Gender and empire in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Caricature, models of empire, and the case for Ottoman exceptionalism

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 283-302

  Brummett, Palmira ^a,b  

^a Department of History ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER; IMPERIALISM; OTTOMAN EMPIRE;

EURASIA; ISTANBUL [TURKEY]; TURKEY;

EID: 35148872621     PISSN: 1089201X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/1089201X-2007-006     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. See Nikki R. Keddie, "Women in the Limelight: Some Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women's History," International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002):553-73;
2. and the introductory essay by the editors on the state of the field in Margaret Meriwether and Judith Tucker, eds., Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 1-24.
3. On issues of masculinity, nationalism, the construction of fatherhood, and male and female readership, see Marilyn Booth, "Woman in Islam: Men and the 'Women's Press' in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Egypt," International Journal of Middle East Studies 33 (2001):171-201.
4. Another author whose work takes direct cognizance of issues of masculinity in its treatment of the reimagined janissary is Wendy Shaw, in her Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
5. For literary and historical approaches that address masculinity, see also Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman Turkish and European Literature, Culture, and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005);
6. Irvin Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999);
7. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000);
8. and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and the Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
9. Gender is becoming a more prominent category as Ottomanists focus on cultural constructions and the ways in which gendered categories are enacted in Sharia court cases. See Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
10. and Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Lawand Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
11. See also Deniz Kandiyoti, "Contemporary Feminist Scholarship and Middle East Studies," in Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 1-27. Kandiyoti wrote that "the historical connection between feminism and nationalism in the Middle East has left an enduring legacy of concerns around the effects of cultural imperialism which has discouraged a systematic exploration ofthe local institutions and cultural processes centrally implicated in the production of gender hierarchies and in forms of subordination based on gender" (19). That is still partially true, but scholars in the past decade have been actively producing the "more context-dependent and micro-level explanatory frameworks" that Kandiyoti advocated (19).
12. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1986), 510.
13. Ibid., 408.
14. In the conference that led to this issue, comparisons to India were most often employed ("Comparing Empires: The Ottoman and British Empires in the Long Nineteenth Century," Washington, DC, April 2003). C. A. Bayly compared the Ottoman Empire sometimes to Britain as imperial power and sometimes to British India as a power in its own right. Sugata Bose proposed that Britain's Indian Ocean empire was a logical unit of comparison for the Ottoman Empire. He went on to argue that the conceptualization of sovereignty in Britain decisively changed in Britain over the long nineteenth century, whereas there seems to be a tacit assumption that the concept of sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire had not changed significantly during the same period. Interestingly, however, in her essay on gender in the British Empire, Philippa Levine used England, rather than India, as the focus of comparison.
15. In my own work I have argued that the late Ottoman Empire can be viewed as functioning in colonial context: "By colonial context I mean that although the Ottoman state was not directly conquered and 'colonized' in the sense that India was colonized, its systems (education, communication, transport, economy, and culture) had been colonized [by the early twentieth century] as surely as had those of India. I am not proposing, thereby, that the late Ottoman empire was essentially the same type of entity as colonized nations such as India or Brazil, for example.... Rather, I wish to draw attention to the possibilities for comparison and to the complex position within the world system that the late Ottoman empire held."
16. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 13.
17. Juan Cole, "Gender, Tradition, and History," in Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, and Power, ed. Fatma Göçek and Shiva Balaghi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23-29. Cole has argued for a periodization in which the long nineteenth century is an era in the recrafting of women's position in economic context: "In the Muslim Middle East, governments during the period 1622-1750 were characterized by various forms of tribal feudalism, creating highly patriarchal societies. In the nineteenth century, the shift to peripheral agrarian capitalism disrupted many family and family-based institutions without necessarily creating new forms of support for women" (23).
18. That difference, in quality and pace, has already been documented in part by Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
19. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, advances a revisionist history of the reign of Abdülhamid. Hasan Kayalι, in Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pushes the era of Ottomanism (as opposed to Arab nationalism) up through the end of World War I.
20. Zehra Arat, in Deconstructing Images of "The Turkish Woman" (New York: Palgrave, 2000), attempts to draw connections between conceptualizations of late Ottoman and Republican females and then link those conceptualizations to more contemporary constructions of the Turkish woman.
