From the abode of Islam to the Turkish vatan

‘From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: The Making of a National Homeland in Turkey’ by Behlül Özkan (Yale University Press, 288 pages, $38)

As the world continues to obsess about the Sykes-Picot borders in the Middle East, it’s worth considering where Turkey fits into the picture. The crumbling of the Ottoman Empire led to the formation of those allegedly artificial borders to the south, but emerging from the ashes in the Ottoman heartland was a nation state determined to prove its authenticity, forging a powerful national narrative in the fire of an independence war. The shift in the way the new Turkish Republic related to its citizens was profound, but the antecedents of this shift actually went back a long way. This book by Marmara University assistant professor Behlül Özkan charts how the old religiously defined imperial Ottoman system was replaced with one of direct loyalty to a territorially-bound state; the shift from an Ottoman to a Turkish vatan. Each page is densely packed with material, and although much of the research is probably not completely original, it’s still a stimulating and impressive work.

In the first half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire faced a crisis of legitimacy similar to that experienced by other European monarchies after the French Revolution. As Eric Hobsbawm observed:

Such traditional guarantors of loyalty as dynastic legitimacy, divine ordination, historic right and continuity of rule, or religious cohesion, were severely weakened ... All these traditional legitimations of state authority were, since 1789, under permanent challenge. This is clear in the case of monarchy. The need to provide a new or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution...