Getting Closer by Getting Away
By Caroline Finkel ’03, SpouseThe news that my husband, Andrew Finkel, had won a Knight-Wallace Fellowship for 2002–03 reached us in Istanbul, where he had been working as a correspondent for a number of media outlets. For five years I had been writing a history of the Ottoman Empire, and welcomed the chance to get away from my all-too-familiar surroundings and look at the Ottoman and Turkish worlds from the other end of the telescope.
Anyone who has been to Turkey cannot fail to appreciate how visible are the traces of the past, even though many of the monuments left by the great civilization that preceded today’s republic are in poor repair. Among the most arresting images greeting the visitor to Istanbul are the mosques of the sultans crowning the spine of the hill in the Old City. Along the Bosphorus we see their palaces and the villas of the aristocracy.
But who were these people? What do we know about the times in which they lived? Why did they build what they built where they did? I wanted to write a book that would answer these apparently simple questions, and also tell in an accessible fashion the complicated history of a largely forgotten dynasty that lasted over 600 years and ruled over territories extending into all three continents of the Old World. But living in the imperial capital city of Istanbul is, for an Ottoman historian, like living in a theme park—one that never closes.
The riches of the University of Michigan library are legendary, and the access accorded to the spouses of Fellows was a privilege beyond my expectations. Istanbul houses the archives of the Ottomans and the state they founded, but offers limited opportunity to keep abreast of recent work by colleagues in other fields.
Perhaps as important as burying myself in the library stacks was the chance to speak to people outside Turkey, whose view of the Ottomans and their history was inevitably very different from that of my Turkish friends and colleagues. We had lived in Istanbul for 15 years, and I was concerned that I had “gone native,” that I had lost the clarity of thought about the Ottoman past that was necessary not only to write a focused history but also to construct a narrative that would capture the imagination of a wider readership.
War broke out in the Middle East during our months in Ann Arbor. Iraq was for centuries part of the Ottoman imperium, and I watched with horror as the U.S. made light of the region’s complexities in the name of importing a cultural mode quite at odds with what had gone before. And very many of those around us assumed that their government was doing the right thing.
Most of all, then, our time at Wallace House convinced me of the importance of knowing the past. Our stay led me to hope that an understanding of history might impart a modicum of good sense to temper the wildest and most arrogant of schemes. Writing Osman’s Dream in Ann Arbor I learned that the world view of us denizens of the old world is as different as it can be from our friends in the new. Our stay was stimulating at every turn, and made of me a more reflective historian.
—Caroline Finkel is the author of Osman’s Dream, The History of the Ottoman Empire, published by Basic Books, 2006.
