“Civilizing Mission” in the Late Ottoman Discourse: The Case of Gypsies

<i>Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire</i>. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 232. $39.95 (hardcover).

The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

Османи на трьох континентах, пер. з турецьк. О. Кульчинського

Reviewed by: Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire by Nazan Maksudyan Heidi Morrison Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 232 pp. Cloth $39.95. Historian Nazan Maksudyan breaks new ground as one of the first scholars to insert children into the Ottoman Empire’s historical narrative. Through the lens of meticulously collected archival records on orphans and destitute children, [End Page 327] Maksudyan argues that children are invaluable historical actors in the late Ottoman Empire’s process of modernization, including projects of urbanization, citizen formation, and welfare policies. As the multinational and decentralized late Ottoman Empire sought to transform to a centralized modern nation state, concerned parties saw the regulation of abandoned, vagrant, begging, and refugee children as a way to refashion religious and political identities, as well as create a new workforce. The state, foreign missionaries, and religious and civil leaders competed to save unfortunate children, who went from being once invisible, non-political members of society to prospective future subjects. Maksudyan’s book begins by making a generalized case for why it is important to write a “history from below,” then traces marginalized children’s activity from the innermost recesses of society to the international stage. Chapter one examines new state techniques for the governance of foundlings, which were propagated to advance the image of modernity. In reality, children in the institutions were ill-cared for, and non-Muslim communities felt alienated by the state’s intrusion into the care of its youngest members. Chapter two provides an intimate look at domestic servant girls’ resistance to abuse by fostering patriarchs. Government concern for these girls did not focus on abuse, but instead on using the girls as a means of policing sexuality and furthering its reach into the population. The third chapter argues that the expansive number of vocational orphanages at the heart of cities was linked to the process of disciplining urban centers and furthering industrial progress. The final chapter looks at the role that abandoned children played in international politics. Foreign missionaries rivaled the Ottoman state and local communal leaders in their thinly veiled proselytizing relief efforts for war-orphaned children. Overall, Maksudyan’s book shows that orphaned and destitute children were at the center of creating the new, modern social order of the late Ottoman Empire. Maksudyan’s book does not provide novel arguments about Ottoman history, nor does it purport to do so. Several historians have documented that the late Ottoman state, and other interested parties, sought to manipulate and control subjects in the modernization process. The contribution of Maksudyan’s book comes from the light it shines on destitute and neglected children as integral to the process of Ottoman modernization. (Historian Benjamin Fortna has already shown that mainstream schoolchildren were part of this process.) Maksudyan’s book successful rescues the most marginalized of children from the past and triumphantly reminds historians to pay attention to the human terms of modernization. From cries at the doorsteps of police stations to little dead bodies without registered names, discarded children are makers of history. It is up to future researches to take the torch Maksudyan has helped light [End Page 328] and move forward in discerning what new insights children can provide about Middle Eastern history. Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (2013) provides perhaps one of the first examples of how this can be done, albeit in the context of modern Egypt. Maksudyan’s book can be of interest to historians seeking to unearth the subaltern in the Ottoman past, and also to historians of other world regions seeking to compare care-taking systems for abandoned and orphaned children. Adoption is not legally possible in Islamic law, and hence unknown in Ottoman society. Heidi Morrison University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

Notes on Contributors

Turkish nationalism became an element of the Ottoman political scene in the late nineteenth century. Although its roots can be traced back to the Hamidian period (1876–1909), Turkish nationalism emerged as one of the most important political ideologies during the Constitutional Regime. Wars that the Ottoman State participated in from 1911 to the end of the empire in 1918 resulted in population and land losses. Especially, following the Balkan Wars, most of the lands that were populated by non-Muslim and non-Turkish subjects were lost. Within this context, Turkish nationalism came to be seen as the most dominant ideological tool intended to save the Empire. This article argues that Turkish nationalism emerged as a reactive ideology that addressed Ottomanism and Islamism, which were the two other dominant state ideologies during the late Ottoman State, due to the changing political context. In this article,Türk Yurdu, a well-known and influential periodical, is used as the primary source of reference to demonstrate the basic features of Turkish nationalism in its infancy.

