This paper focuses on the opera and theatre-activities in Istanbul in comparison with Cairo in the 1860s-1890s. Using the institution of musical theatre as public space the paper discovers how modernity, colonial administration, cosmopolitanism and popular reception of Western music were intertwined in the two capitals in similar and at the same time very different ways based on archival research. This endeavour also aims to critically test the concept of histoire croisée (Werner-Zimmerman) in this period in the Middle East. Thus Istanbul is approached here as a part of a network in the Eastern Mediterranean where not only political but cultural competition connected the participants. Istanbul’s flourishing theatre culture reached its peak with Güllü Agop’s Ottoman Theatre (1867-1884, Matin And) and although there was no special opera house, operas were given since the 18th century in different public theatres, one early example being the Naum theatre in the 1840s which was also supported by Abdülmecid (Turan-Komsouglu). With the transformation of the army, Donizetti Pasha and other European composers served Sultans Mahmud II and Abdülmecid (Arac?). During Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), censure had its effect on opera and theatre activities but nevertheless Istanbul was often visited by foreign troupes and had its own music activities. In Egypt, after the British occupation (1882) the Cairo Opera House (1869) became a public space which was not only confined to European visiting groups but increasingly were used by the local communities. There were Maronite and Jewish balls but also – after the 1870s short experimental period (Sadgrove) – new efforts to present pieces in Arabic for an Arab audience thus this period is the real birth of Arab theatre (Najm). These offers by Al-Qabbani (1884-5) and later by Sulayman Haddad (1894) were controlled and sometimes refused by the authorities. However, occasionally, “Turkish” groups were visiting from Istanbul as well like that of the Armenian Eléazar Mélikian in 1888. In and between these two cities, networks of impresario, political and cultural newspapers, Ottoman propaganda and resistance met in a mixture which one may call the transformation of public space. The theatres and the Opera House offered also a good market for European and non-European artists thus created a locality where money, entertainment and politics met. In the Ottoman and Arab publics we find common strategies of resistance but also common reception of European-style entertainment as civilisation and “culture”.

This paper, on the basis of their publications and yet unexplored correspondence, shall examine the transnational networks of selected German émigré professors who entered Istanbul after 1933 as part of a group of up to hundred Western academics. As part of the Turkish modernization project they were put in charge of establishing Istanbul Üniversitesi as a Western-style university: a specific configuration of academic exile which has received rather little scholarly attention. Guided by questions of access and accessibility, to resources and audiences, the paper will show how the opportunity structures of such networks in interplay with the local conditions shaped the specific exile experience of the émigré professors in question. By looking at their work and the different networks in which the literary historian Erich Auerbach, the orientalist Hellmut Ritter, the sociologist Alexander Rüstow and the administrative scientist Ernst Reuter were involved, it will highlight the scope and limits of their professional endeavors such as reforming their respective discipline’s education tracks while working on monograph projects (Rüstow, Auerbach), reorganizing the Istanbul archives (Ritter) or the city’s infrastructure (Reuter). Conceptualized as histoire croisée, the paper investigates into the mutually constitutive local and transnational levels on which the professors acted and by which they were affected. By investigating into the specificity of Istanbul as place of exile, the paper presents a critique of an overly generic and normative notion of ‘intellectual exile’ as it repeatedly surfaces in accounts of the history of intellectual migration. Within the latter the academic migration from countries under Nazi influence to the Western allied countries exerts considerable and problematic influence in terms of providing a ‘benchmark experience’ whose local specificity tends to be ignored. Similarly and most notably Edward Said, who sometimes explicitly referred to Erich Auerbach’s activity in Istanbul, has described ‘intellectual exile’ as a marginal, half-detached and half-involved position. Eventually, it is less understood as a concrete historical experience than idealized as a conditio sine qua non of the critical intellectual as such, generalized as a ‘mental state’ allowing for critical insights. Even the critical ‘re-localization’ of Auerbach’s exile experience within the Turkish context (Konuk) still suffered from such normative implications. Instead, exploring the local and transnational level alike, the paper sets out to capture and differentiate the levels of marginalization, forms of engagement and critical reflexivity of different émigrés in Istanbul in the first place.

