Download PDF | Can Erimtan - Ottomans Looking West__ The Origins of the Tulip Age and its Development in Modern Turkey (Library of Ottoman Studies) (2008).
278 Pages
Introduction
The Idea of a “Tulip Age’: A Paradigm and Its Meaning
This book scrutinises the idea of a “Tulip Age’ as a time distinct from other periods in Ottoman history. Thus, I will investigate the Turkish literature of the Second Constitutional era (1908-18) and the Republican period of one-party rule (1923-50), which likely provided the source material at the base of the concept of the “Tulip Age’ As the renowned Ottomanist Cemal Kafadar points out, one cannot but recognise that certain ideas and notions have been too readily ‘re-circulated without scrutiny’ in many scholarly narratives dealing with Ottoman history. ! Kafadar critically assesses the idea of a ‘Stileymanic Golden Age’, only to conclude that ‘the whole notion of a “golden age” seems alien to the Ottoman intellectual tradition’ insinuating that this perception of Ottoman history is a kind of historiographical construction. ? He likewise mentions a ‘catchy depiction’ of the 1718-30 era and in talking about this supposed “Tulip Period’, Kafadar asks whether we are ‘justified in using [the term] un-selfconsciously as we are doing’ ?
As Kafadar indicates, the existence of a “Tulip Age’ which phrase he attributes to the ‘historical imaginations’ of Yahya Kemal Beyatli and Ahmed Refik Altinay, ‘two late Ottoman/early republican authors; 4 is widely recognised and even universally acknowledged. The latter decades of the twentieth century saw countless studies and events which declared the ‘Tulip Age’ to have been the point of origin of trends close to the heart of many citizens of the Republic of Turkey: modernisation and Westernisation.
In particular historians and students of Ottoman art and culture appear to regard the Grand Vezirate or saddret of Nevsehirli Damad Ibrahim Paga as the denotatum of the signifier “Tulip Age’ Such a way of looking at Ottoman history has even entered the general Turkish perception of the development of ‘Ottoman-Turkish’ history. The idea of a growing interaction with the West during the early eighteenth century is of such a persuasive nature that, for example, the financial institution Akbank did not hes-itate to link the term “Tulip Age’ with its series of concerts and events celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach in 1998. ° Ina rather ingenious manner, Akbank’s cultural events’ manager insinuated the long-standing connections between Turkish culture and European music in a week-long series of orchestral concerts of Bach’s works, even calling the whole event Bach, caz ve LALE DEVRI | ‘Bach, Jazz and the Tulip Age’]. The events also included a panel discussion on the ‘Ottomans facing West’ during the first half of the eighteenth century.
The Turkish government does not shy away from propagating the idea of a “Tulip Age’ abroad either. In February 2001 the Turkish Embassy in London organised an event that saw the academic Talat Halman and the stage actress Yildiz Kenter present a lecture in Oxford, introducing Turkish culture and history to a wider audience.’ The scope of the event was very wide, but the two speakers easily managed to include a detailed appraisal of the “Tulip Age’ as the beginning of modern attitudes in Turkey.
The idea that the reign of Ahmed II witnessed a break with Ottoman tradition also seems to have taken root in the West, as illustrated by the case of the prestigious Encyclopaedia of Islam. Harold Bowen, in his entry on ‘Ahmad lr (1960), claims that ‘the twelve years ensuing on the peace of Passarovitz [171830] witnessed a remarkable change of taste in poetry, music and architecture and a new inclination to profit by European example’. * Approximately twenty-five years later, Irene Melikoff, in her entry on the ‘Lale Devri’ in the Encyclopaedia, calls the policies of Sultan Ahmed and Damad Ibrahim ‘a serious movement towards a secular society. ? Melikoff’s statement appears to be totally anachronistic, in view of the general historical recognition that the idea of a ‘secular society’ emerged only at the very end of the eighteenth century as a result of the impact of the French Revolution and Napoléon’s subsequent promulgation of the Code Civil.
