Somel, Selçuk A. (2001). The Modernization of Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839-1908: Islamization, Autocracy, and Discipline. Leiden: Brill.
xviii + 414 pp.
$130 (Cloth) ISBN 90-04-11903-5
Reviewed by Barak A. Salmoni
University of Pennsylvania
August 17, 2002
In The Modernization of Education in the Ottoman Empire, Selçuk A. Somel has produced a work whose scope and use of primary sources are unrivaled in the study of modern Middle Eastern education. Addressing nearly all aspects of Ottoman state education, this book will serve as future advanced students' and researchers' first reference on the details of educational logistics, budgeting, broad policy goals, and curricular initiatives on the pre-collegiate levels between the 1840s and the 1860s—the period known in Ottoman history as the Tanzimat, or Reform era—as well as during the 1876-1909 reign of Sultan Abdülhamid. As an encyclopedic introduction to the broad contours of Ottoman education for someone already rather familiar with the larger socio-political framework, Somel's narrative is not sparing, and is not apparently confined to arguing one thesis. Still, his "main argument" is that "the state tried… to use public schools as an institutional tool of social disciplining and modernization." This attempt was doomed to "failure", because of "chronic weakness of finances, the inability to formulate an ideological synthesis of Islamism and modernism as well as ethnic heterogeneity," which ultimately defeated the "project of authoritarian-Islamic modernization" (pp. 12-13). The book is structured to present official intentions (Chapters One, Two), attempts at implementation on the provincial level (Ch. Two-Four, Six), the curricular component (Ch. Five), and graduates' recollections as an evaluation of Ottoman education's success (Seven).
After a brief review of pre-1820s Ottoman educational opportunities, the book's first chapter focuses on legislation and administrative measures taken in ¤stanbul for the provision of primary education between 1838-1869. Plunging into the relevant official documents, Somel detects an interest in administrative/curricular regularization and the recognition that orderly-functioning educational systems providing worldly knowledge are essential for states' survival. This the author implicitly defines as 'modernism'. Alongside this impulse associated with the Tanzimat was the desire to use an expanding school system to inculcate Islamic faith, practice, and morality, in addition to loyalty to the sultan. Thus the 'social disciplining' aspect. Particularly in the 1830s-1840s, "these two concepts remain[ed] unconnected to each other, without any attempt at a synthesis" (p. 31), while afterwards even those associated with modernization of the structures and methods of schooling lacked "a view differentiating education from religion" (p. 41). By the end of the 1860s the enterprise for educational modernism had gained a modest advance, since overall policy desires "gradually changed into the aim of offering curriculum of Islamic and practical worldly content" (p. 49). The tenor of official pronouncements in the next decade, however, signaled that primary schooling was again to be "encumbered by Islamic influenced curriculum" (p. 55) at the expense of secular knowledge. Rather than teaching the ideals of the French Revolution and Enlightenment-inspired individualism, schools continued as vehicles for religio-moral social disciplining.
Chapters Two through Four explore the measures employed and challenges confronted in turning policy pronouncements into reality in far-flung provinces during the Tanzimat and Hamidian years. In addition to chronic under-funding—the state was often at war and the tax-base was difficult to access and depleted—Ottoman subjects were often suspicious of government intrusion into the realm of indoctrination, and were more trustworthy of private local initiatives for Islamic childhood education. These problems were only exacerbated by a shortage of state-trained teachers, thus requiring the use of clerics in state schools. Along with the relatively tentative nature of educational officials' secularizing consensus, this meant that pedagogical modernization was rather difficult to realize. In Somel's view, only in the late 1860s were strong steps taken towards secularized and rational education. Laws in 1869 finally "stressed the promotion of secular knowledge, leaving religion to a secondary position" (p. 89), just as Islamic studies in primary schools were removed from the purview of Muslim clerics. From 1870 to the early 1880s then, modernization and secularization in the sense of esteeming non-religious knowledge gained breathing room in Ottoman education.
