New Perspectives on Gender, Politics, and Medicine in the Ottoman Empire: 1876-1919
Panel 127, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 20 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Scholars who have written on gender, politics, and medicine in late Ottoman history have long argued that the Empire waged an uphill struggle to reconcile Islam with modernity. In particular, they contend that conservatives, Sufis, and other "reactionaries" often frustrated the attempts of secular Westernized elites to reform the Empire by liberating Muslim women and by restructuring political and socioeconomic institutions to match those of Europe. Only recently have scholars begun to revise this view and unearthed evidence that some Sufis, conservative, and even Muslim orthodox thinkers supported proposals to modernize Muslim societies and institutions. Our panel seeks to build upon these efforts.
The first, "The Wali's Wife: Gender, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, and the Ottoman Empire" examines the role of the female followers, wives, and daughters of Shaykh Khalid, the founder of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya Sufi order. This study highlights the role of gender in the order's doctrines and the role of one of Khalid's wives, Khadija. She not only consolidated the movement financially after Khalid's death in 1827, but she also assumed a position of leadership in the Ottoman Empire that rivaled her husband's in importance.
The second presentation, "Islam Mecmuasi and late Ottoman Discourses on Women" questions the assertion that Islamists opposed the Young Turk government's efforts to lessen social and familial pressures on women. It argues that certain Islamists proposed reformist approaches within the framework of Islamic law and their suggestions had a political impact on the status of Ottoman women.
The third presentation?"Musa Kazim on Jihad and late Ottoman political thought"?reexamines Musa Kazim's role in politics during the Young Turk era. It explores how this senior Muslim scholar framed Islamic legal doctrines to win broad public support for the Empire's entry into World War I?even from individuals who were otherwise skeptical of the Young Turks' policies.
The final presentation, "Besim Omer and the Elaboration of Ottoman Plague Policy in the late Ottoman Empire" examines the ideas of this leading Ottoman thinker, who stressed that quarantines were institutions of state sovereignty. This study finds that Omer used Islamic principles, international law, and anti-colonialist rhetoric to persuade Ottoman audiences in 1898 that his government's quarantine policies not only prevented the spread of disease but also protected the Empire's political interests.
Ultimately, we believe that our panel will help shed light on critical but understudied players in the politics and society of the late Ottoman Empire.
The Wali's Wife: Gender, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, and the Ottoman Empire during the Nineteenth Century
This paper proposes to study the role of women in the doctrines and success of the nineteenth-century Sufi saint (or Wali), Shaykh Khalid (1776-1827), and his brotherhood, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya. Though women are almost completely absent from scholarship on Shaykh Khalid's life, women were instrumental in the dissemination of his brotherhood and served as teachers, administrators, financiers, and political leaders. One of Khalid's daughters, Fatima, was a prominent teacher, while the largest contributor to Khalid's properties in Baghdad was a woman. Even more impressive is the case of Khadija, one of Khalid's wives. She oversaw his properties and pious endowment after his death and forged close ties with the elites of the Ottoman Empire.
By analyzing the writings of Shaykh Khalid and his followers, court records and ferman, I will illustrate the role of women in the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. I will argue that the prominence of these women should come as no surprise, since there is nothing intrinsic to Shaykh Khalid's teachings or the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya's devotional practices which precludes women from participating in the order or in political life generally. Just as there is a silsila, or formal chain of spiritual descent, from Khalid to his contemporary male disciples, there is an active silsila of female shaykhs that dates back to his lifetime. I will also focus on how Khadija assumed close control over Khalid's properties after his death, won exemptions from military services and financial privileges for Khalid's family, and forged ties with Ottoman elites, including female members of the Ottoman royal family. When Khadija died at the remarkable age of 101 in 1891, Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) asked a leading Istanbul intellectual to compose a poem eulogizing his decision to uphold her request to rebuild Khalid's tomb.
Finally, I hope that my paper will begin a process of reframing how scholars look at Sufi orders during the nineteenth century. While there is scholarship on the role of women in Sufism generally, there remains little work on Sufism and women in the nineteenth century and how leading Sufi figures viewed women and their proper place in society. Ultimately, this type of work will help us better understand the development of Muslim societies during a critical period in the modern history of the Middle East.
The conventional view presents an image of oppressed women reduced to slavery during the Ottoman rule and completely freed by men under the Turkish Republic. More recent revisionist scholarship has revealed the active role of women outside the domestic realm. Especially the Ottoman court records have extensively portrayed an image of Ottoman women outspoken and vigorously seeking her rights. This presentation aims to contribute to this literature by looking into the Islamist reformist discourses on women in the late Ottoman publications.