One therefore cannot but conclude that the “Tulip Age’ at face value a superficial and even frivolous notion, has been turned into a paradigm determining the way in which a certain phase in Ottoman history is conceptualised. In spite of the fact that the eighteenth century has recently received a great deal of critical attention from a number of different scholars within different disciplines, such as Miige Gocek, Kemal Silay, Tulay Artan, and Virginia Aksan, the paradigm of the “Tulip Age’ remains unchallenged. Selahattin Hilay, writing in the critically well-received book series Tiirkiye Tarihi even posits that the ideology of Westernism (Batscilzk) predates Islamism (Islameitk) in a Turkish context, pointing to the reign of Ahmed tas its initial moment in Ottoman history. #
One could lay the responsibility for the deep-seated nature of the “Tulip Age’ paradigm in Turkish historical consciousness on Tank Zafer Tunaya’s endorsement of the idea of a Westernist “Tulip Age. Tunaya was a renowned and wellrespected historian of the various political and ideological movements in Turkey. His influential Tirkiyenin Siyast Hayatinda Batililasma Hareketleri (1960) opens by positing the date 1718 as the beginning of Westernist tendencies in the Ottoman Empire. ” He views the period between 1718 and 1826 as the era of hesitant and partial transformations following a Western role-model. Moreover, Tarik Zafer Tunaya assigns the “Tulip Age’ the status of a reform movement, on the same level as the military programmes of Selim m1 called the Nizam-t Cedid or ‘New Order’. ®
On an international level, Bernard Lewis and Niyazi Berkes established the ‘Tulip Age’ as an important turning point in Turkish history. In the first instance, the seminal Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961) fulfilled an important role in popularising the idea that Damad Ibrahim Pasa had been a reformer with Westernist tendencies. Lewis, however, does not employ the phrase “Tulip Age’ in talking about him. “ Niyazi Berkes, in his equally influential Development of Secularism in Turkey (1964), on the other hand, is firm in defining the qualities of the reforms undertaken. Berkes declares that ‘[a] secular trend .. . was the dominant feature of the Tulip Era. 5 In the first half of the 1960s these two authorities established the boundaries of the common understanding of the paradigm of the “Tulip Age. Ahmet Evin’s article “The Tulip Age and Definitions of “Westernization”, published in 1980, encapsulates the various strands of the paradigm. © On a superficial level, the phrase focuses on the large-scale cultivation and enjoyment of tulips during Ibrahim Pasa’s saddret, and the Ottoman élite’s indulgence in pleasure and enjoyment (zevk i sefa). ” This recognition of the presence of a pleasure-minded attitude in early eighteenth-century Istanbul leads champions of the “Tulip Age’ to postulate that contemporary European modes of architecture and garden layout were introduced as a backdrop for the then popular stress on entertainment. Evin, for instance, states that ‘[a]long with French architecture, the [F]rench garden also appeared in Turkey’ during Damad Ibrahim’s sadéret. 8
The champions of the “Tulip Age’ also indicate an attempt at structured Westernisation during the “Tulip Age’ Evin, for example, talks about an ‘interest in secular learning’ as being prevalent at the time. ” In particular, the consensus seems to be that during the “Tulip Age’ the idea of progress in the form of European technology (‘Policies of progress, construction and innovation’), 2° was imported into the Ottoman sphere. That in fact, ‘[t]he founding of the Miiteferrika Press was the singular accomplishment of the Tulip Age’. #1 Ahmet Evin appears to typify a trend of claiming the simultaneous appearance of a pleasureminded attitude in tandem with the introduction of progress. Evin says that the protagonists of the “Tulip Age’ (“Damat Ibrahim Pasa and his circle of friends’) assumed two ‘conflicting roles’ at the time: ‘as serious and committed leaders and as sybaritic dissipators. ** The paradigm’s various layers of meaning allow that in the eyes of the champions of the “Tulip Age; for a brief period in the early eigh- teenth-century (1718-30), Ottomans had started to behave according to European models. In 1987 Miige Gécek summarises the paradigm of the “Tulip Age’ as follows:
[During the “Tulip Age’] [a] new type of Ottoman emerged, oriented toward the West and assimilating Western culture. ...
