Juhood Magazine: Volume 1, Issue 1

juhood v o l u m e

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i s s u e

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m a r c h

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JUHOOD v o l u m e

f i r s t

Containing six essays regarding

THE MIDDLE EASTERN REGION which shall be considered to include the

NORTH OF AFRICA , TURKEY and IRAN edited by PHOEBE O’HARA , and her merry team

WE HAPPILY PRESENT this journal ;

C O N S I S T I N G O N L Y O F U N D E R G R A D U AT E W O R K , to our esteemed readers

D U R H A M,

In the year two thousand and nineteen P u b l i s h e d a t D u ke U n i ve r s i t y b y t h e D u ke A s s o c i a t i o n f o r t h e M i d d l e E a s t

in the issue

01

Contents

03

Acknowledgements and Editors’ Note

05

Wolves and Courtesans

Sude Almus

13

Turkish television as soft power

Imagining the Horizon

The violent cycle of ‘modernity’ in Algeria since 1830

Giacomo McCarthy

29

Bryan Rusch

41

Cartooning at Twilight

Ottoman political cartoons, 1908-1911

The King’s Elephant Children in theater and the Syrian Revolution

Natasha Rothenbucher

49

The Mosul Question The League of Nations, 1924-1926

Sinan Hanioglu

71

Lucian Li

83

The Istanbullu Flaneur

Urban observation in Turkish Literature

Interview with Taravat Talepsand

3 Acknowledgements Editors-in-Chief

Phoebe O’Hara Giacomo McCarthy

Editorial Board

Grayson Real

Jason Grill

Hannah Kaplon

Josh Curtis

Natasha Rothenbucher

Design

Hannah Kaplon Giacomo McCarthy Phoebe O’Hara

Illustrations

Masha Feingold

Our Sponsors

John Spencer Basset Fund Student Organization Finance Committee (SOFC)

Cover Art

‘Reified’ Taravat Talepasand

The information provided by our contributors is not independently verified by Juhood. The materials presented represent the personal opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Juhood, DAME, or Duke University.

Juhood: The Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Affairs Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2019 • Copyright © 2019

4 From the Editors...

W

e are thrilled to present you with the re-launch of Juhood, Duke’s journal for academic undergraduate work on the Middle East that was discontinued in 2013. Our predecessors chose the name to counter the post-9/11 perception of the region as violent and fearsome-the Arabic word juhood (‫)جهود‬, which refers to hard work and effort, has the same roots as the stigmatized and connotative word jihad (‫)جهاد‬. The journal was named nine years ago, when Western academic dialogue regarding the Middle East was dominated by the subject of terrorism.

Our version of Juhood joins a conversation of the region that is no longer dictated by the legacy of 9/11. The freshmen who have worked on this journal were infants in 2001; the upperclassmen were preschoolers. We represent fresh perspectives and ideas for Middle Eastern Studies. Our journal intends to provide a medium for these new voices. As such, our design is intentionally non-academic; authors’ voices have not been edited out of their work and the language avoids scholarly clichés.

At the same time, we recognize our imperfections: nobody who worked on Juhood has received a degree past high-school. The content of this journal is a representation of our enthusiasm for the Middle East rather than an effort at empirical scholarship.

We are indebted to our many contributors, editors, artists, and advisors. Taravat Talepasand generously gave us her painting Reified for our front inner cover.

Masha Feingold spent countless hours agonizing over the beautiful illustrations.

Hannah Kaplon and Grayson Real represent the future of this journal. Bryan Rusch and Josh Curtis are invaluable leaders of the Duke Association for the Middle East. Natasha Rothenbucher and Jason Grill are extraordinary editors and invaluable members of our team. Our thanks to all other contributors and advisors.

- Phoebe and Giacomo

Wolves and Courtesans Turkish television as soft power

Sude Almus

T

6

urkish television shows, often referred to as “dramas” or “series,” have gained immense popularity since the 2000s. In the last decade, “Turkish TV series have become a main player in the international TV industry as 25 percent of imported fiction content on a global scale derives from Turkey […] Furthermore, reports rank Turkey as the second-highest exporter of TV series following the United States, selling to more than 140 countries, alongside a business volume assessed to surpass $350 million as of 2017.”1 The exported series present “a strong mix of slick production, storylines full of passion as well as intrigue, beautiful actors/actresses and iconic Turkish sites.”2 Through their growing popularity and marketability, Turkish series have become tools of Turkish foreign policy. Through an analysis of recent history and select case studies, this paper examines the popularity of Turkish television series as a form of soft power; television shows became tools for the dissemination of state propaganda in the 21st century with the ultimate aim of establishing neo-Ottoman hegemony over the regions surrounding Turkey -the Balkans, the Middle East, and other “Muslim lands” with cultural proximity.

The increase in popularity and viewership is a global phenomenon, augmented by the digital age in which television programs are disseminated online and “television audiencehood is re-constructed via fan websites, Facebook pages and so on, or is taken as a medium through which the viewing activity itself occurs.”3 However, the locus of this growth in interest can be restricted to the following regions: the Balkans, the Middle East or “Arab World”4, and to some extent Central and South Asia. It is in this region in which Turkish dramas have entered the mainstream. Television series are broadcast on mainstream channels, online fan bases are large and active, and particularly in the Middle East, “Turkish stars [are] given the red carpet treatment” and “actors having joined ambassadors at receptions held at consulates.”5 It is particularly interesting to note these regions’ geographical and cultural proximity to Turkey, the legacies of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and Middle East, and the rise of pan-Turkic nationalism in post-Soviet Central Asia. In the realm of contemporary Turkish foreign policy, these regions pose benefits and challenges. In the Balkans, Turkish influence depends on acceptance or rejec1 Constantinos Constantinou and Zenonas Tziarras, 2018, “TV Series in Turkish Foreign Policy: Aspects of Hegemony and Resistance,” New Middle Eastern Studies 8, no. 1, (doi:10.29311/nmes.v8i1.2875, 27) 2 Constantinou and Tziarras, 24.

3 Berfin Emre Çetin, The Paramilitary Hero on Turkish Television: A Case Study on Valley of the Wolves (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 186.

4 Understood in this paper to be West Asia and other predominantly Arab countries such as Morocco) 5 Constantinou and Tziarras, 24.

7 tion of “the Ottoman Empire as a superordinate identity”6 and varies wildly across ethnic and religious groups. Turkey wields considerable amount of hard power; “a country’s military, economy, geography, and population and the way these factors can be utilized to achieve a state’s strategic goals.”7 However, through exported television series and pop culture, Turkish series have emerged as a prominent example of soft power. Soft power “comprises of the skill to structure a situation in such way that others will desire what you want, that is, develop preferences or define their interests in ways that are in accordance to those of your own nation.”8 The popularity of Turkish dramas has led directly to the popularity of Turkey itself and the rise of Turkey as “a point of cultural orientation.”9 The “soft power” through brand appeal of Turkey and Turkish culture has impact across multiple dimensions such as the realm of politics and foreign policy, Turkish economy, and tourism. In the realm of tourism, for example, the Cultural Ministry “directly connect[ed] the dramas to the recent upsurge in the amount of tourists to Turkey from Arab countries”10 and the tourism industry has shifted its orientation to serve the expectations of these fans of Turkish exports.

This paper aims to explore the political dimensions of television programs as a form of soft power. One must note that “soft power is neither itself the policy nor does it define it; it merely shapes the environment in which policy is conducted.”11 Thus, soft power is both an environment and a supple tool for influence. The concrete political and cultural impacts of such propaganda and manipulation have yet to be studied, as this is a very recent phenomenon.

However, it is a major cultural development in the region that will inevitably cause shifts in discourse, ideology, and political relationships between nations and cultural groups; for this reason, it is vital that the Turkish television industry, its output, and its impact be examined closely in the coming years.

From this understanding, the following questions arise: how are television series deliberately used by the Turkish state as tools or mediums for political influence? What are the ultimate aims of such use?

HISTORY OF TURKISH TELEVISION In order to address these questions, an understanding of the historical representations of political agendas in Turkish series is necessary. One salient case study is the long-running television series Kurtlar Vadisi, or Valley of the Wolves. While its production was largely geared toward a domestic Turkish 6 Nehir Ağırseven and Armağan Orki, “Evaluating Turkish TV Series as Soft Power Instruments,” OPUS 7, no. 13 (Dec. 2017), doi:10.26466/opus.353287, 39.

7 Constantinou and Tziarras, 25.

8 Constantinou and Tziarras, 25.

9 IBID. 10 Constantinou and Tziarras, 24.

11 Constantinou and Tziarras, 26.

8 audience, its impacts are far-ranging in the Turkish television industry. Valley of the Wolves first aired in 2003 and was immediately successful; it triggered a series of film versions and television re-makes including the controversial Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, Valley of the Wolves: Pusu (Ambush), and Valley of the Wolves: Palestine. While the various productions in the franchise are diverse in terms of subject matter, they all center on Turkish state intelligence agents.

The franchise’s ratings on television and the box office have been exceedingly high, and it has developed a dedicated following domestically; “a couple went to court for changing the names of their children to those of characters from the show [and] several groups from the audience gathered to perform a death prayer after the death of a main character.”12 Valley of the Wolves is an innovation in both the newly privatized Turkish television market in the 2000s and the “mafia-gang subgenre that emerged after the transformation of the television market.”13 As such, its story and propagandistic motives become even more important. Fundamentally, Valley of the Wolves is a story of nationalistic masculinity, and it continually emphasizes that “nationalism is a patriarchal ideology, and nation-states are patriarchal systems.”14 The series positions itself in a lineage of Turkish nationalist heroes; it “makes references to the period from WWI, the constitution of the Turkish nation-state, and positions the protagonist’s fight in a continuum with the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923).”15 Turkish nationalism becomes the basis of the show. From this nationalistic adaptation, Valley of the Wolves also presents an interesting synthesis of “Turkishness” and Islamic identity that, as a result of state-enforced secularism in the 20th century, had largely been absent in television series before. In her analysis of the show, however, Berfin Emre Cetin emphasizes that “the complementary characteristics of Turkishness and Islam is not a relatively new phenomenon but rather had long been a ruling principle of the Turkish elites who decided and shaped the formation of the Turkish nation-state.”16 Through this coupling of Turkishness and Islam, Valley of the Wolves re-expresses Ataturk’s original Turkish nationalism. Its success has marked the series as a viable blueprint for the formulation of pro-state media in the 2010s as the Turkish political climate has shifted. This is not to say that Valley of the Wolves’ impact was only domestic; it has received much attention internationally: “the Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister had an official meeting with the Turkish Ambassador about the serial [...]

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq has been discussed in the US Congress as an indicator 12 Berfin Emre Çetin, The Paramilitary Hero on Turkish Television: A Case Study on Valley of the Wolves, 2.

13 IBID. 14 Çetin, 3.

15 Çetin, 4.

16 IBID.

9 of anti-Americanism in the Middle East.”17 NEO-OTTOMANISM AND TURKISH TELEVISION

As popularity of Turkish dramas has increased and awareness of this popularity has increased, Turkish series have become a medium to spread the Turkish state’s political and ideological agenda to the international audience.

Turkey is acutely aware of its access to soft power through its exported media. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has ordained himself as “the ‘Sultan of Soft Power’ in the wider Sunni Muslim world, positioning himself as a champion for Palestine in places transcending Turkey and the Sunni Arab world.”18 Turkey does not truly have access to such hegemonic power. AKP, the current ruling party of Turkey that has been in place for the last two decades with an increased authoritarian hold on the state, has explicitly stated and acted upon its desire to “create a distinct and ‘dynamic cultural axis’ as part of its outward and independent foreign policy orientation.”19 As they have gradually consolidated domestic hegemony, the AKP’s international aims are twofold: a material projection of power through hegemony and an ideological projection through the spread of “Turkish norms and values.” Television series are tools for both of these aims.20 These norms and values are articulated through the aforementioned re-constructed “Turkish-Islamic” identity.

Mirroring the right-wing nationalist tendencies and neo-Ottomanism in political discourse in Turkey, both the material and ideological projections are rooted in neo-Ottomanism -- the idea of reviving imperialist influence and cultural, political, and economic hegemony over former Ottoman lands.

The administration views much of the Balkans and specifically countries like Kosovo as “neo-Ottoman vassal state[s], with TV series aiding in strengthening a positive image of Turkey whilst instilling further admiration.”21 The Ottoman Empire is also one of the most popular settings for Turkish dramas.

Particularly iconic is the 2011 series Magnificent Century exploring a highly dramatized life in the palace during Sultan Suleyman’s reign; it was “one of the most popular programs in Turkey […] the [pre]eminent show in the Middle East, broadcasted in 45 nations, with the programs subtly altering cultural norms.”22 This historically inaccurate, stylized, and dramatized portrayal of palace life acts as propaganda for and a whitewashing of the Ottomans as a modern, sophisticated, and highly sexualized society; this serves as propaganda for the Turkish state by extension, as the current ruling party views itself as 17 18 19 20 21 22

Çetin, 2.

Constantinou and Tziarras, 26.

Constantinou and Tziarras, 27.

Constantinou and Tziarras, 26, 32.

Constantinou and Tziarras, 29.

Constantinou and Tziarras, 27.

10 a neo-Ottoman entity. Of course, Ottoman period series also have a domestic audience; shows like Dirilis: Ertugrul, with highly successful ratings, “convey the notion that Turkey has a distinctive mission as the heir of a great empire […] these series calms viewers by capitalizing on a satisfying myth of Turkish glory.”23 In essence, the Turk begins seeing himself as the Ottoman and Turkish hero with a glorious cultural lineage and a destiny to rule over the former Ottoman lands.

CASE IN POINT: PAYITAHT

Payitaht: Abdulhamid, or The Last Emperor in English, serves as a useful case study to analyze the recent neo-Ottoman propaganda in television series.

Premiering in 2017, it centers on the 34th and last Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II. In introducing the series, producer Yusuf Esenkal said, “The series will show the ‘Greek War’ which the Ottomans won after many years of loss. The series will also feature the First Zionist Congress, the construction of the Hejaz Railway and the debate over the lands of Palestine which the Ottoman sultan did not give away to the Western powers. The only message we want to deliver with ‘Payitaht Abdülhamid’ is to ‘fight until the end.’”24 This is an essential neo-Ottoman discursive construction: an anti-Western stance appropriating anti-imperialist language while advocating for the Ottoman empire’s right to rule the Middle East and its surrounding territories. It is not empire, exploitation, and lack of sovereignty that is the issue. Rather, the Muslim Turks have an inherent right to conquer land and rule them because of their religious and historical authority. The Palestinian land is not thought to belong to the people living on it, but to the Ottoman Empire; they do not oppose Zionism in support of Palestine’s indigenous population, but because it encroaches on the Ottomans’ controlled lands. Indeed, the show serves as a repudiation and rewriting of the history of the later Ottoman empire, Abdülhamid’s many mistakes, and the late Ottomans’ many atrocities; it also serves as a clear allegory for modern-day Turkey. Various conspiratorial powers serve as “enemies” of the Turkish and/or Muslim people in AKP discourse. It leaves viewers “with a revisionist, conspiratorial narrative of Turkish history” and “the series’ villains actually strongly resemble those imagined by President Erdoğan, with the entwining of conspiracies being germane to the grand conspiracy referred to by, again, Erdoğan, and watched over by an obscure puppet-master he calls ‘the Mastermind,’ the title of a documentary aired on a prominent pro-government news channel that, inter alia, exposed how Jews controlled the world for the 23 Constantinou and Tziarras, 28.

24 “Sultan Abdulhamid’s Era Depicted in New TV Series.” DailySabah, Daily Sabah, 10 Jan. 2017, www.dailysabah.com/arts-culture/2017/01/11/sultan-abdulhamids-era-depicted-in-new-t-series, 1.

11 previous 3,500 years.”25 The enemy of the state/people (the two merge into a single entity) shifts according to conspiracy and in a manner that is historically inaccurate. This often serves to further demonize historically marginalized communities in the region such as Middle Eastern Jewish communities. The neo-Ottoman Turkish nationalists always position the Turks as a paradoxical perennial glorious hero and pitiable victim.

An analysis of the first episode of Payitaht Abdülhamid26 serves as an excellent example of this form of neo-Ottoman propaganda. The episode begins with the Sultan Abdülhamid marching through the streets of Istanbul in what seems to be an official ceremony. Men and women wave modern Turkish flags, and the soldiers surrounding him play traditional imperial anthem music. This music and imagery is particularly evocative for a Turkish audience, as it is very closely associated with national military pride and particularly the Turkish War of Independence, which takes place not long after the events of the television show. Payitaht immediately awakens a nationalist spirit and a sense of pride in a Turkish audience, and then deftly orients this emotional response in a negative direction: during the procession, a coin engraved with the Star of David is passed from a member of the crowd to one of the soldiers, signaling the beginning of an insurrection. The soldiers yell and shoot at the Sultan’s car, and the screen immediately cuts to the logo of the show -- Payitaht Abdülhamid written under the Ottoman coat of arms.

In its first few minutes, Payitaht establishes a conflict between the righteous empire and its evil dissidents that sets the tone of the show. The show blatantly takes advantage of this dichotomy: the “righteous” characters, including the Sultan, are depicted in bright lighting and warm-toned physical settings; the music in scenes centering on the Sultan becomes traditional. Imperial anthems or the mehter military music are again particularly notable because of their nationalist, militaristic connotation in Turkish culture. Abdülhamid is lauded by the viziers: he is “the ruler of the believers, the patron of the people who believe in God, the servant of Mecca and Medina, the caliph of God on Earth, the mighty Abdülhamid the second… may God strengthen your caliphate, and may God make your country everlasting!” While it could be argued that this is simply a representation of ceremonies centered on poetic praise of a ruler, it cannot be denied that this also is a manifestation of the series’ characterization of Abdülhamid. Also of note is the religious undertones of the lauding: Abdülhamid is clearly ordained as the hero of the show, but this praise also introduces the righteousness of his character -- a righteousness predicated upon religious character and qualities. This is reinforced in the representa25 Constantinou and Tziarras, 28.

26 Payitaht Abdülhamid, Episode 1, “Payitaht Abdülhamid 1.Bölüm,” TRT Televizyon (5 July 2018), YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyNz3YvSEhk.

12 tion of the opposite end of the dichotomy. Dissident palace residents, or those who simply question the Sultan’s authority, are depicted in darker settings with ominous music. The members of the palace who disagree with the Sultan and royalty are also explicitly advocating for Western influence and are depicted as disinterested in tradition, Turkish identity, and Islam. The young princes of the Yildiz Palace joke that they have “forgotten Nas and Felak,” short verses of the Qur’an that are basic knowledge for most Muslims, even those without any sort of formal religious education. It is implied that they are far removed from their traditions and religion, emboldening their interest in (Western) modernity. Virtue or lack thereof, then, is signaled by attitude toward religion and tradition and the consequential attitude toward Western influence. Beyond a signal of virtue, interest in modernity also becomes an indication of depravity and evil. A pasha who disagrees with the Sultan’s rule, for example, praises the United States and its exploitation of Black slave labor for building railroads. Most audiences will interpret this as a highly offensive stance; thus the connections between evil, lack of interest in religion and tradition, advocacy for modernity, and opposition to Ottoman royalty are strengthened as a mass in diametric opposition to the “good” and “righteous” Ottoman ruler.

Payitaht transforms “Turkish” virtue into explicitly “Islamic” virtue.

The show taps into the rise of Anti-Semitism (distinct from Anti-Zionism) among Muslims of the Middle East, who view the issue of Palestine as a religious struggle instead of an anti-colonial struggle. With specific references to Muslims as a mass group, the Caliphate, and Islamic virtues, the show succeeds in providing an attractive portrait of the Ottoman empire to its international Muslim viewers. The Ottoman Empire, and by proxy the contemporary neo-Ottoman Turkish state, became the vanguard of the Muslim world. Thus, the Turkish state establishes a natural route to hegemony over the region’s Muslim population. Payitaht Abdülhamid is a comprehensive articulation of the many facets of Turkish dramas as tools of soft power: neo-Ottomanism, the rise of a Turko-Islamic identity, the rise of Turkish cultural products as soft power, and the AKP’s explicit aims of establishing hegemony over a “Muslim” world or the Middle East are evident.

