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Learned Patriots
Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire
By M. Alper Yalçinkaya The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-18434-0
CHAPTER 1
A New Type of Knowledge for a New Social Group
Introduction
Helmuth van Moltke, the military strategist and legendary chief of staff of the Prussian army in the second half of the nineteenth century, had resided in the Ottoman Empire between 1835 and 1839 when he was a young captain, and where he had been employed as a military adviser to Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808–39). In one of the letters he wrote during this period, he recounts an incident that he witnessed while he was a consultant to Hafiz Ahmed Pasha, the general in command of the Ottoman troops fighting against the forces of the rebellious governor of Egypt, Mehmed Ali Pasha. During a council, a religious dignitary who often advised the Ottoman general asserted that the empire still maintained its formidable power, and suggested in a proud manner that ten thousand Ottoman soldiers could get on horseback and, "trusting in Allah and in the strength of their sabres," enter Moscow. "Why not," an officer replied, "if their passports have been properly visaed at the Russian Embassy?" The ironic comment of the young officer Resid Bey, a man educated in Paris, was incomprehensible to the audience, however, as it had been made in French.
Moltke's narrative may have been colored by the affinity he probably felt toward the European-trained Ottoman officer. Similarly, in its superficial portrayal of an antagonism, the anecdote conjures up one of the most popular—and most criticized—themes of twentieth-century political discourse about not only Turkey but the entire Muslim world: the educated, modernizing military officer vs. the ignorant religious demagogue. Yet despite these easy observations regarding potential bias and simplism, the anecdote remains significant. For one thing, it is not an isolated example, as we shall see below. Second, while it would indeed be too simplistic to interpret it as an example of the "inevitable" clash between religion and modern knowledge, the incident is certainly indicative of the attitudes of a new group of individuals in the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire—a new group composed of young men who claimed to possess a superior knowledge of how things "actually" worked in the contemporary world. That the comment had been made in French is not insignificant, either, as French was, in a sense, to become the official language of this new group. The young officer undoubtedly knew that his comments would not be comprehensible; the language he was able to speak was a mark of his distinction from the rest of the council. It is this attitude and this particular group that I will focus on in this chapter and the next.
Resid Bey, known as Resid "the Spectacled," was a product of an early Ottoman initiative to send students to European schools. The man behind the initiative was a vizier of Mahmud II, Hüsrev Pasha (?–1855), a champion of military reform and commander-in-chief of the new model Ottoman army created after the decimation of the Janissaries in 1826. Hüsrev was strictly against reform outside the military, yet in 1831 he was able to have four young members of his household be the first group of Ottoman students sent abroad, to the preparatory school of Jean-François Barbet in Paris to receive a European-style education. This apparent paradox is probably due to Hüsrev's attempt to preserve his own position by making sure some top-level officials of the empire in the future would be "his men" as well—a strategic move within a state mechanism where legal-rational procedures remained much less effective and reliable than personal networks and loyalties. Hüsrev's move demonstrates his foresight, as he must have predicted that the future would belong to those educated in the "European way." Indeed, in a letter he sent to his protégés in 1832, he wrote:
When I picked you to be educated in France out of all the youths I raised before my eyes, I effectively entrusted with you all the hopes regarding the education of Muslim youth. Our state dignitaries will look at you and decide whether to follow my example and entrust the future of their children to the knowledge of Europe.
His protégés would not fail him: of the first four students sent to Paris, one later became a grand vizier—the future Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, who, after Barbet's school, attended the École des mines and is considered the founder of geology in Turkey. Another became a colonel and a third, an artillery general. But these young men were ultimately members of a truly new group, a group with a heightened sense of self-esteem and high status expectations. They would embark on a struggle to redefine what "knowledge" and "ignorance" were to denote and connote to Ottoman Muslims.
A. Defining "New Knowledge," Determining "the Ignorant"
The changes that made people like Resid possible started in the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire. Key in this context were efforts to reorganize the Ottoman military with the assistance of European consultants. This process involved the establishment of new schools, such as the short-lived Hendesehane (School of Military Engineering) in 1734, as well as the more influential Mühendishane-i Bahri-i Hümayun (Imperial School of Naval Engineering) in 1773 and the Mühendishane-i Berri-i Hümayun (Imperial School of Military Engineering) in 1795. Similarly, the first Ottoman ambassadors were sent to European capitals in this century. These significant attempts were sporadic, however, and the true institutionalization of these efforts took place in the nineteenth century.