21. Mervat Hatem, in "Modernization, the State, and the Family in Middle East Women's Studies," in Meriwether and Tucker, Women and Gender, 63-87, has provided a review of various narratives of women's "progress" (e.g., the nationalist narrative and the Marxian narrative) from the nineteenth century. She is not particularly concerned with periodization. Rather, she is interested in the ways in which the state was viewed as an agent of modernization in narratives that evaluate the impact of modernization on gender roles and relations.
22. A recent example is Peter Hoffenberg's review of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine, Journal of World History 14 (2003): 264-69. A significant element of Hoffenberg's critique (266) is the categories by which Cannadine tries to "recover" the history of the British Empire. While gender is not critical to this review, Hoffenberg does think that at least speaking in terms of male and female categories is important.
23. For a nuanced case study of that joint participation, see Carter Findley, "An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889," American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998): 15-49.
24. On Gökalp, see Niyazi Berkes, "Gökalp, Ziya," Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., CD-ROM, version 1.0 (Leiden: Brill, n.d.).
25. On the intellectual constructions of nation, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 323-61. Lewis argues that pan-Turkism was a political program for Turkish exiles and immigrants from the Russian empire; however, "among the Turks of Turkey this programme won only limited support. Their interest in the movement was social, cultural, and literary - a greater awareness of their separate identity as Turks, a new feeling of kinship with their rediscovered ancestor and their remote cousins, a new interest in Turkish language, folklore, and tradition" (351).
26. Geoffrey Lewis, "Turkey," in Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, 1850-1970, ed. Robin Ostle (London: Routledge, 1991), 90-103, esp. 91. Lewis is referring by this designatio n to Edib's early novels written in the 1920s. Edib's work is preoccupied with gender categories and language, as seen in her autobiography;
27. Halide Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib, English ed. (New York: Century, n.d, ca. 1926). It begins its set of stories with the question of "how little girls are." Edib's is a self-consciously female voice, and a voice aimed at a broader Western audience. Born into an elite family in Istanbul in 1883, Edib became a famous author and nationalist leader. Her father was a progressive who believed women should be educated. Thus she was schooled in Turkish, English, and French by tutors. She later became one of the first graduates of the new American College for Girls and wrote a famous novel on the problems of the educated woman. Married at a young age to a prominent scholar many years her senior, she divorced him in 1910 when he decided to take a second wife. Afterward, Edib became a pioneer educator, fought alongside her second husband in the War of Turkish Liberation after World War I, and became a prominent international lecturer. She was a member of the Turkish parliament from 1950 to 1954.
28. Halide Edib, Turkey Faces West: A Turkish View of Recent Changes and Their Origin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930), x.
29. Ibid., 83-84. Here Edib gives a different type of definition for "gendered language." She suggests that language could express the female subject only when it had been modernized (meaning, perhaps, the additions of French and, later, of Latin script to the Ottoman repertoire).
30. For an examination of notions of Turkish exceptionalism as regards the impact of Kemalism on Turkish women, see Zehra Arat, "Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition," in Göçek and Balaghi, Reconstructing Gender, 57-78.
31. Edib, Turkey Faces West, 84-85, On the historiography of the East and West and gender, see Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Nationalist Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
32. Edib, Turkey Faces West, 85.
33. As Ussama Makdisi has illustrated for Mount Lebanon. See Ussama Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism - Community, History, and Violence in Nineteent-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
34. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 117, 120-21, 143-44, 147. Thus the Ottoman female could not be, simply, the embodiment of the protected, spiritual Ottoman core.
35. Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 393. This work is a good source for the evolution of Turkism. Karpat argues that there is a "structural cultural and social continuity" based on the goal of modernization, which links the societies of the Hamidian, Young Turk, and Republican eras. The state of modern Turkey emerged by "relying upon the solidarity and common identity engendered by Ottomanism and Islamism" (406). Karpat's arguments about empire and identity, particularly the role of refugees in redefining Ottoman identity, can be compared to arguments about empire, race, refugees, and identity in the European context.
36. See, e.g., Alice Conklin, "Redefining 'Frenchness': Citizenship, Race Regeneration, and Imperial Motherhood in France and West Africa," in Domesticating Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, ed. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 65-83.
37. Şerif Mardin, "Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century," in Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives, ed. Peter Benedict, Erol Tümertekin, and Fatma Mansur (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 404-46.
38. Studies of Iranian literature reveal similar constructions of the "chic," Europeanized male. On fashion satire, see Brummett, Image and Imperialism, 221-57.
