4.

The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’

Turkey: Bernard Lewis’s
Emergence Fifty Years On*

In 1961 the famous Arabist, Islam scholar and Turkologist Bernard Lewis
published a book with Oxford University Press, which was immediately rec-
ognized as a classic in its field and would remain a leading textbook for a
generation. It was, of course, called The Emergence of Modern Turkey.1 It
was a hefty tome (511 pages), based on research executed in England and
Turkey during the years 1954–9.
The fact that nearly half a century has passed since the publication of
Emergence makes it appropriate to take a second look at the book from the
perspective of contemporary Turkology. In revisiting Lewis’s classic, we can
attempt to gauge if, and where, our field has produced different insights
and, who knows, progressed when measured against the yardstick of this
seminal work.
For me, a closer look at the book which was considered the bible of
modern Turkish history when I studied at Leiden University (and for much
longer) and which influenced my decision to make this my own area of spe-
cialization is of special significance.

Bernard Lewis and Turkish historiography

The first thing that strikes one on making the renewed acquaintance with
the book is how many things, which were self-evident 50 years ago, have
now become problematic. It starts on with the title page: The Emergence of
Modern Turkey. What does ‘emergence’ really mean? Lewis does not address
the matter in his preface, but the word surely suggests that we are faced
with a spontaneous and gradual process, through which modern Turkey
hatches like a chick from its egg. Feroz Ahmad has more recently pointed
out that this is a fallacy.2 For Turkey as we know it is not the inevitable
result of a natural development but the product of wilful acts on the part of

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

ideologically motivated leaders. ‘Emergence’ is not, of course, a value-free

term. It suggests not only gradual development, but also the fulfilment of a
destiny: the chick was in the egg waiting to be hatched. It also suggests the
reaching of a higher phase in history. That is something Lewis does not try
to hide. In the first sentence of the preface we read: ‘The theme of this book
is the emergence of a new Turkey from the decay of the old.’ The old Turkey
is not only old, but decayed as well. What, now, is ‘modern’ Turkey and what
is the old, decayed Turkey which it has come to replace?
To start with the latter, ‘modern Turkey’ is not just the opposite of ‘older
Turkey’. The contrast is that between the republic of Turkey, which was
founded in 1923 and celebrates its 85th anniversary this year, and its pred-
ecessor, the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. In this respect, Lewis’s terminol-
ogy reflects a tradition which has been well-established since the mid-1920s.
The authors of the stream of books written about the new republic had a
strong predilection for this and similar descriptions: Eliot Grinnell Mears,
Modern Turkey (1924); Berthe Georges-Gaulis, La Nouvelle Turquie (1924);
Kurt Ziemke, Die neue Türkei (1930); Jean Deny, Petit manuel de la Turquie
Nouvelle (1933); Henry Elisha Allen, The Turkish Transformation (1935); Sir
Harry Luke, The Old Turkey and the New (1936); August, Ritter von Kral,
Das Land Kemal Atatürks. Der Werdegang der modernen Türkei (1937);
anonymous, The New Turkey (1938); Geoffrey Lewis, Modern Turkey (1955);
Eleanor Bisbee, The New Turks (1956); Irfan Orga, Phoenix Ascendant. The
Rise of Modern Turkey (1958) and Pia Angela Göktürk, Werdegang der neuen
Türkei (1983).
Some authors preferred more colourful wordings to oppose new to old:
Karl Klinghardt, Die Schleier Fallen! (1933); Lilo Linke, Allah Dethroned
(1937) and Barbro Karabuda, Goodbye to the Fez (1959), but the message
remains the same. In all of these books the essential opposition between
‘old’ and ‘new’, which coincides with the transition from empire to republic,
is the framework within which the story of the Turks is told. But what is
‘modern’? We shall return to that particular question later.
When we now look at Emergence, we immediately notice that Lewis’s
attitude towards the problem of continuity and change is ambivalent. On the
one hand he sees the developments after 1918 as ‘a radical and violent break
with the past’, 3 but on the other he interprets that break as the culminating
point of a much longer process of reforms. He writes:

The Turkish revolution began in a formal sense with the forcible

overthrow of an old political order and the establishment of a new

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

one in 1908. In another sense, however, it had been going on for

nearly two centuries.4

In this respect, Lewis’s work differs from that of the real Kemalist histori-
ans, who, like Afet I·nan, see the republic as a radically new departure which
owes hardly anything to the Ottoman past and which has been created by
Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk as a kind of deus ex machina.
Lewis fits much better in a generation of scholars who made their name
in Turkey after World War II, people like the sociologist Niyazi Berkes5
and the jurist and political scientist Tarık Zafer Tunaya,6 who also see in
the Republic of Turkey a new and in a sense final phase in Turkish history,
but who have an open eye for those who prepared it: the architects of the
Ottoman administrative and cultural modernization in the nineteenth cen-
tury and, especially, the Young Turk movement in the early twentieth cen-
tury, which, in Tunaya’s words, constituted the ‘laboratory of the republic’.
Although this approach is certainly much less forced than that of the
orthodox Kemalist historians of an earlier generation, it has one impor-
tant disadvantage. Through it, late Ottoman history almost automatically
acquires a teleological character. It turns into ‘prehistory’ of the republic.
This in turn changes late Ottoman history into Turkish history avant la let-
tre, which misrepresents the multicultural, multi-ethnic character of that
history in which Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Arabs, Albanians and
Bosnians all played important parts within a dynastic and religious political
system. That Lewis fits into this Turkish-nationalist tendency is shown, for
instance, by a passage in his introduction:

So completely had the Turks identified themselves with Islam that

the very concept of a Turkish nationality was submerged.7

Turkish national identity submerged in an Islamic ocean. This seems to indi-

cate that Lewis sees the Turkish nation as a primordial entity that waited for
its chance to shed all Ottoman and Islamic ballast and rise to the surface. Of
course, that is the classic way in which nationalists regard nationality. But
to modern historians, who have been sensitized by scholars like Benedict
Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner to the ways nationalists con-
struct a nation’s past as a weapon in their political struggles, it seems a trifle
naive. A remark on page 7 is, if necessary, even more illustrative of Lewis’s
position. He writes: ‘The Turkish language, which, despite long subjection
to alien influences, survives triumphantly’. Here, Lewis adopts the basic

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

idea of Kemalist linguistic purism, that there exists a pure or ‘real’ Turkish,
which has to be decolonialized and cleansed of foreign influences. Here,
too, he seems to see Turkish identity, expressed in the language, as some-
thing submerged in something non-Turkish (Ottoman?) but with a latent
existence of its own.

Contents and format of Emergence

Emergence consists of two parts. Part one is a chronologically ordered over-
view in nine chapters, starting in the seventeenth century and ending with
the coming to power of Menderes’ Democrat Party in 1950. Part two is
thematically ordered, with each of its five chapters describing a particular
aspect of change. Lewis starts his chronological overview with the ‘decline’
of the empire, itself a notion which has come under attack rather severely
in recent years.8 Then he treats the attempts to restore the state with tra-
ditional means, the growing influence of Europe, the bureaucratic reforms
of the early nineteenth century, the Young Ottoman movement, Sultan
Abdülhamit’s long reign, the Young Turks, the Kemalist republic and the
republic after Kemal. In the thematic part he deals with changing collective
identities, state and government, religion and culture and class structure.
The book is based on literature in English, German, French and Turkish
and on published Ottoman authors, whom Lewis quotes frequently and
effectively, both in the text and in the notes. Archival materials do not seem
to have been used.

Fifty years on
When we now look at the book from where we are nearly 50 years later and
try to compare it with the state of the art in the field of modern Turkish his-
tory, what transpires? I think there are three aspects, or rather three groups
of aspects which play an important role here: intellectual versus total his-
tory, chronology and periodization, and the modernization paradigm.