Imagining The Horizon

The violent cycle of ‘modernity’ in Algeria since 1830

Giacomo McCarthy

R

14

ecently, the French Conseil d’Etat—the French supreme court of administrative justice—upheld a decision from a lower court in 2016 to withhold citizenship from an Algerian spouse of a French citizen because she was unwilling to shake the hand of her male naturalization officer for religious reasons.1 The court ruled against her because her unwillingness to shake the man’s hand proved her “unworthiness or lack of assimilation” because she “refuse[d] to accept the essential values of French society and in particular, equality between men and women.”2 Sixty years earlier, only three years before the 1962 decolonization of French Algeria, the French president Charles de Gaulle, on the proposed assimilation of French and Algerians, said [French are], before anything else, a European people of white race, Greek and Roman culture, and Christian religion.

Don’t try to fool me! The Muslims, have you seen them? Have you seen their turbans and their djellebas? You know well that they aren’t French. Those who promote integration have the mind of a hummingbird. Try to combine oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. Momentarily, they will separate again.

Arabs are Arabs, French are French. You think that France could absorb ten million Muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty and after tomorrow forty? If we integrate, if all of the Arabs and the Berbers of Algeria were considered French, would you stop them from settling in the cities, where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-the-Two-Churches but Colombey-theTwo-Mosques.3

In 1846, 120 years before de Gaulle and only a decade and a half after France had first colonized Algeria, the liberal French statesman Alphonse de Lamartine argued in parliament for perseverance in the Algerian project, saying “The Arabs were impermeable to European civilization; they could never be seated by the side of European communities in one body, politic and social; the fusion 4 of the races—a fine phrase—happened to be beyond human ability.”

Since colonization, the French bureaucracy has struggled to recognize Algerians as capable of becoming French, for reasons of race, religion, and a lack of “modernity.”5 It is the process and result of this concept of modernity

1 Aurilein Breeden, “No Handshake, No Citizenship, French Court Tells Algerian Woman,” New York Times 2018, 218.

2 , in 365587, ed. The Conseil d’Etat (Paris 2013).

3 Daniel Pipes, “Why Was Enoch Powell Condemned as a Racist and Not Charles De Gaulle?,” (Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, 2013). (my translation) 4 Walsh, “Mr. Walsh’s Letter to the National Intelligencer,” Littel’s Living Age 10, no. 116 (1846).

5 Abdelmajid Hannoum, Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11.

15 in Algeria that becomes the focus of this paper. This modernity is not separate from race and religion, as Frantz Fanon recognizes in The Wretched of the Earth, saying that the colonial Church is adulterated religion that brings the culture and the values of “the white man;” “the ways of the oppressor.”6 French racial and religious hegemony are instead parts of modernity’s “restructuring of society by regulating space, politics, and subjectivity of the individual—language, education, body, sexuality, values and ideas, family, health, feelings, taste, and so forth” that has been linked to violence and brutality since 1830.7

Three periods since the French colonization of Algeria demonstrate the influence of the imposition of modernity and the extreme violence that it is associated with. The first is the modernity of colonization—from France’s official entry in 1830 to the Second Republic’s 1848 declaration of Algeria as an “integral part of France.”8 9 Second is revolutionary or national modernity that came with the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s, and third is the postcolonial modernity that manifested itself in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s. By connecting the prevailing rationale of modernity in these three periods, this paper argues that the violence of the Algerian Civil War was a product of the colonial French imposition of “modernity.”

MODERNITY AND VIOLENCE

In the introduction to his book on violence and modernity in Algeria, Abdelmajid Hannoum tells the story of his conversation with a son of a shahid (a martyr who died fighting French colonial rule). The man held a striking opinion: although the colonial period was tragic and brutal, he believed that “’for us [Algerians], colonialism is the equivalent of Europe’s industrial revolution. It brought us modernity.’”10 Although this “modernity” had caused the death of his father as well as a number of his countrymen, this shahid’s son concluded that it was worth its price. Alexis de Tocqueville, the influential French political theorist, agreed with the shahid’s son, justifying the use of violence: “I have often heard men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women, and children.”11 For both Tocqueville and the shahid’s son, the value of modernity outweighed the value of Algerian lives.

In his 1990 book The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens 6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963), 7.

7 Hannoum, 8.

8 Jan Repa, “Analysis: France’s Algerian Wounds,” BBC, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/europe/3974237.stm.

9 Fiona Barclay, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism and French Algeria,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 2 (2018).

10 Hannoum, 1.

11 Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, trans. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore, MD: The John’s Hopkins University Press, 2001), 70.

16 addresses this violence that has succeeded modernity. Notably, colonial violence is not included on his list.12 Following the example of the shahid’s son, Hannoum suggests that the “reason for this may lie in the common belief that colonialism was redeemed because it brought modernity to the rest of the world,” or that colonialism negotiated violence with a set of values and ideas that would eventually bring a lasting peace and global enlightenment.13 14 However, the critics of modernity note that there has yet to be a lasting peace.15 As Michel Foucault says, “Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.”16 Modernity brings violence not only in the form of death and destruction, but also as a discursive formation of reason. This reason, which Foucault calls “the task of the Enlightenment,” found a chaotic world and “embarks on a rational ordering of the social world. It attempts to classify and regulate all forms of experience through a systematic construction of knowledge and discourse.”17 This system provides the framework of modernity and the platform from which power asserts itself.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to course the development of modernity through Europe. Its emergence in that continent had taken hold in the seventeenth century onward, from where it began to spread.18 Its spread via colonialism through the lands of Islam and the “Orient” has been explained as its own discourse and termed by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said argues that the “Orient” itself is the discursive formation of colonial endeavors, empowered by the tendrils of “modernity,” into non-Western territories.19 This Orient became exotic and romantic; the intriguing but careless antithesis to Western “modernity.” Western linguists, historians, theologians, and philosophers descended onto the “Orient” to observe, judge, and report back. Western perspectives saw a lack of “modernity” and created knowledge about the “Orient” that saw its society, people, and culture as lesser.20 This understanding fed the 12 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

13 Hannoum, 2.

14 Kevin Duong, “The Demands of Glory: Tocqueville and Terror in Algeria,” The Review of Politics 80, no. 1 (2018).

15 Mark Antaki, “The Critical Modernism of Hannah Arendt,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, no. 1 (2007).

16 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

17 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), 43.

18 Giddens, 1.

19 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 7.

20 Ibid., 5.

17 logic of necessary colonialism and the replacing of local epistemologies and ontologies with the modernity of the colonizer.21

The trivialization of non-Western values opens the dichotomous space that the scholar of Africa V.Y. Mudimbe calls “marginality,” or “the intermediate space between the so-called tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism.”22 It forces individuals to choose from three options: the first, abandoning society for the old ways, perpetually punished by the cloud of colonialism, the second, accepting the new way and assimilating into the western system, or the third, subconscious option of existing in the marginalized space, unwilling to surrender to the west and associating with surviving structures of the past.23 Colonialism becomes a violent effort to enforce the marginalization of the colonized.24 COLONIAL MODERNITY

The French incursion into Algeria officially began in 1830 after the Ottoman Dey presiding over Algiers insulted the French consul and refused to make the demanded reparations.25 The response was a fleet of one-hundred strong carrying 35,000 men. It departed on May 5 and landed on June 14 and soon captured Algiers, ending a 214-year period of Ottoman rule.26 The French, however, declared that their violence was directed towards the Turkish overlords, and that the inhabitants would soon be free. Despite this promise, the Bey of Titteri was given regional command and swore an oath of fidelity to France only a day after the French victory in Algiers.27

The new French rule was not yet secure. To the east, Ahmad, the Bey of Constantinople, maintained power even after the Ottomans surrendered the territory because his mother’s Arab heritage gave him regional legitimacy.28 To the west and south of Algiers, along the Moroccan border, was Abdel Qader, a sayyid from a powerful family.29 30 By 1832, Abdel Qader was proclaimed by regional leaders as the “sultan of the Arabs,” and by 1834 had signed a secret treaty with the French recognizing his sovereignty and providing him with territory, including the costal port of Arzew.31 Once word of this secret treaty 21 Ibid., 7.

22 V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 5.

23 The Idea of Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

24 The Invention of Africa.

25 “The French in Africa.-Algeria,” The British Foreign Review 18 (1844): 287.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 289.

28 Tocqueville, 19.

29 Ibid.

30 John W. Kiser, Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd El-Kader (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2008), 47.

31 Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present,

18 got back to France, however, the new republican leadership was dissatisfied and replaced the French general in charge, who reneged on the established treaty and pursued an unsuccessful war against Abdel Qader.32 His failures led to his replacement by Thomas Robert Bugeaud, who became Abdel Qader’s main adversary until Abdel Qader’s defeat in 1847. Abdel Qader controlled as much as two thirds of the Algerian territory during his campaign against the French after a treaty signed in 1837.33 It was only in 1841 when Bugeaud was made governor of Algeria and was provided an influx of military resources that he was able to wage a total war of against Abdel Qader that more or less consolidated the former Regency of Algiers under the Tricolore.34 The French suppression of Abdel Qader and other Algerian anti-colonialists was informed by the logic of modernity. In 1831, Barrachin, the ‘sous-intendant civil’ sent Governor General Berthezène a confidential memo describing a process of colonization aimed at a “slow and progressive refoulement of the indigenous people and their replacement with an imported population.”35 This refoulement was defined later by Amédée Desjobert, a colonial deputy whose job was to report periodically on the Algerian situation: “Up until this moment in time, no one has set out in writing the means by which the Arabs are to be exterminated, for wise voices have instead taken to using the term refoulement without troubling the meaning of this term or looking at what it might mean.”36 This tolerance for mass murder was developed through the Orientalist logic of colonialism that had developed in the centuries leading up to the colonization of Algeria. Ann Thomson’s study of European attitudes to the Maghreb in the 18th century demonstrates the development of this Orientalist logic, citing the 18th century French Orientalist Laugier de Tassy’s effort at combating French anti-Islamism: On m’a demandé plus d’une fois s’ils avaient quelque idée de la Divinité. Mais je suis persuade que si ces personnes venaient à converser avec des Mahometans deguisés en chrétiens, elles leur trouveraient autant de raison et solitité qu’à ces derniers; mais qu’ils reprissent le turban, aussitôt toutes leurs qualités disparaîtraient.37

She concludes that by the time the French forces had landed in Algieria, “any trans. Michael Brett (London: Hurst & Company, 1990), 12.

32 William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 60.

33 Ageron, 18.

34 Ibid., 20.

35 Gallois, 161.

36 Ibid.

37 Ann Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes Towards the Maghreb in the 18th Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987), 19.

19 attempt to understand the peoples as equals…had vanished,”38 a conclusion widely supported in recent studies of Colonial Algeria.39 40 41

Thus, the civilizing mission of modernity was justified even at the cost of violence. Often, this violence was made more tolerable when juxtaposed with French descriptions of Algerian-Algerian violence. French accounts of tribal wars emphasized their gore and brutality—rather than dying in combat, fighters were “decapitated,” massacred,” or “shorn of their heads.”42 In 1836, the French officially determined that “to decapitate one’s vanquished foes was a revolting form of barbarism deserving exemplary punishment.”43 The French role was to guide the Algerians away from their natural brutality to a more civilized form of warfare. This becomes ironic given that in 1831 Pierre Boyer, a French officer, had executed by decapitation two Moroccans in Algeria for being spies of the emperor of Morocco.44 This was not an isolated incident of unnecessary and brutal French-Arab violence. The expected reaction to Algerian insurrections such as “cases where tribes had somehow betrayed the French, either by switching their allegiances or attacking French troops or tribes allied to France”45 became the razzia. These raids were extremely violent—examples include the 1836 bombardment of the town of Blida, the 1832 assault on El Oufia, “in which ‘men, women and children were massacred indiscriminately,’” or the 1833 raid on the Gharaba, which saw 200 tribal deaths, 500 injured, the confiscation of livestock, and the imprisonment of the tribe’s women, elderly, and children.46 The razzia had one of two purposes: it could be punitive, or, during the second decade of French presence in Algeria, it could be persuasive, intended to send a message to the tribe that they would be safer as allies of the French rather than Abdel Qader.47 48 For Algerians, these massacres became a system of cultural conversion that forced Frenchness and modernity as superior by using the violence that it claimed was its antithesis.

38 Ibid., 31.

39 Martin Thomas, “Mapping Violence onto French Colonial Minds,” in The French Colonial Mind, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), xxi.

40 Malika Rebai Maamri, The State of Algeria: The Politics of a Post-Colonial Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 23.

41 Gennady Shkliarevsky, “Overcoming Modernity and Violence,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2015).

42 Gallois, 81.

43 Ibid., 85.

44 Ibid., 89.

45 Ibid., 90.

46 Ibid., 91-92.

47 Ibid., 101.

48 Count St. Marie, “Algeria in 1845,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846): 334.

20 In France, these moments of extreme violence, when they were publicized by the media, were seen as aberrations of a colonial mission that occasionally used violence in the effort of peace. This public tolerance of France in Algeria was tested in 1845 when the French press was leaked the story of the massacre at Dahra.49 Buguaud had sent Colonel Jean Jacques Pélissier to subdue the Ouled Riah tribe, but after minor skirmishes and failed negotiations, the desperate tribe ensconced itself within a labyrinth of caves. They misjudged Pélissier, who ordered his men to throw burning bundles of tree branches into the caves. Twelve hours later, the French soldiers searched the caves for signs of life among 600-1000 corpses of men, women, and children.50 Internationally, the massacre was met with disgust. British media described it, saying “a fouler blot does not stain the page of French history,”51 and, in a poem, “Monsters, ye are not men!—a cursed deed is yours!”52 The popular American magazine Littell’s Living Age condemned it, begging the French to repent, “We know you Frenchmen to be brave. You have been proving it for centuries. Reprobate the Dahra massacre to prove that you are not cruel.”53 In France, however, opinion was different. One newspaper remarked, “Are we not guilty of having over excited, by the abominable affair of the grotto of the Dahra, the ferocious instincts of our savage adversaries? Have not we, a civilized people, given to our barbarian adversaries the example of barbarianism?”54 The French majority believed otherwise, casting Pélissier as a “modern Hamlet” faced with a difficult decision that he eventually made for the greater good.55 The opinion was represented in parliament by Mr. Ferdinand Barrot, who defended the act as necessary in the “conquest…of civilization over barbarism.”56 Only fifteen years into the French Algerian project, the massacre of as many of 1000 Algerians, the majority of whom were non-combatants, was not enough to slow the project of modernity.

The violence of colonial modernity was not limited to blood, gore, and destruction. Abdelmajid Hannoum recognizes that 49 William Gallois, “Dahra and the History of Violence in Early Colonial Algeria,” in The French Colonial Mind, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska Univeristy Press, 2011), 3.

50 Amar Belkhodja, Les Enfumedades Du Dahra: Les 1000 Martyrs Des Ouled Ryah (Algiers: El Kalima Editions, 2011), 1-25.

51 James Grant, “Massacre at Dahra,” The Metropolitan Magazine 43, no. 172 (1845).

52 Emma Robinson, “The Dahra Massacre, by the Author of Richeliue in Love, the Prohibited Comedy,” Ainsworth’s Magazine1845.

53 “The Cave of Uig and the Cave of Dahra,” Littell’s Living Age 6, no. 70 (1845).

54 Walsh.

55 Gallois, “Dahra and the History of Violence in Early Colonial Algeria,” 4.

56 Walsh.

21 French colonialism engaged in the conquest of knowledge from the earliest stages of its long history, and it turned soldiers into scholars and administrators into historians and ethnographers. It became a machine of thought despite its sustained and violent physical practices. In only a few decades, 1830 to 1871, France’s reservoir of knowledge about Algeria grew to a colossal size. Colonial scholars did not neglect any region, city, or time period. Monographs, reports, maps, statistics, journals, and magazines were produced with amazing speed and efficiency to tackle each issue related to the colony.57

In order to create the structure needed by modernity, the French first had to create the knowledge that is its keystone. Hayden White, in his “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” argues that this formulation of knowledge administers a narrativized perspective and distorts an ‘empirical’ history: the colonial historian who addresses Algeria, consciously or not, comes to the knowledge with a subconscious agenda, internalized in his mind by the narrative of the discourse he presumes to study.58 59 This creation of knowledge is what leads William Gallois to call early French colonialism in Algeria genocide by referencing Raphael Lemkin, who created the term and said that “the end [result of genocide] may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feeling and their religion.”60 The project of colonialism was brought to replace what was present in Algeria with the system of modernity and the culture of France.61 Donald Denoon and Patrick Wolfe claim that settler colonialism made communal farming, nomadism, and tent-based lifestyles impossible.62 In the early period of French presence in Algeria, the logic of the modern had made the lifestyles and customs of the past impossible or obscured, a part of an “uncivilized” and “barbaric” past.

NATION AND REVOLUTION: THE MODERNITY OF DECOLONIZATION

Jean-Paul Sartre charts decolonization in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The colonizer, fed up with his native slave’s stunted output (no matter how “beaten, undernourished, ill, or terrified”63 he is) reaches the settler’s contradiction: although he believes he should punish his slave’s insurrection with death, he cannot, for he relies on the slave’s production. Thus, “because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to 57 Hannoum, 95.

58 Ibid., 98.

59 Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Reality 7, no. 1 (1980).

60 Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony, 147.

61 Walsh.

62 Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony.

63 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 16.

22 animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.”64

It was between 1847 and 1956, two years into the Algerian War of Independence, that the rest of the space that is known as Algeria was gradually conquered by the French armies. During this time, the French colonial project in Algeria expanded with its territory.65 Settlers—the French unemployed—were brought in unsuccessfully in 1848 to colonize the land. Success only occurred in the mid 1860s when the Société de Crédit Foncier et de Banque and Société Marseillaise de Crédit were created to spark European investment and settlement in Algeria.66 They served as the middlemen for the industry between France and Algeria which was crafted to benefit the French and its settlers, but not the Algerians. Sartre demonstrates this in Colonialism and Neocolonialism: goods are manufactured in France with the capital generated in Algeria which are then sold back to the colonizers in Algeria who generate money without empowering the Algerians by avoiding industry but instead investing in agriculture and raw materials.67 However, because all of the good land in Algeria prior to colonization was cultivated, Sartre calls the history of French colonialism in Algeria “the progressive concentration of European land ownership at the expense of Algerian ownership.”68 By the beginning of the revolution, Algerian land was divided with 3 million hectares belonging to European settlers, 11 million to the French state, and seven million to the Algerians.69 Two thirds of the agricultural production was European (92 billion francs), one third was Algerian (48 billion), except only a third of the Algerian production went untaxed or unpurchased by French entities. This maintained the population at a considerable level of poverty with just enough purchasing power to sustain the import of French goods.70

These were the economic conditions at the onset of the Algerian War for Independence. Although the war officially began in 1954, conflict first showed itself on Victory Europe Day—May 8, 1945. As French citizens celebrated the end of the European theater of WWII, Algerians protested for independence. Their protest turned violent and they massacred 100 settlers. The French army retaliated with the killing of between 1000 and 45000 Algerians.71 64 Ibid.

65 George R. Trumbull IV, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam in Algeria, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

66 Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (New York: Routledge, 2005), 10.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., 12.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 14.

71 Christopher Hitchens, “A Chronology of the Algerian War of Independence,”

23 On October 10, 1954, the FLN (National Liberation Front) formed as a socialist political party with the revolutionary goal of overthrowing the French. After the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the FLN launched the Algerian War on November 1 by triggering nationwide revolts. The following August, their tactics became more direct and more controversial, attacking pied-noir (European) civilians directly. In September 1956 the Battle of Algiers began with three public bombings of European targets by Algerian women. After the failure of the French government to suppress the revolution, a group of piedsnoirs demanded Charles de Gaulle be made leader of France. He was given the position but was unable to stop the revolution and in 1959 determined that Algerian self-determination was necessary. By spring of 1962, a ceasefire had been declared between the FLN and the French government, and on July 1, 1962 six million Algerians voted for an independent Algeria, formally ending French colonialism.72 The new Algerian nation found itself in a difficult position. The British-Ghanaian scholar Kwame Appiah described the challenge of nation building after decolonization, saying “if the history of Metropolitan Europe…has been a struggle to establish statehood for nationalities, Europe left Africa at independence with States looking for nations.”73 The borders of territory that was now Algeria had only been established since the French conquered a strip of land on the country’s western border in 1956—two years after the revolution had started. With this state territory, the new government had to create a nation. If a nation is, as Anthony Smith describes, “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture…a territorial community of shared history and culture,”74 it follows that, despite the nationalism inherent to the revolution, it would be difficult to establish a coherent nation within Algeria’s massive borders.75 This summary reveals the imperfections of decolonization. It cannot turn time to a period before colonialism. Decolonization occurs in a world that has been built out of modernity. Modernity lurks in the asphalt of highways and runways, the conference rooms in office buildings and universities, the teacher’s blackboard, and the nation’s borders. The revolutionary argues for statehood apart from the colonizer’s influence even though the state is a westThe Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/11/a-chronology-of-the-algerian-war-of-independence/305277/.

