Ottoman History Podcast - Arab-Ottoman Imperialists at the End of Empire

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

with Mostafa Minawi hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | What did it mean to be Arab during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire? What did it mean to be Arab and invested in continuation of the Ottoman Empire? In this episode Mostafa Minawi answers these questions by focusing on the lives of two Arab-Ottoman Imperialists from the same family in Damascus, the al-'Azm or Azamzade family. By recounting their lives, excavating their writings, and narrating how their descendants remember them, Minawi explores questions of belonging, race and ethnicity, and the emotional world of a family divided by the fracturing of an centuries-old empire. « Click for More »

The miscarriage or the actually the stillbirth is in many ways parallel with the stillbirth of an imagined multicultural fully equal Ottoman Empire. That was Mustafa Mirawi talking about his latest book, Losing Istanbul, Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of the Empire. This is Zeynep Ozar Badagan. Welcome to Ottoman History Podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about the end of the Ottoman Empire through the experiences of two members of the Al-Azam or Azamzadeh family. Sadiq and Shafiq were from Damascus but resided in Istanbul and worked for Abdulhamid II's government and palace. Facing changing ethnic and racial politics in the empire, we explore the trajectories of how these two Arab Ottoman imperialists came to define their own identities

and how their descendants remember the splitting of the family across the Turkish-Syrian border and nation-states. So why did you decide to write this book? There's a short answer and a long answer for this. So I was not planning on writing this book until August 2020, when I got caught up in an explosion in Beirut. I was writing a completely different book, which is still on contract with Stanford, about Ottoman imperialism in the Horn of Africa, something that I've been researching for a long time. I traveled quite a bit to get to it. So I was just literally in the process of starting to write it, kind of putting it down on paper. And I got caught up in an explosion in Beirut in the port.

And that made me rethink my scholarship or why I do what I do. scholarship or why I do what I do. And what are some of the things that I've always wanted to talk about that I have put to the side because I thought I in my head, I thought they were may might not be that important, or they might not be as accepted in the field. But when you almost die, that sounds really dramatic. You really do think, you know what, maybe this will be my last book. And if it's going to be my last book, what is the book that I really, really want to make sure that people have access to? And personal life and the intimate details, micro history of living through the end of empire, through the turmoil of the end of empire, the trauma that comes with it, as well as some of the uglier aspects of imperialism that manifest themselves in the details of the day-to-day life

that we do not talk about, because mostly we don't have access to. It's the personal day-to-day. Of course, we really over-rely on official documents because the Ottoman archives, the official Ottoman archives are so rich. But having collected out of curiosity for a very long time, 15 years or more, you know, documents and pictures, but also interviews with people that some of whom are no longer with us. I decided that if I wanted to write a book, I wanted to be a book that people can read to get a sense of the tragedy that befell many. In this case, Arab Ottoman imperialists of Istanbul who no longer had a home. So let's unpack that terminology. So it's Arab Ottoman imperialists. Yes. I want to go from backwards. So what makes them imperialist or Ottoman imperialist?

So I do spend quite a bit of pages explaining terminology because it matters. And I really thought about it quite a bit. identitarian categories that I'm assigning to those people based on the reader rather than based on what they would have explicitly walked around thinking they are. So it's an analytical category rather than identity category, if you will. So Arab-Ottoman, and I hyphenate it, is my attempt at not ignoring the element or really the ethnic category when talking about people that were very much at the center of the Ottoman ruling elite, but also invested in the idea of an empire, of an Ottoman empire particularly, that included them. So they promoted it, they supported it, sometimes through

good and bad, sometimes through a lot of ugly. They were invested in it, not just invested because their careers depended on it, but invested in it in a way that allowed them to envision a future for their family, a future that included their family, which were people that were from Egypt and Damascus and Aleppo and Beirut, but also belonged to a larger notion of an Ottoman Empire. So they really believed in the idea of being an Ottoman, not as a member of the imperial dynasty, but as a, dare I say it, a citizen, a loyal subject, of course, with changing notions of what that means. So that's where the imperial comes. That's why I emphasize the Arab. I didn't want to lose that because it was very much part and parcel of how people were signified, for better or worse, you know, being

