Ahmet Midhat did not invent this type, which had earlier made its appearance in genres such as stage plays and caricatures, but his drawing of it in Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi is so vivid that it has served as its quintessential expression in Turkish letters until today. In this sense it might be compared with Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man. Turgenev did not invent the type of the “Superfluous Man,” which was seen as symptomatic of a pervasive and much deeper social problem. But his work embodied this type so successfully that the “Superfluous Man” became a byword for this character type and the social ills associated with it. Indeed, what modern critics say about the figure of the “Superfluous Man” in the world of Russian literature could easily be applied to Ahmet Midhat’s alafranga dandy—namely, that he makes his appearance soon after the encounter with Western European letters and that he appears “not just as another literary type, but as a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, and a presence in life: the superfluous man is the homeless man.”2
Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi is a moralizing tale that juxtaposes the two eponymous characters. The storyline of the “Tale of Sir Plato and Mr. Number the Scribe,” as the title may be somewhat freely translated, makes it abundantly clear to the reader which character’s life and path are preferable, both from the point of view of the satisfaction of the men living it, and from the point of view of the good of wider society. Râkım’s thrift and hard work are rewarded, while Felâtun’s dissolute, pointless lifestyle also leads him to his just desserts—penury and an absence of meaningful relationships. The contrasts are emphasized at every turn in the story: Râkım comes from a very modest background and has grown up in poverty while Felâtun is the pampered only son of a wealthy father; Râkım works hard to get himself educated while Felâtun has had a fancy education handed to him on a platter; Râkım drums up employment opportunities for himself in government offices, but also outside of them, and he works hard at his jobs, while Felâtun lives off a government sinecure procured through family connections and rarely shows up at the office. The negative side of these contrasts is embodied by Felâtun who is, in addition to being aimless and dissolute, a slave to European fashion. Indeed, European fashion is the marker for all his shortcomings. Thus Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi captures one of the great concerns of the age—namely, that the answer given during the Tanzimat reform era to the question “What should we do to save the Ottoman state and society?” had turned out to be a kind of uncritical and indeed superficial adoption of European modes of life that, so far from leading to the strengthening of Ottoman society and state, had further undermined it. But while the book represents a set of sharply drawn contrasts, these are not contrasts between old and new, European and Ottoman. Rather both men represent something new: a very modern evil, personified as the pointless Europeanized dandy—Felâtun, and a modern alternative—Râkım. Salvation, the book suggests, was not to be sought in a return to “traditional” usages. Râkım is not a “traditional” Ottoman nor yet one who rejects European innovations per se. He is educated in both Ottoman and European subjects and makes his living from both providing translations from French as well as lessons in Ottoman. He is worldly and frequents the salons and clubs of Beyoğlu in moderation; he is comfortable in both Ottoman and European-style social situations in terms of food, drink, clothing, and manners. But he is profoundly different from Felâtun in that he has both ambition and discipline. We see throughout the novel his work ethic and commitment to planning. He is, in this sense, the model of the modern man so often discussed and longingly anticipated by Ottoman reformers, the educated Ottoman with a sense of “sa’y ve emel” or “striving and purpose,” a figure whose advent in society was broadly understood to be the necessary ingredient for Ottoman progress. A vexing question in this formulation, however, was how to produce such men, and Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi offers us not merely contrasting portrayals of successful and abortive modernization, it also implicitly offers us Ahmet Midhat’s account of what leads to success or failure in this endeavor.
Râkım’s work ethic and self-discipline initially seem to have their roots in necessity (he starts life as a man in somewhat straitened circumstances, with his widowed mother and her devoted slave Fedayi taking in sewing to support him), but it becomes something that has its roots in his sense of responsibility—first to the aging Fedayi, later to his young female slave, Janan. Ahmet Midhat emphasizes that Râkım needs this sense of responsibility and attachment both to keep him going and to give him a moral compass. Here we are not talking about responsibility of just any kind. Rather, we are talking about responsibility born of love as well as duty, responsibility that is therefore not a burden, but a source of happiness, something that grounds Râkım and propels him forward.
