four companions; an Australian couple, a German student and a man from Holland with whom the writer “teamed up” to go to Adiyaman and from there to Mount Nemrut. The group fall

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into Erek’s trap, little suspecting his honesty. They want to go to Kahta to make it to Mount Nemrut and it turns out that Erek picks them up somehow. At first, Erek pretends that he likes them so much that he himself wants to become their driver to Kahta and he will do anything for them to have a good time while they are in Kahta; he will help them get the best hotel and so on. However, when they get to Kahta Erek’s friendly manners changes into that one of a tout. He leaves them at a terrible B&B where nothing works. In addition, he literally gives them orders to go and do some shopping at his friends’ shops. When they muster courage enough to declare him that they were most unwilling to obey him. The monster which has been hidden beneath his mask is exposed and he uses all kinds of languages to insult them. Even when the group hires another minivan to go to Mount Nemrut, they cannot avoid his involvement. It turns out to be one of Erek’s other minivans of whose driver Erek has given strict orders not to take Lawlor up to the mountain. In spite of all this mischief, when Erek offers to take the group to Urgup they do not decline his offer but continue getting involved with a character like him. Erek also represents careless and irresponsible Turkish drivers who claim thousands of lives every year. On the way Erek drives so carelessly that they have an accident which might kill all of them. It is at this point the writer reveals the difference between the Turkish character and the European character. For after the accident one of them takes charge of the driving and Erek is pacified.

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3.3.9. Turkish Fatalism Burnaby goes to a Café Chantant is İstanbul and listens to a Turkish song about Abdul Aziz, the late Ottoman Sultan. The sultan had just died and the singer was lamenting his death. The singer: . . . began to sing about Abdul Aziz, of all his glory, and how at last pride turned his head. He did foolish things, went mad, and killed himself. ‘But it was not his fault,’ continued the singer, in another verse, ‘it was his kismet. If he had been destined to die a natural death, or on the battle-field, he would have done so.’ (8) Burnaby does not refer to Abdul Aziz and how the song represents his tragic end, he also draws our attention to the way the Turks deal with a tragedy. According to Burnaby, the Turks believe in predestination or the fate so there is nothing that man can do to change this predestination. Consequently, this belief makes Turks different from the British who take lessons from accidents or who investigates these sorts of assassinations and do not let the assassins get away with it. The song also represents the typical Turkish submission to God’s will which makes Turks prone to misdeeds. In that sense, fatalism makes Turks irresponsible, inefficient and lazy. They act irresponsibly because they do not take any precautions to prevent accidents. They are inefficient for they do not feel obliged to perfect their skills since it could only be God’s will if something will work well or not. They are lazy because they do not believe that their efforts will make any difference in terms of work. In all the various accidents, Burnaby has to suffer in his account, it is all due to Osman’s fatalist attitude that these accidents occur. Likewise, Looking for Osman, starts with this account: “I was having a drink in an outdoor café when a piece of masonry broke loose from an overhead cornice. It crashed to

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the pavement inches from where I was sitting” (3). Although the writer gets so scared and frightened for his life, nobody else cares much about that accident that might have ended up deadly. Lawlor narrates people’s reaction: The detonation caused a sensation: a crowd gathered, traffic halted, and those living nearby rushed to their windows. But through it all, the other patrons continued eating. Had the trajectory been only slightly different, one or more of them might have been killed, but beyond a glance at the fallen masonry and another in the direction from whence it came, the event did not interest them. Dinner was more important. (Lawlor 3) All through the account we see that one of the main themes of Looking for Osman is this fatalism and its outcomes. We see Erek as a careless driver; we are told the story of the landlady in Çanakkale who had lost her two sons at a traffic accident; and the fatalist irresponsible minivan drivers who put the lives of their passengers into risk for their silly competition on the way to Troy. The surprising thing in all these cases is that none of the Turkish passengers object to the driver. They neither complain nor criticize. For Lawlor, all these can only be explained through Islamic fatalism. To emphasize the difference between the Turkish passengers and the Westerns, when Erek gets involved in an accident, the Westerns on board take over the control and do something to prevent further accidents. The really significant difference between the Turkish and the Western character comes to the surface on the fatalism issue in Lawlor’s account. Although the four major Turkish characters, Selim, Ercuman, Erek and Meltem, seem to be so different and distinct from each other, in Lawlor’s view, they still share one common characteristic: Despite the fact that Selim, Ercuman, Erek and Meltem are in their early twenties they do not have the faith that they can change their lives and go for their dreams. They all share the submission

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to their fates. They believe that it is in vain for them to make any efforts to change their circumstances as they will end up with whatever has been written for them in their fate. When Lawlor asks the conservative receptionist Ercuman where he would like to go to if he had the opportunity, the only answer Ercuman can come up with is that it is not meant for him to travel. Ercuman does not believe that this is a part of his fate as nobody else in his family had ever been abroad before. Erek’s irresponsible driving, and his way of treating the writer and his companions are also signs of Erek’s fatalism. For Erek, no matter how he drives, if it is meant for him he will have an accident. Moreover, Erek does not see any connection between the way he treats people and the reaction he gets from them. This lack of cause-effect relationship is seen as fatalism by Lawlor. In Meltem’s case, though Meltem is not happy at all with the treatment she gets from her father and the future that is awaiting her, she does not see the power in herself to change her circumstances. She wants to go abroad but she thinks that Turks are not liked anywhere in the world and that is the end of it. When Lawlor suggests going to İstanbul or Ankara she has other excuses for not doing this as well. She is a woman who has submitted to her destiny at twenty-two. As for Selim, he claims that he is Western and European, which Lawlor never believes but finds it difficult to explain why he is not either. It is only at the end of the book when Selim tells how he meets his girlfriend, how they are meant to meet and that it has all been predestined that Lawlor figures out what makes Selim Turkish rather than Western: Selim’s fatalism. Hence, Lawlor’s account, starting with an act of Turks’ typical fatalistic approach to accidents ends with Selim and his predestined relationship with his girlfriend. “Selim” character, which stands for Westernized Turks, proves that Turkish Westernization has just been too shallow and pretentious.

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3.4. A Complex Rewriting of Turkish Modernization: A Fez of the Heart (1995) by Jeremy Seal The major problematic of Seal’s account can be found in this single sentence: “Little, it struck me, was more quintessentially Turkish than the fez; little was less representative of the country than breast covered beaches” (14). In that, Turkey has been trying to Westernize her people enforcing them to become something they are not. On one hand, the fez which was compatible with the Turkish culture and which had been accepted widely by people has been abolished and banned. On the other hand, something like “breast covered beaches” has been brought into Turkey through Westernization. Seal implies that these beaches cannot be regarded as real Turkey. As Seal sees it, Turkey, as she is, can only be found in the hinterland, at places where “fez” is still in the hearts of people. In that context, fez represents resistance to change in Turkey. In Seal’s account fez represents Turkey’s problematic relation with her past and identity. When fez was first introduced in 1826 as a part of Mahmud II’s reforms, it was not welcomed and the Sultan had to take some severe actions to fight resistance. Ironically, in 1925, when Atatürk and his friends wanted to abolish fez, they had to face a similar reaction in the reverse. “Fez,” the symbol of “general orthodoxy,” was banned by the State in 1925. It created such a fervent reaction that fez wearers were bold enough to “walk to the gallows” for their beliefs as it had become a religious symbol. In both of the cases, Turks had to endure their leaders’ (in Seal’s depiction, their tyrants’ or despot’s) caprices and imposition which do not regard the sense of tradition or culture of their own peoples. Seal’s narrative starts in Side, which he insistently calls “pomegranate.” Giving a brief account of how the first European tourists were stoned on the streets of “Pomegrenate.” He says that Turks became tolerant to European tourists only after they see

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that they can make their living through them. Seal suggests that Europeans should not be deceived with what they seee at places like Side and Bodrum. According to him, European tourists see only artificially reconstructed parts of Turkey; however, a journey to hinterland Turkey reveals that Turkey is becoming more and more different from Europe. The question Seal asks at the end of the paragraph points out that Turkey’s change is an alarming one. The argument Seal contests is: “Turkey is Westernizing day by day, and becoming like one of European countries. There is no problem in Turkey.” What Seal tries to do in his account is to address is Turkey’s problems which European tourists cannot see in Turkey. He uses previous travel accounts and historiography to reconstruct the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Turkeys. In that sense, it is important to examine how he uses these texts to reconstruct these past times. 3.4.1. Intertextuality One of the most significant characteristics of Seal’s A Fez of the Heart is the way the text aligns itself with (just like Glazebrok’s Journey to Kars and Lawlor’s Looking for Osman) the nineteenth-century traveler writers. In that sense, Seal’s travel account is a quite intertextual travel book. As Umberto Eco points out: “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told” (qtd. in Butler 32). Christopher Butler addresses the issue of intertextuality with these words: “No text ever finally establishes anything about the world outside itself. It never comes to rest, but merely to use Derrida’s term, “disseminates” variations on previously established concepts or ideas” (32). Therefore, meaning and reality are not free agents that have their own independence. The ideas and representations of reality are not only bound up with language but also with earlier concepts and ideas. These concepts and ideas form the whole we call “discourse,” the term which has been brought to the attention of literary criticism mainly by the French

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philosopher Michel Foucault. In his article “Travel and Writing,” French travel writer Michel Butor argues that there is a very close relation between travel books and travel. He claims that “books are at the origin of the trip; books read . . . projected books” (83). Reading travel books urge people to travel to the lands narrated in travel accounts. According to Jean-Didier Urbain, people are drawn to travel by “a story, or another journey, or yet another story, in brief there is a mediator of desire, a model to be translated that informs one’s vision, governs one’s action and feeds one’s discourse” (qtd. in Borm 23). We can draw an analogy between how a traveler visits a place, “putting test” to a travel guide, and how the traveler-writers put to test earlier travelers. In his “Turkey and the Travel Writer: the Past and the Palimpsest” (1998), David Espey states how reading and travel intertwine: “Our Bible was The Lonely Planet Guide. We put that book to the test of experience; we not only read it—we traveled it” (1). Referring to other travelers’ reflections on a certain site or on certain cultural issues, travelers either contest or confirm the previous travelers’ accounts, which makes travel a stimulating intellectual activity. Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995) is a highly intertextual travel account. In the bibliography of his book, he gives the titles of 52 books on Turkey ranging a time span from 1833 to 1993. Along with travel accounts like Reverend Joseph Wolff’s Mission to Bokhara (1846) or Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan (1837), there are novels like Mary Lee Settle’s Blood Tie (1977) or John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916); there are political books like Gerard Chaliand’s A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (1993) or Arnold Toynbee’s Turkey (1917). Among the books he refers to in his account, there are ones that give a balanced representation of Turkey and her peoples, like Settle’s novel and, Burnaby’s and Pardoe’s travel accounts. On the other hand, there are also the

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ones which try to draw the darkest picture possible like Ramsay’s and Toynbee’s books. As Said puts it, intertextuality is “far from being merely additive or cumulative” as in the case of “the growth of knowledge” in any field, intertextulaity is also “a process of selective

accumulation,

displacement,

deletion,

rearrangement,

and

insistence”

(Orientalism 176). There we come across the question: How does Seal use the accounts of his predecessors? Seal’s alignments obviously go with the second group of writers although he never challenges the writers of the first group explicitly. Yet he acknowledges his affirmation and agreement with the second group at every other opportunity. For example, he calls Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars a “classic,” he attributes a sense of authority to Toynbee’s book on minority issues during the Ottoman Empire and uses this authority to argue that Turks never deal with issues like that in the light of scholarly work. Seal’s acknowledgement of his admiration for Journey to Kars puts him in due alignment with Glazebrook, who uses an imperialist, chauvinistic and racist discourse in his account. In his Orientalism, Said draws our attention to how the nineteenth-century witnesses unprecedented Western hegemony in terms of political and military power and how Orientalist discourse serves this political and military power by justifying invasions and enforcements as the civilizing mission (xxii). With other European nations, England and France ruled over many peoples from Tunisia to India and from Vietnam to Nigeria. As Said observes, studying those peoples was a part of the imperialist project. In his Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation (2001), Michael Pickering addresses the significance of the nineteenth century in terms of molding the stereotypes and the vocabulary to talk about the other cultures. For Pickering, “representations of other cultures and other countries are rooted in the nineteenth-century nationalisms and the pseudoscientific rationalizations of racial difference developed at that time, in European

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societies conceiving themselves as modern” (xii). Taken this into account, Seal’s relation to nineteenth-century travelers plays a significant role in our reading of his politics of representation. Pickering’s assessment of the nineteenth-century representation of other cultures demonstrate the general assumption that there is an improvement in terms of representation and other cultures are represented more fairly, or with less prejudice. In his “Introduction: The Modern Literature of Travel” (1992), Michael Kowalewski makes a similar assumption, remarking that “travel writers today often feel less culturally surefooted than their predecessors” (12). According to Kowalewski, “writers have been alerted, by way of a much-touted ‘crisis of confidence’ in our collective ability to represent foreign peoples, to the limitations of the interpretive grids through which they view life at home or abroad. They are forewarned about the projections of desire that often constitute our images of the ‘primitive’ or the ‘exotic’” (12). It seems as if Seal has never been “alerted, by way of a much-touted ‘crisis of confidence’” that Kowalewski mentions. After analyzing in what context and tone Seal’s references are used, we see that most of the nineteenth-century travel writers have an opener, friendlier and more sympathetic approach to Turkey and her people than Seal, Glazebrook and Lawlor. As in most cases, the Victorian travelers tolerate differences and try to understand the customs of Turks, approaching previous travelers’ accounts with an intellectual and philosophical skepticism. Travelers note some negative aspects of Turkey and Turkish life but they also show a kind of sympathy and compassion. Compared to these nineteenth-century travel writers, (Cyrus Hamlin, Captain Frederick Burnaby, Julia Pardoe, Arundell and early twentieth century writers like Lucy Mary Jane Garnett, Marmaduke Pickthall and Aubrey Herbert) Seal’s account is a representative of the line of writers, in Charisse Gandren’s terms, “who make snap judgments about complex

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problems” (264-83). Marmaduke Pickthall’s With the Turk in the Wartime (1913) According to Şerif Mardin, although it is possible to talk about a Western discourse which presumes the superiority of the West and the inferiority of the East, there is also another discourse which has its roots deep in the Western intellectual history. According to this discourse, the Western civilization is not only in decline but also in a state of “rottenness” (115). Pickthall is certainly in due alignment with the second discourse in everything he says about Turkey and her relations with Europe. Contrary to the hegemonic discourse of his time, his East constitutes all the human values that civilizations could boast about; however, the West, with her depravity and immoral conduct, is the embarrassing brother of humanity. Seal uses two epigraphs at the beginning of his book. These two epigraphs come just after “Acknowledgements” but on a separate page before “Prologue.” One of the epigraphs is a quotation from Marmaduke Pickthall’s With the Turk in the Wartime (1913): “I think it is that you are trying to be something which you never can be, something which nobody with any sense would wish to be—a European.” In his travelogue, Pickthall narrates an account of talking to a Turkish gentleman who is full of admiration for Europe and European culture. The Turkish gentleman, who has little regard for Turkey and Turkish culture, claims that if Turks imitate Europe and European ways, Turkey will become a better and stronger country without the problems faced in 1913. Pickthall responds to this argument with these words: “I think it is that you are trying to be something which you never can be, something which nobody with any sense would wish to be—a European” (205). Pickthall thinks that Turkish people, as they are much more exalted, and far more humane than the Europeans. This is how he sees Europe and

