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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
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