being Rumi, being Armenian, being Turkish, which I'll get to in a second, are all part of this idea that we are all Ottoman, though we belong to these different unsurs or, you know, Arabic anasir. I didn't want to lose that. Just, I didn't want to kind of plaster over it with the notion that everybody's an Ottoman and their being Arab did not matter. It mattered a lot. I borrow and with some danger, I've adopted this idea of a multicultural Canadian way of trying to identify people, which is very problematic. I spent my formative years, if you will, in Canada where, you know, everybody is kind problematic. I spent my formative years, if you will, in Canada, where, you know, everybody is kind of hyphenated, except for the people that do not need to be hyphenated

to belong. So what I mean by this is that, you know, if you're Arab, you would be Arab-Canadian with a hyphen, or Asian-Canadian, or Chinese-Canadian, or Palestinian-Canadian, right? And all of that is supposed to kind of create this idea that multicultural belonging and claiming of Canadian-ness comes through the hyphen without having to lose the first part. But of course, along with that comes an erasure of the native population, native Canadians, right? But also, there is a bunch of people in Canada whose languages are the official languages,

particularly the people of Irish or English descent or Anglo-Saxon descent, that do not necessarily need to identify their hyphen because they are Canadian-Canadian, is how people growing up in the suburbs used to, oh, they're Canadian-Canadian, which means they're white Canadian. In the Ottoman context in the late 19th century, we almost never identify Turkish Ottomans. We say, oh, Arab Ottomans or Rum Ottoman,

or, you know, particularly for non-Muslims, we say, you know, we have to identify their religion or which region they come from, Bulgarian, Albanian. But the Turks, because we assume that Turkish is Ottoman anyway, do not need to be identified as such. I wanted to make the point of identifying all of these elements, unsurs, including the Turkish unsur, as a Turkish Ottoman and an Arab Ottoman, to keep it in the focus of the reader right through. Because it will, as the book progresses from the 1880s into World War I, that becomes incredibly important. But I use it right from the beginning to kind of flag it. You go into incredible detail about

what did Arap mean and how much one of the characters that you're talking about avoids using it. Let me, actually, it might make sense for me to introduce the two main characters. And then because they make different choices about how they identify themselves as time passive. So the two are Sadiq Azamzadeh and Shafiq Azamzadeh. They are one is the nephew of the other, but the nephew is actually older than the other. It's just people had kids late. So Sadiq is actually older than his uncle, but they both come from a specific neighborhood in Damascus. That's where they were born. And they follow similar trajectories until they hit Beirut.

Beirut, one goes to AUB for a bit. The other one goes to the military college in Istanbul. But then they reconnect in Istanbul, living about a block away from one another. So I focus on them and their families in painstaking detail. And I'll explain why the details are important, why I really wanted to keep a lot of the day-to-day details in, which I think of as a slow burn, you know, the way they describe it on Netflix, you know, visceral. I'm hoping for visceral. So I'm hoping for people's patience or at least interest as they go through the day-to-day life rather than skim through most of them, though please go ahead and skim if you need to. By the time they start to

represent the empire in different functions, one being staying in Istanbul most of his life, working in the translation office, very important, but also different positions very close to the sultan. And the other one being an advisor to the sultan, but works internationally. which I talk about in the first book, to Africa, but also representative to Bulgaria, Germany, Arabia, Anatolia, as I find out later, for not very pretty reasons. They have to face the notion of what Arab means and whether they want to adopt it or not at different times. And that changes over 40 years. So that change is important. One, as I say, I kind of go through his writings in multiple editions of same works in different languages to try and parse out what choices he's making in talking about his surroundings and by extension himself

and how he relates to the surroundings. And that changes over time. But how editors for the Arabic translation, the early Ottoman publication, later Ottoman publication, and modern Turkish have made different choices to try and, using different terminology, describe similar things because of their political value. of their political value. The word Arap is very loaded.

It's loaded now, as any Arap would know, living in Istanbul, or who has actually been involved deeply in Turkey. But it's also very loaded at the end of the 19th century, which is what I'm trying to hopefully kind of instigate people to try and look at, not just Arab, but others as well. The reason it's loaded is because it takes on not just the notion of a derogatory. It's more than that. It becomes a racialized term that is related in many ways to blackness and the empire's relationship to blackness as an other. And that becomes really explicit when you look at the writing of Sadek as he travels through Africa, trying to identify

