Ottoman History Podcast - Refik Halit: A Life of Opposition

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

with Christine Philliou hosted by Sam Dolbee and Brittany White | Refik Halit Karay (1889-1965) was a writer, bureaucrat, and political exile whose life spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Christine Philliou traces his life as well as a genealogy of political opposition more broadly in her new book Turkey: A Past Against History. Following Refik Halit between his exiles in Sinop, Syria, and elsewhere as well as his momentous encounter with Mustafa Kemal in the Telegraph Episode, Philliou sheds light on the complicated transition between empire and nation. She also grapples with the challenge of telling history based on the voluminous and often satirical musings of a figure himself deeply invested in interpreting the past. « Click for More »

He kept a diary, a personal diary in French, and all he wrote in the diary was the weather that day and where he went, like meeting with Khalil Chaudhry or whatever. No, and it's just amazing because it's like he published like all of his supposedly deep inner thoughts and feelings about everything. And then he kept this, I don't know if that was a tradition with French writers or what, but it was kind of fascinating that it was just a very bare-bones account of his life. It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. I'm Brittany White. And that was just Christine Filliou recounting the surprising contents of the personal diary of Rafiq Hanid,

the writer, bureaucrat, and political exile at the center of her new book, Turkey, A Past Against History. Christine Filiu is a professor in the history department at UC Berkeley, and her book is a biography of Rafi Khalid, but also a genealogy of the concept of opposition that he embraced, even if it didn't make it into his personal diary. And that was okay, because he wrote prolifically, short stories, satires, memoirs, and pulp fiction, almost always grappling in some way with the end of the empire and what it meant to be a muhalif, or a dissident, as a part of muhalefet, or opposition. Here's Christine Filiu again summarizing Rafiq Khalid's typically ironic stance on these questions. In all the successive epics of human history, he writes, he would have been in the opposition.

His soul would have been in the body of someone scolding Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit, someone criticizing the construction of Noah's Ark, and someone condemned to the Pharaoh's dungeons, all the way up to the French Revolution where he would have been a Girondin condemned to the guillotine before 9 Thermidor. Before settling into his current body, his soul was in that of a Janissary enemy of Alimdar Pasha, separated from that body during the martyrdom of Selim III in 1807-8, or the time of Alimdar's death, and put into his current body as a muhalif against the CUP. In other words, his identity as a muhalif was something essential to his nature

and would remain constant as the metempsychoses of history went on around him. It was not simply contingent on whether his party was in power or in the opposition at any given point. Only his identity, even his soul if you will, as a muhalif and the muhalif's perennial defeat was to remain fixed. Stay tuned for more on opposition and rafiqadid between empire and nation in a minute when our program continues. I wondered if we could talk about this idea of muhalif and muhalifat first, because this is a book that is doing a lot of things. It's a biography of this figure. It's a history of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. But it's also a genealogy of this

concept. So could you tell us a little bit about this idea of muhalifat? I guess the book is trying to get at that question from the present and the past at the same time. So it's inspired by what I saw as sort of the current set of associations around muhalefet as it's used in contemporary Turkey, which seemed to me, I inferred it to be not just simply opposition and dissent, as we would translate it into English, but this kind of privileged type of dissent and opposition, a kind of public intellectual who's already in the establishment and is speaking truth to power with a limited risk involved. And there's an assumption that at the end of the day, all of those in the opposition and in power will sort of close ranks and are part of the same larger establishment. And I thought that was really

interesting as an outsider watching contemporary discourse. And so I started to look back, and it seems to me that the beginnings of this genealogy of muhalefet go back to this kind of hidden or under-discussed split within the constitutional movement. You know, we know about this from our studies in late Ottoman history, that of course, there's the CUP as this kind of Jacobin organization that comes out of the larger constitutional movement, liberal constitutional movement, and or is a real break from that movement. And the CUP ultimately takes over what was a coalition once the constitutional revolution happens, and the constitution is reinstated. And from that point on, those struggles continued, there was sort of this older, liberal, bureaucratic stratum that perhaps differed from in their worldview and

in their political sensibilities from the CUP. And that ultimately, by the time the official history of the Republic gets constructed, after 1927, those inner fissures are kind of buried. And they then have the luxury of couching the whole history as a struggle between forces of progress and forces of reaction, right? Which is exactly how the CUP wanted to portray things at the time when they were still struggling for hegemony, right? That they were the only ones that were truly constitutionalists. Anyone opposed to them must be opposed to constitutionalism. And so what this muhalefet space and concept and word brings out, I think, is this subtle fissure that was always going on within this elite, that there were constitutionalists that were not adherents of the CUP.

And, you know, what happens to them and what kind of voice are they allowed? And if we take a different tack on the same question, the structural condition of this whole conversation is that there is no sustained and sanctioned opposition party between 1908 and 1950. There are episodic failures. And so there is no clearly defined space to express opposition of this kind. There are a lot of threads there and I think we're going to pick up on a number of them later in the conversation. Muhallafet is something that these people are actively using. It's a term of their own as well as an analytic term that you're using. Is that right?

