The Ottoman empire’s westernmost provinces have frequently been detached from mainstream narratives of Ottoman history, and from discussions of the relationship between Ottoman and Arab histories in later historiography. The early development and longevity of a stable local dynasty in Tunis, and, conversely, the relative local instability of the ‘frontier’ regime in Algiers from the mid-seventeenth century and then its early loss to European invasion, have served to foreground the notion of significant autonomy and merely ‘nominal’ Ottoman sovereignty from well before the nineteenth century. In each case, too, the Ottoman period has held different meanings for later writers than would be the case after 1918 in the former Arab provinces further east. Nonetheless, as scholarship on the nineteenth century Tunisian state and the late Ottoman Algerian elite has suggested, the empire did remain symbolically important in the Maghrib. Indeed, it can be argued that in Maghribi Arabic historical writing, the Ottoman period retained an importance that is in quite striking contrast both to the physical and political distance separating these former provinces from the imperial centre, and to the ways in which the empire would more generally be thought of in the Arab Mashriq, and in wider Maghribi society. This paper will examine the role of the Ottoman state as an important focus for historical self-understanding and self-location in Maghribi historiography through two works from each of Algeria and Tunisia, and from two generations of historical writers; the ‘memoirs’ of Ahmad al-Sharif al-Zahhar (1781-1872), naqib al-ashraf of Algiers at the end of the Ottoman regency, and the Ithaf ahl al-zaman of Ibn Abi Diyaf (c.1804-1874) both of whom wrote out of conditions of ‘crisis’ in the 19th century, and the Khulasat ta’rikh Tunis of Hasan Husni Abd al-Wahhab (1884-1968) and Harb al-thalathami’at sana bayna ‘l-Jaza’ir wa Isbaniya by Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani (1899-1983), seeking to ‘recover’ their countries’ histories in the 20th century. Comparisons and contrasts across these generations and in each country, with their different relationships to the memory of Ottoman rule and their different colonial experiences, illustrate the different ways in which the Ottoman period has been interpreted in the Maghrib: in historiography, the empire has been central to locating ideas of legitimate rule, narrating ‘greatness’ and ‘decline’, and explaining the onset of colonialism, while at the same time, and for different reasons in each case, remaining marginal to more widespread perceptions of history and national origins.

The concept of cosmopolitanism makes transnational claims to a world citizenship that transcends national belonging. Istanbul, as the former Ottoman capital, is a city for which the practices and experiences of cosmopolitanism had meaning in a lived, local historic context. Istanbul’s elites had identities both local and foreign, and occupied blended cultural and political spaces. Today, Istanbul’s formerly Greek, Armenian, and Jewish neighborhoods are the subject of much nostalgia and investment. These areas also constitute a material reminder of the processes through which Istanbul was transformed from an Ottoman to a Turkish city and its non-Muslim minorities departed. I examine memories of Ottoman urbanism with a focus on how imaginations of the past are “made real” through ordinary neighborhood landscapes. Tensions embedded in Turkish cultural memory are the focus of much recent critical research. Scholars examine representations of national memory in museums, monuments, and architecture. The Ottoman past is preserved as historic, or it is erased, set apart both from the Turkish national imagination and from the lived spaces of everyday life. The local processes with which ordinary urban residents (not the state, municipality, or political representatives) imagine Istanbul’s Ottoman legacy through the landscape are less studied. In cultural media, Istanbul’s multicultural urban fabric embodies memories of a past where multilingual Istanbullus shared relationships with ethno-religiously diverse neighbors. The material landscape is being reshaped as former minority neighborhoods are gentrified, a situation which relies on the processes through which former minority properties were abandoned. I have been gathering diverse perspectives on these issues with externally funded ethnographic research in formerly multiethnic neighborhoods of Istanbul since 2001. While cosmopolitanism circulates in global political discourse as a normative ideal of tolerant pluralism, it also circulates in the global political economy to become a sign of elite identity. While representing Ottoman cosmopolitanism may respond to concerns for diversity, the process actually reproduces new forms of exclusion. Secondly, memories of the Ottoman past respond to an identity crisis. Istanbul is a city of migrants; memories of the Ottoman past play a role in the politics of defending or challenging what it means to be Istanbullu and Turkish. Finally, nostalgic representations of Istanbul’s cosmopolitan past obscure alternative memories of place. The urban cultural landscape does not merely represent, commemorate, or challenge memory, but is the means through which Istanbul residents perform national memory and thus reinterpret the cosmopolitan Ottoman legacy for the Turkish national present.

