Article 301

Dear Friends, Family, and Interested Observers,

Welcome back to your favorite blogsite. Although I have forwarded all the relevant information, still no word from the U.S. Embassy on the circulation of my diplomatic note. I have learned from Zekeriya that I will be able to copy the court records in Tokat. If I don't hear anything else about my permit, I will probably go to Tokat some time after Ramadan later this month to make some copies and to see Zekeriya and the faculty of the History Department at Gaziosmanpaşa University. I will plan to stay there for a week, so I can take a tour of Tokat Province and the nearby city of Sivas. Sivas was the seat of the major regional governor for most of the 19th century, and Tokat was tied to it as a sub-province. I also feel a need to get out of Ankara and hit the road.

The good side of being cut off from the Microfilm Department is that I have turned to reading the documents that I do have. I have joined a weekly three-hour-long seminar at Bilkent University on Ottoman diplomatics, and I still see Ali Fuat four hours a week. I have been making good progress, and I hope to finish my first defter by the end of the month. Unfortunately the most interesting documents also tend to be the most difficult. Although only a page long, the ferman (imperial decree) that I am working on now has taken me about eight hours to read. The photograph is completely staged.

The topic of the ferman is the implication of the new re-orderings (tanzimât) in the taxation of farm produce in the province of Tokat. According to this decree, non-Muslims were no longer to be subject to the canonical cizye fee, a tax charged to non-Muslim subjects. In its place, the state charged non-Muslims a new "politically correct" tax in lieu of compulsory military service. Since its beginnings, the Ottoman state only obliged Muslim men to perform military service, so in this instance the reform was more symbolic than substantive. In Ottoman historical jargon, the term tanzimât more generally denotes a period of modernizing reforms (1839-1876). These reforms were often shaped per the demands of the European powers, and many of the changes, for better or worse, helped unravel the Ottoman state.

Turkey is undergoing an analogous process today with its negotiations to join the European Union. Europe has mandated two controversial reforms as a prerequisite to Turkey to winning a firm accession date to the "Christian Club." First, the Turkish state must return the properties it seized in 1936 from minority religious foundations. The nationalization of these properties ran contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which ended World War I and Turkish War of Independance. Second, the Turkish state must remove Article 301 of its penal code, which allows for prosecution of journalists and intellectuals who assault "Turkishness", whatever that is. Both conditions sound reasonable to me, and I found this interview in the Turkish daily Radikal with Baskın Oran, who is being prosecuted under Article 301, especially illuminating on the matter. Oran contends that the reforms are being held up by political calculations of the major political parties, who do not wish to be viewed as anti-nationalist before next year's parliamentary election. Ironically, the most strident opposition to the removal of Article 301 comes from the supposedly progressive Republican's People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP), which as the self-styled heir to the original CHP of Ataturk should be all in favor of joining "modern" Europe. Conversely, the governing Islamist AK Party, which on the basis of religious and cultural differences would seem less keen on the EU, is desperate to join as a means to protect its rule from secularist state institutions such as the military. However, the AK Party does not want to lose its parliamentary majority by rescinding Article 301. Even more ironically, the European governments continue to have no compunction against pushing through legislation that delimits free speech. The French parliament is working on a measure to make it a crime to question the veracity of the Armenian genocide in 1915.

As an aside, some readers believed that my comments about the Pope in my last entry were too harsh and taken out of context. This week instead of criticising the Pope, I would like to complement his holiness. Kudos to Pope Benedict for working to abolish limbo, which I take as a step in the direction of inclusiveness. I hope a more productive interfaith dialogue is the next on the agenda.

The weather has been pleasant this week. I guess I'm missing spectacular fall colors back home. To see that kind of color in Turkey you have to go into the mountains. Last week there were quite a few frog soaking soakers ... as you can see from the photo below. Sorry for all the "quotation marks" this week. I've been reading the Times a lot lately, which is quotation happy. I hate giving money to that Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp, but I love the Times' obituaries (!) and book reviews.





Görüşmek Üzere,

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