Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
The Three Lives of Mehmet Lutfi Bey: Under Ottoman, Syrian, and Turkish States
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Çiçek, Muhammed |
| Copyright Year | 2014 |
| Abstract | Front cover of Hatiralarim, the memoirs of Mehmet Lutfi Rifai (Yucel). All images reproduced in this article come from these memoirs.The Ottoman Empire left an abandoned cultural heritage, one which was not adopted by its successor nation-states. The founders of the post-Ottoman nation- states preferred to establish their national identity on the historical basis of denying the imperial legacy and opening a corridor in history for their nations as actors. The Kemalist political leaders and intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey interpreted the late history of the Ottoman Empire as progressing toward Kemalist secularism, which concluded with the collapse of the Ottoman imperial project by the "betrayal" of other nations, such as the Arabs and Albanians, and the rebirth of the Turkish nation from its ashes with the war of independence.1 The Arab nationalist leaders, meanwhile, assessed the transition to nation-states as an "awakening" of the Arab nation to free itself from the "Ottoman yoke."2 These points of viewprevented scholars from penetrating into the late Ottoman world and understanding the social and individual transformations that took place during the transition from empire to nation-states as well as the imperial heritage left by the Ottomans.From the 1970s, however, these nationalist perspectives have been undermined by revisionist approaches to the history of the Middle East. New studies on the origins and development of Arab and Turkish nationalisms based on the contemporary sources demonstrated that the picture was quite different from what had been drawn by nationalist historians and conveyed by nationalist leaders. A main contribution of the new perspective has been to demonstrate the success of the Ottomanism project among the non-Turkish communities in creating a mutual Ottoman identity. Scholars of Arab nationalism have clarified that adherents of Arabist ideology did not follow a policy of "separatism" from the Ottoman Empire.3 Rather, they defended a decentralist version of Ottomanism during the Ottoman era. Recent studies on Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire point to similar trends during the transition from Ottoman to Mandate rules.4Many of these studies focused on either the imperial experience or the transition to nation-states. The present study, however, examines the story of an Ottoman officer from Alexandretta, Muhammad Lutfi Bey al-Rifa'i (later Mehmet Lutfi Yucel), as a citizen of the Ottoman Empire, then Syria, and finally Turkey. It is mainly based on Lutfi Bey's memoirs, written in 1956 when he was a citizen of Turkey. These memoirs were privately published in Turkish by his sons. They were left half-finished due to his death, and thus I have made use of some documents left by Lutfi Bey, as well as the testimony of his children regarding their father, to help illuminate the post-Ottoman period. It seems that being a citizen of Turkey influenced his memoirs, the text of which seem to indicate attempts to demonstrate his loyalty to Turkey in order to avoid condemnation by Turkish nationalists in Alexandretta. This may explain why he wrote his memoirs in Turkish, despite his children's testimony that he used Arabic to communicate with family members.5 Though he spoke Arabic at home, Turkish was his "public language." Lutfi Bey's experience allows us to better understand the construction and de- construction of political identities in the Middle East during and after the Ottoman period. As an Arab who was aware of his Arabness, Lutfi's story also helps to show the mutual Ottoman identity shared by the empire's different nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His case is uniquely interesting due to his having become a citizen of two post-Ottoman nation-states, Syria and Turkey, and having thus been exposed to the nation-building policies of both these states. In this regard, Lutfi's experience includes considerable details on these changes' influence on him, and differs from other Turkish and Arabic testimonies, which follow a more straight- forward narrative defined by the processes of "nationalization" (that is, the transition from empire to a nation-state) in the 1920s and 1930s. … |
| Starting Page | 77 |
| Ending Page | 77 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/JQ%2060_The%20three%20Lives.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
