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Images of the Turk

Ura Vali (Ljubljana)

Review of: Jezernik, Boidar

(Ed.): Imaging the Turk. New-castle upon Tyne: Cambridge

School Publishing 2010, p. 205.

page 1 30 | 08 | 2010 http://www.kakanien.ac.at/rez/UValic1.pdf

Since their presence on thegeographical maps of Europe, the Ottomans attractedattentioninthe mental maps of European people. The encounter of people from European empires andkingdoms with the Ottoman empire drew an intellectualborderline between us andthem, be-tween West and East, between Catholics and Muslims, between civilisation and barbarism.As such this borderline was not seem to vanish, disappear or shadow away and was embeddedin the consciousness and practices of identifications of people. The Turk was for many cen-turies regarded as an European other par excellence. Either through admiration or throughfear, a black and white picture was portrayed, neglecting that societies were not just billiardballs (take it in Eric Wolfs terms1), but that between seemingly different groups of peopleconstant changes, transactions, negotiations and interactions took the stage. The encounterbetween the European and the Turk never was just imperil, but an encounter where severalinnovations and cultural exchanges took place (even sometimes through political interests ofboth sides). These were reflected and narrated in art, literature, music and folklore of several

individuals and groups involved in these social exchanges.The bookImaging the Turkis composed by fourteen autonomous chapters, which arenot

linked by an introduction, but still form a consistent and complex unit, through which is pos-sible to understand theimage of the Turk in Europe. Although the title of the book presumesthat it will speak about the Turk, the authors also equally address the creation of the conceptof Europe or West (or us in general) through the practices of an imaginary machine. How-ever, the narratives reflect social, cultural, political and economical circumstances in whichthey were made, we should take into consideration that narratives about the others speakmostly about ourselves.2As Miha Pintari points out in the fourth chapter about RabelaisPantagruel, the Turk, although in possession of his own status and identity, at the sametime signifies all that is not in the other and at the same time in ourselves. For we are Turksmore than we are Christians, we are Others in respect to ourselves while paradoxically, the

Other, our mirror, can be more ourselves than we are (p. 50). The understanding of theimage of the Turk in Europe is impossible without the knowledge of the circumstances orconditions that were shaping European visions at the time when the image was constructedor invented. The authors of the chapters in the book, thus before going to the image of theTurks, return to Europe and show to specific conditions that conduced to the creation of theimage, paying attention to the relations from which the representations arose. Blent Aksoyin his paper about the music among the Ottomans through Western eyes shows that the writ-ings about the history of music in Europe were not directly an outcome of musical researchbut a reflection of the comprehensive Orientalist discourse on the racial origin, history, re-ligion, language, literature, etc. of the Turks in musical studies (p. 174). In other worlds,the representations are always relational researchers should analyse who is speaking, fromwhich (power) position, to whom, when and why.

However imaginaries could not be constructions per se, but they are an intertwined com-

plex of peoples desires, hopes, projects and experiences with others, also the image of Turkis determined in a great part by the observers towardthe observed as writes theeditor, Boi-dar Jezernik (p. 3). He points that the Turk was not a passive player in the construction ofthis image, on the contrary, in the process of the construction of the image of the Turk, heplayed an active role (ibid.). zlem Kumrular shows the role of the Ottomans court in thecreation of the image of the Turk. He is describing the antagonistic position of the Ottomansin the creation of the image of the Turk in the 16 th century Mediterranean:

Though the role of Europe in the process of creating this image is unquestionable,the protagonist, rather the antagonists of this play are non than the Ottomans. Thesultan and the Ottoman court, with all his principal statesmen, were directly in-volved in the creation of this image, and the outcome was the product of a consciousand systematic work, an efficient tactic of conquest which had three major compo-

nents: violence, arrogance and splendour. (p. 33)This major components made an impression on Europeans, who were either gueststo the Ot-toman court or soldiers on the battlefield or people in daily interactions west and north-westof Istanbul. This impressions were narrated in a vast corpus of work either of 16th to the 19th

century educated noblemen, intellectuals, travellers and adventurers who travelled through
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Images of the Turk


Images of the Turk



Southern Europe to the Ottoman empire, either in oral literature (tales, songs) and expres-sions of people who experienced the encounter with the Ottoman government. Several casesare presented and examined by the authors ofImaging the Turk. zlem Kumrular shows inthe beginning of his article the experiences of different peoples encounter with Ottomans in

16th century Mediterranean and traces the persistence of these experiences in the language,phrases and expressions in the speeches of local people of NorthernMediterranean. SimilarlyAleksandra Niewiara shows the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Common-wealth of the Polish Crown (later, on when the Polish state ceased to exist, the Grand Duchyof Lituania) through the writings of the Polish noblemen and the Polish folklore, tracing thechanges dueto politicalinterests andcircumstances of thePoles in theperception of the Turkover the time. Jale Parla as well, through examination of Byrons Romantic Orientalism inrelation to the book of Boidar JezernikWild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of WesternTravellers (2004),3ascertain that social and personal inventions of otherness or alterity areconditioned by the ideological-hegemonic discourses of sovereignty in the formulations ofdomestic policies and international relations (p. 94f.) . To the same conclusions also comesNedret Kuran-Burolu who analyses the representations of the Turk in the German media

from early modern age to the enlightment:

According to the agenda of the period the image of the Turk has been used for dif-ferent purposes, sometimes he appeared as a person to be afraid of, at other timesas a person to be appreciated, but mostly as an Other, as an enemy, against whomreligious, ethnological and newly emerging national identities could be shaped. (p.63).