This sense of responsibility is revealed most forcefully through the evolution of his feelings for Janan. Râkım has already attained a certain level of material success and stability when he acquires her, and therefore is potentially in some danger of losing his way. However, the transformation of Janan, through his generosity, from slave girl to an increasingly assured, educated, and knowledgeable young woman, engages his emotions in a new way and ultimately keeps him on the right path. For this to be possible, Janan must be a woman who can be a true partner in his labors. The novel requires that she must be a proper companion to Râkım in the sense of being well suited to him in age, attractiveness, and intelligence, but she must also become educated, aware of the wider world, and able to freely choose to join her life to his. Her decision in favor of a life in a modest middle-class home, largely segregated from society, rather than pursuing a possible “career” as concubine (cariye) in a great and wealthy household where she could have lived a life of privilege and influence, is the moment that marks her out definitively as a possible partner for Râkım and mother to his child. It is from and in such a nest, the book assures us, that men such as Râkım spring and reproduce themselves.
Companionate marriage, as opposed to marriage as a business contract between families, was an idea that had gained wide currency in the nineteenth-century Middle East as not merely a marker of modernity, but as a generative element that was essential to helping construct a modern society. In this respect, the story of Râkım is an early literary endorsement of a new social norm. However, what is surprising, as Robert Finn has noted, is the fact that the young woman in question in this novel is a slave (until the very end of the book) and her slave status is not a problem that lies at the crux of the novel, as was typical of other fictions of the period. This very unusual—indeed, distressing—aspect of the novel is not its only unusual feature.
The other striking and quite uncommon feature of this novel is that Ahmet Midhat doesn’t merely lampoon Felâtun. He also offers up the alternative in Râkım, and suggests that what makes Râkım the perfect counterpoise is his ability to be a modern Ottoman, not a fake European. He is educated and entrepreneurial, but his intimate life is lived in the Ottoman way, in an Ottoman Muslim quarter of the city. The food he eats, the people who inhabit his home, the way he manages his domestic arrangements, are all Ottoman rather than European.
At the same time, at the heart of it all is the genuine love between two people who are or become genuine equals in human (rather than formal or institutional) terms. By choosing to illustrate this point using a slave girl who is happy in her condition, Ahmet Midhat is making a very strong statement. He is rejecting what seems to him an excessive and immoral individualism in European social arrangements, which he comments on forcefully in his account of his European tour, Avrupa’da bir Cevelan (A Tour in Europe) and elsewhere. He makes the point that the bonds of love are just that—in other words, that they are both bonds and are based on love. The book suggests that a healthy society has at its core families in which people choose to be responsible for each other (and in that sense choose not to be perfectly free as individuals), where its members find pleasure in not putting themselves first. These ar
e the families that produce and sustain productive, engaged citizens. The trappings of modernity grafted onto the scion of a traditional “patrimonial” family like that of Mustafa Meraki Efendi, Felâtun’s father, offer society only the Ottoman version of the “Superfluous Man”: Felâtun Bey.
