Historians and sociologists have long noticed the importance of mustaches and beards as a markers of identity and status and yet, surprisingly little has been written about the long career of facial hair in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East. A first step filling this lacuna, this paper aims to explain the growing popularity of mustaches around the turn of the twentieth century. The study is based on the examination of hundreds of photos from the late 1870s to the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The personal details of the individuals photographed (date of birth, place of birth, occupation etc.) have been analyzed in order to demonstrate not only when mustaches began to gain popularity, but also, if this trend can be associated with particular social groups. I use contemporary publications, diaries and memoirs alongside the photos, in order to explain this phenomenon and place it within relevant contemporary discourses. Based on all these materials I argue that while mustaches were certainly not unknown in the region before the late nineteenth century, they became increasingly more prevalent, especially among young people who graduated from Ottoman schools between the 1890s and WWI. These people began to assert their place in the cultural and political spheres through a wide range of organizations, from literary clubs, through newspapers and on to political parties. The mustache, I contend, brought together new ideas about masculinity and the importance of youth for the 'progress' of the Ottoman nation. Indeed, the notion of progress (terakki, takkadum) was fundamental here. On the most general terms, this notion implied a rather new understanding of history as a universal timeline along which different nations race for progress. The effort of the young and educated to identify themselves with the 'modern' thus had clear political ramifications: they belonged to the 'new era' and were thus best able to lead society 'forward,' into 'modern civilization.' Such ideas were especially prevalent in post-1908 texts about the 'new generation' (nesl-i cedid) and its responsibility for the future of the empire. Mustaches, I argue, became an important marker of this generational identification and the related self-consciously 'modern' worldview. They allowed one to literally wear his identity on his face, to distinguish himself from his Others, and to identify other members of his group. In short, during this period mustaches grew, or were grown to be political.

In recent years, historians of photography have shown that, rather than being simply a product of modernization, photographic practices helped drive shifts in a range of practices foundational to the experience of modernity. Additionally, by emphasizing photography’s function as both a means of representation and as social practice, these scholars have broadened our perspective on how photographs can and ought to be studied. More recently, photography theorist Ariella Azoulay has called for greater attention to photography not only as a social practice but as a political space, a site of encounter between the individuals present in the moment of the photograph’s creation and all those who might see and use the photograph after the shutter’s click. This paper heeds Azoulay’s call by using photography to explore how education served as a site of exchange and competition between social groups active in the Ottoman territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I take as my primary objects of analysis two photographic archives: the photographic albums produced at the behest of the Sultan Abdulhamid II and gifted to the U.S. Library of Congress in 1894, and the photographic archive of Robert College, an educational institution founded in Istanbul in 1863 by American missionaries. Each of these groups of images aimed to represent new educational practices and institutions intended to transform the Ottoman citizenry. The Ottoman bureaucrats and American missionary educators in charge of these projects understood them as the very embodiment of modernity. The photographic archives these groups left behind provide insight into their competing understandings of that concept, as well as traces of the processes of negotiation and exchange that occurred between them. By framing this history as one of competition and dialogue between Ottoman educational reformers and educators from other countries, this paper endeavors to contribute to recent efforts by historians of the late Ottoman period, such as Benjamin Fortna, Selim Deringil and Wendy Shaw, who have worked to provide an understanding of Ottoman agency to the historical record. By reading these photographic images as documents of an encounter between three groups—Ottoman educational reformers, American missionary educators, and the students who filled their classrooms—this paper provides insight into a pivotal moment of negotiation and exchange, whose end product was not merely the production of modern Ottoman subjects, but the institutions and discourse of modernity itself.

In this paper I will analyze the development of the concept of Ottoman subjecthood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and demonstrate how an essentially Western and liberal regime of modern subjecthood was altered to deal with the Armenian question at first and how these deviations were later generalized to apply to the entire population. Thus the apparently imported concept of subjecthood evolved into a uniquely Turkish regime. The Law of Ottoman Subjecthood was adopted in 1869 for the purpose of integrating the empire to the international legal framework of passports and citizenship. Although the law included special provisions to limit the granting of the privileges of extraterritoriality to the Ottoman subjects by Western countries, these were almost never implemented and the law appeared as a fairly neutral text introducing the European concept of modern subjecthood to the Ottoman domains. This started to change in the 1890s, when the Ottoman government was challenged by growing overseas emigration and Armenian insurgency, and in response the regime of Ottoman subjecthood was gradually altered. Not only were hitherto unused provisions of the law implemented, but also the law was expanded with various amendments. The end result was an imperial order in 1896, which introduced a new regime of subjecthood tailored for the Armenians only; they were given the right to leave the country and forgo their Ottoman subjecthood, under the condition that they would never return to the empire again. Significantly, this new regime only applied to Armenians; the rest of the Ottoman population was not subject to it. The intention was excluding as many Armenians as possible and thus diminishing their proportion within the population. After the revolution in 1908 these Armenians returned to the empire, leaving the Unionist government with a legal challenge. To solve the problem, the Unionists considered the introduction of a new Law of Subjecthood. When this was eventually done, it was World War; drafted by a war cabinet the amendment to the Law of Ottoman Subjecthood in 1916, as well as an entirely new law in 1917 practically generalized the special regime for Armenians as to include all Ottoman subjects. Whereas the law of 1917 was not promulgated, it nevertheless constituted the basis for the Law of Turkish Citizenship of 1928 and shaped the regime of citizenship in the republican Turkey. Texts of laws and documents from the Ottoman archives are among the primary sources.

During the Ottoman Empire’s reform period (1839-1922), an epochal shift took place in the practices and discourses of work and productivity. Ranging from bureaucratic reforms that targeted laziness and pushed for work efficiency, to the new awareness of time made visible through clock towers, Ottoman society experienced this shift in their day-to-day lives. Morality books, an old genre that had new incarnations in the nineteenth century, became one of the sources in which this shift was formulated. With more than 100 morality books published in the nineteenth century, I shall present on how morality books transformed its content in the hands of modern and at times modernist Ottoman authors in the nineteenth century. As the empire went through a nation-and-state formation process, these authors popularized modern modes of thinking about work and laziness, the productive body, and time efficiency, articulating normative dimensions of citizenship. Morality authors, with the experience of new practices that made them re-conceptualize their knowledge categories, frequently referenced a symbolic universe, whose sources also included “Islamic knowledge.” These authors fortified their argumentations by advancing Qur’anic verses and sayings of the prophet. Moreover, they adamantly opposed a set of beliefs and practices that they identified as handicaps for productivity by declaring them un-Islamic and anti-progress, and thus anti-modern. Therefore, some morality books presented the campaign for work and against laziness as one for the betterment of religious life, articulating what can be called an ‘Islamic work ethics.’ Could this phenomenon in popularized discourses of morality be seen as merely a Western content filling in the Islamic forms? More specifically, how would examining morality books as cultural products enable us to understand the connection between Islamic discourses and establishing modern and moralizing narratives, especially about work ethic of citizenry? While this endeavor itself produced a specific tradition of a modernity project historically tied to the Ottoman experience, it also shaped and transformed dynamics of the knowledge fields as it has been produced in the Ottoman context. The assumption that Islam and modernity are mutually exclusive does not explain the wealth of Ottoman experience. This presentation attempts to explore the question of religion and modernity by engaging with a very specific historic context and sources.