Oryantalizm, sömürgecilik eleştirisi ve Ahmed Rıza: Batı'nın Doğu politikasının Ahlaken İflası'nı yeniden okumak

Abstract

By focusing mainly on his book, La Faillite Morale de la Politique Occidentale en Orient (1922), the aim of this paper is to read Ahmed Riza's position as a critique of colonialism and to re-evaluate his ideas within the postcolonial context. In order to do so, first, different answers to the question of how to relate late Ottoman Empire with the analyses of postcolonial studies are discussed. Following the discussion on "borrowed colonialism" approach, it is argued that focusing on the Ottoman intellectuals criticizing Western colonialism and prejudices about other geographies is an alternative approach to bring the case of the late Ottoman Empire to the context of postcoloniality. The article does not appropriate intellectual history as a privileged level of analysis; rather the late Ottoman Empire is considered as a state subjugated by the complex network of informal colonialism. The article goes on to emphasize the similarities of Ahmed Riza's arguments with other postcolonial criticisms. It is argued that, as an intellectual who had to reconcile his universalist position (positivism) with the realities of his locality, Ahmed Rıza based his criticism of colonialism on morality, and in doing so, he presented an earlier example of a common position adopted by postcolonial intellectuals. In his aforementioned work, Ahmed Rıza included not only a criticism of colonialism as such, but also a criticism of ideas and prejudices constructed within the colonial context. In this sense, it is suggested that Ahmed Rıza offered an early version of the postcolonial argument by maintaining that colonialist practices could not have functioned without a specific set of ideas behind them. In this paper, it is also discussed how Ahmed Rıza, being a positivist, initiated discussions with re-gard to defending Islam as a civilization against various types of Orientalist preju-dices. The article is concluded by highlighting the risk of nativism in Ahmed Riza's critical framework and a critical analysis of hte nativist arguments is incorporated into the general discussion.