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the effects of identity crisis
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In a society enshrouded by a type of melancholy found only in Turkey, there is no feeling more pervasive than alienation. Like a low flying cloud, hüzun hangs over Turkey and fills even the brightest hopes of the Republic with a measure of gloom. Caused principally by a crisis of identity, alienation renders much of the population of Turkey detached from the political and social processes. Though Turkey was once a part of a great empire that spanned much of Europe and Asia, it is now a dwarf of its former self. It was once home to a great Islamic civilization whose culture flourished and spread to the ends of the earth, yet it is now an officially secular society devoid of religious inspiration. While these changes occurred many years ago, most Turks have not yet recovered. Just as the prisoner is separated from society, many modern Turks are separated from the very essence of historical and cultural Turkish identity.
As the voice of the people, art and literature can provide us with insight into the Turkish mind. They can help us understand the peculiarities of Turkishness and the effects of alienation on Turkish identity. According to Marxist philosopher Alan Wood, alienation “is to be forced to lead a life in which [one’s] nature has no opportunity to be fulfilled or actualized” (Wood 22). In his “Autobiography,” Turkish poet, Nazιm Hikmet laments upon lost opportunities in his life: “After the age of twenty-one I stopped going places most people go to: / Mosque, church, worship, synagogue, shrine” (Hikmet 325). Like many Turks of his era, Hikmet could not fully embrace his identity as a Turk. His own actions, from speaking out against injustice to inciting rebellion gave Turkish officials cause to imprison him a n...
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...any Turks hold the same regard for Turkey as Orhan Pamuk does for Istanbul: “For me it has always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy” (Pamuk 6).
Works Cited
Bilefsky, Dan and James Kanter. “Turks’ Bid To Join Europe Stalls on Cyprus and Rights, Officials Warn.” New York Times 8 Nov. 2006.
Hikmet, Nazιm, “Autobiography.” An Anthology of Turkish Literature. Ed. Kemal Silay. Bloomington, IN: Cem Publishing. 2006. 325-6.
Kinzer, Stephen. Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. 2001.
Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. New York: Vintage Books. 2006.
Silay, Kemal, “Nazιm Hikmet Ran.” An Anthology of Turkish Literature. Ed. Kemal Silay. Bloomington, IN: Cem Publishing. 2006. 325-6.
Wood, Allen, “Alienation.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995.
In Black Dog of Fate, Balakian illustrates how his Armenian background impacted him as being in the first generation of his family born and raised in America. In the beginning of his memoir, the young Balakian lacked interest in the “old country”. As a kid living in a heavily populated Jewish community, he was envious of his friends walking down the street with their parents to go to the synagogue. Through this feeling of jealousy, he felt as though his Armenian ancestry was stopping him from being like his peers. Because Peter’s grandmother and parents did not give him any information about his family’s past at that time, he did not get to know the similar history Jews and Armenians once shared. At the time of adolescence Armenia’s past put a strain in Peter’s relationship with his father after he wrote a paper on Turkey. “. . . the Turkish term paper marked a turning point; in its wake, my father became even more alien to me” (Balakian 95).
In the following essay, I will be comparing the Hagia Sophia in the City of Istanbul, and the Suleymaniye Mosque of Istanbul. Both of these pieces of art are very significant to the in modern-day Turkey. The art pieces will be covered in more detail further on in this comparative essay, and finally, I will be judging the pieces at the end of this essay
Shaw, Stanford Jay, and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge University Press
Islam has been a dominant force throughout Turkish history. During the Ottoman Empire, Islam ruled every part of the theocratic state, but after the demise of the empire, Turkey's rulers led the country away from political Islam. The modern Turkish state has a strictly secular government, and Islam has been relegated to the personal sphere. Although Turkey has experienced a rise in fundamentalism in the past twenty years, the separation of church and state has remained relatively intact. Even with this increase of fundamentalist Islam, the wide majority of Muslims in Turkey are moderate and tolerant. They have adapted to modern life and value Islam for its moral and spiritual messages. Islam is a guide for right living and ethical conduct rather than a political system. Turkey constantly struggles to balance Islamic life with a secular government. Although the government wants to maintain a strict separation between religion and politics, it cannot ignore the power and influence that Islam has in the lives of the Turkish people.
Greene, Frederick Davis. The Armenian Crisis and the Rule of the Turk. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1895. Print.
"BYU Harold B. Lee Library." History of Turkey: Primary Documents. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Dec. 2013. .
