The essays in this volume derive from papers presented at a conference at Harvard in 2006 to examine how the ‘Orientalist’ views of western European scholars on Ottoman art and architecture were reflected, to their mutual disadvantage, in the opinions of Turkish and Arab nationalists in the Near East in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Few modern nations exhibit the cultural and historical complexity of modern Turkey, with its multi-ethnic and multicultural heritage from the Ottoman empire, and its very hybridity and situation on the frontiers of Islam give it added potential to challenge “the essentialist constructs that still pervade general surveys and popular venues, such as museum displays and exhibitions”. An enquiry into the ethnic, dynastic and national determinants of the history of Anatolia and the Balkans (‘the Lands of Rum’), the editors hope, may therefore provide a model for other regions—though doubtless with varying congruence and evidently not to all. They rightly observe that a major preoccupation of post-1923 Turkish nationalism was to refute widespread and persistent criticisms of the sterility and unoriginality of Turkish art and architecture, but it over-emphasised the ‘Turkish’ element and its purity, at the expense of the centuries-old cross-cultural exchange with Anatolian/Caucasian/Balkan Christianity and Europe, and focused anachronistically on the present borders of modern Turkey, to the exclusion of neighbouring Islamic regions which were formerly provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

The volume begins with a general introduction by the editors and an interesting essay by Cemal Kafadar spelling out the rich implications of the concepts of ‘Rum’ and ‘the Lands of Rum’, of which Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli presciently said (I quote Kafadar's rendering):

“Most of the inhabitants of Rum are of confused ethnic origins. Among its notables there are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam . . . either on their father's or their mother's side the genealogy is traced to an infidel. It is as if two species of fruit-bearing tree mingled and mated, with leaves and fruit: and the fruit of this union was large and full of juice, like a princely pearl”.

There follow three sections which overlap to some extent: on Turkish art and architecture, principally Ottoman, as a manifestation of ethnicity (Heghnar Watenpaugh, Oya Pancaroğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood); Turkish art as a manifestation of national identity (Ahmet Ersoy, Gülru Necipoğlu, Shirine Hamadeh and Sibel Bozdoğan); and a slightly more heterogeneous group, covering the ‘organicist’ movement of the 1930s and 1940s in Anatolia (S. M. Can Bilsel), Islamic archaeology in the early years of the Republic (Scott Redford), museums in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Turkey (Wendy Shaw) and the depressing history of architectural conservation in Istanbul in the same period (Nur Altınyıldız). In the first section Kishvar Rizvi's essay on Arthur Upham Pope and the Royal Academy Persian Exhibition of 1931 is somewhat out of place, but the contrast in her topic and her eccentric treatment of the material is enough to show that that the ethnic approach has lost little of its seductivenessFootnote ¹. All in all, the papers presented here, which inevitably repeat one another up to a point, reveal the complexities, and even inconsistencies, in the unifying grand narratives of canonical scholarship.

The various readings of cultural geography implied by the terms ‘Rum’ and ‘Anadolu’ came with their own political baggage, in conception as well as in their continued reception. It is probably unfair to make much of the fact that the only mention of Kurds in the volume is Cemal Kafadar's reference to the disputed ethnicity of the Yezidis (p. 22, n. 8), but the nationalists had no time for Arab Muslim nationalism either. They even relegated the Muslim character of Anatolian architecture to the background, although periodic, unconvincing, attempts were made to introduce the idea of Turkish Islam via the Alevis. In the last years of the Ottoman empire these were recast as a survival of the Turkish tribes of Central Asia, who “preserved the Turkish language, race and blood” from “the international ideal of the Arab”. From the 1950s onwards the Alevi-Turcoman village came to be seen as an ideal for the investigation of folklore: its supposed integration of the ancient religions of the land with Islam gave it autochthonous status, and its isolation inflicted by centuries of persecution, made it supposedly impervious to modernisation.

For lack of space, unfortunately, it is impossible to review all the contributions at the length they deserve. Sibel Bozdoğan's, however, (‘Nationalist historiography and the “New Architecture” in the early Republic’, pp. 199–221) is somewhat exceptional in treating the debate on the Modern Movement as a still contentious issue and in taking into account the views of practising architects. Initially, the proponents of the Modern Movement rejected Ottoman forms and the nationalists celebrated them, but, paradoxically, the writers and architects who contributed to it, like Sedat Çetintaş, Behçet Ünsal and Celâl Esad Arseven contrived to be both modernists and nationalists, reconciling the paradox by arguing that the aesthetic values claimed by the Modern Movement—rationality, functionality, simplicity, transparency, restraint, the primacy of tectonic form over decoration, and rigorous rectilinear geometry—were precisely those of Ottoman architecture, which in this was unique among the various national schools of Islam and much closer in spirit to the European modernist avant garde.

This could be seen as slight of hand, but it went with a desire to reveal the latent modernity of Ottoman architecture by arguing for its Turkishness, all the way back to the prehistoric cultures of Central Asia, and an attempt to secularise Ottoman architecture, which found its expression in Sedat Hakkı Eldem's espousal of the traditional Turkish timber-frame house, based on the Amcazade Hüseyin yalı (1699). This forms the single exception to the architectural profession's radical break with the Ottoman past, and although its ideal of tracing the rational evolution of Ottoman/Turkish architecture into modernism has remained unfulfilled, and although recent Turkish architecture has, by and large, failed to establish meaningful continuities with the Ottoman architectural heritage, its rejection of the deadening effect of pastiche still raises questions of substance.

One useful result of these papers is that although the arguments they expound were often immoderate, implausible and sometimes quite frankly bogus, the views of the architects and art-historians in the Usûl-i Mi'mârî-i ‘Osmânî published in 1873 are remarkable for their broad-mindedness and common sense. It is also salutary to be reminded that when it came to extravagant ideas, as often as not the Turkish nationalists of the early Republic were merely parroting those of foreign scholars.

Some of the contributors to this volume evidently think of themselves as ‘post-modernists’. This is not to the reader's advantage. Scare quotes are over-used (a catching habit), presumably to indicate that many of their claims are figurative rather than literal. Another, more deleterious feature is their frequent failure to write clearly, with excessive use of technical jargon and a bizarre vocabulary of neologisms, not a few of them, in my view, malapropisms—monolithic if not immaculate (?); epitome (?acme); urbanity (?); inhabitation (habituation); innocuous (innocent); panacea (antidote); systemic (systematic); self-reflexivity (self-reflectiveness?); counterfactual (counter-intuitive—or just contrary to the facts). Most of the contributors have shown themselves capable of writing a clear sentence in other contexts: is this misuse of language part of the credentials of the post-modernist?