72 Ibid.

73 Michael Onyebuchi Eze, The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 125.

74 Anthony D. Smith, “The Nation: Real or Imagined,” in People, Nation, and State: The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism, ed. Edward Mortimer and Robert Fine (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999).

75 Hannoum, 194.

24 ern institution. He learns in universities that is of or a product of the colonizer.

He rebels against the system but does not escape it. The only means of change left to him are those that were used to subjugate him.76 It is ironic that Frantz Fanon, the great controversial revolutionary psychologist and author in Algeria wrote and published his books in French, the language of the oppressor. His arguments are for violence as a retaliation for violence, which is contradictory; he argues that the only way to escape colonialism is to use its structures and its logic against it.77 The irony of this does not escape even Sartre’s laudatory preface, which questions the settler, “In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore and for which there is no cure?”78 The logic of modernity asphyxiates its alternatives by disguising its own revolution as revolution against itself, only unmasked by the characteristic violence with which it is inseparable.

POSTCOLONIAL MODERNITY

Three decades after the success of the war for independence, Algeria was once again thrown into a bloody conflict that brought into conflict a faction that seemed to resemble modernity and colonial influence and a group that championed itself as the voice of the people and the truly decolonized Algeria.79 In 1992, the government—which had seen rule by only one party, the FLN, since decolonization—cancelled the parliamentary elections because the Islamist FIS had secured a dominant victory.80 The result was a brutal civil war that saw high numbers of civilian casualties, estimated between 4400081 and 200000.82 These deaths were often carried out in raids on villages that went unclaimed by either faction. In 1997 alone, there were 13 massacres that led to the deaths of at least 50 civilians. Marnia Lazreg characterizes the brutality as the second coming of the Algerian War of Independence; a revolution against the French and those Algerians (the FLN) who they see as upholding the legacy of colonialism.83

The Algerian Civil War that was fought between two political parties was a war between two differently imagined Algerian nations. The FLN’s 76 Ibid., 217.

77 Fanon.

78 Sartre, “Preface,” 16.

79 Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 258.

80 Hannoum, 174.

81 Roman Hagelstein, “Explaining the Violence Pattern of the Algerian Civil War,” Households in Conflict Network (2008).

82 Fouad Ajami, “The Furrows of Algeria,” The New Republic, https://newrepublic. com/article/72807/the-furrows-algeria.

83 Lazreg.

25 nation was Fanon’s nation—Arab, secular, and socialist. The FIS conceived its nation as Islamic; its nation was “to form the Muslim, Arab, Algerian nation in precisely the form that colonialism wanted to obliterate.”84 This nation relied on Islam overcome the Western cultural, economic, and political modernity that had sunk deep into the fabric of Algerian society.85 It borrowed concepts from Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Westoxification, a book that was instrumental in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Ahmad argues that the only way to shed the colonial influence is by relying on Islam, the only extant structure in Islamic countries that was not restructured by the West.86 The Algerian Civil War was then a war between the militant political party (now with the might of “The Algerian Government”) that was named “terrorist” by its French overlords in the 1950s and 60s and that fought to overthrow its colonial, foreign leaders and a new militant political party, forced to fight a guerilla war, named “terrorist” by the government of the FLN and that fought to overthrow the legacy of colonialism perpetuated by the foreign-educated national elite. In the process, thousands of non-combatant Algerians were killed, slaughtered, and murdered.

Hannoum recounts another anecdote, this time from his childhood growing up in the Maghreb. He was assigned two books at the same time: in his Arabic literature course, he was given a book by a Salafist Moroccan, Allal al-Fasi, that treats on colonial exploitation. In his French course, he was given Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.87 Both argue passionately against the colonial influence. The former is the FIS’s condemnation of colonial influence; the latter is foundational literature in the FLN’s anti-colonial revolution of the past. Yet they argue against each other; they are deemed incompatible. Neither realizes that modernity is the colonial legacy that each is unwilling to get rid of; that neither knows how to get rid of. This modernity is avidly consumed by Islamic revolutionaries and socialist professors alike. It goes uncritiqued.88 The Nigerian thinker Abiola Irele commented on the irony of modernity’s influence in the former colonies, saying We are conscious of the irreversible nature of the transformations the impact of Europe has effected in our midst and which are so extensive as to define the…frame of reference of our contemporary existence.

The traditional pre-colonial culture and way of life continue to exist as a reality among us, but they constitute an order of existence that is… in a direction dictated by the requirements of a modern scientific and technological civilization. It also happens to be the case that Western civilization…provides the paradigm of modernity to which we aspire.

Hence…the ambivalence we demonstrate in response to Europe and

84 85 86 87 88

Hannoum, 194.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Weststruckness (New York: Mazda Publishing, 2012).

Ibid.

Hannoum.

Ibid., 220.

26 Western civilization is in fact a measure of our emotional tribute; it is expressive, in a profound way, of the cultural hold Europe has secured upon us—of the alienation it has imposed upon us as a historical fate.89

This quote resembles Mudimbe’s marginalized space, the place where the colonized mind exists.90 The Algerian “mind”91 then wears the hallmarks of colonialism: it is neither modern (as it was informed by colonial domination), but it knows that it is not of the past either. Meanwhile, Algerian political society has been ripped into a binary between the religious and the secular and the colonizer and the colonized. The FIS claims to represent true anticolonialism while the FLN, terrified of giving up its power, refuses to accept the inevitable democratic victory of the Islamists. In Civil War, political lines are drawn between citizens; they are Islamist or they are secular. Choose one, and you are safe from half of the violence; choose neither and you will be threatened from both sides.92 The terror of modernity reveals itself: the new binary represents small parts of society—the fervently non-religious leftists or the staunch Islamists—and fails to represent the vast majority of the people who exist within Mudimbe’s mindset of marginality—they are religious, and they live in the twentieth century.93 Sartre illustrates the mindset of marginalization at the moment of decolonization in his preface to The Wretched of the Earth. The colonized, he says, realize that they would rather their traditions and their past to the “Acropolis” of Europe. However, “they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens.”94 This is an impossible existence and the reaction is violent. It is violent against the colonizer and it is violent against the native who stands in the way. Whatever must be done to rid the individual of colonialism becomes tolerable to himself.95 But once colonialism is gone, the colors of the world are unchanged. There is still poverty, struggle, political dissatisfaction— the French palace becomes the Algerian president’s house.96 The dichotomy of pre-independence still exists—Algeria 89 Eze, 89.

90 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa.

91 Martin Thomas, “Mapping the French Colonial Mind,” in The French Colonial Mind, ed. Martin Thomas (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2011), xv.

92 Maamri, 94.

93 Jacob Mundy, “Expert Intervention: Knowledge, Violence and Identity During the Algerian Crisis, 1997-1998,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 23 (2010).

94 Sartre, “Preface,” 20.

95 Ibid., 21.

96 “La Presidence,” http://www.el-mouradia.dz/francais/presidence/presidencefr. htm.

27 is neither modern nor is it of the past. The cultural divisions, tensions, and dissatisfactions still exist as they did in the colonial period, and so violence comes once again.97 CONCLUSION Abdelhamid Ben Badis, a leader of the Algerian Islam reform movement of the 1930s, passionately claimed in a speech: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my nation!”98 He is emphasizing the parts of his identity that the French had negated—Islam, Arabic, and a national Algerian psychology. This is, despite its revolutionary anti-colonial tone, a modern statement. It is accepting “Algeria” as Algerian and it associates values to this national entity—Hannoum realizes that this statement would never have been uttered before 1830.99 Neither would there have been a Civil War, an Islamist movement, or a revolutionary overthrow of colonialism. All of these are reactions to the colonial moment.

In each period studied in this paper there have been commonalities: each was touched by violence, and each established binary relationships between different factions of society. In the first period, in which colonial knowledge justified mass killings and war crimes, there were the French and the natives. At decolonization, the battle lines were drawn between the pieds-noirs and the revolutionaries, and finally during the civil war of the 1990s there were the Islamists and there were the secularists. An elaboration of this process of modernity sees how these binaries can be created. Colonialism brings “modernity” which needs to create knowledge to sustain itself. This modernity and this knowledge holds certain wavelengths of human thought as superior, “reason,” “liberty,” “freedom,” and “equality” high among them. Ironically, a power dynamic develops between those who are seen to possess these qualities and those who aren’t. There are then two choices: those qualified to be modern by its most recent definition, and those who are not. The subaltern group, eventually realizing violence to be the demonstrably successful method of winning power, uses modern structures against those who had imposed “modernity” onto them. The structure of modernity then rebuilds, redeveloping the binary of the powerful and the powerless that it needs to sustain itself. Thus, the civil war of the 1990s was a continuation of the fracturing initiated by the 130 years of French colonialism in Algeria.100

97 Hannoum, 226.

98 Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Disposessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 44.

99 Hannoum, 10.

100 Ibid., 226.

28

The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a redhot iron, with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words “Parthenon! Brotherhood!” and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open “...thenon! ...therhood!” It was the golden age.

It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism.

-Jean-Paul Sartre,

preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth

Cartooning at Twilight Ottoman political cartoons, 1908-1911

Bryan Rusch

T

30

he Ottoman Empire was familiar with the dangers of nationalism at the onset of the First World War. At the heart of the Empire, the Turks of Anatolia had established their own brand of nationalism following the 1908 Revolution which left the Young Turks in power, reestablishing the constitution and party politics alongside the Sultanate.1 Internal ethnic divisions had also given rise to nationalistic struggles throughout the Empire which first manifested themselves with the Balkan Wars in 1912, in which Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece took Macedonia, Albanian and Thrace from the Ottomans. This region would continue to be a hotbed of nationalistic sentiment, ultimately sparking World War I with the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Serbia. The Balkan Wars had unintended cultural consequences for the Ottomans, signaling their Imperial disintegration and reformation into the Republic of Turkey. The new Turkey’s emergence as a powerful modern republic was foreseen by the entities vying to define the future of their country.

This re-identification is tangible in the visible culture of Ottoman satirical political cartoons. In this artistic space – only present between 1908 to 1911 due to tight censorship – a process of multi-critique2 was used to provide readership with opinions that were not just one-sided. The benefits and dangers of Western powers and their cultural influence, dilemmas of the Empire’s range of languages and writing3 techniques, and the concern and promise of both the new and old regimes were explored in the same periodicals, and sometimes even in the same frame. To accomplish this complex task, artists took to using an array of recognizable techniques which manipulated local Turkish culture and recent events to make their subjects simplified and recognizable, immediately providing visual context to the issues to be discussed.

The reoccuring characterization of chorus-figures provided local consciousness and symbology, while photorealistic depictions focused on depicting national politics and Westernization that created a distinct visual cultural schizophrenia. This cultural schizophrenia persisted in the attitudes of political cartoons following the Kemalist 1930s.

ARTISTIC PRECEDENCE The early 1700s saw the advent of political cartoons under William Hogarth, who created the first series of visual satire. The form did not find its po1 Koroglu, Erol. 2007. Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity. New York, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. pg 24 2 Double-Critique and Multi-Critique are ideas developed by miriam cooke in terms of the practice of being critical of both the real and the possible, a common practice in the local commentary of the Middle East:cooke, miriam. 1996. Women and the War Story. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. pg 134 3 Ibid, pg 134

31 litical intentions until James Gillray in the second half of the century.4 While Gillray’s use of caricatures came to define the medium, it was the techniques of allegory pioneered by Daumier and the French ideas of “liberte, fraternite, egalite – hurriyet, uhuvvet, musavaat”5produced during the French Revolution that most influenced Ottoman political cartoons.6 Artistic movements in the Ottoman Empire depended on the whims of each new ruler due to their control over the creation and distribution of artwork. The artwork of the empire’s twilight was themed around aestheticism and utilitarianism in architecture and craftsmanship7 to contrast with the representative and depictive art of the West. However, growing European influence instigated a shift in the Ottoman artistic style by 1908.8

By 1908, over a century of French involvement within Ottoman land since Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt had made French the second language of the elite and had idealized French culture. Many Ottoman thinkers of the mid-19th century were educated in France and brought with them concepts of constitutional politics. Symbols of both Revolutionary and Modern France were melded together to communicate the complex relationship of the growing Ottoman-Turkish divide.

The allegory of Daumier saw the representation of political and societal subjects and ideas as objects and people, in a process of anthropomorphism, presenting their interaction as the primary commentary.9 This is one of the primary tools of Ottoman-Turkish cartoons. Daumier also pioneered the symbol of the feminine state as a force of good, a major theme that will be explored later in this paper.10 One of the most powerful symbols in both French and Ottoman Cartoons was the female ideal of Liberty, who in France is known as ‘Marianne.’11 Despite this strong reliance on foreign precedent, the genius of Ottoman-Turkish Cartoons comes from their synthesis with local 4 Godfrey, Richard. 2001. James Gillray: The Art of Caricature. London, United Kingdom: Tate Gallery. pg 26 5 French, then Turkish for Liberty, Brotherhood, Equality 6 Brummett, Palmira. 2000. Image & Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press 1908-1911. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. pg 79 7 Levey, Michael. 1975. The World of Ottoman Art. New York City, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pg 15 8 Erzen, Jale Nejdet. 1991. “Aesthetics and Aisthesis in Ottoman Art and Architecture.” Journal of Islamic Studies 1-24. pg 2 9 Wechsler, Judith. 2013. “Allegory in the Work of Daumier.” In Daumier, 32-39.

London, United Kingdom: Royal Academy of Arts. pg 33 10 Ibid, pg 37 11 Brummet, Palmira. 1998. “New Womn and Old Nag: Images of Women in the Ottoman Cartoon Space.” In Political Cartoons in the Middle East, by Fatma Muge Gocek, 13-58. Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers. pg 19; Brummett 2000, pg 79

32 customs. As will be examined later in this paper, one major feature which few prior cartoons had explored is the use of constant characters to provide a lens for the audience to view the situation presented and the creation of an active national consciousness which drew the audience into the situation, no matter how foreign.

TURKISH POLITICAL HISTORY The historical context of the Ottoman Empire elucidates the peculiarity and importance of the years between 1908 and 1911 for the development of Ottoman and Turkish visual culture, one must understand the historical and political context which surrounded these three years looking from the 1830s to the 1930s. By the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire was under pressure by external powers which were slowly whittling away at its territories. It had become a distinctly medieval empire that was more than 500 years old and maintained an inadequate military and economy. With limited infrastructure and diminishing economic impetus, it could not keep up with the ascendency of rapidly industrializing European powers. As a response, Sultan Abdulmejid I wrote a series of reforms in 1839 known as the Tanzimat, which set out to redefine Ottoman attitudes and institutions. Styles of dress, financial and tax systems, military functions, and individual rights were all updated over a 37 year period that was governed by two different sultans.12 The outbreak of war, rebellion, and famine wrecked the Empire by the end of this period, inspiring a call for a Constitutional Period, which only lasted from 1876 to 1878, when the new parliament elected its own disbanding due to political unrest.13 The next thirty years under Sultan Abdul Hamid II only led to heightened European involvement in the region and a greater loss of territory.14 A political party of liberal young military officers and bureaucrats, the Young Turks took advantage of the discontent and their military affiliation to throw a peaceful coup, spreading word and growing in popularity in the provinces, until the Sultan had to comply to their demand of the reinstatement of the Constitution, gaining the parliamentary majority in the first election.15 Counter revolutions and war defined the Young Turks rule until they were thrust into the First World War, and the Empire was divided amongst the winners. The four-year Turkish War of Independence to oust the last Ottoman holdouts and European powers started in 1919. The Turkish hero of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, lead the Turkish Nationalist movement to victory, consolidating power for the 12 Zurcher, Erik J. 2017. Turkey: A Modern History. New York, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. pg 45 13 Ibid, pg 71 14 Ibid, pg 77 15 Ibid, pg 91

33 next decade.16 OTTOMAN-TURKISH CARTOON The first cartoons appeared in the Ottoman Empire in 1867 as a humor magazine. Due to the government’s control of printing houses and content since the establishment of print censorship in 1857, these humor magazines provided the only opportunity for mass-produced and mass-viewed visual content. With the Young Turk Revolution and establishment of the Second Constitution, many freedoms never before seen in the empire were implemented, and for the first time freedom of the press was guaranteed. In this period, 65 unique satirical political cartoon gazettes were created in Istanbul, each of which published weekly with at least three distinct cartoons.17 These periodicals did not take on distinct party-politics, as the concept was still unfamiliar, and elections were controlled and rigged by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who was in turn controlled by the Young Turks.

They were available for 10 para (1/400 of a Lira) each,18 and individual publishers produced 5,000 to 50,000 copies per cycle.19 The Istanbul elite were known as avid readers of the periodicals, which were distributed throughout the city and surrounding provinces with the development of the train system. Within Istanbul, the periodicals were hung on bulletin boards and walls, passed around in social circles, provided in cafes and lounges, and scavenged out of the trash. Although the target demographic was the male Istanbullu elite, women and non-citizens were known to have been fond of the periodicals as well. Similarly, the illiterate population was engaged by the political clarity of the imagery. As the Ottomans feared the empire’s growing dependence on foreign business, they established laws making Turkish the official language of all business. The total numbers of readers is unknown, but their novelty created a cult following across the society.20 By 1911, the Young Turks were being drawn into international conflicts and were coming under the same criticism of their predecessors.21 The free press, seen as a threat, was squelched once more. Freedom of the press was reestablished in 1930 when the Kemalists felt they had a solid grip on the new Republic of Turkey; this saw a similar level of enthusiasm as its first iteration.

16 Ibid, pg 167 17 Brummett 2000, pg 333 18 This was approximately a third the cost of bread, which was around 10 akce, with 1 akce = 3 para; Pamuk, Sevket. 2004. “Prices in The Ottoman Empire, 1469-1914.”

International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 451-468.

19 Brummett 2000, pg 43, 335 20 Ibid, pg 41-47 21 Ibid, pg 9

34 VISUAL TYPOLOGY To understand the contextual typology developed in the following cartoons, one must establish some of the themes and visual typologies contemporary to Istanbul pre-World War One. Of the most important and interesting is the depiction of identity within the periodicals. Two overarching groups must first be understood: The Ottoman and the foreigner – which should not be viewed as the common simplification of ‘the good and the bad.’

The Ottomans can then be divided into three distinct categories: Identifiable Elite and Political Figures, their Constituents, and the Symbolic Figures of National Conscious. The constituents include the diverse representation of ethnicities present within the Empire at the time, but also include those who recently left the fold to preserve a sense of continuity. The Symbolic figures can be divided once again: The Chorus and The Three Women of State, the Sister-Citizen, Liberty, and the Old Nag.22 The Chorus is a modern adaption of the 400-year old Turkish tradition of Hacivat and Karagoz,23 shadow play characters whose foils are used to expound upon contemporarily appropriate situations in conjunction with one another (Urkmez 2017, 85). They are mascots of the cartoons, presented either alone or in a pair, who appear in the title card and then show up in a majority of the cartoons included . The Three Women are used to contrast the Foreigner, as the Sister Citizen is the common Turkish woman who carries on traditional culture but is vulnerable , Liberty is the power of the Turkish Politic who steps in to defend the local tradition, and the Old Nag is an old woman who has become almost genderless, serving as a cynical advisor and critic through her years of wisdom.

The Foreigner24 must be divided as well, into: the political and the cultural. The political represents the European powers depicted either as individually named countries or as a conglomerate, whose individual aspects are identifiable through stereotypical outfits and hats. The cultural can be seen primarily through the guise of modern ‘technical’ environments and westernized Turks. The epitome of this is the sexualized woman.