Yes, and that's what I try to trace that it's used by the Namuk Kemals, by the young Ottomans in the kind of prehistory of the story that I'm tracking. And they use it as a positive value in a kind of hypothetical constitutional regime, right? So they're using it. And then it goes relatively out of use in the Hamidian period. It pops up again in the second Congress of the Opposition in Paris in December of 1907. And there it's used to mean the coalition of opposition forces in favor of restoring the constitution and against opposition to Abdul Hamid's despotism, istibdad, right? So there it's got an other against which it's defined. It's not just a general positive value of disagreement in a liberal order, right? So

then it starts to get more focused. And then the constitutional revolution happens July 1908. And within a couple years, it switches meanings and it starts to be deployed in the vernacular, in the press, everything as implicitly an opposition against the CUP. It's fascinating because there's so much discussion and so much scholarship about the factions and the disagreements in that short, but very complicated second constitutional period. And it is kind of a way to trace the use of the word, the usage of muhalefet, which is what I'm tracing, is a fascinating way to trace the way the CUP was perceived to have really taken over the space of power. You can see it indirectly through the use of the word opposition. Leading up to June 1913, when the muhalefet, which is what they call them, what they're called by the

CUP and what they end up calling themselves is really a specific group of a little over 800 men who are shipped off, deported to Sinop, so as not to cause trouble for the CUP regime, which has now taken over power completely since January of 1913. So then it's a specific group of men, they're liberals, they're in the coterie of Prince Sabahattin, they're in the Liberal Party, and they kind of get very quiet through the duration of the war for many reasons. And then this flowering happens, and it's used, this is what I'm tracing, when I say the flowering happens, the flowering happens in the usage of the word muhalefet after the war is over and the Ottomans are defeated.

And there are these remnants of this Ottoman administration and these liberals who still seem to think they can make it work somehow under British protection or whatever. They're still working for the Ottoman state. space to look back on the second constitutional period and connect it with the present and really start to create a historical narrative of muhalifat, which is like an imagination and a history of muhalifat, which is the first time that that's happening in the story. I'm tracing the usages of the word. The heart of this genealogy of opposition is the life of Refik Halit. this genealogy of opposition is the life of Rafi Khalid. So choosing carefully who would be our spokesperson and guide through this story, I wanted to show how this genealogy of Mujallifat is muddy. It's got broken. It's got some dead ends. It's got just these kind of disjunctures going on. There was this moment in the armistice period before the national victory, this flowering of a discourse about muhalefet. That is fascinating to me.

And that gets truncated with the national victory. And so that's one of these moments of disjuncture. And it's just this fascinating moment when we see this kind of burgeoning construction or this burgeoning almost ideology and profile archetype of a muhalif as a kind of tragic hero, right? Who's kind of a martyr, but can't give up because he's so principled, but he knows it's hopeless, right? And that, to bring it back to how I started with this contemporary discussion is I did feel like there's this undercurrent of that in this profile of the muhalif today in that, you know, it's hopeless in the end. Like there are these muhalifs, they go to prison sometimes, they speak truth to power, they suffer these things, but it doesn't ever actually

add up to achieving a kind of sanctioned space for opposition or acceptance of disagreement, let's say, between those in power and those who are still in the circle of power, but are not actually in power. What do we know about Rafiq Halid in his life? And how can we contextualize him? And how did he come to be involved in politics in the first place? Yes, that's a great question. And I think that he is a bit of an idiosyncratic choice. Probably if I'd been born and raised and educated in Turkey, I might not have chosen him as the sinecto he of muhalefets because he's not actually leading an opposition party. He's not an opposition figure in that sense. But what I found so interesting about him is that perhaps because he's in this

kind of Francophile, Anglophile, liberal tradition, he has that kind of elitist, aristocratic, gentlemanly profile of someone who has a civic responsibility to be engaged in politics, in political conversations and political discourse, even if he doesn't have ambitions to run the country or to have formal political office. And so that also I found to be a very interesting space that he saw himself as a writer, first and foremost, but as a writer, and you know, one of his early idols was Guy de Maupassant, the short story writer in France, who was very passé by the time Réfi Khalid was growing up. But apparently, in sort of extra European context, de Maupassant had this long afterlife

and was very popular. So Réfi Khalid was very influenced by him, by Victor Hugo, right? That like the role of the writer should be a kind of social critic and a political actor in a way, almost like a Saeedian intellectual in a funny kind of way. He got into politics in the second constitutional period when it was cool to do so, obviously. And he got into satire when there was a flood of satire. It was au courant, right, at that moment. So he didn't do anything so crazy or so out of the ordinary, but he was really good at it. His nom de plume was the porcupine because of the sharp quills, right, his sharp pen. And it was very sharp.

