Who is Turkish “denden”

Since this service was offered, in groups of Turkey's WhatsApps, discussions on the origin of everyone, migration, ethnic mix and purity of race have erupted. 5 million Turks entered the register within the first two days. The interest was so great that the page was blocked. The government was forced to stop the service for many days.

The Turkish state has imposed a strong sense of national identity on its inhabitants for about a century, which ruled out the presence of other ethnicities and highlighted the Turkish clean <x0-cylic “Publicizing this data has left people speechless. As Turks slowly begin to accept the ethnic diversity that exists among them, the 100-year-old idea of the purity of the race, created and imposed by the state, has begun to cool down.

Some Turks, especially families who have lived for many generations in the same cities, have confirmed their deep roots. Others seem stressed. A Turkish nationalist learned that his great grandfather was of Kurdish origin. A friend of mine was surprised to see his great - grandfather's name was Isaac. A neighbor found out she had European roots and decided to apply for dual citizenship.

Ethnic identity has long been seen as a matter affecting national security. Many Armenians of the Ottoman Empire died during the expulsions of 1915, others were forced to return to Islam to survive. The conversion of religion was kept secret even in the family. Many Christian grandchildren have learned too late that they were converting Muslims. Many Turks have only recently discovered that they had Armenian descent.

Family records are now provided for personal use and show how carefully the Turkish state has tracked citizens' records in the last two centuries. I learned that my mother's origin is from Yerevani”, someone writes on the Eksi Sozlik page, where thousands of comments were left on the matter in question. Dad, meanwhile, comes from Georgia. I'm speechless. ”

The Turkish left was disturbed by the excessive interest in origin. They fear it could lead to division and civil war. But the editor-in-chief of the Armenian weekly “Agos” welcomed the publication of the data. He interviewed an anthropology professor who called this movement <x2revolutionary “ ” and “a serious normalisation sign, since it undermines the imagination of Turkish nationalists for ethnic cleanness. In fact, a 2012 study, in the newspaper “Wit After the Year of Human Genetics”, found that Turks were 38% European, 35% from the Middle East, 18% from South Asia and 9% from Central Asia.

The Ottomans chose ethnic complexes with what was called “Myth” system. For centuries different laws have been allowed to be used for every community, for Muslim, Catholic, Greek-orthodox, and Jewish. Religious communities were free to do business, open their own schools, newspapers, and hospitals as long as they paid their taxes to the sultan. But in the 1830 ' s, the modernists of the Ottoman Empire brought a substate concept taken from the West that led to the collapse of the system <x2milites”. A group of Turkish intellectuals, known as the “Young Ottomans”, rejected the reform strongly.

In the 1870 ' s, the group presented a new concept for Ottomanism, promoting a single imperial citizenship that combined Islamic laws with principles inspired by European constitutionalism. They spread the idea of Muslim nationalism: Sunni would be the sovereign identity that granted freedom to other religions. If the state's Sunni was lost, the New Ottomans thought the empire would be dissolved. Ottomanism was their formula for keeping it intact.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when modernization began to develop at a faster pace, problems with genetic complexes multiplied: Jonathans, or New Turks, founders of the Turkish Republic, turned Muslim nationalism into a form of citizenship based on the French idea of secularism, where the government was divided by religious influence.

The problems of ethnic complexes have been trying to solve even with force: a massive population shift in 1923 brought the denaturalisation of more than 1.2 million Greeks to Turkey and of 300,000 Turks to Greece. Those few Greeks and Armenians who continued living in Turkey told them to forget their roots.

After Ataturk's death in 1940, racist clubs popular in Turkey further led nationalism, forming the national identity of pure Turks. The Turks reportedly came from the Central Asian fields. Kurds came from the mountains, while other ethnicities were viewed as dangerous and foreign. Both the left and the Islamists rejected the combination of modernism with a mono-ethnic nation; and the state of Ataturk punished both groups. Marxist poet Nazim Hikmet was sentenced to 28 years in prison; Islamic philosopher and poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy stayed ten years expelled to Egypt because he questioned Turkish nationalism.

Many nationalists have seen the mixture of conservativeism and neoliberalism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a threat to Turkish national identity since 2002, when his Party for Development and Justice came to power. But Erdogan's government has been praised by others because it has allowed historians to openly discuss the history of Ottoman Armenians, as well as the removal of restrictions on Kurdish culture.

With Erdogan, the national identity based on the “Turkish pure race” has been gradually replaced by the Muslim nationalism of the Young Ottomans. Erdogan's party leaders believe that removing religious and ethnic affiliation from Turkey's national identification would repeat the mistakes of modernising Ottomans of 1830.

By opening up the census to the public, the Turkish government, perhaps unwittingly, may have changed our ideas of a pure Turkish nationality and brought an end to the myths of the pure race.

But the time when this registry became public has been well calculated politically. With Turkey's military intervention in Africa, northern Syria, and the approaching 2019 presidential election, the Turkish government hopes to consolidate Muslim nationalism as Turkey's top identity.

So this is the way Erdogan's party has to say that Muslim nationalism is different from republican nationalism: with the new embrace of Islam, the Turkish state has so much confidence that it now allows citizens to discover their ethnic roots. Turks can be proud of their roots and find through research the rational reasons that explain the government's actions in foreign policy.

Archives that were covered with dust were opened to remind Turks not only that their ancestors come from a variety of ethnicities but also to show what expansion has been experienced by the Ottoman Empire, an empire that once spread to three continents.

The New York Times ) Top Channel