Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire

Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire is a tale of how women’s triumphs as well as their failures shaped a global society—not despite, but because of, gender.

The Ottoman Empire was among the longest-lived polities in history, stretching between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries across three continents, several seas, and scores of cities, deserts, mountain ranges, rivers, and forests. This volume provides a compendium of idiosyncratic life stories and explores how women from these eras and regions understood the shape of the world in which they lived, and how they brought their consciousness of their gender to their efforts to re-shape it.

Among the questions explored in the book are how women have negotiated and constructed the public and private spheres, how to define “women’s speech” in a world mediated by men and male-dominated genres and institutions, and how women experienced their bodies as sites of politically inflected reproduction, death, and decay.

The book is thus an accessibly offbeat feminist overview of the field of Ottoman History that provides students, scholars, general readers, and non-specialists with insights into the lives and work of both ordinary Ottoman women and celebrated Ottoman women, women who failed despite their best efforts and women who succeeded against all odds—suicides, spies, and murderers as well as queens, scientists, and poets.

Ruth Miller is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her publications include The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman (2017) and The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (2007).

Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire

Ruth Miller

Designed cover image: Unknown 21 A Musical Gathering - Ottoman, 18th century. The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

First published 2025

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-76187-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-76188-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-16586-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866

Typeset in Sabon

by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Figures

Note on Transliteration, Names, and Pronunciation

Introduction: A Different Shape

Part I The Beginning: Prophecy and Poetry

1 Malhun Hatun (d. 1323): Mother of the Dynasty

2 Mihri Hatun (1460–1515): Distinguished Court Poet

3 Zeynep Hatun (Fifteenth Century): Elusive Touchstone of the Poet Biographers

4 A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya (d. 1517): Mystic, Mufti, and Spiritual Model

Part II A Global Empire: Networks of Influence, Webs of Power, and “The Sultanate of Women”

5 Hürrem Sultan (1502–1558): Roxelana, the Queen and the Witch

6 Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510–1569): Heroine of the Inquisition

7 Nurbanu Sultan (1525–1583): Architect of an Unprecedented Charitable Foundation

8 Şakire Hatun (ca. 1570s): Plaintiff and “Warrior”

9 Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1614): The Bloody Countess

10 Gülnuş Sultan (1642–1715): The Huntress Who Ushered in the Tulip Period

Part III The Ottoman Baroque: Art, Revolution, and Orientalism in the Long Eighteenth Century

11 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762): Errant Embodiment of the European Enlightenment

12 Dilhayat Kalfa (1710–1780): Celebrated Composer

13 Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825): Champion of the Greek Revolution

14 Esma İbret Hanım (b. 1780): Master Calligrapher

15 Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819–1881): Orientalist Painter

Part IV The Age of National Consciousness: Feminist Witnessing and Feminist Disruption

16 Maryana Marrash (1848–1919): Muse, Poet, and Essayist

17 Fatma Aliye (1862–1936): New Woman and Novelist

18 Zabel Yesayan (1878–1943): Genre-Defining Witness to the Armenian Genocide

19 Huda Sha’arawi (1879–1947): Charismatic Founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union

20 Celile Hikmet (1880–1956): Subversive Modernist Painter

21 Halide Edip (1884–1964): The Turkish Republic’s Foremost Feminist

Part V The End: Making Things Fall Apart

22 Sarah Aaronsohn (1890–1917): A Spy in the Levant

23 Anastasia Golovina (1850–1933) and Safiye Ali (1894–1952): Medical Practitioners Across Borders

24 Sabiha Sertel (1895–1968): Dissident Publishing Phenomenon

25 Sabiha Gökçen (1913–2001): The World’s First Female Fighter Pilot

Conclusion: The Lingering Shadow of Osman’s Tree

Glossary

Index

Figures

0.1 Sultan Beyazıt I before Timur, from an Akbarnama (“Book of Akbar”) by Dharam Das, ca. 1600

0.2 The Ottoman Empire in 1683

1.1 A lion brought from Baghdad submits to Osman Gazi by licking his boot, indicating Ottoman dominion over the animal as well as human world, from the Hünernâme, or “Book of Accomplishment,” ca. 1584

1.2 Commemorative Statue of Malhun Hatun in the Turkish city of Eskişehir

2.1 Sultan Mehmet III (r. 1595–1603) entertained by three musicians and two jesters, as the poet Nadiri is introduced to him as a potential beneficiary of his patronage, from the illustrated Divan of the poet Nadiri, ca. 1605

2.2 The poet-biographer Latifi, who described Mihri Hatun as “coquettish” like a woman yet “burning with passion” like a man, from his own illustrated biographical dictionary, ca. 1540s

3.1 Pages from the biographical dictionary of the poet-biographer Aşık Çelebi, ca. 1568

3.2 Züleyha rips Yusuf’s shirt, from Kemaleddin Behzad’s Persian “The Seduction of Yusuf,” ca. 1488

4.1 The severed head of the defeated Mamluk Sultan, who had recently met with A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya, is presented to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, from the Hünernâme, or “Book of Accomplishment,” ca. 1584

5.1 Haseki Sultan Complex Plan, excluding the hospital, by Cornelius Gurlitt, 1912

6.1 A Young Woman and Her Little Boy, presumed portrait of Beatriz de Luna by Agnolo Bronzino, ca. 1540s

7.1 Sultan Süleyman welcoming Hayrettin Pasha back from his Venetian expedition, from the Süleymannâme, or “Book of Süleyman,” ca. 1558

7.2 Women and men in the street watching Nurbanu Sultan’s funeral ceremony, from the Şehinşehname, or “Book of King of Kings,” ca. 1597

9.1 Presumed posthumous portrait of Elizabeth Báthory wearing mixed Western European and traditional Hungarian garb, early 1600s

9.2 Engraving of the torture and execution of French and Walloon mercenaries in 1600 at Pápa castle by Georgius Houfnaglius, 1617

10.1 The highly decorative northeast fountain of Gülnuş Sultan’s New Valide Sultan Mosque Complex in Üsküdar, Istanbul, begun 1708

11.1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in “Turkish” garb with her son, Edward Wortley Montagu, by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, 1717

11.2 Alexander Pope declares his love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by William Powell Frith, 1852

12.1 Early-eighteenth-century female musicians, from the Surname-i Vehbi, or the “Festival Book” of the court poet, Vehbi, ca. 1720

13.1 Laskarina Bouboulina on the Greek one drachma coin, 1990

13.2 Bouboulina Attacking Nafplio, Anonymous, early nineteenth century

14.1 Hilye in free form by Esma İbret Hanım, 1794/1795

15.1 Mermaid by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1863, before her Orientalist turn

15.2 Odalisque by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1869

15.3 Mermaid (The Siren) by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1873, after her Orientalist turn

16.1 Photograph of Maryana Marrash, before 1913

17.1 Fatma Aliye Topuz on the 50 lira Turkish banknote, 2009

17.2 Cover of Debt of Hate by Georges Ohnet in Le Radical, 1891

18.1 Zabel Yesayan as a young woman

18.2 Displaced Armenian families in the courtyard of the German-Levant Cotton Company following the 1909 Adana massacres, 1909

18.3 Zabel Yesayan with her family and the Armenian flag in Paris, 1918

19.1 Huda Sha’arawi in her office, ca. 1900s

19.2 Huda Sha’arawi with Talaat Harb, founder of Banque Misr, 1933

20.1 Hamamda Nü (“Nude in the Bath”) by Celile Hikmet, 1940

20.2 Portrait of Nazım Hikmet by Celile Hikmet, 1944

21.1 Halide Edip as a young woman

22.1 Sarah Aaronsohn and Avshalom Feinberg, leaders of the NILI spy network, 1916

23.1 Anastasia Golovina with fellow activists Zahari Stoyanov, Dimitar Rizov, and Aleksandar Golovin, 1885

23.2 Safiye Ali between the Balkan Wars and the First World War wearing a medal of the Ottoman Mecidiye Order

24.1 Sabiha Sertel defending herself at her trial, 1946

24.2 A page from Tan (“Dawn”), a struggling newspaper purchased by the Sertels in 1936 and transformed into the second largest newspaper in Turkey

25.1 Sabiha Gökçen and her fellow pilots posing with bombs in front of her Breguet 19, 1937

25.2 Women and children displaced following the Dersim Campaign, 1938

26.1 Tuğra of Mehmet IV, ca. 1662

Note On Transliteration, Names, And Pronunciation

Several options are available for transliterating Arabic, Ottoman-Turkish, and Persian words into Latin script. In this book, Ottoman-Turkish words are transliterated into modern Turkish forms (“Mehmet” rather than “Mehmed”), whereas Arabic and Persian words are transliterated following the guidelines listed in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. As much as possible, I have also used English versions of words that have come into general English usage (“Pasha,” for example, rather than “Paşa”). Finally, for those words that may be more familiar to a general audience in their Arabic formulation than in their Turkish formulation, I have used the Arabic transliteration (“waqf” for “foundation,” rather than “vakıf”).

The names that appear over the following pages conform to the practices current at the time of each biographical subject’s life. Surnames came into use, for example, in 1934 in post-Ottoman Turkey. For the purposes of this collection, therefore, Halide Edip Adıvar is “Halide Edip” rather than “Adıvar.” Anastasia Golovina, contrarily, is “Golovina,” and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann is “Jerichau-Baumann.” For a list of titles, please see the glossary.

Ottoman and post-Ottoman place names are notoriously political. Here, I have used common city names in their contemporary English forms, hence “Istanbul” rather than “Constantinople” or “Dersaadet,” “Salonica” rather than “Thessaloniki” or “Selanik,” and “Izmir” rather than “Smyrna,” but also “Nafplio” rather than “Nauplion.” When I’ve believed it would help more than hinder understanding, I have used modern regional place names to refer to historical areas (“Bulgaria,” for something that extends further north than “Thrace”). In general, I have added the qualifier “what is contemporary” (that is, “what is contemporary Bulgaria” or “what is contemporary Egypt”), but even this qualifier may be insufficiently apolitical. When I was faced with a history of border-drawing too complex to address in a short biography, I took refuge in geological formations (“The Carpathians” rather than “Romania” or “Slovakia”).

Letters in modern Turkish are pronounced as follows:

a

a as in all

c

j as in joke

ç

ch as in chimney

e

e as in set

ğ

unvocalized

i

ee as in teen

ı

io as in revolution

o

o as in over

ö

French eu, as in lieux

ş

sh as in shiny

u

oo as in hoot

ü

French u, as in plume

Introduction A Different Shape

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-1

Spanning seven centuries and three continents, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse polities in the world’s history. As such, its shape has always posed a problem. How can the shape of the diverse memalik-i mahruse, the “well-protected domains,” invoked by self-referential sixteenth-century sultans,¹ be the same as the unitary “Turkey” across which nineteenth-century European diplomats sought to extend colonial economic and extraterritorial privileges?² How can a single shape incorporate both the Balkans and Yemen, both the Caucasus and Algeria, along with the populations inhabiting those regions? And how can twenty-five (or even twenty-six) women from lands as far flung as these, from times as disparate as the thirteenth century and the twentieth century, have participated in shaping this object?

One quick series of answers to these questions is: it isn’t; it can’t; and they haven’t. The shapes and spaces invoked by the questions above operate in discrete frameworks. The well-protected domains reference the shape of an empire founded on a prophetic dream of global rule.³ Modern extraterritoriality rights emerge from the speciously rational cartographic shape underlying colonial taxonomies.⁴ And the twenty-five women who populate this volume, separated by time, space, religion, ethnicity, language, class, profession, and culture, shape a gendered agency stretched thin across centuries and continents.

The Ottoman Empire, in these questions, is multiple: a shape dreamt, protected, dominated, colonized, mapped, projected, imagined, mobilized, and, as we shall see later, turned monumental, left war-torn, given over to violence, and made abject, before disappearing altogether. These spaces and shapes do not coincide with one another. Frequently they obliterate one another. And yet, all emerged in whole or in part as a product of women’s shaping.

How did this happen? A useful place to begin to answer that question is with a brief geopolitical history of the Empire. Sometime near the end of the 1200s, following the dissolution of the Abbasid Caliphate under the Mongols in 1258, a quasi-nomadic Turkic leader settled his warriors and clients in the northwestern corner of Anatolia. This Turkic leader’s name was Osman, “Othman” or “Uthman” in classical Arabic pronunciation, hence “Otman” in German or Latin, and thence “Ottoman” in the western European historical record.

For reasons that differ according to commentators’ contemporary political commitments (even “nomadic” and “warrior” are contested descriptors),⁵ Osman amassed a following and began to push the edges of his territory outward. In 1326, Osman’s son, Orhan, captured the Anatolian city of Bursa, which became the first Ottoman capital.⁶ By the end of Orhan’s reign, most of northwestern Anatolia was Ottoman. Under Orhan’s son, Murat, contemporary Bulgaria and Serbia had been largely incorporated into the Ottoman state. Edirne or Adrianople, later the second Ottoman capital city, fell in 1361.⁷

After that, subsequent to a setback and a series of civil wars when Timur, “Tamerlane” in the European record, captured the Sultan Beyazıt I in 1402 and, according to the chroniclers, provoked the latter’s suicide,⁸ the fifteenth century was a period of rapid expansion: Constantinople/Istanbul became Ottoman in 1453, followed by the remainder of the Byzantine Empire. The Balkans, including what are contemporary Albania and Greece, fell by the 1480s. By the turn of the fifteenth century, contemporary European chroniclers were describing the Sultan Mehmet II as a man obsessed by cartography and maps because only maps could satisfy his “desire to dominate.”⁹ The conquest of Crimea, and then, one hundred years later, the Caucasus, turned the Black Sea into what nineteenth-century diplomatic historians liked to call “an Ottoman lake.”¹⁰

Figure 0.1 Sultan Beyazıt I before Timur, from an Akbarnama (“Book of Akbar”) by Dharam Das, ca. 1600. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1935.

And then, in 1516 and 1517, after absorbing the former Mamluk state, including what are contemporary Egypt and Syria and the western part of the Arabian peninsula into Ottoman territory, the Sultan Selim I took on the title of Caliph and Protector of the Holy Places, Mecca and Medina.¹¹ Throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century, much of north Africa, most of the Arabian peninsula, and many of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean became Ottoman. The region that is now Iraq changed hands between the Ottomans and the Iranian Safavids throughout the 1570s and 1580s, gradually becoming predominantly Ottoman by the 1590s.¹² Today’s Hungary and Romania were Ottoman by the end of the sixteenth century.

The year 1699 ordinarily marks the beginning of the Ottoman withdrawal from central and southeastern Europe, though those same eighteenth- and nineteenth-century diplomatic historians frequently and romantically invoke 1683, the year of the disastrous second siege of Vienna, as the turning point in Ottoman territorial fortunes.¹³ By the early eighteenth century, Hungary had been ceded to the Hapsburg state, and by the late eighteenth century most of the eastern and northern Black Sea was Russian. In 1832, following a decade-long war of independence, Greece became sovereign. In 1878, Serbia and Romania likewise established their autonomy.

Throughout the later nineteenth century, British and French imperial actors began to establish formal as well as informal, legal as well as quasi-legal, colonies in Asian and African territory that remained nominally Ottoman until the First World War. Algeria, for example, became a formal French colony in 1848, whereas Syria and Lebanon were subject to French “humanitarian intervention” by 1860 and 1861.¹⁴ Egypt became a British protectorate gradually between 1882 and 1914 via a series of open-ended, temporary states of emergency that lasted nearly 70 years,¹⁵ whereas much of Iraq was ruled de facto by British consular officials rather than Ottoman governors over the same period.¹⁶ In the decade and a half preceding the First World War, Bulgaria and Albania became formally independent, Austria annexed Bosnia, and Italy annexed Libya.

Figure 0.2 The Ottoman Empire in 1683. Source: map by Atılım Güneş Baydın.

The Treaty of Sèvres, which formalized the Ottoman defeat following the First World War and established British and French mandates in most of the Arabic-speaking former Ottoman territories, reduced the Ottoman state to a small area surrounding the city of Ankara. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, marked the end of the Ottoman Empire and established the Republic of Turkey within today’s Turkish borders. By 1924, the Ottoman Caliphate had been abolished.¹⁷

This geopolitical and military history of the Ottoman polity has, however, little to do with the lives of the women who appear throughout the following pages. If anything, it serves as a foil to the less certain shapes and spaces that would have been familiar or significant to them. Indeed, the naïve assumption underlying this conventional tale of borders expanding and borders contracting—that the Ottoman Empire was a cleanly delimited entity characterized by clearcut distinctions between interior and exterior, between compatriot and foreigner, between the abode of justice and the abode of war—is one of many that the biographies constituting this compendium will question.

Consider just one of the more obvious conclusions to draw from this schematic history: the Ottoman Empire, one of the longest-lived Islamic polities in history, was geographically European before it was Asian or African. Moreover, since Ottoman jurists, administrators, and rulers had little interest in converting the non-Muslim peoples inhabiting the Empire’s European territories to Islam, it was also, for its first two hundred years, a significantly Christian-populated state. Only Bosnia and Albania can boast significant indigenous Balkan-Muslim populations today.¹⁸

It would be an error, however, to attribute this Ottoman openness to non-Muslim belief and practice to an anachronistic celebration of religious diversity for its own sake. On the contrary, non-Muslims were tolerated and protected within Ottoman imperial borders only because Ottoman imperial actors were working within a pre-modern Islamic political and legal tradition that incorporated non-Muslim populations into the ideal Islamic state as both tolerated or protected subjects and inferior subjects.¹⁹ Harmonious inequality was the touchstone of the system. Inferiority made the system of tolerance possible.

Additionally, the most significant early modern Ottoman contribution to this centuries-old practice of religious and cultural tolerance was not to reconfigure it into the foundation for a modern proto-democratic system of equal citizenship. Rather, it was to institutionalize its inherent inequality via an elaborate edifice of tax structures, consumption regulations, and surveilled legal autonomy in a bureaucratic arrangement called the millet system that many argue was fully formalized only by the nineteenth century.²⁰ Non-Muslims lived within Ottoman lands, in theory if not always in actuality,²¹ according to their own laws, worshipped according to their own practices, and refined Ottoman variants on their own languages and cultures, while being denied the political, sartorial, and economic freedoms enjoyed by their Muslim counterparts.²²

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the same Ottoman administrators who had governed this just, yet inequitable, early-modern system of religious, linguistic, legal, cultural, and ethnic diversity were thus faced with a dilemma: upon attempting to institute the nascent liberal-democratic ideals of the day by replacing the fluid and informal millet system with a modern, formal system of uniform Ottoman citizenship defined by equality before a single law, the demands for continued “flexibility” on the part of the tolerated yet unequal subjects who would become equal citizens came from every walk of life, from every religious, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic background.²³ Never having served a politics of starkly defined interior and exterior, of not-foreign and foreign, or of legal uniformity, be it religious, ethnic, linguistic, or political, Ottoman institutions simply weren’t up to the challenge. There was no room in Ottoman political theory or practice for a replacement of the communal and frequently local belonging that had always been the cornerstone of Ottoman philosophies of governance, with a monolithic identity defined by abstract lines drawn on an abstract map and institutionalized in an abstract constitution for which an abstract citizenry was willing to spill its far from abstract blood in war.²⁴

It is important, therefore, when reading the biographies that follow to remember this fluid to non-existent distinction between the foreign and the not-foreign, the interior and the exterior, that remained typical of Ottoman political, legal, religious, and ethnic belonging well into the twentieth century. The reason for this is that the temptation for readers will be to imagine the world that these twenty-five women knew as a world defined by the binaries familiar to today’s increasingly contested rhetoric of national belonging—Ottoman or not-Ottoman, European or not-European, oppressors or victims, even modern or not-modern. But it’s best to resist that temptation. The women who inhabit this book came from wildly varied backgrounds and lived fiercely different lives. They had nothing, however, to do with today’s language of pluralism, equity, or equality. Inclusion and exclusion, as they are now defined, would have meant very little to them.

The Problem of “Ottoman Women”

The field of Ottoman history has never lacked innovative, rigorous secondary scholarship devoted to women in imperial life.²⁵ Nor has it fallen short in theoretical studies that take gender as a category of analysis. Every year sees new books and articles published on the famous or infamous women who lived as queens and consorts,²⁶ as patrons of art and architecture,²⁷ or as influential political figures in their own right.²⁸ Several inquiries into the ordinary women populating Ottoman archival documents in the form of plaintiffs or defendants in lawsuits,²⁹ as business owners,³⁰ as contributors to charitable foundations,³¹ or as midwives and doctors³² have rounded out this portrait of women in the Ottoman world. More recently, there has also been a surge of remarkable writing on the women who were themselves artists and poets, in addition to being patrons of these creative pursuits.³³

Although this scholarly interest in women in the Ottoman Empire is open to criticism, descendent as it is of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist fascination with The Eastern Woman,³⁴ its persistence over more than two centuries makes it difficult to argue that women have been marginalized or invisible in the field as they have been in other fields of history. Students of women’s history in the Ottoman Empire can draw on 250 years of, once again, occasionally dubious secondary writing on women, gender, and sexuality in Ottoman domains that includes everything from Gustave Flaubert’s nineteenth-century description of “Kuchuk Hanem”³⁵ to twentieth-century postcolonial work on intersectional gender, race, and class,³⁶ to more recent, critical scholarship that draws on, and extends, both.³⁷ This is in addition to a wealth of archival and primary source material that is directly and indirectly relevant to women, and that stretches back to the sixteenth and even the fifteenth centuries.³⁸

The catalyst driving this biographical compendium, therefore, is not a sudden recognition that women have been missing from the historical record, waiting for the moment at which their introduction to the canon will disorder pre-existing patriarchal assumptions. No. Such a recognition would run too blatantly contrary to the sea of material we’ve always had at hand. We may not like this material, but in the field of Ottoman history, women have always been front and center, perhaps too much so.

Thus, the biographies presented here are motivated by a different impetus. Rather than seeking models of influence or power who might operate in their own right alongside their equally influential or powerful male counterparts, the stories told over the following pages will instead explore and interrogate the contingent quality of women’s agency, empowerment, and identity as it has played out across the myriad sources that constitute the Ottoman historical record. The women who play roles in the ensuing chapters, that is to say, will emerge as empowered agents only to the extent that they also inhabit a shifting and expansive reservoir of materials and documents that remains dynamic and, itself, open to question. These are not tales of commendable or remarkable or infamous behavior. Instead, they are tales of the always doubtful relationship between, on the one hand, agency, and on the other hand, the source material from which historians excavate stories of that agency.

What do we mean by “agency?” Historically, agency has been defined in feminist political theory as a series of relationships between a subject, broadly construed, and the linguistic or material environments within which that subject operates.³⁹ In the early days, scholars drew on liberal philosophies of the empowered individual to argue that agency referred to a sovereign, independent subject acting upon passive fields of speech, language, or matter.⁴⁰ To the extent that a woman had agency, she spoke for herself, and in so speaking defined herself as a rational, self-conscious, embodied individual, thereby exercising her will upon an inert material or linguistic field. This theory of agency, empowerment, and identity dominated writing in women’s history and politics throughout the early and mid-twentieth century, though it also continues to influence popular theories of women’s empowerment today.

A second theory of women’s agency, prominent by the 1990s, criticized this previous valorization of autonomy and radical individualism for its assumption that power, embodiment, or selfhood can operate outside of discourse. It questioned the notion that it’s possible, or even desirable, to operate beyond power or to exert one’s will on or against it.⁴¹ This second theory redefined agency, therefore, as a product of language and the environment.⁴² To the extent that a woman exercised agency, she did so within pre-existing discursive or material fields by reenacting likewise pre-existing norms in spontaneous or unexpected ways. Resisting rather than opposing violence, the empowered woman either ironically reproduced violent discourses or unintentionally subverted them.⁴³ Here, then, the definition of language was expanded to include unconscious habitual actions or established scripts as well as the rational speech of the self-conscious individual actor.

A third theory of agency, gaining ground as of the early 2010s, criticized this second theory both for its privileging of language over matter and for its retention, despite itself, of the still largely discrete individual subject, relational though this subject might be.⁴⁴ This third theory, drawing on the environmentalist and posthumanist writing of the early 2000s that took assemblages of matter, rather than the human subject, as its starting point, defined agency as a process by which both human and non-human potential is realized via the interaction of material and linguistic systems.⁴⁵ According to this theory, a woman would exercise agency to the extent that she participated in the unpredictable interactions of material, environmental, and linguistic forces that spontaneously produced pathways toward action or activity.⁴⁶ Whereas the first theory of agency emphasized rights and choice as the defining attributes of the empowered woman, and the second emphasized resistance and subversion as her key qualities, this third theory emphasized vitality and joy.

There are, of course, many more definitions of the term, but these three are schematically helpful because they range across the spectrum of writing on agency and empowerment, from radical individualism to radical environmentalism. All three, along with others that operate in the interstices of the spectrum, will appear throughout the following pages, often overlapping, sometimes competing, but necessarily, as noted before, contingent. Narratives of agency have always been dependent upon source material, and, as the stories that follow will show, reading and interpreting source material is always a haphazard activity.

This raises our second problem: source material. Consider, first of all, the sheer wealth of stuff available to historians of the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of thousands of legal and bureaucratic documents stored both centrally, in Istanbul, and in provincial archives scattered across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Centuries of travelers’ accounts in several languages. Journals, novels, letters, scientific studies, poetry, calligraphy, epigraphy, monumental building projects—the list is extensive. And certain types of sources lend, or appear to lend, themselves to certain assumptions regarding women’s agency.

In the old days, sources that demonstrated individual self-conscious women speaking rationally for themselves represented the pinnacle of feminist historical work. Letters and journals were best, but the modern novel, too, suggested, at least, an autonomous self-consciousness that hinted at a nascent and properly empowered liberal individual. The notion that self-fashioning via activities such as journal writing is dissociative, and thus as mediated as any other sort of writing, for the most part didn’t play a part in this scholarship. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s epistolary production (Chapter 11) and Fatma Aliye’s novels (Chapter 17) would have been examples of such self-fashioning. Mihri Hatun’s poetry (Chapter 2) and Dilhayat Kalfa’s musical compositions (Chapter 12) would have been similarly, if marginally, acceptable.

As time passed, however, and as new theories of agency less enamored of the rational, autonomous individual took hold, the problem of source material that wasn’t directly or explicitly produced by women, the material in which women failed to speak for themselves or were mediated through male writers or scribes, became less of a problem. Court cases—transcripts of lawsuits, criminal trials, marital disputes, and the like—became increasingly fashionable as sources because, though the women inhabiting them certainly weren’t speaking, unmediated, on their own, the echo of their agency across well-established discourses such as law or commerce allowed for an excavation of evidence of their empowerment. Similarly, the architectural patronage of wealthy women became a popular site for historical research because, though the words of these women were sparse to nonexistent, their physical intervention into an urban landscape was a clear example of both agency and the subversion of pre-existing norms concerning public and private space. Şakire Hatun’s lawsuit (Chapter 8) and Gülnuş Sultan’s building projects (Chapter 10) are each examples of this sort of agency deriving from that sort of source material.

And finally, there are the apocryphal women—the women like Malhun Hatun (Chapter 1), who was most likely a composite of more than one historical figure, or Laskarina Bouboulina (Chapter 13), whose legacy is so hyperbolically heroic that she may as well have been fictional. The source material concerning these women is far from rational or trustworthy. Malhun Hatun may not even have had a single body. But if we read this material within the framework of posthumanist theories of agency, if we read, for example, Malhun Hatun as an assemblage rather than as an individual, we can unearth a robust if partial narrative of agency or empowerment in the same way that we can from the novels, letters, journals, buildings, or court cases. The point, once more, is this: there is no need to adhere to only one definition of agency. Despite the discomfort, forcing multiple theories into conversation with one another will produce a more effective portrait of the women who shaped the Empire, of their lives, their relations, and their identities.

And what about their identities? First, and most important, today’s identity categories, would have had little resonance in the periods and places with which these biographies concern themselves. Prior to the nineteenth century, few of the women who appear here would have recognized “Turk” or “Arab” as an abstract ethnic categorization rather than as a claim to a more complicated and shifting set of literary or civilizational qualifiers.⁴⁷ Adherence to a uniform, centrally standardized linguistic group was non-existent. And even religious identity was fluid, locally situated, and thus heterodox. In the same way that agency in these biographies is contingent both on the source material and, more so, on our reading or interpretation of this material, so too is identity. There were no clear-cut ethno-nationalist distinctions among peoples and populations in the Ottoman Empire until modern census-taking became the norm.

But second, and similarly relevant, remember that the term “Ottoman” itself as a category of belonging was invented by mid-nineteenth-century ideologues out to elaborate a new theory of liberal democratic belonging against the millet system, to counteract what had become growing ethno-linguistic nationalist movements.⁴⁸ Before that time, “Ottoman” referred to the dynasty or, at best, to the chancery language,⁴⁹ meaning that the term “Ottoman women” would have had as little resonance to most of the figures populating this collection as, for example, “Romanov women” or “Hapsburg women.” And even after the term’s reinvention as a category of citizenship, only the self-consciously modern women who occupied themselves with writing likewise self-consciously modern novels or letters (Fatma Aliye, for example) would have employed it in such a way, and even then with lukewarmth.⁵⁰

It is for this reason that, in addition to women who lived their lives within the borders of the Empire, readers will also find in this compendium biographies of northern and western European women who travelled across these borders and left them behind. The lives of these travelers throw into relief the dialectical quality of historically anachronistic terms like “Ottoman women” by highlighting, sometimes starkly, the extent to which empowerment never happens in a vacuum. The Orientalist agency appropriated by northern or western European women travelers—their performance of their empowerment against the backdrop of a picturesque or degraded East—is a classic example of this process and, as unpleasant as it may be to read about it, their lives were as vital to the shaping of the Ottoman Empire as the lives of more intuitively obvious “Ottoman” women were.

And so, these travelers appear in the volume alongside the ordinary “Ottoman” women and the celebrated “Ottoman” women, the women who failed, despite their best efforts, and the women who succeeded, the suicides and the spies, as well as the queens and the poets, as a means of constituting a miscellany of biographies that, above all, avoid the pitfalls of hagiography. This book is not a study in female exceptionalism. Rather, it is a multifaceted tale of how women’s industry, of how women’s tragedies as well as their triumphs, shaped a global polity not despite, but because of, gender.

Overview

Given its pointillist scope, this collection can be read either consecutively, from cover to cover, or impressionistically, each section or chapter standing alone. Although the volume is arranged chronologically, therefore, chronology is not its primary organizing principle. Rather, each chapter explores one of four classic problems in the study of women’s history—borders, spaces, speech, and embodiment—and each biography discusses, implicitly as well as explicitly, (a) how this problem manifested itself in the life history of the biographical subject, and (b) how this subject responded to it as she shaped and interpreted the Empire. Every one of these four problems has also, however, generated nearly as much scholarship in the field of women’s history as agency and identity have.

What do we mean, first, by “borders?” Many decades ago, anthropologists posited what has now become a standard distinction in humanistic and social-scientific study between the border, on the one hand, and the boundary, on the other. The border, according to this traditional anthropological work, has to do with sovereignty. It is the imaginary cartographic line surrounding a state, usually a nation state. ⁵¹ The boundary, contrarily, has to do with identity. It is the likewise imaginary symbolic line dividing social or cultural groups.⁵² This distinction, like all scholarly distinctions, has been contested. But it is nonetheless a useful starting point for analysis.

One of the more destructive aspects of post-Westphalian⁵³ systems of international law, for example, has been the impetus these systems have given to often doomed efforts to superimpose political borders onto cultural boundaries, frequently in the form of walls or wire.⁵⁴ Moreover, the rhetoric of equality, democracy or freedom that often accompanies these endeavors has only exacerbated the bloody futility of such moments. Indeed, in their most extreme manifestations, these moments have led to the population exchanges, ethnic cleansings, and genocides familiar to students of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century history.⁵⁵

Our interest in this compendium, however, is less the dysfunctional relationship between the political border and the cultural boundary, and more how, in the midst of this empty shoring up of boundaries as borders and the other way around, women’s bodies became one of the most exaggerated sites of the collision between the two—how women’s bodily borders, sovereign borders, and cultural or national boundaries have all become mixed up in the popular, political, legal, cultural, and even artistic imagination as interchangeable lines or spaces. As a corollary, we will also ask how women negotiated or subverted these ongoing collisions. For as much as the Westphalian moment operated across women’s bodies on a global scale, it was also challenged or undermined in these spaces. And, prior to the modern period, boundaries—religious, metaphysical, and rhetorical as well as cultural or ethnic—far more than borders determined the shape of polities like the Ottoman Empire.⁵⁶

The questions underlying the biographies that address women shaping borders, therefore, are, first, how did this simultaneity of women’s bodily borders or boundaries with political or cultural borders or boundaries affect the daily life of early modern and modern women? Second, what sort of agency did women exercise when borders and boundaries shaped, or were shaped by, not only territory and culture, but also dreamscapes, religious experiences, or artistic expression? Third, how did women live their lives both on borders and as borders. And finally, fourth, how did women’s lives in turn shape the borders themselves?

The second classic problem in the study of women’s history invoked in the following chapters—space—is related to the problem of borders. Indeed, a traditional question animating much of the earliest work in women’s history was how public and private space might be distinguished from one another, or where to draw the border or boundary between the two.⁵⁷ This question, in turn, prompted an ever-growing series of associated questions: how have women navigated public and private space? Can we speak of the interpenetration of the public and the private? To what extent were women’s bodies inscribed within or superimposed upon private or public space? How was private or domestic space, such as the harem, nonetheless political? How and for what purpose did women reshape notions of the public and the private?⁵⁸

This distinction between the public and the private is, however, only one of several means of thinking about the shape of space. An influential twentieth-century French work on the production of space broadly defined, for example, divided public space itself into, among other categories, the abstract space of the urban square idealized in mass democratic politics, the horizontal space of institutions such as schools or prisons that symbolizes submission to authority, the vertical space of the monument or skyscraper, which reproduces power, the subterranean space of the cemetery, which expresses death, and the strategic space of the suburb, which—in large western European cities such as Paris, at least—forces troublesome groups toward the periphery, away from centers of decision and information.⁵⁹

But even these more detailed theories of space frequently take the city, or more narrowly the western European city, as their model. As a result, such theories both ignore the horizontal, rather than vertical, quality of traditional Ottoman architectural planning, while also encouraging an Orientalist fascination with the supposedly inaccessible harem unique to upper-class city-dwellers.⁶⁰ More than that, this urban emphasis also discounts the shape of space in villages or agricultural areas, the shape of space on the battlefield, or, for that matter, the shape of space in the imagined realm of the prophesied global empire.⁶¹

And yet, all of these spaces were as essential to the lives of the women who appear in this compendium as cities such as Istanbul or Salonica. Indeed, women shaped and navigated imagined or rhetorical space as effectively as they did public, private, or for that matter urban horizontal or vertical space. Hence, the concern of these biographies is not just the shape of space, but the shape and shaping of spaces across the Empire.

Words, speech, and language play much the same role as borders and space in traditional studies of women’s history. Classic feminist work on the history of women and words, for example, often starts with the methodological difficulty inherent in researching private women’s speech when it has so frequently been mediated by public men and male-dominated genres or institutions.⁶² This problem is central to the biographies that make up this collection as well. Most of the women who appear in these pages do so two, three, or four degrees removed. They are described and given speech by men. The most immediate question that a feminist scholar might ask of these tales, therefore, is how might we excavate women’s words when these words have been refashioned by others, frequently into something unrecognizable, across time, space, gender, and often genre?⁶³

But this traditional question is not the only question facing historians of women, speech, and language. A second question, and more to the point for our purposes, might be: ought excavating the lost words of silent women even be the task of the biographer or the historian? After all, in the same way that uncritically reading certain sources—letters, journals, and novels—as evidence of authoritative women speaking for and about themselves led earlier women’s historians to draw occasionally dubious conclusions, so too has the associated search for women’s ever elusive unmediated speech led to equally dubious methods and modes of analysis.

Why? First, because speech, no matter how spontaneous or immediate, is always mediated by time, space, genre, and interpretation.⁶⁴ And second, more important, because one of the assumptions underlying the notion that mediation itself is disempowering is the related notion that speech has one purpose, which is representation, and usually political representation. So long as the speaking woman, historical or otherwise, represents herself effectively, the argument goes, that woman is exercising agency.⁶⁵

As early as the 1980s, however, this interpretation of speech, or of past speech recuperated, became a question, rather than a given, in feminist writing on historical representation.⁶⁶ Though historians might represent the echoes of historical speaking subjects, this writing posited, the goal of these historians could never be accuracy, which is an impossibility, so much as a transformation of the historian’s own narrative consciousness.⁶⁷ Yes, the purpose of speech could very well be, or have been, representation or even communication. But it might also be, or have been, poetry, prayer, or ritual. It might have been babble even, or silence.⁶⁸ It is thus questionable that one or the other sort of source can return a biographical speaking subject from the dead in all of her unmediated glory. What we as historians conjure up instead, according to this second trend in the literature, is an echo, a flicker of a moment of a life, and what we may or may not achieve via this act of conjuration is a shift in our own consciousness. We reanimate them. But the dead are still dead.

In addition to exploring the problem of women’s speech as it is mediated by male-dominated institutions, therefore, a key question motivating these biographies is the more fundamental relationship among gendered language, speech, words, and writing. These are not identical or unproblematic activities, and the tensions and collisions among them can be both productive and disorienting. Our interest, therefore, will be less discovering and recuperating what women said, or meant to say, and more creating a context in which their words might shape our own historical consciousness.

Finally, women’s bodies as vessels of individual or collective life and death, modern as well as pre-modern, have figured in women’s history since the initiation of the field.⁶⁹ The patriarchal claim that reproduction is the central function of the female body, and the associated patriarchal fear of the bare, biological life or death, absent politics, that this body represents, have together produced regimes of sexual oppression and violence that need hardly be enumerated or repeated.⁷⁰ How women have responded to, appropriated, or for that matter, ignored, these well-established tropes is thus worth exploring further.

As we shall see, the women who appear over the following pages experienced their embodiment, their relationship to life as well as to death, in disparate and idiosyncratic ways. Some embraced monstrous life and the monstrous body, giving themselves over to a variation on reproduction that exploded efforts to contain the biological qualities of female embodiment. Others set themselves up as guardians or protectors, rather than producers, of life. And still others dissolved their discrete, singular, embodied reproductive lives across material and environmental spaces. Some defined life as love while others defined life as art, and yet others defined it as an object of consumer desire.

Likewise, the femme fatales and the suicides, the murderers and the martyrs, the vampires and the hags who have embodied death and decay in modern and pre-modern political and cultural rhetoric for as long as they’ve been saddled with responsibility for collective reproduction have their Ottoman counterparts as well. Representing the dark side of liberal choice in the modern period, these women frequently emerge as tragic figures who, despite themselves, often despite their best intentions, choose death. By the early twentieth century, indeed, the well-worn tale of the seductive spy, the despairing suicide, the despotic warrior woman, or all three together had cemented this equation between women’s choice and women’s death within a now mass-produced popular consciousness.

But was there a variation on this theme of deadly embodiment that was peculiarly Ottoman or that pre-dated the eighteenth-century birth of the liberal political subject and her radically individual choice? The chapters that follow will suggest that there very much was. A running theme throughout the following pages is that such women not only inhabited the Ottoman Empire as unique representatives of embodied death, but also, to come full circle, shaped its borders, its spaces, its speech, and, finite though it may have been, its life.

The biographies that constitute this compendium are thus, above all, a miscellany, a collection of fragments of the lives and deaths of some, but not all, or even most, of the women who shaped the Ottoman Empire. Incomplete and fractured, these narratives dwell for longer than might seem necessary on small moments, episodes, or objects in or from the lives of the women they’ve momentarily called back from the dead. But make no mistake: these moments, episodes, and objects are as evocative in their trivial, accidental persistence across time as the most deliberately hallowed or hulking of monuments and palaces. The apple consumed by a fourteenth-century Anatolian peasant or the teacup purchased by an eighteenth-century Istanbul composer are as vital to the shaping of the Ottoman polity as any post-war territorial concession, quasi-constitutional tax treaty, or tribute to imperial might. In many ways, they are more so. Or, at least, so goes the claim underlying this book.

Notes

Einer Wigen, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8 (1) (Summer 2013): 44–66, 54. See also Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in The Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 22.

Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–41.

Einer Wigen, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8 (1) (Summer 2013), 54. For example, the milket-i Osman, the “gifts of Osman,” as elaborated in Chapter 1.

Douglas Howland, “The Foreign and the Sovereign: Extraterritoriality in East Asia,” in Douglas Howland and Luise White, eds., The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008): 35–55, 50. See also Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Linda Darling, “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica 91 (2000): 133–163, 135.

Aptullah Kuran, “A Spatial Study of Three Ottoman Capitals: Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul,” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 114–131, 114.

Aptullah Kuran, “A Spatial Study of Three Ottoman Capitals: Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul,” Muqarnas 13 (1996), 120.

Murat Cem Mengüç, “Histories of Bayezid I, Historians of Bayezid II: Rethinking Late Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 76 (3) (2013): 373–389, 382.

Karen Pinto, “The Maps Are the Message: Mehmet II’s Patronage of an ‘Ottoman Cluster,’” Imago Mundi 63 (2) (2011): 155–179, 157.

Kaan Üçsu, “Cartographies of the ‘Eastern Question’: Some Considerations on Mapping the Sea of the Marmara and the Black Sea in the Nineteenth Century,” in Concha Roldán, Daniel Brauer, and Johannes Rohbeck, eds., Philosophy of Globalization (Boston: De Gruyter, 2018): 253–268, 254.

Einer Wigen, “Ottoman Concepts of Empire,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8 (1) (Summer 2013), 49.

Lâle Uluç, “Selling to the Court: Late-Sixteenth-Century Manuscript Production in Shiraz,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 73–96, 89.

Anders Ingram, “The Ottoman Siege of Vienna, English Ballads, and the Exclusion Crisis,” The Historical Journal 57 (1) (March 2014): 53–80, 54.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 134.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defense of Empire: The British Army and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2) (2015): 249–267, 258.

Mahmoud Haddad, “Syria and Iraq as Proxy Colonies Before Colonization: The Ottoman Vali Versus the Western Consul in the Era of Capitulations,” Die Welt des Islams 60 (1) (2020): 3–30, 29.

Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2.

H.T. Norris, Islam in the Balkans: Religion and Society between Europe and the Arab World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 4–5, 264–265. Galip Çağ, “From Myth to Reality: Some Findings on the Role of Islam in the Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans,” in Ayşe Zişan Furat and Hamit Er, eds., Balkans and Islam: Encounter, Transformation, Discontinuity, Continuity (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012): 8–19, 15–16.

Najwa Al-Qattan, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (3) (August 1999): 429–444, 444.

Fariba Zarinebaf, “Intercommunal Life in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Middle East Studies 46 (1) (Summer 2021): 79–85, 79.

And even the theory was more complicated than it ordinarily appears in conventional histories of the Ottoman Empire that seek a “simplification of a relentlessly complex pile of historical facts into a manageable schema.” Şunhaz Yilmaz and İpek Yosmaoğlu, “Fighting the Spectres of the Past: Dilemmas of Ottoman Legacy in the Balkans and the Middle East,” Middle Eastern Studies 44 (5) (September 2008): 677–693, 682.

“The millet system was not a codified system, and its implementation was not comparable across communities. Eighteen different legal systems have been described under the Ottoman millet practice, as was necessary in such a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society.” Latif Tas, “The Myth of the Ottoman ‘Millet’ System: Its Treatment of Kuds and a Discussion of Territorial and Non-Territorial Autonomy,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 21 (4) (2014): 497–526, 507.

For example, “although the state officials emphasized the logic of distinguishing between religious and nonreligious (or political) in order to reconcile non-Muslim particularism with universal citizenship, the line between them was left flexible.” Masayuki Ueno, “Religious in Form, Political in Content? Privileges of Ottoman Non-Muslims in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (3) (2016): 408–441, 434.

Universal military conscription as an adjunct to universal citizenship remained an ongoing problem for Ottoman political theory throughout the nineteenth century. See, for example, Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu, “Inclusion and Exclusion: Conscription in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 5 (2) (2007): 264–286.

Recently, for example, Suraiya Faroqhi, Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023).

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

Didem Havlıoğlu, “The Writing Subjects: Halide Edip and Assia Djebar,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12 (2) (July 2016): 291–295.

Canonically, Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also, among many others, Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011).

Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700–1850,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 141–152, 142.

Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).

Gülhan Balsoy, The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2013) and Tuba Demirci and Selçuk Akşin Somel, “Women’s Bodies, Demography, and Public Health: Abortion Policy and Perspectives in the Ottoman Empire of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (3) (September 2008): 377–420. See also Khaled Fahmy, “Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” in Lila Abu Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998): 35–72.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Nikki R. Keddie, “Women in the Limelight: Some Recent Books on Middle Eastern Women’s History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (3) (August 2002): 553–573, 555.

Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991), 75.

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

Başak Tuğ, “Gender and Ottoman Social History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2) (May 2014): 379–381.

Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 49.

Laura M. Ahearn, “Language and Agency,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 109–137, 112–113.

Frequently inspired by the philosophy of John Stuart Mill via, for example, Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 118.

“In this sense, a [speech] ‘act’ is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions.” Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 14.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 14.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 14.

For example, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1.

N. Katherine Hayles, “Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari,” SubStance 30 (1/2) (2001): 144–159, 158.

Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See also F. Aslı Ergul, “The Ottoman Identity: Turkish, Muslim or Rum?” Middle Eastern Studies 48 (4) (July 2012): 629–645, 630.

Virginia H. Aksan, “Ottoman to Turk: Continuity and Change,” International Journal 61 (1) (Winter 2005/2006): 19–38, 23.

F. Aslı Ergul, “The Ottoman Identity: Turkish, Muslim or Rum?” Middle Eastern Studies 48 (4) (July 2012), 631, 642.

Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Sultan and the Bureaucracy: The Anti-Tanzimat Concepts of Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim Paşa,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22 (3) (August 1990): 257–274, 258.

Didier Fassin, “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 213–226, 214.

Didier Fassin, “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011), 214.

Like Turan Kayaoğlu, I am maintaining this usage of the term, while nonetheless recognizing its insufficiency. Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 27.

Didier Fassin, “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011), 216.

Aida A. Hozic, “The Paradox of Sovereignty in the Balkans,” in Howland and White, eds., 243–260, 245.

Kathryn A. Ebel, “Representations of the Frontier in Ottoman Town Views of the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 60 (1) (2008): 1–22, 6.

Shampa Mazumdar and Sanjoy Mazumdar, “Rethinking Public and Private Space: Religion and Women in Muslim Society,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 18 (4) (Winter, 2001): 302–324. See also Daphne Spain, “Gender and Urban Space,” Annual Review of Sociology 40 (2014): 581–598. And many more.

For a groundbreaking work on many of these questions in the early modern Ottoman context, see Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).

Aseel Sawalha, “Gendered Space and Middle East Studies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (1) (February 2014): 166–168, 168.

Aseel Sawalha, “Gendered Space and Middle East Studies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (1) (February 2014), 168.

As discussed by, among others, Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3.

A question posed explicitly in Edhem Eldem and Marian Rothstein, “The harem as seen by Prince Salahaddin Efendi (1861–1915). Searching for women in male-authored documentation,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 48 (2018): 29–54, 29–30.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), Excitable Speech, 150–151.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 150–151.

See, among many others, Lois McNay, Against Recognition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) and Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 13.

Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 93.

Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 11.

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 40.

Selected Bibliography

Abu-Manneh, Butrus. “The Sultan and the Bureaucracy: The Anti-Tanzimat Concepts of Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim Paşa,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 22 (3) (August 1990): 257–274.

Ahearn, Laura M. “Language and Agency,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 109–137.

Aksan, Virginia H. “Ottoman to Turk: Continuity and Change,” International Journal 61 (1) (Winter 2005/2006): 19–38.

Al-Qattan, Najwa. “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (3) (August 1999): 429–444.

Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Balsoy, Gülhan. The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Benhabib, Seyla. Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).

Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005).

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993).

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Çağ, Galip. “From Myth to Reality: Some Findings on the Role of Islam in the Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans,” in Ayşe Zişan Furat and Hamit Er, eds., Balkans and Islam: Encounter, Transformation, Discontinuity, Continuity (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012): 8–19.

Darling, Linda. “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica 91 (2000): 133–163.

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Part I The Beginning Prophecy and Poetry

1 Malhun Hatun (d. 1323) Mother of the Dynasty

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-3

The wife of Osman Gazi, eponymous founder of the Ottoman Empire, and the mother of Orhan Gazi, its second ruler, Malhun Hatun’s most celebrated appearance is in the poetry of Aşıkpaşazade, a dervish and writer who lived a century after her death.¹ Despite her temporal distance from her first chroniclers, however, Malhun Hatun’s life history grew increasingly detailed, if apocryphal, over the ensuing years as she became a touchstone for nascent Ottoman self-definition. By the twenty-first century, her memory had become synonymous in Turkish popular culture with early imperial glory.²

According to Aşıkpaşazade’s account, Osman (or, in accounts not penned by Aşıkpaşazade, Osman’s father) fell asleep in the house of a Sufi şeyh (sheikh) Edebali, where he dreamt that a crescent moon shifted from Edebali’s breast to his own, and that a tree grew from his own navel, the shadow of which covered the world. When Osman (or his father) woke and told Edebali his dream, Edebali replied that God had granted him rulership of an empire that would conquer the world. Edebali then betrothed Osman to his daughter, Malhun.³

As the embodiment of Osman’s dream, Malhun Hatun came to embody, likewise, the Muslim as well as Turkic qualities of the early Ottoman state, marking a rupture, or boundary, between what Osman sought to accomplish and the activities of his locally bound, squabbling contemporaries. Interestingly, Malhun may have been not one, but three women. More reliable sources than Aşıkpaşazade posit a second wife of Osman’s, Rabia, as the actual daughter of Edebali,⁴ and the names “Rabia,” “Malhun,” and “Bala” are sometimes used interchangeably in later histories.

Figure 1.1 A lion brought from Baghdad submits to Osman Gazi by licking his boot, indicating Ottoman dominion over the animal as well as human world, from the Hünernâme, or “Book of Accomplishment,” ca. 1584. Source: Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.

It hardly needs saying that Malhun is far removed from conventional standards of feminist agency. Mythical and likely multiple, she doesn’t even take center stage as the sole breeding ground of the Ottoman line. If the crescent moon’s shift in the dream from Edebali’s breast to Osman’s navel is any indication, the message we’re meant to glean from the story is that the wondrous mixture of bodily material that gave rise to the global empire discharged from the (male) şeyh and entered the (male) gazi. And then, given the behavior of the tree, Osman himself birthed his own dynasty.⁵

The betrothal of the daughter in these tales thus appears to be little more than an instrumental afterthought, Malhun/Rabia/Bala as the biological tool that makes the mixing of male essences possible in practice.⁶ She carries narrative value only via her relations to men: daughter of the one, wife of the other, and mother of the last. A dream woman and a male fantasy, she is, at first glance, an inauspicious place to begin a collection of stories about women shaping a polity.

And yet, Malhun endures. Once embedded within the classic Ottoman origin story, she appeared repeatedly over centuries and across continents, increasingly influential with every recurrence. Most recently, she’s been performing to some acclaim in a Turkish soap opera.⁷ Occasionally, she turns up in music videos.

Malhun’s persistence in the Ottoman and then Turkish imaginary hints, therefore, that there may be more to her story than initially meets the eye. How could an inert vessel, fractured, doubled, tripled, and ineffective, stir the imagination of so many artists and scholars, so many audiences, with such divergent political, social, and cultural expectations, over so many years? Might it be that there is something else rippling beneath the surface of Malhun’s placid and apocryphal life that has ignited this fascination and that did shape the early Ottoman state, despite Osman’s apparent ability to do everything on his own? One means of addressing these questions is to collect three or four of the more prosaic images, objects, places, and concepts that recur in retellings of the legend of Osman’s dream: the shadow-casting tree, the room in which Osman slept, the poet Aşıkpaşazade’s taxes, and the title, gazi, used by both Osman and Orhan.

The relationship between Malhun, on the one hand, and the tree, on the other—a tree that is far from unusual in mythic tales of global conquest⁸—is a tricky one. Though it’s true that in some accounts the tree is less prominent than the streams beneath it, trickling over the land before becoming the torrent of the four great world rivers, and in others, the shadow gathers on its own without a clear source, in all of these origin legends the prophetic natural phenomena disrupt Osman’s bodily borders rather than Malhun’s.⁹ It is his navel, his breast, his body that crack open and give themselves over to what was usually understood to be a uniquely feminine activity, birth, before spreading across time and space.

And so where, if anywhere, does Malhun belong in this tale of Osman’s porous and expanding body? What role could she play in the disintegration of Osman into shadow, water, plant matter, and territory, in this story that appears to be nothing more than a hyperbolic variation on the well-established fantasy of male pregnancy, of procreation and lineage without the participation of messy women and their worrisome wombs? What does Malhun do?

A starting point in our search for Malhun’s agency is the sequence of events in nearly every variation on the dream tale. In some accounts, for example, Osman sees Malhun at her father’s home and falls in love with her, pining after her for years before Edebali, having heard the dream story, grants permission to marry. In others, upon hearing or recalling the dream (there’s a temporal slip in these accounts), Edebali belatedly remembers that he’s already promised Malhun to Osman, and he sends her, along with soldiers and a collection of valuable objects, to his future son-in-law, occupied on the battlefield.¹⁰

But in all versions, whether Malhun is the inspiration for Osman’s hopeless love, with her personality peeking through the obscuring centuries, or a piece of depersonalized chattel dispatched by her father along with other gifts to a preoccupied warrior, her role, like that of the tree, is to play up the liminal quality of both Osman and the new Empire. She embodies both the ruler and the state as borderline entities: their placement on a border, their function as a border, and their prophetic future as things without borders. And this quality, catalyst to a redefinition of the Ottoman Empire as an emergent polity that, uniquely, prodded and exploded borders, thus situates Malhun as a woman who exercised not only agency, but, like the natural phenomena she echoes, an extraordinary, world-transforming agency. She was a shaper not only of the state and the state’s founder, but of the consciousness of that state as apart, different from every other quasi-nomadic Turkic military group in the region.

Figure 1.2 Commemorative Statue of Malhun Hatun in the Turkish city of Eskişehir. Source: photo by Basak.

Indeed, this energetic, transformative quality both embodied and wielded by Malhun becomes only more pronounced when we turn to the predominant space that characterizes the dream story—not the supernatural landscape of the tree, not the global conquest projected into the future, but the chamber in which Osman slept. In most accounts, Osman is given a room in Edebali’s home (or shrine or tekke, that is, dervish lodge) that, oddly, is decorated by a Quran. Why oddly? Well, Osman is invited to sleep in the room, but he knows that doing so in the presence of the word of God is an act of impiety. And so, he attempts to stay awake. But he fails. Moreover, he fails quite quickly, according to most of the legendary accounts.¹¹

The glorious, foundational dream of lineage and conquest that kicks off the ensuing eight centuries of rhetorical, if not actual, Ottoman invulnerability, therefore, is the result of, at best, a moment of personal weakness, and at worst, a moment of sacrilege. It is a product of the dizzy unconsciousness that follows sleep deprivation. And more so, Edebali himself, a Sufi şeyh who would have been well aware of Osman’s qualms concerning the Quran near his bed, provoked this moment of sacrilege deliberately.

In fact, it is only after Edebali has witnessed Osman’s weakness and impiety that he betroths his daughter to the future ruler and predicts his line’s worldly success.¹² The superhuman Ottoman legacy is thus squarely situated within, first, human frailty and, second, imperfect devotion. The defining characteristic of the Ottoman state, both in its legendary origin story and later as it projected its political doctrine out into the world, was vulnerable liminality. “The well-protected domains,” in other words, occupied very specifically a border world between sleeping and wakefulness.