So he got into politics in these kind of oblique ways. He got into politics in these kind of oblique ways. I wonder, could you talk about where those sharp quills were pointed in that beginning stage when he's like 20 years old, right? Well, what gets him exiled or deported to Sinop is the sharp quills directed at Talat Pasha. And there it is very emblematic in that it's just a joke, in quotes, that he pokes fun at Talat Pasha's kind of humble Balkan origins in a story he writes. It's kind of a tongue in cheek story called Advice to the Chinese Constitutionalists. Right. 1911, the Chinese constitutional revolution happens. And he's writing this hypothetical note of a memo of advice to them about his experience, their experience with constitutionalism over the last three years. And so he has these kind of thinly veiled jibes's a simple joke, but that really cuts to the quick of the class conflict between the CUP types who are from the Balkans and are kind of interlopers into this Ottoman aristocracy or pseudo aristocracy and these Rafiqa types who are these dandies, these fops, right, these westernized gentlemen with their French education and their bureaucratic families,

right, that gets him, that gets him exiled. And aside from that, in that period, he's poking fun at like, pretty much what everyone is, the kind of the contradictions and the hypocrisies of constitutionalism and like mass politics and the parliament. He has a whole satirical thing that he writes in the style of Naima of the 18th century Ottoman chronicler. That's like the epic of the, in the time of the parliamentarians, right? So it's almost like what we might call a soap opera about what's happening in the parliament. So he's got that slightly distanced gaze onto constitutionalism rather than being invested in one particular faction. Although I should say that if you then read between the lines and you consider what he doesn't write about,

you see that he actually does have specific partisan affiliations and patronage networks that he's part of and that he really shows deference to. For instance, he does not write about the defeat in the Balkan War, which is fascinating for those of us who've read all of the scholarship on that period, because what we're led to believe is it was this like universal tragedy that precipitated a kind of radicalization and this culture of defeat, right, by Eyal Gino, the book. And that seems to very well have been true for the CUP and the masses that they were mobilizing, but for the opposition who happened to have been in power at that moment, another interesting feature of the word muhalefet, that they identify as muhalefet even when they're in power. So they, you know, he wouldn't write about that, because that was the defeat of the party. It was on them that that defeat happened. So he's not going to go and

bemoan what happened to the Balkan Muslims, right? Because it makes his side look bad. So that also took me a while to notice that, oh, there are things that he's not writing about that indicate a lot, right? You mentioned he's sent to Sinop with a bunch of other dissidents, which I think is an interesting choice, because why would you send all the dissidents to the same place where they can kind of congregate and share ideas? Can you tell us about how his political views were shaped during that time? Yes, it must have been a fascinating moment. It was a very heterogeneous group. It was an open

air exile, right? So they could all just like hang out wherever they wanted to hang out during the day. And they had to like check in with the police each day or something. And he's funny about his descriptions, again, years later, his descriptions of it. So that's filtered through whatever it's filtered through. But he sort of tells us like it was at the same time, it was a fun time because Sinop was this little port town with these Greek tavernas and all of that. And it was like, difficult to be away from home and isolating and and he couldn't he just missed home and so there were these a lot of conflicting descriptions about it and i'm sure both sides are true and the group is quickly reduced drastically from over 800 to like 15 shortly after the war starts in 14 most of those guys get pardoned and get let back to Istanbul for whatever reason.

I guess they're no longer a danger or something. And it's fascinating that he, along with only 15 others, has to stick it out in Anatolia. In Chorum first from the summer of 15 until the summer of 16. And then in Ankara for a few months, he goes on his own. And then Bilecik from late 16 until early 18. Like, is he just living on family money in these places of exile? You know, we'll get to Syria later. But yeah, that's funny. That was the other thing his granddaughter and daughter-in-law told me is that he used to pride himself on the fact that he never worked a day in his life.

Meaning he earned any money he earned was either his family money, which he didn't earn, or he earned it from his writing. So that tells you something about his sensibilities and his elitism, right? And yeah, so in Sinop, he can, and I did find this in the Ottoman documents that he did continue to collect his salary. So he was a bureaucrat at these few brief moments in his life, right? 1909 until the purges happen and that's over. He was like a little intern guy, a clerk. And then January 1913, like days before the coup, the sublime port, the storming of the sublime port happens, right? And then he's eliminated from his position. He goes to live in his family villa on the Asian side, but he continues to collect his salary through the war. There are documents where he's like, you know, his

representative, his vekil is like petitioning for a raise or whatever for him. So he has a sinecure. I don't know. I don't actually know how if that money was enough for him to survive. But like he collected a salary, his father sent him money. And then during the armistice period, he must have he was earning money as an editor and a writer and all of that. And of course, he must have gotten a salary as the as the paytay as the telegraph director. And yeah, and then Syria is a different story, which we can talk about. But yeah, so he never worked a day in his life, supposedly. And so he has this itinerary throughout Anatolia for the war. And it's very hard to tell what he actually experienced during those years. He writes very little. And what he does write is this kind of social realist style, almost like Dimo Pessant in the countryside, because he's writing about peasants that he sees around him. And in the one case that I show, it's a story about Sinop, about this encounter between these Istanbul gentlemen from Sinop and