39. For an earlier period, see Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997);
40. and Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). These two works have exploded some of the assumptions about gender roles, language, and public and private spheres in their analyses of women's participation and embeddedness in hierarchies of power, legal status, and communal affiliation.
41. Alan Duben and Cem Bahar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 194-238. For example, Duben and Bahar argue that Istanbul women were forerunners in Turkey's transition to lower fertility levels. "The Muslim population of Istanbul indeed appears to have been the first sizeable Muslim group to have extensively practiced family planning" (4). Duben and Bahar have found a "high percentage of individuals, mostly men but also a large number of women ... living alone or in what we call no family households" (57). It would be interesting to know how that affected gender relations and consumption patterns in a society that Duben and Bahar have generally referred to as "the gerontocracy of Ottoman Istanbul" (78). How much was the later marriage of women and earlier cessation of childbearing documented by these two authors (166-67) the result of greater female "say," or greater female education, or economic factors? The authors note that the relatively low fertility rates in Istanbul "appear to have been widely diffused throughout the social fabric of the city. They were not just limited to the elite or to the most modern, westernized strata of society" (173; see also 241).
42. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains.
43. Ibid., 165,
44. citing Zeyneb Çelik, Displaying the Orient: The Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World's Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3, 39.
45. The next step would be to assess how this particular brand of Hamidian ideology (as presented by Deringil) was gendered. Deringil has already shown that this ideology does have some resonance beyond the ruling house's self-preservatory rhetorics.
46. Elizabeth Frierson, "Mirrors Out, Mirrors In: Domestication and Rejection of the Foreign in Late-Ottoman Women's Magazines (1875-1908)," in Patronage and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 180.
47. Note how this characterization diverges from that of Chatterjee ( Nation and its Fragments, 116-134, 147), whose focus is, after all, the nation.
48. Frierson's treatment of late Ottoman women's issues, Patriarchal Feminism: Gender and the Public Sphere in the Ottoman Empire, is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press.
49. A pioneering work on the women's press (and on issues of domesticity, women's rights, and education) is Beth Baron's The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), which looks at women's literary and press production before and after the British conquest of Egypt. Frierson has argued that Baron's case study on Egypt is not necessarily reflective of the women's press in Istanbul or the empire as a whole. Egypt, however, is interesting because of its colonization by the British and because the Ottoman state considered, and often labeled, Egypt as still part of the empire.
50. For another take on questions of Ottoman domesticity, see Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York: Greenwood, 1986).
51. On satire of the ala franga Ottoman, see Brummett, Image and Imperialism, 201-5, 232-53.
52. Frierson, Mirrors Out, Mirrors In, 198.
53. On images of crime and violence in the West, see also Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, 149.
54. Frierson, Mirrors Out, Mirrors In, 199.
55. A full biographical portrait of the producers of the late Ottoman press has yet to be written. See citations in Brummett, Image and Imperialism;
56. and Turgut Çeviker, Gelişim Sürecinde Türk Karikatürü (Turkish Caricature in Its Developmental Phase), 3 vols. (Istanbul: Adam Yayιnlarι, 1986-91).
57. The extent to which suffrage and women's participation was an issue of the time is illustrated by the satirizing of these subjects in gazettes like Kalem. For an illustration of some of the connections made and affinities struck between those struggling for British and Iranian women's rights, see Mansour Bonakdarian, "British Suffragists and Iranian Women, 1906-1911," in Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Christian Fletcher, Laura Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (London: Routledge, 2000), 157-74.
58. Those connections, in the press, for example, were even more pronounced in the Ottoman case in terms of mutual awareness, press coverage, and Ottoman modeling on the British example. For an early set of explorations into questions of consumption in the Ottoman Empire, see Donald Quataert, ed., Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
59. That is what Edib did when she spoke of "individual liberty in the state." There are significant, contemporary models for constructions of nation and gender that include some content on the Middle East and that extend back into the long nineteenth century. Two such examples are Andrew Parker, Patricia Yaeger, and Mary Russo, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992);
60. and Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London: Routledge, 2000). These works address both masculinities and femininities, but their geographic and political category of analysis is, for the most part, nation rather than empire. Conversely, gender studies that focus specifically on the territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire tend to use the long nineteenth century as a backdrop for the interplay of gender and nation that came afterward, either in the colonial context of the mandates and North Africa or in discussions of the evolution of modern Middle Eastern nation-states in the twentieth century. Exceptions, to some extent, are the works already cited by Meriwether and Tucker, Women and Gender, and Ruggles, Patronage and Self-Representation; these works make the temporal connections between the period of nations and the period of empire, but neither focuses on gendering empire per se.
