On October 16, 2020, the Los Angeles Review of Books published a powerful letter about the war on Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) that was signed by scholars who are considered to be among those most actively engaged in postcolonial theory and political activism, including Tariq Ali, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, and Cornel West. This letter read:
Before the ravages brought in by World War I and the 20th century, Azeris and Armenians in the area lived in the kind of conflictual coexistence with which we are acquainted in the multiethnic parts of the world. We are asking now not only for an agreement to a ceasefire but an insistence on the preservation of that ceasefire and protection for the Armenian minority in its efforts toward self-determination. We hope, in the long run, with the participation of all international institutions of justice, that the democratic will of the ethnic Armenians of the area can be acknowledged.Footnote 2
Yet scholars who specialize in the history of Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East were remarkably silent about this war that will have long-term effects on the small Republic of Armenia (population three million) and the relationships it will be able to maintain with its neighbors, in particular the Republic of Azerbaijan (population ten million) and the Republic of Turkey (population eighty-four million). The latter two countries’ militaries jointly attacked the unilaterally recognized, independent Armenian enclave of Artsakh (population 150,000) during a global pandemic, with help from paid Syrian mercenaries and Turkish military technology.
Medieval history was consistently used as a means of understanding this contemporary conflict, at the very least in the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan. As the conflict was ignored by scholars and collectives in and of Turkey and the greater Middle East, I started to think more deeply about medieval history as it is studied and understood in Turkey and beyond, and what kinds of impacts this might have on the minds of intellectuals whose field is the larger Ottoman world with regard to how they view Armenians today. In many parts of the world, of course, perceptions of contemporary identities are often rooted in the medieval, constructed as a site of purity or origin, even if nations, as we understand them, are modern constructs. This kind of relationship to medieval history can encourage a seemingly systematic misinterpretation of historical sources, as reading medieval and early modern authors offers a real challenge to understanding the ways in which people living from the 5th through the 17th centuries experienced and understood their own identities when compared with the ways we do today.Footnote 3
Still, it is important to analyze the ways in which the complete absence of Armenian history teaching in the Republic of Turkey (from elementary school through university) affects how even the most erudite members of Turkish society might be incapable of understanding the long-term history of Armenians in the lands that are today located within the borders of the Republic of Armenia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Republic of Turkey, as well as how this absence in Turkey might impact discourses on Armenian history in the greater region and beyond. Reconsidering historiographies produced in the context of Ottoman and Turkish studies (situated, in one way or another, within the social and political constructs of the Republic of Turkey) from this perspective, as well as the ways in which Armenian identity has been conceived in a region at the crossroads of the Ottoman, Safavid, Qajar, Russian, and Soviet postcolonial worlds, seems important as we consider how these lenses may impact individual and collective political responses to a modern military aggression against Armenians that has been explained by many politicians as rooted in issues related to identity.
As someone who has spent over twenty years coming and going to Turkey, and who was essentially trained as an Ottomanist of the premodern and early modern periods, the one thought that comes to my mind when I think about Armenians as represented in the histories of the premodern Middle East (I imagine this to mean the 5th through the 17th centuries) in Turkish textbooks or in Turkish or Ottoman studies frameworks is: absence. Historical narratives of this long time period include the Byzantine Empire, Seljuk invasions, Mongol overlordship, Mamluk interactions, the Timurid invasions, the rise of the Ottomans, and eventual Ottoman expansion and domination. Of course, I am speaking here in generalizations—but not in inaccurate ones. Although there has been a great deal of research and interest in Armenian history within the context of Ottoman studies over the course of the past twenty years or so, much of that history writing is grounded in work surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the 19th-century history of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. This work is, of course, very important and has opened new pathways within which people can better understand the last century or so of the Ottoman Empire and how Armenians lived—and how most were eventually moved, de-Armenized, or murdered—within it. Work done on this topic has been funded by various significant foundations and celebrated both by intellectuals who are ethically engaged with the study of the past as well as by institutions in the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian diaspora (keen on proving the genocide happened, due to the robust campaign of denial espoused by the government of the Republic of Turkey).
One cannot underestimate the importance of the work done by Agos (an Istanbul-based, weekly, bilingual—Armenian and Turkish—newspaper established in 1996 whose focus is on “minority rights, democratization, coming to terms with the past, the protection and development of pluralism in Turkey”); the Hrant Dink Foundation (an Istanbul-based organization founded in the aftermath of the murder of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in 2007, the goals of which include studying history from “non-nationalist perspectives”); Aras Publishing House (an Istanbul-based Armenian and Turkish publishing house established in 1993 that aims to “serve as a bridge for the cultural legacy of Turkey's Armenians”); and Anadolu Kültür (an Istanbul-based not-for-profit organization established in 2002, with the goal of building bridges through the sharing of art and culture, both in Turkish cities and beyond). These institutions have broadened the scope of understanding around the pasts of Armenians (and others) in the lands that are today the modern Republic of Turkey, and beyond.Footnote 4
In spite of all of the important efforts put forth by so many people and on so many fronts, with aims of ethically considering the complex pasts of the lands that today constitute the Republic of Turkey in the hopes of building a stronger civil society, it would seem the trickle-down effects of all of this work produced by both individuals and collectives have been minimal. One wonders if this is not, in fact, because of the restricted temporal lens many of these important efforts and projects offer on the past, and the huge gaps that still remain in the kinds of historiographical recalibrations necessary to “come to terms with the past.”
