Monday, 24 May 2004

"HISTORICAL CHANGES OF PARADIGMS IN THE WESTERN IMAGE OF THE TURKS - FROM

A THEOLOGY OF THE INFERNO TO LECTURING DEMOCRACY".

1. INTRODUCTION

On 1st April 2004, in the plenary session of the European Parliament in

Strasbourg an unusually long debate of more than two hours dealt with the progress of

Turkey towards accession to the European Union. More than 40 representatives took the

floor. Most speakers underlined that Turkey had not made enough steps towards

democratisation, while others said that anyway this country was too different from the

rest of Europe to envisage its accession to the Union. At the end of the debate, a report

was adopted by 211 votes in favour, 84 against, and an unusual number of abstentions

(46), followed by an unusual number of vote explanations (13). These results reflect the

division of opinion within the political groups of this institution.

Table 1. Attitude of political groups in the European Parliament on Turkey

Political Groups Attitudes

GUE (Communist)

PSE (Socialists)

GREENS

Ok for accession provided Copenhagen criteria are fully implemented:

- reducing the role of the military - implementation of human rights (free Leyla Zana; freedom for Kurdish culture; rule of law; authorise all political parties) - improving the situation of women (abolish exemption of crimes of honour) - recognition of the Armenian genocide

ELDR (Liberals)

British Conservatives; Finnish, Spanish and Italian PPE

OK for accession; secularism (Kemalism) is an advantage

Dutch, French, German and Austrian PPE

EDD (Hunters etc.); UEN (Pasqua), some far-right parties (Le Pen, Vlaamse Blok, Lega Nord)

Against accession of Turkey: geographically, historically and culturally not European; should reform its philosophical values before joining (Oostlander); too big a population; accession “against nature” (Lang, Front National)

Note. The following MEPs expressed their views orally, or by written statements, :

GUE : Ainardi (F), Korakas (GR); written statement by Bordes, Cauquil and Laguiller (F), Figueiredo (P),

Meijer (NL)

PSE: Ettl (AT), Mrs Karamanou (GR), Swoboda (AT), Katiforis (GR), Lalumière (F), Leinen (D),

Paasilinna (FL), Ceyhun (D), Roure (F), Goebbels (L), Dehousse (B)Greens : Lagendijk (NL), Wyn (UK);

written statement by Mrs Maes (B) Liberals : Olsson (Sweden), Duff (UK), Vallvé (ES), Andreasen (DK), Nordmann (F), Van Hecke (B),

Maaten (NL)

PPE: Van Orden (UK), Elles (UK); Suominen (FL), Gutierrez-Cortines (ES)

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PPE: Smet (B), Sommer (D), Brok (D)1, Ferber (D) , Stenzel (AT), Langen (D), Ebner (I from Bolzano),

Schleicher (D), Bourlanges (F)2, Posselt (D) ; written statement by Mrs Grossetête (F), Sacredeus (S), Mrs

Vlasto (F)

EDD: Belder (NL); Mathieu (F), Andersen (DK)

UEN: Queiró (P): “país euro-asiático”; Camre (DK); written statements by Pasqua (F), Ribeiro e Castro (P)

NI: Claeys (Vlaamse Blok- B), oral and written statement by Mrs Berthu (F), Borghezio (Lega Nord- I),

written statement by Mr Lang (Front National- F)

Up until a few years ago, Western public opinion ignored Turkey. In a survey

carried out by the European Commission in 1976 in the then nine member states of the

Community, to the question "are there other countries that you would like to see entering

the European Community soon And which?" 50% persons questioned mentioned without

hesitation Switzerland, 44% Spain, 39 % Austria, but only 10 % Turkey; the latter

country was mainly mentioned by opinion leaders in Germany, and, to a lesser degree, in

Italy and in Belgium, but even less in the other Member States. For the analyst of the

results, "the geographical and cultural distance probably determines the subjective

distance in the case of Turkey". A survey launched in March-May 2002, showed that if,

after 25 years, the Western Public opinion knows a little more Turkey thanks to recent

developments in tourism, this country still gets the lowest support among all candidates:

47% of the persons asked in the existing 15 Member States were against Turkish

accession, and only 31% in favour; while Romania got 43 % against, 34 % in favour and

Hungary 48 % in favour, and only 31 % against3. Which deeper feelings reflect these

reactions?

Men, social groups, nations find their own place by opposing themselves to

others, to neighbours. Along history, renewed justifications of oppositions lead to

reinterpretations of dividing appearances, passing gradually from the most concrete to the

most abstract ones -from the differences of cloth, food, housing, or sexual behaviour, to a

vaguely defined "culture". Each generation may call into question the past, but keeps the

opposition that looks justifying as a determining factor with new constitutive elements.

At the end of the day, when even common values are shared, one may always argue: “but

we had a different history”. Today the plethora of information gives greater room for

interpretation, but does not necessarily lead towards greater accuracy; old mental

frameworks may subsist, fossilised, like the oldest neurones in aged people‟s brains.

“When, from one group to another, the plastic form subsists, the semantic function is

reversed. On the other hand, when the semantic function is maintained, the plastic form is

reversed.”4 At the base of the operation of social thinking, the need for distinction at all

costs, to find a justification of one‟s cultural identity, leads to prioritise the last perceived

distinctions, whatever opposition which may look socially efficient, and to develop them

as differences. When speaking today about the cultural differences between Europe and

the Moslem world, we don‟t necessarily speak about realities, for our unconscious

remains impregnated with the phantasms which let our forefathers believe that

1 See also an article in New Europe, 24/4/2004.

2 See also interview in Le Figaro, 29/4/2004.

3 http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb57/eb57_en.pdf. According to a poll

Marianne-BVA in Spring 2004, 51 % of French would agree to Turkey‟s accession, 34 % oppose with

a clear division left (58% favorable) / right (55 % against accession) ; Libération, 19/4/2004.

4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La voie des masques, Skira, Geneva, 1975, II, p. 28. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le

totémisme aujourd'hui, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1965.

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insurmountable differences were keeping us apart. Nostalgic orientalist reprints exalt

exoticism and the colonial era as a period of adventure, conquests and unavoidable if not

glorious wars5. The traces of the last images remain confusedly engraved in the depth of

the collective unconscious, like flattened waves which never end. Despite secularisation,

modernisation, the removal of slavery, of polygamy and harems, the Turk's image in the

collective unconscious, remain still impregnated of prejudices inherited from old

literature frozen in school textbooks. Today, the modern guides restrict themselves to

dream the foregone past...

Today‟s attitudes reflect a superposition of layers of information, a palimpsest...

The speech of each generation refashions the text. In case of exclusively oral

transmission, the speech incorporates new elements, over and over very old subsisting

elements, in a global logic (see for example the myth of the flood in a cyclic evolution);

on the contrary, the written transmission allows accumulation of contradictory

information that each generation reinterprets in a stochastic or evolutionist framework. In

that sense, the concept of “end of History” belongs to regimes or cultures pretending

having reached a stage of perfection – as the Soviet Union did under Stalin, or the USA

today under Bush.

The Western belief in the identity between the current inhabitants of a given

territory and their past is deeply anchored in the creeds of the Balkans: these nations have

rewritten their official history, taught in schools, their national ideology, to conform it to

the ideas of the 19th

century nationalist politicians. The Balkans, the Caucasus, and the

Middle East live the drama of introducing in today politics stereotypes old of almost two

centuries. Through the distortions of history in the Balkan countries, ethnic conflicts are

reinvented. For example in connection with the ethnic "purification" programme in

Bosnia, general Mladic said: "The moment has come to avenge us from the Turks in this

region"6. Thus beyond the demonisation, the victimisation, leading to wars representing

therapies, "de-ottomanisation" or “de-orientalisation" still represent a political objective,

while the European construction should encourage us to re-appraise the value of a

multinational and multi-cultural empire, which lasted longer than any Western empire7.

2. A PARADISE HUNG WITH TAPESTRIES, FULL OF MAIDS, TO SWEETEN US

2.1. From a theology condemning physical pleasure – lustful women…

(Middle-Age)

When Islam started to spread, the Christian Churches felt the need to depict it as a

religion of sin, in order to prevent Christians to convert... Euthymius Zygabenus, in his

Catechism of Saracens, "strongly accuses the Moslems of adoring the Venus' Star under

the name of Cobar, because the Muezzins, by calling people to the prayer, shout of all

their strengths, Allah Akbar, which means "God is great"8. Mahomet, according to John

5 Ali Behdad, Belated Travellers, Orientalism in the Age of colonial Dissolution, Duke University Press,

Durham & London, 1994.

6 Le Monde, 5 juillet 1996.

7 See L. Carl Brown ed., Imperial Legacy- The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East,

New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, particularly Norman Itzkowitz, "The Problem of

Perceptions", pp. 36-37, and Maria Todorova, "The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans", pp. 45-77.

8 Bibliothèque orientale, VI, 520.

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Damascene, permitted polygamy to justify his adulteries9. Saracens were idolaters

venerating the stone of the Kaaba considered a representation of Aphrodite‟s head or the

place where Abraham had taken the virginity of Agar. The choice of Friday, day of

Venus, as a day of sanctification appears full of significance for the monk Le Huen.

More than ever, Moslems are said not to believe in hell but that in paradise they

will be able "to join to virgin beauties than ever neither devils nor men had touched, more

beautiful than Hyacinths..."10

, who "will never grow old, and every time men will lay

down with them, they will find them virgins" and " God will multiply power to man to

sleep with women in paradise"11

. In that paradise, the pleasure is extended one thousand

years, and the capacities of the redeemed are increased one hundred times to make him

able to enjoy his happiness The Coranic licence in the sexual field, the encouragement for

carnal pleasures, are regarded as redhibitory for any dialogue between Christians and

Moslems in Contra legem Sarracenorum of Ricoldo de Montacroce (14th

century), or De

casibus of Boccacio12

. For Michel de Montaigne, “when Mahomet promises a paradise

hung with tapestries, gilded and decorated of precious gems, populated of maids of

excellent beauty, full of wines and of succulent food, I see they are mocking, and suit our

nonsense and mortal appetite to sweeten and to attract us by these opinions and these

expectations. Therefore some among us fell in such an error, hoping, after resurrection,

an earthly and temporal life, accompanied by all kinds of pleasures and mundane

conveniences.”13

In medieval Christian thinking, the woman is constantly presented as an

instrument of the devil, leading to incomprehension on women‟s situation in Islamic

countries14

. Some illuminated manuscripts of the 15th

century on the cycle of Saint

Anthony‟s temptations include an Arab tale of a queen whom the hermit, rambling in the

desert, sees bathing in a river and who takes him to her palace of the Thousand and One

Nights.15

The woman locked up, hidden in the harem, frustrated by the impotence of the

eunuchs who holds her, let fantasise on all lusts; Westerners believe, she is subjected to a

conventual arrangement intended to make her an exclusive tool for the satisfaction of her

master‟s desires, and languishes of jealousy when by adventure the master gives up to her

rivals. She is of an unlimited sensuality, which dominates her and makes her stupid. “The

women are extremely attracted to the sin of lust, and men are luxurious beyond measure,

and to be swifter and inclined to this sin, they eat many jams from India and Syria which

9 J. Damascène, Ecrits sur l'Islam, ed. Raymond Le Coz, Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1992.

10 Nicolas Le Huen, Des Sainctes Peregrinations de Jherusalem, Lyon, 1488, quoted by Clarence Dana

Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature (1520-1660), Boivin & Cie, Paris,

1938, p. 43. Le Huen considers the Muslim paradise too human: « Damned the paradise where you

should shit".

11 Ramòn Lull, Le livre de la loi au Sarrazin, Montpellier, 1307, quoted in Rouillard, 53.

12 Anna Cerbo, « Cultura e religione islamica nella letteratura italiana del Trecento », in Europa e Islam

tra i Secoli XIV e XVI, Naples, 2002, t. I, particularly pp. 38-40.

13 Essays, II, xii

14 Cf. Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti, Tolleranza e guerra santa nell'Islam, Sansoni, Florence, pp. 7, 21-

22.

15 Baltrušaitis, Réveils et prodiges, p. 291.

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bring the nature to this sin and they make many children"16

. “The Turkish Women are the

most charming Creatures of the World: They seem to be made for Love; their Actions,

Gestures, Discourse, and Looks are all Amorous, and admirably well fitted to kindle a

soft and lasting Passion. Since they have nothing else to do, they make it their only

Business to Please", and they make their husband so busy that none can cope with more

than four wives17

. "They live just as the Nuns do in their great Monasteries... and their

Bed-chambers will hold almost a hundred of them a piece: they sleep upon Sofas, which

are built long wise on both sides of the Room, so that there is a large space in the midst to

walk in. The King does not at all frequent or see these Virgins, unless it be at the instant

when they are first given him, or else in case he desire one of them for his bed-fellow, or

to shew him some pastime with Music and tumbling tricks." The mistress of the girls

"chooses out such as she thinks to be the most amiable and fairest, and having placed

them in good order in a room, in two ranks, half on the one side and half on the other, she

forthwith brings in the King, who walking four or five turns in the midst of them, and

having viewed them well, takes good notice of her which he best likes, but says nothing,

only as he goes out again, he throws a Handkerchief into that Virgin's hand, by which she

knows that she is to lie with him that night: and she being wondrous glad of so good a

fortune, to be chosen out of among so many... has all the art that possible may shewen

upon her... in attiring, painting and perfuming her, and so at night she is brought to sleep

with the Grand Signior in the women's lodgings: (there being diverse Chambers

appropriated for that business only:) and being in bed they have two great Wax lights

burning by them all night, one at the bed's feet, and the other by the door; and there

appointed... And in the morning, when his Highness rises (for he rises first) he changes

all his apparell from top to toe, leaving those which he wore to her that he lay withall, and

all the money that was in his pockets were it never so much; and so departs to his own

lodgings, from whence also he sends her immediately a present of jewels, vests and

money of great value, according to the statisfaction and content which he received from

her that night."18

Still around 1870, the Turkish Woman, "raised for the man, with the

feeling of the secondary role which is reserved to it in social life, aims only at an aim:

that to lustfully please to the master whom it will have a day... to satisfy his senses, to it

will be taught all the refinements of love. Still a virgin, she will know, in this kind of

things, what the most experienced courtesans know. For her, the decency of the words

and of the acts does not exist..." 19

16

Cantacuzène, Petit traicté de l'origine des Turcqz,190. "Le donne sono di natura lussoriose, si come

suole essere tutta la nazione levantina", I costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi, descritti da

M. Luigi Bassano da Zara.

17 Sieur du Mont, A New Voyage to the Levant, 269- 274. Sir George Courthop, quoted in Stanley Mayes,

An Organ for the Sultan, Putnam, London, 1956, p. 176. See also Jean Palerne, Pérégrinations... Lyon,

Jean Pillehotte, 1606, 270. Count d'Entraigues, L'Egypte Galante, Nouvelle Revue de Belgique,

Brussels, 1942, 19 & 62-63. Jean Chardin, Voyage de Paris à Ispahan, LD, I, 154, 161, 267 ; Lane, An

Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 296-299. A. de Gobineau, Trois Ans

en Asie (De 1855 à 1858), Oeuvres, Pléiade, t. II, 50. Les Voyages et observations du sieur de La

Boullaye-Le Gouz, Gentilhomme angevin, Kimé, Paris, 1994, 87. F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage de la

Grèce, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1826, I, 119; III, 220-221. Edward Saïd, L'Orientalisme, L'Orient créé par

l'Occident, Le Seuil, Paris, 1978, particularly pp. 171-172, 172, 189-191 and 238.