61. Lila Abu Lughod, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), crafts a direct link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
62. Other works that focus on the twentieth-century construction of nation and gender are Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996);
63. Göçek and Balaghi, Reconstructing Gender;
64. and Kandiyoti, Gendering the Middle East.
65. Works that survey the question of women's place in the Middle East over time include Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries of Sex and Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991);
66. Guity Nashat and Judith Tucker, Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Restoring Women to History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998);
67. and Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
68. "The abode of prosperity," "the well-protected domains," and "the exalted Ottoman state" were all monikers for the empire.
69. For male and female mascots used in the press to represent the empire, see Brummett, Image and Imperialism, 51-71. One of the satirical press's emblems of the empire was the peasant Züǧürt (wretched or destitute one), with his fez, prayer beads, and donkey; another was the androgynous "old nag" figure, an outspoken, postmenopausal urban female.
70. I base this characterization on a survey of over sixty-five late Ottoman gazettes, plus a selection of Ottoman yearbooks and assorted other texts from the period 1908-14.
71. On "mother" Europe, see, e.g., Kalem, no. 23, 22. Kanun-ι Sani 1324 Malî/4 February 1909, 5. Kalem reprinted a French cartoon from the gazette Rire showing England as a homely, barefoot female, dressed in armor and sitting on her small island surrounded by ships;
72. Kalem, no. 50, 31 Aǧustos 1325 Malî/13 September 1909, 1.
73. I have argued in my courses that "race" in the early modern Ottoman Empire was a category that was subordinate to class (askerilreaya), religion, and gender as a determinant of status. That argument needs to be examined. Race (meaning color more than ethnicity) was certainly designated and pointed up in Ottoman language, but gender was, I think, a more significant distinction. Ethnicity (Albanian, Greek, or Ethiopian), rather than race per se, was sometimes designated for citizens of the empire and often designated for outsiders. Cins is one (rather more modern) word that is used for race. It means genus, a class ofthings, sort, category, race, nationality, or sex. But I have not seen it used in the Ottoman cartoons I have examined from the period 1908-14.
74. Virginia Aksan, in her essay in this issue, has illustrated the use of reaya as a designation of the non-Muslim population of the empire. Here I use it in its broader sense. In the Ottoman cartoon space bureaucrats were almost an intermediate category; they were associated with the regime but also with the "majority" of the populace who could be victimized by the regime, as when many bureaucrats were put out of work in the course of the reforms.
75. Palmira Brummett, "Dressing for Revolution: Mother, Nation, Citizen, and Subversive in the Ottoman Satirical Press, 1908-1911," in Arat, Deconstructing images, 37-64;
76. and Brummett, "New Woman and Old Nag: Images of Women in the Ottoman Cartoon Space," Princeton Papers: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1997): 13-58.
77. Kalem was published in Istanbul, fairly widely circulated, and aimed at an audience literate in Ottoman Turkish and French. In addition to the cartoons there are six other images offernales in these thirty issues; they appear in an ad, a biography, and several paintings. No female appears in the gazette until issue number 5.
78. Karagöz also targeted an elite, literate audience; like other gazettes, however, it was read aloud and its cartoons circulated outside the context of the gazette itself. (One might say these statistics are skewed by the fact that the gazette's two mascots, who appear in the cartoons, are male. But the similar statistics from Kalem, which had no mascots, seems to belie that suggestion.)
79. Charlotte Jirousek, "The Transition to Mass Fashion System Dress in the Later Ottoman Empire," in Quataert, Consumption Studies, 201-42. Jirousek has argued that "Ottoman dress remained essentially traditional in character until the economic and social alterations of the later nineteenth century created the necessary conditions for development of a true mass fashion system. Even then, this phenomenon was generally limited to an urban elite until after the establishment of the Turkish Republic brought both dress reform and changing economic patterns to the general population" (236-37). That assertion is generally supported in Ottoman cartoons of the 1908-14 era, although the cartoonists took considerable liberty with constructing society through dress.
80. On Ottoman dress reform, see Donald Quataert, "Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720-1829," International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 403-25. Nancy Micklewright has illustrated the trickle-down effect of Western fashion through pattern use and the popularization of Western styles in the nineteenth century, in much the same way that Eugene Weber has illustrated the trickle-down effect of dress styles that helped change "peasants into Frenchmen."
