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Ilkim Buke-Okyar
slaughter is taking place. Nadir transmits the dynamic relationship between visual
metaphors, its audience, and the historical theme of post-Ottoman Arabia. This
representation is sustained by the Turks’ collective memory.
In the nineteenth century, the Middle East and north Africa dominated the Eu¬
ropean exoticism. In various contexts, the word Arab came to signify the antithesis
of “civilization”. Alterity and misrepresentation of the Arabs was embedded in the
contexts of European expansionism and the “Eastern Question” in the beginning
of the century. Distorting representations of reality and their degrading impact
made up a major theme in the colonial literature, serving imperial governance.
Orientalization, in its Saidian sense, constituted the self and Other through nega¬
tive mirror imaging, structuring the perception of “what is good in us is lacking in
them” and at the same time adding a subordinate reversal of “what is lacking in us
is present in them” (Said 1979). In this structural framework of representations,
the Arab became the “ultimate” Other in the definition of the West versus the
East. Later on, the new elite of the Ottoman Empire adopted this reified image as
a means of defining its self-perception.° When the new republic was established,
the Arab Other served as an important component in the rhetoric over the new
Turkish identity, set against the undesired and the pitiful. The objective of this
article is to follow a deconstructive and critical analysis of the “graphic” or “visual”
rhetoric of imperial and, later, national characterization of the Arabs in the process
of nation building from 1908 to 1939.
Nadir used images that were familiar to his Turkish readers. The image of the
Arab as “a dishonest, back-stabbing savage” was part of the postwar narrative,
heavily employed as of the early 1920s, following the 1916 revolt of Sherif Hussein
against Ottoman rule. While embedded in concrete historical circumstances,
images of Arabs have a long history, going back to visual representations of the
Arab as a bagger or a carpet seller in sixteenth century Ottoman Karagéz shadow
plays. Nevertheless, these images were context dependent. Ottoman expansionism
started to alter the socially created typology of the Arab in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, but the critical turning points in the process of social,
political, and intellectual transition occurred during World War I, when the empire
lost its territories in north Africa and the Middle East. This final époque of Ottoman
history was symbolized by the irrevocable collapse of the multi-ethnic empire
and the rise of the territorially limited, nationalist Republic of Turkey, alongside
other nation-states that emerged in the twentieth century. The ambivalent feelings
6 The Western cartoons of the early 19 century represented the exotic that was mostly under the
Ottoman rule as barbaric and backward. The symbolic representation of these features were transferred to
the revolutionary Ottoman cartoons (after the 1908 revolution that ended the reign of Abdulhamid I)
in depicting their orient, in this case the Arab Middle East. The latter became the mirror image of the
new Ottoman elite. For further analysis, see unpublished PhD thesis, Ilkim Buke (2015), Arabs in Visual
Rhetoric and the Emergence of Turkish National Identity, 1908-1939, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev,
Kreitman School for Advanced Graduate Studies.