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

Summary

Introduction: theorizing temporal dimension of policy diffusion in comparative and international education

In this chapter, I trace particular instantiations of the temporal regime of Western modernity with its colonial aspirations in the secular historiography of higher education in Turkey, more specifically in the juxtaposition of the history of madrasas, Islamic institutions of higher learning, and the history modern universities in Turkey. My starting point is to focus on 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 – with one such system being the madrasa, which focused particularly on the teaching of Islamic sciences and law, while another system, the modern university, is a product of unique historical conditions in the West responding to different material, epistemic, political and moral problems. I explore the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern university in Turkey with particular attention to how secular historians narrated attempts in policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th- century Ottoman Empire. In the last section of the chapter, I pragmatically engage with recent revisionist historiography of the madrasa and modern higher education institutions to trace multiple temporalities in the 19th- century events related to transferring and translating higher education in the Ottoman Empire when the Empire encountered the encroachment of Western modernity.

Theorizing temporal dimensions of educational policy and discourse mobilities remains a conundrum as well as an understudied object of inquiry in comparative education and its various theoretical and methodological trajectories in last half- century. In her 2010 presidential address for the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), Gita Steiner- Khamsi rightly put it that there is “an overemphasis on the spatial dimension of policy borrowing and lending” as the majority of studies in the field attempt “to trace and record the direction and destinations covered by a traveling reform” (Steiner- Khamsi, 2010, p 333; see also Lingard, 2021; Rappleye and Komatsu, 2016). In other words, studies attempt to explicate the horizontal dissemination of educational policies and discourses – from one geopolitical context to another on a similar scale.