[Bilimsel Haber] Andrew Mango'dan, TLS'de, _Türkce Konusanlar_in Ingilizce baskisi hk.

[Gonul Pultar]

TIMES ONLINE
	
TLS




May 30, 2008

Meet the Stans

Andrew Mango

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25362-2651646,00.html



THE TURKIC SPEAKING PEOPLES. 2,000 years of art and culture from Inner
Asia to the Balkans . By Ergun Cagatay and Dogan Kuban, editors. 496pp.
Prestel. Pounds 50. 978 3 7913 3515 5.



The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 revealed a 
submerged political and cultural geography. Old passions and old
ideologies, held in check by the All-Union Communist Party for
three-quarters of a century, rose to the surface, fuelling conflicts
that have changed the lives of millions of people. One of these
ideologies is Pan-Turkism, also known as Pan-Turanianism (from which it
is distinguished in theory, but not in practice). A younger sibling and
rival of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism, it is inspired by the romantic
nineteenth-century belief that linguistic affinity translates into
common culture and common interests on which common policies can be
built. Seeing in Pan-Turkism a particularly noxious form of bourgeois
nationalism, the Soviet government tried to endow Turkic-speaking
peoples with separate identities within newly drawn borders, emphasizing
differences that could be reconciled only in common allegiance to the
Soviet Union and the shared inspiration of Russian culture. Now the
reverse is held to be true.

Turgut Ozal, who was President of Turkey at the time, tried to extract
maximum benefit from the collapse of the Soviet Union, by claiming that
his country lay at the centre of a vast newly opened area "from the
Adriatic to the Wall of China", within which a Turkish-speaker could
make himself understood wherever he went. Partly as a result of his
efforts, the view that speakers of Turkic languages were united by
origin, history and culture gained considerable currency. In Turkey,
nationalists have kept this faith in spite of successive 
disappointments, as they tried to find their way through the conflicts
that broke out within and between the newly independent Turkic states -
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan -
collectively nicknamed "the Stans" by some Western observers. Turkish
businessmen have been more practical and more successful as they
identified familiar practices, such as nepotism and corruption, between
the Adriatic and the Wall of China, and turned them to profit. Outside
Turkey, discerning journalists and travel writers have begun the task of
describing the Turkic-speaking northern fringes of the Islamic world.
Academic scholars too have not been slow to respond to official interest
in and public curiosity about a huge area newly opened for our inspection.

The Turkic Speaking Peoples, edited by the Turkish photographer Ergun
Cagatay and Dogan Kuban, an academic historian of Turkish
architecture, sets itself an ambitious target. More than thirty academic
specialists from universities inside and outside Turkey contribute
essays on various aspects of the history and culture of Turkic-speaking
peoples, while #199;agatay provides the illustrations - photographs he
took during his travels in Europe and Asia. Lavishly produced with the
support of sponsors in Turkey, Holland and Norway, this looks like a
coffee-table book with dozens of colourful pictures of "typical" and
exotic scenes. But the text is hard going - academic prose, often
indifferently translated into English, which makes no concessions to the
general educated reader. Its main beneficiaries will be scholars seeking
to profit from the work of their colleagues, and able to make sense of
eccentric spellings and misspellings of proper nouns. Some of these will
irritate - like "Hannifi" for "Hanefi", the name of one of the schools
(and not sects, as the text will have it) of Islam. Others can be
understood with a little imagination, like "Volodimer", the Ukrainian
spelling of the name of "Vladimir, grand prince of Kiev and first
Christian ruler of Russia", as the Encyclopaedia Britannica describes
him, but whom Ukrainian nationalists claim for their own. Finally, only
specialists will be able to interpret such terms as "Tekvin in Tevrat",
meaning Genesis in the Bible (Torah), "Kacharids" for the Qajar dynasty
in Persia, or "Saka", the name under which Scythians are known to
Turkish nationalists. The same names are spelled differently in
different essays. Were an index provided, uniformity could have been
achieved, and scholars would have found it easier to consult the essays.
The book would have benefited from an overall academic editor, who would
have noticed, for example, that Nuri Bilgin's essay on national identity
in modern Turkey lacks a bibliography, which would have allowed a reader
to trace his numerous references. Furthermore, a book produced so
expensively deserves a better proofreader.

