Ottoman History Podcast - Orientalism in the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: January 26, 2019

Episode 399 with Zeynep Çelik hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud How did the Ottomans react to European attitudes and depictions of their own lands? Pondering on the groundbreaking book 'Orientalism' by Edward Said forty years after its publication, our guest Zeynep Çelik discusses the ways in which urban, art, and architectural historians have grappled with representations of the Ottomans by Europeans and representations of Ottomans by Ottomans themselves. Telling us about a number of paintings, monuments, scholarly writings and stories, she argues that Orientalism is still relevant and with us wherever we go. « Click for More »

Welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zeynep Azar Badagan. And I'm Matt Gazarian. And today we are speaking with Zeynep Çelik. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. I look forward to this conversation. Zeynep Çelik is a distinguished professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Federated Department of History at NJIT and Rutgers New York. She teaches on architectural and urban history, colonialism and visual sources. Today we'll talk about the ways urban and architectural

historians have been reflecting on and responding to the arguments laid out in Edward Said's groundbreaking work, Orientalism, published in 1978. The work has been crucial for scholars across humanities and social sciences, and as we will discuss, scholars of built environments as well. We'll draw on Professor Chalik's newest article, Reflections on Architectural History 40 Years After Edward Said's Orientalism, which is going to be published in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. This was also the topic of a talk she gave in Istanbul at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, ANAMED. First, we will ask Zeynep about Orientalism and Ottoman Empire. Then we'll shift topics to talk about the different ways that architectural historians

have used Said's Orientalism to open up new areas of inquiry. So we wanted to start with some basics for our listeners who may not be familiar. Can you talk just a little bit about what is Orientalism in terms of what are the main themes of the book? Why was it so groundbreaking? And most importantly, how has it taken up in Ottoman studies? Perhaps the most important question that Orientalism asks is about representing the other. It's of course very difficult to summarize the entire book in a few sentences, but how do

cultural representations work, and how they are used to create cultural hierarchies and how closely they are linked to politics and politics of domination. So there is a very important political connection in the way cultural representations are framed in that book. cultural representations are framed in that book. And I believe it is that aspect of the book that made it so crucial in the later developments. You're asking me about Ottoman studies, but I would say that its impact has been on everything, on all studies. Of course, the Ottoman studies were influenced. You could not ignore this. Once the book was out, representation of what is Ottoman became a major concern for Ottoman historians, Ottoman cultural historians, and in one way or other, it penetrated all the produced scholarship. However, I would say that it has been as influential on European studies,

as influential in, say, Chinese studies. The questions that Orientalism asked applied to all aspects of cultural representation, political domination, links between history and politics. Again, very important. So how did Orientalists depict Ottoman Empire? If we have this connection of sort of, because you talked about it, this is about power and representation. So how are they representing Ottoman Empire? I don't think they even thought about,

I'm generalizing, of course, but I did not think they even distinguished the Ottoman Empire from what they considered the Orient. So their flattening went to such extremes that the reality of the Ottoman Empire was not that much of an issue for them. What mattered was this category of being Oriental, which of course stretched anywhere from Morocco to Iran, to Iran, farther beyond, places they didn't even know, they didn't even go to, and Ottoman Empire was part of that. What, of course, they did not represent and did not care to look into was what was going on in the Ottoman Empire during the time they were writing about it, late 19th century, they were writing about it, late 19th century, early 20th century, which is an immense modernization process that affected vast regions of the Middle East. That is totally absent in the Orientalist representations. There are other absences as well, but this is a major one. So when we think about how did they represent the Ottoman Empire, I make the connection

to what they did not represent about the Ottoman Empire. And that absence is very, very significant to explain to us some crucial aspects of Edward Said's book. So picking up on that question of representation, there is a very interesting thing that you mentioned, which is the cover of the book when it was published in the US, the first edition. It was The Snake Charmer. But you mentioned that this is not how it appears in other publications of the book. Can you talk more about that and how that relates to representations by Orientalists and whether Edward Said was also thinking about this representation which was happening on the cover of the book? This is a really interesting question and I think it's open to a scholarly study in itself. The first edition of the book in 1978 had a painting by Jérôme,

the Snake Charmer. The Snake Charmer shows a typical Orientalist interior with beautifully rendered tiles in the background, some connotation, some reference to maybe a religious building, even though the tiles are from Topkapı Palace. Then there is a group of men sitting on the ground. In the center is one figure who's larger and fatter and whiter skin than the others. larger and fatter and whiter skin than the others. The others are from all races. They're wearing costumes from all parts of the Islamic world. You name it, it's a construction, obviously.

