The Off Topic Topic

[Razgovory]

I just got paid!  I can finally afford to get that donut off my car!

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I just got paid!  I can finally afford to get that donut off my car!

Couldn't you have parked near a police station to solve that particular issue?

[Duque de Bragança]

Nobody at Mosers care about politics whatsoever.  Also, nobody gets my jokes.  When someone said something was divided in three parts, I immediately said "like Gaul!".  Nobody got the reference.  Man, when I was 18, I had read the Gallic Wars.

So you did not quote the Latin text verbatim?! Per Jovem!
So disappointing. 

[Josquius]

My kids have a book called on the moon. A little kids factual book.
Theres a bit.

 Astronauts went to the moon to see what it'd be like.
If you went to the moon you'd be an astronaut too.

But.... This got me thinking.
What if you could travel to the moon through some kind of portal?
Isn't it the going to space that makes an astronaut? Or is it anything away from earth?

What of theoretical future people born on the moon and planets?
Is being born on the moon enough to make them an astronaut?
What about an o Neill cylinder sort of thing?

[crazy canuck]

You have too much time on your hands

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Or too much weed.

[Syt]

As workplace junk mail goes, this is a new one for me. 

[Josquius]

You have too much time on your hands

Or too much weed.

No to both 

[Sheilbh]

Mentioned in the other thread on Turkey - and also sort of tied to the Anglophone/rest of the world disconnect on the meaning of "Republic", a really interesting piece on Turkish Republicanism (as someone who really disputes the anti-"mob" sentiment in Western democratic thought, particularly interesting):

The Roots of Turkish Republicanism
A new book argues that Turkey's republican culture goes deeper than we thought
Selim Koru
Sep 17

Trying to shake off the fatigue of the summer, I read a little book by Alp Eren Topal entitled Cumhurdan Cumhuriyete: Osmanlı Düşüncesinde Saltanat ve Muhalifleri.

The title is a bit difficult to translate because the book is really an exploration of the term "Cumhur" (pronounced "Djumhour"), the root of the Turkish term for republic. A very straight-forward translation would be something like From Public to Republic: The Sultanate and its Opposition in Ottoman Thought.

The problem with that translation is that the book is based on the evolution of the term "cumhur" before it served as a cognate for "republic." The author claims that the idea of the republic in the late Ottoman Empire isn't simply imported from the West, but that it had roots deep inside the Ottoman experience itself.

This may seem like a very abstract discussion, so let me first discuss why I think this is important in the political moment we're in. We can then delve into the substance of the book a bit.

I have to say, it's a lot more entertaining than I thought it'd be.

In America these days, if you're starting your argument with the phrase "we're not a Democracy, we're a Republic," you're probably on the reactionary right. You'll think that your country's problems stem from an excess in the majoritarian and egalitarian sentiment. The solution is a return to mediatory institutions of church, family, the markets, and the state. These institutions regulate hierarchy, you might argue, and make it possible for the country to function. (There are, of course, less savory versions of the claim, but let's leave it here for now.)

Meanwhile, up in the ivory tower, academics have been probing into the idea of the republic with renewed rigor. This is a mostly left-leaning field, and it appears to be motivated by a desire to overcome the political crisis the Western world finds itself in.

In Turkey, the emphasis on the republican character of government is a growing theme on the scholarly left, and also carries progressive overtones. This is a response to our times. In recent decades, the country has gone through a far-right takeover of the state, and many of its norms and institutions have been destroyed. Most importantly perhaps, the very notion of "the public" (kamu) has been severely weakened.

The current regime is also paradigmatically opposed, not just to the Republic Mustafa Kemal founded, but to the idea of the republic in general. This is a political tradition that is not shy about its monarchic sympathies. New Turkey's cultural air is suffused with nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire: the incessant beatification of the sultans, the TV shows, the car stickers, the ringtones — you know what I'm talking about.

The Islamists understand that the restoration of the sultanate, which held the title of caliph, is next to impossible, but they have sought to recreate its silhouette in the "executive presidency." Kadir Mısıroğlu, one of the deepest influences on the current Islamist movement, said that when the regime's men asked him what he thought of their proposal for the presidential system, he said he would support it "because it is closer to the sultanate." He believed that a presidential system would bypass what he considered petty horse trading of the parliamentary system, and impose order from the top down.

Islamists are prone to naturalistic reasoning, meaning that they think of the return to monarchic dynamics as a return to the way Turkey was meant to be governed. This actually fits well with Orientalist notions of what makes Turkey – and Islam in general – different from the West. Here too, the idea is that in the history of the West, kings were often challenged by notables, and it is that history of contestation that gradually resulted in de-centralized modes of governance, eventually leading to democracy today.