people based on his own categories. So some of the Arabs he meets are never mentioned as Arabs. They're mentioned in very interesting, almost German, you know, adventure writer style 19th century locals or natives or blacks. And then he identifies himself very explicitly as nothing but Ottoman. Sometimes he brings in the Demesine later on in the chapter, but then he switches to white. All of that, avoiding the word Arab where Arab would be much easier to describe the people is something that made me very curious. And initially, I dismissed it as he's just being accurate, you know, like he's trying to think of himself as not a Bedouin. But as I look through the different versions of the writings that he put forward, and also the different versions of people talking about his

writings, and what terminology they use, I realized that in reality, it's actually choices he's making and not just the way people understood certain terminology at that time. So I dug deeper. I dug into the meaning as it shows up in dictionaries. I dug into the meaning as it shows up in the press and how people react to the word Arab and why would it be avoided or adopted and a lot came out so I spent two chapters kind of unpacking the choices he makes as Arab or non-Arab and then the politicization of that choice once we hit the Young Turk revolution so basically what I'm trying to argue is that the word Arab

and describing someone as Arab or identifying with someone who is described as Arab becomes problematic much earlier than we think. And it is not just about old notions of cultural, you know, the Arabs are like that, just like Greeks are like that, or Armenians like that, which of course has been around for a very long time. It's a multicultural society and people have stereotypes about each other. I'm not talking about just about stereotypes. I'm talking about othering, and by othering, defining who you are at a specific moment in time by saying you are not the other. And as an Arab

Ottoman imperialist living in Istanbul, you are invested in defining yourself as an elite member of that society, which starts to sound and talk and later identify as white. That, to me, was very telling. Once you look for it, and you'll start to find it. And there's no better place to find it than from someone who is living in the middle of this as he is experiencing this shift happen and him having to kind of grapple with how he belongs or how he can maintain his presence or relevance in this imperial elite society when racialization is arriving in Istanbul and it's not limited to places in sub-Saharan Africa that he has experienced, or in Europe, which he also has experienced. He chooses to never identify himself as an Arab all the way till the end.

He never changes his signature. He signs on to the founding of a political party, but he was never that invested in it, and he dies soon after. However, his uncle, Shafiq, becomes very invested politically in the notion of Arab unsurb as an unsurb that is being discriminated against on all levels, not just in the government, not just politically, but on all levels, from a state perspective, without an official policy that says that that's what we're doing. Because after the Young Turk revolution, within a couple of years, being Turk becomes almost the idealized notion of what a new modern Ottoman citizen is.

And he fights against it. I'm not trying to defend him as his character. His character, as you can tell in the book, is not exactly stellar. But he fights against it. And a lot of people start to talk about it explicitly. And some of them pay for it very dearly, including their families being interned and during the World War I, of course, him being hanged, but a lot more people, including women and children, being thought of as suspect because they are of Arab origin, even though they

live in Istanbul. Most of them cannot even speak Arabic properly. They can read it. They are very kind of integrated until their Arabness becomes a suspect and not just suspect, but also something to be extricated from this emerging new notion of an Ottoman, which and then later, of course, in the Turkish Republic. We've talked a lot about all of the terminologies that you use. So let's get more into sort of the nitty gritty of actually what's happening. So you talked about the fact that you use a lot of detail describing their daily lives. And you start basically, we're talking about the title of the book is Losing Istanbul. And it's about losing even the space of like where they live in Tashfiqiyah.

So the loss of that in this process, which actually happens in stages, right? With the Young Turks and then the First World War. So tell us of that in this process, which actually happens in stages, right, with the Young Turks and then the First World War. So tell us about that. Tell us about sort of losing actually the space and what was their interaction in that space? Why was it important and how did they lose it in this process? It's very much a story of loss. It's a bit dramatic that way. There is a kind of a darkness.

There's also a bit of nostalgia that has seeped in there. The idea that people like the Azimzades, they don't just lose the space, which is very important. Of course, they lose the places they lived in and they lose their, you know, the neighborhood where they raised their children and so on. But they also lose the center of their universe in many ways, which is Istanbul. And it's not just them. What we don't talk about is the tragedy and also the trauma of that generation that lived, my great-grandfather's generations, who I mentioned and I dedicate the book to. That generation that we dismiss when they used to talk. I'm old enough to have met him and lucky enough to have, you know, I remember my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, who talk about almost like a different world,

