Halil Berktay’s Diary

Why not yesterday? Because it was April 1, and it might have been taken for an April Fool’s Day joke — as in fact at least one of my SPS 102 TFs quipped when I mentioned the idea in last Wednesday’s (31st March) Teaching Colloquium.

Why should all this be interesting? First, at its simplest, because it is history, and all history is fascinating, and I too happen to be a historian, and I have gone through the British Museum’s incredible collection of Egyptian mummies more than once, pondering both the past and what Jack Goody has called “the theft of history.”

Please note Alberti’s general warning against “bold and forward females who try too hard to know about things outside the house.” Roughly fifteen centuries after Procopius and six centuries after Alberti, this is why Marwa Elselehdar’s story stirred me so much early today.

I am so glad that I left this gap, for it has elicited a pertinent comment from Mehmet Kara, one of our History undergraduates. Below you may find the first half of his letter, devoted to various Islamic and Ottoman cases, to which I have made only some linguistic and stylistic corrections.

My point is that she was always being identified and acquiring fame by being alongside a man, which is characteristic of patriarchy. It was through the domination of a series of men that she won entry into European society.

Is what we loosely call the West always and everywhere the same? Homogenous, monolithic, with a single selfish, bigoted world-view adhered to by all? Without any room for diversity, for independent and self-critical voices? Are its social sciences, its history and art history, its archeology and anthropology always and equally Eurocentrist today as before, for example in the heyday of overseas colonial empires?

Halfway through the semester, there are certain things that I need to get off my chest. A few rather direct words of advice, which you may imagine not only to have been accumulating over time, but also to have been triggered by recent experience. Harsh words? Better now than later.

So this is why Prince Philip is (or was) the tip of an entire iceberg which, now, is only a shade of the past — an ever-receding nebulousness which, yes, is deliberately and artificially given a further life in British pageantry, but no longer exercises the kind of influence over European politics that it did only a hundred years ago.

The jockey. Not a he but a she. The first woman rider since 1839, i.e. in more than 180 years, to have won the single most difficult, the most famous, and the most lucrative steeplechase in the world.

Is it possible to say that this is a danger of the past, that it is forever behind us? We are living through such a resurgence of the Far Right, that even in Europe, let alone the rest of the world, it has once more become very difficult, very fragile ground.

I read him in my teens. When I was reading anything and everything that I could get my hands on. The rented flat in İzmir where (I was told) I had been born, and which holds all my memories until I was 17 and about to leave for the US, had a peculiar ground plan which embodied a massive, a glorious waste of space.

The Titanic sank 109 years and two days ago. She struck an iceberg at 11:40 pm (ship’s time) on 14th April, remaining afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes before disappearing below the waves early on 15th April 1912.

I can see some eyebrows being raised. If not in academic circles, then in popular culture. What? Invented traditions? How can traditions be invented? Traditions are not invented; they are… well, traditions. Nobody has deliberately created them. They have existed from time immemorial.

I should have started with E. H. Carr. Or at least, I should have mentioned him at some point. Without him, all those constructions, inventions or imaginings would not have happened. In 1961 he published a small book titled What is History? that marked a historiographical watershed.

In the early weeks of SPS 101 (Humanity and Society I) we talk about the transition from animals to humans, the anatomical changes that make this transition possible, and then the capacities and activities that make us fully human.

At this point I stop and draw attention to this question of figurative reproduction or representation. I pose the question of what is art — and how does it begin, what is required for art to begin.

Still, it’s also true that racism as an extreme form of otherization really takes off with the European Reconnaissance and the emergence of Europe’s first Early Modern empires-by-sea, and is further strengthened over 1870-1914 by Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire.

So the connection between tribal, hunting and gathering societies and cave art is firmer than ever. But in the process, please also note, secondly, that this is an expansion in time as well as space. Our notion of the “oldest” keeps sliding further and further back.

So much is anthropological observation; how it happens — what enables the shaman to achieve such a trance-like state — is another. Is it possible that the shaman is swept away by nothing other than his own passion? Or could it be that he is practising some kind of self-hypnosis? Or else, did they (also) use certain hallucinogenic plants to trigger, facilitate or accelerate the process?

This is further to my comments on abstraction and symbolism.

The quality of writing is not very high. This is a basic problem with having English as your language of instruction. On the one hand, you have to do it. English is a world language, the world language, and Turkish is not. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, most of your reading assignments have to be books or articles published in English.

What is the dividing line between politics and scholarship? How can academia and academics be protected against the heavy hand and dark shadow of outside interference and ideological dictates? Here it is primarily the responsibility of politicians to refrain from fanning the flames of polarization.

Hitler made his last trip to the surface on his 56th birthday, 20th April. That afternoon, Soviet artillery shells started falling on Berlin. Eva Braun and the entire Goebbels family came down into the bunker on 22nd April. Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide on 30th April 1945, when Soviet troops were only 500 metres from the Führerbunker.

Can you kill your own children? Who can kill their own children? Small and innocent children at that — the youngest just 4, the oldest only 12? Magda and Joseph Goebbels did it, back on 1st May 1945. Look at this picture. It is dated to somewhere between 1940-1942.

It was always there (or here); it was a Greek word waiting for the Turks to arrive. Long before Byzantium, it already existed in Ancient Greece and under the Roman Empire. It didn’t have anything to do with mothers; instead, it had everything to do with the east and the sun. In some of the oldest languages of the Middle East, there is a close association between these two notions.

Now for a second and much more current example: What does “Anadolu” mean? Where does it come from? Of course it is the Turkish equivalent of the English “Anatolia.” But which led to which? Or could both be translations of a third word in some other language?

As I re-read Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, I kept thinking to myself: This is how even highly trained, combat-hardened soldiers, inured as they were to killing and being killed, felt about constant artillery bombardment back in 1914-1918. What terrified them. Numbed them. Made them go hysterical. What after a point they couldn’t take.

The air was full of unbelievable tension, so thick and dense you could almost cut it with a knife. Strange things can happen to you in such bizarre circumstances. I wasn’t really thinking of the danger, of how I might get out of this in one piece. I started confusing art and reality, past and present.