Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

exchange or “lifestyles,” too, various sides of nationalist polemics have tended to see the influence of their side in, say, shared musical or culinary practices. The problem with both sides of this debate stems partly from their adherence to a static notion of cultural “goods,” whether one conceives of them in the realm of state building or cooking. In other words, “influence” is understood as a creative party giving one of its own “goods” to an imitating, uncreative other—a notion that needs to be recast now that historians realize influence is not possible without interaction, without a choice by the allegedly passive receiver. And even then, common cultural traits are not necessarily reducible to influence.

      The issue of influence in cultural history is also skewed by its being understood in terms of a sexual act conceived as an unequal relationship. The influencer is like the one who penetrates and is proud, and the influenced is like the one who is penetrated and thus put to shame. A superior culture is naturally one that has more to be proud of in this manner. If “we” were the first ones to come up with the discovery of this (say, the dessert called baklava) and the invention of that (say, the shadow puppet theater called Karag

z) and “our” cultural possessions then infiltrated other cultures and gave birth to offspring, then “our” culture must have been superior and dominant the way a male is over a female. If you have been influenced by others, on the other hand, you have acted like a “passive” partner in intercourse; you have been “inseminated.”

      These are admittedly the more extreme versions of positions that are held much more moderately, if made at all explicit, by scholars who have developed a remarkable sensitivity to such issues and prefer to leave them alone. I feel, however, that we must recognize these issues as underlying currents of much of the historiographies (and of the historical consciousnesses that shape the scholars who create the historiographies) on the four centuries of turmoil and construction in Anatolia that led to the building of a world empire. I think these issues cannot be resolved as they are conceived; if there is any hope of transcending them, it is possible only through reformulating them, not through burying them.

      Compared to the historiography on the rise of the Ottoman state, discussed in detail in the next chapter, that on the emergence of Norman power in medieval France does not run into the same sorts of complications, though there are striking parallels in the basic issues raised by their story. Did the Normans constitute a blood-tie society? Did they continue Carolingian practices and institutions or did they create their own?²⁵ These too are serious questions for the historian, but they lack the imbroglio of nationalist polemics, at least in a directly perceptible way. Had Normandy been a nation-state or a province with self-assertive Normans, the situation might have been different. Whereas, if in the questions posed above you were to replace Normans with early Ottomans, and Carolingian with Byzantine, you could have a whole range of settings for a politically charged discussion, from the corridors of a university to a coffeehouse in Istanbul or Thessaloniki. Charming as this may sound, there are drawbacks, as illustrated by the case of Petropoulos, who was persecuted under the Greek junta for, among other things, writing a book called Ho tourkikos kaphes (“Turkish coffee,” which the junta ordered to be called “Greek coffee”). Similarly, under the Turkish junta of the early 1980s, an academician could suffer for writing about the presence of Armenian and other Christian fief-holders in the early Ottoman armies, whose existence is an undeniable fact. Such tensions may get more serious under military regimes but are not limited to them; even in “normal times,” one can feel the heat generated by arguing whether Cyril and Methodius were Greek or Slavic, or by dealing with the ethnic origins of Sin

n, that most accomplished of Ottoman architects who was recruited in the sixteenth century through a levy that was applied to non-Muslim subjects.

      True, the majority of historians have scoffed at this sort of thing, but without directly tackling the assumption of a continuous national identity, a linear nationhood or national essence that underlies even their own nonchauvinistic historiography. If “we” (from the point of view of modern Turkish consciousness) or “the Turks” (from the point of view of non-Turkish historiography) have come on horseback from Inner Asia and established a state that replaced the Byzantine Empire of “the Greeks,” it is only human that to be “one of us” (or “one of the Turks”) one needs to assume, or in some cases feels compelled to “prove,” that one's ancestry derives from the steppe nomads. And if one is of the Greeks, then one “knows” that one's ancestors have been oppressed by the Turks. Fortunately, such assumptions or presumptions can usually be made relatively easily at the individual level, where one slips into the role of citizen-as-member-of-the-nation (unless one is from a self-conscious minority, in which case one is a member of another “we” in a similarly linear story). It must have been rather traumatic, however, for a republican descendant of K

se Mi

al (Mikhalis the Beardless), one of the founding fathers of the Ottoman state, a Bithynian Christian who joined forces with Osman, converted, and started a minidynasty of raiders in the service of the House of Osman. The twentieth-century Turk, proud enough to take Gazimihal as his last name, at the same time felt compelled to write an article “proving” his glorious ancestor was also a Turk. In this fanciful account, Mi

al is one of those Christianized Turks employed by the Byzantines who eventually chooses to join his brethren on the right side.²⁶

      The essentialist trap cannot be avoided unless we, the historians, problematize the use of “the Turks” (or any other ethnonym for that matter), systematically historicize it and confront its plasticity, and study its different meanings over time and place. I certainly do not wish to imply that being a Turk or a Muslim or a Christian did not matter; for many, it was all that mattered in the grand scheme of things in the long run of the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. In fact, individuals changed their identities presumably not only because they could but also because it mattered. Nor do I wish to imply that it is meaningless to speak of ethnic or national identities (Turks or others), but these should not be—and this is particularly clear in the case of medieval Anatolia, where religio-political affiliations and thus identities were in rapid flux—conceptualized as an original stock and descendants going through a linear series of adventures in time and, along the way, clashing with other original stocks and descendants going through similarly linear series of adventures. Historians tend to overlook the fact that (America is not the only case where) one is not necessarily born into a people; one may also become of a people, within a socially constructed dialectic of inclusions and exclusions.

      It is not the purpose of this book to disentangle these questions of identity and influence embedded in varying degrees in any historical writing on the Ottomans. My purpose here is basically to problematize them before dealing with one specific era when identities were in particularly rapid flux.

      We must note, however, that the issue is not an intellectual abstraction for those who consider Asia Minor their homeland and grapple with its heritage in terms of their own identity. Having grown up in a village which seems to have enjoyed continuous settlement for five millennia and where sprang up the cult of one of the Turkish colonizerdervishes in the thirteenth century, a republican Turkish archaeologist muses that studying that village “would be a contribution to our national history since it is one of the earliest Turkish villages established in Anatolia in the 13th century,” but he adds that “the cultural past of a village which has lived intertwined with the ruins of the prehistorical and the antique ages, which has not rejected those, which has appropriated and used the cave cemeteries, which has carved on its tombstones figures inspired by the wall paintings of those caves and used such figures in its embroideries, starts undoubtedly with the earliest human settlements on these lands.”²⁷ Despite this openness to continuity at one level, the distinction between the “we who came from yonder” and “they who were here” is maintained with surgical precision. Turkish colonizers are immediately taken as the main actors when the archeologist moves to the analysis of some tombstone carvings that replicate designs seen in antique