18 Withers, cité par Stanley Mayes, An Organ for the Sultan, Putnam, Londres, 1956, pp. 219-221.

19 Paul de Régla, Les Bas-Fonds de Constantinople, Tresse & Stock, Paris, 1892, pp. 167-168, 176 ; E.

De Amicis, Constantinople, Hachette, Paris, 1878, 213-214

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The Medieval Church, by consecrating the marriage, by condemning all sexual

relations which did not have as an objective procreation, by also advocating the

superiority of the continence, modified the Western attitude. At the same moment, the

Church makes the monogamy triumph. At the Renaissance, the Calvinism, i.e.

secularisation resulted in making sexual relation utilitarian: sexual relations have

meanings only if they lead to a product - the child -, the pleasure for the pleasure in itself

was condemnable. It was becoming advisable to make economic use of the sperm,

management of the orgasm directed towards the success of fecundation, which will be

developed into eugenics. The harem is conceived as a place of the carnal pleasure, where

man/women relations are reduced to their carnal, sexual aspect, while the Jansenism, the

Puritanism turned them increasingly ethereal, increasingly idealised, abstracted, like

asexual women of the neoclassical paintings of Ingres. To some extent he Turk in his

harem, the sultan, a prototype of Don Giovanni, super male endowed with a sensual

nature of an indefinite power, who abandons himself without barrier to carnal pleasures,

seducer personifying the devil, man of 300 hundred wives or concubines (a number

constantly quoted, which may stem from the number already quoted for Salomon in the

Bible20

) or "one thousand and three" women (two of more than them Thousand and One

Nights), who has lost the concept of original sin, is wasting sexual relations21

. As for Don

Giovanni, sexual relations are condemned, as a devilish pure pleasure act, without

fecundation, sterile (hence the condemnation of polygamy as unproductive…) A

contemporary sociologist like Helmut Schelsky, still notes an "absolute coincidence"

between the political expansion and "the higher degree of civilisation" of the "people of

major civilisation, such as Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, and “the

adoption of a strict monogamy”, the character of single and personalised relation of the

love having become the base of our civilisation. Western monogamy, preceded of pre-

nuptial continence, is for this author a civilisation symbol, the remainder being decline!22

However, times were changing: in the 18th

century, the picture of polygamy

became an opportunity for the libertine society, while rediscovering sexual freedom at the

light of the first ethnological studies, to learn that the dichotomy between pure

Christianity sexually and depraved Islam, was just an aspect of many variations in sexual

behaviour, and that the European one was perhaps one of the most aberrant.

Lascivious women are personified by belly dancers. The Saracen dances, which

already appear on Romanesque capitals, were mocked by French courtiers at Bal des

Ardents23

. The gypsy belly dancers, are described languorous, voluptuous, obscene,

impudent, "showing so lascivious gesture that they could dissolve marbles", of a

"disgusting lewd, monstrous indecencies", coarse distortions opposed to the pure dancing

20

He "had seven hundred women who were like queens, and three hundred concubines; and women

perverted its heart "(Kings, LIII, xi, 3). See Cantacuzène, Postel, Palerne, baron de Cournemin (1621),

Jaubert, Voyage en Arménie et en Perse, 242; Victor Hugo- Les Orientales.

21 See Alain Corbin, "La petite Bible des jeunes époux", in Amour et sexualité en Occident, Histoire, Le

Seuil, Paris, 1991, pp. 235-245; Georges Duby, Le Chevalier, la Femme et le Prêtre. Le mariage dans

la France féodale, Hachette, Paris, 1981, "La femme, l'amour et le chevalier", in Amour et sexualité en

Occident, Histoire, Le Seuil, Paris, 1991, pp. 207-217; J.L. Flandrin, Le Sexe et l'Occident. Evolution

des attitudes et des comportements, Paris, Le Seuil, 1981. Jacques Le Goff, "Le refus du plaisir", in

Amour et sexualité en Occident, Histoire, Le Seuil, Paris, 1991, pp. 177-189. Michel Sot, "La genèse

du mariage chrétien", ibid., pp. 193-206. Gilles Le Bouvier, Rouillard p. 39.

22 Helmut Schelsky, Sociologie de la sexualité, 1955, trad. fr., Gallimard, 1966, pp. 49-55, 154.

23 Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l'Islam, La Découverte, Paris, 1989, p. 187.

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of the Greek nymphs24

. Lady Montagu sees some belly dancers: "Nothing could be more

artful, or more proper to raise certain ideas. The tunes so soft!- the motions so

languishing!--accompanied with pauses and dying eyes! half falling back, and then

recovering themselves in so artful a manner, that I am very positive the coldest and most

rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon them without thinking of something

no to be spoken of."25

Flaubert‟s Salomé is inspired by Küçük Hanım interpreting the

“dance of the bee” in Aswan, and will be found again in the Salomé de Wilde/ Richard

Strauss where the dancer symbolises the aroused and unsatisfied desire, a symbolic

castration. The circulation of Belly dance and Dancing of passion, two of first films shot

in 1896, was forbidden as from their issuing, for obscenity, inaugurating censorship in the

history of the cinema26

. The belly dancer, the nautch girls, the pleasure-woman who

haunts schoolboys' dreams and dances in the stanzas of the poets" (Marcelle Tinayre)

remain provocative in recent cartoons such as the La Porte d'Orient, Le poignard

d'Istamboul.

By an unexpected inversion of vision, Louis Bertrand the cause of the Western

pornography falls down on Eastern shoulders: "In all the hotch potch of romantic writings

of which our authors flood, they distinguish almost exclusively the pornography,

precisely because this kind of literature is an art only by an abuse of language and that

they see in it a kind of extension of the lustful existence such as they dream it. A

pornographic library is, for them, like a shady annex of the harem [... ] The children grow

with a luxuriance that nothing stops. These men are tireless procreators, for whom love is

the major business of the existence. The age does not break their appetites: they are never

satisfied. A doctor of Cairo stated me that, even in the low class, alarming consumption

of aphrodisiacs is made. The catholic confessors, whom you question, in Syria, repeat

you of the similar confidences on their flock...." At sixteen years, the boys marry, says

Bertrand: as from sixteen at seventeen years, a concubine is given [to the young

Persians], if it is discovered that they are in love ". Fascinating passage where the Eastern

lewd justifies the Western pornography!27

. Erotologists like Richard Burton or Paul de

Regla, who pretend from experience that the East is definitely more sexually oriented

than the West, pass their own phantasms in Eastern pseudo-writers' mouth. El Ktab of the

secret laws of love that Paul de Regla claims to have collected form an agonising Khodja

in Üsküdar, more than a Moslem Kama-Soutra as the author states, is more impregnated

of the moral values of the 19th

century western middle classes than of traditional Turkish

24

Jean Chardin, Voyage en Perse, Société Bibliophile, Paris, 245, 314. Sieur du Mont, A New Voyage to

the Levant, 276. See also: Baron de Tott, Introduction p. xviij; C.F. Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en

Syrie, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785, in Œuvres complètes, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1843, 298.;

F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1826, 512; Jaubert, Voyage en

Arménie et en Perse, 205-209, 235; Countess Dora d'Istria, Les Femmes en Orient, Meyer & Zeller,

Zurich, 1859, vol. I, 427 & 466; Henry Cammas & André Lefèvre, "Voyage en Egypte", Le Tour du

Monde, 1863, I, 193-224. (1860) Charles Joseph de Ligne, Mes écarts, Editions Labor, Brussels, 1990,

63. M. Moynet, "Voyage au littoral de la mer Caspienne, 1858", Le Tour du Monde, 1860, I, 307,

inspiring Gobineau‟s La danseuse de Samakha", Nouvelles Asiatiques, Garnier, Paris, 1965, 48.

25 Letter of 18 April 1717 to countess of Mar, I, 407.

26 Wendy Buonaventura, Les mille et une danses d'Orient, Arthaud, Paris, 1989, 104. Caroline Juler, Les

Orientalistes de l'école italienne, ACR, Courbevoie, 1994, 10, 22, 70, 97, 101, 142.

27 Louis Bertrand, Le mirage oriental, Librairie Académique Perrin et Cie, Paris, 1910, p. 217, 127-128.

8

or Arab values28

. While claiming to have scientia sexualis functions, such pseudo

literature in fact appears like an ashamed ars erotica. The prohibition of any

pornographic literature, condemned to circulate under the coat, erotizes the entire

literature29

.

Far from the East, middle-class men may, by hygiene, go to "Turkish houses",

where in rainy November behind flowered curtains of white elephants and waving palm

trees, poor girls from remote villages of central France appear naked under tempting

peignoirs of odalisques, to arouse better the customers, as in de Guy Maupassant's play, A

la feuille de rose, maison turque30

. The hero of Flaubert‟s Education sentimentale gets

his sexual initiation "Chez la Turque", a brothel whose Madame is actually called Zoraïde

Turk "and many believed she was a Moslem woman, a Turk, which added to the poetry

of her establishment". The Scène de Harem à Montmartre of Renoir (1872) also evokes

brothels.31

.

This assimilation harem/brothel, odalisque/prostitute, adultery/polygamy is the

automatic follow-up of prejudices on harems, when brothels and prostitutes are safety

valves making Victorian family's yoke tolerable to middle-class men. Evoking the East

and its disorders is a metaphorical means of evoking European realities hidden in

brothels. The description of the odalisque is the reflection of middle-class realities: they

represent the illicit prohibited relations, of a man with his mistress, genuine sensuality.32

2.2. …to travelling bachelors fantasising for hidden pleasures (17-19th

centuries)

The majority of the travellers of the 15-19th centuries were bachelors. When

leaving on a journey, they had first to split from their families and relationships.

In the 16-18th centuries, in the majority of the harbours and trade centres of the

Middle East, Alexandria, Tripoli, Beirut, Aleppo, the French tradesmen and craftsmen

did not have the right, until 1716, to bring their spouses or even to marry and lived all

together, bachelors, in a reserved district that was called khan or funduk (fındık). The

French consuls had instruction to have women who came in hiding-places and re-

embarked and expelled those who married or led a scandalous life 33

In 1779,

d‟Entraigues points out that the Western merchants in Cairo are bachelors and adds with

perfidy: "the general taste of Egypt makes this deprivation inexpensive". In other words,

28

Paul de Régla, El Ktab des lois secrètes de l'amour d'après le Khodja Omer Haleby, Abou Othmân,

Georges Carré, Paris, 1893, reprint: Omar Haleby et Paul de Régla, Les lois secrètes de l'amour en

Islam, La Nadir-Balland, Paris, 1992.

29 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1, La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1976, 94. Voir

aussi Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience- Victoria to Freud, Education of the Senses, Oxford

University Press, Oxford-New York, 1984, 358-379.

30 Au cercle du livre précieux, Paris, 1960.

31 Tokyo, Musée national d'art occidental.

32 Lynne Thornton, La femme dans la peinture orientaliste, ACR, Courbevoie, 1993, 126.

33 Paul Masson, Histoire du Commerce Français dans le Levant au XVIIe Siècle, Librairie Hachette,

Paris, 1896, 460-463; Sir Harry Luke, Cyprus under the Turks, 1571-1878, C. Hurst & Cy, London,

1969, 89. Volney, Considérations sur la Guerre des Turks en 1788 [1807], op. cit., 765, writes that the

prohibition of wedding leads young men to “singular habitudes”.

9

celibacy excites the desires, perverts them.34

.

Some Eastern specialists, such as Sylvestre de Sacy, Lane or Renan, under their

scientific claims of neutral investigation, as a matter of fact behaved like bachelors in a

"furiously male" world, notes Edward Saïd: they pretend to observe the world as

impartial, cold, external witnesses, dedicated to Science", i.e. generally erudition,

supposed to bring "serenity", as opposed to "enjoyment" and disorder of senses; but in

fact, savagely misogynous, and with a sadomasochistic delight, they describes the

dervishes' self mutilations, the mixture of religion and licence among Moslems, the

excess of libidinous passions.35

Sanderson, 24 years old, in Aleppo, and Alexandria:: "the temptations to evell ar

great in that place, all abhominable, most detestable..."36

The French Ambassador

Nointel, visits the kadi of Sidon: "By manner, he inquired of my chaous if I were married,

and was extremely astonished that I was not so, insinuating nevertheless that he suspected

it, because I had not enough cherished his son.”37

Bachelors, such as Casanova using his

alleged trip to Constantinople to defend several sexual variations38

-; as Lord Byron, -

Adam without Eve, accompanied by Hobhouse, then by Lord Sligo; as Flaubert with

Maxime Du Camp, Charles Garnier, the architect of Paris‟ Opera, with Charles Rolland,

who even did not have any fiancée in France39

; Gerard de Nerval, whose mistress Jenny

Colon had died, writes a book centred on the search of unreachable women40

. Bachelors

again Jean-Jacques Ampère, son of the famous physicist, poet (1800-1864), orientalist

and Saint-Simonien, who travels in 1841 in Anatolia with Prosper Mérimée and Charles

Lenormant, who had fled to escape marriage41

.

The debate on the East also is a debate on the celibacy, where the Protestantism,

which permits the marriage of its pastors and closed the convents, appears closer to

Islam. The ecclesiastical celibacy imposed since the 11th century by the Catholic Church,

was called into question by the Reform, to no avail, as it was confirmed by the Trent

Council. The philosophers of the Enlightenment criticise ecclesiastical celibacy,

considered unproductive in mercantilist terms of population increase42

. Helvetius

34

Count d'Entraigues, L'Egypte Galante, Brussels, 1942.

35 E. Saïd, L'Orientalisme, L'Orient créé par l'Occident, 1978, particularly pp. 171-172, 172, 189-191 et

238.

36 The Travels of John SANDERSON, ed. Sir William Foster, Hakluyt Society, London, 1931, 4. Pückler-

Muskau, separated from his wife for five years, gives himself to "infamen Passion, die mich auf der

einen Seite festhält und auf der anderen degoutiert" (Südöstlicher Bildersaal, 1840-41. Geliebter

Pasha! Feurigste Gnomin! Liebesbriefe von Hermann Fürst v. Pückler un Ada v. Treskow, Artemis,

Zurich-Munich, 1986, 15).

37 Albert Vandal, L’Odyssée d’un Ambassadeur, Les voyages du marquis de Nointel (1670-1680) , Plon,

Paris, 1900, 133, fn 1.

38 Casanova, Histoire de ma vie, Robert Laffont, Bouquins, 1993, I, 293-294.

39 Ch. Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, 1854, 99, 160.

40 Pléiade, II, 1458, 1470.

41 Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance Orientale, Payot, Paris, 1950, 330-334 et 347-348.

42 De Melon, Essai politique sur le Commerce, Chez François Changuion, Amsterdam, 1754, p. 28;

Lettre CXVII; voir aussi Abbé de Saint-Pierre 'Observations politiques sur le célibat des prêtres,

auteur aussi d'un Projet pour l'extirpation des corsaires de Barbarie.

10

connects celibacy and fanaticism: "The experience proves that in general the characters

designed to deprive themselves of certain pleasures, and to grasp the austere maxims and

practices of certain devotion, are usually unhappy characters. It is the only manner of

explaining how sectarian could combine so much holiness and softness principles of the

religion and intolerance”43

. The solitary quixotic hidalgo, pilgrim of love, is continent:

the trip aims to break a marriage or to look for another, but it never leaves intact a

union.44

Continence still is equivalent to cultural creativity for a contemporary sociologist

like Schelsky!45

The trip to the East is a trip of the hidden desire, an interrogation on the proper

identity of unmarried Orientalists, on sexual problems like T.E. Lawrence or Louis

Massignon, who speaks about the incurable cancer of his flesh.46

Bachelors with

fragmentary, unsatisfactory sexual life, in a moment also where the birth control - in the

form of withdrawal or coitus interruptus, spread during the 18th century in urban and

rural aristocracy then the middle classes in France or in the Austrian empire, then to the

19th century in the industrial world, the practice of which involves a mental effort, a

partial sacrifice, an point of honour - becoming an essential element of underground

middle-class morals, involving considerable psychological frustrations.47

Henry de Montherlant concludes, quoting Mahomet: "A solitary traveller is a

devil".48

A parallel can be drawn between hidden women, threats to sexuality and absence

of sexual intercouse/ life in traveling bachelors, letting them fantacise. As a matter of

fact, Western travellers to the Ottoman Empire or Muslim lands, were not seeing women

but veiled: according to Mr Quin, what the Turks call a veil should be a hermetic prison,

"a genuine coat for the figure, a jealous and thick envelope intended really to be

discarded the profane glances and to put beauty to the shelter. If he were faithful in the

first regulations of Islamism, he would form an inviolable rampart behind which would

hide themselves the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin and the owner's face. Thus the law

wants it, but the law is eluded. While continuing attaching this veil around her head, the

Moslem woman lowers it with a rather well calculated negligence to arouse attention, to

43

De l'Esprit. See Les inconvénients du célibat des prêtres, prouvés par des recherches historiques, A

Geneva, Pellet, 1781 (attributed to abbot Gaubin), pp. 214, 248, 269, 334-365, 381. Jean Clair,

Méduse, Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel, "Connaissance de l'Inconscient",

Gallimard, Paris, 1989, p. 85

44 Cf. Ruth El Saffar, "Sex and the Single Hidalgo: Reflections on Eros in Don Quixote", in Studies in

Honor of Elias Rivers, éd. Bruno M. Damiani and Ruth El Saffar, Potomac, 1989; Jürgen Hahn, The

Origins of the Baroque Concept of Peregrinatio, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1973;

Antonio Vilanova, "El peregrino andante en el Persiles de Cervantes", Boletín de la Real Academia

de Bellas Letras de Barcelona 22 (1949): 97-159. Steven Hutchinson, Cervantine Journeys, The

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1992, p.83, 115.

