Dismantling colonial time as the order and condition of comparison: A critique of modernist secularist historiography of higher education in Turkey

• In Event: Researching global education policy: Diverse approaches to policy movement

Proposal

This paper is an attempt to trace the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern higher education institutions in Turkey. The guiding questions of inquiry are: (1) how have the secular historians narrated attempts at policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th century Ottoman Empire? And (2) what are the conditions that make it possible for secular historians to be able to conceptually juxtapose two institutions that have historically belonged to two different discursive systems, temporal regimes, and institutional traditions. Adopting a philosophical and historical interpretive framework, the chapter puts forth the argument that the system of reasoning of the secular historiography heavily relies on a secular conceptualization of time inherited from the Western social theory of “modernization” and “modernity,” wherein there is a particular temporal order and organization of the historical experience. To problematize this ordering of historical experience, the paper engages with recent revisionist historiography and argues that Ottoman reformers were operating in multiple temporalities in the nineteenth century when transferring and translating scientific concepts and institutions of Western origin. Operating in multiple temporalities has to be seen as an ontologically necessary condition for the reformers, which was already a common practice in both Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Overall, the paper problematizes the uncritical adoption of Western, secular time as a condition of possibility and a background grid of intelligibility for global policy movement, which otherwise incessantly reproduces the conditions and aspirations of Western modernity, occluding other onto-epistemologies.

Author

• Yasin Tunc, Portland State University