Western scholarship on Turkish identity directly supplied mid-century Ottoman nationalists their categories

Evidence

Of Western books two in particular seem to have had a considerable influence. One was the Grammar of the Turkish language, with a long historical introduction on the Turkish peoples, published in London in 1832 by Arthur Lumley Davids. A French translation appeared in 1836 and attracted Turkish attention. Its gram­ matical portions helped to inspire the Kava’id-i Osmaniyye of Fuad and Jevdet Pashas, published in 1851, the first modern Turkish grammar to appear in Tur­ key. More important for our present purpose, its introduction served as the basis of a defense of the Turks (not Muslims or Ottomans) by the journalist and essayist Ali Suavi (1838–1878) in the first issue of his journal Ulum, a fortnightly pub­ lished in Paris in 1869 on behalf of the Young Ottoman group of liberal patriots. Another work that influenced Turkish thought was the Introduction a` l’Histoire de l’Asie, published in France in 1896 by Le´on Cahun, containing a semiscientific, semi-romantic account of the history of Asia in which attention is called to the significant role of the Turkish nomads of the Central Asian steppe. Cahun’s book was published in Turkish translation in 1899, and many Turkish writers testify to its formative influence. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 2013

Categorization

• XREF: This evidences exactly HOW a region becomes legible to itself through Western categories — corroborates Said-adjacent claims about orientalism as productive of nationalist identity, and echoes Bernard Lewis’s own scope here.
• QUESTION: Interesting that Ali Suavi defended Turks specifically, ‘not Muslims or Ottomans’ — what displaced the religious/civilizational frame? Worth chasing the shift from Muslim to ethnic Turk identity as a product of European grammar-writing.
• SEED: Essay angle: the West’s grammar books of ‘the other’ functioned as mirrors in which colonial/imperial subjects learned to see themselves as a bounded ethnic nation — European philology as nation-making technology.