45 Helmut Schelsky, Sociologie de la sexualité, 1955, fr. Trans., Gallimard, 1966, pp. 171-182.

46 Cf. Albert Hourani, Islam in European thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge U.K., 1991,

pp. 116-128.

47 See Geza Roheim, Psychanalyse et anthropologie, Gallimard, Paris, 1967, pp. 426 and ff.

48 Henry de Montherlant, Hispano-Moresque, Emile-Paul Frères, Paris, 1929, 39-41.

11

provoke glances, to prick curiosity." 49

Glances through diaphanous veils become an

imaginary game of seduction: coquette and mysterious glances, meaningful and

unperceivable gestures uncovering the ears, the neck, desire to please…50

The veil symbolises the property of the man on his wife – a dream of the 19th

century bourgeois, already made obsolete by the progressive steps towards emancipation.

The veil, in Nerval‟s Voyage en Orient, is the masked ball, the domino, the hood of

penitent, but also "draped shades of bluish shrouds giving Egypt the allure of a "broad

tomb", is a mark of the absence of women, of sexuality, which leads to an imaginative

superabundance51

. The parallel between veil and masked ball is sign that to the 18-19th

centuries, the veil was distinctive sign of women, across the board (the hair dress being

required), that there was only a degree difference in the quantity of veil on the face, and

that more one hid, could one reveal more perhaps below. It is only recently that the veil

became interpreted as a distinctive religious sign.52

The veil can be used to mislead, like

the horrible creature given to the kadi in the Cadi dupé of Monsigny or the Cadi of

Bagdad of Gluck; or an English version of 1778, The Cady of Bagdad, opera buffo of

Thomas Linley.53

The veil is dissimulation, behind which all passions are permitted (like the

consumption of the wine in hiding-place by the Moslems), as writes Lady Montagu in her

letters: "The ladies peep through the lattices… This perpetual masquerade gives them

entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery" and to tell the

intrigues woven in the shops of the Jews of the bazaar with their lover: "You may easily

imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to

fear from a lover's indiscretion”54

. Lady Craven: "I do not know any country where

women could enjoy more freedom, & be safe from any reproach. A Turkish husband who

sees a pair of slippers before the sound door of the harem must not enter: his respect for

sex prevents it, when a foreigner visits his spouse: how easy it is for a man to disguise

himself in woman to return similar visits? If I wanted to walk in the streets, I would equip

myself similarly, because Turkish women have the habit to insult those they meet

unveiled”55

.

The veil becomes a disguise for men to reach their goals: enter a harem, for the

49

Quoted by Joanne, pp. 138-139. See other descriptions of women‟s dresses by Bassano, Nicolay, Lady

Montagu. Mgr Mislin, I, 127 ; Niebuhr, Thorkild Hansen, La mort en Arabie- Une expédition danoise

1761-1767, Editions de l'Aire, Lausanne, 1981, 106, 224.

50 A.-L. Castellan, Lettres sur la Morée [...] et Constantinople, A. Nepveu, Paris, 1820, 3 vol. ; Charles

Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, Hommes et Choses, Etudes sur l'Orient, Pagnerre, Paris, 1854,

258, 374. Edwin de Leon, Under the Stars and Under the Crescent, A Romance of East and West,

Sampson Low, Marston Searle & Rivington, Londres, s.d., vol. II, 103, 153. Edmond About, De

Pontoise à Stamboul, p. 115. Mark Twain, Le voyage des innocents, Payot, Paris, 1995, 346. Marcelle

Tinayre, Notes d'une voyageuse en Turquie, 1910, p. 374. Paul FESCH, Constantinople aux

derniers jours d'Abdul-Hamid, 1907, p. 133 ; Ida Pfeiffer, Voyage d'une femme autour du monde,

Hachette, 1858, I, 594 ; . De Amicis, Constantinople, Hachette, Paris, 1878, 198-200, 202 ; Théophile

Gautier, Constantinople, Michel Lévy, Paris, 1856, 164-165, 187, 228, 325.

51 On women‟s veils in Istanbul, see Pléiade, II, 608, 776, 797.

52 G. des Godins de Souhesmes, Turcs et Levantins, Victor-Havard, Paris, 1896, p. 16.

53 Financial Times, 25 octobre 1991.

54 Letter of 1st April 1717 to Lady M. [Rich]; letter of 1st April 1717 to countess de Mar.

55 Lady Craven, Voyage à Constantinople par la Crimée en 1786, Paris, 1789, 192.

12

Sultan to survey his subjects. The veil represents a displayed external, taboo, under which

all licences are permitted, while Western Europe was living a period of extreme

internalisation of the sexual values. The veil is the taboo that triumphant Victorianism

throws on all that is sex, banning its evocation, which itches our authors, in other words

prohibited lust, imposing remorse into the repressed unconscious. A woman is veiled,

hidden, an unknown factor, almost suppressed, absent, and unhappy, oppressed by Islam.

The veil focuses the imaginary; the veil covers the absence that travellers live; in extreme

cases, it is sexier to veil that to reveal56

. This let understand that, under the veil, women

can hide an unknown phallus, can constitute a danger to men. The peregrine activity of

the travellers turns to voyeurism. Like Nicolas de Nicolay, they burn to uncover the veils

where they place a lustful eroticism that they are not in a position to satisfy57

.

The veil, such as the mask, means something else than what it covers: it becomes

the sign of a code of desire. Anonymity becomes, after all, the vacuum of the object of

the desire, filled only by images in reflection - from where the importance of the glance.

Under the mask, it is nudity, the pure desire58

. The veil excludes the woman from the

travellers' relations; it is symbol of celibacy. The woman locked up is wanted and feared.

The coupling of the description/ pictures of masks – repression of the body/with that of

the maximum visibility-nudity - corporality – for example in the paintings of odalisques

and Turkish baths-, reflects a displacement of Western cleavages on the prohibition of

sexuality: in psychoanalytical terms, the dissimulation of the body multiplies significant

desire - the veil and all that comes out, glances, jewels, become metaphorical substitution

of the desire59

. The veil, to the extreme, involves that "the libido is entirely moved on the

very clothing, the body being only a means of suspension for the dresses”60

. Lacan‟s

master, the psychiatrist Clérambault, passionate to silk fabrics, photographing thousands

of women veiled in Morocco, complacently writes on the obsessions of his clients taking

their pleasure with silk - "the contact of silk is much higher than the sight; but the

crumpling of silk is still much higher, it excites you, you feel wetted; no sexual

enjoyment equals for me that". Basically, the veil is the desire, there is nothing under the

veil but personal desire.61

The abundance of phallic signs reflect however a fear of circumcision, castration

among travelling bachelors.

56

Alain Buisine, L'Orient voilé, Zulma, Cadeilhan, 1993, particularly, pp. 10-11, 33.

57 Voir Frank Lestringant, "Guillaume Postel et l'obsession turque", in Guillaume Postel 1581-1981,

Trédaniel, Paris, 1985; and introduction to the Cosmographie du Levant, André Thévet, Droz, Genève,

1985.

58 Jean-Pierre Martinon, Les métamorphoses du désir et de l'oeuvre. Le texte d'Eros ou le corps perdu,

Klincksieck, Paris, 1970, pp. 200-201.

59 Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers, Orientalisme in the Age of colonial Dissolution, Duke University

Press, Durham & London, 1994, 18, 28.

60 J.C. Flügel, "De la valeur affective du vêtement", in Revue française de psychanalyse, III, 1929, p.

519, quoted in Malek Chebel, L'esprit de sérail, Payot, 1995, 121.

61 Alain Buisine, "Clérambault, un Neuro-Psychiatre voilé", L'Orient voilé, Zulma, Cadeilhan, 1993, 173-

198.

13

Mahomet‟s advantages are already shown in some Romanesque capitals in Southern

France or Spain, or in medieval popular literature62

. a too human prophet, fond of women

- "still for Renan, he did not know how to resist as much as he should have to Satan‟s

instigations”, contrary to Christ. Mahomet compensated the prohibition of wine by the

pleasures of the flesh: "the heat of the climate inflames the blood of the Arabs, and their

libidinous complexion has been noticed by the writers of the Antiquity". And the prophet

is said to have tried to equal the thirteenth work of Hercules by satisfying eleven women

in only one hour"63

. "The angel Gabriel taught him the composition of a ragout which

gave it major strengths to enjoy women", writes Bayle64

. Mahomet‟s breeches would be

the Turks' standard, claims Sallaberry65

.

Polygamy permits to fantasize on the sexual resources for those who live it. It is

the despot's glorious body, the king's bodies, written body of pure enjoyment66

: “The

Easterners, for the Western, are so only untiringly lascivious, depraved, vain, sensual,

malignant, Father Boucher writes around 1620,67

hypersexual, dominated by an

"undifferentiated sexual impulse". The Pehlivans, Turkish fighters, such as bellowing

bulls, symbolise male strength: "men strong , robust, nervous men [… ] half naked,

except strong oiled leather breeches", writes Belon. They are virgin 68

… The Lustful Turk,

describes a supposed dey of Algiers, whose terrible instrument fatal foe to virginity,

Nature's masterpiece of prodigious stiffness and size, is the delight of women, agony of

enjoyment69

. Brantôme still: "I like a wish that a lady made, when being told by a poor

slave escaped from Turkish hand of the torments and evils that they inflicted him as they

do to all poor Christians, when they held them, speaking of all kinds of cruelties. She

wondered what they do to women: "Alas! Madam, said the slave, they perform to them

the most dishonest torment unceasingly to the point they die. – Please to God, interjected

62

Ernest Renan, Etudes d'Histoire religieuse, Michel Lévy Frères, Paris, 1857, "Mahomet et les origines

de l'islamisme", 222-225.

63 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Modern Library, New York, III, 76,

116-117 [quoting Ammien Marcellin, XIV, 4: "Incredible est quo ardore apud eos in Venerem uterque

solvitur sexus"].

64 Quoted by Grosrichard, 126.

65 Sallaberry, Voyage à Constantinople, en Italie et aux îles de l'Archipel par l'Allemagne et la Hongrie,

Chez Maradan, Paris, an 7, 192.

66 Grosrichard, 98.

67 Le Bouquet sacré, composé des plus belles fleurs de Terre Saincte, Paris, 1620, cité par Rouillard, p.

239; un autre voyageur, La-Boullaye-le-Gouz écrit que le P. Boucher "décrit hardiment... ce qu'il n'a vu

que de loin."

68 See also Giovan Antonio Menavino, Trattato de costumi e vita de Turchi, 1548, 166; Les navigations,

pérégrinations et voyages faits en la Turquie par Nicolas de Nicolay Dauphinois, etc.,. 1989, 172-173.

Joseph Pitts, A faithful account of the religion and manners of the Mahometans,&c. 1810, 444-445,

Jean Chardin, Voyage en Perse, Société Bibliophile, Paris, 239, Nerval in Cairo, I, 131. Goytisolo, A

la recherche de Gaudí, pp. 50-62. F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage en Grèce et à Constantinople, 1798-

1801, Ed. F.P. Vaillant, Voyages autour du monde, 345; Gaspard Drouville, Voyage en Perse fait en

1812 et 1813, A Paris, A la Librairie nationale et étrangère, 1825, II, 22-29.

69 The Lustful Turk, Anonymous, in Pagan Delights, Caroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., New York, 1994.

14

the Lady, that I endure such a martyrdom!" 70

Chardin refers to Galian‟s comments on

climates: "the luxury [… ] is natural to the Persian climate [… ] generally hot and dry

with this degree to which one feels the movements of love more and to which one is abler

to answer, passion for women is extremely violent there"71

.

The travellers did not miss the shows of Karagöz, which they describe as

shameful, obscene, brutally dishonest, extremely indecent, dismaying, dissolute,

depraved, infamous, absolutely licentious, scandalously burlesque, "too horribly gross to

be described" (Hobhouse), making shocking jokes," revolting of cynicism ", -"shadow

shows full of obscenities, luxurious, with ignoble instincts, brutal appetites, similar to the

famous god of Lampsaque " whose frightening weapon, threatens all his adversaries ", a

bump, as a Punch, but of very individual conformation,, "sings the joys of love, but of

very material love with technical details to scandalise the most tolerant ones "(Rolland)

and" often forgets the softness of the harem to abandon himself to the prohibited

pleasures of which first Bajazet, and, probably not the last, Mahmut the reformer gave the

example". The travellers who want to see Karagöz, capped with a fez as Rolland to look

like a Turk, follow the Turkish mothers who bring their daughters "to learn there what

men are in their luxurious needs and monstrous passions", but never say that they left the

show before its end!72

However the censorship was introduced in Turkey towards the end

of the 19th

century as the apostolic nuncio to the Porte could intervene vis-à-vis the police

authorities to successfully obtain immediately the removal of the "doubtful role" of a

priest in a Karagöz play73

.

Erotism invades Eastern Architecture described by travellers. Le Corbusier, in

Istanbul, is ecstatic "to palpate the generous belly of mud and to cherish its grail collar,

and then explore sound subtleties curves [… ] Art… excites the sensuality, arousing deep

echoes in the physical being. It gives to the body - to the animal - its right share and then,

on this healthy basis, proper to the expansion of joy, it can draw up the noblest

columns… Forms are expansive and inflated of sap… the most expansive volume [is] the

most beautiful one." "Formidable minarets, which in remoteness are fine like horsetails of

the marshes, exalt and direct at the top this major push righteously… In Istanbul there

are only two types of architecture: the large crushed roofs, covered with gullied tiles, and

70

Mémoires de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille Seigneur de Brantôme sur les vies des Dames Galantes de

son temps, Les Bibliophiles Africains, Casablanca, III, pp. 26, 141, 169. See also Marot in Epistre

envoyée de Venize à Madame la duchesse de Ferrare (1536).

71 Jean Chardin, Voyage en Perse, Société Bibliophile, Paris, 367.

72 Paul Fesch, Constantinople aux derniers jours d'Abdul-Hamid, 1907, N.M. Penzer, The Harêm, an

account of the institution as it existed in the Palace of the Turkish Sultans with a hsitory of the Grand

Seraglio from its foundation to modern times, Spring Books, London, 1965, 184. .B. Sevin, quoted in

F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage en Grèce et à Constantinople, 1798-1801, Ed. F.P. Vaillant, Voyages

autour du monde, 384. E. de Amicis, Costantinopoli, pp. 194-195; L. Enault, Constantinople et la

Turquie- Tableau historique, pittoresque, statistique et moral de l'Empire Ottoman, Hachette, Paris,

1855, p. 366; Dora d'Istria, Les Femmes en Orient, Meyer & Zeller, Zurich, 1859, vol. I, p. 46; P. Loti,

Aziyadé, p. 70-72; Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 386; M.

Michaud et M. Poujoulat, Correspondance d'Orient (1830-1831), Bruxelles, 1841, IV, 27; Nerval, II,

642-655, and "La peinture des Turcs", II, 874; Charles Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, Hommes

et Choses, Etudes sur l'Orient, Pagnerre, Paris, 1854, 144-148

73 Mgr Bonetti, La Voce della Verità, cité par Hans Barth, Le Droit du Croissant, H.C. Wolf, Paris, 1898,

p. 174.

15

the bulbs of the mosques with the gushing of the minarets…"74

The eroticisation of the

landscape among male travellers (not female) affects the domes of mosques, minarets,

masts of ships, the cypresses, steles of the cemeteries, all figuring redundant phallic

symbols75

. Abbot Michon observes: "The only thing which is original in the mosques,

which belongs to the Islamism, of which it has all the honour. It is the minaret. I am

jealous of it for Christianity. Only the minaret is beautiful! What a noble design!…"76

Everywhere against the sky-line the sharp sentinel lances of the minarets, each one, at the

prayer hour, gifted with voice, as of a warning prophet or watchful angel", "slender white

shafts, coroneted with balconies, where the turbaned caller to prayer may chant out his

periodical summons, rising into such perfect, enchanted blue air, and pointing to a sun

twice as big and hot as our English ones, so that their beauty becomes something quite by

itself, and the charm is a charm that will not transplant, and that is difficult to translate

into words"77

.