like it's a different planet that they inhabited, which they drew meaning from, who they made references to. And Istanbul was at the center of it, even if it's just in their imagination. Most of them have never made it to Istanbul or have seen Istanbul. But they were part of a larger collective history and a sense of belonging, whether some would criticize it, some would hate it, some would love it. For some it worked, for some it didn't work, obviously. But it was a world that ended relatively abruptly for a lot of people and for a lot of people in the provinces who also identified with the idea of being part of a larger Ottoman Empire, where the center is Istanbul. Here I'm talking about

a family that was much closer to the center of the hurricane, if you will. If we think of the last few years as a hurricane, the last 10 years that led to the splintering of the empire, the people at the very center, very close to the eye of the storm, felt it the most intensely. And they are people who were not just invested in the idea, they worked for it. They worked for it both literally, and they tried to ideologically identify with or promote imperialism as it was seen from an Ottoman perspective. But they saw the writing on the wall much earlier than most people in the provinces. And they tried to salvage it. I don't want to describe them as heroes. Their very existence depended on it. It's an existential threat that

they were facing as the empire was disappearing because they saw where things are heading. You either lose everything that you have thought of yourself as being both Arab and Ottoman, or you decide to forget the past completely, pretend that it didn't happen, change your name, change your culture, change everything, and pretend that the past was an awful darkness that needed to be cut out like a cancer. And those people who lived there and worked for the palace during the Hamidian period, through the Young Turk period or the CUP period or the Second Constitutional period, depending on how you want to spin it, they were still continued to be invested until there was no room for them to invest anymore. that loss, that real tragedy, that trauma, then you're supposed to forget and then, you know, work for some imagined idea of a nation state that was either under colonial or not under colonial occupation, you know, whether you're on the Turkish side of the border or the Syrian side

of the border. And in many ways, that history that we have erased because we talk about them as separate. So in Turkey, the history of Turkey and the transition from the empire to the Turkish Republic is really getting a lot of attention in the last 20 years or so. And we're doing a much better job at explaining that it wasn't just like this weird abrupt, suddenly people forgot and we moved on, but there's trauma and there's continuities that happen. But for the rest of the empire, for the rest of the empire that was not necessarily Turkish speaking, we have, for different reasons, have done a much poorer job at explaining the trauma of transition for day-to-day people's lives. And we talk about how not everybody was invested in the nation state, but we never really know how people experienced that.

The people that were not aiming for some imagination of an Arab pan-Arabism or it wasn't part of their political imagination at all, or people that thought of, particularly in places like Lebanon or Syria or Palestine, where those divisions, not just within them as Arabic majority speaking provinces, but as provinces of a much larger collective political identity is something we don't talk about. So it's not just the splitting, we talk about the splitting up of the quote unquote Arab countries into different nation states, but we don't talk about their extrication from what they actually belong to, which is a larger Ottoman collective. And that collective memory, that collective forgetting, actually,

is something that I very much wanted to explore. But the best way I could access it is this family, mostly because they left us a lot of records, because they're elite families that also worked for the government, but also because they were both from the provinces, but also very much of Istanbul. So I thought they would be an ideal case study. So I talk about their day-to-day, the tragedy of the things falling apart, the losses. I mean, there's losses of babies that happen at one point in the book, but the miscarriage or the actually the stillbirth is in many ways parallel with the stillbirth of an imagined multicultural, fully equal Ottoman Empire that many of those people counted on, but then lost very quickly. You also see the splitting of the like the family actually splits there they are and

they have different names on the two sides of the syrian like turkish border the hardest thing was to find the descendants because they changed their name on the on the turkish side and i did that back in 2008 2009 i was like i sent a group message back when facebook would allow you to send just random messages and I sent a random message to anybody that has the three letters A, Z, M in their Facebook. And funny enough, that's how I stumbled across someone who picked it up and said, we are no longer Azimzades, but we are the Azimzades. And they are the Turkish side of the family. But of course, the Syrian side of the family or the Egyptian side of the family, they had a very long political career.

And of course, they're al-Azams, and they were much easier to get a hold of. But they have, for all intents and purposes, kind of split, the two sides have split. And they have different versions of history and memory of who they were under Ottoman rule. Both share the pride in the imperial past. they were under Ottoman rule. Both share the pride in the imperial past. There is this notion of we were the ruling elite, very much shared on both sides, but they have very different versions of their history and how they ended up where they ended up. And that memory is actually a huge part of what you present in the book, because it's about how the family remembers different generations of it, the ones who survived and how they talk about what their father said or grandfather said.

