Tag: Ottoman past

  • Britain in Palestine

    Britain in Palestine

    Britain in Palestine 1917-1948

    Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back to this period, making it essential viewing for understanding Britain’s legacy in the region and the situation on the ground today.

    To access English, Arabic and Hebrew subtitles click on the CC link on the video. For further analysis of the events outlined in the film see the Companion Guide to Britain in Palestine 1917-1948.

    Reviews

    “A very useful explanation of how we got to where we are today. Fascinating photos I had not seen before. A great resource to show in any classroom or forum to people who want to learn more about this region, and specifically, Britain’s involvement. Afif Safieh, Former Palestinian Ambassador

    “…This film brilliantly puts into perspective the role the United Kingdom played in Mandate Palestine from 1917-1948.” Rabbi Howard Finkelstein, Ontario, Canada

    “This is an excellent short 18-min video from @BalfourProject explaining briefly but super-clearly how British colonialism has caused a century of war in Palestine.” Matthew Teller, Journalist and author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City (2022)

    “Britain in Palestine 1917 – 1948 is a clear, precise and factual explanation of the historical origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For anyone who wants to develop a real understanding of the issue but is intimidated by it’s complexity, this film is the place to start.” Judah Passow, Photojournalist

  • As if the Ottoman Period Never Ended

    As if the Ottoman Period Never Ended

    By DAN BILEFSKY
    Published: October 29, 2012

    ISTANBUL — Since the lavish, feel-good Turkish epic “Conquest 1453” had its premiere this year, its tale of the taking of Constantinople by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmet II has become the highest-grossing film in Turkey’s history, released in 12 countries across the Middle East and in Germany and the United States. But its biggest impact may be the cultural triumphalism it has magnified at home.

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    Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times

    Visitors at the Panorama Museum in Istanbul. Large crowds are flocking to the institution, which features a 360-degree painting of the siege of Constantinople.

    Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times

    A tourist in Ottoman attire inside a Topkapi Palace photo booth.

    Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times

    The actress Aslihan Guner on the set of “Once Upon a Time Ottoman Empire Mutiny.”

    Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times

    A traditionally dressed military band on the streets of Istanbul.

    Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

    A poster for “Fetih 1453.”

    “Conquest 1453” (known as “Fetih 1453” in Turkish) has spawned a television show with the same title and has encouraged clubs of proud Turks to re-enact battles from the empire’s glory days and even dress up as sultans and Ottoman nobles. The producers of “Once Upon a Time Ottoman Empire Mutiny,” a television series about the 18th-century insurrection against Sultan Ahmet Khan III, said they planned to build a theme park where visitors will be able to wander through a reproduction of Ottoman-era Istanbul and watch sword fights by stuntmen. At least four new films portray the battle of Gallipoli, the bloody World War I face-off between the Ottomans and Allied forces over the straits of Dardanelles and one of the greatest victories of modern Turkey. The coming “In Gallipoli” even includes Mel Gibson starring as a British commander.

    The Ottoman period, particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries, was marked by geopolitical dominance and cultural prowess, during which the sultans claimed the spiritual leadership of the Muslim world, before the empire’s slow decline culminated in World War I. For years the period was underplayed in the history taught to schoolchildren, as the new Turkish Republic created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 sought to break with a decadent past.

    Now, as Turkey is emerging as a leader in the Middle East, buoyed by strong economic growth, a new fascination with history is being reflected in everything from foreign policy to facial hair. In the arts, framed examples of Ottoman-era designs, known as Ebru and associated with the geometric Islamic motifs adorning mosques, have gained in popularity among the country’s growing Islamic bourgeoisie, adorning walls of homes and offices, jewelry and even business cards.

    The three-year-old Panorama Museum, which showcases an imposing 360-degree, 45-foot-tall painting of the siege of Constantinople, complete with deafening cannon fire blasts and museum security guards dressed as Janissary soldiers, is drawing huge crowds.

    And in the past few years there has been a proliferation of Ottoman-themed soap operas, none more popular than “The Magnificent Century,” a sort of “Sex in the City” set during the 46-year reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Turkish show pulpishly chronicles the intrigues of the imperial household and harem, including the rise of Suleiman’s slave girl-turned-queen, Hurrem. Last year it was broadcast in 32 countries, including Morocco and Kosovo.

