The contributions in New Perspectives on Turkey’s issue no. 56 cover a range of subject matters, periods, and methodological approaches, including a study of literary milieux, the reception of a television series, the Turkish film industry, and problems of power and legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire’s Arab lands. Finally, the issue’s roundtable debate is devoted to a discussion that, despite its global importance, is newly emerging in Turkey; namely, climate change policy.
Barış Büyükokutan’s essay is an exploration “outside the West”—specifically, in Turkish literary milieux—of the three types of secularity posited by Charles Taylor. Using network analysis, the author finds that the “secularity three” were present among poets, but not among novelists. He locates the explanation for this contrast in the availability of nonpious gatekeepers in poetry circles, with whom aspiring pious poets had to associate, whereas pious novelists did not go through such a process. In his discussion, Büyükokutan also addresses the importance of religious conflict in studying the secular.
The next article’s starting point is the television sector—specifically, the reception of the hugely successful television series Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century). Murat Ergin and Yağmur Karakaya approach the interpretations of viewers of this show in terms of the erosion of the boundary between “highbrow” and popular culture, arguing that people are, depending on their social positions, differentially interpellated by the discourses of state-led neo-Ottomanism and popular cultural Ottomania. The authors’ analysis, based on interviews, demonstrates that individuals juxtapose The Magnificent Century with what they deem “proper” history, in the process rendering popular culture a “false” version of history. In the process of doing this, different groups of viewers display different interpretations of the Ottoman Empire, imagining it as the epitome of tolerance, the representation of true Turkish and/or Islamic identities, or as a burden on contemporary Turkey.
Özlem Öz and Kaya Özkaracalar, in their paper, focus on the revitalization of the Turkish film industry since the 1990s, following its sharp decline during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The authors employ a “path-dependence” perspective to explore the industrial and spatial dynamics of the sector, making use of interviews with industry representatives. Their analysis indicates that the advertising and television sectors, as well as entrepreneurship, played significant roles in the reemergence of the film industry.
The final two articles in this issue shift the focus of scholarly attention to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire. The next essay focuses on the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, specifically on the transformation of the petitioning system following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. Through his reading of petitions from Greater Syria, Yuval Ben-Bassat shows that, in the context of the relative political freedoms of the Second Constitutional Period, Ottoman subjects started to directly petition the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet) and the parliament, rather than the sultan or the grand vizier. While, historically, petitions asked for a sultan’s benevolence and mercy—thereby granting him legitimacy—in this period they demanded political and constitutional rights. Through an examination of this change, Ben-Bassat argues that the meaning of justice was, at the time, gradually shifting from being a sultanic prerogative to a framework of constitutional rights.
Talha Çiçek’s essay—which makes use of documents from Ottoman, British, German, and Austrian archives—deals with the Ottoman-Rashidi partnership of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which resulted in both the Ottomans and the Rashidis becoming more significant actors in regional politics. He argues that this partnership made more visible the increasing Ottoman influence in Najd (i.e., central Arabia) and the Persian Gulf while simultaneously assisting in the Rashidis’ emergence as a regional power.
In this issue, we also feature a roundtable debate on climate change policy in Turkey, with the hope of making a contribution to the nascent social science scholarship on climate change. The participants in the roundtable hail from the fields of climate science, economics, international relations, urban studies, and political ecology, thus providing a broad multidisciplinary perspective. The individual contributions by Murat Türkeş, Erinç Yeldan, Semra Cerit Mazlum, Ethemcan Turhan, and Osman Balaban take up such diverse issues as Turkey’s imperative to reduce carbon emissions, the meanings of climate justice, the development of a social science perspective in Turkey on climate change, and Turkey’s position in global climate change talks.
