Gurion University of the Negev Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of Middle East Studies
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1 BEN- GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF MIDDLE EAST STUDIES AN OTTOMAN REBELLION IN THE EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA? THE MENEMEN INCIDENT OF 1930: STATE, REBELLION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BY DAN SEGAL UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR DROR ZE’EVI MARCH 2008 2 BEN- GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF MIDDLE EAST STUDIES AN OTTOMAN REBELLION IN THE EARLY REPUBLICAN ERA? THE MENEMEN INCIDENT OF 1930: STATE, REBELLION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS BY DAN SEGAL UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR DROR ZE’EVI Signature of student: ________________ Date: _________ Signature of supervisor: ________________ Date: _________ Signature of chairperson of the committee for graduate studies: ________________ Date:_________ 3 i ABSTRACT History books describing the early period of the Republic of Turkey usually refer to the violent event taking place in December 1930 in the small western Anatolian town of Menemen as a case of religious rebellion against the secular state. Most such texts describe how a small group of young men affiliated with the banned Nakşibendi order marched the streets of Menemen shouting slogans against the government and in support of the restitution of the deposed caliph and Islamic law. The accounts continue to depict the most dramatic moment of the episode, in which a skirmish between the rebels and the officer commanding the small military unit in charge of quelling the disturbance resulted in the killing and beheading of the young officer. The authorities soon regained control of the situation. In the aftermath of this event martial law was announced in Menemen and its environs, hundreds of people were tried either for collaboration with the rebels or for participation in activities of the banned tarikats (Sufi brotherhoods/orders) with whom the rebels were affiliated and 28 people were hanged on gallows set up in Menemen. The study follows the creation of a standardized version of the event in the press and its promotion by the state by means of the national education system and through commemoration of the young officer and teacher, Kubilay. This version, which featured the event as a Nakşibendi conspiracy perpetrated by reactionary religious zealots, was never substantiated by positive evidence. However, I contend, by and large it was adopted by historians of the Middle East. Challenges to this official version mainly by Islamic-minded intellectuals – made possible due to the liberalization of the Turkish political sphere in the 1960s – doubted the identity of the perpetrators as religious and sought to depict the event as a government conspiracy meant to eliminate the Nakşibendi tarikat. Like the official version, this version was never confirmed. The main purpose of this study was to situate the Menemen Olayı in a context different than that proposed by Kemalists, Islamists or historians of the Middle East. This other context is that of rebels and rebellion in the Ottoman Empire. By analyzing ii various cases since the sixteenth century, which were classified by official Ottoman documents as rebellious, I seek to show that rebellion in Ottoman contexts was by and large a conventional political dynamic aimed at attaining official approval rather than an act of subversion in search of autonomy. What follows is that despite customary historical periodization, according to which the Menemen Olayı occurred in the context of the Republic of Turkey, the Menemen rebels might have acted under a consciousness, which was more informed by Ottoman social and cultural conventions than by the novel Turkish national ideology promoted by Kemalists. This alternative reading of an arguably minor historical event has wider implications on historiographical matters. Firstly, it proposes an interpretative agenda, which appends cultural analysis to political periodization and nation-state endorsed narratives. Secondly, it serves as an instance of the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the Ottoman/Turkish experience of modernization so commonly described as a unidirectional and unambiguous process. iii 4 Contents Note on Transliteration iii 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Historiography of the Early Republican Era – From 3 "Turkish Revolution" to Revisionist History 1.2 Anatolia between Empire and Republic - Continuity and 6 Change 1.3 Challenge and Opposition to the Government 9 1.4 The Historical Image of the Nakşibendi Tarikat 11 1.5 Conceptual Issues – Do all Rebels Yell? 14 2. The Menemen Incident – A Rebellion Narrated 18 2.1 The Roots of a Rebellion Narrative: One Week in Cumhuriyet 20 2.2 Reproduction of the Official Version by the Kemalist State 26 2.3 The Official Version Strikes Root in Academe 28 2.4 Challenges to the Official Version 30 2.5 Two Rival Versions and their Discontents 32 3 Rebels against the State? – Rebellion in Ottoman Contexts 35 3.1 The Celali : Primitive Rebels, Political Bandits or Provincial Osmanlılar? 