What can we learn about the intersection of everyday social practice and imperial power within the walls of favored Ottoman institutions? How is Ottoman authority sustained and/or contested in public bathhouses, coffeehouses, and imarets? How do these institutions treat social difference in the form of Muslim and non-Muslim, and male and female, and urban and rural identities? Drawing upon interdisciplinary methods and archival research, the panelists will show how many local and global trends converged within the bathhouses, coffeehouses, and imarets situated along caravan routes and major arteries in the empire. The panel begins with an examination of the structure and uses of the coffeehouses in Ottoman Aleppo, with special attention to the Coffeehouse of the Waqf of Iphsir Pasha, Aleppo (1653). The rise of new commodities, sociability, and leisure culture in Aleppo's coffeehouses will be linked to the wider global consumption in coffee as well as to the broader architectural environment of the city. The second paper examines urban bathhouses through the lens of eighteenth century bathhouse regulations that sought to segregate Muslim women from non-Muslim women. The author will examine the juridical basis for barring mixed confessional bathing and place it within the context of Ottoman anxiety over the transgression of non-Muslims in public space. The next paper maps bathhouses in Ottoman Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama using historical and archaeological methods to document commonalities and differences. Drawing upon a database of rural baths in Ottoman Syria, the author will examine the ways urban and rural bathhouses were Ottomanized as well as the ways rural bathhouses adapted to local needs and tastes. Another paper explores imperial soup kitchens (imarets) situated along the main pilgrimage and trade routes in Syria. Using endowment deeds, chronicles and travel accounts, the author examines social inclusion or exclusion within imperial public kitchens and mosques. The panel finishes with a discussion of social gatherings in the private space of the home, including courtyards and gardens in sixteenth century Damascus with special attention to ethnic differences between Ottomans and local Arabs who encountered each other in these gatherings and the power relations brokered through social networking. Through the lens of multiple spaces, the panel examines coffeehouses, bathhouses, imarets, and private homes as loci of global and imperial interests that are sustained and, at other times, contested in popular rural and urban social practice.
Although there is a growing body of literature treating the human networks and cultural projects connecting the Ottoman capital to its provinces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provincial integration in earlier periods is often seen as a predominantly bureaucratic and legal affair. My paper aims to offer an account of the social and cultural aspects of Ottoman incorporation by examining encounters between Rumis and abn?' al-‘arab in social gatherings in sixteenth-century Damascene homes.
Held in the reception rooms and gardens of Ottoman residences, these gatherings (often referred to as maj?lis, sing. majlis) were key venues for the exchange of ideas, the establishment of patronage networks, and the performance of power. This took on particular significance in the context of an expanding empire: as one of the main points of entry into a new locale for Ottomans on the move, privately-held social gatherings often became important spaces for cultural and political encounters. How did local residents and appointed officials, often with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, meet within these spaces? How did governors and qadis, as new arrivals within a vibrant and sophisticated intellectual community, use them to assert their authority? What were the rules that governed these encounters, and how were these rules established by a heterogenous group of participants?
Sixteenth-century Ottoman sociability is more than a mere curiosity: travel accounts, biographical dictionaries, and etiquette manuals all testify to the importance of proper behavior, polite conversation, and intellectual acuity for garnering respect, exerting power, and securing appointments. By examining the etiquette, the attendees, and the intellectual exchanges of social gatherings in Damascene homes, I hope to shed light on the complex social and cultural dynamics governing the early period of Ottoman rule in Bil?d al-Sh?m.
The coffee trade and the rise of the coffeehouse in the Middle East have been the subject of several important recent studies. They address issues such as consumption, trade, urbanism, political activity by non-state actors, etc. My study focuses on the development of the coffeehouse (15th-17th centuries) as part of the social history of space and architecture. Having appeared in the Islamic realm in the fifteenth century, this novel urban institution accompanied the spread of coffee from the shores of the Red sea to the Mediterranean and beyond, carried by transnational networks of trade, religion, and taste. Once transplanted into Europe, the coffeehouse emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries as the forum central to the rise of the “bourgeois public sphere” and the development of modern political culture. The coffeehouse’s inscription at the very origins of modernity has shrouded its Islamic beginnings and controversial early life. Borrowing elements of social practice from a variety of contexts, including mystical gatherings, the coffeehouse fostered a new type of sociability characterized by a hospitality of peers. The coffeehouse constituted the point of convergence of many historical vectors: the marketing of a new commodity, the consumption of a new beverage, the democratization of hospitality, leisure, and the popularization of elite pastimes. Mapping the urban location of coffeehouses suggests that they appeared on critical commercial arteries in tandem with other services: they represented an urban marker whose rise or fall indicated the importance of thoroughfares, or the reorientation of economic centers. Very few specimens of early coffeehouse architecture exist today. The study focuses on some early extant examples in Aleppo, and particularly the exceptionally well preserved and documented Coffeehouse of the Waqf of Iphsir Pasha, Aleppo (1653). This examination reveals that this institution built upon the vocabulary of Ottoman architecture to create a new type of semi-public space, characterized by an unprecedented accessibility and openness to the street. These major innovations became naturalized in Ottoman urban architecture.
While many scholars have analyzed gender and non-Muslim status as discreet social categories, this study explores the intersecting axes of gender-class-religion within a series of nine eighteenth century bathhouse orders registered in Aleppo’s shari‘a courts. The eighteenth century witnessed the revival of waning sartorial codes as the Ottoman Empire sought to preserve social privileges under threat by non-Muslims and women who flouted imperial prescriptions. Ancient sumptuary laws were revived at a time when the empire was faced with political crises, religious revivalism, and showing signs of early experimentation with modernization. Aleppo’s shari‘a courts and the city’s bathhouse keeper’s guild were tasked with monitoring transgressions within the city’s bathhouses. The empire would later disband the sumptuary laws altogether soon after this brief experiment. Increased regulation of women and non-Muslim minorities can be found in bathing regulations that mandated separate bath sundries for Muslims and non-Muslims and, more severely, strict prohibitions on co-confessional bathing for women. Aleppo’s bathhouse regulations are placed within the wider context of Islamic and Ottoman discourses on nudity (‘awra) and co-confessional bathing. Several jurists declared that non-Muslim (dhimmi) women were to be treated as unrelated men and, therefore, forbidden to gaze upon a naked Muslim woman. These debates are included in order to further expose the legal scaffolding upon which the Ottoman rulings were constructed.
