Fortna, Benjamin C. (2002). Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire. London: Oxford University Press.
Pp. xvii + 280
$74 ISBN 0199248400
Reviewed by Barak Salmoni
University of Pennsylvania
August 5, 2002
It has long been a refrain among students of the Middle East that the role of education in modernization and identity-formation has been mentioned by standard texts only to be neglected by sustained inquiry. Thanks to the book under review here, education can now be fully integrated into the study of late Ottoman history as a central component in a struggling regime's strategy to bolster its domestic legitimacy and repel foreign cultural encroachment. Benjamin Fortna is an American on the faculty of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. In a book based on doctoral work at the University of Chicago, he has filled a gap in Middle Eastern studies literature allowing for greater dialogue with the field of educational history.
Concentrating on the pivotal era of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909), Fortna has selected the secondary level of schooling roughly corresponding to American junior high and highschool. Called the idâdî, these schools expanded in Ottoman urban and provincial centers from the late 1860s, and became the backbone of the state's educational system meant to produce junior cadres for government departments. Also seeking to revise received wisdom about the nature of Ottoman modernization and the role of education within it, Fortna contends that rather than a unidirectional, conscious enterprise in Western-inspired secularization, Ottoman educational attitudes, policy, and curriculum during the decades prior to 'Young Turk' rule (1908-1919) were moving forthrightly in the direction of increased Islamization and celebration of the sultanate as the guarantor of Ottoman national survival. According to the author, in contrast to educational measures during the 1830s-60s years of Ottoman reform (the Tanzimat) inspired by and emulating French secularizing approaches almost entirely, we must now give due credit to "the pervasiveness and importance of the Ottoman and Islamic elements in informing the educational agenda of this period" (p. 10). By examining official educational correspondence at the central and provincial levels; 1880s-90s measures to combat foreign educational-cultural encroachment through altering curricula at the idâdî level; school architecture and decor; and curricular artefacts such as school maps, texts, disciplinary reports, and selected students' recollections, Fortna elegantly argues his "main thesis… that the late Ottoman state assigned education the conflicted task of attempting to ward off Westerns encroachment by adapting Western-style education to Ottoman needs" (p. 12). Ottoman schooling was thus both modernizing and Islamic in nature, forcing us to reassess the nature of Ottoman socio-politics as a whole during this era.
Narratively sparing, this book is quite well-suited to use by students in classes on comparative educational history and the modern Middle East, particularly as the introductory chapter locates late Ottoman experiences in a global context showing similarities to France, Czarist Russia, China, and Japan, and highlights the significance of the author's conclusions for reinserting Islam into Middle Eastern modernization. These are both welcome, innovative methods for conceiving of education in the region, and will elicit much valuable research in the future. A second chapter then selectively portrays mounting official Ottoman concern through the 1860s-80s that foreign missionary schools as well as indigenous non-Muslim institutions were surpassing the state in providing education to Muslim citizens, thus risking Ottoman defeat on the ideological plane. We see here that instead of unquestioning Europeanization, ultimately "Ottoman educational policy was informed by the spirit of competition" (p. 84) with external powers and internal threats to ideological legitimacy.
Chapter Two, "Fighting Back," brings the reader into the 'engine compartment' of the book, focusing on the idâdî-preparatory school. Beginning with the Galatasaray Sultanisi in ¤stanbul, founded in 1867-1868 through French governmental support and prodding, Fortna demonstrates that an originally secularizing and Europeanizing venture—including French as the language of instruction, European instructors, and classes mixing Muslims and non-Muslim—was redirected during the 1880s-90s "as an attempt to reassert Ottoman interests at the expense of their Western, in this case French, counterparts" (103; italics in original). This was done through increasing the number of Muslim students by almost 40%, injecting into the curriculum increased attention to Islamic subjects and Eastern languages, and reducing exposure to Western thought as well as European faculty. The author then details the numerical expansion of idâdîs in provincial centers, where similar curricular priorities presumably obtained.