It was also in the nineteenth century that "ignorance" became one of the most frequently used words in Ottoman texts on the state of the empire. Appearing regularly in the official documents of the early 1800s, "the perils of ignorance" became one of the leitmotifs of the official discourse on the empire's problems, particularly in the second half of the century. But as Resid Bey's remark exemplifies, not only did references to ignorance involve direct or indirect attributions of ignorance and knowledgeability to different groups, but they were also built on particular assumptions about what constituted knowledge itself. As knowledge and what was expected of those who possessed it came to be defined differently, ignorance and the characteristics of the ignorant were also described in varying manners.
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a new group emerged in the Ottoman Empire comprising individuals who had been to Europe, or who spoke a European language, or who had been educated in Europe or at a European-style school in the Ottoman Empire, or some combination of the above. These experiences and skills were crucial particularly for the new generation of Ottoman bureaucrats whose role was much more vital at a time when the military might of the empire proved incomparably less effective against European powers than in the past. Using Bourdieu's terminology, we can argue that this new type of cultural capital enabled these individuals to gradually acquire statist capital as well, and, using their newly acquired status as "men of the state," they propagated new definitions of knowledge and ignorance. Defining the knowledge they possessed as useful and true knowledge, they sought to legitimize their power. This effort not only had implications for the status of the representatives of other forms of knowledge, but entailed new imaginations of social and political hierarchy within the Ottoman Empire.
1. Early Characterizations
A rather early example of the way in which knowledge and ignorance came to be redefined under the impact of European-style education is the famous treatise of Seyyid Mustafa, one of the first graduates of, and later a teacher at, the Imperial School of Military Engineering opened in 1795, during the reign of the reformist sultan Selim III (reigned 1789–1807). Written in French and published in Istanbul in 1803 under the title Diatribe de l'Ingénieur Séid Moustapha sur l'état actuel de l'art militaire, du génie et des sciences à Constantinople, this is a work that contains in a nutshell many key themes of the future debates regarding science. Similarly, as it was a work that was also sent to Ottoman embassies in Europe, it can be read as promotional material, depicting the way the empire wished to present itself to European powers at the time of Selim III.
In the autobiographical introduction of the Diatribe, Mustafa argues that although he was tremendously interested in scientific knowledge even as a child, he was not satisfied by what Turkish masters could teach him. He learned French, "the most universal language"—a comment that the editor of the French publication emphasizes with a footnote—and read at a young age the works of European scientists that he was able to acquire. He was particularly impressed with the impact mathematics had had on the development of military tactics and architecture in Europe. Luckily for him, it was Selim III's reign in the Ottoman Empire—a sultan who was convinced that "welcoming the sciences and the arts" would be the most intelligent deed for a ruler and would bring the most benefits for his people. Hence, the European-style school of engineering was opened in Istanbul, and Mustafa became one of its first students.
Mustafa's experiences in this new institution evidently heightened his sense of distinction from those who were unaware of the sciences he held so dear. When doing fieldwork in public, he and his fellow students found themselves surrounded by "the voice of incompetence and ignorance" coming from every corner. They were "molested, almost persecuted" by the people around them, who were screaming, "Why do you draw these lines on these papers? What is their use? Warfare cannot be conducted with a compass and a ruler." The actions of the people disheartened the students, and they felt it impossible that the people could be disabused, but it was once again the benevolence of the sultan that helped them: Selim III followed their progress carefully and gave them opportunities to demonstrate to people of all classes "the great benefits of mathematical sciences applied to the art of war and to fortification." In other words, when the ignorant public ridiculed and disillusioned them, their patron the sultan restored their hope and self-esteem. It is unclear how audiences were made able to perceive what Mustafa and his colleagues demonstrated, but the sultan's authority is without doubt what the students, lacking an authority of their own, sought refuge in. "New knowledge" and its representatives were under state protection, and the authority of new knowledge rested on the legitimacy of the holders of state power.
Did such a legitimacy exist, then? As future events would demonstrate, the answer was hardly positive. For Mustafa, too, it was clear that the sultan himself had faced problems. Old glories had led the Ottomans into lethargy, and "the class of the idiots and the superstitious" were fooling the simple-minded into believing that any innovation based on imitation was an offense. But with his zeal as well as composure, Selim III silenced the "cowardly reproach," and "shut the mouth of ignorance and forced all classes of people to follow his example." Hence, Mustafa states optimistically in conclusion, his country is now how he had always wanted it to be: "enlightened more each day by the torch of sciences and arts."
