{"title":"From Conspicuous to Conscious Consumers: Ottoman Muslim Women, the Mamulat-ı Dahiliye İstihlakı Kadınlar Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi, and the National Economy","authors":"Nicole A.N.M. van Os","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Unionists aimed at establishing a national economy with an Ottoman Muslim elite of commercial and industrial entrepreneurs. One of the means to stimulate the development of a national economy was the promotion of the consumption of national products. This article discusses how Ottoman Muslim women actively participated in the campaigns to promote the consumption of these goods by the public through not only the publication of articles in the (women’s) press, but also by establishing organizations to this aim. It also shows how, within the context of the development of a national economy, the meaning of “national” (milli) shifted over the years from “not coming from outside the Ottoman Empire” to “produced by Muslims.” It does so by focusing on one particular women’s organization: the Mamulat-ı Dahiliye İstihlakı Kadınlar Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi (Charitable Women’s Organization for the Consumption of Local Products).","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"113 - 130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69769539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Beginning Was “A Woman”: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye","authors":"Başak Deniz Özdoğan","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As the most prolific and eminent female writer of late nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literature, Fatma Aliye (born 1862) began her career in 1889 by translating a French best-selling novel (Volonté by Georges Ohnet) into Ottoman Turkish (as Meram) and publishing it under the pseudonym “Bir Kadın” (A Woman). This study assesses the significance of Aliye’s translation of Volonté and its preface “Dibace” as the expression of her main motivations to exist in the literary public by introducing herself as the initiator of female authorship. Additionally, it reevaluates Aliye’s usage of the pseudonym “Bir Kadın” by taking into account both Meram’s plot and her beginning motivations in “Dibace.” Thus, this article deals with the translation process of Meram as a representation of Aliye’s motivation, will, and courage to participate in the literary public through the agency of her own writing in a male-dominant literary atmosphere.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"55 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42146193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Solitary Female Refugees and the Widows’ Asylum (Kırmızı Kışla) in Late Nineteenth-Century Istanbul","authors":"Gülhan Balsoy","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the short-lived asylum, Kırmızı Kışla (Red Barracks), established to offer shelter and protection to the women forced to migrate to the Ottoman capital as the result of the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War. The main Ottoman policy toward the refugees was to settle them in the underpopulated parts of the imperial territory. However, women who lost their families were not seen suitable for the Ottoman settlement policy unlike the male refugees who offered the twin benefits of cultivating land and paying tax. But what the solitary female refugees would do in the Ottoman capital, where they were going to stay, or how they would earn their bread was not clear. Moreover, the bureaucrats as well as the middle classes of the city feared that protracted poverty and misery might draw especially women without male guardians to immoral ways. The asylum in Istanbul was established in such a context and with the concern to offer relief and control to refugee women. In sum, this article focuses on the specific case of Kırmızı Kışla as an opportunity to discuss the experiences of the otherwise invisible female refugees and search ways of making them agents of research.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"73 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47374372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Homeland Will Not be Saved Merely by Chastity”: Women’s Agency, Nationalism, and Morality in the Late Ottoman Empire","authors":"Ç. Oğuz","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Social norms and customs, especially the ones regulating the women’s place in society, occupied a privileged space among the topics that precipitated heated discussions in the late Ottoman Empire. This article deals with Ottoman Muslim women’s strategies and discourses used to defy moralistic criticisms targeting “women’s emancipation.” By taking a closer look at the articles penned by women writers in various journals, it explores how women writers in the late Ottoman Empire approached the preoccupancy of “the woman issue” in discussion of morality and moral decline. This study aims to address the debates about how the relaxation of strict moral codes could allow women to further realize social agency and how this demand interplayed with the development of a secular and nationalist view of morality as well as the idea of a social reform in Ottoman society.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"111 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69769503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Pensioned Gentleman”: Women’s Agency and the Political Economy of Marriage in Istanbul during World War I","authors":"Kate Dannies","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:How to survive economically after the loss of their breadwinner was the dilemma faced by women during World War I in the Ottoman Empire. Scholarship on the socioeconomic impact of World War I has emphasized women’s entry into the labor force. While the war did facilitate women’s unprecedented access to public space, it reinforced dynamics that ultimately limited women’s economic security and access to citizenship rights. The political economy of World War I led to the codification of patriarchal support and dependence in law, while weakening in practice the existing marital economic bargain between breadwinners and housewives. Meanwhile, the Ottoman state sought to ensure that any expansion in women’s labor market participation was temporary. Through an analysis of marriage advertisements published in 1918, this study demonstrates that breadwinner-housewife marriage remained the primary means by which Ottoman women sought to achieve economic security during World War I. Men, meanwhile, traded on their wartime social capital to demand ever greater domestic and financial contributions from prospective wives. The requests that Ottoman women made of potential grooms, and the qualities and resources they offered in return, therefore provide an important but overlooked window into women’s agency in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"13 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44931094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Yazıcıoğlu Brothers and