And they're looking at this boy who is depicted from the behind. The boy is naked. He has a very pretty body. He must be about 12, 13 years old, and there's a snake around the boy. So we know what they're looking at, but we're only seeing the beautiful buttocks of the boy, and it is the center of the painting. Very evocative painting, and it summarizes the contents of the book quite beautifully, how the Orient is imagined in all of its multiple aspects, from the male power to its corruption and so forth. Now, this was the first edition, and of course, it became a big platform for reaction. The later editions, I would say editions outside the U.S., did not use that cover. It is an interesting study to look at how it was produced in different parts of the world.

In the Islamic world, nothing like this ever, but not in France either. Even Penguin Books had a different cover. In Turkey, the designers got very clever. They tried and tried, and there are these various attempts. One shows a Western scholar next to an Eastern scholar, and there's a divide in between. Others came up with other stories. For the most serious translation is by Metis Yayınları. Metis Yayınları has a very mild cover showing Pierre Lhoti getting off the boat. That in itself says something about the contents of the book and the messages and their provocative nature. And what Edward Said was thinking about, well, I do know how the image was chosen. Said did not choose it himself. He didn't even know about the painting at the time. But a very wise editor brought him a number of images. And when he saw this one,

he said, this is it. So when was Jerome's painting actually painted? In the late 1870s, the height of Orientalist painting. And it is currently at the Clark Art Gallery in Williamstown. And was he actually here in Istanbul? Oh he was in Istanbul all right he was in Istanbul but he used photography most of the time to construct the backgrounds of his paintings and they are fragments he pulls together fragments and makes a very believable scene to those who probably know nothing about it. Okay, then moving from the world of the visuals to the realm of the textual, you talk about this wonderful story written by an Ottoman author. Can you tell us more about the early 20th century author, Omer Seyfeddin,

and his strategic writing about French Orientalism and what it tells us about Orientalism. Omar Seyfeddin's short story, The Hidden Sanctuary, Gizli Mabed, was written in 1919. So it's a little late, but there are earlier examples and we can come back to that if you want. It is a Proto-Saidian critique of Orientalism. It starts out with a young Frenchman who is fascinated by the Orient, who comes to Istanbul, and he's very unhappy. He has some Turkish friends like him, modern men of science, literature, intellectuals. He asks them to see the real Orient because Istanbul is too modern for him.

He's taken, one of his friends takes him to his house in an old, faraway part of Istanbul. The Frenchman gets very excited when he sees the wooden house, its wooden lattices, and its picturesque setting for him. They spend the night there. In the morning, the Frenchman is very happy. He tells his Ottoman friend, I've discovered it. What did you discover? I discovered the hidden sanctuary.

Here is how he describes this hidden sanctuary he found. White curtains allow a pale light in. Walnut sepulchers held together by iron rings are placed in the corners. Without any doubt, they contain the mummies of their beloved ancestors. Ropes at different heights crisscrossed the room in geometric patterns. Their meanings escaped me. Above them, relics are hanging, surely belonging to the deceased. On the floor, urns of different sizes contained sacred waters from Mecca, Medina, and other mysterious places.

I tasted them, and my heart began to beat hard. I sneaked out like an abuser, a traitor, an unbeliever who had entered a hidden sanctuary. I felt as though the sepulchers would open, and all Turks in turbans who had been buried for centuries would attack me with their swords. I felt the profound echoes of a dark and obscure dome in an explicable thrill. His friend was highly amused because this hidden sanctuary was in fact the old lady's storage room. He corrected the Frenchman's discoveries. I'm quoting again. We don't use cupboards like you do in our houses. Instead, we use storage trunks. What you mistook as sepulchres are in reality our linen chests. The ropes are simply to dry the laundry. The relics are old garments no longer worn.

