Tanzimat Döneminde Türk-Osmanlı Müzisyenlerinin Sürüklenmesi: Dilencilerden Serbest İşçilere

Abstract

ABSTRACT After exploring the study of ney teachers and their sonic spirituality in Istanbul from an ethnographic approach, I have seen many of my interlocutors these days dwelling in a conundrum in which most of them see themselves as living links of previous social orders, somehow lost and regained during the present. The closure of dervish lodges during the early days of the Turkish Republic, as much as the historic restoration and reopening of some of these venues in recent decades, are often presented as outcomes of a social transformation caused by a given moral rationality embedded within the new institutions of an emergent nation. From this point of view, individuals are seen in a distorted way as related –or opposed– to these institutions, thus, flattening their own dimension and the ways in which their sedimented co-constitution as individuals have emerged before 1924. Beyond the debate about the authenticity of the so-called Sufi music, or whether there are “real dervishes” in today’s Istanbul or not, this article looks back at the historical period in which tekkes and Sufi lodges were banned and closed to suggest that this closure opened an emergent form of labor that transformed the subjectivity of Turk-Ottoman instructors during the early twentieth century. Like an old watch that is repaired and rearranged to vindicate the present moment (Castrillón 2021), caretakers of Tasavvuf sonic repertoires are unavoidably embedded in larger systems of tension and movement that require constant tuning and interpretation.