Through the use of the multi-critique, each of these identities never holds a consistent connotation, and no simple generalization can ever be 22 Brummet 1998, pg 29, 34, 37 23 Hacivat is the educated elite Turk, while Karagoz is the illiterate peasant Urkmez, Basak. 2017. “Turkish Animation: A Contemporary Reflection of the Karagoz Shadow Play.” In Animation in the Middle East, by Stefanie Van De Peer, 84-106. New York, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. pg 84 24 One key difference between Turkish Cartoons and its Western Inspiration was the inability to use Social Darwinism for differentiation. The Turkish were aware of the modern theory, but were technically at the bottom of the evolution, so could not depict Europe, or their own constituents as ‘base’ without undermining their own position; Brummett 2000, pg 321

35 made. Most common and most stable are the Ottoman Symbolic figures, which can more rightly be identified as uniquely Turkish entities. Their use as a cultural lens from which the common citizen can relate through their own experiences and tradition to the unfamiliar subject matter of current affairs and modernism is what made them so digestible and successful at creating a lasting cultural visual cannon supporting the revolutionary idea of a Turkish Nationalism.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM One of the most distinct forms of identification and characterization that had been used since the days of the French explosion, was the use of anthropomorphism. Key figures and countries are represented through animals and objects which have distinct connotations for the subject at hand. In the Ottoman case, animals are often used to represent various countries in conflict, using national symbols as their basis with some of the most identifiable being Russia often appearing as a bear, Austria-Hungary as two eagles, and in a turn of pride, the Ottomans portraying themselves as a lion. When looking at internal subjects, two of the most common animals are the dog and the cat. The dog is used to represent the peasant class while the black cat is of a cynical servant class. These cartoons serve to critique the commoners of the Empire.

However, one of the most powerful examples of anthropomorphism is the repeated use of the Donkey as an example of the Ottoman people.Shown here by one of the most prolific and famous publishers, Malum, ‘Information’ the donkey is all, elite and commoner. The anthropomorphism reveals its sting when the contrast is in full use: an Ottoman Elite is represented by the upright Donkey, who serves as the Chorus of Malum. Throughout the periodical and in the particular cartoon shown, the common Ottoman working class citizen is represented by a normal donkey, merely a beast of burden who is harnessed and ready to work, following the orders of others. In this cartoon, the commoner is even blinded, walking in a circle, powering a contraption, possibly a water wheel or mill, under the command of the Elite. The message of the trope is clear: the Ottoman people are blindly led without progress by an elite that can only be differentiated in its outward appearance. However negative the current situation is, the depiction also implies that roles can be reversed, and that no position in society determines one’s path.

The use of anthropomorphism was a classic method of identification in political cartoons, that through its distinctions provided the basis for a uniquely Turkish people that was split between Imperial and Turkish identities and motives.

CHORUS

36 Though the trope was explained above, viewing the use of the Chorus in a few individual pieces is important in understanding how it promoted a Turkish identity beyond its historic context. Two other prominent periodicals that published twice weekly were Yeni Geveze and Cadaloz, translating to ‘New Talk’ and ‘Old Bitch’ respectively. In Yeni Geveze, two characters, foils like Karagoz and Hacivat, represent conservative Turkish Traditionalist values and modern Turkish Liberal values through a slim old man with a long beard wearing traditional robes that could be associated with Islamic garb,25 and a fat middle aged man with a distinguished moustache and suit that does not necessarily imply westernization. They both share the fez hat, showing their common Turkish identity. The use of clothing trends to distinguish between ethnicities and define their differences stereotypically, not antagonistically, is typical of all periodicals.26 These two characters are found almost constantly together in situations ranging from the unbelievable (animals drawing battle lines, marriages with Cholera), to the realistic (discussions with key Ottoman figures), and everything in between depicting common Turkish life . Certain cartoons have these two as merely observers in a bubble in the top corner, while others have them taking primary action, such as sawing a pasha in half together. One of the key aspects of their relationship is presented in the previously mentioned cartoon:even though they come from vastly different sets of beliefs, they work together to alter the current situation. They are active players in maintaining the revolutionary ideals and constant questioning inspired in 1908, as seen in a cartoon where they both water and trim a flower pot whose flowers represent several key figures of the government, several heads having already been cut from their stalks.

In Cadaloz, the Chorus also serves as the character of the Old Nag, who through her age no longer takes sides, but criticizes and advises all. Unlike the characters of Yeni Geveze, Cadaloz (also the character’s name) takes an active role in every cartoon, not fearing to take politicians by the ear or scold the entire parliament.

She is seen heading bands of revolutionaries through the street and consoling the women following the mighty Ottoman men whose feats of grandeur are supposed to impress . Her role is an active citizen who is not afraid to step in on any affair.27 25 Islamism and Turkism had been in opposition since the beginning of the nationalist movement. The Turkist agenda were actively against the Sultanate Caliphate, which threatened the last Islamic government. While Islamism was tried to gain traction in this period, its propaganda and policy were deemed dead by the end of WWI; Koroglu, 2007, pg 28-29.

Islamic opposition primarily challenged fashion within both the real and the cartoon worlds.

Their focus was on the over-extravagance and ‘squandering of economic resources’ which these new fashion trends promoted with European imports; Brummett 2000, pg 228. Within the cartoons, Islam as a religion was used as an underlying, assumed identity of the Turkish people. It took on the role as an underlying, undeclared, unifying factor; Brummett 2000, pg 324-325.

26 Brummett 2000, pg 222 27 Brummet 1998, pg 40

37 She is informed by her Ottoman upbringing, but also steps in for nationalistic causes. For example, he cartoon where she prepares the duel between the Ottoman Imperialist who uses the European Pen28 and foreign languages and the Turk who is using his qalam29 to write in the distinctly Turkish-Arabic script, reveals the contemporary conflict of the nationalistic language laws put into place by the Young Turks.

These choruses provide a distinctly Turkish understanding to both local affairs in Istanbul, as well as the broader actions of the Empire. They are conscious of the diverse set of ideologies present within modernizing Turkey. However, instead of positioning them against one another, the cartoons use their perspectives as a method of presenting a diversity of opinions in the cartoons -- a diversity that can be unified in their objectives.

INTERNATIONAL CONCERN Many cartoons were dedicated to international concerns, taking on drastically different styles and techniques that created complex hard to read images that targeted elite and even Western audiences. These cartoons ranged from tropes of European monsters encroaching on the vulnerable Turkish people, to extremely specific incidents where the locale, people depicted, and animal symbology all played an intricate role in telling the story.

They appeared in Yeni Geveze, with a layer of realism unseen in any other cartoons of this periodical, or of other periodicals. The cartoons portrayed depth and complex action as well as clear emotions on the faces of the characters involved. Each cartoon uses the foreground to portray the primary subject, while the background holds important reactionary details, giving context and stakes to the primary action. No singular narrative or goal can be discerned from these cartoons. Some show the Turks and Europeans complicit in the searching for, impaling, and capturing of individuals while others depict Europeans as outlandish exaggerations of excess and monarchical rule as well as militaristic powers seeking out the vulnerable Turkey. Due to their complex nature and reliance on written cues, most of their meaning is indiscernible.

However, reoccurring symbols and hints provided in the visual style and production methods can help bring context to these powerful images.

To begin with previously identified symbols, Liberty and Sister-Citizen take prominence in these cartoons as the embodiment of the Turkish State when compared to European Powers. Sister-Citizen is used to represent both the cultural heritage of Turkey, as well as her vulnerability. She is often portrayed tied up or imprisoned, and once is even seen with her breast exposed.

28 The classic pointed stylus whose nib holds ink in a hole, which then comes to a point - distinct from those used for arabic script whose nibs come to a straight edge, angled 29 Turkish for pen

38 While in other cartoons the Sister-Citizen overcomes her chains by herself, Yeni Geveze always contrasts her inability to fight with Liberty’s strong and impassioned defense. Liberty is portrayed classically, in a long, white flowing robe, with one arm outstretched, holding an Ottoman flag or staff aloft, and the Ottoman star and crescent emblazoned on her chest or behind her head.

She is shown single handedly defending Sister-Citizen from a seven-headed monster of the European powers. Another cartoon depicts her, in one powerful call to action, riding a chariot with each horse labeled, as a single soldier charges ahead in front of her. While Liberty is a strongly Ottoman symbol, Sister-Citizen is distinctly Turkish, wearing stereotypically Turkish garb and carrying Turkish mannerisms. Additionally, she is labeled ‘Anatolia’ in some cartoons, and does not appear in other cartoons set outside of the peninsula.

While the dichotomy of distinct Ottoman and Turkish identities are clearly present, subtleties are not present in the depiction of Europeans. European powers are stereotyped by their dress and demeanors and are presented as a group, whether literally as a hydra, or by taking part in group activities or observation.30 Their actions are presumptive and aggressive towards the Ottoman Empire, represented by the Star and Crescent -- both presented as a disembodied symbol, and as a part of Liberty’s costume, markedly distinct from the Turkish Sister-Citizen.

Through these depictions, the dialogue of ‘Imperial Ottomans’ and ‘nationalistic citizens’ are not outwardly antagonistic. They present a codependency. However, once the external European Powers enter the scene, this balance of Ottoman and Turkish is broken. When Both Liberty and Sister-Citizen are found together against European powers, Sister-Citizen is caught in the crossfire, a victim to larger imperial desires. However, when Sister-Citizen faces the Europeans on her own, she finds it in herself to break their chains and stand on her own. Cultural identity and imperial struggle are made distinct, but ultimately a strong national identity is the only thing which can overcome encroaching Europe.

COMPARISON TO THE TURKISH CARTOONS OF 1930 After censorship was reapplied in 1911, Freedom of Press did not reappear until Ataturk had consolidated power following the War for Independence (1919-1923) in 1930.31 Ayhan Akman describes this development as “‘a turning point’ for cartoons and politics in Turkey; the cartoons, which were found in newspapers, presented the world through the lens of ‘The West,’ the 30 Brummett 2000, pg 160 31 Gencer, Yasemin. 2013. “Pushing Out Islam: Cartoons of the Reform Period in Turkey (1923-1928.” In Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image,

by Chritiane Gruber and Sune Huagbolle, 189-213. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. pg 191

39 standard to which all customs, norms, and institutions were judged.’32 The cartoons were divided such that the ‘local and daily’ were portrayed as hyper-detailed caricatures which viewers could identify with. The ‘idealized western world’ is portrayed utilising a naturalistic style that exaggerates the world so that the viewers could process and attempt to emulate this new lifestyle, bifurcating the ideal of Turkish identity.33 The liberal and the conservative perspectives present these two value systems, while the artistic depictions of caricature and the hyper-realistic is divided between local and cultural commentary and Western involvement and political commentary.

Some cartoons are strikingly similar in their presentation of hyper-realized pairs of sexualized women, the epitome of Westernization in the Empire, and Turkey. Due to the immense popularity of the cartoons of 1908-1911, the conceptualization and delivery of the cartoons post-1930 created an effective and decisive stylistic division that are characteristic of Turkish cartoons between 1908-1911. 1930’s developments were not revolutionary but merely an evolution of a distinct cultural schizophrenia which had developed out of its 1908-1911 predecessors. Due to the power placed in these cartoons for presenting a critical visual culture against authoritarian governments, their role in defining new communities and identities and the methods for systemizing the symbols and styles for communicating these are both necessary.

CONCLUSIONS The freedom of press from 1908 to 1911 in the Ottoman Empire provided the Turkish people with one of the first chances of creating the ‘Imagined Community,’34 theorised by Benedict Anderson. However, when compared to the development of the Imagined Communities described by Benedict Anderson, the Turkish Community held two major distinctions: the identity came from the people, not from the monarchy or government; and the identity was communicated through visual culture, not written.

The Turkish Community within the Ottoman Empire was shaped into a revolutionary community against its own failing Imperialism. This was done through the recreation of the acts of the past in order to shape the mindset of the future and through the lens of familiar cultural symbols placed into foreign context, aware of its own deficiencies in the modern world, while hesi32 Akman, Ayhan. 1998. “From Cultural Schizophrenia to Modernist Binarism: Cartoons and Identities in Turkey (1930-1975).” In Political Cartoons in the Middle East, by Fatma Muge Gocek, 83-132. Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publisher. pg 85 33 Ibid, pg 91 34 These Imagined Communities are national identities which through the homogenization of customs, history, and language through the advent of the printing press; Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York City, New York: Verso. Pg 5-6

40 tant to adopt new practices for loss of their own identity. The artists of these cartoons, whose identities we will never know due to their wariness in the face of an authoritarian government, could not support or defame particular politics under the Ottoman government. Instead, they sought to define what was Turkish and what was Ottoman, a much more dangerous act. Though just brief shadows in Turkish history, their actions were the start of something much greater. The complex sentiments planted bolstered the rise of the Kemalists and are still felt today in the strong visual culture of politics in modern Turkey.

The King’s Elephant

Children in theater and the Syrian Revolution

Natasha Rothenbucher

S

42

yrian writer Sa’dallah Wannous wrote many plays that metaphorically critiqued former Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad’s regime. In his play The King’s Elephant, Wannous predicts the crucial involvement of children in affecting political change, suggesting that change will emerge from the youth because the Assad regime has instilled a fear strong enough to silence Syrian adults. As such, the Assad regime has established an unopposed one-party system. As such, the Assad regime has established an unopposed one-party system. Syrians have endured the Assad regime with little opposition except in 1982 in what became known as the Hama Massacre. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood led a rebellion in the Syrian city Hama against Hafiz al-Assad and his Ba’athist Party rule. Hafiz al-Assad responded by besieging the town.

Although the official death count is unclear, accounts range from 10% to 25% of citizens killed.1 Following this massacre, many surviving rebels were forced into exile and the entire country watched as Hafiz al-Assad mercilessly defeated the Syrian people. The brutality of the Hama Massacre forced many into a fearful silence that would last almost thirty years. In 2011, protests beginning in Daraa, Syria spread throughout the rest of the country leading to a civil war.

The protests in Daraa began when a group of 15 schoolboys wrote revolutionary slogans on their school wall. They were arrested by Bashar al-Assad’s secret police and brutally tortured for over a month. Consequently, protests erupted in Daraa demanding the release of the children. Soon protests against Assad and the regime spread to other cities in Syria. Bashar al-Assad, following in his father’s footsteps, responded almost immediately with violence by sending the military to siege protesting cities and “put down” protestors. By July, Syrian Army defectors created the Free Syrian Army and the protests evolved into a full-scale civil war. In a country with people too afraid of their government to speak out, it took the torture of children for opposition to form. Thus, Wannous’s prediction in The King’s Elephant came to life in 2011.

Children’s actions and their consequent suffering broke the barrier of fear so long instilled in the Syrian population. The children, because of their youth, could not completely grasp the fear the generation before them felt and thus, acted courageously against the government without fully understanding the repercussions. As a result of their actions, the Syrian regime has continuously punished and targeted children throughout the revolution in an attempt to silence the opposition into fear. However, this brutality against children has only further encouraged dissident behavior among adults and children, breaking the long tradition of passivity out of fear of the Assad regime.

In The King’s Elephant, author Sa’dallah Wannous predicts the monumental role of children in inciting political change in Syria. The play, written in 1 Pearlman, Wendy. 2016. “Narratives of Fear in Syria.” Perspectives on Politics.

14, no. 01, 24.

43 1969, slyly critiques Hafiz al-Assad’s brutality and highlights the depth of fear within Syrian society. The play depicts an Arab kingdom where the king has an elephant who destroys something new every time he walks through the town.

In the past, the elephant had destroyed someone’s home or injured a person.

However, this time, the elephant crushed and killed a little boy, townsman Muhammed al-Fahd’s son. This event prompted people to discuss with each other the atrocities the elephant has committed and how the king cannot see the harm his elephant has done to his people. However, people continually remark that they cannot speak up because “it’s the King’s elephant.”2 Present in this discussion is a woman with her daughter. Her daughter chimes into the conversation with innocent questions such as “why did the elephant tread on him [the little boy]?”3 or “will they punish him [the elephant]?”4 or “why does the King love a vicious elephant?”5 These questions, all very logical, reveal the little girl’s innocence and inability to grasp and understand the authoritarian rule of the King. This inability to conceptualize the fear the adults feel leads her, later in the play, to act in a way the adults never could. The more the people of the kingdom talk, the angrier they become. Finally, they decide to address their grievances to the king. The townspeople, including the little girl and her mother, rehearse their speech while one man, Zakaria, leads. He begins with “The elephant, lord of all time!”6 while the rest of the people follow with “killed Muhammad al-Fahd’s son…”7 along with the rest of the offences of the elephant. After many rehearsals, the people go to see the king. As they are led to see the king, the people notice an increasing guard presence and become more and more nervous. Upon seeing the king, Zakaria begins “The elephant, lord of all time!” but only a few voices continue, “kill—.”8 As soon as the few voices realize they are the only ones talking, they fall silent. Zakaria tries again, “The elephant, lord of all time!” This time the little girl says (alone because none of the adults will speak) “killed Muh—” but her mother silences her quickly. Thus, out of fear the people never address their grievances to the king. Instead, they tell the king they love the elephant so much that they think the elephant should have a wife to keep him company. Their fear leads the people to further contribute to their problem by suggesting the king get another elephant.

Although political change was never achieved, the role of children is 2 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. 2003. Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology. New York: Interlink Books. 437 3 Ibid. 436.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. 438.

6 Ibid. 444.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. 449

44 still clear. The little girl did not understand why people were afraid, she could not comprehend potential repercussions from the king. As a result, she had no problem speaking what the adults rehearsed. Being a child, she was less afraid and therefore more likely to act. Additionally, it was the death of a child that prompted the people to speak to the king. Thus, it is clear that the harm of a child can diminish people’s fear. Wannous later predicts that there will be a greater Syrian Revolution. At the end of the play, the dialogue goes: GROUP: That was a story.

ACTOR 5: Which we acted.

ACTOR 3: In the hope we can learn a lesson from it.

ACTOR 7: Do you know now why elephants exist?

ACTOR 3: Do you know now why elephants breed?

ACTOR 5: But this story of ours is only the start.

ACTOR 4: When elephants breed, a new story starts.

GROUP: A violent, bloody story, which one day we’ll act for you.9

This dialogue communicates that the actions of the elephants (that symbolize the government) will only worsen over time. At some point the actions will become so disgusting that the people will revolt. This is the “violent, bloody story”10 the group will one day act out. It is the Syrian revolution of 2011. Thus, Wannous both predicts the Syrian revolution and anticipates the place of children as crucial actors in the revolution. Like the little girl, children will not have the same fear the generation before them has been conditioned to have.

Like the little boy’s death, it will take cruelty towards and the suffering of children to ignite political action in adults.

Prior to 2011, most Syrians experienced a silencing fear under both Hafiz al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad. Scholar Wendy Pearlman defines silencing fear as fear that “encourages submission to their [the autocratic leader’s] coercive authority” through threats to punish citizens for political dissent.11 The harsh regimes of Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad succeeded in instilling this silencing fear into Syrian society, even “’conditioning the behavior of most Syrians.’”12 The Hama Massacre of 1982 ended so tragically that it sent Syrians into a further, deeper silence where the memory of this traumatic event has blocked any attempts at political action since then. In an interview conducted by scholar Wendy Pearlman, a Daraa citizen recounts Hafiz al-Assad’s reign: “Hafiz al-Assad tamed the Syrian people by using security and military rule. It was like you have a wild animal that you want to make a pet. This turned Syria into a big farm…He killed political life.”13 Thus, following the Hama Massacre 9 10 11 12 13

Ibid. 451 Ibid.

Pearlman, Wendy. “Narratives of Fear in Syria.”

Ibid.

Ibid. 25.

