Conclusion: Turkey-in-Europe, Turkey-in-Asia, Turkey-in-Britain
Educated English men and women inhabited a mental landscape created by their reading. For anyone who was even mildly ‘at home’ with books, the five writers discussed here lived cumulatively and simultaneously for their readers as the century moved on. Toy
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Conclusion: Turkey-in-Europe, Turkey-in-Asia, Turkey-in-Britain
‘The cross descends, thy minarets arise’ were the words that came to mind as Lord Byron recalled the moment when he first set foot in the Ottoman Empire. The contrasts are stark in this line from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: cross versus minarets; descends versus arise, and behind it all, West versus East. His words were meant to evoke shivers of anxiety and fear as the poem’s hero enters the territory of the archetypical Islamic Other. In fact, however, Childe Harold (like his creator) first penetrated the Ottoman Empire at Greece, and adding to the confusion, in the lands known at the time as Albania. Byron, like Disraeli and Toynbee and many of their contemporaries, came to know and value Turkey after having been disappointed with Greece. They were the victims of ‘reading blindness’, a temporary condition that hindered them for a short time from seeing the images before their eyes. Educated English men and women set forth on their journeys with a horizon of expectations created by their reading. They were ready to find in Greece the familiar well-spring of their own European civilization and were shocked to discover that Greece was the East. Not only were modern Greeks unexpectedly distinct from the heroes of the classical world, but their landscape was thick with mosques and Muslims. Four of the five writers whose lives and work have been discussed here actually travelled on to Istanbul and were entranced by a culture that was not only distinctly alien but was also perceived as authentic. The ‘textual universe’ in which Edward Said’s Orient existed was so fragile for these
© The Author(s) 2016 D.S. Katz, The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776–1923, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41060-9_7
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men that it evaporated almost on contact. As each new writer came onto the stage, he inevitably built on the foundations laid by his predecessors, to the extent that it was almost as if they had all lived at the same time. The first writer, Edward Gibbon, had few illusions about Greeks and none about their Byzantine successors, but was full of admiration for the ‘rise and progress of the Ottomans’. Gibbon was read in Victorian England by those with a general education, and if his attacks on Christianity rendered him unsatisfactory for many a pious reader, his scholarship was undeniably deep and his writing was exceedingly brilliant. Even the hopelessly devout Cardinal Newman (1801–1890) had to admit that it ‘is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the infidel Gibbon’.1 The entire second half of Gibbon’s great six-volume work gives a picture of the genesis, growth and genius of the Ottoman Empire that, even today after nearly two and a half centuries, remains compelling and still historically accurate in many of its interpretations and narrative details. If Gibbon provided a universal scholarly foundation upon which every ‘informed or at
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