The choice of a slave girl to illustrate this dichotomy was obviously a conscious one on the part of Ahmet Midhat, certainly intended as pointed, and perhaps even intended as shocking. While Ahmet Midhat placed great value on freedom in the sense of an individual’s ability to make (informed) choices, he strongly opposed what he saw as an excessive and morally corrosive individualism in European societies—that is, a system of values in which it appeared to him that individuals considered only their own desires and well-being without regard for others or for society more broadly. Furthermore, though Ahmet Midhat was an advocate of greater education and inclusion in some aspects of the public sphere for women, as can be seen from his support for Fatma Aliye, one of the first female Ottoman novelists, he rejected the notion of equality in the sense of formal sameness. The sexual division of labor and social roles, with men freely assuming economic and protective responsibilities toward women, who in all important ways were their physical and intellectual companions and who had freely chosen them, was, according to Ahmet Midhat, the cornerstone of a healthy, “go-ahead” society. In this sense we may also take the novel as a response to European comments on the “woman question” and European criticisms of sex segregation in Ottoman society. Just as Felâtun is the anti-Râkım, Madame Polini is the anti-Janan, and Ahmet Midhat invites us to consider which of them is really free and happy. He does so in 1875, when the Ottoman Empire was already in the process of suppressing the slave trade and there was broad awareness of international, especially British, opprobrium around the institution of slavery. Ehud Toledano has noted that this international criticism led to a certain defensiveness among Ottoman thinkers, who tended to condemn slavery but nevertheless emphasized what they saw as the gentler nature of Ottoman/Islamic slavery. However, Ahmet Midhat had already expressed himself forcefully on the negative consequences of slavery in one of his earliest novellas, entitled Slavery (Esaret), in 1870. Thus one must see his choice of a slave to fill the role of the anti-Madame Polini not as an apology for Ottoman slavery, but as a rhetorical device.3
Râkım’s life in many ways mirrors that of his creator, Ahmet Midhat, a fact that has been noted by Turkish critics. Ahmet Midhat was born to a family of very modest means in the Tophane district of Istanbul in 1844. His father was a small-time cloth merchant and his mother (a refugee from Russian Transcaucasia) took in sewing to supplement the family’s income. Ahmet Midhat spent his childhood years as a shop assistant in Istanbul’s Egyptian Bazaar.4 He later recalled the long hours, hard work, poor food, inadequate clothing, and many beatings he endured during this period. However, he learned the ins and outs of running a shop, began to earn tips while serving in the shop, and persuaded a neighboring shopkeeper to teach him to read and write in the evenings. He began to earn extra income by writing letters for other people in his spare time. Upon the death of his father, his older brother, who was part of the network of the great nineteenth-century Ottoman statesman and reformer, Midhat Pasha, moved the family to Vidin, where the young Ahmet enrolled in school. Later he moved with his brother to Niş, where he completed his education at one of the new reformed middle schools (rüşdiye) established throughout the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. His academic success was noted at the time by Midhat Pasha, who was in the habit of keeping track of the progress of the school’s students. When Midhat Pasha became governor of the newly created Danubian province (Tuna Vilayeti), Ahmet was called to its capital city, Rusçuk (modern Ruse, in Bulgaria), to take a position in Pasha’s scribal service. At this time Midhat Pasha, impressed with Ahmet Midhat’s energy and ability, gave him his own name “Midhat,” as a sign of favor (hence the name Ahmet Midhat), and made arrangements for him to learn French. He also encouraged him to pursue classical Ottoman learning at the local medrese. During these years, among other activities, Ahmet Midhat did some writing and translating for the newly established provincial gazette. Never one to lose an opportunity, he used this connection to teach himself all the technical aspects of printing and lithography as well. These years were the time of wild youth for Ahmet Midhat, who developed spendthrift habits and rakish behavior. His family arranged his marriage in hopes that this would settle him, but when this expedient failed to produce the desired result, his older brother cut him off, throwing him out of the family home and obliging him to make his way entirely on his own. In 1869, when Midhat Pasha was appointed governor of another newly established Ottoman administrative unit, the province of Baghdad, he charged Ahmet Midhat with establishing a publishing house there and producing the new province’s official gazette. Ahmet Midhat traveled to Baghdad as part of Pasha’s initial 104-person team, and soon began to bring out Zevra (Baghdad), the official paper (and the region’s first). During this period he also began to write and print First Teacher (Hace-i Evvel), a kind of textbook for the new technical and trade school that Midhat Pasha was setting up in Baghdad (and that was later established in all provinces as part of the Empire-wide provincial reforms).
