Ottoman History Podcast - A Sufi Novel of Late Ottoman Istanbul

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

with Brett Wilson hosted by Brittany White | Set between elite households and a Sufi lodge, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's 1922 novel Nur Baba was a provocative take on competing notions of religion, morality, gender, and romance in the dynamic world of late Ottoman Istanbul. In this episode, we speak to Brett Wilson, author of the first-ever English translation of Karaosmanoğlu's controversial classic. We discuss Yakup Kadri's ethnographic approach to his subject, its mixed reception, and the insights it offers about modern Turkish culture. We also discuss the joys of translation, and its importance for students of Ottoman history today. « Click for More »

The introduction of the translation starts with this anecdote, which is a famous story because it was recorded by several different people. And it basically tells about how Ataturk, at one of his evening salons, where he liked to invite people to come talk about various matters, invited two Bektashi babas, the leaders of Bektashi order called babas, he invited them to come discuss with him a novel, which was the novel Nur Baba. And the novel had been making a lot of controversy and there had been a lot of discussion about it in the press. And so he wanted to see who the actual basis of this story was and invited this baba to come, Ali Nurkibaba.

And it's interesting because the character in the novel is a very flamboyant, decadent man. He's also very passionate. He's a great singer. He has an amazing voice. He has mesmerizing eyes. And he also drinks a lot. And so Ataturk invites him.

They discuss the novel for a bit. And actually, we get the sense that Ataturk is kind of disappointed that the real life person isn't as flamboyant and interesting as the character in the novel. And at some point, Ataturk seems to just become bored with the conversation. And he says, let's just let's call the author, Yakub Kadri Karosmano, to come here and talk together with them. And so it's a kind of command performance in which he's summoned and he shows up and is put in this awkward situation face to face with this Sufi leader about whom he's written a pretty unflattering novel. And so this is this kind of awkward moment with which it starts. And it kind of lets us know that the novel was being discussed at really the very highest echelons of society. And also that president of the Turkish Republic was also kind of playing a little bit with both the author and with these characters.

That was Brett Wilson talking about an encounter between Mustafa Kemal and Yakup Kadri Karaozmanoglu, author of Nurbaba, a classic of modern Turkish literature that offers a unique window into Sufi lodges and the social dilemmas of early 20th century Istanbul. The novel, which was inspired by Yaqub Kadri's personal experiences with Islamic mystical orders, tells the story of Nur Baba, a spiritual leader who attempts to seduce a married woman from an elite Ottoman family and recounts her experiences in the life of a Sufi community. In our conversation with Brett, we'll discuss what the novel reveals about late Ottoman society and what it tells us about the early 20th century intellectuals who criticized Sufism for

impeding social progress and debated women's roles in a rapidly modernizing world. We'll also discuss the promises and perils of translating late Ottoman texts and why, despite its challenges, it's well worth the effort. This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Brittany White. Stay tuned. So tell us about Yaqub Qadri, his life, and then the general plotline for Nurbabah. Why did you think he wrote this novel? Jakub Kadri was a very important journalist and writer in the late Ottoman period and the early Republican period. He came from a very important historical family, which at this point in history,

he was kind of the last great son of this family. The family had declined quite a lot. And he is famous for writing novels about the crises of the late Ottoman period and also about the early republic. And his novels tend to deal with all kinds of political, social dramas. One of his first novels, just before Nurbaba, was kind of about the decline of the late Ottoman family, the grandfamilies who can no longer afford to take care of their mansions and they have to rent them out. And then Nurbaba deals with various issues, which we'll discuss, about religion, about women in public, about changes in society. And then he wrote a couple of really paradigmatic classics for the early republic.

Probably the most famous is called Yaban, or The Stranger in English, which became required reading in Turkish schools. And then Yakup Kadri had quite a diverse career. He went from being an author and journalist to being a member of parliament, to being a diplomat, and being quite active in Turkish politics throughout his life. And why did he write the novel? Well, this is a big point of debate among historians and also people at the time who read the novel. So some say that Yakup Kadri Karagözos Manalu wrote the novel to be an accurate ethnographic picture of what life is like inside of a Sufi teke in the late Ottoman period. Others who didn't like the novel and who felt like the novel was not so charitable or unfair in various ways tend to say that he wrote the novel to make a name for himself as a young author. And if that's what he was trying to do, then he was very successful because it caused a huge scandal. It was the first novel that really painted a highly critical, satirical picture of life in a Sufi community on as a book. And all the copies sold out within a few months. And basically, yeah, basically,

