It is often supposed that nighttime in early modern Ottoman cities was a socially dead period that came to life only with the arrival of Western forms of nocturnal conviviality. Arus Yumul, for example, argued that during the nineteenth century, the Ottoman ruling class “introduced nightlife into a society where night-time sociability was practically non-existent.” In this presentation I argue that although urban order indeed encouraged introversion during the dark hours, there were nevertheless traditions of nightlife that drew their meaning from transgressing this very order. In the first part of the presentation I outline the contours of urban daily routine. In contrast to present-day, artificially-lit societies, in the early-modern Ottoman Empire day life and night life were clearly distinguished from one another on a number of levels which seem to have reinforced each other. On all these levels sunset represented a meaningful moment; it was a time of closure. Sunset marked the termination of the daily cycle of religious worship, the end of another round of clock hours (which were commonly counted from sunset to sunset), and the conclusion of the calendar day. Moreover, darkness brought an end to the daily cycle of social life. With sunset the gates of cities, roofed bazaars, quarters, neighborhoods, and courtyards were shut and the call for the night prayer signaled the almost complete evacuation of the streets. However, at least among the elites there developed elaborate traditions of nightly conviviality, the most common being the meclis. The meclis was a semi-institutionalized gathering of close companions which was usually held overnight in private gardens or houses. Using extracts from eighteenth century gazels, I will show that for its selected participants, and within its clearly delineated spatial and temporal boundaries, the meclis allowed, indeed encouraged excessive behaviors that would be unacceptable beyond its confines. The night-gathering derived much of its meaning from the inversion of temporal routine, an inversion that was clearly the privilege of the privileged. The ability to consciously transgress the norms of the commoners served the exclusive collective identity of those engaged in these activities. On the methodological level, the presentation demonstrates how divan poetry can be used alongside more ‘traditional’ sources, to go beyond the level of observable patterns and reconstruct the world of perceptions that underlay these patterns.

In this paper I argue that some of the novels of the Arabic Nahda period, and especially those of Nu'man Abdu al-Qasatili of Damascus, were in effect an effort to re-envision masculinity and the role of the “new man,” an attempt that was embedded within a discourse of femininity and the “new woman.” While the discourse regarding women and femininity in this period was carried out openly in both non-fictional and fictional texts, views and reflections concerning men and masculinity were overwhelmingly expressed in fictional texts. By inspecting these novels, historians can construct the discourse of masculinity in the Arab provinces under the Ottoman Empire, which so far has been little explored. I view Qasatili's novels as an integral cultural product of the ‘renaissance’ period and as a major medium for the renegotiation of gender. Thus I see novels of this period as fictional and factual texts and as cultural artefacts which offer powerful examples of how a culture “thinks” at a particular historical moment. I approach these novels as historical tools, which enable us to reconstruct the contours of this gender discourse and re-evaluate its significance for modern Arab gender relations. I argue first that in these novels, written during the late nineteenth century by the first generation of young Arab novelists, two models of masculinity, an older generation’s and that of a younger generation, are competing for hegemony. The authors posited and offer two alternative paths to the victory of modern Arab masculinity: a “revolutionary,” confrontational mode, and an “evolutionary,” sequential one. Secondly, I argue that in order to mitigate the anxiety produced by this struggle, these novelists first took up the primordial concept of masculinity, imbued it with new gender significance, and posited it in their novels as the model for the modern Arab masculinity. Concomitantly, they deployed the figure of the young “new woman” both as a vehicle to enable this shift from the older generations model of masculinity to that of the younger generation, and to displace the generational unease from young men onto young women. Finally, within the context of this panel, this paper represents an attempt to bridge not only the disciplinary divide, but also the lingual one. Discussing the literature of the Arabic Nahda within its historical Ottoman context will serve to illuminate communalities and differences between literary works published in Ottoman-Turkish and in Arabic and stimulate further comparative study.

Dissatisfied and frustrated with the censorship regimen established by the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II, Halid Ziya (U?akl?gil) (1867-1945), a well-canonized litterateur of the late-Ottoman Empire, wrote a novel, titled Mai ve Siyah (Blue and Black, 1897), depicting the life of a young man who strives to be a successful poet but fails miserably in the end, both in his career and personal life. The protagonist's failure, stemming from his unsympathetic surroundings rather than his own incompetence, constitutes a channel for Halid Ziya to express, in very implicit terms, his discontent with the tight control of the press and with the predominance of outdated literary values. The writing of this particular novel was, in fact, such an insatiable urge for its author that it “deprived [him] of tranquility, with an absolute necessity to be born.” (from H.Z.'s memoirs) Following its serialized publication in the Servet-i Fünun (The Wealth of Knowledge) journal, the self-censoring author managed to escape the keen eyes of government censorship. Yet Mai ve Siyah became part of a wave of heated discussion on the directions that literature (and poetry, in particular) should take in relation to the impact of the West and to the local literary heritage. The novel was criticized in terms of both its gloomy representation of the literary sphere of its time, and for its subscription to a highly elitist narrative language. The “dekadanlar” (decadents) controversy, named after an accusation directed by the famous Ahmed Midhat Efendi at the Servet-i Fünun writers and poets, the discussion seems to have divided litterateurs and intellectuals into opposing camps. In this presentation, I will analyze the literary field in the Ottoman capital during the last decade of the nineteenth century, which Mai ve Siyah both was generated within, and takes as its subject. The term “literary field,” coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, allows literary scholars to incorporate social, economic, political and other historically significant factors into their analyses, without lapsing into the reductionism of a “historian's approach” towards literature. Having a novel as the starting point for such an attempt to overcome the disciplinary divide will, in fact, not only prevent an often-seen isolation of the literary work from the environment of its production but it will also caution historians against a crude interpretation of fiction as a mirror of reality.