Reviewed by: Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia by Ayşe Özil İpek K. Yosmaoğlu (bio) Ayşe Özil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia. New York: Routledge. 2013. Pp. xv + 186. 11 Illustrations, 5 maps. Cloth $140. Appearing almost simultaneously with Nicholas Doumanis’s Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford, 2012), this book is a welcome addition to the growing English-language literature about the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. Özil taps into a rich selection of primary sources, including the collections of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens; the Greek Foreign Ministry and State Archives; Archives of the Greek Educational Association; the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives; Ottoman Court Records; and the British National Archives. Some of this material had remained virtually untapped, and the author does an admirable job of parsing these sources to further our understanding of what she calls “the notion [of community] in practice” (15)—specifically, in this instance, the koinotites of Greek Orthodox Christians in northwestern Asia Minor and not the Orthodox Christians, writ large, of the empire, despite what the title suggests. The author’s focus is on the province of Hüdavendigar that extended from the shores of the Marmara Sea in the north to the west-central Anatolian hinterland in the south, including a stretch along the Aegean around the town of Ayvalik (Kidonies). Building on the work of scholars such as Richard Clogg, Haris Exertzoglou, Socrates Petmezas, Eleni Frangakis-Syrett, and Edhem Eldem, among others, Özil acknowledges, and proceeds to challenge, a common misperception in conventional narrative histories of the Ottoman Empire, namely that the (Greek) Orthodox mainly comprised a class of “merchant bourgeoisie.” She emphasizes the diversity and social stratification within the Greek Orthodox community, not only across the empire, but also in relatively more homogenous administrative entities such as the Hüdavendigar province. Moving beyond the well-worn paradigm of a monolithic Rum milleti, the book, in the author’s words, “tries to understand what the community was about by exploring the notion in practice. … [It] takes a relational approach and treats the Christian presence under the Ottomans as a variable set of contexts and situations” (15). In order to accomplish these objectives, Özil turns her focus to “institutions,” an understanding of which, she argues, is necessary to make sense of communal relations (17). The book is organized in five chapters following this institutional framework, in the following order: local administration; local finances and taxation; legal corporate status; law and justice; nationality. Özil’s most significant contributions are in the sections where she carefully defines the post- Tanzimat (administrative reforms staring in the 1840s) koinotita as a vital institution of local governance for the Greek Orthodox subjects. While discussing at length its membership structure and relationship with the church, the author nevertheless notes the limitations of the koinotita and the simultaneous existence of other, less formal ways of communal organization. Another important intervention of the author is her discussion of the “legal corporate status” of non-Muslim millets in the Ottoman Empire, including Orthodox Christians, which presumably allowed their highest-ranking religious authority to govern these groups with a great degree of autonomy, easily lending itself to the construction of a sense of collective identity. These assumptions were central to the static and old-fashioned view of millets and [End Page 203] the millet system—to the extent that one can speak of a system as such—as the kernel of nations and national resistance to the Ottoman yoke. Özil does not merely add to the old discussion of whether or not there were autonomous millets in the Ottoman Empire; instead, she directly tackles questions concerning the authority accorded to communities in addressing internal legal disputes. By using examples of such disputes over communal ownership of real estate, she demonstrates that any notion of communal “corporate legal status” is false. Furthermore she shows that until the legislation of March 1913, which allowed “the registration of immovable property in the name of institutions,” communal property was deeded to individuals—a...

In the mid‐1890s school maps in the Ottoman Empire underwent a simple but important change: maps that represented the empire in its entirety confronted students in the growing number of Ottoman state schools. These new maps, which showed the empire's far‐flung territory within a single frame, began to replace older maps based on European models that had depicted the Ottoman domains as marginal lands clinging to the fringes of Europe, Asia and Africa. This shift in design should be understood within the context of late Ottoman educational policy, which was attempting to inculcate a strong sense of loyalty to, and identification with, the empire as an historical, political and geographical construct. While this effort produced some of the intended results, the attention to geography occasioned by the new emphasis on maps also raised some awkward questions. Students so recently attuned to studying geography naturally wondered why their empire was shrinking, and why its political leadership had allowed this to happen. The change in late Ottoman educational cartography thus highlighted not only the advantages and disadvantages of using maps for socio‐political purposes in general, but also the extent to which the late Ottoman state had chosen a particularly difficult moment to summon the concision and power that maps afford.

