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Ilkim Buke-Okyar
The Arab Other in Turkish Political Cartoons,
1908-1939
The date is November 18, 1943. It is a regular Thursday in the streets of Istanbul.
The layperson, on his daily routine, will quickly pay for the newspaper, the one he
gets every morning, the daily Cumhuriyet (“The Republic’).! Rushing to work, he
will scan the headlines on the front page. His eyes will stop for a few moments on
the attractive bold print. After getting a grasp of the major events, he might start
turning its black-and-white pages, one by one, perusing the day’s news. But when
the reader reaches page four, he is undoubtedly struck by Cemal Nadir’s colourful
cartoon, which covers the entire top half of the page.” One can assume that such
busy laypeople with their worldly cares would be better reached by the clichés of
the colourful cartoon than by the printed lines of type.
The cartoon is a panoramic depiction of the political situation in north Africa
and the Middle East (Fig. 1).? If we read this cartoon today, looking beyond its im¬
mediate context—namely, a moment in mid-November 1943—we will be able to
identify a motif that was quite familiar to Turkish audiences. The various illustra¬
tions of Arabs seen in Nadir’s cartoons functioned as visual reference points laying
the groundwork for the evocation of a variety of themes and subjects concerning
the images of Arabs as embedded in post-Ottoman and early republican Turkish
public opinion.
' Cumburiyet, the Turkish daily was the new republic’s most important source of news. It had the widest
distribution of any newspaper, yet its daily distribution was limited to Istanbul. It was distributed nation¬
ally by subscription but went out only weekly. Since the day it first went to press, Cumhuriyet’s stable
of writers embodied the republican era’s intellectual elite, including Ziya Gökalp, Aka Giindiiz, Hasan
Bedreddin, Resat Ekrem Kogu, Ahmet Rasim, Peyami Safa, Ahmet Refik, Ismail Habip, Abidin Daver,
Cenap Sahabettin, Vedat Nedim, Halit Ziya, Cevat Fehmi Baskut, Mümtaz Faik, Fuad Köprülü, Halit
Fahri, Zekeriya Sertel, Yakup Kadri, M. Nermi, and Sükrü Kaya.
? Cemal Nadir was widely acknowledged as one of the most important political cartoonists of his period.
His cartoons were published in Cumhuriyet along with prominent cartoonists like Ramiz Gökce. Starting
in 1928, Nadir’s cartoons were published on the newspaper’s front page. However, with the economic
downturn of the Second World War, the newspaper cut its page count from eight to four and moved
Nadirs space to page four (Öngören 1983).
> The political cartoons appeared in Ottoman print during the 1860s, almost half a century later from
its appearance in Europe. They became the indispensible tool for political propaganda throughout the
20" century, especially during World War I. Although the late Ottoman and early Turkish cartooning
and cartoonists were highly influenced by their European counterparts in technical terms, the significant
influence of traditional Turkish satire and stereotypes as displayed in 16" century Karagéz shadow plays
could be traced in early Turkish cartoons.