Hakky-Bey and His Journal Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman, or, Mirʾāt-ı ṣanāyiʿ-i islāmiye (1898)

Abstract

A bilingual periodical published in 1898, titled Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman for its French audience and Mirʾāt-ı ṣanāyiʿ-i islāmiye for the Ottoman one, introduced its readership to the world of Islamic art in two idiosyncratic issues. A certain Hakky-Bey, the sole author behind these issues and a well-regarded antiques dealer in Paris, intended to introduce his vast collection to readers through meticulously arranged lithographs of his objects. In other words, he told the story of Islamic art through exemplary items from his collection. In parsing the contents of the journal, this article attempts to construct Hakky-Bey’s biography and reveal the sociopolitical and cultural routes, as well as the cosmopolitan networks, that shaped the unexpected trajectory of his career. As an independent Ottoman scholar, Hakky-Bey played a crucial role in the emerging field of Islamic art at the end of the nineteenth century, for which scholarship has given undue credit to European “Islamophiles.”