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European morality: “The deity behind the powers of Europe being, as it is, not God but Mammon” (205-06). Pickthall’s Europe is in such a moral corruption that “nobody with any sense would wish to be—a European” (206). According to Pickthall, Turkey symbolizes innocence; whereas, everything European is abominable. Therefore, instead of trying to become European, Turkey should be what she is and be contented with that. The question to ask here is whether Seal uses the epigraph in this sense or in a sense that Turkey can never become European and should not try it in vain. In Seal’s narrative, Europe is so superior that a country like Turkey can never reach that level of perfection. In Pickthall’s representation of Turkey, Turkey stands for everything Europe is not in a very positive sense. He has an understanding and empathizing attitude towards Turkey, while the dominant British point of view of his time was to condemn Turkey of committing atrocities against her Christian minorities in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars. Pickthall contests this dominant ideology which is used to justify the future plan of dividing the Ottoman territory among France, Russia and England. He thinks that Turkey is unjustly treated and he contests the idea that Turks persecute their Christian minorities at every possible occasion: It is Turkey’s exclusion from that magic circle which includes such shining lights as Russia and the Balkan states, her not being “Christian,” simply, which is held to justify the partition of her Asiatic territory (already, as I hear, arranged for by the Powers) and will give the character of a Crusade to yet another cruel massacre, . . . one must protest at least against the dragging in of Christianity as a mere blind to the true nature of the deed in contemplation. (Pickthall 205-06) Pickthall openly condemns the division based on Christian-Muslim dichotomy. He also condemns the use of the idea of the Crusades by the Powers. He finds this Christian-

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Muslim polarity applied by the Powers as “a crime against humanity” (206). All through his account, he incessantly challenges Turkey and Turk stereotypes in England. He contests the idea that difference of religion or culture should play a significant role in the politics and the reshaping of the world. Pickthall highlights the similarities between the Ottoman Christians and Muslims: “Of old, when Greek women veiled like the Turks, Greek men wore Fez, a turban like the Turkish men, there was no such bitterness between the two religions . . . it is the outcome of a century and more of anti-Turkish propaganda . . . ” (86). As the quotation openly puts forward, Pickthall is against the idea that religious differences should be exploited to serve political causes. Rather than the Christian Europe, he favors the idea of Europe without any religious identification. A Fez of the Heart’s predominating tone taken into consideration, we see that Seal does not use Pickthall’s comment as a compliment to Turkey and Turkish culture. There is a big difference between the contexts. First of all, Seal’s ideological position before Turkey and his quest should be read in the context of how he represents Turkey and Turks. Unlike Pickthall, Seal bases his account on emphasizing the difference between Turkey and Europe. Unfortunately, he builds his representation of difference and dissimilarity on religion. He mainly focuses on Islam-Christianity dichotomy and strives hard to reveal that Muslims are not compatible with Christians as the Muslims have no tolerance or respect for Christianity. Wherever he goes he draws Muslims as anti-Christian. In Cappadocia, for example, talking about the destruction on the frescoes of a church, he expresses his feelings with the following words: “. . . a monstrous intolerance, the frescoes had been disfigured. The faces of Christ, the disciples, and the saints, had been obliterated with some sharp flint so that a neat oval of rough stone showed in their place. I felt anger rising inside me . . .” (177).

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Mary Lee Settle’s Blood Tie (1977) Another epigraph Seal uses at the very beginning of his book is from Mary Lee Settle Blood Tie (1977). In her Turkish Reflections (1989), Settle gives us a quite detailed account of how she first came to Turkey in 1973. While staying at a Greek island, she experiences an unpleasant treatment and she wants to try her chance in Turkey to see if she would feel more comfortable and at peace. The welcome she receives in Bodrum makes her stay in Bodrum for three years. The reason why she tells this story about the Greek island and how she is welcomed in Bodrum can be read as the writer’s design to reveal how religion does not matter in terms of friendship and belonging. What Seal quotes from Settle is: “When you make a world for tourist you make a lie, a patchwork from all the coats you have shed” (qtd. in Seal 1). Settle quotes this sentence in such a context that it can be read as a call to tourists for not to make their minds about Turkey only through knowing the places like Bodrum, Side, Kuşadası and like, which were designed for tourists and do not reflect the actual lifestyle of Turkish people. She suggests that the Turkey which is unknown to Western tourists is a much better, much more loveable and friendlier Turkey. We can find further clues on how Settle sees tourists and tourism in her Blood Tie (1977), for which Settle won the National Book Award in Fiction. Settle declares her anti-tourist feelings through her heroine, Ariadne: Ariadne looked out over her sweet city, the gem she had polished in her mind, her paradise. She knew then that it was finished, and that she made too much of it. It had reached the ears of the bored, the rich, the tasters of cities. She could see Cary Stewart, with whatever lover she was carrying as luggage, arriving at the port, the new port of ancient Ceramos, a city she did not know. (Blood Tie 331)

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Settle’s representation of the city people is not flattering at all. She draws them as spoiled consumers who are always looking for a new place to discover and then gradually ruin. Then they get bored again as quick as they spoil the last innocent place. In Ariadne’s view people like Carry Stewart are a ruin to a place, they are like plague, everything unwanted. Settle describes the effects of tourism within these terms: In the evening, women in well cut trousers, and caftans from a hundred ports, came ashore from the yachts and clogged the bars. Business was booming . . . For two weeks the town had been without water . . . Murat charged fourteen lira for a gallon of water. He had written the price on the door of the kahve. Every day he changed it to a higher price . . . (Ariadne) told herself that in that dry invasion of August she too had become only another foreigner without a name. (Blood Tie 327-28) According to Settle, tourism, through the economic opportunities it brings, seduces the inhabitants of Ceramos. She finds a kind of purity in the lives of the people who have not been spoiled through contact with tourism. To reveal the innocence and purity of the country life, Ariadne takes her friend Lisa to a walk to introduce her to people she knows in a Turkish village. According to Ariadne, these villagers are “still hospitable and kind.” She finds in places like this “the old Ottoman manners, the hospitality of Islam” and a corner from the heaven (Blood Tie 334). Settle’s is a quite different approach, compared to Seal’s accounts of the villagers and Anatolia. Settle celebrates the lifestyle of the simple Anatolian villagers, while placing the tourists on a morally corrupt status. Moreover, tourists seduce those people living in the towns that have been discovered to their peril by the tourists. Yet Seal quotes Setlle’s observation in such a context that her words gain a totally different meaning. What he

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implies through her words is: “Do not be mistaken with the tolerance, good manners and friendly attitudes of the Turks you meet at tourist destinations like Side. They tolerate you just because you pay them. They have good manners just because you shop from their markets and stay in their hotels and eat in their restaurants. Go to the hinterland and see real Turkey. See how hostile they are to Europeans, how unfriendly and different they are.” While tourists are the agents of corruption in Settle’s narrative, Seal reverses her statement and makes Turks, who work in the tourism industry, the agents of illusion making, creating an unreal world which aims to deceive Seal’s audience. Pierre Loti Another Turcophile writer Seal mentions in his account is Pierre Loti.74 He might be considered as the most acclaimed European writer who has ever resided Turkey. His memory is so dear to Turkish people that, as Seal states, there are neighborhoods, hotels, cafes called after him (28-29). Grace Ellison’s An Englishwoman in Angora (1923) opens with her voyage to Turkey on board Pierre Loti, a French ship. Ellison took her journey to the Turkey of 1923, the country which had just won her Independence War. Although most had lost their faith that Turkey, the Sick Man of Europe, would survive the foreign 74 İnci Enginün observes that the Turkish intellegentsia read Loti’s works with interest and admiration but most of them did not like Loti’s representation of Turkey. They did not find his narrative flattering at all. They state that what the backward and rotten points they want to change are celebrated by Loti. They cannot make up their mind on the question whether Loti had been making fun of those issues or he was serious about them. One more thing they find problematic or disturbing about Loti’s approach to Turkey is the results this overpraise cause. Especially the reformists see this overpraise as a mar before modernization and change. They think that this praise creates a false impression that change and modernization attempts only creates a deformation on the face of Turkey but does not create any kind of amelioration. For Loti mourns for the change that Turkey has undertaken and laments that it is becoming less exotic day by day. What Enginün quotes from Yakup Kadri gives us a clear picture of the structure of feeling of the1920s and 1930s Turkish intelligentsia: “. . . ne Loti, ne de Loti gibi bizi acayip ve zavallı bularak seven frenk muharrirleri, Mustafa Kemal'in itibarını asla kazanamamışlardır. O, kendisini bir “Yeni Adam1 hissettiği ve Türk milletinden bir canlı ve ileri cemiyet çıkaracağını bildiği için, memleketimizi bir müze hâlinde görmek isteyenlere karşı, bize doğrudan doğruya düşmanlık edenlerden ziyade kızıyordu.” (Neither Loti nor the other Western writers who loved Turkey finding us exotic and miserable had never been appreciated by Atatürk. As he felt himself a new man and as he knows that there would emerge a vivid and advanced people from Turks, he felt angrier at those who want to see Turkey as a museum than those who directly show their hostility.)

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invasion. As Ellison puts it, when Turkey had few friends; even at his deathbed, Loti was concerned with Turkey and her welfare, therefore he his last words were “a defence of his beloved Turks” (21). Ellison’s Loti, who does not invest all his loyalties only to his own native country France, is concerned with the welfare and independence of Turkey. This identification and fellow feeling is lost in Seal’s account, which distantiates Loti from Turkey. Seal depicts Loti’s attachment to Turkey as a self-deception, and a long lasting fantasy which does not have a deep emotional commitment: “I had always assumed that this romantic Orientalist would have eschewed the indifferent embrace of French soil and insisted on being buried in his beloved Constantinople” (29). According to Seal, Loti has only an Orientalist vision of Turkey and İstanbul which consists of “the fabulous Orient, and [of] the veiled, forbidden and thus irresistible harem girls” (29). However, in Seal’s view, Turkish modernization and Westernization project had always been a reality Loti tried to suppress in his works. According to Seal, it was these Westernization efforts which had “disenchanted” Loti (29). In the Western imagination Loti had a reputation for being an admirer of Turkey and defendant of Turkish independence during the Ally invasion from 1919 to 1922. We can align his name with Pickthall and Settle who also contest the hegemonic discourses of their cultures and societies in terms of representing Turkey. Despite Seal’s depiction of Loti as a figure who is rather critical of Turkey’s Westernization, Loti’s name still rings as a pro-Turkey writer who does not see Turkey as an anti-thesis of European identity. Because Seal draws upon three most positive writers on Turkey at the beginning of his account, one might be easily misled to think that Seal will assume an unbiased attitude to Turkey in his representation. Yet, Seal’s attitude is racist and Eurocentric from the very

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beginning of his account. An Alternative Discourse: Tom Brosnahan’s Turkey: Strong Sun Dark Tea (2006) In his Turkey: Strong Sun Dark Tea (2006), American Tom Brosnahan says that he was often asked why he left his developed native land, the USA, to live in a country like Turkey which, especially in 1960s, had far less modern facilities like good hospitals, good roads, shopping malls, cinemas and so on. He explains to his Turkish friend why he sees the time he spends in Turkey as a great benefit for his own personal development with these words: . . . given the choice between the two any sane person would opt to live in the highly developed country. This was logical but only partly true. Economic development is not culture, and by several definitions Turkey had as much or more culture than the USA. Furthermore, people are people no matter what the level of development. They work and play, they laugh and cry, they find the beauties and joys of life. Those beauties and joys are often different in Turkey than at home. (39-40) Seal is asked the same question at the very beginning of his narrative. His reflections on the point are far from Brosnahan’s. While Brosnahan tries to explain the motives for his stay in Turkey through issues like “joys and beauties” of different cultures, Seal takes the question as an indication of, supposedly historical and cultural, Turkish aggressive expansionism to the West: “West has been best for Turkish ideologues and leaders ever since the eleventh century” (19). Following this reflection, Seal introduces the issue of how desperately Turkey wants to become a member of the European Union. He describes Turkey’s membership application to the European Union as “the third Vienna

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siege.”75 Seal reads Turkey’s desire to join the European Union and her Westernization efforts as a hidden agenda of doing what they could not do in two Vienna sieges (21). It can be argued that Seal’s main point in making such assessments on Turkish history and Westernization is the alarm Turkey created in Europe with her application to the European Union. In fact, Seal was not the first writer who addressed the issue from such a point of view. Likewise, in his Islam and the West, Lewis draws our attention to the Muslim immigrants in Europe and states that “some have described the present situation as the third Muslim invasion of Europe, more successful than either the first or the second one” (41). Mistifying the owner of this assertion, Lewis does not let us know who “some” are. Julia Pardoe’s The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1838) Another nineteenth-century traveler Seal refers to is Julia Pardoe. In her The Beauties of the Bosporus (1838), Pardoe describes the Eyüp Mosque: The mosque, built of the purest white marble, with a court gloriously shaded by gigantic trees . . . is the most sacred of all the Constantinopolitan temples for on this spot tradition says that Abu Eyoub, the companion-inarms of the Prophet, was slain, . . . and is rendered still more holy in the eyes of the Turks, . . . it is within those walls that every Sultan, on his accession, is invested with the sword of sovereignty. No infidel foot is permitted, under whatever pretence, to desecrate the mosque of Eyoub; and Christians are rarely, and always reluctantly, admitted even to the court. (9)

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On the eve of EU’ decision to start membership negotiations with Turkey in November 2, 2005, Germany and Austria assumed such an anti-Turkish position that Madeleine Blunt from The Guardian commented on their opposition: “Austria and Germany are still thinking of the geese whose honking woke the army when Vienna was under siege from the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century, commented one seasoned observer.”

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Pardoe tells us why the Eyoub Mosque is a sacred place emphasizing its historical significance. When she lastly declares that people who are not Muslim are not allowed into the mosque, we have already been told the reasons. It is not because Islam is hostile to other religions but because this particular mosque is so special that it is kept for the Muslims only, which is something comprehensible. Seal compares Pardoe’s 1837 Eyüp Mosque with that of 1993: Eyup had led Islam’s early campaigns against infidel Byzantium, and I did not wish to raise the ire of any veiled, swaying zealot who might wish Eyup had been more through. Furthermore, early accounts suggest a stone thrown by an infidel had killed Eyup, and although other sources concede he might in fact have died from a quite secular bout of dysentery, there was that certain sense of the old gods staring down the new beliefs of the foreigners with undisguised intolerance. (38) The difference in the tone is quite obvious. Muslims around the Eyüb Mosque are depicted as potential enemies of non-Muslims in Seal’s account. History76 is reconstructed in such a way that Seal’s account implies that Turks and Muslims have always been hostile to nonMuslims and they still are. Compared to Pardoe’s account, it can easily be seen how Pardoe refrains from reflecting on differences and how carefully she chooses her details so as not to recall past conflicts. For example, Pardoe does not mention in which war Eyüp dies, or who he is fighting against when he dies. The difference in discourse can be better understood by referring to Edward W. Said’s The World, the Critic, and the Text (1983). Said draws our attention to Foucault’s

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On the constructedness and the inventiveness of historical accounts Hayden White notes “ . . . historical narratives . . . are verbal fiction, the contents, of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature . . . ” (qtd. in Butler 33).

