[Bilimsel Haber] Review: The State And The Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran

[Gonul Pultar]

*Atabaki Touraj.* /The State And The Subaltern: Modernization, Society 
and the State in Turkey and Iran./ London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. 256 pp. 
ISBN 978-1-4356-1600-4.

*Reviewed by* Kerem Öktem
*Published on* H-Soz-u-Kult (April, 2009)

*A. Touraj: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran*

‘The State and the Subaltern’ is a collection of eleven well-crafted 
essays on late Ottoman, Turkish and Iranian history. It is based on a 
workshop at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, 
convened by the editor of this volume, Touraj Atabaki, in 2003. It is 
also the follow-up to the volume Touraj Atabaki / Erik-Jan Zürcher 
(eds.), Men of Order. Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza 
Shah, London 2004. Atabaki’s intention is to discuss the processes of 
accommodation of and resistance to two cases of authoritarian 
modernisation, which he sees characterised by the prominence of 
authoritarian leadership. In fact, he suggests that after the demise of 
the Ottoman empire and the setbacks of the Iranian constitutional 
movement, ‘middle classes and the intelligentsia [were left with] no 
other option than to look for a man of order, who, as an agent of the 
nation, was to modernize society, sometimes even against the will of the 
people, and, install a centralized, powerful … government capable of 
solving the country’s growing problems of underdevelopment’. Having thus 
established a surprisingly deterministic framework for comparison, he 
sets out the goal ‘to have a comparative, contrasting and inclusive 
historical study of modernization in modern Turkey and Iran from below’ 
by focusing on ‘subaltern’ groups, whose history is disregarded in 
official historiographies (p. xv).

As the collection is not organised around sections, and the individual 
chapters come with no apparent ordering principle, and for the sake of 
clarity, I group the essays around the five thematic clusters of Ottoman 
legacy, ethno-religious diversity, opposition and resistance, labour and 
gender. Erik-Jan Zürcher’s examination of Turkey’s Ottoman legacy is a 
key chapter, as it establishes the larger historical context. In 
contradistinction to Atabaki, who suggests convergence and similarity on 
the meta-level of conceptual debates (i. e. authoritarian models of 
modernisation), Zürcher discusses the conditions of total war and 
destruction that paved the way for the emergence of the republic and 
that shaped the world views of its leaders. The loss of the Balkan 
territories, birthplace of the majority of Young Turk cadres, the next 
to complete extermination of the empire’s Armenians, the loss of up to 
2,5 million lives among the Muslim population, and the devastation of 
the economy of large parts of Anatolia, all these are contextual 
parameters crucial to understand the severity of Unionist and Kemalist 
authoritarianism.

Vangelis Kechriotis’s examination of the gradual estrangement of the 
empire’s non-Muslim millets from its increasingly Turkish-nationalist 
leaders, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), further highlights 
the particularity of the Ottoman/Turkish case. Unlike in Iran, where the 
political role of non-Muslim communities was marginal, the Christian 
millets in the Ottoman empire took centre stage in debates and events 
shaping the territorial and political future of the region. Kechriotis 
traces a widening disconnect: On the one side, a CUP government that 
sought to secularise the state in order to maximise its power, yet 
defining the nation as exclusively Muslim. On the other, an Orthodox 
community, that was secularising its institutions and power structures, 
while clinging to old-established ‘privileges’. If after the 1908 
revolution, Young Turks still believed in the imperial policy of 
negotiation, discrimination and ‘privileges’, reminiscent of Reza Shah’s 
policies, with the Balkan Wars and World War 1, the wish to negotiate 
‘at least in the manner that the traditional institutions of the Ottoman 
society were used to’ (p. 70) was gone once for all.

Donald Quataert’s chapter on the strikes of 1908, the first 
wide-reaching organised labour protests in the Ottoman empire, traces 
the emergence of modern unions in Istanbul and Izmir from the 1820s 
against the backdrop of the perseverance of the guild system and an 
overly suspicious state. Labour in the empire was ethnically stratified, 
and many trade union leaders were in fact members of the Christian 
millets or foreigners. By the time the republic emerged, and workers 
could have built upon this tradition of trade unionism, restrictive 
labour laws, ethnic cleansing and war had left the unions headless, and 
the state in charge.

