Միջազգային հեղինակավոր «Islamology» (նախկինում՝ Pax Islamica) ամսագրի 2017թ. առաջին համարում հրատարակվել է թյուրքագետ Վարուժան Գեղամյանի «Invention of Lausanne: Day of Peace as an instrument to construct charismatic leadership in traditional…
Հայերեն տեքստի համար տե՛ս այս հղումը։
It is really important, when a professional historian like Dr. Zurcher speaks as a professional on very important issues, like the Armenian Genocide and argues, that “Historians of Turkey also have something specific to offer. Now that the outlines and many of the details of the genocide have been so well established by historical research based on original documents and eye-witness accounts, there are, I think, two areas where historians of Turkey can contribute significantly to a better understanding of it, on the basis of Turkish sources. The first area is that of the causes and motives.” His well-known book “Turkey: A Modern history” is available online for the readers of my blog.
Below is the the text in English and Turkish (translation into Turkish by Onur Günay).
A declaration to the public by our colleague Prof. Dr. Erik-Jan Zürcher on the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide.
On the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian genocide someone like me, who sees himself as a historian of Turkey in the twentieth century, has to speak out.
In the first place, there are moral and ethical reasons why this is so. Historians of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the twentieth century have a special responsibility. We cannot allow a situation to continue such as I knew it when I was a student and a young university teacher in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when – in spite of the fact that outside our field the genocide had been an object of historical research for fifty years – we were barely aware of what had happened in 1915. Our textbooks only mentioned it as a footnote to history, if at all, and never defined it as a genocide. Our teachers never discussed it.
I felt the effects of this clearly in my own research. In 1984 I published the book that would form the basis for my academic career. It was called The Unionist factor. The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement (1908-1925). The dates in the title are significant, because the most important thesis of the book was that the national resistance movement in the Ottoman Empire after World War I, out of which the Republic of Turkey emerged, was in fact the creation of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress that had been in power during World War I. It was also this Committee that launched Mustafa Kemal, the later Atatürk, as a leader.
The book was well received, but a friend of mine translated a review in an Armenian journal for me.