Intellectual versus total history

The first concerns the kind of history Lewis has written and clearly has
wanted to write. Emergence is first a history of the élite and its instrument
of power, the central state, and second an intellectual history, a history of
ideas. Whichever chapter we look at, Lewis concerns himself with the mem-
bers of the administrative and intellectual élite, the development of their
thinking, the terminology they used (and partly invented) and the measures

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

they took. Because he concentrates to such an extent on the history of ideas,

Lewis seems to work from the premise that people act from ideological
motives. Such an approach overlooks the extent to which people use ideas
to defend their political and social interests. A logical result is that policy,
in the sense of the formulation of aims and the promulgation of laws and
regulations gets much more attention than the power struggles in which the
Ottoman (and Turkish) policy makers were involved at the same time. Here,
Carter Findley’s two-volume history, both institutional and social, of the
Ottoman civil bureaucracy has given us a much fuller picture.9
In Emergence, the writing of intellectual history is at the expense of the
depiction of social realities. When one reads the passage about the consti-
tutional revolution of 1876,10 one could be forgiven for thinking that it was
Namık Kemal’s play The Fatherland or Silistria which brought down the old
regime, and not the famine in Anatolia, the insurrection in the Balkans or
the financial crisis of the state. When Lewis does write about the financial
crisis, he sees its root cause in the extravagances of the court11 (and in this
he is clearly influenced by the Ottoman reformers with whom he identifies)
instead of in the immense financial burden created by the introduction of a
conscript army, the acquisition of modern armaments and the ballooning of
the Ottoman bureaucracy. The question how the reforms worked out in the
provinces is not really answered, the question what it all meant for the average
Ottoman subject is not even posed. We do not discover what the introduc-
tion of conscription or the eradication of the plague meant for the people,
even though we can assume that developments such as these were far more
influential that the ideological constructs of the intellectual élite in Istanbul.
Something similar is true for the famous reforms of the age of Atatürk. There,
too, we see the reforms exclusively through the eyes of the élite. When discuss-
ing, for instance, the prohibition of the Fez or the introduction of the Swiss
civil code in 1926, Lewis does recognize that there was resistance, but he does
not ask why. The negative reactions are all those of ‘Muslim conservatives’.12
In all these respects our field has undergone a sea change in the last
25 years. We no longer concentrate exclusively on the central state, on the
élite, its ideas and its measures. In these last 15 years, economic history of the
late Ottoman Empire has come of age, with French researchers and American
and Turkish colleagues attached to the Braudel Centre in Binghamton play-
ing a leading role in this development. Jacques Thobie’s impressive 1977
study of French economic interests in the Ottoman Empire13 was a pioneer-
ing effort, but in the 1980s conference proceedings and monographs were
published in rapid succession. Something nearly all of these publications

