Post-Ottoman nationalist states shaped Western views of the Turks through their own liberation narratives

Evidence

Since the spread of nationalism to the Balkans and the Near East, more than a dozen states have risen from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, each with its own national legends of liberation and its own brand of national historiography. Like most liberated peoples, the Balkan, and later the Arab, states tended to blame all the defects and shortcomings of their societies upon the misrule of the fallen imperial masters. More articulate in Western terms than the Turks, they have succeeded in persuading most Western observers of the truth of their version of history. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 631

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates the Said-adjacent claim that the Orient’s legibility to the West is produced by ex-colonial/imperial successor elites themselves, not only by Western Orientalists — parallels the role postcolonial nationalisms play in Edward Said’s account.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the broader representation-production cluster by adding a non-Western actor (successor-state historiography) that rivals the Turks in definiteness.