The travellers are struck by the steles of cemetery, tumuli stones, looking like a

hairstyle of janissary, or a turban, or mushroom or Karagöz exhibitions.78

"The cold thing

that I held tight between my arms was a marble terminal planted in the soil", writes

Loti79

. An explanation of the imaginary function of the cypresses is given by Pouqueville:

in Morea, they were subject "of a secret worship of the negroes (i.e. eunuchs), who

returned each year in procession, under the control of their aga, in order to practise

superstitious ceremonies to which no white coloured man is admitted"."80

Cypresses

produce an "extraordinary effect" to abbot Michon. Compared to the majestic Turkish

cypresses, the English yew trees seem brushes, says Lady Craven, 81

, and a fortiori

Musset‟s pitiful willow, adds Mrs de Régnier.82

Obsession of the verticality of columns:

Thevet reproduces three83

; the cistern to the one thousand and columns, such as the

74

Le Corbusier, Le Voyage d'Orient, Parenthèses, Marseille, 1987, pp. 12-16, 60, 66, 73. Charles

Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, Hommes et Choses, Etudes sur l'Orient, Pagnerre, Paris, 1854,

231-232. See also G. Sandys, quoted by Dorothy Carrington, The Traveller's Eye, Readers Union with

the Pilot Press, Londres, 1949, 96.

75 Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, Bernardin-Béchet, 90, 193;

ein Wald von Minaretts, von Masten und Zypressen V. Moltke, Unter dem Halbmond, Erlebnisse in

der alten Türkei, 1835-1839, Edition Erdmann, Stuttgart, 1984, 59, 63, 64, 109, 167, 188.

76 Abbé J. H. Michon, Voyage religieux en Orient, Mme Vve Comon, Paris, 1853, tome I p. 219, 222.

See also: H. Aurenche, La Mort de Stamboul, Peyronnet, Paris, 1930, 176. “leur finesse stupéfie autant

que leur hauteur”.

77 Walter Thornbury, Turkish Life and Character, I, 101, 250

78 Robert Gillon, Le crépuscule des sultans, Silhouettes d'Islam, Rossignol & Vandenbril, Bruxelles,

1913, 87. Voir aussi: Sallaberry, Voyage à Constantinople, en Italie et aux îles de l'Archipel par

l'Allemagne et la Hongrie, Chez Maradan, Paris, an 7, 144, 186-187. Flaubert, Lettres d'Orient,

L'horizon chimérique, Bordeaux, 1990, 247; Charles Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, Pagnerre,

Paris, 1854, 216, 250; Patrick Boman, Trébizonde en hiver, Le serpent à plumes, Paris, 1994, 28, 102;

Edmondo De Amicis, Constantinople, Librairie Hachette, Paris, 1878, 350

79 Suprêmes Visions d'Orient, p. 16, and Aziyadé, p. 306. see also Les Désenchantées, pp. 49-50, 67-68.

80 F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, Chez Firmin Didot, Paris, 1826, IV, 397.

81 Cité par Dallaway, I, 6.

82 Née de Hérédia, cf. Cl. Farrère, Loti, p. 90.

83 André Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant, Librairie Droz, Genève, 1985, 80, 129-131.

16

Thousand and One Nights, is for Melville a “palatial sort of Tartarus... Used to be

resivoir(sic). Now full of boys twisting silk... terrible place to be robbed or murdured

in.”84

The French translator of De Amicis from Italian into French, when translating a

passage dealing with a eunuch standing in front of a mosque‟s column, apparently

troubled by the reference, writes “colline” (hill).

The circumcision, as expressed by Thornbury, is an “initiatory rite, which

(analogous to our confirmation, though differing somewhat in the ceremonial) must be

undergone before a young Muslim is rendered worthy of Paradise”- where the author

refers to the carnal paradise.85

Since the Middle Age, Western writers on Islam fantasize

on circumcision, a "humiliating and painful ceremony" to which "Jesus Christ wanted to

subject itself", oddly venerated after the triumph of Christianity.86

. Western men fear it

like a castration but are also afraid that women believe that circumcised men have greater

manhood, from the exhibition of the gland87

.

The prominent phallus, threatening woman in rape and man in sodomy, is

threatened by the circumcision, which paradoxically discovers it. The ceremonies of the

circumcision are described by Cantacuzene: "on time of supper, child to be circumcised

is brought in. And the surgeon discovers the gland and with tweezers takes the folded

skin, says that he will implement the circumcision the next following day, and leaves.

And immediately after, pretending to have forgotten something related to the preparation,

without saying word, he cuts the skin at the member's end and puts on the wound a little

salt and cotton. Then he is called a Moslem, i.e. a circumcised."88

The Circumcision of

the Voyvode is mentioned among the stories propagated in the streets of the Italian cities,

at the same time as the Turk's War in Hungary, the English Schism, in the Courtesan of

Aretino89

. Father Robert tells that the Turkish master of a poor French slave from Lyons

84

Herman Melville, A Visit to Europe and the Levant, 1857, quoted in Chronicles Abroad Istanbul-,

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1995, 75. Walter Thornbury, Turkish Life and Character, II, 204.

Charles Texier, Asie Mineure, Description géographique, Historique et Archéologique des provinces

et des villes de la Chersonnèse d'Asie, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1862, 283.

85 Walter Thornbury, Turkish Life and Character, II, 149.

86 Cf. Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman, 7ème Controverse, Les Editions du Cerf,

Paris, 1966, 211-213.

87 Cf. le Roman de Mahomet, Rouillard, p. 52. Mandeville, Voyage autour de la Terre, Les Belles

Lettres, Paris, 1993, 77; L. Bassano, Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi, 38-39; J.

Palerne, Pérégrinations... 108; A. Morison, Relation Historique d'un Voyage nouvellement fait au

Mont Sinaï et à Jérusalem, etc. 1705, 76, 470, 707. Devereux, Femme et mythe, p. 192. The threat of

circumcision was used during all the nineteenth century like a "therapy" of the masturbation and of the

illnesses which were associated to it (Sander L. Gilman, "Plague in Germany, 1939/1989: Cultural

Images of Race, Space and Disease", Nationalisms & Sexualities, Ed. Andrew Parker, & al.,

Routledge, New York-Londres, 1992, 180-181).

88 Théodore Spandouyn Cantacasin [Cantacuzène], Petit Traicté de l'origine des Turcqz, Ed. Ernest

Leroux, Paris, 1896, "De la circoncision des Turcz". Integrally reproduced in Cosmographie de

Münster, Bâle, 1552; also: Ottaviano BON, “The Sultan’s Saraglio, An intimate Portrait of Life at the

Ottoman Court”, Saqi Books, London, 1996, 59 and 135. Elias ABESCI, Etat actuel de l’Empire

ottoman, Contenant des détails &c., Paris, 1792, I, 113. Eugène Roger, who lived five years in

Palestine, writes in La Terre Sainte, published in 1644, that at the time of the circumcisions, a bowl full

of prepuces is placed on the banquet table.

89 Quoted by Orhan Kologlu, Le Turc dans la presse française (Des débuts jusqu'à 1815), Maison

d'Edition al-Hayat, Beyrouth, 1971, 57.

17

wanted absolutely "him to become a Moslem and that he allowed to be cut... This poor

slave came to our Superior, to tell the sorrow he had to see his master in this resolution,

because he was decided to be still a good Christian. Our Superior exhorted him, ensuring

him that, even when his master would circumcise him against his will, he could always

be a good catholic; what comforted him so much that, when his master wanted the

operation to be carried out, he declared that whatever Muslims may do, he would still

remain a Christian, which put his master in such an anger, that he knocked him on the

head with an axe; but he had not done it and rather he repented, because he recognised a

great deal of fidelity in this poor slave. Then he had him so well bandaged that he did not

die from the wound.”90

According to Gibbon, some Arab doctors claim that Mahomet was born without a

prepuce and that for this reason circumcision is necessary for the salvation; but it is more

probable, that the prophet followed "practice congenial to the climate of Mecca [which]

might become useless or inconvenient on the banks of the Danube or the Volga"91

. Like

Buffon, he may have copied Thévenot, who had written: "Moslems believe that man

having the prepuce cut is fitter for generation; and truly Arabs have the prepuce so long

that if they would not cut it would bother them extremely, and on their thresholds small

children to whom it hangs extremely long can be seen; in addition to this, if they did not

cut their prepuce, while urinating they would always retain a few drops of it which would

pollute them"92

. While preparing an expedition to Arabia, Niebuhr and his colleagues

receive from European professors the task of inquiring if circumcised men feel more

pleasure during copulation than uncircumcised93

. In the Essai sur les Mœurs, Voltaire

contradicts Thévenot, by experience: "It is not at all by a principle of health that

Ethiopians, Arabs, Egyptians get circumcised. It is said that they had too long a prepuce;

but if one can judge a nation by an individual, I saw a young Ethiopian, born out of his

fatherland, who had not been circumcised: I can ensure that his prepuce was precisely

like ours". Or Byron: "I see not much difference between ourselves and the Turks, save

we have foreskins and they have none..."94

In fact, the mention of circumcision indirectly refers to the fear of Castration,

personified by the eunuchs , “swarthy Nubia' s mutilated son", as Byron writes in Childe

Harold, “specialist in djerrid, a blunted Turkish javelin - I know not if it can be called a

manly one, since the most expert in the art are the black eunuchs of Constantinople."

[The launched javelin is lost…] Thornbury sees a "wild Nubian eunuch, mounted on an

entire Syrian horse [sic!], keeping women on the telekis, the hand on the handle of their

golden sabre, rolling their eyes until they become quite white and yellow, and whipping

the horses when Francs look at women".95

Travelling bachelors feel threatened in their

90

Voyage en Turquie et en Grèce du R.P. Robert de Dreux, pp.58-59.

91 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Modern Library, New York, III, 73,

quoting Pocock, Specimen, 319-320, and Sale, Preliminary Discourse, 106-107.

92 Jean Thévenot, Voyage du Levant, L'Empire du Grand Turc vu par un sujet de Louis XIV, ed. François

Billacois, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1965, p. 120. Buffon, De l'homme.

93 Thorkild Hansen, La mort en Arabie- Une expédition danoise 1761-1767, Editions de l'Aire,

Lausanne, 1981, 94, 126. See Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern

Egyptians, 64, 500-502.

94 Lettre à Henry Drury, 3 mai 1810, ed. Peter Quennell, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 65.

95 Walter Thornbury, Turkish Life and Character, I, 158, 233, 236, 239; II, 57.

18

virility. "The sight of a white eunuch creates an unpleasant feeling [on Flaubert],

speaking nervously, he is a singular produce, you cannot detach your eyes from him; the

black eunuchs sight never caused me anything similar”. The reader may wonder where

Flaubert attaches his eyes.96

Edmond About is clearer: to their hands in their pockets:

"For us Western idlers, it is always an object of curiosity that the beardless, shining and

soft face of one of these incomplete men when we see him in the street on the seat of a

car with a woman, or standing the hands in his pockets in front of the door of a palace…

The traveller's route in this country is literally full of questions".97

(In other words, the

absence of sex is question). When Reinach writes "I know nothing of more wretched than

these broad greasy faces, hanging flesh, extinguished eyes, bestial smile", does he not

refer these "hanging flesh" to impossible erection?98

In fact, the 18th

century expresses an ambiguous attitude with respect to the

castratos, beardless soloist, grown in Naples and Monserrat convents, dedicated to the

Mother-Virgin, replacing women in the pontifical chapels since 1555, then stars of the

baroque opera. 99

"Venice is so impassionate of [the castrato] Farinelli that if the Turks

were in the Adriatic sea, they would be left to unload quietly so as not to lose two

ariettas", writes abbot de Conti in 1728100

. Suard notes that virtuosos par excellence, by a

quite singular reversal of the word which comes from Latin virtus, in other words the

distinctive quality of man - virility, courage, strength, moral size are men who have lost

their distinctive qualities101

. Paradoxically, the Barock opera could not give a role of

eunuch to castratos, who personified noble and handsome men in love, glorious heroes,

gods of the mythology, never subordinate or ridiculous harem doorkeepers. Osman, the

guardian of Constance in Die Enführung, is a bass, just as the Osmin of the Caravane of

Cairo is a tenor. Thus by inversion, the eunuch gets a virile voice! Why all these

eunuchs? asked Paul Valéry: quite simply because the bachelor travellers of the 18-19th

centuries, who were prohibited any sexual relation in the name of morals or in the name

of the religion, seek to escape from a company where the principal means of

contraception is the coitus interruptus, in other words the stopped enjoyment, sterility;

they are obsessed with the fear of losing a sex whose use even remains limited, repressed

sex and may not be able to be again in use. The eunuch is a metaphor of forced chastity,

he represents the impotence of the travelling bachelor who compensates his vain

excitation by a fertile imagination. The traveller was in situation of eunuch, and increased

his ugliness and horror; the phantasm on castration is an inversion of the sexual

hyperpower attributed to the Turks.

96

Voyage en Orient, p. 648.

97 Edmond About, De Pontoise à Stamboul, Hachette, Paris, 1884, 93.

98 Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, G. Charpentier, Paris, 1879, tome 1, 217. See also Cantacasin,

Petit Traicté de l'origine des Turcqz, Palerne. Penzer, Sir Richard Burton, Brantôme, Vies des Dames

Galantes de son temps, Casablanca, I p. 147; Joseph Pitts, A faithful account of the religion and

manners of the Mahometans, &c. 1810, 395.

99 Isabelle Moindrot, L'opéra seria ou le règne des castrats, Fayard, 1993. Cf. Patrick Barbier, The

World of the Castrati. The history of an extraordinary operatic phenomenon, Souvenir Press, London,

1996.

100 Cf. Sylvie Mamy, Les Grands Castrats napolitains à Venise au XVIIIème siècle, Madarga, collection

Musique/Musicologie, 1994.

101 Introduction to Jérusalem délivrée.

19

Table 2. Man/ eunuch/ woman

Turkish man, white, virile

mustachioed

[=sexual strength,

political sloth]

Foreign woman, abducted, sold lewd

unapproachable, veiled

= sexual manipulator

Eunuch:

foreigner, black beardless

[ = sexual impotence, political power]

Bachelor traveller

sexual impotent

foreigner

The sexual semantic functions of religious oppositions based on phantasms, were

reversed in contemporary Western societies, which have evolved, especially since 1968,

towards a permissive structure closer to the one that the prudish Western opinion

formerly attributed to the Moslems. Some modern travellers describe without prudishness

their experience and sexual prowess, their drugs and copulations. When the Moslem

countries adopt more strict façade morals, similar to the strict capitalist ethics of work102

,

a Victorian Puritanism borrowed from the West, and pretend to be offended at the licence

of the monstrous Western present societies with homosexuals' marriages, women's naked

representations, etc, hence Western liberals will point to their absence of sexual freedom

and connect it to Islam, while present official moral values are the simple transposition of

European Victorianism. The traditional sexual attitudes, in the Islamic societies and

particularly in Ottoman Turkey, may finally have been closer to the world of today than

were Calvinist Prudishness and Victorianism.

102

Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in World Civilization, 3, The

Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1974, p. 195.

20

Table 3. Development of attitudes with regard to sexuality

Greek-Roman Medieval Traditional Western Societies

Antiquity Christianity Islam post 1968

Polygamy - - + -/+

Divorce + - + +

Virginity

(no sexual relations - + + -

before wedding)

Chastity - + - -

Birth control - - -* +

Masturbation + - + +

tolerance

Bestiality + - + +

tolerance

Homosexuality + - + +

tolerance

« Transvestites » - - + +

Eunuchs + Sacerdotal + -

Celibacy

Prudishness - + - -

* Birth control in seraglio for the sultan‟s brothers.

The description of Moslems as models of sexual freedom or “Barbarian‟ liberalism,

“of sexual happiness" appear during the period 1680-1715, a capital moment of change in

the European consciousness, where Islam, inversed mirror both close and far, turns to

represent a sexual paradise, critical of Western frustrations and inducing to dream103

. The

trip to the East is accompanied by a quest for martyrdom, as a justification with risk of

the confrontation with the temptations of flesh (see St Francis)104

.

103

Guy Turbet-Delof, L'Afrique Barbaresque dans la Littérature Française aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,

Genève, Librairie Droz, 1973, 309-315.

104 Roberta Denaro, « In Partes barbarum et infidelium : l‟Oriente come terra di martirio », Europa e

Islam tra i Secoli XIV e XVI, I, particularly pp. 308-309.

21

3. CLASSIFICATION OF THE SPECIES, IRREDUCIBILITY AND INTERNATIONAL

LAW

3.1. Taxonomy: Progressive identification of Turks, nomads or renegades?

Superficial observers elaborate a taxonomy – becoming a phylogenies - in a

continuum starting from religious sect to ethnos confused with millet, and there to the

nation, confused with spoken language, pretending to be anthropologically scientific.