And even today, historians emphasize this “frontier” or “borderline” quality of the early Ottoman confederation. Wedged between the Byzantine and Seljuk empires, the early Ottoman polity flourished, according to these accounts, solely to the extent that it could push, police, inhabit, and rupture this liminal area.¹³ And from this borderline polity, so these histories continue, grew an empire that always retained, even if only nostalgically, its early consciousness of itself as multiple, as an assortment of “domains” that stretched not only across territories, but across time, and indeed across the metaphysical realms of the religious and the oneiric.¹⁴ The tree grew through all of them.

And so too did Malhun. It was, after all, Malhun’s doubled, tripled, blurry presence as the link among these realms that forged the polity. It was Malhun’s centrality to the story, her role as linchpin and catalyst, that reaffirmed, years later, the Ottoman state as a threshold state absent borders while on a border. And it was thus Malhun who shaped the centuries-long rhetoric and ideology of the Ottoman Empire as a glorious because contingent enterprise, a state always on the frontier.

This is, moreover, a quality of Malhun’s that emerges with particular clarity in her most famous chronicler, Aşıkpaşazade’s, treatment of her life and in his reading of his own prosaic economic reality against the backdrop of that glorious story. Aşıkpaşazade, born in 1400 in Amasya, just south of the Black Sea, was the descendant of a family of well-connected Sufi dervishes similar to Edebali’s and Malhun’s. He wrote his history of the Ottoman dynasty at the age of 86 after witnessing the Ottoman conquest of much of the Balkans, participating in Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and settling in the new capital city to begin buying up land, shops, houses, and businesses in his old age.¹⁵

Though his poetic history of the Ottoman state is an epic tale of origins and grandeur, therefore, more than one commentator has suggested that a secondary purpose of the poem is to glorify early Ottoman military exploits as a backhanded protest against the post-conquest bureaucratization of Ottoman state power that led, in turn, to the taxation of Aşıkpaşazade’s own urban property.¹⁶ This is because by the late fifteenth-century, the Ottoman state, like any large, settled state, had begun to rely on taxes as much as plunder for its operational expenses. Indeed, one of the Sultan Mehmet II’s primary contributions to Ottoman administration was reconciling this centralization of governance with an ongoing, if increasingly wistful, rhetoric of the Ottoman Empire as a borderland battlefield.¹⁷

Aşıkpaşazade disliked Mehmet II’s necessary hypocrisy. And thus Malhun, one hundred years later, became the conduit for voicing his displeasure. Was she nothing more than a conduit? Perhaps. But consider this: Malhun, via Aşıkpaşazade and his poetic colleagues, was living, speaking, and shaming the powerful a century or more after her biological death. Using Aşıkpaşazade as much as he used her, Malhun in this way continued to alter the landscape of all three early Ottoman realms—the poetic or oneiric, the religious or supernatural, and the territorial. Malhun, as much as Osman and Orhan, shaped an ideology of Ottoman statehood that reverberates even today.

And it is this act of shaping that brings us, finally, to the fourth poetic concept that constitutes this chapter—Malhun’s husband, Osman’s, and her son, Orhan’s title, gazi. This title, and the activity to which it refers, gaza, has prompted more scholarly debate, old and new, about the nature of the early Ottoman Empire than perhaps any other term mobilized by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Ottoman leaders.¹⁸ Useful because epigraphic—etched in stone on more than one tomb, and thus one of the most enduring pieces of material evidence pointing to what Orhan and his descendants understood themselves to be doing, or what historians hope they understood themselves to be doing¹⁹—the word has nonetheless provoked endless, frustrated academic squabbling.

Superficially, gaza is simple enough. An Arabic word ordinarily translated as “warring or raiding for the faith,” it is tangentially related to jihad, but it lacks jihad’s carefully circumscribed legal and metaphysical definitions and requirements.²⁰ This means that for Ottoman purposes it was more suited than jihad to Osman’s motley and less-than-spiritual followers’ likewise less-than-orthodox interpretations of religious belief and practice.²¹

From there, however, things begin to fall apart. First, even by gaza’s relatively relaxed definition and parameters, it’s difficult to conclude that Osman’s motivation for going to battle was to war for the faith, given the volatility of confessional identities in the regions in which he battled,²² given that at least two of his highest commanders were Greek Christians,²³ and given that he attacked neighboring statelets that adhered to any and all manner of religious faiths, including Islam.²⁴ And so, or so goes the scholarly debate, perhaps he was less interested in faith than he was in plunder.²⁵ Or, perhaps he wanted to emulate the example of the Seljuks.²⁶ Or, perhaps he felt pressured by the Byzantines.²⁷ Or, for that matter, perhaps the entire early expansion of the Ottoman state was a happy accident, by-product of the future Sultan’s quest for pastureland for his people’s sheep.²⁸ To repeat, the debate among proponents of these various explanations has been vigorous, and it continues to this day.

But with Malhun’s entry onto the scene, especially in the second variation on the dream story, where she arrives on the battlefield with other gifts, this debate becomes less meaningful. Indeed, Malhun’s presence in the midst of Osman’s combat, appearing at the same poetic moment as the Christian commanders who may or may not (likely not)²⁹ have spontaneously converted to Islam before joining the fray, she operates, once more, as a link among these different worlds. Osman and Orhan can, in Malhun’s presence, be gazis at the same time that they seek plunder, ally with Christians, raid Muslims, emulate the Seljuks, shake off the Byzantines, and appropriate pasture land for their grazing animals. Malhun’s characteristically aggregate variation on agency and shaping works here as well. She is the one who removes the dichotomies and barriers, who thickens and quickens the purpose of the Ottoman polity, and who thus leads it, as Aşıkpaşazade himself wrote, toward glorious conquest. Malhun, more than any other figure in the tale, draws together the disparate universes that shaped the early Ottoman state.

And so: supernatural tree, haunted bedroom, property tax, and an ambiguous title. These pieces of the story, taken together, suggest several complementary as well as contradictory readings of Malhun’s biography. The most straightforward of these readings would remember her as a silent, passive object or instrument in the expansionist fantasy of a series of male actors—her father, her husband, her son, and her son’s descendants. And this reading is valid, drawing as it does on widely accepted histories and theories of agency and empowerment. Malhun never spoke for herself. And she was anything but an independent, self-conscious actor.

A second reading, however, making use of an equally well-established, if more recent, understanding of agency, might reconstruct Malhun Hatun less as an instrument of male aggression, and more as a forceful figure in her own right in the shaping of an early polity, powerful not despite, but because of, her fractured, multiple bodies, her apocryphal relationships to multiple fathers and multiple or missing sons, and her role as a doorway among disparate, drifting worlds. Malhun’s very blurriness made it possible for her, according to this second reading, to shape not only a local Turkic lineage, but an imagined imperial space, explicitly outside of time and temporality, global or universal even in its ongoing self-expression as a fragile border. In this sense, Malhun’s agency is similar to the agency of other mythic or quasi-mythic women, of ghosts and witches. It is the agency of threshold women who act as gatekeepers between worlds—between the world of the past and the world of the future, between the world of dreaming and the world of waking, between the world of the impossibly narrow military march and the world of the impossibly wide well-protected domains.

In this sense, also, Malhun is a resonant figure to stand at the beginning of the history of the Ottoman Empire, an empire the longevity of which, at least in poetry and legend, is directly attributable to its straddling of these various worlds. This is a quality of nascent Ottoman statehood that, indeed, Edebali himself invoked by putting his future son-in-law to sleep in a room in which it was forbidden to lose consciousness—which is, of course, typically Sufi behavior.

But perhaps this less active variation on agency is dissatisfying. If so, consider the following: Anatolia in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a turbulent place, full of warriors and errant champions, Sufis and ambitious scholars. And though Aşıkpaşazade’s tale of the sisterhood of warriors who bedeviled the Byzantine border with as much energy as Osman’s followers is likely an invention,³⁰ chances are that there was another şeyh in the midst of all that turmoil, from the Qarasï perhaps, a şeyh with a different daughter who in turn married a different tribal leader. And chances are that this tribal leader, too, once fell asleep and dreamt of an empire and a global line. But his dream, as it turned out, wasn’t prophetic. And so, this woman lived out her life in a single body, dying an ordinary death, absent an echo. This woman, unlike Malhun, did not ricochet across the centuries in the wake of her dispersed and fractured voice. Chances are, she was content.

Notes

Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 88.

Arzu Öztürkmen, The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey (London: Seagull Books), 53. See also Miriam Berg, Turkish Drama Serials: The Importance and Influence of a Globally Popular Television Phenomenon (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2023).

Marc Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 27.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 295.

Marc Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 26.

Marc Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 26.

Arzu Öztürkmen, The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey (London: Seagull Books), 53.

Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 87.

Ali Anooshahr, “Writing, Speech and History for an Ottoman Biographer,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 69 (1) (April 2010): 43–62, 58.

V.L. Ménage, “On the Recensions of Uruj’s ‘History of the Ottomans,’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30 (2) (1967): 314–322, 318.

Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 88.

Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 88.

Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 48.

Beginning in “Anatolia, arguably the most enchanted land of the medieval Islamic world …” Baki Tezcan, “The Disenchantment of Sufism, the Rationalization of Sunni Islam, and Early Modernity,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 7 (1) (Spring 2020): 67–69, 68.

Marinos Sariyannis, A History of Ottoman Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 34.

Linda Darling, “Political Literature and the Development of an Ottoman Imperial Culture in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1 (2014): 57–69, 66.

Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 127.

Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 34.

Rudi Paul Lindner, “What Was a Nomadic Tribe?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (4) (October 1982): 689–711, 709.

Pınar Kayaalp, “Frontier Warriors as Cultural Mediators: Shifting Identities of Byzantine and Turkish March Fighters as Elicited from Anatolian Epic Literature,” Mediaevistik 25 (2012): 119–130, 120.

Pınar Kayaalp, “Frontier Warriors as Cultural Mediators: Shifting Identities of Byzantine and Turkish March Fighters as Elicited from Anatolian Epic Literature,” Mediaevistik 25 (2012), 126.

Pınar Kayaalp, “Frontier Warriors as Cultural Mediators: Shifting Identities of Byzantine and Turkish March Fighters as Elicited from Anatolian Epic Literature,” Mediaevistik 25 (2012), 124.

Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 8.

Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 85.

Rudi Paul Lindner, “What Was a Nomadic Tribe?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (4) (October 1982), 690.

Linda Darling, “Political Literature and the Development of an Ottoman Imperial Culture in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1 (2014), 60.

Halil İnalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 103–129, 127.

Rudi Paul Lindner, “What Was a Nomadic Tribe?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (4) (October 1982), 708.

It is equally possible that Köse Mihal, the Christian companion, was himself fictional or a composite fairy tale figure. Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 96–97.

Nikolay Antov, The Ottoman ‘Wild West’: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 54. See also Lale Özdemir, Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013), 111.

Selected Bibliography

Anooshahr, Ali. “Writing, Speech and History for an Ottoman Biographer,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 69 (1) (April 2010): 43–62.

Antov, Nikolay. The Ottoman ‘Wild West’: The Balkan Frontier in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Baer, Marc David. The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (New York: Basic Books, 2021).

Berg, Miriam. Turkish Drama Serials: The Importance and Influence of a Globally Popular Television Phenomenon (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2023).

Darling, Linda. “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica 91 (2000): 133–163.

Darling, Linda. “Political Literature and the Development of an Ottoman Imperial Culture in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1 (2014): 57–69.

Flemming, Barbara. “Aşıkpaşazade’s View of Women,” in Essays on Turkish Literature and History (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Heywood, Colin. “The Frontier in Ottoman History: Old Ideas and New Myths,” in Daniel Power and Naomi Standen, eds., Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 228–250.

Imber, Colin. “The Ottoman Dynastic Myth,” in Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1996).

Imber, Colin. “What Does Ghazi Actually Mean?” in Çiğdem Balım-Harding and Colin Imber, eds., The Balance of Truth: Essays in Honour of Professor Geoffrey Lewis (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000): 165–178.

İnalcık, Halil. “How to Read ‘Ashık Pasha-Zade’s History,” in Colin Heywood and Colin Imber, eds., Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V.L. Ménage (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1994): 139–156.

İnalcık, Halil. “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 103–129.

Lindner, Rudi Paul. Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (London: Routledge, 1997).

Lindner, Rudi Paul. “What Was a Nomadic Tribe?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (4) (October 1982): 689–711.

Karataş, Hasan. “Ottoman Origins,” in Patit P. Mishra, ed., Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa (London: Sage, 2012): 184–185.

Kayaalp, Pınar. “Frontier Warriors as Cultural Mediators: Shifting Identities of Byzantine and Turkish March Fighters as Elicited from Anatolian Epic Literature,” Mediaevistik 25 (2012): 119–130.

Lowry, Heath. The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).

Ménage, V.L. “On the Recensions of Uruj’s ‘History of the Ottomans,’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (30) (1967): 314–322.

Niyazioğlu, Aslı. Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer’s Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Özdemir, Lale. Ottoman History Through the Eyes of Aşıkpaşazade (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2013).

Öztürkmen, Arzu. The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey (London: Seagull Books).

Peirce, Leslie. Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Sariyannis, Marinos. A History of Ottoman Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Terzioğlu, Derin. “Sufis in the Age of State-Building and Confessionalization,” in Christine Woodhead, ed., The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2011): 104–117.

Tezcan, Baki. “The Disenchantment of Sufism, the Rationalization of Sunni Islam, and Early Modernity,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 7 (1) (Spring 2020): 67–69.

2 Mihri Hatun (1460–1515) Distinguished Court Poet

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-4

Mihri Hatun, one of the earliest and most influential women poets of the Ottoman literary tradition, did not, according to her sixteenth-century Ottoman biographers, marry.¹ Nineteenth-century European Orientalists for this reason dubbed her “the Sappho of the Ottomans.”² What does this moniker mean? Is the only connection between the two the centuries (or, in the case of Sappho, the millennia) of rumors surrounding their unseemly independence and their uncertain sexual orientation? Could their biographers, whether sixteenth-century Ottoman or nineteenth-century British, French, or German, have been as crass as that?

The most likely answer to that final question is, yes, they could. But one alternative explanation, or recuperation, of the moniker might also be the sparse clarity of Mihri Hatun’s verse, an expressive talent that cuts through hundreds of years of mediation by male historians. A single line of Mihri Hatun’s poetry, like a single line of Sappho’s poetry, is more incisive than any prolix prose attempt to situate her within literary or sexual history.³

More to the point, however, her words also shaped an imperial poetic tradition even as they eluded these persistent attempts on the part of male commentators to categorize or transform them into gendered stereotypes.⁴ Mihri Hatun, like Sappho, carefully and deliberately played on the trope of unruly female desire while nonetheless preserving her “virginity” in the face of concerted (literary) attempts to “conquer” it.⁵ Whatever her actual sexual orientation may have been, she transformed this desire into grist for the poetic mill, thereby elevating her identity as Woman Poet above and beyond any easy or inelegant platitude, sixteenth- or nineteenth-century.

This chapter therefore concerns itself with the productive tension that Mihri maintained between poetry, on the one hand, and autobiography, on the other, with her careful shaping of her life into a form of poetic play. By recognizing that literary memory is mutable and dynamic, and that poetry is always a game, Mihri Hatun was instrumental in transforming an emergent genre of Ottoman literature into a space for performing a very specific type of aestheticized autobiography. Rather than mimicking pre-existing Persian or Arabic poetic conceits, Mihri helped to inaugurate a peculiarly Ottoman-Turkish poetic tradition that took the discrete life of the poet on its own terms rather than as a pre-cut theme to be flattened into pre-existing patterns. In the process, she became one of the most prominent poets in the Ottoman literary tradition.

A native of the Anatolian city of Amasya, appropriately the setting of the Persian romance Farhad and Shirin,⁶ Mihri Hatun was born into a powerful aristocratic family long affiliated with the Ottoman dynasty.⁷ In addition to their social, military, and economic power, Mihri’s ancestors and relatives also wielded considerable spiritual influence. Mihri, for example, traced her lineage back to the founder of one of the leading Sufi orders in Anatolia, her father was a judge, and her grandfather was an honored Sufi şeyh (sheikh), much like Edebali had been (Chapter 1).⁸

This familiarity with Sufi beliefs and practice was key to Mihri’s creative development for several reasons. First, the relationship between poetry and mysticism in the early modern Ottoman world was a close one. More often than not poets were Sufis and Sufis were poets,⁹ and even Mihri’s legal-minded judicial father tried his hand, as a Sufi, at versifying.¹⁰ Additionally, Sufi orders of the sort founded by Mihri’s ancestors were traditionally open to women occupying prominent roles, not least of which was reciting their own compositions at gatherings.¹¹ Mihri herself, in fact, not only wrote poetry, but also legal opinions (fetvas or fatwas) on women’s issues, an activity very much in keeping with Sufi practices.¹²

Mihri was not unusual, therefore, in taking on a role as a significant poet within her order. What was unusual was her transition from Sufi poet to court poet—eventually becoming a beneficiary of the patronage of the Sultan Beyazıt II’s son, Ahmet—and, more so, the acclaim that she garnered from her contemporaries and later biographers as a leader of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman literary culture. How did she negotiate this professional transformation?

This question is difficult to answer because most of her biographers are quiet about her educational background.¹³ Most likely, however, Mihri’s rise to court poet began with an apprenticeship to a master. Poets, like specialists in other crafts in the early modern Ottoman Empire, undertook an exhaustive training with masters who, when these apprentices were deemed prepared, would then introduce them to potential patrons. And in the field of literature, these master–apprentice relationships functioned, aesthetically if not necessarily in practice, as titillating Plato’s Symposium-style interactions, formal pedagogy as sentimental education.¹⁴

Mihri’s relationship to her master—whom we know from her own poetry as well as his to be the poet Müeyyedzade Abdurrahman Çelebi (or Hatemi)¹⁵—was no exception to that rule. Indeed, one reason that contemporary scholars are as confident as they are in placing Mihri into a master–apprentice exchange with Hatemi prior to her entry into Ahmet’s court is the textual detritus that the literary affair between the two left behind. Mihri wrote several poems to Hatemi, each playing with and pushing the boundaries of erotic pedagogy,¹⁶ with Mihri herself at one point even subverting the conventional trope of the “boy” who serves “under” his master by claiming that she’s better than any “boy” at expressing poetic love of that sort.¹⁷

And, it seems, she was correct in her assessment. Upon completing her training, she quickly became one of the most well-compensated court poets of her time, earning as much as 3000 akçes, or silver coins, for a copy of her divan, or collected verse.¹⁸ But let’s pause here. Well-compensated? Is that all? “Well-compensated” feels like an anti-climactic term after spending the first part of this biography in the realm of genius, inspiration, play, and creation. And yet, the best indicators of poets’ skills at the time that Mihri wrote were, in fact, the gifts bestowed upon these poets by their patrons, or the monetary prizes that patrons awarded poets for competitive imitations or parallels of their colleagues’ writing. Indeed, given the reality of poetic production in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, money and remuneration were sometimes the only means of signaling a poet’s talent.

Figure 2.1 Sultan Mehmet III (r. 1595–1603) entertained by three musicians and two jesters, as the poet Nadiri is introduced to him as a potential beneficiary of his patronage, from the illustrated Divan of the poet Nadiri, ca. 1605. Source: © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Consider, after all, the nature of early-modern Ottoman poetic practice. First, and most important, publication was not the goal of a successful early-modern Ottoman poet. Ottoman poetry, like Ottoman music and other arts, was valued and appreciated instead for the immediacy of its performance in a gathering or literary salon (meclis) as much as it was for the textual traces it left behind in the form of publication.¹⁹ The text of the poem and its recitation could not be disentangled from one another in the Ottoman literary imagination, and no one tried to disentangle them.

Nor did anyone try to isolate the physical representation of the text from its other forms. Rather than typesets prepared for mass consumption, early modern Ottoman poems, upon their recitation, were disseminated via calligraphy.²⁰ They were thus valued as unique physical or material works of art no less than they were as unique acts of linguistic creation or performance. A poem’s words, its performance, and its physical attractiveness all contributed to an audience’s or patron’s evaluation of that poem as worthy or less so. All carried equal critical weight.²¹

Poets working in the early modern Ottoman literary milieu were, then, performers and sometimes calligraphers as much as they were authors. They did not toil away unknown and unseen before sending their work to an anonymous editor for rejection or acceptance, publication, and review. This was not the world of Emily Dickinson burying herself in her Amherst bedroom. Nor, however, was it the world of the poetic courtesan of the European Renaissance.²² Ottoman poets created their poetry publicly, spontaneously, and in the moment. And then they turned this poetry into a uniquely material art object, all while retaining their respectability.

Indeed, the immediacy and physicality of Ottoman poetry are important to emphasize because doing so helps to shift our conversation away from what are usually understood to be the obstacles faced by women writers, especially in studies of European-language poetry. Performing as a respectable woman for a patron or a salon of fellow poets, after all, demands a very different set of strategies from working as a courtesan or negotiating the edifice that eventually became the global publishing industry. And Mihri Hatun mobilized these strategies with great acumen and nuance.

It would have been impossible, for example, for Mihri to camouflage herself behind a male pseudonym as so many respectable published women writers, both past and present, have done. Even had she been inclined to disavow her gender, which she appears not to have been, she would have been compelled to reckon with it whenever it came time to perform her work. As a public activity that occurred in real time, literary production could never be relegated in the early modern Ottoman context to the isolated and neurotic realm of the invisible lady poet. Mihri’s gender was always, necessarily and playfully, part of her performance.

Additionally, as respectable performers, Ottoman women poets had to position their words as well as their bodies in the quasi-public, quasi-private sphere of the salon in such a way that these words and these bodies packed the requisite erotic-poetic punch (that is, weren’t boring) without damaging their reputation for virtue.²³ To continue to appear in the salon, a woman like Mihri would have had simultaneously to perform as the desiring and thus sexualized poetic lover common to literary convention and as the virgin immune to assaults on her sexual dignity. Her world, that is to say, was not the world of, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Chapter 11), in which, at the end of an active, erotic life, the poet passes her last, sad, dead days editing and re-editing her oeuvre for posthumous publication.²⁴ Sixteenth-century Ottoman poets were valued because they were alive, not dead or dying. And in Mihri’s case, she was both alive and a woman.

If the extant source material is any indication, Mihri performed this role of living, desiring, erotic, virginal, and respectable poetic lover with virtuoso skill. Indeed, her awareness of her gender—and her subtle, never explicit introduction of alternative interpretations of gender identity into the genre that was becoming uniquely Ottoman poetry—pushed the boundaries of early modern Ottoman literary production into hitherto unexplored realms, all while maintaining classical form. By playing with the conventional tropes of the gendered lover and the gendered beloved, Mihri took the subversive autobiographical potential of poetic playfulness to previously inconceivable logical conclusions, a contribution to the literary tradition that is best exemplified in her triumphant conquest of the traditional imitative poetic parallel.²⁵

Poetic parallels or imitations or imitatios²⁶ were common performance pieces in the Ottoman salons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A forum in which competing poets would either honor their predecessors or trade compliments or insults with one another while following a strictly defined set of compositional rules concerning theme, image, meter, rhyme, and refrain,²⁷ the imitative parallel also highlighted the random or destructive function of chance in even the most constrained of rule-based frameworks. As such, these exchanges, especially when competitive, were charged and uncertain affairs even as they adhered to rigorous and scrupulously maintained guidelines. As in any competition, the goal of the competitor was to trip up her rival, to provoke him into a loss of control. And for a poet, of course, this loss of control would be a loss of control over his or her text,²⁸ a loss prompted by the introduction of the chance element into the framework and signified by the unsuccessful poet’s inability to adhere to the rules.²⁹

Mihri Hatun was a master of this poetic game. In a genre in which a key strategy of insult was to question the opposing poet’s sincerity as a lover of the beloved by muddling up the gender identities of each (a move made doubly effective in Ottoman Turkish, drawing on Persian, with its un-gendered pronouns), Mihri, as a woman poet, spoke from a position of explicitly muddled identity. Rather than allowing her position as a performing woman to be used against her, she weaponized it in these literary exchanges.³⁰ And this she did, once more, to great effect.

When a contemporary poet wrote that he would sleep on a mat outside the door of the beloved to prove his devotion, for example, Mihri, viscerally foregrounding her body, replied that she would sleep even without a mat, groveling on the ground among the dogs.³¹ When she was chastised for feeling no shame, implicitly because she was a woman, she owned the shamefulness, transforming it into an aspect of the desiring lover. Her male counterpart, unable even metaphorically to inhabit the shamed and debased body of the implicitly female lover, thus lost the literary battle, and their poetic audience awarded Mihri the distinction of having done him a favor by mentioning him in her poetry.³²

“Implicitly female lover.” This phrase is key to understanding the extraordinary effectiveness of Mihri’s verse. Indeed, the “implicitly” is an important qualifier to keep in mind because neither Mihri nor her colleagues ever explicitly introduced her femininity into her writing. Doing so would have unaesthetically upset the rules of classical, gender-ambiguous love poetry. But ironically aware of herself as a woman, just as her audience ironically was, Mihri didn’t have to be explicit. Her positioning of herself as a speaking woman as well as a speaking poet provided all the subtext that was required. And it was thus as a woman that she succeeded as a poet and pushed, if gently, the boundaries of Ottoman literature into the realm of idiosyncratic, rather than conventional, poetic autobiography. Or, as one envious and frustrated poet-biographer, Latifi, put it, “although the coquettishness of her poems and the mannerisms of her speech are feminine, in burning and being consumed [by passion] she is like a [male] lover, and in the expression of passion and pleading [to be loved in return] she is masculine.”³³

Mihri’s contribution to classical Ottoman literary production, then, was subversively to transform the slippage among gender positions common to mystical love poetry into a concrete, embodied phenomenon. She moved the conceit of the lover’s uncertain identity from a trope toward a potential material reality. And in the process, she helped to create the conditions for a new, distinctively Ottoman, variation on what was already a well-established Arabic and Persian poetic tradition. Mihri Hatun’s poetic autobiography floated the possibility of a personal and idiosyncratic mode of “self”-expression in Ottoman poetry that hadn’t quite existed before.

Figure 2.2 The poet-biographer Latifi, who described Mihri Hatun as “coquettish” like a woman yet “burning with passion” like a man, from his own illustrated biographical dictionary, ca. 1540s. Source: National Library, Turkey.

And it is arguably for this reason that gifts of money were the best measure of Mihri’s talents. The poem, as imagined by Mihri, was not the intangible product of an inspired author’s creative will. Rather, as she herself made clear, it was the performance of an ongoing interaction among material, embodied, and gendered words that were available to, and could be mobilized by, anyone with the skill to make use of them. Poetry was a craft. Words and bodies were the raw materials of that craft. And, properly, Mihri was paid, recompensed, as a master of that craft.

Notes

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 21.

Elizabeth Kelley Bowman, “The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric,” Comparative Literature Studies 50 (2013): 244–261, 251.

Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black, and Mehmed Kalpaklı, eds., Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 49–50.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 43.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 49.

Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25, 15.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 39.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 80–81.

Bill Hickman, “On Editing Ottoman Turkish Tekke Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137 (3) (July–September 2017): 567–584, 584.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 79.

A practice that has continued into the modern and contemporary period. Margaret Hunt, Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2014), 241.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 80–81.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 25–54, 34.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 268.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 81.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 205.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 81.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 381 note 11.

Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ, “Entertaining the Sultan: Meclis, Festive Gatherings in the Ottoman Palace,” in Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen, eds., Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World (London: Seagull Books, 2014): 124–144, 125, 131.

İrvin Cemil Schick, “Reading and Writing Practices in the Ottoman Empire,” in Didem Havlıoğlu and Zeynep Uysal, eds., Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature (London: Routledge, 2023): 105–115, 108–109.

Zeynep Tarım Ertuğ, “Entertaining the Sultan: Meclis, Festive Gatherings in the Ottoman Palace,” in Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen, eds., Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World (London: Seagull Books, 2014), 131.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 39.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 104.

Rae Ann Meriwether, “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013): 623–641, 624.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 119.

Walter Feldman, “Imitatio in Ottoman Poetry: Three Ghazals of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21 (2) (1997): 41–58, 42.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 118.

Walter Feldman, “Imitatio in Ottoman Poetry: Three Ghazals of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21 (2) (1997), 57.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 118.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 120.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 119.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 121.

As quoted in Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 198.

Selected Bibliography

Andrews, Walter. “Singing the Alienated ‘I’: Guattari, Deleuze, and Lyrical Decodings of the Subject in Ottoman Divan Poetry,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (1993): 191–219.

Andrews, Walter and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

Andrews, Walter G., Najaat Black, and Mehmed Kalpaklı, eds. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

Eldem, Edhem and Marian Rothstein. “The Harem as Seen by Prince Salahaddin Efendi (1861–1915): Searching for Women in Male-Authored Documentation,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 48 (2018): 29–54.

Ertuğ, Zeynep Tarım. “Entertaining the Sultan: Meclis, Festive Gatherings in the Ottoman Palace,” in Suraiya Faroqhi and Arzu Öztürkmen, eds., Celebration, Entertainment and Theatre in the Ottoman World (London: Seagull Books, 2014): 124–144.

Feldman, Walter. “Imitatio in Ottoman Poetry: Three Ghazals of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 21 (2) (1997): 41–58.

Foka, A. and J. Liliequist, eds. Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Halman, Talat S. Nightingales and Pleasure Gardens: Turkish Love Poems (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).

Havlıoğlu, Didem. Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Havlıoğlu, Didem. “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 25–54.

Hickman, Bill. “On Editing Ottoman Turkish Tekke Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137 (3) (July–September 2017): 567–584.

Hunt, Margaret. Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Kafadar, Cemal, “A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25.

Kuru, Selim S. “Sex in the Text: Deli Birader’s Dâfi’ü’l-gumûm ve Râfi’ü’l-humûm and the Ottoman Literary Canon,” Middle Eastern Literatures 10 (2007): 157–174.

Meriwether, Rae Ann. “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013): 623–641.

Öztürk, Veysel. “The Notion of Originality from Ottoman Classical Literature to Turkish Modern Poetry,” Middle Eastern Literatures 19 (2016): 135–161.

Schick, İrvin Cemil. “Reading and Writing Practices in the Ottoman Empire,” in Didem Havlıoğlu and Zeynep Uysal, eds., Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature (London: Routledge, 2023): 105–115.

Silay, Kemal. “Singing His Words: Ottoman Women Poets and the Power of Patriarchy,” in Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997).

3 Zeynep Hatun (Fifteenth Century) Elusive Touchstone of the Poet Biographers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-5

Zeynep Hatun’s career as a writer is difficult to reconstruct. Her major work has been lost, and most of what we know of her comes from two later male poet-biographers.¹ Nonetheless, she is a compelling example of an artist whose words, even when erased, continued to influence Ottoman literary culture. Remembered as much for her spiritual and intellectual excellence and musical talent as she is for her poetry,² Zeynep Hatun defied classification as both a mystic and an artist.

Like Mihri Hatun’s (Chapter 2), Zeynep’s extant poetry lends itself to a gender fluid reading. This is because the beloved in her writing, expressed as it is in the gender-neutral pronouns of Persian and Ottoman Turkish, can once again code as female as much as it codes as male.³ Zeynep’s sexuality, however, was less subject to gossip than Mihri’s.⁴ Moreover, given the explicit rather than implicit mysticism and “virtue” permeating Zeynep’s work, in which the beloved is a religious as well as an erotic object, it is dangerous to push claims concerning her sexual identity too far. Key to this chapter, therefore, is the literary and spiritual (rather than psycho-sexual) point that even an ambiguous, hazily remembered poet whose words have been lost can shape an Empire and its poetic and mystical traditions.

Zeynep Hatun’s life overlapped with Mihri’s, and their legacies as “the first woman poet writing in Ottoman Turkish” likewise overlap in early biographical collections of poets. Born, like Mihri, to a judge in, like Mihri, the Anatolian city of Amasya⁵ or Kastamonu,⁶ Zeynep studied Arabic and Persian literature as a student before performing as both a poet and a musician herself.⁷ Unlike Mihri, Zeynep married, at which point she abandoned her poetic and musical careers. There is no record of Zeynep writing poetry or appearing among other performing poets after she became a wife.⁸

The biographers who were her contemporaries imply that Zeynep’s decision to cease writing and performing upon marriage was proper and respectable. Whereas single women could embody the varied gender roles taken on by the poetic lover, married women, as real-time representatives of the gender-static “wife,” might introduce a discordant note into the playful exchanges facilitated by patrons in their salons (meclises).⁹ Zeynep, therefore, was doubly silent, first, as a poet whose words have been lost, and second, as a wife who chose to cease speaking.

She thus operates more as a literary echo of Malhun Hatun (Chapter 1) than as an obvious compatriot to Mihri. Like Malhun, Zeynep appears to be an inauspicious addition to this collection, a dreary reminder of the obstacles, disregard, and invisibility creative women face as they make their life choices. Zeynep, disappointingly, chose silence.

But Zeynep’s story also invites an alternative articulation of women’s creative agency, one in which quieter expressions of empowerment flourish alongside the echoing, exuberant voices more common to traditional feminist histories. How is this possible? One place to seek answers to this question is, counter-intuitively, in the sources in which traces of Zeynep do remain: the poetic biographical dictionaries.

These dictionaries, which constitute a genre called tezkire-i şuara that thrived between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, combined life histories of poets alongside sample verses.¹⁰ Compiled for the most part by formally educated members of the “learned” class who were themselves poets,¹¹ the collections were both a safeguard against artists being lost to time and an institutionalization of what was becoming by the end of the sixteenth century a distinctive Ottoman Turkish literary canon.¹² By avoiding taxonomies of region, profession, education, background, or gender, these biographical dictionaries began to systematize the role played by the “poet” as poet in the emergent Ottoman cultural context.¹³

Figure 3.1 Pages from the biographical dictionary of the poet-biographer Aşık Çelebi, ca. 1568. Source: National Library, Turkey.

The fact that gender was not an organizing principal of most, if not all, of these compendiums does not, however, mean that the compilers were gender-blind. Mihri and Zeynep, for example, were often compared to one another as “women-poets.”¹⁴ But so too were judge-poets, former-slave-poets, Bursa-poets, Istanbul-poets, poets-with-unpleasant-personalities, and the rest compared and contrasted.¹⁵ Once the overarching heading of “poet” had been established, juxtaposing across taxonomic lines, including gender, simply became the reflexive response of the scholarly commentator.

Furthermore, as years passed, biographies of poets, as a genre, began to adhere to fixed methodological rules. Entries on individual poets nearly always contained, for example, first, a chronological biography including background, education, and frequently physical appearance, second, representative samples of the poet’s work, and third, a critical commentary on the skill or lack thereof of that poet.¹⁶ By the seventeenth century, the biographical volumes also began to cite one another, which generated a web of references that additionally cemented the “biographical dictionary of poets” as a separate genre, and “poet” itself as a discrete identity.¹⁷ That the compilers of these volumes also drew largely on information gleaned verbally from those who knew the poets they were immortalizing—that is, gossip—merely emphasized the self-contained nature of what was becoming both an Ottoman poetic canon and a key critical appendage of that canon.¹⁸

And so, like any half-scholarly, half-artistic self-referential system of citations and counter-citations, biographical dictionaries of poets began to generate a discursive field that any poetry-writing individual would be forced to negotiate before becoming, properly, “a poet.” Once biographies of poets became a literary endeavor in their own right, that is to say, producing poetry ceased to be the same thing as being a poet. Yes, creating poetry was an attribute of the poet, but it was not the only one. And indeed, if Zeynep Hatun’s role in the development of the canon is any indication, creating poetry wasn’t even the most important attribute of a potential poet.

Zeynep, after all, was included in the biographical literature only once she’d ceased to write. She was included as an exemplary poet and musician and mystic who didn’t, in fact, produce music or poetry. The reason that we know she became silent upon her marriage to her husband is very specifically because the biographers say that she did, not because of anything that she produced.

More than her vocal and well-documented counterparts, therefore, Zeynep became the exception to the rule that helped to transform “poet” in Ottoman literary culture into a designation, a status, or an indicator of membership in a class—part of a protected canon—rather than a means of describing someone who produced something that looked like poetry. She remained a poet, crucially, despite having ceased speaking. And her paradoxical position as a silent, invisible poet reinforced an emergent cultural rhetoric of poets themselves as belonging to a separate, distinct profession.

But if Zeynep, in her silence, negotiated the discursive field that was becoming the Ottoman literary canon, did she also shape or influence that canon? Or was she merely fodder for its critical trappings? A turn now to the details of her inclusion within the biographical collections as both an exemplary mystic and musician and an exemplary poet will help us to address these questions.

Lyric poetry in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman literary milieu was in some ways indistinguishable from Sufi devotional poetry in that same milieu.¹⁹ Zeynep, however, was remembered in the biographical dictionaries as more than just a lyric poet who played on the familiar mystical theme of the divine beloved. Her internalization of “virtue” as a way of life—as more than just a well of material to tap for her personal creative endeavors—set her apart, in these accounts, from her more worldly contemporaries. As the poet-biographer Latifi put it, “she was highly worthy, sinless, virginal, and a paragon of virtue, “ while possessing an “inborn intellectual charm [that] amazed the ordinary people of the world and astounded the discerning people of her age.”²⁰ Her devotion to this exemplary mode of living thereby also lends itself, now, to a reading of her silence as, itself, empowered.²¹ Zeynep’s decision to stop producing, that is to say, generated a tension in her poetic persona between a characteristically mystical or virtuous mode of being and non-being that no amount of speech, however elegant or witty, could replicate.

Consider, for example, the complicated role played by speech and speaking in just one of the most popular stories explored by Sufis at the time that Zeynep was writing—the Story of Yusuf and Züleyha.²² An extension the Story of Joseph in the last chapters of Genesis, the Muslim retelling of the relationship between Yusuf and Züleyha traces the tribulations of Joseph/Yusuf, purchased as a slave having escaped the murderous designs of his jealous brothers.²³ After living and working for several years in the household of his master and his master’s wife, Züleyha, Yusuf attracts the sexual attention of his master’s wife. When he spurns her advances, she publicly accuses him of attempting to seduce her instead. Yusuf is imprisoned, and thus begins a new chapter in God’s testing of a potential prophet.²⁴

The scene as it is revealed in the Quran, however, is more elaborate than it is in Genesis, with more complex personal motivations attributed to both Yusuf and his master’s wife, along with a distinctively legal flavor attached to the description of the imprisonment of the former. Züleyha, for example, is described as being unable to control her love for Yusuf specifically because of his beauty. Yusuf, in turn, is tempted by her seduction rather than repelled by it, and Yusuf’s master questions his wife about her story rather than believing her immediately.²⁵

When witnesses note that the back rather than the front of Yusuf’s shirt was torn in their altercation—signifying that he was running away from her rather than pushing himself toward her—it is proved that Yusuf was telling the truth, and that his master’s wife was lying. Nonetheless, the master’s wife defends herself by citing, again, Yusuf’s compelling beauty. She calls on the women of her community to view Yusuf, and when they see him, they are so struck by his form that they cut their hands in frustration, demonstrating the innocence (depending upon one’s mode of legal interpretation), if not the honesty, of the master’s wife.²⁶ Yusuf still finds himself imprisoned.

The legal commentary and religious exegesis on these passages in the Quran continue, like the verses in Genesis, to take Yusuf rather than his master’s wife as the protagonist of the story, and to interpret the moment of failed seduction as a moment of God’s testing.²⁷ But even within these less poetic fields, the personalities and motivations of both Yusuf and his master’s wife are developed and extended.²⁸ The master’s wife, for example, unlike in Genesis, has a name, Züleyha, and the problem of her culpability given the impossibility of resisting divine beauty becomes a classic legal as well as religious problem.

More to the point, however, when the poets begin to play with the motif, and then, by the fifteenth century, when the story becomes a lyric set piece,²⁹ things change. Most significantly, Züleyha, rather than Yusuf, is repurposed as the tragic hero of the tale. Sufi poets, male as well as female, take to identifying themselves with Züleyha as the doomed lover of inaccessible divine beauty even in poems that have nothing otherwise to do with the story. And though the poems produced in this context were couched as spiritual, the eroticism of Züleyha’s tragedy, of her inability to grasp her beloved, of her metaphorical if not actual imprisonment in a moment of impossible anticipation, become necessary components of the story’s spiritual force.³⁰

At the time that Zeynep was writing, indeed, the most celebrated variation on this theme was a narrative poem written in Persian by Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492), which Zeynep almost certainly read in its original language. But she needn’t have read the original. For importantly, the poem was also translated into Ottoman Turkish to be used as a model in Ottoman poetic circles just as Zeynep was being educated. Several poets, Mihri included, referenced it.³¹ Did Zeynep? We can’t know. But the purpose of invoking it here is not to speculate about what Zeynep’s erased words might have been, not to imagine what poems she might have written in response to Jami, and rather to emphasize the validity of her silence according to the very terms by which Sufi poets themselves worked.

Figure 3.2 Züleyha rips Yusuf’s shirt, from Kemaleddin Behzad’s Persian “The Seduction of Yusuf,” ca. 1488. Source: National Library and Archives of Egypt.

The underlying message within all of the prolix versifying about Züleyha’s dilemma, after all, is that Yusuf’s beauty is unspeakable. The divine beloved cannot be reached via the spoken or written word any more than it can be grasped by desiring hands. Words fail. And the silent pause at the end of the poetic line or the rest between musical phrases with which Zeynep, as an equally talented musician, would have been more than familiar thus apprehended the divine far more effectively than tens of thousands of lines of poetry could comprehend it. It was in the silence of the breath drawn before speaking, in the silence of the moment of anticipation, in the silence of infinitely deferred gratification, that Züleyha passed her tortured and, to Sufis, exemplary life. And Zeynep, if the biographers are remembering her properly, did the same—a forgotten Sufi poet who composed, in the end, silence.

But then, Zeynep’s silence need not be read so metaphysically. Remember the idealized immediacy of Ottoman poetic performance (Chapter 2). Early modern Ottoman poems were not meant, despite the flourishing genre that was the poetic biographical dictionary, to be archived. They were meant to be performed. One might thus float the argument that the gradual accumulation of biographies of poets, the preservation of poets and poetry as dead objects embedded within historic documents—the very laudable work to rescue poetry from potential loss in an ever-growing archive—undermined, as criticism is always wont to do, the very vitality of the poem as a vibrant because ephemeral performance. Poetic biographical dictionaries can be read, in other words, as themselves the destruction of poetry.

Zeynep’s work eluded that destiny. We can’t read it, and therefore it retains its spontaneity. Zeynep’s silent, erased poems thus highlight one of the most important characteristics of Ottoman poetry despite the canon—its existence in the moment. Her poems were and remain performances. And their absent trace makes clear that an archive is unnecessary to poetry as a lived and living experience. Yes, their erasure was an accident. But a Sufi might call that accident fate. Or grace.

Notes

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 25–54, 33.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 197.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 52.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 197.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 20.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 197.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 197.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010), 39.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 216.

Barbara Flemming, Essays on Turkish Literature and History (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 269–270. See also J. Stewart-Robinson, “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January–April 1965): 57–74, 57.

J. Stewart-Robinson, “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January–April 1965), 60.

J. Stewart-Robinson, “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January–April 1965), 61.

J. Stewart-Robinson, “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January–April 1965), 61.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010), 33.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010), 32–33.

Niki Gamm, “Riyāzī’s Tezkire as a Source of Information on Ottoman Poets,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 99 (4) (October-December 1979): 643–652, 650.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010), 33.

J. Stewart-Robinson, “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January–April 1965), 62.

Bill Hickman, “On Editing Ottoman Turkish Tekke Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137 (3) (July-September 2017): 567–584, 570.

Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 197.

On poetic silence see, among others, Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 93 and Lisa A. Mazzei, “A Poetic of Silence,” Counterpoints 318 (2007): 57–69, 59–60.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 133–7.

Gayane Karen Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi. “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 485–508, 485–6.

Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusuf’s ‘Queer’ Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist 40 (2016): 245–266, 245–6.

Merguerian and Najmabadi, 501.

Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusuf’s ‘Queer’ Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist 40 (2016), 246.

Amanullah De Sondy, “Prophecy and Masculinities: The Case of the Qur’anic Joseph,” Crosscurrents 61 (4) (December 2011): 529–539, 536.

Amanullah De Sondy, “Prophecy and Masculinities: The Case of the Qur’anic Joseph,” Crosscurrents 61 (4) (December 2011), 537.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 48. See also Hamid Algar, “Jāmī and the Ottomans” in Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, eds., Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th–14th/20th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 63–135, 67.

Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusuf’s ‘Queer’ Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist 40 (2016), 249.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 48.

Selected Bibliography

Algar, Hamid. “Jāmī and the Ottomans” in Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, eds., Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, ca. 9th/15th–14th/20th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 63–135.

Andrews, Walter. “Ottoman Love: Preface to a Theory of Emotional Ecology,” in J. Liliequist, ed., A History of Emotions, 1200–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2012): 21–48.

Andrews, Walter, Najaat Black, and Mehmed Kalpaklı, eds. Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

Andrews, Water and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

Boyar, Ebru and Kate Fleet. Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

De Sondy, Amanullah. “Prophecy and Masculinities: The Case of the Qur’anic Joseph,” Crosscurrents 61 (4) (December 2011): 529–539.

Flemming, Barbara. Essays on Turkish Literature and History (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

Gamm, Niki. “Riyāżī’s Tezkire as a Source of Information on Ottoman Poets,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 4 (1979): 643–652.

Havlıoğlu, Didem. Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Havlıoğlu, Didem. “On the Margins and Between the Lines: Ottoman Women Poets from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 1 (2010): 25–54.

Hickman, Bill. “On Editing Ottoman Turkish Tekke Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137 (3) (July–September 2017): 567–584.

Mazzei, Lisa A. “A Poetic of Silence,” Counterpoints 318 (2007): 57–69.

Merguerian, Gayane Karen and Afsaneh Najmabadi. “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 485–508.

Stewart-Robinson, J. “The Ottoman Biographies of Poets,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (January-April 1965): 57–74.

Umut Inan, Murat. “Imperial Patronage of Literature in the Ottoman World, 1400–1600,” in Hani Khafipour, ed., The Empires of the Near East and India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019): 493–504.

Yaghoobi, Claudia. “Yusuf’s ‘Queer’ Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist 40 (2016): 245–266.

4 A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya (d. 1517) Mystic, Mufti, and Spiritual Model

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-6

It is a stretch of the geopolitical definition of the Ottoman Empire to include A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya in this compendium. Born and raised in Damascus, she died in 1517, the year that Sultan Selim I defeated the Mamluks and incorporated the city into Ottoman domains. Nonetheless, her position as an influential writer and mystic who inhabited the shifting borderlands between the two states, and whose work continued to reverberate even when that border disappeared under the Ottoman advance, places her well within the framework of women who shaped Ottoman life.

Throughout her career, A’isha wrote twenty works of prose and poetry, by her own account, exploring what she called a life of love.¹ Instructional as well as esoteric, these works described an ideal life in which the finite boundaries of human existence would dissolve into the infinite spaces of divine love.² A’isha, that is to say, was what contemporary commentators might call a theorist of life writ large. She was, additionally, a theorist who both inspired a following and wasn’t afraid to translate her ideas into practical strategies to benefit that following.³ Her contributions to Sufism echoed over the centuries, across both Ottoman and post-Ottoman geographies, transforming her into a model of intelligent and influential piety not only during her lifetime but well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.⁴

Seventeenth-century biographical dictionaries, the earliest in which she appears, describe A’isha as a brilliant and devoted scholar and mystic in terms that sometimes border on the hagiographic.⁵ Modern historians and biographers have either taken these statements at face value or characterized them as ironic, depending on their literary and political commitments.⁶ Whatever the case, these early biographies flesh out the portrait of A’isha that emerges from her own sixteenth-century work: she was a committed and serious writer and thinker who nonetheless appreciated the value of joy and humor in brightening the short, flawed episode that is human existence.⁷

It helped her cultivated world view that A’isha was, herself, privileged, the descendant of a prominent scholarly family, and the daughter, like Mihri Hatun and Zeynep Hatun (Chapters 2 and 3), of a judge who saw to it that she received the same rigorous education that her five brothers had.⁸ Unlike Mihri and Zeynep, however, A’isha didn’t specialize. Though Mihri on occasion issued a legal opinion (fatwa) and though Zeynep was a skilled musician as well as poet, A’isha took the polymath performance much further than her near contemporaries.

As a young woman, for example, A’isha travelled to Cairo to study literature and the sciences, including religion, eventually earning a license both to teach and formally to issue fatwas.⁹ She exchanged riddles and literary puzzles with some of the most prominent scholars and writers of her time. And she, like Mihri, took on the male poetic establishment of her milieu with vigor, while always, like Mihri, foregrounding her awareness of herself as a female (“lady”) writer.¹⁰

Unlike Mihri, however, A’isha’s dismantling of male poets’ prerogatives was so devastating that a poem composed about her by one of these defeated men was included in several seventeenth-century histories of her life. A hundred years after her career had ended, in other words, perplexed biographers were still citing other poets citing A’isha herself concerning the difficulty of her work. And, once more, though there may have been some irony in this hyper-referential and citational representation of her life, such irony needn’t be assumed.

How did A’isha build for herself this unassailable reputation for intelligence, piety, and erudition? The process began early in her life, once she’d completed her pilgrimage to Mecca, where she had a vision of Muhammad during the city’s celebrations of his birthday.¹¹ This encounter with the Prophet set the groundwork for a lifetime of mystical contemplation of the divine that, in turn, led to a drastic and influential reinterpretation of how an individual’s discrete, mundane life might be fused into collective spiritual life.¹²

Though she continued her studies and teaching, retained her provocative wit, married, bore two children, and lived for many years as a far from retiring widow,¹³ A’isha’s aura of piety never faltered in the years following this initial encounter. By 1516, the year before her death, when she was travelling with her grown son between Cairo and Damascus, the Mamluk Sultan even called on her for a personal audience.¹⁴ On the verge of what would turn out to be a catastrophic war against the Ottomans, the Sultan requested A’isha’s guidance and good wishes. These she granted, though her intervention didn’t bring about the outcome the Sultan was seeking.

Geopolitical intervention, however, had never been A’isha’s purview. Rather, the majority of her extant works take as their topic variations on the theme of the perfection of the Prophet and how to contemplate this perfection.¹⁵ It was furthermore her exceptional skill in narrating the process by which the Prophet might, in his perfection, guide a believer toward spiritual union that brought to A’isha her enduring reputation. Her distinctive contribution to the familiar and well-established Sufi genre of praising the Prophet’s attributes as a path toward communion with the divine, in short, was less its content than it was her presentation of this content.¹⁶ For A’isha, unusually for her time, foregrounded in her writing not only her gender, which many others women mystics had also done, but her private, and frequently physiological, reactions to the Prophet’s presence.¹⁷

Unlike even Mihri, who held back from describing her private receptiveness to the beloved by operating within the carefully depersonalized confines of classic poetic form—flirting with, rather than stating outright, her affective responses to the beloved’s nearness—A’isha spoke to her audience directly, explicitly, and at length about the embodied rapture, bliss, and intensity of her encounters with an equally embodied Muhammad. As a result, she guided her readers and followers toward an unusual interpretation of the Sufi theme of self-annihilation, an interpretation that involved a constant, if paradoxical, awareness of the body in all of its tactile particularity. The dissolution of the self as envisioned by A’isha did not involve the eradication of physical or material existence. On the contrary, spiritual communion as she understood it celebrated the female body especially as a site of what she described as a viscerally “affectionate” rather than “passionate” love.¹⁸

Figure 4.1 The severed head of the defeated Mamluk Sultan, who had recently met with A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya, is presented to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, from the Hünernâme, or “Book of Accomplishment,” ca. 1584. Source: Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.

In this way, A’isha’s writing also differs considerably not only from the writing produced by her male Muslim counterparts, but from the writing produced by the women mystics of medieval and early modern Christian Europe. For though it is true that women mystics of pre-modern Christianity likewise recounted their relationships with the divine in a language that bordered on the sexual—documenting the minutiae of their physiological responses to the divine presence, the bliss of tingling skin, the rapture of hot breath, the shuddering and the awe¹⁹—these mystics also played up the passion, rather than affection, of their love.²⁰ More to the point, Christian mystics also dwelled on the pain that was wrapped up in their spiritual-as-bodily pleasure.²¹ A’isha’s Christian counterparts, in other words, took pleasure in suffering at the hand of their Prophet in the same way that their Prophet himself had suffered.²²

Physical pain, contrarily, plays almost no part in A’isha’s prose or poetry. Yes, she describes separation from the divine beloved as a sort of psychic torture, hence “life” as a quest for union, a migration away from, or an amelioration of, that torture.²³ But Christian women mystics went much further than mourning separation as a source of pain. Rather, they described their meetings with the divine as encounters in which, among other terms, they were slapped, lacerated, beaten, bloodied, pierced, or penetrated.²⁴

Once more, none of this imagery appears in A’isha’s work. Quite the opposite, rather than describing herself as penetrated, or having been penetrated—the object of a completed sexual act—A’isha, like both her male and female Sufi contemporaries, understood divine communion to be an event or limit point that existed only in the future. The self-annihilation idealized in her poetry and prose was always deferred, imagined, or desired, never completed or fully experienced.²⁵

And so, though A’isha’s writing was certainly erotic, it describes less a discrete sexual encounter with the divine and more a diffuse fully embodied relationship with it. Divine love is, in her teaching—and paraphrasing—a boundless, secret sea open to tasting; it is a breathing fire that cannot be extinguished; it is an illness without a cure; and it is a tortured longing that induces quick shallow breathing, bewilderment, and agitation before giving way finally to absorption.²⁶ The Prophet’s presence is thus a presence that celebrates the human female body in all of its physiological manifestations, rather than isolating it as a sexualized target of divine mastery.

A’isha’s idiosyncratic centering of embodied femininity as a part of mystical union remained, moreover, directly tied throughout her life’s work to her first ecstatic experience in Mecca celebrating the Prophet’s birthday. How was this possible? One place to begin answering this question is to note that celebrating the day of the Prophet’s birth was a relatively late development in West Asian and North African Islamic history.²⁷ It was only in the twelfth century that the popular tradition took hold that taking joy in the day or hour of Muhammad’s birth would entice him into the celebrant’s home.²⁸ And it was much later, in the early to mid-sixteenth century—the years that saw A’isha writing and these same regions incorporated into the Ottoman Empire—that birthday commemorations became widespread and jubilant, lavishly funded by male as well as female patrons.²⁹

A’isha’s literary commemorations of the birth of the Prophet, therefore, positioned her at the forefront of a tradition that was sufficiently settled to be respectable, but sufficiently innovative to remain open to interpretation, especially in her hometown of Damascus. In 1516, the year before her death, in fact, a contemporary Syrian historian wrote in a tone both impressed and worried, that the governor had held a birthday celebration for the Prophet so elaborate that it was attended by all the women of the city, of every rank and background, every one of whom participated.³⁰

And how did A’isha celebrate this moment? Once more, she celebrated it by remembering and narrating her physiological state when she first encountered the Prophet in her dream. As she writes in one of her more well-respected panegyrics on his birth, she herself was in Mecca during this initiating moment of contact, but unable to enter the Sanctuary because of a “ritual disability” (that is, menstruation).³¹ Restricted to her bed, she lay back and observed the Ka‘ba from her window. She then began to sleep, and the Prophet appeared to her in a dream, which precipitated her first experience of ecstasy, “an awe that took me away from myself.”³² From that point forward, A’isha devoted herself to expressing and living the life of love that had been promised to her in the vision.

But this is a remarkable set of associations for a Sufi mystic to assemble as a means of celebrating the Prophet’s birth. A’isha was not only alone in her bedroom when she encountered Muhammad; she was alone in her bedroom and menstruating. It is difficult to imagine a more personal or physiologically distinctive bodily function for her to attach to this life-transforming event.

