Секция III
70
M. Fuat Köprülü’s opinions are supported and extended further by Halil İnalcık’s
new claims. Among several other factors, İnalcık always considers
gaza
factor as a
historical fact and stresses that jihad or
gaza
continues to be the leading dynamic of
the ottomans till the end of the 17
th
century. He expresses this idea by saying; “
Gaza
is the leading factor for the progress of Ottomans in Asia and Europe.”
Turkologist like Ronald C. Jenings, Colin İmber, Hungarian Turkologist Gyula
Kaldy-Nagy, Şinasi Tekin, Colin Heywood and Heath Lowry reject the
gaza
thesis.
English Historian Colin Imber takes the discussions about the subject one step further
and calls the ottoman history until the last quarter of the 15th century as “
a black
hole
”. Using new claims by modern Turkish historians such as Feridun M. Emecen
andMehmet Öz, this study will try to evaluate these approaches to the Ottoman history
that name the period from the foundation to the early empire as “
a dark period
”.
Akile Zorlu Durukan (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey)
Educational Content as the Mirror of Official Historiography:
1930s and the New History Textbooks in Turkey
Shifts to new political structures that legitimate themselves on drastically different
grounds than their predecessors almost inevitably entail new representations of the
past, which are ultimately linked to identity building. The Early Turkish Republic
and the national historiography it created represent one of such cases.
The formulation and propagation of an officially sanctioned version of history
during the 1930s almost immediately followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire and
the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The regime implemented a program
of cultural change and identity transformation within the framework of an extensive
modernization project. The ruling elite sought to transfer pre-existing loyalties to an
allegiance to the Republican state, its ideals and Turkishness, which was envisioned
as superseding all identities. Discarding the recent past and the Islamic tradition as
a reference point in the collective memory rested at the crux of this endeavor. The
ideological expression of this perceived rupture found expression in the regime’s
perspective on and articulation of history. The official historiography practically
sidestepped the Ottoman and Islamic periods by downplaying their role in favor of
a strong emphasis and glorification of a distant, pre-Islamic Turkish past.
Education in general, public schooling in particular, was one of the most valuable
tools available to Republican officials in the process of identity building through the
propagation of the newly created national historiography. The new regime directly
mirrored its ideologically motivated assertions in educational content through the
writing of new history textbooks for all levels of education. This presentation aims
to briefly portray the fault lines of the new historical narrative as reflected in the
textbooks and then focus on how it depicted the sidestepped eras, especially the
subject of Islam.