As to the sacred waters collected in urns, they are no other than rainwater leaking from the roof. Do not laugh, the Frenchman reacts. Even your storage rooms are mysterious, incomprehensible, and religious. You are blind. You do not see these meanings. This is the end of the quote. I think it is so sharp in first reenacting the Frenchman's vision, then the modern Turkishman's reaction, but the superiority of the Frenchman at the end, or how he sees himself so superior,

that he tells the Turk, no, you don't know even how mysterious you are. We understand it better than you do. And that summarizes like what Orientalism is, right? That relationship of power in terms of knowledge production. Absolutely, absolutely. It's such an intelligent story. However, I should say that he's not unique. There is a long tradition in Turkish literature and also Turkish scholarly writing criticizing Orientalist discourse. So these examples, which are very rich, they show us how even during ottoman times long before edward said was even born there was this fascination and exoticizing of these places called the orient and this assumption of authority to sort of even when the so-called oriental him or

herself comes up and says you think this is exotic and special, but really it's our linen closet. They even come out and say this, and still the observer from Europe comes back and says, no, you don't even know how beautiful and mysterious this is. I think this is the obstinacy of the discourse, that we still are encountered with very similar statements today, despite the time that has passed, despite so much scholarship and so many revisions. Was there a way that the authors at that time called this European obsession with the mysteries and exotic worlds, as they would see it, of the East? Did they have another word

for it outside of Orientalism? I don't think it's a systematic discourse because it is so fragmented and scattered. Do painters in Ottoman Empire or photographers, anybody in the realm of visual production, are they also responding to Orientalism? Well, we have the unique and very well-known case of Osman Hamdi Bey, who is an Orientalist painter. However, his depictions, his style is very Orientalist. His depictions are different. So there is sort of a speaking back to the Orientalist representations in Osman Hamdi Bey's paintings. But then again, he also orientalizes the Ottoman Orient.

So two questions. First, so it's like he uses the methods of an Orientalist painter, but then his subject matter is somewhat different. And maybe you answer what the second question is. Can you go into a little more detail of that, of his depictions of the Ottoman Orientalist? All right. For example, harem scenes. You do not get the lazy odalisque reclining forever, half nude in Osman Hamdi's paintings. He has paintings called a harem scene, and you see women engaged in work, talking to each other. You have men and women looking at each other. women looking at each other. It's a very different kind of social world that he represents. Women are very interesting in Osman Hamdi's work. A woman grooming herself with her maid behind her, but she looks at her mirror and she's in control of her looks. She's giving the orders. Whereas you have corresponding representations in C. Jérôme's work.

The woman is being groomed and her head is down. She has no control over her body. The kind of implications behind that scene are so obvious. And you said he also represents the Ottomans' Orient. What do you mean by that? Well, I'm thinking of one painting when he depicted a scene in Mesopotamia, and that was in Nippur. It is an excavation scene that he translated into a painting. I think he worked very closely with a photograph in that one. But Mesopotamia, excavation site, you don't have any colour there.

In the photograph, you do see workers scattered here and there. He took these workers, and instead of making them work, he turned them into lazy Arabs, as we called them, jokingly. These lazy Arabs sit down, they lean around, they're really not the workforce in the painting. And he also colored them in many different ways. We know what the Mesopotamian workers wore on the excavation sites. They did not go there in bright reds and blues and yellows. So in that way, he took something which really did not have anything Orientalist about it and made it Orientalist. And assuming that the workers

were just hanging out is another way of repeating the many, many, many depictions of scenes of antiquity in the Middle East where Arabs are always in the foreground as people who do nothing, just lie around. So apart from Osman Hamdi Bey, can you think of any other examples of people who are responding to Orientalism, whether they are self-Orientalizing or they are Orientalists during the Ottoman period? It is, again, everywhere, but in a fragmented way. Sometimes a work may seem it's criticizing Orientalism, and yet you read it closely, it is doing something else. Let me bring you the example of Le Costume Populaire, an empire Ottoman, Elbiseyi Osmaniye, again produced with Osman Hamdi's leadership for the Vienna exhibition

in the 1870s. This is a categorization, classification of the whole empire according to costumes. It's an ethnographic, shall we say, proto-ethnographic study. And all the photographs are taken against a very neutral background. This all looks like it is answering back to the innumerable representations in photography of people of the Orient. Okay, this is the visual part. Then you read the text, because it is accompanied by text, about who these people are.