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perception of discourse and the way details could act as agents with active roles in the construction of discourse. Said’s remarks on the discourse and detail relation gives us a useful insight: Foucault’s method is to study the text as part of an archive, which is composed of discourses, which are composed of statements. In short he deals with texts as part of a system of cultural diffusion, rigidly controlled, tightly organized, difficult to penetrate. He argues that everything stated in a field like literary discourse or medical discourse is produced only with the most selective method, with little regard for individual genius. I have argued that similar things take place when “other” and peoples are discussed. Each statement is therefore a material effort to incorporate a particular piece of reality as selectively as possible. (150) When Seal’s account is read under the light of Said’s proposition, we see that Seal’s representation of the Eyüp Mosque is a “material effort to incorporate a particular piece of reality as selectively as possible.” Seal does not only reconstruct his historical account with details full of negative images, recalling the past conflicts and tensions; he also transfers these tensions to his own time, rendering Islam and Turks as a potential threat to Europe and Christendom. Even when he seems to agree with travelers who have had a sympathizing attitude towards Turkey, Seal undermines this point and turns it against Turkey. When he disagrees with a positive trait observed by an earlier traveler, he straightly contests the validity of this observation and offers his own alternative. When it comes to the writers who mainly have a hostile attitude towards Turkey, he never contests how these writers represent Turkey in their accounts. On the contrary, Seal confirms these writers through his account

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and gives examples from his own experience as he wants to prove their thesis. How Seal mentions Glazebrook’s work is a very typical example of Seal’s biased discourse. Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984) Drawing on writers like Settle, Pickthall and Loti in the early pages of his work, as Seal unfolds his account he starts to associate himself with writers who emphasize the difference, unlikeness and the Otherness of Turkey. This affiliation puts Seal on the same ideological line with some of the nineteenth-century travel writers who argue that Turkey is a desperately backward country; she is what Europe is not and the gap between Turkey and Europe is one that could ever be surmounted. Granting Philip Glazebrook’s chauvinist travel account Journey to Kars the “classic” status, Seal declares that he shares Glazebrook’s ideological position, which is a perfect example of how nineteenth-century imperialist discourse prevails at the end of the twentieth century. The way Seal represents Konya Mevlana museum is a very good example of how devoutly Seal puts his alignments with Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984): At the Mevlana museum, where dervishes whirled around the mausoleum of their spiritual leader before they were forbidden to do so by Atatürk in the 1920s, a leaflet explained the sema thus: “Contemporary science definitely confirms that the fundamental condition of our existence is to revolve. . . . The shared similarity among beings is the revolution of the electrons, protons, and neutrons in the atoms. . . . Everything revolves, and man carries on his life by the revolution of his blood, by his coming from the earth and his return to it, which is also a kind of revolution, by his revolving with the earth itself. (185) We may assume that Seal will explain who Mevlana is and thus translate his experience to

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his readers. On the contrary, Seal suggests that even values like Mevlana77 should be mocked and discarded by using as a comic element. His description which starts as a serious explanation, letting the voice of Turks through the leaflet, ends with his interpretation: Then, I thought, there was the endless revolution of worry beads between Turkish fingers, not to mention the doner kebap. Still, devoting one’s life to sema whirling when so much whirling, planetary, biological, and culinary, was going on elsewhere struck me as excessive. Whenever I’d whirled as a child, I quickly felt dizzy and sick, and the one thing my mother did not

77 In her Turkish Reflections (1991), Mary Lee Settle reflects on Mevlana: “Celaleddin Rumi, the great Turkish religious mystic and poet, known by the Muslimsms as the Mevlana, the Lord. . . . He has been called the Shakespeare of Islam” (123). He was an ecstatic poet and mystic, and in his long life in Konya, he was beloved mixture of holy man and dancing fool of God. Konya has been a holy place ever since the Mevlana’s funeral. He was followed not only by Muslims but by the Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians he welcomed equally in his message of universal love” (124). In A Byzantine Journey (1995), John Ash gives even a more positive and admiring account of Mevlana. For Ash, Mevlana was a mystic whose message was above religions. As a result, Mevlana and his philosophy is represented as cement between people of different religions. When Mevlana dies, the Jews and Christians also want to attend his funeral. Whereas, the Muslim population of the city think that this is most inappropriate as they consider Mevlana to be a Muslim saint. When the sultan asks the non-muslims why they want to attend a Muslim Saint’s funeral, they answer: In him we have comprehended the true nature of Jesus Our Savior and of Moses. In him we have found the same guidance that is offered by the perfect prophets whose words we have read in our books. If you Muslims call our Master a new Mohammed, we Christians recognize him as the Jesus of these times. Just as you are his sincere friends, so are we a thousand times over his loving servants and disciples. It is thus that he has said: “Seventytwo sects hear their own mysteries from us. We are like a flute which, in one mode, is the concordance of two hundred religions.” Our master is the sun of truth who has shone upon mortals and accorded them his favors. Does not the whole world love the sun, which illumines alike the abodes of the poor and the powerful, the Christians and the Muslims? Our Master is both the sun and the window that admits the light of the sun. He is like bread, which is indispensable to all who live. Has it ever been known for a hungry man to run from bread? Just so is our Master essential to us. (170) One more sympathetic and comprehensive observation of the sect and its practitions can be found in Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan (1837). Pardoe narrates her experience at a Mevlevi ceremony: I am by no means prepared, nor even inclined, to attempt a Quixotic defence of the very extraordinary and bizarre ceremonial to which I was next a witness; but I cannot, nevertheless, agree with a modern traveler in describing it as “an absurdity.” That oit does not accord with our European ideas of consistent and worthy worship is not possible, but certain; yet I should imagine that no one could feel other than respect for men of irreproachable character, serving God according to their means of judgment. (38) Pardoe is mistaken in her last judgment as writers like Seal would often make fun of the sect and its practices.

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seem to feel for me when I threw up down her front was divine love. (185) There is no measure Seal cannot take to denigrate any value that might be associated with Turks. He sees nothing wrong with comparing his sense of whirling as a child and the practice of devoted people, who have had a tradition of more than eight centuries behind them. 3.4.2. Stereotyping and Constructions of the Other as “Strategies of Symbolic Containment and Risk” As Pickering rightly observes, nationalism tends to use ‘us’ against ‘them’ dichotomy, using “the other” to construct a sense of national identity and social cohesion (109). The politics of belonging and not belonging plays a crucial role in celebrating what is “culturally close and familiar above what is distant and dissimilar” (109). The politics of belonging mainly use territorial attachments in the sense of belonging. Another strategy used to maintain the cultural belonging is the “dissociation from what is contrasted with national mediations” (109). Pickering defines the next step: “Various people are then seen as not belonging, not only because they do not have the same nationality but also because their characteristics forms of life are divided from ‘ours’ by symbolic boundaries which contrastively identify them as inferior” (109). What Pickering refers to as “symbolic boundaries” is significant in the way Seal represents Turkey. For deploying Islam as the “characteristic form of life” in Turkey, Seal divides Turkey from Europe meanwhile “contrastively identifying” Turkey as “inferior.” Pickering also notes that “stereotyping and constructions of the Other operate as strategies of symbolic containment and risk . . . the threat which such strategies wish to keep constantly at bay. They both involve attempts to combine and contain contrary themes, but in so doing keep those contrary themes in active view” (xi). Reading Seal’s

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account in the light of Pickering’s terms, we see that Seal uses these “strategies of symbolic containment and risk” to depict Turkey as a threat to Europe, with her own internal clashes and conflicts. He combines and contains contrary themes like fundamentalism-secularism, Turk-Kurd, and focuses all his attention on these clashes. Despotism In her article, “Sir Paul Rycaut78 and his Influence on the Eighteenth Century Thought on the Turks”, Asli Çırakman gives us a very good example of how certain arguments which are put forward timidly are consolidated by their followers. Çırakman gives Rycaut’s case as an illustration of her point. According to her, although Rycaut holds prejudices against Turks in his representation of the Turkish government system, his prejudices “were not often too deeply grounded, they were rather unsettled and likely to alter when experience and circumstances challenged his preconceptions” (243). In contrast, for most of the eighteenth-century travel writers like Montesquieu, prejudices are deeply rooted, settled, and unlikely to change even when experience and circumstances challenge them. Çırakman points out how the eighteenth-century European travelers, like Montesquieu, canonized Rycaut’s work in their accounts through “redefining” the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire as an “inherently Oriental form” of despotism (243). Modern travel writers have also inherited this argument from their predecessors. One of the most important stereotypes Seal uses is the historical tyranny of the Turkish governmental machine. According to Seal, how fez was introduced into Turkish life in 1826 and then how it was banished in 1925 and how it was treated in 1993 are strong evidences of Turkish despotism.

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Rycaut went to Ottoman Turkey as the English Ambassador in the second half of the seventeenth century. His account on the structure of Ottoman politics has also been published in Turkish: Rycaut, Paul. Türklerin Siyasi Düsturları. İstanbul: Elips, (2004).

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In Seal’s account, a hat is never simply a hat in Turkey—as it is in England or other European countries. According to the writer, Turks see it as the most important sign of their identity. Therefore, any effort to change it through imposition has always created resistance in the society. However, Turkish political leaders were ruthless with regards to these reactions. Seal reconstructs the historical moment of the introduction of fez by Sultan Mahmud and how it was received by people: “The sultan might next expect them to wear their underpants outside their trousers. Only a giaour (infidel) would so treat his subjects” (33). The Sultan is depicted in such a way that all his motives can only be seen as capricious policies regardless of the values of his people. The introduction of fez was felt as such oppression that it led to mutinies within the Ottoman army which resulted in the slaying of the janissary troops. Seal’s account of the introduction of fez to the nineteenthcentury Ottoman Turkey portrays a capricious Sultan who knows no limits in dictatorship and kills thousands of people just to impose an insignificant silly hat on the one hand and unreasonable people who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of a mere hat on the other. Thus Seal’s narrative becomes a narrative of not belonging since the values highlighted are absolutely unacceptable absurdities which would not belong to any European people. When it comes to the abolition of the fez, Seal spends more time on reconstructing how it happened. He gives many details about how Atatürk went to Kastamonu and declared that he wanted Turkish citizens to wear Western hats rather than the fez. He describes rebellions against the Western hat and how these rebellions were crushed: “Most of the 114 found guilty on charges varying from incitement to riot to violation of the hat laws received sentences of two to ten years. Three were condemned to death” (124). For Seal, even in 1993, the despotic attitude of the Turkish government is still more

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or less the same. “ . . . by law, you could go topless in this Middle Eastern and almost exclusively Muslim country, but you could not wear a fez” (14). Within these terms, Seal challenges the legitimacy of Turkish government as it does not represent the people in the European and Western sense. Consequently, the Turkish application to become a member of the European Union loses its validity as it has been done by a body which does not represent the people; moreover, the people obviously do not consider themselves European and it is only the government’s despotic will to join the Union. Barbarian Turk, “Scourge of Civilization” In her article entitled “A Glimpse at Various Stages of the Evolution of the Image of the Turk in Europe: 15th to 21st Centuries” Nedret Kuran-Burçoğlu draws our attention to the Turkish image in the fifteenth century. She refers to a Venetian nobleman, Niccolo Barbaro’s diary; and briefly summarizes how Turks are depicted as cruel people who “strike the heads off Christians” (25). She also mentions a sixteenth-century “German philistine” Hans Sachs, who, in his Die Welt des Hans Sachs, depicts Turks as a “cruel” and “merciless” people who would “kill innocent children” (27). It can be argued that Seal’s way of seeing the Turks as “cruel” and “merciless” people is not that different from those of Barbaros of the fifteenth and Sachs of the sixteenth centuries. At the beginning of his travelogue, Seal introduces Ahmet as a young Turkish man whose parents come from a village called Sabuncular. Ahmet promises to take Seal to his grandparents’ in the village. When they arrive in the village, Seal sees that Ahmet has two shotguns at the backseat of his car. When he asks what they are hunting, Ahmet says “kurt” (“coorrt”), which means wolf in Turkish; whereas, under the influence of “merciless and cruel Turk” stereotype, Seal takes it for “Kurd” (“cured”) an ethnic minority whose number is estimated between 10-12 million. Seal’s response is worth

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noting: “’You often shoot Kurds, do you?’” (54). Seal realizes his misunderstanding while they are hunting when Ahmet shows him a print of a wolf paw. The same stereotype haunts Seal’s imagination once more: Ahmet grabbed the shotguns and took me hunting. . . . The door was eventually opened by a small boy with a plastic machine gun who sprayed Ahmet, me, and a couple of nearby dogs with imaginary lead. I wondered what he’d been learning for the last ten minutes. Happily, he took a tumble on the ice in his attempts to finish us off. (59) Seal talks about the little boy’s game as if it is unique to Turks only. Even a kid’s game serves Seal in his narration to reinforce the stereotype of murderous Turk. The “hunting Kurds” misunderstanding and then the little boy’s playing with the machine gun follow each other in such a way that Seal leaves an impression with his readers that Turks are gun loving people and they can be expected to shoot people for sport as they also train their children to do the same. He distances himself from his hosts and emphasizes the difference between himself and them as the men with guns, barbarians and the man who does not have guns, the civilized. 3.4.3. Turkey as a Threat: The Third Vienna Siege As he is leaving for Turkey, Seal states that, a Turk approached him at Heathrow airport and asked him why he was going to Turkey “without unnecessary preamble.” According to Seal, this question reveals the Turkish desire of always going to the west because: “West has been best for Turkish ideologues and leaders ever since the eleventh century, when they and their people upped their central Asian sticks and relocated to Anatolia” (19). The first thing to note here is how Seal echoes Glazebrook’s views on the central Asian roots of Turks and how he implies that these “instinct” of going to West “has been best for Turkish

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ideologues.” The other thing to note is the “central Asian sticks” which most probably refer to the supposedly primitive and nomadic character of Turks. Just like Glazebrook, he associates Turks with Mongols: What with the scorched earth chic inspired by the Mongols, you could do that in those days, and with the capture of Constantinople in 1453 the Turks could make the first of many claims to being European. These they might have felt in a farsighted moment, would one day lend substance to their applications for membership in the European Community. (19-20) This is not the ultimate point where Seal’s fear-evoking performance reaches its zenith. He continues with his analogy: “Eventually, this Western impetus carried them to the very gates of Vienna, where the Ottoman army encamped during the great sieges of 1529 and 1683, setting down a fabulous image that has at once haunted and enthralled Christendom ever since” (20). Seal goes on with picturing the terror and misery that the Ottoman army created before Vienna. Then he once more establishes a connection between these two sieges in the past and Turkish application to European Union: A besieged, desperate population of cat eaters quivering at the Islamic scourge outside the walls is thus imagined, and doubtless there were plenty of Turks ready to confirm the worst of their fears. Even so, this bewitchingly forceful image yet be misleading. Listen carefully, it seems to me, and rather than the merciless proclamations and chants of an army intent on malevolence, one may actually hear among the tents and the majesty the muted “Can we join you?” of a people pleading to belong. On Turkey’s summer beaches, in the bars and by the backgammon tables where the Europeans can be found, it is a request the Turks are still making. (21)

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Seal keeps elaborating on how Turks beg to become a part of Europe and identify themselves with the Europeans thus: For the Turks never did get into Vienna. As European armies got stronger, further Westernization by simple geography became increasingly expensive on soldiery. So they by and large stayed where they were and consolidated their empire by incorporating weak neighbors to the south while their leaders introduced new hats of an increasingly Western tint every century or thereabouts. The march which had been foiled on the ground would continue in the mind. If they couldn’t get there in their boots, then they’d do so in hats instead. (21) Depicting Turkish efforts to reform their society and country as part of a conspiracy plot that aims to pose another threat to Europe, Seal’s discourse excludes Turkey and Turks from Europe.79 His message conveys the old discourse that Orient is a non-changing and frozen entity. In that, Seal addresses the issue in such a way that his message reads: “Turks are trying to change themselves only to achieve their sole goal more cunningly: invading Europe and destroying her civilization.” The message his discourse conveys does not reveal any trait of good-will, trust, or friendliness. Invoking the past conflicts and drawing analogies between current politics and aspirations and those of old hostilities, Seal establishes a sense of threat. Warning Europeans against the Turkish threat goes as far back as Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1520-1592), the Austrian Ambassador to the Suleyman the Great, who had 79

A similar discourse emerged on the eve of EU’s decision to start membership negotiations with Turkey on November 2, 2005. Germany and Austria assumed such an anti-Turkish position that Madeleine Blunt from commented on their opposition: “Austria and Germany are still thinking of the geese whose honking woke the army when Vienna was under siege from the Ottoman Turks in the sixteenth century. . .” (Blunt).

