Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire, 9 June 2015, Berlin, Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)

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...

Credit relations in the Ottoman Empire developed within the framework of the Islamic prohibition of riba. In this context, murabaha, was used by the Ottomans in the sense of a legitimate (free from riba) return on loans along with its classical jurisprudential meaning. However, especially since the second half of the nineteenth century, murabaha was also burdened with the meaning of usury, which signifies riba. This article aims to analyse the transformation of murabaha in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire and examines how meanings changed and transformed as a result of social reality permeating daily language. In this context, Ottoman credit terminology and the socio-economic history of credit relations will be analysed in the Late Ottoman Empire. Archival documents, writings of Ottoman authors in newspapers and books, translations from foreign languages and dictionary sources as well as sharia court records and fatwas will be used in the research. In the light of the mentioned sources, it is aimed to correct some misconceptions in Ottoman historiography regarding credit relations. In addition, the development of credit relations in the Ottoman Empire and how these relations were shaped will be revealed by tracing the evolution of murabaha in Ottoman history.

<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).

There is a general consensus among Ottomanists that capital punishment became a rare occurrence in the Ottoman Empire from the 1840s onwards. This paper argues that two structural aspects of the reformed criminal justice system functioned as constraints on the imposition of the death penalty in the late Ottoman Empire. The first concerns the Tanzimat state’s particular attention to the principle of legality and procedural correctness with regard to criminal prosecution and sentencing. These principles, together with a centralized judicial review procedure, deprived local authorities of discretionary punishment powers that left them little leeway to administer the law on their own. This resulted in the circumscribed use of summary executions and death sentences for crimes against the state. The second aspect concerns the merging of Islamic criminal law, particularly Hanafi doctrines, with state-enacted penal codes, and, in parallel, the dual trial procedure carried out in crimes committed against individuals, i.e., homicide. Drawing on archival sources as well as distinct viewpoints harbored by the Ottoman elites, this article contends that the mingling of two spheres of jurisdiction extensively restricted the power of the judicial councils/Nizamiye courts to pass death sentences for acts of premeditated murder.

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

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...

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

Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Employment of Slaves in the Classical Ottoman Empire - Traditional Ottoman Policies towards Slavery before the Tanzimat - Means of Enslavement and Slave Acquisition in the Late Ottoman Empire: Continuation of Ottoman Slavery after 1839 - British Policy and Ottoman Slavery - Ottoman Policy during the Tanzimat Period, 1846-1876 - Ottoman Policy during the Reign of Abdulhamid II and the Advent of the Young Turks, 1876-1909 - The Emancipation and Care of Slaves in the Late Ottoman Empire -Conclusion - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Reviewed by: Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire Yakup Bektas (bio) Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Wendy M. K. Shaw. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. xi+269. $60. Possessors and Possessed is a major study of the advent and growth of the idea of the museum in the Ottoman Empire from the late nineteenth century until its collapse in the aftermath of World War I. Wendy Shaw shows that Ottoman museum and archaeological practices developed in response to European imperialistic designs. But the Ottomans did not passively copy the Europeans. Rather, they adopted this institution selectively and modified it to reflect their own cultural and political aspirations. Ottoman elites, while anxious to present their museums, collections, and displays as symbols of modernity and conformity to European cultural norms, nevertheless carefully designed them to counteract conceptions of the Ottoman Empire as the Other. In a fast-crumbling empire, museums increasingly expressed and served a nationalist agenda. They produced models for a new Ottoman identity, especially during the decades of the empire's transition to a nation-state. The narratives of national identity and history they developed not only helped shape the state ideologies of the late Ottoman Empire, but have persisted in the Republic of Turkey of today. Early Ottoman collections consisted of spoils of war and religious relics. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the city's landmark Byzantine basilica of Hagia Irene was turned into an armory, and later it also housed Islamic and Christian relics. When two collections of the sultan were added in the mid-nineteenth century, the basilica was divided into the Magazine of Antique Weapons and the Magazine of Antiquities. The latter received chief attention in response to European archaeological intrusions into Ottoman territories, and in 1869, to signify the sultan's patronage of antiquities, it was renamed the Imperial Museum and moved to another building. Under Osman Hamdi from 1881 to 1910, a French-educated lawyer and painter, the museum developed into a prominent Ottoman institution—albeit not on a par with its European counterparts—which regulated the [End Page 666] collection of antiquities throughout the empire, sponsored legislation to check exports and smuggling, and initiated archaeological excavations. The government soon discovered that the museum could be a tool for state ideologies. Between 1876 and 1909 Sultan Abdülhamid effectively used museum displays to enhance his imperial image at home, while abroad he promoted his empire through exhibits at international expositions and photographic displays. He even had a model military museum set up in his palace, and he was planning to build a full-scale version when he was deposed in 1909. Europeans came hunting for antiquities in Ottoman territories at the same time they were exerting economic and political pressure on the empire. Ottomans thus perceived the removal of antiquities not simply as a loss of historical treasures but as a threat to their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Through their own collection, preservation, and display of antiquities, they hoped to reassert their territorial sovereignty, invalidate European prejudices of presumed Ottoman negligence of antiquities (often used as a justification for their removal), solidify the relationship between the land and its present peoples, and demonstrate Ottoman modernity and "European-ness." Ottoman museums accordingly emphasized the artifacts and spatial arrangements that linked the Ottoman to the European, most symbolically via the antiquities of the Hellenic and Roman civilizations, in which Europe traced its golden past. Natural history and contemporary arts were for the most part excluded. An interest in Islamic arts developed and enthusiasm for military collections revived only in the empire's final decades, when wars and territorial losses caused it to pursue a more nationalist agenda. Although most of her book deals with the museums of Istanbul, Shaw also pays attention to nascent museums elsewhere. In no case was she able to provide statistics as to the number of visitors. It is clear, however, that museums were primarily for elite visitors, whether Ottoman or foreign. Shaw includes a chapter that looks at how technology rendered antiquities and archaeological sites more accessible...

