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To what extent did a perceived morality crisis play a role in the dramatic events of the last years of the Ottoman Empire? Beginning in the late nineteenth century when some of the Ottoman elites began to question the moral climate as evidence for the losses facing the empire, this book shows that during the course of World War I many social, economic, and political problems were translated into a discourse of moral decline, ultimately making morality a contested space between rival ideologies, identities, and intellectual currents. Examining the primary journals and printed sources that represented the various constituencies of the period, it fills important gaps in the scholarship of the Ottoman experience of World War I and the origins of Islamism and secularism in Turkey, and is essential reading for social and intellectual historians of the late Ottoman Empire.
The culture of politics within any system of governance is influenced by how state and society interact, and how these relationships are mediated by existing political institutions, whether formal or informal. The chapters in this volume highlight two broad types of informal political engagement in the Middle East: civil action that works in tandem with the state apparatus, and civil action that poses a challenge to the state. In both cases, these activities can and do achieve tangible results for particular groups of people, as well as for the state. For many, informal politics and civil mobilization are not a choice, but a necessity to secure--collectively--some kind of social security, th...
Using Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources drawn from three genres of legal text, this book is the first full-length study in decades to investigate the evolution of Ottoman land law from its classical articulation in the sixteenth century to its reformulation in the 1858 Land Code. The book demonstrates that well before the nineteenth century the tradition of Ottoman land tenure law had developed an indigenous form of property right that would remain intact in the Land Code. In addition, the rising consensus of the jurists that the sultan was the source of the land law paved the way for the wider legislative authority that the Ottoman state would increasingly assert in the Tanzimat period of reform. Demonstrating the profound and ongoing adaptation of a legal tradition that was at once both Ottoman and Islamic, it revises our understanding of the relationship between the modern Islamic world and its early modern past, and what kind of intervention was represented by reform in the 19th century.
In 1910, when Khedive Abbas II married a second wife surreptitiously, the contrast with his openly polygamous grandfather, Ismail, whose multiple wives and concubines signified his grandeur and masculinity, could not have been greater. That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt’s modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the “political work.” Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler�...
Order and Compromise questions the historicity of government practices in Turkey from the late Ottoman Empire up to the present day. It explores how institutions at work are being framed by constant interactions with non-institutional characters from various social realms. This volume thus approaches the state-society continuum as a complex and shifting system of positions. Inasmuch as they order and ordain, state authorities leave room for compromise, something which has hitherto been little studied in concrete terms. By combining in-depth case studies with an interdisciplinary conceptual framework, this collection helps apprehend the morphology and dynamics of public action and state-society relations in Turkey. Contributors are: Marc Aymes, Olivier Bouquet, Nicolas Camelio, Nathalie Clayer, Anouck Gabriela Corte-Real Pinto, Berna Ekal, Benoît Fliche, Muriel Girard, Benjamin Gourisse, Sümbül Kaya, Noémi Lévy Aksu, Élise Massicard, Jean-François Pérouse, Clémence Scalbert Yücel, Emmanuel Szurek and Claire Visier.
This vividly detailed revisionist history exposes the underworld of the largest metropolis of the early modern Mediterranean and through it the entire fabric of a complex, multicultural society. Fariba Zarinebaf maps the history of crime and punishment in Istanbul over more than one hundred years, considering transgressions such as riots, prostitution, theft, and murder and at the same time tracing how the state controlled and punished its unruly population. Taking us through the city's streets, workshops, and houses, she gives voice to ordinary people—the man accused of stealing, the woman accused of prostitution, and the vagabond expelled from the city. She finds that Istanbul in this period remains mischaracterized—in part by the sensational and exotic accounts of European travelers who portrayed it as the embodiment of Ottoman decline, rife with decadence, sin, and disease. Linking the history of crime and punishment to the dramatic political, economic, and social transformations that occurred in the eighteenth century, Zarinebaf finds in fact that Istanbul had much more in common with other emerging modern cities in Europe, and even in America.
This book explores responses to authoritarianism in Turkish society through popular culture by examining feature films and television serials produced between 1980 and 2010 about the 1980 coup. Envisioned as an interdisciplinary study in cultural studies rather than a disciplinary work on cinema, the book advocates for an understanding of popular culture in discerning emerging narratives of nationhood. Through feature films and television serials directly dealing with the coup of 1980, the book exposes tropes and discursive continuities such as “childhood” and “the child”. It argues that these conventional tropes enable popular debates on the modern nation’s history and its myths of identity.
Since the second half of the 1980s social movements, which questioned the legitimacy of the hitherto seemingly stable systems of Kemalist Turkey and socialist Balkans, won ground. Political Islam struck Turkey; in the Balkan socialist countries the dams broke, and parliamentary democracies replaced monolithic socialist regimes. These processes have not been gender neutral. Therefore the central question is: after the abolition of patriarchy and the official installation of gender equality, are patriarchy and female discrimination returning in the region through the backdoor, although in a modernized version?
The first to combine the study of representation, gender theory, and Muslim women from a historical and geographical perspective, this book examines where women have represented themselves in art, architecture, and the written word in the Muslim world. The authors explore the gendering and implicit power relations present in the positioning of subject and object in the visual field and look specifically at occasions when women publically adopted the stance of the viewer, speaker, writer, or patron.