The Middle Age was confusing "Turkish", Moor, Saracen, Moslem; where the

Turk as such hardly existed, nor the Turkish woman who was said Circassian, bought,

slave, nor the renegade or the child of the devşirme... A paradox between the Turks'

radical otherness in relation to the West is that, for the observers of the 15-17th

centuries,

most of the leaders of the army and of the administration were slaves (kul) coming from

the European territory of the ottoman empire, either by voluntary conversion or by

devşirme. The Turk, as a renegade, thus was the negative image of the European,

mongrels, mixes, changing religion and culture. Writers were disturbed by the number of

Christians who adopted the Moslem religion; they attributed conversions to force, or to

the interest, to the ambition of rapid rise in the Ottoman hierarchy, or to the taste for

lewd. The renegade par excellence was the Janissary, the recruitment of which is reported

in detail by all the authors, and even suggested as a policy to be adopted in the opposite

direction. Catholics had to attribute conversions to constraint, to the fear of torture, to

legitimize the maintenance of anti hedonistic moral rules for the majority of Christians.

The appraisal of the phenomenon is ambivalent: renegades are at the same time those

who ensure technology transfers bringing technological innovation, and the blooming of

sciences in the Moslem world (Ernest Renan), those who bring openness and political

changes (see the presentations of Ibrahim pasha and of numerous sadrazams, of Ibrahim

Muteferrika, of Ferik pasha, even to Atatürk); but nevertheless they are considered.

traitors, greedy for lucre and lewd, more malicious with regard to people of their original

faith than the Turks of origin. At the time of the Renaissance, conversions to Islam or to

Protestantism were seen from the same point of view by the Catholics and Inquisition, so

much that Charles V, criticising a pope allied to Francis 1st, himself allied to Suleiman,

sighs: "I will be the last not to become a Turk". Conservative Catholics of the end of the

19th

century consider the secular (laic) people like renegades: "The revolution is like the

Turkish empire, it is populated of Christians who will greed for fortune. It teaches them

to hate the cross, against which a relentless war is made, in order to pass for a good

renegade. Regarding the Christian mothers, they generate too, thanks to the public

schools and thanks to the colleges, small impudent Turks, heinous of the noble cross, that

they still carry themselves with love, on their chest… ", writes La Croix on 13 September

1883. The attraction of Communism between 1920 and 1989 was judged in the same

terms.

The description of the renegade (dönme) fulfils several functions: one, shown by

Postel, is to reassure - the Turk is not Turkish - the Turk as such did not exist, but was

only a kind of paradigmatic substitute to the bastard intended to disappear if the

legitimate brother behaved properly. He was a reversed European, therefore not

invincible. A second function was to give a reversed image, darkened intentionally,

symbolic of the doubt that the disorder of conversions suggested, an image which

remained bad beyond death - it was said that the renegades' corpses did not putrefy105

:. A

105

according to the Father Dan, quoted by P. Calixte de la Providence, Corsaires et Rédempteurs, Desclée

de Brouwer et Cie, Lille, 1884,

22

third function aimed to stress precariousness and reversibility, due to the arbitrariness of

the prince: renegades reached the top through their corruption, shepherds become kings,

but their fall could happen even faster. A fourth function indicated that they were sterile,

like Volney or Gobineau write: this intended to criticise cross-breeding, and at a time of

almost racist construction national, to regret the absence of national purity considered a

reason of the empires' decay. In other words the description of renegades was

unconsciously used to invite to the respect of the order, of the hierarchy, of classes. In the

opposition Turk of the cities/Turk of the countryside one can see indirect criticism of a

multinational empire by Western nationalists.

Table 4. Taxonomy: Christians versus Muslims

Greeks, sons of Themistocles and Pericles

Armenian, Christians, submitted, resigned, often devoid of energy flexible, modest, almost timid

Turks, sons of the steppe, fond of plundering

Kurds, Moslem, savage, quarrelsome insolent and proud

106

La Boullaye Le Gouz proposes an original classification opposing European and

Moslem nations in mirror:

106

Henri Avelot, Croquis de Grèce et de Turquie, 1899, 104.

23

Table 5. Taxonomy: Turks vs. Persians, 17-18th

centuries

The Spaniards are like the Ottoman Turks: they do not learn foreign languages - are faithful in friendship - are civilian between, themselves, cruel to the other nations - frugal

The Italian holds the middle between French and Spaniard, like Arab between the Ottoman and the Persian; they are divided and are dominated by the foreign powers. 107.

Turks "hospitable and splendid by ostentation, serious by practice", never mercantile, in good faith and liberal but by pride of their superiority, patient and brave, more fanatic than the Persians.

The French resembles the Persian

They are free lively critical minds and tolerant -curious and jealous to be believed the bravest ones - superb in dresses - more courteous with the foreigners that with their compatriots

Persians: "the loose spirit [...] of good company, civilian and polite towards foreigners. They like the refined, the festivals and the luxury, that they brought to a level as far as no other nation. They are good experts in all, and it is difficult to mislead them: that means that the Jews, are very rich in Turkey, and extremely miserable in Persia." (Otter)

Source: La Boullaye Le Gouz, Otter, Jaubert

Table 6. Taxonomy: Invaded/ Invaders

Christians (dominated)) Moslem (invaders)

(autochthonous, sedentary) (nomads)

Europe Greeks<Greeks Turks

Asia Maronites, Nestorians Arabs (Bedouins)

<Assyrians

Africa Copts<ancient Egyptians Arabs (Bedouins)

(Berbers)108

Mamelukes

-

The cartographic representation of the Ottoman Empire by Élisée Reclus aims to

simplify the geographic situation of ethnic and religious groups, in order to fit the

nationalist French vision of one nation- one territory.

107

Les Voyages et observations du sieur de La Boullaye-Le Gouz, Kimé, Paris, 1994, 89-90. The

comparison French/Persian will be taken back by Gobineau two centuries later. Jaubert, Voyage en

Arménie et en Perse, 315-319.

108 The Berbers‟ invaded status was used by French colonial propaganda to divide the Muslims.

24

The reconstruction of a family of Indo-European languages, at the beginning of

the 19th

century, parallel to the development of the evolution theories and phylogenies in

natural sciences and palaeontology, lead anthropologists to confuse language, nation,

ethnos, culture and race. Although Pittard, in 1915, considered that neither by the stature,

neither by the cephalic index, nor by the colour of the hair, one could distinguish between

the various physical types of the Balkans: "I defy a career anthropologist to say, without

making errors, in front of men equipped in the banal European costume: here is a Turk,

here is a Greek”. Subsequently at Atatürk‟s instigation and with Prof Afet Inan, he

carried out an anthropological survey over 64,000 Turks, showing them rather medium

sized, brachycephalic and leptorhinians, without attached eyes109

.

The nationalists of the 19th

century could not accept the idea of multinational,

pluri-ethnic pluri-cultural society, which would call into question the European nation

states considered the best model of economic and political development included by

Marxist110

: they classify to justify Western supremacy, through racist interpretation of

backwardness (see the analysis of Primitive Mentality, by Lévy-Bruhl, an analysis that he

will regret in view of the rise of Nazism). The categorisation which wants itself

increasingly "scientific" at the 19th

century, when the theories of family trees of people

with the family's Indo-European reconstruction [the situation of the Hittite branch in the

Indo-European group in 1914 consolidates at Western the idea that Anatolia was

originally Indo-European, that the history of Anatolia is covered by the history of Greco-

Roman "Antiquity" where the Hittites play only the role of remote precursors of these

peripheral Indo-European ethnic groups such as the Thracians, the Phrygian, the Lydians

who based themselves in the Hellenised mass of the Eastern, of the Semitic family - the

other groups being Altaics. Curiously this debate continues today with writers

assimilating transmission of technologies of agriculture and linguistic cultural influence.

A recent European publication states: "Abstraction of some marginal people abruptly so

much so that the impact of their exoticism our Europe can be held for unimportant

quantitatively appears, culturally, such as the indo-Europeanisation of a Neolithic

substrate, modelled by the traditional heritage, Christianisation and, finally, the own

genius of each one of its people"111

.

In the process, the sons of the steppe are opposed to the sculptural sons of Pericles

and of Themistocle, the later being considered the heirs of mythical heroes at the source

of our culture, at the time when the neo-classicism of the 17-18th

centuries made it

fashionable in architecture, painting, sculpture, theatre...

109

Marc-R. Sauter, Les Races de l'Europe, Payot, Paris, 1952, pp. 182 et 225. On racist ideologies see

Michel Leiris, "Race et civilisation", in Cinq études d'ethnologie, Denoël-Gonthier, Paris, 1969, pp. 9-

80; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et Histoire, Gonthier-Unesco, Paris, 1961].

110 Maria Todorova, "The Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans", Imperial Legacy- The Ottoman Imprint on the

Balkans and the Middle East, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 72.

111 “Les strates fondamentales de la personnalité européenne”, in Aux sources de l’identité européenne, de

Lambros Couloubaritsis, Marc de Leeuw, Emile Noël, Claude Streckx, Presses Universitaires

Européennes, Bruxelles, 1993

25

Table 7. - Taxonomy of “races” in the Ottoman empire, 19th

century112

"Race" Greek Turk Renegade Armenian Jew

Origin Ancient Scythian Christian Asiatic? Semitic

Greeks Tartar European Asiatic

=European Asiatic

Physical a statue strong fat, handsome? ugly

Features handsome (except oily ugly

(except in in heavy

Fanar) towns)

Dress blue green/white blue blue

Slippers blue yellow red black

Turban white green

Language grinding husing jerked Spanish/

"marble simple, poor raucous

Activity trade lazy parasite trade trade

=official usurer usurer

Behavior lively taciturn talkative talkative

and joyful phlegmatic active servile

talkative (keyf) corrupt probe et

-industrious immutable thoughtful invidious

and active faithful liar peaceful

liar (mainly byzantinised rascal rascal

in Fanar) urban Turks heavy

Religion superstitious fanatical faithless superstitious narrow

ignorant sceptical ignorant minded

Politics anarchy despotic abuser servility servility

These simple characteristics, which tourist guides abuse of (see the 1912 edition

of the Guide Bleu) would be today sentenced by courts as encouragement to racial hatred.

3.2. De- and Re-generation: the sick man of Europe (19th

century)

Degeneration may be related to a concept appearing already under Guillaume

Postel‟s pen: abastardissement (bastardisation), in considering heretic Christians, and

particularly for the Byzantine Greeks113

. Degenerated, deteriorated, depraved Greece,

112

Dallaway, Constantinople ancienne et moderne, 1798, I, 130, 233.; Pouqueville , Ubicini, Godins de

Souhesme; Guide bleu 1912, etc.

113 Frank Lestringant, "Altérités critiques: du bon usage du Turc à la Renaissance", D'un Orient l'autre,

Vol. I- Configurations, Editions du CNRS, Paris, 1991, p. 90-97.

26

"populates slave, whose idiotic soul lost its old energy" (Grasset Saint-Saveur), corrupt

language (Chateaubriand), "the Byzantines, degenerated Romans" (Gobineau), and later

the degenerate Ottoman Turks or Egyptians, running after the developments of the

industrial civilisation114

. For Protestant writers of the 19th

such as Channing, depraved,

perverse, corrupted by the sin is equivalent to degenerate: "the mankind [is] currently

degenerated by an abuse of the free will"115

, in other words he regretted the progressive

democratisation of the Western societies. The decay of the Greeks of Constantinople is

due, according to Volney, inspirer of Napoleon's campaign to Egypt, to a despotic and

bigot government, and, more generally, to ignorance and to cupidity, "delirium of the

enjoyments" among Moslems contrary to the "principles of the natural morals which is

the base of empires and societies". The conquest of Greece by the emperor of Austria

would make it possible to bring certain economic development, but "to resuscitate the old

Greeks, manners to the modern Greeks, the most corrupted race of the universe” they

should abandon their mercantile life and withdraw from the cities." Volney, physiocrat

rousseauist, advocates the return to earth, against the cities116

.

Even a contemporary writer like Jean-Paul Roux still judges that the Greeks

"were degenerated by Byzantium and by a half-millennium vassalage"117

. But also the

Enlightens oppose decline of an empire, - and Gibbon or Montesquieu had made an

analogy between the ottoman empire /Roman empire, which, to democracy or moderate

regimes, allowing to hope for a decline of all the empires -, whose structure unavoidably

leads to degrading, to vice, to sex, in an ethical, moralising concept of social and political

progress, where what is not value of expanding mercantile/ industrial civilisation is

regarded as cause of decline. The idea that the degeneration, decline or deterioration

would come from the absence of purity, of the mixture of the "races", ultimately led to

Nazism, to Spanish Franquism, to the Greece of the colonels with phoenix as a symbol of

regeneration, to the exchanges of population, to ethnic cleansing, an idea implicit in the

nationalist movements of the 19th

century118

. Decay of the Greeks was attributed to cross-

breeding, bad marriages with foreign and corrupt people by Gobineau in his Essay on the

Inequality of the human races which assimilates degeneration with senility, decrepitude.

The degeneracy or degeneration is retrogression (bastardisation) towards cosmopolitism,

mixture, despicable in period of triumphant nationalisms in other words the pluri-

114

D. Nicolaïdis, D'une Grèce à l'autre. Représentation des Grecs modernes par la France

révolutionnaire, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1992, 48, 56-57. The author is disturbed that, before

Greece‟s independence, while travellers distinguish Greeks from Turks, they consider them equally

degenerate. Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie, Pléiade, 365.

115 Ernest Renan, Etudes d'Histoire religieuse, Michel Lévy Frères, Paris, 1857, 366-367

116 C.F. Volney, Les Ruines ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires, in Oeuvres complètes,

Firmin Didot, Paris, 1843, pp. 17, 19, 26; Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, pendant les années 1783,

1784 et 1785, ibid. 116, 135, 153. Considérations sur la Guerre des Turks en 1788 [1807], ibid., 769.

Similarly: « La décrépitude des peuples les reconduit en enfance, writes Chateaubriand: le génie des

nations s'épuise, elles vieillissent déplorablement, "et quand il a tout goûté, rassasié de ses propres

chefs-d'œuvre, et incapable d'en produire de nouveaux, il s'abrutit et retourne aux sensations

physiques" (Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, Bernardin-

Béchet, 157, 169).

117 Jean-Paul Roux, Turquie, Petite Planète, Le Seuil, Paris, 1976, 8.

118 Barrès likes in Sparta eugenics. Maurice Barrès, Le Voyage de Sparte, Emile-Paul Editeurs, Paris,

1906, pp. 230-231, 274. This should be examined in the nationalist context following the Franco-

Prussian war of 1870, when the French conservative groups, la Cocarde, launch a natalist campaign,

against birth control, as a means to increase population against Germany. .

27

culturalism is the division's cause"119

. The Phanariot George Bibesco was busy with “the

regeneration of his race. It seemed to him that there was no need for a revolution and that

the Greek race (by Greeks you understand all those who read Plato) would regain its rank

without jolts, with time, and almost without efforts, he wished... that it preserve its pure

language.”120

The Greeks were considered people “the most intensely and thoroughly

democratic" in Europe, by John Mahaffy. "It had been a cardinal article in the Whig creed

of previous generations that political and civic virtues withered among a degraded and

enslaved people, that loss of liberty entailed turpitude and cowardice"; Byron, Hobhouse

and Finlay, philhellenes, are convinced that the Greeks were degenerated by slavery, but

will be redeemed by independence, and that the regained independence of mind is the

best condition for progress - this is one of the fundamental myths of the liberalism of the

19th

century121

.