The Ottomans, meanwhile, revered their sultans and obeyed them with religious trepidation until the 19th century or so, when Enlightenment ideas flooded the decaying empire, shook their faith, and cascaded into the republic that we know today. That's why the ideas of political freedom, self-government, and citizenship, are all kind of fleeting, and the country kind of skews towards autocracy all the time. Atatürk's little misadventure into republicanism was interesting and all that, but deep down, Turkey wants to be a sultanate again.

Right?

Stop and think for a second, and you might remember that the Ottomans also had serious revolts. No fewer than six Ottoman sultans were deposed. Three of them were killed.

A major difference from the West is the historiography surrounding those events. The uprisings against the monarchy aren't described approvingly (no "Glorious Revolution" here) but primarily as regressive and regrettable events.

And that's where the book comes in. Alp Eren Topal conducts what he calls an archeological excavation of the term "cumhur" (again, pronounced "djumhour"), since that is the root for the word "Cumhuriyet," the contemporary word for republic. The term comes into Turkish from the Arabic root ( جمهور) and at its most basic, means something like "multitude, throng."

Topal writes that he actually started with the typical assumption that it might have started to show up in texts somewhere in the 19th century as a cognate for the Western "republic," but found that it has usage that goes far deeper. The book begins in the 17th century, and follows the term as it is used in janissary uprisings against the sultan multiple times. In every iteration, the term "cumhur" becomes more political, and you get the sense that something like a self-governing public is beginning to emerge around the term.

I should note that by the 17th century, the janissaries, the elite fighting unit directly under the sultan's command, had changed considerably since the classical period. They were no longer the devşirme boys from non-Muslim European provinces, but Muslims who one way or another made their way into the military elite of the empire. Think of them as a proto-bureaucratic force. They occupied different levels of officialdom and even commerce, and thus had a lot of say over how government was run.

Osman II (1604-1622) was notoriously weak, and when he faced pressure from the janissaries, he tried to fight back by closing their coffee houses and clamping down on dissent. The janissaries first killed his grand vizier, then also asphyxiated him with a bowstring.

Topal looks at texts from the time, and again and again, the Sultan's opposition, the groups of janissaries protesting and eventually threatening his person, are described as the "cumhur."

Here Topal translates from the writing of janissary officer Hüseyin Tûgī, and I'll translate for you his translation:

Molla Gürani, his şeyh Derviş efendi and Kadızade efendi, all mounted their horses and met the cumhur's party. The Ulema and the şeyh again pleaded and said: my sultan, the cumhur isn't well. Give them what they want, or things will get worse, the city will be turned upside-down.

    'Soldiers of Islam, in the name of the ulema sultan Mustafa, pledge allegiance,' they said. They [the janissaries] responded: sultan Osman still sits on the throne, pledging allegiance is not appropriate [caiz değildir]. The cumhur and ulema discussed for about an hour...

    Then a group of the cumhur went and released the debtors and [sentenced] prisoners from the Baba Cafer and Galata prisons...

Here the term "cumhur" becomes not just any group of people, but a group with a specific political purpose, this one being the opposition to the reigning sultan. I especially like how a group of them eventually go bust people out of prison. People think that mobs are out for blood, but just as often they'll just go undo some of the suffering that an oppressive state is inflicting on society.
   
One factor here is religion. The Ottoman sultan is obviously of the Hanefi-Maturidi sect, and he's the caliph, meaning that he claims to be descended from the prophet Muhammed. The janissaries, however, are at this point of the Bektaşi order. They're much more unorthodox, and arguably quasi-Shia in character. Both sides express their arguments in religious terms, and both are right in their own ways.

In court, for example, the sultan is said to be the ultimate arbiter, and his subordinates are his "kul." In English, the term is often translated as "slaves," but that's not quite right. A "kul" in Islamic theology simply means "servant or slave of God." It was Ottoman convention that the sultan addressed his subjects as "kul" as well, and that their necks were "thinner than hair" meaning that the sultan could kill them at will. This is deeply ingrained into the public imagination today, but if you stop and think about it for a second, it's also deeply heretical.

And the janissaries did think about it, as Topal points out. Among others, he cites the famous 16th century janissary poet Hayretî:

We are not prisoners of [sultan] Süleyman, nor are we the kul of [sultan] Selim,

    It isn't known, but we are the kul of the Şah-ı Kerim [the Bektaşi order]

It makes perfect sense that this kind of language would be deeply significant among janissaries resisting central rule. It's just lamentable that official history has downplayed it, giving us a very stylized popular image of the Ottoman past.

