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This article identifies the correspondences that Ibn Khaldun's concepts of asabiya, mulk and dynasty have in Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel Submission. It analyses the work of a contemporary author through the method sketched out by a Muslim scholar of the 14th century, thereby provincializing a European text, and showing the continuities of cultural thought in the Mediterranean. While putting the role of asabiya at the centre, the article deploys Dipesh Chakrabarty's understanding of provincialization, and Fernand Braudel's concept of encounters in the Mediterranean. In Submission, Houellebecq describes a France in which a Muslim candidate has become the president. As the perceived source of Western European culture, Mediterranean has become uncanny, and Houellebecq's novels reflect this uneasy relationship between the continent and the basin. Houellebecq's narrator reflects how the decline of France and its apparent cultural suicide is due to lack of solidarity between the classes, how White French people are very quick to adopt the ways of the Maghrebi immigrants, and how, ultimately, the Maghrebi immigrants who are now in power will suffer the same loss of vitality as their White French predecessors. These observations comply with the cyclical social behaviour that Ibn Khaldun has mapped out in the Muqaddimah.

This article investigates the ways in which the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi perceived and represented the various political powers and cultural heritages in the Mediterranean, through a reading of his seventeenth-century travelogue, Seyahatname. I argue that Evliya's text reveals the palimpsest of political power and cultural hegemony extant in the Mediterranean of his time and attempts to legitimise Ottoman rule, employing several tropes and narrative threads. For Evliya, the Mediterranean is primarily a battlefield that has witnessed the victories and defeats of the Ottomans throughout their history. Evliya's Seyahatame, in that sense, is within the tradition of travel writing in the service of imperial meaning-making and meaning-sustaining processes. I call the narrative structure under which Evliya's observations are gathered the Ottoman Chronotope: a chronotope that highlights the project of sustaining a commonwealth, through ties of commerce and faith. In Evliya's text the islands become a geography where the Ottomans' sense of mission and empire is bolstered by 'old books' and oral narratives that he claims were popular particularly among the Mediterranean Greek population. ; WOS:000424860000008 ; 2-s2.0-85043793581

In Masks or Souls, written in Paris in 1937, Turkish author Halide Edib Adıvar makes use of elements of modernist theatre to express her political views. Having been brought up in the metropolis of Istanbul, she spent time in other urban centres like London and Paris, always corresponding and exchanging ideas with literati both in Europe and Turkey. In the play I'm going to talk about, Halide Edib names Nasreddin Hoca, a country savant/sufi whose anecdotes range from the surreal to the sublime, as her inspiration. The tone of the play is informed by Hoca's sufi embracing wit, and yet Nazım Hikmet's 'I want to become a machine' poem recurs like a refrain as the modernist, futurist reflection of the sign of the times. There are several disembodied voices, poems and songs in the play: even the bodies on stage are used as masks or puppets, and thoughts are given through voice over. Masks or Souls' aspirations are cosmological as Halide Edib brings the masks of larger than life, almost mythical figures of Nasreddin Hoca, Shakespeare, Tamurlaine and Ibn Khaldun to comment on the state of the world.