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An “Ottoman Moment” in Egypt: The Young Turk Revolution of 1908

ARIT lecture by Doğa Öztürk

March 2, 2020
6pm
Entrance free

ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, İstiklal Caddesi No. 181, Merkez Han, Beyoğlu, İstanbul


The scholarship on modern Egypt and Egyptian nationalism generally assumes that Egypt became politically independent of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th century onwards and steadily marched towards becoming a sovereign nation-state in the first decades of the 20th century. There has been little focus, however, on the role that the Ottoman imperial culture played in the emergence of modern Egypt as a political entity, even though Egypt was officially a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914. Therefore, to be able to fully understand the cultural context from which modern Egypt came into being, Ottoman consciousness in Egypt from the mid-19th to early-20th centuries should be analysed.

This lecture focuses on the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 in order to examine how Ottoman consciousness provided a background for the birth of a distinct Egyptian identity in the early-20th century. It will demonstrate that similar to the rest of the Empire, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led to an upsurge of Ottoman cultural consciousness among the ruling and intellectual elite in Egypt, as well as the wider segments of the Egyptian society, at a time when a separate sense of an Egyptian identity was developing. The lecture situates Egypt firmly within the Ottoman context and demonstrates how the development of a distinct Egyptian national identity was not an isolated process but took place within the framework of Ottoman imperial culture.

Doğa Öztürk is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University Department of History. His dissertation analyses the prevalence of Ottoman consciousness in Egypt between 1841 and 1914, a time period when Egypt was gaining more political and economic autonomy from the Ottoman Empire. His areas of interest are the history of Islamic Civilisation, the Ottoman Empire, Modern Middle East, and Comparative Empires and his research focuses broadly on the cultural and intellectual ties that existed between the centre of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces in the 19th and early-20th centuries.


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