On the Appropriation of Lexicographic Methods of Kemālpaşazāde’s (1468–1534) Glossary Daḳāyiḳu l-ḥaḳāyiḳ

The glossary Daḳāyiḳu l-ḥaḳāyiḳ by Kemālpaşazāde is a valuable lexicological work that demonstrates the appropriation of medieval lexicographic methodologies as a means of spreading knowledge of the Persian language in the Transottoman realm. The article aims to analyse this Persian-Ottoman Turkish philological text based on the Arabic and Persian lexicographic traditions of the Early Modern period. The advanced approaches to morphological, lexical and semantic analysis of Persian can be witnessed when examining the Persian word units in the glossary. The study of the methods of the glossary attests to the prestigious status of the Persian language in the Ottoman Empire at a time when Turkish was strengthening its multi-faceted positions. Taking into account the linguistic analysis methods that were available in the sixteenth century, contemporary philological research is suggesting new etymologies for some Persian words and introduces novel lemmata, which make their first-time appearance in Persian vocabulary.

Caught between Two Empires: The Teaching of Persian in Bosnia at the Time of Transition from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian Rule

This article considers the presence of Persian within the educational system of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the westernmost frontier of the ‘Persianate world’, between the 1860s and the first decade of 1900. Based on a survey of primary sources, such as the first journals introduced in Bosnia by the Ottoman administration, I show that the introduction of new educational establishments in the 1860s and 1870s brought a mass expansion of the teaching of Persian in Bosnia. Even after the Austro-Hungarian occupation of 1878, Persian continued to be taught in old and some newly founded schools. However, the following decades saw a lively debate on the teaching of Persian, highlighting the redundancy of this language in a new social and cultural context. As a result, Persian was completely removed from Bosnian schools at the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to presenting new knowledge about the spread of Persian in the Balkans, and the instruction of foreign languages in the Ottoman Empire, I intend to demonstrate here that a similar process of withdrawing and removing Persian from the educational system was occurring in Habsburg Bosnia simultaneously with the decline of Persian in British India.

Competing Intellectual Currents within Modern Turkish Conservatism: The Bergsonian Connection

The philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) emerged during a critical juncture of European history as a reaction to the predominance of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism. Essentially, it strived to contest the peculiar convictions of these intellectual traditions and reintroduce the primacy of creativity, transcendence and human agency. As such, its influence had travelled across time and place. In modern Turkey, the thought of Bergson particularly influenced a group of conservative literati including İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978), Peyami Safa (1899-1961), Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1901-1974) and Mustafa Şekip Tunç (1886-1958). For these intellectuals, Bergson represented the face of the ‘Other West’ and they appropriated his ideas with the aim of transforming the starkly positivist and rationalist disposition of Kemalism while being firmly committed to the ideals of the Modern Turkish Republic. On a different side of Turkey’s intellectual spectrum, another figure also appealed to Bergson and his philosophy. It was Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983), who fiercely dissented the project of the republic for its pro-Western foundations and reconceptualized Islam as a totalizing ideology. Hence, through a critical cross-reading of different primary and secondary sources, the present article contrasts these competing currents of Turkish conservatism, their appropriations of Bergsonian philosophy and attitudes toward their society’s experience of the Turkish revolution and modernity.

“We Didn’t Forget to Take Our Shoes Off at the Door Just Because We Were Punks”: The Early Years of Punk in Turkey

The proposed contribution focuses on an analysis of the debut of punk in Turkey within a framing that highlights its contexts and peculiarities. Considering punk not only as a musical genre but also as an underground culture with wider socio-political trends and implications, this study aims to assess, more broadly, the characteristics of this phenomenon during the years of its initial stages in the Turkish scene. Punk in Turkey started to appear at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, at first involving young people who had grown up and been socialized in political terms during a decade characterized by the extreme social consequences of the 12th September coup d’état. As a more general phenomenon, through the study of punk in this local form, it is possible to reconsider the strategies and needs of expression of antagonism and social malaise of a specific generation which, as in the case of Turkey, has usually been referred to as uninterested in socio-political dynamics. Although the local punk scene has attracted only limited attention to date, this case study offers a new perspective to rethink deeply the research approaches which consider generational phenomena as a homogeneous perspective, as well as the boundaries that shape and confine the expression of dissent.