And yet, once again, she not only associates menstruation with her first vision, but she narrates this memory of her menstruation to countless later audiences of correspondents and followers. The event that launched A’isha into the pursuit of the life of love was thus synonymous with one of the most private and female of bodily functions in the literary or religious imagination. The diffuse spiritual life that she envisioned could not be anything except embodied.

So what then does A’isha’s unusually visceral and private interpretation of the life of the mystic have to do with the Ottoman Empire that incorporated Damascus into its territory only the year after her death? To answer that final question, we must return to our geopolitical starting point. Once again, Aisha’s life—the prosaic quotidian life she lived as a human among humans—was spent in the borderlands between Ottoman and Mamluk domains. Though she herself may never have imagined herself as Ottoman, therefore, Arabic-speaking Ottoman mystics in the centuries following her death had no qualms about incorporating her work into their distinctively Ottoman canon.³³ Not only did A’isha enjoy a shining reputation among seventeenth-century, and thus geopolitically Ottoman, biographers, but she continued to influence Ottoman Sufi practices in the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years after her initial moment of celebrity.

Moreover, though she’d fallen into obscurity by the late eighteenth century, she was recuperated by later nineteenth-century Ottoman Egyptian and Syrian nationalist and feminist writers, and then never forgotten again.³⁴ Nowadays, her reputation among scholars and mystics worldwide is nearly as elevated as it was at the time of her life and death. Whereas most early modern Sufi mystics get translated only in bits and pieces, much of A’isha’s work is available in several European as well as West Asian languages.

Or, to get at A’isha’s enduring legacy from a different direction, a biographical dictionary published at the end of the nineteenth century by self-described feminist writers for self-described feminist reasons recuperates her, for these same reasons, in her rational guise as a legal scholar rather than in her diffuse guise as a mystic or poet.³⁵ A’isha, this biography notes, was once asked, in her capacity as emergent mufti (jurist), to issue a fatwa in response to a question concerning sexual propriety: if, the question ran, a woman has sexual intercourse with a man not her husband while asleep, has she committed a sin?

A’isha’s response? The jurists representing three of the four schools of Sunni law, she remarked, would say no, the woman isn’t culpable because she was unaware. According to the fourth school, however, the Hanbali school, the woman must have been culpable because if she hadn’t been enjoying herself, she would have pushed the man off and gone back to sleep.³⁶

As with Sufis like Mihri and Zeynep—not to mention Edebali (Chapter 1)—it’s difficult to know with A’isha where the irony begins and ends.

Notes

Emil Homerin, A’isha al-Ba’uniyya: A Life in Praise of Love (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019), 22.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010): 127–144, 140.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 167–183, 177.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 137.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 138.

Emil Homerin, “Writing Sufi Biography: The Case of ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyah (d. 922/1517),” The Muslim World 96 (2006): 389–399, 390.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 139.

Milad Milani, “The Principles of Sufism: Review,” Journal of Religious History (2015): 624, 624.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 137.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 140.

Emil Homerin, A’isha al-Ba’uniyya: A Life in Praise of Love (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019), 22.

Emil Homerin, A’isha al-Ba’uniyya: A Life in Praise of Love (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019).

Emil Homerin (ed.) in ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyyah, The Principles of Sufism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), xxi.

Emil Homerin (ed.) in ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyyah, The Principles of Sufism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), xxii.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 177.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 139.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 139.

Emil Homerin (ed.) in ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyyah, The Principles of Sufism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), xix.

Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999): 25–49, 30.

Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999), 30.

Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999), 30.

Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999), 30–31.

‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyyah. The Principles of Sufism, ed. Emil Homerin (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 89.

Julie B. Miller, “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999), 32.

For more on deferred pleasure and Sufism, see Chapter 3 and Claudia Yaghoobi, “Yusuf’s ‘Queer’ Beauty in Persian Cultural Productions,” The Comparatist 40 (2016): 245–246.

‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyyah. The Principles of Sufism, ed. Emil Homerin (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 90.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 168, 174.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 168.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 176.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 176.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 178.

Marion H. Katz, “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 177.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 137.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 137.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 141.

Omaima Abou-Bakr, “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010), 141.

Selected Bibliography

Abou-Bakr, Omaima. “Articulating Gender: Muslim Women Intellectuals in the Pre-Modern Period,” Arab Studies Quarterly 32 (2010): 127–144.

‘A’ishah Al-Ba‘uniyyah. The Principles of Sufism. Emil Homerin, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Azad, Arezou. “Female Mystics in Mediaeval Islam: The Quiet Legacy,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56 (2013): 53–88.

Bray, Julia. “Literary Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Arabic Biography,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20 (2010): 237–253.

Elmeligi, Wessam, ed. The Poetry of Arab Women from the Pre-Islamic Age to Andalusia (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Friedman, Rachel Anne. “The Poetics of Devotion in ‘A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya’s Praise of God and Muhammad,” The Muslim World 106 (2016): 539–560.

Homerin, Emil. A’isha al-Ba’uniyya: A Life in Praise of Love (London: Oneworld Publications, 2019a).

Homerin, Emil. “Crossing Borders: ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūniyya and Her Travels,” Der Islam 96 (2019b): 449–470.

Homerin, Emil. “Living Love: The Mystical Writings of ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyah (d. 922/1517),” Mamluk Studies Review 7 (2003): 211–234.

Homerin, Emil. “Writing Sufi Biography: The Case of ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyah (d. 922/1517),” The Muslim World 96 (2006): 389–399.

Katz, Marion H. “Commemoration of the Prophet’s Birthday as a Domestic Ritual in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Damascus,” in Marco Faini and Alessia Meneghin, eds., Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018): 167–183.

Katz, Marion H. “Textual Study of Gender,” in Léon Buskens and Annemarie van Sandwijk, eds., Islamic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Transformations and Continuities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016): 87–110.

Miller, Julie B. “Eroticized Violence in Medieval Women’s Mystical Literature: A Call for a Feminist Critique,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15 (1999): 25–49.

Pfeifer, Helen. “Encounter After the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th Century Ottoman Damascus,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 219–239.

Ullah, Sahar Ishtiaque. “Postclassical Poetics: The Role of the Amatory Prelude for the Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3 (2016): 203–225.

Part II A Global Empire Networks of Influence, Webs of Power, and “The Sultanate of Women”

5 Hürrem Sultan (1502–1558) Roxelana, the Queen and the Witch

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-8

Of all the women in this compendium, Hürrem Sultan (“the laughing one”)¹ or Roxelana (“the Ruthenian”)² is likely to be the most familiar to those conversant with the history of the Ottoman Empire. Taken as a slave from, perhaps apocryphally, a region in what is contemporary Ukraine, she was purchased as a concubine for the Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (or “the Lawgiver”) in 1520, when she was seventeen years old.³ Once introduced to the harem, Hürrem Sultan rose to political prominence, transforming the relationship between women’s private or domestic space and Ottoman sovereignty forever.⁴

Hürrem Sultan is best known for having carved out for herself the role of “queen” by marrying Süleyman, which was unprecedented for a sixteenth-century slave, and then ruling uncontested beside him until her death.⁵ This chapter, however, focuses less on Hürrem’s personal triumphs, with their hint of seduction and manipulation, and more on the extraordinary institutional revolution she oversaw. The imperial harem, for example, one of the most misunderstood spaces in Ottoman and Islamic history, reached a pinnacle of political influence under Hürrem, as a unique, and uniquely gendered, institution defined, ruled, and organized by women.⁶

Even so, however, the harem is also not the focus of the pages that follow. The transformation of the harem into an apparatus of governance and a space of women’s empowerment has received such extensive and influential scholarly attention over the past decades that it would take more than a short, impressionistic biography to do the institution justice. In keeping with our interest in the marginal and the trivial, in the bits and pieces of lives that hint at, rather than demonstrating, the agency of their subjects, therefore, this chapter will dwell instead on two less monumental aspects of Hürrem’s institutional revolution: first, the accusations of sorcery and witchcraft that stalked her rise to power,⁷ and second, how those accusations were tangled up in the construction of the Haseki Sultan Complex in the Fatih neighborhood of Istanbul, one of her most prominent interventions into Ottoman urban, rather than domestic, space.⁸

Students and scholars of Ottoman history might be mystified by this turn to Hürrem’s sorcery. Witchcraft had little resonance in the popular or high culture of the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman institutions never succumbed to witchcraft hysterias of the sort that characterized their northern and western European counterparts. Indeed, there wasn’t even a proper word for “witch” in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish. The epithet thrown at Hürrem was ziadi, later cadı or cadu, a Persian term that fused together “witch,” “vampire,” and “sorcerer,” and that was used more often in lyric love poetry bemoaning the effects of a pair of magical eyes than it was in legal or political documents.⁹

Nonetheless, in 1534, rumors began to float in the circles that concerned themselves with such things that Hürrem was a far from poetic witch. More to the point, these rumors gathered rhetorical momentum by reproducing themselves across the very materials that Hürrem herself had used to forge her public image. The attack on her reputation became possible, that is to say, because Hürrem’s persona was, by design, a carefully cultivated product, dependent on three fragile media edifices for its successful mobilization: first, state sanctioned communiques; second, the building projects and charities that she patronized; and third, the half-romantic, half-caustic reports that European diplomats in Istanbul sent to their masters back home.¹⁰

Hürrem was thus, and once again by design, more an atmosphere than a person, even to those who lived alongside her or whose profession it was to publicize her activities. No one saw her. No one spoke to her. Ottoman royal women, unlike the royal women of England, Spain, or France, were not put on display.¹¹ Quite the opposite, their status was confirmed via their works rather than via their adorned, spectacular bodies.¹²

Indeed, although “Roxelana” was the subject of several European Renaissance paintings, these paintings were as much idealized fantasies as the mythological and religious figures populating the overtly allegorical work that proliferated at the same time.¹³ For all we know, or anyone knew, Hürrem looked a fright, and the Sultan was captivated solely by her wit and laughter. Then, as now, Hürrem communicated to us, her public, through proxies, and as time passed, those proxy voices were simply not as loud as the voices of the European diplomats and Ottoman courtiers who had increasing reason to fear her.

Thus, over time, the message promulgated within and across Ottoman borders was that Hürrem was uncanny, and that the depersonalized mood that she dispersed throughout the court, the Empire—and eventually the globe—was equally so. Indeed, when the unprecedented marriage between the Sultan and his former slave took place in 1536¹⁴—the same year that Anne Boleyn, also a witch, lost her head¹⁵—European onlookers in particular made use of what had become a commonplace narrative of sexual and political intrigue: Mahidevran, the Sultan’s discarded former favorite, was the honorable Catherine of Aragon to Hürrem’s sinister and manipulative Anne Boleyn.¹⁶ Whereas Henry VIII came to his senses, however, Süleyman remained bewitched, allowing the sorceress to cast her spell not only on the court and the harem but on the Empire as a whole.

But all of this intrigue raises the question of how Hürrem took up her provocative and singular positions as both “queen” and “witch” in the first place. It also raises the question of how these roles influenced her building projects. To get there, we must go backward in time to her enslavement in Ruthenia sometime between 1509 and 1516.

In the early sixteenth century, the area that is now Ukraine was one of the most fertile sources of captives for the thriving and ancient Black Sea slave trade.¹⁷ Though this trade had been monopolized by Venetian and Genoese merchants throughout the medieval period and into the early 1400s, it had by the 1500s been usurped by Crimean Tatars working under the protection of an expanding Ottoman Empire.¹⁸ Slaves bound for the Ottoman market were thus both trained, as they had always been, in the skills that would appeal to prospective buyers, and also converted to Islam, which was new.¹⁹

The intermediaries who purchased, trained, and converted Hürrem educated her specifically for success in an aristocratic harem. Though she would have been aware of the requirements of a concubine when she entered the Sultan’s palace in the 1520s, however, even at that stage, her learning curve toward the status of favorite, or haseki, much less “wife,” would have been steep. This is because the leaders of the Ottoman royal family had, in the century preceding Hürrem’s entry onto the scene, sidestepped the dynastic wars that had plagued them in earlier years by eschewing marriage altogether.

Rather than adhering to a system of family alliances and primogeniture—a practice which they believed left states open to the ambitions of dueling aristocratic families who were prone to launching errant pretenders—Ottoman sultans by the 1500s instead produced heirs only via slave converts whose loyalties to the Ottoman dynasty could be assured.²⁰ The sole family in contention for the throne was thus the Ottoman family. There were no destructive rivalries or battles between or among, for example, Plantagenets, Lancasters, Yorks, and Tudors bedeviling the Ottoman political landscape.

By the time Hürrem entered the palace, therefore, convention held that any concubine who produced a son (but not a daughter) with the Sultan could no longer act as his consort.²¹ On the contrary, upon giving birth to a son, a sultan’s favorite was expected turn away from her role as consort and devote all of her attention to her role as mother, shifting her interest from the present ruler to her child, whom she would guide in the direction of future rulership. Since all sons had an equal right to the potential status of sultan, the highest rank to which a concubine aspired was thus not “queen,” which in any case didn’t exist, but instead “queen mother,” or valide sultan.²²

Hürrem upset that system. Upon her arrival in the palace, the Sultan already had four children with three other women, which included two sons in addition to Mustafa, the son of his current favorite, Mahidevran.²³ When Hürrem continued to consort with Süleyman after the birth of her own son, Mehmet, and eventually bore three additional sons and a second daughter, therefore, she overturned what had become a carefully balanced hierarchy of personal and political interests that had protected the state from what most onlookers believed was the fatal threat of clashing power bases.²⁴ When she then, upon her marriage in 1536, furthermore replaced that system entirely with one in which the harem itself became a space of imperial governance and administration—an innovation noted with astonishment by European diplomatic observers—the only explanation that occurred to those same observers was that something supernatural was afflicting the palace.²⁵

“Roxelana’s” witchcraft, in other words, went far beyond love spells and potions, as indeed had Anne Boleyn’s. The fear that she generated wasn’t the fear of a woman with pretty eyes distracting her male counterpart. That sort of superficial power was and remained the stuff of contemptuous male versifying. Rather, the fear that she generated was the less pleasurable fear of an entirely unknown, because never seen, yet nonetheless celebrated woman inhabiting a liminal place between the public and the private, between, even, the battlefield and the harem, and projecting from this space an atmosphere that permeated an empire. And, as Shakespeare would make clear a few decades later, occupying gates and doorways while flinging one’s personality through time and space is a well-worn habit of witches,²⁶ a habit at which, though the vocabulary in Ottoman-Turkish was lacking, Hürrem was an adept.

And perhaps she cultivated the image. The Haseki Complex, her most famous building project, is certainly a witchlike construction, full of doors and conduits, saturated with an atmosphere of boundaries and vibrating, ambivalent power. Indeed, though Hürrem is frequently credited with initiating the later vogue among powerful royal women for patronizing monumental architectural projects in the Ottoman Empire, this collection of edifices is esoteric and indecipherable in way that most monumental male, and even later female, building was not. There is something beyond or apart from the merely spectacular about the Haseki Complex, particularly in comparison to the Süleymaniye Complex founded by her husband a few miles away, that marks it distinctively as the project of a haseki rather than a sultan.

How? Constructed between the years 1538 and 1551, the Haseki Complex was, first of all, the inaugural project of the man—also a former slave convert—who would later become the celebrated imperial architect, Mimar Sinan.²⁷ Even taking into consideration Sinan’s future glory, however, the structure is a suggestive, rather than monumental, group of buildings. Sinan, indeed, though remembered now for the extravagant designs of structures like Süleymaniye, was uncharacteristically restrained in this initial foray into royal planning. Some commentators even argue that he couldn’t have been fully responsible for it, given his sometimes baffling architectural choices and the fact that it was his first year as chief architect.²⁸

Whatever Sinan’s contribution, however, the Complex in its entirety eventually comprised a small mosque, a school (medrese), a soup kitchen (imaret), a children’s school, a cemetery, and a hospital (in roughly chronological order—the hospital was completed last, in 1551).²⁹ The land on which it stood spanned a comparatively small footprint in a neighborhood that was rapidly growing up around a weekly market operated, perhaps importantly, by women.³⁰ And though it was the last to be built, the most famous element of Haseki Complex was, and continues to be, the hospital, or darüşşifa.

This darüşşifa, etymologically derived from dar, door, and şifa, healing, was the third major hospital built in Istanbul. Opening immediately upon completion in the 1550s, it enjoyed nearly uninterrupted funding and operation over three hundred years, continuing its work at least into the early nineteenth century, when it was converted into a hospital for women with mental disorders and venereal diseases.³¹ In the middle of the nineteenth century, it again became a charitable hospital. And then, following a destructive earthquake in 1894, its doors finally closed.³²

Why, though, should Hürrem have focused on the hospital? And more to the point, why is the Complex in its entirety so frequently associated with the hospital today? One answer to these questions is personal. Hürrem’s first son, Mehmet, had died of a “plague” a decade before, a private as well as political catastrophe for his mother that left both her and the Empire in a vulnerable state at a turbulent period in imperial history.³³

Figure 5.1 Haseki Sultan Complex Plan, excluding the hospital, by Cornelius Gurlitt, 1912. Source: Cornelius Gurlitt, Die Baukunst Konstantinopels (Berlin: E. Wasmuth, 1912), 222, 18.e., Getty Research Institute.

Additionally, however, the founding of hospitals is a transformation of urban space that reflects Hürrem’s personal and political position within the imperial power networks that she was forced to negotiate throughout her life, even as she re-defined them. For the hospital in early-modern Ottoman political, cultural, and scientific rhetoric was, as the “door of the cure,” the preeminent place in which an individual’s background or identity might be shed, prior to transformation and reintegration into society.³⁴ Hospitals were imagined, even in the documents that funded them, as places—unlike mosques, schools, or even soup kitchens—where individuals from every religious, ethnic, or professional background might mix and interact prior to re-entry into Ottoman social structures.³⁵

Open explicitly to “strangers,” charitable hospitals, via their work on bodies as well as souls or minds, were thus a key imperial mechanism for domesticating unknown figures into local as well as Empire-wide social systems.³⁶ In the same way that the harem had transformed Hürrem from a foreign slave into an Ottoman ruler, that is to say, the hospital transformed wandering or afflicted strangers into Ottoman subjects. The hospital and the harem were spatially and philosophically reciprocal.

But the hospital was also more than a means of domesticating strangers. Given that, theoretically if not always in practice, early modern Ottoman medical science downplayed contagion as a cause of illness in favor of miasma, crossed stars, or jinn, the spaces of hospitals nearly always interpenetrated other buildings.³⁷ In the case of Haseki Complex, these other buildings were, remember, a mosque, a school, a soup kitchen, and a cemetery. This arrangement, in turn, meant that the Complex was not only economically efficient—both the soup kitchen and the cemetery, for example, could serve the three other institutions—but also aimed at eliminating any trace of fear or shame from the treatment of illness.³⁸ The hospital’s spatial reflection of Ottoman physicians’ theoretical rejection of the doctrine of contagion, in other words, allowed the “strangers” who were healed there not only to be absorbed into Ottoman society via their cure, but to be absorbed without stigma.

Far removed from both the quarantine-style northern European hospital cut off from contact with society and the monumental non-medical structures built by sultans and meant to dominate onlookers, Hürrem Sultan’s sixteenth-century hospital was thus above all a space of interaction, welcome, and domesticity. It was a doorway not only between sickness and health, but between stranger and subject, and between fear and acceptance. As such, it was a space that likely appealed personally to the Ukrainian slave girl who had passed through several similar doorways on her journey toward political prominence, toward a position in which she might finally act as gatekeeper herself.

The legacy that Hürrem left for later women patrons of urban architecture in the Ottoman Empire was in this way more complex than it might at first appear to be. Yes, powerful women could and did significantly shape imperial space, especially in the decades following Hürrem’s rise to power, and especially in urban centers. But the shapes that they built in the earlier years were ambiguous compared to those of their male counterparts. Large and looming, they nonetheless also reflected lifetimes of fluidity, and they were founded upon a recognition that moving through space can be, in itself, transformative and worthy of commemoration.

How, then, did Hürrem shape the Ottoman Empire? Quite simply, as the witch that her detractors claimed that she was. Hürrem projected an atmosphere of influence over the public arenas she transformed that, in the end, could never be fully dispersed. Indeed, to back away from the panegyric, it might be worth remembering her life’s work in the words of a less enamored female court poet, Nisayi, lamenting the Sultan Süleyman’s execution of his first son (Mahidevran’s son), Mustafa, who had been a great patron of poetry and literature in the years before his strangulation:

You allowed the words of a Russian witch into your ears

Deluded by tricks and deceit, you did the bidding of that spiteful hag

You slaughtered that swaying cypress, fruit of life’s orchard

What has the compassionless Monarch of the World done to Sultan Mustafa?³⁹

So, Hürrem made some enemies along the way.

But then, the poet Nisayi might have comforted herself with the irony that the ultimate objective of Hürrem’s labor, the title of valide sultan, escaped her. Predeceasing Süleyman, she never saw her son, Selim, become sultan.⁴⁰ After crossing countless thresholds and passing through myriad gateways, after building a celebrated mosque and an even more celebrated hospital, after turning women’s domestic space into a force to be reckoned with, she never, in the end, became queen mother. Only queen.

Notes

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 4.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 4.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 14–15.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 62.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), Empress of the East, 127.

See Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For an account of less prominent women in the harem alongside a useful review of the past two decades of literature on the subject, see Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Heather Madar, “Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women,” Early Modern Women 6 (Fall 2011): 1–41, 26.

Suraiya Faroqhi, Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023), 70.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), Empress of the East, 147, 331 note 6. See also Özlem Ögüt Yazıcıoğlu, “Roxolana in Turkish Literature: Re-Writing the Ever Elusive Woman of Power and Desire,” in Galina I. Yermolenko, ed., Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture (London: Ashgate, 2010): 141–166.

Scholars nowadays also have a collection of letters she wrote to Süleyman when he was on campaign and to various European sovereigns on important state occasions. Galina Yermolenko, “Roxolana in Europe,” in Yermolenko, ed., 23–56, 34.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 171.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 124–125.

Heather Madar, “Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women,” Early Modern Women 6 (Fall 2011), 14–15.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 8.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 8.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 271–272.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 16–17. See also Felicia Roşu, ed., Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900–1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2022), passim.

Andrzej Gliwa, “How Captives Were Taken: The Making of Tatar Slaving Raids in the Early Modern Period,” in Roşu, ed., 187–249, 189.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 16–17.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 313–314. For an analysis of how this process played into the Sultan’s projection of personality and power, see also H. Erdem Çıpa, The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 29.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 111–112.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 127.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 184–185.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 184–185.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 184–185.

Bill Angus, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Zeynep Ceran Keçici and Sibel Onat Hattap, “Mimar Sinan’s First Work on Istanbul: Haseki Complex and Historical Development of Haseki Darüşşifa,” Quarto Convegno Internazionale-Architecttura Eremitica Sistemi Progettuali e Paesaggi Culturali (September 2013): 1–10, 1.

Zeynep Ceran Keçici and Sibel Onat Hattap, “Mimar Sinan’s First Work on Istanbul: Haseki Complex and Historical Development of Haseki Darüşşifa,” Quarto Convegno Internazionale-Architecttura Eremitica Sistemi Progettuali e Paesaggi Culturali (September 2013), 2.

Zeynep Ceran Keçici and Sibel Onat Hattap, “Mimar Sinan’s First Work on Istanbul: Haseki Complex and Historical Development of Haseki Darüşşifa,” Quarto Convegno Internazionale-Architecttura Eremitica Sistemi Progettuali e Paesaggi Culturali (September 2013), 3–4.

Zeynep Ceran Keçici and Sibel Onat Hattap, “Mimar Sinan’s First Work on Istanbul: Haseki Complex and Historical Development of Haseki Darüşşifa,” Quarto Convegno Internazionale-Architecttura Eremitica Sistemi Progettuali e Paesaggi Culturali (September 2013), 2.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “A Picture of Health: The Search for a Genre to Visualize Care in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Grey Room 72 (Summer 2018): 36–67, 38.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “A Picture of Health: The Search for a Genre to Visualize Care in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Grey Room 72 (Summer 2018), 38.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 233.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 14.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 139.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 154.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 119.

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 67–68.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 22.

Leslie Peirce, Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 304.

Selected Bibliography

Argıt, Betül İpşirli. Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Balsoy, Gülhan. “Haseki Women’s Hospital and the Female Destitute of Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” Middle Eastern Studies 53 (2019): 289–300.

Çıpa, H. Erdem. The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

Dillinger, Johannes, ed., The Routledge History of Witchcraft (London: Routledge, 2019).

Faroqui, Suraiya. Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).

Hathaway, Jane. The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Havlıoğlu, Didem. Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Kayaalp, Pınar. “An Analysis of the Hospitals of Sultan Süleyman and Hürrem: Two Different Approaches to Healthcare in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Medical Biography 27 (2019): 102–108.

Keçici, Zeynep Ceran and Sibel Onat Hattap, “Mimar Sinan’s First Work on Istanbul: Haseki Complex and Historical Development of Haseki Darüşşifa,” Quarto Convegno Internazionale-Architecttura Eremitica Sistemi Progettuali e Paesaggi Culturali (September 2013): 1–10.

Necipoğlu, Gülru. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Özgüleş, Muzaffer. The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

Madar, Heather. “Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women,” Early Modern Women 6 (Fall 2011): 1–41.

Peirce, Leslie. Empress of the East: How a European Slave Girl Became Queen of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Peirce, Leslie. Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Shefer-Mossensohn, Miri. Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

Roşu, Felicia, ed. Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c. 900–1900: Forms of Unfreedom at the Intersection between Christianity and Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2022).

Tunç, Şen A. “Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul: A Treatise on Talismans Attributed to Ibn Kemal (d. 1534),” Journal of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12 (2017): 66–88.

Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem Ögüt. “Roxolana in Turkish Literature: Re-Writing the Ever Elusive Woman of Power and Desire,” in Galina I. Yermolenko, ed., Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture (London: Ashgate, 2010): 141–166.

Yermolenko, Galina I., ed. Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture (London: Ashgate, 2010).

6 Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510–1569) Heroine of the Inquisition

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-9

The fortunes of the Jewish or converso Mendes family, which dealt in spices, jewels, and banking in sixteenth-century Lisbon, is a classic story of the European Renaissance. It is also a classic story of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition.¹ This chapter concerns itself with the later life of one of the more colorful members of the family, Gracia Mendes Nasi, once she’d fled Portugal and the Inquisition, and emigrated to Istanbul.

Upon the death of her husband in 1538, Beatriz de Luna (her Catholic name), and later, Gracia (her Jewish name), less than thirty years old, found herself triply vulnerable to the Portuguese authorities.² Her wealth, her religious status, and her gender all conspired to attract Inquisitorial interest,³ and she was forced to transgress both geopolitical and religious boundaries and borders to save her life, her family, and her business interests. This she did with heroic, now legendary, resolution: moving from Lisbon to Antwerp in 1536, from there to Venice in 1544, from Venice to Ferrara, where she may have first publicized her Jewish identity, in 1550, and then from Ferrara to Salonica, an Ottoman-Greek city, in 1553.⁴

Once settled within Ottoman domains, Doña Gracia began to practice Judaism openly. After moving to Istanbul in 1554, she furthermore became a leader, if a contested one, of the Ottoman Sephardic community.⁵ Throughout the remainder of her life, she built up one of the most distinguished Jewish legacies in Ottoman history, financing synagogues and schools, supporting the settlement of other fleeing Jews and conversos, and encouraging and expanding Jewish publishing ventures.⁶

Doña Gracia is thus an easy addition to this compendium. Brave, brilliant, and independent, her memory as a feminist hero is so remarkable that several cities and nations have declared “Doña Gracia Days” in her honor. She, like Malhun Hatun (Chapter 1), also appears in a Turkish soap opera.⁷ Unlike Malhun Hatun (Chapter 2) or Zeynep Hatun (Chapter 3), however, whose agency demand patient excavation, or Hürrem Sultan (Chapter 5), whose influence, though profound, was invisible, Doña Gracia was the quintessential model of feminist empowerment. She imposed her will across three continents as she openly and emphatically shaped both an empire and the world.

Indeed, oppositional and strong as she was, defying not only archetypal monsters like the Inquisition, but underhanded, debt-ridden monarchs out to contain her, or to marry her, or both, there is little need for historians to stretch the definition of agency to recuperate her life story. We needn’t even seek evidence of subversion or resistance in self-annihilating piety or silent, habitual activity on her part. Doña Gracia wasn’t quiet. From her flight out of Lisbon as a Catholic converso carrying threatening letters of introduction to the English monarch Henry VIII, a man not known for respecting the integrity of stray, unprotected women,⁸ to her triumphant entry into Istanbul nearly two decades later, proudly Jewish, complete with flamboyant clothing and a retinue of glamorous hangers-on parading behind her carriages,⁹ Doña Gracia had a knack for wielding and displaying her personal sovereignty. Choosing to remain single following her widowhood in order to maintain her financial independence, her identity wasn’t even relational. No quietly bubbling discursive waves for her.

Nor is it the purpose of this chapter to question this conventionally inspiring memory of Doña Gracia as an assertive woman who would have held her own against the most outspoken of the twentieth-century’s second-wave feminists. Interpretation, once again, is always the reader’s prerogative, and in the same way that Malhun Hatun’s contingent agency (Chapter 1) may not read as convincing to many, Doña Gracia’s obvious strength of character may seem immune to scholarly interrogation. She did, after all, elude a far more insistent variation on that sort of exchange by frustrating the designs of the Inquisition.

Figure 6.1 A Young Woman and Her Little Boy, presumed portrait of Beatriz de Luna by Agnolo Bronzino, ca. 1540s. Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Nonetheless, it is worth attempting to recontextualize her life story within an alternative theory of agency less wed to fables of sovereign subjects imposing their wills upon the world, if for no other reason than it might help us to sketch out a complementary accounting of Doña Gracia’s life. And the first move in the direction of this alternative interpretation might be to step back from the easy, satisfying narrative of Doña Gracia as a proud and stubborn Jewish woman, confident in her identity, who clung to her faith under pressure, over decades, across oceans, and who stood up to some of the most oppressive religious and political persecution in history before, ultimately, winning. Because this was not the experience of most conversos.¹⁰ And it was certainly not the experience of Doña Gracia or her family.

The daughter of a Jewish family ejected from Spain following the 1492 Alhambra Edict of Expulsion, Doña Gracia’s, or Beatriz de Luna’s, parents had already been forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal at the time of her birth in 1510.¹¹ She was, that is to say, born Catholic. Her marriage to Francisco Mendes Benveniste, a relative of her mother, was, moreover, celebrated in the great Lisbon Cathedral.¹² Only later, according to some sources but not all, was it also secretly celebrated in a crypto-Jewish ceremony.¹³ In Lisbon, she and her husband lived ostentatiously as Catholics, not as Jews.¹⁴

In 1538, following the death of her husband, Doña Gracia recognized the precarity of her community’s identity despite its outward trappings. And so, from Antwerp she organized an escape network for other conversos fleeing the Iberian peninsula.¹⁵ The beneficiaries of this network, people such as herself who had become vulnerable not despite, but because of, their, or their parents’, conversion, made use of her family’s merchant vessels, which continued to dock at Portuguese ports.¹⁶ From there, Doña Gracia’s ships brought these refugees to Antwerp, where they were funded before making their way to Venice and then to the Ottoman Empire. When her sister, also a converso, thwarted this initial iteration on the escape network by denouncing Doña Gracia as a crypto-Jew to the Antwerp authorities after she (Doña Gracia) had convinced her brother-in-law (her sister’s husband) to write a will in her (Doña Gracia’s) favor, Doña Gracia eventually joined her nephew, Joseph Nasi, in Ottoman Salonica and then Istanbul, where the network was re-constituted.¹⁷

Joseph Nasi’s career had been as colorful as his aunt’s. Sent as an envoy, or spy, by the Portuguese authorities to Istanbul to report on Ottoman naval technology, Joseph Nasi, like Doña Gracia, had returned to his Jewish roots upon finding safety in Ottoman lands.¹⁸ Once circumcised and married to Doña Gracia’s daughter, he resided ostentatiously with his aunt in a palace in the European section of Istanbul, where he both helped her in her endeavors to rescue imperiled Jews and conversos while also mobilizing the merchant and information-gathering networks he’d established as a Portuguese spy, now on behalf of the Ottoman state.¹⁹

If Doña Gracia and Joseph Nasi personally benefitted from their information-gathering activities for the Ottoman Empire—she with the gift of Tiberias from the Sultan Selim II,²⁰ and he with the rulership of the island and archipelago of Naxos²¹—that is a mere by-product of their gratitude toward the government that had allowed them to practice their faith honestly and openly. Or, at least, so goes the hagiographic literature. Moreover, if the Ottoman Jewish millets in Salonica and Istanbul were unenthusiastic, and sometimes openly hostile, to Doña Gracia’s efforts to uplift them, this hostility was nothing more than a conservative reaction to her and other exiled Sephardim’s liberal interpretations of religious identity and practice. Or, once again, so goes the hagiographic literature. And finally, if Joseph Nasi’s greatest rival in the Ottoman Court was neither a Muslim aristocrat nor a Christian diplomat, but instead the Ashkenazi Jewish physician of the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, also a refugee, but in his case, from Austria,²² this was purely accidental, not an indication of any serious fractures within the Ottoman Jewish community about the identity or loyalty of conversos, and certainly not about the identity or loyalty of Joseph Nasi himself. Or, so goes the hagiographic literature.

If we look at the less hagiographic literature, however, and at the activities and writing of both Doña Gracia and her nephew on the ground, it becomes clear that they were, themselves, far from certain about who they were or what faith they were, in fact, practicing. Remember: though their parents or, in Joseph Nasi’s case, grandparents had converted to Catholicism, they both had been born Catholic. It was thus natural for them to perform their “Europeanness” to an exaggerated degree when resident in Istanbul, even as they vacillated equally pointedly between their Jewish (“Eastern”) and their Catholic (“Western”) identities according to which Europeans they happened to be addressing or influencing.

Whereas Joseph Nasi, for example, played up his “Jewish” information and trade network, which stretched, he claimed, from India to Venice, in order to emphasize his indispensability as a spy for both the Ottomans and the Portuguese, he referred to himself by his Catholic name, “Juan Miques,” and repented of what he called his “apostasy” from Catholicism in a 1571 letter to King Philip II of Spain when he found himself outmaneuvered at the Ottoman Court by the Grand Vizier.²³ Doña Gracia likewise orchestrated a carefully crafted spectacle of Jewish devotion as she scattered synagogues, yeshivas, and publishing houses across the Ottoman urban landscape while nonetheless managing to convince the Portuguese ambassador to Istanbul in the 1550s that she “remained a Christian at heart” and wished to return to western Europe, her homeland.²⁴ In this context, one begins almost to feel a shred of sympathy for the informant younger sister, left without a husband, an inheritance, or an identity, in Antwerp.

But does sullying the narrative of Doña Gracia as she is celebrated on Doña Gracia Days also suggest that she was hypocritical, a fake, a crypto-Catholic all along? No, it does not. On the contrary, the purpose of introducing doubt into the conventional flat story of the doughty heroine of the Jewish resistance is to allow for a re-examination of the complexity of, in particular, her agency. If Doña Gracia’s identity wasn’t monolithic, if her faith was multilayered and flexible rather than invulnerable and romantically imperiled, then she herself becomes far more relevant to the actual operation of borders and boundaries within and beyond Ottoman lands.

And so, our second move in exploring this alternative interpretation of Doña Gracia’s biography is to collect a series of objects, spaces, moments, and concepts from the established tale, and then to recontextualize them. These include the clothing that she wore upon her triumphant entry into Istanbul; the merchant fleet that, while transporting the family’s spices and liquid assets also rescued Iberian conversos and moved spies across Joseph Nasi’s network; and the millet system.

Doña Gracia’s clothing and retinue upon her initial appearance in Istanbul were a deliberate and calculated provocation, a message sent both to the Catholic monarchies that she’d fled and to the Muslim Sultanate that she’d entered. With regard to the first, following the 1492 Expulsion Edict, Spanish and, later, Portuguese monarchs found themselves in a difficult position. Having forced the conversion of both Muslims and Jews to Catholicism, and having then encouraged the departure of both, apparently mistrusting the very conversos they’d created, these monarchs were now faced with the financial consequences of having, in the process, also driven out most of the intellectual, mercantile, and banking concerns that had previously propped up their moribund, land-based agricultural economy in what was becoming a financialized proto-capitalist world.²⁵

Recognizing their error, these monarchs then attempted to shore up their borders. Reversing their previous policies, they now prevented conversos from leaving rather than forcing them to depart, while cynically accusing the wealthier ones of crypto-Judaism in order to gain control of their financial and technological assets.²⁶ Portuguese, Spanish, and Austrian monarchs—as well as their English and Dutch counterparts, because Protestant states were not immune to the temptation²⁷—thus needed families like Doña Gracia’s to be secretly Jewish. If these families weren’t secretly Jewish, then the state had no excuse to confiscate their property.

By entering Istanbul in a fashion that was not only openly Jewish, but flamboyantly Jewish, therefore, Doña Gracia was provocatively exploding the established narrative of conversion, followed by secrecy, followed by hiding, followed by inquisition, followed by inevitable exposure that had become common to Jewish identity in Europe at the time. She and her family, or so she broadcast to the watching public, were thereby both converts and not, both secretive and not. Their exposure on the streets of Istanbul was of their own making, which meant in turn that their Jewishness, or not, was likewise of their own choosing.

At the same time, however, though she’d obtained the Sultan’s permission before flouting the city’s sartorial conventions,²⁸ the message that she was sending to Ottoman rulers, not to mention to the Ottoman Jewish millet,²⁹ was similarly combative. Unlike Catholic and Protestant monarchs, who needed their Jewish subjects to deny their identity prior to inquisition and exposure, the Muslim Ottoman Sultan needed his Jewish subjects to perform their identity openly, but always within the confines of the tightly controlled, pre-existing legal structure that characterized the nonetheless fluid millet system.³⁰ This performance, however, Doña Gracia also rejected, parading her Jewishness, or not, deliberately outside of the legal boundaries of Ottoman Jewish identity. She in this way flouted the comfortable lines that separated not only Jewish and not-Jewish subjects, but “foreign” and “native” Istanbul Jews, as well as Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews.

It’s no wonder, then, that so many of the Jews already living in the city found her and her family’s presence suspicious or offensive.³¹ Far more than an affront to their supposedly conservative belief system, she was a threat to the legal and cultural boundaries that had protected their practice for nearly three hundred years of Ottoman rule. She shook the foundations of a millet system that was already ad hoc, and that was now also rapidly weakening under the onslaught of an emergent capitalist system that was transforming early modern religiously inflected privileges into modern proto-colonial extraterritoriality rights. And she did this all while calculatedly provoking the responses of both the Christian and Muslim rulers to whom she was ostensibly appealing for protection.

And then finally, of course, she was also demonstrating, in the most boisterous possible manner, the foolishness of maintaining religious divides in a world increasingly ruled by capital and the movement of liquid assets. Fundamentally, she entered Istanbul not as a Jew or a Catholic, not as Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or Ottoman, but as the head of a multinational, multireligious financial concern that was one of a handful slowly taking over the world. She was in this way deliberately establishing a new and alternative set of local and global borders and boundaries that threatened everyone’s interests.

Indeed, the merchant fleet that spearheaded this expansion, that engaged itself simultaneously in such exalted activities as the rescue of imperiled refugees and in such disreputable exercises as the extension of Joseph Nasi’s spy network,³² played a similarly dual role in Doña Gracia’s shaping of Ottoman borders. The inverse of her clothing choices, the merchant fleet shrouded itself in secrecy. Eluding the attention of both Portuguese inquisitors and Ottoman naval commanders, it extended the family’s influence from the Atlantic Ocean to India, from northern Europe to Yemen and southern Africa. In the process, it embedded Doña Gracia and her relatives in a new sort of statecraft. This was not merely the turn to the seas that would launch the British and French into imperial prominence in the coming centuries at the expense of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottomans. It was also the turn to secrecy and information gathering, rather than spectacle, as the privilege of the powerful.³³

As states became increasingly bureaucratic and centralized throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as economies became ever more capitalist, statecraft became all the more enamored of secrecy and data collection.³⁴ And Doña Gracia and her family were, of necessity, at the forefront of this shift—at the vanguard of one of the most significant transformations in statecraft in the early modern period. Moreover, they owed this position at the vanguard very specifically to the uncertainty of their religious and political identities. Doña Gracia was a key player, that is to say, in drawing and shaping what would become the modern boundary between the distracting public spectacle and covert information gathering—the boundary common to every contemporary nation state from the early modern period to today—because she failed to choose a side and stick with it.

Closer, then, according to this alternative reading of her agency, to the media- and data-manipulating post-feminists of the twenty-first century than to the outspoken second wave feminists of the twentieth to whom she’s so frequently compared, Doña Gracia is thus also more relevant to continuing debates surrounding women’s empowerment than she might first appear to be. Reconfiguring not only the boundaries of religious identity, but of sovereignty itself—locally, in Ottoman cities, regionally, across the empire, and globally over mercantile and data networks—Doña Gracia shaped the polity as a direct result of her less-than-pure faith, as a direct result of her political disloyalties, and as a direct result of her questionable personal motivations. Her story, indeed, though exaggerated, mirrors that of many other Jewish refugees. Foreign while native, Sephardic while not, retaining their language as Ladino—Spanish written in Hebrew characters—while inhabiting some of the oldest Istanbul neighborhoods, these converts, or not, became the inheritors of a modern, rather than Renaissance or early modern, world.

And so, though the tightly controlled borders of contemporary nation states reflect more immediately the closed borders of Inquisitorial Portugal than they do the porous open boundaries that never quite surrounded Ottoman territory, it is the porous and open boundaries that remain, despite centuries of post-Westphalian history, the supposedly humanitarian (not to mention capitalist) ideal. We don’t like walls, even when we ourselves build them. Though our reality may be the impermeable border, therefore, our standard, in the modern world, has always been the blurry membrane.

All of this means, in turn, that regardless of whether one prefers Doña Gracia unblemished, pure and coherent, or tarnished, compromised, and fractured, she did shape a new sort of open-ended world. This was a world of networks and connections, of dynamism and flow, where the anxiety of never quite knowing who or what you are is more than counterbalanced by the endless potential for, if not self-fashioning, then certainly the fashioning of the discursive fields within which you operate. And as much as she wouldn’t have recognized herself in the Doña Gracia celebrated on Doña Gracia Days, Doña Gracia herself—the consummate protean actress—would undoubtedly have been entertained by the images parading through the streets of Philadelphia or New York City, or even the Iberian peninsula.

Notes

Jonathan Ray, “Iberian Jewry Between West and East: Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009): 44–65, 53.

Herman Prins Salomon and Aron di Leone Leoni, “Mendes, Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: The State of the Art (1532–1558),” The Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (3/4) (January–April 1998): 135–211, 139.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000): 43–52, 45.

Marianna Birnbaum, “Jewish Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara,” Mediterranean Studies 7 (1998): 135–141, 136.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013): 454–476, 458.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 50.

Namely in Muhteşem Yüzyıl, “The Magnificient Century.” Jana Jahbour, “Winning Hearts and Minds through Soft Power: The Case of Turkish Soap Operas in the Middle East,” in Nele Lenze, Charlotte Schriwer, and Zubaidah Abdul Jalil, eds., Media in the Middle East: Activism, Politics, Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 145–164.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 46.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 50.

Jonathan Ray, “Iberian Jewry Between West and East: Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009), 53.

Herman Prins Salomon and Aron di Leone Leoni, “Mendes, Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: The State of the Art (1532–1558),” The Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (3/4) (January–April 1998), 147–148.

Howard Tzvi Adelman, “The Venetian Identities of Beatrice and Brianda de Luna,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 25 (2013): 10–29, 15–16.

Howard Tzvi Adelman, “The Venetian Identities of Beatrice and Brianda de Luna,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 25 (2013), 16.

Herman Prins Salomon and Aron di Leone Leoni, “Mendes, Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: The State of the Art (1532–1558),” The Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (3/4) (January–April 1998), 155.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 44.

Marianna Birnbaum, “Jewish Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara,” Mediterranean Studies 7 (1998), 136.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 47.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror: Ruptures, Relations, and Forms of Identity,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 175–205, 179.

Herman Prins Salomon and Aron di Leone Leoni, “Mendes, Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: The State of the Art (1532–1558),” The Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (3/4) (January–April 1998), 161. See also J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013), 463.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 51.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013), 463.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013), 471.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013), 469.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror: Ruptures, Relations, and Forms of Identity,” Jewish History 25 (2011), 179.

Though the Ottoman Muslim ruling classes were by no means capitalists themselves, they recognized the benefits of encouraging this proto-capitalist behavior, welcoming its elaboration in cities like Salonica by families such as Doña Gracia’s. See, for example, Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Vintage, 2006), 53–54.

Kevin Ingram and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, eds., The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2016), xix.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000), 46.

Peter Christensen, “‘As if She Were Jerusalem’: Placemaking in Sephardic Salonica,” Muqarnas 30 (2013): 141–169, 168 note 44.

Recently arrived Jews from Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal were already mocked as vulgar by many members of pre-existing Ottoman Jewish communities. Mazower, Salonica, 54.

Fariba Zarinebaf, “Intercommunal Life in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Middle East Studies 46 (1) (Summer 2021): 79–85, 46.

J.A. Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013), 457–458.

Emrah Safa Gürkan, “The Efficacy of Ottoman Counter Intelligence in the Sixteenth-Century,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 65 (1) (March 2012): 1–38, 5–6.

Dejanirah Couto, “Spying in the Ottoman Empire: Sixteenth-Century Encrypted Correspondence,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds., Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 274–312, 275.

Dejanirah Couto, “Spying in the Ottoman Empire: Sixteenth-Century Encrypted Correspondence,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds., Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 276.

Selected Bibliography

Adelman, Howard Tzvi. “The Venetian Identities of Beatrice and Brianda de Luna,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 25 (2013): 10–29.

Ben-Naeh, Yaron. “Research on Ottoman Jewish History and Culture: The State of the Art,” Revue Européenne des Études Hébraïques 18 (2016): 53–89.

Birnbaum, Marianna. “Jewish Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara,” Mediterranean Studies 7 (1998): 135–141.

Birnbaum, Marianna. The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003).

Brooks, Andrée Aelion. “A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance,” European Judaism 33 (1) (2000): 43–52.

Christensen, Peter. “‘As if She Were Jerusalem’: Placemaking in Sephardic Salonica,” Muqarnas 30 (2013): 141–169.

Couto, Dejanirah. “All Roads Lead to Goa: Messengers, Interpreters, Jewish and New Christian Informants in the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century,” in Shalva Weil, ed., The Jews of Goa (Delhi: Primus Books, 2020): 200–237.

Couto, Dejanirah. “Spying in the Ottoman Empire: Sixteenth-Century Encrypted Correspondence,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond, eds., Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 274–312.

Gürkan, Emrah Safa. “The Efficacy of Ottoman Counter Intelligence in the Sixteenth-Century,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 65 (1) (March 2012): 1–38.

Ingram, Kevin and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, eds., The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Lenze, Nele, Charlotte Schriwer, and Zubaidah Abdul Jalil, eds., Media in the Middle East: Activism, Politics, Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Levy, Avigdor. Jews, Turks, and Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth Through the Twentieth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002).

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Vintage, 2006).

Orfali, Moises. “Doña Gracia Mendes and the Ragusan Republic: The Successful Use of Economic Institutions in Sixteenth-Century Commerce,” in Elliott Horowits and Moises Orfali, eds., The Mediterranean and the Jews: Society, Culture, and Economy in Early Modern Times (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2002): 175–202.

Ray, Jonathan. “Iberian Jewry Between West and East: Jewish Settlement in the Sixteenth Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Studies 18 (2009): 44–65.

Salomon, Herman Prins and Aron di Leone Leoni. “Mendes, Benveniste, de Luna, Micas, Nasci: The State of the Art (1532–1558),” The Jewish Quarterly Review 88 (3/4) (January–April 1998): 135–211.

Shaw, Stanford J. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991).

Tavim, J.A. Rodrigues da Silva. “Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror: Ruptures, Relations, and Forms of Identity,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 175–205.

Tavim, J.A. Rodrigues da Silva. “Sephardic Intermediaries in the Ottoman Empire,” Oriente Moderno 93 (2013): 454–476.

Zarinebaf, Fariba. “Intercommunal Life in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Middle East Studies 46 (1) (Summer 2021): 79–85.

7 Nurbanu Sultan (1525–1583) Architect of an Unprecedented Charitable Foundation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-10

Of Venetian descent, possibly Jewish, possibly Catholic, possibly a Greek from Corfu, Nurbanu Sultan was captured and enslaved, at least in the more romantic accounts of her life, by Hayrettin Pasha Barbarossa—naval officer or pirate, depending on one’s point of view—in 1537, when she was twelve years old.¹ She was sent to the future Sultan Selim II’s palace when she was fifteen, and by 1543, she had taken on the title of favorite or haseki. She bore the future Sultan Murat III in 1546, and according to the chronicles, when she died in 1583 her son broke tradition and followed her corpse, publicly lamenting.²

A powerful influence in Ottoman politics alongside the famous Grand Vizier, Sokollu Mehmet Pasha,³ rival of Joseph Nasi (Chapter 6), who, among other projects, floated the idea of cutting a canal through Suez to join the Mediterranean to the Red Sea,⁴ she was a classic example of the clever, respected power behind the throne. Given her position in Ottoman court affairs, she also endowed many prominent buildings that continue to dominate Istanbul’s urban fabric and skyline. This chapter, however, focuses in particular on the charitable hospital that she, like Hürrem Sultan (Chapter 5), erected and, more so, on the financial institutions that she established to fund it. Both of these projects cemented her role as wellspring of the Empire’s life and health, and dominant shaper of its economic as well as physical architecture.

Though the term isn’t quite accurate, Nurbanu Sultan was, in practice, Hürrem Sultan’s daughter-in-law. By the time she took on the title of haseki (favorite), and certainly by the time she became valide sultan (queen mother), Nurbanu thus faced a challenge: how could she match the legacy of women’s statecraft and sovereignty that Hürrem had left behind her? Was it possible to reshape the role of powerful royal women for a new era and new circumstances? The answer to that second question, as her life history makes clear, was yes. Indeed, Nurbanu not only reconfigured both the role of haseki and later the role of valide sultan, but she surpassed even Hürrem in her influence over Ottoman governance.

Figure 7.1 Sultan Süleyman welcoming Hayrettin Pasha back from his Venetian expedition, from the Süleymannâme, or “Book of Süleyman,” ca. 1558. Source: © Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

Whereas Hürrem, for example, quietly exchanged correspondence with diplomats and monarchs, Nurbanu entertained ambassadors on their own terms, directing much of the Empire’s foreign policy in her own name.⁵ Whereas Hürrem transformed the harem into a quasi-private, quasi-public governing apparatus, Nurbanu doubled its size, funded it as a branch of government, and granted herself the highest daily stipend in the land.⁶ Whereas Hürrem built a respected hospital, Nurbanu constructed a massive medical edifice on the shores of the Bosphorus funded by one of the most extensive and intricate foundations (waqfs) in Ottoman history.⁷

All of this she accomplished, furthermore, while also overseeing a return to prominence within the harem of the valide sultan, in place of the haseki⁸—an internal shift in influence that was accompanied by a revolutionary external shift in the architectural styles preferred by these ambitious royal women. Under Nurbanu’s influence, royal women began to eschew building projects that would quietly complement a reigning sultan’s own projects, like Hürrem’s Haseki Complex to Süleyman’s Süleymaniye Complex. Rather, and increasingly, women with the political and financial means of doing so competed with one another, and often with reigning sultans, to rival or surpass in magnificence, including acoustic magnificence,⁹ anything that had been built before.¹⁰

Nurbanu’s Valide Sultan Complex in Üsküdar was the preeminent example of this competitive architectural mode. It was a project that transformed the area in which it was built from a small backwater on the wrong side of the Bosphorus to the densely populated Istanbul neighborhood and rhetorical crossing point between “Europe” and “Asia” that it is today.¹¹ And it thus resembled in its uncompromising grandeur Süleymaniye far more than Hürrem’s suggestive, rather than commanding, Haseki. As such, it ushered in an unprecedented building boom that permanently altered the city’s urban landscape.¹²

This spectacular transformation of the political and financial role of royal women, accompanied by the equally spectacular transformation in the ways in which these women intervened in urban space did not, however, occur without backlash. Since Hürrem’s era, conservative sectors of Ottoman society had been disturbed by the coalescence of what would later be called the “Sultanate of Women.”¹³ And by the time Nurbanu was completing her medical complex a generation later, this discontent was being broadcast via an increasingly vehement series of accusations that women like Hürrem and Nurbanu were not only, at least in the case of Hürrem, witches, but witches who were leading the Empire into financial ruin.¹⁴

Whether these accusations had merit or were nothing more than a fantasist variation on the misogynist theme of women incapable of handling money is a question that has been fought out in scholarship on the period for well over a hundred years.¹⁵ Important for our purposes, therefore, is less the validity or lack thereof of these claims and more the point that Nurbanu deliberately sought to refute them in her planning for, and construction of, Valide Sultan Complex. She did all she could, in other words, to signal to her detractors that she was more than capable of both building and funding something hitherto unimaginable.

Though massive and imposing beyond any charitable compound that had been designed previously, for example, the project was also obsessively well-financed.¹⁶ Indeed, the foundations supporting both the construction, which began in the reign of Selim II, when Nurbanu was haseki, and ended in the reign of Murat III, when she was valide sultan, were as celebrated at the time as the buildings themselves.¹⁷ Their memory has likewise attracted nearly as much scholarly attention as the architectural history of the physical Complex.¹⁸

But why, beyond Nurbanu’s acute rejoinder to one salvo in a centuries-long misogynistic propaganda war, should the financial arrangements of the foundation funding the structure have been so fascinating to so many observers for so many years? And what does the relationship between the foundation and the buildings have to do with Nurbanu’s shaping of Ottoman life? How has Nurbanu’s financial acumen supplanted her political acumen as the defining characteristic of her rule in so much contemporary scholarship?

Before addressing these questions, it must first be noted that the charitable foundation (waqf), like the millet (Chapter 6) and the timar, or land revenue granted in exchange for military service (Chapter 8), is one of the most well-studied institutions in the field of Ottoman history. Indeed, the operation of the waqf as the alienation in perpetuity of privately held properties into income-generating endowments, ideally, but not necessarily, in support of a charitable cause,¹⁹ remains an ongoing issue of interest to scholars. One reason for this scholarly attention is that the classical Islamic legal object that was the waqf became formalized and bureaucratized under Ottoman rule, which meant that each newly created Ottoman foundation left an extensive paper trail behind it.²⁰ The waqf documentation today is thus, to say the least, overwhelming, and therefore a likely spot for a historian to find a new story. There’s always a document that hasn’t been seen, and hence a scholarly contribution to the field to be made.

But charitable foundations have attracted scholarly interest for other reasons too, most notably because they were essential to the social and economic functioning of the Ottoman Empire. Waqfs, in fact, took on several complex roles in the Ottoman period that would have baffled their originating architects in the early Islamic period. To choose three examples, cash waqfs introduced a system that looked like interest-based loans into early modern Ottoman economic systems;²¹ personal waqfs allowed families to circumvent established Islamic laws of inheritance;²² as the chapter that follows demonstrates, squabbling relatives occasionally attempted to undercut one another’s legal positions by liquifying their military landholdings into waqfs;²³ and so on. In short, foundations, though pious, were also a slippery institution in the Ottoman Empire, and even by the fifteenth century they were as much a means of evading inconvenient legal norms as they were of satisfying charitable impulses.

