Late Ottoman Era Research Articles

From a Daughter of the Republic to a Femme Fatale: The Life and Times of Turkey's First Professional Fashion Model, Lale Belkıs

From a Daughter of the Republic to a Femme Fatale:The Life and Times of Turkey's First Professional Fashion Model, Lale Belkıs Rustem Ertug Altinay (bio) I woke up with a voice. It was not scary. On the contrary, how shall I explain, it was a heart-warming, soothing, echoing, soft voice. It was saying "Belkıs . . . Belkıs . . ." The voice was rising with echoes. When I opened my eyes, I saw a man's arm reaching my bed from the ceiling. A hairy, long, strong arm rested its fist on my bed. As if it was talking to me. That strong voice was saying "Belkıs, a very beautiful life awaits you . . . One day you will do very important things, you will be appreciated . . ." It was repeating these words. —Lale Belkıs, İpek Çoraplar (2006, 23, translation is mine) This dream was experienced by Belkıs Durmaz, a Turkish girl growing up in Istanbul in the 1940s, who, more than half a century later, narrated it in her memoirs. The interpellation however, was by no means unique to Belkıs or her unconscious. It was a reflection of gender politics in early Republican Turkey under the successive Republican People's Party gov­ernments, especially in the promises made by the state to women and the bargains female citizens entered into with the republic under the politics of state feminism. In this essay, I will follow the story of Belkıs Durmaz, who later became the fashion model, actor, singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and designer Lale Belkıs. Moving from her experiences as a woman and her career as Turkey's first professional fashion model, I will discuss the role of fashion in Turkey's modernization and nation-building program. My focus will be on the unique history of fashion modeling in Turkey from its inception as [End Page 113] a state-sponsored performance form to its integration into the capitalist market economy, and the emergence of diplomatic fashion shows where modernization, postcoloniality, nationalism, and gender politics coalesce to create a performance of Turkish national identity. Exploring the entan­gled dynamics of design, production, promotion, and consumption, I will discuss how the gendered dynamics of modernization and national­ism gave rise to a unique style. As I examine the perceived relationship between national identity and the female body, I will also analyze the mul­tiple significations of bodies across competing political paradigms. Early Republican Sartorial Politics and the Girls' Institutes The first two decades of the Republic of Turkey following its inception in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were character­ized by a series of legal, political, and cultural reforms aiming to construct the country as a modern, secular (albeit implicitly Sunni Muslim) nation-state. Women's role in Turkey's modernization and nation-state construc­tion program reflected the patterns of women's inclusion in nationalist projects as identified by Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1994): they were expected to continue the biological, social, and cultural reproduction of the collectivity; participate in national, economic, political, and military struggles; reproduce boundaries of the nation; and signify ethnic/national differences. In the context of a transition from a multiethnic Islamic Empire to a secular nation-state based on the idea of one culture, ethnic­ity, language, and religion, women were conceptualized not only as "the builders of a 'new life,' a modern way of living both in the private and the public spheres" (Göle 1997, 51) but also as the symbols of this new life. In order to facilitate women's participation in the modernization and nation-state-building efforts, the government appropriated some demands of the Ottoman and Turkish feminist movement and created a "state feminism" by granting women certain civil and political rights as well as educational and professional opportunities. A particularly important site for the transformation of women's bodies and subjectivities in the service of the Kemalist regime was the girls' insti­tutes. Established in the 1927-28 academic year by restructuring the girls' schools of sartorial arts and crafts built in the late Ottoman Era (Arat 1998, 162), these schools combined the basic postelementary school curricu­lum with...

From “Great History” to “Small History”: The Genesis of the Zionist Periodization

The article examines the genesis, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, of the current Zionist periodization, which separated the early decades of Zionist history into distinct immigration waves [ Aliyot ], and numbered them from the first to the fifth. The anticipated mass immigration to Palestine right after the Balfour Declaration was numbered the “Third Aliya”, following the two biblical immigrations from Babylonia. Later, the linguistic convention of the “Third Aliya” was changed from a long-range perception of history to a short-range one, and two preceding immigration waves were retrospectively pinpointed in the late Ottoman era. The new periodization was disseminated in the Yishuv during the 1920s, when the sequence of immigration waves was extended with the beginning of the Fourth Aliya in 1924. The new Zionist periodization established the concept of Aliya as the measure for assessing Zionist history, employing a judgmental distinction between the oleh driven by nationalist motives, contrasted with the Mehager whose concerns were personal or limited to family well-being. It thereby explains the magnitude of the pioneer ethos in the middle class Yishuv society, and demonstrates the political, cultural, and social implications of linguistic processes.