36 3.2 Rebellious Ayan of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 41 3.3 Keeping the Paşa at Bay: Mehmed Ali - Rebel of all Ottoman Rebels 49 3.4 State of Confusion: State, Society and Rebellion 50 3.5 Enemies of the State? 54 4 By Way of Conclusion – Rebellion, Historiography and Change 56 4.1 Epilogue 57 4.2 Towards an Alternative Interpretative Framework 66 5 Bibliography 71 5 iii Note on Transliteration This study covers events and subjects related to Ottoman and modern Turkish history. Like any other publication which presents terms rooted in foreign, mainly non- ‘Western’, languages, this study runs into the challenge of transliteration. The challenge is intensified where several usages of terms exist due to historical circumstances. I have by and large followed modern Turkish transliteration to indicate the Turkish context of events, terms and people. Thus, for example, I use fetva and şeriat rather than fatwa and shari’a ; Atatürk rather than Ataturk . in references I have retained the spelling of names used in the original texts. Thus, whereas I use the form Nakşibendi , variations such as Naqshbandi appear in the notes. I have deviated from this method to use accepted English spelling for terms or names which became familiar for readers of English. Thus, for example, I use Janissary rather than Yeniçeri and Istanbul rather than Đstanbul . Some notes on pronunciation may be useful for readers unfamiliar with Turkish: c – j in Jack ç – ch in church ğ – has the effect of lengthening the preceding vowel; roughly as y in saying ı – e in brother ö – u in fur ş – sh in shoe ü – French u as in tu iv 1 1 INTRODUCTION Six young rebels march from the small town's mosque to the government building. They shout slogans against the government invoking religious symbols. Frightened local inhabitants shut their doors and stay home; others join the outlaws, cheering and clapping. Two military officers fail in dissolving the disturbance, another tries harder and meets his unfortunate death by the hands of the rebels. The reinforcement arrives and easily manages to scatter the crowd killing a few of the rebels in the process. The stuff of history. At a glance this could be a basic outline of scores of incidents in the historical past of so many human societies. Numerous episodes of this nature and scope had most likely remained unknown or unrecorded or, in other cases, were forgotten along the years. The incident taking place in Menemen, a small town in western Anatolia in 1930 met a different fate; it occurred at a unique time and in such circumstances that rendered it a significant historical fact and an event commemorated by some rather than assign it to oblivion. Although a full account of the event, which has come to be known in Turkey as Menemen Olayı , was never substantiated by positive evidence and while it continues to be the subject of perennial heated discussions in the Turkish media, it is still recorded in official state publications and referred to in most history books as a violent insurgency designed and perpetrated by members of the Sufi Nakşibendi order (tarikat ) in order to reinstate the şeriat , the holy Islamic law. Islamist intellectuals, on the other hand, have been arguing as of the 1960s, that the Menemen ‘rebellion’ was in fact a staged operation, designed by the regime to eliminate all opposition. Could the incident in Menemen be neither a reactionary religious rebellion nor a plot by the government, but an artifact of Ottoman society? Could there be an Ottoman rebellion in 1930? 2 This study does not seek to expose the ‘truth’ about Menemen, nor does it offer, as the questions posed above might imply, a new periodization of Turkish history. Rather what I wish to do is use the case of Menemen as a starting point for a historiographic excursion and to set on a wider journey following the historiographical trail of the early Turkish Republic. Specifically I would like to utilize the case of Menemen and its historiography in order to discuss the influence of state-sponsored and initiated historiography on the writing of academic history and the consequences of two historiographical dichotomies – that between Ottoman and Turkish histories and the one between political history and social history. The premise of this study is that the Menemen incident, as other historical events of the early republican era, was interpreted within a certain historiographical framework, which I will tentatively label as ‘nationalist’ or ‘Kemalist 1‘ (although some of its proponents were not state officials or even Turkish citizens, but foreign observers). Featuring a periodization according to which a secular republican Turkey emerged in 1923 following the collapse of the religious Ottoman Empire, this framework had been developed by the republican elite for well known and widely documented practical and ideological reasons of forging a new national identity and creating a break with past identities and present-day opposition.