Moreover, as a result of the legally ambiguous, yet pious, spaces they opened up, Ottoman waqfs traditionally benefitted women in particular.²⁴ The elaboration of a system of charitable foundations of the sort that underpinned the Ottoman economy indeed made it possible for women to operate as economic actors in a manner that would have been impossible had the waqf been unavailable to them as an economic instrument.²⁵ Many women, for example, used waqfs overtly and unapologetically as trust funds, self-perpetuating income over which they had complete personal control.²⁶ And across the Empire, between 20 and 25 per cent of waqf founders were women. Additionally, though privileged women like Nurbanu were the most prominent beneficiaries of the waqf system, the registers make clear that women from all strata of society, from smallholders to queen mothers, took advantage of it. And so, unsurprisingly, the “women and waqfs” literature constitutes a significant proportion of waqf scholarship generally.²⁷

But what about Nurbanu and her own foundation? The Valide Sultan, to begin with, was aware that attention was being paid to the types of businesses and properties that generated income for the construction and maintenance of her Complex. As a result, these properties, though necessarily profit-making to serve their purposes, were carefully chosen to be as close to public services as possible.²⁸

Her decision to devote the income from three baths to the foundation, which itself included a non-profit double bath, for example, cultivated a rhetorical connection between their health-giving waters or purity and the ongoing construction of the physical buildings.²⁹ Likewise, by linking together several income-producing properties not only across the city but throughout Anatolia into a widespread pool of funding, Nurbanu sank her project’s economic roots into an Empire-wide, rather than local or narrowly metropolitan, network.³⁰ In this way, even as the physical prominence of the Complex dominated Istanbul’s urban skyline, its financial network extended the Valide Sultan’s influence far into the countryside and beyond.

Nurbanu, that is to say, recognized the power of the waqf not only as a means of channeling money in the proper direction with minimal interference on the part of jurists and bureaucrats, but also as a means of displaying the more subtle permutations of her power across the Empire. The physical Complex celebrated her immediate, urban magnificence. But the foundation funding it demonstrated the reach of this magnificence. The massive, if invisible, waqf was in this way as much a statement about Nurbanu’s political power as the Complex itself was.

To repeat, however, Nurbanu was not unusual in her appreciation of the simultaneously symbolic and economic functioning of the waqf apart from whatever cause it supported; she was merely more grandiose. Between 1530 and 1540, in Anatolia alone, charitable foundations established by patrons from varied backgrounds, motivated by impulses that would have been more than familiar to the Queen Mother, supported close to 1500 mosques, over 100 schools, and hundreds of other institutions, all of which together employed well over 7000 functionaries.³¹ Istanbul itself hosted over 3000 foundations by 1596, a decade after Nurbanu was building.³² Nurbanu’s only real innovation, therefore, aside from the project’s huge size, was to string together a network of income-producing properties across the Empire into a single foundation controlled, if not administered, by her.

But what an innovation this was. Consider the mere size of the project: a large mosque, three schools, a tekke (dervish lodge), two inns and a guesthouse, a soup kitchen, the double bath, and, of course, the hospital.³³ Serving the hospital alone were close to thirty specialists, from physicians, surgeons, and ophthalmologists to herbalists, pharmacists, and prayer leaders, all of whom oversaw a further staff of servants and workers.³⁴ The foundation thus supported not only the construction and upkeep of the buildings, not only the beds, medicines, and tools, but also the salaries and maintenance of the personnel in perpetuity.

All of this meant that the “life” and the “health” that Nurbanu was defining as she built and funded her charitable hospital were biological and economic life and health. These were a life and a health inextricably and deliberately linked to the flourishing economy of the Empire. Nurbanu’s construction project, in other words, imagined the preservation of life to be not only the duty of the physician, or the consequence of a medical relationship between individual sufferers and individual healers, but the outcome of a vast, Empire-wide system, in which the health of the economy and the health of the population were one and the same.

Figure 7.2 Women and men in the street watching Nurbanu Sultan’s funeral ceremony, from the Şehinşehname, or “Book of King of Kings,” ca. 1597. Source: Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul.

As much as histories of women as economic actors in the early modern Ottoman Empire have tended to focus either on women’s patronage activities or on their skill at negotiating the waqf system for their own purposes, therefore, it is equally valuable to consider how women, and especially royal women, intervened at the intersection of the two.³⁵ And this is not least because doing so is an effective means of finally redirecting the male-dominated secondary literature that has uncritically taken the vocal despair of the sidelined jurists and bureaucrats at face value, describing activities such as Nurbanu’s as, in essence, a destructive and extreme form of shopping. For as the more complete story of Nurbanu’s Valide Sultan Complex and its hospital makes clear, royal women didn’t just build; they funded. And they understood perfectly well how that funding worked.

Or, to put this argument in a different way, though the Complex alone, as a building project, was itself a feat of remarkable acumen and audacity, the foundation that supported the Complex was equally so. While she certainly had a phalanx of specialists advising her, after all, Nurbanu retained the final word on her investing decisions. She herself determined which industries, which properties, and which businesses were likely to generate the most income, which were likely to grow in the future, which ought to be abandoned because they had seen their best days, which of her many interlocking assets supported one another and which conflicted, when and whether to re-direct income to more promising investments or causes, and how to read the investing decisions of those who competed as well as cooperated with her.³⁶ Moreover, though all waqf founders and managers made similar decisions every day, Nurbanu’s were directed toward a financial edifice of unprecedented size and complexity.

It is, indeed, something of an irony, if not a surprising one, that contemporary waqf scholarship, even as it emphasizes the economic agency that women found in the system, has increasingly associated the foundation itself, as an institution, with authoritarian, anti-secular, and anti-democratic modes of governance.³⁷ The flexibility of waqfs, it seems, troubled not only sixteenth-century jurists and bureaucrats, but also twenty-first century political philosophers. Independent and sometimes idiosyncratic, the financial infrastructures represented by the waqf system that handed over economic control to powerful women like Nurbanu continue, even now, to strangle, so these political philosophers argue, today’s capitalist enterprise.³⁸ Just as capitalism and democracy go (uncritically) hand in hand, so too, it seems, do women and authoritarianism.

But these are anachronistic musings. Important for our purpose instead is a smaller, more historically situated point: Nurbanu Sultan was a politically powerful and influential woman who built and funded charitable hospitals. Her method of funding these hospitals was sufficiently complex and ingenious that it has raised eyebrows now for five hundred years. The story that she helped to initiate—a story of pious healthcare tangled up with less-than-pious financial dealings, with both enmeshed in gender identity—however, is very far from over.

Notes

Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 166. Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 92.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006): 11–20, 14.

Stefano Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007), 97.

Giancarlo Casale, “Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World,” Journal of World History 18 (3) (September 2007): 267–296, 285.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 27.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 27.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 15.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 91.

Nina Ergin, “The Soundscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques: Architecture and Qur’an Recital,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (2) (June 2008): 204–221, 205.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 47. Expansion of the buildings also frequently reflected “the patron’s increased status.” Nina Ergin, “The Soundscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques: Architecture and Qur’an Recital,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (2) (June 2008), 216.

Serving, for example, as “a station for the caravans destined to Anatolia.” Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 15. Though the neighborhood is no longer a favorite site for tourists. Nina Ergin, “The Soundscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques: Architecture and Qur’an Recital,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (2) (June 2008), 216.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 47.

Leslie Peirce, Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 279.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 47–8.

These criticisms concerning the “consumption of money” became particularly intense under Nurbanu’s successor at the end of the sixteenth century. See, for example, Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, “The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex at Eminönü,” Muqarnas 15 (1998): 58–70, 63.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 15–17.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 15.

For an excellent overview and analysis of this literature and its repercussions in Nurbanu’s time, see Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), ch. 2, passim.

Mary Ann Fay, “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 33–51, 35.

Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 44–48.

Murat Çizakça, “The Cash Waqfs of Bursa, 1555–1823,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38 (3) (1995): 313–354, 316.

Margaret L. Meriwether, “Women and Waqf Revisited: The Case of Aleppo, 1770–1840,” in Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 128–152, 136. See also, among others, Mary Ann Fay, “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), 42.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 207–238, 217.

Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 88–93.

Mary Ann Fay, “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), 39. See also, among others, Seven Ağır, “Nineteenth-Century Female Entrepreneurship in Turkey,” in Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop, eds., Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 405–432, 415–16.

Mary Ann Fay, “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), 36.

For a far-reaching overview of Ottoman waqfs as family enterprises, see Beshara Doumani, Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 102–152. See also Margaret L. Meriwether, “Women and Waqf Revisited: The Case of Aleppo, 1770–1840,” in Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 131.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 17.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 54–55.

As Macaraig writes, each revenue-producing element was “a small cog in a large machine, a pinpoint in an extensive economic network that tied together urban buildings and gardens in the imperial capital with the farms, pastures, inns and bread ovens in the far-flung provinces, from present-day Bulgaria to eastern Anatolia.” Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 54.

Gabriel Baer, “The Waqf as a Prop for the Social System (Sixteenth-Twentieth Centuries),” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997): 264–297, 285.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 53.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006), 16–17.

Ömer Düzbakar, “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of the Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006).

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), passim is an example of an intervention in this productive mode.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 71.

Timur Kuran, for example, argues that “the Islamic waqf impoverished civil society and made democratization more difficult.” Timur Kuran, “Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 64 (2016): 419–454, 421.

For a more radical variation on this theme within a nonetheless worrisomely traditional “comparative” context, see Rasmus Broms and Bo Rothstein, “Religion and Institutional Quality: Long-Term Effects of the Financial Systems in Protestantism and Islam,” Comparative Politics 52 (3) (April 2020): 433–449, 443.

Selected Bibliography

Ağır, Seven. “Nineteenth-Century Female Entrepreneurship in Turkey,” in Jennifer Aston and Catherine Bishop, eds., Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 405–432.

Baer, Gabriel. “The Waqf as a Prop for the Social System (Sixteenth-Twentieth Centuries),” Islamic Law and Society 4 (1997): 264–297.

Carboni, Stefano. Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007)

Casale, Giancarlo. “Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World,” Journal of World History 18 (3) (September 2007): 267–296.

Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Çizakça, Murat. “The Cash Waqfs of Bursa, 1555–1823,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38 (3) (1995): 313–354.

Dişli, Gülşen. “Planning of Functional Spaces in Ottoman-Period Hospitals (Darüşşifa) of Anatolia,” Al-Masaq 27 (2015): 253–276.

Doumani, Beshara. Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Düzbakar, Ömer. “Charitable Women and their Pious Foundations in the Ottoman Empire: The Hospital of The Senior Mother, Nurbanu Valide Sultan,” Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine 5 (2006): 11–20.

Ergin, Nina. “Ottoman Royal Women’s Spaces: The Acoustic Dimension,” Journal of Women’s History 26 (2014): 89–111.

Ergin, Nina. “The Soundscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul Mosques: Architecture and Qur’an Recital,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (2) (June 2008): 204–221.

Fay, Mary Ann. “Women and Waqf: Toward a Reconsideration of Women’s Place in the Mamluk Household,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 33–51.

Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Isin, Engin and Ebru Üstündağ. “Wills, Deeds, Acts: Women’s Civic Gift-Giving in Ottoman Istanbul,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 15 (2008): 519–532.

Kayaalp, Pınar. The Empress Nurbanu and Ottoman Politics in the Sixteenth Century: Building the Atik Valide (New York: Routledge, 2018).

Kayaalp, Pinar. “Vakfiye and Inscriptions: An Interpretation of the Written Records of the Atik Valide Mosque Complex,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 1 (2012): 301–324.

Kuran, Timur. “Legal Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 64 (2016): 419–454.

Macaraig, Nina. Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Meriwether, Margaret L. “Women and Waqf Revisited: The Case of Aleppo, 1770–1840,” in Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 128–152.

Özgüleş, Muzaffer. The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

Özlüdil, Burçak. “Psychiatry, Space, and Time: Case of an Ottoman Asylum,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5 (2018): 67–89.

Peirce, Leslie. Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 207–238.

Shefer-Mossensohn, Miri. “The Many Masters of Ottoman Hospitals,” Turkish Historical Review 5 (2014): 94–114.

Singer, Amy. Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).

Thys-Şenocak, Lucienne, “The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex at Eminönü,” Muqarnas 15 (1998): 58–70.

8 Şakire Hatun (ca. 1570s) Plaintiff and “Warrior”

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-11

Şakire Hatun is neither famous nor celebrated. Though the descendant of a middling-prominent Anatolian family, respectable landholders in the region surrounding Ankara even before the fifteenth-century consolidation of Ottoman power, she is known to us today only via bits and pieces of archival data unearthed by Hedda Reindl-Kiel and published in article form in 1997.¹ Şakire belongs among the twenty-five women collected in this volume, however, because of her relationship to another frequently misunderstood Ottoman space, the timar.

Timars, briefly, were parcels of land-revenue granted by Ottoman sultans in exchange for military service. Timar-holders did not legally own the land—ownership remained in the hands of the sultan—and technically most timars were not hereditary. But timar-holders did retain the right to tax the peasants working the land, to cultivate it, and to collect revenue from its produce in return for providing the sultan with military support.²

Şakire’s story is relevant to the gendered quality of this space because she and her family were involved in a decades-long, Dickensian lawsuit over who held their timar, a lawsuit that eventually concluded in Şakire’s favor.³ Key to this chapter, therefore, is the military quality of the space over which Şakire fought and then eventually exerted control. For while it is true that timars were occasionally granted to high-ranking women within the Imperial family as an extra revenue-source,⁴ in the same way that high-ranking women within the Imperial family would sometimes travel with a sultan on campaign, the success of an ordinary, provincial woman in a lawsuit over what was essentially the spatial right to go to war is remarkable.

“The spatial right to go to war” is a phrase that demands unpacking. Let’s begin, therefore, with the place of the timar in Ottoman military history. From there, we’ll turn to the rights and agency women negotiated in provincial Ottoman courts. And then, finally, we’ll consider Şakire’s successful fusion of military and legal space for her own purposes and her appropriation of that very same spatial right.

Over the years that Şakire fought her lawsuit, the Ottoman landed military drew on three principal sources of armed labor.⁵ The first, the Janissary Corps, had been established in the early fifteenth century as an infantry division personally loyal to the sultan.⁶ Staffed by slave converts in the same way, and for the same reason, that the harem was,⁷ it remained the nucleus, if not the largest part, of the Ottoman Empire’s military apparatus until the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries.⁸ At that point, when the global trend toward modern armies populated by citizen-soldiers turned alternative variations on militarism such as slave armies, mercenaries, or private militias into, at best, an ineffective response to a new sort of warfare and, at worst, a crime against a new sort of international law, the corps was abolished.⁹ The Janissaries disappeared, in other words, when nation-states defended by citizens became the geopolitical norm, and when military engagements prefiguring the twentieth century’s experiments in total war became the combat norm.

The second pillar of the Ottoman military, nearly as important as the Janissaries during the early Ottoman expansion into the Balkans, were locally recruited auxiliaries who knew the terrain and could act as a guerilla force in support of the sultan’s regular troops.¹⁰ These local recruits were ordinarily offered hereditary tax exemptions as part of their payment, and though some converted to Islam, most did not. This refusal to convert, however, made little difference to their military role.¹¹ So long as warfare remained an activity undertaken by opposing monarchs out to seize physical land and its revenue, rather than an activity undertaken by emergent nation-states out to establish internationally recognized borders within which a uniform and militarized population of citizens would flourish, the religious or ethnic identity of the soldiers fighting them remained irrelevant. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when national identity became a key characteristic of the citizen-soldier, these ethnically and religiously fluid local recruits, like the Janissaries, disappeared (or became demobilized “bandits”).¹²

Of interest to us in this chapter, however, is the third traditional support of the Ottoman armed forces, the timar-holding sipahis, or cavalry. Though the timar system, so-called, continued on in one form or another into the early nineteenth century, commentators have frequently described it as the least modern and most cumbersome of the classic three pillars of the Ottoman military.¹³ It was the timars, according to this literature, that doomed the Ottoman army to obsolescence once the fully militarized nation-state had become the both the geopolitical and the combat norm.¹⁴

Indeed, whereas the policy of granting timars to soldiers who had acquitted themselves well on the battlefield worked well as the Empire was expanding, so this conventional story continues, that same policy became counterproductive and pernicious as territorial expansion ground to a halt and then reversed itself in later years.¹⁵ The timars disintegrated over this period into oppressive tax farms, while timar-holders became little more than rapacious clerks and hangers-on.¹⁶ In the end, the timar system as a whole degenerated into a drain on what was now an officially failing economy or, in the more emphatic literature, into the fundamental reason that the Ottoman state failed to acquit itself as a proper proto-capitalist, proto-nationalist undertaking.¹⁷ Again, this is the conventional story of the timar system. More recent scholarship has begun to question its bad reputation.¹⁸

One reason for this change in scholarly attitude, and an aspect of the timar system that becomes relevant to Şakire’s fortunes, is that it’s impossible to pinpoint when the system actually fell to pieces. In part this is because territorial expansion and contraction themselves are notoriously ambivalent terms given the multi-front wars in which the Ottoman Empire was perpetually involved.¹⁹ But it is also because if one draws conclusions based solely on the early modern manuscript and archival materials related to timar holdings,²⁰ the timar system was always falling apart, corrupt from its inception, its decline pushed further and further backward in time until it preceded the establishment of the first timar. Orhan (Chapter 1), it seems, got it wrong. The “timar complaint literature,” as a genre, much like the “Sultanate of Women complaint literature” (Chapter 7), is thus sufficiently extensive that it has occupied the attention of generations of later scholars.²¹

It is, however, precisely the ambiguous quality of the timar as an institution that helps to explain the surprising success of Şakire’s lawsuit. It also helps to explain her triumph over her male relatives in securing for herself, a woman, land revenue meant specifically to support a military contribution to a state in the midst of what was, in the mid-sixteenth century, near uninterrupted warfare. Persistently subject to complaint or re-definition, always open to reinterpretation, the timar was particularly susceptible to the linguistic assaults that are the stock-in-trade of courts. Courts like nothing better than exploiting ambiguous rhetoric. And Şakire took advantage of that situation.

Consider the depth of the timar’s vulnerability to legal assault. Though one of the most well-studied institutions in Ottoman history, no one, even today, quite knows how to define it, any more than scholars of European history have produced a concise, user-friendly definition of “feudalism”—another military term whose meaning was more often thrashed out in the grey space of the legal arena than in the red space of the battlefield.²² Aside from the fact that the revenue from the timar was granted by a sultan, little else about the holding is clear, and even then, only some timars were explicitly affirmed or reaffirmed by a sultan’s writ.

Timars, for example, weren’t supposed to be hereditary,²³ and yet frequently they were.²⁴ In the later years, most timar-holders were Muslim, but even into the eighteenth century Christians also held them.²⁵ Indeed, in the earliest period, Christians often acted as sipahis, or cavalry.²⁶ The sons of these Christian timar-holders did then often convert to Islam upon their technically illegal inheritance of the initial holding. But they also frequently did not. Was there pressure to do so? Was conversion a means of displaying loyalty to a sultan? To his military? No one knows.

Finally, of course, women weren’t timar-holders. Except that they were. High-ranking women in the Ottoman household commonly held timars as part of their salaries.²⁷ Revenue from timars almost certainly went into the construction of Hürrem Sultan’s (Chapter 5) Haseki Complex and possibly into Nurbanu Sultan’s (Chapter 7) Valide Sultan Complex. All of this means that even in the sixteenth century, when Şakire went to court and when the timar system was supposedly at its most coherent, the institution over which she was claiming something that looked like ownership was open to interpretation or even complete redefinition.

And it is here that the relationship between women in Ottoman Anatolia and the courts to which they brought their lawsuits becomes important. For court records are some of the most useful sources for biographers out to piece together the lives and work of women in the Ottoman Empire—though obviously court records no more represent unmediated women’s voices than any other historical text does.²⁸ Indeed, provincial Ottoman legal space, almost more than any other institutionalized imperial space, was a staging area for women’s agency, especially in the early modern Ottoman world.²⁹ Thousands of records across former Ottoman territories tell stories of women registering or protecting their businesses, of women administering their property, of women suing for divorce, or, similar to Şakire, of women contesting inheritance decisions. The central Anatolian provinces—Şakire’s home—were, moreover, a hotspot for this activity as well as for the documentary evidence that this activity left behind.

By introducing the timar, what was ordinarily taken to be male military space, into the legal arena that was at the very least open to, if not dominated by, women, however, Şakire was nonetheless inserting an unusual element into this well-rehearsed tale of women’s legal agency. This is because she sought, remarkably for the time, to turn what was explicitly a military sphere into a space as open to women’s intervention as the courts or the urban landscape had become. In a small way she was thus prefiguring the broader eighteenth-century turn to warfare as a problem of law, or of martial behavior as a problem that ought to be discussed in a legal rather than a military vocabulary.³⁰ She was, that is to say, conflating the military with the legal very much like a proto-Enlightenment proto-citizen.

Think, for example, about the narrative turns taken by her decades-long case. At the beginning of the legal dispute, the timar in question had been held by two brothers, each of whom had supported, in alternate years, the Sultan’s military endeavors.³¹ In 1569, however, one of the brothers died without a male heir. His widow, Şakire, expected to inherit the holding, which would have been in keeping with Ottoman interpretations of Islamic inheritance law. But she did not.³²

Instead, the records indicate that her husband’s daughter and widowed sister took possession. In the early 1570s, when the second brother and the widowed sister had both also died, the timar passed in turn to the sons of the brother and to the daughters of the sister—in other words, to Şakire’s nieces and nephews by marriage.³³ In 1575, having remarried, Şakire opened a complaint not against the second transfer of the holding to the nieces and nephews, but against the original inheritance decision of 1569 that excluded her from the legacy.³⁴

Once Şakire’s claim for her portion of the original legacy had been registered, the legal maneuvering became intense. And this is the moment that ought to have been the opportunity for a conservative legal establishment to step in and protect the supposedly masculine character of the timar as a military space. But, once again, it did not.

Aside from a brief, incidental decision stating that women weren’t permitted to hold timars, which everyone, male and female, in the case ignored, the gender of the participants had little to do with their strategies for litigation or with the outcome of their arguments.³⁵ Provided someone associated with the timar at some point showed up on the battlefield, the Ottoman administration had no interest in how the share was divided, or in whether the timar itself coded as male or female. The Ottoman legal establishment was content to let the suit play out.

Indeed, Şakire’s only misstep throughout the litigation arose not from her status as a woman, but from her status as a merchant when, in the early 1580s, she tried to liquidate the timar to sell to a charitable foundation, a waqf—a time-honored, cross-cultural means of protecting legally vulnerable assets.³⁶ At that point, the Ottoman courts did take action, preventing the sale not because women couldn’t hold timars, but because timars couldn’t be liquidated and weren’t sellable property.³⁷ The problem with the transaction, as far as the courts were concerned, wasn’t Şakire’s gender; it was her cynical attitude to both charity and military service.

Moreover, though it’s clear from this chapter in the story that Şakire had no personal interest in the timar as a timar—a liquid equivalent of the holding was just as attractive to her as the military space with its attendant prestige or dignity—she quickly disguised her attitude to the land. Having nearly lost her claim following the blunder with the sale, she resumed her litigation under the pretense that she was the most appropriate choice as timar holder per se.³⁸ And following her personal visit to the high court in Istanbul in the late 1580s, the Ottoman legal establishment agreed. She was awarded control of the holding in 1589, twenty years after the initial inheritance decision. At this point, the records dwindle to a halt.³⁹

But does this story have anything substantial to do with timars as military space, or with women, like Şakire, shaping such space? Examined objectively, the timar itself seems almost incidental to the narrative. A dysfunctional family of the sort that peeks through the archival documents presented here would have argued over any sort of property—military, agricultural, commercial, or liquid. And even leaving aside the military vs. non-military quality of the holding, it’s difficult to exalt Şakire’s claim in contemporary feminist language as the claim of a woman seeking empowerment within a male-dominated system. Her protest, after all, initially concerned the inheritance of her likewise female sister-in-law and nieces. And even four and a half centuries later, the activities of her second husband read as a trifle sleazy.

Nonetheless, though Şakire and her lawsuit did not in any uniform or broad-ranging way transform the timar system from a masculine institution into a system subject to a more nuanced gendered legal vocabulary, we can interpret her agency in the same way that we interpreted the agency of apocryphal, aggregate figures like Malhun Hatun (Chapter 1). Her endeavors do suggest, even if they do not insist upon, an arena within which Anatolian women could potentially shape Ottoman military space. Moreover, the court’s relaxed attitude to her gender as she staked out for herself “the spatial right to go to war” similarly suggests that the Ottoman battlefield was no more a purely masculine arena than it was a purely Muslim arena.

Yes, the timar-holder’s responsibility was to support a sultan’s military efforts, and yes, Şakire’s timar fulfilled its duty even through two decades of litigation. But battles were battles in the early Ottoman imaginary regardless of who was fighting them,⁴⁰ regardless of the religion of the participants and, it seems, regardless of their gender. Identity on the battlefield was, reasonably enough, a fluid performance well into the eighteenth century. Perhaps more to the point, even in the eighteenth century, when national militaries staffed by citizen soldiers embodying static, discrete identities became the norm, only the theory of battle changed. The battlefield itself, as the entrenched masses of the First World War discovered to their trauma, remained chaotic, always just beyond the reach of legal rationality.

Şakire’s contribution, therefore, her act of empowerment, was to express this fluid military identity, this interpretation of battlefields as spaces of constantly shifting identities, in a distinctively legal vocabulary. The lawsuit concerned inheritance rights, true. But the rhetoric of the lawsuit domesticated military space into a field that agents or actants of any gender might negotiate.

In this manner, Şakire prefigured the paradoxical modern transformation of warfare into an activity always to be regulated by law and yet always beyond the reach of law. Her intervention signaled the beginning of a shift away from the classical and early modern problem of “just warfare” that had troubled philosophers of military activity for thousands of years and toward modern efforts to regulate the behaviors and identities of soldiers in minute and bodily ways.⁴¹ In reading the right to send soldiers into battle as a variation on inheritance rights, Şakire was simultaneously taking a small step in the direction of modern military norms. And thus, alongside her daughter, her sister-in-law, her nieces, her two husbands, her father-in-law, and her nephews—the last of whom, if the documents are any indication, wisely kept their heads down—she was as vital to the shaping the Ottoman Empire as any valide sultan building any number of enduring monuments.

Notes

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 207–238.

Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014): 193–226, 194.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), passim.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 208.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 331–354, 333.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 335.

That is, personal loyalty to the sultan. Gilles Veinstein, “On the Ottoman janissaries (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries),” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 115–134, 116.

Gilles Veinstein, “On the Ottoman janissaries (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries),” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 115.

Gilles Veinstein, “On the Ottoman janissaries (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries),” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 121.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 335.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 335.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 336.

See Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), 197, for a critique of this literature.

For an analysis of this literature, see Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20–21.

Malissa Taylor provides another useful analysis of this trend in Malissa Taylor, Land and Legal Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Harmonization, Property Rights and Sovereignty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023), 22–23.

Malissa Taylor, Land and Legal Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Harmonization, Property Rights and Sovereignty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023), 22–23.

Haim Gerber, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 167.

For an in-depth exploration of this literature, see Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), passim.

For an early, groundbreaking work on the cultural and aesthetic implications of setting aside the decline thesis, see Shirine Hamadeh, “Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the ‘Inevitable’ Question of Westernization,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63 (1) (March 2004): 32–51, 34.

Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), 194–195.

See the analysis of Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), passim.

Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19–20.

Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), 206.

Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 175.

Linda T. Darling, “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014), 203.

Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 90.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 208.

Boğaç Ergene, Local Courts, Provincial Society and Justice in in the Ottoman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 126.

Leslie Peirce, “Writing Histories of Sexuality in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 114 (5) (December 2009): 1325–1339, 1333.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla. Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 134.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 215.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 215–216.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 217.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 217.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 217.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 217–218.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 218.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 219.

Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 220.

Virginia Aksan, “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 335.

For a variation on this theme, see the discussion of law and child soldiers in Douglas Howland and Luise White, eds., The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 11.

Selected Bibliography

Aksan, Virginia. “Mobilization of Warrior Populations in the Ottoman Context, 1750–1850,” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 331–354.

Darling, Linda T. “Historicizing the Ottoman Timar System: Identities of Timar Holders, Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Turkish Historical Review 8 (2017): 145–173.

Darling, Linda T. “Nasihatnameler, İcmal Defterleri, and the Timar-Holding Ottoman Elite in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları/The Journal of Ottoman Studies 43 (2014): 193–226.

Ergene, Boğaç. Local Courts, Provincial Society and Justice in in the Ottoman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Gerber, Haim. State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).

Hamadeh, Shirine. “Ottoman Expressions of Early Modernity and the ‘Inevitable’ Question of Westernization,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63 (1) (March 2004): 32–51.

Howland, Douglas and Luise White, eds. The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

Heraclides, Alexis and Ada Dialla. Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Jennings, Robert C. Studies on Ottoman Social History in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Women, Zimmis, and Sharia Courts in Kayseri, Cyprus, and Trabzon (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1999).

Lowry, Heath. The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).

Peirce, Leslie. Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Peirce, Leslie. “Writing Histories of Sexuality in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 114 (5) (December 2009): 1325–1339.

Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “A Woman Timar Holder in Ankara Province During the Second Half of the 16th Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997): 207–238.

Singh, Anantdeep. “Forum Shopping in the Middle East and South Asia: Its Impact on Women and the Evolution of Inheritance Codes,” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 46 (2014): 289–319.

Taylor, Malissa. Land and Legal Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Harmonization, Property Rights and Sovereignty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023).

Tekgül, Nil. “Cash Loans to Ottoman Timariots during Military Campaigns (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries): A Vulnerable Fiscal System?” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (2016): 590–617.

Tezcan, Baki. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Veinstein, Gilles. “On the Ottoman janissaries (fourteenth-nineteenth centuries),” in Erik Jan-Zürcher, ed., Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014): 115–134.

Woodhead, Christine. The Ottoman World (London: Routledge, 2011).

Zürcher, Erik Jan, ed. Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

9 Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1614) The Bloody Countess

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-12

The Countess Elizabeth Báthory is a woman as famous in her own way as her close contemporary, Hürrem Sultan (Chapter 5). Not only does she, like Hürrem, have a dedicated Wikipedia page, but she has inspired a second, associated page entitled “Elizabeth Báthory in Popular Culture,” which lists 51 literary and poetic works, seven graphic novels, 12 stage plays, 44 film and television adaptations, one radio program, 23 video games, and 58 musical compositions, songs, or band names, including “The Wrath of Satan’s Whore” by the Dutch black metal band Countess, that take her as an inspiration.

She wasn’t really a mad, murderous vampire. Or, perhaps she was. The primary source material is sufficiently fragmentary that she could have been anything, hence her apotheosis in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature into the paragon of the bloodthirsty not-quite-European infection that threatened the fragile edifice of civilization¹—all the way up to 1897, when Bram Stoker lobbed Vlad Drakul into the mix.² And it is certainly not the purpose of this compendium to shatter that reputation, to privilege the historical Elizabeth Báthory over the literary or artistic Elizabeth Báthory because the former is somehow more real. On the contrary, as biographers, our process, as always, is to begin with the same small heap of events and memories that inspired, variously, Dutch metal bands and J.S. Le Fanu,³ and to contribute, via our own imperfect augmentation, to the ongoing retellings of her life.

And what a heap it is in the case of Elizabeth Báthory. A scion of one of the most noble families in Hungary, she counted among her relations at the time of her birth in 1560 several of the highest ranking political, military, and judicial figures in the region. Her uncle was the King of Poland.⁴ Another uncle and her grandfather had been voivodes, elected or appointed leaders of Transylvania, and her brother was a high judge of Hungary. Though she herself was a Calvinist,⁵ her family ran the gamut from Roman Catholic to Lutheran to Unitarian to Orthodox.⁶ Transylvania was one of the most religiously tolerant regions in Europe at the time, and though officially Protestant, its laws protected a confessional freedom that would have been unheard of further west.⁷

True, Transylvanian voivodes and princes encouraged this multi-confessionalism more out of necessity than because of an overarching commitment to tolerance.⁸ As the shifting and always contested borderland between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, meeting place of refugees, displaced populations, mercenaries, and ambitious gentry from all over Europe, the region was already fragmented ethnically. Encouraging religious strife would have been fatal to its rulers. And so, perforce, their laws protected any number of idiosyncratic religious faiths.⁹

But our interest here is less the multi-confessional quality of Transylvania itself than it is the activities of the so-called bloody countess once she’d reached her maturity there. As noted, therefore, Báthory was born in 1560. At the age of 15, she married a wealthy Hungarian nobleman.¹⁰ Though he died of a mysterious illness many years before she was arrested, he’s of relevance to her story for two reasons. First, he gifted Báthory the Castle of Csejte, the site of her murders, her imprisonment, her death, and, depending on the genre, her undeath;¹¹ and second, he was away from her, fighting the Ottomans, for most of their marriage.¹² Báthory, responsible for the protection and security of the castle, had free rein there and in the surrounding countryside to govern as she saw fit.

She took advantage of that position. Sometime in the 1590s, after the birth of her five or possibly six children, she began to kill, first, servants and peasant girls, and then later, the daughters of gentry who had been sent to the castle for their education.¹³ In 1610, when the killing had become too conspicuous to ignore, her guardian, appointed by her husband in his will, visited the castle and arrested her.¹⁴ Two trials in 1611 presented physical evidence, such as dead and dying girls found in the castle and a log of victims, alongside hundreds of witnesses to her crimes.¹⁵ Following the trials, Báthory was imprisoned in the castle, where she died in 1614, at the age of 54. Four of her less well-connected accomplices were executed.¹⁶

Biographies of Báthory and her legacy span from the prurient to the poetic to the revisionist to the fastidiously historical. It’s helpful to start with the prurient. During the trials, witnesses stated that Báthory had killed between 150 and 650 girls and women, and the authorities who arrested her claimed that they had encountered a dead, naked girl huddled against the outside door of the main residence of her castle as well as two other dead, tortured girls inside.¹⁷ Servants testified that the girls Báthory killed were always naked, and that Báthory took sexual pleasure in their torture and their death¹⁸—slashing them with blades, inserting pins into their nipples, burning them and freezing them, and also occasionally eating them.¹⁹ Later accounts also have her drinking and bathing in their blood.²⁰ Nineteenth-century narratives, invoking nineteenth-century misogynist tropes, have her believing that doing so will leave her eternally young and beautiful.²¹

The poetic, rather than pornographic, accounts have played in equally motley ways with the themes of blood and pain and sex that saturate the more salacious quasi-historical narratives. But they have also attempted to draw some literary or moral value out of these stories. Early on in the nineteenth century, for example, Báthory became shorthand in poetic literature for horrific and monstrous female sexuality run amok, a sexuality even more appalling and appealing given its lesbian overtones.²² In these Victorian-era poetic explorations of her appetite, the moral message became that all women are secretly Báthory, awaiting merely an opportunity for their release.

By the mid-twentieth century, this moral had shifted according to the times. Rather than a cautionary tale about women’s appetites, this literature framed itself more as an inquiry into or exploration of the intersections among death, pain, pleasure, and ecstatic abandon.²³ In these later variations on the theme, Báthory’s crimes are re-configured not as crimes per se so much as fearless inquiries into the limits of the unspeakable, sacred in the same way that any other religious sacrifice might be.²⁴

And then, over the past ten to fifteen years, there’s also been a revisionist historical, rather than poetic, trend in writing on Báthory. A number of more careful scholars than those who initially set the tone for studies of the bloody countess have claimed, for example, that given the contemporary source material and the circumstantial quality of the evidence presented at her trial, it is possible that Báthory was framed.²⁵ Her wealth and widowed status made her an obvious target for litigation, especially by her guardian.²⁶ And her Protestantism, though certainly common in the region, would have placed her in a weakened position in relation to the Catholic Hapsburgs, who might have wanted her contained.²⁷

Other revisionist accounts, while accepting the verdict on her crimes, have sought to add complexity to her motivations. Though not going so far as to celebrate mass murder as a mode of feminist agency, which, at the very least, would leave the agency of the mute, naked, dead girls a lingering problem, these commentators have instead contextualized her behavior both within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century class and gender politics and within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century norms of acceptable violence. What Báthory was doing in her dungeons and in her bedroom, after all, was not all that different from what her husband had been doing on the battlefield.²⁸ It’s odd that she, and she alone, until Vlad Drakul joined her, should have become the infamous, undead villain of the story.

And so on. Our purpose here isn’t to evaluate the merits of these approaches to the Báthory story before choosing a side and defending it. Each is as valid as the other, and each has both strong points and flaws. Rather, our purpose is to explore how these retellings have, together, grown in and out of one another, and in the process transformed Báthory into one of the most compelling biographical subjects of early modern European history. And more particularly, our purpose is to ask how this biographical shaping of Báthory, be it the disputed historical Báthory or the blood-sucking, literary Báthory, simultaneously shaped the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman borders or boundaries, and Ottoman attitudes toward life and death.

From the perspective of military history, this last question lends itself to a straightforward answer. The castle, Csejte, that Báthory had been charged with protecting occupied a precarious position on the always vulnerable border between the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires. Even the term “border,” in fact, is an inaccurate description of the space it commanded. The true border between the states, their vassals, and their tributaries was an ambiguous stretch of territory that in places was over a hundred miles wide, and that easily constituted its own separate polity.²⁹ Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps don’t even try to mark it.³⁰ There is the Hapsburg Empire. There is Poland. There is the Ottoman Empire. And then, somewhere in their midst, there is a wide, illustrated blur that may or may not have been any of them. That’s where Báthory lived.

Moreover, even the largely set and delimited Transylvania that had been ruled off and on by Báthory’s relatives was always either directly under Ottoman suzerainty (between, for example, 1571 and 1602) or a tributary to the Sultan, or simultaneously a Hapsburg and Ottoman vassalage, pledging allegiance to both.³¹ And the Báthory voivodes and princes of Transylvania, especially when they chose to align themselves strategically with the Ottomans against the Hapsburgs or other rival claimants to influence,³² were often condemned by their enemies not only for being “of the Turks,” but also for “turning Turk,” that is converting, or at least dressing as though they had.³³ They likely didn’t convert, though personal belief is impossible to establish historically. But the rhetoric of conversion to, or infection by, the habits of their Ottoman Muslim neighbors and overlords is sufficiently robust to lodge a doubt in the mind.

Though Elizabeth Báthory herself remained, during her sojourn in Csejte, always on the not-Ottoman side of the absent border, therefore, the Empire was nonetheless persistently present, flaring up around her on all sides even as she bled her servant girls to death. The fact that she and her land did not become formally “Ottoman” between the 1590s and her imprisonment is thus better interpreted as a happy accident than as a reflection of some recognizable separation between the Ottoman world and the world outside of it. Geopolitically, Báthory’s activities were as much Ottoman as they were not.

Figure 9.1 Presumed posthumous portrait of Elizabeth Báthory wearing mixed Western European and traditional Hungarian garb, early 1600s. Source: Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.

Culturally as well, however, Báthory was living within an Ottoman sphere of influence. It was, indeed, something of an aristocratic pastime in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Hungary to flirt with conversion to Islam,³⁴ while less aristocratic mercenaries and soldiers fighting in the region did whatever it took confessionally to be paid.³⁵ Additionally, Ottoman fashions permeated Hungarian and Transylvanian courts, regardless of their association with this or that confessional preference. Several noblemen, for example, had their portraits painted in Ottoman garb, often in Ottoman poses.³⁶

Moreover, and lest we forget the time period in which these noblemen lived, this appropriation of Ottoman fashion was neither a variation on exploitative nineteenth-century cultural cross-dressing (Chapter 15) nor an adaptation of a gentler eighteenth-century Turquerie (Chapter 11).³⁷ On the contrary, the rage for Ottoman fashion was the product of what scholars in the late twentieth century would have called cultural imperialism. As one of the two dominant powers in the region around which the peripheral polities of the Carpathians orbited, the Ottomans, as much as the Habsburgs, set the region’s cultural markers.³⁸ Lesser aristocrats living in the borderlands, in turn, embraced these markers in order to flag their awareness of the directions in which the world was moving. Báthory’s vampire tendencies, therefore, were as deeply embedded in Ottoman cultural history as they were in Hungarian or Carpathian cultural history. The deaths she manufactured were as much Ottoman deaths as they were Hungarian deaths.

Indeed, they were Ottoman deaths as much as they were Hungarian deaths despite the fact that vampires had little to no resonance in Muslim Ottoman high or popular culture. Like witchcraft (Chapter 5), vampirism had never captivated the Muslim Ottoman imagination in the way that it had the imagination of Christian Europeans. Whereas it’s true, for example, that vampirism appeared occasionally in Ottoman writing, the most frequent recurrence of the theme was not in folklore, but in bureaucratic reports sent to the imperial center by frustrated Muslim administrators of provincial Christian-majority towns seeking advice on how to respond to Christian peasants desecrating the graves of the suspected undead.³⁹

Furthermore, even when vampires do materialize in the Ottoman Empire’s popular rather than bureaucratic or legal literature, their associations are very different from those that cloak European vampires. When the famous seventeenth-century traveler Evliya Çelebi, for example, described a battle between two vampire (obur) communities in the northern Caucasus—a battle that climaxed with the triumphant oburs falling on the necks of the vanquished and drinking their blood, while the remaining oburs levitated and flew away—he was presenting it to his readers as interesting local color, not as a cautionary tale.⁴⁰ Vampires, in his re-telling, were one of many entertaining habits of the populations of, here, the Caucasus Mountains, not a source of fear or a potential threat to civilization.⁴¹ Vampires of the aristocratic, sexually voracious, civilizationally terrifying Elizabeth Báthory type would have left most Turkish- or Arabic-speaking Muslim Ottoman onlookers cold.

And yet, Báthory’s style of killing still harmonized with the killing style of both her Ottoman and her Hapsburg contemporaries. Consider, for example, the Ottoman response to a moment of mass violence that provoked more international interest at the time of its occurrence than Báthory’s local scandal.⁴² In 1600, at the height of Báthory’s killing spree, in the town of Pápa a little over a hundred miles south of Báthory’s castle, a garrison of French and Walloon mercenaries who had been collected to fight the Ottoman army rebelled.⁴³ They’d not been paid for a year, they were ill and hungry, and the war in which they were engaged was going nowhere. Indeed, it never went anywhere. The so-called “Long War” throughout which Báthory retained control of Csejte, resulted in almost no change in Ottoman or Hapsburg territorial holdings.⁴⁴

Taking charge of the town, therefore, the mercenaries imprisoned their Hungarian officers before eventually opening negotiations with the nearby Ottoman commander to surrender the town to him.⁴⁵ The negotiations dragged, the Hapsburgs sent a force to besiege the town, the French and Walloon rebels looted, pillaged, and starved further, threatening at one point to eat their Hungarian hostages, and weather prevented the Ottomans from relieving them.⁴⁶ In the end, the town fell to the Hapsburgs once again, and most of the rebels were captured. Those who weren’t captured fled to the Ottomans, converted to Islam, and continued to do their jobs in much the same way that they had before.⁴⁷

It is those who were captured, however, who are relevant to our Ottoman interpretation of the Báthory story, to our reconfiguration of Báthory as, specifically, an Ottoman killer. The rebellion of the mercenaries became a news item throughout Europe, recounted by French, British, Austrian, German, and Ottoman historians and pamphleteers almost immediately following the events.⁴⁸ But the Ottoman narratives of the rebellion depart significantly from their European counterparts. Whereas Ottoman commentators describe, for example, the negotiations between the rebels and the Ottoman garrison, the weather, and the sad fortunes of war, European commentators dwell affectionately on the fate of those rebels who were captured at the fall of Pápa, on their tortures and their executions, on their pain, their bodies, and their blood.⁴⁹ An engraving produced eighteen years after the events depicts in gory detail the skinned and impaled rebels arranged around the re-secured fortress, writhing in agony.

Figure 9.2 Engraving of the torture and execution of French and Walloon mercenaries in 1600 at Pápa castle by Georgius Houfnaglius, 1617.

But the purpose of noting the fate of the mercenaries both at the time of their deaths and in later narratives of their mutiny is not to suggest that Ottoman historians or Ottoman military commanders were less bloodthirsty than their European counterparts. They weren’t. And they would have had just as much reason, for propaganda purposes, to turn the rebels into misunderstood, unjustly punished heroes as the Hapsburgs would have had to broadcast their torture and death as savage criminals.

Rather, it is to emphasize that though the border between Ottoman and not-Ottoman in eastern and central Europe was blurry, and though aesthetic and cultural preferences and practices flowed freely within and across that border, Ottoman Muslim narrative tastes did differ from those of their European Christian counterparts. Both were violent. Neither was civilized in the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century sense of that term. But what coded as monstrous did differ between the two. There was a gap between Ottoman interpretations of unnatural death and non-Ottoman interpretations of unnatural death.

Elizabeth Báthory bridged that gap. And this, finally, is her contribution to Ottoman history as well as our reason for including her in this compendium. For as centuries passed, and as Báthory was gradually rediscovered for the purposes of Enlightenment-era and post-Enlightenment European Gothic literature, her story became a touchstone in that genre not only for the thrilling fear of the irrational and not-modern that forever threatened a newly rational modernity. She didn’t simply represent, alongside so many other Gothic villains, the infectious potential of the not-quite-civilized not-quite European.⁵⁰ She wasn’t only a feminine Vlad Drakul.

Additionally, and more important, Báthory as the quintessential murderous Carpathian aristocrat haunting the edges of Europe, was frightening because she was always potentially, or even in fact, on the verge of becoming Ottoman. The death, or undeath, that she represented was twofold. It was, first, as so many commentators on the Gothic genre have noted, the death that is synonymous with a newly minted bourgeois individual’s submission to the ineradicable, undead, noble bloodline.⁵¹ But second, it was also the submission of a people as a whole to an overwhelming, ineradicable, noble Muslim Empire.

Báthory’s sadistic blood lust was, has been, and remains frightening not only because of its aristocratic excesses. Consider, after all, the equally excessive fate of the French and Walloon mercenaries. It remains frightening because this Carpathian blood lust was, and remains, always just on the edge of tipping over into Ottoman blood lust.

Unnatural aristocratic immortality became synonymous in Báthory’s story, that is to say, with unnatural imperial immortality—the undead political monster synonymous with the undead Empire. Indeed, both are remembered today not for having died and disappeared, but for having disappeared without dying. Both were always, eternally, rearing up to threaten civilization, civilized norms, and civilized borders. For, even now, no one knows where Báthory is buried⁵²—any more than we can pinpoint with accuracy the slain, inert corpse of the Ottoman polity.

Notes

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018): 103–122, 104.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999): 163–173, 167.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 166.

Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014): 173–205, 177.

David P. Daniel, “Calvinism in Hungary: the theological and ecclesiastical transition to the Reformed faith,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 205–230, 218.

Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper. “Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013): 85–108, 88.

Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper. “Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013).

Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper. “Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013), 102. The tolerance, that is to say, was a result of religious and political strain rather than openness.

Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper. “Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013), 103–104.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 105.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 106.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 106.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 110.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 111.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 111–112.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 167.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 166–167; Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 110–111.

Alexandra Fitts, “Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘La Condesa Sangrienta’ and the Lure of the Absolute,” Letras Femeninas 24 (1998): 23–35, 26.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 167.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 167.

On the sexual politics of these representations, see David William Foster and Alejandra Pizarnik, “The Representation of the Body in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik,” Hispanic Review 62 (3) (Summer, 1994): 319–347, 322.

James Craig Holte, “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), 167.

Kimberly Marwood, “Imaginary Dimensions: Women, Surrealism, and the Gothic,” in Maria Purves, ed., Women and Gothic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014): 39–62, 53–54.

Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (Berkeley: City Lights Publishers, 2001), 138. See also Alexandra Fitts, “Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘La Condesa Sangrienta’ and the Lure of the Absolute,” Letras Femeninas 24 (1998): 23–35.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 116.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 117–118.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 117–118.

Bela Bodo, “Hungarian Aristocracy and the White Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (4) (October 2010): 703–724, 719.

As Kathryn A. Ebel puts it, “the pre-modern frontier consisted of an ambiguous transitional zone between two states who perceived the limits of their sovereignty more in terms of the towns they controlled than in terms of a hypothetical boundary line separating the two territories.” Kathryn A. Ebel, “Representations of the Frontier in Ottoman Town Views of the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 60 (1) (2008): 1–22, 6.

Kathryn A. Ebel, “Representations of the Frontier in Ottoman Town Views of the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 60 (1) (2008), 17.

Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014), 185–186.

As Sigismund Báthory did, for example, between 1592 and 1597 when the Pope Clement VIII tried to organize an anti-Ottoman league in the region. “The miscalculation that underpinned the crusade was revealed when Báthory fell afoul of the Habsburgs through seeking a rapprochement with the Ottomans in 1597.” Alessandro Olsaretti, “Political Dynamics in the Rise of Fakhr al-Din, 1690–1633: Crusade, Trade, and State Formation along the Levantine Coast,” The International Review of History 30 (4) (December 2008): 709–740, 717–718.

Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014), 177.

Tijana Krstić, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion in the Age of Confessionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (1) (January 2009): 35–63, 54. See also C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992): 451–471, 464.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 463.

Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014), 177–178.

For an analysis of the development of modern cultural cross-dressing, Ottoman as well as European, see Kader Konuk, “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004): 393–414.

Adam Jasienski, “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014), 183.

For a variation on the theme of desecrated graves, see Evliya Çelebi in Murat Yaşar, “Evliya Çelebi in the Circassian Lands,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 67 (2014): 75–96, 82.

Murat Yaşar, “Evliya Çelebi in the Circassian Lands,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 67 (2014), 80–81.

Murat Yaşar, “Evliya Çelebi in the Circassian Lands,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 67 (2014), 83.

Henry Ettinghausen, “International Relations: Spanish, Italian, French, English and German Printed Single Event Newsletters Prior to Renaudot’s Gazette,” in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham, eds., News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 261–279, 276. See also, Carmen Espejo, “The Princet of Transylvania: Spanish News of the War against the Turks, 1595–1600” in Raymond and Moxham, eds., 512–541.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 454.

Zoltán Péter Bagi, “The Life of Soldiers during the Long Turkish War (1593–1606),” The Hungarian Historical Review 4 (2) (2015): 384–417, 406.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 454–455.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 456.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 465 note 78.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 454.

C.F. Finkel, “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992), 454, 458.

Marie Kolkenbrock, “Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism,” The Modern Language Review 113 (1) (January 2018): 147–167, 151–152.

Marie Kolkenbrock, “Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism,” The Modern Language Review 113 (1) (January 2018), 151–152.

Aleksandra Bartosiewicz, “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018), 115.

Selected Bibliography

Bagi, Zoltán Péter. “The Life of Soldiers during the Long Turkish War (1593–1606),” The Hungarian Historical Review 4 (2) (2015): 384–417.

Balázs, Mihály, Judit Gellérd, and Thomas Cooper. “Tolerant Country—Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013): 85–108.

Bartosiewicz, Aleksandra. “Elisabeth Báthory—a True Story,” Przegląd Nauk Historycznych 17 (2018): 103–122.

Bataille, Georges. Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (Berkeley: City Lights Publishers, 2001).

Bodo, Bela. “Hungarian Aristocracy and the White Terror,” Journal of Contemporary History 45 (4) (October 2010): 703–724.

Borham-Puyal, Miriam. Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women: Echoes of the Past (New York: Routledge, 2020).

Daniel, David P. “Calvinism in Hungary: the theological and ecclesiastical transition to the Reformed faith,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 205–230.

Ebel, Kathryn A. “Representations of the Frontier in Ottoman Town Views of the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 60 (1) (2008): 1–22.

Finkel, C. F. “French Mercenaries in the Habsburg-Ottoman War of 1593–1606: The Desertion of the Papa Garrison to the Ottomans in 1600,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 55 (1992): 451–471.

Fitts, Alexandra. “Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘La Condesa Sangrienta’ and the Lure of the Absolute,” Letras Femeninas 24 (1998): 23–35.

Foster, David William and Alejandra Pizarnik. “The Representation of the Body in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik,” Hispanic Review 62 (3) (Summer, 1994): 319–347.

Holte, James Craig. “Not All Fangs Are Phallic: Female Film Vampires,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999): 163–173.

Jasienski, Adam. “A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing Fashion and the Politics of Display in Early Modern East-Central Europe,” Muqarnas 31 (2014): 173–205.

Kármán, Gábor and Lovro Kunčević, eds. The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Kolkenbrock, Marie, “Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism,” The Modern Language Review 113 (1) (January 2018): 147–167.

Konuk, Kader. “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004): 393–414.

Krstić, Tijana. “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion in the Age of Confessionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (1) (January 2009): 35–63.

Marwood, Kimberly. “Imaginary Dimensions: Women, Surrealism, and the Gothic,” in Maria Purves, ed., Women and Gothic (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014): 39–62.

Pálffy, Géza. “Scorched-Earth Tactics in Ottoman Hungary: On a Controversy in Military Theory and Practice on the Habsburg-Ottoman Frontier,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61 (2008): 181–200.

Pizarnik, Alejandra. “The Bloody Countess,” in Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): 466–477.

Raymond, Joad and Noah Moxham, eds. News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Richter, Nicole. “Bisexual Erasure in ‘Lesbian Vampire’ Film Theory,” Journal of Bisexuality 13 (2013): 273–280.

Thorne, Tony. Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess (London: Bloomsbury, 1997)

Yaşar, Murat. “Evliya Çelebi in the Circassian Lands,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 67 (2014): 75–96.

10 Gülnuş Sultan (1642–1715) The Huntress Who Ushered in the Tulip Period

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-13

Though less renowned than Hürrem Sultan (Chapter 5) and Nurbanu Sultan (Chapter 7), Gülnuş Sultan left a legacy as a patron of art and architecture as extensive and lasting as her transformative predecessors. Born to a Greek Orthodox family on Crete, she was enslaved during the Ottoman invasion of the island in 1645.¹ From there, she was introduced to the Sultan Mehmet IV’s harem in the late 1640s, where she began to exert political and cultural influence, especially after 1664 when she became, first, a royal favorite (haseki) and, later, a queen mother (valide sultan).²

Accompanying the Sultan on his military campaigns and hunting expeditions, Gülnuş journeyed throughout the Empire, from Belgrade to Mecca, transforming urban and rural space along the way.³ The cities in which she built prominent mosques, schools, fountains, soup kitchens, khans, houses, shops, tombs, and baths include Bursa, Edirne, Istanbul, Mecca, Kastamonu, Oran, Suez, Jeddah, and Chios.⁴ Gülnuş, like Hürrem, Nurbanu, and other prominent royal women, thus extended the female space of the harem across the Empire’s territory, shaping not only the urban neighborhoods of Istanbul, but several other cities and even agricultural regions that lay beyond the metropole. Her incorporation of public space and land into her sphere of influence was unmatched, before or after her lifetime.

But Gülnuş’s transformation of urban, rural, and imperial space was, despite its scope, also an ambivalent affair. Though she built, according to many commentators, quantitatively more than the great patronesses of architecture who preceded and followed her, she also built at a time when the nature of “Ottoman space” was at its most equivocal. For Gülnuş’s remarkably long period of influence—23 years as haseki followed by another 20 years as valide sultan—coincided with one of the most rapid contractions of borders, especially of European borders, in the Empire’s history.⁵

It also coincided with a growing recognition among the Ottoman ruling classes and their cultural collaborators that the well-protected domains dreamt up by Osman (Chapter 1) were no longer the eternally expanding global endeavor that they had once appeared to be. “Territory,” and, in turn, “land,” “space,” and “shape,” had all come to mean something different, and sometimes something disturbing, to subjects of Ottoman rule by the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.⁶ Whereas Gülnuş’s military counterparts failed to intuit this change, however, persisting to their detriment in equating imperial space with land to conquer or with territory to occupy, Gülnuş, if her building projects are any indication, did not. It is her recognition that Ottoman space was in need of rhetorical re-shaping, reflective of new territorial realities, that is the focus of this chapter.