these Greek girls of the town. And so he's writing about what he sees around him. And that's great, but he's not engaging in politics with a big P. His reflections back, he picks out, for instance, the fire of Ankara in the fall, late summer, early fall of 1916, which he's an eyewitness to, and he survives it. Doesn't seem to write about it at the time. Again, it's all about what gets activated later. He writes about it in August of 1921 in the midst of the Turkish War of Independence and when the conflict is really heating up. And he writes about it as a way to critique the national movement by critiquing the CUP government that possibly got the fire to get started in 1916 in Ancarta. So he's constantly playing with history and with narrative. But it's very hard to reconstruct what he must have been thinking or experiencing at the time. Because he's so good at convincing you later about what he thought and felt back then. I mean, I guess I'm curious, were there points when you were doing this research and writing this, where you were especially frustrated with this dilemma?

It's almost as if we don't see anything happening in his life outside of a particular political framing, or he's just making fun of stuff. Like, is there more? His early life, it's all a matter of narrative and representation. We can't even really get under there to get the primary sources about what actually was going on during those years. All we can get are the reflections and the kind of ex post facto narratives. Yeah, which he was extremely good at. So yeah, I mean, maybe there are kind of objectives. I did find some Ottoman documents about his whereabouts, like I could

confirm that he got transferred to Ankara at this time, and this person signed it. And then he went, you know, I can confirm all of his itinerary and everything. But in terms of the subjective experience, it is so hard, especially when he looks back on his time in Ankara, and it was brief, it was a couple months, and I make quite a bit of it in the chapter on the war and his exile is that he had maybe, question mark, a close relationship with Dr. Rashid, who, you know, is anything but an opposition figure, right? He has some problems with the CUP at that moment for not because he's opposed to the genocide. He's one of the big, like big perpetrators of the genocide, right? And so

you would think that they wouldn't be good friends. But the way he talks about the friendship, it's almost like he goes a little too far. He's like a little too obsequious about Dr. Rashid and a little too careful to point out what a good friendship they had. Very unclear if he's saying it ironically, if he's telling us that it was an instrumental friendship, which, of course, it must be also that because Dr. Rashid had the power to help him get back to Istanbul, right? So there's so many levels to it. And he's so good at irony. And I think people reading his work at the time, like in the Armistice period would have understood all those levels of irony.

But so much of it is lost to me that was born decades later, right? And it's not from that context. So, yeah, it's very frustrating. And I think there's still so much to be told about it. I wrote the whole first draft and I realized that I was completely fooled by Riffey Collier because he's such an amazing writer. He wrote continuous, he was constantly reframing the recent past, right? That's starting in like 1919 and after. And I was taking his writing at face value.

And so he's writing, let's say in 1919 or 1940 about 1909. And I was assuming that those texts were really about 1909. And I was assuming that those texts were really about 1909, when actually, as we know, as historians, History 101, those texts are really about the time he's writing in. So once I started to separate out how he was using muhalefet and how he was framing the narrative at different points in time, a whole different story started to emerge about what this trajectory was of muhalefet and these disjunctures. So a word of caution to all of the history students out there. Don't forget History 101.

Besides being known for his pointed satire, Rafiq Khalid is also often referred to as hain or traitor, which stems from his short tenure as the director of the Telegraph Service or PTT and a significant run-in with Mustafa Kemal in the nationalist independence movement. He got back from exile in the winter of 1918 and then war ended in the fall and he was living on the campus of Robert College. He was teaching Turkish there. So he was rubbing elbows with Dr. Adnan Adivar, Halide Edip Adivar, right? And these intellectuals.

And he was waiting at the ferry with Dr. Adnan one day in the spring of 1919 when the Damat Ferit Pasha cabinet was reinstated, right? In March or April, Dr. Adnan was like, hey, you'd be a really good candidate for the PTT, for the telegraph director, like, and Ali Kemal, who had been his patron and friend in the months before that was appointed interior minister. And so like, there was definitely an old boys network, which shouldn't be surprising. There's no claim to like egalitarian anything at that moment. So he he threw these personal connections, he got this post, and it had been vacant. He gives us all these details about how the post had been vacant for like a year. And so

he walked in and it was just there was no telegraph director. It sounds crazy. It couldn't have been a year because that would mean during the war, but it was a long time. And he found stacks and stacks of journal, right, of like the spy reports and everything that were still happening. So we're in the summer of 1919. And Mustafa Kemal has arrived in Samsun, which is the classic starting point of Nutuk, the official history of the War of Independence, written by Mustafa Kemal himself. May 19, 1919, he arrives in Samsun with an official mission from the Ottoman government to put down the brigandage of the Greek and the Armenians in the area. This then turns into him taking up the mantle of the national resistance movement against foreign occupation. And he puts out a call.

