Ottoman History Podcast - Cemal Kafadar Between Past and Present, Part 1

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Episode 464 with Cemal Kafadar hosted by Maryam Patton, Chris Gratien, and Sam Dolbee In part one of our interview with Cemal Kafadar, we discuss his intellectual influences in the broadest sense, ranging from the Balkan accents of the Istanbul neighborhood in which he grew up to his early interest in theater and film. Kafadar talks about key events that shaped his worldview, including the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution. He also touches on the works of history and literature that inspired him, as well as his first archival forays in the shadow of the 1980 military coup. And in closing, he brings up a question that nagged him from the beginning: "do we do what we do to understand, or do what we do to change the world?" We'll speak more about that question in part two of this interview, coming soon. « Click for More »

How do I know that you're going to be able to do that? Hey. Hey, Miriam. You excited? Yeah. What's going on? I thought you were, like, interviewing him for a second. We always keep the tape running. It's our new method. We have a post-modern method. So it's recording now?

It's recording right now. Oh, here we go. Right on time. Yes, it is. Nice to meet you, guys. Hi. Nice to meet you, guys. Yeah, we're ready to go. Hi, Sam.

Good to see you. I didn't know you would be here. Let'suk. Hoş bulduk. Hoş bulduk. Burada olacağını bilmiyordum. Hizmet Döneri'ne gidelim. Zor ama... Ben Cemal Kafadar. Ve siz Otoman Hizmet Podcast'ı dinliyorsunuz. Calab'ın bir şar yaratmış iki cihan aresinde, Bakacak didar görünür ol şarın kenarında. Nagihan ol şare vardım, anı ben yapılır gördüm, Ben dahı bile yapıldım tanrı şu toprak aresinde. My Lord has created a city between two worlds.

One sees the beloved if one looks at the edge of that city. I came upon that city and saw it being built. I too was built with it, amidst stone and earth. Well, we've already done the introduction, so you know what this is, and you know who that was, but I'll say it again.

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby, and that was Cemal Kafadar reading Hacib Ayram Veli's poem, from which Kafadar's 1995 book Between Two Worlds takes its title. Cemal Kafadar is the Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies at Harvard University, and this episode is a special episode. Usually we talk with people about their research, but in this one, we take a broader view. Marian Patton, Chris Graydon, and I spoke with Kavatar about his path to becoming an Ottoman historian and his intellectual trajectory more generally. We've divided the conversation into two parts, and this one, part one, covers his upbringing

and education, including everything from the Balkan accents of the Istanbul neighborhood he grew up in, to the way his love for film has shaped his historical vision. We all owe so much to different encounters other than our books and things, obviously, that we don't probably pay enough respect and attention to those. I love committing poetry to memory. My grandfather, who died when I was nine, had many things in mind for my future. One of them was that I would be a hafiz, and I started it. I was very good at it, committing memory to memory, and I did several pages to his friends for him to impress his friends, of course, that his grandchild could do this. So maybe that's when the committing to

memory stuff became a pleasure for me. So, you know, Hafiz is somebody who commits the Quran to memory, but who commits things to memory. Unfortunately, I don't have the musical side of a Hafiz like Evliya Çelebi. He was a Hafiz and he was a real musician, not me. But now Hafiz in Turkish is also a nerd, somebody who just memorizes. I'm sure you know all academics have some of that to them to some degree. Otherwise what? My father, my

early childhood he was a manifatturacı. In fact the full name of the shop is of another era. Manifattura, tuhafiye, and züccaciye. We sewed buttons, zippers, ribbons, some cloth, things of that sort. People would make sewing, home textiles with. Manifattura. Tuhafiye is souvenir from Arabic. In züccaciye, you would sell tea cups and things of that sort. Glassware. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in the early 60s, before Özal and liberalization, Arçelik was created. And my father got a bayilik, an agency to sell Arçelik products

in the neighborhood and expanded the shop.k. Bu yüzden beyaz eşyaları satıyorduk. Yani kuru kuru, yıçma makinesi. Ama Arçelik'in bir satışçısınızsa Arçelik'i sadece satabilirsiniz. Bu da bir satışçı olarak. Belki de Amerikan tarzında iş yapmanın bir tarzını öğrendi. Arçelik'in bir satışçısıydı. Rami. Eyyüp'ün köklerinden yukarıdaki. and he was the archelig bayi in the neighborhood rami uphill from the hills of eyup which is where i was born and went to elementary school then we moved to fatih but he kept his shop until his self-retirement in rami that was our home base and did you work in the shop? Yeah. I mean, I enjoyed doing the little things.

