Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire by Nazan Maksudyan (review)

<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).

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

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.

<i>Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity</i>. By Kent F. Schull. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 226. £70.

Although the establishment of history as a discipline has been examined extensively for European, North American, and, partly, Asian contexts, the Ottoman case still constitutes a neglected issue in the study of the global history of historiography and, in broader terms, of modern intellectual history. The present article focuses on the late Ottoman intellectual world and explores the making of the historical discipline in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that this transformation was the consequence of a number of interrelated factors, such as the turbulent developments in late Ottoman politics, Ottoman(ist) efforts to forge a “national” historical master narrative after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, and Ottoman historians’ engagement with European historical thought and writing. Besides examining these factors and the ways in which they interacted, the article deals in detail with the works of late Ottoman historians to probe the Ottoman case of the professionalization of history.

It has been often been observed that women have been rendered invisible by historians and frequently left out of written history. However, while their subjectivities and activities may not be reflected in written history, many women have been true 'historical subjects,' important contributors to the making of history. Mihri Musfik Hanim is one of these neglected historical subjects, a significant figure of late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish society mainly because of her contribution to the institutionalization of art education for girls and the modernization process in Turkey. The beginnings of plastic arts in the late Ottoman Empire went hand in hand with the westernization process in other areas, such as the military, education, and public administration during the years 1774 1820, generally regarded as the early period of westernization. It has been argued that Mihri Hanim could be regarded as an Orientalist painter in the style of Osman Hamdi Bey. Keywords:late Ottoman woman; Mihri Musfik Hanim; Painting; Republican Turkish

The historiography of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s long reign (1876–1909) was long mired in Orientalist and Turkish nationalist essentialism. Abdülhamid has typically been vilified as an anti-West and anti-Christian bloodthirsty tyrant and an Islamic reactionary autocrat. More recently, Selim Deringil (The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 [1998]), Benjamin Fortna (Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire [2002]), Kemal H. Karpat (The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State [2001]), Engin Deniz Akarlı (The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1920 [1993]), and others have revamped our understanding of this crucial period with more nuanced and unbiased studies. This revisionist historiography, largely but not exclusively focused on the Ottoman center, has been enriched by more specialized studies, to which Mostafa Minawi’s The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz belongs.

Domestic Spaces as Showcases: Interior Photography in Early twentieth-century Istanbul Ece Zerman (bio) keywords Domestic interiors, late Ottoman Empire, photography, self-representation, visual culture At the beginning of the twentieth century, paintings, reproductions of paintings, and photographs of family members, relatives or of “great men” crowded domestic interiors. On the walls, historical scenes were intermingled with landscapes, and often combined with family photographs. The diffusion of photography and the development of new techniques allowing for the faster reproduction of images facilitated their circulation, which had, in turn, effects on the ways in which the interiors were decorated.1 Novels narrated these new trends; etiquette books gave advice on the arrangement of photographs in interiors, or on the decoration of the walls of a room. This constantly changing imagery provides clues to understand the ways in which contemporaries represented themselves in a period of profound transformation, from the late Ottoman Empire to the early Republic of Turkey. Following this path, this short paper explores through a variety of case studies the images displayed on the walls of late Ottoman domestic spaces, and considers these interiors as a space of self-representation. Complementing visual documents with textual ones helps to give insights into the ways in which the images circulated and served to display multiple identities and social affiliations within interior spaces. The principal object of this paper is both interior photography and the images exposed on the walls, as observed through this genre of photography. In other words, I focus on interior photographs to analyze what notions of self-representation the images on the walls may reveal. The “class” dimension of these photographs has to be underlined: interior photographs, compared with those produced in a studio, required the possession of a camera or a photographer [End Page 325] to come specifically to a home. This was hardly an easily affordable practice. This explains the fact that interior photographs for this period come, almost exclusively, from relatively wealthy families. With cameras being expensive and requiring long exposure times at the beginning of the twentieth century,2 we may assume that interior photographs from this period correspond to an intentional representation of a personal space.3 According to Sarah Anne Carter, “interior photographs documented a process of personalization within the home, arranging individual possessions and spaces as part of a unified, aesthetic composition.”4 We may pursue her line of argument here and assert that it was not a random part of the house that was photographed, but a space carefully defined by the photographic frame and chosen by the inhabitants or the photographer. It was probably no coincidence that these places reflected, in many cases, imagery to which the inhabitants seemed to have a personal connection. The family archives of Said Bey (1865–1928), an Ottoman high official and teacher living in Istanbul, provides my first case study.5 An undated photograph (Figure 1) shows a living room. It is framed to depict the space in its entirety. In front of the window, we see two men sitting, barely visible because of the overexposure. This is most likely Said Bey’s konak [mansion] in the old neighborhood of Aksaray. If so, the photograph must have been taken before 1913, since it was during this year that the family moved to an apartment in the fashionably modern district of Şişli. The two sides of a large open door are decorated with small rugs, and each is topped by a rectangular frame, probably bearing a calligraphic inscription. On the left, above the carpet and the calligraphy, there is a painting placed in a prominent position. We have some hard data on this painting (Figure 2) as it was in the possession of Said Bey’s great-granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana. According to her testimony, the [End Page 326] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. SALT Research, Said Bey Archive, AFMSBTH035. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Portrait on the wall in Figure 1. Oil painting on canvas. From the personal archive of Said Bey’s great granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana, donated to the Sadberk Hanım Museum, Istanbul (SHM 19554-E.50). [End Page...