With these comments, Seyyid Mustafa makes clear what he regards as ignorance: lacking the new knowledge produced by the Europeans, or, more fundamentally, knowledge about the uses and significance of science, especially those sciences that had recently been developed in Europe. In order to make a case for the new military school, Mustafa refers to the saying of the prophet that permits Muslims to use the weapons of the enemies of Islam when fighting them—the principle of "due reciprocity" that was used commonly in this period to justify the importation of the arts and sciences of the Europeans. But it is clearly not the military sciences alone that Mustafa endorses, as his constant emphasis on "sciences and arts" indicates; in a way reminiscent of Resid's comment cited at the beginning of this chapter, Mustafa's emphasis is on the practical. What matters is utilizable knowledge about how things "really" work in the new world: one can know a lot in this new world, but can at the same time remain "ignorant" if the knowledge in question is "old knowledge."
Mustafa's presentation of a particular image deserves constant attention as well, as it would continue to appear in a variety of forms in future works on the new sciences of the Europeans: the sultan as the protector of science and those who possess it. The "benign" sovereign is portrayed as a wise ruler in full support of the new students, both by seeing to their every need, and by "silencing the mouths of the ignorant" when necessary. Therefore, learning the new sciences and applying them is, in a sense, the duty of the students toward their protector, the sultan. Seyyid Mustafa and his fellow students had been presented with a gift from the sultan that necessitated reciprocation.
Ironically, Mustafa's patron Selim III—the sultan who had "shut the mouth of ignorance"—would be killed during the revolts of 1807–8 along with a number of other representatives of the "New Order" that he had endorsed. A commonly made argument regarding these revolts portrays the main actors behind them as the reactionary alliance of the Janissaries with factions within the ulema. Focusing on such an alliance of the groups designated as "ignorant" by possessors of "new knowledge" could encourage facile and anachronistic portrayals of the revolts as an episode in the "wars" between tradition and modernity or religion and science. As students of the period argue, however, a more nuanced reading would be that the revolts were primarily a result of a conspiracy carried out by a clique aggravated by the favoritism of Selim III. That the New Order posed a significant threat to the status of a number of groups representing the Old Order (such as the Janissaries) is undeniable, but it is also important to see how Mustafa's Diatribe itself makes clear this identification of state power with a small group endorsed by the sultan.
Ultimately, Seyyid Mustafa is but one representative of a broader group composed of people who identified themselves not only with "the new"—defined in a variety of ways—but also with state authority. The particular subset of which Mustafa was a member contained young men trained in Europe, or in European-style schools within the empire, and who were learned about the new sciences that were not taught in the traditional Ottoman institutions of higher education for Muslims, the medreses. This subset was remarkably small at the time of Mustafa but would grow consistently throughout the nineteenth century. These men, who perceived and portrayed themselves as representatives of new knowledge, were the major contributors to the debate on the meanings of knowledge and ignorance throughout the nineteenth century. Consequently, that they so tightly associated the types of expertise they acquired with state authority would prove fundamental to the way Ottomans debated science.
It should be noted at this point that it is not particularly reasonable to imagine these schools as immaculate institutions where the new types of knowledge were studied in a state-of-the-art manner. The schools in question came in many different types and with varying levels of sophistication, and, consequently, it would be erroneous to portray these students as masters of the new sciences. Indeed, due to the absence of a comprehensive educational system designed around these new institutions, many schools that were intended to provide higher education ended up having to teach literacy first. Nevertheless, this is not a particularly relevant matter if we want to understand the attitudes of the members of this new group. Ultimately, what matters is the very fact that they did receive some training in fields that were not taught in traditional Islamic institutions such as the medreses, rather than how competent the students actually were, as the perception of distinction is not a function of actual competence and experience.
Besides these students, an equally important subset of this group consisted of those who had somehow visited or actually been employed in Europe and had a chance to personally observe the new curiosities of the Europeans. Most typically, these were Ottoman diplomats—a group that emerged in the eighteenth century and played an ever-growing role in Ottoman politics and thought.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Learned Patriots by M. Alper Yalçinkaya. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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