Taken as a whole, Gülnuş’s architectural patronage cannot be dismissed as yet one further valide sultan’s intervention into the urban landscape, or as the voice of a powerful woman made flesh and stone. More than that, her construction projects were a re-articulation of sovereignty writ large that played out in a careful new interpretation of how a strong, sovereign state might shape space even when territorial expansion was no longer a viable option.⁷ Gülnuş recognized that an effective sovereign negotiation of space need not take the form of domination. Moreover, her re-imagining of the spaces of sovereignty as spaces that could flourish despite military defeat ushered in, following her death, one of the most artistically innovative and productive periods in the Empire’s history, the so-called Tulip Period.⁸

This era, an epoch between 1718 and 1730, is remembered today as a high point of creativity and prosperity for the Empire.⁹ It was also the moment when the rest of the Ottoman ruling class caught up to Gülnuş and began to enjoy a sovereignty that was, now deliberately, in spatial flux. Whereas Gülnuş herself had died by the first years of the Tulip Period, her influence thus lived on not only in her architectural patronage, but in her re-invention of what that architectural patronage was meant to do.

Before launching into this era of artistic and architectural production that began three years after Gülnuş died, however, let’s begin with her origins. The girl who would eventually become “Gülnuş” was born to Greek Orthodox parents on Crete at some point before 1645, the first year of the extended Ottoman–Venetian war over the island.¹⁰ When the town of Rethymno fell to an Ottoman naval officer called Mad Hüseyin Pasha in the mid-1640s, Gülnuş was sent back to Istanbul along with other spoils of war.¹¹ Given that she bore her first son (Mustafa) to the Sultan Mehmet IV in 1664, it’s likely that she was a child when she reached the capital city, and that she was educated for her role in the harem from a young age.¹² Whatever her educational background, she took on the title of haseki in 1664, a title that she retained when her second son (Ahmet) was born in 1673, and that she continued to hold until Mehmet IV was overthrown in an armed mutiny in 1687.¹³

Before his removal from office, Mehmet IV enjoyed both battle and hunting, the latter perhaps more than the former. Unusually for a seventeenth-century monarch, Ottoman or otherwise, he also enjoyed carting his household along with him on his longer journeys and campaigns. Gülnuş thus spent a great deal of time with Mehmet IV touring the Empire, an activity that left her better informed than many of her earlier and later counterparts as to the physical characteristics of imperial space.¹⁴ Whereas most royal women encountered regions beyond Istanbul only via images, descriptions, maps, or at best through windows, Gülnuş experienced these regions personally. This sensitivity to the tactile quality of the land would influence many of her later building projects.

Gülnuş’s relative accessibility to those living outside the harem also altered her public image, especially among European commentators. Indeed, when she appeared as a fantasy in European artwork, as so many imperial women had before and after her, her representation was less salacious than the representations of her counterparts. Rather than a sorcery-enshrouded Aphrodite of the sort that Hürrem was arbitrarily deemed to resemble, Gülnuş frequently appeared instead as a clean and mobile Artemis, on horseback, chasing hounds, always fluid, always moving.¹⁵

Whether or not these artistic fancies about Gülnuş had anything to do with reality, she seems to have taken them up and made use of them as she re-envisioned the monuments and buildings that would be her tangible legacy. Fountains, waterworks, emergent-baroque decoration, fruit, flowers, witty and teasing epigraphic tags were increasingly the marks of her patronage, especially by the end of her career.¹⁶ She presented herself, that is to say, as elusive, taunting and versatile rather than as heavily sovereign, stable, or seductive.

But then, Gülnuş needed flexibility more than her earlier counterparts had needed it, given the political environment within which she rose to prominence and consolidated her power. By the 1680s, and certainly by the early 1700s, times had changed from the days when Mad Hüseyin Pasha had been marauding around Crete, looting, pillaging, and fighting off the Venetians. The Venetians scarcely existed any longer. And the Ottomans were an entirely different entity from what they had been in the mid-seventeenth century.

Though scholars today contest traditional periodization, it is worth noting that the classic downturn in Ottoman military fortunes has, for centuries, been pinned to the year 1683, the year of Mehmet IV’s failed second siege of Vienna.¹⁷ And as much as “decline” is an inaccurate description of the Ottoman Empire’s affairs over the ensuing two and a half centuries, the Sultan’s bureaucrats and soldiers were nonetheless aware of the Empire’s diminishing presence in southeastern Europe especially.¹⁸ Indeed, they removed Mehmet IV from the throne four years after the failure at Vienna because, they said, he had been concentrating too much on his hunting and his harem to the detriment of his conquests.¹⁹

When Mehmet IV fell from power and was imprisoned along with his sons in the city of Edirne, his brother, Süleyman II, took the throne. Upon Süleyman’s death in 1691, Mehmet IV’s second brother, Ahmet II, ruled until his own death in 1695. Throughout this period (Mehmet IV himself died in prison in 1693), Gülnuş remained, or possibly was kept, in the Old Palace—notoriously the seat of widows and thrown-off women—in Istanbul. She spent eight years, in other words, removed from power. In 1695, however, Mehmet IV’s and Gülnuş’s son Mustafa II came to the throne, and Gülnuş, now as valide sultan, returned from exile.²⁰

Once out of exile, she turned her attention, emphatically, to water. Indeed, though Gülnuş had patronized building projects of various kinds prior to taking the title of valide sultan, and though she continued to build non-aquatic monumental structures and mosques after her return from obscurity, her fascination with waterways grew exponentially after her imprisonment.²¹ All told, she built or repaired 27 fountains in her lifetime, with the most prominent, in the Galata neighborhood of Istanbul, undertaken between 1698 and 1703.²² In this way, she acted as something of a trendsetter. Between 1703 and 1809, the period that encompassed the Tulip Period and then later what some have called, less fancifully, the “Ottoman Baroque,” 365 additional fountains were built by wealthy patrons in Istanbul alone.²³

Why fountains? This question has prompted several compelling art-historical answers,²⁴ but an additional answer might also lie, if obscurely, in the fate of her son, Mustafa II. In an echo of his father’s lot, Sultan Mustafa II found himself responsible for the second great downturn in Ottoman military fortunes, the Battle of Zenta and the ensuing Treaty of Karlowitz, which ceded control of Hungary almost in its entirety to the Hapsburgs. Four years later, Mustafa II was thus also deposed following an armed rebellion.²⁵ Once Gülnuş’s second son, Ahmet III, became Sultan in 1703, he and his mother together worked tirelessly to stave off future mutinies and rebellions.²⁶

Part of this endeavor to quell high as well as popular discontent with the new identity of the Empire was a concentrated effort to formulate a new interpretation of Ottoman space. Given that conquest, expansion, and domination were no longer themes that resonated, or that could resonate, interventions into imperial space necessarily had to play on alternative motifs. Gülnuş’s increasing focus on waterways can be read as one offering in this direction. And it is an offering that she made with a vengeance.

Figure 10.1 The highly decorative northeast fountain of Gülnuş Sultan’s New Valide Sultan Mosque Complex in Üsküdar, Istanbul, begun 1708. Source: photo by Kurmanbek.

Concentrating initially on the district of Galata in Istanbul, a predominantly non-Muslim area that was beginning to attract both cosmopolitan Muslims and a growing European diplomatic community, she began with a fountain attached to a mosque that she had commissioned in the neighborhood.²⁷ Upon learning that the water reaching the fountain was bitter, she instructed her intermediaries to construct a waterway that would bring water from a sweeter source.²⁸ When told that such construction would be prohibitively expensive, she ordered her builders to undertake it anyway. By the time sweet water was running to the fountain, she had spent half as much on the waterworks as she had on the construction of the religious building itself.²⁹

From there, a legacy was inaugurated. For Gülnuş didn’t limit herself to ensuring that the initial fountain was perfect. Having built for the neighborhood a regular, healthy source of water, she then decided to take advantage of it. And so, by 1708, she had erected four additional fountains, all with pillars, pedestals, engravings, and inscriptions more elaborate than the comparatively sedate mosque that the first of the fountains had been meant to serve.³⁰ She had also spent more than the entire expense of the mosque on their construction.³¹

By 1722, after her death, her son Ahmet III had in turn undertaken an extensive dam project in the nearby Belgrade Forest to capture sufficient sweet water to support what had by then become a fountain-building mania³² (a mania so extreme that by 1768 an edict forbade building hamams [public baths], if not fountains, because of the drain these projects put on the city’s water supplies).³³ By the first years of the nineteenth century, close to four hundred new fountains had been built in Istanbul and its environs alone, most by wealthy women seeking to emulate Gülnuş’s style of patronage. Gülnuş, in short, had kicked off a century-long trend.

As unprecedented as the fountain-building craze had become by the mid-eighteenth century, however, Gülnuş wasn’t working solely within the realm of innovation. Rather, by celebrating in her work what had until the late seventeenth century been seen as a marginal or utilitarian architectural endeavor³⁴—the fountain as appendage—she was returning to the practices of earlier generations of royal women who had focused their attention on likewise smaller or seemingly incidental attachments. The relationship between the comparatively humble mosque and the prominent fountains that she constructed in Galata, for example, clearly echoes Hürrem’s choices for the Haseki Complex—a collection of buildings still known more for its famous hospital than for its less-famous mosque.

Moreover, both Hürrem’s peripheral yet prominent hospital and Gülnuş’s peripheral yet prominent fountains exist—explicitly so in the deeds and documents that surround them—as structures meant to invite the participation of a diverse set of actors from a likewise diverse realm of backgrounds and loyalties into close proximity with one another.³⁵ Hospitals and fountains, unlike mosques, are both variations on space that fuse, or even confuse, identity rather than separating or solidifying it. And each does so as much by playing up the porousness of bodies—of cures undertaken or of water imbibed—as it does the porousness of space. Although Gülnuş’s decision to situate an imperial mosque in a predominantly non-Muslim neighborhood can correctly be read as an act of architectural aggression, therefore,³⁶ her persistent focus on the fountains, like Hürrem’s focus on the hospital, also transforms these spaces into places of integration more than rupture.

Perhaps more to the point, like the invisible yet influential financial network that supported Nurbanu’s own medical complex, the invisible channels that connected Gülnuş’s fountains to the countryside were likewise their most enduring feature. Though fountains were, and often continue to be, appreciated as minor rather than major projects, after all, the underground or hidden waterways supplying them—stretching throughout the city and beyond the city’s borders, infiltrating but not conquering forests and open land—make them, quite physically, at least as monumental as the largest mosque or palace. The fountain is one node in a fluid web of influence, rather than a static, self-contained shrine to sovereign domination and will.

Furthermore, whereas it is true that all large structures rest on hidden supports and penetrate the ground in occult ways, the fountain, with its small above-ground protuberance and its massive underground support system is, once again like Nurbanu’s financial network, primarily a hidden structure. Its greatest extent is always unseen and extended outward, like the roots of a tree. The fountain, unlike the monument, brings a natural element, water, into urban space, and thereby fuses the forest or glade with the city. And it provokes in its viewer or user a very different interpretation of the spaces in which the human, the natural, and the divine might intermingle—an interpretation that sets aside conquest in favor of connection and play.

And so, even more than Hürrem and Nurbanu, who also recognized the value of structures that interpenetrated one another because of the afflicted and cured bodies that moved through them, Gülnuş re-shaped both visible and invisible sovereign space. While still concentrating on the intermingling of buildings, bodies, and networks, she offered up an alternative ideology of intervention into the landscape. Her fountains and their waterworks might indeed be read as a direct response to the Ottoman loss of cartographic or geopolitical land-as-territory—as a grand statement that the space above the ground and the space beneath the ground, that the water flowing to and from the ground, were as politically significant as the ground itself, whether that ground had been taken or ceded, dominated or occupied.

And if this reading is accurate, her message was well received. The years after her death saw an explosion of Ottoman art, architecture, and writing that focused on the pleasures of inhabiting land rather than on the joys of plundering it—on appreciating rather than dominating space.³⁷ Gülnuş inaugurated the Ottoman Baroque.

Handmaiden, then, to that unmentionable word, “decline,” Gülnuş also provided in exchange for territorial expansion, in exchange for the intoxication of conquest, a viable alternative definition of Ottoman space. A final explanation for Gülnuş’s attraction to waterworks might indeed be that, notwithstanding the early European representations of her as a virginal, spirited Artemis, she herself enjoyed a touch of licentiousness. For long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fountains had been poetically associated with both relaxed morals and abandoned behavior.³⁸ Though necessary to the daily life of the neighborhoods that grew up around them, fountains were also dangerous, places where men and women, girls and boys, of every background met and consorted with one another.³⁹

And it was this feature of the fountain that was emphasized by the inscriptions that adorned them, especially throughout the eighteenth century—inscriptions that extolled in ever more explicit terms as years passed the sensuality of the liquid that they discharged. But then, water is always sensual, even outside of poetry, as Gülnuş must have been aware when she spent half the price of her mosque replacing the bitter water that served it with sweet water from further afield. No one wants to swallow something stale.

Or, as one final conjecture, we might float the notion that, Mad Hüseyin Pasha aside, Gülnuş simply missed watery Crete, praised for thousands of years as the land of the sweet and bubbling spring. For those years that are never recounted, those years that are impossible to recount—that period splitting the lives of powerful royal women between enslavement and authority—undoubtedly leave a mark. They could have left Gülnuş with any number of preoccupations. She could, for all we know, have always been thinking of her lost waters.

Notes

Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 55.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 216–217.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 22–23.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 88, 239–241.

Ünver Rüstem, “Piety and Presence in the Postclassical Sultanic Mosque,” in Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, eds., Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2021): 376–420, 398.

Jonathan Grant, “Rethinking the Ottoman ‘Decline’: Military Technology Diffusion in the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 10 (1) (Spring, 1999): 179–201, 199.

For an extended analysis of how postclassical building projects “renegotiated [pre-existing standards] in response to changing circumstances,” as well as scholarly accounts of this renegotiation, see Ünver Rüstem, “Piety and Presence in the Postclassical Sultanic Mosque,” in Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, eds., Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 376–377 and passim.

Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer, “Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750,” Past & Present 221 (November 2013): 75–118, 115.

Sometimes reconceived as the Ottoman or Turkish Baroque. Shirine Hamadeh, “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth Century,” Muqarnas 24 (2007): 185–197, 192. See also Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 16, 19.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 16.

Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 115–116.

Betül İpşirli Argıt, “A Queen Mother and the Ottoman Imperial Harem: Rabia Gülnuş Emetullah Valide Sultan (1640–17150),” in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, eds, Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 207–224, 210.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 21.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 20–23.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 174. One might also mention the possible frivolity of 300 platelets adorned with gemstones detached from a shahada or “profession of faith” ornament she received as a gift in 1705. Hedda Reindl-Kiel, “The Must-Haves of a Grand Vizier. Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha’s Luxury Assets,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 106 (2016): 179–221, 195.

See Jane Hathaway, The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 133, for the complexity of this moment.

See Betül İpşirli Argıt, “A Queen Mother and the Ottoman Imperial Harem: Rabia Gülnuş Emetullah Valide Sultan (1640–17150),” in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, eds, Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 214–216, for an analysis of this discussion.

John-Paul A. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 122.

Betül İpşirli Argıt, “A Queen Mother and the Ottoman Imperial Harem: Rabia Gülnuş Emetullah Valide Sultan (1640–17150),” in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, eds, Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 210.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 140–157.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 143.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002): 123–148, 144 note 4.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 141.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 29–30.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 30.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, “A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space,” Muqarnas 34 (2017): 157–195, 167.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, “A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space,” Muqarnas 34 (2017), 193 note 65.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 145.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 148.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 148.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 123.

Nina Macaraig, Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 153.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 141.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 141–142. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 154.

Muzaffer Özgüleş, “A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space,” Muqarnas 34 (2017), 185.

Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 35.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 141–142.

Shirine Hamadeh, “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002), 123.

Selected Bibliography

Argıt, Betül İpşirli. “A Queen Mother and the Ottoman Imperial Harem: Rabia Gülnuş Emetullah Valide Sultan (1640–1715),” in Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain, eds., Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 207–224.

Aydın, A.F. “Water Supply Structures of the Ottoman Period in Istanbul.” Water Science and Technology 13 (2013): 615–625.

Bevilacqua, Alexander and Helen Pfeifer. “Turquerie: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750,” Past & Present 221 (November 2013): 75–118.

Cerasi, Maurice. “Istanbul 1620–1750: Change and Tradition,” in Raymond, A., A. Petruccioli, R. Holod, and S.K. Jayyusi, eds., The City in the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2008): 465–489.

Ghobrial, John-Paul A. The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Gordon, Matthew S. and Kathryn A. Hain, eds. Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Grant, Jonathan. “Rethinking the Ottoman ‘Decline’: Military Technology Diffusion in the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 10 (1) (Spring, 1999): 179–201.

Hamadeh, Shirine. The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth-Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007a).

Hamadeh, Shirine. “Splash and Spectacle: The Obsession with Fountains in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” Muqarnas 19 (2002): 123–148.

Hamadeh, Shirine, “Westernization, Decadence, and the Turkish Baroque: Modern Constructions of the Eighteenth Century,” Muqarnas 24 (2007b): 185–197.

Hathaway, Jane. The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power Broker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Imber, Colin, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Macaraig, Nina. Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Özgüleş, Muzaffer. “A Missing Royal Mosque in Istanbul that Islamized a Catholic Space,” Muqarnas 34 (2017a): 157–195.

Özgüleş, Muzaffer. The Women Who Built the Ottoman World: Female Patronage and the Architectural Legacy of Gülnuş Sultan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017b).

Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “The Must-Haves of a Grand Vizier. Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha’s Luxury Assets,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 106 (2016): 179–221.

Ruggles, D. Fairchild. Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

Rüstem, Ünver. Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Rüstem, Ünver. “Piety and Presence in the Postclassical Sultanic Mosque,” in Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, eds., Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2021): 376–420.

Şahin, Söner. “Open Space Use in Ottoman Daily Life: Landscape of Historical Dams in Istanbul,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 35 (2015): 279–289.

Shefer-Mossensohn, Miri. Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

Part III The Ottoman Baroque Art, Revolution, and Orientalism in the Long Eighteenth Century

11 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) Errant Embodiment of the European Enlightenment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-15

Peruse any English-language syllabus of early modern Ottoman history, and the correspondence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu will figure prominently. The wife of the English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary wrote a series of letters depicting her life in Istanbul between 1716 and 1718 that gave rise to a genre of travel writing that continues unabated today. Of course, Lady Mary’s letters are problematic as source material. An eighteenth-century wit, she valued a brilliant turn of phrase more than accuracy, an aspect of her writing that becomes apparent early on in her correspondence.¹

More than that, though, and more worrisome to later feminist scholars, Lady Mary also claimed to have unique access to a true, indeed authentic, Ottoman life that less brilliant, and less female, writers lacked.² She mobilized her gender to position herself as an expert on the “private life of the ___,” and in the process she set the groundwork for more than one eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century publishing empire. She ushered into being, in short, a key trend in modern, and eventually colonial, Orientalist writing.³

Nonetheless, Lady Mary’s thoughts on the liberating aspects of veiling, which allowed, she argued, anonymous, unfettered female access to public space,⁴ and to the responses of Anatolian peasant women to smallpox that today look a lot like vaccination,⁵ continue, for better or for worse, to intrigue English-language readers. It would thus be remiss not to include her in a collection of this sort. If anyone exploded borders and boundaries in her quest for agency and empowerment, it was Lady Mary.

Figure 11.1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in “Turkish” garb with her son, Edward Wortley Montagu, by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, 1717. Source: © ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Three trends over the past half century have characterized scholarly writing on Lady Mary’s agency, especially in its relation to the shape or shaping of the Ottoman Empire. The first, drawing on theories that celebrate the self-conscious action of the rational sovereign subject, have posited Lady Mary as an exemplar of Enlightenment-era feminist self-expression, a forerunner to heroes of eighteenth-century European women’s history like Mary Wollstonecraft.⁶ Lady Mary is, indeed, even more attractive than Doña Gracia (Chapter 6) as a biographical subject, because whereas Doña Gracia certainly left a lasting personal legacy, Lady Mary not only left a legacy, but she wrote and crafted this legacy herself, while establishing the foundations for its continuing vitality following her death. Producing hundreds, thousands, of pages of letters, poems, essays, pseudo-anonymous newspaper and journal articles, and belles-lettres during her lifetime, editing these pages, and carefully positioning them in the public sphere,⁷ Lady Mary’s voice was well and truly heard.

The earliest scholarship celebrating this voluminous, if perhaps neurotic, self-expression as a model of feminist agency likewise takes her description of her two years in the Ottoman Empire at face value. Lady Mary was a rational, thoughtful observer; her access to private, and particularly female, spaces and perspectives granted her a unique perspective on the lives and cultures of the people she observed; and her ethnographic shaping of the Ottoman Empire thus was, and continues to be, valid. Such scholarship praises Lady Mary especially for her “non-judgmental attitude” and her “ability to see [her]self and [her] culture from another point of view.”⁸

A second, later, trend in analyses of Lady Mary’s writing about the Ottoman Empire was indebted to work that situates agency within interlocking systems of power that are in turn grounded in gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. According to these analyses, Lady Mary was an early and pernicious example of what had become by the twentieth century an onslaught of colonizing white women who performed their feminist empowerment dialectically against the backdrop of picturesque, silenced Others. Speaking for, and in fact shaping, her Ottoman interlocutors, Lady Mary fashioned herself as an expert, as the unique expert, on “Turkish life,” thereby increasing both the volume and the value of her already overwhelming voice. Moreover, she performed this role as she simultaneously degraded and effaced the objects of her study. As one advocate of this variation on interpretation put it, Lady Mary “attach[ed] a penis to herself and penetrate[d] a ‘feminized’ East.”⁹

In this second iteration of studies of her life and writing, Lady Mary’s reliability as an observer of Ottoman life is no longer taken for granted. Indeed, her outlook is deficient precisely because of her claims to access and authenticity. To the extent that she did shape the Empire, it was a violent act, devoid of meaning outside of her own narcissistic process of self-fashioning. Her narrative has value only as a narrative of her own error and blindness.

A third variation on scholarship addressing Lady Mary’s work positions itself as something of a corrective to both the first and second trends, and is thus, for the most part, chronologically later. (Very broadly, the first trend was prominent in the 1980s and before, the second in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the third in the 2010s and 2020s, though all overlap and continue to inform one another.) Noting, for example, that the period in which Lady Mary lived and wrote in Edirne and Istanbul, 1716 through 1718, pre-dates the conventional historiographical starting point of modern or high colonial literary and artistic production—and that the Ottoman Empire itself, though having lost European territory, was far from geopolitically or economically vulnerable at that point, enjoying as it was an unprecedented cultural explosion in the form of the Tulip Period (Chapter 10)—this writing questions the validity of positing Lady Mary as an early example of the violent, and sometimes sexually violent, Orientalist white woman.¹⁰

Yes, according to this literature, the claims to access and authenticity ought to be examined critically. And of course, self-expression isn’t in and of itself empowering when what constitutes the “self” is always up for grabs. But a fruitful interpretation of Lady Mary’s agency, and thus her shaping of the Ottoman Empire, might also derive from reading her writing as “indicative of cultural restraints on femininity, and the impossibility … of expressing female desire at home”—meaning that, for example, “Turkey’s ‘ancient’ pastoral landscape and cultural difference made a different sort of female agency available.”¹¹ This “different sort of female agency” invites interrogation and, given the scare quotes around “ancient,” cannot be detached from Orientalist literary production. But the conclusion of such an interrogation needn’t be that her writing was an unadulterated expression of colonial or proto-colonial power. Perhaps the relationship between Lady Mary’s shape and the shape of the Ottoman Empire was mutually constitutive without being exploitative, dialectical without being oppressive.

None of these interpretations of Lady Mary’s agency is more or less valid than the others. And it is the work of readers to determine which, or which combination, if any, is satisfying or explanatory. Two moments from her time in the Ottoman Empire, however, may nonetheless help readers in reaching their conclusions. The first is her famous, infamous, or notorious, depending on one’s politics, visit to the hamam (public bath) outside of Edirne. And the second is her decision to have an Anatolian healer inoculate her young son against smallpox before the family’s return to London—followed by her vocal advocacy of this Anatolian variation on vaccination once back in England.

Let’s begin with the hamam. Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters, published in 1763, the year after her death and against her family’s wishes,¹² constitute three thick volumes. Yet, the three paragraphs detailing her visit to the public baths on her journey toward Edirne have received more attention from twentieth- and twenty-first century scholars of Orientalism than the rest of the work put together. Rather than summarizing the text, therefore, which might expose a latent bias one way or the other, it’s best to reproduce those paragraphs in full:

[The hamam] is built of stone in the shape of a dome, with no windows but in the roof, which gives light enough. There were five of these domes joined together, the outmost being less than the rest, and serving only as a hall, where the portress [sic] stood at the door. Ladies of quality generally give this woman a crown or ten shillings; and I did not forget that ceremony. The next room is a very large one paved with marble, and all around it are two raised sofas of marble, one above another. There were four fountains of cold water in this room, falling first into marble basons [sic], and then running on the floor in little channels made for that purpose, which carried the streams into the next room, something less than this, with the same sort of marble sofas, but so hot with streams of Sulphur proceeding from the baths joining to it, it was impossible to stay there with one’s clothes on: the two other domes were the hot baths, one of which had two cocks [sic] of cold water turning into it, to temper it to what degree of warmth the bathers please to have.

I was in my travelling habit, which is a riding dress, and certainly appeared very extraordinary to them: yet there was not one of them that showed the least surprise or impertinent curiosity, but received me with all the obliging civility possible. I know no European court where the ladies would have behaved themselves in so polite a manner to such a stranger. I believe, upon the whole, there were two hundred women, and yet none of those disdainful smiles and satirical whispers, that never fail in our assemblies, when any body appears that is not dressed exactly in the fashion. They repeated over and over to me, “Guzel, pec guzel,” [sic] which is nothing but “Charming, very charming.” The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture among them: they walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes our general mother with. There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of a Guido or Titian,—and most of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair, divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces …

[T]o tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr. Jervas could have been there invisible: I fancy it would have very much improved his art, to see so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions, while their slaves (generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen) were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty fancies. In short, it is the women’s coffeehouse, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented, &c—They generally take this diversion once a week, and stay there at least four or five hours, without getting cold by immediately coming out of the hot bath into the cold room, which was very surprising to me. The lady that seemed the most considerable among them, entreated me to sit by her, and would fain have undressed me for the bath: I excused myself with some difficulty. They being, however, all so earnest in persuading me, I was at last forced to open my shirt and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well; for I saw they believed I was locked up in that machine, and that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband …¹³

This passage has given rise to a torrent of scholarly responses, critiques, and questions since its publication. Hundreds of pages have been devoted to it. It has been praised for its sympathy and humanity in “lend[ing] an air of virtue and artistry to what could otherwise be perceived rather differently.”¹⁴ It has been interpreted as an invitation to readers to “imagine being the naked observer of naked women,” thereby “mimicking the voyeuristic male gaze of the Orientalist painter.”¹⁵ It has been described as a deliberate, writerly confounding of subject and object, in which Lady Mary simultaneously situates herself and the women she observes in the bath as “objects of inquiry” for her English audience, thereby critiquing “the confines of English women’s dress and the role husbands played in this institution.”¹⁶ It has been read as a moment of playful, if nonetheless racist, homoeroticism, in which the description of the low lights, warm water, and sensuous domes eventually gives way to a “seduction scene” in which “the bathers ‘force’ Montagu to undress.”¹⁷ And so on, ad infinitum.

There is no one proper response to it, of course. The passage is all of these and more. But the point to be remembered here is that both Lady Mary and the Ottoman Empire—the latter classically and problematically reified in the bath scene—are multiple. They are, and continue to be, long years after the death of both, interlocking agents, spaces, and objects. Lady Mary shaped the Ottoman Empire in her letters in the same way that the Ottoman Empire shaped her, perhaps via an exploitative Orientalist dialectic, but perhaps in other ways as well. And indeed, the second moment that we’ll retrieve from the well-documented leavings of Lady Mary’s life, to juxtapose against her visit to the hamam, only makes this aggregate quality of her agency more pronounced.

Lady Mary’s advocacy for smallpox engrafting, a form of inoculation practiced in the Ottoman Empire and China centuries before Edward Jenner’s introduction of vaccination to Europe in the late eighteenth century, has until recently been dismissed as an eccentricity she picked up following her return to England, a sideshow to her more politically and sexually provocative enterprises and escapades.¹⁸ Running off with a bisexual Italian man at the age of 47,¹⁹ after all, is far more attention-grabbing than her fascination with the dull insertion of viral material under the skin. Nonetheless, scholarship and popular writing on her work over the past two decades especially has re-evaluated her championship of inoculation, suggesting that it was more central to her life-story than historians have previously believed.²⁰ And intuitively, this reappraisal makes sense. Lady Mary had an intimate and agonizing relationship to smallpox, a disease that had become more fatal in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than it had been before.

In short, the story goes as follows: having been born into a well-placed political family—her father, the Earl of Kingston, was a prominent Whig member of Parliament—Lady Mary shocked Society by eloping with the unimpressive Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712.²¹ She then worked alongside her husband, propping up his career in Parliament and at Court by means, according to observers, of both her wit and her beauty. Her brother survived smallpox in 1713. And she herself survived infection in late 1715.²²

But she was also left disfigured, her face altered, and thus in a significantly reduced and weakened position at Court. Though her husband’s appointment to the prestigious Istanbul Embassy in 1716 was a step up in their family’s fortunes, therefore, it was also a welcome escape for Lady Mary, who could no longer count on her mind and her face as political assets.²³ Indeed, recent readings of her poetry, especially that which followed her defection from her husband to her lover, have situated her as an early contributor to the growing field of disability studies or disability literature.²⁴

It is understandable, therefore, that she would have not only insisted upon the inoculation of both her son, in the Ottoman Empire, and her daughter, upon the family’s return to London, but also felt justified in standing up to the British medical establishment’s distrust of the procedure by encouraging the same for the children of other aristocratic European families.²⁵ Indeed, though Lady Mary’s social position was already weakened following her husband’s unsuccessful tenure as Ambassador, and though her friendship with, for example, Alexander Pope had already derailed either for romantic reasons or because, according to some, she returned borrowed sheets to him without washing them,²⁶ her vocal advocacy for inoculation did not help her cause.²⁷

Experimenting with smallpox engraftment on convicts kept at Newgate Prison, after all, was one thing.²⁸ It was another thing entirely to risk an untried preventative measure on the well-born children of London Society solely on the basis of the doubtful expertise of what Lady Mary herself described as:

old women who make it their business to perform the operation [ingrafting (sic)] every autumn, in the month of September, when the great heat is abated … they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle … [T]he Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the middle of the forehead, one in each arm, and one on the breast, to mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed.²⁹

This process, it hardly needs saying, was not the rational method of the British surgeon or physician. Moreover, Lady Mary’s insertion of herself into the ongoing debate over the best means of dealing with an increasingly dire epidemic was not appreciated by them. Though her flight to Italy, away from her husband and her former friends—Pope at this point was calling her a “pox’d Sappho”³⁰—was the culmination of a number of defeats and setbacks, therefore, her unflinching, failed, and, to some, irrational, insistence on popularizing inoculation within British borders was a not insignificant impetus as well.

Figure 11.2 Alexander Pope declares his love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by William Powell Frith, 1852. Source: Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland.

But what does any of this have to do with the shape of the Ottoman Empire? One means of answering this question is to return to the ways in which Lady Mary’s life and writing had become, by the end of the twentieth century, as it is today, a chaotic heap of signifiers in search of an absent author. Less than a century after her death, Lady Mary had already become in the literature that took her life as an object not only politically multiple, described variously as Whig, Tory, Liberal, Radical, or something else entirely,³¹ but morally multiple as simultaneously feminist, ethnographer, or proto-colonial Orientalist,³² and even sexually so, presented as heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, narcissist, or secretly desiring to become male.³³ Lady Mary was, in short, everything and anything at once. But in the same way that the borders and boundaries containing her own identity increasingly frayed and fractured over time, so too did any distinct boundaries she’d implicitly or explicitly drawn, as an Orientalist or otherwise, between the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and England or the British Empire, on the other.

And this, finally, is why she found herself no longer accepted in polite society when she reached the end of her life. For Lady Mary’s advocacy of a smallpox inoculation that originated with witch-like Anatolian women bearing nutshells was not simply irrational. It was, more so, an entirely unacceptable interpenetration of Ottoman and British space and culture. Indeed, by introducing her own shattered self and identity into this pre-existing rhetoric of civilizational-as-bodily contagion—a rhetoric that would become only more fanatical as stories such as Elizabeth Báthory’s (Chapter 9) were popularized in the form of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction³⁴—Lady Mary was adding, wantonly adding, a new, and emphatically undesirable, dimension to the rising European fear of both civilizational and biological infection.

Contagion hysteria, after all, is always political; it is a story of the horrifying simultaneity of weakened bodily as political borders. And Lady Mary, with what in hindsight was remarkable naiveté given her otherwise savvy manipulation of popular culture at the time, thought that it would be a good idea, in the midst of one of the most pronounced moments of such hysterias, to suggest to her English audiences that an appropriate response to it would be to bring the Ottoman Empire to London—just as Bram Stoker would bring Vlad Drakul (Chapter 9) there a little over a century later.

How did Lady Mary shape the Ottoman Empire, then? In one simple way: she smuggled, against overwhelming odds, Ottoman borders, boundaries, and spaces directly into England and English bodies. And though this act of infiltration appears now, in hindsight, to be something of a paradox given the tilt at the time she was writing toward a proto-colonial world—toward “penetration” in the other direction—it was no more paradoxical than the Ottoman Tulip Period itself, characterized by colossal artistic and cultural production against the backdrop of equally substantial territorial contraction.³⁵

Indeed, this interpenetration of Ottoman and English and British borders that Lady Mary celebrated with what may have been irony in the hamam scene—and with deadly but unsuccessful seriousness throughout the doomed inoculation farce—is very much in keeping with the light-hearted play at the center of both early eighteenth-century Ottoman culture and early eighteenth-century British culture. Both, to their detriment as well as delight, were dealing with far too many signifiers, more than they knew what to do with. Both were up in the air.

And so, in the end, perhaps all we can hope is that Lady Mary enjoyed her late-life relationship with the bisexual Italian man. Or “man?” Read the explicitly Orientalist, no less than explicitly playful, Orlando for more on that theme.³⁶

Notes

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007): 51–61, 51.

Rae Ann Meriwether, “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013): 623–641, 624.

Kader Konuk, “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004): 393–414, 393.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 630.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 626.

For an analysis of this literature, see Brenda Ayres, ed., Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), vii. See also Magdalena Nerio, “Genteel Appropriations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762): Lady Louisa Stuart, William Moy Thomas, and the Rigors of Victorian Memoir,” in Ayres, ed., 17–36.

Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 82.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, “An Early Ethnographer of Middle Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762),” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40 (4) (October 1981): 329–338, 338.

Meyda Yeğenoğlu, “Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the Harem,” Inscriptions 6 (1992): 45–80 as cited in Teresa Heffernan, “Feminism against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary’s ‘Turkish Embassy Letters,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2) (Winter 2000): 201–215, 202. See also Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80, on how Montagu “has what men do not have and can thus supplement their lack.”

For example, Teresa Heffernan, Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 46 and passim.

Helen Deutsch citing Jill Campbell in Helen Deutsch, “‘This Once Was Me’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012): 331–355, 352 note 12.

Rae Ann Meriwether, “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013), 624.

M.W. Montagu, The Letters of Lady M.W. Montagu During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718. Vol. 1 (Chiswick, London: C & C Whittingham, 1825), 94–96.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, “An Early Ethnographer of Middle Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762),” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40 (4) (October 1981), 330.

Kader Konuk, “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004), 395.

Rae Ann Meriwether, “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013), 625–626.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 57.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012): 330–362, 330.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 55.

For example, Jennifer Lee Carrell, The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox (New York: Penguin, 2004).

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 337.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 339.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 341; Helen Deutsch, “‘This Once Was Me’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012), 340.

Helen Deutsch, “‘This Once Was Me’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012), 340. See also, Jill Campbell, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the ‘Glass Revers’d’ of Female Old Age,” in Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., Defects: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000): 213–252, 225, 236.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 344.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 353.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 353.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 346.

M.W. Montagu, The Letters of Lady M.W. Montagu During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718. Vol. 1 (Chiswick, London: C & C Whittingham, 1825), 130–131.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 353; Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 54.

Diana Barnes, “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012), 335.

Kader Konuk, “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004), 394.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), 55; Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80–84.

Marie Kolkenbrock, “Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism,” The Modern Language Review 113 (1) (January 2018): 147–167.

Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23.

Alison Winch, “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007), passim.

Selected Bibliography

Ayres, Brenda, ed. Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Barnes, Diana. “The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38 (2012): 330–362.

Bowman, Elizabeth Kelley. “The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric,” Comparative Literature Studies 50 (2013): 244–261.

Campbell, Jill, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the ‘Glass Revers’d’ of Female Old Age,” in Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds., Defects: Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000): 213–252.

Deutsch, Helen. “‘This Once Was Me’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012): 331–355.

Esfandiary, Helen. “‘We Could Not Answer to Ourselves Not Doing It’: Maternal Obligations and Knowledge of Smallpox Inoculation in Eighteenth-Century Elite Society,” Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 92 (2019): 754–770.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. “An Early Ethnographer of Middle Eastern Women: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762),” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40 (4) (October 1981): 329–338.

Hall, Jordan, Anna K. Sagal, and Elizabeth Zold. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Turkish Embassy Letters: A Survey of Contemporary Criticism,” Literature Compass 14 (2017): online.

Heffernan, Teresa. “Feminism against the East/West Divide: Lady Mary’s ‘Turkish Embassy Letters,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2) (Winter 2000): 201–215.

Heffernan, Teresa. Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

Kolkenbrock, Marie. “Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism,” The Modern Language Review 113 (1) (January 2018): 147–167.

Konuk, Kader. “Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Criticism 46 (2004): 393–414.

Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994).

Macaraig, Nina. Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul: The Biographical Memoir of a Turkish Bath (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

McQuigge, Alexis. “‘They Give No Cordials to Heighten the Fever’: Lady Mary, Corruption, and the Problem of Royal Influence,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27 (2015): 181–200.

Meriwether, Rae Ann. “Transculturation and Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 53 (2013): 623–641.

Montagu, M.W. The Letters of Lady M.W. Montagu During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718. Vol. 1 (Chiswick, London: C & C Whittingham, 1825).

Nerio, Magdalena. “Genteel Appropriations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762): Lady Louisa Stuart, William Moy Thomas, and the Rigors of Victorian Memoir,” in Brenda Ayres, ed., Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 17–36.

Precup, Amelia. “Mapping Femininity as Self-Reflection Strategy in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Travel Letters,” Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 3 (2017): 93–108.

Rüstem, Ünver. Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Winch, Alison. “‘In Plain English, Stark Naked’: ‘Orlando,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Reclaiming Sapphic Connections,” Critical Survey 19 (2007): 51–61.

Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. “Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in the Harem,” Inscriptions 6 (1992): 45–80.

12 Dilhayat Kalfa (1710–1780) Celebrated Composer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-16

Dilhayat Kalfa deserves more attention than she’s received from historians over the past few centuries. A prolific and influential composer and performer of classical Ottoman instrumental music,¹ she appears most frequently as a footnote in general studies of eighteenth-century Ottoman court culture. Until recently, she’s been little more than an ornamental data point in the study of the Tulip Period (Chapter 10) and its aftermath.²

This is not to say that her compositions have fallen by the wayside. On the contrary, her music itself resonates powerfully even today, as a quick tour through YouTube will confirm. But Dilhayat Kalfa herself is elusive. Scholars know almost nothing about her life beyond her music, and it has been difficult to put together a satisfying narrative of her as a living, fleshed out person. What might we say about her for the purposes of this volume, then? What does it mean for a woman’s music to echo across the centuries when she herself is mute and invisible? Can we write a biography of a sound?

To begin to answer these questions, here is what historians do know about Dilhayat’s life: she was raised in the palace during the reign of the Sultan Ahmet III, at the tail end of Gülnuş Sultan’s (Chapter 10) influence; she reached maturity when the Sultan Mahmut I, remembered as a hunchback who enjoyed poetry, music, and chess, was backing away from what Ottoman observers were now decrying as the decadence of the Tulip Period; and she flourished throughout the rule of the less artistic, but more fiscally responsible, Sultan Mustafa III.³ Her title, kalfa (“lady” or “supervisor”), suggests either that she was a teacher or that she held a mid-level, supervisory role in the now bureaucratized harem.⁴ She may have been both. The only significant document aside from her music that survives and speaks to historians is a record unearthed in the Ottoman archives of the estate she left behind.

This is, however, a fun document. Among her physical rather than musical leavings, for example, were: eight books, including a Quran and a collection of religious verse; six clocks, including a little gold clock in a case, a large chiming pendulum clock, a little hanging clock, and an ornamental marble clock; twelve pieces of jewelry, including silver, gold, pearls, a piece of jade, and several diamonds; five furs, including a sable, a sable with a hood, and a tartar fox stole; 120 pieces of linen or embroidery, including eleven towels; 143 kitchen items, including 86 bronze dishes; 94 pieces of Dresden ceramics, including 40 assorted tea cups; 186 articles of clothing, including one ahmediye (an embroidered velvet) and five pairs of plain, drawstring trousers; 16 copper utensils; and various household goods.⁵

She lived well, it seems.⁶ Indeed this list on its own breathes as much life into Dilhayat as any legal document or waqf register might her earlier or later counterparts. One could imagine her, for example, adorned in a pair of drawstring trousers, along with the hooded sable to keep warm, wandering her rooms, listening to the ticking of her clocks, and waiting for her 85 dinner guests or 39 teatime friends to arrive to take her mind off the brevity of life. One does wonder about the clocks, ticking across three hundred years of silence. Perhaps she needed them for her music.

But this chapter is not concerned with Dilhayat as a consumer of eighteenth-century luxury goods, as fascinating as this angle on her life might be. Rather, our interest lies in how, as a composer and a consumer, she influenced not only the artistic tastes of three different sultans’ courts, but the trajectory of Ottoman music writ large. How did Dilhayat’s role as a woman composer and a woman consumer affect her interventions into Ottoman life as well as Ottoman art?

An entry point into this issue is the character of the music that Dilhayat both composed and consumed. As a branch of classical Islamic music involved, like Mihri Hatun’s and Zeynep Hatun’s poetry (Chapters 2 and 3), in a complex relationship with Sufi practice,⁷ Ottoman music differed in both theory and performance from the pitch- and scale-based staff notated music that had been formalized in Europe by the end of the sixteenth century.⁸ Though a contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and blessed or cursed with a similar brain chemistry, Dilhayat thus followed and broke very different rules and conventions than those that Mozart followed and broke. The central unit of Ottoman music, for example, was not the isolated musical note but instead the makam, which has been translated into European languages as, literally, “place” or “spot,” and also, musically, as “mode,” “scale,” or “tonal-spatial framework.”⁹

“Mode” may be the most accurate here because, though a makam is a set of rules for composing and performing a specific type of melody, and though each makam dictates a series of notes that must be played throughout the melody, a makam does not indicate every individual note or its order or duration on a staff or scale.¹⁰ The first attempt to reproduce Ottoman music in staff notation was instead undertaken in the seventeenth century by a Polish prisoner of war who converted to Islam and became a court musician—an effort that his Ottoman colleagues found more entertaining than useful.¹¹

Makams, therefore, are guidelines for composition and for performance rather than representations of an abstract, imagined musical piece in its totality. They are frameworks within which music is created rather than attempts to depict visually every detail of a pre-conceived work. Or, put differently, makams are a means of organizing tones, patterns, and chromatic alternations that contextualize, rather than dictate, compositions and performances.

As a result, the relationship between composition and performance in Ottoman music, just as in Ottoman poetry, was and is much tighter than it was or remains in classical European music¹² (though it bears more than a passing resemblance to American jazz or blues).¹³ In many ways, in fact, the two terms—“composition” and “performance”—were synonymous, with composition frequently a performance, and performance frequently a type of composition. Moreover, rather than a single song or piece exemplifying a makam, a makam was understood to be the dynamic interplay of hundreds or even thousands of pre-existing pieces that were always potentially or actually being performed.¹⁴ An Ottoman musical composition, in short, was always, by definition, a work in volatile progress.

But makams also carried value and meaning in Ottoman Islamic culture beyond the realm of music. According to both early Islamic and later Ottoman music theorists, for example, different makams corresponded to different emotional, physical, and psychological states as well as to different astrological influences.¹⁵ Composers and performers thus honed their skills by challenging themselves to work within, variously, makams for sadness, makams for healing, makams for sleeping, makams for joy, makams for Jupiter, makams for Mars, and so on, evaluating the worth of a makam in part on the basis of the physiological or spiritual responses it provoked in players and listeners.¹⁶ Moreover, once they had developed their talents within pre-existing makams, many of these performers and composers would invent entirely new ones, expressing previously unexplored shades of meaning via likewise new shades of sound.

By the time Dilhayat was composing in the early eighteenth century, hundreds of recognized makams thus existed, of which some included several thousand exemplary pieces.¹⁷ Regardless of the number or quality of the pieces of which they were constituted, however, only a handful of makams were enduring. And Dilhayat’s reputation for brilliance—which was acknowledged both at the time of her compositions and throughout the ensuing three hundred years—rested not only on the restrained yet complex works that she composed and performed within established makams, but additionally on her invention of one of the few makams with staying power, a makam called Evcara.¹⁸

Or, at least, most contemporary historians and performers of Ottoman classical music credit Dilhayat with inventing Evcara. Given the fluidity of Ottoman musical composition, it’s difficult to pinpoint a specific inventor or originator of any one makam, even when evidence points to this or that historical figure. For, again, a makam is not a static object. It is not a strict set of abstract rules, declared once, as a unit, and then mobilized as a means of including or excluding certain pieces of music. It is, on the contrary, the sum of its ongoing compositional and performative parts, and thus always a work undergoing elaboration. Whereas some compositions included within it are judged to be skillful examples of a mode, therefore, and some are not, determining whether these examples are the first of their kind always provokes debate.¹⁹

Figure 12.1 Early-eighteenth-century female musicians, from the Surname-i Vehbi, or the “Festival Book” of the court poet, Vehbi, ca. 1720. Source: © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Nonetheless, it is one of Dilhayat’s compositions, preserved and performed repeatedly over the past three centuries, that has been most frequently recognized as the basis for the compositions and performances in Evcara that followed. Indeed, so influential was this composition in its early days that it transformed Evcara into a makam that would inspire some of the most prominent composers and performers in later eighteenth-century Ottoman music, including the Sultan Selim III, who wrote hundreds of pieces of music, and who overlapped with Dilhayat for twenty years, as a prince, before he took the throne.²⁰ Chances are that they encountered one another, at least by reputation, in the Palace. There’s a good possibility that Dilhayat taught him.

Whether or not Dilhayat did guide Selim III’s musical education, the influential saz semai, or final instrumental movement of a classical Ottoman suite, that impressed him remains one of the most frequently performed pieces of Ottoman music today.²¹ And it’s easy to see why. Taking the form to a new level, Dilhayat’s saz semai established Evcara as a distinctive makam even as it adhered to the rules of the simpler, pre-existing modes that she had fused together to create it (that is, the scales that she transposed to a new pitch).²² As such, the composition has always fascinated both performers and composers, occupying as it does the difficult and narrow space between the exceptional and the exemplary.

According to some commentators, in fact, Dilhayat’s composition tips too far into the exceptional to be exemplary.²³ For despite its flawlessness, Dilhayat’s saz semai has always made classical musicians nervous. And this in turn has meant that though nearly all of these musicians have appreciated Dilhayat’s brilliance, some have preferred the later, safer compositions in Evcara, like the Sultan’s, as models of the mode.²⁴

Why? In part, again, because Dilhayat took care to differentiate among, and to preserve the integrity of, the earlier makams that she brought together when she invented Evcara. She interpreted Evcara, in other words, as a combination of other, simpler modes, rather than as an entirely separate entity.²⁵ Whereas this unusual style of interpretation thereby allowed her greater flexibility and virtuosity in her composition, however, it also meant that others composing or performing in the mode were forced to work through all four of the earlier makams that she herself had mobilized as she put it together. And most of the composer-performers who followed her were simply not that talented.²⁶

As a result, therefore, the later ambiguous interpretations of Evcara that leant themselves more easily to repetition were often canonized as exemplars of the makam. Dilhayat’s composition was, if paradoxically, too brilliant to serve as its prototype. And though no one who has commented on it has ever doubted its value, those who credit the invention of the Evcara to Selim III²⁷ rather than to Dilhayat feel obligated to do so because his more subdued and easily mimicked compositions became, by default, the norm for the mode in later years.

But what does any of this have to do with the shape of the Ottoman Empire? Yes, Dilhayat was a dazzling composer. She also liked an attractive clock. Of the more than one hundred compositions she is known to have produced, though, fewer than twenty survive. Is this really enough material to prompt her inclusion in a volume dedicated to women who shaped a polity?

Arguably, yes, it is. For regardless of whether the musical genius who flashes brilliantly for a moment and then goes silent lived his or her short life in Istanbul or Vienna or Salzburg or New Orleans, regardless of the quantity of things, objects, or writings that this or that genius may or may not have left behind, the meaning of both “genius” and its leavings is always contingent on a deliberate act of remembering. Music, after all, regardless of its notation, means nothing unless it is being performed. Upon being performed, however, the smallest sound or silence or rest of which that music is composed conjures up not only the mind and the soul that imagined it, but also the world that gave birth to it.

Or, to put this point in a different way: conventional wisdom among composers of classical Ottoman music is and was that the final sound in a piece is both the most important and the most difficult to compose, because of what follows it—namely, silence.²⁸ And after the silence? At best, an archival document describing the state of one’s teacups. And eleven used towels.

Notes

Walter Feldman, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 63–64.

Hans de Zeeuw, Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes along the Silk Road and Beyond (Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, 2018), 29.

Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 185–187.

On ranks in the harem and the title kalfa specifically, see Edhem Eldem and Marian Rothstein, “The Harem as Seen by Prince Salahaddin Efendi (1861–1915): Searching for Women in Male-Authored Documentation,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 48 (2018): 29–54, 31 note 4.

Talip Mert, “Dilhayat Kalfa’nın Mirası,” Musiki Mecmuası 466 (1999): 68–73, 68–69.

Though she may have been unusual in this respect. See Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 185, who also emphasizes that she bequeathed significant pieces of jewelry to two of her slaves upon her death and their manumission, 195.

Walter Feldman, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 80, 481–482.

For an extended analysis of exchanges between Eastern and Western classical music in the eighteenth century, see John Morgan O’Connell, “In the Time of Alaturka: Identifying Difference in Musical Discourse,” Ethnomusicology 49 (2) (Spring/Summer 2005): 177–205, 184–185.

Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007): 31–60, 37, 53–54 note 14.

Can Akkoç, William A. Sethares, and M. Kemal Karaosmanoğlu, “Experiments on the Relationship between Perde and Seyir in Turkish Makam Music,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32 (4) (April 2015): 322–343, 323.

Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul (London: Routledge, 2023), 13–14; John Morgan O’Connell, “In the Time of Alaturka: Identifying Difference in Musical Discourse,” Ethnomusicology 49 (2) (Spring/Summer 2005), 197, note 14.

Owen Wright, “Middle Eastern Song-Text Collections,” Early Music 24 (1996): 454–469, 456.

Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul (London: Routledge, 2023), 62, 93–94.

Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007), 36.

Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007), 35.

Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007), 48–49.

Can Akkoç, William A. Sethares, and M. Kemal Karaosmanoğlu, “Experiments on the Relationship between Perde and Seyir in Turkish Makam Music,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32 (4) (April 2015), 323.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015): 180–195, 181, 185.

Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007), 36.

Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol, Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul (London: Routledge, 2023), 14.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 181.

Karl Signell, Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1986), 139.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 189.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 194.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 184.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 184.

Robert Garfias, “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 185.

Walter Feldman, Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 196.

Selected Bibliography

Akkoç, Can, William A. Sethares, and M. Kemal Karaosmanoğlu. “Experiments on the Relationship between Perde and Seyir in Turkish Makam Music,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32 (4) (April 2015): 322–343.

Argıt, Betül İpşirli. Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Çolakoğlu Sarı, Gözde. “Melody-Usul-Poetic Prosodic Meter Relations in Ottoman-Turkish Music,” Journal of Literature and Art Studies 5 (2015): 128–140.

de Zeeuw, Hans. Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes along the Silk Road and Beyond (Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing, 2018).

Ekinci, Mehmet Uğur. “The Kevserî Mecmûası Unveiled: Exploring an Eighteenth-Century Collection of Ottoman Music,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 22 (2012): 199–225.

Ertan, Deniz. “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007): 31–60.

Feldman, Walter. Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition, and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire (Berlin: VWB-Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1996).

Feldman, Walter. Music of the Ottoman Court: Makam, Composition and the Early Ottoman Instrumental Repertoire, revised edition (Leiden: Brill, 2023).

Garfias, Robert. “The Saz Semaisi in Evcara by Dilhayat Kalfa and the Turkish Makam After the Golden Age,” in Victoria Lindsay Levine, ed., This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015): 180–195.

Greve, Martin, Efkan Oğuz, and Onur Nobrega, eds. Writing the History of “Ottoman Music” (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2015).

Harris, Rachel and Martin Stokes, eds. Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World: Essays in Honour of Owen Wright (London: Routledge, 2017).

Head, Matthew. Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

Koç, Ferdi. “Musicians Educated at the Music School of Sultan III. Selim,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 174 (February 2015): 2166–2173.

Macarthur, Sally. Toward a Twenty-First Century Feminist Politics of Music (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Mandziarz-Kuźmiński, Milda. “The Role of Women in Sufism. Female Followers of Mevlevi Order and their Active Participation in Sema Ritual,” Facta Simonidis 7 (2014): 149–161.

Mert, Talip. “Dilhayat Kalfa’nın Mirası,” Musiki Mecmuası 466 (1999): 68–73.

O’Connell, John Morgan. “In the Time of Alaturka: Identifying Difference in Musical Discourse,” Ethnomusicology 49 (2) (Spring/Summer 2005): 177–205.

Sanlıkol, Mehmet Ali. Reform, Notation and Ottoman Music in Early 19th Century Istanbul (London: Routledge, 2023).

Wright, Owen. “Middle Eastern Song-Text Collections,” Early Music 24 (1996): 454–469.

13 Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825) Champion of the Greek Revolution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-17

Let’s begin with the ending. Laskarina Bouboulina died on her balcony after being shot in the forehead in the midst of a family argument.¹ And that’s the least exciting part of her story. A celebrated hero of the 1821–1832 Greek War of Independence, Bouboulina is remembered today not only for donating her fortune to the Greek cause, but for actively fighting alongside Greek soldiers at the head of a fleet that she herself equipped and led against the Ottoman navy.² In the centuries following her death, she was immortalized in film, music, and painting as one of the most inspiring personifications of Greek liberty, independence, and courage.³

Born in 1771 on the island of Hydra, Bouboulina was fifty years old when the Revolution began. She was also twice a widow and three times a mother, her second husband having died fighting Algerian pirates in 1811.⁴ But her widowhood served her, and her cause, well. Indeed, with the inheritance that her husband had left behind upon his death, which the Ottoman government unsuccessfully tried to confiscate in 1816, Bouboulina purchased weapons and a fleet.⁵

Though she stated in her application for the ships’ licenses that she had requisitioned the boats to defend her personal property, she was clearly, even at the time of their purchase, preparing herself for military engagement.⁶ The fleet’s flagship, the Agamemnon, for example, had been furnished not only with cannon but with a professional crew long before the hostilities broke out, and when the Revolution did start, it showed itself more than prepared to enter into the fighting immediately.⁷ Between 1821 and 1824, therefore, at which point the Revolution became a civil war, Bouboulina led her boats into several skirmishes and participated in two of the most devastating blockades of the conflict, key moments in the erosion and dismantling of Ottoman control over the region.