The conservative-progressive tension that gradually eroded the Empire at the very end was established.
The implications of the phrase “Tulip Age’ have continued to be accepted a priori. Martin Strohmeier, writing in the 1980s in his critical appraisal of Turkish historiography on the Seljuks, for instance, is also unable to resist the idea of a “Tulip Age’ stating that prior to Damad Ibrahim’s saddret (‘die Tulpenzeit’), the Empire’s population had been isolated from ‘developments’ beyond the Ottoman borders. He then maintains that during the “Tulip Age’ a certain privileged section of Ottoman society had become subject to outside influences, leading to a ‘Europeanisation of their life-styles. *4
In the early 1990s Suraiya Faroghi mentions the “Tulip Period’ as ‘the first period in Ottoman history in which large sections of the upper class became interested in cultural contact with Europe’ * At the close of the twentieth century the Turkish edition of Christoph Neumann’s reinterpretation of the Tarih-i Cevdet contains a value-laden phrase about the ‘reforms initiated by Damad Ibrahim Pasa during the “Tulip Age’ *6 Similarly, in the year 2000 Ariel Salzman released an article purporting to outline the beginnings of consumerist attitudes in the Ottoman Empire, using the phrase “The Age of Tulips in its title.” Salzman concentrates on Damad [brahim’s saddret, mentioning the building of ‘a new palace’, Saadabad, ‘constructed on French plans’. She goes as far as claiming that scholars view the narrative of the latter part of Ahmed 111s reign ‘as a cautionary tale of the perils of precocious modernization. ** And in 2003, Aksin Somel published a Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire, which contains an interesting entry on the “Tulip Period.” Somel stresses ‘the pursuit of pleasure’ during Damad Ibrahim’s saddret, but also talks of a ‘policy of peace toward the empire’s western neighbors’ In the end, he seems unable to resist the notion that ‘incidental Westernization’ took place in the early eighteenth century, *° mentioning ‘[p]ark designs from France’, the appearance of the ‘baroque style’ in ‘civil architecture’, and concluding with pointing at the ‘first Ottoman Muslim printing press’ during Ibrahim Pasa’s administration. *! Very recently, Cemal Kafadar has also revisited the issue of the “Tulip Age’ in a piece published in the catalogue of the exhibition The Sultan’s Procession, held in Istanbul between 1 June and 1 October 2006.*? Kafadar mentions ‘the so-called Tulip Period (1718-30) ... [which is] considered to have initiated the lifting of some kind of presumed iron curtain between an essentialized “Ottoman culture” and a post-Renaissance “European mind”. * Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Turkey’s perception of its relationship with modernisation and Westernisation is still able to determine the historical imagination.
Here I will analyse and evaluate key texts in Turkish that stand at the basis of the above-mentioned views. I start with the late-Ottoman perception of the latter part of the reign of Ahmed I, and finish with the Kemalist perception of the nature of Damad Ibrahim Pasa’s policies. Rather than rework the historicity of the various claims made by the authors under investigation, their methodological approach will be analysed and thus their productions will be subjected to source criticism. The book’s aim is therefore to engage with the idea that, as hinted at by Kafadar, the notion of a “Tulip Age’ is a historiographical construct and to dismantle this construction into its separate components. Ottomans Looking West? thus tries to determine whether history is the product of its writing rather than a reflection of historical reality as it occurred. *4
The constructed narrative of the “Tulip Age’ presents a picture of a certain section of the Ottoman upper classes in the early eighteenth century which turned away from the certainties of the Islamic Orient, and instead became inclined to follow the innovative ways of the West. In a more general sense, this narrative could in fact be seen as a template for Turkish society as a whole reorienting itself'to the Occident throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
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