The degeneration concept appeared in the 18th

century, while the concept of

social, historical progress supplanted the Christian concept of redemption of the world by

Christianity122

. Max Nordau, inspired the physical description of the criminals by

Lombroso, in Degeneration assimilates the artists‟ degeneration with the process leading

to criminality, prostitution, mental illness, and gives an apocalyptic description of the

intellectual life and artistic at the end of the 19th

century in Europe: end of race,

erotomaniacs, opium-eaters, dipsomaniacs, without faithless and lawless, inadaptable

egotists, irrecoverable, impotent social parasites, disordered immoral intellectuals

affected of debilitation and deterioration, incapable to check their impulsions, hesitant

between a mysticism inherited from the Jesuits' education and an unlimited sensuality,

like Baudelaire Verlaine, Wilde, indulging in Turkish music like Wagner initiating the

hysterical Germans to the mysteries of the Turkish kief (sic!). The causes are attributed to

alcoholism, tobacco, the atmosphere of the cities, stress! 123

Whereas Nordau was a

pioneer of the Zionist movement, paradoxically, forty years later, in the Nazis' mouth,

Jewish art will be considered degenerate; in other words, the term is simply a classifying,

racist term, ambivalent, masking realities. Decay of it appears at the same time the result

of unrestrained, aberrant, perverse sexuality, but is also given as a cause of the lack of

"control of the senses"124

. The terms decay/regeneration, decline- /progress, are used to

describe what is regarded as an alternative to abnormal/normal in relation to the moral

and economic Western values125

. Regeneration becomes in Barrès, Maurras‟s works the

119

J.B.B. Eyriès, La Turquie ou Costumes, Moeurs et Usages des Turcs. Suite de gravures coloriées, avec

leurs explications, Paris, Libraire de Gide fils.

120 Princesse Bibesco, La nymphe Europe, Livre 1 Mes Vies antérieures, Librairie Plon, Paris, 1960, p. 93,

quoting a book of prince Georges Bibesco, Le Fanatisme turc au XVIIIe siècle. Pouqueville gave to his

history of the Greek Revolution the title: Histoire de la régénération de la Grèce.

121 John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion, Victorians and Edwardians in the South, Oxford University

Press, Oxford, 1987, p. 234.

122 Cf. Grosrichard, pp. 55-64. Cf. Mona Ozouf, L'homme régénéré, Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires.

123 Degeneration (Entartung), Londres, William Heinemann, 1895, inspired from Dr. B.A. Morel, Traité

des Dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'Espèce humaine, et des causes qui

produisent ces Variétés maladives, Paris, 1857; Paul Moreau (de Tours), Des aberrations du sens

génésique, Paris, 1883..

124 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1, La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1976, 56, 88, 156-

157.

125 Sigmund Freud, Délire et rêves dans la "Gradiva" de Jensen, Gallimard. Regeneration, at the

beginning of the French Revolution is an ambivalent political term : Louis XVI is hailed as the

28

return to the traditional values, a pure conservatism126

. Degeneration, in the mouth of a

Gabriele Mandel, still means dropping traditional values, such as courtesy, tolerance, art

of living, in order to prefer the universally mercantile values of industrial civilisation127

.

Similarly, when dealing with the Ottoman Empire in the 19th

century, “in the

society, in the administration, in the government, everything which is bad comes from the

Turks... I arrive with this idea that only [the Greeks] can regenerate the East ", writes

Joseph Reinach128

. The degeneration of the Ottoman Empire after the death of Suleiman

has been a traditional view of the historians since the beginning of the 19th

century, with

the idea frequent among conservative ottoman historians that a return to the organisation

of the time of Suleiman would enable the empire to come back to its peak129

. Djait

associates Ottoman Empire and decline of Islam, assimilating the later to Arabism: by

absorbing a flow of slaves of Eastern Europe, "the Ottoman Empire nearly lost its soul",

by succumbing to the temptation of Europe, it "sank in the conquest of Christian territory

that it even did not seek to assimilate, instead of concentrating on the organisation and

properly Islamic territory integration". He repeats what some supporters of the Ottoman

traditions had written a century earlier – that Turks by adopting the Byzantine spirit fell

into a kind of moral decomposition130

. The reason of Turkish' decay, according to Claude

Farrère, was their giving up the nomadic life, wars, abandoning oneself to the pleasures

of the seraglio, and at the time of Atatürk, to drop some of the most reasonable Koranic

traditions: modernism is harmful131

. .

Alleged causes of degeneration are the ignorance, due to the absence of printing,

said Volney, and conservatism in government and in religion132

. The Moslem thought for

Renan is degenerated: it exists only among "last degenerate representatives of literatures

of whom it (the philologist) makes its speciality", and he limits the contribution of the

Semites to the only religion [critical of the Moslem world still unconscious and indirect

criticises of its teaching with a racist key]133

.

The word regeneration is popularised in the context of an anti-revolutionary,

"régénérateur de la France", the National Assembly was called to regenerate the Kingdom ; the

Monarchy is regenerated by the Etats généraux- freedom is regenerating, writes Mirabeau. Then the

Revolutionary press describes the Aristocrats as degenerate, depraved, irresponsible. The citizens, to

regenerate should come back to their roots, to cut useless members , etc. (Mona Ozouf, L'homme

régénéré, Gallimard, 1989, 126-142, 173.)

126 Maurice Barrès, Le Voyage de Sparte, Emile-Paul Editeurs, Paris, 1906, p. 29.

127 Gabriele Mandel, Mamma li turchi, L'altra faccia della Mezzaluna, Il Cannochiale/Lucchetti,

Bergame, 1990, 175.

128 Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, G. Charpentier, Paris, 1879, tome II, p. 26, 221-223, 236.

129 Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem, Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, Oxford

University Press, New York, 1993, 154-155.

130 Paul de Régla, Les Bas-Fonds de Constantinople, Tresse & Stock, Paris, 1892, p. 162.

131 Claude Farrère, Forces spirituelles de l'Orient, Flammarion, Paris, 1937, pp. 181-183, 237.

132 C.F. Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785, dans Oeuvres

complètes, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1843, 299, 304.

133 Cf. Christian Decobert, "La lettre de Renan sur l'Ecole du Caire", D'un Orient l'autre, Vol. 2-

Identifications, Editions du CNRS, Paris, 1991, p. 5, et, Henry Laurens, "A propos de la controverse

Renan/Afghani: Islam et protestantisme", ibid., pp. 220-227.

29

conservative Restoration, such as a return to the moral order, to the ancient and supposed

pure values [but already the Revolution advocated the return to the pure Republic of old

Rome], against the supposed libertine excesses of the 18th

century. Then in the specific

context of the fall of the French Empire, France must be regenerated vis-à-vis England

and Prussia which overcame it. Regeneration is described as a handing-over on the rails

in functioning towards the civilisation, opposed to "out-of-date people, degenerate races,

empires in decline, where the spirit of party replaced patriotism"134

.

Regeneration in education is first conceived as a return to a national language and

to old texts, "to the monuments of the old civilisation". Efforts to chase words borrowed

form foreign languages are typical of this nationalist policy of bourgeoisies to promote a

national language, even artificial. Teaching sciences and new technologies appears only

secondary, subsidiary135

.

Table 8. De- and Re-generation

Evolution Degeneration

Wild state good salvage

(anarchy) = state of nature childhood

=force, fanaticism =peace (Rousseau)

Civilisation Urban perversion old age

(law, freedoms) =tyranny

3.3. From oriental despotism to clash of civilisations

The traveller fanaticises on developments of the seraglio and of Oriental

despotism as recourse of arbitrary and freedom of decision against the legalist, formalised

society he comes from. Enough was written about the tolerance of Islam at the time of the

massacres of Crusades, the tortures of the Inquisition, the devastations of the Wars of

religion, the fanatic excesses of the Revocation of the Nantes Edict, without taking into

account the Holocaust136

.

134

F. Julien, Papes et Sultans, Plon, Paris, 1879, p. 3. "Als Rußland Seine Regeneration unternahm,

befand sich dies Land in einer solchen Isolierung von Europa, dass die Staaten des Abendlandes fast

gar keine Kenntnis nahmen von Massregeln, deren Wichtigkeit sie erst in ihren gewaltigen Folgen

erkannten. Wie ganz Anders ist das in osmanischen Reiche; man möchte sagen, Europa nimmt mehr

Anteil an der Türkei als die Türkei selbst" The religion prevents progress-"in Turkey, reforms started

by the end. Sie bestand meist in Äusserlichkeiten, in Namen und Projekten. Die unglücklichste

Schöpfung war die eines Heers nach europäischen Mustern, mit russischen Jacken, französischem

Reglement, belgischen Gewehren, türkischen Mützen, ungarischen Sätteln, englischen Säbeln und

Instruktors aus allen Nationen " V. Moltke, Unter dem Halbmond, Erlebnisse in der alten Türkei,

1835-1839, Edition Erdmann, Stuttgart, 1984, 349 & 352.

135 J.J. Ampère, La Grèce, Rome et Dante, Etudes littéraires d'après nature, 6ème éd., Didier et Cie,

Paris, 1870, 94. Coray, Mémoire sur l'état actuel de la civilisation dans la Grèce, lu à la Société des

observateurs de l'homme, le 16 nivôse an XI (6 janvier 1803), in Lettres inédites de Coray à Chardon

de la Rochette, Firmin-Didot, Paris, 1877, pp. 451, 453, 481-488.

136 Joseph Reinach, Voyage en Orient, G. Charpentier, Paris, 1879, tome II, pp. 230, 244, 363 et 397,

citant Collas, La Turquie en 1859. Ch. Mismer, Soirées de Constantinople, Typographie et

Lithographie centrales, Constantinople, 1869, pp. 204-209.

30

Machiavelli the first to discuss the absence of intermediate bodies, as opposed to

Western European kingdoms where monarchs must cope with numerous intermediate

powers (aristocracy, clergy, Parliaments, corporations); the kingdom of the Turk, whose

regime is based on the satisfaction of the soldiers, not of the people like in most Western

European countries, would be difficult to conquer, but easy to preserve137

. Travel

relations describing the seraglio of the sultan in the 17th

century were written for Louis

XIV, unfavourably comparing the Topkapı palace with the architecture of Versailles, but

attaching a major price to the etiquette, to habits, to palace services. The darkening of

cruelty through stories of dumb, murders of brothers, women thrown to the sea, eunuchs,

enabled Louis XIV to increase the weight of absolute monarchy up to the last limits

where he would not pass for "Eastern despotism". The myth of the well ordered Turkish

state, functioning properly in the 16-17th

centuries, is used to strengthen the central power

in its fight against aristocracy138

. The Eastern despotism became “a hyperbolic image of

the abuses of power of the French monarchy", that Montesquieu could not directly

criticise139

. For Montesquieu, the despotism in the Ottoman Empire stems from the

absence of a clear rule of succession, the confusion of the three legislative, executive and

judicial powers on the head of the sultan; “the warm climate which encouraged the

expansion of Islam, polygamy and despotism; and he finally concludes that "the moderate

government fits better to the Christian religion and the despotic government to the

Muslim”140

.

As he had not found feudal structures in the Ottoman Empire fitting his dialectical

construction, Marx endorsed the categories of Montesquieu without any examination141

.

Engels suggests to solve the Turkish question in one sentence: in the Balkans, the

Southern Slavs don‟t have "other rivals than the barbarian Turks or the Arnautes, who for

a long time have appeared to be the adversaries to any progress.… The history as well as

recent events, show that an independent Christian state must be founded on the ruins of

137

"Tutta la monarchia del Turco è governata da uno signore, li altri sono sua servi; e, distinguendo el suo

regno in sangiachi, vi manda diversi amministratori, e li muta e varia come pare a lui" Il principe, chp

IV. See also chp. XIX. See also the speech of Diego de Mendoza in the Venitian Senate in 1543, or the

description of the Persian regime by Chardin, Voyage en Perse, Société Bibliophile, Paris, 338-341,

which inspired Montequieu.

138 Gabriele Mandel, Mamma li turchi, L'altra faccia della Mezzaluna, Il Cannochiale/Lucchetti,

Bergame, 1990, 53, et aux pp. 94-95 des citations de Machiavel et Jean Bodin.

139 Gülru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power. The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and

Sixteenth Centuries, The Architectural History Foundation, New York, and The MIT Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991. Abdessalam Cheddadi, "Les démons du despotisme: En deça et au-

delà d'un concept", D'un Orient l'autre, Vol. 2- Identifications, Editions du CNRS, Paris, 1991, ibid.,

pp. 389-393; Marie-Louise Dufrenoy, L'Orient Romanesque en France- 1704-1789, Etude d'histoire et

de critique littéraire, Editions Beauchemin, Montréal, 1946, p. 226.

140 L’Esprit des Lois, chp. XVI.2 and XXIV.2. Volney, who inspired the Egyptian campaign of Bonaparte,

after a long stay in Cairo, shared the same views. C.F. Volney, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie, pendant

les années 1783, 1784 et 1785, dans Œuvres complètes, Firmin Didot, Paris, 1843, 283-289.

141 See Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, New Left Books, London, 1976 (Traduction

française: L'Etat absolutiste, François Maspero, Paris, 1978), who, after concluding that our ignorance

creates wrong categories, still maintains a "muslim mode” where he includes Turkey, Persia and Mogol

India. See L. Valensi, Venise et la Sublime Porte, La naissance du despote, Hachette, 1987, and Alain

Grosrichard, Structure du Sérail- La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l'Occident classique, Seuil,

Paris, 1979, pp. 31-39.

31

the Moslem state of Europe." 142

In the same line, Karl Wittfogel assembled an enormous

ideological construction affirming that the "hydraulic societies", prototypes of the Eastern

despotism, could function only with a rigorous slavery submitted to a careful hierarchical

bureaucracy made up of slaves (Janissaries) blindly at the service of an arbitrary despot.

Obviously, as the hydraulic term was not really appropriate neither for the Byzantine

empire nor for the pastoral Turks moving from central Asia towards Anatolia or the

Balkans, the author situated them in a "marginal structure", as "sporadic hydraulic

societies on the "fringe" - where the principal criterion of the despotism seems the

capacity for a multinational empire to keep its power on major distances143

.

Francis Fukuyama, guru of American liberals, in his famous book on the end of

history, considers that Islam, as opposed to freedom of conscience, similar to the

European Fascism, is intolerant and contrary to democracy, the Moslem countries are

"Asian authoritarian states" and that the only Moslem country which succeeded in

developing a kind of democracy is Turkey, thanks to its efforts to split from Islam144

.

Similar simplistic language appears in Huntington‟s book Clash of civilisations.

3.4. Cultural irreducibility

Our observers, far from being impartial, needed to make believe in fanaticism to

justify their support for the nationalist movements and the parcelling out of the empire:

Chateaubriand, who had visited Turkey as the "last Crusader" wrote while minister of

Foreign Affairs: "Pretending to civilise Turkey by giving it steamers and railway, by

disciplining its armies, while teaching it to operate its fleets, does not mean to extend

civilisation to the East, this introduces cruelty into the West… Future Ibrahims may be

able to bring us back to Charles Martel's time… A people whose social order is based on

slavery and polygamy must be sent back to the steppes of the Mongols… The human race

can only gain from the destruction of the Ottoman Empire… All the elements of the

morals of the political society are in the roots of Christianity; all the germs of social

destruction are in the Muslim religion. The present sultan is said to have made steps

towards civilisation: this is because he tried to submit fanatic hordes to regular exercises,

with the help of some French renegades, and some English and Austrian officers. Since

when mechanical learning of weapons has been civilisation? It is an enormous mistake, it

is almost a crime to have initiated the Turks to the science of our tactics; the soldiers to

be disciplined must be baptised, unless on purpose we want to raise the buriers of our

society” 145

. Turcophobe such Pouqueville: "the despotism and the plague arose and

continue within the inertia of the Asian races, the life of which is only an opprobrious

length" "I often wondered why the Turks had not been exterminated for a long time as a

plague of the states?"146

Guizot, although in favour of the protection of the integrity of

142

Article in New York Daily Tribune, 21 avril 1853, quoted in Les marxistes et la question nationale

1848-1914, Georges Haupt, Michael Lowy, Claudie Weill, Ed. François Maspéro, Paris, 1974.

143 Karl Wittfogel, Oriental despotism, A comparative study of Total Power, Yale University Press, 1957

(after the French translation: Le despotisme oriental. Etude comparative du pouvoir total, Arguments,

Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1964, pp. 188, 203, 228, 243, 246-247, 254-260, 300-311, 374, 384, 473-

479. However, some psychoanalysts still use the concept: see Jean-François Lyotard, Des dispositifs

pulsionnels, "Capitalisme énergumène", Union Générale d'Editions, Paris, 1973, 37-38.

144 Francis Fukuyama, The end of History and the Last Man, Avon Books, New York, 1993, pp. 34-36,

45-46, 217, 236-237. What about Indonesia or Malaysia?