    The empire’s rehabilitation has inspired mixed feelings among cultural critics. “The Ottoman revival is good for the national ego and has captured the psyche of the country at this moment, when Turkey wants to be a great power,” said Melis Behlil, a film studies professor at Kadir Has University here. But, she warned: “It terrifies me because too much national ego is not a good thing. Films like ‘Conquest 1453’ are engaging in cultural revisionism and glorifying the past without looking at history in a critical way.”

    Faruk Aksoy, the 48-year-old director of “Conquest 1453,” said that he had dreamed of making a film about the conquering of Istanbul ever since he arrived there at the age of 10 from Urfa, in Turkey’s rugged southeast, and had been mesmerized by Istanbul’s imperial grandeur. But he had to wait 10 years to make a big-budget film because the financing and technology were not available.

    The film’s budget of $18.2 million was a record in Turkey, but it has more than recouped that, grossing $40 million in Turkey and Europe, Mr. Aksoy said. So stirred was a crowd at a recent screening that it roared “God is Great!” as the sword-wielding Ottomans scaled Istanbul’s forbidden walls. Mr. Aksoy recalled that one cinema manager debated calling the police, fearing a real fight.

    “We Turks are hot-blooded people,” he said. “The Turks are proud about the conquest because it not only changed our history but it also changed the world.”

    But others warn of a dangerous cultural jingoism at work. Burak Bekdil, a columnist for Hurriyet Daily News, mused in a recent column that the time was ripe for a film called “Conquest 1974,” to celebrate the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, or “Extinction 1915,” to commemorate the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. Death threats followed.

    Critics have also faulted the film for inaccuracies and hyperbole, though Mr. Aksoy stressed that he had employed Ottoman scholars. Members of the court of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI — portrayed as hedonistic boozers surrounded by nubile dancing girls — talk in Turkish rather than Greek or Latin. Even Mehmet II, the conquering Sultan famed for his prodigious nose, has been retooled as a heroic pretty boy.

    Alper Turgut, a leading film critic, deplored this one-dimensional universe even as he lauded the film’s epic ambitions. “If they had exaggerated just a bit more, it would be an absurdist comedy,” he said in an interview.

    Mr. Aksoy expressed annoyance that a film meant to entertain was being politicized. “Would you ask Ridley Scott if he was politically influenced?” he asked.

    Cultural critics noted that the film’s religious underpinning — there’s even a cameo by the Prophet Muhammad predicting that Constantinople will be conquered by believers — had made it popular with the growing Islamic bourgeoisie in a country that has increasingly turned its back on the crisis-ridden Europe and instead looks increasingly eastward. (The movie has also been embraced by some members of the governing Islamic party as an alternative to Hollywood’s “crusader mentality.”)

    Religious conservatives had been marginalized during the secular cultural revolution undertaken by Ataturk. “For the first time we are seeing this new Islamic bourgeoisie, its tastes and its mores, reflected on the small and big screens,” Mr. Turgut said.

    Ms. Behlil noted that the advent of big-budget television shows and films depicting the Ottoman era owed something to the country’s popularity in the Arab world, which was bringing in new revenues for production companies. Last year Turkey was Europe’s largest exporter of soap operas, pocketing $70 million in revenues.

    But it is at home that the series and films are having a profound impact, educating a new generation of Turks.

    Burak Temir, 24, a German-Turkish actor who played a prince on “Once Upon a Time Ottoman Empire Mutiny,” said he had initially been intimidated about portraying an era he knew so little about.

    To prepare for his part, the show gave him a four-month crash course in Ottoman manners that included learning how to ride horses, sword fight, use a bow and arrow and puff out his chest. Even when not filming the show, he sports a Sultan-like beard and skinny Ottoman-style pants. “It makes me proud to be Turkish,” he said.

     

    A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: As if the Ottoman Period Never Ended.
  • Pleasure jaunts in Ottoman times

    Pleasure jaunts in Ottoman times

    Niki Gamm ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

    Today there are complaints that religious holidays are only an excuse to take a vacation. It seems that the Ottomans also used them to take a break

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    The most researched aspects of the Ottoman Empire over the centuries have been the court, government and armies. We rarely catch a glimpse of the Ottoman at leisure and certainly we don’t very often see how women amused themselves, especially out of doors. Until the 19th century and the introduction of public transport, we might assume that a woman’s leisure time was spent at home or visiting with nearby friends and relatives. Oh, yes. The sultan could put on lavish displays for members of the court, some of which are depicted as miniatures in books created to commemorate special occasions such as the circumcision of Sultan Ahmed III’s sons. Only when Western travelers at the beginning of the 19th century came do we get representations of leisure activities and written descriptions.

