Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

dualism based on religious identity. Yet this does not preclude the possibility
of friendship and cooperation with individuals from "the other world." It is
always possible that those individuals will eventually join you and fight for
the same cause, just as the warden declares himself Muslim more than halfway
through the novella. And the author has no qualms about using the word gaza for
the joint undertakings of the Christian and (freed) Muslim shipmates, including
himself, under the chieftainship of the warden-captain as gaza even before the
latter's conversion.
This is only to be expected from proselytizing faiths, and is not surprising
among Muslims, who did not need to be theologians to know one of the basic
tenets of their faith, namely, that all human beings are born Muslim since it is
the natural religion. (Only thus could the kul system flourish to the extent
that it did. Through this system, thousands of non-Muslims from the fourteenth
to the seventeenth century were enslaved or recruited, converted to Islam, and
trained to function as kuls , or servants, of the House of Osman in the military
and administrative cadres of the Ottoman state, including the highest positions.
You could
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indeed trust these ex-infidels because once shown the true path of Islam, which
accords with the innermost nature, the fitra , of every human being, they would
follow it in accordance with their natural tendency.)
It would be wrong to see only cold-blooded calculation toward future gains in
those acts of cooperation. As implied by Barbarossa's gests, there must indeed
have been those who appreciated the valor or scruples or skills or connections
or humor or beauty or plain human warmth of others even if they were on the
wrong side. Even the literature that was produced after the total and brutal
rupture which followed the intense violence of the Anatolian war between Greeks
and Turks in this century had room for complex relationships of hostility and
affection, repression and solidarity, between the two peoples.[67]
One should, on the other hand, not forget that they fought bloody wars after
all. Complex relations developed, symbiosis and cooperation were possible, but
over the long run people's behavior was, at least in part, shaped by or attuned
to an either/or struggle. The two sides of the frontier had over the centuries
molded overlapping planes of social and cultural interaction and lived, in
certain respects, in more proximity to one another than to certain elements
within their "own" societies. The frontier was a "veritable melting pot of
religions, races, and cultures."[68] But in countering this kind of
nonexclusivist vision to the nationalistic exclusivist depiction of medieval
Anatolia,[69] one should not get carried away and forget that there were indeed
two sides that fought one another on the basis of identification with this or
that side. In an article that successfully delineates the biases of sources
written from the point of view of sedentary peoples, Keith Hopwood, for
instance, seems to nearly suggest that our perception of a pattern of conflict
between the two peoples and their "lifestyles" derives solely from the
misperceptions and skewed reportage of urban-biased historians of Rome,
Byzantium, etc.: "the conflict between pastoralist and sedentary farmer is a
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