Two Slovenian authors in their paper shows how the encounters with the Turk or the pro-duction of the images of the Turk as Other in these encounters, were later used as the basisof establishing local identities. Peter Simoni is analysing the writings of Johann WeichardFreiherr vonValvasor, a 17th century nobleman, who was travelling through the southern partof the Habsburg Empire (nowadays the state of Slovenia and part of Croatia), namely thebor-derlands between twoempires (as thenameKrajina imply) anddescribedhis encounters with

people, their habits and customs. Valvasor describes several signalling, fortress and defencesystems against the Turk and lays stress on these places and peoples as the stronghold anddefence of imperil Ottoman or Islamic incursions into a Christian world. He unconsciouslydesigned what later become an intellectual borderline between East and West, progress andbackwardness, civilisation and barbarism used in the policy or ideology of identity building.Valvasors writings, embraced in The Glory of theDuchyof Carniola (Die Ehre de Herzogth-ums Crain), later became an important source for the creation of Slovene national identity.More than two centuries after Valvasor, the Slovene poet Anton Akerc gives impression ofhis travels to Istanbul and the Russian South as Bojan Baskar shows in the eighth chapter.On Andre Gingrichs notion offrontier Orientalism,4 Baskar shows that the images of, allu-sions to, andreferences concerning the encounters with the Turks of late medieval and earlymodern era are ubiquitous in cultural and art heritage as well as in mass education through

print and electronic media. Together, these references provide a shared field of metaphoricremindersof thepast, availableto everyone as elements of local identity(p. 107). Most of thetexts are posing more importance on the impact that the image of the Turk or the encounterwith the Ottomans had on the construction of identities in Europe, while Nazan Aksoy looksat the impact of relations between the Ottoman Turkey with the countries of Europe at thetime when the wave of modernisation affected the exhausted Ottoman Empire. He showshow the introduction of the novel, a literal genre imported from Europe in the process ofwesternisation in the middle of the 19th century, paradoxically became a medium throughwhich Turkish intellectuals expressed their fears and anxieties regarding westernisation (p.144), reflecting the changes that affected the values of the Ottoman society and which arosereconsiderations of Turkish identity.

Nonetheless the image of the Turk is to be seen as an invention of and for the Europeanaudience along with the creation of an imagined community 5 that at the same time share

the idea of itself and a clear notionof symbolic difference towardthe Other. As Rajko Murishows, the Other is constructed within the process of othering through identification, dif-ferentiation, subjectivation and classification. The final result of the process is alterity, orradical alterity, creation of theimaginedOther which mayappear in any disguise imaginable(p. 19). The process of alterity produce classifications or symbolic systems, a structure that
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Images of the TurkUra Vali (Ljubljana)


transcends time and may become something that is often regarded as a constraint that dri-ves and controls human activity and existence. As such it could postpone or transfer humanagency in the creation of symbolic structures to a reified structure which becomes a power-ful tool in establishing political interests or an excuse of implementing power relations. The

image of the Turk in Europe represented for many centuries an unchangeable, firm and un-questionable symbolic structure, which was, and still is, often present and at hand, wherepolitical interests and aims are in the game, as Alenka Bartulovi shows in how far thenarratives of the Turkish incursions were the main argument against the construction of amosque in Slovenia or as Ayhan Kaya shows based on the image of the Ottoman Turk andhow it applies to migrants and drives the policy of migration in the European Union.6

The book portrays the image of the Turk as an projection of desires, hopes, interests andfear in the course of establishing power relations and identity while social interactions andcultural exchanges occur. It is importantto analyse these exchangesas they enrichour knowl-edge andreframe theunderstanding of ourselvesand oursociety, or as Svanibor Pettan showsin his paper on the basis of the continuum and co-existence of the alaturka and alafrangastyle in the music of Kosovo:

Thus alaturka-alafranga, as a methapor of fundamental dilemmas that mark thelives of humankind in the early twenty-first century, remind us that balanced knowl-edge and understanding of the past can and could strenghten our sense of respons-abilty in dealing with various co-existing options and assist us in the further devel-opment of Balkan music studies. (p. 191)

The bookImaging the Turkrepresents a precious collection of scientific papers that in thelight of discourse analysis and ethnography critically examine andrevise the reified and natu-ralised self-evidence of thepast, thepresent and thefuture of theimageof the Turk in Europeunveiling intertwined social, cultural, political and symbolical exchanges that occurred in theencounters of social groups and formation of social identities.

Notes

1 Wolf, Eric Robert: Evropa in ljudstva brez zgodovine[Europe and People Without History]. Book I. Ljubljana: Studia

Humanitatis 1998.

2 Jezernik, Boidar: Zakaj pri nas ive Cigani in ne Rom. [Why Gypsies and not Roma live here?]. In: Jezernik, Boidar

(Ed.): Zakaj pri nas ive Cigani in ne Romi. Narativne podobe Ciganov/Romov [Why Gypsies and not Roma live here.

Narrative images of Gypsies/Roma]. Ljubljana: Oddelek za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo, Filozofska fakulteta

2006, p. 7-32, here p. 32.

3 London: Sa qui books.

4 Gingrich, Andre: Frontier Myths of Orientalism. The Muslim World in Public and Popular Cultures of Central Europe.

In: Baskar, Bojan/Brumen, Borut (Ed.): MESS. Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol.II . Ljubljana: Intitut

za multikulturne raziskave 1996, pp. 99-127.

5 Anderson, Benedict: Zamiljene skupnosti. O izvoru in irjenju nacionalizma [Imagined Communities Reflections on

the Origin and Spread of Nationalism]. Ljubljana: Studia Humanitatis 1998.

6 Additionally, this also drives the whole process of Turkeys integration into the European Union, as much as the image

of the state of modern Turkey is often unjustifiably related to the Ottoman Empire or Islam in general.
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