Whoever describes the Ottomans describes himself

Whoever narrates the Ottomans does not in fact narrate the Ottomans, but only narrates himself. In saying this, it is possible both to erect a barrier against accusatory statements made about the Ottomans and to open a solid door to questioning how those statements relate to history.

The basic principle that suits the nature of the matter, and to which that nature is subject, concerns history. So it would be more accurate to say that whoever narrates history narrates himself.

What happened in history is not something waiting out there somewhere for us to discover. Rather, it stands as material that we can rebuild and reinterpret and reassess at every moment. Someone blind and bald whom you cursed until yesterday, you can suddenly imagine on another agenda as almond-eyed and golden-haired.

In history, perhaps you cannot deny the reality of events and cannot present them as though they never happened, but you can always reassess how those events took place. Whether the conquest of Istanbul by Mehmed the Conqueror was a conquest that opened and closed an era, or a barbarian occupation in which the beautiful Byzantine civilization was ruthlessly brought to an end, can vary depending on where you look from, and your approach to the Conqueror's personality may likewise change from one day to the next.

In different periods, very different histories of the Ottomans have been written on different subjects. Every kind of Ottoman historiography of every weight has been possible across the whole spectrum: from the Ottomans as a theocratic state to the Ottomans as a country where secularism was applied in its most ideal form, from an Ottoman state ruled by the absolutist authority of the sultans to an Ottoman state supervised and limited by the Shari'ah law, from an Ottoman state in which central administration was applied rigidly to a thoroughly decentralized one.

In all these examples there is only one thing that can be clearly understood: historical writings tell us not what the Ottomans really were but what they correspond to in the minds of those who wrote that history. In a sense, those who write history are not writing what really happened in history, but are writing themselves through what happened.

If you like, let us not trouble ourselves with the past at all. Let us look at how the events of today are reflected the same evening in the discussion programs on television. Although there is no lack of information about those events and no difficulty in accessing that information, and although every detail of the events is plain as day, you can witness endless disputes and quarrels about those events. These disputes in fact already give sufficient clues about how the events being lived today will be reflected in the future.

We said earlier that Arabs like not the Ottomans but today's Turkey. Because until recently, in the eyes of the Arabs the Ottoman era was a dark and agonizing period remembered through the practices of the Unionists (Ittihad and Terakki) in the early 19th century, and the independence and national identity of today's Arab countries were based on this myth of liberation from the Ottomans.

Yet this finding can also be corrected as follows. This historical perception that was valid in the Arab world until yesterday is not an unchanging perception either. When the Republic of Turkey turned its face to the West and approached the Arab world with a kind of arrogance, the Arabs froze their perceptions of Turkey at that time. Their histories regarding the Turks took shape in that period. Yet today, as relations with Turkey develop, their histories can suddenly stir and come to life, and increasingly Ottoman history too can be rewritten through that lens. That is why history is never a completed set of events. Even today new contributions can be made to the history of events that took place centuries ago. Moreover, as one might suppose, the contributions are not made thanks to the discovery of new information about the events; on the contrary, it is entirely the reading of those who look at the events that proves decisive.

It is clear that if the Turkey of up to ten years ago had gone to the Arabs offering nothing else but a neo-Ottoman proposal, it would have met with no warm welcome. However, in light of the performance that Turkey displays today in the person of Erdoğan, it has become possible for it to be rediscovered along with its history, that is, with the Ottomans. Turkey's performance today leads the Arabs to choose and remember the more positive scenes of the Ottomans in place of bitter memories.

On this occasion we can say that Turkey's history with the Armenians is subject to no different a rule. No new document about 1915 has been found, yet suddenly we see many well-known countries setting about writing the history of the Ottomans of 1915 by means of their parliaments. Yet it is clear that this historiography has nothing to do either with 1915 or with the Armenians.

In the end everyone reflects their own calculations and their own quests onto history. The historical products that emerge, too, provide firmer data not about the past but about understanding the present. Of course the problem is that no one can tell this apart, and that every narrated history carries a claim of being exactly as it happened.

We need to talk about history as much as we read history, for the sake of some measure of historical consciousness. It is worth continuing...