Earlier generations of Arab historians treated the Ottoman legacy in negative terms, using 400 years of Ottoman rule as a backdrop for narratives of Arab national revival. But disillusionments of Arab nationalism since 1967, the renewed significance of religiously defined identities, and the entrenchment of distinct and separate Arab states, all changed the climate for consideration of Arab peoples’ Ottoman experiences. The place of the Empire in Arabs’ collective imagination is particularly telling, since a revived image of it as the first modern Islamic state (for good or for ill) competes with an older view of the Empire as the avatar of oppressive Turkish colonialism. Changing views of the Ottomans inform analysis of the highly visible “Islamic revival” —emphasizing supposedly Islamic cultural and political norms and values — in the Muslim Middle East since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In the specific case of Lebanon, the Ottoman past typically served as a foil for Lebanese writers’ self-representations and self-understandings. They characteristically presented the Ottoman era as a historical, political, and cultural dead weight that submerged Lebanon’s ancient glories without extinguishing the country’s allegedly unique historical personality. Though ideologically at odds because of competing political and territorial claims, Lebanese Arab nationalist and Phoenicianist Lebanese Christian nationalist narratives similarly portrayed the Ottoman past in pejorative terms. More recently, however, much work has been done on Lebanon’s Ottoman period, including the previously under-represented eighteenth century. Such writing is spurred and given a sense of urgency due to existential questions posed by the civil war that ravaged Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Whereas historians of Mount Lebanon can (and often do) focus on internal histories and treat “the Ottomans” (and other mostly Muslim actors) as outsiders on par with “the Europeans,” histories that encompass Lebanon’s coastal towns (former centers of Ottoman administration) cannot externalize Muslims and Ottomans so easily. Moreover, even the Mountain’s various princes, beys, and sheikhs ultimately owed their positions to pecking orders legitimized and buttressed by an overarching Ottoman imperial system. Bearing this context in mind, my paper will treat 1980s-era Lebanese Arabist writing from two prolific historians, Wajih Kawtharani and Hasan al-Hallaq. Their works reevaluate Lebanon’s past in ways that reflect positively the Sultanate’s identification with Islamic rule. Deriving the significance of these historians’ understandings of themselves and their country through their treatment of the Ottoman era illuminates the ongoing dialogue between history and consciousness that underpins today’s “Islamic revival.”

The Ottoman sultan was Egypt’s titular sovereign until 1914, but in the late 19th century some historians of Egypt found the terminus of Ottoman rule in the French invasion and inauguration of Muhammad `Ali’s government. This periodization was later canonized in Egyptian academia, so that Egypt’s Ottoman history was defined as beginning in 1517 and ending in 1798. However, the vagaries of Egypt’s relationship with Istanbul meant that this periodization was neither obvious nor uncontested. The purpose of this paper is to compare the evolving, discordant interpretations of Ottoman history presented in four works by notable Egyptian historians: al-Jabarti (ca. 1824), `Ali Pasha Mubarak (ca. 1889); Muhammad Farid (ca. 1912); and `Umar al-Iskandari and Salim Hasan (ca. 1919). The paper compares the historiography of three significant moments: (1) the Ottoman conquest; (2) the re-assertion of Mamluk power before 1800; (3) the accession of Muhammad `Ali. The paper investigates how the defeated Mamluk sultanate is related to Egypt’s identity in these works, and how the Ottomans are positioned in the flow of Islamic history. The paper reviews our authors’ reflections on the causes of Ottoman “decline”, and analyzes views of how Muhammad `Ali attained power, his legitimacy, and what his rule portended for Egypt. The documentation is found in the principal historical works of the authors: `Aja’ib al-athar fi al-tarajim wa al-akhbar (al-Jabarti); al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida (`Ali Mubarak); Tarikh al-Dawlah al-`Aliyah al-`Uthmaniyyah (Muhammad Farid); and Tarikh misr min al-fath al-`uthmani (Umar al-Iskandari, Salim Hasan). The historians differ radically on the relationship between the Mamluks and Egypt—oppressors vs. proto-nationalists—and in their assessment of the Ottoman conquest’s impact. There is no linear evolution of opinion prior to Egypt’s independence in 1922 nor a strict correlation between an Egyptian-nationalist orientation and attitudes toward the Ottoman state: `Ali Mubarak was a moderate nationalist but anti-Turk, while Muhammad Farid was an ardent nationalist but advocated Egypt’s organic bond with the Ottoman Empire. Broadly, one may distinguish between an appreciation of the Ottomans in their defense of Islam and implementation of justice (al-Jabarti and Farid), and a repudiation of the Ottoman period as Egypt’s “dark ages” (Mubarak, al-Iskandari & Hasan). However, al-Iskandari and Hasan’s book acceptance as a secondary school textbook represents the fixing of an historiographical orthodoxy that categorized Ottoman rule as alien, corrupt, and retrograde, a view that remains dominant in Egyptian popular consciousness.