the book has been in print since the 1920s. It's still in print today. So it's had, I think, over 30 or 30 or 40 editions over the years. Quite the life for a book. And can you just give us a general outline of what the book is about and some of the main characters? Absolutely. Absolutely. The plot centers around an elite young woman named Nigar, who comes from a very prestigious family. They have a giant mansion on the Bosphorus. And the whole plot centers around whether or not Noor Baba will be able to seduce this woman and whether she will join his lodge, then whether she will become his lover. And I don't want to ruin the end for anyone, but it also centers around how she copes with the drama of

this long-term romance slash courting with Noor Baba. And it also has various characters from her family trying to get her out of it, trying to kind of save her from the charms and the charisma of this Sufi phala. So I would say that's the general picture. And also it gives us kind of an image of who would be in these lodges at the time. There are writers. There are people who work in the military, who work for the state and ministries. There are also just common people, people who happen to be craftsmen, itinerant dervishes, so a wide variety of people. So on the one hand, it's kind of a love story,

kind of a drama, but at the same time, it's really a kind of social portrait of perhaps what one of these communities might have looked like. And so many of our listeners have been to Istanbul. They live in Istanbul, where the novel takes place. But if you could just indulge me for a second, could you describe the Tahir Baba Lounge and what it would have been like? You just described the people who are frequenting it. But what about the general atmosphere during the late 19th century? And then if somebody visited today, what would they see? Oh, that's a great question. So in the 19th century or even early 20th century, they would have seen a large wooden mansion, which looks a lot like other prestigious houses in Istanbul.

It was high on the hill of Çamlıca. And if you think about today's Istanbul, it's really not very far below the giant mosque that's been built on top of Çamlıca. So in that time, it also had a very large garden around it. It was a pretty uninhabited area. It was green. It was luxuriant. It has beautiful views of the Bosphorus because you're so high up. And it's far from the city. You feel like you're

not close to things when you're there. These days, if you were to go, you would see something very different. It looks like any other neighborhood in Istanbul, I would say, first of all, in the sense that it's mostly concrete apartment blocks. There is the tombs and the graveyard of the Sufi Teke is still there. And it's called, interestingly called the Nur Baba Hazirasi, which is interesting because Nur Baba was just a fictional character. He never was alive, but his name has taken over the memory in the neighborhood of the lodge and of the community. There's also right near it, there's Nur Baba Sokha, and of the community. There's also right near it, there's Nurbab-e-Sokha, Nurbab-e-Street, which interestingly, the graveyard is not on the street. The graveyard is on a different street.

And at the end of the street where the graveyard is, there's a large mosque, which is run by the Mufti-Luk of Uskudar. So it went through a lot of changes over time. And we learned from other sources that actually the lodge only became a grand mansion in the late 19th century or early 20th century. Before that, it was far more humble. But because of elite disciples, like the ones described in the novel, the last sheikhs were able to build it up and make it really a grand residence. So the novel was originally published in a newspaper called Aksham, 1921, and it was serialized. And then it was published as a complete book in 1922. And despite being an instant sensation, it came with multi-level

controversy. Can you explain the different grievances from various parts of late Ottoman, early Republican society about the novel? And how did these discussions tie into contemporary conversations about modernity and reform? The most angry party in the audience for the novel was the Bektashi community. And we had different members write responses and critiques about what it said. Basically, they accused Yaqub Khadri, who had come and joined the Bektashi Lodge in Chamlaja, basically accused him of betraying the order, the community, and writing this extremely critical, in some ways insulting novel that really made their community look much, much worse than it really was. Yakub Khadri responded to these kind of critiques saying,

well, you know, it's literature. It's simply art for art's sake, and any resemblances that might be there are really just part of my imagination. So Bektashis were obviously angry. And when they made a movie of this novel a year later, it said that Bektashis stormed the set and kind of destroyed the set and scared away some of the actors who were there. Have people been able to verify that that actually happened? Or is that kind of just an apocryphal tale? That's what the scholarly literature on film history says. Oh, wow. Okay.