145 Mémoire à M. de La FERRONAYS, 30 November 1828.

146 F.C.H.L. Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, Chez Firmin Didot, Paris, 1826, IV, 121, VI, 84.

32

the Turkish territory, looks pessimistic: "There is nothing to hope of the Moslem world,

neither for his own reform, nor for the Christians only the misfortune of the events placed

under its laws.”147

"Paul Deschanel addressing the Chamber of Deputies, on 29 February

1888: "The East is the country of the tradition par excellence; it kept through the

centuries its indelible character; and one of the essential features of this character, it is the

mixture, the confusion of religious issues with civil life. It is what explains the

insurmountable difficulties to which all the Ottoman reformers ran up, and it is what also

explains the errors, the miscounts of the Western politicians, however extremely well-

advised, but who requested from the Turkish empire measures, incompatible reforms, I

does not say only with its organisation, but with its very existence, because they appeared

to believe as they had business in a State political like ours, while actually they were in

the presence of warlike theocracy, of religious feudality, of immutable orthodoxy”.148

Renan: “The worst social state, is the theocratic state, such as Islamism and the old Papal

States, where the dogma reigns directly in an absolute way”149

.

“Turkey never changes”150

. "This people replaced a civilised people without any

change in its cruelty, and it was established in a large city with its laws made for

quarrelsome hordes and nomadic tribes... Patriotism, such as we know it, is a not known

virtue of the Osmanlis... The Turks' laws are less those of the country that they inhabit

than those of the religion that they profess... at [them] all what could resemble patriotism

is completely subordinated to religious fanaticism”.151

"It‟s enough to scrape with the end

of the nail the pasha, the bey, the effendi to find the barbarian with his wild instincts, his

wild hatreds, his thirst for brutal sovereignty", believing, cruel fanatic and under the

excitation of the priests who deceive it and lead it to violence while resting on the

regulations of the Koran on Jihad. "Mahomet, such as the despotism, slavery and

fanaticism, these two cankers of the ancient societies, finished its time among our modern

democracies." 152

"The Turkish race entirely lacks philosophical and scientific spirit",

writes Renan in Islamisme et la Science. "The Turks will never manage to reach

European civilisation: their religion will always be for them an insurmountable obstacle."

"This brutal race had made the war with incredible cruelty. Thus is its memory in

execration among Greek people... This people preserved his cruelty until our days.

Civilisation does not fit it. They often reminded me of children who like to dirty

themselves, and who despair their mothers... To such men, there must be only the life of

the immense steppes of the north of Asia.” Abbot Michon denies that a Western

education can change the Turks: "The young Turks who return from the foreign

147

Mémoires, t. VII, p. 240

148 Max Choublier, La Question d’Orient depuis le Traité de Berlin. Étude d’Histoire Diplomatique,

Paris, Arthur Rousseau, 1897. Gladstone The Bulgarian Horrors, Cf. R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli,

Gladstone, and the Eastern Question, London, 1935; New York, Barnes & Noble, 1963.

149 Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1883, p. xii, 130-131. Cf.

Hourani, Islam in European thought, 30.

150 Henri Avelot, Croquis de Grèce et de Turquie, Autour de l'Archipel, Alfred Mame et Fils, Tours, 1899,

77.

151 M. Michaud et M. Poujoulat, Correspondance d'Orient (1830-1831), N.J. Gregoir, V. Wouters et Cie,

Bruxelles, 1841, II, p. 151 et 221. See also César Vimercati, Constantinople et l'Egypte, Henri et

Charles Noblet, Paris, 1858, pp. 49-86.

152 Le Camus, 379.

33

countries... at their London, Vienna or Paris return, are put elegantly; they no longer carry

babouches and are extremely fluent in English, in French or in German; but they drink

wine, they smoke during the Ramadan, they became bad subjects and do not have any

creed... [ one ] calls them giaours, and they remain without place... When their idleness

begins to weigh them, they come imperceptibly back to the uses of their country, they

gradually drop the false European varnish that they had brought, and they become again

more Turkish than ever; often they are more hostile to the European ideas that

others…”153

"The Turks remained Moslem, were thereby resistant to any fusion, to any European

culture, the Koran them by inspiring fundamentally the contempt and hatred. At the

contact several times secular of the Christians, they had only their fanaticism exalted, that

accentuate their Asian characters and they appear more foreign and cruel than ever, as to

the Christian beliefs which already separated it from them, Europe added the

revolutionary principles to which they can include nothing... Truly, the Turks cannot be

absorbed in European civilisation; they cannot be assimilated; today less than never. The

Turkish people is dead... The sultan will be able to give to the beautiful plans of Europe

sanctions and signatures; they will be able to inspire no confidence: for drawing a pen is

not enough, to suppose it sincere, to change its nature and that of Islam." 154

Similar ideas today: “Turkey does not belong to Europe neither by geography, nor

by its history or its culture”155

. Turkey is “heterogeneous” (Bayrou). “I don‟t believe that

Turkey may ever fulfil the political criteria of Copenhagen”156

.

3.5. From prohibition of alliances with the unfaithful to integration into the

European concert: ordinary capitulations.

Was the Ottoman Empire ottoman condemned to be opposed to the Christian

Republic by an ideological gap, as was the iron curtain? The progressive dissolution of a

medieval Christian Republic regulated by the Roman Catholic Church, as Chabod wrote,

lead to the development of the concept of Europe. Charles 5th

was still defending the

“Christian Republic”; Sully, seventy years later speaks of Europe. Would a compromise

have been possible if by chance, the Emperor could have married one of his daughters to

the son of the Padishah or vice versa, as it had happened in the 14-15th

centuries? Why

such a marriage became impossible? How were agreements negotiated with the Moslem

countries? International law progressively turned into a law of the States, where “natural

law“, in other words secular law replaced canonical law or Sheria – hence the application

by Moslem countries of diplomatic rules similar to those of the Christian countries,

leading to peaceful coexistence and to trade expansion. International law was recognized

as a part of the Sheria, contrary to the traditional Roman law and of the Empire/constant

Church separation of the Middle-Age]; in fact, the Koran includes provisions covering

the principle pacta sunt servanda (surats IX 4 and XVI 93) and diplomatic immunity of

153

Abbé J. H. Michon, Voyage religieux en Orient, Paris, 1853, tome I, p. 87, 156, 232.

154 E. Driault, La Question d'Orient, F. Alcan, Paris, 1905, p. 387, in Rodinson, Marxisme et monde

musulman, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1972, p. 200.

155 Mrs Grossetête, European Parliament, 1

st April 2004 ; Bourlanges, Figaro, 19/4/ 2004.

156 Elmar Brok, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, New Europe, 19

April 2004.

34

envoys (§§ 732-733 of Šaybānī); customs duties and restrictions on trade, authorisation to

negotiate reciprocally advantageous agreements with the non Moslem powers157

.

However, the inclusion of these provisions in the sacred book does not differ from the

recognition of international principles.

The prohibition of alliances with the unfaithful (Pactum cum infidelibus or Foedus

impius) had been developed by the Church as a rule of canonical law- notably by the pope

John VIII in the 9th

century distorting the words of Saint Paul prohibiting the marriage

with the unfaithful to prevent the alliances of the lords of southern Italy with Saracens.

Later, in the years 1228-1245 the Popes try to oppose the establishment of relations

between Frederic II of Schwaben and the Egyptian sultan el-Malik al-Kâmil158

. The

Lateran council of 1179 reiterated the prohibition of trade with the Moslems; this

prohibition remained into force until the 14th

century, confirmed by Clement V 1307's

bulla, except derogation given by the Holy See - the Ragusans had received in 1373 such

a pontifical authorisation for a limited trade with the unfaithful159

. The provisions of

canonical law prohibited Christians to provide Saracens cereals, wood, ammunition and

weapons; agreements concluded with the unfaithful were deemed void per se. The

sanction was excommunication (for Zapolya, but not for Francis 1st just as that had been

the case for Frederic II), or the prohibition for the prince's territories. A distinction was

made by Thomas of Aquino between jus humanum, applicable also to the pagan princes

allowing alliances provided not be directed against a Christian prince, and jus divinum,

prohibiting alliances Christian/unfaithful directed against a Christian prince160

. When the

Pope learnt that the king of Hungary, John Hunyad, had concluded a treaty with the

Turkish sultan, he dispatched a legate bringing a conciliar decree stating that no Christian

prince should keep faith to the enemies of faith - where faith (fides) is taken in the double

meaning of trust given to the enemy, and religious faith, word given to God161

. Similarly

the alliance of Francis 1st with the Turks against Charles V was considered scandalous,

but not that of the latter with the Persians against Suleiman. Francis 1st sent a

memorandum to Paul III to justify the conclusion of its alliance with the Turks by the

universality of the family of the nations162

. The history of the 15 and 16th

centuries are

157

Shaybani, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, ca. 750-804 or 5. The Islamic law of nations: Shaybani's Siyar.

Translated with an introd., notes, and appendices by Majid Khadduri. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press

[1966]

158 2 Corinthians, 6, 14.

159 Boško I. Bojović, “Dubrovnik (Raguse) et les Ottomans”, Turcica, XXIV (1992) p. 121. Manfroni,

„L‟Empia Allianza », Rivista Marittima, 1896, 3e trimestre, p. 278

160 See Octavianus Cacheranus, Disputatio an Principi Christiano fas sit pro sui, suorumque bonorum

tutella foedus inire, ac amicitia infidelibus iungi, ab eisque auxilium adversus alios Principes

Christianos petere , Turin, 1556; Lyserus Disputatio Politica de Foederibus cum Infidelibus de

(1676), J.H. Pott De Fœderibus Fidelium cum Infidelibus (1686). Nys, E., « La Théorie de l‟équilibre

européen », RDILC, 25 (1893) pp. 38-39. A. Gentili, Hispanicæ advocationis libri duo. De iure belli,

(New York, 1921), III, p. 19. B.N. Madrid Ms. 1093, 191 sq. on leagues and alliances with the Muslim

world.

161 Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Livre V, chapitre 6, Livre de Poche, 1993, p. 475-476.

See the Hungarian-Turkish treaty shown by the Turks to Walerand de Wavrin, in Jehan de Wavrin,

Anchiennes chronicques d’Engleterre, Paris, Mme

Ve Jules Renouard, 1859, vol. 2, p. 68.

162 See also J. Mathorez, « Un apologiste de l‟alliance franco-turque au XVI

e siècle. François Sagon », in

Bulletin du Bibliophile, 3 (1913), pp. 105-120 ; Carl Göllner, « Die Haltung der öffentlichen Meinung

zum Türkenbündnis Franz I.“, in Revue historique du sud-est européen, 20 (1943), pp. 208-222; René

35

however full of examples of alliances with the Turks against other Christian powers,

including by the Popes scared by the French invasions of Italy163

. Furthermore the decline

of the Popes' spiritual power, at the time of the Reform, made sanctions hardly

operative164

.

The question of knowing if one can only conclude "pact" with the unfaithful was

still a topic for discussion among Catholics in the 17-18th

centuries. For Gentili, on

knowing if it is permitted to entertain relations with the Turks: “religion is business

between God and men, not between men”. For the internationalist Grotius, "it is a

commonly agitated question, to know whether it is permitted to conclude Treaties &

Alliances with those which do not belong to the true Religion. To judge from the natural

law, there is no difficulty at all in it: for the right to conclude Alliances is common to all

Men, notwithstanding Religious differences." 165

, but in the § xii, he adds that "all the

Christians as Members of only one body [should] be sensitive to their respective evils…

Kings and People have to help each other when an Enemy of the Religion attacks the

states of Christendom…”

In spite of this, Italian Republics (Venice, Pisa, Florence, Genoa), the kingdom of

France or Catalonia soon passed agreements regulating trade with the Saracen countries,

and established consular (diplomatic) representations in the most important commercial

harbours during the 13 and 14th

centuries; and the prohibitions fell into disuse166

,. The

capitulations between the Ottoman Empire and Western powers, renew earlier

agreements between the Byzantine empire and the Italian Republics167

.

Quatrefages, „La perception gouvernementale espagnole de l‟alliance franco-turque au XVIe siècle“,

in Revue Internationale d’Hitoire Militaire, n° 68 (1987) pp. 71-84. E. Nys, Les origines du Droit

International, 1894, p. 162. Michelet, in his Histoire de France, hails the alliance of Francis 1st with

Suleiman the Magnificent as an "immense event, decided by despair, which [the King] himself

probably considered like a call to the devil, but who really was a thing of God, the first base of alliance

of religion and of reconciliation of people" … holy work which, by the reconciliation of Europe and

Asia, created the new balance, the increased order of the modern time, substituting human harmony to

Christian harmony “ (Chp. XII and XV).

163. Uzunçarşılı, 453 ; K. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, II, pp. 456, 508, 513 fn. 32, 514, 521, 534 fn.

115, 537 ; J. Valera, Historia General de España, 1922, t. VIII, 13 . Taha Toros, Geçmişte Türkiye-

Polonya ilişkileri, Istanbul, Perka, s.d. ; J. Garbacik, « Le relazioni turco-polacche tra XVI e XVII

secolo alla luce dei rapporti e dei dispacci dei baili veneziani a Costantinopoli », in Italia, Venezia e

Polonia tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento, 1967. Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, Relation de

l’expédition de Charles Quint contre Alger, traduction par Pierre Tolet, ed. H. D. Grammont, A. Aubry

– Paris, 1874.

164 Giulio Vismara, Impium Foedus. Le origini della “Respublica Christiana”, Milan, Dott. A. Giuffrè,

1974.

165 De jure belli ac pacis, Book II chp. XV par.viii.

166 Cf. Fr. Rey, De la protection diplomatique et consulaire dans les échelles du Levant et de Barbarie,

1899, p. 32.

167 Cf. Fr. Lane, Venice, a Maritime Republic, 1973, p236. Auguste Benoît, Etude sur les Capitulations

entre l’Empire Ottoman et la France et sur la Réforme Judiciaire en Egypte, Paris, Librairie Nouvelle

de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1890 ; Gatteschi, Manuale di Diritto publico e privato ottomano ;

Carnazzi-Amari, Traité du Droit international public en temps de paix ; V. Féraud-Giraud, De la

Juridiction française dans les Echelles du Levant et de Barbarie ; Etudes pratiques sur la question

d’Orient, Réformes et Capitulations, Paris, Amyot, 1869. Bertold Spuler, « Die Europäische

Diplomatie in Konstantinopel bis zum Frieden von Belgrad (1739) », Jahrbücher für Kultur und

Geschichte der Slaven, Breslau, Band XI, 1935, pp. 53-55. Aldo Gallotta, « Il trattato turco-veneto del

36

The capitulations represent an international agreement beyond religious divisions,

where basically the personal (civilian) provisions (civil) place put aside religion

differences as a matter of fact to be recognized as such. In the capitulations granted by the

Ottoman Padishah, no commercial reciprocity is requested, this is because the

capitulations (chapters) are seen as privileges autonomously granted to a vassal (like

Venice or Poland) while the Empire had no interest as such in trade.

As Sousa rightly considers capitulations are just the continuation of medieval

international practice between Byzantium and the Christian States, and do not stem from

Moslem law or from religious differences (even if since the 17th

century Western powers

focussed on the relative aspects of those differences to broaden their scope): basically the

feudal regime of the personality of laws (applying to the subjects of a prince or citizens of

a republic and to their vassals) corresponded to the legal Moslem regime; its application

by the medieval consulates in the Eastern Mediterranean Latin States in particular in

judicial matters between citizens of same origin notably in the kingdom of Cyprus or in

the Byzantine empire continued without major changes in the Moslem state which

succeeded them168

.

The principle of the Sheria is universal and personal, while after the peace of

Augsburg stating the principle of territorial sovereignty, the Western Law will become

increasingly a territorial Law where secularisation buries the religious differences, which

the Turkey will endorse with the Republic. The territorial law prevailing from the 16th

century in the emerging European nation States progressively completely replaced the

personal medieval legal system, which remains in force in Ottoman territory. Sousa

considers that the disappearance of the personal law in Occident and the development of

the territorial law stem from the influence of the “Germanic” ways of life (development

of free agriculture, intermarriages between persons of diverse communities, uniformising

influence of the Church in family relations, feudalism). In fact, more than feudalism,

which created a personal link between the lord and his vassal; the passage to territorial

12 gennaio 1482 », dans Studia Turcologica memoriae Alexii Bombaci dicata, a cura di Aldo Gallotta,

Ugo Marazzi, Naples- Rome, Herder, 1982.

168 Ravndal, G.B., The origin of the Capitulations and of the Consular Institution, Senate Document n°

34, 67th

Congress, 1st session, Washinton, Government Printing Office, 1921;: Wansbrough, J .,

« Venice and Florence in the Mamluk Commercial Privileges », Bulletin of the School of Oriental and

African Studies, 28 (1965), pp. 483-523; Contuzzi, La istituzione dei Consolati ed il diritto

internazionale europeo nella sua applicabilità in Oriente, Naples, 1885, pp. 147 , 152-153 ; G.