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

have in common, is that they not only chart the developments within the
late-Ottoman economy, but also try to place these in the context of the
capitalist world economy centred on Europe. This is no coincidence. Many
of the historians who have done this work, people like Donald Quataert,
·
Şevket Pamuk, Çağlar Keyder, Huri Islamoğlu and Reşat Kasaba, have been
inspired by the ideas of André Gunder Frank and in particular by Emanuel
Wallerstein’s ‘World System’ model. It is interesting, however, to note that
the best work emerging from this school shows up the inadequacies of that
model. Quataert, for instance, shows how Ottoman manufacture, instead
of declining or disappearing under the influence of the incorporation of the
Ottoman economy into the periphery of the capitalist world system as one
would expect, adapted itself and resisted the onslaught of the Europeans
through cost control, use of imported commodities and products and exploi-
tation of niche markets.14 Kasaba shows that the Armenian and Greek bour-
geoisie did not, in fact, have a ‘compradore’ character and that it competed
successfully with the metropolitan European capitalists.15
Social history is, of course, not entirely separate from economic his-
tory. Two of the path-breaking collections in this field, Economies et sociétés
dans l’Empire Ottoman, edited by Jean-Louis Bacqué Grammont and Paul
Dumont in 1983 and Social and Economic History of Turkey, edited by Halil
·
Inalcık and Osman Okyar in 1980, show the connection between the two
fields even in their titles. Paul Dumont, together with the Turkish politi-
cal scientist Mete Tunçay, can be regarded as the pioneer of the history of
Ottoman socialism, while Quataert has been the first to give us a picture of
the lives of Ottoman workers at the railways, in the docks and in the mines.16
The lowest step on the Ottoman social ladder, that of the slaves, first gained
attention in Ehud Toledano’s study of the Ottoman slave trade.17
Since 25 years, historians have been able to build on solid historical
demographic studies, such as those published by Kemal Karpat18 and, espe-
cially, Justin McCarthy.19 These make use of the data collected by those,
who – in McCarthy’s words – were the only ones in a position to actu-
ally count: the Ottoman administration. Thanks to their work we can now
answer questions about the size and composition of the late Ottoman popu-
lation with a degree of exactness unthinkable 30 years ago. Alan Duben and
Cem Behar have shown what is possible in the field of demographic micro-
studies in their book about the development of Istanbul households.20
Apart from the development of social and economic history proper,
the work of French Turkologists such as François Georgeon, Paul Dumont
and Stéfane Yérasimos has broadened the scope of cultural history in the

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

direction of a history of mentalities which tries to chart society’s attitudes

and worldview and which merges imperceptibly into social history.21
As early as 1973, Halil I·nalcık made an attempt to see how the nine-
teenth-century reforms were received in the Balkan provinces in his article
‘The application of the Tanzimat and its social effects’.22 Since then, many
local studies based on Ottoman archives in the Balkans and in the Arab
world have given us a much fuller picture of what actually happened on the
ground (as opposed to what Istanbul bureaucrats thought should happen).
The economic history of the republic has made great strides thanks to
the work of people like Zvi Yehuda Hershlag, Korkut Boratav, Osman Okyar,
William Hale and Şevket Pamuk. We now have a reasonably accurate idea
of economic growth, production and income distribution. The same cannot
be said for the social history of the republic. Şehmus Güzel and others have
done important work on labour relations and the workers’ movement,23 but
there still is an almost total lack of history ‘written from below’, a historiog-
raphy which focuses on the experiences of ordinary people and the way they
have undergone the modernization process. The most promising attempt so
far has been made by Gavin Brockett,24 who studied resistance to the Kemalist
reforms, but it is clear that this aspect of the field awaits further development.
To sum up the first point, I think we can say that the most important
development in this sector of Turkology has been that the history of ideas
and institutions, of the central state and the élite, has given way to a much
broader approach in which history of mentalities, social history, demog-
raphy and economics all play a role, although this development has gone
further for the late empire than for the republic.

Chronology
The second aspect of Emergence that may be considered outdated, concerns
the degree of continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the republic and
the periodization which follows from it. We have already noted Lewis’s
ambivalence vis-à-vis this question. He sees the development of modern
Turkey as a long-term process, but at the same time he sees a ‘radical and
violent break’ in that development after 1918, when something substantially
new emerges in the shape of the national resistance movement in Anatolia.
What he loses sight of in this context, is the degree to which this movement
and the republic which grew from it was the work of the same circle of
Young Turk politicians and officers who had brought about the constitu-
tional revolution of 1908, and the extent to which it was the result of con-
scious planning on the part of these Young Turks.

