Christine M. Philliou’s historiographically challenging and imaginative new book, Turkey: A Past Against History is a most welcome addition to the field of late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican history, a field that is mostly known exalting conventional archives and essentialist historical narratives predicated on clear-cut binaries, such as revolutionary and anti-revolutionary camps or heroes and traitors. The book enters into this rather insipid field through the prism of Refik Halid Karay (1888–1965), an incorrigible muhalif (opponent and dissenter) from the late Ottoman era. After finding himself on the list of Yüzellilikler (150 personae non gratae) of the early Turkish Republic, he had to flee the country. He was later pardoned and passed away in İstanbul in 1965, having come to be regarded as an esteemed literary figure and an “elder statesman of muhalefet” (opposition and dissent) (p. 196). Using Karay as a foil to historically problematize the dynamic and contingent period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, the book utilizes not only Karay’s biography, but also thoroughly engages with his literary oeuvre (including his published memoirs and correspondence) as well as his journalistic publications. In doing so, it produces a narrative that places Karay and his muhalif persona at the epicenter of the historical events and transformations happening around him or within his world (as well as within himself), tying together historical and literary sources through a historical analysis of the shifting socio-political circumstances and possibilities of the period.

The book embarks on a larger examination of late Ottoman and Turkish Republican history in seven chapters, each of them chronologically arranged to cover different stages of Karay’s life as well as the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. In many ways the book is a history of the concept of muhalefet filtered through Karay’s life, and of the conditions that made differing forms of muhalefet unravel in different eras, from the autocratic reign of Abdülhamid II to the post-coup Turkish Republic of the 1960s. Such an engagement allows for Philliou to disclose the complex and contingent nature of concepts such as muhalefet, and plausibly freedom or democracy, thus challenging the static and monolithic understanding of these terms commonly practiced in mainstream historiography.

Such a historical narrative revolving around and conceived through Karay only may sound too personal or subjective. But that also seems to be an explicit historiographical intervention or exposé of Philliou’s book. One might read the book as a solid reminder of the personal and subjective contours of “official history” writing (and “truth” making) on the Ottoman-Turkish transition from empire to republic. The authoritative source of this official history is the Nutuk (The Speech)—the 1927 rendering of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) on the subject of that transition, which dictates a specific history while silencing others. What Turkey: A Past Against History thus provides us with is a personal and subjective counternarrative to the equally personal and subjective official history, this time constituted through Karay.

Problematizing the history of composite and dynamic processes of transition, the book aims to unlock “three major problems in scholarship on the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey: first, the relationship between Ottoman liberalism and the constitutionalism of the Young Turk movement and particularly the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP); second, the problem of continuity and rupture in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey; and third, the politics of memory regarding the Ottoman past, particularly the late Ottoman past, in the Turkish republic” (p. 5). In this sense, the book makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on these issues, aiming to revise official history-writing on the establishment of the Republic and its projected memory of the Ottoman past, as well as to challenge the restraining effects of such official projects on the way that Ottoman-Turkish history (and the Republican present) is conceptualized and reified. These are themes that have been discussed by scholars of Ottoman-Turkish history over the last few decades and yet still hold great potential for further revisionist investigations. Karay’s historical counternarrative, as scrutinized by Philliou, provides novel insights, and hence new possibilities and directions, for engaging with these issues.

Among the three historiographical problems that are covered in the book, I find the third one—the politics of memory of the late Ottoman past—to be the most striking, especially its attempts to be an utterly original exercise of rethinking the impact of the Armenian genocide on the ways in which the Ottoman past is conceptualized and memorialized within the Republic. The Armenian genocide consequently appears throughout the book as a pivotal, yet persistently repressed memory, both at the conscious and unconscious levels, for Republican society. This was even so among the survivors of the Ottoman muhalefet who had been characteristically opposed to the CUP, vociferous in acknowledging what they defined as CUP atrocities against the Armenians, and who considered the nationalist government in Ankara to be an offshoot of the CUP. Under the Republic, the issue of the Armenian genocide nevertheless transformed into a repressed memory (in the psychoanalytical sense) even for the muhalefet, as it became inhibited and then vanished in the transition from empire to republic, from the rule of the CUP to the nationalist (and later Kemalist) regime.

