Recent scholarship on the economic history of the Middle East has suggested that the institution of waqf, the Islamic pious foundation, was a key reason for the region failing to follow the European example of economic, technological and social progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The papers on this panel complicate this understanding of Middle Eastern history by examining the dynamics and diversity of waqf practice and reform across the region during this transformative period. As the waqf had been a nearly-ubiquitous tool for governing property throughout the region, transforming this institution became instrumental for state centralization and the reorganization of economic and social relations according to the principles of the market. Reformist governments in Cairo and Istanbul sought to bring pious foundations and their resources under their direct control, bringing the interests of the state into direct communication with the layered claims of property-owners, religious administrators, and beneficiaries of charitible endowments. Case studies from Egypt, Anatolia, Greater Syria, and the Balkans reveal the diverse results of the interplay between state administrators and local interests: while foundations in both Western Anatolia and the Balkans declined during this period, outcomes in Syria and Egypt were much more varied. The panel will discuss the reasons for this variation and its implications for larger narratives of the region's economic, social and cultural history.
The first paper explores continuity in legal practice through the confrontation between longstanding household waqfs and Mehmed Ali Pasha's early agricultural monopolies in the Egyptian Delta at the turn of the nineteenth century. The second paper focuses on Ottoman Syria, examining the role of waqf in urban and rural locales and contestations over waqf governance between the central ministry, the local civil and judicial authorities, and waqf administrators. The third paper highlights the appropriation of waqf properties in Bursa--a major industrial center that received large numbers of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus--by both the authorities and the city's business elites. The fourth paper follows the trajectory of a local waqf in Salonica, focusing on the interplay between loss of administrative autonomy and the radical transformation of the institution's revenue base.
Based on legal and administrative primary sources and using a variety of disciplinary approaches, these four papers address an important gap in our understanding of the waqf, an institution implicated at the deepest levels of social structure and resource management throughout the Ottoman lands.
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Zoe Griffith
This paper examines the interplay between a legal and economic culture of household waqf and early centralizing efforts under Mehmed ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1804-48) in the Egyptian Delta at the turn of the nineteenth century. Land and urban property held by elite provincial families as waqf presented an immediate obstacle to Mehmed Ali’s efforts to increase revenues from taxation and trade of agricultural products. When the pasha imposed state monopolies on cash crop production in the northern Delta beginning in 1812, he brought the state into direct confrontation with the longstanding interests of household waqfs invested in irrigated land, wells, and waterwheels as well as urban mills, storerooms, and livestock facilities. Drawing from the Shari’a court records of the major urban centers of the northern Delta, Rosetta and Damietta, this paper explores the fate of agricultural waqf property during the economic and administrative restructuring of Mehmed ‘Ali Pasha’s early decades. Following the fortunes of waqf properties and property-holding households from the late-eighteenth century, I will highlight points of continuity and divergence in legal practice and economic activity during a transitional period most often discussed as a moment of rupture in Egypt’s Ottoman history.
The pasha brought much of Egypt’s agricultural land under the control of the central state when he abolished the administrative category of landed tax farms in 1813. But waqf was not an administrative category, and the land and industrial property held as waqf fell under the jurisdiction of Shari’a law. Thus, the negotiations by which this property came into the possession of the central state in Cairo or, alternatively, remained in the hands of prominent families, transpired in the local courthouse. These negotiations, involving the ulema, rural shaykhs, and agricultural merchants, used the same legal mechanisms that local populations had been using to transact household waqf property as a form of quasi-private property for generations. This paper contends that local understandings of waqf property in the Egyptian Delta were crucial to shaping the implementation of Mehmed Ali’s agricultural monopolies on the ground. At the same time, considering the confrontation over household waqfs in the Delta allows us to situate Egypt squarely within larger processes of state centralization and capitalist reorientation that characterize the Ottoman nineteenth century.
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This paper explores the social and economic functions and legal parameters of the institution of waqf in late Ottoman Syria. The paper aims to answer two lingering questions in the literature on waqf: First, what roles did awqaf play in rural Syrian economies and industries in the nineteenth century? Second, how did the attempted imperial reforms to the institution of waqf play out in provinces like Syria that had strong local legal traditions as well as extensive property held by “family” waqfs ostensibly outside the jurisdiction of central agencies?
The literature on waqf in the Ottoman empire is dominated not only by the idea that waqf was a stagnant institution, but that modernizing reforms successfully disempowered and defunded awqaf across the empire in the nineteenth century in a prelude to their official dismemberment in the early days of the Turkish Republic. Recent research has shown that waqf was a dynamic legal mechanism used for radically different economic goals in various Syrian locales in the nineteenth century. Waqf was also the legal foundation for the control and devolution of property required for expanding local industries from soap production to horticulture. At the same time, the attempts of central Ottoman agencies to gain greater control over the empire’s awqaf had decidedly varied results, with waqf remaining a dynamic institution in Syria into the Mandate period.