45 and the immense violence employed by the regime, the Syrians were tamed (or silenced). They were obedient and under the strict control of their owner (Hafiz al-Assad). Another Daraa citizen explained: “We don’t have a government. We have a mafia. And if you speak out against this, it’s off with you to bayt khaltu – ‘your aunt’s house.’ That’s an expression that means to take someone to prison. It means, forget about this person. He’ll be tortured, disappeared. You’ll never hear from him again.”14 This expression appears to have become commonplace, along with the practice of telling someone to forget another person. Fear is reaffirmed in a person with every arrest and every arrest can occur with the smallest critique of the government. The conditioning of silence is further carried to the next generation through parents (who lived the Hama Massacre and other Hafiz al-Assad atrocities) raising their children with the warnings “’Whisper! The walls have ears’ and ‘Keep your voice low.’”15 This practice carried over to Bashar al-Assad’s rule as one Syrian recounts that he did not even mention Bashar al-Assad’s name.16 The practice of silencing fear, instilled during Hafiz al-Assad’s rule and continued in Bashar al-Assad’s reign is indicative of the Syrian way of life. Fear was so commonplace that it was a lifestyle, an identity, and second nature.17 Thus, in 2011 adults were conditioned to be silent, conditioned to fear the Assad regime. This paralyzing fear is why the ignition of the revolution belongs to the children not the adults.

The children because of their innocence and youth have yet to understand the fear of their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grand parents. Their actions are informed by an incomplete comprehension of the Assad regime and the extent of its brutality. The children will be the ones who break the barrier of fear in adults, they will be the ones who end the silence.

The events in Daraa City that ignited the Syrian revolution highlight the crucial role of children in affecting change. On February 16, 2011 high school boys Bashir Abazid18, Naief Abazid19, Issa Abazid20, Mouawiya Syasneh21 and eleven others participated in writing revolutionary slogans on their school walls. The boys wrote phrases they had heard from the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions: “The people want to topple the regime,” and “Leave.”22 They 14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Hanano, Amal. “The Syrian Schoolboys Who Sparked the Syrian Revolution.” The National, March 30, 2012.

19 MacKinnon, Mark. “The Graffiti Kids who Sparked the Syrian War.” The Globe and Mail. December 2, 2016.

20 Hanano, Amal. “The Syrian Schoolboys Who Sparked the Syrian Revolution.”

21 Macleod, Hugh. “Inside Deraa.” Al Jazeera. April 19, 2011.

22 Hanano, Amal. “The Syrian Schoolboys Who Sparked the Syrian Revolution.”

46 also wrote their own phrase directed at Bashar al-Assad: “Your turn, doctor.”23 Bashar al-Assad was a medical doctor before he became president and thus, the boys were telling Bashar al-Assad that he was next to fall just as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Ben Ali had. The boys’ actions were a result of what they had seen on TV happening in Egypt and Tunisia. In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Naief Abazid claims “It was something silly. I was a kid. I did not know what I was doing.”24 Thus, it is clear that these schoolboys did not understand the weight of their actions, they “were just playing.”25 An adult in Syria would never have written such graffiti because he or she understood the brutality of the Assad regime and has been conditioned into silence. However, a child is different. A child cannot understand the fear and thus, acts without fully comprehending his or her actions.

Following this graffiti, the schoolboys involved were arrested by Bashar al-Assad’s secret police. Moved around from one site to another, the boys were brutally tortured. They were beaten, hung from the ceiling, electrocuted, had their fingernails torn off, and much more.26 The boys were held for a month and a half, and during this time, Daraa changed drastically. At the start of their arrest, parliament representative from Daraa, Nasser al-Hariri, went to the office of the local intelligence chief Atif Najib (a relative of Bashar al-Assad) to negotiate the children’s release.27 There, Najib told Nasser, “’Your people either accept things as they are, or you bring their women to me and I make them conceive some new kids.’”28 This comment was extremely insulting to the people of Daraa. It insulted the women of Daraa and showed that these children would never be returned. Disgust at the regime and desperation for their children prompted people to act in protest. It was not just one person’s kid who was tortured, it was the children of Daraa City and thus the entirety of the Daraa Governorate. In Daraa, clan-based networks are very prominent in daily life and the children arrested came from some of Daraa’s major clans (the Abazid clan is the largest in Daraa City). Thus, the brutality against these children was further magnified to all community members. People took to the streets demanding the release of their children and the government responded with violence. Eventually, Bashar al-Assad released the children. However, upon their return, everyone could see their scars – scars that represented the 23 Ibid.

24 MacKinnon, Mark. “The Graffiti Kids who Sparked the Syrian War.” 25 Saleh, Layla. 2013. “’We Thought we were Playing’: Children’s Participation in the Syrian Revolution.” Journal of International Women’s Studies. 14, no. 5.

26 Macleod, Hugh. “Inside Deraa.”

27 Reinoud Leenders. 2012. “Collective Action and Mobilization in Dar’a: An Anatomy of the Onset of Syria’s Popular Uprising.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly.

17, No. 4. 428.

28 Ibid.

47 intense brutality of the regime and the fact that not even children were off limits. The release of the children was too late, protests had begun throughout the Daraa Governorate and throughout Syria. In defending their children, the Syrian people had finally broken the barrier of fear and were demanding change, demanding the fall of the regime that had silenced them for over 50 years. Like the boy who was killed in The King’s Elephant, these Syrian schoolboys were the catalyst for wider societal action.

With the Daraa City schoolboys setting the stage for child involvement in the revolution, they also set a precedent for the targeting of children by the Assad regime. The cruel arrest and torture of the schoolboys proved to Syrians that children were not off limits in this war. Brutality towards children by the regime served the purpose of, in the eyes of the regime, silencing its opposition and asserting its power. However, hurting children crossed a line and thus, had the opposite effect – it called Syrians to action. This is precisely what happened when Hamza al-Khatib, a 13 year old boy from the Daraa Governorate, was arrested at a protest on April 29th 2011, brutally tortured, and returned dead to his family a month later.29 Hamza al-Khatib was disgustingly violated, carrying marks of torture when his body was returned to his family: lacerations, bruises, and burns to his feet, elbows face and knees.30 Additionally, his hand and genitalia were severed.31 The brutal treatment of Hamza shows that the regime sees children not only as collateral damage, but also as yet another demographic of people to torture and abuse. The incredibly inhumane acts committed by the regime toward children only generated greater disgust by the Syrian people towards the regime and thus, greater political action. In targeting children to instill fear in his subjects, Bashar al-Assad did the opposite: he broke the fear. He pushed the Syrian people over the edge.

Hamza al-Khatib’s story, along with the many children victims of the war, shows the importance of children as an emotional trigger against a merciless government. Similar to the boy’s death in The King’s Elephant, it takes brutality towards children for adults to decide to take action.

In The King’s Elephant, play writer Sa’dallah Wannous predicts the Syrian Revolution and anticipates the monumental role of children in that revolution. Like the innocent girl in The King’s Elephant children cannot fully comprehend the fear the generations before them feel towards the Assad family and regime. Therefore, they are more likely to take political action without anticipating the weight of their actions and the consequences. Like the 29 Flamand, Annasofie and Macleo, Hugh. “Tortured and Killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13.” Al Jazeera. May 31, 2011.

30 Ibid.

31 Saleh, Layla. “’We Thought we were Playing’: Children’s Participation in the Syrian Revolution.”

48 schoolboys from Daraa who thought they were just playing, children unwittingly started the Syrian Revolution. The consequences of their actions called adults to action. The regimes brutality towards children did not send adults and children alike into submission and silence. Instead, it empowered them to break their long tradition of fear and unite in protest and opposition. This is similar to the boy’s death at the hands of the king’s elephant in The King’s Elephant. It was a child’s death that made the adults decide to finally take action.

Although the adults ended up backing out of their decision to protest the king, the end of the play sees a revolution on the horizon. The role of the children in the play eludes to how further brutality toward children will eventually push the Syrian people towards revolution. Thus, the monumental role of children as the spark of the revolution is evident through the schoolboys in Daraa and Hamza al-Khatib’s death, along with countless other children’s deaths and gross mistreatments.

The Mosul Question The League of Nations, 1924-26

Sinan Hanioglu

T

50

he eligible inhabitants in the region administered by the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government went to the ballot box on September 25, 2017 for an advisory referendum on independence from Iraq. A fortnight after the vote, Iraqi federal forces and state-backed militias launched a multipronged attack on the disputed areas between the federal territories and Iraqi Kurdistan and reestablished central authority.

For the average observer in the West, this episode was nothing other than yet another clash among the many ethno-religious groups in the highly volatile Middle East. Almost no references were made to the background of the referendum in northern Iraq, let alone mentioning demands for a similar plebiscite to determine the future of the region between 1923 and 1926.

The Treaty of Ankara signed in 1926 between Iraq under a British mandate and Turkey determined the fate of this region. In fact, this treaty settled the final post-World War I dispute and awarded the former Ottoman province to Iraq under a British mandate. The longest-lasting international conflict of the post-1918 world order thus ended without an armed confrontation. This fact, however, should not lead us assume that the parties involved reached this settlement easily.

Turkey wished to retain the region along with the other parts of the Ottoman Empire in which Turks and Kurds had formed a majority. The British, however, did not want to leave the oil-rich region, and categorically rejected the annexation of Mosul by Turkey. The parties could not reach an agreement at the Lausanne Peace Conference that convened in 1922-23, and consequently referred the issue to the League of Nations for settlement.

The League of Nations formed a special commission of inquiry to prepare a report on the region and make a recommendation to the Council of the League regarding the boundary between Turkey and Iraq. The special commission conducted extensive research to make a recommendation to the Council of the League of Nations regarding the fate of the region. The commission also collected information from experts, scholars, and former diplomats to address different aspects of this issue. It also held approximately 800 interviews to gauge the wishes of the population in the disputed territory.

The final report and its numerous annexes and maps provide the most important data about the pre-1925 conditions of the region.1 It is likewise an invaluable source to understand the roots of the present-day conflict in north1 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière entre la Turquie et L’Irak: Rapport présénte au Conseil par la Comimisson constituée en vertu de la resolution du 30 septembre 1924/Question of the Frontier between Turkey and Iraq: Report Submitted to the Council by the Commission Instituted by the Council of Resolution of September 30th 1924, C. 400 M. 147. 1925. VII.

51 ern Iraq. Despite this fact, the scholarship on the issue has generally ignored the report and discussed the matter mainly as an international conflict over an oil-rich region.

The accepted view on the subject is that the British, who desperately needed to secure oil supplies for their exclusively oil fuelled battleships, wished to keep Mosul within Iraq to expolit its mineral resources. As an influential member, Great Britain used diplomatic channels and other means at its disposal to obtain a favorable decision from the League. In fact, the entire episode of League of Nations’s work is nothing other than an insignifcant detail in the resolving of the Mosul Question.

According to this line of thought, in the settlement process, nobody paid any attention to the wishes of the inhabitants of the region. They were mere bystanders observing a power game. Like the British, the League and the commission formed by it paid no heed to their will. This judgment had been advanced even before the submission of the committee’s report,2 and has continued to prevail since then.

This article will challenge this accepted view and discuss the work of the commission and its final recommendation to the Council of the League. By making a thorough analysis of the work of the commission and its final report, I will attempt to demonstrate that the commission did indeed pay attention to the will of the people in the region though it refrained from reaching a decision based solely on it.

MOSUL: FROM BACKWATER TO MAJOR INTERNATIONAL QUESTION The Ottoman Province of Mosul Despite being upgraded to a province in 1879, Mosul remained as one of the least developed Ottoman provinces. The most important geographical lexicon of the empire published in 1898 stated that while the province was economically self-sufficient, it had long lost its economic dynamism. In addition, Mosul housed a large number of unsettled populations; roughly 70% of the Muslims, mainly Arabs and Kurds, and almost all the Yazidis scattered throughout the province were nomadic peoples. An overwhelming majority of these peoples was illiterate.3 A handbook comparing Ottoman provinces, likewise, stated that with a total of mere 7 miles (12 kilometers) of roads, Mosul was one of the least connected provinces and almost totally dependent on the navigation of the Tigris.4 The Berlin-Baghdad Railway, commissioned in 1903, 2 See F. W. Chardin, “The Mosul Question: What the Inhabitants Really Want [?]”

Contemporary Review 128 (1925): 57-63.

3 “Musul Vilâyeti,” Kamusü’l-Âlâm, 6 (I898): 4481-85.

4 Memâlik-i Osmaniye Ceb Atlası: Devlet-i Aliyye-i Osmaniye’nin Ahvâl-i Coğrafiyye ve İstatistikiyyesi, ed. Tüccarzâde İbrahim Hilmi and Binbaşı Subhi (Istanbul: Kütübha-

52 was supposed to connect Mosul to the outside world. It did not reach, however, even to Diyar-ı Bekir by 1915. 5 The Ottoman authorities prepared numerous reform projects for Mosul but could not implement any of them fully, and, in fact, made the preservation of law and order their main objective in this backwater province.6 Ina similar vein, Great Powers showed little interest in Mosul and its inhabitants. Unlike many other provinces of the empire no foreign diplomats served in Mosul except for a British consular agent attached to the consul-general in Baghdad.7 An unexpected development, however, made the Ottoman province of Mosul a center of European interest. In 1871, a German scientific expedition reported favorably on the prospects of the possibility of Mesopotamian oil mainly concentrated in the Mosul province.8 By the last decade of the nineteenth century, several foreign companies and individuals presented reports to the Sublime Porte and the sultan regarding the rich oil reserves mainly in the Kirkuk sub-province. The discovery of oil, in fact, paved the way to Mosul becoming an international problem.

The British Interests in Mosul and the Turkish Petroleum Company During the first stage of the Lausanne Peace Conference held in 1922, the British representative Lord Curzon stepped up to the podium to refute accusations of trying to assume control of the oil resources of Mesopotamia.

He stated that “the attitude of the British government with regard to the retention of Mosul is [not] affected by the question of oil.”9 The British secretary further remarked that he did not know “how much oil there may be in the neighborhood of Mosul, or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to be a fraud.”10 He was, obviously, not telling the truth.

His letter to the American ambassador in London written three years prior reveals unequivocally that he knew all the intricate details regarding the oil reserves of Mosul, and their possible exploitation by a British dominated company.11 ne-i İslâm ve Askerî, 1323 [1905]), 224 .

5 Edward Mead Earle, Turkey, the Great Powers, and the Bagdad Railway: A Study in Imperialism (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 73.

6 Gökhan Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890-1908 (London: Routledge, 2006), 63-66.

7 Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil (London: MacMillan, 1976), 15.

8 Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 22.

9 Turkey, no. 1 (1923): Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs, 1922-1923: Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace, Command Paper (herearfter Cmd). 1814 (1923), 360 10 Ibid.

11 Curzon to Davis, February 28, 1921, Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government and the United States Ambassador Respecting Economic Rights in Mandated Count-

53 In fact, as the British press reported, for Curzon and the British Foreign Office the Province of Mosul had a certain political importance; however, this was far outweighed by its economic significance.12 For the British the most important issue was not marketing revenues but regulating the price of oil and securing its constant flow. Thus, started in 1902, they embarked on a bitter struggle with Germany, France, and the United States for securing a paramount position in the affairs of Mesopotamia.

After protracted and unsuccessful negotiations with the Ottoman government the British policy-makers conceived the idea of forming an Anglo-German-syndicate under British control to reconcile the interests of London and Berlin.13 A London banker, Sir Ernest Cassel, formed a British joint stock company with a capital of £ 80.000 for the purpose of acquiring oil concessions in Mosul and called it the Turkish Petroleum Company. The British and German diplomats reached an agreement in February 1914 to double the shares of this company, dividing them among the following groups: Fifty per cent D’Arcy group (British), twenty-five per cent Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company (British), and twenty-five per cent Deutsche Bank (German).14 The British, who received German diplomatic support thanks to this agreement, started pressuring the Ottoman government, and requesting Ottoman conferral of a monopoly to this company over Mosul oil. The joint Anglo-German pressure resulted in a carefully worded note-verbale issued by the Ottoman grand vizier on June 28, 1914, a few weeks prior to the eruption of the July Crisis.15 While the British claimed that the Ottoman government had granted a concession, legally this was “not a concession but the promise of the concession.”16 The British, however, regarded it as such, and thereafter exerted their best efforts to protect it.

From Sykes-Picot to Lausanne The First World War opened a new chapter in the history of the Mosul Question. For the British, the fate of Mosul was one of the most important concerns. Thus, they convinced Sharif Husayn of Mecca, who had agreed to launch an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, that Mosul should not be included in his future Arab kingdom.17 The British, however, reluctantly conceded the ries, Cmd. 1226 (1921), 10-13 12 “The Fate of Mosul: Economic Value of Province to Great Britain,” Financial Times, June 4, 1924.

13 Edward Mead Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company? A Study in Oleaginous Diplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly 39/2 (1924): 268.

14 For the full text of the agreement, see Kent, Oil and Empire, 170-71.

15 An English translation of the Ottoman note is given in Papers Related to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1921 (Washington D.C., 1936), 89-93.

16 Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company?” 271.

17 “Letters between Hussein Ibn Ali and Sir Henry McMahon,” WWI Document

54 civil administration of Mosul to France by the Sykes-Picot agreement reached on May 16, 1916. The agreement awarded Mosul to a future Arab State under French Protection.

The British had serious concerns regarding the French attitude vis-àvis the Turkish Petroleum Company, and even during the war Sir Mark Sykes, one of the two architects of the agreement, remarked that “Picot had been ill-advised in taking Mosul.”18 The British concession was not unconditional.

They made clear to the French that they would have “Mosul without oil;” the French grudgingly agreed.19 At the conclusion of the war, however, the British decided to change the terms of the deal and take Mosul back to their zone of influence. When Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau met in early December 1918 to discuss their joint strategy in the forthcoming peace conference, the former requested Mosul along with Palestine. The French premier, who wished to assure France’s security in Europe, resentfully abandoned France’s diplomatic title to Mosul.20 To appease their disgruntled French allies, in 1920, the British gave them the 25% share that had been previously owned by Deutsche Bank.21 The subsequent Treaty of Sèvres signed between the Ottoman Empire and the victors of the First World War in August 1920 granted Mosul to an Iraqi state under a British mandate.22

The British seemed to have received the best possible deal. They would be in control of Mosul and 75% of the shares of the Turkish Petroleum Company that would be charged with exploiting the oil in the province. They faced, however, an unforeseen obstacle.

The Ottoman Government had signed the Treaty of Sèvres, but the rival nationalist government refused to accept its terms. Turkish nationalists adopted an earlier document called National Pact (Misak-ı Millî) issued by the Archive, https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Letters_between_Hussein_Ibn_Ali_and_ Sir_Henry_Mcmahon, Accessed on December 3, 2017.

18 Sykes’ letter to Ronald Graham, dated Rome May 23, 1917, in “Copies of Private Letters 6 April-23 May 1917,” in The Papers of Sir Mark Sykes, 1879-1919: the Sykes-Picot Agreement & the Middle East, https://microform.digital/boa/documents/578/copies-ofprivate-letters-6-april-23-may-1917?q=mosul, Accessed on November 22, 2017.

19 Gregory P. Nowell, Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), ss. 115-20.

20 Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “France’s Middle Eastern Ambitions, the Sykes-Picot Negotiations, and the Oil Fields of Mosul, 1915-1918,” The Journal of Modern History 66/4 (1994): 697-725.

21 Memorandum of Agreement between M. Philippe Berthelot, Directeur des Affaires politiques et commerciales au Ministère des affaires étrangères, and Professor Sir John Cadman, K.C.M.G., Director in Charge of His Majesty’s Petroleum Department. Cmd. 675 (1920).

22 The Treaties of Peace 1919-1923, Vol. II, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (New York, 1924). https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Section_I,_Articles_1_-_260. Accessed on November 14, 2017.

55 last Ottoman Parliament in February 1920, as their road map for the dismemberment of the empire.23 According this document, the Mosul province in which Turks and Kurds enjoy an overwhelming majority should be included in the new Turkish state.

When Lausanne Peace Conference convened in the aftermath of the victorious conclusion of the Turkish War of Independence, Turkish representatives requested the implementation of the National Pact. This prompted an impasse and the negotiations broke down in February 1923. The conference adjourned two months later, and Turkey continued to insist on a plebiscite to determine the future of the former Ottoman province of Mosul.24 The British, who did not wish to leave the region to Turkey, however, categorically rejected this proposal. Lord Curzon maintained that the “poor Kurds . . . do not even know what it [plebiscite] means,” and the issue in hand was nothing but a border determination.25 Likewise, thanks to the American diplomatic support, Turkey also rejected all proposals for recognizing the Turkish Petroleum Company’s rights for exploration.26 The parties could not reach an agreement in the second round of negotiations as well. Hence the Allies and Turkey signed a peace treaty while leaving the Mosul question unsettled. The third article of the treaty stipulated that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two governments . . . the dispute shall be referred to the League of Nations.”27 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF THE QUESTION

Theses of the Parties

As stipulated by the peace treaty, the conflicting parties met in Istanbul in May 1924 to reach a settlement. At this meeting known as the Haliç (Golden Horne) Conference, the Turkish delegation requested the restoration of the former Ottoman province of Mosul to Turkey in its entirety. In response, the British representatives, brought the issue of a Nestorian autonomous region to be established on the Turkish side of the border to the bargaining table. Obviously, there was no room for negotiations, hence, after exchanging diplomatic notes and maps, the parties decided to terminate the conference and refer the 23 Stanford J. Shaw, From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of Liberation 19181923, vol. II (Ankara: TTK, 2000), 803.