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warned Europe against Turkish threat in his Turkish letters which were first published in 1581. In his Crescent and Star (2001), Stephen Kinzer draws our attention to the fact that in Othello, Othello was summoned against the Turks. Kinzer gives us a brief account of the extent of this feeling of being threatened by the Turks in Europe: For centuries European literature overflowed with dire warnings of the Turkish peril. King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, wrote a vivid poem describing the world as locked in conflict “betwixt the baptiz’d race and circumcised Turban’d Turks.” The sixteenth century Italian historian Augustino Curio warned that “even at our doors and ready to come into our houses, we have this arrogant and bragging hellbound. (5) Seal also addresses the same issue with his rhetorical question “No problem in Turkey?” (15). Seal’s account is shaped around this central question and his whole account becomes an attempt to answer it. In that sense, his account can be considered as a highly speculative and imaginative social psychoanalysis of Turkish society, in terms of how the Turkish people deal with the socio-cultural change they have undertaken: It might even be, it struck me, that the fez clung on in the mountainous, suspicious hinterland. For if it survived only as a tourist trinket devoid of meaning, then why the discomfort of the young shopkeeper80 who had sold me my fez? I preferred to believe it still had the power to remind Pomegranate’s Turks of a past they wished to deny, a kind of amulet against Turkish self-deception. So when I set off down the Turkish road in search of the end of a broken towrope, I took my fez with me. (15) The italicized expressions reveal Seal’s tendency to see Turkey’s problematic relation with 80

Author’s italics.

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her past in terms of psychoanalytical metaphors. His analysis is an undertaking which places the fez at the center of his examination. For Seal the fez stands for Turkey’s “self deceptive” relation with her past and culture. The discomfort of the young shopkeeper refers to the whole nation’s “discomfort” with their past, which “they wished to deny.” Consequently, his search for fez is a symbolic search for the “end of a broken rope,” the long suppressed and seemingly lost true nature of Turks. 81 Seal’s focus on this issue echoes the us-them, East-West, and most importantly, Islam-West (Christendom) dichotomies.82 This is a good example to how Seal evokes Muslim-Christian dichotomy: I told him that I spoke Turkish, and he quickly switched to his native tongue, introducing himself as Metin. How did a good Muslim feel about 81

In his “The Clash of Definitions” (2000), Said draws our attention to the recent developments in the fields of cultural and rhetoric studies: . . . the very idea of identity itself involves fantasy, manipulation, invention, construction. . . . Hayden White 1970s . . . Metahistory . . . nineteenth century historians like Marx, Michelet and Nietzsche—how their reliance upon one or a series of tropes (figures of speech) determines the nature of their vision of history. Thus Marx, for instance, committed to a particular poetics in his writing which allows him to understand the nature of the progress and alienation in history according to a particular narrative model, stressing the difference in society between form and substance, . . . histories are best understood, not according to criteria of “realness”but rather how their internal rhetorical and discursive strategies work: it is these, rather than facts, that make the visions of Tocquville or Croce or Marx actually work as a system, not any external source in the so-called real world. (582) 82 Karim draws our attention to the titles such as “Islam versus the West” (Woodward, Colton, Liu, & Whitmore, 1985), “Free Speech, Islamic Faith Meet Head-on in Pakistan” (Harvey, 1993), “Muslim Rage” (Lewis 1990), “An Angry Faith” (Smith 1989), “The Dark Side of Islam” (Nelan 1993), “The Vatican’s Dark Marriage to Islam” (Herstgaard, 1993), “The Crescent of Crisis” (1979), “Moslems Battle Police in Malaysia Bloodbath” (Reuters, 1985), “Islamic Death Threat” (Reuters, 1984) etc. Karim notes that it is unthinkable to replace Islam with “Christian” in any of these contexts (155-156). In his “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990) Bernard Lewis formulates this us-them paradigm: Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilisation in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.

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tending to the relics of Christianity, I wondered. “They are beautiful churches,” he replied. “Christians, Muslims, it makes no difference to me.” Admittedly, he did not approve of everything that Christians did. . . . “Heepies,” he called them. “They came here in the seventies on the overland route to India and used to camp in the chimneys and made much love.” “I can see where they got the ideas from,” I replied. Metin blushed an Islamic red and turned away. “Only Christians think like that. We call them fairy chimneys,” he said coyly . . . I marveled that Metin, working long days as he did in one of the most phallic of all valleys, could be so coy about the penises that had surrounded him for twenty years. (176) Seal’s first question “How does a good Muslim feel about tending to the relics of Christianity?” presupposes a kind of enmity and contest between these two religions. Although Metin gives a quite positive answer and expresses his respect for Christianity,83 Seal would not be cheated with that. He insists on getting a hostile answer from him; this time asking whether he has not found anything wrong with Christians. Metin comes up with “hippies,” who are considered marginal in the West as well. Seal takes this as an indication of hostility to Christendom, identifying the “hippies” with Christianity itself and 83

One thing that Seal does not take into consideration is that for Muslims Christianity is one of the revered religions along with Judaism. I would like to quote Pardoe a second time on the reception of Christianity by Turks: Turks are extremely tolerant with regard to religious opinions; their creed being split into as many sects as that of the Church of England; and each individual being left equally free to follow, as he sees fit, the dictates of his conscience…they not only tolerate but even respect the Christian monks and regard their monasteries as holy places bearing the names of saints, and inhabited by men . . . devoted to God. (40-41) Said, Kabbani and Karim draw our attention to the fact that Muhammad has not been seen the same way Jesus Christ has been revered in Islam. Karim notes that “Christendom initially tended to view Islam as one of the many heresies that abounded during the middle ages . . . Voltaire continued to attack prophet of Islam for being violent, salacious and irrational” (162).

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exploiting Metin’s answer to build a dichotomy. “Metin blushed an Islamic red.”84 Here Seal depicts a natural reaction as a distinguishing mark between Islam and Christianity. He suggests that Christian reaction would be totally different from Metin whose personality is erased as he is homogenized with one billion other people who come from the same religio-cultural background. Distancing himself further from Metin, he questions his sincerity in “blushing” as well. Seal finds it impossible for a person to work at such “phallic valley” for twenty years and preserve his coyness. There must be something wrong, something unnatural with Metin, thus with Islam. Seal does not stop evoking anger and inviting his readers to share his rage. Although he does not have a clue about who has done all the damage to the frescoes, he is sure that it is the Turks. Seal reasons why and how Turks must have desecrated the frescoes: . . . this was a knowing perpetration hiding behind a zealot’s knowledge. . . . For does not Islam forbid the depiction of the human image? For cannot God alone create man? Furthermore, the desecrations most probably occurred long after the Christian community in Capadocia had been dispersed. The rock churches had been attacked not as symbols active in

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This reminds us Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? (3.1, 54-66.)

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their affront to Islam, but as unthreatening, inert relics of a religion that locally had had its time. Religious wrath I could understand, but this was pious pettifogging of a sort that filled me that morning with fury. (177-78) The fact that he has no clue on who has caused all that damage is the central point of the question here. What Seal is doing is speculating, with his presumptions and presuppositions, on the intolerance and cruelty of the Muslim Turks. He has no doubts about the identities of perpetrators because he assumes that it is in the nature of Islam not to tolerate representations of human images. And the crime becomes even more cruel and evil with the detail that Turks commit it after the Christian minorities are expelled from their lands. Yet Seal never refers to religious tolerance that existed in Anatolia during the centuries that Muslims, Christians, Jews and people from all other different religious lived together. He has cited Pardoe on Eyüp fez factory and the Eyüp mosque, but he does not cite her when it comes to her observations which state that there was also tolerance and respect between Islamic and Christian societies. In his Dervish: The Invention of Modern Turkey (1996), Tim Kelsey85 looks for the dervishes whose activities are forbidden by the decrees of the Republic of Turkey in 1920s. In İstanbul the writer hears that every year at one certain night Muslims and Christians meet at an Armenian church to wait for a miracle to happen. According to the rumor, every year at that night one invalid person, regardless of his or her faith, is healed if s/he gets into the church and prays from dusk till dawn. He narrates how the Muslims and Christians wait for the miracle at an İstanbul Armenian Church in Balat and how they see each other in such a practice: The Christians walked confidently up to the painting and lightly 85

Another British writer who investigates Turkish culture in 1990s in terms of religious practices and the relation of the Islamic groups with the Republic of Turkey.

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kissed the saint’s buckle. A Muslim, uncertain of this ritual, watched a man kiss it, and then followed slowly, raising his lips to the icon… “Two years ago Ali, a Muslim, was healed. Ali had an illness. He had fallen in love with a German girl. He had been refused. He became very ill—he couldn’t walk or speak. But here in the church someone passed out and shouted his name, and a girl put her hand on his chest and he was cured…” “Do you like having Muslims in your church?” “This is the house of God. Unless you wear a hat, or smoke cigarettes and drink, it doesn’t matter.” (100-101) Although there is an unfortunate history of religious and ethnic intolerance in Anatolia as anywhere else in the world, there is also a history of what Said calls living together in a working harmony which is narrated in Pardoe’s, Ash’s and Kelsey’s travel accounts but supressed in Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts. 3.4.4. Forging a Nation and National Character: Imposed Change For Seal, in Turkey the most significant two conflicts are the secular-fundamentalist and the Turk-Kurd. Starting with his visit to Van, Seal discusses issues like the Armenian historical legacy around Van and how the Armenians were exterminated by Turks and Kurds. His representation of Hakkari demonstrates how un-Turkish the place is and how the Kurds in Antalya associate themselves with PKK rather than the Republic of Turkey. His visit to Hatay aims at showing how cosmopolitan Hatay used to be and how this cosmopolitanism started to disappear with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey and Atatürk’s despotic decrees. According to Seal, Turks have no national consciousness before 1908, the year when the Young Turks became the ruling government in Turkey: “. . . to describe

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somebody as a Turk was to invite a punch in the face. ‘A thousand Turks for a radish,’ as the saying went; ‘poor radish!’ Not since the vandals had a single caste been so vilified” (161). After this denigrating description comes an account of how Turkish identity is forged by Atatürk: To inspire a wholesale reOrientation of Anatolian thinking on Turks and radishes was no mean feat. But Turkish stock soon rose, surpassing the value of radishes. As early as 1908, the mystically imbued idea of a Turkish homeland was being actively bandied . . . . By the 1920s, Turkish nationalists were actively propagating notions of Turkishness. They worked to uncover Turkish equivalents for Arabic names that they then gave children, enthusiastically adopted the name. Öztürk, or pure Turk when surname time came to Turkey, and turned to the calpac, the hardy hat of the steppe wherein all Turks were supposed to have their origins . . . . Schoolbooks current at the time of Atatürk claimed that the Turks came from a great inland sea in central Asia that dried up during a drought and so caused them to become nomads. Consequently, the version went, they established separate but distinct Turkish civilizations as far afield as China, India, the Levant, North Africa and Spain. This conveniently put the Turks at the heart of most leading civilizations and also explained how they became nomads: by climatic necessity, they insisted, not by instinct (a bit primitive, nomadism). (161-62) What Seal firstly suggests is that Turks do not have a national consciousness like the Western peoples. They identify themselves with Islam and being Turkish did not mean

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anything to them until recently. The national consciousness is an artificially forged, relatively new idea for Turks. As an expert on Turkey and Turks, Seal hints that if you look at the under layers you will see the Islamic identity. For Seal, this newly forged national character does not represent an improvement but deterioration in terms of civilization. The new project introduces a far less tolerant ideology than “the tradition of tolerance that the Ottoman practiced upon the empire’s numerous religious and racial minorities” (163). Seal suggests that by abolishing the fez, the Republic of Turkey also abolishes the notions, ideas of “cosmopolitanism” as fez is introduced to “encapsulate the benign ideal of cosmopolitanism” of the Ottoman Empire in 1826. Seal claims that, fez represented an equation of religions and the ethnicities of the subjects of the empire who had been distinguished through their headgear. Seal notes that when Mahmud II introduced fez, he justified this new hat as an act of secularization, of making religion an issue of personal affairs and abolishing it from the public sphere. Seal also implies that the forging of the Turkish nation project, though it may sound like a Westernization and Europeanization project, is essentially a non-European project which is full of cruel moments and a lot of guilt: “Racial geography is nowhere very simple between Baghdad and Vienna,” wrote Arnold Toynbee in 1917. While no Ottoman would have thought to query such an obvious statement, the Turks in the aftermath of the Great War had no choice but to claim Anatolia as an exception. For their nation’s very legitimacy rested upon the claim that Anatolia’s racial geography was in fact inherently simple: it was Turkish. To have accepted Toynbee’s dictum, to have pursued a policy of cosmopolitanism, would have been to entertain the claims of the Armenians and Kurds to most of eastern Anatolia

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and of the Greeks to Western. And so the lie of Turkish nationalism, engendered by the pure instinct to survive, was born. Like the cornered chess player who resorts to overturning the board as the only way out, Turkey had succumbed to the irresistible appeal of simplistic nationalism. Chess, interestingly, is not much played in Turkey. And Turkey, equally interestingly, is where the Gordian knot was cut. (163) When Turks ignore 28-year-old J. R. Toynbee’s assumption on how to resolve their ethnic and minority problems, they reject the proper, scholarly way of dealing with their problems. But again, Seal does not mention the fact that in 1917 Turkey and England were in war and Toynbee was working for the Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office. The chess board and Gordian knot analogies suggest that Turks can never do anything fairly. Furthermore, in the next a few pages the writer goes to a restaurant where two Turkish men play backgammon, when one loses, the expected, the quite characteristic thing happens and the loser “catches the side of the board with his fist and catapults the markers into the smoky air, opting for the simple solution” (166). Thus the analogy is extended to present an assumption which starts as a theory is actualized and extended to the present. Seal’s observation that “chess, interestingly, is not much played in Turkey” implies that Turks do not value any kind of intellectual effort which requires patience and hard work. Thus, for Seal, Turks use the easiest but the costliest method in resolving their problems with their minorities: bloodshed. In his A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Pierre Macherey states that it is as important to look at what a text cannot say as much as what it says.86 Certain arguments 86

. . . the knowledge of a literary work is not a demystification or an undoing; it is the

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simply cannot find their ways into Seal’s account. As noted above, most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century travel writers who wrote on Turkey are not so biased as Seal. If they point out mistakes about Turkey and Turks, they also know how to appreciate certain values. One may assume that after a century of developments in communication technologies, the accessibility of travel, media and many other aspects of life in the world, Seal’s account would be much more sympathetic and positive than his nineteenth-century counterparts. Burnaby states that English newspapers are full of Bulgarian and Armenian massacres during 1876. Having been familiar with the Eastern question, Burnaby has suspicions about the accuracy of the news. He thinks that most of that news is a part of the Russian propaganda to keep England out of the war, which is about to break between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Burnaby states that he wants to get first hand information and see everything through his own eyes. He explains his motives: It was difficult to arrive at the truth amidst all the turmoil which prevailed. Were the Turks such awful scoundrels? Had the reverend gentlemen . . . really seen Christians impaled . . . ? Should I not behold Christians impaled and wriggling like worms on hooks in every high road of Armenia, or find an inquisition and a weekly auto da fe the amusement of the Mohammedans at Van? (x) Burnaby’s journey aims to put this information into test and verify whether all that has been reported on the matter is correct or not. He is not satisfied with all the controversial production of a new knowledge; the enunciation of its silent significance. . . a true analysis does not remain within its object paraphrasing what has already been said; analysis confronts the silences, the denials and the resistance in the object—not that compliant implied discourse which offers itself to discovery, but that condition which makes the work possible, which precedes the work so absolutely that it cannot be found in the work. (Macherey 150).