Learning about colors. That was the most fascinating. I still work on colors. Names of the colors of the different ribbons were fascinating. I was learning nefti, the dark green, black green of the oil that comes out of this. Petrol, et cetera. You know, those kinds of things were fascinating to me. And showing off, reading very early, reading, you know, those kinds of things.

It's a social environment, a dükkan. I've always appreciated the fact that after, for instance, Zati, the great divan poet of the early 16th century, Su Yong and Walter Andrews both worked on Zati. He had a dükkan in Beyazıt Square. He did mostly fal and tulsım, those kinds of things, but it's a dükkan. And you can read his memoir, no, you can read the letaif about Zati, the funny tales, anecdotes about Zati, the funny tales, anecdotes about Zati.

And many of the stories take place either in his shop or in the shops of his neighbors. And they're all social spaces, the barber shop especially. So Dikken was a social space. I learned a lot, counting, multiplying, those kinds of things, little transactions. I enjoyed it. And you had the Haricelik Bahai there after. That's another kind of world where you learn a lot about the value, appreciate ordinary people

with their quotidian matters can be so much fun. And you learn so much from that. Like what kinds of things? Many of them, the people in the neighborhood, were mostly Balkan immigrants. Mohajir, Majir, we said. Pronunciation, that was more common. Majir, but same way.

They had many tales making fun of each other's accents. And it makes you think about language. Now I realize that different constructions of sentences by some folks were due to the fact that they were actually speakers of some Slavic language and they kept the syntax but applied it to Turkish. I can give you examples of this language. Yapiyoruz tamir hem gizli pençe.

This is a shoemaker, shoe repairer. Yapıyoruz tamir. Hem gizli pençe. Bu bir şiş yapıcı. Şiş yapıcı. Yapıyoruz tamir. Hem gizli pençe. Şimdi gizli pençe, ne denir? Gizli. Ve ruhu, ben büyüktüm,

metal ekledik. Ve eğer çak çak çak yapmak istemiyorsanız, Gizli pençe yapıyorlar. Kulağa sıkılmıştır. Bu iyi bir sanatçıydı. Ama Türkçe'nin şikayetinde, Yapıyoruz tamir hem gizli pençe. into the soul. That was a good craftsman, right? But the sentence in Turkish syntax doesn't it? Do you know what syntax that is?

I don't. It must be given the guy. I know where he's from. He's from Kosovo. So it's probably Albanian. So within that diversity, I guess one learned. My mother sometimes, I mean my own parents spoke very good Turkish, now you're reminding me, but my mother sometimes had problems and they always made fun of her. You know she couldn't say say program. She always said polgram. So jokingly one would say dilini eşek arısı soksun. May the big bee sting your tongue. Yes, so one does see ways of offending, putting folks down. In my elementary school I could see some of that based on all kinds of things. Class, gender, certainly, needless to point out. And I noticed that history can be a tool for that, for that kind of oppression.

That's unfortunately very much a part of the world. Imagine Alevis in Turkey fought for so many years to just get a paragraph about the fact that there are Alevis in the country. We're talking of at least 10%. And the Ministry of Education compromised at some point by putting a picture of, say, Hacı Bektaş in there. Is that a compromise really? Hacı Bektaş is one of the giants of, you know, Turkish, Anatolian, and more cultural heritage anyway. So it should be there to begin with, so on and so forth.

Women, blacks, this and that, you know, in high school textbooks, it's easier to observe, but it gets subtler, it gets far more refined and sophisticated, and maybe all the more dangerous when it's in the hands of great academics. Political discussions. Turkey was getting more and more politicized in the late 60s. Political discussions were, my elder brother, five years older than I, was going to the university

and one had started to experience boycott, greve, those kinds of things debated in those environments or in the coffee house in Rami, which gave me a sense of what a lively, debating environment any of those places could be. My mother too, I read many women's novels thanks to her. She had filibitis on her legs and the doctorate recommended going to the Bursa Caplicellari. She's from a village of Bursa Kaplıcaları'na gitmeye önerdi.

O da Bursa'nın bir köyü. O da Balkan emigreni. Onlar Tirilya'da evlendiler. Güzel bir köy. Birlikte miydiniz? Tirilya, güneşli. Çok güzel. Eski Yunan köyü.

