Between Two Worlds. Cemal Kafadar

In his review of K

pr

pr

l

] produced a solid work of explanation and synthesis.”²⁵

      Written by a man who disdained deterministic single-factor explanations, however, K

pr

pr

pr

l

's sociocultural portrait of the frontiers pointed to various factors that endowed the uc society with mobility and a potential for expansion and to various characteristics of the Ottomans that favored them in particular. The Kay1 origins, for instance, were never assigned a causal or explanatory role, and the demographic push from the east was cited as only one of the elements that transformed frontier mobility into Ottoman expansion.

      Whatever his historiographic sophistication, however, K

pr

pr

l

failed to note, were born to great women who were not of Turkish birth, like Nilüfer

t

d I.

      As for lesser men and women, K

pr

yn

k, which was completely inhabited by Christians when Ibn Battuta passed through it, should have been Islamized toward the end of the same century, since Yildirim Bayezid had people brought from there and from Torbali to establish the Muslim quarter that he founded in Constantinople. Even if this report were true, it would be more correct to explain it by the establishment of a new Turkish element there than by a general conversion. Logically one cannot easily accept that the Muslim quarter in Constantinople was simply settled by Greeks who had recendy become Muslims.”²⁸

      Later on, he even drops the cautious “almost invariably” and states with absolute certainty that “the Ottoman state was founded exclusively by Turks in the fourteenth century.” And then he finally lets the cat out of the bag when he argues, quite logically, that “just as the fact that a significant number of the rulers of the Byzantine Empire came from foreign elements is no proof that the Greeks lacked administrative ability, an analogous situation occurring in the Ottoman Empire cannot be used as proof that the Turks lacked administrative ability.”²⁹

      The last point, namely, the “administrative ability” of a people, to be demonstrated to the “civilized world” in particular, was much more than a question of national pride, as was mentioned above. Such arguments resonated with one of the basic principles in the “new world order” between the two great wars: a people had a right to nationhood in a civilized world only if they could prove that they had in their historical experience what it takes to create a stable state and to govern in a civilized manner. That is one of the most important reasons why nationstates took up the construction of a past as avidly as they drew plans for industrialized modernity. New generations had to, as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk put it in a saying that is now inscribed on many public sites in Turkey, “be proud [of the nation's past achievements], work hard, and be confident [of the future].” K

pr

l

steered his own course clear of official history and of the so-called Turkish history thesis with its notorious, though fortunately short-lived, excesses like the “sun-language theory.”³⁰ Naturally, however, he was a man of his times.

      No perilous pitfall in logic seems to have trapped historians more than the genetic fallacy, perhaps because, by the nature of their profession, they are prone to evaluating the truth value of an assertion on the basis of its origins. It