Legacies of Legal Reform: Muftis, the State, and Gendered Law in the Arab Lands in the Late Ottoman Empire

2001 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Judith E. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Legal Moralism ◽  
Reform Project ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Social Imperative

We are accustomed to thinking about Ottoman reform of the laws governing personal status as a project undertaken under the liberal banner: such reform was progress, an attempt to lift oppression in the interests of justice and the modernization of the society. Insofar as we can speak of a dominant historical narrative in a field that has received very little scholarly attention, it is this image of liberal efforts to alleviate the oppression that women suffered as a result of the strict application of traditional Hanafi law in the Ottoman Empire that shapes our view of the reform project. Most of the established Western scholars of Islamic legal reform have concurred that society awoke to the injustice of this oppression in the course of the nineteenth century and undertook reform as part of an effort to improve the position of women. Responding to the “needs of society”, the reformers undertook to remedy some of the worst abuses. Their task was to introduce legal moralism into a system that had become hopelessly ossified and formalistic, and hence unresponsive to social imperative.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Darin Stephanov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Mass Scale ◽  
Comprehensive Approach ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Promising Area ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

The introduction provides a brief overview of the book’s main questions and goals against the backdrop of recent scholarship on group identities and communal boundaries. This book proposes a more systematic and comprehensive approach to the topic in the context of the late Ottoman Empire, based on terminological innovation and a three-tiered theorization of average personal attachments. By adopting the meta concept of ruler (in)visibility, it connects the ruler to the ruled and suggests that the former had no viable competitor for popular loyalties over most of the nineteenth century. It then identifies the annual all-imperial ruler celebrations, a global mass-scale nineteenth-century phenomenon, as an under-researched and extremely promising area of focus in the study of the moorings of contemporary popular belonging. Finally, the introduction discusses methods and sources, and provides a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the book.

scholarly journals From Class Solidarity to Revolution: The Radicalization of Arsenal Workers in the Late Ottoman Empire

2013 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akın Sefer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis article introduces a bottom-up perspective to the history of the Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on the experiences of workers in the Imperial Naval Arsenal (Tersâne-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Drawing mainly on primary documents, the article explores, from a class-formation perspective, the struggles and relations of Arsenal workers from the second half of the nineteenth century until the revolution. The Arsenal workers’ involvement in the revolution was rooted in their class solidarity, which was revealed in a number of ways throughout this period. The workers’ immediate embrace of the revolution was spurred by their radicalization against the state; such radicalization stemmed from the state's failure to solve the workers’ persistent economic problems, and its attempts to discharge them and replace them with military labor. The case of the Arsenal workers thus points to the role of working-class discontent in the history of the revolution, a dimension that has thus far been only minimally addressed in Ottoman historiography.

The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808 to 1908

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
World History ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
National Foundation ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”

Making “Tribes” in the Late Ottoman Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-487
Author(s):  
Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Standard Term ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

Binding with a Perfect Sufi Master: Naqshbandī Defenses of rābiṭa from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-78
Author(s):  
M. Brett Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Turkish Language ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Different Parts

Abstract This article explores debates surrounding the controversial spiritual exercise of rābiṭa – the binding of the disciple with a Sufi master by envisioning the image of the master in different parts of the body. Despite being criticized as a non-Qurʾanic practice and as a form of idolatry, rābiṭa was made a ritual of prominence among the Khālidī-Naqshbandī suborder which took shape in early nineteenth-century Syria and spread throughout the late Ottoman Empire. Tracing defenses of the practice from Arabic sources in the early nineteenth century to Turkish language treatises in the twentieth century, I argue that the Sufi ādāb manual al-Bahja al-saniyya composed by Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Khānī (1798-1862) established a repertoire of arguments that have been adopted and reused in Turkish language treatises until the present with little variation, revealing a remarkable continuity of apologetics over nearly two centuries. Additionally, the article considers the role of this ritual in defining the nature of master-disciple relationships and establishing hierarchies of Sufi devotion and obedience.

scholarly journals One-Humped History: The Camel as Historical Actor in the Late Ottoman Empire

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Onur İnal
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Western Anatolia ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article explores the so far little explored animal dimension of the significant social, economic, and ecological transformations that occurred in Western Anatolia in the late Ottoman Empire. It focuses on how the use of the hybrid, one-humped “Turcoman” camel transformed the way in which trade and transport operated in the region. In light of Ottoman, Turkish, and European sources, it suggests that the camel was a visible yet often underestimated actor in the incorporation of Western Anatolia into global markets and integrating the camel as important history-shaping actor into the historical narrative allows us to better grasp the complex relationships that existed between humans, nature, and technology and to change the way we think about the Ottoman Empire.

scholarly journals Beyond ‘Black Turks’ and ‘White Turks’ – The Turkish Elites’ Ongoing Mission to Civilize a Colourful Society

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Ramm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

AbstractThis article undertakes a conceptual enquiry into the history of the Ottoman/Turkish concept of civilization. It shows how the concept of civilization became one of the key elements of political and intellectual thought in the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Beginning with the adaption of the idea of civilization in the nineteenth century, the desire to be recognized as civilized has moulded the thinking of Ottoman and Turkish elites regardless of their political orientation. From the early Ottoman modernizers to the present-day AKP government the pursuit of

The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taner Akçam
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Young Turks ◽  
East And West ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Late Ottoman

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.

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