There were scattered local resistance movements in the West, in the Izmir area and in the East. And he puts out a call called the Amasya Protocol or the Amasya Circular, calling for the unification, the mobilization of these movements. And the first step is to publicize this and circulate this information. In order to do this, the telegraph is the necessary means of communication. Rafi Khalid himself finds himself at the telegraph office, directing the telegraph office in Istanbul for the Ottoman government under British occupation. And he faithfully executes his orders given from Ali Kemal, the interior minister, and above him from the British to reject that protocol, that amasia

circular, and to forbid telegraph operators throughout Anatolia from accepting or circulating this and any correspondence from Mustafa Kemal. Ultimately, as the standoff escalates, it results in their call for his arrest. So their his resignation, their call for his resignation, his resignation, their call for his arrest, and he's a renegade, officially in the eyes of the Ottoman government. resignation, his resignation, their call for his arrest, and he's a renegade, officially, in the eyes of the Ottoman government. The definition of Mustafa Kemal as renegade, in conjunction with what is known as the Telegraph episode, would deeply shape Rafi Khalid's life and the political trajectory of Muhammed Afet. Now, Rafi Khalid was in the right or the wrong

place at the wrong time as the person who had to be the face of rejection and opposition against Mustafa Kemal. Of course, what happened after is the Congress of the Eastern resistance movements in Erzurum later that summer, and then in late September of all of the resistance movements East and West in Sivas. And that becomes the protocol, that becomes the beginnings of the Misaka Mili and the National Independence Movement. It seems like a rather trivial episode in a sense because it's not an actual battle.

It's a personal standoff. We can talk about it as, you know, happenstance in a way that it was these two that opposed each other at that moment. But if we look a little deeper at the way that each of them depicts it after the fact, they do sort of see eye to eye that it was a crossing of the Rubicon in the sense that it was this moment when, from the Ottoman point of view, or Rafi Khalid's point of view, it was an irreversible split between this national movement and formal Ottoman sovereignty.

From Mustafa Kemal's perspective and from the emergent Turkish nation's perspective, it was an irreversible breach, an irreversible betrayal of the national will represented by, embodied by Mustafa Kemal himself. And from that point on, in Mustafa Kemal's eyes, and in the national movement's eyes, their allegiance was only to the Sultan, not to anyone under his government. So this was a break. For Muhalefet, this is important because it is this last moment of the concept, the kind of space of meaning of muhalefet against the CUP and the remnants of the CUP. And from that point on to oppose the nationalists has both continuities from the

opposition against the CUP, because many, it's mostly the same people. It's an ever shrinking group, because many of these intellectuals and statesmen and bureaucrats are increasingly going onto the side of Ankara and the nationalists. But those who are staying behind are remnants of that old space of muhalifat. And as the national government in Ankara, the presumptive national government, as they gain momentum and then they become the actual national government. These muhalifs are actually out of this new configuration of sovereignty. And so they really are national traitors, because they are opposing what is being configured as the nation. And so it's a very complex moment. And it kind of shows the intricate moves, like discursive moves, the document,

like the archival moves, the military moves are just one level of this of what it meant to go from Ottoman to Turkish. It wasn't just, you know, we elide it, we say, oh, from empire to nation state, as if it's some like obvious and self explanexplanatory thing. It was actually extremely complicated and it came down to these little moments and these documents that they both reproduce overwhelmingly in Rafiq Ali in his memoirs and then Mustafa Kemal in Nutuk. It's very important that they give the verbatim texts

of these telegrams that went back and forth. And that is fascinating, because you can also see how they're part of the same culture of bureaucracy and the written word, right? Rifi Khalid is writing or not writing in Sinope and all of these places for so long, and in this kind of comfortable exile. And then all of a sudden he's in the position where this decision is forced upon him. And it's such a consequential decision. It's like almost a decade of nothing. And then this incredibly consequential bureaucratic that then affects the next 20 years of just kind of sitting around writing stuff.

Yes. And what's interesting is that when he writes about this, these moments in his memoir, he is very upfront and frank about the fact that his opposition was fueled in large part by this incredible anger and resentment that he had been exiled for those however many years during their 1935 years in Anatolia for the war, because of these people. And so he sees these nationalists, and Ali Kemal sees them too, as simply unionists in disguise. Like they're, let's, you know, let's be serious people, right? These are the same people. And this is what's fascinating to me too, is that the party line, the official line, obviously, until Eric Zuhra came along, and then many Turkish scholars after that too, was that there's not that obvious continuity. It's

a different state. At the time, as we see from these writings, their opposition saw them as one and the same kind of clique and the same political culture and everything. The non-Muslim minority saw them as one and the same. And the British, of course, saw them as one and the same. Because the British saw them as one and the same. And the British, of course, saw them as one and the same. Because the British saw them as one and the same, it also then made it very easy for the Turkish nation, even if maybe the CUP or remnants of the CUP were in very important places in that new nation, they could really dismiss that accusation and say like, oh, they're just saying that because they didn't understand. And of course, it's not the same people. But when you actually look at the time when everybody else is saying it, except for the people themselves who are denying it, it really starts to look different.