This late-Tanzimat modernism was short-lived. Chapter Five looks at curricular approaches from the late 1860s, focusing on the resurgence of social disciplining through Islamic substance. On the one hand, official debate informing the period into the 1890s involved the purpose of education, particularly beyond the elementary (iptidâî) level: was it to form mid-level Ottoman bureaucrats, or should educational substance produce Ottoman subjects possessing worldly knowledge "with the aim to raise economically productive individuals" (p. 175)? According to Somel, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the latter view had come to dominate official educational policy. On the other hand, this process reinforced a swinging pendulum in curriculum. Though "emphasis on natural scientific and utilitarian subjects increased and the stress on moral education decreased" (p. 173) for a short time after 1868, this appears limited to the intermediate and preparatory schools (rüşdiye; idâdî). Further, as understandings of schooling became more mass-oriented, regime-supportive and Islamic-hued material re-entered the curriculum in a much more energized fashion. As "traditionalist circles increasingly came to consider moralistic stress in education as compatible with the natural scientific and practical content of course subjects" (p. 178), the result by the 1900s was a policy "where the need for practical education merged with the policy of social disciplining, and government schools at the end ceased to function as solely civil official-raising institutions" (p. 179).
In the author's opinion, the attempt at modernization and social disciplining failed. Somel feels texts in particular manifested a dualistic nature. Through a brief review of the main contours of several history and morals books for primary and secondary level schools, he highlights in particular the presence of authoritarian values, Islamic motifs and methods of explanation, and dynasty-celebrating narratives, all of which emphasized "both the Sultan Caliph as the main source of political and religious authority and the Islamic community as the only social unit of political and religious identity" (p. 180). The consequence of what the author clearly considers curricular atavism was "the discrepancy of the promotion of traditional religious values as a means of political control on the one hand and of the stress on modernization and material progress on the other" (p. 168). As the latter "were hardly compatible with the medieval Islamic way of thinking" (p. 192), Somel's judgment of Ottoman curricular efforts is rather harsh: "the Ottoman administration remained unable to synthesize these aims into a coherent ideology. This inability emerged as a major structural weakness of the Hamidian school system, which displayed itself in the inconsistencies in the textbook contents and led to the superficiality in instruction" (p. 202).
The evidentiary basis for these assertions emerges in Chapter Seven, which deploys a large number of memoirs in order to reveal students' impressions of school life. From one perspective, Somel presents a broad tour of possible educational experiences between the 1870s and 1908 from pre-school through secondary school. More precisely, he delineates the negative collective memory of education held by some of the Turkish Republic's most eminent educators, politicians, and publicists, who self-identified as anti-Hamidian and pro-'Young Turk'. For this group of students, we find that in post-primary years of schooling, they came to resent the harsh pedagogical methods, ambiance of mistrust informing school life, and mechanical approach to learning. Just as important, the memoir literature indicates that despite official strictures, illegal anti-Hamidian, pro-liberty, and even Turkish nationalist publications infiltrated schools in urban centers, energizing student disaffection. Generalizing from memoirs of these students, Somel holds that "these generations of Hamidian youth increasingly felt hatred toward the educational system and the state administration" (p. 244). Concluding, the author views overall Ottoman educational efforts as a failure. From the 1880s on, the Empire was racked by an unending series of non-Muslim and Muslim separatist movements, as well as by internal efforts to overthrow the sultan. "Most of those involved in all these separatist movements were graduates of the Hamidian public schools. In other words, the Hamidian policy of social disciplining did not work" (p. 275).
As an encyclopedic reference particularly for the legislative and quantitative aspects of 1830s-1908 Ottoman education, Somel's book is a tremendous resource. Yet, if judged as an incisive, focused study successfully proving a thesis, it proves somewhat frustrating. Most fundamentally, it appears conceptually imprecise. The book seems to hinge on the dichotomous distinction between "modernization" and "social disciplining." These two terms are never rigorously explained or problematized, just as they are not contextualized in reference to any social science literature. The former term appears to imply technological, worldly, and economics-oriented; throughout, the latter is explicitly and exclusively identified with pro-Ottoman dynasty and Islam, both considered ipso facto autocratic and medieval. This indicates an a priori normative secularist approach instead of a conclusion based on research or comparative educational study, and thus tends to ignore the innovative aspects of Hamidian pedagogy. These include attentiveness to the need for mass-oriented ideological communication; regularization of school levels, grades, examinations, and teacher-training; much greater intentionality in use of curriculum; the pairing of scientific and moralistic subjects; and the conscious merging of patriotic and religious motifs. In the context of European education, such processes are indeed considered characteristic of educational and political modernization, just as are states' willingness to deploy official religion for the sake of ideological legitimation. Indeed, in the post-Foucault world, it is perhaps more appropriate to view social disciplining as an inextricable component of modernization.
