How Happy to Call Oneself a Turk
How Happy to Call Oneself a Turk

Author: Gavin D. Brockett

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0292744994

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The modern nation-state of Turkey was established in 1923, but when and how did its citizens begin to identify themselves as Turks? Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's founding president, is almost universally credited with creating a Turkish national identity through his revolutionary program to "secularize" the former heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Yet, despite Turkey's status as the lone secular state in the Muslim Middle East, religion remains a powerful force in Turkish society, and the country today is governed by a democratically elected political party with a distinctly religious (Islamist) orientation. In this history, Gavin D. Brockett takes a fresh look at the formation of Turkish national identity, focusing on the relationship between Islam and nationalism and the process through which a "religious national identity" emerged. Challenging the orthodoxy that Atatürk and the political elite imposed a sense of national identity from the top down, Brockett examines the social and political debates in provincial newspapers from around the country. He shows that the unprecedented expansion of print media in Turkey between 1945 and 1954, which followed the end of strict, single-party authoritarian government, created a forum in which ordinary people could inject popular religious identities into the new Turkish nationalism. Brockett makes a convincing case that it was this fruitful negotiation between secular nationalism and Islam—rather than the imposition of secularism alone—that created the modern Turkish national identity.

Borders of Belief
Borders of Belief

Author: Gregory J. Goalwin

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2022-07-15

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1978826508

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Religion and nationalism are two of the most powerful forces in the world. And as powerful as they are separately, humans throughout history have fused religious beliefs and nationalist politics to develop religious nationalism, which uses religious identity to define membership in the national community. But why and how have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of national identity in what sociologists have predicted would be a more secular world? This book takes two cases - nationalism in both Ireland and Turkey in the 20th century - as a foundation to advance a new theory of religious nationalism. By comparing cases, Goalwin emphasizes how modern political actors deploy religious identity as a boundary that differentiates national groups This theory argues that religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a powerful movement developed as a tool that forges new and independent national identities.

The Korean War in Turkish Culture and Society
The Korean War in Turkish Culture and Society

Author: Nadav Solomonovich

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 3030840360

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This book explores the important role that the Korean War played in Turkish culture and society in the 1950s. Despite the fact that fewer than 15,000 Turkish soldiers served in Korea, this study shows that the Turkish public was exposed to the war in an unprecedented manner, considering the relatively small size of the country’s military contribution. It examines how the Turkish people understood the war and its causes, how propaganda was used to ‘sell’ the war to the public, and the impact of these messages on the Turkish public. Drawing on literary and visual sources, including archival documents, newspapers, protocols of parliamentary sessions, books, poems, plays, memoirs, cartoons and films, the book shows how the propaganda employed by the state and other influential civic groups in Turkey aimed to shape public opinion regarding the Korean War. It explores why this mattered to Turkish politicians, viewing this as instrumental in achieving the country’s admission to NATO, and why it mattered to Turkish people more widely, seeing instead a war in the name of universal ideas of freedom, humanity and justice, and comparing the Turkish case to other states that participated in the war.

Turks Across Empires
Turks Across Empires

Author: James H. Meyer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-18

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0192586335

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Turks Across Empires tells the story of the pan-Turkists, Muslim activists from Russia who gained international notoriety during the Young Turk era of Ottoman history. Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinskii and Ahmet Agaoglu are today remembered as the forefathers of Turkish nationalism, but in the decade preceding the First World War they were known among bureaucrats, journalists and government officials in Russia and Europe as dangerous Muslim radicals. This volume traces the lives and undertakings of the pan-Turkists in the Russian and Ottoman empires, examining the ways in which these individuals formed a part of some of the most important developments to take place in the late imperial era. James H. Meyer draws upon a vast array of sources, including personal letters, Russian and Ottoman state archival documents, and published materials to recapture the trans-imperial worlds of the pan-Turkists. Through his exploration of the lives of Akçura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu, Meyer analyzes the bigger changes taking place in the imperial capitals of Istanbul and St. Petersburg, as well as on the ground in central Russia, Crimea and the Caucasus. Turks Across Empires focuses especially upon three developments occurring in the final decades of empire: an explosion in human mobility across borders, the outbreak of a wave of revolutions in Russia and the Middle East, and the emergence of deeply politicized forms of religious and national identity. As these are also important characteristics of the post-Cold War era, argues Meyer, the events surrounding the pan-Turkists provide valuable lessons regarding the nature of present-day international and cross-cultural geopolitics.

