The best way to master a subject is to try to teach it. This is a truth I discovered years ago when, fresh out of university, I was charged with teaching students barely younger than myself Turkish. Time and again these students made me realize how little I knew about the intricacies of the Turkish language. Some 15 years on I rediscovered this truth when Dr Lester Crook invited me to write the present volume, the primary purpose of which is to serve as teaching material. Although by then I had been researching and writing for years on the period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, again, it made me realize how much there was I didn’t know and how much there was that wasn’t known at all. Again, I learned as I wrote. Therefore, if reading this book is only half as rewarding to you, the reader, as writing it has been to me, the author, it will have amply served its purpose.
I have always found that in the academic profession many of the most useful findings are the outcome of informal discussions with one’s colleagues and students. Their contributions mostly remain anonymous, since they are submerged into the unconscious, only to reappear as one’s own bright ideas. Apart from these anonymous contributors, a synthetic work such as this is, of course, heavily dependent on the authors of the monographs that have been used in the synthesis. Their names, and those of their works, are to be found in the bibliographical survey at the end of the book, which shows the extent of my debt.
A number of people made specific contributions through their comments on parts of the text: Dick Douwes of the Catholic University of Nijmegen, Professors Jan Lucassen and Rinus Penninx of the University of Amsterdam, and Dr William Hale of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Parts of the book also reflect the work of a number of former students, notably the MA theses of Nicole van Os, Jacqueline Kuypers and Anneke Voeten.
Dr Lester Crook has contributed greatly to any merits the book may have by his meticulous and informed reading of, and commenting on, the text.
The original suggestion for this book came from my dear friend Dr Colin Heywood of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, who pointed out that there could be a need for a book such as this 30 years after the publication of Professor Bernard Lewis’s epochal Emergence of Modern Turkey. I can only hope the result is somewhat as he expected it to be.
Saskia’s contribution has been much greater than the patience and forbearance for which wives and partners are usually commended in prefaces.
Nijmegen/Amsterdam
August 1992