Popülasyon ilişkisi. Makedonya'dan geliyorlar. Yunanistan'dan. Oraya geldi. population exchange. They come from Macedonia, Greece, settled. And that's where she's from. But then she married to... Istanbul evlendi. That's the way she married to Istanbul. And

because of her condition, we would go to Kaplica, the hot baths in Bursa. And my father kept the shop. So I went with her. She was reading all these Kerem and Nadir, Angelique, translated French novels, you know Angelique? Then they made movies of them and they became very popular.

I think that's why I got so very interested in Asiye Hatun's Dream Diary. It gave me a sense of a literary pleasure of a sort that I knew from reading what's called women's literature, speaking of another social environment full of another kind of sensibility. I mean, Rami and the Balkan immigrant community there was mostly secular, but pious.

And to me, that combination of secularity and piety was normal. It was okay to have an alcoholic beverage once in a while. And some people in the larger family were known as akşamcı, but that's who they were. They had a glass of rakı every evening, but at Ramadan, they would not. You know, then you knew of somebody who drank quite a bit and had non-halal activities, let's put it that way, and then goes on the hajj and comes back, grows a beard and gives up on everything. This was all very normal.

But then going to the Friday prayer was a must. I don't remember anyone really pushing you to it. It was just the social environment that gave you a sense that you must, kind of a thing. Which is the way it must have been much of the time in most places. One could go on and on. Obviously this is such a big issue for Turkey. on and on. Obviously, this is such a big issue for Turkey. But generally in Turkey, that kind of thing changed a lot. It's been changing. Going visiting mosques with Gülruh especially for scholarly reasons as well as personal and aesthetic. To go visit mosques

for now nearly 40 years on our own or together. We've experienced big transformation toward more of a segregated closed off difficult experience not everywhere still fortunately but you know in the late 70s 80s you were welcome anywhere as a you know Istanbul woman or boy coming in with a camera and just or with foreign friends doing things, talking in English. Do I sound like I have nostalgia? Honestly, not really. No, I like my time. I mean these comments I think are not driven, triggered by nostalgia. I me put it that way. I may feel nostalgia, but is this observation

a nostalgic re-reading of the past? This is the question I was trying to preempt. I was doing two things very intently and thought I could do them maybe in the future when I was a teenager. And one was writing poetry, one was playing, acting in plays. I could have gone on, I guess. Doing it well is another thing but I may have this was when you're still 17 18 19 there abouts the last one I played was Galileo Galilei Bertolt Bertolt Brecht the first one I played was I was in German high

school junior high school this timekeknises German speaking German teaching high school you know next to the Iranian consulate there I was one of the voices from behind I didn't do any acting really yelling it was Faust but simplified and I was telling Faust, Faust, hüte dich vor der Magie, fahre fort in deinen Studien, oder du bist auf ewig verloren. So that was my first

speaking acting. Sort of. And then I played the Russian ballet teacher in You Can't Take It With You. James Lovett is a legend, Robert College English American literature teacher. And he was also a director of the plays. And he discovered that, I don't know how he came to that, but that I could pronounce, that I could do the Russian accent quite well, which may have something to do with the fact that my parents spoke Macedonian and my grandparents.

I heard it all the time, though they never taught me. I think the phonology seeps in better than the syntax if it's never taught to you at that age. So anyway, so I was doing my little rebishka. That was my main line. So you can't take it with you to Galileo Galilei. That was the end of my career, the peak of my acting. Did you know at the time that it was the last one you'd be in?

Or did it just happen? Sort of, yeah. No, no, I was really, no, I was quite, you know, how people are cat or dog people. There are also cinema or theater people. I was at that time moving quickly from cinema, theater to cinema rather. Obviously, it's not an either or for millions of people, but for some people, it was either theater or cinema. And I was 17, 18, 19, thereabouts, I was moving to cinema.

1789, there about I was moving to cinema. One of the major cultural institutions for some of us in Istanbul at that time was the Cinematheque. It's a legend. Onat Kutlar, the founder, whom I later met, he unfortunately died at the end of a bombing incident at the cafe under the Marmara Hotel, Taksim Square. At that time, actually, we had planned with him to write a script for Sultan Cem. We can come back to that.

