The Ottoman Novel: A Literary Approach to Integrating ‘the Muslim’
with ‘the Modern’ in 19th Century Ottoman Society
Abstract
Prior to its ultimate dissolution, the Ottoman Empire witnessed an intellectual decline whose most difficult periods spanned the late nineteenth century. In addition to a series of political and legal reforms, the rising Orientalist discourse exposed the Ottomans to an intellectual onslaught as well. To counter this, the Ottoman intelligentsia attempted to construct a native reactive discourse. Literature was one of the main vehicles by which Western culture (and therefore the Western way of perceiving itself, the world) was impacting and influencing if not infiltrating Ottoman culture. The Ottoman response was to come to terms with the Western model and imbibe what they could, such that novels appeared for the first time in Turkish with writers attempting to bridge the cultural and intellectual gap between traditional Ottoman culture and rising Western influence by focusing on the modernizing processes of the Empire.
The most prolific of them was Ahmet Midhat. He not only published journals and newspapers, but authored numerous books throughout his life. Best known as Turkey’s first novelist he produced over thirty novels at a period when the genre was just entering the Ottoman phase. As a writer he had one main objective: to educate his people, for which he has been given the title ‘the first teacher’.
On the one hand, Midhat was a ‘progressivist’ who wished his country to modernize. As a person who had devoured Western literature, he used ‘novel’ to educate his people on i.e. education, science and technology, areas in which the West had advanced. On the other, he was a devout Muslim and strove to educate his readers on the greatness of Islam as a religion, and the legacy of Islamic civilization. For the spiritual and moral well-being of his society, he always promoted Islamic ethics against what he perceived to be ‘European immorality’. This attempt to straddle the path between two cultural fronts was not easy, and he is best known for this continuous struggle to strike a right balance between them, that is to formulate a fitting synthesis between Eastern-Western culture for the modern Ottoman identity. For his pains his novels were widely popular, and his objectives clearly struck a cord with readers.
I intend to discuss Ahmet Midhat’s novels in my presentation and his vision to utilize them not only to transmit knowledge, but also to educate his people on how to interpret knowledge eclectically as Muslims in an era of modernization and change. A vital part of this analysis involves discussion of the role Islam played in the minds of intellectuals who worked towards modernization of society whilst under the shadow of Orientalist discourse.