And the continuity looks very complex. And it makes the early years of the Republic look very different. If you think about the Telegraph episode as like that little watershed turning point that symbolizes so much, For several years after that, there's this sorting that's going on, bargains, negotiations, figuring out how to get Istanbul on board because it's a no-go zone in the first couple years of the republic. There's a lot of opposition for various reasons. So the whole formation of the republic really does start to look very different from that perspective. In 1922, after the nationalist forces arrived in Istanbul and expelled the remaining occupying armies, Rafik Halit, fearing for his life, chose exile.

He fled to Beirut during the spring of 1923 before eventually moving on to Syria. Almost immediately, he began to write his account of the war. And what's fascinating is that memoir is so full of details. Every encounter he has, he has to back up and tell you how he met that person before the war and whose grandson they were. And all this stands in such stark contrast to Nutuk, where everything starts May 19th, 1919. Before that, swept away, we're on a tabula rasa, you don't talk about what people were doing during the war and that, right? So that in and of itself is a fascinating contrast. It takes him several years to change his orientation,

I suppose. And you could, again, he is a bit of an opportunist in that he's engaging in muhalefet until about 1927-28, when he has what he calls it a change of convictions, persuaded by his new wife who wants to go back to Istanbul. And so he's like, okay, maybe the Republic isn't so bad anyway. So it still takes him 10 more years to get back in the good graces and to kind of engineer a situation where he can be let back in. And I argue that the occasion for this is his involvement in the Hatay-Alexandretta dispute between Turkey and Syria, which is a fascinating space, this kind of liminal space that Sarah Shields has written about, but it generally gets very little attention as sort of an event within, you know, with its own internal dynamics and social dynamics. And so he was, being in Aleppo, he was very close to Hatay and he would go all

the time because it wasn't within the Turkish state, but there were a lot of Turkish speakers there. So he was already cultivating relationships there, let's say. And so when the Hatay dispute escalated in the mid 30s, he was well positioned. So it turned from a space where muhalifs could be kind of milling around like a little Wild West kind of situation to a space where one could prove allegiance to this kind of national unity and get that territory for Turkey. So he managed to sort of swoop in in this last episode for Turkish irredentism, right, and prove his loyalty and his worthiness with the stories, with the essays that he wrote and the polemical, you know, he was

arguing against Zakiye Arsuzi on the Syrian side, one of the founders of the Ba'ath Party, right? And so he was one of the spokespeople for the Turkish side. So he proved his loyalty, ingratiated himself, got back in, in June of 1938. And that was quite, quite a reversal. And I opened that chapter with the telegram that he wrote in response to Tan newspaper asking him how he felt to be returning to Turkey. And it's just a perfectly exemplary piece of Kemalist hagiography, I suppose, right? It's incredible pan to this new miraculous Turkish Republic, which is fascinating given his past. I think you say this in the book, even as you're reading it, you're not totally sure whether to believe it. It seems a little too rich, almost. He lays it on really thick. Yes. And that's it's again, with him,

you just never quite know. I mean, clearly, there were reasons he needed to be taken seriously in those claims at that moment, right? He was proving trying to prove his loyalty in order to go back home. I don't know, it just brings up this question of like, how can you ever say? And then it makes you wonder about all the other people who remained formally loyal to the national movement and the Republic through all these years. What were they actually thinking? Who knows, right? And they probably didn't put it down on paper. Like so many of the stories that he writes, like whether social realist or satirical, they're so morbid. Various plots hinge on unexpected death, ironic death, intentional death, failed attempts at death. And it seems like this bizarre thing where he's at once, he's satirical and not serious. He's experiencing the

Balkan Wars, the First World War, genocide, ethnic cleansing of that time period. And he's not, you know, making straightforward political pronouncements about it. But he's constantly writing about it. I don't know if you have thoughts about that. Or if you just wanted to talk in general about the challenges of understanding this kind of satirical literary production as a gloss for politics or the limits of that? That's really a great question. I had not actually noticed that even though I was translating and discussing all of these stories, but you're right. And what I would say is, I think that the age he lived in involved so much loss and so much mourning, right, and so much death, as you pointed out,

that it is kind of inevitable. And I know that one of the books in his correspondence with Rzatev Fik, which was published as a volume, and is I benefited from greatly in this book, and it's amazing the kinds of things they discuss. And one of the things he mentions reading while he's in exile is this book by a Polish author, actually, I have right here, because I can't remember the author's name, Quo Vadis. And it's all about, it's Henrikh Sinkiewicz. And it was very popular at the time, it was translated into 20 different languages. It was like a huge sensation of kind of middlebrow literature, which is perfect, because that's kind of what Rifi Kadi was.