Vernacular Islamic Apologetics on the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean Frontier","authors":"Carlos Grenier","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:“To write a book so that the people of our land…. [would] know the bond of Islam,” was the stated aim of Ahmed Yazıcıoğlu as he composed Envarü’l-Asıkin, a Turkish work of catechistics and dogmatics in the Ottoman frontier city of Gelibolu in 1451. Alongside his older brother Mehmed, the Yazıcıoğlus completed a widely-read set of vernacular writings on religion that helped define the popular face of Ottoman Sunnism. But why were they so keen on presenting a basic vision of Islam to the ordinary believer of Rumelia in the mid-fifteenth century? This article will explore how the Yazıcıoğlus’ catechistic corpus emerged out of the interconfessional conversations of the Ottoman frontier lands. It is here argued that the Yazıcıoğlus’ dogmatics can be read as attempts to clarify a perceived confusion as to the boundaries between Islam and Christianity, a synthesis that could teach an audience of new or unlettered Muslims the distinctness of their own religious community. This article invites further exploration of the way Ottoman imperial piety, just as in other early modern societies, continued to bear traces of its origin in the borderlands and its particular local circumstances.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"131 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47231044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women’s Agency in the Late Ottoman Empire","authors":"Ç. Oğuz","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"12 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44366757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mihri Rasim and the Founding of the Women’s Fine Arts Academy, İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi: a Double-edged New Social Reality","authors":"Özlem Güli̇n Dağoğlu","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:An iconic and pioneering Ottoman-Turkish portrait painter and educator, Mihri Rasim (d. 1954) resisted social and religious conventions prescribing women’s lives to the intimacy of domestic spheres. A deeply committed feminist, she used her political connections with the Young Turk leaders to help expand institutional, educational, and professional opportunities available to Ottoman women. In 1914, she founded the first fine arts academy for Ottoman women in Istanbul, the İnas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi. Thanks to her initiatives, women received an art education comparable to European artistic standards considered the best at the time and gained access to a new line of profession. Despite her critical role in Ottoman-Turkish art history and education, scholarship on Rasim is very limited. This article thus aims to bring to the fore her work to establish the Women’s Academy and how it was received. Ottoman women seized the opportunity to enhance their agency in the public sphere and in the male-dominated Ottoman art milieu, although they could not overcome certain cultural and social limitations, real and symbolic, on women’s bodies. The Women’s Fine Arts Academy was a double-edged new social reality. This study argues that the academy also cosmetically served modernization—the principal ideology of the nationalist project.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"33 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45845523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sixteenth-Century Poturnak Endowments in the Ottoman Western Balkans: The Boljanić Family","authors":"Sanja Kadrić","doi":"10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jottturstuass.6.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Charitable endowments known as vakıf bolstered the urbanization, Islamization, and Ottomanization of the western Balkans. Some of the wealthiest and the most famous of these endowments were established by Ottoman state officials native to the region. This article focuses on two such officials, Hüseyin Pasha Boljanić (d. 1595) and Kara Sinan Bey Boljanić (d. 1582). These two brothers entered into Ottoman service through the devşirme, a levy of young men from rural and mostly Christian subjects living in parts of Anatolia and the Balkans. Hüseyin Pasha and Kara Sinan Bey are somewhat exceptional because they were Poturnak oğlanları, Muslim recruits for the devşirme. This article examines the motives behind their endowments. It places these motives in the larger context of the brothers’ shared identity as Poturnak oğlanları, their commercial and military interests, their relationship with the republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), and their family’s connection to the famed Sokollus. In doing so, this article elucidates how endowments in the western Balkans reflected the backgrounds, regional identities, and personal interests of their benefactors, as well as how they were shaped by their benefactors’ intisap (political clientage) and kinship ties.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"6 1","pages":"155 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46710862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Judicial Reforms, Sharia Law, and the Death Penalty in the Late Ottoman Empire","authors":"Ebru Aykut","doi":"10.2979/JOTTTURSTUASS.4.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/JOTTTURSTUASS.4.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:There is a general consensus among Ottomanists that capital punishment became a rare occurrence in the Ottoman Empire from the 1840s onwards. This paper argues that two structural aspects of the reformed criminal justice system functioned as constraints on the imposition of the death penalty in the late Ottoman Empire. The first concerns the Tanzimat state’s particular attention to the principle of legality and procedural correctness with regard to criminal prosecution and sentencing. These principles, together with a centralized judicial review procedure, deprived local authorities of discretionary punishment powers that left them little leeway to administer the law on their own. This resulted in the circumscribed use of summary executions and death sentences for crimes against the state. The second aspect concerns the merging of Islamic criminal law, particularly Hanafi doctrines, with state-enacted penal codes, and, in parallel, the dual trial procedure carried out in crimes committed against individuals, i.e., homicide. Drawing on archival sources as well as distinct viewpoints harbored by the Ottoman elites, this article contends that the mingling of two spheres of jurisdiction extensively restricted the power of the judicial councils/Nizamiye courts to pass death sentences for acts of premeditated murder.","PeriodicalId":36583,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association","volume":"4 1","pages":"29 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2979/JOTTTURSTUASS.4.1.02","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45280234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}