Leisure culture in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle East was instrumental in the construction of perceptions of law and society, Orient and Occident, modern and traditional, and it brought to light conflicts between colonial authorities, national bourgeoisies and the lower classes over issues of public morality. Public spaces such as coffeehouses, nightclubs, and hashish dens have been debated – accepted and/or condemned – by Middle East societies ever since these institutions' emergence in the region.
Presentations in this panel examine four types of establishments: Coffeehouses, nightclubs, Hashish dens, and music concerts. Drawing on an array of archival sources, one presentation will trace the history of Cairo’s coffeehouses as an urban space in the intersection of leisure culture, public norms, and engagement with the state. It will focus on the frictions between European-style, “modern” coffeehouses and what became “traditional” ones, in terms of forms of sociability and leisure practices, which marked different social classes. It will also discuss how Egyptian coffeehouses became spaces for political activism, inducing the state to put them under strict surveillance and policing.
Another presentation deals with the history of hashish consumption in late Ottoman and interwar Palestine, juxtaposing the two periods. By drawing on a variety of untapped sources, this paper places particular emphasis on the way hashish was conceptualized by Palestinians, Jews, and the British. Then, this paper demonstrates the extent to which these conceptualizations were crucial for the delineation of accepted moral boundaries and the production of images of deviancy-cum-criminality. By identifying hashish as an Oriental vice, the British sought to exclude hashish and other mind-altering substances (such as opium) from acceptable social behavior, an effort which they shared with mainstream Zionists. At the same time, Palestinians and marginal Jews who consumed hashish challenged these boundaries and pushed them to their limit.
The last presentation discusses the role of European refugees, who arrived in Iran during World War II, in establishing nightlife culture, in which Tehran took a leading role until the late 1970s. In the 1940s mostly Polish refugees arrived in Iran. Shortly afterwards they opened establishments such as nightclubs, cafés, and cabarets. Initially, these institutions were designed to cater to both the Polish community and Allied service soldiers. Although these establishments faced harsh criticism from Iranian nationalists and clerics, Iran’s emerging urban middle class embraced that culture and helped to cultivate and localize it.
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Dr. Lior B. Sternfeld
In 1941, following the Nazi invasion to the Soviet Union, Stalin granted amnesty to about 850,000 Polish prisoners in Siberia. Those Poles were sent to the Gulags in 1939 for being “Class Enemies” in the Soviet occupied zone in eastern Poland. “Class Enemies” was a broad definition for bourgeoisie, artists, industrialists, and essentially everyone the Soviets did not want in their occupation zone. After two years in the gulags and great suffering they had been given a chance to rebuild their life; 400,000 of them in Iran and 450,000 in India. In Iran they settled mostly in Tehran and Esfahan. Their impact on the rapid changes in Iranian urban life and cultural tapestry was immense.
Shortly after their arrival the Polish refugees started to establish institutions such as bars, cafes, and cabarets to cater to their communities who looked to restore the lifestyle they had prior to the forced exile. However, the potential market for such life style was much broader than the Polish community alone. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Allied armies found comfort and entertainment in Cafe Polonia in downtown Tehran or the Polish cabarets, theatres, and bars. The emerging urban middle class in Iran also found this lifestyle fitting squarely with the cosmopolitan vision they had for their capital and their country.
This development also invoked an interesting discourse of criticism on behalf of nationalist circles, as well as religious elites who criticized the immorality of those activities.
This presentation will discuss the flourishing of this type of leisure culture in Iran in the war years and afterwards, until the revolution in 1979.
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Dr. Alon Tam
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century coffeehouses in Cairo functioned as a hub for politicians, revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, middle- and upper-class men and women, workers, immigrants, and people from different ethnic, racial, and religious communities. Indeed, coffeehouses were more than just a meeting place, they were a social, political, and cultural institution in Egypt, that bore the impact of sweeping processes of change occurring within Egyptian society, including Westernization, economic globalization, modernization, and reform. For example, new, European-style, coffeehouses were part and parcel of the immense urban development projects that, starting in the 1860s, created new neighborhoods in Cairo, modeled after European capitals, especially Paris.
