I promised to stop writing about this a long time ago, but who would have thought that the Ottoman language would ever be making headlines. A slightly belated piece on teaching Ottoman from today's Foreign Affairs:
Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan recently declared that, starting immediately, Turkish students
would begin studying the Ottoman language in school. Erdogan defended the move
by explaining that learning Ottoman, an older version of Turkish
written the in Arabic script and used in the Ottoman Empire up into the early twentieth
century, would help citizens “reconnect with their past.” But Erdogan’s critics
condemned his decision as yet another heavy-handed attempt to promote a
conservative version of Ottoman nostalgia, akin to his efforts to build a replica
Ottoman barracks in the center of downtown Istanbul and a replica Ottoman
mosque on the city’s highest hill.
For anyone who has ever
struggled to learn the notoriously difficult Ottoman language—sometimes
described as a practical joke played on historians—forcing it on a generation
of schoolchildren might seem like the quickest way for Erdogan to destroy his
popularity (and the Ottoman Empire’s as well).
In fact, wrestling with
Ottoman texts could give students a newfound appreciation for modern Turkey’s
founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who transformed the Turkish language by
adopting the Latin script in 1928. More seriously, if even a tiny percentage of
students do manage to learn more than just enough to pass their tests or sound
out inscriptions on old tombstones, they could present a major threat to Erdogan’s
carefully cultivated version of a pious Ottoman past. Last year Erdogan
famously lashed out at the directors of a popular soap opera for suggesting
that Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent spent more time in the bedroom
than on horseback. Who knows what he would he do if young students could
suddenly read the wealth of homoerotic poetry composed in the Ottoman centuries.
Among the many reforms
through which Ataturk distanced his new republic from its Ottoman past, the
linguistic transformation was one of the most dramatic. Within three months in 1928, Turkish citizens went from writing
their language in the Arabic script to the Latin script. Alongside a sweeping
shift in vocabulary – new replacements
appeared for even some of the most common words, for example “school,” “north,”
“south,” and even the phrase “for example,” – the alphabet change eventually rendered
anything written before 1928 completely illegible to the vast majority of
modern Turkish citizens.
There was, admittedly, a real
mismatch between Turkish sounds and Arabic letters, though by 1928 they had
been successfully used to write Turkish for a millennium or so. Ottoman script
included a few characters Arabic didn’t—an extra two dots to distinguish “p”
from “b” for example— but Arabic’s dearth of vowels was poorly suited for the
vowel-heavy Turkish. As with English, jarring inconsistencies between spelling
and pronunciation mounted with time: the Turkish word for “later,” now straightforwardly
written and pronounced as “sonra,” was tortuously rendered in characters akin
to s-u/v-k-r-h in the Ottoman script. A modified Arabic script could have
solved these problems; indeed, Ottoman reformers had already made proposals to
this effect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But Ataturk wanted
to bring the Turks closer to the West, and so he chose the Latin script and
severed Turkey from its past.
In addition to the switch in
alphabets, the transition from Ottoman to Modern Turkish also entailed
replacing words of Arabic and Persian origin with authentically “Turkish” alternatives
(as well as words from French, the modern European language par excellence at
that time),. Some replacements were found in the everyday speech of rural
Anatolian villagers or the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, both of which were
assumed to have preserved an untainted original Turkish. Others were simply invented
by a special committee, then inserted in classrooms and dictionaries where some
stuck and some didn’t.
At best, in its early stages,
this effort rendered an elite written language comprehensible to the masses—the
equivalent, perhaps, of replacing Latinate legalese like “sine qua non” with a
plain English term like “necessary.” A decade later, though, the reforms
themselves became an ideologically driven barrier to understanding, as
perfectly commonplace words were replaced with new artificial-sounding
creations. Imagine the government mandating that all “Exit” signs instead read
“Goplace.” Eventually the
effort was abandoned, while people satirized its absurdities by imagining fake new
words like “oturaklı götürgeç, or
“sitting-place-having bringing-thing” for “bus.”
Historians
have increasingly criticized Ataturk for his revolutionary zeal and the authoritarian
nature of his reforms. Many have plausibly claimed that his insistence on
fitting a diverse society into the straightjacket of modern secular nationalism
led successive governments to respond brutally when citizens wanted to keep speaking
Kurdish or wearing headscarves. But as Antoine
de Saint-Exupery hints in the Little
Prince, fault also lay with the Europeans, whose prejudices led them to see
these reforms as necessary and take Turks in top hats, say, more seriously than
Turks in fezzes.
