The words ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’, and ‘Greek’ in the Ottoman Empire in 1899

• العربية: كلمات « تركي » و« عربي » و« يوناني » في الإمبراطورية العثمانية في عام 1899

While reading Khaled Khalifa’s beautiful, elegiac novel No One Prayed Over Their Graves, I noticed something that may not matter in the context of the novel, but is worth thinking about if you’re interested in the history of social categories that are taken for granted today. The narrator talks about a party thrown by a Christian woman in Istanbul to welcome the new century on the night of 31 December 1899:

He liked Maggie’s idea of welcoming a unique moment with a raucous party that she had begun preparing a month ahead of time. She invited Greek musician friends and a few of her old friends, mostly Christian Turks working in small public roles, or Greeks over sixty who were still lighthearted and loved dancing. They would reminisce about their past with deep grief and plot how to return to their villages in Greece, but year by year they mouldered away in the big city, turning their hands over and remembering that most of their villages had been burned to the ground by Ottoman troops. (p. 142)¹

Elsewhere he talks about a Christian maid from Iraq and a Muslim maid working in the same house in Aleppo near the end of the 19th century:

Before they fell asleep, Margot would remember her youth and tell Um Kheir about the young men who used to wait for her to pass so they could have the boon of a single glance from her…. Hundreds of times Margot retold stories about Muslim youths, Kurds and Arabs and Turks, who had falen in love with her…. (p. 102)

Were the words ‘Turk’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Greek’ used in this way in the Ottoman Empire in 1899? I was sceptical, remembering things like this observation by historian Keith David Watenpaugh about the inhabitants of Aleppo in 1918:

With few exceptions, the question of who was an Arab and who was a Turk rarely arose in the city and would have been considered absurd. Most urbane, literate Aleppines would have bristled at being designated mere ‘Arabs’ or ‘Turks’, terms which in pre-nationalist consciousness connoted backward desert dwellers or rough country people.²

Sociologist Murat Ergin says something similar:

The term “Turk” in the Ottoman Empire was broadly used as a derogatory term referring to unrefined nomads in Anatolia…. [T]he cosmopolitan subjects of the empire living in large cities never considered themselves Turks. This was about to change toward the end of the nineteenth century….³

As for the meaning of the word ‘Greek’ in Anatolia, historian Anthony Bryer writes:

At the beginning of the [19th] century a Pontic Christian might describe himself in the old way as a Douberites, Phytianos or Tsitenos first, and then as a ‘Roman’ (Rum) Orthodox subject of the sultan; by the end of the century he was calling himself a Greek….⁴

So perhaps the meanings of these words were changing, at least for some people, in 1899. In any case, I would like to read a novel that focuses on how social categories changed in that period, and on what was lost with the spread of nationalist concepts.

Bibliography #

Bryer, Anthony. 1991. “The Pontic Greeks Before the Diaspora.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4 (4): 315–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/4.4.315.

Ergin, Murat. 2017. “Is the Turk a White Man?”: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity. Brill.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2005. “Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City: Historicism, Journalism and the Arab Nation in the Post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean.” Social History 30 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/030710242000337260.