The meaningless Ottoman Turkish debate

Turkey’s post-modern civil war continues to produce confusion on the conceptual level. The latest example is the meaningless debate about Ottoman Turkish in high schools. It is currently taught as an optional lesson, but here was a discussion during last week’s National Educational Council to make it compulsory.

This is the latest topic in the bitter battle between Islamists and secularists. Needless to say, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also jumped into the fray. Addressing the Religious Council a few days ago, he insisted that Ottoman Turkish will be taught in high schools “whether some like it or not.”

Those who oppose Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) see this as another reactionary step aimed at overturning the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Supporters of Erdoğan and the AKP, for their part, see this as another way of undermining the secularists.

One of the simplistic assumptions in this battle centers on the Arabic script used by the Ottomans and its relationship to the Quran. To argue that knowing the Ottoman script enables one to read the Quran, however, is like arguing that the Latin alphabet enables one to read the Latin Bible.

Ottoman Turkish is not Arabic either, although it uses many Arabic and Persian words. Its relationship to modern Turkish is similar to the relationship of Middle English, which uses many French words, to modern English.

Although knowledge of the Ottoman script does not enable one to automatically understand the Quran, those who know it are able to read what their grandparents wrote. My grandfather, Bekir Fahri, an Ottoman intellectual born in 1876, was Turkey’s first novelist inspired by Emile Zola’s naturalism and a well-known literary critic...