How was privacy perceived in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century? And what changes did its definition undergo from the last decades of the eighteenth century on? This paper explores developments and changes in the concept of privacy as it was understood by the Ottoman government and its subjects. First, it examines privacy as a social notion that had existed in Islamic cities from the rise of Islam. With some variations, the concept of privacy had one definition throughout Islamic history. Accordingly, cities were divided into a private and public sphere. The former was intended for the use of residents, while the latter was the place where the government and its agents operated. That was also true for the Ottoman Empire during most of the eighteenth century. From Ottoman archival documents and fatwa collections one learns that the state respected its place within the urban landscape, and did not intervene in people’s private matters unless called upon to do so. For example, the Ottomans did not usually pursue criminals into residential quarters, but rather waited for neighbors to turn them in. They operated a team of street cleaners and garbage collectors, who were not responsible for alleys, courtyards or houses that did not serve the general public. And, after earthquakes or fires, the state financed the reconstruction of many buildings, none of which were private residences. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, things began to change. State response to natural disasters suggests a shift in the limits of privacy, evident by the boundaries the state was willing to cross. While in the mid-eighteenth century the above-given description was the prevalent one, by 1855, in the aftermath of the Bursa earthquake, the state embarked on an urban planning project that encompassed all areas, private and public. Through looking at state investments after calamities, and by examining new initiatives in the fields of criminal investigation and sanitation, this paper will address the evolution that took place in the concept of privacy in cities, to the end of the nineteenth century. It will trace similar processes that had taken place in Europe since the sixteenth century, and assess how different the Ottoman approach to privacy was from the European one. It will then argue that the Empire eventually adopted an approach to privacy that, although greatly influenced by Western concepts, preserved traditional Islamic values to some degree.

In this paper we present a threefold argument, chronological, geographical, and socio-cultural, in order to demonstrate that interest in the woman question and the lively and charged debate it stimulated began in Greater Syria in the early nahda (awakening) period (between 1858 and 1900) and persisted throughout, drawing into its orbit leading intellectuals as well as members of the general public and permeating even into the peripheral areas of Greater Syria. We propose to re-envision this early period and the debate concerning women by examining the public reflection of this debate in the early nahda press, mainly the privately published Beiruti journals and newspapers. First, we argue that it was during these years that early thinkers and their readers turned their attention to gender issues and re-casted gender relationships, as part of their overall scheme of social and political regeneration. Second, we emphasize that it was in Greater Syria that these issues first came to the fore. Greater Syria, and in particular Beirut, was a hub of growing intellectual ferment of bookstores and printing presses, literary salons and scientific societies, journalists and newspapers. Only later was the debate relocated to Egypt. Third, this study of the dialogue on women, developing between the writers and readers of the newspapers, points out its major themes and sources of influence; it therefore emphasizes the modes and directions of the diffusion of ideas, the “community of discourse” the authors, readers, commentators, and critics, who over time discuss, revise, and expand on ideas. By moving beyond the accepted chronological, geographical, and socio-cultural boundaries of this debate, re-envisioning them, and illustrating that the nahda involved a major re-conceptualization of social relations, in which gender and women’s issues lay at its core, we provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of the debate on women.

The history of economic thought in the non-European world has been a neglected subject, and the Middle East is no exception. However, the modern history of the Middle East cannot be fully understood without having recourse to economic thought, since the modern history is also the story of rising awareness of a new economy-oriented world order and the local reactions to it. Nevertheless, the role of economic ideas has hardly found a place in the intellectual history of the region. Thus, there is still a huge gap in our knowledge of the economic roots of the ‘Middle Eastern modernities’. A handful of studies concerning the subject matter seem to be trapped within the boundaries of the well-known ‘imitation-rejection’ model, which is based on the famous ‘modern-traditional’ dichotomy of the Modernization theory. Nevertheless, this simplistic binary model is far from providing us with a good explanation of the highly complex structure of intellectual and social processes. This study is an attempt to shed light on the economic aspects of the ‘Ottoman modernity’ as a project of the Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen, based on the idea of forging ‘economically minded individuals’ who would build a modern country. The interplay between modern European economic ideas and traditional/religious values, and the consequent political, social and economic transformation, were the main reactants of this highly complex process. Thus, instead of following the traditional method of ‘cataloguing the ideas and intellectuals,’ this study puts the emphasis on the interaction between intellectual history and social change. The main sources for this study consist of the examples for a ‘modern Ottoman society’ and its ‘modern citizen’, which were presented in the Ottoman textbooks for modern economic theory, journal articles on economic issues, and more importantly, popular novels and stories from the era. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to document the immediate actual social impact of these intellectual endeavors. Nevertheless, a clear understanding of these ideal models provides us with very important clues about the roots of the modernization projects of the post-Ottoman modern Middle Eastern nation-states.

The Ottoman reformist intellectuals’ strong association of materialist and positivist currents in the West with modernization itself has been a central feature of the studies on the intellectual history of the late Empire. The reaction which the scientific materialism espoused by these thinkers engendered on the part of the Ottoman proponents of philosophical spiritualism has also been given considerable scholarly attention. Yet another heated debate, almost completely ignored by historians and intricately linked to the one just mentioned, had briefly flared up in fin de siècle Istanbul between the practitioners of phenomenal spiritualism and certain members of the capital’s medical community about the possibility of communicating with the dead. The episode in question not only complicates the current picture of the intellectual history of the period, but also carries considerable significance for the study of the history of Ottoman science. This talk focuses on the controversy precipitated by the appearance, after 1908, of a number of periodicals and books in Turkish that were dedicated to modern occultism in general and spirit communication in particular. As “table-turning” quickly turned into a fad in an Istanbul where the so-called Young Turk Revolution had just taken place, some of the claims made by these publications were publicly denounced by two prominent doctors: Kemal Cenab [Berksoy] (1876-1949), a professor of physiology at the University of Istanbul, and the psychiatrist Mazhar Osman [Usman] (1884-1951). Based both on the contents of the Ottoman spiritualist publications, and on the reactions of Kemal Cenab and Mazhar Osman, it will be argued that the question of scientific authority lay at the center of this controversy. While being of interest to anti-materialist circles in the capital, the doctrines embraced by the Ottoman spiritualists notably claimed a great degree of scientificity and empirical validity. In this context, it will be emphasized that the emergence of a short-lived but vibrant Ottoman spiritualist press coincided with a growing emphasis on psychical studies in the West and a positivist approach to the detection of spiritual phenomena.