Tuesday's Read: The Emergence of Modern Turkey

Lewis, Bernard The Emergence of Modern Turkey. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
___
Bernard Lewis (b. 1916) is a fascinating figure. A member of the old guard of Middle East scholars - from the day when being an "Orientalist" was a job description, not an opprobrious epithet - he has been a figure of controversy since his 1990 Atlantic article, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which contained the subheading and argument of a "Clash of Civilizations" brewing between "the West" and "the Muslim world." This subheading was capitalized on and expanded into an article in Foreign Affairs (1993) - and later into a book of the same title in 1996 - by political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008). The gist of the Clash of Civilizations thesis was that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the next great "enemy of the West" would be radical Islam. Scholarly response to this contention was swift and unrelenting; coupled with Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, there are fewer theses which have been so thoroughly parsed and denounced, and fewer which have remained so ubiquitously persistent, despite the constant countercries. (It is also something of an irony that the two men, Said and Lewis, were frequent sparring partners, the former accusing the latter of "ignorance" and over-simplification.)



Lewis earned his widest acclaim as a scholar of Ottoman Turkey, and it is this scholarship that is widely credited as his best work. For this reason, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (originally published in 1961 and re-issued in a third edition forty years later) has remained one of the standard sources, a staple text on early Turkish history. Emergence begins with a section on Ottoman history leading up to Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt. The analysis shows its age, as Lewis traces the Ottoman Empire according to the theory of "Ottoman decline," now widely disputed. He argues that the Ottomans were wholly uninterested in the technological advancements of Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Still all of the major elements of Ottoman and early Kemalist history are here in impressive detail, including discussions of the Tanzimat reforms, the Ottoman Constitution, the Young Ottomans, Young Turks, and CUP, and the rise of Ataturk and the Republic itself. In part two, Lewis analyzes four elements of the transformation of Turkey to its modern state: national identity; changes in popular understandings of the role of government; religious and cultural change; and the role of class and elites.