Music, power and symbolic violence: The Turkish state’s music policies during the early republican period

The importance and significance of music in terms of the state and society were discovered and redefined at particular junctures in the history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. This history is simultaneously Turkey’s history of modernization and westernization, extending back to the institutional reforms of the late Ottoman era and epitomized by the establishment of a secular nation-state in 1923. The musical values of the people and their popular experiences were simply ignored by the Kemalist reform of music and this caused a great deal of unrest and discussion. Given the definition by Bourdieu, who extended Weber’s definition of state, it might be argued that music reform is a paradigm example of ‘symbolic violence’ operated by the state. This article provides a historical analysis of the Turkish state’s music policies with the aim of examining their changing meanings within the general context of the history of modernization in Turkey.

The Challenges of Documenting Jerusalem History during the late Ottoman Era.

تحاول الدراسة إلقاء الضوء على أبرز الإشكاليات التي تواجهها كتابة تاريخ القدس في العصر العثماني، وخصوصاً خلال القرن التاسع عشر. فالكتابة حول القدس خلال القرون الثلاثة الأولى من الحكم العثماني لا تواجه الإشكاليات والصعوبات نفسها التي تواجهها عملية التأريخ للقرن التاسع عشر؛ حيث شهد تاريخ القدس خلال هذا القرن تحولات سياسية واقتصادية واجتماعية وثقافية وعمرانية، عقدت مهمة الباحث في دراسته لقضايا تاريخ هذا القرن وإشكالياتها؛ إذ تتطلب دراسة هذه الفترة الرجوع إلى مصادر متنوعة ومتعددة اللغات وغير متوافرة في مكان واحد يسهل الوصول إليه، الأمر الذي يدفع الباحث إلى الاعتماد على بعض هذه المصادر ويستثني مصادر أخرى؛ مما يعرض دراسته إلى الكثير من أوجه النقد. كما تظهر هذه الدراسة تعقيدات التأريخ للقرن التاسع عشر على الرغم من أن السنوات العشرة الأخيرة شهدت تطوراً - كماً ونوعاً - في الدراسات حول تلك الفترة، وظهور العديد من الدراسات الأكاديمية الجادة. لا تهدف هذه الدراسة فقط إلى إلقاء الضوء على طبيعة الدراسات التاريخية المتعلقة بالقدس العثمانية، خاصة تلك التي صدرت في الألفية الثالثة بل تهدف أيضاً - بشكل أساسي - إلى الوقوف على أبرز إشكاليات الكتابة التاريخية المعاصرة حول هذا الموضوع. لا تنبع أهمية هذه المسألة من تحديد إشكالات هذا الموضوع فقط وإنما فتح أيضاً آفاقاً جديدة لكتابة تاريخ القدس في العصر العثماني وفق أسس ومنهجية تتجاوز إشكاليات الكتابة التاريخية المعاصرة، التي سيتم تناولها في هذه الدراسة.

Ottoman Clay Tobacco Pipes

Clay pipes constitute an attractive class of artifacts given their prominence in the relatively recent archaeological record, their decorative richness, their usefulness in dating, their testament to tobacco production and type of consumption, and the manner in which they reflect the socioeconomic status of their users. Until recently, most archaeologists who have conducted excavations at historical sites of the Late Islamic period have either partly or entirely neglected the significance of Ottoman pipes in their publications. It is not surprising, therefore, that detailed studies on Ottoman clay tobacco pipes are quite rare. Nevertheless, studies of clay pipes in general can be traced to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many journals and archives concerned with such artifacts were established in Europe and America, including the following: The Archaeology of Clay Tobacco Pipes, Society for Clay Pipe Research Newsletter, Historic Clay Tobacco Pipe Studies, and National Clay Tobacco Archive, in addition to seminal publications on clay pipe studies such as A. Oswald’s Clay Pipes for the Archaeologist (1975); R. Robinson’s Tobacco Pipes of Corinth and the Athenian Agora (1985), and U. Baram’s Material Culture, Commodities and Consumption in Palestine, 1500-1900 (1996). The Ottoman clay tobacco pipes discussed in this paper were collected over a six-year period from Saffa, a village located in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 16 km west of Ramallah and nearly 22 km northwest of Jerusalem. Saffa was inhabited throughout the Roman, Byzantine, Early and Late Islamic periods. In 2006, the estimated population of the village of Saffa was 3300 persons. Here, the cultivation of tobacco plants in the village both for local consumption and for trade lasted at least from late Ottoman era to the 1970s.