It is for this reason that Bouboulina is one of the most revered heroes of the Greek Revolution. (Irene Papas played her in the 1959 film celebrating her life, delivering such lines as “there are no women and men in the fight; only free people and slaves;” or “wherever there is fire and fight—this is where you will find me.”)⁸ And interestingly, her reputation for military aptitude was established early on, not only in Greek narratives of the war, but also in British and French narratives.⁹

We’re using the word “interestingly” to refer to these western European narratives of her life deliberately. This is because most of the contemporary British and French, if not Greek, literature in support of the Revolution relied heavily on images of enslaved, helpless, half-naked Greek women in chains rather than on free, competent, wealthy, and fully clothed Greek women who fought as naval commanders.¹⁰ Whereas it’s true that the fictional Bouboulina throws around the term “slavery” with great gusto and abandon, therefore, it’s worth emphasizing that she’s much more likely in heroic as well as historical accounts of her life to be found in a prison or on a boat than “enslaved” in an Orientalist fantasy of a harem. And this re-fashioning of the oppressed Greek woman is, in itself, a vital contribution that Bouboulina made not only to the Greek cause but also to the relentlessly gendered—eventually verging on pornographic—later nineteenth-century rhetoric of liberty and independence writ large.

Figure 13.1 Laskarina Bouboulina on the Greek one drachma coin, 1990. Source: scan by John Alan Elson.

To get at the reverberating influence of Bouboulina in both her historical and her fictional manifestations, however, we must step back from both 1950s-era Greek publicity and 1830s-era British and French pornography, to consider instead how the Greek Revolution itself became a turning point in the European vocabulary of legitimate governance, and thus also a turning point in European, especially, interpretations of the shape of the Ottoman Empire. For our interest in this chapter is not how Bouboulina shaped Greece, though obviously she did, or even how she shaped Hollywood, but rather how she shaped the Empire. And all of these she did in the context of a Greek War of Independence that was the first geopolitical crisis in modern history to provoke an international response of the sort that would in later years be called “humanitarian intervention.”¹¹

The quotation marks surrounding “humanitarian intervention” in the paragraph above are as deliberate as “interestingly” was earlier. This is because these quotation marks are emphatically not scare quotes. Rather, they’re a means of flagging what had been, before the 1820s, an unheard-of concept in diplomacy and international law. This concept, however, though unimaginable a few decades before the Greek Revolution, more than proved its staying power as a rhetorical object in the ensuing years, becoming as influential in the mobilization of that other frightening nineteenth-century object, “public opinion,”¹² as Bouboulina’s courageous refusal to stand down had been.

Indeed, increasingly coherent within legal, political, and literary circles as the century progressed, famously systematized in John Stuart Mill’s high-imperial 1859 essay, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,”¹³ tangled up problematically from its inception in the elaboration of European colonial power, “humanitarian intervention” eventually became one of the most compelling justifications in international law for ignoring the legally recognized borders surrounding what had once been sovereign states—the exception that proved the Westphalian rule. Nowadays, “humanitarian intervention” is sometimes the only justification for such military action, with the pre-nineteenth-century rationales that had, at the time, been deemed more ethical than sentiment, such as economic self-interest, balance of power, or sovereign right, dressed up in the garb of “humanitarianism.”¹⁴ And again, it was the Greek War of Independence, more than any other military engagement, that set the groundwork for this seismic shift in the modern rhetoric of legitimate interference.¹⁵

The Greek Revolution, however, was not the first modern nationalist movement to challenge Ottoman imperial rule. More than a decade earlier, Serbian nationalists had led a similar revolt, similarly widespread, similarly bloody, and rife with similar atrocity on both sides. And yet, the international response at the time had been lukewarm.¹⁶ Even the Russian government, quasi-legal protector of Serbian identity within Ottoman borders, had failed to intervene in a meaningful way. Furthermore, it is important to emphasize that this comparative lack of a response was not because the nascent thing that was public opinion in Europe did not support the Serbian cause. On the contrary, the Serbs were oppressed and valiant in the European imagination in the same way that the Greeks would be ten years later.¹⁷ The two moments, aesthetically, were identical.

But in the 1810s, unlike in the 1820s, European governments were still adhering to a pre-colonial, eighteenth-century interpretation of international law and diplomacy. And, according to this interpretation, the international community existed for one purpose alone: to protect and to shore up the rights and interests of sovereign states, to maintain the balance of power, no matter how romantic or appealing the cause of non-state groups who threatened those rights and interests might be. There was simply no precedent for violating a sovereign state’s integrity in the name of sentiment or aesthetics at the time of the Serbian movement.¹⁸

When the Serbian nationalists initiated their revolution, in other words, the logic of European colonial power had not yet crystallized. Though it was on the verge of taking shape, there was still, in the 1810s, no clear link in the European political imagination between sovereignty, on the one hand, and something called civilization, on the other, and thus no rationale for eroding the integrity of previously acknowledged polities on the basis of a sliding scale of humanity or progress.¹⁹ And so, as a result, although the Serbian Revolution was, in practice, successful, its end result was not the independence that would have shattered legal norms as they stood at the time. Rather, it was an autonomous principality in the mode of the Báthorys’ Transylvania (Chapter 9), a territory with a precedent, and thus not a threat to the international balance of power.²⁰

All of this changed during the Greek Revolution. And it did change during the Revolution. Indeed, when the uprisings began, Greek nationalist leaders looked to be in the same position that Serbian nationalist leaders had occupied a decade before—the beneficiaries of a vague international sentiment that their cause was just, but little in the way of material support.²¹ As the war continued, however, this international sentiment became something stronger, and eventually it became something that would legitimize not an autonomous principality, but a properly independent nation-state, the first of its kind in the post-Ottoman framework and the world.²²

Why Greece became the setting for this initiating experiment in European humanitarian intervention has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly writing over the past century. And there are several articles on this topic in the “Selected Bibliography” section that follows the notes. For the purposes of this chapter, though, what’s important is not why it happened but merely that it did, and, more so, that Bouboulina’s shaping of the Ottoman Empire makes sense only against the backdrop of this extraordinary shift in the ethics of international law.

So what, then, was Bouboulina doing as European intellectuals were questioning their ethical commitments? One thing that she was doing was participating in two of the most decisive blockades of the War—the first, in 1821, surrounding the city of Tripolitsa²³ and the second, in 1822, surrounding the city of Nafplio²⁴—each of which proved the effectiveness of Greek military strategy, and each of which has been celebrated in the heroic story of Bouboulina’s War as a daring exploit, fearless and audacious, evidence of her legendary capabilities and courage. She led her sailors, her “brave young lads,” to victory and glory at Tripolitsa and Nafplio, and thus led Greece to an equally glorious independence.²⁵ Excellent. Let’s look in more detail at the sieges of Tripolitsa and Nafplio.

First, Tripolitsa: after a blockade of several months had left the inhabitants of the city starving, ill, and dying, their leaders opened negotiations with the besieging forces to establish terms for a disciplined surrender.²⁶ Once the surrender had been arranged, the Greek forces surrounding the walls nonetheless forced their way through into the residential neighborhoods.²⁷ Over the ensuing three days, the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city, along with any Christians believed to have collaborated, were tortured and slaughtered alongside their children.²⁸ Bouboulina herself was criticized by contemporary observers for her enthusiasm in accumulating plunder even as the terms of the surrender were being negotiated,²⁹ and then later as between 8,000 and 15,000 unarmed Muslim and Jewish civilians were murdered.³⁰ The massacre was particularly extensive because the city had also been a refuge for thousands of Muslim peasants who had already fled the destruction of their homes in the countryside.³¹ Indeed, the moment was sufficiently horrific that a few, but certainly not all, or even most, of the European philhellenes who were participating in the humanitarian intervention at the scene reconsidered their undertakings and returned home to write ethically confusing accounts of their experiences that weren’t nearly as popular as Lord Byron’s.³²

And Nafplio: after a blockade of several months had left the inhabitants of the city starving and dying, their leaders opened negotiations with the besieging forces for a disciplined surrender.³³ Once the surrender had been arranged, the Greek forces—but there’s no need to repeat the story.³⁴ The coda to this variation on the repetitive tale of extermination and atrocity is that Bouboulina herself took up residence in one of the empty—or emptied—houses once the city had been cleaned.³⁵ And a number of the European philhellenes who were participating in this iteration of humanitarian intervention accepted orphaned Muslim girls as slaves in lieu of payment—their slave-status then legally confirmed by the European consulates that had been established in Athens.³⁶

Before we go any further, however, one point must be made clear: the purpose of dwelling on the horror of the sieges of both Tripolitsa and Nafplio is not to suggest that the Greek cause was unjust. Nor is it to suggest that Bouboulina herself was a bad person or, for that matter, a good person, undeserving of her role as hero. Sieges are sieges, and war is war. The purpose of the former is to starve a population into submission. And the notion that the latter can be undertaken in the absence of atrocity is a fantasy of just-war theorists who live in The Hague. The rape, torture, and slaughter characteristic of these two moments was repeated, with roles reversed—that is, Muslims raping, torturing, slaughtering, and enslaving Christians—in several other cities across Greece (Chios is the most notorious)³⁷ over the course of the same war. And, once again, there is little point in rehearsing the arguments over who victimized whom more.

Figure 13.2 Bouboulina Attacking Nafplio, Anonymous, early nineteenth century. Source: © The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

Rather, the purpose of dredging up the dirty and historical, rather than legendary, details of Bouboulina’s daring escapades at Tripolitsa and Nafplio (her daughter married the son of the General responsible for the worse excesses in the former)³⁸ is to explore how her presence reconfigured them as stories of the shape of the Ottoman Empire rather than as stories of the shape of a collection of emaciated and miserable civilians. For they are odd moments to serve as the apex of Bouboulina’s mythology. Intuitively, one would have expected her hagiographers to downplay her role in Tripolitsa and Nafplio, perhaps even quietly to move her elsewhere, to a less morally compromised engagement, to a battle, perhaps, that involved matching wits against an opposing Ottoman naval officer, rather than facilitating the extermination of starving children. But that didn’t happen. On the contrary, the two sieges are her crowning glory.

And it is here that the intersection between Bouboulina’s heroism and the newly birthed European rhetoric of humanitarian intervention clicks into place. For Bouboulina, as a proper hero, carried death around with her. That is what heroes do. They spend their lives courting death, tricking death, flirting with death, cheating death until, inevitably, death wins. A hero’s honor coalesces against the backdrop of death, hence Irene Papas’ implacable beauty as death.

But, as the heroic tales have also always driven home, death is rarely glorious, even if the honor it generates later becomes so. As a result, Bouboulina’s encounters with death, on the balcony, in the midst of a sea battle, by starvation, in a trench at the end of a bayonet, carry no literary value beyond the fact that they are, in their pure form, death. There is no need to divide these different deaths into acceptable or unacceptable, legitimate or illegitimate, civilized or uncivilized, or for that matter humanitarian or not. Indeed, doing so would weaken their narrative force. They are all, broadly, death. And death of any kind, no matter how despicable, throws the hero’s honor into relief. Even the death of abject civilians. Even the death of the unprotected elderly. Even the death of innocent schoolchildren. War is ugly, and Bouboulina is beautiful. That is the message to take from the story.

The job of differentiating acceptable deaths from unacceptable deaths, therefore, falls not to Bouboulina’s biographers, working in a genre distinct from political philosophy, but to the European experts on ethics who were observing and narrating the War of Independence as the world’s first humanitarian project. And as these experts made clear, any death that touched Bouboulina was, by definition, acceptable. It was legal and just. Bouboulina was a hero. She embodied the honor/death dialectic. She was fighting a just war in the name of self-defense.

And so, to return to the ending with which we began, when the bullet ripped through Bouboulina’s forehead on that balcony, it signified not only the honorable death of the hero, but also the less honorable death of the Ottoman Empire. Or, at least, it signified the death of Ottoman sovereignty. It also, and perhaps more importantly, signified the Empire’s re-birth as one of the earliest of the uncivilized, not-quite sovereign territories that would become, throughout the nineteenth century, open to colonial intervention.

Yes, that is to say, Bouboulina’s heroism made death in a humanitarian context thinkable. But it also, as a result, made modern colonialism thinkable. And both were extraordinarily significant contributions to Ottoman as well as global history. That her bones are on display as relics in the Museum of Spetses, where she first equipped her fleet, is thus entirely fitting.

Notes

April Kalogeropoulos Householder, “Reframing the Greek Revolution: A Critical Survey of Sources Related to Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): 39–92, 74.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014): 43–48, 44.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014), 45.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014), 44.

Pamela D. Toler, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 117.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014), 44.

Kalomoira Argyriou-Koumpi, “Civil War and the Assassination of Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): 39–92, 319.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014), 45.

Even if less enlightened British commentators found her “a vulgar, masculine woman.” Denys Barau and Anne Stevens, “Women in the Greek War of Independence,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 53 (2021): 145–157, 151.

Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 87–88.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 134.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 115.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 122.

On the contemporary “climate of heightened expectations” for humanitarian intervention, see Jennifer M. Welsh, ed., Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 106.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 109.

Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 43.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 105–106.

See Gustavo Gozzi, Humanitarian Intervention, Colonialism, Islam, and Democracy: An Analysis through the Human-Nonhuman Distinction, trans. Filippo Valente (London: Routledge, 2021), xii and passim.

Frederick F. Anscombe, “The Balkan Revolutionary Age,” The Journal of Modern History 84 (3) (September 2012): 572–606, 578.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 106–107; Gustavo Gozzi, Humanitarian Intervention, Colonialism, Islam, and Democracy: An Analysis through the Human-Nonhuman Distinction, trans. Filippo Valente (London: Routledge, 2021), 65.

Mark Mazower, The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (New York: Penguin, 2022), xxxviii.

April Kalogeropoulos Householder, “Reframing the Greek Revolution: A Critical Survey of Sources Related to Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 41–42.

April Kalogeropoulos Householder, “Reframing the Greek Revolution: A Critical Survey of Sources Related to Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 304.

As described in the Museum dedicated to her memory. April Kalogeropoulos Householder, “Reframing the Greek Revolution: A Critical Survey of Sources Related to Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 5.

William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 49.

William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 50.

Evdoxios Doxiodis, State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 33.

Denys Barau and Anne Stevens, “Women in the Greek War of Independence,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 53 (2021), 151.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 109.

William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 44–45.

Alexis Heraclides and Ada Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 109.

William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 105–106.

See William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 105–108.

Lydia Papadimitriou, “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014), 45.

William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence (Cambridge Open Book Publishers, 2008), 108.

Frederick F. Anscombe, “The Balkan Revolutionary Age,” The Journal of Modern History 84 (3) (September 2012), 578.

Maureen Conners Santelli, “The Greek Heroine: Bouboulina’s Legacy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): 95–120, 104.

Selected Bibliography

Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Anscombe, Frederick F. “The Balkan Revolutionary Age,” Journal of Modern History 84 (2012): 572–606.

Argyriou-Koumpi, Kalomoira. “Civil War and the Assassination of Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023): 39–92.

Barau, Denys and Anne Stevens. “Women in the Greek War of Independence,” Clio. Women, Gender, History 53 (2021): 145–157.

Beaton, Roderick, Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Beaton, Roderick and David Ricks, eds. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896) (London: Ashgate, 2009).

Cothran, Boyd, Joan Judge, and Shubert, Adrian, eds. Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

Doxiadis, Eudoxios. “Standing in their Place: The Exclusion of Women from the Judicial System in the First Decades of the Modern Greek State, 1821–1850,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 25 (2007): 75–97.

Doxiodis, Evdoxios. State, Nationalism, and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

Gozzi, Gustavo. Humanitarian Intervention, Colonialism, Islam, and Democracy: An Analysis through the Human-Nonhuman Distinction, trans. Filippo Valente (London: Routledge, 2021).

Heraclides, Alexis and Ada Dialla. Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century: Setting the Precedent (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Householder, April Kalogeropoulos. “Reframing the Greek Revolution: A Critical Survey of Sources Related to Bouboulina,” in April Kalogeropoulos Householder, ed., Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023a): 39–92.

Householder, April Kalogeropoulos, ed. Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023b).

Karabelias, Gerassimos. “From National Heroes to National Villains: Bandits, Pirates, and the Formation of Modern Greece,” in Stephanie Cronin, ed., Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2008): 263–283.

Mazower, Mark. The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (New York: Penguin, 2022).

Papadimitriou, Lydia. “Heroines of the 1821 Revolution in Greek Cinema: Bouboulina (1959) and Manto Mavrogenous (1971),” in Marian Tutui, ed., Balkan Heroes and Anti-Heroes (Divan Film Festival, 2014): 43–48.

Poulos, Margaret. Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Rodogno, Davide. Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Stefanou, Eleni. “The Materiality of Death: Human Relics and the ‘Resurrection’ of the Greek Maritime Past in Museum Spaces,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 18 (2012): 385–399.

Toler, Pamela D. Women Warriors: An Unexpected History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).

Welsh, Jennifer M., ed. Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

14 Esma İbret Hanım (b. 1780) Master Calligrapher

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-18

An influential calligrapher of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman court, Esma İbret Hanım was a practitioner of one of the most esteemed arts in the Islamic world—the material realization of words. Her work, like Dilhayat Kalfa’s musical compositions (Chapter 12), continues to shape global artistic trends today, with many of her pieces displayed in private collections and museums across several continents.¹ Esma İbret’s life, unlike Dilhayat’s, has also been well documented, and she herself has been celebrated over the centuries not only for her artistic accomplishments, but also for her exemplary artistic temperament.² Her legacy makes her an ideal biographical subject.

How did this legacy come about? First, at ten years of age, Esma entered a Sufi tekke (dervish lodge), where she studied with a series of teachers and practitioners.³ By fifteen, she was a master. She later married her teacher and became renowned both for her skill in traditional calligraphic forms and, again like Dilhayat, for her experimental forays into previously unexplored styles.⁴ Having proved herself to be a student capable of negotiating the social and aesthetic expectations of her time, she then took on her title, “İbret,” which means “object lesson” (and also “warning”).⁵ It’s difficult to imagine a more archetypal story of a woman who shaped and re-shaped the Ottoman Empire by, very physically, shaping and re-shaping Ottoman words.

In order to get at the profundity of Esma İbret’s contribution to the shape of the Empire, however, we must first understand how calligraphy became the acclaimed practice that it had by the time she was working. For as much as appreciating a text’s materiality for its own sake had deep roots in Ottoman literary culture (Chapters 2 and 3), the quality most sought after in an eighteenth-century calligrapher as a calligrapher was less the objective beauty of his or her finished product than the beauty of his or her character as revealed by that product.⁶ Early modern students of calligraphy like Esma thus underwent intensive training in both the skills necessary to creating an attractive or inspiring text and the honing of the spiritual and moral consciousness necessary to turning the production of that text into, itself, a site of inspiration.⁷

Calligraphy, indeed, as product and practice, was closely linked to early modern as well as modern interpretations of what it meant to be an exemplary moral or spiritual actor. Unlike the isolated and frequently personally off-putting creative genius that was increasingly lionized in bourgeois Europe at the time that Esma was working, eighteenth-century Ottoman calligraphers sought to live as both inspiring artists and inspiring people, fully aware of themselves as small parts of something larger over which they had no control. They were, in this sense, the opposite of passionate or brilliant prodigies. And they were thus uniquely qualified to intervene in eighteenth-century Ottoman cultural and political life.

The character and quality of these calligraphic interventions into Ottoman, and more broadly Islamic, cultural and political life has, however, given rise to several, often contradictory, trends in scholarship over the past several decades. Early on in the twentieth century, for example, Orientalist observers of Ottoman and Islamic calligraphers argued that calligraphy packed the aesthetic and sometimes social or political punch that it did because it was and is the paradigmatic Islamic art.⁸ Given the distaste for figurative representation in Islamic culture, this scholarship posited, calligraphy, as the elevation of script rather than image into an art form, was an ideal outlet for devotional creativity.⁹ Indeed, the most respected calligraphers of both the early modern and modern periods often slyly introduced figures and images into their work via the manipulation of script and letters, thereby injecting a provocative tension into the contemplation of words via the overlap among the meaning of the text, the beauty of the letters, and the shape of the image that the letters evoked but could never represent.¹⁰

Later commentators criticized this earlier trend for its reification of essentialist categories like “Islamic art” or even “Ottoman art,” and also for its unquestioned assumption that Muslim artists have ever rejected iconic representation. First, these commentators noted, the conventional wisdom concerning the distaste in “Islamic art” for figurative representation was and continues to be overstated or at the very least far from established.¹¹ As a tour through the past fourteen centuries of Islamic art in all of its variety demonstrates, there are myriad counter-examples of explicitly figurative representation across vastly different Islamic social and cultural milieus that undermine this rule in every way.¹² Additionally, however, and more important, associating the so-called paradigmatic Islamic art with, specifically, a lack or an incapacity—positing that the millennium-old practice that is calligraphy is a product of something that Muslims broadly defined cannot do or see or think—is, at best, a contemptuous attitude to take toward this deeply sophisticated and multifarious creative activity.¹³

And yet, as another trend in scholarship has argued in turn, there is a problem with the blanket dismissal of the Orientalist writing as well. This is because calligraphy has been praised as an expression of a specifically Muslim spiritual devotion in many historical as well as contemporary Islamic contexts. It has been praised as such, however, “not because of some supposed Islamic iconophobia,”¹⁴ but rather because by deliberately sidestepping overtly representational art, calligraphers have opened up for themselves a productive space in which they might dissolve, as artists, any number of facile false dichotomies between “image” and “text,” or for that matter between “real picture” and “surrogate.”¹⁵

Moreover, this dissolving of representational false dichotomies is very much relevant to faith-based, and especially Sufi, interpretations of pious existence in the world (see Chapter 4). It thus makes sense that calligraphy would be celebrated as the apex of “Islamic” artistic production, despite the Orientalist connotations of doing so, within both an Ottoman and post-Ottoman context.¹⁶ From the earliest years of the Empire into the contemporary Turkish Republican period,¹⁷ calligraphy has spoken, in a realm somewhere between or beyond both text and image, uniquely to its practitioners as well as to its viewers.

What are we to do with these conflicting arguments? One means of navigating them is to note that historical, rather than theoretical, scholarship on the subject of calligraphy has sought to avoid the essentializing traps characteristic of the earliest trends in the Orientalist study of the art by evaluating it alongside non-artistic archival and primary source documents. Rather than attempting to sketch a grand theory of all devotional art, across all time and all space, this scholarship has instead situated each piece within its idiosyncratic historical and cultural context. And in the process, it has domesticated the high-flown, if evocative, comments over the centuries regarding precisely the paradigmatic quality of calligraphy, comments such as the following: calligraphy “exists to serve Islam.”¹⁸ “The first thing God created was the pen.”¹⁹ “The letters of calligraphy derive from the eminent proportions of the universe.”²⁰ “The Qur’an was revealed in the Hijaz; it was best recited in Egypt and best written in Istanbul.”²¹ And so on.

Calligraphy, in short, is not the paradigmatic Islamic art. It can’t be the paradigmatic Islamic art because there’s no such thing as the paradigmatic Islamic art. But given the analogy that more than one commentator on calligraphy has proposed over the centuries between writing, on the one hand, and God’s creation of the universe, on the other, given, indeed, the originating miracle that was the Quran, it is safe to say that calligraphy occupies a privileged position among the arts that claim to bring artist and audience closer to the divine. There is something about calligraphy that elevates it above its mundane counterparts.

It is, moreover, this close connection between writing and divine creation that leant to calligraphy the distinctive mode of artistic agency that practitioners such as Esma İbret adopted so successfully. For, once again, though few creative endeavors prior to the popularization of the eighteenth-century European fable of the artist as an isolated authority resonated in Ottoman literary culture—poets, too, remember, were understood to be combining and re-combining pre-existing fields of language rather than conjuring up their “own” words ex nihilo—calligraphers more than most were emphatic about their embeddedness in, and indebtedness to, an environment rather than an ego. They distanced themselves deliberately from the rhetoric of inspiration as a personal or individual act of will, preferring instead to spend hours or days concentrating on, for example, the shape of their carefully wrought instruments or the tactile quality of their paper.²²

And this they did because a key component of the earliest education of the calligrapher was his or her acceptance and understanding that the pen controlled the writer rather than the other way around. The pen was not a tool. It was a partner—as, for that matter, were the paper, the words, the teacher, every calligrapher who had lived before, every calligrapher who would live after, and the infinite sphere of potential viewers of the work.²³

The calligrapher’s artistic agency, in other words, did not belong to him or her. It was not his or her own act or, worse, his or her own property. It was an agency distributed across limitless material and rhetorical fields. And the education of calligraphers was thus understood to involve, before any other sort of training, disciplining the body, mind, and soul to the oscillation of these fields, rather than acquiring skills to be put to personal creative use.

Sufi masters of calligraphy, for example, insisted upon the virtue of training and discipline to such an extent that they disavowed the possibility of reaching an endpoint to that skill acquisition.²⁴ Practicing writing, according to these masters, was as much an artistic act, and as much an act of worship, as producing a finished masterpiece. The repetitive process of feeling the pen, perfecting a letter or letter group, or blackening a page with failed attempts was itself a contemplative or meditative pursuit that allowed the practitioner to regard divine beauty.²⁵ In the Ottoman context, indeed, these blackened sheets of practice paper were valued in their own right as works of art, the merged and overlapping letters compared in commentary on them to musical notes rising, falling, and coming together.²⁶ (These practice sheets are also valued on the art market today as much as, if not more than, finished products.²⁷)

But Ottoman calligraphers had reasons aside from the mystical to emphasize the process by which they produced their art. Latecomers to the practice, Ottoman practitioners and their audiences, like Ottoman poets and their audiences, were inserting themselves into a centuries-old Arabic and Persian tradition while simultaneously seeking to invent their own, endemic variation on the art.²⁸ As a result, Ottoman patrons, less spiritual than the calligraphers they supported, were self-conscious in their privileging of calligraphy as the highest expression of artistic good taste.²⁹

By the sixteenth century, in fact, Ottoman court poetry and painting were frequently evaluated not on their own merits, but according to how well they conformed to the aesthetic norms associated with calligraphy.³⁰ Courtiers rose and fell in favor in part as a consequence of their ability to position themselves as connoisseurs of calligraphic form.³¹ And so, given both the esteem and the lavish financial support granted to calligraphers in the Ottoman Empire, students of calligraphy from all over the world, from Iran and Central Asia and even further afield, began travelling to Istanbul for training.³²

All of this meant that when Esma began her work in the eighteenth century, the education of calligraphers in the Ottoman Empire had become a formal, almost bureaucratic, process.³³ Indeed, whereas it’s true that students of calligraphy in other cultural, historical, and political milieus had always followed a well-established course of training and apprenticeship, the Ottoman contribution to this classical training process was officially to institutionalize it.³⁴ Not only were promising students actively recruited from Ottoman primary schools to undertake apprenticeships, but at the end of their training, which had become among the strictest in the world, they were granted a state-sponsored permission or license to sign their names to their works.³⁵

And this training process was, to say the least, exacting. First, a master taught an apprentice how properly to observe a model line.³⁶ Having proved adept at watching this model line being composed, having understood spiritually as well as materially how the line was formed, the student would then, months later, be allowed to copy it.³⁷ The master would correct the copy, return it, and the process would be repeated. Many students were dismissed from training at this point. (Esma, remember, was ten years old when she began her formal education.³⁸)

Those who remained would then enter the discipline proper. This discipline began with repeatedly copying single letters in the easiest of the six classical scripts.³⁹ Once the master was satisfied with the form of the single letters, the student would move on to double letters and then to complete words and sentences.⁴⁰ Finally, students were allowed to copy lines from the Quran or classical poetry.⁴¹ Having become adept at this act of copying, the student would start over again with the next of the six scripts. Under ideal circumstances, this training process took five years, at which point the master issued a signed license to the student, granting that student permission to append his or her name to his or her work.⁴²

Before the graduate became fully integrated into the community of master calligraphers, however, he or she also underwent a final test. The teacher would choose the work of an earlier master for the graduate to reproduce and then set the student to labor. Having observed the work, the new graduate would create an identical copy from memory. A successful completion of the task would thus result in a finished product that could not be differentiated from the original, except that the student had signed it.⁴³

But let’s pause here, because it’s important to emphasize once again that the signature on the student’s version of the work was not an emblem of possession, any more than the student’s initial copy was an act of plagiarism or appropriation. Far from it: the student’s signature was an indication that he or she had successfully embedded him or herself within a field of artistic agency that extended centuries into the past as well as centuries into the future, and that included not only human practitioners of the art, but their instruments and their media. The signature, that is to say, was an act of self-dissolution, not an act of self-expression. And if the teacher was satisfied with this final test, it would be presented in a public ceremony to a committee of master calligraphers who would, in turn, appreciate it.⁴⁴

None of this self-effacing discipline, however, meant that calligraphy as process or as a product lacked personality.⁴⁵ On the contrary, it was the emphasis on contemplative repetition that infused the practitioner’s work with its indefinable charisma.⁴⁶ Indeed, regardless of the external qualities of a finished product, that product was always uniquely imbued, according to experts capable of appreciating it, with the trace of the calligrapher who had made it, to the extent that if the soul was absent, the work was deemed a failure.⁴⁷ Once again, however, this imprinting occurred not via a discrete moment of individual expression, but rather via the calligrapher’s appreciation and understanding, articulated in repetition, of creation in all of its manifestations.⁴⁸

As a result of this theory of artistic agency, therefore, and importantly for Esma’s later career as an artist and a spiritual example, the beauty of the calligrapher’s soul or character was paramount to the evaluation of the quality of his or her work. Given the traces that the calligrapher scattered throughout his or her creation, the calligrapher had to be, variously, moral, accomplished, moderate, restrained, and pure. The calligrapher had to discipline him- or herself to both artistic expression and devotional abnegation. For if he or she could not, he or she risked tainting not only his or her own work, but the field as a whole, with unaesthetic self-absorption or self-consciousness.

Esma learned to disperse her body, mind, and soul throughout the calligraphic field by the age of fifteen.⁴⁹ More so even than her teacher and her colleagues, in fact, she was celebrated for her ability to sublimate her identity as an isolated, ephemeral individual to an eternal, universal creative agency that found expression in the collective operation of pen, paper, ink, hand, mind, and soul. Her genius, recognized both at the time and today, was thus the genius of, to switch vocabularies, aggregate or ecological feminism rather than feminist individualism. It was a brilliance that embedded itself as much in the pen’s existence as an actant as it did in her own exertions with that pen.

According to contemporary sources, for example, the hilye (literally, “ornament,” but in practice a description of the moral and physical attributes of the Prophet similar to those that A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya [Chapter 4] wrote⁵⁰) that she completed for her final test was so accomplished, and so imbued with spiritual energy, that it was presented by its original commissioner to the Sultan Selim III (Chapter 12).⁵¹ The Sultan, in turn, presented it to his mother and granted Esma a pension to continue her work. Meanwhile, the original commissioner of the piece bestowed upon Esma the title of İbret or, again, “object lesson” or “warning.”⁵²

But what does it mean that Esma’s reputation rested on a hilye valued not only for its technical skill but also for its spiritual force? To answer that question consider what a hilye was meant to do. Hilyes, once more, were portraits of the Prophet painted in words rather than images. As such, hilyes bore apotropaic qualities.⁵³ Holding a hilye, reading it, reciting it, or as they became larger, observing it in a room,⁵⁴ protected the recipient from harm.⁵⁵

Figure 14.1 Hilye in free form by Esma İbret Hanım, 1794/1795. Source: © The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

The recognition that Esma was a composer of powerful hilyes in particular, therefore, was not just a comment on the beauty of her soul, or on the fact that her imprint on the work had exalted rather than tainting it. Additionally, it was a comment on the fact that Esma was capable of transmitting divine energy into the objects that she produced and was capable of introducing the recipients of these objects into the calligrapher’s spiritual field. She was, in short, a spiritual guide as much as an artisan, just as A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya had been.

And in this she was unusual. Indeed, she was so powerfully respected as a spiritual guide that her husband frequently comes across in histories of their lives together as envious of Esma’s abilities, and especially of her capacity to navigate the strict rules of calligraphic form while nonetheless breathing her own life into her work. For he himself, though also respected as a talented technician, was also known for his “obstinacy,”⁵⁶ that is, his inability to disperse his ego and discipline himself sufficiently to produce lasting work. He clutched his soul to himself and, according to commentators, his work suffered for it. Quickly it became obsolete.⁵⁷

It is in fact worth dwelling on the relationship between Esma and her husband as a means of throwing into relief Esma’s own talent: having travelled with his father from Dagestan in the Caucasus to Istanbul to study, Esma’s husband and teacher had been unable in his early years to adhere to the training regimen undertaken by aspiring calligraphers. He’d thus learned on his own to copy the work of great masters and had managed in this way eventually to receive permission to sign his name to his creations. Unlike Esma, however, whose work was valued for its energy as well as for its skill, her husband’s was and still is remembered as technically impressive but “static” and, thus, dead. Even in his lifetime, it was eclipsed by the work of those less talented but also less wed to intruding their individual, self-aggrandizing identities into the field.⁵⁸

A classic story of the lives of the two might, indeed, be an evocative final note with which to conclude this chapter. One Ramadan, so opens the tale, Esma’s husband’s patron asked him to produce a devotional calligraphic work. Her husband, discouraged because he had nothing on hand to give to his patron, fell into a depression. Esma, noting her husband’s despair, said to him that she had completed a work in his style, and that she would be pleased to have him present it to his patron under his own name. Her husband, uncertain, examined the work. When he witnessed its skill, he was delighted, corrected a few errors, and presented it to his patron as his own. His patron was astonished and pronounced it among the most beautiful and affecting works in his collection. And so the story ends.⁵⁹

This is, it hardly needs saying, not much of a story of feminist empowerment. Specialists in Ottoman calligraphy, in fact, have recently been reconsidering much of Esma’s husband’s work, concluding that several of his other pieces were also composed by her. Perhaps, at times, Esma took the self-abnegation too far.

Or did she? Remember, after all, how calligraphers themselves understood artistic agency. First, and most important, it was always distributed. There was no such thing as taking credit for another’s work because there was no such thing as “other’s work.” Rather, the agency of the artist flowed through the artist herself, into her instruments, across material and spiritual environments, through all of the senses, into words, objects, images, and letters, and even, if necessary, into one’s husband. And as it did so, it celebrated universal creation.

The fact that Esma understood that the artist could never be an artist while clinging to his or her discrete genius, therefore, meant that her work, even when signed by another, retained its energy (as, indeed, her husband’s patron remarked). And so, given this shifted interpretation of artistic agency, the admirable figure in this story remains, because of her self-effacement, Esma. Her depressive and tortured, if certainly Romantic, husband is no more, nor less, relevant to her agency than her pen or her paper or her ink. Unlike her husband’s soul, which remained a paltry, finite thing trapped by his fear of personal failure, concerned only with impressing his patron, Esma’s soul encompassed all of creation.

But if it’s more comfortable to endow Esma with her own voice, to make her a modern feminist “object lesson” rather than an ambivalent and cautionary “warning,” to situate her within the more familiar framework of the once lost but now celebrated woman-genius, that’s certainly an option. Consider the fate of her extant work over the past several decades: one of her hilyes and her most famous Quran are at the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul, a second hilye is in the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, and a Quran she completed at the age of sixteen was recently sold at auction by Christies.⁶⁰ These works have, in turn, become global representatives of a peculiarly Ottoman variation on Muslim devotion. And thus Esma herself, a fifteen-year-old prodigy who disciplined her genius to an art that allowed individualism to present itself only in the subtlest of ways, became a link between the earliest Ottoman practitioners of the form and the women who continue to develop it in post-Ottoman states, including Turkey, today.

Notes

In, for example, the Topkapı Palace Museum. See www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/esma-ibret-hanim (accessed May 20, 2024).

David Simonowitz, “A Modern Master of Islamic Calligraphy and Her Peers,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (2010): 75–102, 79.

Michael D. Calabria, “By the Book: Women as Calligraphers and Patrons of the Qur’an,” in Muhammad Shafiq and Thomas Donlin-Smith, eds., Making Gender in the Intersection of the Human and Divine (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019): 161–184, 170.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 108.

Fanny Davis, Mary E. Esch, Sema Gurun, and Bruce Van Leer. The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York: Praeger, 1986), 225.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 275–298, 281.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006): 107–130, 108–109.

For a deep dive into these trends in the scholarship, see İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008): 211–224, 211 and passim.

Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 11.

Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 12.

Esra Akın-Kıvanç, Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 158.

Esra Akın-Kıvanç, Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 158.

Esra Akın-Kıvanç, Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 211.

İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 211.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 3.

Even if it has been incorporated into contemporary Turkish art as a “symbol” rather than “icon” among Turks who don’t read Arabic script. İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 223.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 292.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 279.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 279.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 21.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006), 109.

For more on this theory of inspiration in Ottoman-Islamic artistic production, calligraphy, music, and poetry writ large, see among others, Deniz Ertan, “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter–Spring 2007): 31–60, 36.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006), 110.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 286.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006), 112.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006), 113.

Emine Fetvacı, “The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I,” Muqarnas 32 (2015): 135–154, 145–146.

Thereby also echoing the tenth-century Abbasid notion that calligraphy ought to be “the standard against which painting is being measured.” Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Culture: Sight, Insight, and Desire,” Muqarnas 32 (2015): 23–61, 36.

Emine Fetvacı, “The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I,” Muqarnas 32 (2015), 137.

Emine Fetvacı, “The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I,” Muqarnas 32 (2015), 137.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 108.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 284.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 284.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008); İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 223.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 40.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 40–41.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41; David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 284; İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 223.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41–42.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 42.

Indeed, the calligrapher’s body can be “understood as incarnated in the finished work” as a “kinesthetic process” as much as the calligrapher’s soul has been. David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 279.

Maryam Ekhtiar, “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006), 110.

David J. Roxburgh, “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008), 279–280, 298 note 55.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 45.

David Simonowitz, “A Modern Master of Islamic Calligraphy and Her Peers,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (2010), 79.

İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 213.

David Simonowitz, “A Modern Master of Islamic Calligraphy and Her Peers,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (2010), 79.

Fanny Davis, Mary E. Esch, Sema Gurun, and Bruce Van Leer. The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York: Praeger, 1986), 225.

Tobias Heinzelmann, “Visualizing the Prophet—Rhetorical and Graphic Aspects of Three Ottoman-Turkish Poems,” in Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, and Dilek Sarmis, eds., The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2022): 583–619, 614.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 37; İrvin C. Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008), 215.

Tobias Heinzelmann, “Visualizing the Prophet—Rhetorical and Graphic Aspects of Three Ottoman-Turkish Poems,” in Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, and Dilek Sarmis, eds., The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 614.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 108.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 108.

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 108.

“Dünü ve bugünü ile Haliç sempozyumu: 22–23 Mayıs 2003, Cibali, İstanbul,” (Istanbul: Kadir Has Üniversitesi, 2003), 469. See also Dünden bugüne İstanbul ansiklopedisi. Vol. 3 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih Vakfı'nın ortak yayınıdır, 1993), 207.

See www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/esma-ibret-hanim (accessed May 20, 2024).

Selected Bibliography

Akın-Kıvanç, Esra. Muthanna/Mirror Writing in Islamic Calligraphy: History, Theory, Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

Calabria, Michael D. “By the Book: Women as Calligraphers and Patrons of the Qur’an,” in Muhammad Shafiq and Thomas Donlin-Smith, eds., Making Gender in the Intersection of the Human and Divine (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019): 161–184.

Ceballos, Manuela. “Calligraphy as a Sufi Practice,” in Sarwar Alam, ed., Cultural Fusion of Sufi Islam: Alternative Paths to Mystical Faith (New York: Routledge, 2020).

Davis, Fanny, Mary E. Esch, Sema Gurun, and Bruce Van Leer. The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York: Praeger, 1986).

Derman, M. Uğur. Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998).

Ekhtiar, Maryam. “Practice Makes Perfect: The Art of Calligraphy Exercises (Siyāh Mashq) in Iran,” Muqarnas 23 (2006): 107–130.

Ertan, Deniz. “Cycles and Peripheries: An Ottoman ‘Kitâb el-Edvâr,’” Asian Music 38 (1) (Winter-Spring 2007): 31–60.

Fetvacı, Emine. “The Gaze in the Album of Ahmed I,” Muqarnas 32 (2015): 135–154.

Gharipour, Mohammad and İrvin Schick, eds., Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

Gruber, Christiane. “The Rose of the Prophet: Floral Metaphors in Late Ottoman Devotional Art,” in David J. Roxburgh, ed., Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod (Leiden: Brill, 2014): 223–249.

Heinzelmann, Tobias. “Visualizing the Prophet—Rhetorical and Graphic Aspects of Three Ottoman-Turkish Poems,” in Denis Gril, Stefan Reichmuth, and Dilek Sarmis, eds., The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam. Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2022): 583–619.

Mukattash, Eman. “‘The Burden of Representation’: Absence and the Deferral of Meaning in Yasmine Ghata’s The Calligraphers’ Night,” Forum for World Literature Studies 10 (2018): 342–352.

Necipoğlu, Gülru. “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Culture: Sight, Insight, and Desire,” Muqarnas 32 (2015): 23–61.

Roxburgh, David J. “‘The Eye is Favored for Seeing the Writing’s Form’: On the Sensual and the Sensuous in Islamic Calligraphy,” Muqarnas 25 (2008): 275–298.

Schick, İrvin C. “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53 (2008): 211–224.

Schick, İrvin Cemil. “Reading and Writing Practices in the Ottoman Empire,” in Didem Havlıoğlu and Zeynep Uysal, eds., Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature (London: Routledge, 2023): 105–115.

Schimmel, Annemarie. Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

Shaw, Wendy M. K. What is “Islamic Art”? Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Simonowitz, David. “A Modern Master of Islamic Calligraphy and Her Peers,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (2010): 75–102.

Turna, Nalan. “Ottoman Apprentices and Their Experiences,” Middle Eastern Studies 55 (2019): 683–700.

15 Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819–1881) Orientalist Painter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-19

This chapter concerns itself with the life and work of Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, a traveler, an expatriate painter, and a self-described expert on the Orient. She also caught the eye and pen of Hans Christian Andersen, of “The Red Shoes” and “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” fame, one of many fans of her output.¹ How did this happen?

Elisabeth Baumann was born in Poland, trained as a painter in Germany, met her husband, the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau, in Rome, and then settled in Denmark.² Once in Denmark, she became a painter of portraits and patriotic scenes, while also giving birth to nine children.³ Our primary interest here, however, lies not in her early propagandistic work so much as in her later pornographic paintings, which capitalized on the early nineteenth-century European vogue for Orientalist images and, more so, on the desire among a consuming bourgeois public for these images to be “authentic.”⁴

Jerichau-Baumann, always a consummate businesswoman, indeed recognized an opportunity in this burgeoning bourgeois consumer desire, and, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Chapter 11), she therefore crafted a professional identity for herself by mobilizing her gender to lend credibility to her art.⁵ Taking on the role of the hyperbolically female adventuress and ethnographer, she watched, so she claimed, “Eastern women” in a way that European men could not, and she used this variation on authenticity via voyeurism to inaugurate a remarkably successful career.⁶ In Jerichau-Baumann’s case, this career consisted of fantasy harem painting.

Unlike Lady Mary, however, Jerichau-Baumann conceived of the harem not as a potentially empowering space, nor as a quasi-political institution of local or sovereign authority, but rather as the hidden, erotic source of Oriental life to which she, among few, had access.⁷ And so, even as she catered to the growing European demand for the null set that was ever more authentic and ever more extravagant images of the Orient—and even as she played a key role in shaping the European colonial discourse of the effete and backward East—she also, more narrowly, molded and marketed a newly desirable thing called “Ottoman life.” By the end of her career, she had become one of the most popular artists of her day.

Very well. So she cobbled together for herself a lucrative business out of the racism of a consuming, nineteenth-century European middle class. What is she doing in our collection of women who shaped the Ottoman Empire? The chapter on Lady Mary was questionable enough. But at least Lady Mary lived at a time when the European Orientalist discourse remained inchoate, and when Gülnuş Sultan (Chapter 10) could celebrate the strength of the Empire by scattering fountains across Istanbul via a water network that surpassed anything in London. Jerichau-Baumann was an entirely different character. Mobilizing the strident vocabulary of high colonialism, she built her career with scrupulous calculation upon the accumulated carcasses of Levinasian recognition⁸—exploiting exploitation itself—and she never once questioned or regretted her instrumentalization of the objectified subjects that she represented in her painting.

And yet, nonetheless, she remains a compelling addition to this volume. Indeed, uncomfortable as it may be to read about it, the dialectic of superiority and inferiority that framed the work of artists like Jerichau-Baumann was as deeply embedded in Ottoman vocabularies of identity and subjectivity as it was in British, French, Danish, Polish, or German vocabularies of the same.⁹ Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Ignoring it also makes identifying its subversion, re-articulation, or ironic re-appropriation in other contexts difficult. This chapter, therefore, not only explores how an influential if, by contemporary standards, unethical woman artist shaped one variation on the colonial discourse of exclusion by positioning herself as an expert on “Oriental life,” but also how she shaped Ottoman interpretations of that “Oriental life” as well.

For Europeans weren’t the only consumers of Jerichau-Baumann’s paintings. On the contrary, Jerichau-Baumann spent the bulk of her “Eastern” career as the employee—the dependant—of wealthy Muslim patrons in Istanbul and Cairo.¹⁰ And even those paintings that she produced independently were, if not always purchased by Ottoman aristocrats, certainly discussed among them, evaluated for their aesthetic contributions to a thriving global, rather than purely European, culture industry.¹¹

Though Jerichau-Baumann’s Ottoman patrons were obviously not interested in the supposed authenticity of her work, that is to say, they were very much educated and intelligent consumers of it, fully aware of the subtle permutations of colonial power that permeated it. They recognized in her overwrought attempts to appeal to a consuming public, to any consuming public, Eastern or Western, an opportunity for themselves as well. And this was an opportunity not to debase themselves as the victims of the colonial gaze, but rather to participate, often with humor, and often with a knowing self-consciousness, in the production of the discourse itself.

Why, after all, does one commission a portrait of oneself or one’s family? One does so to transform the life of the portrait’s sitter into an object of consumption and desire. Why does one, in turn, commission a racist portrait of oneself or one’s family? That will be the question motivating the remainder of this chapter. Exploring the dynamic that made this question thinkable isn’t pleasant. But it is necessary.

Let’s start, however, with the earlier, less successful, years of Jerichau-Baumann’s career. When she initially began showing her pieces in Denmark, these pieces were, according to contemporary critics, adequate. Prolific and ambitious, if “saccharine,” her work brought her moderate recognition and middling respect in the Danish art world.¹² The British art-critical world, unlike their Danish counterparts, occasionally praised it tepidly for its technique.¹³ Before she took to travelling, therefore, Jerichau-Baumann lived the life of a decent and capable painter, an artist whose work was fine if not overwhelming, competent if not field-transforming. And this response to her effort was enough to drive a creative temperament to despair.

Rather than sinking into despair, Jerichau-Baumann instead shifted her subject matter. Recognizing the growing fashion among her customers for Delacroix-style Orientalist painting, she began to depict imaginary harem scenes and odalisques.¹⁴ When critics and the press began to take an interest in this new output, she decided to cement her reputation by making these scenes “real.”¹⁵ And this professional move, as it turned out, was inspired.

After journeying to “The East,” a region defined in nineteenth-century journalistic accounts of her adventures as Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt in the 1860s and 1870s in search of that elusive verisimilitude, and after working extensively in Istanbul, Izmir, Athens, and Cairo, Jerichau-Baumann became one of the most celebrated painters of her day.¹⁶ Once bourgeois and aristocratic subjects of the Ottoman Empire began hiring Jerichau-Baumann to paint European-style portraits of themselves and their families, bourgeois and aristocratic subjects of the British, French, Danish, and German Empires indeed lined up to purchase the sketches and discarded Oriental-style portraits that she had retained when her Ottoman clients had chosen the works that appealed to them.¹⁷ In hindsight, her activities seem almost like a swindle.

But they weren’t a swindle. Quite the opposite, Jerichau-Baumann’s reputation as a thoughtful and inspired artist soared, and her capacity to produce, as a woman, “genuine representations of so-called eastern beauty”¹⁸ placed her at the forefront of the European Orientalist tradition. When she expanded into subjects who were unaware of her artistic interest in them, such as peasants, workers, and street sellers, in addition to her paying clients, she furthermore positioned herself not only as an artist with access but as a respectable ethnographer with discernment.¹⁹ She documented, so she claimed, what she had determined to be real life as well as responding to the fantasies of those sitting for their portraits.²⁰

And so, inevitably, after close to a decade of work in Istanbul and Cairo, she took the step that would seal her position as one of the three or four most influential Orientalist painters of her generation. Namely, she began to throw the street scenes together with the portraits, placing the wife of a Cairene aristocrat, for example, at the edge of a field alongside a peasant selling pottery, or dressing the street-seller in the clothing of an imagined odalisque.²¹ She thereby deliberately confused, in a single composition, what passed for reality with what passed for fantasy.²² It was, furthermore, here that she discovered the winning visual arrangement for the European as well as the Ottoman market: a chaotic amalgam of bits and pieces of fantastic and realistic imagery from a present and past that had never happened,²³ all of which together would evoke some half-remembered sense of what The Orient ought to be.²⁴ Jerichau-Baumann had found her métier.

The past thirty or forty years of commentary on this work has drawn the obvious conclusions. The language of access and authenticity that Jerichau-Baumann used to describe and market her paintings had nothing to do with some pre-linguistic reality that she had grasped, uncovered, and exposed, and everything to do with positioning herself as the empowered, speaking European subject re-presenting the disempowered, silent Oriental object.²⁵ The anarchic amalgam of imagined past and imagined present, of imagined reality and imagined fantasy, not only titillated an audience of European consumers who already knew what they wanted to see, it also reinforced a pernicious colonial discourse of the disorganized East operating outside of time and thus inviting both conquest, on the one hand, and discipline and management, on the other, by an ordered, progressive, and far from picturesque West.²⁶ There’s no debate here, and much of the writing addressing Jerichau-Baumann’s production feels almost pro forma. She’s an easy subject to box up, and in general contemporary scholarship has been more interested in more complicated figures like Lady Mary.

But what about Jerichau-Baumann’s insistence that, specifically, she was painting life? Was there any intersection between her Orientalist rhetoric of life, specifically, and early nineteenth-century Ottoman interpretations of life, more broadly? And if there was, does it matter? To get at these questions, it must be noted, first, that many of the scholars who have spent time with Jerichau-Baumann’s Orientalist creations have analyzed them with more subtlety than the critique sketched in the paragraphs above suggests.

In particular, these commentators have explored the complexity of the power relations that grew up around Jerichau-Baumann as an employee of Istanbul and Cairo patrons who, themselves, sought her out to paint their families even as they watched her perfecting and mobilizing the rhetoric of Eastern inferiority that made her career. For the agency of these patrons, though difficult to parse, is as relevant to interpreting the life that she painted and shaped as Jerichau-Baumann’s own agency. These patrons, after all, were anything but mute objects of the European gaze. Indeed, some recent scholars have even posited that Jerichau-Baumann’s relationship with them might best be understood as a mode of tense cultural exchange rather than as a straightforward discursive assault.²⁷

All of this means that, yes, the European discourse of timeless, languid harem-life as the Real Life of The Orient placed the painter, despite her dependent economic status, in a position of rhetorical superiority. But once again, Jerichau-Baumann’s Ottoman interlocutors were not unaware of the power of this discourse, nor were they unable to recognize the politics of cultural appropriation that animated it. The Ottoman observers who commented on Jerichau-Baumann’s painting, for example, did so with as much interest as their British, French, Danish, Polish, and German counterparts, praising it, specifically, as a model of the Orientalist genre, and thereby playing with and “speaking back” to the colonial discourse.²⁸ Moreover, one of the greatest patrons and collectors of Orientalist images in the nineteenth century, Jerichau-Baumann’s and otherwise, was Halil Şerif Pasha, an Ottoman diplomat and statesman who lived for years in Paris²⁹—while one of the greatest Orientalist painters of the time was the celebrated, if notorious, Osman Hamdi Bey.³⁰

Ottoman consumers of Orientalist cultural production, in other words, were unashamed of supporting the artists responsible for it. Many in fact re-appropriated the harem fantasy and the street scenes as they were depicted in her art as a source of cultural pride, not because they fetishized the harem’s supposed authenticity or believed her street scenes to be real, but because the life she depicted packed a discursive punch that was in no way purely one sided. Anyone with a humorous sense of self-awareness and an understanding of the complexity of the artist’s gaze could, at least according to this alternative trend in the literature, claim it and mobilize it for his or her own purposes.

At the same time, however, the purpose of this chapter is not to recuperate Jerichau-Baumann as a misunderstood historical figure in need of sympathy or understanding. Her work is a prime example of high colonial European racism, and it merits the critical attention as well as the concern that it has received. Rather, the point of this chapter is to emphasize the multifaceted quality of the dialectical exchanges in which work such as Jerichau-Baumann’s was embedded, and to find within these exchanges a space in which a smaller, narrower thing called “Oriental life” was formulated. And to get there, we must return to Hans Christian Andersen—in and of itself a distressing move.

Nonetheless, Andersen’s own complicated fascination with tortured little girls, especially as it plays out in the tale of the “The Little Mermaid,” is an effective starting point for teasing out Jerichau-Baumann’s role in the Ottoman, rather than European, discourse of Oriental life. “The Little Mermaid,” therefore, is a story about how things that resemble humans, but aren’t quite human, live and desire along the edges of human civilization. It begins when a mermaid, a physically beautiful but soulless creature who will live for three hundred years before turning to sea foam, falls in love with a prince. The prince is human, which means that he has a short and embodied lifespan, but also an eternal soul. The mermaid therefore strikes a bargain with a witch to exchange her voice and her mermaid’s tail for legs to try to attract the attention of the prince. The witch agrees to help her, but tells her that though she will be able to walk and dance among the humans on land, she will remain in exquisite, blood-soaked pain throughout her time there, and if the prince marries another, she, the mermaid, will expire and disappear. If he marries her instead, a part of his soul will enter her body, and she will become fully human. The mermaid fails. She is offered the choice of killing the prince to avoid the fate of dissolving into foam, but she refuses to do so. In the end, rather than dissolving into foam, she becomes an earthbound spirit who can, potentially, gain a soul, provided that she spends three hundred additional years doing good deeds for humans.³¹

This story, like most of Hans Christian Andersen’s oeuvre, can be interpreted in a variety of different directions.³² Important for our purposes, however, is that Jerichau-Baumann painted several iterations of the little mermaid, or at least a little mermaid, both before her sojourn in the Ottoman Empire and in the midst of it. The one she completed between visits, in 1873, repurposed as “The Siren,” is her most celebrated, and it is the version that interests us here.

For it is this version of the little mermaid that most explicitly conflates the fantasy of the desiring sub-human with the fantasy of the desiring Orient. Indeed, though at first glance the mermaid appears safe, with nothing overtly Eastern about her, a more focused examination reveals that her languid, half-naked position against the rock is taken directly from Jerichau-Baumann’s odalisques, that her face is the face Jerichau-Baumann had already painted onto several peasant girls drawing water from fountains, carrying pitchers of water, and doing other timeless and pastoral things, and that her headdress of seaweed looks remarkably like a veil.³³

Moreover, in 1873, when she completed the painting, Jerichau-Baumann was between sojourns in the Ottoman Empire; she’d returned from her first successful visit to the region in 1870, and she was about to set out again in 1874.³⁴ The third mermaid, therefore, was a quintessential product of the distinctive talent that Jerichau-Baumann was honing at the apex of her career—a reconfiguration of a peculiarly Scandinavian and Protestant fairy story for Orientalist consumer tastes.³⁵ It was, in other words, an amalgam of fantasy and reality that, because it was confused, felt authentic.

