World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

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Between Worlds: Identity and Thought in the Late Ottoman Empire (324) - NOT_DEFINED activity_field_Panel
 

· NOT_DEFINED date: THU 22, 11.30 am-1.30 pm

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Ohio State University (USA)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Carter Findley

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: This panel highlights the activities and identities of prominent Ottoman figures that engaged multiple intellectual worlds and lived in-between empires. These papers address and analyze the intellectual mobility as well as the dynamic nature of late Ottoman identity.

Chair: Carter Findley

Paper presenter:Randi Deguilhem, IREMAM-MMSH, Aix-en-Provenc, “Navigating Multiple Worlds: the journalist / medical doctor Salah al-Din al-Qasimi in late Ottoman Damascus”
Born into an eminent Damascene family in 1887, Salah al-Din al-Qasimi lived and worked in a multiple goal-oriented milieu which influenced him from childhood. To this end, Salah al-Din received a twofold kind of education. On one hand, he was schooled within the Ottoman civil educative system, attending the famous Ottoman secondary school in Damascus, Maktab ‘Anbar, and then the Medical College which opened in the early years of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, he received a madrasa education directed by his brother, the well-known Salafi scholar, Jamal al-Din. On the strength of this double-oriented education, Salah al-Din chose the path of journalism with Syrian-based newspapers as a forum of expression, publishing articles and giving public lectures, for example, at the Arab Renaissance Society in Damascus beginning at age fifteen. Through both the lens of his own newspaper articles published during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century in addition to information found in a biography on him published by Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, this presentation will study these dual educative influences on Salah al-Din which simultaneously placed him intimately within an Islamic Salafi culture as well as within the framework of the Ottoman civil school system. When studying these sources, it becomes clear that both types of education came to the fore as Salah al-Din navigated through his dual knowledge base, resulting in a synthesis of his multiple worlds as he expressed himself to the larger public via his journalism and lecturing activities.

Paper presenter: Carter Findley, Ohio State University, “Ignatius Mouradgea d''Ohsson Between Two Worlds: Cultural Mediation and Self-Promotion”
Mouradgea d''Ohsson (1740-1807) wrote and published the most authoritative eighteenth-century European book about the Ottoman Empire, the Tableau général de l''Empire othoman, published in both a lavishly illustrated, deluxe edition in three folio volumes and a more modest edition with few illustrations in seven smaller volumes (Paris, 1787-1824). Contrary to commonplace assumptions, he was neither an orientalist nor a travel-writer. He was a marginal man uniquely positioned to acquire cultural (and economic) resources, which he sought to use to establish himself and his family among the elites of Enlightenment Europe. A half-French Ottoman Armenian Catholic who made his official career as a translator at the Swedish legation in Istanbul, he used the knowledge acquired through study and official experience and the wealth acquired by marriage and trade to go to Paris to write his great book. The outbreak of the French revolution ruined his fortunes, nearly prevented completion of his publishing project, and also coincided with changes in modes of literary production that made a work like his obsolete by the time it all came out. D''Ohsson never really recouped, although he headed the Swedish legation in Istanbul as minister for several years in the 1790s. However, he did establish his son and daughter in the Swedish aristocracy. And he left a huge work that generations of Ottoman historians have mined for facts. Now at last it is possible to see how that work contributed to French court politics of the 1780s, the cultural politics of the Swedish elites, the Ottoman reform movement under Selim III, and the debate on enlightened despotism. This study draws on the text of d''Ohsson''s Tableau, the pictorial sources associated with the lavish illustration program of his deluxe folio edition, and the voluminous manuscript and archival documentation from Turkey, France, and especially Sweden.

Paper presenter: James Meyer, Montana State University, “Identity Freelancers: Yusuf Akçura and Ahmet A'ao'lu in Russia and the Ottoman Empire”
Yusuf Akçura and Ahmet A’ao’lu, Turkic Muslims born in Russia who are well known in late Ottoman and Turkish historiography for their roles in the ‘pan-Turkist’ movement, have long been seen by scholars primarily as ‘intellectuals.? Because Akçura and A’ao’lu are discussed in the scholarly literature mainly in the context of their ‘ideas’ and ‘arguments,’ the published newspaper and journal articles of these two individuals, usually taken from their years in Istanbul, tend to constitute the major source base of scholarship devoted to them. Using a different set of sources including documents from state archives in Istanbul, Baku, and Kazan, as well as publications appearing in the Russian Empire and previously uncited and unpublished personal correspondence? I discuss Akçura and A’ao’lu not simply within the context of an ‘emerging’ Turkish nationalism, but rather within a broader, trans-imperial milieu of Muslims traveling between Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran. In this setting, Akçura and A’ao’lu appear less as consistent Turkic nationalists and more like identity freelancers, less like intellectuals focusing primarily upon identity and more like activists devoted principally to constitutionalism and progress. In their mobility, Akçura and A’ao’lu fell within a well-established pattern of both elite and non-elite Muslims travelling between the Russian and Ottoman empires’ often playing the two empires off of one another as they moved between them.

Paper presenter: Brett Wilson, Macalester College, “Printing the Qur’an in the Ottoman Empire and Ahmet Cevdet Pasha”
Though Ottoman Muslims began to use the printing press in the eighteenth century, they did not print the Qur’an until the late nineteenth century, decades after their co-religionists in Russia, Iran, Egypt, and India. Copying the text was the work of scribes trained in the calligraphic tradition, and the Ottoman ulama viewed print technology as a European technology. In order to make copies less expensive, political leaders proposed that the state subsidize a Qur’an printing initiative. This sparked protests from the scribes who feared for their livelihood as well as opposition from the ulama who rejected the press as a foreign technology of dubious ritual purity. Using archival documents, my paper examines the developments that led to the printing of the Qur’an in Istanbul. A member of the ulama who left the ulama ranks and became a prominent statesman and historian, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha played a leading role in advocating for printing the text. His leadership enabled the combination of European print technology and the Ottoman-Islamic scribal tradition, causing the Qur’anic text to be produced and distributed on a heretofore unprecedented scale.