The ideological divergence within the bureaucracy during the modernization process in the last period of the Ottoman Empire is mostly reduced to three different ideological orientations composed of Westernism, Islamism, and Turkism in the relevant literature. However, claiming that this model, which is formulated regarding the classical works of Gökalp and Akçura, could not adequately explain the actual ideological division between the bureaucrats of the period, this study aims to propose a new theoretical framework based upon an alternative tripartite model. For this, Anthony D. Smith’s infamous theoretical explanation about the ideological-strategic differences between the bureaucratic elites of various societies, which rise as a response to the experience of modernization, is re-evaluated and reformulated concerning the intellectual contribution revealed in classical and contemporary studies on the ideological and intellectual orientations within the late Ottoman elites. Accordingly, the first ideological orientation within the elite groups that fundamentally stood against any attempts in the name of modernization and advocated retaining the Islamic tradition could be entitled “traditionalism.” The second one, which could be named “Westernism” (Westernist modernism), asserted that the only way to capture Western civilization was following the same modernization path as the West, contrary to the previous orientation. “Conservatism” (conservative modernism), the third and final ideological orientation, made a distinction between the fields of culture and civilization and idealized to implement a conservative version of modernization by synthesizing Islamic tradition with the technical developments of the contemporary Western world.

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...

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 3–5 Copyright © 2017 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.4.1.01 Crime, Punishment, and Social Control in the Late Ottoman Empire: An Introduction Ufuk Adak The idea of publishing this special issue entitled “Crime, Punishment, and Social Control in the Late Ottoman Empire” edited by Kent Schull (Binghamton University, SUNY) and guest editor Ufuk Adak (Istanbul Kemerburgaz University) emerged following a stimulating workshop held at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin in the summer of 2015.1 The workshop provided us with an opportunity to present and discuss recent scholarly work on security, crime, and punishment in the late Ottoman Empire, leading us to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history. Five of the seven contributing authors in this issue participated in the productive presentations and long discussions of the workshop. All seven respond to and join a growing interest in crime, punishment, and social control in the Ottoman Empire, reflected in a bourgeoning literature and academic conferences ,2 by rethinking the interconnected historical relations between reform, law, penal policy, and security. Although each article in this issue approaches its respective subject different methodologically, all share similarities and connections; each author conducts extensive analysis of archival sources and 1. The ZMO, now the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) deserve special thanks for their generous support in organizing this workshop. Ufuk Adak, “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire, 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2, no. 2 (2015): 447–49. 2. Avi Rubin, “Modernity as a Code: The Ottoman Empire and the Global Movement of Codification,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, no. 5 (2016): 828–56; Kent F. Schull, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Noémi Lévy-Aksu, Ordre et désordres dans l’Istanbul ottomane (1879–1909) (Paris: Karthala, 2013). The most recent international conference on punishment, particularly prisons, entitled “The World of Prisons: The History of Confinement in a Global Perspective, Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century” organized by the University of Bern was held in Switzerland 7–10 September 2016. 4 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4.1 provides much-needed analytical and empirical frameworks for the legal and security policies of the empire. The promulgation of the Tanzimat hastened the implementation of legal reform in the Ottoman Empire. The codification process included new criminal codes, regulations, and ordinances issued in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman reformers sought ways to standardize crimes—their definitions, scopes, and typologies—and also attempted to provide limits and uniformity for the forms of punishment that would be applied throughout the empire. The nineteenth-century Ottoman legal reforms encompassed new judiciary processes and established new legal and penal institutions such as Nizamiye courts and prisons on the basis of new criminal codes. The implementation of new penal law and the standardization of law enforcement for all of the subjects living in the empire was not an easy task for Ottoman officials throughout the empire. For instance, in regards to the imposition of the death penalty in the late Ottoman Empire, Ebru Aykut illustrates how the