Pélissié du Raussas, Le régime des capitulations dans l’empire ottoman, vol. 1, Arthur Rousseau,

Paris, 1902; Francis Rey, De la protection diplomatique et consulaire dans les échelles du Levant et de

Barbarie, thèse, Paris, Librairie de la Société du Recueil Général des Lois & des Arrêts, 1899;

Alexandre de Miltiz, Manuel des consuls, Londres, 1837-1838 ; W. Lehmann, Der Friedensvertrag

zwischen Venedig und der Türkei vom 2. Oktober 1540, nach dem türkischen Original herausgegeben

übersetzt und erläutert, Bonn Orientalische Studien, Heft 16, Suttgart, W. Kohlhammer, 1936 ; C.

Villain-Gandossi, « Contribution à l‟étude des relations diplomatiques et commerciales entre Venise et

la Porte Ottomane au XVIe siècle », Südost Forschungen, 26 (1967), 23. Tafel, G. L. Fr. & Thomas,

G.M., Urkunden zur älteren Handels- und Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, Vienne, 1856-1857,

3 vol. (Fontes rerum austriacarum, t. XII à XIV). Francis Rey, De la protection diplomatique et

consulaire dans les échelles du Levant et de Barbarie, thèse, Paris, Librairie de la Société du Recueil

Général des Lois & des Arrêts, 1899, cf. pp. 1-; G. Salles, L’institution des consulats, son origine, son

développement au Moyen-Âge chez les différents peuples, Paris, 1898; Mas-Latrie, Archives de

l’Orient Latin, t. I, pp. 406-408; Don Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau, Memorias históricas sobre

la marina, comercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, Madrid, 1779-1792, t. II pp. 156 et

302. Nasim Sousa, The Capitulatory Régime of Turkey. Its History, Origin and Nature, The John

Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1933, p. 158-159, fn. 4

37

law should be sought in the formation of the nation states founded on a territorial base,

applying the principle cujus regio ejus religio.

The first projects for a perpetual peace in Europe, trying to replace the medieval

role of the pope by some kind of secular organisation with Sully, Leibniz, abbot de Saint-

Pierre, propose to suppress the Turks from Europe (through Poland in Leibniz‟ Mars

Christianissimum of 1684169

; abbot de Saint-Pierre, second version170

), or to exclude

them from the institutions envisaged for Europe (Bacon‟s de Bello sacro, E. Cruce), even

if some kind of arrangement may be concluded with them to rely on them to contain more

remote Eastern Muslim neighbours (abbot de Saint-Pierre).

The ideological dichotomy (religious) Christianity/Islam can be represented as

follows:

Christian Republic = dar-ul harb Umma (Islam)= dar ul-Islam

Crusade ğihad

believers = gâvur mumîn

This bipolar opposition, with a relative prohibition of relations between the two

worlds can be compared to the ostracism of the Soviet Union and its satellites during the

period 1923-1989 by Western powers – when relations were restricted to a minimum.

The end of this opposition leads the American superpower to try to find new enemies. )

Does this mean that Turkey was not part of the international legal system in

development? Lord Stowell, on the case of Madonna del Burso said in 1802: “The

inhabitants of the ottoman empire are not professors of exactly the same law of nations

with ourselves. In consideration of the peculiarities of their situation and character, the

court has repeatedly expressed its disposition not to hold them bound to the utmost rigour

of that system of public law, on which European states have so long acted in their

intercourse with one another” 171

.

Finally, the declaration annexed to the Treaty of Paris concluding the Crimean

War in 1856 “integrating Turkey into the community of European law” seems

preposterous: such a declaration would imply that all treaties signed with Turkey since

the 15th

century were null and void! Actually the underlying intention of this declaration

was to avoid, within the framework of the European concert, that any power seeks to

conquer some pieces of Turkey without the agreement of the others. The concept of state

of law, opposed to States without Law – parallel to the Moslem dar-ul-Islam concept,

opposed to dar-ul-harb, is simply a means of recognition of participation in one same

community, which denotes an imperialistic conception of law172

. In fact, the 1856 Treaty,

while mentioning the integration of Turkey into the European concert, reinforced the

169

Quoted by Félix Julien, Papes et Sultans, Plon, Paris, 1879, p. 263.

170 Projet de traité pour rendre la paix perpétuelle entre les souverains chrétiens, etc. Antoine

SCHOUTEN, Utrecht, 1713, pp.464-66. ed. S. GOYARD FABRE, Garnier, 1981

171 1802, 4C. Rob., p. 169, in Nasim Sousa, The Capitulatory Régime of Turkey. Its History, Origin and

Nature, The John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1933, 162, fn. 14.

172 In 1837 the Ottoman ambassador in Vienna suggested that the Ottoman Empire should join the

European concert in order to avoid external crises: Sadık Rifat, Müntehabat, VIII, pp. 38-39: “Avrupa

devletleri beyninde cari olan hukuk-i düveliyeye dahil olmak”, cf. Carter Vaughn Findley, “État et droit

dans la pensée politique ottomane: droits de l‟homme ou Rechtsstaat? À propos de deux relations

d‟ambassade”, Études turques et Ottomanes, n° 4, déc. 1995, EHESS, Paris, pp. 46-49.

38

contradiction between the secular law territorially applied in Western countries on one

side, and on the other side the guarantees and privileges given to religious minorities by

the hatt-i şerif of Gülhane (1839) and the Hatt-i hümayun of 1856, consolidating or even

extending the millet system173

.

The issue is less the discrepancies between the Ottoman Empire and the

remainder of Europe in the 15-16th

centuries, but more its progressive alienation or

isolation from changes happening in the rest of Europe, following the peaces of 1547 and

1565 with the Habsburgs, which froze a status quo for a century and a half174

. After those

agreements, indeed the Ottoman Empire did not take part to the international law making

process, marked by the treaties of Westphalia, the peace of Utrecht, or even the Congress

of Vienna.

4. CONCLUSION

To arouse the interest of the reader, the writer needs to add something new, to

excite the desire, at the risk of exaggerating, to overbid on his predecessors, to allow his

imagination, his obsessions, his major impulses to go beyond reality. The authors accuse

themselves of these overflows: La Boullaye Le Gouz says that Belon, when writing about

Turkish women's pants, tries to excite the reader "fearing to say what he had wanted to do

in Europe, if he had met the same flexibility as in the East".175

But Belon had already

pointed out the importance of personal history in the appraisal of travels: "if several

people walk together in some foreign countries, most hardly one or two will devote

themselves to observe the same thing".176

The condemnation of lust aims, the Victorians

and puritans of the 18-19th

centuries to clear themselves to the readers, whom are

attracted by innuendoes.

The additions, pepper, salt, spice the existing texts, the heard rumours to mark

down oneself of the predecessors, to give an original key, to point out attention, to go

exactly beyond the limit of the real, and so now to avoid the copyright for the quotations

exceeding a certain length. The very realism is recreated by the imaginary according to

the desire of man. The majority of the authors are satisfied with reproducing their

predecessors, by adding a little sauce. Minarets inflate, hamams become darker… The

pictures high in colour of the orientalist exoticism cheaply give satisfaction to the

unconscious, to the turbid sensuality, to the masochism and to the sadistic instincts of the

173

Article 7 of the Treaty : « Sa Majesté la Reine du Royaume Uni de la Grande Bretagne et d‟Irelande,

Sa Majesté l‟Empereur d‟Autriche, Sa Majesté l‟Empereur des Français, Sa Majesté le Roi de Prusse,

Sa Majesté l‟Empereur de toutes les Russies, et Sa Majesté le Roi de Sardaigne, déclarent la Sublime

Porte admise à participer aux avantages du droit public et du concert Européens. Leurs Majestés

s‟engagent, chacune de son côté, à respecter l‟indépendance et l‟intégrité territoriale de l‟Empire

Ototman , garantissent en commun la stricte observation de cet engagement et considèreront, en

conséquence, tout acte de nature à y porter atteinte comme une question d‟intérêt général » ; cf. Hugh

McKinnon Wood, « The Treaty of Paris and Turkey‟s Status in International Law », American Journal

of International Law, vol. 37 n° 2 (1943) pp. 262-274.

174 Cemal Kafadar, « The Ottomans and Europe », Handbook of European History 1400-1600. Late

Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, eds. Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman & James D.

Tracy, E.J. Brill, Leyde, New Yord- Cologne, 1994, pp. 589-636.

175 Quoted by Rouillard, p. 262.

176 Observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte,

Arabe, et autres pays estranges, 1553.

39

quiet Western middle-class men."177

It that which authors show near reality or an expression of their personal

fantasies? Do our current fantasies on Islam and the Moslems emerge from the depths of

layers of the sexual Western unconscious; are they only the reality transfigured by the

work of art? A travel account, is the imaginary relationship between the imaginary of the

previous trip accounts, of the trip guides, of the novels and visual arts expressions, of

ambient prejudices, and met supposed reality.178

.

Iorga notices, for the 16th

century, "impassioned curiosity, a desire to learn,

attention and spontaneity, different personalities each one considering the East his own

way; all that hardly will no longer be met during the following century"179

. The broad

open curiosity of the 16th

century, which had to cope with an aggressive looking Ottoman

empire , was eroded during the 17th

century, as if there had been a closure of the minds,

or rather an inversion. Then in the 18th

century, the declining empire, the sick man of

Europe, is seen as a good pretext for criticism.

The freedom of the artists can create the history: it is to recognise that somebody

can be creative historically, to the interstices of the play of the interests of group, where

the pressures appear relatively balanced and where fertile imagination can be enough to

change the course of events.180

.

Others on the contrary appear as Turcophiles or sometimes only as liberals, open,

neutrals like Postel, reputed "sink of Satan" and an atheist181

, Voltaire for sake of

criticism of Catholicism, judge that it not there have not a determinism of climate, and

admire the egalitarianism, the hospitality in the Moslem world182

, Lamartine 183

,

Thackeray sympathises with the Turks against the Crusaders184

. Toynbee lost his Oxford

pulpit, for his criticism of the Greek occupation of Anatolia in 1921185

... Here personal

177

Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l'Islam, suivi de Le seigneur bourguignon et l'esclave sarrasin,

La Découverte, Paris, 1989, p. 82.

178 Cf. Jean-Paul Charnay, Les Contre-Orients ou Comment penser l'autre selon soi, Sindbad, Paris, 1980,

pp. 247. Jean-Claude Vatin, "Le Voyage- Elements pour une taxonomie", et "Au terme du voyage", La

Fuite en Egypte, Supplément aux voyages européens en Orient, CEDEJ, Le Caire, 1989. Jean-Didier

Urbain, L'idiot du voyage, Histoire de touristes, Plon, Paris, 1991, 181-182

179 N. Iorga, Les voyageurs français dans l'Orient européen, Conférences faites en Sorbonne, Boivin &

Cie-Gamber, Paris, 1925, p. 49.

180 Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in World Civilization, 3, The

Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1974, p. 5.

181 Rouillard, p. 207.

182 Essai sur les mœurs. Aziza Said, "L'Orient historique chez Voltaire", et Abdel Aziz Djabali, "Candide

ou le détour oriental de Monsieur de Voltaire", La Fuite en Egypte, Supplément aux voyages

européens en Orient, CEDEJ, Cairo, 1989, 75-112.

183 Lamartine, Voyage en Orient, Pagnerre-Hachette-Furne, Paris, 1856, II, 487-490.; Ayla Gökmen, "Un

ami de la Turquie: Lamartine", Stamboulimies, Les carnets de l'exotisme n°11, Poitiers, Janvier-Juillet

1993, p. 85-88.

184 Thackeray, A Journey from Cornhill to Cairo, Houghton, Mifflin and Co. , Boston and New York,

1889, 411.

185 The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, cf. R. Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arthur Toynbee

and the Koraes Chair, London, Frank Cass, 1986.

40

freedom plays a role: nobody is so conditioned by his education and men are not so

different that some interval of freedom does not make it possible to seek some variance.

As if, in the presentation of the Turk, the West identified the principles of an

order that it was to lose, which was to be called into question, a coded language where

the sovereignty of the male was about to collapse (thus introducing the eunuch) and

where the request for equality, for the free sexuality of women emerged, was necessary -

the invention of the couple)?. 186

..

Vis-à-vis a sceptical Borgès, - "the East is like time. If I‟m not asked to define it,

I know it, if I‟m asked, I do not know it ".

The East/Occident opposition is carried out by the travellers according to a form

of binary thought, of positive/negative standards, incorporating a linear dimension into

the 18th century (the progress concept, avatar of the Christian redemption scheme)

devaluing the past and the different forms of companies, while perhaps the Eastern world,

such as ancient Greece, sought a measure between what could appear excessive.187

.

With the Turkish Republic, harems, eunuchs, and most of all hamams, veils,

water pipes have disappeared; now Turkish women can even wed freely with non

Moslems, they may take the initiative to divorce, start a professional career, they

dominate even business and politics188

. The development of the status of the Woman in

Turkey, during the second half of the 19th

century accelerated to reach as from the 1940s

a level comparable with that of the majority of the Western countries. Women were

integrated into industry and politics (right to vote in 1934; as from 1975, 44% of women

are active in Turkey, i.e. a higher percentage than the majority of the industrialised

countries189

), sometimes sooner than in certain Western countries, just as they were

sooner sexually liberated by contraception. Women inMoslem countries, once they play a

role in the active world - and they are not pushed back by the fairly low level of wages -,

practise birth control, whether there is or not an active policy of family planning - as in

the countries of North Africa and in Turkey190

. There is no difference between the

demographic trends of the catholic countries of the Southern Europe, where the birth rate

dramatically falls with the education level191

.

Irreducible contradiction between the maintenance of borders inherited the

tyrannical principle of the Renaissance: cujus regio, ejus religio - and the universalism of

the values defended by Europe. The collapse of the Berlin wall suppresses a reason for

border. Consequence drawn by Berlusconi, Louis Michel, Michel Rocard: if we take

England, why not Turkey, and Israel, and the Maghreb... At the liking of alliances, public

opinion is directed for or against Turkey: favourable in France and in England at the time

186

Alain Grosrichard, Structure du Sérail- La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l'Occident classique,

Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1979, particulièrement p. 219-228.

187 Michel Foucault, L'usage des plaisirs, Gallimard, 132.

188 Cf. Elliot, Tinaire, Hellys.

189 Cf. E. Mine Tan, Kadın ekonomik yaşamı ve eğitimi, Türkiye Iş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, Ankara,

1979.

190 Jean-Claude Chasteland, "Une démographie éclatée", Le Monde, 30 août 1994.

191 Cf. Gilberto Freire.

41

of the Crimean War, unfavourable in these two countries when Kaiser Wilhelm II wentto

Istanbul and incorporated Turkey in the triple Alliance.

The Turkish image is negative beginning 19th

century with the explosion of

romantic philhellenism in the tread of Byron until after the conquest of Algeria, positive

during the Crimean War when the French and the English took the side of Turkey against

the Russians and defended the progression of reform in the ottoman empire192

, - the

lowering of Turkey can be judged contrary to the interest of France (or of England), who

need a counterweight to the power of Austria and especially of Russia whose imperialist

ambitions were known - Turkey itself reformed and modernised193

. These variances in

the approaches attributed to the changes of policy, as if the policy managed to change the

public opinion; the French wish to have two strong powers in the Orient, Turkey and

Egypt; England wants to protect and extend its trade, Russia dreams to throw its shade on

the Bosphorus, Greece wants a rebirth of the Byzantine empire. At the end of the century,

the image is again negative, except with Loti and Claude Farrère, and among the

Germans. However, reforms were implemented too late in the Ottoman Empire in

relation particularly as regards the political evolution in the Balkans. Resting on religious

or national minorities, the West behaved against its own principles [of tolerance, of

removal of religious discriminations], but in accordance with its interests: divided to

reign. It adopted a preserving attitude with respect to Turkey, forgetting that this country

served as a tolerance model in the 17-18th

centuries against religious fanaticisms, and that

the alleged fanaticism of Islam was replaced by another fanaticism, nationalist

fanaticism…

Like Medusa becoming aware of her own image, the reflected distorted picture,

that the Turk can mirror, may paralyse changes…

192

Cf. Hollander, H. Lamarche, Les Turcs et les Russes, Histoire de la Guerre d'Orient, Barba, Paris, etc.

193 Charles Rolland, La Turquie contemporaine, Hommes et Choses, Etudes sur l'Orient, Pagnerre, Paris,

1854, 60-61, 315-322; Frederick Burnaby, On horseback through Asia Minor.