81. See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). She has also suggested a periodization similar to that offered by Edib. Micklewright argues that the transformation to Westernized female dress, signaling a change in mentalité, had already occurred by the time of Abdülhamid II, with most dress changes taking place from the 1830s to the 1860s.
82. See Nancy Micklewright, "Public and Private for Ottoman Women in the Nineteenth Century," in Ruggles, Patronage and Self-Representation, 155-76. The author's discussion suggests what I would call the fashion colonial context in the mid-nineteenth century, with Ottoman palace female ceremonial dress taking on the modes of Europe by 1876, especially in the aftermath of the visits by Empress Eugenie and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
83. I employ this period in part because the 1908 revolution prompted a great outpouring of literature of all sorts, especially the press and the types of satire that had been suppressed under Abdülhamid II and would increasingly be suppressed again as the Committee of Union and Progress gained power and the Balkan wars and World War I geared up.
84. Kalem, no. 48, 23 Temmuz 1325 Malî/12 August 1909, 9.
85. Kalem, no. 96, 23 Eylül 1326 Malî/6 October 1909, 3; the cartoon is by Seclad Nuri.
86. For a different type of juxtaposition of the fashionable white female and the "black" in Western dress, see Partha Mitter, "Cartoons of the Raj," History Today 47 (1997): 16-21. Mitter's consideration of Indian, particularly Bengali, satire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries includes a cartoon of the Indian babu (Westernized Indian) with a young white woman giggling at him (18). There are some interesting intersections between Ottoman and Indian cartoons, particularly "penetrating self-parody and social comment" (17). They share targets, like foreign entrepreneurs, Westernized dandies, "corrupt city fathers, and the mismanagement of official famine relief" (19). What is different is that for Ottoman cartoonists British imperialism was still mostly "outside" the empire, except in North Africa and the Persian Gulf. Also, the racial contrast drawn between colonizer and colonized in Indian satire was not the same kind of factor in Ottoman cartoons; Ottomans were the same color as Europeans in the Ottoman cartoon space. Where distinctions of skin shade tended to be made was in cartoons of European imperial incursions in North Africa.
87. For further comparisons found in Persian cartoons of the same era, see Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988).
88. On the eunuchs and slavery in the Ottoman Empire, see Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998).
89. See Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
90. and John Hunwick, "Islamic Law and Polemics over Race and Slavery in North and West Africa (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century)," in Slavery in the Islamic Middle East, ed. Shaun E. Marmon (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999), 43-68.
91. Kalem, no. 9, 16 Teşrin-i evvel 1324 Malî/29 October 1908,12.
92. Kalem, no.45, 16 Temmuz 1325 Malî/29 July 1909, 4.
93. The necessity of the coincidence between monarchy and empire is problematic because the sultan and other kings tended to be the primary embodiments of their empires. Ottoman cartoons in this period both equated monarchy with empire and suggested that while monarchy was obsolete empire was not.
94. Kalem, no. 23, Kanun-ι sani 1324 Malî/4 February 1909, 8-9. The figure presenting the women to Franz Josef may be Hüseyln Hilmi Pasha, who became grand vizier that February, but I am not sure that it is meant to be him.
95. In other frames Albania is often embodied in the form of a mountaineer (in fact I have never seen it embodied as female.) In this caricature, William is wearing half of a mountaineer's costume.
96. Karagöz, no. 598, 19 Şubat 1329 Malî/4 March 1914, 1.
97. Kalem, no. 11, 30 Teşrin-i evvel 1324 Mali/12 November 1908, 1.
98. Elsewhere in the cartoon space the army was also criticized as weak and unable to defend the empire's territories. But the army here can preserve a certain aura of nobility that the sultan, Abdülhamid II, at this point in time could not. On the discrediting of the monarchy in Iran at the same time, see Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 136-37. A 1908 article in the gazette Musavat charged the shah with, among other things, failing to protect the borders, safeguard the cities, and reform the army.
99. The nature of the border is unclear; it may suggest a river, or the Bosphorus.
100. Kalem, no. 13, 13 Teşrin-i sani 1324 Malî/26 November 1908, 8. The French caption adds "to have peace," and the caption in Ottoman Turkish echoes the French: "Türkiye for the Turks."
101. Karagöz, no. 533, 20 Haziran 1329 Malî/12 July 1913, 4. Karagöz and Hacivat, along with other shadow-puppet characters, were often employed as mascots and spokespersons in the Ottoman satirical press.