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

I think this is an area where my own work has contributed to a substan-

tial revision. My main conclusion has been that the traditional periodiza-
tion, which is followed by Lewis, and which sees the ‘national struggle’
(Millî Mücadele) between 1919 and 1922 as the first phase of the history of
the republic, is very distorting for two reasons: first, the initiative for this
struggle was taken by those same Young Turk leaders who had held power
in Turkey between 1913 and 1918; and second, the proclamation of the
republic was really the result of a coup d’état within the movement by a rad-
ical wing led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha Atatürk. For the large majority – not
only of the rank and file, but also of the leadership – the aim of the struggle
between 1918 and 1922 was not the founding of a Turkish state but the
preservation of the Ottoman Sultanate and Caliphate. In short: the most
important dividing line in post-war history is not that of 1918 but that of
1923.25 In my view, Lewis is therefore wrong when he says (speaking about
the situation in 1919): ‘A new Turkish state was emerging in Anatolia.’26
· ·
Recent work by Turkish historians such as Selim I lkin, Ilhan Tekeli,
Bülent Tanör and Engin Berber on regional resistance movements, by Bilge
Criss on Istanbul during the British occupation and by Ahmet Demirel on
the first national assembly in Ankara seem to confirm the importance of
Young Turk organizations in the national resistance, and thus the continuity
with the empire.27
An important reason why Lewis is able to characterize the national inde-
pendence movement as new, is his neglect of precisely that period which has
been both the most traumatic time in modern Turkish history and its most
formative phase: World War I. Lewis devotes a great deal of attention to
the debates among Young Turk intellectuals and publicists on the eve of the
World War, but the war itself is dealt with in two sentences:

It was while they were still discussing this question that, in October
1914, the Turks stumbled into a major European war, as allies of
one group of European powers against another. By 1918 it was clear
that their time had run out.28

Quite apart from the fact that Lewis does not explain anything about this
fatal stumble, he thus neglects even to mention the following developments,
which all contributed decisively to the way Turkey took shape after the war.
First: The abolition of the capitulations, those centuries-old economic
and juridical privileges held by the Europeans and their protégés in the
empire and the introduction of a nationalist economic policy, aimed at the

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

formation of a native Muslim class of traders and industrialists. This policy

·
of ‘National Economy’ (Millî Iktisat), which has been described in detail
by Toprak in his book of the same title and many subsequent books cover-
ing the same ground 29 is a direct precursor of the economic policies of the
republic which also aimed at the creation of a national bourgeoisie under the
protective umbrella of a military-bureaucratic élite.
Second: The intimidation and discrimination of the Young Turk regime
which led to the flight of hundreds of thousands of Greeks and the depor-
tation and death of possibly seven to eight hundred thousand Armenians.
In the thematic part of his book, Lewis does mention a holocaust of 1916,
when ‘a million and a half Armenians perished’. 30 This means, incidentally,
that in quantitative terms he accepts the most extreme Armenian claims.
But he describes the events as a ‘struggle between two nations for the pos-
session of a single homeland’ and lays no connection between this episode
and later history. All too often in the field of Turkology we forget that the
modern state of Turkey was built on ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The
historiography on the issue has been in the grip of very emotional polemics
between Turks and Armenians for 80 years. Nevertheless, it has to be said
that for a long time research, which really gives us a degree of new insight
into what happened in those horrible years 1915–17, has been done almost
exclusively by Armenian scholars like Vahakn Dadrian and Ara Sarafian.
Since 1992 the Turkish sociologist Taner Akçam, who was deeply influ-
enced by Dadrian, has come to the fore as the leading ‘dissident’ voice on
the Turkish side. His work only received international attention when one
of his books was translated into English in 2006.31 Akçam has called atten-
tion to the effect this continued silence on the ethnic policies of the Young
Turks has had on Turkish society at large. A very painful point that has been
raised specifically by Akçam is the fact that so many people who had been
deeply involved in the persecution of the Armenians, and who thus had to
fear either Armenian revenge or punitive action by the British, became pro-
tagonists in the national struggle and thus founding fathers of the republic.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the most promising development
seemed to be the joint effort made by the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish
Scholarship (WATS) to create a platform for discussion based on empirical
evidence. Donald Bloxham made a successful effort to situate the Armenian
genocide in the framework of imperialist rivalry. 32
In the same way, Greek scholars like Paschalis Kitromilidis and Alexis
Alexandris are the ones who do research on the million and a half Greek
Orthodox who lived in Anatolia before 1922. In Turkey only one scholarly

