Khent (the fool): an Armenian utopian vision compared to Ottoman-Turkish utopias

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This chapter focuses on the Armenian writer Raffi (Hakob Melik Hakobian) and his novel Khent, the last chapter of which presents a utopian vision of the future of Armenians in the late 19th century. As an early example of the impact of nationalist tendencies on utopian imagination, Raffi’s work bears similar characteristics to Turkish nationalist/Islamist utopian works produced in the early 20th century. The chapter suggests that Raffi’s work sees Turks as the arch-enemy of the Armenian nation. Several Turkish nationalist/Islamist utopian works that will be referred to, in return, present Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities as the enemy of the Turkish nation. However, although they present each other as their adversaries, their ways of thinking and identity construction strikingly resemble each other.