I attended a Zoom conversation hosted by my colleague and friend Professor Ayfer Karakaya-Stump at the College of William and Mary in fall 2021. The title of the presentation was “Armenian Identity in Turkey and Remembering the Ottoman Empire.”Footnote 5 Karakaya-Stump had invited Garo Paylan, a member of parliament in the Republic of Turkey of Armenian origin, to speak. Mr. Paylan (a member of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP) offered many important perspectives on the relationships between regional histories and contemporary politics in Turkey.Footnote 6 The insight he offered that struck me most was that it was difficult for him to explain to many people living in Turkey, even some of his constituents, that he was Armenian and from Turkey. He talked about how commonplace it is in Turkey for people to imagine that Armenians are migrants from elsewhere and how difficult it is for him to get people living in Turkey to see that his being Armenian, born in Malatya, is part of a centuries-old story that, in fact, predates the 11th-century Seljuk invasions into Anatolia.
I am not interested here in indigenousness or the notion that one people predating another people in a particular place gives them a unique agency over a body of land. I am, however, interested in thinking more deeply about the ways in which skewed histories produced in the Republic of Turkey (and beyond) have a way of neatly and effectively erasing Armenians, pushing the act of erasure (genocide) further back in time and, in fact, implicating more and more people in the shared act of negation. There is purpose and intention (or, at the very least, compliance) in removing or ignoring evidence of a very long-term Armenian presence in the region.
It becomes clear how intentional this project is when one considers, even briefly, a few key facts. There is nowhere in Turkey, the nation–state whose borders encompass the cities and regions where most premodern, early modern, and modern Armenian history played out, continuously and over centuries, where one can actually study Armenian history. When I say nowhere, I mean that not only are there no Armenian history classes offered in the grammar or high school system (public or private) anywhere in the country; I also mean that there are no universities that have regular classes on Armenian history, let alone an Armenian history program.Footnote 7 The impact is very effective; not only do non-Armenian citizens of Turkey not learn about Armenian history, but in Armenian schools in Turkey students can only catch glimpses of Armenian history through the teaching of Armenian literature. This, too, has its limitations; a few years ago, I gave a talk to the students of an Armenian school in Istanbul, and when I spoke about Mkhitar Gosh (1130–1213), possibly one of the most significant writers and thinkers of medieval Armenia, students stared at me, dumbfounded. When I asked their teachers afterward how this had happened, they explained that they did as much as they could, but that they were constrained by the requirements of the state. As Linda Barış has shown in her recent work, education laws prohibit the teaching of Armenian history in Armenian schools in the Republic of Turkey. Furthermore, although principals of Armenian schools in Turkey are ethnically Armenian, the state appoints all of the (non-Armenian) Turkish vice principals of Armenian schools.Footnote 8
Scholars of the premodern world are becoming more engaged with the kind of multilingual research that might help us see the medieval, beyond our presentist notions of the past and the ways in which identities therein are lived and perceived. This also is true with regard to Armenian history (studied both inside and outside the Republic of Armenia), as well as the history of medieval Anatolia, which for so long was saddled with the legacies of the Turkish History Thesis. By the late 1960s, the “Anatolian Civilizations Discourse” (as described by Aslı Gür) seemingly displaced the Turkish History Thesis with a less racialized and more geographically inspired sense of “homeland” and “belonging” that would be far more inclusive of diversity.Footnote 9 According to Gür, this discourse is presented most plainly at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, located in Ankara. Still, this museum includes no mention of Armenians or Armenia in any part of its permanent exhibition.Footnote 10 One understands that the act or notion of including Armenians or Armenian history, even in a less racialized, more diverse framing of the long history of Turkey, remains something of an uphill battle in Turkey. The same can be said, of course, for the histories of Kurdish, Alevi, and Syriac individuals and collectives.
Both inside and outside the Republic of Turkey, new work is being done that encourages a concomitant reading of premodern and early modern Armenian sources and stories alongside those of their neighbors. We simply need more scholarly work on Armenians that engages directly and intentionally with historiographies and histories that intentionally (or complicitly) omit Armenians, both in books written within the Republic of Turkey and in those written by scholars outside of it, who read and cite those books written by scholars in Turkey. These kinds of integrational historical endeavors offer the possibility of alternative, and more authentic, approaches to thinking about premodern and early modern Armenia, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, northwestern Iran, and the South Caucasus as places where Armenians lived with Arabic-, Greek-, and Syriac-speaking Christians as well as with Arabic-, Kurdish-, Persian-, and Turkish-speaking Muslims, among others.
How do these points relate to a contemplation of why scholars of Ottoman history and Middle Eastern history remained silent during this war? My sense is that this long history of the Armenians and its erasure (or the ignorance thereof) is of utmost importance in understanding this silence. The state-sponsored genocide denial campaign has had huge effects on the ways in which histories (ancient, premodern, early modern, and modern) are conceived, portrayed, and studied in the Republic of Turkey, such that over time and with intention the erasure of Armenians as a people of the region now takes place in books and in minds, stretching back much further than 1915. When people do not understand the long-term presence of Armenians in this place, it becomes difficult to empathize with them as human beings who have lived in this region and been active participants in its cultural, social, and economic production over centuries. The erasure of Armenians from history books renders them usurpers with a complicated and inorganic-seeming obsession with modern Turkey. Their absence in the past seemingly calls for their erasure over and over again, while their contemporary presence becomes something akin to a cultural and political annoyance unworthy of political discourse, rather than an accepted and continuous reality that merits investigation, contemplation, and conversation.