Figure 15.1 Mermaid by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1863, before her Orientalist turn. Source: private collection.

Figure 15.2 Odalisque by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1869. Source: private collection.

Figure 15.3 Mermaid (The Siren) by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1873, after her Orientalist turn. Source: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; photo by Villy Fink Isaksen.

And once again, it was also an amalgam sufficiently resonant to have seen the mermaid’s image repeatedly replicated over the past century and a half. In large part, this is because the mermaid is inoffensive, even in her nudity. Mermaids aren’t supposed to wear clothing. Whereas displaying an odalisque on one’s mousepad might provoke embarrassment, no one would object to a mermaid.

Even more than Jerichau-Baumann’s overtly Orientalist work, however, the mermaid nevertheless embodies the most destructive aspects of her commentary on Ottoman-as-Oriental life. For though it’s true that the Orientalist paintings were marketed as representations of something broadly ethnographic called Eastern Life, the story of the “The Little Mermaid” is, narrowly, a cautionary tale about how certain groups of human-like creatures live in one way, and other groups of fully human creatures live in another, and never the twain shall meet. Jerichau-Baumann’s mermaid-as-odalisque made the point clear: Oriental life was poignant, picturesque, doomed, and not quite human; it was a life of beautiful bodies absent souls.

At the same time, however, the mermaid painting also reveals the spaces that Jerichau-Baumann left open throughout her career for Ottoman, as well as British, French, Danish, Polish, and German, criticism and re-interpretation. The point of the story is that the prince never notices or looks at the desiring mermaid. His attention is always, frustratingly, elsewhere. And the mermaid herself, therefore, in the narrative if not on the canvas, is the opposite of the object of voyeuristic appropriation. Her life disintegrates around her because she can’t attract his gaze, even though she desires nothing else.

By associating the doomed, beautiful, and soulless life of the mermaid-odalisque with the inability to be seen, Jerichau-Baumann’s comment on life, desire, and spectacle thus becomes more complicated than it initially appears to be.³⁶ It becomes something so complicated, in fact, that it begins, in an unexpected way, to dovetail with A’isha al-Ba’uniyya’s (Chapter 4). Desire here is a torturous, painful state of being. Only directed properly can it lead to a dissolution that is ennobling rather than degrading.

Or, to return to the less metaphysical question animating this chapter: why commission a racist portrait of oneself or one’s family? One commissions a racist portrait to turn the racist rhetoric itself into a consumer object rather than a source of psychic injury. One commissions the racist portrait to domesticate it and to pacify it. Again, the lesson of “The Little Mermaid” is that the gaze endows the object with life. And if Jerichau-Baumann’s career played on any running theme, it was that the gaze always belonged to the consumer, and never to some abstract, universal spectator. Her overriding concern throughout her working life was who would buy her art. It was the consumer, more even than some imagined monolith called the West, who exercised agency across the discourses of life in which Jerichau-Baumann participated. And her Ottoman patrons—the consumers of her art—understood that situation perfectly well.

Whereas Jerichau-Baumann herself transformed Oriental life into an object of European voyeuristic desire, therefore, her Ottoman patrons transformed European voyeuristic desire itself into an object of ironic consumption. The subversion of the discourse was a possibility from the beginning. And the Ottoman participants in this discursive interplay were in this way actors as much as they were victims, negotiating, rather than bowing to, yet one further, tired example of high colonial power in action. They found it, to be perfectly clear, funny.

Notes

Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 257–266, 257.

Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011): 31–63, 45–46.

Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Asia, Africa, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 32.

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 119.

Julia Kuehn, A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (New York: Routledge, 2013), 80–81.

Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011), passim.

Mary Roberts, “Other Desire and the Desire of Others,” in Joan DelPlato and Julie Codell, eds., Orientalism, Eroticism, Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2016): 141–162, 153.

As described by, among others, Ayşe Çelikkol, “Secular Pleasures and FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Victorian Poetry 51 (4) (Winter 2013): 511–532, 522–523.

Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107 (3) (June 2002): 768–796, 768.

Julia Kuehn, A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (New York: Routledge, 2013), 85.

Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press 2007), 136.

Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 262.

Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 259.

Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011), 47.

Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011), 47.

Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011), 46.

Mary Roberts, “Harem Portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım,” in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, eds., Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2006): 77–98, 82–83; Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 259.

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 168.

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 168.

Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), 119.

Mary Roberts, “Other Desire and the Desire of Others,” in Joan DelPlato and Julie Codell, eds., Orientalism, Eroticism, Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2016), 152.

Mary Roberts, “Other Desire and the Desire of Others,” in Joan DelPlato and Julie Codell, eds., Orientalism, Eroticism, Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2016), 152.

Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 263.

On chaos, timelessness, and nostalgia in the Orientalist imaginary, see, among many others, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993, 2012), 144–145.

For a more sophisticated variation on this theme, see Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Asia, Africa, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 47 and 252 notes 29, 32, and 34, where she describes Jerichau-Baumann’s deliberate appropriation of both authoritative and flirtatious voices, depending on her imagined audience.

Again, for a sophisticated take on this issue, see Julia Kuehn, A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (New York: Routledge, 2013), 145.

Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press 2007), 139.

For an extended analysis of this mode of expression, see Zeynep Çelik, “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 19–42. See also Alex Dika Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 29, 39, 96.

Alex Dika Seggerman, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 222 note 1.

Edhem Eldem, “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and his Paintings,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 339–383, 340.

Lori Yamato, “Surgical Humanization in H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’” Marvels & Tales 31 (2) (Fall 2017): 295–312, 300.

Lori Yamato’s reading of this copious literature from the direction of disability studies is particularly useful for our purposes here. Lori Yamato, “Surgical Humanization in H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’” Marvels & Tales 31 (2) (Fall 2017), passim.

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Havfrue/Mermaid (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen: 1873).

Julia Kuehn, “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010), 263.

As Oxfeldt notes, this “Nordic Orientalism” was far from unusual. By the mid-nineteenth century, for example, the pastiche Orientalist Tivoli amusement part in Copenhagen had become, as it continues to be, “the quintessential Danish tourist attraction on par with the Little Mermaid.” Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28–29.

In the same way that, as Yamato argues, the original H.C. Andersen story does. Lori Yamato, “Surgical Humanization in H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’” Marvels & Tales 31 (2) (Fall 2017), 304, 308.

Selected Bibliography

Beaulieu, Jill and Mary Roberts, eds. Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

Bodin, Helena. “‘The Clamour of Babel, in All the Tongues of the Levant’: Multivernacular and Multiscriptal Constantinople Around 1900 as a Literary World,” Textual Practice 34 (2020): 783–802.

Çelik, Zeynep. “Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,” in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 19–42.

Çelikkol, Ayşe. “Secular Pleasures and FitzGerald’s ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Victorian Poetry 51 (4) (Winter 2013): 511–532.

Cherry, Deborah and Janice Helland, eds. Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2006)

DelPlato, Joan and Julie Codell, eds. Orientalism, Eroticism, Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Eldem, Edhem. “Making Sense of Osman Hamdi Bey and his Paintings,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 339–383.

Kuehn, Julia. “Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, ‘Egypt 1870,’” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 257–266.

Kuehn, Julia. “Exotic Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation, and Imagination,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32 (2011): 31–63.

Kuehn, Julia. A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

Makdisi, Ussama. “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107 (3) (June 2002): 768–796.

Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Journeys from Scandinavia: Travelogues of Asia, Africa, and South America, 1840–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Roberts, Mary. “Harem Portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım,” in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, eds., Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2006): 77–98.

Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press 2007).

Roberts, Mary. “Nazlı’s Photographic Games: Said and Art History in a Contrapuntal Mode,” Patterns of Prejudice 48 (2014): 460–478.

Roberts, Mary. “Other Desire and the Desire of Others,” in Joan DelPlato and Julie Codell, eds., Orientalism, Eroticism, Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2016): 141–162.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993, 2012).

Seggerman, Alex Dika. Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Yamato, Lori. “Surgical Humanization in H.C. Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid,’” Marvels & Tales 31 (2) (Fall 2017): 295–312.

Zorgati, Ragnhild Johnsrud. “The Painter and the Princess: Constructing Feminism/Decentering Orientalism between Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cairo and Tunis,” Cultural History 9 (2020): 46–71.

Part IV The Age of National Consciousness Feminist Witnessing and Feminist Disruption

16 Maryana Marrash (1848–1919) Muse, Poet, and Essayist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-21

Descendant of an old and prominent Eastern Catholic literary family that had inhabited the cosmopolitan Syrian city of Aleppo for centuries, Maryana Marrash is remembered today mostly for the vibrant artistic and intellectual salon that she established in her home.¹ When she appears in histories of, variously, modern Arab feminism,² modern Arabic literature,³ Arab nationalism,⁴ or the relationship between modern Arab feminist literature and the development of a dissident Arab national consciousness,⁵ it is thus usually as a figure who encouraged other writers, rather than as a figure who, herself, wrote. But Marrash did write, copiously, and though this productive output is by no means ignored by her biographers, her writing itself is more frequently lauded for inspiring later authors than it is for its intrinsic quality.

It’s possible, of course, that her writing simply wasn’t good. But there may also be something else going on in this articulation and re-articulation of Marrash as an inspirational, rather than creative, figure. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to locate the partially effaced Maryana Marrash who lived at the intersection of “supportive” and “creative,” to respect the salon-keeping muse celebrated in popular memory even as we explore the work of the more somber feminist writer and intellectual.

For Marrash, playing the role of both muse and author, not only helped to inaugurate one of the most prolific periods of modern Arab literary history,⁶ but also, if more prosaically, helped to set the contours of the Ottoman publishing industry that made this literary production possible. Her distinctive historical contribution was not only to shape Ottoman words themselves, Arabic, Turkish, French, English, or otherwise, but to do so by intervening directly into the emergent apparatus by which those words were disseminated. And in this role, she was unmatched.

Figure 16.1 Photograph of Maryana Marrash, before 1913. Source: Filib Di Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sihafah al-‘Arabiyah (Beirut: al-Matba’ah al-Adabiyah, 1913) vol. 2, 241.

Marrash, like many of her nineteenth-century feminist counterparts, benefited from a privileged economic and educational background.⁷ Even before she made her name as a cultural icon in her own right, therefore, she carried around with her a hefty load of pre-existing cultural capital. Her father, for example, was known among his literary peers for the grandeur of his private library in a world of substantial private libraries.⁸ Her brother, Francis, was both a physician and a writer, a combination of professions that was popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other examples include John Keats, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Schiller, W. Somerset Maugham, Anton Chekov, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mikhail Bulgakov.⁹ A second brother, Abdallah, wrote for international newspapers and journals.¹⁰ And she herself travelled widely after attending French missionary schools, where she studied French and English literature, before eventually submitting her own articles and poems to the popular Arabic-language journals that were beginning to proliferate across the eastern Mediterranean.¹¹

The journal in which her work appeared most frequently was Majallat al-Jinan (Magazine of Gardens, or al-Jinan, The Gardens or Paradise), a successful bimonthly journal published out of Beirut between 1860 and 1886. The journal, which served as a platform for “general interest” stories, collected together political essays, art and literature, instructional articles, world and local news, pronouncements and decrees issued by the Istanbul government, scientific essays, serialized novels, satires, and puzzles or riddles.¹² Its mandate was to provide sufficiently provocative material to hold a growing reading public’s attention without being so provocative that it brought down the wrath of either the sultan in Istanbul or the khedive (Chapter 19) in Cairo on its head.¹³

This it did for twenty-five years before its closure, in part by devoting a great deal of space to what people at the time, in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, liked to call “The Woman Question.”¹⁴ This focus on women’s issues also had the side-benefit of appealing to the journal’s largest consumer base: literate, Arabic-speaking urban women from cities as diverse as Baghdad and Casablanca, Basra and Tangier, Paris and London.¹⁵ Indeed, women not only disproportionately subscribed to and read the journal, but they were vocal contributors to it over the years. Though Maryana Marrash was one of the most celebrated of these, a beacon of al-Jinan’s women writers, she was by no means the only one.¹⁶

Scholarly histories of al-Jinan and its mass-produced counterparts frequently focus on two related contributions that the magazine made to modern Arab history. The first is the significant part it played in the development of Arabic literary genres, and especially in the development of the Arabic novel.¹⁷ The serialized fiction published first in al-Jinan, and then later in journals like it, established a set of norms for novel writing in Arabic that remained in place for more than a century after its demise.¹⁸

The second historical contribution that is commonly associated with the journal, and one that is more immediately relevant to our purposes, was its success in generating a variation on the modern, liberal public sphere in Arabic-speaking regions.¹⁹ By carving out an imagined or abstract realm within which literate Arabs might interact and rationally engage with one another, al-Jinan and journals like it created the conditions for a sense of national belonging predicated on a shared language and shared values, rather than on shifting local affiliations and attachments, or on loyalty to a sultan that had never been particularly strong to begin with.²⁰

Importantly, women as consumers, readers, and contributors to these journals played a key role in the elaboration of this public sphere. Indeed, Maryana Marrash’s poetry and essays constituted no more than a few drops in a flood of widely-distributed publications read by, and sometimes deliberately produced for, women.²¹ These were thus publications that opened up a space within which an Arabic-speaking bourgeoisie might recognize and define itself not only as a unified political collective, but as a unified political collective that concerned itself specifically with women and their social position.²² The “woman question,” at least in this influential variation on historical analysis, was inseparable from the development of early Arab national consciousness broadly defined.²³

And what responses did this Question provoke among members of the gradually coalescing nationally conscious collective? Like many feminists of her time, Marrash spoke in a language that appealed to her nineteenth-century audiences rather than to her twenty-first-century readers. This means that though what she wrote was certainly provocative for her time, her language strikes many of today’s feminists as, at best, uninspiring. Women’s empowerment, for example, and especially women’s empowerment through education, was necessary and crucial, she argued, not only to the development of Arab women themselves, but also, and more so, to the development of Arab men, who would benefit from living among self-respecting wives and mothers.²⁴ Women’s education would uplift society because educated women would learn to throw off small-mindedness in favor of virtue. Marrash was, in short, a product of her era.

But Marrash also pushed the boundaries of what was deemed appropriate women’s education and enlightenment further than many of her male contemporaries, including her brother, Francis. Indeed, Francis, who also published in al-Jinan, and frequently about The Woman Question, also praised women’s education, arguing, however, that one must always remember Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of women’s authenticity.²⁵ Education for women, according to both Francis and Rousseau, was praiseworthy only up to a point. Unfeminine specialist pursuits such as science, contrarily, ought to remain off-limits because scientific fields unsex the women who study them, and thereby undermine the positive outcomes of women’s education more generally.²⁶

Marrash and other women writers disagreed with Francis on this point and others, and this tension between the Marrash siblings and their colleagues, which played out across the pages of al-Jinan was, of course, very much a part of its editorial design.²⁷ Reasoned debate on a consumer-friendly topic not only sells copy but also contributes to the functioning of a vibrant public sphere.²⁸ Marrash and her brother, so the argument goes, were in this way vital both to the health of the journal and to the health of a united Arabic-speaking nation. Both signified a move away from the realm of irrational, self-interested, private literary production and toward the realm of rational, patriotic, public literary discussion. Jürgen Habermas would have approved.²⁹

And yet, it may be worthwhile to set the rational public sphere to the side for the moment as we explore in more detail what Marrash herself made of her career. In large part this is because al-Jinan, despite its careful straddling of the sufficiently provocative and the overly provocative, inevitably attracted the wrong kind of attention, and the Sultan Abdülhamit II revoked its license to publish in March of 1886.³⁰ Marrash continued to contribute to other venues, it’s true, but her career gradually took on a new trajectory, a trajectory that throws into doubt the explanatory power of hygienic theories of emergent democratic public engagement in Arabic speaking regions. From the moment the journal closed, indeed, Marrash ceased to personify the conventional and comforting fable of a clean transition from irrational, private art in the service of a pre-modern patron to rational public art in the service of a modern, national people. And in place of that fable, she began to personify something more complex, different, and interesting.

In 1893, for example, Marrash became the first Syrian woman to publish for a mass readership a modern book of poetry. Printed in Beirut, the book, Bint Fikr (A Thoughtful Girl or Daughter of Thought), was heavy on lyrics, elegies, and panegyrics.³¹ The most affecting of these, according to reviewers, was the elegy mourning the death of her brother, Francis, in which she compared herself to al-Khansa, the tragic seventh-century poet who lost two brothers in battle, and who moved the Prophet so dramatically that he praised her as the most powerful composer of elegies of her time.³² But then, everything in Marrash’s book was well regarded by critics, and Marrash herself thus garnered a reputation for technical skill at infusing the overwrought ambiance of the French Romantics into subtler classical Arabic forms.³³

But how did the book fare among readers themselves? Did her critically successful mass-produced book also help to forge and define a broader united reading public? It’s difficult to answer these questions—not, however, because of the volume’s content or reception, but because of the means by which it went into circulation. The Sultan Abdülhamit II, remember, had shut down al-Jinan in 1886. Seven years later, therefore, in 1893, Marrash included among the poems in the manuscript a panegyric praising both the Sultan in Istanbul and his governors in Aleppo to ensure that her own book didn’t suffer the same fate.³⁴ As a result, the book passed the censors and went into production.

By eulogizing the Sultan and his governors to gain access to the printing press, however, Marrash was not simply paying her dues to a petulant and authoritarian leader, another commonplace figure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global history. Additionally, and presciently, she was also facilitating a collision between the pre-modern politics of aristocratic patronage that had lifted the careers of figures like Mihri Hatun (Chapter 2), Zeynep Hatun (Chapter 3), Dilhayat Kalfa (Chapter 12), Esma İbret (Chapter 14), and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (Chapter 15)—not to mention the seventh-century poet al-Khansa—and the modern politics of mass distribution. She wrote her poetry, that is to say, both for the benefit of the patron and for the benefit of an anonymous public, thereby initiating a distinctively Ottoman variation on what was becoming a newly democratic media environment.

Indeed, the public sphere as well as the role of the publisher in shaping it, looks skewed from this angle, if productively so, less like the Habermasian ideal.³⁵ For by preserving the role of the patron in what is ordinarily understood to be an industry that had thrown off top-down control, an industry in which popular, democratic tastes or the rational exchange of democratic ideas, controlled output,³⁶ Marrash was likewise creating a framework in which an autocratic ruler could legitimately participate in the circulation and consumption of popular media. She left an unexpected and surprising space for the early modern patron within the modern mass distribution of democratic texts. And in the process, she made the patron a partner in her modern, rather than classical or early modern, art.

It is, in fact, important to emphasize the legitimacy of the patron’s role in this process. The publishing industry as Marrash understood and reformulated it was not, despite appearances, a publishing industry oppressed by the interventions of a tyrant who failed to recognize that a properly modern media must be left unfettered. It was not a publishing industry languishing under the thumb of a ruler who had nothing to do with art. Rather, as Marrash’s panegyrics made clear, publishing in the modern Ottoman context was a dynamic relationship in which government administrators and authors could benefit equally from the mass distribution of media. And, as a corollary, government administrators and authors could similarly benefit from the thoroughly modern culture of celebrity that was attaching itself to the output of these popular presses.

Or, to put this point differently, Marrash’s negotiation of the Arabic-language Ottoman publishing world created a situation in which both she and the Sultan could participate in the popular fantasy of what would, by the twentieth century, be termed the celebrity bestseller.³⁷ She created room for both the artist and the leader in the emergent public relations fiction that each and every individual member of a mass readership who purchased a product formed a personal relationship with that product’s creator.³⁸ She offered the leader a share in her celebrity.

And in the process, she became a remarkably prescient early adopter of today’s notion that a mediated public sphere is not the same thing as a free public sphere, that celebrity is always contagious, and that buying and reading the same text that everyone else is buying and reading can imaginatively transform the consumer as well as the celebrity into a unique and special individual.³⁹ The public sphere that she helped to usher into being, in other words, was not, or not only, a space of thoughtful, rational democratic engagement. Additionally, and more so, it was a space of carefully orchestrated affective exchanges that could cement the author’s, and by extension the ruler’s, and eventually the consumer’s as well as the government-affiliated media oligarch’s, positions as celebrities. It hardly needs saying that this public sphere resembles far more closely what today’s social-media-inflected readers-as-consumers experience than anything dreamed up by a stultified mid-twentieth-century German political theorist.

And so, Marrash’s enduring reputation as the magnet pulling together one of the most esteemed literary salons in Aleppo makes sense. For it was both as an inspiring muse and as a talented essayist and poet that she began to elaborate this distinctively Ottoman variation on the politics of mass readership. It was in her salon, no less than in the pages of her books and articles, that she exploded the simple theory of a clean separation between or among the supposedly classical or medieval realm of aristocratic patronage, the supposedly early modern realm of the haute bourgeois salon, and the supposedly modern realm of mass democratic media. Marrash’s peculiar talent was to inhabit all three simultaneously.⁴⁰ In the same way, therefore, that Marrash herself occupied a space somewhere between muse and creator in the popular imagination and in popular memory, she also occupied a likewise multifarious spot at the intersection of the aristocratic patron’s court, the haute-bourgeois wit’s salon, and the publisher’s factory spitting out undifferentiated product for mass consumption.

Whereas we certainly ought to remember Marrash for her influential late nineteenth-century statements concerning women’s education and social uplift, therefore, for the poetry that she wrote, and for her foundational work in inspiring a generation of writers and intellectuals who would, in fact, shape a nation, we might also recall this more complex legacy. For this is a legacy resting not on the content of her words, but on what she made those words do. Not only did she negotiate three apparently antagonist systems of disseminating ideas—patronage, the salon, and mass distribution—but she cobbled the three together into an Ottoman variation on publishing that would strike many of today’s readers as, at the very least, familiar.

And so, though it is true that the public sphere that she helped to inaugurate wasn’t the ideal theorized by twentieth-century European political philosophers, it did prefigure a mode of political and affective belonging very much in keeping with today’s compromised democratic-oligarchic material reality—a reality as characteristic of contemporary Europe and North America as it is of West Asia. She imagined, more than a century before it had reached its fruition, the political as well as artistic potential of modern or postmodern celebrity prestige attached to both writer and patron. And, more to the point, she domesticated that prestige for Ottoman no less than emergent Syrian nationalist consumption.

Notes

Some recent biographies deliberately foreground the salon as a key “part of her public persona.” Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, “The Harem as Biography: Domestic Architecture, Gender, and Nostalgia in Modern Syria,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 211–238, 228. See also Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 50.

Pauline Homsi Vinson and Nawar al-Hassan Golley, “Challenges and Opportunities: The Women’s Movement in Syria,” in Pernille Arenfeldt and Nawar al-Hassan Golley, eds., Mapping Arab Women’s Movements: A Century of Transformations from Within (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012): 65–92, 67, 85.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 50.

Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 52.

Miriam Cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 54.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009): 615–633, 616.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 50.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 50.

Aziz al-Azmeh, Secularism in the Arab World: Contexts, Ideas and Consequences, trans. David Bond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 223.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 50.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 619.

Ashraf A. Eissa, “Majallat Al-Jinān: Arabic Narrative Discourse in the Making,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 18 (2000): 41–49, 42.

Ashraf A. Eissa, “Majallat Al-Jinān: Arabic Narrative Discourse in the Making,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 18 (2000): 42.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 619.

Ashraf A. Eissa, “Majallat Al-Jinān: Arabic Narrative Discourse in the Making,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 18 (2000), 42.

Ashraf A. Eissa, “Majallat Al-Jinān: Arabic Narrative Discourse in the Making,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 18 (2000), 43.

Sabry Hafez, “Culture Journals and Modern Arabic Literature: A Historical Overview,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 37 (2017): 9–49, 13; Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 617.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 617.

Sabry Hafez, “Culture Journals and Modern Arabic Literature: A Historical Overview,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 37 (2017), 12–13.

Elizabeth M. Holt, “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40 (1) (2009): 37–70, 40–43. See also Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 65.

Radwa Ashour, Mohammed Berrada, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Amina Rachid and Mandy McClure, “Arab Women Writers,” Southwest Review 94 (1) (2009): 9–18, 12–13.

Margot Badran, “Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1 (1) (Winter 2005): 6–28, 7–8.

For an excellent overview of this literature (and its relationship to the less frequently discussed, if no less anxiety producing, “man question”), especially in Egypt, see Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 22–40.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 620.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 620.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 620.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 620.

Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (4) (November 2009), 620.

For more on the classical Habermasian public sphere and the “Arabic reading public,” see Elizabeth M. Holt, “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40 (1) (2009), 39–40.

Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry, trans. Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (London: Macmillan, 1981), 77.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 284 note 20.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 58.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 58.

Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 58.

Elizabeth M. Holt, “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40 (1) (2009), 39–40.

For an analysis of women, literary patronage, nascent mass democratic publishing, and the salon operating at the intersections of the three, see Christine Gerrard, “Senate or Seraglio? Swift’s ‘Triumfeminate’ and the Literary Coterie,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 31 (2016): 13–28, 14–15.

For more on the culture of the celebrity bestseller, see, among others, Antoine Lilti and Alice Le Goff, “On Figures Publiques,” Historical Social Research 32 (2019): 19–38.

Antoine Lilti and Alice Le Goff, “On Figures Publiques,” Historical Social Research 32 (2019), 34.

Antoine Lilti and Alice Le Goff, “On Figures Publiques,” Historical Social Research 32 (2019), 34.

And, as Watenpaugh argues, eventually to be effaced as a coherent biographical figure by all three. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, “The Harem as Biography: Domestic Architecture, Gender, and Nostalgia in Modern Syria,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 233.

Selected Bibliography

Arenfeldt, Pernille and Nawar al-Hassan Golley, eds. Mapping Arab Women’s Movements: A Century of Transformations from Within (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012).

Ashour, Radwa, Mohammed Berrada, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Amina Rachid and Mandy McClure. “Arab Women Writers,” Southwest Review 94 (1) (2009): 9–18.

Auji, Hala. “The Implications of Media: A Material Reading of Nineteenth-Century Arabic Broadsides,” Visible Language 53 (2019): 20–49.

Auji, Hala. Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Ayalon, Ami. “Arab Booksellers and Bookshops in the Age of Printing, 1850–1914,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37 (2010): 73–93.

Ayalon, Ami. The Arabic Print Revolution: Cultural Production and Mass Readership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Ayalon, Ami. “Private Publishing in the Nahda,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40 (2008): 561–577.

Badawi, M.M. A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

Badran, Margot. “Between Secular and Islamic Feminism/s: Reflections on the Middle East and Beyond,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (1) (Winter 2005): 6–28.

Besara, Adel, ed. The Origins of Syrian Nationhood: Histories, Pioneers, and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Boyar, Ebru. “The Press and the Palace: The Two-Way Relationship Between Abdülhamid II and the Press, 1876–1908,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69 (2006): 417–432.

Cooke, Miriam. Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Eissa, Ashraf A. “Majallat Al-Jinān: Arabic Narrative Discourse in the Making,” Quaderni di Studi Arabi 18 (2000): 41–49.

Elsadda, Hoda. Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012).

Gerrard, Christine. “Senate or Seraglio? Swift’s ‘Triumfeminate’ and the Literary Coterie,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr 31 (2016): 13–28.

Hafez, Sabry. “Culture Journals and Modern Arabic Literature: A Historical Overview,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 37 (2017): 9–49.

Hill, Peter. Utopia and Civilization in the Arab Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Holt, Elizabeth. “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s Beirut,” Journal of Arabic Literature 40 (2009): 37–70.

Khaldi, Boutheina. “Microcosming the Nahah: Mayy Ziyādah’s Salon as a Hybrid Space,” Journal of Arabic Literature 41 (2010): 262–302.

Lilti, Antoine and Alice Le Goff. “On Figures Publiques,” Historical Social Research 32 (2019): 19–38.

Roper, Geoffrey, ed. Historical Aspects of Printing and Publishing in the Languages of the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Vinson, Pauline Homsi and Nawar al-Hassan Golley. “Challenges and Opportunities: The Women’s Movement in Syria,” in Pernille Arenfeldt and Nawar al-Hassan Golley, eds., Mapping Arab Women’s Movements: A Century of Transformations from Within (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2012): 65–92.

Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian. “The Harem as Biography: Domestic Architecture, Gender, and Nostalgia in Modern Syria,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 211–238.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Zachs, Fruma and Sharon Halevi. “From Difāʿ Al-Nisāʾ to Masʾalat Al-Nisāʾ in Greater Syria: Readers and Writers Debate Women and Their Rights, 1858–1900,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 615–633.

Zeidan, Joseph T. Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).

17 Fatma Aliye (1862–1936) New Woman and Novelist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-22

The daughter of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, a distinguished Ottoman statesman best known for the Mecelle, the first comprehensive codification of Islamic civil law, Fatma Aliye was one of those turn-of-the-century feminists whose boundless energy eclipsed nearly all who followed. After trying her hand at translation via an Ottoman-Turkish edition of the French novel Volonté by Georges Ohnet,¹ she went on to write several novels of her own, to work as the editor of a women’s journal, and to publish histories on such topics as “Famous Muslim Women.”² In the midst of her writing career, Fatma Aliye also gave birth to four daughters, became the first female member of The Ottoman Red Crescent (the Muslim equivalent of The Red Cross), and founded the first formal women’s association in the Ottoman Empire.³

Her life and work, however, were also intimately bound up in the dissolution of the Ottoman state, and especially in the near uninterrupted border wars that continued from the 1890s through the First World War. As such, she also represented a lost generation. Though a nationalist, Fatma Aliye was also cosmopolitan, having travelled with her father as he took up positions in Egypt, Syria, and Greece, all of which existed somewhere on the spectrum of quasi-Ottoman to colonized to sovereign at the time.⁴ Her life and work thus typify a woman struggling with the metaphysical boundaries between self and stranger even as she deplored the political borders that were constantly on the move.

Ordinarily, biographies of Fatma Aliye’s active and vocal life trace an escalating development from her work as a translator, in which she submerged her voice beneath that of a French male author, signing her book, indeed, as nothing more than “A Lady,” to her increasing courage as she attached her name to a corpus of novels, essays, and articles that she formulated and wrote herself.⁵ And this interpretation is reasonable given a definition of agency in which empowerment comes of finding, perfecting, and then projecting one’s own voice. Indeed, the progress narrative of Fatma Aliye’s growing and thriving self-expression has inspired several generations of readers over the past century or more,⁶ and it is hardly in need of a corrective.

At the same time, however, this progress narrative is not the only story to draw from her work, particularly now that her almost caricatured self-presentation as a turn-of-the-century New Woman has led many commentators to question her relevance to more recent feminist writing and activism.⁷ In this chapter, therefore, we’ll flip the progress narrative on its head to see what happens when we re-write her life as an exercise in translation, as a tale of fluctuating, rather than accumulating, degrees of authoritative speech. Can her feminism remain coherent having undergone such a shift? One way to answer this question is, despite its patriarchal overtones, to begin with her father and his Mecelle.

Ahmet Cevdet Pasha has already been the subject of several influential biographies of his own, and there’s no need to go into his background, family, education, successes, or failures. For the purposes of situating Fatma Aliye historically, it’s sufficient to note that Ahmet Cevdet’s legacy is a legacy of synthesis and codification. In response to a global trend toward uniform, bureaucratic transparency among increasingly capitalist, mass-democratic states in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Ahmet Cevdet spearheaded the codification of Islamic and European (primarily French) law for Ottoman use under the broader heading of traditional Ottoman-Islamic jurisprudence (or fiqh).⁸ The Mecelle represented a pinnacle of this process: a virtuoso blending of three of the four major schools of Sunni civil law operating alongside selected French norms, it both demarcated traditional modes of legal interpretation and codified them for the purposes of modern usage.⁹ Important for this summary, however, is the narrower point that Ahmet Cevdet’s contribution to Ottoman governance was to move it ever further in the direction of synthesis, unity, and top-down authority.

The classic interpretation of Fatma Aliye’s feminist consciousness implicitly and sometimes explicitly sets her up as a dutiful daughter who followed in Ahmet Cevdet’s footsteps.¹⁰ Indeed, she was lionized at the time she was writing by the pre-existing Ottoman-Turkish male literary establishment as much for her respectability and her sense of duty as she was for her writing talent, a legacy of intellectual, if not domestic, submission that hasn’t been missed by more recent critics of her work.¹¹ She too, so the story goes, sought synthesis, codification, unity, and authority for a patriarchal Ottoman ruling class: synthesis via her translational work, codification as she sketched for Ottoman literary consumption the ideal, educated modern girl-woman brimming with energy and self-respect, and unity in her labor for a charitable medical society that defined battlefields as spaces of uplift rather than as spaces of chaos, pain, or even military activity. The authority in this portrait of course goes without saying.¹²

The problem with this story is that respectability and uplift, though certainly admirable in their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century place, make late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist historians nervous. Hence, Fatma Aliye has received less attention in recent years as the Ottoman Empire’s first Turkish-language woman novelist than one might expect. No one goes so far as to make the implicit accusation explicit. Unlike Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Chapter 11), she has yet to be accused of strapping on a male member. But the hint of appropriated patriarchal authority in the name of her own personal aggrandizement, and especially at the expense of less talented, less respectable, less connected, and even less “Ottoman” or later “Turkish” women hovers insistently about her legacy.¹³ Recent historians have thus remained comparatively quiet about her life and work even as propagandists and ideologues have remained vocal. (Her image appears on the 50-lira Turkish banknote.¹⁴)

What happens, though, when we experiment with a relational, rather than authoritative, variation on feminist agency for Fatma Aliye? Might re-thinking her agency help to separate her from the respectability and self-importance that have tainted her work? And might she be, therefore, more than simply an energetic avatar of her overwhelmingly progressive father?

Figure 17.1 Fatma Aliye Topuz on the 50 lira Turkish banknote, 2009.

The most effective means of answering these questions is to return to her relationship to translation. Indeed, by privileging her role as a translator over her role as a self-expressive author writing in her “own” words, a different portrait of the Turkish language’s celebrated first woman novelist emerges. And in this alternative interpretation, Fatma Aliye’s work becomes less a means of fabricating a synthetic national whole within unquestioned, carefully patrolled borders and boundaries, less a means of policing respectable behavior and social conformity, and more a means of probing the permeability of the borders and boundaries themselves.

Moreover, her father in this alternative reading ceases to cast his patriarchal shadow. For, though Ahmet Cevdet himself may well have been an uncompromising Ottomanist, fantasizing about and attempting to sculpt a unified state within which a unified “Ottoman” population lived in peace and prosperity—whether they liked it or not—Fatma Aliye, as translator rather than author, leaves behind a more equivocal legacy. Indeed, from her literal translation of the initial French novel into Ottoman-Turkish, to her cultural translation of the popular global trope of the imperiled slave girl into the preferred protagonist of her own books and essays, to the civilizational translation of the Red Cross into the Red Crescent and back again, Fatma Aliye’s work can, provided that she’s read above all as a translator, be recuperated from the rhetorical wasteland that is feminine, rather than feminist, duty.

Let’s begin with her translation into Ottoman-Turkish of Georges Ohnet’s novel Volonté (or Will)—a bad novel by a bad author.¹⁵ It is, in fact, such a bad novel that one wonders how Fatma Aliye chose it as her initiating foray into the world of literature, when she could have taken any one of hundreds of other models of classical or modern French literary production to introduce to the Ottoman public sphere. And yet, she chose Ohnet, an author who was both derided at the time and remembered today, if at all, as an embarrassment to the French literary establishment.¹⁶

At the same time, however, Ohnet was wildly popular and financially successful during his lifetime. His books sold in the thousands, primarily to petty bourgeois women looking for simple, melodramatic adventures in which they could simultaneously recognize themselves and lose themselves.¹⁷ Moreover, he was a master of the French magazine serial, in which each installment ended with a cliffhanger, and in which each finished whole reinforced banal, conservative messages about the virtues of thrift and economy, the patriarchal family, sexual purity, and conjugal maternity.¹⁸ Mocked mercilessly by French artists and intellectuals of every stripe, held up as the personification of all that was wrong with the novel as a nineteenth-century form, Ohnet nonetheless raked in the royalties, more than content with his mediocre product and its financial compensations.

All of this, therefore, easily explains Ohnet’s own choices, and especially his refusal to improve his product. Critical praise is capricious; money is not. He’d made his decision, and he stuck with it.

But what about Fatma Aliye? Did she simply have bad taste? Was she, too, interested primarily in royalties? When questioned later in her life as to why she’d chosen Volonté rather than any other French novel to introduce into Ottoman society, she evaded the question by pointing, in an echo of Ohnet himself, to the commercial success of her translation among the Ottoman and then Turkish reading public.¹⁹ And, of course the serialized novel—faulted from its inception, from London to Paris to Istanbul to Beirut (Chapter 16) for its unwieldy form and, more so, for the fact that, generally speaking, women wrote serials for, generally speaking, other women, and were paid, generally speaking, by the word, making them financially independent businesswomen rather than praiseworthy, if dependent, artists²⁰—was Fatma Aliye’s own form too. She also preferred magazines.²¹

Figure 17.2 Cover of Debt of Hate by Georges Ohnet in Le Radical, 1891. Source: Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

Still, though, of all the French books by all the French authors in the world, she chose Volonté? She chose to spend hours and hours, days and days, in the intimate company of Georges Ohnet? It wasn’t even his most popular work.²²

But perhaps the literary quality of the work to be translated and the translation itself weren’t Fatma Aliye’s interest any more than the royalties were. Consider, after all, the agency of the translator. On the one hand, translation is, in the sense of perfectly rendering the meaning of one language in another, always doomed to failure—an aspect of the translator’s work that has been at the center of discussions in translation studies for decades.²³ The alien and foreign language can never be domesticated, which means in turn that the crossing of the linguistic border undertaken by the translator is necessarily always a work in progress.²⁴ It is never a completed act. And so, Fatma Aliye’s choice of a bad French novel to render into Ottoman-Turkish might thus be read as a quiet commentary on the similarly ambivalent overlap of colonial French and imperial Ottoman borders, linguistic as well as political, at the time.

On the other hand, however, initiating a translation likewise involves the translator claiming, at least at the outset, mastery of the language to be translated.²⁵ In the case of Fatma Aliye’s work, this language was, once again, French, the quintessential and hegemonic colonial language. Fatma Aliye, therefore, in the very act of translating Volonté, could also be read as usurping and conquering the language of colonial domination. She was not so much eliding her own voice in favor of the French male author’s, according to this interpretation, as she was appropriating the French male author’s as her own, dominating it, and disciplining it. Her choice of a bad novel by a bad author can thus be read as a decision to highlight an abject French form waiting to be conquered by an Ottoman-Turkish-speaking woman who knew the world better than the original author.

But this is a troubling attitude to assume on the part of any translator, even a quasi-colonized feminist one. And so, finally, if we want to be less dialectical about the uncomfortable relationship between translation and power, we might consider a third mode of linguistic agency in Fatma Aliye’s choice of Ohnet’s novel as her initiating foray into translation. According to this third variation on translational agency, the translator neither mourns the chaos of the necessarily failed linguistic crossing-over nor conquers the other language for her own purposes, but instead produces a cosmopolitan, de-territorialized linguistic space within which a new community of readers, neither purely French nor purely Ottoman-Turkish, might be formed.²⁶ This community, in turn, recognizes the impossibility of total uniformity as well as total mutual understanding, but the attempt to unite and to understand, though inadequate, nonetheless links it together.²⁷

According to this third mode of linguistic agency, the product delivered by Fatma Aliye reading Ohnet would be neither French nor Ottoman-Turkish, but both, and its readers would inhabit both French and Ottoman space, with neither dominating the other. Unlike the unified population imagined by her father, then, which was created, constructed, or coerced from above via legal codification, the community imaged by Fatma Aliye in this alternative interpretation of agency is open, fluid, and always in the process of emergence or becoming. It is, by definition, both incomplete and porous, a place for finding new meaning without erasing the remnants of the original meaning. In the same way that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (Chapter 11) introduction of Anatolian smallpox inoculation as much as her translation of Ottoman lyric poetry into English for consumption by cultural figures like Alexander Pope can be read, therefore, either as an exploitative act of appropriation or as an attempt to open up a de-territorialized, borderless space of emergent community—or as both at the same time—so too can Fatma Aliye’s translation of Volonté.

And indeed, these varied approaches to Fatma Aliye’s agency as translator and author can also help us to understand the anachronistically Gothic feel of a number of the tropes that appear in her own later novels. For though turn-of-the century New Woman literature as a global genre was never short on heroines overcoming extreme, and often repetitive, obstacles as they reached their moment of liberated empowerment, Fatma Aliye’s protagonists as well as her secondary characters faced odds that brought to mind more the eighteenth-century victims of Italian aristocrats in Ann Radcliffe’s stories than the spirited working women who inhabited the popular novels of the 1890s and 1900s.²⁸ The only significant difference between the eighteenth-century Gothic and what Fatma Aliye was producing, indeed, was that the reward at the end of her tales was appropriately modern—a salaried position as a schoolteacher, for example, or work as an enthusiastic amateur scientist, rather than the besotted lovers and husbands who awaited Radcliffe’s heroines.²⁹

Nonetheless, despite the modern rewards she offered her heroines, Fatma Aliye did retain an unhealthy fascination for the outmoded themes of slavery and submission in her writing, a fascination that she visited remorselessly and with more than a hint of sadism on those same heroines. Not only do her model women overcome lives of overwhelming servitude in their quest for usefully employed self-actualization, for example, but they often languish in this servitude under cruel and capricious masters and mistresses for most of the pages of all of her novels.³⁰ Some even die in servitude.³¹ In one surprising twist in her most famous novel of 1891–1892, Muhadarat (Disquisitions), the protagonist escapes her wicked stepmother by entering into a loveless yet rich marriage before, eventually, choosing to enslave herself and thus escape the marriage.³²

Moreover, this romanticization of the girl/woman-as-slave prior to a brief, final emancipation in the form of the girl/woman-as-employee has opened Fatma Aliye up to extensive scholarly criticism. Fatma Aliye was, after all, herself, privileged and connected. Her own multiple careers would have been impossible without several servants seeing to her domestic needs, women living lives of far less romantic servitude than she imagined for her heroines.³³ Her appropriation of the voice of the “slave” or “servant,” therefore, reads to many commentators as little different from, for example, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann’s (Chapter 15) Orientalist appropriation of the same.

But more than that, Fatma Aliye’s celebration of women’s education not only as a means of escaping slavery but, more so, as a means of fabricating an ever-broader reading public that would respond to her didactic literature by churning out likewise ever-more identical New Women whose highest ambition was to serve as honorable and respectable vestals of public institutions, has left some recent feminists cold. For this is an unapologetically authoritarian, rather than authoritative, project, not to mention more than a little self-aggrandizing. Yes, she rescued women, as she herself would have put it, from domesticity as the highest ideal. But at what cost?

Once again, however, if we re-imagine these novels as acts of translation rather than as acts of authority, their message and their relevance to Fatma Aliye’s life might become more palatable to contemporary audiences. This is because, as translations, the books can no longer claim to speak for—or to re-animate for didactic and entertainment purposes—actual slaves, servants, or women in servitude, any more than Ottoman-Turkish can be an actual substitute for French in her translation of Volonté. Rather, as translations, these works open up a space, a translational arena, within which a growing reading public might attempt to understand the problem of servitude, even as this attempt is doomed to failure. As translations, in other words, Fatma Aliye’s novels aren’t authoritarian lessons so much as they are invitations, welcoming rather than forcing readers into an emergent, rather than totalitarian, collective far removed from the monolithic polity produced, at least on paper, by her father.

It is, in fact, worth noting that the Ottoman-Turkish title Fatma Aliye chose for her translation of Volonté was Meram, a word much closer to “intention” than it is to “will.” Moreover, though Muhadarat has been translated as everything from “Memories” to “Useful Information,” to, again, “Disquisitions,” it might just as easily be rendered instead as “Discourses.” And this last title, perhaps, describes more accurately what it is: a linguistic field within which multiple modes of agency operate in the absence of a single, and single-minded, will—a cosmopolitan, de-territorialized, and borderless space of potential, but never actual, community and belonging.

But then, these interpretations of Fatma Aliye’s life and work are, themselves, suggestive rather than authoritative. And this is because she was, however we might re-think her agency, very much a strong, certain, strident, and self-expressive woman who made her voice heard. She almost certainly would have recognized herself as a woman with a Will rather than as a woman subject to Discourse.

Nonetheless, even as a reader imagines this more conventionally feminist Fatma Aliye marching toward the future alongside her equally certain first-wave global sisters, wearing the no-nonsense uniforms of the plucky reporter, the stern schoolteacher, the steadfast Red Crescent nurse, or the devoted suffragist, it’s worthwhile to spare a thought for her fragile and confused creations as well—her Fazılas and Fevkiyes, her Refets and Pirayes, and even her wicked Calibes. Undoubtedly, these characters would have appreciated their apotheosis into new womanhood, especially considering the alternatives open to them. But with a creator as severe as Fatma Aliye, one does wonder whether they might also have appreciated the possibility, at least, of lives less honorable and of worlds less stark. It’s impossible to know. And, of course, if anything is an act of unforgivable discursive violence, it is stealing an author’s characters away from her.

Notes

Johann Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 78.

Başak Deniz Özdoğan, “In the Beginning Was ‘A Woman’: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2019): 55–72, 60.

Ebru Boyar, “The Public Presence and Political Visibility of Ottoman Women,” in Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, eds., Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016): 230–253, 242.

Serpil Çakır, “Fatma Aliye,” in Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006): 19–24, 19–20.

For an analysis of this literature, see Başak Deniz Özdoğan, “In the Beginning Was ‘A Woman’: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2019), 69.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 91–114, 103. See also Serpil Çakır, “Fatma Aliye,” in Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 24.

Or, as Çiğdem Oğuz writes with more nuance on the problem posed by New Womanhood in the late Ottoman context, “the late Ottoman feminist movement developed counter arguments against morality polemicists who argued that women’s involvement in public life would cause further moral decline and degeneration in society. However, resistance to the social norms did not mean a complete rejection of customs, traditions, mores, or religious norms. Many women embraced a certain level of compromise in principle in order not to attract harsh commentary leading to a total marginalization of the women’s movement and its principles. A distinctive feature of this accommodating attitude was the embrace of nationalism, through which women could emphasize the need for social reform in society that could feed all the political reforms that had been initiated at the time as well as those to be initiated in the future.” Çiğdem Oğuz, “‘The Homeland Will Not be Saved Merely by Chastity’: Women’s Agency, Nationalism, and Morality in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2) (Fall 2019): 91–111, 110–111.

Samy Ayoub, “The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State: Fashioning and Refashioning of Islamic Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2 (1) (Spring 2015): 121–146, 123–124.

Samy Ayoub, “The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State: Fashioning and Refashioning of Islamic Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2 (1) (Spring 2015), 126.

Nagihan Haliloğlu, “Translation as cultural negotiation: the case of Fatma Aliye,” in Gillian E. Dow, ed., Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers, 1700–1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007): 159–176, 168.

Başak Deniz Özdoğan, “In the Beginning Was ‘A Woman’: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2019), 67–68.

As Deniz Kandiyoti notes, the “longest lived women’s weekly of the time … to which Fatma Aliye Hanım was an important contributor, proclaimed on its title page that it served three principles: being a good mother, a good wife, and a good Muslim.” Deniz Kandiyoti, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991): 22–47, 27.

Senem Timuroğlu, “Women’s Nations from Ottoman to the New Republic in Fatma Aliye and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Writing,” in Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Suzan van Dijk, eds., Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014): 431–450, 441–442.

Senem Timuroğlu, “Women’s Nations from Ottoman to the New Republic in Fatma Aliye and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Writing,” in Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Suzan van Dijk, eds., Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 433.

Criticized for “his heavy, colourless sentences, his pompous morality … and absurdly trite psychology.” Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 38. See also Johann Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 79.

Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 39; Johann Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 79.

Leading to his “noisy and persistent success.” Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 39.

Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 38.

Johann Strauss, “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 78.

Diana Holmes, Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 40.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 105.

An argument can be convincingly made that she chose it specifically for the “absurdly trite psychology,” which would be easier to translate across cultures than a more sophisticated world view. Nagihan Haliloğlu, “Translation as cultural negotiation: the case of Fatma Aliye,” in Gillian E. Dow, ed., Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers, 1700–1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 167.

Brian James Baer, “From Cultural Translation to Untranslatability,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 40 (2020): 139–163, 143–144.

Carolyn Shread and Louis von Flotow, “Metramorphosis in Translation: Refiguring the Intimacy of Translation Beyond the Metaphysics of Loss,” Signs 39 (2014): 592–596, 594.

On the problematic rhetoric of “mastery” over a language in a postcolonial context, see Jeanne Garane, “How Postcolonial Translation Theory Transforms Francophone African Studies,” The Comparatist 38 (October 2014): 188–205, 192. For an analysis of “mastery” over language in other contexts, see Harriet Hulme, Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation: Exploring the Works of Atxaga, Kundera, and Semprún (London: University College London Press, 2018), 248.

As discussed by, for example, Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe, “Translation: An Exercise in Midrashic Reading, or Translating the Intentio,” CR: The New Centennial Review 16 (1) (Spring 2016): 161–176, 170; and Harriet Hulme, Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation: Exploring the Works of Atxaga, Kundera, and Semprún (London: University College London Press, 2018), 248.

Harriet Hulme, Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation: Exploring the Works of Atxaga, Kundera, and Semprún (London: University College London Press, 2018), 248.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 104–105.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 107.

Ehud R. Toledano, “Late Ottoman Concepts of Slavery (1830s–1880s),” Poetics Today 14 (3) (Autumn 1993): 477–506, 499–500.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 108.

Elif Akşit, “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 108.

Deniz Kandiyoti, “Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades: Images of Women in the Turkish Novel,” Feminist Issues 8 (1) (1988): 35–50.

Selected Bibliography

Akşit, Elif. “Being a Girl in Ottoman Novels,” in Benjamin Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 91–114.

Akşit, Elif. “Fatma Aliye’s Stories: Ottoman Marriages Beyond the Harem,” Journal of Family History 35 (2010): 207–218.

Baer, Brian James. “From Cultural Translation to Untranslatability,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 40 (2020): 139–163.

Boyar, Ebru. “The Public Presence and Political Visibility of Ottoman Women,” in Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, eds., Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016): 230–253.

Boyar, Ebru and Kate Fleet. Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Çakır, Serpil. “Fatma Aliye,” in Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006): 19–24.

Direk, Zeynep. “Fatma Aliye Hanım: Gender Debates in Turkey,” Asiatische Studien 72 (2018): 693–716.

Frierson, Elizabeth B. “Women in Late Ottoman Intellectual History,” in Elisabeth Özdalga, ed., Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy (London: Routledge, 2005): 135–161.

Haliloğlu, Nagihan. “Translation as cultural negotiation: the case of Fatma Aliye,” in Gillian E. Dow, ed., Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers, 1700–1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007): 159–176.

Holmes, Diana. Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).

Hulme, Harriet. Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation: Exploring the Works of Atxaga, Kundera, and Semprún (London: University College London Press, 2018).

Kandiyoti, Deniz, “End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism and Women in Turkey,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (London: Macmillan, 1991): 22–47.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades: Images of Women in the Turkish Novel,” Feminist Issues 8 (1) (1988): 35–50.

Oğuz, Çiğdem, “‘The Homeland Will Not be Saved Merely by Chastity’: Women’s Agency, Nationalism, and Morality in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2) (Fall 2019): 91–111.

Özdoğan, Başak Deniz. “In the Beginning Was ‘A Woman’: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6 (2019): 55–72.

Parker, Saliha. “Unmuffled Voices in the Shade and Beyond: Women’s Writing in Turkish,” in Helena Forsas-Scott, ed., Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1991): 270–300.

Safarian, Alexander. “On the History of Turkish Feminism,” Iran and the Caucasus 11 (2007): 141–151.

Shread, Carolyn and Louis von Flotow. “Metramorphosis in Translation: Refiguring the Intimacy of Translation Beyond the Metaphysics of Loss,” Signs 39 (2014): 592–596.

Strauss, Johann. “What Was (Really) Translated in the Ottoman Empire? Sleuthing Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Translated Literature,” in Marilyn Booth, ed., Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations Around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Timuroğlu, Senem. “Women’s Nations from Ottoman to the New Republic in Fatma Aliye and Halide Edip Adıvar’s Writing,” in Amelia Sanz, Francesca Scott, and Suzan van Dijk, eds., Women Telling Nations: Women Writers in History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014): 431–450.

Toledano, Ehud R. “Late Ottoman Concepts of Slavery (1830s–1880s),” Poetics Today 14 (3) (Autumn 1993): 477–506.

18 Zabel Yesayan (1878–1943) Genre-Defining Witness to the Armenian Genocide

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-23

An Armenian essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist, Zabel Yesayan chronicled both the early twentieth-century anti-Armenian atrocities undertaken by the Ottoman government and the 1915–1916 Armenian Genocide to which these atrocities gave rise.¹ By publishing both her personal accounts of the violence and the collected accounts of other Armenian refugees, she thereby became a key figure in the development of genocide testimony broadly defined, a genre that continues to influence the documentation of mass death today.² Yesayan, that is to say, was a woman whose writing not only shaped a critical historical moment, but who, herself, shaped the words of others into a format recognizable to a global audience.

And yet, as the preeminent representative of Armenian women’s writing during and after the First World War and its accompanying brutality, Yesayan occupies a difficult linguistic position. Taking genocide as her subject, and then developing a theory of Armenian women’s identity bound up in the history and memory of genocide, Yesayan made it her literary ambition to do the impossible: to find words to speak the unspeakable, and to develop a system of thought to think the unthinkable.³ This she did, however, with both courage and resourcefulness by crafting a vocabulary, if necessarily an imperfect one, that would be invoked by witnesses and survivors not only of the Armenian Genocide, but of similar crimes against humanity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.⁴ Her writing shaped both an Ottoman Empire dissolving into chaos and unprecedented violence and the emergent twentieth-century genre that became vitally necessary to expressing that violence. How did she get there?

Yesayan was born in Istanbul as Zabel Hovhannisian in 1878. Having graduated from Holy Cross primary school in the city, she escaped to Paris at the age of seventeen during the 1895 massacre of Ottoman Armenians that prefigured both the later extermination campaigns and the 1915 Genocide. Though living and studying in Paris had been common among Armenian men for generations, Yesayan was unusual as a female adjunct to the mostly male Armenian Sorbonne community. Indeed, she shared rooms with Russian women because there were no Armenian women students with whom she could live, and she worked in a French hospital, also among women, to support herself.⁵

Nonetheless, and despite her isolation, Yesayan flourished both academically and socially in Paris, even as she admitted in her journals that she frequently found herself reading French Romantic poets as her only company.⁶ She eventually completed degrees in literature and philosophy, and in 1900, she married the Ottoman-Armenian painter, Dikran Yesayan.⁷ In 1902, she returned to Istanbul with her son—leaving her husband and daughter behind in France—where she launched a productive and highly respected literary career.⁸

Figure 18.1 Zabel Yesayan as a young woman.

