A Liminal Orientalism: Turkish Studies by Franz Babinger

Franz Babinger (1891-1967), a German scholar publishing on Ottoman history, worked outside the mainstream of Oriental philology of his time. While he shared many of the nationalist, patriarchal and gendered views of his generation (he was, however, not anti-Semitic), his interest in the “realities” of history bridled the scope of Orientalist assumptions and the reliance on canonical texts singled out as key to understanding “Islam” or the “Middle East”. Extensive travels and an eye for material conditions made him understand the Ottoman Empire as a Mediterranean phenomenon. Rather than intellectual or political differences his brusque and irascible character (along with his idiosyncratic use of German that makes his works difficult to understand for second-language readers) prevented his research from resonating with contemporary historians. His correspondence shows how Babinger established and then destroyed a working relationship with Halil İnalcık that might have won him a Turkish audience.