And it's as though you're reading French Orientalists, because all the clichés about, say, the woman of Damascus are in that text. The text says something totally different. So how do you reconcile the two? Yes, this is Ottoman Orientalism, which peeks into many, many aspects of late Ottoman textual and visual culture. What language was the text written in?

Several languages, because it was meant for the universal exposition. French, I think it was in German and Ottoman as well. We're going to take a music break right now and we'll come back and continue our conversation'm Zeynep Azar-Badegan here with Matthew Gazarian talking to Zeynep Çelik about the impact of Edward Say's Orientalism in Ottoman and architectural histories. So in the first part, we spoke about Orientalism in the Ottoman Empire and its impact on authors and artists at the time and how they take up themes of it, respond to it, adopt it themselves, or at least its methods. What about urban and architectural history? How have scholars in these fields taken up or responded to Orientalism?

How have scholars in these fields taken up or responded to Orientalism? I would like to go back to the late 19th, early 20th century with this, because, again, very fragmented, there is a discourse in art history, which wasn't even a discipline in Turkey at the time, that tries to bring some revisions. For example, Celal Esat Barseven wrote a series of articles distinguishing the regional characteristics of what was classified under Islamic art. So that's basically a very, very important position. He had his own agenda. He made the Ottoman architecture, Ottoman art higher than the others because he said it's purer, it's not like the others. So in some way, there is that cultural hegemony building there as well. On the other

hand, it is a call for differentiation. I've come across other texts, little bits and pieces though, we can't really pull together an anthology out of these, criticizing the Arabizans architecture of North Africa that was being practiced by French architects and saying, look, they're not doing the right thing, they're collapsing everything, they're not doing the right thing, they're collapsing everything, they're putting them all into one piece, whereas look at our post office

by Kemalettin Bey in Istanbul. There we really show how Ottoman architecture can be used in modernity, in a modern way. So in terms of positioning yourself towards the West, you discuss this cross-cultural analysis and dominance of the West. There's always that axis. Why is this important? And can you give us examples of how this has played out in urban and architectural history? And whether debates in global history had any impact on this? Cross-cultural relationships became another major theme

in architectural and urban studies. However, something went a bit wrong with that. We always looked at how the West was changing the East, how the East always looked at the West as a superior entity. When we started looking at it a little bit more closely, we realized that that horizontal axis was not a very good idea, because the world is big, and the axes go in multiple ways. And it is not only the East looking at the West, the West looking at the East, but they also go South and North, and it's very complicated. And there are attempts to bring

that into the discourse. The same thing happened with colonial studies. Let's say French colonial studies, always North-South, North-South, north-south, whereas it wasn't like that. There was also an eastern connection. And more and more, we're seeing instances of such complicated networks appearing in the work of architectural and urban historians. I find it very interesting. I try to look for instances like that. Can you give us an example? I find it very interesting. I try to look for instances like that. Can you give us an example?

Okay, let me give you an example which comes from my book Empire, Architecture, and the City. In 1865, when Napoleon III was to go to Algeria for the first time, there was an idea to create a memorial for this occasion. So in Paris, they asked architect Viollet-le-Duc, who was one of the neo-Gothic architects actually of the time,

but a very interesting man, a rationalist, they asked him to design this memorial. He designed a memorial, which is extremely complicated. I'm not going to go into the details, but there's one aspect of the memorial on three columns, which represented the three departments of Algeria under the French. He placed three mosques. The model for these mosques came from, not from Algeria. He didn't know what mosques looked like in Algeria, but he must have had some books. He looked at the book and he placed three Selimiye mosques on top of these three columns. Selimiye being the famous... The famous Sinan, 16th century famous

Sinan mosque. Little replicas. Okay, the project was immense and it wasn't realized, but it is an important project. It was published and discussed widely. Then a few decades later, at the connection of the telegraph line between Damascus and Medina, the Ottomans decided to memorialize the occasion. With what? A memorial. How are we going to do this? They asked the head architect, Raimondo Daronco, an Italian, to design a memorial. Daronco was in Istanbul. He didn't go to Damascus. He revived the idea of a column with a mosque on top. The

lower half of the column has telegraph lines and a lot of metaphorical abstract things, but on top he placed a mosque. He was, however, more modern than Viollet-le-Duc. Instead of a 16th century mosque. He replicated a late 19th century mosque, a mosque that had been built by Abdülhamid and carrying his name in Yildiz. When you trace the geography, the transfer of ideas, the traveling of ideas, okay, you have Viollet-Luduc in Paris being asked to design something for Algiers.