Chapter Four turns to idâdî school architecture and disciplinary action. Though appearing as monuments to Western technological modernity which removed schooling from the ambit of the mosque, Fortna suggests that moving beyond schools' architectural facades reveals the extent of Islamic continuity in the Hamidian educational approach. Not only did these schools feature miniature mosques and prayer leaders on campus, but in some areas such as Edirne and Jerusalem, new idâdîs were built near venerable mosques at the center of Muslim quarters. Likewise, ornaments such as the Sultan's seal and pro-dynasty slogans adorned walls, while disciplinary cases in various locales from the 1890s and early 1900s showed that for Ottoman educational administrators, the infractions that mattered involved Islamic morality. The author thus concludes that in spite of superficial Westernization in school architecture and discipline, more important is "the aggressive presence of religiously—and nationally—motivated educational competition" (134).
The following chapter (Chapter Five) supports arguments developed in earlier parts in a quite original fashion by examining maps used in geography classes from the 1890s on. Earlier Tanzimat educators had imported maps from Europe whose orientation did not allow inclusion of all Ottoman domains. They also shaded different continents in separate colors, thus negating the idea of Ottoman territorial integrity. In contrast, Fortna shows how later maps produced domestically were oriented and colored to include all Ottoman lands, in an effort to communicate Ottoman greatness. Attempting to assess the impact on students of these maps, Fortna includes memoirs of selected idâdî students from those years, to demonstrate that along with transmitting patriotic feeling, such maps could also elicit unfavorable comparisons of the current reality of a contracting empire to the memory of previous grandeur. Perhaps the most important contribution of this chapter is its affirmation of growing Ottoman intentionality in the deployment of pedagogical technology for ideological purposes.
Chapter Six, 'Morals', culminates Fortna's study through an examination of memoranda and selected textbooks for ethics. Based on an earlier, comparatively focused article, the author demonstrates that in the competition against foreign cultural encroachment, it was specifically the ethical content of education that Ottoman elites wished most to Islamize and nationalize: "the 'secular' system envisioned during the previous Tanzimat period was now to be put to work for an altered religious, cultural, and political agenda" (206). According to the author, curricular guidelines insisted on more ethical development, and prescribed attention to traditional Islamic motifs, values, and practices, parallel with inculcation of loyalty to the state and Sultan as the embodiment of legitimate Islamic authority. The author's close examination of one ethics text in particular reveals that the didactic method, ideas communicated, and even narrative structure of lessons supported "an interrelated cluster of attributes" labeled "quietist," such as "respect for authority, duty, loyalty, and hierarchy, all critical to the Hamidian neo-patrimonial agenda" (231). Fortna concludes that unlike previous unquestioning interest in Western methods, "the emphasis the Hamidian state put on inculcating morals was perhaps the defining characteristic of its educational agenda" (241), such that "here is Hamidian educational policy in microcosm: a moving away from more overtly secular aspects of the Tanzimat conception of Ottoman education toward a consciously Islamic basis, and all of this being carried out against the backdrop of foreign encroachment which renders the changes all the more pressing" (216).
Written in elegant prose, Fortna's study is a truly solid basis for future work on Ottoman and Turkish education, not the least because of the questions he asks. Furthermore, by addressing official pedagogical discourse and legislation; school architecture; disciplinary regulations and cases; maps as visual curriculum; and textbooks for the key subject of morality, the author has set a new standard for scholarly rigor in a subfield of Middle East studies only now receiving its proper due. It is thus naturally in the nature of such an innovative work to suggest several questions. By concentrating on the idâdî-preparatory level of schooling, the author selected a discrete component of Ottoman education providing needed focus. Still, this narrow focus leaves it somewhat unclear how the preparatory rung fit into the modernizing educational system as a whole, either conceptually, numerically, or curricularly. Here, examination of the proportion of school-starting youth continuing on to and completing idâdî schooling would permit particularly the student of education history without a Middle East background a greater appreciation of the significance and strength of Fortna's unique contribution. In the same vein, anchoring Chapter Three with a discussion of the Galatasaray school as representative of Ottoman educational desires is quite sensible. Still, the brief nature of Fortna's description does not permit a full view the school's dynamics, and leaves one wondering if the Islamizing measures of the 1880s-1890s did not exist in a larger context of Westernization. More fundamentally, because Galatasaray was such a unique case—located in the imperial capital where oversight was closer and funding much more forthcoming—linkages between dynamics described there and the realities of provincial schooling may be harder to establish. In short, absent a more detailed discussion, Galatasaray may appear as more exceptional than representative. Indeed, when describing the idâdî system as a whole (113-137), Fortna appears to fall back on a structural-institutional narrative conforming to earlier historiographical approaches.
