Modern Ottoman historiography has been shaped mainly by the nationalist narratives of the post-Ottoman states that portrayed the empire as a monolithic entity and privileged the actions and stories of some at the expense of others. Viewing the empire from the perspective of the nation-state, this discourse has relegated any voices or life-experiences that could not be neatly encapsulated within the emerging post-Ottoman nationalisms, to the margins of the historical narrative, which ultimately resulted in their exclusion from the collective memory of the people.
This panel brings together academic papers that tap new primary sources and study the expressions of ethnic, regional, class and gender based identities by hitherto ignored Ottoman subjects in their particular historical moments. Thus, this panel aims to: 1) highlight and critique the problems of the nationalist paradigm in historicizing the Ottoman empire; 2) illustrate the complexity, diversity and dynamism of an Ottoman society that does not manifest the symptoms of a terminal illness associated with the “decline paradigm”; and 3) restore the agency of subaltern groups within the empire whose actions and world views later were denied access to the nation’s meta-narrative.
In accordance with these aims, the first paper concentrates on a prominent female activist of the Ottoman constitutional period, whose voice defies the traditional argument that Turkish women were entirely dependent on the paternal benevolence of the state in acquiring equal rights. The second paper deals with the tribulations of an Armenian banker in mid-nineteenth century Istanbul, who despite the confiscation of his property and a period of exile in Great Britain, attempted to rejoin the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy, thus presenting an alternative vision of the relationship between the state and Armenian subjects. The third paper focuses on a Beirut-based intellectual whose complex ethnic background and historical writings, celebrating imperial rather than national spaces, defy a categorization of the man and his ideas within the parameters of the nation-state. The fourth paper examines the world view of an expatriate Greek subject through her book Haremlik (1909), which highlights her fluidity of identity between the categories of Greek, Ottoman and American, as she physically travels between empire and diaspora. Finally, the fifth paper visits the memoirs of a Lebanese entertainer that shed light on a way of life during World War I absent from the national narrative yet presenting an outside challenge to it.
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Dr. Mustafa Erdem Kabadayi
In my planned presentation I want to focus on unsuccessful attempts of an Armenian banker, once the biggest sarraf of the Ottoman state Mkirdich Cezayirliyan, to regain economic and political power. Cezayirliyan was not only a banker but also a successful entrepreneur. In 1840s he was a key personality in the Ottoman political life. He operated in various fields. He was a tax-farmer, factory owner, financier, philanthropist and also active in communal politics. In 1850 his wealth reaches its summit. Strangely in this year he was accused of embezzlement, arrested and imprisoned. During his captivity most of his property was sold out and his earlier sources of income were either auctioned or taken away. After spending approximately two years in prison Cezayirliyan leaves Istanbul for London and from there he sends numerous petitions to the Ottoman administration and tries to regain control of the assets he lost. To increase his chances he obtains British citizenship. This political leverage does not bring the expected success and he returns his hometown, Istanbul as a broken person and dies approximately a year after his return. The petitions he sent from London to the Sublime Porte provide us with a rare opportunity to listen to an extraordinary Ottoman subject and hear his personal views and feelings about not an extraordinary practice of confiscation in the Ottoman Empire. The style and the contents of Cezayirliyan’s petitions change in the course of his unsuccessful struggle. His personal biography and the period in which most of his petitions were written are very informative to understand and interpret these petitions. In my presentation I will attempt to place his exile years within his life span and his career in order to be able to understand his point of view and his very personal perspective on state-subject relationship in the Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century.
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Dr. Serpil Atamaz
The voices of Ottoman women activists, which are essential to gaining a better understanding of both the late Ottoman and modern Turkish history, have been consistently left out of the nationalist narrative due to the limited range of sources scholars have used and the way in which they have utilized these sources. Attempting to fill this void, this paper examines the usually overlooked women’s periodicals of the constitutional period, such as Kad?nlar Dünyas? (Women’s World, 1913) and Kad?nl?k (Womanhood, 1914), and uncovers the voice of Aziz Haydar, a newspaper columnist, an educator, and one of the most ardent defenders of women’s rights of her time.