So the cinema interest has always been there. And I still have the synopsis for the Sultan Cem film, which he read and then we agreed that we would the next summer just the New Year's Eve was the bombing incident and it you know I won't go into the politics of it and the next summer we were to do the writing together. But the cinematic when I didn't know Anat Kutler as a person then, he was just a great towering figure of intellectual life and we were high school students,

was just fabulous. It was a fabulous place. They just knew what they were doing. I watched all of the Fassbinder movies between 1971 and 73, before I came to America. Before there was any show on Fassbinder yet here

in the United States because it took time for German cinema to catch as you know in any case so in high school I was getting interested through the cinema take I was in general very deeply involved as at least audience and reader in movie in literally criticism poetry etc thought i would study philosophy when i came to study here in hamilton college in 1973 when the vietnam war was still on and being there was so odd at first then Then I loved it. I started to like winters and snowscapes. And I still do. I cherish it. But it was very odd.

After Istanbul, you can imagine. The college itself was great. I mean, you know, this is 73. Nixon is on. Watergate is on. The Vietnam War is on. There's one TV among the halls, people watch it in a group, and teachers are, professors are there too, cursing at Nixon and saying things.

Unthinkable from the very authoritarian Turkey I was coming from. Unthinkable, that kind of relationship with the professor, first of all. And then both of you yelling at TV, at the president, my goodness, and there's a war. Come on, we knew that, of course, there's a big anti-Vietnam movement, but that it could be expressed at that level. So that, for instance, was educational in the best sense.

Wow, good kind of feeling is that one has with it. Students had stereos. There was great music, of course. It was a time of good music in America. What was the music you listened to? Friends' stereos mostly, but they, did we listen to Led Zeppelin, King Crimson? One of my friends from upstate New York

was a fan of Jay Giles' band. I knew nothing about that before coming to America, but I learned. Bob Dylan, who we already knew much of violin turkey. He'd already made the rounds throughout the world. John Baez and Bob Dylan had. A friend of mine was into jazz. He took me to a Dizzy Gillespie live concert in Philadelphia. And we always hitchhiked in those years.

American friends and us, 73. Hitchhiking became dangerous or simply not done towards the end of the 70s. But 73, it was very, on a good sunny day like this, one would see several people hitchhiking. Also, that Hamilton College had books like Cemal Pasha's memoirs. Unthinkable, why the hell, I said, and then several European travelers books on the author.

So I read some, thanks to a good simple but good college library up in North or the New York State I read some 19th century stuff on the Ottomans that I knew nothing that I didn't know existed really really, yes. And that was also, I must say, an eye-opening kind of thing. But I was also doing a double major, which I didn't finish, in film studies. And my film instructor was a terrific guy, passed away in the meantime, film instructor was a terrific guy, passed away in the meantime, but he worked with Coppola as the boom man on several films including Apocalypse Now. He really knew his craft and from him I got the appreciation which I did not violate the Cinematheque, the appreciation of the craftsmanship of film which later I think helped me a good deal in terms of the way I think about

history. But we can talk about that too, the editing of it, the laborious process of working towards something while you know much of it will be cut. Coming up, more of our interview with Jamal Kafadar, as we talk about some of the historians and teachers who inspired him, and some of the events that shaped him. That's in a minute, when our show continues. While developing all these interests, I was reading historical things of historical interest, but not necessarily with an eye to become a historian, nor was I much interested in the more technical, academic kinds of history at that time. What did that mean to you at the time?

What stood as technical academic history? Barkan. Not that you necessarily have to name names. The academic, the Turkish academic historical work, which I knew was of great merit and stuff, but it wasn't intellectually that appealing. I was more interested in philosophical questions and stuff. And I eventually, along the way, within a few years, figured out that dealing with those philosophical questions

or literary critical types of questions might be, that those interests might be pursued through historical work as well, that this can be a matter of greatest intellectual pleasure, which is what I thought was missing in the academic work, which is probably because I did not appreciate it sufficiently at that time. A few readings, a few inspiring readings came at the right moment for me, late 70s, just early grad school. And that would include Prodel and Natalie Davis. Oh, history can be done like this? It's also a moment when very obvious givens and the truths of the Republic, going back to the total now, were being questioned, were being dismantled, not from the more obvious, say, anti-Kamalist opposition or anti-Republican,