new criminal justice system and the dual trial procedure constrained the Ottoman judiciary in their rulings. Examining several cases drawn from archival sources, Aykut analyzes the complex structure and processes of nineteenth-century Ottoman judicial decision-making through a discussion of the Tanzimat’s judicial reforms, legality , and procedural correctness particularly regarding the death penalty. This shift in Ottoman conceptions of crime and punishment resulted in the construction of a new relationship between the state’s political power and its legitimacy. İbrahim Halil Kalkan argues that banning torture in criminal investigations and as a form of punishment in the mid-nineteenth century provides a stark illustration of this new relationship, particularly in regards to the state’s aim of treating all Ottoman subjects equally. Kalkan explores this ban as...

Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) The bourgeoning literature on security, crime, punishment, and prisons in the Ottoman Empire presents opportunities to explore not only new archival investigations and methodological discussions about the notions of criminality in the Empire, but also encourages us to re-think the interconnected relation between law, security and penal policy in the Empire. This one-day workshop entitled “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire” was a chance to present and discuss some recent examinations of the triangle of security, crime, and punishment in order to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history by providing case studies from throughout the Empire. As in many contemporary states, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire saw the institutionalization of security forces and also the expansion of surveillance mechanisms, such as passport regulations in order to track population movements. More importantly, these mechanisms focused on hastening the process of surveilling criminals as defined by the State. Furthermore, through administrative and infrastructural urbanization attempts, particularly in the imperial center, which aided in regulating street life, new understandings of criminality generated novel relationships between Ottoman cities and their residents. This relationship was expressed through adherence, or not, to policies and the eventual construction of new prisons throughout the Empire. The workshop had three sessions and overall seven papers were presented during these sessions. In the first session of the workshop, Ebru Aykut (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) examined the practice of the death penalty and the meaning of justice in the late Ottoman Empire. Aykut argued that for the local authorities, the death penalty was a necessary instrument to deter criminals and maintain public order and security, which could be accomplished only if the punishment was inflicted immediately without delay. Aykut stated Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 447–449 Copyright © 2015 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.19 that according to the State, the principle of legality and procedural correctness was more important and necessary than deterrence by punishment. Thus, there was a gap between the local understandings of justice, which were concerned more with the promptness of punishment than procedures and written law, and what justice meant for the central government. In this respect, Aykut elaborated that the death penalty turned into a contested and in some cases negotiable issue between the central and provincial authorities in the late Ottoman Empire. As the second presenter of the first session, Noémi LévyAksu (Boğaziçi University) focused on the use of martial law (örfi idare) in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78 in various districts of the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia. Lévy-Aksu discussed and posited that banditry, gangs and ethno-religious tensions were the main reasons behind the application of martial law in these districts. By presenting many case studies from the late 1870s to early 1880s, Lévy-Aksu argued that martial law turned into a tool of government in terms of dealing with serious tensions at different levels of the state apparatus. In the second session of the workshop, İlkay Yılmaz (Istanbul University /ZMO) presented a paper on the hotel registers in the Hamidian Era, which were part of new mechanisms against security threats perceived by the Ottoman state. Yılmaz stated that some incidents occurred in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance assassination attempts and the demonstrations of Kumkapı in 1890 and Bâb-ı Âli in 1895, which played a major role in the shift of security practices of the Empire. Yılmaz argued that as in contemporary states such as in France and Belgium, the Ottoman government issued new registration regulations not only to collect individual information about the visitors of hotels and residents of apartments but also to track anarchists in the Empire. After presenting the relationship between city and crime in fin de siécle Istanbul, Nurçin İleri (Binghamton University) touched upon mapping criminality through space and time, which existed in the physical and social borders of the city, and analyzed the quantitative and...