Aziz Haydar’s voice, which reached thousands of people in 1910s through newspapers and public speeches but has become silent since then, is significant in many ways. Not only does it represent the sentiments of many female activists of the period, but it also embodies the complex interplay among feminist, nationalist, westernist, and Islamist dynamics in the Ottoman Empire in early twentieth century. Furthermore, it portrays an alternative view of history that emphasizes women’s agency, which has been hitherto ignored in nationalist historiography.
This paper suggests that a contextualized analysis of the writings and speeches of Aziz Haydar will clearly demonstrate that Turkish women in the last decade of the empire were actively involved in political, social and cultural debates, including the one on woman and gender, and pushed for their own agenda by changing both the issues at hand and the language that was used. It will reveal that through these debates, Turkish women were able to claim equal citizenship, challenge the male-monopoly on public discourse, defy established gender roles, criticize patriarchal values, and implement change from the bottom up. Thus, helping to restore women’s agency in Ottoman and Turkish history, the analysis of Aziz Haydar’s voice will refute the nationalist discourse that has long claimed that Turkish women were lucky because they were given equal rights with men without having to ask or fight for it.
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Mr. Ziad R. AbiChakra
The National narrative of the post-Ottoman states of Lebanon and Syria has portrayed the years of World War I as a period of extreme hardship intentionally inflicted on the civilian population by a Turkish dominated Ottoman state apparatus. This narrative written from the perspective of the political and literary elites of Lebanon and Syria, remains silent on the real life experiences of the subaltern elements within the population, especially when these experiences do not serve the general goals of this narrative. Using the memoirs of Badi'a Masabni, a Syro-Lebanese entertainer and oriental dancer, which presents an alternative style of life during the war years hitherto missing from the narrative, this paper will show that the elitist national narrative is far from being inclusive of all the sections of the civilian population, and that the voices and life-experiences of subaltern groups, if included, will present a more nuanced and complex picture of the reality of life during the war years.
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Ms. Judith Laffan
This paper will shed light on a seemingly forgotten notable of Ottoman Beirut.
Yuhanna Abkariyus (d. 1886) was a dragoman who spent his working life acting for the British, both in Cairo and Beirut. His father was an ex-Armenian bishop and his mother a Maronite. Being educated by the American Protestant missionaries and an influential member of his “native” Protestant church, Abkariyus was a noted member of the Arab renaissance (nahda), writing, among other things, a global history and an English-Arabic dictionary. Despite these accomplishments, though, he is virtually missing from histories of Ottoman successor-states. The reason for this is simple. With his hybrid background he does not fit easily within any nationalist teleology; or at least not those of the states one might expect to claim him, such as Lebanon, Syria, or Armenia. Similarly, he is absent from the precursor histories of Arabism and Ottomanism. Both oversights demonstrate how dependent historians have been on national narratives even when they attempt to explain non-national realms. By drawing on Abkariyus’s experiences, which cannot sit within the framework of a single nation-state, and by delving into his history, “Qatf al-zuhur fi ta’rikh al-duhur” (Beirut 1873), I argue that we can regain an important vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual scene. For Abkariyus, good governance, rather than ethnic or confessional partisanship, defined the active states of the world, and the Ottoman Empire, far from being in darkness, or yet on the brink of collapse, was one of its guiding lights.
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Travel writing is very much a thriving genre of literature in our times, and the issues brought about by a large-scale global movement of peoples and the existence of expatriate communities are already found in the travelogues that some of us are working on. Travel writers were often multicultural individuals who attempted to negotiate the differences and distances between cultures, but also between expatriate communities and the homeland. I propose to examine a travelogue by a Greek subject of the Ottoman Sultan, Demetra Vaka Brown. Her travelogue Haremlik published in 1909 chronicles her first trip back to Constantinople after a six year absence. In trying to explain her native city to her American audience Vaka Brown attempts to negotiate the differences and distances between Turk and Greek to create affinities between Greek and American. She walks a fine line where she claims authority and access to authentic information because she is from there and yet she emphasizes that she is not one of them. Her being an outsider at home helps to make her an insider abroad, which then becomes her new home. Demetra Vaka Brown’s work allows us a more nuanced view of relations between the Greek and Muslim women’s interactions as well as a more complex view of the encounter between the East and modernity within Ottoman households.
