Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient: A Critical Discourse from the East (1872–1932). Edited by Zeynep Çelik

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press

A century before Edward Said, a robust critique of orientalism proliferated within the so-called Orient. Zeynep Çelik argues this point in an edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship from the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient criticizes European knowledge production about Turkey through voices well known—such as Ahmed Midhat, Nâzım Hikmet, Halide Edib, and Tevfik Fikret—as well as those less so, including Şevket Süreyya and Ebüzziya. Translated into English from the original Turkish edition by Gregory Key, Nergis Perçinel, Micah Hughes, İlker Hepkaner, and Aron Aji, these modernist writers do not celebrate the arrival of European modernity so much as critique its transformation of nearly every facet of Turkish life: architecture, tourism, gender, and literature. This light paperback is therefore anything but: it is an essential companion to Orientalism (1978). While Said’s text has generated many memorable critiques, ranging from those of Aijaz Ahmad to Wael Hallaq, Çelik’s intervention gives voice to those who were “orientalized.” If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance.

For Çelik, what unites the collection’s disparate authors is “an obsessively reactive pattern,” in which “Europe always served as the point of reference. Being Ottoman or Turkish was always in response to Europe” (53). This argument overstates European influence and downplays Ottoman agency, but it is generally true of Turkish intellectuals within the volume’s modernist period and those who wrote in the decades prior to it. For example, the Tanzimat (Reform) Period, beginning in 1839, inaugurated a feverish period of modernization in the Ottoman Empire, partially through the appropriation of European concepts and ideas, that would culminate in the shock of Westernization during the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk reformed everything from the script to the fez. The writers in this collection express the anguish of living during this period of upheaval, often with mordant wit.

Namık Kemal’s 1872 essay “Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient” (“Avrupa Şark’ı Bilmez”) begins the collection and provides its matter-of-fact title. Like many writers in this volume, Kemal points out the linguistic and cultural ignorance of European orientalists while emphasizing the importance of correcting the record: “When we are finally able—like the Russians, the Poles, the Greek—to counter the aspersions cast upon us in other languages by expressing ourselves in those same languages, then the general public in Europe will quickly get to know the Orient, and just as quickly render to us our due” (62). While it is unlikely that his European contemporaries would have deigned to consider such rebuttals, even in their own languages, Kemal would get his wish over a century later with the translation of this volume into English.

Nodding to Kemal’s “Europe Knows Nothing About the Orient,” Ebüziyya sharpens his gaze (and critical knife) in the second chapter on the native informants who aided European orientalists. Ottomans themselves abetted the European orientalist bastardization of knowledge. These partnerships were not tragic instances of auto-orientalism but rather nefarious collaborations with the enemy: “Specifically, because the greater part of European scholars who travel to the Orient do not know the Oriental languages, all that they learn about us comes from guides, to whom they give the name cicerone,” Ebüziyya laments. “One may well imagine what manner of knowledge and morals are possessed by those who seek their livelihood in acting as guides to anybody and nobody, and how accurate is the information that they offer” (64). The stereotypes these orientalists—European and Ottoman—propagated about Ottoman women, in particular, were a source of great anxiety. Halid Ziya’s chapter, “Turkish Women in the Foreign Press,” conveys as much: “These pictures upset us, make us angry at people responsible for this counterpropaganda against us” (193).

The volume’s objects of critique come into even sharper focus in one of its longest chapters, wherein Kemal methodically debunks Ernest Renan’s 1883 lecture “Islam and Science,” which averred the incompatibility of those concepts. Yet at its best moments, Kemal’s piece becomes less of a broadside and more of an inquiry into the history of cross-cultural theory: if Renan denied the originality of Islamic philosophy, pointing out its debts to the Greeks and Sassanians, Kemal reminds us that Greek philosophy was itself a heady font of intercultural influence (86). Jamal al-Din Al-Afghani’s rebuttal of Renan is also of interest on this topic.

Surprisingly, Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient features an even more pointed critique of another individual: the French writer Pierre Loti. In fact, there is an entire section (five chapters) devoted to excoriating his work. Yet perhaps history has already done its job: Loti has not endured, with the exception of a hill that bears his name, near Istanbul’s Golden Horn. Still remembered is Ahmed Haşim, this collection’s most endearingly blunt writer. “Are Our Movie Theaters Tools of French Imperialism?” asks why Turkish theaters provide French subtitles for Turkish audiences (99). Another of Haşim’s gems, “The Library,” extends the critique into literature, questioning the value of “all these worthless books they have been translating into Turkish lately, books whose sole merit is that they were written in one of the European languages” (97). In Haşim’s view, the translations should have flowed in the reverse direction, from Turkish into English. His essay “Muslim Time” (“Müslüman Saati”) does not appear in this collection, but it would have fit nicely. Much like the other chapters of Çelik’s volume, it documents the clash of Ottoman and European epistemologies—in this case, with respect to temporality.

Şevket Süreyya’s “Bankruptcy of Europacentrisme” is arguably the volume’s most important text and certainly its most scholarly. It will be of special interest to global modernists and comparatists. Written in 1932, the essay long predates contemporary critiques of European periodization or Eurochronology. “The periodization of human history into several eras such as the Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Age, and contemporaneity, is actually quite recent,” he writes (105). “The history which starts with Europe and ends with Europe is both a narrow perspective and an incorrect framework, and it has thus far either exiled us outside history or left us outside civilization” (109). In five pages, Süreyya presages the critique of historicism that Dipesh Chakrabarty made famous in Provincializing Europe (2000).

Images of Ottoman newspapers, Islamic art and architecture, and even families beautifully illustrate Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient. The volume provides a perfect introduction for those interested in modern Turkish literature beyond the likes of Orhan Pamuk, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, or Sabahattin Ali as well as important context for understanding those writers. Likewise, its newspaper articles offer invaluable primary sources for those who wish to deepen their study of orientalism beyond Said. Çelik’s volume deserves its place on many syllabi, and any scholar of global modernism or modernity should own it.