Crossing the Mental Borders of 19th century Istanbul: Migrant Ideas from the Margins of the Empire To the Margins of the Capital The study of the Ottoman Empire in her catch- up strategies with the rising powerful forces in the late 19th century leads us to examine both the new understanding of policy change and the new policy makers. A study on the émigré intellectuals, constituting a group of these policy makers from the lost territories of the Ottoman empire in the 1880s, reflects us their rivalry with the traditional imperial elites in Istanbul which is significant to investigate how cultural backgrounds of metropolitan intellectual elites clashed with the orientations of émigré intellectual coming from the margins of the empire. This paper aims to mingle together a new theoretical outlook with a new empirical basis. The recent literature about the émigré intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire focuses on their role in disseminating Pan-Turkist ideas and limits the research agenda within the limits of nationalism studies. This paper aims to provide a new framework for this social group as an ascending technocratic intelligentsia positioning themselves against the existing intellectual setting in Istanbul. Thus, I propose the idea that intellectual milieu of Istanbul in the last quarter of the 19th century can be also problematized in terms of intensifying tensions between the two wings of intellectual strata: the existing courtly intellectual circles coming from the ‘human science backgrounds’ and the ascending technocratic intelligentsia constituted by the intellectuals crossing the Balkan Peninsula and Caucasia. In order to have a broader perspective towards the rise of this new technocratic intelligentsia in the cosmopolitan structure of Istanbul, this study combines the new sources ranging from the manuscripts from Library of Kazan University to the records of Translation Office in Istanbul. Through the use of these new sources, I aim to explore their individual background and their products before their life in Istanbul and to have a different outlook for what they have produced in their later career. Contrary to the existing presumptions seeing nineteenth century Istanbul within a framework of a deviant or peripheral metropolitan zone in terms of intellectual and scholarly activities, through the examination of these marginal figures, I propose a different view for Istanbul to emphasize how, on the one hand, it resembled other capital cities in general, and how, on the other hand, its specific historical and geographical situation individualized it.

The aim of the proposed paper is to shed new light on the still unstudied and ill understood cosmopolitan character of Istanbul in the 19th century through the lenses of Arab intellectuals and officials. Despite the well attested residence of a larger number of Arabs in the Ottoman capital, very little is know as to the networks into which they were absorbed or which they established, as to how these scholars and officials integrated in the local urban fabric of political and other institutions, and as to how they shaped and were shaped by the very cultural and social milieu of the city. Whether it is possible to speak of the marginality of Arabs in Istanbul is a thesis the paper seeks to deliberate. With the crisis of legitimization of the Sublime Port, and regardless of intensified occupation to safeguard the Arab provinces, the official Ottoman attitude changed regarding the ‘Arab-Islamic connection’, i.e. the relevance of the Arabic language, of Islam, and Arabo-Islamic heritage and civilization. Thus Arab intellectuals, scholars, and officials who resided in the city faced an ambiguous situation that affected their status in the city as is effected Arab self-perception as well as in the perception of Ottoman officials and public figures. More specifically then, the focus of the paper is twofold. Thematically, it explores the intricate relationship of Arab intellectuals in Istanbul with other local institutions and intellectuals as well as with other ‚foreigners’ residing in or passing through the city between the 1860-1900. The central figure through whose biographical data, personal networks and intellectual work this situation will be discussed is Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (d. 1887), who spent the last 20 years of his life in Istanbul. Theoretically, it explores the potentials of the concept of histoire croisée to develop a thicker description of the relationship between Arab modernists and Ottoman reformers and multilayered approach that avoids the center –periphery paradigm for the case of Arab Ottoman history and culture.