24 Ibid., 361.

25 Ibid.

26 Fiona Venn, “Oleaginous Diplomacy: Oil, Anglo–American Relations and the Lausanne Conference, 1922–23,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20 (2009): 428-32.

27 Treaty of Peace with Turkey and Other Instruments Signed at Lausanne on July 24, 1923, Cmd. 1929, (1923), 15.

56 matter to the League of Nations.28 At the Council meeting held in September 1924, in Geneva, both sides reiterated their theses. The British representative Lord Parmoor restated that the work to be done by the League was “the definition of the frontier line between Turkey and Iraq.”29 The Turkish representative Fethi Bey, in response, maintained that the point in dispute was not one of a frontier line, but “whether the Province of Mosul as a whole should, or should not return to Turkey.” He, on behalf of the Kurdish and Turkish populations of Mosul, requested the restoration of the entire province as delimited by the Sublime Porte in 1879 to Turkey.30 The parties concerned then submitted memoranda marshalling demographic, political, geographic, historical, economic, and strategic reasons on which they based their claim. The Turkish side maintained that the Kurds and Turks with populations 263,830 and 146,960 respectively, had formed an overwhelming majority in Mosul whereas the Arabs with a mere population of 43,210 and non-Muslims with a population of 31,000 constituted insignificant minorities. The Mosul province formed an integral part of Eastern Turkey in which the population consisted of Turco-Kurdish elements, whereas the territory of the state of Iraq was peopled by Arabs.

According to Turkish authorities, Mosul geographically constituted an indivisible part of Anatolia and presented climatic conditions identical with those prevailing in Asia Minor. Historically, the Turkish side claimed, Mosul had been ruled by Turkish administrators since the Abbasid caliphs. Ankara highlighted the economic relations of the province with Anatolia and stated that leaving Mosul to Iraq would put Turkey in a weaker position from a strategic viewpoint as well.31 The British drew a diametrically opposite picture. Their memorandum submitted to the Council provided different demographic figures giving the Arab population as 185,700, Kurds as 454,700, Turks and Turkomans as 65,800, and non-Muslims as 83,800. According to the British one-twelfth of the population in the area, therefore, was politically and racially allied to Turkey whereas nearly five-twelfths, the Arabs, Yezidis, and Christians were “emphatically desirous of inclusion within Iraq.” The remaining half was a separate people 28 See the minutes of the meetings and exchanges notes-verbales reproduced in La question de Mossoul de la signature du traité d’armistice de Mudros (Constantinople: Ahmed İhsan, 1925), 180-200.

29 League of Nations: Thirtieth Session of the Council: Report by Lord Parmoor, Miscellaneous, no. 20 (1924), Cmd. 2287, 8.

30 La question de Mossoul, 183.

31 League of Nations, Frontier between Turkey and Iraq: Letter and Memorandum from the Turkish Government, C. 494. 1924. VII, 6-11.

57 with different leanings. According to the British, Mosul geographically formed an indivisible part of Iraq, historically it had been ruled by Arab administrators in Baghdad for centuries, and from an economic viewpoint it was the economic hinterland of Iraq. Finally, the British claimed that Baghdad and Basra would be at the mercy of the Turkish army in Mosul if it became a part of Turkey.32

Composition of the Commission

Having examined the arguments of the parties, the Council formed a commission of inquiry and sent it to Mosul, with power to ascertain the sentiments of the local populations, to consult the three governments concerned, and then submit a recommendation to the League in the form a detailed report. Formation of a commission of inquiry, instead of a boundary drawing committee, in fact, expressed a tacit approval of the Turkish thesis. By sending this commission to the spot, the League, likewise, made it clear that it would like to ascertain the local sentiment.

The Council took the issue of selecting members to this body seriously.

It decided to prevent the inclusion of any individual from countries that had close relationships and alliances with the two parties involved. In addition, it was decided upon not to appoint an American representative, due to the expressed U. S. interest in Mosul oil.33 As a result, the Council set up a commission composed of Carl Einar Thure af Wirsén, a former Swedish army officer and diplomat, Count Pál Teleki, a renowned expert in geography and the former Prime Minister of Hungary, and Colonel Albert Paulis, a former Belgian officer and colonial administrator. Wirsén was chosen as the chairman of the commission.34

The Turkish side, which had expressed concerns regarding the League’s impartiality, could not oppose these appointments. None of these individuals or their governments had any interest in the disputed area or was dependent on any of the contending parties. It should also be remembered that for the first time the League of Nations entrusted such responsibilities to a national (i.e., Count Pál Teleki) of one of the defeated nations of the First World War.35 The criticism of not including “a Muslim member”36 makes sense; however, the Council could not appoint an Arab or a Turk. In addition, the Soviet Union became a member in 1934, thus, appointing a Muslim from one of its socialist 32 League of Nations, Memorandum on the Frontier between Turkey and Iraq, C. 396. 1924.VII, 1-8.

33 Walters, F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), vol. I, 307 34 “League of Nations Council Minutes: 31st Session,” League of Nations Official Journal 11 (November 1924): 1670.

35 Walters, League of Nations, vol. I, 307.

36 Chardin, “The Mosul Question,” 63.

58 republics was not a viable option. Finally, in the 1920’s the rest of the Muslim world was either under direct colonial rule or de facto control of the British and their First World War allies.

Despite briefly occupying the Åland islands jointly with the Germans, Sweden remained as a neutral power during the First World War. Thus, choosing a chairman from Sweden seemed appropriate. Wirsén had served in many Eastern European capitals including Constantinople as the Swedish military attaché, thus he had a number of acquaintances in Turkey. He had no interest in the disputed area, and, in fact, believing that “the political, economic, geographic, and ethnic situations were so complicated that finding a solution would be almost impossible,” he did not want to be involved.37 Only at the Swedish government’s insistence did he reluctantly agree to serve.38 In contrast to Wirsén, Count Pál Teleki had served as the prime minister of a defeated Central Power that tried to resist fragmentation after the conclusion of the Treaty of Trianon, which separated large chunks of land from Hungary and reduced it to a land-locked country. Thus, having served as a statesman who attempted to restore lost territories after the First World War,39 he did not seem to be the best candidate to serve on a commission tasked with deciding whether a lost province should be restored to a defeated Central Power.

There was yet another issue that made Teleki an unlikely candidate for the position in question. He had become a member and then the president of a learned association named the Turan Society during the first decade of the nineteenth century. This society promoted the idea of the Turkic origins of the Hungarians and proposed closer cultural and political relations with the Turkic world. As the editor-in-chief of the journal of this society also named Turan, Teleki visited Constantinople on several occasions and became a staunch Turkophile. During this period, he led initiatives such as bringing Turkish students to Hungarian schools to bolster ties between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary.40 The British protested Teleki’s appointment on the grounds that he had been a member of the aforementioned society; however, the Council refused to replace him.41 37 John Rogers, “The Foreign Policy of Small States: Sweden and the Mosul Crisis, 1924–1925,” Contemporary European History 16/3 (2007): 361.

38 Ibid.

39 Balázs Ablonczy, Pál Teleki, 1874-1941: The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician, tr. Thomas J. and Helen D. DeKornfeld (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2006), 71-75.

40 Ibid., 28-37.

41 As reported by the Turkish dailies Hakimiyet-i Milliye and İkdam on August 18 and 19, 1925, respectively. See Tahir Kodal, Paylaşılamayan Toprak: Türk Basınına Göre

59 The third member of the commission, Albert Paulis was a Belgian colonial official and officer who had served on the Western front. Thus, like Teleki, he, too, could not be considered as a genuinely impartial individual.

Marc Dassier, who closely examined Paulis’ diaries kept during the commission work, maintain that the Belgian colonel did not take sides, and was mainly concerned with the security of the Christian minorities in Mosul.42 Gertrude Bell, who gained fame as the Desert Queen and served as an advisor to the Iraqi King,43 and met with members of the commission in that capacity, remarked that “the President Mr de Wirsen, a Swede, [was] honest, fat, and unintelligent.” According to her, “the live wire [was] Count Teleki, a Hungarian―he is also the danger,” and “Colonel Paulis, a Belgian, half way between the two others in intelligence and well meaning.”44 Bell further commented that “I’m convinced, I’m positive, that he [Teleki] is definitely pro-Turk and that he is going to do his damnedest to get the Commission to give recommendations which will be pleasing to the Turks.”45 The League seemed to have worked hard to form a commission that would not rubber stamp the British thesis and quickly draw a boundary accordingly. In fact, it did set up a commission that might view Turkish interpretations more sympathetically.46 This undertaking of the League helps us challenge the frequently repeated thesis that the British had won Mosul at (1923-1926) Musul Meselesi (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2005), 287.

42 Marc Dassier, “Le rapport de la Commission de Mossoul : Pro-Anglais ? ProTurc ? Le pour et le contre,” in “Le carnet irakien du Col. Albert Paulis,” http://marcdassier.skynetblogs.be/archives/tag/marc%20dassier/index-0.html. Accessed on November 28, 2017.

43 For her impact on Iraqi politics see, H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London: Constable, 1993), 232-66; Myriam Yakoubi, “Gertrude Bell’s Perception of Faisal I of Iraq and the Anglo-Arab Romance,” in Gertrude Bell and Iraq: A Life and Legacy, eds. Paul Collins and Charles Tripp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 187-213.

44 Gertrude Bell to her father, Sir Hugh Bell, Baghdad, January 21, 1925. Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University, http://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_id=790. Accessed on November 17, 2017.

45 Gertrude Bell to her stepmother, Dame Florence Bell, January 28, 1925. Bell Archive, Newcastle University, http://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/letter_details.php?letter_ id=793. Accessed on November 17, 2017.

46 The British High Commissioner in Iraq, too, made a similar remark much to the dismay of the members of the commission: “He was afraid that his Government and public opinion in England might be led to imagine that the nationality of the individual members of the Commission, and sentiments which might be attributed to them, would not be of some influence on their respective conclusions.” League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 11. The British assessor likewise commented that the commission members “were without doubt bien travaillés by the Turks in Angora.” See “Final Diary of the British Assessor to the League of Nations Committee,” enclosed with Sir H. Dobbs to Mr. Amery, Baghdad, April 16, 1925, in Records of Iraq, vol. 4, 19251927, eds. Alan de L. Rush and Jane Priestland (London: Archive Editions, 2001), 657.

60 the Lausanne Conference in 1923, and that what happened afterward does not merit attention.

The Council, which had decided to form a committee of inquiry, then undertook two actions. First, it adopted a resolution that affirmed the broadly-defined mandate of the commission.47 Second, it drew a line of demarcation called the Brussels line between the two disputants.48

Possibility of a Plebiscite

Having received a broadly-defined mandate, the commission first attempted to determine the nature of the real subject of the dispute. It rejected the British thesis that “a plebiscite would be impossible because the question at issue is a frontier problem and not the fate of the Vilayet of Mosul.”49 The members of the commission argued that the territory between the lines proposed by the conflicting parties was too large for it to be said that the question was merely one of boundary drawing. Furthermore, the area contained over 800,000 inhabitants of different ethnic and religious groups.50 Hence, they concluded that they should launch a detailed investigation and find appropriate mediums to gauge the sentiments of the people much to the dismay of the British, who had sought a quick resolution based on the available records.

The commission, then seriously considered holding a plebiscite in the region. This would be, of course, the simplest way to determine what the inhabitants really wanted. When the commission arrived in the disputed area; however, its members observed the grave difficulties involved in holding a full-fledge plebiscite. The area was under British occupation, and, therefore, the neutrality of the administration could not be secured.51 In fact, the British authorities refused to give assurances for limited “experimental plebiscites” to be held in cities.52 In the European regions in which plebiscites were held such as Schleswig, Allenstein, and Marienwerder, special commissions of the League had assumed administrative control and prepared strict regulations for referenda.53 Unlike the plebiscites that had taken place in Europe, more than half of the population in Mosul was nomadic, and, as discussed, had no registration and identity cards. In, Mosul, even if a plebiscite were successfully held, with 47 “League of Nations Council Minutes: 30st Session, “League of Nations Official Journal 10 (1924): 1360.

48 “League of Nations Council Minutes: 31st Session,” League of Nations Official Journal 11 (1924): 1659-60.

49 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 12.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 18.

52 Ibid.

53 Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, vol. I (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), vol. I, 67-70, 128-33, 451.

61 guarantees of freedom in voting, a great majority of the nomadic people would follow those of their tribal chiefs and land-owners on which they were dependent.

On paper, it would be easy to criticize the commission for not choosing the most direct medium to understand what the inhabitants of Mosul really wanted; however, the realities of the region imposed limitations on choosing the best venue possible. This should not be read as something similar to the Orientalizing and patronizing attitude of the British. The commission did not make any comments similar to those of Lord Curzon or argued that Orientals could not express their opinions freely. The final report of the commission lacks the overt Orientalist overtones of the epoch. Only in one section does it make remarks on “Character and affinities of the various races.”54 Even then, however, the report attempted to differentiate nomadic and settled people, and refrained from using tiresome Orientalist clichés such as barbarian, savage, uncivilized, and fanatical. The final report criticizes the conditions, but not the people and their culture.

The commission reasonably commented that holding a plebiscite in an area occupied by one of the contending parties was extremely difficult, and thus decided to use other methods to comprehend the wishes of the population. It should be remembered that by 1925 significant concerns had arisen regarding the practicality of plebiscites, and the League had cancelled a number of referenda such as those proposed for Orava, Teschen, Vilna, and Zips due to regional difficulties and lack of a sufficient number of neutral troops, law enforcement personnel, and officials.55 In Teschen, for example, for an area of mere 880 square miles and 420,000 individuals living in highly industrialized centers, the international commission requested 3,000 neutral troops and an additional police force to safeguard the plebiscite.56 The size of the disputed area in Mosul was 35,000 square miles and contained a population of 800,000 individuals scattered all over the region. Hence in light of the realities on the ground and in the historical context of the 1920’s, the commission did not take a radical decision by attempting to use methods other than plebiscite.

Commission’s Work on Ethnography, History, Geography, and Economy

While the commission decided to use different methods other than holding a plebiscite, it came to the conclusion that it should not reach a decision based solely on the information submitted by the contending parties. It, therefore, decided to carry out independent research and investigations. The commission subsequently asked numerous scholars and experts to provide 54 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 43-51. The commission used the term “race” in a loose sense and did not refer to its anthropological interpretations.

55 Wambaugh, Plebiscites, vol. I, 141-62, 321-29.

56 Ibid., 162.

62 information regarding the demography, history, geography, and economic conditions of Mosul. The list of consulted individuals included the most renowned scholars of the time.57 In addition, the commission sent detailed questionnaires to Ankara, Baghdad, and London and requested further information.58 Its own research helped the commission challenge many arguments advanced by the contending parties. By comparing the demographic data provided by Ankara and London, the commission reached the conclusion that both sides had inflated the figures of certain populations. On the one hand, the British, especially after 1918, attempted to inflate the population figures of the Arab population, and counted Turks and Turkomans as members of separate ethnic groups in their documents. The Turkish side, on the other hand, exaggerated the number of the Turks.

In fact, the Turkish authorities had fabricated statistics and submitted them as the results of the 1914 Ottoman census. The Ottoman government could not hold a census in Mosul in 1914 due to internal disturbances and difficulties.59 Even if they had held a census, it would not have shown the respective Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish populations separately. The Ottomans counted individuals as members of millets (religious communities) such as Muslim or Greek Orthodox. Thus, while they counted a Greek Orthodox Albanian as “Greek Orthodox,” they registered a Muslim Albanian as “Muslim.”

The Ottoman demographic statistics, therefore, could not provide figures for Turks, Kurds, and Arabs.60 The commission did not know this; nonetheless, it concluded that the figures that Ankara had provided were not reliable.

Likewise, the commission also understood that the British assertion maintaining that they had “counted the houses and consulted the official Turkish census documents” did not reflect the reality.61 As a recent study shows, the British, too, used statistics as a tool to justify their case and liberally played with population figures. 62 The commission could not have known this either. It, however, comprehended that the huge discrepancies between the Turkish and British statistics could not be reconciled (for instance, the Turkish statistics provided the number of Turks in Sulaymaniyah as 32, 960 and the British statistics give the same figure as 2),63 and requested original 57 For the list of these scholars, see League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 13.

58 Ibid, 6.

59 Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 190.

60 Stanford J. Shaw, “The Ottoman Census System and Population, 1831-1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9/3 (1978), 329-34.

61 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 32.

62 Fuat Dundar, Statisquo: The British Use of Statistics in the Iraqi Kurdish Question, 1919-1932 (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2010), especially 11-25.

63 Ibid, 20.

63 records from the contending parties. Both Ankara and London declined to accommodate the request.64 In the end, upon concluding that “the statistics and maps provided by the two parties [were] far from accurate,”65 the commission used all the available data and collected information from local leaders and double checked it to reach rough estimates. It concluded that the number of the Arabs was slightly (on an average of 5% to 10%) exaggerated; the number of Turks,66 likewise, should be significantly smaller, and the Kurds indisputably form the majority of the population.67 The commission thus maintained that “if the ethnic argument alone had to be taken into account, the necessary conclusion would be that an independent Kurdish State should be created, since the Kurds form five-eighths of the population.”68 The commission then moved to examine the historical, geographic, political, and economic reasons put forth by the contending parties, before going to the disputed area to hold interviews. This examination, too, proved that the contending parties had used the historical and geographic information and economic data liberally to support their cases. By using expert information and consulting with the available material in books, geographical lexicons, and encyclopedias, the commission reached the conclusion that history, geography, or the economy should not dictate an indisputable decision in either way.

It agreed with the Turkish thesis that the disputed area had been under Turkish rule for centuries; however, it also highlighted the fact that this rule was for a long time exercised through the governors of Baghdad.69 The commission rightly maintained that geographically the area never had a name of its own, and, did not constitute a distinct natural region; therefore, it could be attached either to Anatolia or Baghdad and Basra without causing a major separation.70 The commission concluded that economic considerations argue in 64 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 32-34.

65 Ibid., 86.

66 The commission, however, rejected the British thesis maintaining that the Turks in the former Ottoman province of Mosul were not Turks but Turkomans who had come to the region from Iran long before the foundation of the Ottoman state.

The commission stated that the Turks of Mosul were of the “same race as those in the Turkish Republic.” Ibid., 47-8, 57.

67 Ibid., 57.

68 Ibid.

69 The Turkish side could have proven that the pashas of Baghdad had administered Mosul for a very brief period (See Ahmet Gündüz, Osmanlı İdaresinde Musul, 15231639 (Elazığ: Fırat Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2003), 32-44, and Nilüfer Bayatlı, XVI. Yüzyılda Musul Eyâleti (Ankara: TTK Yayınları, 1999), 34-45); however, the Turkish authorities did not have that information at their disposal in 1925.

70 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 57.

64 favor of the union of the disputed territory with Iraq, though mountainous districts in the north of the line of demarcation could be separated without the slightest inconvenience.

In the carefully penned final report, the commission contended that Mosul should not be awarded to Turkey or Iraq for solely historical, geographical, or economic reasons. The commission also refused to take a decision squarely based on demography. It rejected the shared British and Turkish assumption that certain groups should prefer joining Turkey or Iraq under British mandate due to their ethnic and religious identities. Consequently, instead of multiplying Kurdish and Turkish or Arab and non-Muslim populations, the commission decided to hold extensive rounds of interviews to grasp the sentiments of the inhabitants.