Drawing on an array of archival sources, such as Egyptian secret police reports and informants reports from the 1890s and 1910s, British intelligence reports from 1919, photographs, travel guides, maps, and statistical yearbooks, this presentation will trace the history of Cairo’s coffeehouses, roughly between the 1860s and the 1960s, as an urban space in the intersection of leisure culture, public norms, and engagement with the state. It will describe how the European-style, “modern” coffeehouses, established by European immigrants, brought in new forms of sociability that changed gender dynamic in the public sphere, as well as new foodways, new leisure practices, and new urban design. It will discuss how these new practices marked elite social class, and contrasted with those coffeehouses that became “traditional” ones. This presentation will show how those places and practices were received by different groups of Egyptians, who both participated in them, and used them as sites for developing new national and anti-colonial sentiment. In this context, it will examine how Cairo’s coffeehouses turned from a site for discussing government policy to a site of political activism, inducing the Egyptian state, and later the British colonial one, to put them under strict surveillance and policing.
It is surprising how scholarly attention devoted solely to the institution of the coffeehouse in the Middle East has remained relatively meager, certainly in comparison with the volume of scholarship on coffeehouses in Western Europe. This presentation will fill in some of that gap. At a time when many historians are constantly searching for “sites,” sometimes imagined or abstract ones, to investigate, coffeehouses provide an opportunity to study real, concrete places that shaped and were shaped by the historical forces of their age.
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Prof. Haggai Ram
I explore the (under)world of hashish consumers in Palestine in the interwar years. This world was affected by the expansion, during the interwar years, of international and British imperial efforts to prohibit, control and regulate the trade and use of hashish. As elsewhere, the newfound policy of control created in Palestine a rupture with earlier modes of hashish consumption and generated myriad images of criminality. By drawing on archival sources, memoirs, works of fiction and the press, I discuss these two aspects of control in Palestine. First I demonstrate the extent to which hashish consumers, Palestinians and labor immigrants from neighboring Arab countries, had to conduct their mind-altering affairs more discreetly than ever before. The kinds of subterfuge resorted to by these consumers to evade persecution is contrasted with reports about hashish consumption in the late Ottoman Levant, which was comparatively open-ended. I then provide a vista of the colonial knowledge about hashish consumption that informed Mandatory enforcement agencies and was essential for the criminalization of local consumers. This knowledge traveled to Palestine from India and Egypt, where the British had long contended with (and largely misunderstood) cannabis-oriented cultures. Sensationalized images of this knowledge were instrumental in the meaning-making activity of the burgeoning Zionist community, whose objective was to exclude Palestinians and prevent the assimilation of supposedly alien-cum-Oriental habits and practices. Jews who joined Arabs in hashish trafficking operations from Lebanon/Syria, across Palestine, to Egypt, and/or in sociable affairs in which hashish was taken, were said to have transgressed the moral boundaries of the Zionist movement.
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Prof. Avner Wishnitzer
Recent scholarship about Jerusalem in the nineteenth century contributed immensely to our understanding of the major transformations of the period and yet, these were mostly examined in broad daylight, leaving half of the city's history quite literally in the dark. This study seeks to illuminate different aspects of the nocturnal in Jerusalem from the return of the Ottoman authorities in the 1840s, until the British occupation of the city. Relying on a wide array of sources, from the registers of the local municipality, to newspapers, diaries and memoirs, the study shows that down to the end of the nineteenth century, nighttime in Jerusalem remained a "temporal frontier" that was only loosely regulated by the authorities, and strongly connected with fears of the criminal, the transgressional and the supernatural.
As in other cities in the Ottoman Empire, street lighting was one of the measures employed to colonize the night and yet, from the very start, it was identified not only with the practical needs of the police, but with more general ideals of order, progress and civilization. From the early 1910s, street lighting contributed to the development of Jaffa street as the new heart of a self-consciously "modern" mode of public nightlife. Local journalists and politicians sought to develop night life in Jerusalem as part of their conscious effort to promote Jerusalem as a "tourist attraction," a thoroughly modern city in which the ancient and the disorderly is squeezed into historical sites and times (as in holidays).
Intentions aside, the history of night in late Ottoman Jerusalem cannot be reduced to a "then there was light" story. Not only was the actual illumination of the city a piecemeal, incremental process; changes in social conventions associated with night time too were slow and gradual. In many areas of the city darkness persisted, hosting thieves, robbers and demons as it has for centuries. Even where street lanterns were installed, they did not simply "turn night into day." rather, they created a new temporal territory in which old and new, local and foreign and light and darkness interacted in complex ways, a territory for which new conceptual and moral maps were yet to be drawn.
