Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stated in 2017 that his company was “competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” Just a few years earlier Jonathan Crary warned that sleep is the last barrier protecting us from being fully absorbed into a new configuration of non-stop capitalism that threatens to reduce us to full-time producers and consumers. Given that the 24/7 society has already invaded our bedrooms, Crary’s seems more relevant than ever. The rapid changes in sleep patterns is prompting a flurry of new research into the world of slumber in the humanities and social sciences. Based on a book project that is nearing completion, the proposed talk is a first attempt to bring the Middle East into the conversation. Relying on medical texts, court records, travel accounts, court and popular poetry, and even treatises on statecraft, the study offers a first peek into the largely invisible world of sleep in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on eighteenth century Istanbul and Jerusalem as two - very different - case studies. In a society that was based, at least officially, on strict hierarchies of religion, gender, age and social class, sleep may appear at first sight to be the only common denominator, the one natural constant in a world of socially-determined variables. But it was not. The night in general, and sleep in particular did not lie outside the power matrix of the day. The only “natural” thing about sleep was the biological need for it. Everything else, from sleeping time to sleeping place, from bedtime fears to sleep disturbances, depended on one’s social position. My main argument is that in contrast to common ideas about the sound sleep of “simple people,” the lower one's social status, the poorer the quality of her or his sleep was likely to be. Historicizing sleep in the Middle East may contribute not only to our understanding of this crucial aspect of the history of the region, but also to wider contemporary discussions. While our bedrooms are indeed being invaded, we should be careful not to contrast dystopic accounts of a sleepless future with naive portrayals of the supposedly peaceful slumber of times past. Any conversation about the future of repose must consider its history, fraught as it was with inequalities.

The history of mental illness and psychiatry in the Middle East in particular reflects the multiple ways in which colonial governments and modern nation-states defined their national projects and relationships with their subjects. With the advent of British colonial rule in 1882, and the British professionalization of mental health, the responsibility for treating mental illnesses was placed within the hands of British, and British-trained, male doctors who acquired increasing legitimacy. A new medical discourse was created in which women were the objects of the medical gaze of these men. As the Annual Reports of the Mental Disease Administration and the Lunacy Division during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt will attest, women, as both patients and nurses, were a central part of the new medical and social order that was being defined and constructed by British authorities. This study will therefore illustrate how gender norms were affected by the changes wrought by the professionalization of psychiatry. The study will further demonstrate how the professionalization of mental health, as practiced in the asylum by male doctors who possessed medical authority over women’s minds and bodies, was different from popular healing methods such as the za?r, in which women were the primary providers and patients. It will also reveal how the psychiatric profession, and the men that represented it, constructed a modern trope of the “new woman” in Egypt. As Egyptian psychiatrists began to perceive of themselves as members of a distinct medical profession, they began to express their medical and non-medical views on the pages of the burgeoning press. Emerging mental health constructs were thus being transferred from the hallways of the asylum to the homes of Egyptian families through the pages of the Egyptian press. To understand these constructions, the study will make use of journals printed in Cairo and Alexandria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These include al-Muqtat?af, al-S?ih?h?a, al-Mu?ayyad, al-Majallah al-S?ih?h?i?yah, al-Majallah al-T?ibbi?yah al-Mis?ri?yah, and al-Bala?gh al-Isbu??i?. The study will further make use of primary archival material, including government memoranda and administrative reports, in Da?r al-Watha??iq al-Qawmi?yah in Egypt and in the National Archives at Kew Gardens in the UK. In addition, Lunacy Division Reports, Reports of the Medical Officer of Health in Cairo, and Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health with specific sections on the “Lunatic Asylum” will also be accessed at the Wellcome Library in the UK.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman government began to settle semi-nomadic pastoralists in the plains and mountains around Adana (Çukurova). At various points the Ottoman government used both persuasion and coercion to accomplish its ends. These efforts intensified in the 1860s in the aftermath of the Crimean War with the creation of new institutions. Until recently, most approaches to this campaign of forced settlement has depended on the analysis of official documents, such as the reports of military-state commissions like Firka-i Islahiye (Reform Division). These documents reflect the vantage points of the bureaucrats and soldiers of the Ottoman government, but not the experiences of the nomads who were forcibly settled. My research attempts to tell the other half of the story by exploring oral sources like turku (folk songs), agit (elegies) and other forms of poetry produced by tribesmen and tribeswomen that were passed from generation to generation. More specifically, in my paper I explore the oral materials of the Avsarlar tribe, one of the semi-nomadic groups in Southern Anatolia. One of the most famous producers of this ‘folk history’ was Dadaloglu (c. 1785- c. 1868). Dadaloglu and other ozans (folk-singers) of the Avsarlar tribe had their own narratives to trace what happened in the mid-19th century in Southern Anatolia, specifically around Çukurova. When it was described as “civilizing mission” with reforms in the region from the state perspective, folk songs of Avsarlar constructed a narrative by bloody coercion which not only costed them lives but also their cultural identity. I will lay out this alternative perspective and compare this narrative with stories contained in the Ottoman official documents. At the heart of this paper is a story of Ottoman settlement policies (especially the Firka-i Islahiye) and how these played out in the lives and culture of the Avsarlar people.