Continuity and Change in Social Policy Approaches toward Women

AbstractThis article discusses the development of social policy in Turkey from a gender perspective. Focusing on continuities and changes in the formal social security system and the labor market regulation, it aims to describe the place of women in social policy until today. I argue that social policy measures from the late Ottoman era to the single-party period laid the foundation for later gendered policy approaches through specific assumptions on women's roles and position. With the introduction of a modern social security system in the post-World War II period women have increasingly become integrated into the system, either as workers or as dependents of workers; however, assumptions about women's place in the family and the labor market did not change much. Familial dependency and traditional gender norms were assumed and reinforced through certain gender-differentiated policies, and women workers have been encouraged to go back home. Over the last two decades, however, the conceptualization of women in social policy formulations has shifted towards a policy that encourages female labor and equal treatment of genders.

PHILANTHROPIC ACTIVITY, OTTOMAN PATRIOTISM, AND THE HAMIDIAN REGIME, 1876–1909

This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and society—that is, various social groups' voluntary activities, especially fund-raising campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself. These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was “the public domain where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse.” Within the parameters of this definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in voluntary activities in the broader political arena.

The Turkish Pendulum between Globalization and Security: From the Late Ottoman Era to the 1930s

The primary goal of this article is to understand the historical dynamics which led in Turkey to the emergence of a pendulum between liberalization/ globalization at the time perceived as integration with the modern and popular west, in particular, Europe and national security, seen as the preservation of the Ottoman lands against both external (ironically the large European powers and Russia) and internal enemies (internal in the sense of those nations and ethnic groups which aspired to be independent of Ottoman rule and which were, again ironically, open therefore to the manipulation of the external enemies). To understand these dynamics requires two main missions. First, by looking into the political liberalization initiatives of the late Ottoman era (seen in the most general sense as those attempts to share political power with the Sultan) and their relation with the tremendous public concern over the empire's security, the article explores the genealogy and formation as well as the overwhelmingly shared perception of a dichotomous relationship between security and liberalization.' Second, by carrying out a detailed analysis of the two attempts to introduce multi-party politics during the republican era, I try to show how the previously identified dichotomy between liberalization and security developed into a 'national security syndrome', through which the democratic liberalization process would be systematically administered, managed and, ultimately, contained. It can be argued that the Ottoman state was, by and large, a garrison state, in which the waging of war was one of the main factors behind its construction and resulting structure.2 At a time in history when the rule of the day was conquest, power, alliances and geopolitics, the Ottoman state was a true example of a geopolitical state/empire. This primacy of geopolitics made the Ottoman state a largely centralized and highly hierarchical power apparatus at the hands of the sultans, and for the most part, security issues were able to be handled quite efficiently.

Ordered liberty and disciplined freedom: Turkish education and republican democracy, 1923–50

For students of the twentieth-century Middle East, the problematic prospects of democracy attract great interest. Nation states in this region are politically young in comparison to those of western Europe. After emerging from colonial rule, they have undergone uneven socio-economic development where socio-political processes are telescoped and regimes confront tremendous challenges to survival. Observers have thus pondered whether or not Middle Eastern states can be democratic in a manner understood in the West, where the concept of democracy itself is held to have originated. For those considering democracy alien to Arab-Islamic political culture, Egypt's 'liberal experiment' in parliamentary democracy during 1923-52 presents a clear example of failure, where leaders, parties, monarchs, and foreign powers conspired to vitiate democratic life and discredit it in the eyes of citizens. Likewise, French conduct in inter-war Syria undercut the development of democratic norms, and reinforced the oligarchical political inclinations of the late Ottoman era elite families. Conversely, though identified closely in the West with democracy, Israel has been characterized as manifesting a procedural as opposed to conceptual commitment to democracy, along with elements of ethnic democracy.' Turkey presents something of a contrast to its fellow Ottoman successor states. A movement in the early twentieth century inspired by the French

The Role of People'S Houses in the Making of National Culture in Turkey

Scholars engaged in the study of nationalism have often stressed an analytical distinction between the rise of nationalism and the growth of nations since nationalism, by its very nature, has always preceded the nation (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990). In the case of Turkey, the rise of nationalist movements rooted in Ottoman Turkism has been well-documented by studies focussing on their pioneering leaders, publications and institutions. Efforts aimed at the making of a Turkish nation, however, coincided with the period following the establishment of the Turkish nation-state. This new phase of Turkish nationalism differed from the preceding nationalist movements of the late Ottoman era, in its concern with the consolidation of a form of its own. It borrowed elements from, but also deviated from, the expansionist, pan-Turkist tendencies of the earlier era.