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news he has through taking the journey he contests the accuracy of the English newspapers and public opinion. When he enquires about whether there is a conflict between Christians and Muslims in İzmir, he is told that “ . . . the Christians and Turks in Smyrna were on the best of terms; however, he added that certain papers believed to be in Russian pay, were constantly announcing that there would shortly be a massacre of the Christians; it was said that this was done to excite bad blood between two sects” (4). What Burnaby highlights and celebrates is the friendly relationship between Turks and the Christians. He condemns the efforts to destroy this harmony. Unlike Burnaby’s sensitive attitude to issues such as making generalizations and emphasizing differences, Seal highlights the differences and bitterness while ignoring and avoiding the possibilities for harmony, friendship, and compatibility. In Seal’s account, any minor event becomes larger than itself and represents that of a much bigger fault with Turks. The main difference between Seal’s approach and Burnaby is the way they make their minds. Burnaby is quite suspicious of the accounts given on Turkey.He wants to see everything with his own eyes and make up his mind afterwards. He suspects that most of the atrocity accounts can be attributed to political attempts to darken the image of Turkey in the West so that she be left without Western Power’s support. Contrary to Burnaby’s approach, Seal never takes these political conjunctures into account. Seal takes it for granted that any negative account on Turkey should be read as the transcription of reality into books.87 87

Hollandand Huggan note that though it is possible to apply a formalist approach to travel writing this approach “risks running aground on definitional . . . inconsistencies, and on the seeming determination of the genre to fly in the face of traditional boundaries” (10). Therefore, the approach they find “more fruitful” is the one: which sees travel writing as occupying a space of discursive conflict. Travel narratives, in this context, are examples of what Hayden White calls “fictions of factual representation”:

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Likewise, Seal’s account of how Turkey deals with her minority problems and the Turkish reaction to atrocities in Bosnia is quite consistent with his tendency to associate Turkey and Turks with cruelty and barbarism. For Seal, there are two major conflicts in Turkey of the 1990s. The first one is the cultural contestation between the secular state and political Islamic groups. The second biggest challenge that Turkey faces is with its largest ethnic minority, the Kurds. Seal sees a parallel between the Armenian issue and the Kurdish issue. He thinks that the Kurds are being persecuted by the Turkish government. His visit to Van and Bitlis in search of fez sheds some light on his concern with the minority issues and how they are dealt with in Turkey. He maintains that: There is conspicuous innocence in the Turkish spirit, a sincere belief in the highest of ideals that cannot countenance the possibility of such a holocaust . . . Nineteen fifteen is remembered as Atatürk’s defense of Gallipoli, the anvil of heroism on which the Turkish state was later forged Turks find quite unpalatable the idea that in the same year the blueprint for the Final Solution was being fashioned at the other end of their country. And so Sadi and people like him have picknicked on Armenian islands until the islands appear Turkish and history is reorganized to their satisfaction. (255) Seal acknowledges how he comes to the conclusion that atrocities have been committed on the Armenians of Van: In libraries over the years, among travelers’ diaries and memoirs, moldering pages of dog-eared print and sepia photographs, I had found unsensational accounts that had served to convince me. These were not accounts that they claim validity—or make as if to claim it—by referring to actual events and places, but then assimilate those events and places to a highly personal vision. Travel writing thus charts the tension between the writers’ compulsion to report the world they see and their often repressed desire to make the world conform to their preconception of it. (10)

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detailed the atrocities against Armenians; they were cameos compelling in their very ordinariness, told by priests and adventurers, mercenaries and writers, painters and eccentrics, old soldiers and aristocrats. The simple accumulation of unexceptional references to Armenians living their lives in nineteenth-century towns and villages all over eastern Turkey led to the question where, then, are the Armenians now? (256) Giving a short account of Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, Seal states that it is not only meant to establish an Islamic state but also a Kurdish one. Having based the roots of the problem into an older date, he furthermore elaborates on how serious the problem has become for Turkey: Perhaps the alarm explains why journalists have done a good deal of prison time for arguing the Kurdish case, why a travel guide that claimed there were Kurds in Turkey and a German magazine that included within its covers a map of Kurdistan were banned as recently as 1989, and why some eight staff working for the pro-Kurdish publication Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda) died in mysterious circumstances. (272) He also lets Kurds speak in his account. As a typical Kurdish reaction to what has been going on, he voices the Kurdish discourse: ‘PKK may kill people in the mountains, but they are the only voice we have. If they allowed us a political party, then perhaps fewer of us would care for the PKK.’ ‘Do you want to live in a country called Kurdistan?’ ‘I just want the same opportunities as the Turks. It is too late for me, but I’d like my grandchildren to learn Kurdish at school. That would be grand!

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I’d like to watch Kurdish programs on television. And I’d like these fucking soldiers off our backs.’ (279) During his visit in Turkey he comes across many instances and he witnesses many scenes where Turks express their solidarity with Bosnian Muslims. While Seal is sensitive to what has taken place in Turkey, he simply dismisses what had been going on Bosnia. He depicts the Bosnia rally that takes place in İstanbul: Turks were gathering by the hundreds in Taksim Square, where İstanbul’s marches and demonstrations traditionally came to a head, often murderous and bloody. Today the fighting would remain elsewhere, Turks across İstanbul thought of Sarajevo, of that city’s razed mosques and desecrated cemeteries. In their minds, they saw gun-toting Serbs wearing crucifixes and nationalistic young Russians signing up for the defense of their Slavic brothers. They remembered Turkish gastarbeiter immolated in the towns of eastern Germany, their factories now empty. Reflecting bitterly on how the West was failing them. . . . (231) Obviously, the most important point here is how the writer reflects on the demonstration and the illusionary world views of the demonstrators as what they protest is only taking place “in their minds.” The expression makes all the depiction a fantasy, an imagination, an illusion of the Turks. Turks demonstrate against the West for the mere sake of the suspicion and hate felt for the West, not because there is a problem in Sarajevo. And what matters for the writer is the pretext that Sarajevo supplies the opportunity of talking about the 1909 Austrian embargo in Turkey, ignited by the Austrio-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia. The other significant point which Seal implies is that Turks are in fact themselves, brutal and murderous because “marches and demonstrations traditionally came to a head,

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often murderous and bloody” (231). Thus, the sincere intention of the demonstration and the goodwill of the demonstrators are undermined by the writer. For him, these demonstrations can be read as hypocrisy of Turks who always see the West as an enemy. Although he mentions Turkish sensitivity to Bosnia several times in his account, he never once gives any voice to what has been taking place in Bosnia. Even when he has the perfect opportunity to say a few words on Bosnia, while describing the Armenian and Kurdish minority issues, the writer keeps silent. As the Turks, Seal describes, forget about the Armenians, and erases their existence from their memories, Seal erases the existence of the Bosnian reality from his memory. Interpreting the demonstration in İstanbul, Seal does not let Turks represent themselves. 3.4.5. The Rise of Turkish Nationalism: End of Cosmopolitanism As Said tells us “. . . to the Orientalist, who believes the Orient never changes, the new is simply the old betrayed by new . . .” (Orientalism 104). How Seal narrates the introduction and then the abolition of fez affirm Said’s observation. For Seal, the introduction of fez symbolized the efforts of the abolition of religious and ethnic discriminations; Seal quotes Mahmud II’s words which justify the introduction of the fez and then reflects on them: Henceforth, I recognize Muslims only in the mosque, Christians only in the church, Jews only in the synagogue. Outside those places of worship, I desire every individual to enjoy the same political rights and my fatherly protection.” This was the way forward, with neither West nor East prevailing, but with the two worlds instead coexisting and their conflicting ideologies no longer colliding in the wreckage of car bombs and detentions, language laws and burned-out hotels. (312-13) A sum of all the faults Turkey face can be found above in “car bombs and detentions,

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language laws and burned-out hotels” which reveal how serious Turkey’s problems are. Therefore, people who think that “there is no problem in Turkey” should reconsider their ideas on Turkey. Another important point about this quotation is the way it celebrates Mahmud II’s efforts and condemns modern Turkey for regressing from his principles. Mahmud II’s is the “way forward,” modern Turkey is even behind the standards and principles of Mahmud II. For Seal, the fez stands for the secularization of the Ottoman society, recognizing equality to all in terms of religion. On the other hand, by the time the fez was abolished, that idea of recognizing equal rights to minorities had long been forgotten as Turks had cleansed Anatolia from Armenians and Greeks. The introduction of fez by Mahmud was an act of negotiation between the West and the East; whereas, abolishing the fez marks the end of this negotiation. Although Turkey claims that she has turned her face to the West through abolishing the fez, she has done it in a most nonWesternly manner, using despotic power to repress minorities and at times massacring them. For Seal the rise of Turkish nationalism means the destruction of the Ottoman cosmopolitan co-existence. His account closes with his visit to Hatay, which according to the writer, is the typical once cosmopolitan town. Thus he completes the circle he starts from another southern town Side. Hatay is the city which Steven Spielberg used as a set for one of his Indiana Jones films. The story of the film takes place in 1938 thus the people of Hatay wear fezzes because Hatay was not a part of Turkey until 1939. Then Seal gives an account of how cunningly Turkey annexed Hatay in spite of the fact that the majority of the population was not Turkish. Later Seal praises the cosmopolitan culture of Hatay; it is the first time he has seen Christian churches in a Turkish city since he left İstanbul. Unfortunately this cosmopolitanism has been diminished. The last paragraph of Seal’s

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account affirms how the new Republic of Turkey, which aspires to become a European state, has destroyed the “cosmopolitanism” of Hatay: Perhaps this was how Atatürk’s life ended: with a valedictory vision of the people of Hatay, Turkish and Arabic, Muslim and Christian, watching as their beloved red-felt hats, whether they chose to call them fezzes or tarbooshes, were stamped into the summer dust; with the sound of slogans proclaiming Hatay to be Turkish and serving the death warrant on the lessons of compromise and cosmopolitanism that had been passed down to the people of Iskenderun from that distant mountain where Antiochus lay; and with the thought that he had at last achieved all he intended, positioned the final piece, and the Turkish jigsaw was complete. (329) “The Turkish jigsaw” analogy refers to the destruction of differences in Turkey and the imposition of an unnatural despotic identity on people. Turkey is depicted as the destroyer of the legacy of “compromise and cosmopolitanism” that Seal traces back to Antiochus. With such an attitude towards her minorities Turkey should not be regarded a European country, therefore the 1989 application of Turkey for full membership to the EC is groundless and should be considered suspiciously by the Europeans. The Turkish identity which has been forged through despotic impositions is a most problematic, almost schizophrenic in terms of its internal conflicts. Another issue where Seal keeps the same distance and does not show any sign of loyalty to his object is his depiction of the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Seal takes his audience to Hakkari and Diyarbakir to investigate the issue. He blames both the Turkish army and PKK for using cruel methods in fighting each other. When his plane lands in Diyarbakır, he sees conscript coffins taken to military planes:

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They were waiting nothing as grand as a handshake, only the barked order from their commanding officer to board the transporter. In front of them a pair of green-shrouded coffins that had been lowered from the hold of another transporter was being shouldered by a duty of soldiers and borne slowly to a waiting military ambulance. As the coffins passed, the fresh conscripts stiffened to attention as if by instinct, all except the boy with the plastic bags, who bent respectfully to tuck away the errant trouser leg. (253) There is not even the shade of a feeling like sympathy for the dead soldier or his friends who may feel a kind of terror at such an emotional scene. What concerns Seal is how the commander “barks orders” to the new conscripts, the military presence of Turkish forces in Van, and the severity of the conflict. Neither the dead soldier nor the new conscripts are people to be identified with, nor can his sympathies possibly go with them. In that, we see almost the same attitude Alexander Kinglake assumes in his Eothen. When his guide tells him that one of his servants has died, he remarks that he finds it strange that the guide takes it for granted that he will feel sorry for a servant (176-77). Seal gives us an account of his visit to Akdamar Island in the middle of Lake Van: I wandered up the jetty at Akdamar, the place of Turkish forgetting. The island was a sunlit fairy kingdom with trees in blossom and tall headstones inscribed in an unfamiliar script. The friezes on the walls of the domed building standing on a shoulder of the island were like a text from a fabulous story that had nothing to do with the pathetic significance of handshakes or with the coffins of young conscripts. Instead, there were lions, snakes, angels and dragons, horses, dogs, gazelles, oxen, eagles and turkeys, cocks and bulls. There was a problem in fairyland, though: the

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building, its pink sandstone walls absorbing the warm sunlight, was a church, and it was Armenian. (253) Here arises the question of what “the pathetic significance of handshakes and coffins of young conscripts” is. What do they have in common? As Seal combines them with “and” and uses “significance” to address both of them, they should have something in common. “Pathetic” does not modify their well-being, or is not used to give a feeling of empathy or identification. What is pathetic is that Turks have always had problems with their minorities and the only method they use to handle these problems is the use of despotic power. While they are warlords, fighting bloody wars against their minorities, Armenians have been occupied with building beautiful monasteries like the one on Akdamar Island. Therefore, Armenians are different from both Kurds who kills Turkish conscripts and Turks who perform a dictatorial system of military chain of commandment. There is one more interesting point in Seal’s representation of Turkey’s conflicts with her minorities, especially with that of Armenians and Kurds. Although Seal criticizes both Kurdish terrorist organization PKK and Turkish army for using unnecessary violence on the civil population of the region, criticizing both for their uncivilized methods, he never mentions any Armenian atrocity against Turks or the Kurds of the region. In terms of applying violence, Seal sees no difference between Turks and Kurds. This is how he reflects on World War I: “During the Great War . . . Turks and Kurds had cooperated enthusiastically in the annihilation of their archenemies, the infidel Armenians. A few years later, they dealt similarly with the Greek invaders . . . ” (269). Then Seal gives an account of how the Republic of Turkey deals with the Kurdish Şeyh Said rebellion in 1925: “ . . . rebel villages were burned and their defiant peasants massacred. What had collided with the bold, bright idealism of the new republic?” (270). Neither do Kurds get