Likewise, although there is
no denying the radical transformation that Ataturk brought to his country’s
language, or the speed with which he did so, the break was not as sudden as
many now assume. In the early 1900s, the vast majority of Turkish citizens
couldn’t read or write in any script, and among the elite that could, many were
already familiar with Latin letters from studying French. And what’s more, for
decades following 1928, many Turks—and, according to rumors, even Ataturk himself—continued to keep
diaries, write to friends, and jot down shopping lists in the Arabic script
they first learned in school. In a sense, Ataturk’s language revolution was
only fully realized in the 70s when the first generation of adults came of age
without any knowledge of Ottoman.
All this history makes
Erdogan’s mandate to bring back Ottoman language to the classroom somewhat
ironic. Erdogan’s gesture was aimed as Turkey’s pious masses, who have largely
come to accept the idea that this language is part of “their” heritage. But,
for much of the past century, it was actually the ruling class of well-educated
secular elites, lawyers and diplomats in particular, who were most comfortable
with ornate and obscure linguistic holdovers from formal Ottoman.
Ataturk’s language reform was
an integral part of his populist nationalism, which sought differentiate his
new revolutionary regime from the old, often oppressive and unpopular, Ottoman government.
But such rhetoric hid the autocratic nature of his own regime and the continuities
between the Ottoman elite and Turkey’s twentieth-century leaders. It is only
after decades of frustration with this often-undemocratic secular elitism that
teaching the language of the Ottoman court can be interpreted as a populist
gesture. But if the Turkish population learns to read Ottoman for itself, popular
Islamic Ottoman nostalgia could be the first victim.
Many accounts make it seem as
though modern Turkish Islamists, under Erdogan, were the first people to
embrace their country’s Ottoman past after almost a century of secular neglect.
But it might be more accurate to say that they are simply the most recent and
successful group in Turkey to appropriate Ottoman history for their own ideological ends.
The first group, in fact, was
Ataturk and his supporters. Although Ataturk denounced the Ottoman royal family
for its misrule, he was quick to claim
the successes of the Ottoman army—feared from Yemen to the Gates of Vienna—as
a tribute to the martial spirit of the Turkish nation. In the 1940s and 1950s,
Turkish nationalists celebrated Ottoman military achievements, as well as the
architectural, cultural, and scientific achievements of the empire’s fifteenth-century
golden age. Generations of Turkish children have grown up with cartoons and
action movies that reveled in Ottoman-era military heroics.
Some secular nationalists even
went as far as to claim that Ottoman sultans such as Mehmet the Conqueror had
invented religious tolerance and helped inspire the European Renaissance. Most
recently, a rival interpretation of Ottoman history made inclusive
multi-culturalism the empire’s defining feature. Emphasizing the co-existence
of religions and cultures under Ottoman rule, this version has appealed both to
Western liberals looking for counter examples to the clash of civilizations, as
well as Turkish progressives seeking to build a more inclusive identity for the
Turkish state.
Modern Turkish Islamists have
worked hard to graft an Islamist reading of the Ottoman past onto these
nationalist and liberal traditions. Some contemporary secularists’ allergic
reaction to all things Ottoman is, if anything, a sign of the Islamists’
success. In a less polarized political climate, many of the opposition figures
now criticizing Erdogan’s move might have welcomed it as part of a patriotic
effort to reconnect with a glorious chapter in Turkish history. But teaching
Ottoman seems suspect when presented alongside elementary school religion
classes and new restrictions on alcohol, all part of Erdogan’s plan to create a
“pious generation.”
It’s an odd moment when old
Orientalist clichés about Ottoman decadence and corruption seem a necessary
corrective to a romanticized Ottoman history purged of even normal levels of human
depravity or oppression. Armed with a knowledge of the Ottoman language and a
politically-motivated desire to refute Islamist myths, plenty of Turkish
academics have already begun to dig out evidence of a less idealized Ottoman
past. Alongside poems about bathhouse assignations and royal drinking bouts, this
includes more substantive material showing how Ottoman citizens themselves
criticized official corruption or religiously justified abuses of power. Just
one hint of what might lie in store for Erdogan comes from a 1951 issue of the
then-popular magazine History World, whose editor claimed to have combed through the archives to find
the most “hair-raising” verdicts of Ottoman judges, guaranteed to “surpass even a twentieth-century murder
novel in bloodiness.” Readers, he promised, would be shocked by accounts of
judges “feeding human flesh to dogs, chaining men by the nose as if they were
bears, and hanging women from their breasts and men from other parts.”
Hitting closer to home, a
commentator on the anti-government Halk TV joked that perhaps if people learned Ottoman
they would finally be able to read Erdogan’s grandfather’s criminal record.
Erdogan’s party has resorted to multiple forms of censorship in trying to
control what Turkish citizens can read. But as this jab suggests, teaching a
new language is fundamentally inimical to this kind of control. Making students
learn Ottoman will be hard. Even harder will be controlling how they use their
newly acquired skill.
