The Indian scholar and Khilafat activist Abul Kalam Azad wrote between the two world wars that in the modern period, after humanity had been brought into greater contact through new means of mobility and communication, the world remained divided. It was only the holy city of Mecca whose purpose was to “mend together humanity’s scattered hearts and dejected souls.” His understanding of the space of Mecca and the hijaz as a sacrosanct space which, like the moth around a flame, drew all to its center spoke at the same time to inter-war anxieties related to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire-Caliphate and the desire to seek out new forms of trans-regional association rooted in God’s transcendence and the imminent possibility of enacting his vision of a unified community of believers on earth. For Azad, and many other South Asian scholars, the holy cities, then, stood metonymically for the collective potentialities of the entire umma as opposed to the limited horizons of European empire and the nation form. Yet, Mecca’s role in the inter-war debate was all the more powerful because the meaning of its sacred topography was heavily contested within the global community of Muslims as a site of pilgrimage and a locus of multiple reverences. In this paper, I use the Saudi conquest of Mecca and Medina in 1924-25 and the destruction of the tombs of the Prophet’s companions in the Mu‘alla and Baqi‘ cemeteries as a moment of rupture at which competing understandings of the holy cities’ place in the community were laid bare. In particular, I look at the ways in which the destruction of the tombs provoked the ire and support of a diverse group of South Asian scholars and activists representing various reformist trends in Islam (eg. The Khilafat Movement, the Ahl-e Hadith, the Barelvis), who saw in the Saudi conquest both the auspicious beginnings of Muslim unity on the normative model of the Prophet and the rise of a new force of moral chaos and dissension. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s critical geography and his concept of “absolute space,” I argue that the conflict over the landscape of the holy cities was at the same time a conflict over possible future forms of association rooted in particular spatial-temporal orders that nonetheless were positioned against the normative order of the European state system. This paper will be based on a number of inter-war publications in Urdu and Arabic.

Museums in Turkey are today undergoing an opening and privatization that is emblematic of larger changes that are occurring across the country. While this opening brings with it a greater diversity of forums in which cultural groups have expression, it is not necessarily accompanied by a greater degree of liberalism. Using a set of museums in Gaziantep, a city in southeastern Turkey, as a case study, this paper explores present-day issues of national identity and projection of self through the urban spaces that are being created and restored for various purposes. Given that there has been a proliferation in recent years of museums and restoration projects in this particular city, Gaziantep provides an especially interesting framework for such a study. These museums and urban renewal projects, largely promoted by the municipal government, have been designed to both claim Gaziantep’s position in the national story and to secure its place internationally. Museums are used to assert a particular framework of multiculturalism, or a pluralism of peoples, origins, and traditions that exist, as well as emphasize certain historical narratives – all of which are fashioning a particular face to the rest of the nation, asserting its importance to the international community, and reshaping the city itself. In this study, I look at how the visitor is presented with historical narratives of the city in museums, restored neighborhoods, bazaars, and former churches and look specifically at the ways in which the city’s expression of self is closely tied to the Independence War and the former Armenian populations. I study the ways in which museums and urban projects are deliberately creating and perpetuating narratives while suppressing others in a manner that, while categorically different than the nationalist homogenizing force that swept early Republican museums, is still closely tied to stories that bind citizens to homeland and city to nation. Using Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s discussion of culture and commodity, as well as Esra Ozyurek’s arguments for social liberalism and nostalgia for Ottoman pluralism, and Fabian’s discussion of time as an “other-izing” force, this study tries to place the emerging role of Gaziantep’s vibrant museum culture into a larger museological framework that is both emblematic of Turkey today and provides an important case study in which nationalism and multiculturalism intersect in the dialectic of museums.

This paper will throw light on the nature of Ottoman neighborhood, mahalle, in the sixteenth century through the analysis of court records. The Ottoman mahalles have often formed a statistical basis for the social historians dealing with the pre-modern Ottoman urban history. While mahalle is usually interpreted as a communal and administrative ensemble with a mosque as its nucleus, the nature of mahalle itself has not been fully analyzed heretofore. This is because official documents, which researchers usually rely on, seldom reveal how one was defined and formed. The first volume of court records of Uskudar, a suburban district of Istanbul, contains approximately one thousand records of inheritance, purchase and sale, punishment, and so forth, from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. It also provides precious examples for the study of mahalle itself. First of all, mahalle system does not seem to have been widespread and established in Uskudar during the period. Unlike other contemporary Ottoman cities such as Bursa or Karaman, the early court records of Uskudar rarely registered mahalles where relevant persons resided. Considering Uskudar’s later volumes of the late sixteenth century registered mahalles methodically, the lack of mahalle names indicates the absence of such a social structure during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Secondly, attempts to create mahalles in Uskudar can be pointed out in the records. One of few examples that registered a name of mahalle concerns with an appointment of government official. When one was involved in formal affairs, his/her residence mahalle should have been recorded as a social identity, although in reality there was no definite mahalle organization there as mentioned. Uskudar was a newly-populated district after the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 where the development was at the hands of immigrants, not the central government. When the latter tried to put the district under its control for various reasons, such as taxation or security during the sixteenth century, loosely formed Uskudar was reorganized into mahalle-based society. Thus, a mahalle at the beginning can be regarded as an official and administrative organization, rather than local and spontaneous.