Topal then gets into the 18th and 19th centuries, where he begins talking about the "Cumhuriyet" or the Republics in Europe, and how the Ottoman experience of the "cumhur" and the Western experience gradually blend together into a form of republicanism we might recognize today. In 1826, of course, the janissaries were massacred and disbanded in the "Auspicious Incident," which weakened elite pushback against the sultan, but their example remained ingrained in the public imagination. One unforgettable quote from the late Ottoman intellectual Namık Kemal reads:

In this way, they trample on our laws, they take our property... Shall we suffer in this way indefinitely? Of course not. Yes, for some time, the government's every act of oppression was tolerated, but the thing that weakened the people's solidarity and resistance were the corpses of the thousands of janissaries lying at the bottom of the Golden Horn.

Namık Kemal is perhaps the most central late-Ottoman intellectual, and the next generation of Ottoman officials, including the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), grew up reading him and were deeply influenced by his ideas. Mustafa Kemal, of course, is one of them. After Istanbul came under allied occupation in 1918, he defied the Sultan's orders, put together an army, defeated the occupying powers, and in 1923, declared a republic.
   
   
Mustafa Kemal famously attended a costume ball dressed as a janissary when he was a military attache in Sofia in 1914. In addition to being supremely poetic, the photo also serves as an excellent cover for this book.

There are other interesting points Topal touches on, including the Ottoman conception of liberty, the separation of the sultan and the state, the notion of popular sovereignty, and how the early janissary uprisings hang over those discussions. I won't be going into all that here. What's important for here is that Topal tracks the term "cumhur" fairly deep into Ottoman history, and gets us a form of popular pushback against quasi-theological central power that doesn't originate from the Western enlightenment, but from the Anatolian experience itself.

So why, you might ask, does all this matter? So what if there was a "cumhur" embedded in the Ottoman experience before the influence of Western republicanism became apparent. What does that change?

I think there are many contemporary implications, but the main one is that it helps illustrate how the Islamist conception of the state and authority are wrong. Turkey's political inheritance is not to revere the state and consider its leader beyond reproach.

Rebelling against the supposedly divinely-ordained central ruler (and having a great time while doing it) is deeply ingrained in Turkey's collective experience. The young people who are facing down police barricades on the streets of Istanbul aren't just following mental models set by the French Revolution or Scottish Enlightenment, they are the descendants of 17th century janissaries who gathered 60,000 men to march on the sultan's forces.

That matters. And it doesn't just matter because it makes this act more authentic and "national." It matters because it means that the resistance has deep roots, and is harder to extinguish. The republic that Atatürk founded isn't some kind of "parenthesis" as the Erdoğan's surrogates like to say, but the culmination of a pattern that's been in the making for centuries.

Perhaps the Erdoğan palace knows this on some level.

Take the case of Fatih Altaylı. After leaving his job on one of the biggest TV networks in the country, this man launched a YouTube channel and quickly became the most popular journalist on that platform. As I've said before, I didn't like him very much, but appreciated his stubbornness and independence. This year, soon they arrested İmamoğlu, they jailed Altaylı too. They probably didn't want him on the outside when they were deepening their crackdown on the CHP.

So they would have arrested him anyways, but I think the charge they levied on him is telling: it's threatening the president. The clip they cited is one where Altaylı is reflecting on the character of the Turkish public:

    This nation is a nation that has strangled its own sultan. When it did not like him, when it did not want him, it jeered its sultan. It is no small matter — there are Ottoman sultans who were killed, who fell victim to assassination ...

Again, this is just pretext for arrest, but it's interesting that Erdoğan's people would pick this to prosecute the case. It must have sounded very offensive and outlandish to them. Everyone knows that the sultans faced rebellions, but it's considered inappropriate to talk about it in this way.

I suspect that's going to change in the coming years. There's a buildup of irreverent anger that will continue seeking outlets. The more important question is whether it will fulfill the more constructive promise of the "cumhur," to build up, once again, a foundation of solidarity and self-government.

[Jacob]

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing that Sheilbh.

[mongers]

Anyone else done this:

It was a mistake to put the house plants outside for the summer, I was tidy up and they seemed to enjoy/benefit from being in the garden.

Now Autumn is here, I've brought them in, but some have grown so massively they no longer it in their allotted spaces or anywhere else that isn't really convenient.   

[crazy canuck]

Yep, and this is a good opportunity to divide them and make more plants 

[mongers]

Yep, and this is a good opportunity to divide them and make more plants 

That's good advice and I've accidentally started that; one of them was an old 'mothers-in-law' plant, ancient family heirloom, was on it's way out.

So I rescued a all the bits, that were still growing or falling out of the pot, most had no real roots, but all have now taken and I'll be given out to family members when they visit.

I shall have to ask my cousin, but I think it was originally a plant belong to the grandparents, so likely 60+ years old. 

[Syt]

[Crazy_Ivan80]

 

Personally I get a decent laugh out of the cartalk with Martok ones (something like that)