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

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

These quotations and page numbers are from Leri Price’s translation of the novel. For the original Arabic text and page numbers, see the Arabic version of this article. ↩︎
Watenpaugh, “Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City”, 9. ↩︎
Ergin, “Is the Turk a White Man?”, 71. ↩︎
Bryer, “The Pontic Greeks before the Diaspora”, 327. ↩︎

Shady Lewis, On the Greenwich Line

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The novel On the Greenwich Line, by the Egyptian writer Shady Lewis, came out in 2019. Since reading it in Arabic in 2023, I have given the original Arabic version or the French translation to several of my friends (there’s also a German translation), and now I will be giving other friends the English translation that is due out next month. With great sensitivity, Lewis has written a very funny comic novel about immigration, racism, and bureaucracy in London, where he is a social worker. In a lecture at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in April 2023, he said that when the news is so full of horrors every day that we become inured to them, humour can revive our feelings. The treatment did me a lot of good.

Literature on Benjamin Geer

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

Bibliography #

Shady Lewis, On the Greenwich Line