While he was in Baghdad province, his older brother, who was occupying a post in Basra, died, leaving Ahmet Midhat the head of a numerous family. Lacking better alternatives, he sent the family back to Istanbul. When, shortly thereafter, it was announced that the government was holding a competition for new textbooks to be used in the Empire’s elementary schools, Ahmet Midhat submitted a copy of Hace-i Evvel, resigned his post with Midhat Pasha, and returned to Istanbul in 1871. However, his text was not adopted. Thus Ahmet Midhat entered into a period when he was hard pressed to support himself and his family, but during which he gained an enormous amount of publishing experience. Through personal connections he was offered the position of editor-in-chief of the weekly journal the Military Register (Ceride-i Askeriye). At the same time, he set up a small printing press inside his own home and began to print and distribute First Teacher in installments. Similarly, he published a series of short stories and translations that he had begun writing in Baghdad. He gave this series a title, Letâif-i Rivâyat (Amusing Tales) and continued publishing works in this series until 1894. This was a shoestring operation: Ahmet Midhat did all the technical aspects of the printing himself, and used the women and children of the household to perform the rest of the labor. He then distributed these publications with the help of water sellers, tobacconists, and peddlers who sold them throughout the city. But there was not initially a great audience for such works, and the family was falling on very hard times. Fortunately he was offered the opportunity to do some writing for Basiret Gazetesi (Discernment), and the earnings from this together with the salary from the Military Register allowed him to get by. He moved his press to a commercial location, and with time made it into more of a going concern by taking on paid printing jobs, as well as continuing to publish his own work. Throughout this period he generally expanded his connections in the literary and journalistic world and undertook a number of writing and publishing projects. It was at this time that he came into contact with members of the liberal-minded and constitutionalist Ottoman intellectual opposition known as the Young Ottomans. He began writing some unsigned pieces for their journals. Partly due to his association with them and partly due to the publication of an essay in 1872 that defended materialism, “Duvardan Bir Seda” (A Voice from Behind the Wall), he was sent into internal banishment on Rhodes in the spring of 1873 at the same time as many others of the Young Ottoman group. Ahmet Midhat was not idle during this time. He founded a school on the island together with friend and fellow political exile Ebüzziya Tevfik, and he also wrote a number of novels which were sent to Istanbul and published under his own name by the Kırk Anbar Press, with his friend Mehmet Cevdet, who held the press’s license, taking responsibility for them. Felâtun Bey and Râkım
Efendi was among these, appearing in 1875.
In 1876, due to a general amnesty following the toppling of Sultan Abdülaziz, Ahmet Midhat was able to return to Istanbul. He developed good relations with the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who came to the throne as a liberal sultan willing to accept the proclamation of a constitution in 1876, but who by 1878 had dismissed the parliament and embarked on what was to be a long and authoritarian reign lasting until 1909. This positive relationship with the throne meant that for the rest of his life Ahmet Midhat held a number of official posts. Among these were editor of the official state gazette, Takvim-i Vekayi (The Calendar of Events), and directorship of the imperial press, the Matbaa-i Amire, as well as various posts on the Committee for Public Health. In addition, he was sent as the official Ottoman representative to the International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm in 1889.
Among his most important achievements was the founding of the longest running Istanbul Ottoman daily paper, Tercüman-i Hakikat (The Interpreter of Truth), which appeared virtually uninterrupted from 1878 to 1922. He actively managed and edited the paper until his retirement in 1909. Here, in addition to news items, editorials, shipping information, etc., he published many fictions in serial form, both his own and those of promising new authors, many of whom, like Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar and Ahmet Rasim, became important figures in the world of Ottoman and Turkish literature. In addition to his many efforts as a novelist and journalist, he published a number of important works in other fields including economics and religion. His translations included not only novels and short stories, but also works of philosophy.
After his retirement from publishing in 1909 (that is, after the Young Turk revolution that would eventually sweep Abdülhamid II from power), he taught a number of general courses on history, religion, and philosophy at the Darülfunun (later Istanbul University) as well as a pedagogy course at the Darülmuallimat (Istanbul Normal School) until his death in 1912.
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