Placing Islam
Placing Islam

Author: Timur Warner Hammond

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-05-16

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0520387449

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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. For centuries, the Mosque of Eyüp Sultan has been one of Istanbul’s most important pilgrimage destinations, in large part because of the figure buried in the tomb at its center: Halid bin Zeyd Ebû Eyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Timur Hammond argues here, however, that making a geography of Islam involves considerably more. Following practices of storytelling and building projects from the final years of the Ottoman Empire to the early 2010s, Placing Islam shows how different individuals and groups articulated connections among people, places, traditions, and histories to make a place that is paradoxically defined by both powerful continuities and dynamic relationships to the city and wider world. This book provides a rich account of urban religion in Istanbul, offering a key opportunity to reconsider how we understand the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond.

Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity
Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity

Author: Kamran Scot Aghaie

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 0292757514

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While recent books have explored Arab and Turkish nationalism, the nuances of Iran have received scant book-length study—until now. Capturing the significant changes in approach that have shaped this specialization, Rethinking Iranian Nationalism and Modernity shares innovative research and charts new areas of analysis from an array of scholars in the field. Delving into a wide range of theoretical and conceptual perspectives, the essays—all previously unpublished—encompass social history, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and comparative analysis to address such topics as: Ethnicity in the Islamic Republic of Iran Political Islam and religious nationalism The evolution of U.S.-Iranian relations before and after the Cold War Comparing Islamic and secular nationalism(s) in Egypt and Iran The German counterrevolution and its influence on Iranian political alliances The effects of Israel’s image as a Euro-American space Sufism Geocultural concepts in Azar’s Atashkadeh Interdisciplinary in essence, the essays also draw from sociology, gender studies, and art and architecture. Posing compelling questions while challenging the conventional historiographical traditions, the authors (many of whom represent a new generation of Iranian studies scholars) give voice to a research approach that embraces the modern era’s complexity while emphasizing Iranian nationalism’s contested, multifaceted, and continuously transformative possibilities.

Becoming Turkish
Becoming Turkish

Author: Hale Yilmaz

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2013-07-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0815652224

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Becoming Turkish deepens our understanding of the modernist nation-building processes in post—Ottoman Turkey through a rare perspective that stresses social and cultural dimensions and everyday negotiations of the Kemalist reforms. Yilmaz asks how the reforms were mediated on the ground and how ordinary citizens received, reacted to, and experienced them. She traces the experiences of the subaltern as well as the experiences of the elites and the mediators in the overall narrative—highlighting the relevance of class, gender, location, and urban and rural differences while also revealing the importance of nonideological, social, and psychological factors such as childhood and generations.

The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman and Turkish Times
The Heritage of Edirne in Ottoman and Turkish Times

Author: Birgit Krawietz

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-12-16

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 3110639084

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Modern scholarship has not given Edirne the attention it deserves regarding its significance as one of the capitals of the Ottoman Empire. This edited volume offers a reinterpretation of Edirne’s history from Early Ottoman times to recent periods of the Turkish Republic. Presently, disconnections and discontinuities introduced by the transition from empire to nation state still characterize the image of the city and the historiography about it. In contrast, this volume examines how the city engages in the forming, deflecting and creative appropriation of its heritage, a process that has turned Edirne into a UNESCO heritage hotspot. A closer historical analysis demonstrates the dissonances and contradictions that these different interpretations and uses of heritage produce. From the beginning, Edirne was shaped by its connectivity and relationality to other places, above all to Istanbul. This perspective is employed at many different levels, e.g., with regard to its population, institutions, architecture, infrastructures and popular culture, but also regarding the imaginations Edirne triggered. In sum, this multi-disciplinary volume boosts urban history beyond Istanbul and offers new insight into Ottoman and Turkish connectivities from the vantage point of certain key moments of Edirne’s history.

Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic
Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic

Author: B. Fortna

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-10

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0230300413

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An exploration of the ways in which children learned and were taught to read, against the background of the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. This study gives us a fresh perspective on the transition from empire to republic by showing us the ways that reading was central to the construction of modernity.