To contribute to developing a more nuanced narrative of the role of waqf in the empire’s economic and social history, the paper relies on a close reading of orders sent from the Imperial Waqf Ministry in Istanbul to Syrian judges regarding how to adjudicate claims on particular awqaf, liason with waqf administrators or directly intervene in administration. The paper supplements this correspondence with civil and Sharia court records to argue that while waqf continued to play a dynamic and diverse role in nineteenth century Syrian economies, battles over who governed awqaf and their revenue intensified between various arms of the Ottoman bureaucracy. These contestations both involved more local actors in Ottoman bureaucratic operations and brought more extensive property into the purview of central state agencies, if not under their direct control.
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Miss. Elcin Arabaci
Throughout the Ottoman classical ages, the evkaf (pl. of vakıf, or the religious endowments) were the primary institutions for public service in the Ottoman towns. The evkaf allocated public resources, war booty and agricultural surplus to many important causes, from urban infrastructure, to civil education and health service, from soup kitchens for the poor, to the maintenance of religious sanctuaries and provisioning of loans to the needy community members. With this function, the evkaf bolstered the legitimacy of the House of Osman as well as their dignitaries in the provinces, and, for that reason, extortion of the evkaf property was a great taboo.
However, this taboo shattered after 1826, when the evkaf and their revenues were taken under the control of the Ministry of Evkaf. The state never openly extorted the vakıfs, yet, as their revenues began to be transferred to the other sectors the state needed, the evkaf became impoverished. This opened the gates for the commercialization of the evkaf property.
This paper discusses how this process worked in the case Bursa, setting forth some cases on the basis of research in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives. These cases demonstrate some of the patterns whereby the evkaf were converted into private property in the 19th century. Usurpation of the evkaf by the industrialists is one of them. Another is to sacrifice of the evkaf property for the modernization projects of the state, including turning them into state enterprises or leasing them to the private sector. The third way is the reserving the vakıf land for the immigrant settlements, and therefore depriving the evkaf of their revenues.
Was the commercialization of the evkaf an inevitable outcome of the process of modernization and integration to global capitalism in the 19th century? How might the preying on the vakıfs have brought about the social disputes and movements of the Ottoman period? With the analyses of the cases presented from Bursa, an Ottoman urban center of industrialization and global commerce of silk, the goal of this presentation is to open these questions for discussion.
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Sotirios Dimitriadis
In September 1890, the mosque of Makbul İbrahim Paşa was badly damaged in the great fire that swept through the city of Salonica. For the next fifteen years—a period otherwise marked by economic growth and spatial expansion for the cıty—the pious foundation (waqf) associated with the mosque failed to raise the necessary resources for its restoration, leaving the building to languish as a burnt shell. In my paper, I propose to explore this paradoxical decline of major mosque and waqf in a period of general economic growth. Using primary material from the Vakıf Genel Müdürlüğü archives in Ankara, as well as the Historical Archives of Macedonia, I seek to connect this decline to broader themes concerning the historiography of the Late Ottoman Empire, such as the history of the Ottoman reform period and the urban transformation of the empire’s major cities.
When Makbul İbrahim Paşa converted Salonica’s 8th century Haghia Sofia basilica into a mosque in 1526, he had made it the center of his personal pious foundation, endowing the complex with a significant amount of properties in Salonica. In the following century, the relation between the waqf, its administrators, and the local merchants and businessmen who rented its extensive properties determined much of the city’s economic activity. During the 1840s, however, as part of the Tanzimat reforms, the Ottoman state ended the autonomous function of awqaf across the empire, placing them under the jurisdiction of the newly founded Ministry of Pious Foundations. In the same period, Salonica’s commercial elites began to invest their earnings from trade and money-lending into local real-estate, creating a booming property market at odds with the complex structure of parallel ownership that had underpinned the waqf economy.
In my paper, I contend that the loss of institutional autonomy of the waqf, together with the challenge posed by the emerging real-estate market, can explain the gradual decline of the mosque and its foundation, to the point that its administrators proved unable to respond to the devastating results of the 1890 fire. By highlighting these two processes, I aim to contribute to the little-studied evolution of this crucial Islamic institution, the waqf, during the long and turbulent Ottoman nineteenth-century, and at the same time use my case-study as a lens with which to study the broader process of spatial transformation in a major Ottoman urban center.