    Where men were concerned, the 17th century Ottoman travel writer, Evliya Celebi, has been one of the very few who let us know what he and his friends did during their leisure time such as the days when there was a religious holiday like Şeker Bayram and Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice. Today there are complaints that such religious holidays are only an excuse to take a vacation. It seems that the Ottomans also used them to take a break.

    Evliya Celebi writes, “There have been such amusements and pleasures on these green fields that no words can fully describe. All gentry, noblemen and prodigal sons of the plutocrats of Istanbul adorned the valley with more than 3,000 tents. Every night these tents were illuminated with thousands of candles, oil lamps and lanterns. In the evening the leading groups were entertained by musicians, singers, minstrels and performers… until sunrise while 100,000 fireworks adorned the sky with lightning, stars, butterflies, etc., and the entire Kağıthane was bathed in this radiant splendor. Guns were fired from dawn to dusk. Besides these tents, scattered along the two banks of the Kağıthane River, were more than 2,000 shops vending not only foods and drinks but also myriad valuables. Every day the clowns, jesters, jongleurs, bear, monkey, donkey and dog trainers, puppet shows, birdmen, and sword eaters, about 360 entertainers performed and made great profit. Four janissary platoons were assigned by the palace to maintain order in this area. Most of these janissaries used to swim in the Kağıthane River.”

    Going out of doors was a different experience for an Ottoman woman, although it apparently became easier in the 19th century. Until then, women from the imperial harem would be transported in closed carriages to places along the Golden Horn such as Kağıthane, known also as Sadabad and the Sweet Waters of Europe. If the area where they were going to be was not enclosed by high walls, a canvas would be stretched along the limits of the area. Janissaries would patrol the outside and the black eunuchs would ensure privacy from inside. In the best known miniature depicting women at play outdoors, we see several women relaxing alongside a river with fountains playing in it. One woman is swinging from a tree while another pushes her. Yet another woman is stretched out beneath a tree and smoking a water pipe. On the other side of the water, several men can be seen talking with each other while two men seem to be selling food. The artist obviously felt it was all right to show men that close, although he made the figures much smaller in an attempt to add depth to the picture. Clearly women had a much quieter outdoors experience than men did.

    Looking beyond the harem women to the outside, we have the letters of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador who was in Istanbul in 1717-18. She was particularly interested in the Turks and in her letters, she seems to have contented herself with visits to prominent Turkish ladies and other members of the diplomatic corps.

    Julia Pardoe, a young British woman, was in Istanbul with her father in 1836 and wrote about her experiences and observations. She seems to have particularly liked the Sweet Waters of Europe, which was the name given by foreigners to the area just to the west of Sadabad. She describes the area as “the loveliest spot in the neighborhood of Constantinople.” The stream there runs through green vegetation and because it is the only stream of any size near the city, “it is an object of great enjoyment and admiration…You feel at once that it was destined by nature for holyday [sic] uses.”

    Pardoe continues, “The green sward was covered with merry groups – Wallachian and Bulgarian musicians were scattered among the revelers; Bohemian flower-girls were vending their pretty nosegays in every direction, so skillfully arranged that each veiled fair one saw in an instance had been anticipated by the dark-eyed Flora – mounted patrols appeared and disappeared along the crests of the hills as they pursued their round of observation.”

    “As we continued our drive, we passed a hundred groups of which an artist might have made a hundred studies. All was enjoyment and hilarity. Caiques came and went along the bright river; majestic trees stretched their long branches across the greensward; gay voices were on the wind; the cloud had passed away; and the sun lay bright upon the hill-tops. I know not, a spot on the earth where a long, sparkling summer day may be more deliciously spent, than in the lovely Valley of the Sweet Waters.”

    The Sweet Waters of Europe apparently lost some of its attractiveness by the time Dorina Neave was living in Istanbul at the turn of the 20th century. She describes going there in a closed landau carriage and being unable to even acknowledge that she knew anyone in the various carriages that passed hers. She writes, “to me it was more like taking the part of a caged animal in a circus parade… This was considered one of the bright recreations suitable for a Turkish lady’s life, but I have seldom found any excursion more trying.”

