Speakers on “Panel 8: Ottoman Identity & Memory” will be presenting their work from 3:40–5:15pm in Allard 122.
Hala Qasqas (PhD, UVic), The Legitimacy of Coffee and Coffeehouses in Damascus (1600-1800)
Coffee: This simple plant was discovered in Ethiopia and moved through Hejaz to Damascus, where it changed the face of the city and created new social spaces that the city had never seen before, Coffeehouses, which opened for the first time in 1568 in Damascus. At that time, the first coffee sellers did not realize that they were laying the groundwork for a new social hub that would fundamentally change the urban structure of the traditional city. This place imposed new conditions that occupied people with new secular practices outside the home and mosque. You may be surprised that the emergence and spread of coffee has a history full of religious controversy, which led to a three-century-long struggle between supporters and opponents of the legitimacy of these new places.
The ritual of drinking coffee in these coffeehouses facilitated discussions about the political and social conditions of the city. In response, authorities began closing coffeehouses and banning coffee drinking, commonly using religion as a pretext to achieve a political purpose. I aim to study the impact of coffee’s emergence on the development of various social and leisure activities in Damascus during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The overall framing question of my paper is: Why was coffee associated with the radical changes that occurred in Damascene society? Despite being a pivotal period in Damascene history, it has been neglected by researchers, due to the controversial history of coffee and coffeehouses. My paper transcends the limits of religious arguments and considers the role of coffeehouses as an essential part of the Damascene heritage, as well as a fundamental instigator of the emergence of Early Modernity in Damascus.
Naz Vardar (PhD, SFU), Gender and Transgression in Apokries and Baklahorani Festivities in Late-Ottoman Istanbul
Carnival celebrations in Istanbul, locally referred as Apokries and Baklahorani, have taken place in Christian and European neighborhoods of the city such as Pera, Galata, Beyoglu and Tatavla during the late Ottoman era. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the pre-Lenten revelry occurred on the street level among the working-class and middle-class people as well as in a more elite and bourgeois fashion in the theatres, ball rooms and embassies.
Studies on public celebrations in the Ottoman context has long focused on those with imperial or national character. Carnival, as a marginalized tradition with transnational elements, has long been ignored by historians and even erased from the collective memory of the city after 1940s. The narratives in memoirs and police reports from the Ottoman archives provide important insight on the experience and perception of intersections of class, gender and ethno-religious identities in the empire.
This presentation specifically focuses on the transgressive behavior and behavior that challenge the ethno-religious and gender roles in society: women’s participation in the festivities; cross-dressing by Muslim men; and plays that ridicule certain occupational groups which were associated with specific ethno-religious communities and masculine behavior. The aim of this presentation is to look into and analyze the late-Ottoman society from below and from a transnational perspective in a festive context which provided a carnivalesque atmosphere for the people to publicly manifest their identities and views about the world around them which had been undergoing a social and political transformation.
Turhan Ozan Yıldız (PhD, UBC), Three Propositions for Two Seventeenth century Ottoman Antiquarian Attitudes: The Cases of Evliya, Katip Çelebi, and Hüseyin Hezarfen Efendi
The perception of antiquity by early modern Ottoman intellectuals has been an uncharted territory until very recently. With the rise of cultural history in the 1990s along with the monographically written works by Ottomanists on great Ottoman thinkers such as Katip Çelebi (d.1657) and Evliya Çelebi (d.1682), the area is at last open for more peculiar topics within the oeuvre of the Ottoman intellectuals who particularly produced a cultural sphere that could be denoted as ‘Ottoman manner’.1 In this study, I will particularly investigate the notion of antiquity, usually denoted as zaman-ı kadim and the perception of Romano-Byzantine past which is present in the works of Hezarfen Hüseyin(d.1691), Evliya Çelebi, and Katip Çelebi. These three Ottoman intellectuals were the prominent figures of the seventeenth century Ottoman/Constantinopolitan intellectual circles. Moreover, they were prolific authors as well as prolific readers. Although this study tries to encroach upon the possible or tangible sources these three authors used, the focus will be on the use of idioms pertaining to antiquity, ancient history, and its legendary characters. The use of language will also eventually shed light on the perceptions of these three authors towards Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantine past.
Ismail Noyan (PhD, SFU), Mecelle as the Product of Global Islamic Networks
Drawing on primary sources in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, this paper argues that the Mecelle can be considered as one of the earliest products of global Islamic networks. There was almost a consensus that it was not possible to sustain the empire without monist, simple, systematized state-centered civil code. Yet, some Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen including Âlî Pasha and Kabuli Pasha espoused translating and adopting the French Civil Code whereas others, most notably, Cevdet Pasha and Şirvanizade Rüşdi Pasha proposed to codify the empire’s own civil code in accordance with the sharia and eventually they succeeded at establishing Mecelle Commission to prepare the first modern civil code in the Islamic world (1868-1876). This dispute was long portrayed in the literature as the clash between two diametrically opposing groups: modernist versus traditionalist; secular versus religious; progressive versus reactionary.
The recent scholarship adequately challenges the tendency of examining Mecelle within these binary dichotomies and preoccupying with the discussion of whether the Mecelle was secular or religious; or whether it was in accordance with the sharia or modern codification technics. However, the studies on the Mecelle are mostly content with the Ottoman context and as a matter of fact literature predominantly focuses on the imperial capital, Istanbul. This paper aims to close this gap by paying attention to the connections and affiliations across the empire and larger Islamic world to examine Mecelle from a less İstanbul-centric perspective. I argue that Mecelle can be considered as among the first intellectual products of entangled Islamic networks especially considering the facts that (a) the members of the Mecelle commission came from different parts of the empire, and (b) Mecelle served as a working model for other codification attempts and it was commented, challenged and appreciated in the larger Islamic world such as in Tunisia, Algeria, India, and Afghanistan.