Browsing by Author "Avci, Remzi"

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Citation - WoS: 3
Citation - Scopus: 1
Pan-Islamism and the Jihad Discourse of the German Orientalists in the First World War
(Univ Malaya, Acad Islamic Studies, 2019) Avci, Remzi
Pan-Islamism and jihad became very popular topics in Germany before and during the First World War, in particular among journalists, politicians, diplomats and orientalists. After the declaration of Ottoman jihad against the Entente powers in 1914, some German orientalists in particular felt that it was their responsibility to write about jihad and pan-Islamism. This article first examines the approaches of the German academic orientalists to German Orient policy, pan-Islamism and jihad, by analyzing the similarities and contrasts between the texts of the orientalists as part of a network. It then tries to determine the role of the German academic orientalists in shaping German strategy towards Islam in the First World War. Although the focus is on texts written between 1914 and 1916, some works of orientalists written before the First World War are also considered, in order to understand how their thoughts changed over time.
With the Whip Into the Dirty Orient: the Depiction of the Orient in Oskar Mann’s Travel Letters
(Istanbul Univ, Fac Letters, 2021) Avci, Remzi
The present article deals with the travel letters of the German orientalist Oskar Mann (1867-1917). With financial support from the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, Mann made two expeditions to the Ottoman Empire and Iran between 1901 and 1906 to research the Iranian languages and dialects. Travel letters and travel diaries are texts with relatively subjective value judgments, in which people and cultures are often described using ethnocentric stereotypes, because a real journey represents a cultural encounter and confrontation with the other that offers unique and invaluable information about the new world. The description of a foreign culture cannot be separated from the subjective value judgments of a traveller. This means the foreign world in which the traveller moves is represented by the subject who experiences it. According to Mann, the Orientals are people from a place that has surrendered to the West. He separates the Orient from the Occident with precise and sharp lines and divides them Eurocentrically into two separate categories. During his travels, Mann produced and imparted knowledge about the foreign cultures on the one hand, and on the other hand he spread and reinforced images and prejudices as well as stereotypes that led to the ontological differentiation between Orient and Occident. This essay tries to show that he perceived the Orient with hegemonic thought patterns and that his foreign imagination remained deeply rooted in the classic European orientalist discourse of the 19th century, and as a consequence the Orient was devalued. This study discusses the stereotypes, images and pattern of ideas that he used to represent the population of the foreign country where he travelled.