And it's all about the fall of the Roman Empire. It's this long kind of epic of these particular people and the empire is falling apart and whatever. And that's where I would go with that question is like he really felt probably like that's the kind of time he was living in. And he was like this. How many hundred years years 600 year empire is literally falling apart, it's over. And it's kind of and that's why I think the play that I kind of opened the whole project with about this lapse of memory, this amnesia, this lapse of memory between 1908 and 1929 is so telling, because it's almost too much to bear, like remembering it all and

telling it all and like really detailing the disintegration of it all is it's it's too much. And so most people and this is this is the solution the Republic offers is like, OK, just forget it. Just let's just forget it. We're going to move on. It's a clean slate because we can't process this. We can't adjudicate the war crimes. We're not going to. We don't want to. And we're just not going to deal. And so that's what was going on around him.

And I think that that's one of the things that makes him so remarkable as a writer is that he refused to just block it out. remarkable as a writer is that he refused to just block it out. And so, so your observation is really great that like, he's gonna write about it, and it's gonna involve death, like in a lot of different forms and a lot of different settings, and in jokes and in serious things and in tragedy, right? In all different genres, it's going to involve death, because that's really, that's what was he was surrounded by, right? And even in the 50s, when he's still writing about this Ottoman past in a kind of fanciful, very, it's still, the conflict becomes simplified into like, oh, is this a past to be proud of? Is this like a imperial, regal, royal past that we should be talking about? Or is this shameful? Is it this

dark, horrific, corrupt period? And often it's played out in women, of course, like, is she a princess or is she a whore, right? So is that past something to be admired? Or is it something to be ashamed of? And that's kind of what we're left with decades later of like, you know, it says a lot about Occupy that now they pick up with that past and they can do anything they want with it because it's been put aside for so long. By the mid-20th century, Refik Halid's position had changed, but so too had the political possibilities in Turkey more generally. The 50s is a key period for this because of this Democrat Party, right? because of this Democrat Party, right?

That the leaders of that, Jalal Bayar, right? Some of these guys were all from that older generation, from Teşkilat-ı Masusa, from CUP, from everything starting from the beginning. And Adnan Menderes, the younger. So there's this populist face to it. And then there's this face of continuity from the late Ottoman period and constitutionalism.

There was that imagination of muhalefet that woke up again from the late Ottoman period and constitutionalism. There was that imagination of muhalefet that woke up again from the late 40s, especially 1950 on, that had gone to sleep, kind of, that it woke up briefly from 1919 to 1922, and Rafiq Ali kind of had that flowering of stories about muhalefet. And then it kind of went to sleep. People used the word in the Republic, obviously, in different ways, although in that new context. But then in the 50s, it really became romanticized in a new way. And that historical continuity of muhalifat started to get connected up. So I think that that's an explanation for why now there is a kind of a leftist, secularist muhalifat.

a kind of a leftist secularist muhalefet, like some very prominent intellectuals are kind of fit this profile of a muhalif, right? And then there's AKP. And like Erdogan himself, they see themselves as muhalefets, even though they have been in power for 20 years, which is fascinating, a fascinating statement about this word, and how kaleidoscopic it is for modern Turkey, that they really see themselves as still fighting the ghosts or the actual descendants of CUP and these, you know, secular nationalists. And so that whole configuration still within Turkey is really colored by this history or shaped by this earlier history. So I didn't play out completely what happens after 1960 to connect it up with right now, but I kind of tried to connect enough dots to show that it is actually the prehistory for the discursive framework of

what goes on now in Turkey. I was really struck by the passage toward the end where you mentioned stumbling across a copy of, I think it was one of his novels in an antiquarian bookstore in Istanbul and finding these notes in it and what that revealed to you. Yeah, so I found an original autographed copy of Bir İçim Su, A Tall Drink of Water, right, which was actually a collection of stories that he wrote when he was in Syria. And it was published in Ottoman characters, even though it was 1930. So it was a couple years after the alphabet changed, but they continued. Interestingly, it's Armenian Turkophone presses in Aleppo, who are continuing to publish in Ottoman because they can because they're outside of Turkey. So it's this original in Ottoman. And in the front flap is a

dedication handwritten by him in Ottoman from the early 50s. Was it the early or the mid 50s? I can't recall the exact date now. Written to the daughter of, at the time, someone who was a prominent journalist and I believe an MP of kind of this emergent Democrat Party contingent, right? It was fascinating to me that he, you know, by that point, he had become, I don't know, mainstream, or he was such an elder, he was harmless. Everyone must have remembered him from their younger days, but he wasn't threatening anyone anymore. He had bought into the Republic. Clearly, it had wheels. It was a viable state by the 50s. It was indisputable, right, that it was working. And, you know, he was part of this circle of journalists. And then this woman who was a young woman when he wrote this dedication to her,