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any better representation from the writer: “On February 25 [1925], a London Times editorial writer had claimed that Kurds customarily lived on a high-calorie diet of killing: ‘As the Kurds have no longer Armenians to kill, they have taken to killing Turks instead’” (270). As for how Turkey handles the rebellion which is under way in early 1990s, Seal writes: “ . . . some eight staff working working for the pro-Kurdish publication Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda) died in mysterious circumstances during 1993, most recently a young correspondent, Ferhat Tepe, whose bruised body was found by a fisherman in a lake near Elazig on August 5 of that year” (272). There is almost no improvement in terms of dealing with conflicts in Turkey. It is worsened with time that has passed from 1925 to 1990s. Likewise, the PKK and his actions are yet more brutal and cruel: Survivors told the soldier that the PKK had turned up and persuaded the village’s fifteen militiamen to lay down their arms so that they could talk more congenially to the villagers—Kurds to Kurds . . . One of the insurgents gave a speech glorifying the PKK. Then without warning they opened fire—Kurds on Kurds—before torching a number of houses. (273) In his interaction with the people in Hakkari as well, there is no sign of any kind of sympathy towards their cause. He does not identify himself with any of them. Although he gives voice to these people’s problems and worries, he is not concerned with these. His main aim is to prove that Turkey is a country full of problems. The Kurds tell him about how they find it difficult to speak Kurdish in public spaces. One old man narrates his work experience in Van and how he is forbidden to speak Kurdish: “If the boss had ever heard me speaking Kurdish to people, even Kurdish people, he would have sacked me” (278). This is how the same old man reasons for PKK membership: “If you’re going to have to

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spend a couple of years getting wet and miserable in the mountains, it’s better to do it with your own people” (278). However, at the end of this passage to whom Seal’s loyalties go with is clearly seen through these words: “Kuşadası, İstanbul, Antalya, Pomegranate . . .” I remembered the soldier’s disbelieving refrain. Now that the PKK had hit three of these places, the sound was no longer of water lapping against beaches and the hubbub of holiday bars but of shattered glass followed by a moment of silence and then screams of terror. Even in these places Turkey could not escape. (28283) The Turkey Seal pictures has an innate, almost natural tendency to create violence and terror. This concluding remark echoes Glazebrook’s words on how Turkish nature is prone to create destruction and terror (233-36). 3.4.6. Shallow Change: What Turks Understand from Modernism When we discussed Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman, we pointed out how Lawlor depicted the results of Turkish modernization. Lawlor’s Selim, who represents the Turkish modernization and Westernization, stands for what Turks understand from modernity and the West: a shallow imitation of appearances, the consumption of Western goods, the assumption of titles without their responsibilities. Seal has a quite similar approach to Turkish modernization in terms of representing it as a shallow change which does not have deep roots in Turkish culture. For Seal, almost all the Turks he meets in Turkey try to convince him that Turkey is a Western and European country. When they look most modern and Western it takes only a few words to take this mask down. Unlike a European who would stay calm in times of provocation, Turks lose themselves, revealing their original identity hidden deep inside: “Now they abandoned all pretense. Exhilaration was

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abroad. Man in flapping jackets with ties draped over their bellies were throwing fists at each other while friends and employees were attempting to bundle them into waiting cars” (261). Seal suggests that Turkish modernization is all words and appearances; it goes only skin-deep and its spirit has not been grasped by Turks. According to Seal, modernization has been imposed on Turkish society by force. His account of the history of the fez signifies this point. According to Seal, the fezzes are not visible in the Turkish scene today because of Turkish dictators who imposed whatever they want with decrees on people. His trip in the Anatolian hinterland reveals that the fez he is looking for is “a fez of the heart.” In spite of all the decrees and impositions of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turks keep the fez in their hearts. In that, fez becomes a symbol of how shallow and skin-deep the Westernization and the modernization of Turkey have been. As all those changes are imposed upon a people who do not demand them, there arises the notion that Turkey has changed. If you know the holiday resorts such as Side and Bodrum, you will likely to be deceived by the tolerance and friendliness that the Turks show to Europeans. Seal suggests that, the fez has disappeared and Turks look more like us now but how has that change taken place? Therefore, the fez is also the symbol of despotism, difference, and denial of history and identity. In the final analysis Seal comes to the conclusion that the Westernization efforts in Turkey have only created, in Huntington’s terms, a “torn society.” Another point Seal emphasizes is the notion that according to a Turk wearing fez or any kind of non-Western hat means being backward. When Seal says that he is looking for hats, the standard answer he gets is “Hats, eh? Well, we in Inebolu don’t wear many hats anymore. We’re modern here” (88). In that context, Seal also highlights the diversity and polarity among the Turks. As Erdogan Bey, Seal’s landlord in Inebolu, explains why

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people in Inebolu consider themselves modern, Seal manipulates Erdogan Bey and makes him compare Inebolu with Kastamonu: “’Our mentality is big city.’ ‘Unlike Kastamonu?’ ‘Exactly,’ he replied.” It is very likely that Erdoğan Bey would not define the identity of his town against Kastamonu if it were not for Seal’s manipulative question. Seal goes further and builds a binary opposition on Erdogan bey’s comment among Turkish towns. The same dichotomy is established once more with the assassination of Uğur Mumcu, the journalist who has since become the symbol of many of the martyrs who has been assassinated for their views and criticism of the attacks against the secular democracy in Turkey. Seal looks for eccentric extremists in hinterland Anatolia and he finds them. Then he compares them with their nineteenth-century counterparts of. And as a finishing touch, he generalizes these exceptional “one in a thousand” types and makes them the mainstream Turk. Thus isolating all the dark pieces and creating a collage from them, he gets a perfect picture of Turkey whıch serves his central question in terms of Turkish application for full membership to the EU: “Is Turkey European enough to become a member?” Contrary to the belief that Turkey has been secularized and Westernized, the Anatolian hinterland reveals that Turks are still Islamic and there is a growing tendency to identify with Islam in Turkey, which means that Turks see Christian Europe as an hostile power against Islam. The Bosnian rallies and how these are depicted is a good example to that. Seal uses the clash between the secularly Oriented Turks and their opponents as an evidence to his theory (the assassination of Ugur Mumcu and the reactions). Another important point is the rise of PKK, the Kurdish separationist terrorist organization that has been threatening the unity of Turkey for twenty four years. Because she walks on the geographical, ethnic and religious “tight ropes” (24) it is difficult to anticipate where she

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will fare to: Thus, Seal’s account becomes an answer to those who claim that there is “no problem with Turkey?” (15). 3.4.7. The Politics of Denigration As the Turkish columnist Gündüz Aktan maintains misrepresentation is never a simple matter. It is in the service of a political agenda with serious results. Aktan argues that all the societies have certain types of “inaccurate images of others because of [their] prejudices, inaccuracies and incomplete knowledge.” For Aktan these can be fixed through “informative publicity campaigns,” whereas “if there are pathological factors shaping that image, then the problem becomes a case of ‘malignant prejudice’”. On the serious outcomes of stereotyping and prejudices against other societies, Aktan introduces the case of the anti-Semitic lobbies in Europe between the world wars. As he observes these lobbies “used to claim that Jews were corrupting the societies they were living in.” For these claims Aktan writes: . . . Jews were doing this by controlling the world finance system, while others were claiming that Jews were supporting communism and anarchy - even though the two streams of thought contradicted each other. Above all, Jews were bad, sick and ugly. One could not call them human, they could not change either because of their primitive and ancient religion. Six million Jews were subjected to unbelievable persecution and later to genocide based on these irrational premises. Pointing out the connection between these “irrational premises” and the Holocaust, Aktan draws our attention to the close similarity between the recent Turkish image in Europe and the Jewish image during the inter-war period. He notes:

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Again, some people may say: “The world has changed a lot now. We took lessons from the past. Conditions are different now” Anti Semitism is, according to one claim, 2000 years old. Yes, the lesson was terrifying but 50 years is too short for these cultural conditions to change. We can not say “Everything is different now”. Because 3 million Turkish people have filled the vacuum left by the Jews of Europe and they are fighting the new racism as we speak. The ferocity of criticisms directed towards Turkiye indicates the revival of historical prejudices against us. Just like Glazebrook and Lawlor, as a practice of exclusion, Seal denigrates Turkey and Turks in his account. Making them look and sound ridiculous, Seal undermines the legitimacy and the dignity of Turks and Turkish culture. This makes them vulnerable, susceptible of any claims of their own to their sovereignty. They are made into such a caricature that it becomes normal, legitimate and justifiable to make fun of them as they do not belong in. In their “Visualizing Otherness: Nazi and Other Use of Visual Representation,” University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies provides us with these cartoons which demonstrate the politics of representation:

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Visualizin

g Otherness: Nazi and other use of visual representation

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There are a lot of similarities between the caricatures of the Jews from the Nazi period, and Seal’s derogatory depiction of Turks in his account. As the Nazi representations of Jews reveal, the excluded group is stripped of their humanity and they are depicted as non-feeling laughing-stock. They can be laughed at and persecuted for the simple reason that they are not like “us,” they are “them,” a different type of being, certainly not human. In the second caricature, even the geese laugh at the Jews which is to connote that it is the most natural thing to do. It is also worth noting how deformed and degenerated the Jewish bodies are: They are fat, they have ugly faces with hooked noses,

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they have big mouths, and their facial expressions suggest cunning, plotting, everything dishonest. They absolutely lack dignity which is one of the most crucial points that makes them most vulnerable. This lifts all the weight of any kind of conscientious responsibility towards them, however they be treated. And the last thing worth noting about these pictures is the fact that the caricaturist shows no loyalty to the Jews at all. He feels no responsibility towards them, no sympathy or any kind of concern for their welfare as s/he has so dehumanized them that they no longer belong to the same specie as “us”. The Jews are “them.” Seal’s account aims to rip Turks and Turkey of any kind of dignity. Everything in Turkey is to be laughed and mocked at. Even when Seal admits that there is amelioration, he allows no room for any kind of dignity, respect or good-will. When Seal acknowledges that after 1991 there had been a certain improvement in the way the police treat people, he uses this example as an indication of change: “It was a telling measure of change in Turkey that you could even insult a policeman’s car these days and get away with it” (171). The notion of “loyalty” a writer shows to her/his object of analysis plays a significant role in the discussion of the politics of representation. It is this lack of loyalty in the Nazi representations of the Jews in the cartoons discussed above which makes those cartoons possible. It is also this lack of loyalty and the rejection of any kind of fellow feeling and the monstrous distance that cause people to kill each other and inflict unimaginable cruelties upon others. This lack of loyalty is one of the most important elements of exclusion and othering. Accordingly, Seal’s, Lawlor’s or Glazebrook’s accounts can be read as calls for rejecting any kind of loyalty to or affiliation with Turkey.

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Conclusion I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciations of the past, the expressions of regret for its having ended, or-even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive-the hostility between Western and non-Western cultures that leads to crises. The world is too small and interdependent to let these passively happen. (Said, Culture 18-19) In this reading of Turkey and Turks in American and British travel writing, from 1850s to the present, we have mainly focused on three travel narratives88: Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984), Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993) and Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995). Travel accounts like Lady Mary Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross, or Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel (1848), Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1991), John Ash’s A Byzantine Journey (1995), Tom Brosnahan’s Turkey: Bright Sun, Strong Tea (2005), and many others are used to reveal the patterns of discursive extension through time and counter discursive practices. This examination has resulted in eight major findings. First of all, although the Orientalist discourse still maintains a notable space in the genre of travel writing, all these accounts are far from carrying a homogenous Orientalist discourse. The unlikeness between Settle’s and Glazebrook’s accounts in terms of four Orientalist dogmas suffices to

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A brief analaysis of Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections is used only as a touchstone to mark how travel writing can be at its best.

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mark this point as they employ different discourse strategies to construct their experiences of Turkey. Secondly, this study has shown that whether or not Turkey should be considered a European country is one of the central questions of the Orientalist travel writing in the 1980s and 1990s. In this argument, Turkey’s Muslim identity is used as an element of nonbelonging. Related to this, whether Turkish Westernization movements have made Turkey a European country is also another issue that has been discussed in travel writing. Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan : And Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836 (1837) can be considered as one of the earliest examples of this examination. It has been followed by works such as Lino Linke’s Allah Dethroned (1937), and especially Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993) and Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995). The significance of the writer’s loyalty to her/his object of representation, Turkey in this case, is another important point that has emerged. Where the writer invests her/his loyalties is a political element of the writer’s discursive alignments. In this context, there emerges a close connection between the Nazi representations of Jews in 1930s cartoons and representations which occur in Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts. In terms of intertextuality, an immense admiration for nineteenth-century travel writers has been detected., especially for those writers who celebrate the high time of British Empire. The term “Raj Revivalism” explains this admiration “as an expression of nostalgia for a lost era, for the end of Empire” (Bassnett 11). The difference in representation with regards to gender and nationality has also been noted. It has been found out that women’s travel accounts distinguish themselves from men’s accounts dramatically in terms of their loyalties and political affiliations.

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A remarkable difference between American and British travel writing comes to the surface. While American imperialism is currently everywhere with its ugly face it is not a nostalgic or romantic vision for the American travel writer; whereas, for the British travel writers, the Empire exists in their minds as a benevolent entity of the glorious past. Having briefly stated the eight major findings of this study, we would like to discuss them further in detail. Reading travel accounts written on Turkey, though in different grades, two main tendencies come to the surface: the first one is to highlight the differences and, borrowing Pickering’s words, “translate” them “into otherness” (49) by emphasizing Turkey’s Muslim identity and thus presenting her as the anti-thesis of Christianity. The second tendency is to present Turkey as a country not that dramatically different from England or America. In the latter approach, differences do not pose a threat or hostile identity but are welcomed as cultural diversity. The writers who adopt the former approach presuppose the West-East, or Christianity-Islam dichotomy. Furthermore, they assume what Said calls a “textual attitude” towards Turkey. In that sense, they rarely contest what had already been said on Turkey. Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1991) is a perfect example to the second group of travel accounts. Hence it has been used as a touchstone to demonstrate the difference between the two tendencies. Settle’s work which is a significant attempt for mutual understanding and respect stands as a testimony to what travel accounts can be at their best. It contests the Orientalist discourse and the “Eurocentric misunderstanding of the Turks” which started “in the years of the Crusades, when an infidel enemy was needed to rouse Christian passions” (xiv). What she is trying to do is to show that the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Midnight Express (1978) are “ogrelike cartoon caricatures when compared to people [she] had known and lived among” (Turkish Reflections xii).