The book ends without attempting a comprehensive conclusion; instead there is only a very short epilogue, and an even shorter afterword, leaving the project of the genealogy of the muhalefet open-ended. There are mere glimpses into plausible analogies with current socio-political circumstances in Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party, and the possibilities of muhalefet within this context. In this regard, it provides a lot of material to ponder the present, as would be expected from any conscientious genealogical-historical analysis.

While the book offers a significant contribution to Ottoman-Turkish historiography, attempting to bring out new questions as well as methodological possibilities, it is nonetheless possible to criticize it for leaving some other historiographical concerns unchecked. Claiming to write “a genealogy—although not necessarily the genealogy—of muhalefet” (p. 17) makes one wonder if focusing merely on Karay is enough to capture muhalefet genealogically. Karay, after all, was an İstanbulite, (secular) Muslim, heterosexual, upper-middle class man, journalist, and writer. It was eventually possible for him to reconcile with the Republican regime, becoming—or at least trying (rather desperately) to prove that he was—an avid supporter and admirer of the Republic. It is through his prism that we go through this counter-historical account of muhalefet, and not through any methodically nonconforming or marginalized member of the late Ottoman muhalefet. One cannot help but wonder what sort of a genealogy might appear if other figures of the muhalefet of the era, for whom a reconciliation with the Republic was out of the question, were added into the analysis. I am referring to figures such as Şeyhülislam Mustafa Sabri Efendi (1869–1954), among others, who were also on the list of Yüzellilikler together with Karay, but were not able to return to the country even when they were officially pardoned in 1938. Or what kinds of differences are there to be found out among the muhalifs who remained and were active in the Republic? We have a glimpse of this diversity only when the book very briefly focuses on instances such as the Independence Tribunals or muhalif publications such as Tan, for which Karay wrote a column in the early 1940s.

Yet by focusing on Karay, the book seeks to find out the kind of counternarrative, which can be incorporated into the official Republican narrative, later to be diluted and integrated with it in the different corners and shifting conditions of possibilities of Ottoman-Turkish history. This might explain why Philliou keeps employing concepts such as the “Ottoman establishment”, later to be replaced by the “Republican establishment”, to refer to Ottoman and Republican governmental mechanisms and bureaucratic elites as well as their continuities, despite the static reverberations and contradictory connotations of concepts such as establishment or origins for genealogical analysis. Genealogy, after all, is a method of historical inquiry that aims to problematize historically essentialized concepts such as establishment or origins by reflecting on their contingencies, impermanence, and ephemerality. In this sense, Turkey: A Past Against History is a book that traces more of the ways in which the old Ottoman (as well as the new Republican) muhalefet was incorporated into and internalized by the Republican official metanarrative rather than focusing on what was repressed, ruptured, or irredeemably deviated while, at the same time, continuing to persistently haunt their narration.

One might also ask if approaching muhalefet as a concept originating specifically in the second half of the nineteenth century, and conceptualizing it as an outcome of the Western impact on the Ottoman Empire (p. 41), is the most nuanced way in which to conduct a genealogical examination of muhalefet in the Ottoman-Turkish context. It is certain that the book’s main aim, throughout its genealogical arch, is to reflect on the fissures and continuities between the Ottoman and Republican elites, and thus pose a direct challenge to the official history on Turkey that depicts the new Republic, with its socio-political and cultural (re)arrangements, as a complete break from the Ottoman Empire. Yet one wonders what a genealogy of muhalefet that does not focus on a specific era of transition or a context of origin would look like.

It is true that one cannot expect everything from a single book. But I deem that it takes a book such as Turkey: A Past Against History to trigger the kinds of historiographical questions posed above, and plausibly many others, to be probed by other readers. In this regard, the book gives more than it purports to do. I hope that it will be read and discussed widely, and inspire many new historiographically challenging and innovative studies to emerge in the field of Ottoman-Turkish studies.