I don't know what the nature of their relationship was, or she was just the daughter of his friend, or if they had some friendship themselves. But she then went on to become, she's Selma Ashworth, Selma Jochar, who married a British guy named Ashworth. And then she became a kind of a cult figure. She became a Turkish Communist Party, a Communist Party operative. She was living in London, and she would make secret trips to East Germany and was helping to broadcast the Turkish language radio from the Eastern Bloc. She was one of the founders, apparently, of Amnesty International for Turkey. And she so she was like, you know, kind of the link to that next that post 1960. We might call it muhalefet. We might call it part of the global left, right? The radical left. And it's just fascinating that, you know, Rafi Khalid, who was never a socialist or a radical of any kind,

I wouldn't ever pretend to make that argument. But that next generation did have these other trajectories that led to that in a different world, right? In this world of Cold War politics. Yeah. Was this project about Rafiandit from the beginning? Is there an origin story here? My first book, as I'm sure you know, was about the early to mid-19th century and methodologically was kind of similar to this

in that I took a person's life and trajectory and used it as a lens onto a very chaotic period of when there wasn't really much continuity of structures or ideas or anything. And so all the, so I sort of grabbed onto this one line of continuity of a person's life who was situated at the edge of the center, right? Who was situated at once very close to power and yet totally shut out of power because he was Christian, right? And I wonder what the end end of the empire would look like from that perspective. And so it's not going to be an Ottoman Greek at that point in time, because the whole situation had shifted. So in an interesting way, as I started to read the works of Rafi Khalid, starting with Delhi,

which I was just fascinated by, who would write that in 1929, like at the works of Rafiq Khalid, starting with Delhi, which I was just fascinated by, who would write that in 1929, like at the height of Kemalism and the hegemony of Mustafa Kemal, someone sitting and writing a satire of like, so that was like the initial wonder of this whole thing. And then as I started to read more, I thought, well, he actually, he does embody a similar kind of vantage point in that he is very close to power, He was of the privileged class. And yet, because of the way things unfold and the way they shake out and the CUP, who were interlopers, end up taking over the political center, he then gets shut out of power. So he has this unique perspective that he's very, he has this intimate relationship with power and can tell us what was happening and what it looked like. But he wasn't a convert. He wasn't like from within and he's not going to give

us the party line about what was going on. So I felt that it was much more interesting and complicated than someone even like Halide Adip, who was brilliant and complicated and everything. She was on board with the nationalist project in a way that he was not at the beginning. So that, I guess, would be the origin story is that I see this as kind of a sequel of the first book, but of a very different nature in a way. Yeah, I was wondering about that, like lives as microcosms for broader patterns. And it's such a compelling structure for telling these complicated stories. Yeah. And I think it does reflect in microcosm the real contradictions and paradoxes of Ottoman history in that last century, in that the Ottoman state, like we talk about, okay, the Ottoman state,

they had Tanzimat, then they had absolutism, then they had second, you know, brief constitutionalism, second constitution, as if the empire was one thing, as if the state was one thing. And actually, it was merged together with European great power states through the Tanzimat and after. So it's kind of inseparable from that, which means someone like Rafiq Ali, who's collaborating with the British, he's simply doing what the Ottomans had been doing since the previous century. It wasn't some crazy, like treasonous sudden act or turnaround. It was a continuity. But because the nationalists had to position themselves in a way

and position the others in another way, and they had to really repudiate the Ottomans, that's how they could do it, right? And so to me, it just is still a biography of the empire, because this is what happens to the empire, the empire becomes the opposition. As people talk about this book, and even the last book, because they're biographies, it's easy to represent them as just biographies and I guess I hope that people also take away that there is an analytical argument going on in the book and so the biography is the vehicle for that I just really hope it generates discussion about what muhalefet is

what opposition is and what power is and how it's changing in the 20th century because that was really what I wanted to understand and I wanted to really understand the intellectual and emotional experience of this incredible dislocation and violence and transition and falling apart of one huge state and the building up of another and so I just really wanted to get down to the granular level and see what that felt like for a thinking person who was not necessarily attached to partisan viewpoints. And I guess also just to say that, I mean, to explain the subtitle, because I realized that it's not self-explanatory, because I thought it was to me, it's self-explanatory, that like a past to me it's self-explanatory that like a past against

history what I'm trying to say with that is that history is all about stories and narratives right and there's a history with a big h in Turkey and that's you know an oversimplification but it's it's also true that until pretty recently there was one history and history with a small h is stories that we can make about the past and Rafiq Khalid was just drowning in the past and stories and so I find that to be just such a significant counterpoint to the ahistorical history with a capital h that That this, like this is history. This is like the teeming details and the chaos and the challenge of putting together stories and some story line that was meaningful and made sense through all of these changes, right?

And that is an act of muhalefet, as we see, because the counter stories and memoirs to Nutuk don't even begin until the 50s. The narrative muhalefets is part and parcel of this political arena. That's Christine Filyu. Her book is Turkey, A Past Against History, out now with University of California Press. Of course, as always, you can find more information about the book, 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.

That's it for this episode until next time take care