...ic cleansing of a certain race, and there is no reason for wanting to create the perfect race. The Turkish government set out to do just that, they wanted a takeover to occur, they were aiming to wipe out a whole race, because of what? To have a mono-ethnic and mono-religious society? To become “perfect”, well it needs to be recognized by all, especially the Turks. The Turkish need to realize that they cannot put the blame on others, the killings were by their hands not any other group. It’s hard to admit something so far into someone’s past, and some have a hard time reminiscing those memories because they are ashamed of what they did to people just like them. What people of today’s society need to realize is that just because it’s hard to admit that their people did something so horrible, does not mean that it does not need to be acknowledged nor appointed to.
Between 1301 to 1922, in the region north of present day Syria, was known as the Ottoman empire. It was rooted in the belief that Islam as an ideology should be in power. One territory held by the Ottoman empire was their homeland of Turkey. In 1907, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, wanted for the most part to have people who were educated outside of the country limited in what they could do, and if not then they were expunged, as he thought that they were the cause of his land’s plight and decline. This resulted in him becoming very unpopular with his people, thus having many secret societies created practically under his nose. The most important being The Young Turks.
Turkey’s involvement in the World War 1 provided cover for extreme elements of the very nationalistic Young Turks regime to carry ...
Roger Crowley, author and historian; Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London; and Colin Imber, formerly Reader in Turkish at Manchester University discuss these questions.
Throughout time, women have left a significant impact on the culture and outlook of one of the largest and longest-lasting nations in world history: the Ottoman Empire. As would be expected, the role of women has transformed and adapted throughout the empire’s long breadth of control along with larger cultural shifts. However, an accurate idea of life as a whole for women living in the Ottoman empire from the 13th century to 1920s can be found in a variety of documents describing their role in the context of the law, the home, and society as a whole.
The Young Turk government during World War 1 lead a deliberate attempt to destroy the Armenian minorities, from 1914 to 1918. At the beginning of the 11th century, Armenian political independence was brought to an end by a wave of invasions and migrations by Turkic-speaking peoples, and in the 15th and 16th centuries the region that was mainly inhabited by Armenians was annexed by the Ottoman Turks, and became a part of the vast Ottoman Empire. “Armenians retained a strong sense of communal identity, however, embodied in the Armenian language and the Armenian Church. Life for Armenian villagers was difficult and unpredictable, and they often received harsh treatment from the dominant Kurdish nomads” (Britannica). Even though Armenians were a minority surrounded by the Ottoman’s lifestyle and culture, they retained their own identity. The Muslim Ottomans shunned other cultures, and when the Armenians did not change even after being annexed, the Muslims felt hostility and hatred towards the Armenians and their culture. “The prominence and influence of the well-educated and cosmopolitan Armenian elite had a drawback in that it became a source of resentment and suspicion among Muslims” (Britannica). As the Armenian minorities thrived, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire became envious and resentful. This jealousy added “fuel to the fire,” and the Armenian minorities were even more in
Sajdi argues that a lot of popular narratives that surround the story of the Tulip Era, look at Sultan Ahmed III’s and Damad Ibrahim’s effort to introduce Western forms into the Ottoman Empire as “the desire to copy Western ways and emerge from the restraints of a medieval past” (Sajdi 48). Other historians that Sajdi cites, is Robert Olson who saw the westernization of the Ottoman Empire as “undertaking a first serious attempt…to try to understand one another during the Tulip Age” (Sajdi 48). Sajdi argues that due to these “well-made stories” the “precocious modernization” of the Ottoman Empire is interpreted as seeing the move to the West as Turkey’s destiny. Sajdi cites that current critical discourse looks at the popular discontent with architectural reforms that were enacted by Ahmed III and Damad Ibrahim- “with benevolent rulers trying to impose innovation on an unwilling populace steeped in religious bigotry and prejudice” (Sajdi 49). Sajdi cites author, Ahmed Refik who believed that the creation of the Saadabad topos embodied issues in Ottoman-Turkish history and was a rebellious acts of those who wished to stay pure to Ottoman tradition by taking down this building with Western architectural influences during the reign of Ahmed III.
...olutionist reforms proved permanent, and gave Turkey domestic peace and a measure of prosperity even in his lifetime. But Kemalism has also left Turkey with a divided identity - Europeanised but not quite European, alienated from the Islamic world but still a Muslim country.
Cicek, Kemal. “The Cambridge History of Turkey. Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839.” Journal of the Economic &Social History of the Orient 52, no.1 (2009): 153-158. EBSCO.