Suchergebnisse

This book collects Serif Mardin's seminal essays written throughout the span of his prolific career. Comprising some of the author's finest and most incisive writings, these essays deal with the historical background, political travails, and socioeconomic metamorphosis of Turkey during a century of modernization. With his characteristic sophistication and breadth of vision, Mardin provides readers with a remarkably objective analysis of ideology, civil society, religion, urban life, and violence in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Mardin moves easily from sociological topics on violence and class-consciousness to the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the philosophy and culture of modern Turkey within the greater Middle East. These influential pieces-collected for the first time in one volume-represent an invaluable addition to the field of Middle East studies. Serif Mardin served as the chair of Islamic studies in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, D.C., for more than a decade. He is the author of "The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought" (also published by Syracuse University Press), "Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey", and editor of "Cultural Transition in the Middle East".

Teilw. Zsfass. in engl. Sprache

Much of the meaning we commonly attach to the term 'revolution' grows out of our image of the French Revolution.1 The social upheavals we associate with the latter have been deeply etched in the history of thought by Taine's accounts of bloodshed and terror, and later generations have only broken the spell with difficulty.

Few countries have been as frequently described in terms of national character as Turkey. Even the earliest observers of the Ottoman Empire appear anxious to set their findings into some generalized formula of the Turkish ethos. The term used to refer to these attempts at national stereo-typing in the lingua franca of the Levant was Alia Turca behavior, an expression which has survived into modern Turkish.

Turkey is not in the usual sense a developing country. It is a state, the fabric of which has endured for a number of centuries. Consequently, its political culture embodies elements which go far back into history. It has both an ethos and eidos of service to the state and a bureaucratic apparatus which for centuries has been entrusted with the application of the values embodied in its political culture. The structure of the state has been somewhat looser in Iran, but there too, the situation is appreciably different from what it is in the Arab states or Pakistan where the structure of the state is recent, its mark on the ethos of the people slight and its political traditions embryonic. In the case of Turkey and to a less extent in Iran, some of the crucial problems of developing nations – problems which are acute in many Arab states – such as those of building up an identity as a nation, overcoming particularistic allegiances, launching oneself into the take-off stages of industrialization are well on the way to solution. We are faced then, under the rubric of 'Middle East' with a number of countries which are at different stages on the scale of modernization. By itself, this would suffice to make the subsuming of all Middle Eastern countries under a single heading extremely unwise.