Kemal H. Karpat. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. (Studies in Middle Eastern History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 533. $49.95 Get access Karpat Kemal H.. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. (Studies in Middle Eastern History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 533. $49.95. Donald Quataert Donald Quataert State University of New York, Binghamton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 107, Issue 4, October 2002, Pages 1327–1328, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.4.1327 Published: 01 October 2002

List of Illustrations Preface Childhood In The Late Ottoman Empire and After Benjamin C. Fortna Introduction The Western Concept of Childhood Laurence Brockliss I CONCEPTIONS OF CHILDHOOD Chapter One The Interplay Between Modernization and the Reconstruction of Childhood: Romantic Interpretations of the Child in Early Republican Era Popular Magazines, 1924-1950 Nazan Cicek Chapter Two Child Poverty and Emerging Children's Rights Discourse in Early Republican Turkey Kathryn Libal Chapter Three Nation-Building and Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt Heidi Morrison II WAR, GENDER AND NATION Chapter Four Becoming a Girl in Ottoman Novels Elif Aksit Chapter Five Conscripts into Soldiers, Peasants into Patriots: The Army and Nation-Building in Serbia and Bulgaria, 1878-1912 Naoum Kaytchev Chapter Six A Triangle of Regrets: Training Ottoman Children in Germany during the First World War Nazan Maksudyan Chapter Seven Bonbons and Bayonets: Mixed Messages of Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Benjamin Fortna III REMEMBERING CHILDHOOD Chapter Eight Locating Remembrance: Regimes of Time and Cultures of Autobiography in Post-Independence Romania Alex Drace-Francis Chapter Nine Presenting Ottoman childhoods in post-Ottoman Autobiographies Philipp Wirtz Chapter Ten Escaping to Girlhood in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Demetra Vaka's and Selma Ekrem's Childhood Memories Duygu Koksal

The years between the 1870s and 1920s have been considered a transformative period for psychology, during which it prepared to leave the house of metaphysics, religious thought, and the moral sciences to join the team of the sciences. In depicting the transition from the “science of the mind” to modern psychology, the mainstream historiography has produced a narrative of linear and overnight transition from a whole body of philosophical and theological knowledge built around the concept of the soul, beginning with the foundation of modern academic institutions. In the late Ottoman Empire, however, the soul continued to attract Ottoman academics and intellectuals under the roof of the Darülfünun (today’s Istanbul University), contrary to the foundational myths of the field of psychology.With a focus on the debates and texts promoted by the Darülfünun faculty as a state-funded institute of higher education, this paper explains the rising academic and intellectual interest in psychological thought following the 1908 Revolution in relation to late Ottoman cultural, ideological, and political dynamics. It draws our attention to the uses and implications of an alliance between spiritualism and psychology during the foundational years of academic psychology in the late Ottoman Empire. The Darülfünun faculty sponsored intellectuals and academics whose understanding of psychology emphasised the human soul (ruh) and emotions such as honour (mükerremiyet) and passion (ihtiras) as opposed to scientific questions about human nature brought by the theory of evolution and the philosophical doctrine of materialism. This interpretation enabled scholars, such as Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi and Mustafa Şekip Tunç, who were critical of scientific determinism, to contribute to scientific discussions. This paper argues that in an environment where burning questions about science and religion – such as if the soul existed separately from the body – were silenced, the Darülfünun faculty’s academic and intellectual interest in psychological thought stemmed from the popularity of the notion of the soul, which signified human authenticity and honour. Ultimately, this paper uncovers the ways in which the human body and the soul surfaced as sites of contestation and knowledge in the late Ottoman Empire.