Edward Said formulated and discussed Orientalism for the first time and he concentrated more on the attitutes mostly towards Islam and the Arabs. He mainly examined the literary texts that were produced by the “Western mind.” By defining Orientalism as a discourse, he made an invaluable contribution to the field. This article, however, concentrates on the European perception of the Ottoman Empire starting from the sixteenth century until the modern times in terms of the interpretations about the Ottoman governance. It aims to show the Orientalist tendencies in European texts in describing the Ottoman government. It begins with the examination of selected texts written about the Ottomans by the sixteenth and seventeenth century travellers. The article determines that the general approach towards the Ottoman Empire lacked a theoretical base although the travellers did define the empire as a tyranny. The definition of tyranny, however, was quite ambigious. In the second part, the article concentrates on the Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu and his model of “Oriental Despotism.” Montesquieu argued that this was the worst governance method and the Ottoman Empire was the perfect example of it. In the final part, “Sultanism” of Max Weber was outlined. The article trys to show how Orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire carried to modern sociological theory through Weber’s internalization of them. Weber argued that the enslaved janissary army caused both the Ottoman government and society to lack all kinds of freedom.

This article examines the treatment of Armenians by the late Ottoman and Turkish republican state with a special focus on the social and political roles of the Armenian clergy, especially the patriarch. After giving a brief account of the historical evolution of the millet system – the principles and practices applied by the Ottoman state in its treatments of non-Muslims – the article tries to understand whether the new regime kept it or adopted a modern approach during the transition from empire to nation-state. It concludes that the republican state has created a deliberate inconsistency in its treatment of the Armenian community and patriarch. Although it has avoided recognizing them as a group and their group’s rights it continuously discriminated against them because of their group identity. The republican state has tried to downgrade the patriarch to a mere religious figure without any social or political role which is defined de jure. However, it has continued to accept him as de facto leader of the Armenian community on some occasions.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iraq was visited by two influenza pandemics-one in 1889-1893 (the so-called Russian flu), the other in 1918-1920 (the so-called Spanish flu). These pandemics occurred during two completely different political contexts in the history of Iraq-that of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq since the sixteenth century, and that of the British wartime occupation, which brought an end to Ottoman rule in the region during World War I. The different political contexts in which influenza appeared in Iraq produced significant differences in how Ottoman and British authorities responded to the disease. Specifically, while influenza was widespread across Iraq during both pandemics, the Ottomans largely ignored the disease, whereas the British tracked and studied it. Despite these differences, however, there were certain similarities across both pandemics. For one, there were subsequent outbreaks of influenza following the worst of each pandemic, but these did not meaningfully shape Ottoman or British public health priorities. Second, in both cases, there was uncertainty about the nature of influenza, much as there was elsewhere in the world. As this article demonstrates, the history of influenza in late Ottoman and British occupied Iraq was one marked by continuity and change.

This paper examines the transcultural agency of selected representatives of the second generation of Polish political émigrés to the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century: chemist, hygiene specialist and general Karol Bonkowski Pasha (1841–1905); general and state dignitary Władysław Czaykowski/Muzaffer Pasha (1843–1907); general and diplomat Hasan Enver Pasha (1857–1929) as well as diplomat, journalist and member of parliament Alfred Bieliński/Ahmed Rüstem Bey (1862–1934). Most of them were born and raised in the multi-ethnic empire, made careers in various fields and often reached the highest positions in the Ottoman state apparatus. They often played the role of transcultural intermediaries during the political and social transformations of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. This paper focuses on their involvement in the late Ottoman public sphere by elucidating their place in Ottoman society at the time of transition that characterised the period in question. By tracing the trajectory of these figures’ identity entanglements, it examines their attitudes towards attachment to the Ottoman Empire and Poland. It underscores the importance of the Ottoman capital – Istanbul – as a contact zone in this process. It sheds light on various spheres of transcultural agency of these second-generation Polish émigrés in the late Ottoman state and society.

In modern Turkey, male circumcision is so inextricably linked with Muslim identity that one may assume it a practice universally performed by them for centuries. However, a significant number of Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire were uncircumcised. This article argues that circumcision became a universal Muslim practice through the infrastructure and bodily surveillance of the Ottoman central state and modern physicians who considered circumcision a requirement for public health, rather than solely as a key religious practice. Through circumcision, the late Ottoman state not only aimed to crystallize the Islamic character of its Muslim population but also to secure its political loyalty through the link of religious and political identity. The growing state infrastructure, specifically modern education and conscription enabled the central state to interfere with the bodies of its population in a way previously impossible. This process, however, should not be understood as a mere state imposition on the society. Local populations usually welcomed the state-led circumcision campaign as it relieved them of a financial burden. Thus, circumcision became ingrained in Muslim life as a result of the Ottoman modernization in which state and local interests, traditional and modern elite interests, and religious symbolism and secular strategies overlapped.