One of the leading Islamist reformist publications in the late Ottoman Empire was Islam Mecmuasi (Islamic Review). Edited by a Kazan Tatar emigre, Halim Sabit, and funded by the Committee of Union and Progress, this journal quickly became the venue for publishing Turkist and Islamist reform ideas. Ziya Gokalp's articles on the "social methodology of Islamic law" and Halim Sabit's Islamist contributions to the secularization of the Ottoman polity constitute the foremost influence of Islam Mecmuasi on late Ottoman intellectual and political life.
On the issue of women, too, Islam Mecmuasi presented ideas that challenged traditional views on women. The articles in Islam Mecmuasi exerted reformist ideas expressed within an Islamist framework. This presentation will discuss specifically the articles on women and their reformist proposals in Islam Mecmuasi. At the same time Islamist reactions in Sirat-i Mustakim and Sebilurresad will be analyzed.
The reformist ideas brought forth in Islam Mecmuasi served as guidelines for the CUP government and in some cases these ideas were materialized through government acts. The connection between Mansurizade Said's reformist ideas on polygamy and CUP government's limitations on polygamy in 1917 is particularly remarkable in this context. Thus this presentation will explore the impact the reformist Islam Mecmuasi had specifically in the realm of gender. The sources that this presentation relies on include published articles in late Ottoman periodicals, such as Turk Yurdu, Islam Mecmuasi, Sebilurresad, and Sirat-i Mustakim, as well as the unpublished personal archives of Halim Sabit, the editor of Islam Mecmuasi.
Historians have generally interpreted the former Seyhulislam Musa Kazim's extensive essay justifying Jihad against the Entente in November 1914 as an attempt to rally support in the Empire among the Arabs and provoke Muslim rebellion in the British and French colonies. Scholars have yet to fully explore the impact of this issue on non-Arab Muslims within the Ottoman Empire itself. Many of the most politically active Ottomans in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century were recent refugees from former imperial territories in the Balkans and Caucasus. They had fled the Russians and Balkan Christian armies who often threatened their livelihood after defeats such as the 1877-1878 Russo-Ottoman War, and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. As a result of these defeats the refugees believed prior Ottoman official pronouncements of confessional equality and liberal government triggered the wars by signaling weakness to Pan-Slavic and Christian separatist movements. The refugees therefore tended to oppose the Young Turk and Tanzimat governments that made these statements and support the Pan-Islamists who sought to preserve Muslim dominance in the Ottoman Empire. The refugees' threat to the government was demonstrated a few decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War when, in 1877, they supported Sultan Abdulhamid II's suspension of the Ottoman Constitution and many liberal reforms. Thus, Musa Kazim, aware of a similar threat to his Young Turk reformist government, used his justification of Jihad to appeal to these skeptics to join in armed struggle against their former oppressors and promised them the opportunity to liberate their lost homelands. His extensive interpretation of the Quran proved effective in mobilizing the refugee population by claiming that their struggle to retake their lands was a universal goal of the Muslim community at home as well as abroad.
Besim Omer (1862-1940), a leading Ottoman medical thinker wrote a seminal article on plague for the widely-read journal Servet-i Funun in May 1898. Omer, who was trained both in France and at Istanbul's Military Medical School (Mekteb-i Tibbiye-i Sahane), penned the most influential Ottoman public response to Alexander Yersin's discovery of the bubonic plague in 1894. While Omer accepted Yersin's biological explanation of the bubonic plague as a bacillus transmitted by rats and fleas to its human victims, Omer placed the history of the plague within an Ottoman historical context. His work should therefore be viewed not just by empirical scientific standards but also by analyzing to what extent geopolitical and social factors influenced his perception of the disease. Omer, like many of his fellow Ottoman medical reformers believed that his government's participation in international quarantine system was supported by Islamic principles which called for preventative measures against the epidemic disease. Omer applauded earlier Ottoman successes in this regard-such as the Ottoman establishment of a maritime quarantine in 1838 and its membership in the international sanitary board from 1842 onwards. Yet, Omer also highlighted a critical change in the Ottoman perception of the plague. Whereas most earlier Ottoman writers avoided discussing whether the Ottomans were a focus of the disease, Omer posited that plague generally spread to the empire from foreign lands. This presentation will argue that Omer's argument was based on the geopolitical realities of the time. As the proceedings of the International Sanitary Conferences and other Western language sources show, many foreign medical authorities claimed that colonized countries such as Egypt and India were previously focuses of the plague. They often implied that only enlightened Western public health policies could prevent the unsanitary conditions in which the infected rats and fleas flourished. Omer's response that the Ottomans were able to independently implement their own sanitary measures was an important ideological justification for maintaining the Empire's sovereignty.