Fortna's examination of school architecture is a quite refreshing perspective. Here however, the data seems open to differing interpretations. One may argue that rather than an over-arching effort to imbue school buildings with a traditional Islamic ambience and a non-European Ottoman distinctness, the mere process of erecting new buildings visually different from predecessors, and then encapsulating state-determined manifestations of religion and patriotism within their controlled space, was in fact an operation bearing several resemblances to contemporary European educational phenomena, through which religion was secularized and compartmentalized, and states tapped into school patriotism as a legitimacy resource. Here greater reference to educational trends in the West would have been edifying. Conversely, rather than Islamic assertion, the construction of modern-looking state schools in historically important Islamic sites could have signified—or been interpreted by onlookers as—a provocative non-traditional insertion of state agencies into new areas. Just as other recent scholarship on Ottoman education has emphasized the modernist, Europeanizing visual impact of Ottoman educational architecture during these years(some120), it is equally likely that students were impressed most with the discontinuity from preceding Ottoman-Islamic tendencies in these schools.
The author's discussion of maps presents further interpretive and methodological questions. As for the latter, were there no geography textbooks in use at the time? If so, what did this unique category of curricular artefact transmit to students? If not, what does their absence indicate about Ottoman educators' conceptions? Also vexing is the status of a memoir as an historical source for indicating students' reaction to maps. As the author indicates, the memoirs he uses were written several decades subsequent to school experiences, thus layering them with the interpretive bias of subsequent activites. Further, those who wrote memoirs were far from the typical student whose very unremarkability grants the observations so much importance. Ôevket Surreya Aydemir, for example, was a quite unique individual, prominent as an ardent Turkish nationalist and leftist supporter of the Turkish Republic's leaders, who went on to a career of government work and writing. Likewise, Huseyin Cahid Yalçin became an important political journalist in the 1910s-30s. In this case, broadening the sample beyond these two individuals may have provided some balance. As for issues of interpretation, though Fortna emphasizes the problems of earlier maps, perhaps the mere activity of a student from Edirne studying about Egypt or Arabia in the 1840s-1880s transmitted a broader Ottoman political identity, in spite of the visual segmentation the author documents so well. As it is, when assessing the impact of maps in Ottoman preparatory schooling, Fortna's careful scholarship tempers his text with a great number of speculative "must have"s, "may have"s, and "perhaps"s (pp. 197-199).
While excellently written and an extremely fulfilling read, the concluding chapter on morals curriculum elicits the broadest and most concerning question, which applies to the work as a whole. Closely examining curriculum to put into relief the re-Islamization of a heretofore secularizing educational project, Fortna neglects pre-1860s. Though understandable given limitations of scope in today's academic publishing market, some demonstration of secularizing and Europeanizing measures in educational thinking, curriculum, and school dynamics during the earlier period seems essential to the argument that post-1880s approaches were different in substance and intent. Significantly, recent work on the educational system as a whole from the 1830s to 1908 repeatedly devotes attention both to Islamic survivals up until the mid-1860s and Abdülhamit's Islamist-nationalist educational agenda of the 1880s and beyond. As Fortna himself refers mostly to measures in the late 1860s as examples of pre-Hamidian educational Europeanizing, one may posit an alternative view: rather than a radical pedagogical reorientation, in the 1880s-1908 period a more powerful government evinced educational intentionality through conscious, politically calculating espousal of policies recalling realities of the 1830s-1860s. In such a perspective, educational secularization emerges as more of an 1860s to 1870s parentheses. This view only magnifies the importance of Fortna's work in revising earlier historiography which portrayed nineteenth-century Ottoman change as centered on Europeanesque secularization as the panacea of modernity.
The above comments are intended not so much as criticism as they are a testament to the quite overdue and fertile ground that Fortna has provided for inquiry into Middle Eastern education as well as dialogue with global educational studies. With his meticulously researched and accessibly composed examination of the course of one component of late Ottoman education, he has opened an important window onto a central dimension of Middle Eastern socio-politics. Though it may be some exaggeration to claim that "this book shows that in the field of education the continuities between the Ottoman and [Turkish] Republican periods are stronger than usually perceived" (p. 14), Fortna's book will prove substantively, methodologically, and even stylistically essential reading for all future researchers of twentieth-century education in this region.
About the Reviewer
Barak Salmoni
Middle East Center
University of Pennsylvania
Email: kbar18@comcast.net
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