:Early modernization reform from the 19th century to the early 20th century led to the secularization of the Ottoman Empire in respect to politics, law, and education. Competition between contradicting secular and Islamic thoughts has occurred since then, and it has produced the divisions of pan-Islamism, Modernism, and Turkism in the ideological field of the Ottoman Empire. Such phenomenon is the manifestation of political and ideological chaos of the late Ottoman Empire, which has intertwined with the contradiction of tradition and modernity, between the Orient and the West, presenting the developing trends of diversification, complexity, and variability. Intensified ideological struggle occurred in the late Ottoman Empire previous to its collapse. Social and political reforms began to transform the country from a traditional empire to modern nation-state. Due to the relationship between trends of political thoughts and Islam, nationalism could not get rid of the impact of Islam in the late Ottoman Empire. Islam has not only perpetuated pan-Ottomanism and pan-Turkism in the form of pan-Islamism, it has also exerted a wide range of effects as a relative individual trend of political and social thoughts.

This paper discusses the new legislative and administrative security reforms and practices in the Ottoman Empire, influenced by the anarchist fear in Europe and the anti-anarchist regulations against “propaganda by deed.” The Ottoman reform process was in line with the global synchronization of the modern states, but it cannot be seen only as a part of this global process. While the reform schemes regarding Macedonia and Eastern Anatolia became a battleground between the Great Powers and the Ottoman Empire after Berlin Treaty (1878), the Ottoman threat perceptions also created a new security discourse against revolutionaries, rebels and rogues. This paper examines how Hamidian state elites defined security concerns, the ways in which processes of securitization were operated and legitimised with discursive methods, and how these discursive strategies were produced globally and implemented in the Ottoman Empire. Particularly after 1878, the Ottoman government started to ground the threat perception based on the notion of a probable association between Armenians and revolutionary organisations. Besides the security discourse, this paper examines the concept of security as an embedded process in administrative regulations and their practices that open the discussion on routinized bureaucratic decisions and acts which created the normalization of internal security measures.

Studies in the context of the professionalisation of the teaching profession in Turkey mainly focus on policies and practices for teacher training in the Republican Period. However, the practices and policies in the last period of the Ottoman Empire for training modern teachers, which have an extensive historical background for the professionalisation of the teaching profession, have not been analysed within a holistic framework. Based on this deficiency, the present study discussed the professionalisation process of the teaching profession in the Ottoman Empire. In this direction, the aim of the present study is to evaluate the teacher training policies and practices for modern civilian schools in the Ottoman Empire by analysing them in terms of professionalisation of the teaching profession. Five criteria were determined that indicate the professionalisation process of the teaching profession in the Ottoman Empire. In line with these criteria, it has been understood that important steps have been taken towards the professionalisation of teaching in the late Ottoman Empire. Efforts towards establishing specific criteria for entering the profession, the methods applied for the professional development of teachers, the increase in the roles and competencies of educators/teachers in subjects related to teaching, the possibility for teachers to form professional organisations and, finally, improvement in the social status of the teaching profession were the important steps taken in the last period of the Ottoman Empire. Study data included archive documents, regulations, and ordinances concerning the teaching profession, advertisements, and news or articles about the teaching profession in the press of the period. The historical method was used for this study.

Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864

Based on their writings, the religious beliefs of the Nusayrīs have been studied since the 19th century. But historical knowledge and information about them in the 19th century, based on Ottoman sources has been rather meager. Only in recent years this kind of research intensified. In the Ottoman Empire real interest in the Nusayrīs started during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Due to fear of infiltration of heterodox Muslims by foreigners, especially by American and English Protestant missionaries, the Sultan was pressed to attract them to the Hanafī-Sunnī school. In this process, the status of the Nusayrīs underwent changes. After summarizing the attitude of the provincial Syrian administration and of Istanbul toward the Nusayrīs in the first decades of the 19th century, the article will give an overview of the developments regarding the Nusayrīs during the Tanzimat and the Hamidian era until roughly the Young Turk revolution. The following questions will be asked: How did Protestant missionaries integrate the Nusayrīs into their millenarian belief in a new social order? By what means did the Ottoman pacifying or "civilizing" mission attempt to integrate the Nusayrīs? And how did the Nusayrīs respond to the efforts of the Christian missionaries and the Ottoman state? The article will also challenge the view that the name "'Alawī" was only used after 1920.

The literature on the history of passports has been generally discussed in the context of freedom of movement around the globe during the 19th century. However, with its administrative regulations and practices, the Ottoman Empire offered a different view of passports and mobility controls. Through perceiving new threats from the political issues of the late 19th century and directing its attention mainly at the Armenian and Macedonian Questions, one of the critical issues facing the Ottoman government during the Hamidian Era (1876–1908) was controlling the geographic mobility of the individuals who were perceived as a threat based on Ottoman security policies. This paper brings a particular case of this history into focus: the administrative control of the mobility of Armenians. Despite the fact that extensive research has been done on the Armenian Question, so far, little has been written on the policies restricting their mobility. This paper aims to explore the passport regulations and practices to shed light onto the relationship between state formation, Ottoman threat perceptions and the marginalisation of the Armenian community. I offer a new look at the securitisation of the Armenian Question.