which is always there, and some of it also developing in more sophisticated ways in time. developing in more sophisticated ways in time. But readings like Tanpınar and Oğuz Atay were very crucial for intellectuals of my generation to think beyond the givens, at least to be ironical and hysterical and to enjoy the irony and satire and the parody of the world that we were living in and we were given uh and the history books were of that world and then some readings enabled us to think beyond it ozata is just amazing i have to say many you go back to my generation you talk to people moving into social sciences, humanities, with some intellectual ambition, and he will be there in the biography someplace as a major, as a critical

reading. I moved to the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill, where I thought I could perhaps do Islamic thought and also Ottoman history or history of Ottoman thought. Didn't know really. I was just trying to find my way, just touching the different parts of the body of the elephant and trying to make sense of it. Were there any other fields of history that sort of you started to draw upon in your work? Was it always, was it Ottoman history from the beginning,

from the get-go? Well, Islamic history, I really want to, I found Ottoman history as it was being done then, I think things have changed a bit under certain influences and dynamics. Not sufficiently steeped in the medieval Islamic context or background.

That it was, for reasons having to do with republican history, it was just too divorced from things having to do with religious learning, religious sciences, piety of people in general. But it's not just true that I discovered of this field. In general, you know, religion mattered very little in the larger framework of the social sciences for a while in the 20th century. I think the Iranian revolution here played a big, big role in my life. I know in that of many friends, like it came right in the middle of my grad school. The Iranian Revolution really brought certain things home

in terms of studying history and deciding as to what matters. Though those things change. I mean, another context, another development eventually will probably conceal and reveal differently. The Iranian Revolution brought up the relevance of piety, religious traditions, and everyday religiosity, etc. to those of us who try to understand societies in the present or in the past. But when I went

to do my graduate work at McGill I had decided that that really was missing, that I had to learn Arabic, which is already an ideologically loaded step in Turkey. Many of my friends then wrote, Jamal has become an Islamist. This is 97-78. You know these kinds of associations which were even stronger at the time. So you know taking a course on fukh jurisprudence was a possibility and I loved it. Taught by a more traditional Afghan scholar though the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill is not a traditional Islamic study. It's not a madrasa, but there were some opportunities of that sort as well and I

studied some Arabic and Sufism with Harman Landolt and things that I wouldn't be able to do as an Ottoman history student in many other places. Then Shina Stikkim was a great bonus of the fact that Gülru was a student here at Harvard and when she decided to take Ottoman Turkish with Sinasi, I asked if I could join them and the three of us basically read texts for two years and I came to appreciate how a philology how a philological mind works. Shinazi was terrific. His most excited moments would be when he was when he found an opportunity to work on an etymology from the text that we were reading and he would develop it like a mathematical formula. It was a delight. And doing the work in the archives when

it started again in 1989, in 1981, the military, the junta in Turkey, political events always intervene. And I found that in moments of severe political trauma and crisis in Turkey, the archives and the manuscript libraries have been wonderful refuge for many of us. Not that I want to escape from the political reality, but you need some time to breathe on your own and in that sense for several hours in the day, to immerse yourself in the material and trying to figure out if it's a Vav or a Re for half an hour, that's wonderful. That's just what you need in general, but in those moments in particular.

Anyway, I really started to appreciate the labor in the archives and the manuscript libraries which is fortunately not gone nor will it go I imagine. For anyone I guess like yourselves or people listening to us it's not a it's a familiar pleasure it's a familiar pleasure, it's a familiar labor, it's a familiar ordeal, it's all of those things. But having been asking those, what I thought were grand philosophical questions before, it was also an awakening that to do certain things well, you just need to figure out if it's a wah or a rah. It's as simple as that.

What were the grand philosophical questions you went out thinking you were going to answer? Okay, I mean, this will sound silly maybe, but one of the big ones was the binary of idealism versus materialism. That was very big in the late 60s, early 70s in Turkey and in many other places. Marxism of different kinds, of course. There's also the Balkan socialist publications on Ottoman history.

Anti-Marxism, the Cold War era discussions had their own ramifications and configurations in Turkey, but something of that sort, idealism versus materialism was big. Another one was, do we do what we do to understand, or do we do what we do to change the world? That was part one of our interview with Jamal Kafadar. In part two, we'll pick up on that last theme of how history can help us both understand and, hopefully, change the world. We'll talk about Gezi, histories of place, and, don't worry, that plan for a movie about the life of Jim Sultan. Of course, as always, you can find more information, including a bibliography, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. You can also join us on Facebook, where the community of listeners is over 35,000 strong. Thanks for listening to this episode of the

Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care.