Ordeal by Silence: Epistemic Erasure and Scholasticide in Post-Ottoman Turkey

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 was the springtime of the Empire's nations. The proliferation of journals, community centres, educational initiatives, and political activism by minority intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire evidenced a taste for intellectual exchange and political engagement that had laid dormant for decades of autocracy under the tenure of Abdulhamid II. The calls for justice, liberty, and equality resonated in every language and confronted each community with endless opportunities for self-transformation. No one, drunk as they were with the taste of freedom, could have predicted the genocidal silence that would soon consume their institutions, communities, histories, and their very languages.

This paper positions the scholasticide of non-Turkish educational institutions and intellectuals of post-Ottoman Turkey within the long durée of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. It draws on Palestine Studies and histories of the Nakba to argue that the Armenian Genocide was not an event but a structure which unfolded over successive decades of state violence and epistemic erasure. The ethno-state of the Turkish Republic, which emerged with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, aspired to liquidate non-Turkish intellectual networks, institutions, and languages as part of its assimilation policy. This scholasticide isolated and ghettoised hitherto connected villages and communities across the Asia Minor while decimating the educational infrastructures that was built by minority intellectuals and teachers. This paper builds on archival work on minority intellectuals of Armenian, Circassian, and Kurdish provenance in a comparative fashion. It further interrogates the very field of Turkish Studies to incorporate this scholasticidal silence into the study of Turkish intellectual history and political thought.