Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

time. Furthermore, we should note the gender-specific designation of the subject
of the inquiry: "great men of the Ottoman state." However one chooses to
characterize their ethnic origins, some of those great men, Köprülü failed to
note, were born to great women who were not of Turkish birth, like Nilüfer Hatun
, the mother of Murad I.
As for lesser men and women, Köprülü seems to have been equally keen on
maintaining the purity of as many as possible, absolving them of renegadism and
probably also the Ottoman conquerors of forced conversion. Against the evidence,
he argues: "According to Ottoman sources, Göynük, which was completely inhabited
by Christians when Ibn Battuta passed through it, should have been Islamized
toward the end of the same century, since Yildirim Bayezid had people brought
from there and from Torbali to establish the Muslim quarter that he founded in
Constantinople. Even if this report were true, it would be more correct to
explain it by the establishment of a new Turkish element there than by a general
conversion. Logically one cannot easily accept that the Muslim quarter in
Constantinople was simply settled by Greeks who had recently become
Muslims."[28]
― 41 ―
Later on, he even drops the cautious "almost invariably" and states with
absolute certainty that "the Ottoman state was founded exclusively by Turks in
the fourteenth century." And then he finally lets the cat out of the bag when he
argues, quite logically, that "just as the fact that a significant number of the
riders of the Byzantine Empire came from foreign elements is no proof that the
Greeks lacked administrative ability, an analogous situation occurring in the
Ottoman Empire cannot be used as proof that the Turks lacked administrative
ability."[29]
The last point, namely, the "administrative ability" of a people, to be
demonstrated to the "civilized world" in particular, was much more than a
question of national pride, as was mentioned above. Such arguments resonated
with one of the basic principles in the "new world order" between the two great
wars: a people had a right to nationhood in a civilized world only if they could
prove that they had in their historical experience what it takes to create a
stable state and to govern in a civilized manner. That is one of the most
important reasons why nation-states took up the construction of a past as avidly
as they drew plans for industrialized modernity. New generations had to, as
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk put it in a saying that is now inscribed on many public
sites in Turkey, "be proud [of the nation's past achievements], work hard, and
be confident [of the future]." Köprülü steered his own course dear of official
history and of the so-called Turkish history thesis with its notorious, though
fortunately short-lived, excesses like the "sun-language theory."[30] Naturally,
however, he was a man of his times.
No perilous pitfall in logic seems to have trapped historians more than the
genetic fallacy, perhaps because, by the nature of their profession, they are
prone to evaluating the truth value of an assertion on the basis of its origins.
It seems that the validity of Köprülü's account was suspect not necessarily
because its contents were analyzed but merely because he was known to have
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