‘With or Without Workers’ is Kaveh Bayat’s meticulous micro-history of a 
strike in the Abadan oil refinery in 1929, the first major industrial 
action in Iran, which established the patterns of discontent and 
conflict around oil and foreign domination that would erupt in the 
1950s, and then again, in the Islamic revolution. Bayat’s essay is also 
a reminder of the differential contexts: While Reza Shah’s authoritarian 
regime struggled to impose its reforms on an unruly population and the 
modern sectors of the economy remained largely foreign dominated, Turkey 
in the late 1920s had literally disengaged from the world in economic 
terms and committed itself to refashioning its society through a 
ruthless project of social engineering.

The Pahlavi reforms of 1927-1929, often compared to the preceding 
Kemalist revolution, and the resistance they were met with are the 
subject of Stephanie Cronin’s ‘The New Order and its Opponents in Iran’. 
She explores the fierce resistance to the Pahlavi reforms by a coalition 
of religious scholars (ulema) and bazaris in cities like Tabriz and 
Teheran, as well as by Azeri and Kurdish tribes in the countryside. In 
comparison, Hülya Küçük’s ‘Sufi Reactions Against the Reforms’ 
elucidates how in Turkey members of the ulema and of Sufi brotherhoods 
were either incorporated into state institutions, or defrocked. Most 
leaders of religious confraternities chose to acquiesce and keep a low 
profile. They accepted that they had ceased to be ‘someone’, and had 
become ‘anyone’ (p. 140), only to re-emerge after the relative 
liberalisation of the 1950s. The experience of near eradication, loss of 
status and ridicule, together with the choice for accommodation with 
state policies might partly explain why most religious orders in Turkey 
have chosen, to our days, to abstain from revolutionary paths to power. 
In this, they differ profoundly from the Iranian example.

To what extent the Kemalist nation-builders were ready to keep their 
stranglehold on society becomes apparent in Umut Azak’s critical 
appraisal of the Menemen incident, which occurred in the last days of 
1930. Reconstructing the murder of a young officer on the basis of court 
records, she establishes how Republican ideologues elevated this event 
to a founding episode of the narrative of a Manichean struggle between 
progress and religious reaction, and established a key commemorative 
practice of the state around it.

‘The State and the Subaltern’ promises a comparative analysis of 
opposition from below to what is assumed to be similar versions of 
authoritarian modernisation. However, a couple of brief comparative 
references aside, the authors seem to be conspicuously uninterested in 
the ‘other’ case. The Iranian chapters deal with Iranian history, and 
the Turkish/Ottoman chapters deal with Turkish/Ottoman history. The 
improbable image emerges that there was hardly any transfer of ideas, 
policies and people between the two countries. The lack of historical 
and thematic categorisation and a synthetic introduction that would 
establish a comparative perspective between Turkey/Ottoman empire and 
Iran does not help the reader, as it seems to reinforce the misleading 
assumption that the two cases are rather similar. At a closer look, the 
individual essays, especially those of Zürcher, Quataert and Kechriotis, 
reveal to what extent the Ottoman/Turkish case of modernisation is 
characterised by the conditions of destruction and rupture.

Such conditions were absent in the case of Iran, where the old imperial 
mindset of negotiation, punishment and accommodation seems to have 
survived, probably even up to the Islamic revolution in 1979. Reza Shah 
would try wide-ranging reforms, even considering ‘unveiling’, but would 
eventually back down in the face of resistance from the ulema and 
bazaris, as shown in Afsaneh Najmabandi’s essay. In the Ottoman empire, 
1915 is the seminal turning point, after which the old imperial mindset 
of the state as pater familias of his subjects, meting out both 
punishment and privilege was replaced with a social Darwinist state that 
kills, if need be, to ensure compliance and conformity, and where 
negotiation has been dropped from the repertoire of governance.

‘The State and the Subaltern’ is not a ‘comparative, contrasting and 
inclusive historical study of modernization in modern Turkey and Iran 
from below’. Without a synthesis, and a meaningful conceptual focus – is 
the subaltern approach really the most appropriate to discuss as 
disparate groups as the empire’s Greek Orthodox millet and the class of 
religious scholars? – this is a collection of essays that stay firmly 
within the confines of their respective epistemological communities. The 
‘subaltern politics’ approach seems to face significant methodological 
limitations, when it is used for comparative purposes, at least in this 
volume. That the collection is, nevertheless, a major contribution to 
the debate in Ottoman, Turkish and Iranian studies, is owed to the high 
quality and originality of its individual chapters.


*Citation: * Kerem Öktem. Review of Touraj, Atabaki, /The State And The 
Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran/. 
H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. April, 2009.
*URL:* http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24573