I had announced the previous week the analysis I would be making of the way in which the historian and chronicler Şanizade Ataullah Efendi, whoseHistory(Tarih) has long and often been praised for the "modernity" of its introduction(mukaddime), had been "freely" inspired by Voltaire's "History" article in Diderot and d'Alembert'sEncyclopédie. The most surprising aspect of the matter was that Şanizade had managed to secure the approval and praise of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) for a text emanating from an author regarded, along with Rousseau, as a miscreant(zındık) and blasphemer(kâfir). Of course, there's no real mystery here: Şanizade had simply adapted Voltaire's text to make it compatible with the conservative ideology of the Ottomanestablishment.
A more detailed reading of Şanizade's text reveals the modus operandi of this adaptation. Generally speaking, it appears that he proceeded by three main means: omissions, additions and distortions. Some "statistics" applied to the text in question clearly show the dimensions of this manipulation: Voltaire's text was around 8,500 words long; Şanizade's is only half that (4,300), of which less than two-thirds are the philosopher's (2,600), the rest being Şanizade's own creativity. Voltaire quotes nearly twenty historians; of these, Şanizade retains only Herodotus, whose name he spells "Heredod".
Many omissions are due to ignorance rather than choice, even if political or ideological: it's obvious that Şanizade chooses to skip over and omit many passages that are culturally and intellectually inaccessible to him. These gaps and omissions are evident when he discusses Roman history, revealing his inability to distinguish between Greeks and Romans, whom he indifferently calls Rûm. More surprisingly, his treatment of Asian history reveals his ignorance of figures such as Cyrus and Oghuz Kagan, with whom he should be familiar.
The additions, on the other hand, enable him to "correct" Voltaire, particularly when the latter ignores or mocks religious facts. In this way, he infuses a healthy dose of Islamic doctrine into his text, completely reversing the fundamental logic of the plagiarized text. Last but not least, Voltaire's "exotic" examples are transposed to make them comprehensible to the Ottoman reader in an extremely muddled and often misplaced way. Thus, Portuguese expeditions to Asia are compared to the Ottoman reconquest of the Hedjaz just ten years earlier, while Europe's intellectual discovery of China is "translated" by a long digression on Murad I 's victory in Kosovo in 1389. In both cases, these exercises in adaptation provide an opportunity to sing the praises of the reigning sultan and his ancestors, contributing to the chronicler's "success" with his master.