Sensing the Pulse of the Population

The Commission invited the Turkish and British governments to appoint assessors who would provide lists of former and current provincial officials (individuals who have served in the last twenty years), municipal council members, local notables, tribal chiefs, sheikhs, leaders of various communities, clerics, and large landowners. Holding 800 interviews, the commission endeavored to sense the pulse of the population. The sample was not highly representative (the total population was roughly 800,000 and the number of individuals eligible to vote was around 120,000 since election laws restricted the suffrage to males over 30 in Turkey and Iraq. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 granted limited suffrage to women in Great Britain, however, the British did not apply it in colonies and mandates). The sample size thus represented approximately .067% of the eligible voters, but interviews with individuals who occupied important positions and formed public opinion might provide significant insights into the preferences of the population. The method adopted by the commission was to explain the purpose in simple terms to the individuals who came to meet with it, and then to pose the questions jointly prepared by the British and Turkish assessors.71 Initially, the commission faced major difficulties in conducting interviews. The British High Commissioner Sir Henry Dobbs at first proposed interviews to be held only in the town of Mosul, arguing that the “British Government might not approve of the Commission’s decision to make separate enquiries in different parts of the vilayet.”72 The commission rejected this proposal, and the British grudgingly allowed interviews to be conducted across the province. Despite this permission, the British authorities and the Iraqi 71 “Final Diary of the British Assessor to the League of Nations Committee,” enclosed with a note from Sir H. Dobbs to Mr. Amery, Baghdad, April 16, 1925, in Records of Iraq, vol. 4, 660-62.

72 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 11.

65 officials under their supervision adopted a restrictive attitude. On the strong insistence of the commission, the British and Iraqi authorities were compelled to alter their policy, and the members of the commission made a large number of excursions and held interviews throughout the province via cars, airplanes, horses, and on foot.73 A rather long British report describes, in detail, the interviews held at the town of Sulaymaniyah. This document reveals that the commission paid close attention to impartiality and examined the lists submitted by the British and Turkish assessors carefully. It, furthermore, reassured the interviewed individuals that their depositions would be kept strictly confidential.74 It, likewise, shows that despite British objections the commission interviewed several pro-Turkish individuals and persons who had participated in rebellions against the British. 75 The final report of the commission provides summary information regarding the consultations undertaken in different towns and villages but does not tally exact figures for any sub-province but Mosul.

In Mosul proper, members of the Arab independence party vehemently urged that the mandate should come to an end at once. Some Arab nationalists preferred union with Turkey to an Arab state under a European mandate. 53 Arab leaders thus voted for Turkey while 102 unconditionally for Iraq, 22 for Iraq on certain conditions, 8 were undecided, and 3 declared that they wanted a Muslim government. In general, members of poorer classes favored union with Turkey as opposed to individuals representing middle and upper classes who wished to stay in Iraq.76 In the sub-provinces of Arbil, Kirkuk, Rawandiz, and Sulaimaniyah, a great majority of the Kurds interviewed by the commission expressed a strong desire for an independent Kurdish state under European, preferably British, mandate. When they comprehended that this was not an option, they voiced demands for Kurdish local autonomy and the prolongation of British control. The majority of the Turkish witnesses declared their wish to join Turkey, though a significant minority declared that they would prefer Iraq on economic grounds. Among the Arabs, the extreme nationalist ones said that they prefer incorporation into Turkey to an Iraq under foreign control, and lower classes, in general, expressed a similar view. The Yazidis were divided equally as pro-Turk and pro-Iraq. Finally, most of the Nestorians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans, and almost all the Jews were in favor of an Arab government insofar as 73 Ibid., 7-12, 75-78.

74 “Report by Captain A. J. Chapman on the Visit of the Frontier Commission to Sulaimani, February 27th-March 3rd, 1925, February 27, 1925,� in Records of Iraq, vol. 4, 641-55.

75 Ibid., 642-43.

76 League of Nations, Question de la Frontière, 77.

66 European control was maintained. They, however, said that they would prefer Turkey as “the lesser evil,” if the European mandate should not continue.77 This was, of course, a quite complex picture as the desires of the inhabitants of Mosul did not coincide with ethnic lines. Instead of counting votes, the commission, therefore, made an in-depth analysis, and submitted its recommendations to the Council of the League.

The Recommendations of the Commission and the League’s Decision

Looking at the question from the viewpoint of the interests of the local populations and assigning a relative value to economic, geographical, political, and strategic arguments, the commission recommended that Mosul remain in Iraq on the following two conditions: 1. “The territory must remain under the effective mandate of the League . . for. . . twenty-five years.

2. Regard must be paid to the desires expressed by the Kurds that officials of Kurdish race should be appointed for the administration of their country, the dispensation of justice, and teaching in schools, and that Kurdish should be the official language of these services.”78

The commission further counseled local autonomy for the Assyrians, and advised that all the other Christians, Jews, and Yazidis enjoy religious freedom and minority rights.79 The Council of the League of Nations with the exception of the representative of the Turkish government unanimously accepted these recommendations.80 Turkey protested the decision and recalled its representative from the Council. On December 16, 1925 the Council, decided that the frontier between Turkey and Iraq should be drawn along the Brussels Line, as soon as the aforementioned two conditions were fulfilled. First, Britain and Iraq should jointly undertake to continue the mandatory regime for twenty-five years.

Second, the Kurds in Iraq should receive administrative and cultural autonomy by the mandatory power.

The British at once accepted both conditions, 81 and announced the measures to be adopted by the Iraqi government for the administration of predominantly Kurdish districts and regions. These measures looked like a serious program of autonomy on paper;82 however, the Iraqi King, who declared 77 Ibid., 77-78.

78 Ibid., 87-89.

79 Ibid., 90.

80 League of Nations: Report by M. Umden on the Question of the Turco-Irak Frontier, Cmd. 2565 (1925), 4-5.

81 Treaty with King Feisal Signed at Baghdad, 13th January 1926, with Explanatory Note, Cmd. 2587 (1926), 2-3.

82 “Memorandum on Administration of Kurdish Districts in Iraq,” in League of

67 that “among the first duties of every real Iraqi will be to encourage his brother, the Iraqi Kurd, to cling on his nationality and to join him under the Iraqi flag,”83 never applied it. On June 5, 1926, representatives of Turkey, Iraq, and Great Britain signed a treaty by which the new frontier became definitive. 84 Mosul, which had been one of the most underdeveloped provinces of the Ottoman Empire, became a major international problem after the First World War. The British wanted to keep it in Iraq, under their mandate, and the Republic of Turkey desired to return it to the new nation-state that emerged on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

The League, to which the dispute was referred, took an impartial stand on the Mosul question. Instead of sending a boundary demarcation commission to the spot, the Council of the League formed a commission of inquiry.

This commission was composed of individuals who wished to carry out an objective and independent research and field work to reach a decision. Despite relentless British requests asking for a quick recommendation based on the available statistics and information, the commission endeavored to understand the desiderata of the locals and collected additional data to make a suggestion to the League. While the commission recognized the practical impossibility of holding a general plebiscite, it attempted to gauge the preferences of the inhabitants through large town-hall meetings and a host of personal interviews with leading figures across Mosul. Unlike the British, who Orientalized the locals, the commission cared for the preferences of the people.

The members of the commission quickly comprehended that the issue in hand was quite different than the many cases that had also been brought to the League for arbitration. As opposed to the populations in the Aland Islands, Tyrol and Salzburg, or Eupen and Malmédy, the inhabitants of Mosul preferred a third option which was not on the table. A significant majority of the population expressed an unflinching desire for independence or self-rule despite being asked to choose between Arab or Turkish administrations.

In his essay entitled “But the Alternative Is Despair,” Nathaniel Berman discusses the tension between the advocates of subjective self-determination (i.e., plebiscite principle) and proponents of minority protection in the interNations: Letter from His Majesty’s Government to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations and Proceedings of the Council of the League regarding the Determination of the Turco-Irak Frontier and the Application to Irak of the Provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League. London, March 2, 1926, and Geneva, March 11, 1926, Cmd. 2624 (1926) , 4-6.

83 Ibid. 6.

84 Treaty between the United Kingdom and Iraq and Turkey Regarding the Settlement of the Frontier Between Turkey and Iraq Together with Notes Exchanged. Angora, June 5, 1926, Cmd. 2912 (1927), 2-10.

68 national arena during the interwar period. The former maintained that nationalist disputes would best be resolved through institutionalizing the principle of plebiscite. In contrast, the latter rejected the notion that ethnic groups could enjoy formal international legal standing.85 As Berman argues, the international law of the interwar period sought novel and innovative solutions to the inter-state disputes such as plebiscites and treaties protecting minorities and their rights. The work and final recommendations of the commission duly reflect this tension. It proposed a settlement not solely based on a plebiscite, but its recommendations did not totally ignore local preferences. Likewise, while failing to grant formal international legal standing to the Kurds and the Christians of Mosul, the commission suggested legal protection for them. In other words, it endeavored to find the middle ground between subjective self-determination and minority protection.

The recommendations of the commission were not only avant-garde in the standards of the 1920s, but they were also impartial. The commission concluded that the people who had not been given a third option should become citizens of a nation-state with cultural and limited administrative autonomy under a European mandate. In reaching this conclusion, the commission did not pay any heed to British economic interests. The British resolved that aspect of the issue separately through the Red Line Agreement of 1928.

A high-ranking British official remarked in 1925 that the “enquiries of the commission . . . may have left the seeds of trouble for the future.”86 He was right. Instead of simply drawing a line of demarcation and awarding a region to a state, the commission requested autonomy and protection for the Kurds and Christians in Mosul. For these minorities that had not been officially recognized, the special protection rights offered a major chance for their societal and communal transition into the new political age.87 The Arab nationalists in Baghdad decided to comply with this request only on paper, however, and announced a new administrative scheme for the areas heavily populated by the Kurds and promised legal protection to various Christian communities. Had they even partially implemented these schemes and fulfilled their promises, things could have unfolded differently. The culpability should not be placed on 85 Nathaniel Berman, “But the Alternative Is Despair: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law,” Harvard Law Review 106/ 8 (1993): 185961.

86 “Final Diary of the British Assessor to the League of Nations Committee,” in Records of Iraq, vol. 4, 664.

87 H. Müller-Sommerfeld,” The League of Nations, A-Mandates and Minority Rights during the Mandate Period in Iraq, 1920–1932,” in Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East, eds. S. R. Goldstein-Sabbah and H. L. Murre van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 265.

69 the shoulders of the League or the commission that it set up, but on the policy-makers in Baghdad and London.

A close examination shows that while the League of Nations did not live up to the great expectations and provide collective security, it did serve as an impartial arbiter in numerous international conflicts in the 1920s. The Mosul conflict was, in fact, one of them and by taking the desiderata of the inhabitants of this region into serious consideration, the League gave them a voice and made meaningful recommendations for future administration. Unfortunately, the policy-makers on the ground paid no heed to them and planted the seeds of the modern-day disputes in this region.

70 The border is a line that birds cannot see.

The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.

The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.

The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe.

The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.

The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.

The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going.

The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so many.

The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a stop sign, always red.

The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished.

The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.

The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a thousand imaginations.

The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do not rhyme.

The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.

The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the evening.

The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far.

The border is two men in love with the same woman.

The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.

The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made.

The border is “NoNo” The Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.

The border is a locked door that has been promoted.

The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.

The border has become Checkpoint Chale.

The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken.

The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier.

The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.

The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing changes.

The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.

-Alberto Ríos, The Border: A Double Sonnet (1952)

The Istanbullu Flaneur Lucian Li

I

72

n his ethnography/autobiography Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk describes the archetypal scene of Huzun (Melancholy) in Turkish cinema as the forlorn and defeated protagonist wandering the poor and decrepit back alleys of Istanbul before gazing out at the Bosphorus. Urban existence, particularly the city of Istanbul itself, forms a powerful recurrent theme in Turkish literature, especially the works of the two authors forming the focal point of this paper: Orhan Pamuk and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar. With the focus of Tanpinar and Pamuk on the city of Istanbul, it is no surprise that observation, depiction, and exploration of the city play critical roles in their works.

Pamuk and Tanpinar’s characters are overwhelmingly male, well educated, cultured, bourgeois, and they wander the city aimlessly, observing and mingling with crowds of the common people. It is difficult not to immediately consider them in the context of the Parisian flaneur (the person and the associated action of flanerie. Although these characters are clearly not flaneurs in the original French sense, they often occupy comparable social and cultural positions, interact with the world in a similar fashion, and observe and dissect the city and its denizens. At least on a superficial level, the characters parallel the archetype of the flaneur extremely closely. However, it is the ways their works challenge and problematize the literary role of the flaneur and its inextricable connection with modernity which makes the comparison interesting.

In this paper, I will first establish the definition and historical context of the 19th century Parisian Flaneur, before moving into a comparative analysis of how characters in A Mind at Peace, Istanbul, and The Black Book both conform to and challenge the original boundaries of the flaneur’s societal role in the following themes: the flaneur’s position as an individual within the collective body of the crowd, his ability to construct and undermine narratives of modernity and historical memory, the power of his uniquely insightful gaze to make sense of chaotic urban life, and his ability to synthesize cultural products from those observations.

From Tanpinar and Pamuk’s treatment of the flaneur and careful adaptation to their unique contexts, we can see a clear challenge to the Western and modernist roots of the flaneur. In creating characters who observe and document urban life in the Turkish context, Tanpinar and Pamuk both problematize the imposition of imagined narratives through the observer’s gaze, while Pamuk rejects the idea of empirically constructed narrative altogether and seeks to construct subjective experiences and motivations for flanerie.

OVERVIEW OF AUTHORS In his life, Tanpinar was known more as a professor of literature, public intellectual, and political figure, and it was not until after his death that he became regarded as a fiction author. He was intimately involved with the project

73 of Turkish modernization and westernization after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and the Kemalist Cultural Revolution. His novels and poetry reflect this involvement in the nation building project, and can thus generally be described as modernist due to their belief in progress and support of a nationalist social project.

Tanpinar’s novel Huzur or A Mind at Peace was published in 1948, and it chronicles the deteriorating mental condition of a bourgeois Istanbullu, Mumtaz, as his faith in modernity collapses with Europe’s steady progress towards the chaos of the Second World War. The novel is unique because of its vivid description of Istanbul sights and people based on extensive observation by both the author and narrator.

Orhan Pamuk is a contemporary Turkish author whose works focus on the failures of Kemalism and modernity. His work extensively utilizes archives of historical memory as well as stories and tropes from the Ottoman past. Pamuk is generally categorized as a postmodern author because of his rejection of objective truth, narratives of historical progress, and utilization of multiperspectivalism and nonlinear chronologies.

Pamuk’s Black Book is at its essence a postmodern detective novel. The narrator’s wife disappears mysteriously, and he embarks on a journey through Istanbul in search for clues. The narrative is interspersed with newspaper columns composed by the narrator’s brother-in-law Celal, who he is intensely jealous of. Eventually, the narrative assumes explicitly Sufi aspects, and the detective search is transformed into a spiritual quest for meaning and clarified identity.

Pamuk’s Istanbul serves as both an autobiography of the author’s youth and a history of representations of the city. Istanbul’s chapters focus on different visitors to and observers of Istanbul, and analyze the impact of their ideologies, goals, and intellectual contexts on their interpretations of the city.

DEFINING THE FLANEUR

In its original conception, the flaneur was typically a bourgeois man who had the leisure time to stroll through the boulevards of the city aimlessly, observing the crowd around him and documenting interesting urban sights and spectacle. He collected his observations, and published them in “Physiologies” of the city, categorizing his observed subjects into different types based on their behavior and traits. The flaneur can be seen as a forerunner to “the reporter, to the detective and even to the international hyper-bourgeoisie, to dandies and travelers moving around the world with the aim of proving themselves and testing new experiences.”1 1 Nuvolati, Giampaolo. “The flâneur: A way of walking, exploring and interpreting the city.” Walking in the European City: Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography

74

In this way the flaneur originally participated in an effort to empirically document the progress and impacts of modernization, but as the role developed, by Baudelaire’s time, it had abandoned its ambition to depict the world with total realism. Because the intellectual context shifted to favor more romanticist and aestheticized representations in lieu of realism, the flaneur’s role changed as well. The “avant-garde incarnation was uniquely committed to the defense of imagination against a narrowly scientific conception of modernity.”2 From the empirical physiologies, Baudelaire’s “artist-flaneur” progressed to duplicating his “urban observations and description” on the “level of analogy and metaphor” rather than the purely realist level.3

In contemporary sources, flaneurs, both original and avant garde, were assigned almost mythological abilities to decode and translate the chaos of urban existence into coherent modernist narratives. With their refined artistic sensibilities and superhuman creativity, they could decode images, experiences, and observations and essentially “read” and “write” the city as a text.4 Consequently, flaneurs were generally coded as extremely cultured and well educated.

Later on, Walter Benjamin played a critical role in reviving the role of the flaneur in literary criticism using the works of Baudelaire. He connected the flaneur with not only modernity, but specifically the impacts of capitalism and urban life. He “stressed the flâneur’s embeddedness in commercial mass culture and his intimate links with mid-century journalism and popular literature”.5 To Benjamin, the flaneur was a professional observer, whose role in capitalist society was to see and document every occurrence. This participation in the capitalist market vastly complicated the flaneur’s cultural production, and critics have often drawn comparisons to a “literary prostitution”6 functionally commodifying both cultural production and the flaneur himself.

INDIVIDUALS AND THE CROWD

As a product of modernity, the flaneur is placed into a strange hybrid state vis-a-vis his individual creative talent and his reliance on his ability to observe crowds and society from an insider’s perspective. This tension is best described in the literature as being “alone in the crowd.” This state causes the flaneur to be “melancholic but also open to contacts” and both a passive spec(2014): p.26.

2 Gluck, Mary. “The flaneur and the aesthetic: Appropriation of urban culture in mid-19th-century Paris.” Theory, Culture & Society 20.5 (2003): p.74.

3 Ibid. p.76 4 Ibid. p.70 5 Ibid. p.54 6 Lauster, Martina. “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the” Flâneur”.” The Modern Language Review (2007): p.146.

75 tator and active participant in interpreting and rewriting reality with his own works.7 The flaneur’s “peculiar combination of private and public qualities that distinguished him from both heroes of antiquity and the modern bourgeois.

Like modern life itself, the flâneur was anonymous in his outward appearance. He lacked all recognizable images or physical traces that would have distinguished him from others”.8 This lack of individuality in terms of outward appearances is starkly contrasted with the enormous creative individuality necessary for the flaneur’s existence.

Thus, even in this hybrid state, the individual nature of the flaneur still took precedence: “Rather than being a type, defined by codes applicable to all members of the class, the avant-garde flâneur was a unique individual, who represented...originality. His identity was based...on masks, disguises and incognitos, through which he defined his empathic identification with modernity”.9

In Baudelaire’s reformulation of the flaneur as an artist, we see this underlying tension resurface powerfully. “the pre-I850 flaneur strives to understand the individual Other in his or her otherness, the homme desfoules (man of the crowd), as described by Baudelaire, seeks to lose all selfhood in a quasi-mystic (or quasi-orgasmic) fusion with ‘la foule’ considered as an undifferentiated and anonymous mass.10 Flaneurs rejoice in their anonymity and long to become one with the crowd. This status as “I with an insatiable appetite for the non-I” reflects a desire to “take part in universal communion” with the “non-I.”11 Despite this desire, the act of flanerie serves to throw the flaneur into stark relief against the urban crowd and imposes an extreme individualism, almost solipsism, upon the flaneur.12 This bears interesting similarities to the Sufi journey and the always unrequited desire for unity and annihilation with the beloved.

With the democratization of urbanism, and the mixing of bourgeois with the urban poor in the new boulevards of Paris, flaneurs and other bourgeois were plunged into “jostling crowds” and confronted with the stark reality of “urban poverty”. The power of the individual flaneur to decipher the meaning of modernity, and the beneficial nature of modern existence itself were challenged by confrontation with these harsh truths. “At the end, flanerie 7 Nuvolati p.23 8 Gluck p.65 9 Ibid. p.77 10 Lauster p.147 11 Shaya, Gregory. “The Flaneur, the Badaud, and the Making of a Mass Public in France, circa 1860-1910.” American Historical Review 109.1 (2004): p.48.