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

study on the population exchange with Greece was published. 33 This reflects
the fact that, whereas the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1922–4 had always been a defin-
ing moment in the Greek historical consciousness, attention to it in Turkey
remained scant until well into the 1990s.
Third: The loss of the Arab provinces which had been under Ottoman
rule for 400 years, coming so soon after the loss (in the Balkan War, which
Lewis does not treat in any detail either) of European core provinces which
had been Ottoman for 500 years. The loss of these old imperial domains has
been very important in the development of a separate Turkish identity. After
all, we should not forget that the founders of the republic had all witnessed
these events personally, and often at the military front. Since the 1990s we
have seen the appearance of a spate of good books about Arab–Turkish rela-
tions in this era, notably by Sabine Prätor and Hasan Kayalı. 34
Finally: the war itself. Justin McCarthy has shown how ten years of
continuous warfare turned Anatolia into a land of widows (with a net popu-
lation loss of two and a half million Muslims and hundreds of thousands
of Christians through war, persecution, hunger and disease),35 while I have
tried to show how serving in the Ottoman army itself almost meant a death
sentence. 36 At the moment there seems to be a spectacular increase in the
interest of young Turkologists in the World War I period.
In conclusion to this point, I would say that we can now see that Lewis,
through his neglect for the World War, misses essential steps in the develop-
ment of modern Turkey.

The modernization paradigm

The third, and at the same time the most important, aspect of obsolescence
concerns the paradigm, the fundamental vision of history which underlies
Emergence. This paradigm is that of modernization. Lewis sees the his-
tory of Turkey in dialectical terms as the struggle between an enlightened
élite, which is open to the ideas of the West (the Tanzimat bureaucrats, the
Young Ottomans, Young Turks and Kemalists), and representatives of tradi-
tional, mostly religious, values. Slowly and at great cost, the reforming élite
of Turkey in the end succeeds in making Turkey a modern country on the
European model.
Although he does not explicitly define ‘modern’ anywhere, it is clear what
the concept means to Lewis: the nation state, a constitutional-parliamentarian
regime and industrialization. Fundamental to his concept of modernity is
that of secularism – the removal of religious elements from government,
law, education and culture. Just as for the Turkish Kemalists, modernization

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

and secularism seem to him to be almost synonymous. This, of course, is a

key element in the Kemalist tradition. After all, when Niyazi’s great work
The Development of Secularism in Turkey was translated and published in
Turkish, its title was Türkiye’de Çağdaşlaşma (Modernization in Turkey).
In Lewis’s eyes – and this, too, is typical of writers from the moderniza-
tion school – the march of modern, Western civilization is irresistible. There
is resistance, both among the élite and the masses, but that resistance is
the rear-guard action of traditional sectors, which in the end will prove to
be backward islands in a modernizing society. They are the ones of whom
Lewis can say in the context of the proclamation of the republic: ‘Not all
the Sultan’s former subjects were able to view the march of events with the
same historical realism.’37
In this respect Emergence is a typical product of the 1950s and 60s.
Since then, contemporary developments in Turkey and in the world of Islam
generally have taught us a degree of scepticism. That the secular nation state
in Turkey has only been maintained for the last 50 years with the help of four
military interventions and continuous limitations on civil liberties, tends
to undermine Lewis’s optimistic assessment of Turkey as a country where
‘westernizing revolution is accomplished and irreversible’38 and where ‘the
social changes that preceded and accompanied the rise of democracy have
continued and given greater strength and numbers to the new groups and
elements whose interests and aspirations are with freedom.’39
Lewis’s conclusion that Atatürk’s nationalism was ‘healthy and reason-
able’, without ‘arrogant trampling on the rights and aspirations of other
nations’40 is strange in itself, given the suppression of widespread Kurdish
revolts in the 1920s and 30s. But for us, who have witnessed 15 years of open
warfare between the Turkish army and the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK),
it is almost surreal. Generally speaking, one can say that it is striking that the
problem of the Kurdish community in Turkey is not dealt with in Emergence,
not even in the chapter on ‘community and nation’. This would certainly be
impossible in our day. Not only the ongoing propaganda war, but also the
work of serious scholars such as Peter Andrews, Martin van Bruinessen and
Hamid Bozarslan has emphasized the ethnic complexity of Turkey, which
had been hidden from view by the Kemalist nation-building process.41
One does not have to look only at the shortcomings and limitations
of the secularist and nationalist modernization policies to call Lewis’s
dichotomy of modern versus reactionary into question. Perhaps the great-
est success of Turkey’s modernizing élite is the very fact that it has lost its
monopoly on political and cultural debate. Through the spread of higher