Somel considers 1830s-1908 Ottoman education a failure because graduates of state schools were among those involved in ethnic separatist movements and efforts to unseat Abdülhamid. In this case, pedagogical "success" would have to be defined as preservation of the Ottoman dynasty and territories. Not only does this tremendously over-burden education, but it ignores the constellation of other political, diplomatic, cultural, and conjunctural factors at work in Ottoman lands from the 1890s to 1919. More basically, to assert that some graduates of state schools were involved in various oppositional activities does not prove that state schools by their nature created anti-Ottoman youth, or that most graduates of these schools joined anti-Hamidian initiatives. In Somel's terms, the latter statement would need to be true in order to prove educational failure. Additionally, that most ethnically-Turkish (and even Arab and Kurdish) anti-Hamidian graduates strenuously supported the post-1909 Ottoman regime and fight for the state's survival suggests that in broader terms "social disciplining" did communicate the desired values.
Part of the problem related to Somel's assertions here involves his use of memoirs. In the field of educational history, researchers are often concerned to demonstrate not only official intent, but pedagogical outcomes as well. For earlier eras the memoir presents a potential treasure of recollections. It is, however, a difficult source with which to work, written decades after subsequent events can cloud or ideologically skew memories. Moreover, memoirs are often composed by exceptional people whose representativeness is thus questionable. In Somel's case, judgment of Ottoman educational failure is based on the recollections of historiographically prominent individuals including nationalist literati (Rasim, Uşaklıgil, Yalçın, Y. Kemal, and H.E. Adıvar—the only woman), military or political leaders (Karabekir, R. Nur, Karaosmanoğlu), or social commentators and expert pedagogues (Aydemir, Baltacıoğlu). Thus, though Somel is to be credited for casting a wide net, the sample cannot be entirely representative.
Somel's analytical method is also somewhat frustrating. As a broad work, he sometimes omits the necessary illustrative detail. In particular, the chapters dealing with curriculum and memoirs do not approach them in a sufficiently qualitative fashion, thus denying them their own voice. And, as regards texts, the reader is left uninformed regarding several important matters. Just a few of these include differential presentation of curricular messages over ascending levels of schooling; biographical background and ideological predispositions of text authors; and distribution of texts and length of use before being superceded by new curricula. Equally frustrating for students of Middle Eastern and global education, Somel engages in no dialogue with studies of contemporaneous educational phenomena in Europe or the Far East—for which material indeed exists—nor does he critically integrate some quite new work on late Ottoman education such as that by Benjamin Fortna, or Gregory Starrett's work on official Islam in modern Egyptian state schooling (Putting Islam to Work; University of California, 1998).
A further comment is necessary. The careless editing of Brill is visible on nearly every page, from spelling errors to grammatical mistakes that either change the author's intended meaning or render phrases incomprehensible. While Somel's native language is Turkish and he has published mostly in German, and though Brill is a press based in Europe, the latter has been publishing in English for several decades. The ready availability of English-fluent copy-readers, as well as the tremendous ease possible in computer-based editing and the prohibitive expense of Brill's books mean that both reader and author deserve to encounter nothing but a near-perfect final product. That this is not the case mars a work that is a tremendous contribution to the field, notwithstanding points raised above.
Somel concludes his work with the important insight that the dualistic modernizing and social disciplining approach in Ottoman education "shaped individuals who on the one hand were mostly positivists and modernists, and at the same time were authoritarian. It is rather difficult to find graduates of Hamidian education who were consistent liberals and democrats" (p. 276). This is a quite illuminating comment to students of Republican Turkish and Middle Eastern history during the 1920s-1950s, and shows how central is the study of education to understanding socio-political change. One hopes that Somel and other researchers will continue to probe with ever greater analytical rigor and richness of detail the avenues of inquiry which he has opened.
About the Reviewer
Barak A. Salmoni
Middle East Center
University of Pennsylvania
Email: kbar18@comcast.net
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