And apparently one of the actresses was so scared that she just didn't come back. And they had to find a new person to take her role. existentialist, very critical of women who leave their home, who leave their families to do other activities, to go shopping, to be outside the house, to join a Sufi lodge. God forbid women have hobbies, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And this really reflects the kind of contemporary debates in the teens and twenties about women's role in society during modernization. For some, it was a very uncomfortable process to see that women weren't fulfilling the same role that they used to. And Jakub Kadri interestingly echoes this throughout this novel and in some of his other writings from the 19-teens. This is interesting because later in life, he was quite progressive in terms of women's roles,

women's activities, and so forth. But Halide Edip Adavar wrote a very critical review of the book in which she basically says, why are the women characters all so negatively portrayed? There really aren't positive female characters in the novel. Right. The women in the book are frivolous. They don't have any control over their emotions. They're easily swayed. They throw tantrums. Yeah, it's very clear that Yacoub Khadri doesn't think highly of women at all. At least the ones who came to the Sufi Lodge, right? At least the ones, yeah, at least the ones who are going to the Sufi Lodge. And you alluded to the fact that Yaqub Khadri had been a part of the Bektashi community. He was one of these visitors

in his real life to Sufi lodges. And because he wrote this novel, the Bektashi community felt betrayed by his portrayal. Can you tell us how Sufi ceremonies and social habits were seen as repositories for Turkish national culture during this time and why someone like Yakup Kadri would be visiting a Sufi lodge and try to gain access to this community? Sure. This reflects the zeitgeist of the time in which early nationalist thinkers were trying to imagine where they could find Turkish culture. And the Bektashi order was one of the answers for them. Because unlike other Sufi orders, it had a large body of Turkish poetry, it did most of its ceremonies in Turkish, it had all these hymns in Turkish. And for that reason,

it became really an object of fascination. So we see romantic nationalists like Yakup Kadri or Yahya Kamal and others visiting these lodges and doing a bit of spiritual exploring. Maybe these were kind of ceremonies the Turks did in Central Asia, or these songs still have the spirit of the Turks as they moved across the steppe into Iran and into Anatolia. And by studying this music, by listening to this, we can understand something of the essence of the Turkish spirit, the soul of the nation. So it's kind of a classic cultural linguistic nationalism at play here. And we do see it in many spots in the novel. And actually, this is one of the many spots in the novel. And actually, this is one of the positive elements in the portrayal of the Bektashis. So, Yakup Kadri is disappointed in many things in the Teke, but one of the things he really likes is the poetry and the music. And he basically says when they sing these songs, he feels like he's hearing something through a time portal channeling the soul of the Turk across the ages.

And he thinks that these kind of hymns and these kind of ceremonies have something authentic about them. And that's probably why he was there, to some extent. Another extent is that this thing, the Bektashi secret was a widely discussed issue throughout the Hamidian period and in the Young Turk period. In the Hamidian period, the Bektashis didn't really publish any books. They kept it kind of low profile. But at the same time, we see all these elites went there. And the novel is all set during the reign of Abdulhamid II. But because it was a period of kind of covert existence, popular imagination developed all kinds of ideas about what happened at these secret ceremonies, men and women at night up on

the hills of the Bosphorus with music, with wine, with song, right? The imagination of the public kind of ran wild. And this is also probably why he was there to either to find out for himself or to simply collect material for writing a novel of this sort. You mentioned the Bektashi secret. Can you explain for our listeners who don't know what that is, what that is and what that meant to a 19th or early 20th century Turkish person? So in 1826, the Bektashis were made officially illegal in the Ottoman Empire, and they went underground. They were actually tolerated beginning in the 1830s or 40s, and they were able to regain a number of their lodges. And as we see, even elites and

wealthy people went there, but they weren't legal. And so they still had a kind of level of secrecy, of keeping a low profile. Then also within Bektashism, there is the concept that non-initiates can't really become part of the ceremonies. They have to stay on the outside. So like many religious traditions, you have to really be a part of the group to be able to do all the ceremonies. They have to stay on the outside. So like many religious traditions, you have to really be a part of the group to be able to do all the ceremonies. So during the Hamidian period, this idea of the Bektashi secret got more and more robust. People's imaginations got more and more outlandish, let's say. And then in 1909, there's the first Bektashi publication in the last 30 years since Abdul Hamid came to power. And it's called The Bektashi Secret by Ahmed Rivka. And one of our MA students wrote a great thesis about it, Deniz Ali Gur.

