Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

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Muslims and reverted to its "Spanishness" after expelling the invaders (after
eight centuries!). Greece, Bulgaria, or any other post-Ottoman state did the
same in terms of national history-writing, though the situation is not always as
clear-cut as in Iberia, where systematic expulsions and forced conversions
followed the reconquest. In the Balkans, as in India, it remains complex because
of the intertwined existence of peoples who identify with different layers of a
given country's past; so long as each layer remains exclusive of other layers in
historical consciousness, such identification also has the potential of turning
to exclusivism ("cleansing," to invoke the most notorious recent example) in
reality. In terms of history-writing, all this implies that historicizing the
identities of those peoples, and thus underlining their plasticity and
multiplicity over time, is taken, as was the case for Castro with respect to
"Spanish-ness," as questioning the essence of nationhood. That, I would argue,
is precisely what needs to be done in understanding the Turkish invasions of and
migrations into Asia Minor and in reconstructing the formation of the Ottoman
state.
Most current historiography, however, tends to operate on the basis of a "lid
model" whereby at least some empires (the oriental ones?) are conceived as lids
dosing upon a set of ingredients (peoples) that are kept under but intact until
the lid is toppled and those peoples, unchanged (unspoilt, as nationalists would
like to see it), simply reenter the grand flow of history as what they once
were. They may have experienced changes in terms of numbers and material
realities but not in essence. Readers may also be familiar with this view from
the recent example of Soviet dissolution, which was widely analyzed in terms of
history beginning again for the peoples of the former USSR. But can one see the
expression of Kirghiz or Belarus national identities, for instance, in terms of
a reassertion? Were they not constructed to a large degree, in terms of
identifying with a particularly delineated territory as homeland, for instance,
during the Soviet era, which was a formative historical experience for all of
them?
A recent publication that appeared in the most authoritative encyclopedia in the
field of oriental studies takes us closer to our specific subject matter. In the
lead essay to the entry on "Othmanli" (= Ottoman), "the subject peoples of the
Balkans" are described as "for centuries peoples without history" until the
nineteenth century.[19] Where, in this depiction, could a historian fit the
Muslim Slavs and Albanians, for instance? Or, how does one deal with the
movement, under Ottoman rule, of Orthodox Slavs to areas now contested in
Bosnia?
The Ottoman state/identity was not a lid that dosed upon already
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formed national identities (of Arabs, Bulgarians, Turks, etc.) only to be
toppled after a few centuries when those identities reasserted themselves. Some
of these identities were formed to some extent, but they were reshaped (some
might say, de-formed) under the aegis of, through the structures of, in response
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