And then you contrast that to all the sources that you have found, whether they are from the Ottoman state or the records that these people have left or even the basically family photos that have survived. So you basically created a family archive. Yes. For this family. What was the process? Because it took you a very long time to bring all of this together and the texture that it actually brings. Texture was very

important to me. I mean, my first book is very much a diplomatic history, political history, where even though there are people, the people are just names. I didn't want the people to be just names here. I really wanted to write something that the reader can relate to as human beings, flawed human beings, but human beings nonetheless. To do that without resorting to fiction, you need a lot more sources and not just state sources, though if you read them in the right way, you might find a lot more details than you think that are on the personal level. To do that, that meant I, for a long time, this was a back burner project. So I would continuously collect, I would continuously interview whenever I could. But that started in 2008. And it continued on literally until I started writing, and it continued literally until I started writing because the last interviews I did

was with one of the great-grandchildren of one of the people in the book who lives in the States now, and that was like two years ago. So yeah, if I had a book in mind and was doing research for a specific book, I would have abandoned this a long time ago because the idea that I would wait 15 years to write a book, it's just not something you should ever do. The fact that I didn't know if it would ever become a book or not, and what I

wanted to say with these details or not, is something that I kept doing, but on the side, knowing that it might never actually amount to a book. The moment I knew exactly what those sources are telling me, beyond just the family story, is when I decided to write the book. And it wrote itself really quickly. I wrote it in one year in Hungary, sitting in the isolation of a pandemic. of pandemic. So why is that memory important? Like, why is it constantly, basically, being referred to in the book? Is that part of trying to capture that trauma, which has basically persisted intergenerationally?

Memory is important because memory is emotive, and I wanted an emotive thread in the book. These are real people that have real descendants. They are not some characters in history books, right? They're very, very real. They become very real to me. When I wrote the chapter in which Sadiq passed away, I literally cried, and I couldn't believe myself I was crying, because I was literally writing those words imagining the what he was going through desperately trying to he wanted to die close to Mecca and Medina and he couldn't it was a very tragic end in many ways because of all of these of the interviews in which the memories come out those people become real people and I have responsibility towards them and And I have an emotional attachment with them, both love and hate and everything in between. But also memory

is important because for me, 100 years ago is not that long ago. For me, the memory of my great grandfather and great grandmother telling me about living through the last period of the Ottoman Empire. That is my lifetime. This is our lifetime. And we, and I say we here as people from the region, in many ways are disconnected from this very recent, it's a hundred years is nothing. It's a very recent, literally they are family members that still are alive that remember. We are disconnected from that period of alive, that remember. We are disconnected from that period of transition, that horrible period of transition, and it's done to us. It's done to us because our history is not written by historians that are invested in this memory. It's written by people that want to have larger meanings about the geopolitics of what happened. Of course, there's

specific concepts that are very important that we want to talk about, but the real experience of those people that have gone through these transitions and then the aftermath, us, we are the aftermath. That history that we're disconnected from is so important to reconsider because you can never really understand what you're struggling with. You cannot, as a generation, my generation, and even the generation after me, you can never really understand what you're dealing with if you don't understand the trauma that led to where we are today, along with other things. Of course, colonialism played into it. Of course, Israel-Palestine conflict figures really strongly in the middle of it. Of course, all of these things are there. But those are all big geopolitical things that are happening out there, almost theoretical. We talked about Orientalism a lot, to try and understand what is going on with us emotionally. And we will never

be able to understand that until we understand that 100 years ago, it was a completely different reality. And that reality matters. And the only person who is invested, the only people that would be invested in excavating that experience of our own great grandfathers and great grandmothers would be people that are interested in the health and well-being and also the intellectual development of us people from that region that are invested in the well-being of that region and not just for academic reasons. So this is very much a micro history of two people of a family. How do you reconcile that with telling the history of an end of an empire,

with telling an imperial history? I want to really put in a plug for microhistory to re-embrace it. Imperial history can be written through microhistory. In many ways, there are certain things that we can only access about imperial history. The microhistory of experience of imperial history in many ways tells us in some cases a lot more than just understanding what international correspondences or firm or whatever do. So a big plug for micro history, whether it is a family, a village, a town, a neighborhood that engages with people's lives and the emotional life of people can be really, really illuminating for us to understand the history of the region.

Thank you for listening to Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time.