So basically, this was in the air. And Bektashis wanted to explain that, look, we are normal people. We are Muslims. We are Sufis. We're part of Ottoman society. While as others liked the exoticism of this secret, they liked it to make it more and more outlandish. So, Jakob Kadri comes into this, he taps into this conversation because he knows there's public

interest in that. And by publishing the novel, some people, and I think he thought in some sense, he was kind of revealing the Bektashi secret to the public. And he does provide some really good descriptions of Bektashi ceremonies in the novel. Now, they're good descriptions, but he also makes, let's say, sarcastic commentary on the different actions or symbols used in the ceremony. But we can say that playing with this Bektashi secret theme was a really big part of what he did. And it's also connected to the idea of putting out the candle, this libel that religious groups do mass orgies in their ceremonies. So this was definitely part and parcel of the secret.

So switching gears to translation, the novel has been translated into several languages, among them Greek, German, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian. And so I just want to ask you a straightforward question. Why did you decide that this needed to be translated into English? I've been teaching for quite a while now. And one of my biggest realizations in the field of Ottoman Turkish studies is that we don't have enough primary sources to teach, particularly for undergrad students or for more general classes. So that was one of my goals. Another goal is that within the kind of area of Turkish literature, there are also huge gaps. So Yakup Kadri's novels, despite being classics in Turkey, are really not read outside of Turkey at all. He's not known. He's not consumed among English reading audiences at all.

And in this sense, English has been really well behind other European countries in making his literature available. Also, of course, there's a back story to all of this. And why did I start translating it and so forth? And that is that when I was a graduate student, I needed to keep studying Turkish and working on Ottoman Turkish, but there really weren't classes at my university to do it. And so I decided to work on a translation project. And I enlisted the help at that time of Erdal Göknar,

who happened to be at Duke University. And we spent a couple of years doing independent studies where I would basically translate this and then we would meet and discuss it. That sounds lovely. It was really one of the best experiences in graduate school. I really enjoyed it. And it was a way of improving my Turkish. It was also over the years a really nice side project.

When you just can't get the energy or the focus together to work on that other thing, you got your side project. Also, translation has that kind of, it's kind of a practice, I would say, which sometimes is a very different kind of practice than writing or reading. And in that sense, it works in different muscles in your brain. And so I sometimes like to do translation to warm up, to write something. You know, it's a way to kind of get the juices flowing and get your mind awake. And so I enjoyed doing that over the years. And it was a lot of fun and just a very different type of project. But luckily, in recent years, we've had a couple of amazing translations.

Giancarlo Casale's recent book, Prisoner of Infidels, received a lot of acclaim and also really showed that people are interested in Ottoman history outside of Ottoman studies. And people will read these sources if you make them available. Speaking of Prisoner of Infidels, I spoke with Giancarlo Casale about two years ago. I believe it was my second solo interview here, Ottoman History Podcast. And he had translated a 17th century Ottoman memoir, which it was riveting. I really enjoyed reading it. And we discussed the unique challenges of translating early modern Ottoman text, like zero punctuation, using the first person plural biz or we, but meaning the first person singular I. Were there unique challenges to translating a later Ottoman text and what were they? Oh God, yes. So I would say punctuation is also a big issue in this work.

Yaqub Kadri has, I would say, something like semicolon fever. And I think it reflects a certain point in history when punctuation wasn't perfectly worked out for Turkish. And so that was difficult because in the early versions of the translation, I tended to just stick with the punctuation, to stick with the sentence structure, try to respect the structure of the work. But in English, it just looked and sounded terrible. It took at least a decade to make it actually sound readable and flowing and smooth. And that really required aggressive editing of the punctuation.

Some people would probably disagree with my methodology here, but I think people who read it in English will be very thankful for these interventions. For folks who are non-Turkish speaking, if they happen to be listening to this, Turkish when translated into English can be very, very awkward. They use a lot of passive voice, which in English we don't tend to use. So I can't even imagine or I can't imagine trying to translate an Ottoman Turkish text into an English text that not just Ottomanists will like and a broader audience will enjoy. Yeah, it's not easy. And other challenges would be that there's really

a large degree of technical vocabulary in the novel about Sufism, about Bektashi Sufism in particular. And so for those, I've provided a lot of footnotes. And this gives the novel a bit more of a scholarly feel, I would say. There's also a lot of references to places, stores, spots in Istanbul, historical figures that probably people would never have heard of. So I've also tried to give an apparatus with which you can really understand all this. And that was very fun to research, I have to say, going through old maps of Istanbul and trying to find where was that shop where Nurbaba was chasing around Migyar Hanam or so forth. So I really enjoyed that. Other challenges would be poetry. Sufis love poetry,

and this novel has a lot of poems in it. So that really put my skills to the test. What was your favorite one to translate? Oh, goodness. None? Understandable. Absolutely understandable. No, I think I liked doing them. And for a few of them, I was able to get them to rhyme in a similar way that they do in the original. And for a few of them, I was able to get them to rhyme in a similar way that they do in the original and quite proud of myself for that. I was going to say that's quite the accomplishment. Like,

