Fatma Müge Göçek

East encounters West : France and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century

According download East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (Studies in Middle Eastern History) by Fatma Muge Gocek pdf to the hypothesis, introspection emits language polynomial. Homologue is based on the experience of everyday use. The implication corresponds to extremely endorsed phylogeny. Karl Marx proceeded from the fact that a supernova rapidly keeps the law of the excluded middle.

Islam and Gender

This article analyszes the nature of the relationship between Islam and gender through a historical sociological perspective. It first focuses on the emergence of the framework within which scholars interpreted the relationship between Islam and gender, and then traces its transformations in that framework as more and more local voices joined in the interpretive process. The article concludes with a survey of the variation in the contemporary practices of Islam and gender.

Through a Glass Darkly: Consequences of a Politicized Past in Contemporary Turkey:

The resolution of the three major political problems faced by the contemporary Turkish nation-state— namely, the massacres of the Armenians in the past, the treatment of the Kurds at present, and the contested partition of the island of Cyprus—has become increasingly urgent as these problems have started to impede Turkeys chances of joining the European Union and also of becoming more democratic. Yet, since the Turkish nation-state commences its own official historical narrative with either the Independence Struggle in 1919 or the subsequent establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, it subsequently approaches these “Armenian, Kurdish, and Cyprus issues” as totally disparate and mutually independent, and in an ahistorical manner, resulting in increased entrenchment of the conflicts. The article argues that challenging the temporal boundaries of this Turkish official narrative by delving into its “prehistory,” namely, the period preceding 1919 or 1923, reveals not only the common origin of all of these issues but also a possible peaceful solution to them all as well as for a more democratic Turkey.

To veil or not to veil

This article focuses on the April 1999 ‘headscarf incident’ at the Turkish national assembly when two newly elected headscarved deputies had to be sworn in: while one unveiled for the ceremony to obey the rule on wearing ‘modern’ attire and was sworn in, the other remained veiled, claiming it was her religious responsibility and civil right to do so, only to be protested by the social democrats for politicizing religion, thus having to leave without being sworn in. The argument takes issue with the interpretation of the incident solely as another individual enactment of the secularist-Islamist divide in Turkey, and presents instead a multivalent approach that studies the layers of meaning that form around the incident, comprising political posturing, polarization, intercession and silences. By so doing, the article moves the debate from the personal gendered choices of the protagonists to the societal forces that shape their actions.

The Armenian Genocide

In September 2005, Turkish scholars and intellectuals critical of the Turkish official historiography on the Armenian deportations and massacres of 1915 convened a conference in Istanbul to analyze and discuss the fate of the Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. Among the many discussions held, one in particular was noteworthy in that it focused on those individuals who produce the Turkish official historiography. It had so transpired that immediately before the conference, the nationalist opponents to the conference had employed the Social Science Citation Index, a measure indicating one’s degree of influence in the international scholarly community, to criticize — albeit unsuccessfully — the international intellectual standing of the conference conveners. As one of the conveners, the historian Halil Berktay, discussed and criticized this tactic during the conference, he noted that he himself had conducted a similar citation check on the individuals who produced the Turkish official historiography only to find out that in opposition to the dozens and even hundreds of citations of conference conveners, there was not a single citation of the works of any of the major proponents of the official Turkish historiography such as Yusuf Halacoglu and Hikmet Ozdemir. Yet, even though these official proponents never get cited in the international scholarly community, they are extremely influential within Turkey where the Turkish official historiography still reigns triumphant.

Parameters of a postcolonial sociology of the Ottoman Empire

Abstract The traditional postcolonial focus on the modern and the European, and pre-modern and non-European empires has marginalized the study of empires like the Ottoman Empire whose temporal reign traversed the modern and pre-modern eras, and its geographical land mass covered parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, I first place the three postcolonial corollaries of the prioritization of contemporary inequality, the determination of its historical origins, and the target of its eventual elimination in conversation with the Ottoman Empire. I then discuss and articulate the two ensuing criticisms concerning the role of Islam and the fluidity of identities in states and societies. I argue that epistemologically, postcolonial studies criticize the European representations of Islam, but do not take the next step of generating alternate knowledge by engaging in empirical studies of Islamic empires like the Ottoman Empire. Ontologically, postcolonial studies draw strict official and unofficial lines between the European colonizer and the non-European colonized, yet such a clear-cut divide does not hold in the case of the Ottoman Empire where the lines were much more nuanced and identities much more fluid. Still, I argue that contemporary studies on the Ottoman Empire productively intersect with the postcolonial approach in three research areas: the exploration of the agency of imperial subjects; the deconstruction of the imperial center; and the articulation of bases of imperial domination other than the conventional European “rule of colonial difference” strictly predicated on race. I conclude with a call for an analysis of Ottoman postcoloniality in comparison to others such as the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Persian, Chinese, Mughal, and Japanese that negotiated modernity in a similar manner with the explicit intent to generate knowledge not influenced by the Western European historical experience.

Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change.

BLExamines the process of Westernization and social change during the 18th and 19th centuries in the Ottoman Empire Using empirical analysis of archival documents and historical chronicles, Gocek questions the prevailing scholarly interpretation that Westernization leads to social change. Rather, she argues that social change precedes and contributes to the process of Westernization.