The new official history and St. Sophia

I remember the times when our high school history textbooks changed in the late 1970s, after the nationalist-conservative coalition government came to power. I was going to one of the few private high schools of the time and our teachers preferred to use the old textbooks; nevertheless, we were supposed to buy the new ones. When I scanned the new books out of curiosity, I noticed the difference: the focus was now on the glorious times of the Ottoman Empire, whereas the old books emphasized Western history, as well as ancient Turkish history in tune with the official Republican ideology.

In fact, competing historical narratives have been part of the political rivalry between the Kemalists and the conservatives from the beginning of the multi-party period that started in 1950. Finally, after the military coup of 1980, a curious mixture of the so-called “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and Kemalist revival” became the official ideology that replaced the Kemalist one. Kemalism, with its civic and secular emphasis, had long failed to define the “national identity,” even before the coup of 1980. It was the Islamized version of Turkish identity (or Turkish-Islamic synthesis) that managed to redefine the national identity, as a result of the growing dominance of conservative nationalism over politics, despite the radical interpretation of the 1960 coup. French researcher Etienne Coupeaux’s book on the transformation of the official history from Kemalist to Islamic-Turkish between 1931 and 1993 (De l’Adriatique a la mer de Chine/ Türk Tarih tezinden Türk İslam Sentezine, 1998) is best at telling us the story of the shift in the historical paradigm.

The ideological background of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) is based...