For all its imperfections, the book contains much useful information
that is not easily available elsewhere. Thus Omeljan Pritsak's brief
history of Turkic nomads in Southern Europe makes it easier to date
references to tribes such as Polovtsians, Cumans and Pechenegs, even if
the general reader would quickly weary of his list of unfamiliar names.
Similarly, Talat Tekin's study of present-day Turkic languages, which
lists their different characteristics, can be consulted with profit, but
not read with pleasure. Like some of the other authors in the book, he
fails to stress a salient fact - that while the speaker of one Turkic
language would find it easy to learn another language of the same
family, most of these languages are not mutually comprehensible without
preliminary study. It is for this reason that a Tatar from Kazan and an
Azeri from Baku prefer to communicate in Russian rather than struggle to
make conversation in their respective native tongues.

In structure, the book resembles the successful exhibition, entitled The
Turks, at the Royal Academy in 2005. This brought out the importance of
Turkic peoples, and of the states that they created, as vectors of the
cultures of settled lands surrounding the steppes of Eurasia - the
original homeland of nomadic Turkic tribes. The Turkish sponsors of the
exhibition may have hoped that it would have brought to public notice
the importance of Turkish links with Europe throughout history. In fact,
it was the inspiration of the Far East, and in the first place of China,
which came to the fore. So too did two characteristics of Turkish
peoples - their success in creating, sustaining and ruling states, and
their ability to achieve a synthesis of the cultures of the peoples with
which they came into contact. The editors of The Turkic Speaking Peoples
emphasize this ability in a series of sections organized around the
concept of symbiosis - the coexistence of Turks and other nomadic
peoples like the Mongols, and more importantly the interrelationship
between Turks on the one hand, and Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Byzantines,
Slavs and West Europeans on the other. The book offers studies of
various aspects of these relations rather than an overall review of them.

Thus on the subject of Turkish-Byzantine relations, Nevra Necipoglu
confines herself to the eleventh and twelfth centuries and concentrates
on dynastic marriages. Interesting as these are, the author does not
address the question that has preoccupied historians: what was more
important in shaping Ottoman Turkey (and its heir, the Turkish
Republic), the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire, or the practices of
earlier Muslim states, and in particular those developed by Persian
viziers for the Seljuk rulers of the Abbasid Caliphate? Again, the doyen
of Ottoman historians, Halil Inalcik, selects for study the foreign
policies of the Ottomans and West Europeans vis-a-vis each other - one
aspect only of the complex relationship between the Ottomans and Western
Christendom in trade, culture, war and peace.

Professor Inalcik is one of the eminent authorities enlisted by the
book's editors. Another is Irene Melikoff, whose study of shamanism
among pagan Turks and its influence on the culture and practices of the
heterodox Alevis of Anatolia is one of the best and most readable essays
in the section on religion. Elsewhere, the reader's curiosity will be
stimulated by the essays on two eccentric communities - the Turkic
Gagauz of Bessarabia (now Moldova), who are Eastern Orthodox in
religion, and the tiny community of Karaim in Lithuania, who speak a
Turkic dialect and profess a literalist form of Judaism which rejects
all rabbinic interpretations of the Bible.

Specialists will be interested in these studies of discrete aspects of
the history and culture of Turkic-speaking peoples. But the general
reader will want to know how these peoples live today and how important
they are in the world. The answer is not to be found in the book under
review, but rather in such recent works as Carter Vaughn Findley's The
Turks in World History, Hugh Pope's lively journalistic impressions in
Sons of the Conquerors: The rise of the Turkic world (both reviewed in
the TLS, July 15, 2005), and in Colin Thubron's masterpiece of travel
literature, Shadow of the Silk Road (reviewed in the TLS, November 17,
2006). It is the last of these three books that brings out the contrast
between the vast expanses of the Turkic states and their riches in
natural resources, on the one hand, and the dilapidation of their
societies, on the other.

The Turkic peoples number some 150 million in all, half of whom live in
the Republic of Turkey. In recent history, most of the ancestral Turkish
lands fell to the more numerous and more advanced Russians, whose
cultural influence, although diminishing, remains paramount in the
former Soviet republics. But as the number of Russians decreases, it is
the Chinese colossus that may well come to overshadow the Turkic
republics of the former Soviet Union, as it overshadows today the life
of the Turkic Uighurs in what used to be called Chinese or Eastern
Turkistan. The history of Turkic-speakers would then come full circle as
they revert to their earliest recorded existence as people moving within
the Chinese orbit.