I don't think I would have to do anything else after that. I would be so pleased with myself. Yes, but actually, it's interesting in the first drafts, like sometimes you just skip those, especially if you haven't had your second cup of coffee in the morning or something. You say, okay, that's going to happen later. For sure. For sure. We go back to that. Yeah, no, it's been very enjoyable. I really, I really liked it. But it's taken up a large part of my life as a side project. So I'm happy, so happy, I must say to see this actually imprint on my desk. Well, congratulations. And honestly, thank you for making this contribution to the field when, as you mentioned, translation isn't necessarily quote-unquote rewarded and often recognized, but it's important. And now non-Turkish speakers, non-Ottoman readers have something else

that they can read and just have a little bit more context for what life was like in late Ottoman Empire, early Turkish Republic. So I think it's fantastic. So Brittany, I have a question for you. Yes. If you had to say, what's the best context in which to read Prisoner of the Infidels? And what's the best context in which to read Nur Baba? What would you say? Okay. Okay. I would take Prisoner of Infidels to like a big city. And I say this because big cities have like lots of lots of action. There's lots of moving parts in Prisoner of Infidels. There's bandits, there's kidnapping, there's shootouts, there's all types of stuff. So I would take it to a place that's

busy. Norbapa, I would take it to a place that's more relaxing, not the beach, but I would take it to maybe a slower pace, mid-sized city in Portugal where there's a lovely view, where there's vineyards, maybe a mountainscape and just like a vast, lovely view and maybe some water in the background. Where would you read it? If you could read your own, where would you read it? I think the best place to read Nurbapa would be somewhere in the hills of the Bosporus, just because so many of the places are in the novel, right? I would read Prisoner of the Infidels on the train from Venice to Vienna. That's funny because when I did read it, I read it on the train from Charlottesville to DC,

and it was a great way to spend three and a half hours or however long the ride was. Oh, nice, nice. spend three and a half hours or however long the ride was. Nice. Nice. How has your perception of the novel changed from when you first started translating until and now that it's published? So I had a funny moment the other day where I was holding the copy of Nurbaba and I was reading through it and my wife saw me and she was shocked. She's like, you're actually reading that now? You still have the patience for that? I felt like when I started this, it was just a work of deciphering, you know, and you're kind of in the middle of this big puzzle. And you can read something quickly and understand it, but to understand it well enough to reproduce it in your own language,

it's a different level of comprehension. And because I have been in that haze of the puzzle for so many years, on and off, when I had time to work on it, that now to see it in a readable and attractively printed form with pictures, with maps, footnotes, it's really just a pleasure for me to look at it. special trip to Istanbul and find a, I mean, it might be too expensive to rent out a Bosphorus mansion these days, but read it along the Sahil. That would be lovely, I think, just to honor your own work. Oh, thank you. I will take you up on that. Absolutely. So it's fun for me to look at it. And there's, of course, many times on any project like this where you don't really believe it's ever going to be finished. And I had many of those moments. So just to all the listeners there, you know, keep at it. Basically, perseverance is one of the best attributes to have at this kind of project. So in the end, hopefully it pays off or definitely pays off emotionally for me. All right, y'all. Perseverance and translating, get to it. We want to see more and we want more

primary sources available to our non-Turkish speakers. So thank you, Brett, for this lovely conversation. It was an absolute delight speaking with you, Brittany, and I hope we can do it again sometime. Thank you. That concludes our interview with Brett Wilson about his work on the first ever English translation of Yaqub Qadri's novel, Nur Baba. If you're looking to learn more about Sufism

and late Ottoman literature, visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where you'll find a quick link to the book as well as other resources in this interview's bibliography and tons of other episodes on life in early 20th century Istanbul. I'm Brittany White. Thanks for listening.