102. For some insights on the Ottoman women's movement and this particular gazette, see Aynur Demirdirek, "In Pursuit of the Ottoman Women's Movement," in Arat, Deconstructing Images, 65-82.
103. Karagöz routinely featured women in "traditional" (as opposed to Westernized) dress in its cartoons, often in juxtaposition to those things associated with the "new." The gazette also routinely lampooned changes in female dress style. For a cartoon in which Karagöz dons fashionable women's clothing to satirize women adapting the fashion of wearing swords (elements of male dress), see Karagöz, no. 615, 19 Nisan 1330 Malî/2 May 1914, 1. The sexual imagery in many of these cartoons is fairly explicit. Women were pushing their boundaries, and so men were pushing back. Unlike many of his male counterparts in the Ottoman cartoon space, Karagöz felt no compunction about donning women's dress or participating in women's work.
104. Falaka, no. 3, 1 Aǧustos 1327 Malî/14 August 1911, 4.
105. Frierson, Mirrors Out, Mirrors In, 180.
106. Of course this was not the only option for Ottoman (or British) discourses on female sexuality, but it was a potent and I would argue dominant one. Where the female is charged with preserving the empire in one case, she might be charged with "saving" the nation or redeeming it from empire in other settings. Much has been written on the crafting of the female in India. One pertinent example is Susie Tharu, "Tracing Savitri's Pedigree: Victorian Racism and the Image of Women in Indo-Anglian Literature," in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 254-68.
107. Philippa Levine, personal e-mail communication with author, December 2002.
108. Frontier "others" in Albania and the Yemen, for example, are of course an important factor. But the empire had long had various frontier others, in Bosnia and Kurdistan, for example. The existence of resistance or insubordination among frontier polities or populations, however, does not negate the ideology and rhetoric of Ottoman exceptionalism that depended on concepts of inclusion.
109. That is, the elite classes thought so (although the extent to which such ideas permeated the "other" classes is an interesting question). Deringil (Well-Protected Domains, 148) has argued that there were elements of the "civilizing mission" paradigm in Ottoman conceptualizations of the empire as an imperial power like all the others, particularly in Ottoman rhetorics concerning Africa. He points to a book by Mehmed izzed, saying, "The general tone of the book is very much in keeping with the 'white man's burden' approach of late nineteenth century colonialism." Göle (The Forbidden Modern, 82) has addressed the notion of the civilizing mission and the invocation of civilization in her discussion of Kemalist ideology and women as the "decisive criterion of societal choice between the dualities of East/West, progressivist/reactionary, and secularism / Islam" in the era from the Tanzimat tothe late twentieth century in Turkey.
110. The Ottomans also acknowledged other kinds of empire, the Japanese empire, for example, which stood as a model of imperial power and Asian exceptionalism, achieving military success and "modernization" while preserving the emperor. On the juxtaposition of the Ottoman empire and Japan, see, e.g., Renée Worringer, "'Sick Man of Europe,' or 'Japan of the Near East'? Constructing Ottoman Modernity in the Hamidian and Young Turk Eras," International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 2 (2004): 207-30.
111. Kayali, in Arabs and Young Turks, has argued for the enduring nature of Ottomanism and loyalty to the Ottoman state. See also Keith Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 121-33. Watenpaugh provides an eloquent articulation of the complexities of identity and historical consciousness in Aleppo in response to World War I.
112. A Moroccan envoy to France in the middle of the nineteenth century echoed some of the distinctions between European and North African exceptionalism that one finds in Ottoman rhetorics of empire. For Muhammad as-Saffar, the French (especially the women) were exceptional for their work ethic, their impressive machine culture, their formidable military, and their pursuit of learning. He found his own culture superior in its treatment of the poor and in its piety. See Muhammad as-Saffar, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 7845-1856, ed. and trans. Susan Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 152-57.
113. On the British use of critiques of infidel immorality as a basis for advancing British exceptionalism, see Philippa Levine, "What's British about Gender and Empire?" in this issue. Levine's statement "Criticisms of the infidel immorality of the Ottoman lands were frequent" and often focused on "the allegedly decadent sexuality of the East" could easily be transposed for Ottoman cartoons caricaturing the infidel morality of Europeans and the decadent sexuality of the West. The difference is that direct allusion to the religion of the immoral Europeans is seldom found in Ottoman cartoons.