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Settle’s travelogue differs from Orientalist travel accounts in these four points that Said has described as Orientalist dogmas. First of all, how she describes Bodrum and the people she met there demonstrates her rejection of the East-West paradigm. Settle writes: “[They] made their livings by fishing, by sponge diving . . . . [It] was quiet, gentle, a dignified place of dignified people. I found there the greatest capacity for friendship I have ever known” (Turkish Reflections xi). This is a representation which can scarcely be found in a narrative where the writer has assumed an Orientalist discourse.89 Secondly, instead of generalizations on Turkey and Turks, she renders the differences and represents Turks as individuals. Most importantly, Settle tries to give an insight into Turks’ “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s terms. Contrary to Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal, who constantly condemn Turkey in all issues with the presumption that Turks are a cruel and barbarian race, Settle renders the Cyprus conflict that she witnessed in 1974 from the Turkish perspective. Representing the Turkish worries about the welfare of the Turkish Cypriots, she writes: “The newly elected Turkish Prime Minister, Bülent Ecevit . . . was begging the British Prime Minister . . . to intervene in Cyprus to protect the Turkish minority there. . . . I only saw this from the point of view of a small town, of people listening to radio . . .” (Turkish Reflections 29). She thus captures the zeitgeist of 1974 Turkey which has scarcely found a balanced and two-sided representation in the Western media. Thirdly, there is substantial divergence between Settle’s representation of Turkish history and Westernization and those of the Orientalist travel writers. While the Orientalists portray the East as an unchanging entity frozen in time, Settle’s account marks the change that Turkey had undergone from her first stay between 1972-1974 and her 89

See how Glazebrook represents the Turkish restaurant owner and the shepherd in his account (Journey to Kars 73).

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second visit which inspires her to pen this account in 1989. She describes the change in Bodrum: “It was no longer my sweet, kind and quiet town . . . . this was twentieth century invasion, Yenibodrum, New Bodrum. It is busy and shining and very, very rich, white as bone, too elegant for the country people I had known to live there any more” (Turkish Reflections 218). Finally, Settle’s narrative contests the Orientalist dogma which views Turkey as a threat to the West. The enormous chasm between Seal’s translation of the Turkish word “gazi” as the “destroyer of Christians” (119) and Settle’s as “the honourable name for a hero, a survivor of war, a leader” (Turkish Reflections xiv) will suffice to demonstrate to what extent Settle’s discourse dissociates itself from an alignment with the Orientalists. Unlike Settle’s discourse whose loyalties have been shared evenly between her readers and her topic, Turkey and Turks; Glazebrook’s discourse, since his loyalties are spent on his intended British or Western readers, keeps an enormous distance between the writer as the subject and Turkey and Turks as the object. This dissociation makes Journey to Kars an Orientalist travel account par excellence: “Neither NATO, nor the EC, nor the self-proclaimed Europeanization of Atatürk, could ever make a Turk mon frere, mon semblable. Nor did I want him to be. From Turkey and the Turks I wanted something else, perhaps the antithesis of the ‘homeliness’ of Europe” (197). Glazebrook’s representation of Turkey as the “antithesis of the ‘homeliness’ of Europe” reveals the construction of his account fully on the absolute and systematic difference between Turkey and Europe. For the writer, this difference can never be surmounted and always serves to exclude Turks. Thus he acknowledges what he expects from Turks and Turkey: to give Europeans a sense of coherence at the expense of Turkey and her peoples. Glazebrook’s hatred for Turks is caused by his textual approach, not by a personal

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encounter with hostility. That he attributes authority to texts, especially to those with a strong Orientalist tendency is obvious from the start. As he declares, he does not want to recognize any kind of difference from what he has read in books. What appeals to him is to imagine the nineteenth-century Turkey of the Orientalist travel writers. Finally, as he constructs Turkey as the antithesis of Europe, Turkey becomes an enemy and a threat. The writer’s ungrounded fears as he approaches Turkey from a Greek island, and his construction of the analogy between Monghol hordes and modern Turkish conscripts evoke the barbarian Turk stereotype. Glazebrook was not the first Western writer to defy Turkish claims for European identity. The question of whether or not Turkey is a part of the European identity has long been discussed. Recently the issue has a more prominent significance when Turkey’s membership negotiations with the European Union are taken into account. A recent example can be found in The Guardian writer Alexander Chancellor’s reflections on his Turkey visit. Chancellor went to Turkey at the beginning of April 2006. While he was there he learned that some municipalities in Turkey killed street dogs, (according to Chancellor’s depiction) on the grounds that dogs are considered as unclean animals in Islam. The writer reflects on the issue: This made me wonder if Turkey really is ready to join Europe. True, its people seemed charming, intelligent and civilised; and its capital city could boast an M&S. But this was no way to treat a dog. Furthermore, the report included the distressing detail that at least two of the dead dogs had been sexually abused. Why would you want sexually to abuse a dog if you considered it “unclean”? It made no sense, but it suggested that the founder of modern Turkey, the great Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, had died before

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Europeanising his country as fully as he would have liked. But I mustn't make too much of this. Muslims are by no means alone in not liking to be licked by dogs and Islam is opposed to cruelty to animals of any kind, its faith teaching that animals are part of Allah's creation and so should be treated with respect. Therefore, it is not Islam but the barbarity of Turks that is in question in the killing of dogs. Here the writer tries to do his best to dissociate Turkey from Europe and delegitimate Turkey’s claims for European identity. The mistreatment of dogs serves here as a reason for exclusion. It is also interesting that in such a context that this cruel treatment can be related to the failure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s modernization project. Chancellor takes the most marginally pervert behaviour which cannot be approved by Turkish society as an example of how not only Turks but Muslims in general treat not only dogs but also animals. The only way to treat animals is being European in Chancellor’s discourse as he sees this behaviour as an indication of the failure of Atatürk’s Europeanization project. As Brian Dolan sees it, regional distinctiveness or national historical consciousness are not the major factors that determine the European identity. Dolan maintains that “the quest for a unified, inclusive European identity is guided by arbitrary criteria” (5). He underlines the fact that the demarcation of geographical boundaries and establishment of Amembership standards” have a long history in Europe. The long history of travel and foreign encounters have a considerable influence on the construction of the European identity: “. . . since the eighteenth century, we find similar questions . . . raised in travel narratives and contemporary public debate” (4). In the light of Dolan’s views, Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts form a highly influential intellectual platform where matters of Turkish identity and its relation with Europe are contested.

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As Benedict Anderson argues in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991), another aspect of this crucial identity construction is the formation of a nationalist narrative which makes it possible to feel oneself a part of an “imagined community.” Pickering rightly observes that nationalism tends to use “us-them” dichotomy and employs using “the other” to construct a sense of national identity and social cohesion. The politics of belonging and not belonging play a significant role in celebrating what is “culturally close and familiar above what is distant and dissimilar” (Stereotyping 109). The politics of belonging mainly use territorial attachments to express belonging. Another strategy used to maintain cultural belonging is the “dissociation from what is contrasted with national mediations” (109). Pickering defines the next step: “Various people are then seen as not belonging, not only because they do not have the same nationality but also because their characteristic forms of life are divided from ‘ours’ by symbolic boundaries which contrastively identify them as inferior” (109). The Europe-Asia paradigm, in this sense, is not a neutral way to address geographical entities. While Europe as a concept conveys connotations like enlightenment civilization, technological, economic and scientific developments, Asia is what Europe is not;

unenlightened,

noncivilized,

barbarian,

technologically,

economically

and

scientifically underdeveloped. If we consider the time Glazebrook wrote his book, we see that in the early 1980s Perestroika and “winds of change” had not been thought of yet and Europe had been divided into two with the Iron Curtain. The Wall that divided Berlin was the symbol of this division. Therefore, the fall of the Wall in 1989 signified the end of the Cold War between “the Free World” and “the Iron Curtain” countries and the start of a new era for Europe. Although Turkey was considered to be closer to Europe than the Iron Curtain countries

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during the period between World War II and 1989, instead of Turkey the long lost members of the family were to be reunited by the EU.90 If we read Glazebrook’s account within this context, we see that it is a travel account which puts forward the idea that being a part of NATO and allying with the “Free World” against the bigger evil, “Soviet” expansion, do not make Turkey Western or European. Therefore, his insistent use of the word “Asiatics” to refer to Turks is a strategy of excluding Turkey from the European identity through redefining the conditions of belonging. Creating an imagined Turkey and Europe in terms of the nineteenth-century imperialist discourse of travel writers, Glazebrook reads the nineteenth-century travel accounts “selecting, displacing, deleting, rearranging and insisting on” certain types of representations which he thinks best fits his blackening project. In Said’s words, he “systematically excludes the actualities of the modern” Turkey through his “complex rewriting” (Orientalism 177). Maybe not as explicit and manifest as he does, Lawlor’s Looking for Osman fulfills all the four Orientalist dogmas that Said puts forward. Lawlor sees Islam as a factor in Turkish life which will never let the Turks become Europeans. In his reasoning, Islam makes Turks fatalist, therefore non-European. He insists on the impossibility of Turkish claims to European identity, defying all kinds of affiliation between Turks and himself. Another Orientalist dogma which emerges in his account is his textual attitude. All through his account, he prefers paradigms offered to him by the British travel writers to the facts of modern-day Turkey. In consequence, he always looks for the exotic Turkey, reading between the lines of what Turks say to him. Therefore, he insistently misinterprets what 90

As Huntington notes Turkey has allegedly lost her importance with the fall of the wall and the end of Cold War. Alliances were redefined and this time religious and cultural issues were the determining factors. Although Turkey first applied to European Union for membership in 1963, countries that were under Iron Curtain until 1989 have become members of the Union while Turkey is still being suspended.

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people relate to him. He never trusts any Turks on whatever they can pronounce on their aspirations to become a more modern country. When Lawlor’s travelogue is read in parallel with nineteenth-century travel writers like Kinglake, Warburton and Burnaby, it can be observed that Lawlor sees and represents Turkey using the “conceptual and textual grid” of these Victorian travelers. Following in Kinglake’s and Warburton’s footsteps, Lawlor gives a very biased account of Islam and presumes an authority on matters concerning the differences between Christianity and Islam. Both Lawlor’s and Seal’s accounts lay their loyalty with their supposedly Western readers. They are so constrained by the imagery and the vocabulary that have been collected to talk about Turkey that they can hardly ever say anything beyond this discourse. To reveal the extent of their alignment with the traditional Orientalist discourse to talk about Turkey and Turks, it shall suffice to highlight a few points that Jonathan Haynes made on the seventeenth-century traveler writer George Sandys. In his The Humanist as Traveler (1986), Haynes discusses the seventeenth-century travel writer George Sandys’s travels to Turkey, Egypt, the Holy Land, and Italy. He points out that even though Sandys is a Renaissance intellectual and he can show a “sympathetic recognition of difference” (19) to different cultures, when it comes to Islam and Turkey, Sandys becomes an “exponent of unified and militant Christendom” (21). Haynes notes that the Islamic world had always been a “first and foremost religious issue” for the Renaissance intellectuals. Haynes expounds this Christendom-Islam dichotomy which sees Islam as the “the scourge of God” (18) with James Boon’s formula of how societies might see and represent each other: “Social facts represent selections from larger sets of possibilities of which societies keep symbolic track, whether consciously or

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unconsciously, explicitly or covertly. Societies conceptualize themselves as select (in both senses) arrangements, valued against contrary arrangements that are in some way “objectified” (qtd. in Haynes 22). In that sense, Sandys defines himself in Christendom, selects positive sets of possibilities from the Christian world as his self-image and attributes all sorts of negative sets of selections to Islam. This is how Sandys represents Islam and the Islamic culture and civilization: countries once so glorious, and famous for their happy estate, are now through vice and ingratitude, become the most deplored spectacles of extreme miserie: the wild beasts of mankind hauing broken in vpon them, and rooted out all ciuilitie; and the pride of a sterne and barbarous Tyrant possessing the thrones of ancient and iust dominion. Who aiming onely at the greatnesse and sensuality, hath in tract of time reduced so great and so goodly a part of the world, to that lamentable distresse and servitude, vnder which (to the astonishment of the vnderstanding beholders) it now faints and groneth. Those rich lands at this present remainwast and ouergrowne with bushes . . . (qtd. in Haynes 21) In Boon’s terms, here we see Sandys using explicit and conscious efforts to draw a rather dark picture of Islam and Turkey. It is surprising to see that, though not that “explicit” and maybe not that “conscious,” the same discourse still persists, and a great majority of the Western intellectual still sees Islam and its civilization within the same conceptual and textual grid. As far as Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s Turkish character portraits are concerned, we see that no “learning has been permitted” to them nor do they “have any virtues.” For instance, in Lawlor’s account, Turks are represented as fatalists who are also devoid of any moral principles. They are different from the Europeans because of their

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religion. No matter how hard they might try, they can never become Europeans. On the contrary, the harder they try the less European—but the more Asian—they become. In that sense, Lawlor’s (also Glazebrook’s and Seal’s) narrative aligns itself with the nineteenthcentury imperialist discourse. A partial explanation for this denial of the capacity for change can be found in Ussama Makdisi’s “Mapping the Orient: Non-Western Modernization, Imperialism, and the End of Romanticism” (2003). Makdisi reveals how most of the nineteenth -century travelers to the Ottoman Empire deny the possibility of any kind of change. Makdisi points out how they suspect and question the sincerity of all the reforms that had been undertaken: “The Ottomans prided themselves on their arrival at the doorstep of modernity despite European political and military hostility. Europeans, however, insisted that modernity could not be achieved by a non-Western nation as much as it could be bestowed by benevolent Western Imperialism” (45). Makdisi argues that the acceptance of any kind of success in those reforms would be the death of the discourse of la mission civilisatrice, which would put the imperialist justification of expansionism and colonialism out of context. The point Makdisi highlights gives us an insight to read Glazebrook’s, Lawlor’s and Seal’s refusal to acknowledge Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s and his friends’ sincere efforts to modernize Turkey. In Makdisi’s terms, these travel writers “continually defer” Turkish modernity and “completely deny its possibility” (46). Interestingly enough, this continual deference is quite consistent with how Huntington reads Turkish Westernization and modernization, for an acknowledgement of any success in these efforts is contesting the discourses like la mission civilisatrice and “the clash of civilizations.” It will be contradicting civilizing mission discourse because this will lead to such a conclusion “if they can do it themselves we are not needed and our

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mission is over. Moreover, if we lose the justification for our mission so does the Empire.” As for the clash of civilizations, this paradigm assumes that civilizations always suspect each other and establish their identities on the Otherness of different civilizations. Therefore, any efforts to take the rival civilization as a model and celebrate that culture as much as your culture is deemed as an unnatural act which is doomed to fail. In the case of such a civilizational shift, the whole paradigm loses its ground because the paradigm presupposes clear-cut differences which prohibit any kind of cultural affiliations and interchange among these civilizations. The term “Clash of Civilizations” itself is loaded with all the connotations of what Said terms as the four Orientalist dogmas. Orientalist discourse does not only defer Turkish modernization, but it also tactfully forbids Turkish voices a chance of expressing their own views on the issue. One of the strategies that the Orientalist discourse uses to disallow the Turks to represent themselves on the question of modernization is to represent Turkish intelligentsia’s opinions in a suspicious and cynical tone: The official Turk at Constantinople . . . know well how to adapt their conversation to gain the good-will of—or, I should rather say, to deceive— any distinguished foreigner who may chance to visit them. They will affect the most liberal ideas and the most enlarged views; they will flatter their guest by praising the institutions of his country . . . he fancies his Turkish acquaintance to be an enlightened and discerning person; but he little suspects that under his specious parade of enlightenment and admiration is concealed the most perfect contempt for the person he has been complimenting, and of all that he has been praising, added to a hatred of everything emanating from Christians, which is further envenomed by a