    On the other hand, Neave was marginally more enthusiastic about the Sweet Waters of Asia. “One of the pleasant summer outings amongst the few amusements permitted by Turkish etiquette to the ladies of the harem was the weekly visit on Friday to the Sweet Waters of Asia. This was quite a fashionable rendezvous and afforded an opportunity for foreigners to get a good view of Oriental ladies at close quarters in their becoming national costume and yashmak – the veil which mysteriously hid the Circassian beauties, but left their beautiful eyes uncovered. The scene was very picturesque as the caiques with their fair occupants were rowed up and down by two or more caiquejis, dressed in flowing white trousers and richly embroidered zouave coats over white shirts, and wearing the inevitable red fez on their heads. Turks in smartly gilded skiffs followed the ladies’ caiques, as closely as they dared, and many a romantic intrigue was carried on at these Friday meetings, in spite of the fact that the river was patrolled by police, who kept a vigilant look out to prevent any man from speaking to the ladies when the river became so congested that the only means of progress was by pushing one’s craft forward by hand at the expense of the boat alongside It was at such a time that one could see men contrive to slip billets doux into gloved hands as they brushed past…”

    The Ottoman’s Sadabad, Kağıthane and the Sweet Waters of Europe and Asia no longer exist. We have other ways of taking pleasure jaunts today.

  • Turkish P.M. Erdogan: We Cannot Deny Our Ottoman Past

    Turkish P.M. Erdogan: We Cannot Deny Our Ottoman Past

    Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan stands among Justice and Development Party (AKP) members during a meeting at the party headquarters in Ankara, September 28, 2011. (Photo: Adem Altan /AFP / Getty Images)  Read more:
    Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan stands among Justice and Development Party (AKP) members during a meeting at the party headquarters in Ankara, September 28, 2011. (Photo: Adem Altan /AFP / Getty Images) Read more:


    Our interview with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, published earlier this week on Global Spin, dwelled mostly on the growing shadow cast by the charismatic premier across the face of Mideast geo-politics. One question edited out of the earlier transcript raised the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, whose dominion once stretched over much of the region. As they now swagger through Cairo, Tripoli and other former Ottoman strongholds, Erdogan and — perhaps to even greater degree — his Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu have earned the monicker of “neo-Ottomans.”

    Few democratically-elected statesmen in this day and age would welcome the label of imperialists. And, for whatever connotations “neo-Ottomanism” invokes abroad, it’s a far more sensitive subject domestically in Turkey. Nearly a century of Ataturk-inspired, Western-facing secularism meant those raised in modern Turkey looked with wariness upon the decadence, decay and religiosity of Ottoman times, when, after all, Istanbul was the veritable capital of the putative Caliphate.

    But much has changed since Erdogan’s rise to power. Turkey no longer pines after Europe — indeed, see Erdogan’s matter-of-fact retort at the close of our interview with him — is ruled by a moderate Islamist party, and has signaled clear intent to influence events in many of the countries once ruled by Ottoman Sultans. Below is Erdogan’s response to a question I posed to him on whether he accepted donning the neo-Ottoman mantle:

    Of course we now live in a very different world, which is going through a scary process of transition and change. We were born and raised on the land that is the legacy of the Ottoman empire. They are our ancestors. It is out of the question that we might deny that presence. Of course, the empire had some beautiful parts and some not so beautiful parts. It’s a very natural right for us to use what was beautiful about the Ottoman Empire today. We need to upgrade ourselves in every sense, socially, economically, politically. If we cannot upgrade ourselves and the way we perceive the world, we will lag behind tremendously. It would be self-denial. That’s why whether it be in the Middle East or North Africa or anywhere in the world, our perception has in its core this wealth that is coming from our historical legacy. But it’s established upon principles of peace. And it all depends on people loving one another without discrimination whatsoever.

    Critics may wonder how willing Erdogan and other Turkish leaders are to actually admit to the empire’s “not so beautiful parts”, not least the grisly massacre of Armenians when the Ottoman Empire itself was on its last legs. Turkish diplomats on the sidelines of U.N. meetings spoke to TIME of Erdogan’s professed commitment to values of peace, tolerance and neighborly love — a lofty sentiment not exactly on display during the continued Turkish offensive against rebel Kurds in the country’s east.

    Still, it’s noteworthy that the Turkish P.M. sees in the Ottoman past a “wealth” — a soft-power cachet, based presumably on the empire’s extraordinary diversity and tolerance of many faiths — to inform the present. We tend to forgive many Western powers, say the French, British and even the Americans, for tracing their foreign policies sometimes in memory (or nostalgia) of lapsed empire. An ascendant, capable Turkey has every right to walk its own post-imperial path as well.

    via Turkish P.M. Erdogan: We Cannot Deny Our Ottoman Past – Global Spin – TIME.com.

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