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 The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building

education and wealth a large and vocal middle class has emerged, important
parts of which no longer regard a strong religious identity and a modern
way of life as incompatible. Social scientists who work on Islam in Turkey,
people like Şerif Mardin, Nilüfer Göle and Sencer Ayata have realized that
movements such as that of the Nurcus or of the Welfare Party are not sim-
ply ‘reactionary’ or ‘fundamentalist’. Quite to the contrary, they argue that
these are ideological movements which function in modern industrializing
society and try to formulate answers to the problems it poses.42
Sadly, the debate among historians of modern Turkey is less sophis-
ticated. The 1993 textbook by Lewis’s pupil Feroz Ahmad (which I have
mentioned earlier), The Making of Modern Turkey is a prime example of
the survival of the modernization paradigm with its black and white con-
trasts and simplifications. Witness for instance the claim: ‘Nationalism was
accepted by everyone except reactionaries,’ or the statement, ‘Secularism
was also accepted by nearly everyone.’43
In Turkey itself, the growth of a strong Islamist movement has led to a
polarization in which many intellectuals feel threatened and turn back to
the original Kemalist modernization model.

Conclusion
What, then, should be our conclusion both regarding Emergence and regard-
ing the development of this part of Turkology over the last 50 years?
I think we can say with confidence that Emergence is outdated in a
number of ways. Fortunately so, because it means that Turkology has pro-
gressed. In three crucial areas we now have a richer and much more com-
plete picture of Turkish history. In the first place people have finally marched
into the historical picture. No longer are we only interested in the question
of whether the Young Turks were Ottomanists, Islamists or Westernists, we
also want to know whether their policies meant people starved; not only do
we analyse what ‘populism’ meant in Kemalist ideology, we want to know
whether workers had the right to organize or strike. In the second place we
have become aware of the fact that the developments in the late Ottoman
Empire served not only an arsenal, or a laboratory, for the republic, but that
the Young Turk power élite had set in motion a number of developments
which made Turkey what it became after 1923. We realize, or we should
realize, that Turkey carries with it the traumas of a state which lost most of
its centuries-old core provinces in the spate of five years and could survive
only after massive and vicious ethnic cleansing. In the third place, our history
writing no longer needs to be caught in the clair-obscur of enlightened élite

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 The Rise and Fall of ‘Modern’ Turkey

who have been touched with the magic wand of the West on the one hand
and religious reactionaries on the other. We can see that modernization, such
as that which Turkey has undergone in the last 200 years, is a multi-faceted
phenomenon, which evokes very different reactions. Many of these reac-
tions, even if they are advertised as ‘Islamic’ or ‘traditional’, do not necessar-
ily signify rejection of the modernizing process. They may even be the form
in which modernization can most successfully penetrate an Islamic society.
Nevertheless, Emergence remains an imposing tour de force, an ele-
gantly written survey, with a clear central theme, rich in detail and based
on astounding erudition. Nowhere is the struggle of the Ottoman, and later
Turkish, élite to catch up with the modern world depicted better. The fact
alone that the book can serve as the subject for this chapter after nearly
50 years says enough about its qualities.

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