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sense of inferiority, wounding most bitterly and offensively his bigotry and his pride. (Jas Brant qtd. in Makdisi 46) The most important point to note in Brant’s reflections on the Ottoman officials’ attitude is his interpretation of their voice. Through undermining the sincerity in their voices, Brant does not let them represent themselves. He reads hidden intentions in the expression of their opinions, invoking the discourse that takes it for granted that Muslims or Turks can never see Christian Europeans as brothers, or in Glazebrook’s terms, “mon frere” (197). In his A Fez of the Heart, Jeremy Seal uses a different strategy to forbid Turks from representing themselves in his account. Seal’s travelogue is an attempt to analyze Turkey’s schizophrenic identity crisis, using the abolishment of fez by the newly born Republic of Turkey as a symbol of oppression. In his account, whenever Turks want to express their opinions, he interprets their voices to demonstrate how problematic Turks’ views on the issue are. While trying to give his readers a symbolic reading of the significance of fez as regards to Turkish identity and of the gap it has left in the Turkish society, he presumes the role of a social-psychoanalyst. Though with what he knows about Turkey and his ignorance on Turkish language and culture he is only an amateur social-psychoanalyst who is not equipped with the knowledge and expertise of his field. Despite his scattered knowledge on Turkey, Seal takes his thesis on Turkey as far as asserting that there is a despotic state in Turkey which governs despite the people. The way the writer sees it, the state imposes Westernization without any demand from the people. If there are any voices which criticize these changes, unlike in a Western democracy where criticism is accepted as a part of democracy, reactionaries are “marched to the gallows” (15). Seal suggests that people who desire the Westernization of Turkey are just the elite of the country. He claims that what the people from the hinterland want is

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different; they despise European values and see the West as an enemy. Therefore, Europeans should not be deceived with the idea that Turkey really wants to become a part of the European Community; in Seal’s view she does not. The majority’s heart is with the fez and what it represents: the Ottoman Empire and her non-secular theocratic order. As Seal depicts it, the establishment of the Republic of Turkey has only created a cultural rupture within Turkish society. Although he mentions the Uğur Mumcu91 assassination and the huge popular reaction against this assasination, he does not read these as an indication of how people have embraced the ideals of the Republic, especially secularism. Instead, Seal interprets this assassination as an indication of how secularism and modernism are contested in Turkey. While Seal’s account spotlights the challengers of Turkish modernism, it neglects the voices of people who believe in modern Turkey. Moreover, he does not mention (for the sake of coherence) any of the notable gains that the modernizing reforms brought either.92 It is seen that the way Seal uses nineteenth century travel accounts is in due alignment with the way Glazebrook and Lawlor. All three of them reconstruct the Turkey of the nineteenth century through these narratives and reflect on how similar Turkey still is, but none of them wants to bring forth the positive changes 91 Mumcu was an investigative journalist and columnist for the daily Cumhuriyet. He investigated the relations between Islamic groups and politics. His murder (24 Jan. 1993) was claimed by fundamentalist groups such as Islamic Liberation Organization, Raiders of Islamic Great East and Islamic Jihad. Mumcu has been regarded as a martyr of Republican ideas, especially to that of secularism. 92 For Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the improvement of economy, education and the women’s disadvantaged position in Turkish society were some of the most significant goals of the Republic. The fact that he organized an İzmir Economic Congress only a few months after the War of Independence indicates that for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk economy was of utmost importance (Zekey). Considering the economic indicators it is seen that while Turkey’s total imports were merely 51 million $ in 1923 (http://www.ceterisparibus.net/veritabani/1923_1990/dis_ticaret.htm ), this figure was 81 billion $ in 2006 (http://www.dtm.gov.tr/ead/ekolar1/eko02.xls). This is a 1600 fold increase in 83 years. In terms of education Turkey’s achievements are impressive by any means. In 1923 the number of primary school students was approximately 330 thousand (only 20% of them girls) and 3 thousand university students (10 % of them girls); in 1998 the number of primary school students was 10 million (45 % of them girls) and 1.5 million university students (40% of them girls) (DIE). These figure reveal extraordinary developments both in education and the participation of women into public sphere. My family’s history is a telling case which demonstrates how these figures have been felt on personal level. My grandmother who was born in 1925 was not sent even to primary school. My mother could go to primary school but not allowed any higher. In a third generation my only sister has a master degree in Economics.

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Turkey has achieved. All three writers assume the ideological positions of the Victorian travelers with an immense admiration. Salman Rushdie explains this admiration felt for the Victorian travelers as Raj Revivalism. According to Rushdie, this nostalgia felt for “the lost hour of precedence” (92) started with Margaret Thatcher’s time as the prime minister. Rushdie points out the boom of the cultural productions which celebrate the Empire overlooking the harm inflicted the colonized peoples. In these TV serials and movies the Empire is represented as a benevolent father and the colonized people like the Indians are depicted as immature and uncivilized peoples who need the protection and the rule of the British. Susan Bassnett relates Rushdie’s observation to travel writing and maintains that travelogues have also been influenced by this approach and it is possible to find its traces in the British travel narratives of the period. Women travel writers’ accounts show a distinct divergence from male writers’ accounts. As Sara Mills points out, “It is their struggle with the discourses of imperialism and femininity, neither of which they could wholeheartedly adopt, and which pulled them in different textual directions, that their writing exposes the unsteady foundations on which it is based” (3). Women writers like Montagu, Pardoe, Ellison, Linke and Settle almost never align themselves with the imperialist discourse. Although authors like Burnaby, Vambery and Glazebrook focus on the affairs of the British Empire and act as its agents, even when they have a high status like Lady Montagu, women writers hardly ever “adopt” such a tone and make the Empire the central question of their accounts. With Montagu, Pardoe and Ellison, we see that these writers, strongly contest the hegemonic view of Turkish women in British travel writing. Ellison’s Zayneb Hanum and other works on Turkey exemplify this approach. As Kabbani points out, with the popularity of the Arabian

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Nights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Muslim women became the fantasy objects of the Victorian men. Ellison’s Three Years in a Harem challenges the notions of Harem held in England during that time and attempts to demonstrate what it really was. In that women travel writers have a considerable advantage over men as they have the access to the women circles in Turkey as well as to the men’s. In travel writing a noticeable difference is observed between American and British travel writing. First of all, American writers like Ash, Whitman, Settle and Brosnahan do not identify themselves with the nineteenth-century British travel writers. Therefore, they do not use the imagery and the discourse of these Imperialist writers as much as their British contemporaries. Another difference is that Turkey and Britain have a more loaded history compared to the history of the Turkish relations with the USA. When the Iraq invasion was still under planning and American Troops’ occupation of Iraq from Turkey was discussed in 2003, implantation of any British troops to Turkey was not even mentioned. It was declared that since the British Army had stayed in Turkey as an invading army, this was out of the question for Turkey. Despite alliances and cooperations on many circumstances, Turkey and Britain have also had a history of conflicts and clashes, whereas Turkish-American relations can only be traced to the twentieth century and most of this time Turkey and America were strong allies, especially, during the Cold War period. Because it is the age of American empire, American travel writers Settle and Brosnahan face reactions regarding American foreign policy. Both Settle (Turkish Reflections 28) and Brosnahan (18) distance themselves from the policies of their country and express their disapproval. On the other hand, during their stays in Turkey Glazebrook, Lawlor and Seal come across fewer accusations with regard to England’s present foreign policies or overseas operations.

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With their unresponsive attitude and internalized Orientalism, Turkish intellectuals also have responsibility in this situation. For instance, despite his denigrating attitude towards Turkey Jeremy Seal still considers his work to be an indication of his love for Turkey. He is, to a certain extent, right to think so as has never had any feedback from Turkey. In the twelve years since the publication of his “A Fez of the Heart” (1995), no individual from a country of 70 million has ever cared to express their resentments to this book, which has also been translated into French, German and Italian. People from other countries do not show a similar nonchalance as far as the image of their countries is concerned. Two Turkish anti-American cultural productions pulp thriller Metal Storm (2004) and the movie Valley of Wolves: Iraq (2006) have become widely popular in Turkey. They eventually attracted considerable response in the American mainstream media such as The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.93 This indifference can be partially explained through what Said calls internalized Orientalism. According to Turkish poet and critic Hilmi Yavuz all the modern Turkish literature of the Republican era is an Orientalist one (5-9). Although Yavuz takes his claim to an extremity, his argument is still worth discussing. In his “İçselleştirilmiş Açık ve Gizli Oryantalizm ve Kemalizm” (“Internalized Manifest and Latent Orientalism and Kemalism”) (2002), Hasan Bülent Kahraman argues that Turkish intelligentsia has assumed the Orientalist discourse and represented their own country within this framework. Mine G. Kırıkkanat’s daily Radikal article “Halkımız Eğleniyor” (27 July 2005) is a typical example of how the Orientalist discourse has been adopted by Turkish 93

Especially, Jackson Pollock’s 2005 February Wall Street Journal editorial article “The Sick Man of Europe – Again”, (16. February 2005) where he expresses his worries on the deteriorating American image in Turkey and states that the recent Turkish government does not do anything to ameliorate it illustrates how much the American media care for their country’s image overseas.

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writers.94 The indifference to these travelogues, which consolidate the negative Turkish image, can be interpreted as a consequence of this concurrence. Thus Turks themselves may miss the misrepresentation and misinterpretation prevalent in them. Another explanation can be the tendency to not to take these travelogues seriously: “How many people read them and what if they take these as the representation of reality?” Yet as Said puts it misrepresentation is never a simple a matter. In his “Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition” (2003) to Orientalism Said maintains how the Orientalist expertise is still used to justify wars and occupations, the recent case being the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan by the American forces.95 The question to ask here is can we afford these misrepresentations which result in wars, exclusions and marginalizations of the disadvantaged people of our world. Today people are more intertwined than ever in the world history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the number of people who had traveled to the Ottoman Empire was hundreds, in the subsequent centuries thousands and maybe ten thousands. On the other hand, only in 2004, more than one million English and a quarter million American visited Turkey.96 This means that millions of peole from England and America have met Turks, eaten Turkish food and learned something about the country and the people. Furthermore, there are also those thousands of English and American people as well as Germans and Italians who have settled in Turkey. On the Turkish side of the picture, there are millions 94

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s novel Yaban (1932) and Nurullah Ataç’s essay “Prospero ile Caliban” (1961) are some of the best-known examples of this attitude. 95 Compared to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan this can be regarded as a miniscule example but Turkey has also experienced a similar case recently: the assassination of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink on 19 Jan. 2007. As one of the spokespersons for the Armenian minority in Turkey he was so misrepresented and his views were so distorted by ultra-nationalist groups and their media that his murder was justified and legitimized by certain terror groups. The misrepresentation created such a narrative at the cost of Dink’s life that his murderers believed that they had served their countries through ending the life of a traitor who tries to undermine Turkey. 96 “Bacasız Sanayi.” Ekonomik ve Sosyal Kalkınma Hareketi 17 Nov. 2005. 28 Jan. 2007 .

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of Turks who study or work in countries as diverse from Australia and Japan to Russia, America, Canada, Thailand etc. As the cultures and societies overlap and interweave, what Said calls as “the bewildering interdependence of our time” occur (Said, “Adrift in Similarity”). Since we live in such an interdependent world, we need peace more than ever. We need to understand each other and solve problems without arms because mass destructive weapons like nuclear heads, chemical and biological bombs are also faster and more effective than ever before. When we think of the tens of millions of people who died in two world wars and especially the scope of devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima we see that the same technology which saves lives when it is used at hospitals can exterminate ten thousands, hundred thousands of civilians in cities not only with their present and the past but also with their future. Therefore, as Said maintains “rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow” (Orientalism xxix).

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Background The presenter of this doctorial dissertation received his Bachelor of Arts degree from English Language and Literature Department of Ege University in 1997. In 2002, he received his Master of Arts degree with his thesis “The Reflection of the Industrial Revolution in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charles Dickens' Hard Times” from the Institute of Social Sciences, Department of English Language and Literature, Ege University. He is currently working as an instructor at the Foreign Languages Department of the same university.

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ÖZET Edward Said’in Orientalism (1978) adlı çalışmasını kendisine hareket noktası olarak alan bu çalışma, 1850’den günümüze İngiliz ve Amerikan seyahat yazınında Türkiye ve Türklerin nasıl temsil edildiğini incelemeyi amaçlamıştır. Said’e göre, Oryantalizm Doğu’yu araştıran nesnel bir bilim dalı olmaktan çok, Doğu hakkında söylenebileceklerin ve söylenemeyeceklerin sınırlarını belirleyen, Batı emperyalizmi ile beslenen, Oryantalistlerin iddialarının aksine son derece politik bir söylemdir. Said’in eseri akademik dünyada öylesine büyük bir etki yaratmıştır ki, “sömürge sonrası çalışmalar” (“postcolonial studies”) adıyla bilinen alanın doğmasına vesile olmuştur. Said’in eserini başlangıç noktası olarak kabul eden yüzlerce inceleme yapılmış, doktora tezleri yazılmış ve üniversitelerde dersler açılmıştır. Bu geniş çaplı ve yaygın tartışmaların Batı’nın Doğu temsillerine bir düzeltme getirip getirmediği bu tezin ortaya koyduğu en önemli sorunsaldır. Bu bağlamda, Mary Lee Settle’ın Turkish Reflections (1989), Philip Glazebrook’un Journey to Kars (1984), Eric Lawlor’un Looking for Osman (1993) ve Jeremy Seal’ın A Fez of the Heart (1995)

adlı seyahatnameleri, on dokuzuncu yüzyıldan bu yana yazılmış, değişik

söylemleri başlangıç noktası olarak kabul etmiş, yirmi kadar farklı seyahatname ile karşılaştırılarak incelenmiştir. Adı geçen eserlerde Oryantalist söylemin ne şekilde belirlendiği, hangi metinler arası ilişkilerle beslendiği ve Said’in ortaya koyduğu kavramların günümüz siyasi konjonktöründe hangi kavramlarla örtüştüğü ortaya konmuştur. On dokuzuncu yüzyıl ortalarından günümüze kadar yazılmış Türkiye ve Türkleri temsil eden seyahatnamelere baktığımızda, bu eserlerde Oryantalist söylem her ne kadar egemen söylem konumunda olsa da, bir çok farklı söylemin eş zamanlı olarak farklı eserlerde kullanıldığını gözlemliyoruz Anahtar kelimeler: Oryantalizm, temsil, ötekileştirme, seyhat yazını, söylem.

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ABSTRACT Taking Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) as a departure point, this study attempts to investigate how Turkey and Turks have been represented in British and American travel writing since 1850. According to Said, far from being an objective field of study, Orientalism is a discourse which predetermines what can and cannot be said on the Orient. Said’s work has created such a huge impact on the academia that its influence led to the birth of the field known as the “postcolonial studies.” Hundreds of books and PhD dissertations which take Orientalism as a departure point have been written and a great number of courses have been taught at universities. Whether these wide ranging discussions and criticism have brought a correction to the representations of the East by the West is the most important and central problematic of this dissertation. In that context, Mary Lee Settle’s Turkish Reflections (1989), Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars (1984), Eric Lawlor’s Looking for Osman (1993) and Jeremy Seal’s A Fez of the Heart (1995) have been investigated along with twenty other travelogues. This study has examined how the orientalist discourse operates, how intertextual affinities determine the discourse and the modern counterparts of the concepts that the Orientalist discourse is mainly constructed upon. When we examine the travel accounts written from 1850 onwards, we see that travel writing is far from being homogenous in terms of discourse. Although the Orientalist discourse is the dominant one, it is still possible to see that counter-discursive accounts do exist side by side with the Orientalist discursive practices. Keywords: Orientalism, representation, othering, travel writing, discourse.