He looks at Istanbul, not even Istanbul, Edirne. But he doesn't know the difference most likely. An Ottoman mosque. And then he carries it back to Algeria through Paris for a monument in Damascus, an Ottoman imperial monument. The architect in Istanbul looks at Algeria and designs a monument for Damascus based on a model in Algeria, but complicates

it with some ideas from Istanbul. So it is instances like that, and this is not the only one, obviously. There are many, many examples along these lines. They're a bit tricky to unearth, but I do believe that we're going to have more and more examples. So moving on from this spatial analysis and going to think about sort of time and temporality, what is the role of time and temporality in Orientalism?

You talked about the idea of looking at a 16th century mosque and then looking at a more modern mosque for a later monument. So how does time and temporality and periodization shape how we study and understand architectural history, urban history, and Ottoman history? Another very big and important question, I think. Jack Goody wrote a very, very nice book, very accessible book,

on how Europe imposed its own hegemony on the rest of the world by dividing up the time according to its own development, which is, of course, constructed. This became a reference point that everybody else followed, and I guess it's going to stay with us. We're going to deal with it for the rest of at least our lives. Nonetheless, it goes back to Edward Said's idea of how the Orient is frozen in the past. It doesn't matter the timeline of the rest of the world. What matters is the timeline of Europe and European developments.

I don't think we can change this, but I would really like at least my students, to approach it critically every time they say the long 19th century, they should think, what does the French Revolution have to do with what we're dealing with? Or every time we say world wars, whose world, whose war, who's involved in it? Now, Jack Goody explains all of this very, very nicely, but here is my own Europacentrism. I didn't come through everything well, and by chance, after I finished the article, I came across an article which was published in an early Republican periodical called Cadro, important periodical, in 1933. The article is by Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, and it is called The Classification of Europocentrism. And he does exactly what Jack Goody does, only in 1932. And he says that Europe is a very small place, but it dominated history by dividing the time up like that.

Basically making the same argument and elaborating it in quite some detail. This is coming from somewhere. He did not invent this, but he thought about it. He was a very, very important intellectual of the early Republican period. It must have some origins in the early Soviet Union. And I'm thinking perhaps the Baku Conference. When was the Baku Conference? Baku Conference was a conference on the oppression of colonized peoples. And it is a proto-third-worldist conference. We forget it when we analyze the independence movements. There is a lot that goes back to that conference. What year was it?

1920s, Lenin was still alive. I think it was 1924. So early Soviet Union. Early Soviet Union. Many publications came out during that period in Ottoman, all published in Baku, and with beautiful covers, constructivist covers. And you think this Turkish text is coming from that?

I think nothing drops from the sky. So I think he probably developed it. It's a detailed article. It's a really good article. And of course, Jack Goody didn't know about it. Edward Said didn't know, but they didn't know about what came before them. And it is up to the historians, often by accident, to discover these, how shall I say, I can't even call them precedents. You dig into history and

you find that it had already been said. So it's the 40th anniversary of publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. And we are recording this in Istanbul, and we are here in Turkey. Should we be thinking about Orientalism after 40 years, and how should we think about it? Does it give us anything to analyze or understand what's happening right now in the world? I think Orientalism is with us. I think Orientalism is with us, and I think it's a very strong reference point for those of us who've read it and thought about these issues. And even for others, it's through osmosis that they know about the critical discourse around Orientalism. What should we do? How should we relate to it today?

I am not one to give any advice. It provokes us, it makes us think critically, but I am really not about to explain present-day Turkey in concrete references to Orientalism. And let me also say that Orientalism is so much with us, like colonialism, neocolonialism, neo-Orientalism is with us, that it doesn't matter where you are. I go to Doha, it's there. I go to, I live in New York, I experience it every day. Hence, we carry it with us, and I hope we continue to do so. At least it gives us a critical framework. Thanks for joining us. It was a pleasure to join you. Thank you. If you want to know more, check out the forthcoming December 2018 issue

of Journal of Society of Architectural Historians. And we look forward to Zeynep Çelik's forthcoming book on this topic. We will also post a bibliography on our website, www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's all for this episode. Until next time, thank you and take care.