12 Ibid. p.49

76 was an ideological attempt to reprivatize social space, and to give assurance that the individual’s passive observation was adequate for knowledge of social reality.”13 Fundamentally, the flaneur channels the mass communal experiences of poverty and urbanization and reframes them as an individual’s observations and personal reflections.

In Istanbul, Pamuk’s conception of Huzun inverts the expectations of flanerie. A man wanders the streets of the city, but instead of becoming a “flaneur alone [taking] possession of the streets”14 or a “unique individual who represented a principle of differentiation and originality”,15 he is subsumed by the crowd, and his individual story, experiences, and struggles are made unimportant. Pamuk’s final definition of Huzun is the erosion of an individual’s will to stand against the values and mores of the community and he tellingly contrasts it with the furious ambition glorifying the spirit of the modern city and of individuals standing against societies.16 The weight of history from the city’s “sights and streets and famous views” forms huzun, not the individual story of the protagonist. Pamuk’s huzun seeker is not searching for images of progress and modernity to refashion into narratives with creativity; he has instead chosen to surrender to the weight of communal and historical destiny and turns instead to the ruins of lost empire. Through huzun, the flaneur “in the crowd but not of the crowd”17 can achieve the unity with the “non-I”.

CONSTRUCTIONS OF MODERNITY AND HISTORY

The flaneur’s intimate connection with modernity cannot be overstated. He could not have existed without the mass urbanization associated with industrialization and modernization. Although some aspects of the flaneur type parodied and challenged aspects modern social norms and expectations, on a fundamental level, flanerie depended upon and reinforced ideologies of modernity.

Contemporary depictions of the flaneur “stressed the public and heroic potential of the city. They suggested that modern life, despite its anonymity, had the capacity to produce epic images of its own greatness that would render it transparent to observers.”18 Through empirical documentation, early flâneurs supposedly used their “power of vision [to] humanize the urban landscape and overcome the inherent illegibility of the modern world.”19 Modern13 Buck-Morss, Susan. “The flaneur, the sandwichman and the whore: the politics of loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): p.103.

14 Ibid. p.115 15 Gluck p.77 16 Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul. Editions Gallimard, 2018, p.104.

17 Shaya p.49 18 Gluck p.55 19 Ibid. p.86

77 ization depends on clear and rational narratives of progress to perpetuate and legitimize the social upheaval and fundamental reform necessary for transition, and flaneurs provided the empirical evidence and creative frameworks necessary to support such narratives.

Beyond their actions and ideological allegiance, the figure of the flaneur itself captures and reflects the modern urban experience. Within the experience and fundamental assumptions of flanerie, we can see common themes of alienation, psychology of distraction from stimulation, and social and gender configurations of the city which define consumer capitalist societies.20 The inability of the flaneur to escape alienation even as he is amidst a crowd, the constant search for interesting diversions to document and publish, and the almost exclusively male and upper class composition of real-world flaneurs all reflect fundamental truths about 19th century modernity.

The flaneur’s dependence on and reinforcement of modernism obviously did not guarantee unflinching support. Although the flaneur’s uniform of a “black coat and top hat” mirrored bourgeois fashions exactly, “they signalled...ironic detachment from the dominant social order”. This irony presented a “subtle challenge to bourgeois norms of propriety, discipline and conformity” and “problematized conventional bourgeois definitions of modern life.”21 This is similar to the postmodernist “complicit critique” posited by Hutcheon.22 As modernization efforts progressed to their logical conclusion, the role of the flaneur became more incompatible with some realities of modern urban life. The flaneur “could no longer claim to embody the totality of the social and cultural values of an emerging urban modernity. He stood in increasing opposition to the new city emerging out of Haussmann’s monumental urban renewal project, which was transforming Paris into a rational, predictable, visually coherent, but emotionally alienating urban landscape.”23

Tanpinar writes in support of Turkish modernism and nationalism in a period of precarity for the new Turkish Republic. In Pamuk’s view, Tanpinar and his friend Yahya Kemal “had a political agenda” to “look for signs of a new Turkish state, a new Turkish nationalism” in the ruins.24 Tanpinar’s “Stroll Through the City’s Poor Neighborhoods” (both the text and the real life action) fits neatly into the framework of flanerie and modernism: he is searching for images of “beautiful sights that endowed the city’s dwellers with the huzun of the ruined past” and the “poor, defeated, and deprived Muslim population, to 20 21 22 23 24

Shaya p.76 Gluck p.61 Hutcheon, Linda. The politics of postmodernism. Routledge, 2003. p.3.

Gluck p.74 Pamuk, Istanbul, Tanpinar and Kemal, p.4

78 prove they had not lost one bit of their identity.”25 In A Mind at Peace we see the juxtaposition of scenes of poverty and “backwardness” with the “lone electric lamp burning as if to augment the dimness of the mosque,”26 a clear symbol for the interplay between Western and modern “enlightenment” and the darkness of religion and the past. This is followed immediately by the claim that “everything that might be termed national is a thing of beauty...and must persist eternally.”27 A Mind at Peace uses images of poverty and deprivation to support the Kemalist modernization project; the images serve a dual purpose: a reminder of the progress still left to be made and of a unifying national self image found in the purity of impoverished Turks.

Could we say then that Pamuk’s characters reinforce a “postmodern ideology” through their underlying assumptions, observations and literary production in the same way that the flaneur and Tanpinar reinforce modernist ideology?

In Istanbul’s Huzun chapter, Pamuk also gives a laundry list of huzunfilled experiences and observations, most of which include poverty, backwardness, and inferiority.28 He uses this in an effort to construct an Istanbullu identity, a more cosmopolitan and historically informed identity not based on the coerced modernity of the Turkish nation. Pamuk as “flaneur becomes an allegorical figure who reveals the transformation visible in the urban cityscape and the early harbinger of a major economic transformation.”29 In The Black Book’s chapter “Who Killed Shams of Tabriz”, we gain some insight into the motivations of the characters’ strolling through the streets of the city. Rumi’s (and Galip’s) search through “every street in that city” is not a search for images with which to construct narrative, it is a part of a mystical Sufi journey.30 Although it is framed in modernist terms evoking the idea of the traditional flaneur (a detective’s empirical and rational search for a missing beloved), it is clear that the outcome is predetermined, and the journey is not truly about finding objective truth at all. Pamuk sources alternate motivations for the experience of urban observation and exploration from Islamicate tradition, and provides an alternate motivation: a subjective spiritual exploration instead of a search for objective representation.

THE GAZE

The flaneur’s most important characteristic is his ability to observe and 25 Ibid. p.6 26 Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi. A Mind at Peace. Archipelago, 2011. p.394.

27 Ibid.

28 Pamuk, Istanbul, Huzun p.94 29 Laschinger, Verena. “Flaneuring into the Creative Economy: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City.” The Explicator 67.2 (2009): p.102 30 Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Vintage, 2006, Shams of Tabriz.

79 interpret daily scenes of urban existence. The flaneur “observes the city with intelligence and distinction” and uses his “overdeveloped sensibilities to dwell on mysteries and telling details”.31 In the logic of the flaneurs, “all objects were capable of yielding beauty and pleasure and the products of popular culture were as worthy of admiration as elite art”. The gaze of the flaneur itself determines the aesthetic quality, not the subjects of his observation.32 Obviously, this conception of the flaneur fundamentally privileges the observer over the observed, and this power imbalance has rightfully attracted postcolonial and feminist criticism. “The flaneur...as a man who takes visual possession of the city...has emerged in postmodern feminism discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’. He represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women.”33 The power dynamic of the flaneur’s gaze can also be compared to the gaze of a western tourist. “The tourist may merely impose his/her ideas and values on to the host culture and come away more confirmed than ever in gender, race, age and/or ethnic superiority.”34 Similarly, the flaneur represents the urban poor using his refined aesthetic sense and creativity. Their daily rituals and lives are used as a canvas upon which the flaneur can project his own ideas and images. The unique relationship between the flâneur and the urban environment was invariably characterized by the metaphor of the city as text and the flâneur as reader and writer.35 This relation obviously implies a degree of domination and control as to which images are represented and how they are conveyed and framed.

In the capitalist logic of division of labor, the flaneur’s “single occupation...is to see and see everything.”36 He is represented as almost superhuman in his perceptive abilities. “Nothing escapes the investigative gaze of the flaneur as he centers the “seen world” on his reflections and observations.”37 Engaging in observation as a profession not only makes him the most qualified possible observer, it also means that he is able to devote enormous amounts of time and effort. One anecdote about a flaneur and a scarf display describes it thus: “the flâneur remains transfixed before the same object for hours, engaged in complex reflection about the fashion trends indicated by the cloth, about the factory processes that went into its making, about the far-off places where the raw materials originated. What had appeared as an isolated, and 31 Shaya p.49 32 Gluck p.69 33 Wearing, Betsy, and Stephen Wearing. “Refocussing the tourist experience: The flaneur and the choraster.” Leisure studies 15.4 (1996): p.152.

34 Ibid. p.239 35 Ibid. p.70 36 Lauster p.155 37 Lauster p.154

80 self-contained, commodity to the common observer, was transformed by the flâneur’s imagination into a coherent story of exotic adventure and heroic creation.”38 In A Mind at Peace, Tanpinar’s Mumtaz witnesses a street porter and immediately converts his observation into a grotesque analogy to European sculpture: “A street porter approached in slow motion, bearing a massive load on his back, his neck and torso weighted down under the burden...in a rather bold economy of line...For Mumtaz, this anatomical geometry recalled Pierre Puget’s caryatids in Toulon. But he immediately doubted his own description. Did such an economy of line truly exist? Voila, this was a head that had been adjoined to the torso. But that wasn’t quite accurate either.”39 Mumtaz aestheticizes the suffering of the porter, and projects a westernized cultural reference onto the body of the porter. The man is decomposed into a series of lines and shapes, and reconstituted as a beautiful geometric statue. Mumtaz quickly realizes the futility of this cause: “He doesn’t resemble Puget’s giants at all. They display an expression of taut muscle and might emanating from the entire body. Meanwhile, this poor man has been swallowed whole by the load on his back. In his mind’s eye, Mumtaz once again conjured the man’s face in all its vividness. It bore neither any expression of strength nor any trace of thought.”40

Tanpinar heavily relies on the techniques and idea of the flaneur in his work, but he also critiques the power dynamic inherent between observer and observed. Although Tanpinar is clearly cognizant of the problems with representation and the power of his gaze, and he works to challenge notions that his observations can represent objective truth, the practice of flanerie is clearly too important to his ideological and political project to simply abandon.

In Istanbul, Pamuk discusses Melling, a prototypical flaneur-adjacent character, and upholds him as an “insider” who saw “the details and materials of Istanbul as its own inhabitants saw them and was not interested in exoticizing or orientalizing his scenes.”41 We see again the same imbalance in power between observer and observed, but surprisingly, Pamuk seems to accept it as a matter of course: “the İstanbullus of his time did not know how to paint themselves or their city—indeed, had no interest in doing so...he saw the city like an İstanbullu but painted it like a clear-eyed Westerner, Melling’s Istanbul is not only a place graced by hills, mosques, and landmarks we can recognize, it is a place of sublime beauty.”42 Melling represents through painting 38 39 40 41 42

Gluck p.69 Tanpinar p.386 Ibid. p.387 Pamuk, Istanbul, Melling p.10 Ibid. p.11

81 the Istanbullus who are unable to represent themselves; he isn’t tapping into any kind of communal Huzun to understand Istanbul, he is simply present, observant and creative. Rather than documenting modernity, Pamuk’s Melling focuses on a smaller project: the realist depiction of scenes of daily life in Istanbul.

CONCLUSION

Clearly, the influence of the flaneur lies heavily on both Tanpinar and Pamuk. As a character archetype, the flaneur or similar characters play significant roles in most works by these two authors, and as an action, flanerie takes center stage in many of their plots. Tanpinar explicitly uses urban observation to construct a modern Turkish identity, and thus parallels the original literary construction of the flaneur extremely closely. He begins to critique certain aspects of flanerie, particularly the power imbalance between observer and observed, and the projection of narratives and aesthetic judgments onto the observed subjects. Pamuk echoes most superficial aspects of the flaneur in his characters, like their actions, their class, and their education, but abandons the fundamental assumption that they can produce coherent narratives based on objective observations. He also attempts to end the dominance of the archetype of the flaneur, by finding historical antecedents for urban observers in non-Western traditions.

82

For Mßmtaz, the pigeons were a vice of sorts in Istanbul, like lures that attracted men to women of ardor. They might also be compared to the fables children spun to magnify themselves, to fill their inner worlds, whose mysteries we couldn’t fathom; and like a fable of this nature, this large tree and this Ottoman architecture, whose gilded door was visible within a Tyrian purple shadow each time he turned his head back, might even have conjured this covey. A coffeehouse apprentice swung a pendant tea tray to the fullest extent as he purposefully passed through the midst of the pigeons so they’d flutter hither and yond. The apprentice was...

-Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, A Mind at Peace, 50

Interview with Cover Artist, Taravat Talepasand Hi Taravat, thanks so much for taking the time to chat!

No thanks so much for the opportunity Phoebe!

Amazing; tell us about the piece ‘Reified’ that we are featuring on our front cover?

So it’s part of the ‘Westoxification’ show, a broad discussion on how so much of Iran has been westernised.

Reified is about beauty standards in the Middle East and based on imagery from Iran. It’s talking about the Middle East as a whole in that it’s part of a discussion on what parts of you and your face you can show in public, and what women and men are doing to erase their heritage by getting plastic surgery. So many women are shaving their noses to make themselves look western; there is this idealised pinched nose (honestly it seems pig-like to me) that is the most sought after. I have never understood it. This trend is also related to class, commodities and capitalism because the surgery is incredibly expensive. I’m seeing so many wealthy Iranians with unnatural Middle Eastern noses, and its creating this weird dystopia in the region. In Reified, I wanted to show the viewer a before and after image similar to ones produced by plastic surgeons. Covering the eyes was an important detail because this is what the real before and after photos look like; patients want to hide who they are so their eyes are blacked out from their surgery pictures. I also used really vibrant intense colours to create this sense of chaos. Yeah so I just love that fucking word Reified, I feel like it should be the word of 2019 you know… taking something abstract and making it concrete.

However, during the last ten years, weed has become extremely popular, like in the States.

Another similarity is between the use of opioids in the US and opium in Iran. Opium has long been used in Iran… it originated in Afghanistan and is so accepted across the region. In both countries if you’re caught you get slapped on the wrist, whilst people are dying from the use of these drugs. These shared histories and current trends of drug abuse are never thought about, and I think it’s good to challenge this perspective that Iran and the US are so incredibly dissimilar.

How does your nationality play into your work?

I love my roots now, but it took me a long time to love where I’m from because growing up there was so much conflict. Living there when the regime took over, we had the Iran-Iraq war, then Desert Storm, it’s like oh my god, it’s never ending. Once I accepted myself and learnt to love where I was from I wanted to do something about it, I was always painting and drawing, and that was my wonderful escape. So I focused on art school and learning how to create my conversations on the middle east diaspora, like being Iranian and being a woman and pushing forward.

Tell me about your ‘Iran’ printed denim jacket?

I also really like to find commonalities between the US and the Middle East in my work, contrasting the West and East. As much as people say they’re different it’s like, yes that’s true, but there are also a lot of things happening that are running parallel with each other. I mean look at the Kardashians and how girls all over the US are copying their surgery. You could take a Kardashian and insert an Iranian women with money… it’s the lip injections, the bigger, bmbi eyes, the Botox… it’s American, Iranian, its everywhere. This is how I show people in the US that there are similar things going on in our countries; the West and the East yes are different, but they are also in other ways, incredibly similar.

What are other similarities between the US and Iran that you bring up in your work?

I focus on drug use as a huge source of comparison between the US and Iran. In the US people used to groan about marijuana being illegal, but now there are billboards with it all over, people are growing it in their backyard like look how far we’ve come and how quickly the change happened. Now you look at Iran and they’re like well we also couldn’t give two shits. Historically, Ira-

So Westoxicated came out in LA in the first year of Trump, and I was like fuck yeah that’s make a giant political statement, like giant meth pipes, the Kim Kar dashian rug, and other stuff. After that I had the ‘Born in America and Made in Iran’ show, which was timed alongside Trumps ban coming in when people were like what

the fuck is going on. Then Kanye came out with the Pablo album and shirts, relating to Pablo Escobar and Pablo Picasso. Kanye did all these pop up shops selling these shirts for thousands of dollars… the price was unbelievable. Him and Trump coming to the fore at the same time just made me think what the fuck is going on with all these fucking misogynistic men in power. So I said fuck it, I’m going to take Kanye’s old English font and write Iran four times on a denim jacket and sew on loads of patches and shit. Then I made shirts with the same ‘Iran’ printed four times on it, and they were so popular so I made others saying Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon. What’s great about those pieces is that they’re affordable, unlike most art, everyone and anyone could buy and wear a shirt and feel part of this movement standing up for who we are.

Is your work received differently in Iran vs the US? Once upon a time yes. I thought that not many people saw my work in the Middle East. In the US, From the Westerner, European or let’s just go out and say it white folks who would see my pieces and would say ‘ooo this is work is about Iran or a place that is so taboo and made by a woman’ so I tried to turn people and this exoticisation on their heads and say, ‘so you think Iran and the Middle East is all about the veil? Well… let me show you the other side and take the veil off’. Being here and being western myself, living that hyphenated life that so many others with dual nationalities, whether they’re Chinese American or Mexican American, can relate to that conversation. Western audiences are really intrigued by my work. But it made me feel like, well, where are my people at? Where are the Iranians encouraging my stand against being judged as either one or the other? And when I did hear back from people it was mostly like oh how can you be making this kind of work, and my response was to flip them off and say, you don’t know how to paint and I do.

The Iranian backlash has been from arrogant, self-righteous, narcissistic Iranians who believe I’m less Iranian because I wasn’t born in Iran. Fuck off. Now I would say a decade later, I get so much applause and support from a younger generation, those of you in high school or undergraduate studies who were born somewhere else, who have travelled to and from their country saying fuck yeah I can relate to your work. When I look at my Instagram account and who follows me (I can’t say that I don’t care!) but I’m just interested in knowing who my work reaches, most of them are Middle Eastern women and men. I’m so glad that I have this outreach, this crew from all over the world encouraging me.

What needs to happen with our generation to be more aware of the Middle East?

I think it is happening, you should look at Before We Were Banned, they have a travelling exhibit to show people

what’s going on in the communities that have been impacted by Trump’s ban on certain Muslim countries.

That’s when I do have to credit technology, for allowing us to spread our work to people everywhere and have these conversations together. This collective of young Middle East groups are aware of each other and conversing with each other, we are being present and speaking up about our own awareness, and the awareness that we share outwardly. It’s an outwardly inward experience that is finally opening up. It’s going to take a long time and some work but another thing that people should do is travel to those countries if you can. I understand that many can’t, but if I was able to Iran with no issues… it’s great for this generation to go and document and share their own experiences. Even in their own countries, for the diaspora to travel back to their countries, and bring their experiences back to the West.

For that to happen you have to love who you are and where you’re from, and I know that’s hard to do and really understanding your family and parents are part of this, but most importantly this is me; this is about me and what I chose to identify as. You can pick parts from the language, the culture, the food whatever but try and always take something with you and reidentify it with yourself.

This personal yet communal aspect of your work seems really important?

Yes. The work you’re doing with this journal is similar to what I want to evoke in my pieces; to encourage a real push about the coming together of all of us from the Middle East and being able to love yourself and understand where you come from inwardly and outwardly. We could make changes based on even the way that we perceive ourselves and how we interact with others and that’s a beautiful thing.

85

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cartooning at twilight – Bryan Rusch

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88 Kibar; Ma’lûm; Çekirge; Babahimmet; Cingöz; Lak lak; Hayal-i cedit; Musavver geveze; Köylü.”

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the king’s elephant – Natasha Rothenbucher

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Saleh, Layla. “’We Thought we were Playing’: Children’s Participation in the Syrian Revolution.” Journal of International Women’s Studies. 14, no. 5. 2013. 80-95.

The Mosul Question – Sinan Hanioglu

Balázs Ablonczy. Pál Teleki, 1874-1941: The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician.

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The Istanbullu Flaneur – Lucian Li

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flaneur and the choraster.” Leisure studies 15.4 (1996): 229-243.

92

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