Given the trauma of 1895, Yesayan’s writing, even in the early days of her professional development, frequently took as its subject the painful process that was becoming, or living as, a woman in times of social and political turmoil. The articles and stories that she published in French and Armenian between her return to Istanbul and the beginning of the First World War, for example, often gravitated toward explorations of the tensions that exiled women in particular must navigate between cosmopolitan, or later diasporic, statelessness and rapidly weakening networks of local community bonds.⁹ Her early writing queries, in other words, the relationships and tensions between artistic production and social responsibility, as well as between private desire and public witnessing, in diaspora populations especially.¹⁰

Intriguingly, Yesayan’s early work also drew on the popular tropes of speculative or weird fiction to express the pain or dislocation involved in embodying such tensions. Women, she intimated via forays through Edgar Allen Poe as much as through Charles Baudelaire, were uniquely capable of narrating and witnessing both the violence of exile and the ruined architectures of belonging that accompanied this violence because, as women, they were already familiar with the psychic pressures that attend such narration.¹¹ By the late 1900s, many of her contemporary critics agreed that she had perfected this style.

In the year 1909, therefore, Yesayan took a decisive step further in her literary career. She began fieldwork on a project that would formalize not the fantastic or hallucinatory features of alienation writ large, but rather the fact-based art of testimony that would transform her into one of the most respected chroniclers of atrocity in the world.¹² She turned herself, in other words, into a witness as well as a writer.

Among the Ruins, the book that came out of this fieldwork, which she published in Istanbul in 1911, recounted her 1909 journey with the Armenian Patriarch’s Commission to Cilicia in the aftermath of the Adana massacres.¹³ The account became, and remains today, a case study in how to narrate mass death without sacrificing either sensitivity or a meticulous adherence to facts.¹⁴ Indeed, the juxtaposition of survivor interviews and personal impressions that characterized the volume not only became a hallmark of her increasingly acclaimed style, but has been imitated by countless subsequent writers on similar themes over the past hundred years or more.¹⁵

Figure 18.2 Displaced Armenian families in the courtyard of the German-Levant Cotton Company following the 1909 Adana massacres, 1909. Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

So influential was Among the Ruins, in fact, that some commentators have wondered why the more “psychological” works that Yesayan wrote at the end of her career, especially throughout the 1930s, shied away from the cutting prose and reportage style that she had perfected in her description of the Adana massacres.¹⁶ For her later work, though shot through with memories of atrocity, was more often than not allusive rather than testimonial, dwelling on discrete moments and episodes (the moment of deportation, the moment of a family member’s death) rather than on the more comprehensive catastrophe of a mass annihilation.¹⁷ The last of her novels don’t even reference mass death at all.¹⁸ Why would Yesayan have abandoned her influential position as a witness to state-facilitated extermination at the very moment it was becoming most necessary and relevant to a changing world?

One means of answering this question is to examine more closely how Yesayan’s own position as an Armenian writer changed between 1909 and 1916—and then into the 1920s. In 1909, when she began to write Among the Ruins, Yesayan could still position herself as the cool voice of reason, outside of events, narrating horrors that had happened to other people. By 1917, however, she herself was no different from those she had once been representing, a survivor—indeed a remnant—as well as a witness, and thus occupying a different and less secure speaking position. Moreover, this transformation of her voice across less than a decade was both rapid and jarring, leaving Yesayan off-balance even as she sought to regain in both her written and her political work a lost sense of communal belonging.

In the spring of 1915, for example, when the Ottoman government began targeting Armenian intellectuals for elimination, Yesayan was the only woman on the initial list of citizens to be arrested.¹⁹ When the police arrived at her home on the night of 23 April, however, she was visiting friends, and her family warned her via intermediaries not to return. She thus hid for many weeks in the city until eventually she managed to escape across the Bulgarian border using a false passport. There, she was reunited with her mother and her son, who had also fled Istanbul, and the three settled in the Caucasus. By 1917, when the extent of the Genocide’s devastation had become clear, she was working in Baku with refugees. Between the end of the war and 1919, she travelled with her son through Iran, Iraq, and Egypt until she could be re-united with her husband and daughter in Paris late in the year.²⁰

But Yesayan’s immersion in the atrocities as something more than an external witness, as an itinerant exile herself, didn’t end with the War. In 1920, as the slow process of post-war reconstruction began, she returned to Adana to work with survivors and to collect testimony to raise global awareness of the status of what was becoming the Armenian diaspora. Between 1917 and 1923, even as she lived without a permanent home, she published five books, both journalistic and fictional, on the events of 1915–1916, some in Armenian and some in European languages, while also serving as part of the Armenian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.²¹ All of these works expanded on the theme of women as witnesses to atrocity, exploring how women’s subjectivity becomes saturated by death and its memory.²² All of these works, moreover, further established Yesayan’s reputation as a writer distinctly attuned to the ongoing multigenerational trauma of mass violence within the diaspora communities that survive it. By 1923, she was in a position to begin lecturing on the subject at French Universities.²³

Figure 18.3 Zabel Yesayan with her family and the Armenian flag in Paris, 1918.

Nonetheless, the financial security of a post-war exile was fragile in the early 1920s, and when her husband died in 1921, Yesayan was hard-pressed to support her family in interwar Paris. Her situation became even more precarious in the early 1930s, and so, in 1933, she settled in Soviet Armenia, where she took a position teaching at Yerevan State University. But even there she wasn’t safe in her identity. In 1937, accused of ideological impurity by the Soviet authorities, she was arrested and imprisoned. She wrote letters to her family from prison for a few years until, in 1942, the letters ceased. Her biographers speculate that she died the same year.²⁴

It is worth pausing here, however, to dwell on the narrative voice that Yesayan crafted for herself in these final years of her life, a decade or more after the Genocide. For it is in these last works, despite the bafflement that they provoked in readers who wanted something journalistic from her, that she made her greatest contribution to the genre that was becoming genocide testimony. Yesayan’s elaboration over these years of a vocabulary of mass death that never mentions mass death, of words to commemorate but never to describe or represent the destruction of a people, would in fact be mobilized not only by Armenians, but by myriad other communities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries upon experiencing violence akin to the 1915–1916 atrocities. Yesayan, that is to say, conceived of a means of telling, finally, what could never be told. And in this way, she prefigured a long list of celebrated witnesses to genocide, crimes against humanity, and Catastrophe as diverse as Refaat Alareer, Louis MacNeice, and Farida Karodia.

Indeed, in 1935 Yesayan published what many consider to be her masterpiece, The Gardens of Silihdar. This is a story, however, not of violence, but of her happy childhood in Istanbul, the city that before 1915 had been a center of Armenian cultural and intellectual life.²⁵ And though it is true that many Armenian survivors published personal accounts of their early lives in Istanbul before the catastrophe that befell them, all of which can be read as acts of individualizing resistance against the dehumanizing history of genocide,²⁶ Yesayan’s work conjured up in particular the lively 1890s, a bright and brittle—if nonetheless violent—period that was obliterated by the grim devastation that followed in the early twentieth-century.

Moreover, in conjuring up this period, Yesayan deliberately worked against a political and historiographical process in Republican Turkey contemporary with her 1930s-era writing—the construction of a progress narrative of Turkish nationalism that took the tyrannical 1890s-era Sultan Abdülhamit II (Chapter 16) as its foil and then, via this laser-sharp focus on a single villain ruling over a singularly villainous time, erased any evidence either that Armenians had lived happily in Istanbul during his reign or that Turks collectively might be responsible for their disappearance.²⁷ She thereby undercut the formal act of forgetting that characterized Turkish cultural production throughout most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.²⁸

Yesayan’s memoir, in other words, preempted a response that remains common among spectators and perpetrators of mass death—a response in which spectators habituate themselves to descriptions of violence and in the process either forget it or explain it away, while perpetrators shift responsibility to a single scapegoat.²⁹ The Gardens of Silihdar, by refusing to describe the violence as violence at all, anticipated and nullified that response. Moreover, and as a result, the book also repositioned the memoir—the recording of the vibrant life that flourished before the act that can’t be spoken—as the quintessential model for later genocide narratives. The catastrophe hovers over the story, the reader is well aware of what is coming, but the moment is never recounted. And the power of this method of silent, shadowed testimony is incontrovertible: it consumes the audience without allowing it relief, without allowing the climactic moment of violence to be turned into a linguistic object open to domestication, internalization, or, for that matter, denial. The act of not speaking the events is itself what makes those events real and unassailable.

And again, this method of testimony has become common to narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first century atrocity across the globe.³⁰ Indeed, though it is true that reportage of the sort that Yesayan perfected in Among the Ruins is also prevalent, this journalistic style of witnessing operates more often in the realm of law, geopolitics, or diplomacy, where truth is derived from numbers and facts, and where subjective, lived experience is, at best, suspect. Outside of these specialized contexts, however, where collective memory is actually formulated, the coherence of genocide narratives rests instead on the tropes that Yesayan developed to survive her own experiences.³¹

First, she narrated the unthinkable horror of the event via allusive references to small moments rather than via sweeping gestures that might be challenged as too grand or too overwrought for “truth” by those who seek to forget. And then later, she abandoned even those fragmented references, witnessing the erasure of a people by speaking only of the ebullience and kindness of the community as it had flourished before. She thereby explicitly forestalled any move to turn this erasure into an object of analysis, of debate, or, again, of denial. She eluded in her late work the problem of who is allowed to be mediator and who is subject to mediation by immersing her speech and silence in the past, present, and future voices of the vanished community itself.

In this way, Yesayan’s memoir, as a genocide memoir, is the opposite of nostalgic or nationalist or manipulative. There is no yearning for the past, for the lost place, or for the imagined homeland. There is only the insistence that her audience feel the impending catastrophe and remember the future of the community that the violence erased. And it is this mourning for a lost future rather than for a lost past that has become a—if not the—defining characteristic of the memorialization of genocide. This characteristic of genocide testimony was invented, infused with life, by Zabel Yesayan.

Notes

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 196.

For the tension between Armenian survivors’ descriptions of what they called aghed, or the Catastrophe, and “the homogenizing, juridical logic” of Raphael Lemkin’s “genocide,” see David Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33 (3) (Fall 2011): 367–389, 374.

Michael Freeman, “Speaking about the Unspeakable: Genocide and Philosophy,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 8 (1) (1991): 3–17, 3.

Foreshadowing, for example, the work of Walter Benjamin on collective mourning. Helena Vilalta, “Empty Fields and Crying Stones,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 42 (Autumn/Winter 2016): 144–155, 154.

Elif Shafak, “Accelerating the Flow of Time: Soft Power and the Role of Intellectuals in Turkey,” World Literature Today 80 (1) (January-February 2006): 24–26, 25. Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 198.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 203.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023): 79–98, 89.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 196.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 203.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 203.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 203.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023), 89.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023), 89.

Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalism or Premeditated Continuum (London: Routledge, 2007), 54. David Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33 (3) (Fall 2011), 375.

Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalism or Premeditated Continuum (London: Routledge, 2007), 55.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 231–232.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 232.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 232.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023), 91.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 197.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023), 92–93.

Michelle Tusan, “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023), 93.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 198.

Victoria Rowe, A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003), 198.

Rubina Peroomian, Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (California: Scholar’s Press/UCLA Studies in Near Eastern Culture, 1993), 106–107.

Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339, 1330, 1339 note 76.

For an analysis of the global literature on Abdülhamit II’s tyranny and its relationship to memories of the lead up to the Armenian Genocide, see Henk de Smaele, “Covering the Ottoman Empire: Orientalism and the Mass Media,” in Houssine Alloul, Edhem Eldem, and Henk de Smaele, eds., To Kill a Sultan: A Transnational History of the Attempt on Abdülhamid II (1905) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 193–224, 217.

On collective forgetting in Turkey, see among others, Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 49; Seyhan Bayraktar, “The Politics of Denial and Recognition: Turkey, Armenia, and the EU,” in Alexis Demirdjian, ed., The Armenian Genocide Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 197–211; and Nikolaus Schrodt, Modern Turkey and the Armenian Genocide: An Argument About the Meaning of the Past (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 116–117, and passim.

For a discussion of more recent acts of “remembering” that also domesticate and neutralize the moment, see Hülya Adak, “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 123 (1) (January 2008): 20–26, 23.

For an analysis of this process, here with reference to Chinua Achebe and Nigeria, see Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, “Imagined nations and imaginary Nigeria: Chinua Achebe’s quest for a country,” in A. Dirk Moses and Lasse Heerten, eds., Postcolonial Conflict and the Question of Genocide: The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970 (London: Routledge, 2018), passim.

On mourning and genocide, see among others, Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate: Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9 (Fall 1997): 80–112, passim.

Selected Bibliography

Adak, Hülya. “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 123 (1) (January 2008): 20–26.

Akçam, Taner. From Empire to Republic: Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zoryan Institute, 2004).

Altınay, Ayşe Gül and Andrea Pető, eds. Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide, and Political Violence (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Bayraktar, Seyhan. “The Politics of Denial and Recognition: Turkey, Armenia, and the EU,” in Alexis Demirdjian, ed., The Armenian Genocide Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 197–211.

de Smaele, Henk. “Covering the Ottoman Empire: Orientalism and the Mass Media,” in Houssine Alloul, Edhem Eldem, and Henk de Smaele, eds., To Kill a Sultan: A Transnational History of the Attempt on Abdülhamid II (1905) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 193–224.

Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna. “Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide as a Gendered Event and Process,” New Perspectives on Turkey 53 (2015): 185–190.

Freeman, Michael. “Speaking about the Unspeakable: Genocide and Philosophy,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 8 (1) (1991): 3–17.

Göçek, Fatma Müge. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalism or Premeditated Continuum (London: Routledge, 2007).

Hovannisian, Richard G., ed. The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1986)

Kazanjian, David. “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33 (3) (Fall 2011): 367–389.

Korkmaz, Ayşenur. “At ‘Home’ Away from ‘Home’: The ex-Ottoman Armenian Refugees and the Limits of Belonging in Soviet Armenia,” Journal of Migration History 6 (2020): 129–150.

LaCapra, Dominick. “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate: Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9 (Fall 1997): 80–112.

Laycock, Jo. “Survivor or Soviet Stories? Repatriate Narratives in Armenian Histories, Memories and Identities,” History and Memory 28 (2016): 123–151.

Nichanian, Marc. “Zabel Yesayan, Woman and Witness, or the Truth of the Mask,” New Perspectives on Turkey 42 (2010): 31–53.

Ohanian, Daniel. “Collaboration in Ottoman Governance: The c. 1907 Imperial Census and the Armenian Apostolic Patriarchate of Istanbul,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4 (2017): 365–380.

Peroomian, Rubina. Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (California: Scholar’s Press/UCLA Studies in Near Eastern Culture, 1993).

Rowe, Victoria. “Armenian Writers and Women’s-Rights Discourse in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Constantinople,” Aspasia 2 (2008): 44–69.

Rowe, Victoria. A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, 1880–1922 (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2003).

Schrodt, Nikolaus. Modern Turkey and the Armenian Genocide: An Argument About the Meaning of the Past (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014).

Shafak, Elif. “Accelerating the Flow of Time: Soft Power and the Role of Intellectuals in Turkey,” World Literature Today 80 (1) (January-February 2006): 24–26.

Tachjian, Vahé. “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15 (2009): 60–80.

Tusan, Michelle. “The Armenian Genocide, Women Aid Workers, and World War I in the Middle East,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, eds., Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900–1950 (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2023): 79–98.

Vilalta, Helena. “Empty Fields and Crying Stones,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 42 (Autumn/Winter 2016): 144–155.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

Watenpaugh, Keith David. “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339.

Yesayan, Zabel. Gardens of Silihdar: A Memoir, trans. Jennifer Manoukian (Boston: AIWA Press, 2014).

Ziemer, Ulrike, ed. Women’s Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

19 Huda Sha’arawi (1879–1947) Charismatic Founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-24

Many of the women who appear in this collection left a legacy of personal charisma as vibrant as their legacies of buildings, hospitals, poetry, or politics. Huda Sha’arawi’s charismatic activism and the celebrated afterlife of her public persona, however, are intimately tied up in her cultural, social, and political work. Born to a wealthy and well-connected ruling family in the provincial Egyptian town of Minya, she received the cosmopolitan education common to aristocratic eastern Mediterranean and North African women at the end of the nineteenth century.¹ This education left her multilingual in Arabic, English, French, and Turkish, as well as familiar with the religious, cultural, and literary canons of each of these overlapping linguistic traditions.² It also meant that though she married at thirteen, she maintained her independence, continuing her studies and activism throughout her life.³

Sha’arawi has thus left to biographers a plethora of narratively useful texts and historical moments to chronicle, to celebrate, or in later years to question: poetry and memoirs, charitable organizations, a vocal advocacy of the rights that interested turn-of-the-twentieth-century feminists, the founding of a feminist journal, and the creation of the Egyptian Feminist Union, among others.⁴ All of these formed interlocking parts of Sha’arawi’s virtuoso self-fashioning.

The pinnacle of Sha’arawi’s feminist career in traditional Egyptian nationalist historiography, however, was her leadership of the March 1919 women’s protest against the British occupation of Egypt,⁵ which coincided not only with Halide Edip’s (Chapter 21) May 1919 protest of the British occupation of Istanbul but also with the Indian and Irish uprisings against British colonial excesses in their own cities.⁶ Indeed, Sha’arawi’s personal charisma and skill at anti-colonial mobilization have remained front and center of her legacy, so much so that they have helped to temper growing scholarly critiques of her less celebrated, more complicated, political commitments.

Figure 19.1 Huda Sha’arawi in her office, ca. 1900s.

For Sha’arawi, as a product of her time in the same way that Maryana Marrash (Chapter 16) and Fatma Aliye (Chapter 17) were products of theirs, was as invested in, for example, helping to turn hijab into a charged and ambivalent political signifier rather than a personal choice,⁷ or the value of a dialectic between “advanced” Western and “backward” Eastern countries,⁸ as she was in liberating her homeland. It is, however, her revolutionary activities against the brutality of British colonialism that continue to animate her popular memory. And so, it is her revolutionary activities that are the focus of this chapter.

There are many places to begin the story of the British colonization of Egypt, but the most useful for our purposes is nearly a century before Sha’arawi was born, with Mehmet Ali Pasha. The Albanian-born governor of the early nineteenth-century Ottoman province of Egypt, Mehmet Ali is credited in traditional Egyptian nationalist historiography with having invented the modern Egyptian state.⁹ An effective and energetic leader, he and his son, İbrahim, instituted a series of economic, bureaucratic, and military reforms in the province that eventually turned Egypt, as “Egypt,” into a viable potential nation-state capable not only of supporting itself economically within established, clear-cut borders, but of militarily taking on its nominal Ottoman rulers.¹⁰ Indeed, after marching on Istanbul in 1838—more than the Greek nationalists (Chapter 13) had accomplished in their own Revolution five years earlier—only the intervention of Britain and Russia together prevented what would have been the dissolution of the Ottoman state altogether.¹¹

Since Egypt, unlike Greece, was insufficiently Christian and European to serve as an object of humanitarian intervention (Chapter 13), however, Mehmet Ali’s project was quickly crushed. An 1838 treaty and 1841 convention following the battle saddled the Egyptian government with sufficient colonial baggage in the form of extraterritorial rights and economic concessions to prevent it from ever recovering its nineteenth-century independence or repeating its army’s march toward Istanbul.¹² Additionally, the treaty and convention detached Egypt from Ottoman administration in all but name, and thereby created one of the earliest of what would become many later nineteenth-century paradoxes of colonial international law.¹³ As of 1841, Egypt was simultaneously Ottoman, Egyptian, and British. It was also in a near perpetual state of quasi-legal emergency, a state that British administrators eventually formalized and put to use as they suppressed later, more emphatic, protests against their occupation.

Despite their straitened circumstances, however, Mehmet Ali’s dynasty ruled the province/colony/nation until 1953, in fact outlasting the Ottoman house.¹⁴ Moreover, throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Mehmet Ali’s descendants “governed” Egypt with the same energy, competence, and effectiveness that had characterized his earlier administration. In 1867, therefore, the Ottoman Sultan granted the title of khedive to İsmail (or the Sultan recognized the title—Mehmet Ali had taken it on himself earlier in the century), the current ruler of the territory.¹⁵ And though khedive is a difficult status to parse, in essence it meant that aside from an annual tribute paid to Istanbul, Egypt under İsmail was sovereign.¹⁶

Nevertheless, and important for our purposes, the Ottomans continued to imagine Egypt as “Ottoman,” while the Egyptian ruling class likewise drew heavily from the Ottoman imperial, rather than the Egyptian national, milieu. Sha’arawi’s mother, for example, was a Circassian-born Turkish speaker in the same way that Mehmet Ali himself had been an Albanian- or Macedonian-born Turkish speaker.¹⁷ The nation thus remained rhetorically multiple even as it fell further into an economic subjection that was extreme even by the extreme colonial standards of its day.

By 1876, the colonial drain on Egypt’s economy had become fatal, and the Egyptian government declared bankruptcy.¹⁸ In 1882, therefore, when Sha’arawi was three years old, the Egyptian middle classes and military leaders rose up against the khedive in an effort to force him to accept constitutional curbs on his power while limiting European interference in the administration of the state.¹⁹ The 1882 Urabi Movement or Uprising, so called because it was led by an officer named Ahmad Urabi, became, in turn, the justification for direct British intervention in Egypt. Declaring an official, if technically temporary, state of emergency that remained in place until the 1950s, and thereby once again initiating in Egypt what would become a global twentieth- and twenty-first-century trend toward open-ended, crisis-driven states of exception, the British occupied Egypt.²⁰

The space that was “Egypt,” especially in its relation to the Ottoman Empire, in this way took on yet one further incoherent dimension as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Now, Egypt was not only simultaneously Ottoman, Egyptian, and British, just as it had been before, but it was also simultaneously sovereign and colonized, simultaneously in crisis and well-ordered, simultaneously independent and protected, simultaneously defined by law and outside of the law. It was within this political, legal, and cultural environment that Sha’arawi passed her childhood.

When she was in her mid-twenties, the First World War erupted. In response, the British designated Egypt an official protectorate and in the process precipitated the post-war 1919 revolution during which Sha’arawi would make her name. For though the Ottoman government still imagined Egypt as “Ottoman,” ordinary Egyptians blamed the British, rather than the Ottomans, for the food-shortages, violence, and exploitation of resources and manpower that had afflicted them between 1914 and 1918.²¹ (In Syria, by contrast, the War-era shortages and destruction are still, today, called “The Great Famine” and associated with Ottoman Turkish tyranny and misrule.²²)

Moreover, though the misery of the War years had, not unexpectedly, primed the peasants and working classes of the protectorate to reject British colonial control, it was the unexpected, at least by British standards, entry of the Egyptian aristocracy and middle classes into the movement that created a unified revolutionary front.²³ Indeed, the catalyst for the revolution was not a material, working class betrayal, but instead an intellectual and political, middle class betrayal: first, the British rejected the aristocratic and bourgeois Egyptian nationalist movement’s demand that Egypt represent itself at the Paris Peace Conference.²⁴ And then second, more shocking to their bourgeois and aristocratic audience, the British administration arrested and deported Sa’ad Zaghlul, a close acquaintance of Sha’arawi, and the leader of the movement that had made this demand.²⁵

On the morning following Zaghlul’s arrest, therefore, the eighth of March, student protests engulfed Cairo. Though the British initially believed that these protests were limited to a few disaffected groups of elite intellectuals, when the unrest spread to the countryside and to the working-class sections of the city, where railways and telegraphs were attacked and dismantled, it became clear that the demonstrations were igniting a nation-wide revolution. And so, over the next month and a half, until the end of April, the British military and police responded with increasing aggression, firing into crowds, executing village leaders, and arresting hundreds of suspected instigators.²⁶

In the midst of this nation-wide protest, on the twentieth of March, Sha’arawi led the largest ever women’s demonstration against the British colonial state. Or, at least, according to her memoirs, she led the demonstration (she devotes four chapters to the revolution).²⁷ Front and center, spurring on the protesters, shouting “down with the despotic oppressors and down with occupation,” even taunting British soldiers to their faces, Sha’arawi conjured up around herself on that day an aura of Egyptian-ness explicitly backdropped by British imperial violence.²⁸ She does note briefly that Zaghlul’s wife was involved in the action too.²⁹ But this pro forma recognition is surprisingly minimal and de-centered, especially given what must have been his wife’s personal as well as political interest in the cause. The aura and charisma of the event, if Sha’arawi herself is to be believed, fell fully upon one person.

How, though, did this moment in Sha’arawi’s life, its repetition in her memoirs, its further polishing in commentaries on her memoirs, and then its representation in artistic and cinematic adaptations of these commentaries, shape Egypt as well as the Ottoman Empire? Where was Sha’arawi’s agency? The best place to begin answering these questions is in Sha’arawi’s physical placement within both the demonstration and the broader urban fabric of Cairo, which, by her own accounting, was as confused and multiple as the legal placement of Egypt within early twentieth-century colonial geopolitics.

First, for example, the young women Sha’arawi had single-handedly designated as the vanguard of the march, those holding the first banner, decided, once they’d begun walking, to move in the direction of Zaghlul’s nationalist headquarters rather than toward the American and French Embassies, where Sha’arawi had hoped to stage her demonstration.³⁰ Moreover, when Sha’arawi sent a colleague forward (meaning that she was at the back of the march at that point) to inform the younger women that they were going in the wrong direction, they defied her order to turn and continued to move toward Zaghlul’s building. Sha’arawi’s exegesis of this movement emphasizes her disappointment at the time. She’d intended the protest to be a spectacle for “a large number of foreigners,” whereas the women at the head of the march had apparently wanted to be seen by Egyptians instead.³¹ Unable to stop the thrust of the march once it had begun, she allowed the younger women to lead them toward what she believed was a less significant audience.

Upon reaching the nationalist headquarters, however, fortune favored Sha’arawi’s search for foreign onlookers, and the climax to the protest, the moment that made her legend, occurred. Encountering a detachment of British soldiers who blocked their path, Sha’arawi pushed to the front of the march, intending—it’s unclear what. But once she’d reached the first row of women, her decision was made. One of the soldiers aimed his rifle at her. She wanted to move even further forward, toward the rifle. But another woman took her arm and prevented her.³²

At this point, history was made. Sha’arawi turned to the woman restraining her and proclaimed, in English presumably, “let me advance, and Egypt will have another Miss Cavell today!”³³ The British soldier, having heard her words, lowered his weapon in shame.

Upon consideration, this moment strikes the uncharitable reader of her memoirs as an unusual act of interpellation. Sha’arawi, if her account is to be taken literally, chose to embody the protest, indeed to project the aura of a future Egyptian nation-state, by addressing a fellow demonstrator, another Egyptian woman, in English, for the benefit of a watching British soldier. One wonders what the woman holding her arm, the conduit through which Sha’arawi addressed Great Britain, thought of the moment. Or, for that matter, what did the women through whom she’d pushed forward to reach the front believe she was doing? Could they understand her? Did they care? Or were they worried more about Egypt’s future? Or even their own safety?

We don’t know. And, obviously, it doesn’t matter. The revolution was crystallized in that moment and for a century afterward in the Egyptian nationalist imagination.³⁴ The iconic standoff between the triumphant Sha’arawi and the shamed British soldier speaks for itself.

And this is as it should be. Charisma, always anti-rational and enthusiastic, has its own rules, and the logic of hairsplitting historical accuracy is not among them. Transforming present and future spaces into theatrical sets, as well as present and future crowds into audiences,³⁵ is what’s important to the charismatic process. It would be churlish, therefore, to question Sha’arawi’s accounting of herself. It would, moreover, be beyond churlish to raise an unnecessarily pointed question about, for example, Sha’arawi’s disgust with the rebelling peasants who attacked her aristocratic friends and their property in Minya at the same time that she was in Cairo interposing her body between the British rifles and the women populating her protest.³⁶ And it is certainly not helpful to wonder what motivated her to downplay in her memoirs the roles of the other women, including Zaghlul’s wife, who marched alongside her.

More important for rounding out this chapter, therefore, is to ask a very different question: how did Sha’arawi’s path through the streets of Cairo, how did her pushing to the front of the group of protesting women, shape the state that would become Egypt as much as it shaped the state that had once been, but was now no more, the Ottoman Empire? For this was a linked and twofold enterprise in which Sha’arawi was just as much of a central player as she claimed to be. She was, in fact, as she herself stated, “Miss Cavell.”

And who was “Miss Cavell”? Briefly, Edith Cavell was a globally renowned media celebrity at the time that Sha’arawi took up the revolutionary cause. A British nurse stationed in occupied Belgium during the War, she was executed by the German military in 1915 for the crime of smuggling British, French, and Belgian soldiers and civilians of military age over the border into the Netherlands, whence they returned to Britain to resume hostilities against Germany.³⁷ And to be clear: this activity was very much a crime against both early twentieth-century German and international law, in the same way that the German invasion of Belgium, technically, was not.³⁸

But Miss Cavell’s shameless breaking of local as well as international law was never at issue in her memory or in the history of her memory. On the contrary, more important than quibbles over law and legality were Cavell’s immediately recognizable personal charisma and the aura of nationhood that her martyrdom leant to oppressed Belgium. Upon her execution, Edith Cavell became one of the most iconic figures of War-era Entente propaganda, the personification, despite being English, of “Brave Little Belgium.”³⁹ Furthermore, this politically useful persona of hers, variously brave, serious, innocent, strong, whatever worked at the moment in the music halls, was repeatedly reinterpreted and appropriated over decades of British history, even as she herself was granted a day of commemoration in the Church of England’s calendar.⁴⁰

At the same time, however, even despite her early-twentieth-century celebrity, her role as metonym of metonyms, Edith Cavell does seem an unexpected figure for Sha’arawi to invoke at the moment of her exaltation. For though it’s true that the “Miss Cavell” confrontation retains its emotional force even now, a century later, when few remember who she was, it’s difficult to parse what Sha’arawi herself could have intended, in 1919, in crafting an association between her own desired, spectacular death and the British Cavell’s actual and likely not all that desired death.

Her message, true, might have been simple: tyranny, military brutality, and occupation are evils regardless of their perpetrators, and their perpetrators are always shamed in the end by the fractured women’s bodies that batter up against them. This is a trope as old as the saints among whom Cavell now resides. Frail, violated women’s bodies have always attracted an audience when juxtaposed against the menacing physicality of militarized state power.⁴¹

But more sophisticated than that, Sha’arawi was also making a comment in her choice of icons about how Egypt could, and would, become a space apart from Britain. For remember, the tension in the Edith Cavell story, and in the “Brave Little Belgium” story generally, was a tension between German legalism, on the one hand, and what all civilized not-German people knew, intuitively, despite the law, to be “right,” on the other. It was a tension between law and an aura of goodness and civilization.

Cavell, after all, did break the law, just as Belgium was open, according the 1899 Hague Convention, to a legally justified invasion. But the point of the propaganda surrounding Cavell’s death as well as Belgium’s occupation was that sometimes law must be ignored in the name of civilization, humanity, and, eventually, charismatic imagining.⁴² Cavell represented an attractively frail propriety that had been obliterated by an ugly and brutal legality. She thus moved the space of her execution, as well as the space that was “Belgium,” away from the realm of legal representation and into the realm of the evocative, alluring remainder.⁴³ Indeed she moved these quite literally into the realm of the evocative, alluring remainer given her prominent role in War-era music halls. Cavell, put bluntly, set an invincible precedent for throwing off law.

In this way, she was an ideal reference point for Sha’arawi. For more than anything else, as Egyptian observers had already noted time and again, British colonialism was a highly legalistic affair. Egypt’s entire history of occupation could, indeed, by 1919, have been read as a tale of cynical, predatory legalism, from the 1838/1841 treaty and convention that ended Mehmet Ali’s bid for economic and political independence all the way through to the later years of ever-broadening regimes of extraterritoriality.⁴⁴ And Sha’arawi was by no means the first Egyptian activist to intuit this situation.

The parallelism that she drew between herself and Cavell, therefore, was evocative not simply because both had died, or potentially died, fighting tyranny, but narrowly because both had redefined the fight against tyranny to be a charismatic rather than a legal affair. And the Egypt that Sha’arawi conjured up as she shamed the British soldier was thus likewise not a legal object, not an Egypt bound and oppressed by law, but a dynamic space of enthusiasm and faith, a space within which Egyptians, together, could project an aura rather than a statement of Egyptian-ness. As the British themselves had already made clear, the spectacularly legalistic Paris Peace Conference was a non-starter.

And so, it makes good sense that Sha’arawi recounted the path of the march through the streets of Cairo as a chaotic muddle. It was disjointed in her memoirs because it was meant to be disjointed. It failed to attract the attention of the foreigners waiting at the French and American Embassies because it was supposed to fail. And it ground to a halt in front of the building staffed by nationalists who, despite every incentive not to, continued to place their faith in law and legal solutions because it was meant to do so.

Sha’arawi was a talented writer. The confusion of the protest scene was deliberately set. For the spectacle that she was preserving for national consumption was not the spectacle of women taking to the streets in the name of legal unity. Far from it. The spectacle she was preserving was the spectacle of women blocked in the streets by law and then freed by their sui generis aura. The spectacle was, itself, a roving search for an audience. It was its own justification.

Figure 19.2 Huda Sha’arawi with Talaat Harb, founder of Banque Misr, 1933.

Moreover, this spectacle of a demonstration in search of an audience that Sha’arawi narrated, this gradual transformation of the streets of Cairo into theatrical rather than legal space, was not undertaken for the benefit of the ephemeral “large groups of foreigners” who may or may not have even understood it. It was staged instead for the imagined and infinitely extended community of spectators who were future Egyptians and future readers of her memoirs. Sha’arawi spoke, in English, through the Egyptian woman, and to the British soldier, not to communicate with the woman restraining her, not to communicate with the soldier, not even to communicate with the blocked demonstrators, but rather to conjure into being a potential audience displaced in time.⁴⁵ And this would be an audience that recognized Egypt, at the moment of her interpellation, not as a legally defined colonial object, but instead as an accumulation of associations, as an aura. As such, it would be a far more powerful Egypt than anything the British could administer, colonize, or oppress.

Thus, it is here that Sha’arawi’s revolutionary activities likewise shaped the Ottoman Empire. The shape they evoked, however, was not a state, a former state, or a failed state, but rather a colonial cautionary tale, a story of what happens when colonized populations place excessive faith in the European rule of law. For the Ottoman Empire, unlike what was becoming the nation-state of Egypt, was a state enmeshed in seven centuries’ worth of law. It was a space demonstrably incapable of freeing itself from the damaging constraints of what law had become under European colonial rule, no matter how much this law might be reformed or reinterpreted. And it was therefore, likewise demonstrably, doomed.

Indeed, Egypt’s endless, illogical “marriage,” so-called in much of the nationalist historiography, to the Ottoman Empire continued as it did only because neither could rid itself of the legal entanglements set up by European lawmakers that bound them together. Or, neither state could rid itself of its legal entanglements until women like Sha’arawi and Edith Cavell finally demonstrated the ethical potential—to some the disturbing ethical potential—of sloughing off law altogether. Sha’arawi, as much as other late-Ottoman citizens who witnessed the dissolution of Osman’s dream, participated in crafting a memory of Ottoman space as legal (and doomed) rather than charismatic (and emergent).

And all of this means, in turn, that the uncomfortably dated aspects of much of Sha’arawi’s feminist consciousness need not raise our contemporary hackles. The worrisome statements about hijab, the paternalistic attitude toward peasants, the fascination with supposedly European methods of women’s supposed empowerment—none of it carries normative, legal weight. And none of it is supposed to. Sha’arawi was crafting via these activities as well, via her questionable feminist interventions, a charismatic legend, an amalgam of haunting associations, an aura, not a prescriptive set of remedies. Did she really invoke Edith Cavell’s name, in English, to a British soldier aiming a rifle at her? Of course she did. Or perhaps she did not. It doesn’t matter.

Sha’arawi isn’t history. She is culture.

Notes

Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 7; Huda Sha’arawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), trans. Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1986), 4.

Huda Sha’arawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), trans. Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1986), 62–63.

Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 36. According to other accounts, she married at fourteen. Dina Heshmat, Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998): 53–82, 60.

Dina Heshmat, Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 11, 118; Basuli Deb, “Cutting across Imperial Feminisms toward Transnational Feminist Solidarities,” Meridians 13 (2) (2016): 164–188, 180.

For more on 1919 in British imperial history, see Noor-Aiman I. Khan, Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), passim.

Even as she shifted the discourse from “veiled” vs. “unveiled” to “modest” vs. “immodest.” Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 68. Or, alternatively, as she shifted the same discourse to a question of “concealment” rather than “covering.” Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 79.

Though usually only for rhetorical purposes during debates concerning, for example, women’s suffrage. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 215.

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1997, 2002), 1. Or, on his Macedonian descent, see Khaled Fahmy, Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (London: Oneworld, 2009).

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1997, 2002), 285–286. On the complex rhetoric of the “Egyptian nation” in this context, especially applied retroactively, see pp. 307–308.

Nadia Ramsis Farah, Egypt’s Political Economy: Power Relations in Development (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 27.

Nadia Ramsis Farah, Egypt’s Political Economy: Power Relations in Development (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2009), 27.

Brian Z. Tamanaha, Legal Pluralism Explained: History, Theory, Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 41.

Emilio Giuseppe Platti, “The Arab Revolutions and Islamic Civil Society,” in Erkan Toğuşlu and Johan Leman, eds., Modern Islamic Thinking and Activism: Dynamics in the West and in the Middle East (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014): 101–126, 108.

Adam Mestyan, Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 61.

Adam Mestyan, Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 61–62.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 80.

John P. Dunn, Khedive Ismail’s Army (London: Routledge, 2005), 78.

On the Ottoman response to 1882, see Selim Deringil, “The Ottoman Response to the Egyptian Crisis,” Middle Eastern Studies 24 (1) (January 1988): 3–24.

Sara Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 85, 99.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015): 249–267, 253.

Mustafa Aksakal, “The Ottoman Empire,” in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 459–478, 461–462.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015), 253.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015), 252.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015), 252.

James E. Kitchen, “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015), 252–253.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 68.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 71.

Basuli Deb, “Cutting across Imperial Feminisms toward Transnational Feminist Solidarities,” Meridians 13 (2) (2016), 180.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 71.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 72.

Basuli Deb, “Cutting across Imperial Feminisms toward Transnational Feminist Solidarities,” Meridians 13 (2) (2016), 180; Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 72; Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 67.

Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 67.

Dina Heshmat, Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 119.

Or, as Walter Benjamin puts it, to produce “a strange weave of space and time.” C. Stephen Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114 (2011): 17–34, 33.

Mohja Kahf, “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998), 70.

Ian F.W. Beckett, The Making of the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 91–92.

On the limitations of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Convention, and in particular the former’s “humanitarian shortcomings” with regard to the German invasion of Belgium—against the propaganda trope of the “scrap of paper”—see Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World,” The American Historical Review 102 (3) (June 1997): 714–747, 729–730.

Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World,” The American Historical Review 102 (3) (June 1997), 735.

Christine E. Hallet, Edith Cavell and her Legend (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 84, 105.

Nicoletta F. Gullace, “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World,” The American Historical Review 102 (3) (June 1997), passim.

C. Stephen Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114 (2011), 22.

C. Stephen Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114 (2011), 33.

Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Creating thereby, once again, Benjamin’s “strange weave of space and time.” C. Stephen Jaeger, “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114 (2011), 33.

Selected Bibliography

Anghie, Antony. Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Ayad, Nada. “Between Huda Sha’arawi’s Memoirs and Harem Years,” in Mohammed Albakry, ed., Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts, and Politics: Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017): 113–132.

Badran, Margot. “The Feminist Vision in the Writings of Three Turn-of-the-Century Egyptian Women,” Bulletin 15 (1988): 11–20.

Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Baron, Beth. Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

Deb, Basuli. “Cutting across Imperial Feminisms toward Transnational Feminist Solidarities,” Meridians 13 (2) (2016): 164–188.

Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 1997, 2002).

Fahmy, Khaled. Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (London: Oneworld, 2009).

Farah, Nadia Ramsis. Egypt’s Political Economy: Power Relations in Development (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2009).

Gullace, Nicoletta F. “Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World,” The American Historical Review 102 (3) (June 1997): 714–747.

Hallet, Christine E. Edith Cavell and her Legend (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Heshmat, Dina. Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Aura and Charisma: Two Useful Concepts in Critical Theory,” New German Critique 114 (2011): 17–34.

Kahf, Mohja. “Huda Sha’rawi’s ‘Mudhakkirati’: The Memoirs of the First Lady of Arab Modernity,” Arab Studies Quarterly 20 (1998): 53–82.

Kahf, Mohja. “Packaging ‘Huda’: Sha’rawi’s Memoirs in the United States Reception Environment,” in Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj, eds., Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (New York: Garland, 2000): 148–172.

Khan, Noor-Aiman I. Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Kitchen, James E. “Violence in Defence of Empire,” Journal of Modern European History 13 (2) (2015): 249–267.

Lanfranchi, Sania Sharawi. Casting off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

Melman, Billie. Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (New York: Routledge, 1998).

Mestyan, Adam. Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Quawas, Rula B. “‘A Sea Captain in Her Own Right’: Navigating the Feminist Thought of Huda Shaarawi,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8 (2006): 219–235.

Ramdani, Nabila. “Women in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution: From Feminist Awakening to Nationalist Political Activism,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 14 (2013): 39–52.

Reinkowski, Maurus. “Uncommunicative Communication: Competing Egyptian, Ottoman and British Imperial Ventures in 19th-Century Egypt,” Die Welt des Islams 54 (2014): 399–422.

Sha’arawi, Huda. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879–1924), trans. Margot Badran. (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1986).

Siegal, Mona L. Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Tamanaha, Brian Z. Legal Pluralism Explained: History, Theory, Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

20 Celile Hikmet (1880–1956) Subversive Modernist Painter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-25

Celile Hikmet had the questionable good fortune of being the daughter of one extraordinary man and the mother of a second. Her father, Hasan Enver Pasha, was the child of a Polish officer who had fled to the Ottoman Empire in 1848 and converted to Islam. A talented linguist, Hasan Enver traveled extensively in Asia and the Americas, developing an expertise in the analysis of sectarian uprisings, a skill set that benefited him, if more intellectually than ethically, when he served as an Ottoman General during the First World War.¹

Celile Hikmet’s son, Nazım Hikmet, was a globally celebrated avant-garde poet whose provocative verse left him imprisoned in Turkey and then on the run for decades across Europe and Asia.² His poetry, which, according to the indictment of the Turkish court that sentenced him, “incited rebellion,” as it was meant to, proved too much for both Turkey and its future NATO allies to stomach at the beginning and height of the Cold War. And so Nazım, like so many other poets who shook up the tightly controlled Western establishment in that period, fled to the Soviet Union, where he died of a heart attack five years before Sabiha Sertel (Chapter 24), who first published his poetry, died in the same place.³ There’s a Soviet-Russian postage stamp commemorating him.⁴

Celile herself painted. And though she never travelled in, variously, Cuba, Central Asia, or China to observe revolutions as her father had done, and she never became a rallying point for oppressed poets worldwide as her son would become, she was a good painter, a modernist who enjoyed a female nude. Was she fortunate in her family? She certainly benefitted from their influence and from an artistic education that wouldn’t have been available to less privileged women in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. And Nazım’s activities kept her name in the news even after her artistic career had faded. But then, not a single discussion of her work over the past century fails to refer to her as either Hasan Enver’s daughter or Nazım Hikmet’s mother, or both. She is, historically, a daughter and a mother before all else. And her work has been obscured, even obliterated, by the shadows cast by her acclaimed male relatives’ legacies.

This chapter will address Celile on her own terms, as a painter. Indeed, her career as a painter, rather than as a daughter or a mother, deserves a closer look than it has received in the scholarship on her family. This is not only because it influentially subverted and played with audience expectations of Ottoman and then Turkish Republican artistic themes, but more so because it made thinkable a new and provocative interpretation of what artistic life at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Republic could be.

Celile, for example, was concerned above all with how her paintings would interact with the work of other artists—past, present, and future, imperial as well as nationalist—rather than with how well they’d do on a bourgeois art market. She was thus emphatically uninterested in the marketability of her paintings, giving most of them away, while famously insisting that any recipient of the nudes or bath scenes display those scenes in their living rooms rather than in their bedrooms.⁵ She set out, in other words, self-consciously and from the very beginning of her career, to live a life of artistic integrity in turbulent, and frequently financially precarious, times. In the process she became, like Esma İbret (Chapter 14), something of an object lesson.

The lesson that Celile represented, however, was complicated, as much political and aesthetic as it was moral or ethical. Her life was a bright example of the revolutionary potential of creative productivity in a time of imperial dissolution followed by authoritarian state formation. And she responded to these provocations, if subtly, accordingly. But then, perhaps she could give a thought to these high flown issues because, unlike Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (Chapter 15), whose artistic career might best be summarized as a frantic, lifelong attempt to appease a voracious consuming public by discarding artistic integrity altogether to pre-empt, predict, and respond to their desires, Celile never had to worry about supporting nine children. She could devote herself to her art and its interventions—and this she did with remarkable success.

Celile’s background was cosmopolitan, similar to the background of other bourgeois and aristocratic inhabitants of Ottoman metropolitan centers. Born in Salonica, where her father was stationed in the 1880s, she spent much of her childhood and young-adulthood in Istanbul, where she first studied painting with the Sultan Abdülhamit II’s court painter, Fausto Zonaro.⁶ At the age of 20, she married a diplomatic officer in Salonica, Hikmet Bey, with whom she had two children, including Nazım.⁷ In 1917, in the midst of the War, a decade after Fausto Zonaro, along with his patron, Abdülhamit II, had been driven from the court, and the year after her first public exhibition at the inaugural Galatasaray Exhibitions⁸ (a professional milestone that receives almost no attention in stories of her life), she left her husband for the poet, Yahya Kemal. Yahya Kemal, in turn, rejected her.⁹

At this point, Celile’s story begins to take on shades of the Bloomsbury Group. Unhappy, or “desolate” according to the more romantic accounts, Celile left Istanbul for Paris. She then moved on to Rome and Berlin, where she studied painting formally, until she returned to the city to establish herself as an influential member of the new Turkish, rather than Ottoman, modernist movement. When her son began to draw undesirable political attention to himself, she increasingly devoted herself to managing him, and then later, to petitioning over thirteen years to have him released from prison.¹⁰ She died, blind, at the age of 76, in 1956.

Celile’s legacy, then, is a legacy not dissimilar to that of contemporaries like Vanessa Bell. And historians as well as art historians frequently dwell with more detail and prurience than is necessary on her artistic lifestyle without giving due attention to her actual art.¹¹ Here, however, we’ll begin once again to tip the balance back in favor of her work.

And so, the first point to note in this sketch of Celile’s professional life is that she began to flourish artistically relatively late. It was only after her divorce that she came into her own, her productivity growing as the Empire collapsed around her and as the Republic that would inspire and ruin her son materialized in its place.¹² But her subjects, despite the political turbulence in which they were created, were subdued. According to many critics, they were deceptively subdued. She painted, for example, portraits, still lifes, fruit, and flowers. Her media were usually oil, charcoal, watercolor, and pastel.¹³ And then, on top of all the rest, she had a penchant for nudes. These were quiet nudes, true. But they were nonetheless nudes.¹⁴ And it is this theme that will concern us throughout the rest of the chapter.

For, unlike Jerichau-Baumann’s facile and commercial appropriation of the Orientalist nude theme, Celile was doing something different and transformative with her bath scenes, something that inhered more in her technique than in her identity, and something that, according to both contemporary and later commentators, sabotaged rather than reinforcing the conventional power relations among clothed painter, clothed audience, and unclothed subject. Indeed, her playful reinterpretation of the Orientalist nude recast the voice of the bathing woman depicted on paper or canvas as one of many voices joining together in a collective, and powerful, variation on artistic and political life. She never silenced or caricatured her nude women. And thus she left the pornographic world of Jerichau-Baumann and her colleagues far behind.

Consider, for example, the well-established contours of the Orientalist and misogynist tradition that Celile was exploding in her work: the classic philosophical argument concerning the objectifying gaze that silences and dehumanizes the female nude—whether in the paintings of, say, Jan-Baptist Huysmans or in the paintings of, say, Edgar Degas—is that this gaze places the partially clothed or entirely unclothed female in a necessarily sexualized position.¹⁵ Given the uncompromising, if invisible, presence of the gaze in the story that the painting tells, the nude has two options. It’s possible that she is aware that she’s being watched—Huysmans’ hamam and harem paintings, with their performative props like musical instruments, textiles, and mirrors—in which case she is, by nineteenth-century bourgeois standards, a tawdry, amoral seductress, deserving of objectification.¹⁶ Or alternatively, she may be unaware that she is being watched—Degas’ paintings of solitary bathers—in which case she is the vulnerable, and thus eroticized, victim of an intrusion over which she has no control.¹⁷ Whichever the case, the act of viewing the female nude necessarily leaves the painting’s audience, as much as its creator, complicit in a sexualized violence that is impossible to detach from the scene the painter has set. In the end, we are all raping the nude.

Moreover, if the nude’s painter was a woman, she wasn’t absolved of complicity in this act of violence. Quite the opposite, nineteenth-century woman painters of female nudes were, according to this trend in scholarship, hijacking the male heterosexual gaze for their own self-aggrandizement—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Chapter 11) strapping on the male member—and thereby reifying the violence against them. Women participants in the objectification of the female nude were, indeed, almost worse than their male counterparts, parodying as they were what ought to have been a laudable search for agency and empowerment. And even had their intentions been pure, whatever non-exploitative appreciation of women’s embodiment may have animated their paintings was lost or made irrelevant, submerged as it was within a dominant masculine discourse that transformed women’s bodies into always potentially exposed targets of male sexual aggression.¹⁸

Again, this is the classic story of the objectifying gaze, which remained popular in scholarship throughout the end of the twentieth century. More recent work on the problem has stepped back from the notion that nudes were, given nineteenth-century socio-cultural frameworks, always necessarily exploitative. This scholarship has also questioned the related argument that everyone who came into contact with these works—the painter, the imagined viewer, the actual viewer, the curator of the museum displaying them—was, regardless of circumstances or background, occupying a male, heterosexual subject position.¹⁹

If nothing else, the totalizing implications of this classic scholarly work on the gaze posited what many have since described as a problematic situation in which it becomes philosophically impossible for a nineteenth-century painter ever to depict a solitary women who wasn’t being watched and violated, unless that woman was fully clothed. Disrobed solitude was beyond representation according to the logical conclusion of this school of thought. And so, by extension, a woman who failed to keep her clothing on was always the actual or potential victim of a voyeur. As several recent commentators have suggested, this attitude toward female nudity, as well as toward female chastity, raises more than one uncomfortable question about the nature of women’s sexual autonomy writ large.²⁰

But it is, nonetheless, at the intersection of the classic work on the Orientalist gaze and the more recent work that disputes it that Celile’s painting comes into its own. Celile, of course, was a twentieth-century painter, which means that she’s chronologically removed from the oeuvre that concerns much of the scholarship on this issue. She was also, however, very much a child of the nineteenth century, and it is her shift from a nineteenth- to a twentieth-century aesthetic, from an Ottoman to a Turkish artistic vocabulary, that leant her work its power.²¹ Or, put differently, it was very specifically Celile’s self-conscious reframing of exploitative nineteenth-century themes, like the nude woman in the bath, within twentieth-century modes of expression that positioned her as one of the most influential late Ottoman and early Turkish-Republican modernist painters in history.

Indeed, Celile didn’t even shy away from painting odalisques.²² But these odalisques are all, deliberately, a shade off, not quite right, often simply wrong, when observed closely or at length.²³ And more so, when she chose to, as she did in her influential 1940 “nude in the bath” (hamamda nü), she could rip apart the conventions altogether.²⁴ She was fully capable of more than sly subversion.

Indeed, Hamamda nü, like most of her other bath scenes, depicts, like so many paintings that came before it in the pornographic hamam genre, a naked woman, damp, her upper body twisted and partially exposed. But there is nothing about the woman’s body, pose, or accoutrements to mark her as exotic. She is ordinary and familiar, easily recognizable. Her comfortable familiarity is made only more conspicuous by the fact that the mirror, classic prop of the voyeuristic bath scene, which ordinarily reflects either the vanity of the seductress or the multiplied bodies of the victim replicated beyond her control, is almost entirely obscured Celile’s painting. What can be seen of it is opaque, reflecting nothing.²⁵

Defying the objectifying transformation of the reflected body in the bath into undifferentiated bodies in the bath, therefore, the mirror, as Celile has positioned it, is less important as a prop than the water overflowing and dribbling toward the bather is. And this is water, moreover, that is very clearly cold. Its coolness is evidenced not only by the cool palette of the painting, but also by the huddled position of the bather. The woman in the painting is shivering, as one does when exiting a bath—and the viewer is clearly meant to empathize with her.²⁶

Figure 20.1 Hamamda Nü (“Nude in the Bath”) by Celile Hikmet, 1940. Source: private collection.

It is this gesture toward empathy, toward understanding, that is key to Celile’s explosion of the nude-in-the-bath genre. Indeed, it is in this invitation to the viewer to understand the bather in all of her humanity, rather than to watch her as an unintelligible object of implicitly heterosexual male desire,²⁷ that Celile has effected her radical disruption of the traditional artistic trope. For she has structured the painting in such a way that its viewers can imagine the bather not only as a figure with a psychology as complex as their own, but also as a figure occupying a space of familiarity rather than exotic domination. She has invoked in this twentieth-century painting, in other words, the newly cinematic possibility of encouraging viewers to imagine themselves as participants in the scene rather than as the painter or voyeur looking on.²⁸

In the same way that spectators of cinema in the early twentieth century increasingly were encouraged to identify with the characters in the film they were watching rather than with the camera itself, that is to say, spectators of Celile’s bath paintings were likewise meant, for the first time in the history of the genre, to identify with the bather rather than with the artist. Moreover, by collapsing the exotic into the ordinary and the viewer into the subject, Celile blurred not only visual and cultural boundaries, but temporal ones, drawing together Ottoman and Turkish artistic conceits into a new and revolutionary style. Her quiet, simple paintings were in this way nearly as defiant—nearly as productive of revolutionary response—as her son’s overtly radical Marxist poetry.

And so, having invoked Nazım once again, it is worth concluding this chapter by exploring the connections between her quiet nude paintings and her son’s raw poetry. This is because Celile’s nudes, subtle as they may be, are children of the same cultural tensions that Nazım’s poetry became. They are shocking, disconcerting, in much the same way that his verses are.

For Nazım, like Celile, was both the beneficiary and the victim of an established Ottoman artistic vocabulary that by no means disappeared when the political borders of the Empire disintegrated. On the contrary, the pre-exiting Ottoman artistic establishment carried with them into the early Turkish Republic the same cultural capital that had sustained them throughout the waning decades of the Empire—a situation against which both Celile and Nazım chafed. And so Nazım, like Celile, gestured toward shedding that tradition even as he mourned its end. His avant-garde free verse bears little superficial resemblance to, for example, Mihri Hatun’s (Chapter 2) lyric poetry—and yet he can’t help reincorporating, sometimes explicitly so, the conventions that she represented into the radical style he was developing.²⁹

But most important, Nazım, like Celile, also sought to express the painfully visceral living conditions he witnessed around him in such a way that they would stimulate a revolutionary empathy on the part of his readers. His goal, like hers, was more than aesthetic appreciation. Like Celile, Nazım wanted to erase artistry from his art, he wanted break the formalism, but he wanted to do so specifically in order to create a bond not between audience and artist, but between audience and subject.³⁰

If a single theme ran throughout his writing, indeed, it was that the subjects of his poetry were subjects, not objects. And so, like Celile, he took themes that appeared to lend themselves to exploitation—contemptible and sometimes comically Orientalist themes—but then he reconfigured them into tales of release. He was a revolutionary, but a revolutionary always embedded, even in exile, in an Ottoman legacy, in Ottoman tropes, and in Ottoman expectations. It is worth noting that Halide Edip (Chapter 21), another inheritor or victim of an Ottoman legacy that simply wouldn’t die, helped him to flee Istanbul in 1921, during his first run-in with government authority.

But what does her son’s fate tell us about Celile’s art? It is, of course, a stretch to argue that Celile’s portraits, to say nothing of her fruit and flowers, were deliberately or even incidentally political in the way that Nazım’s dialectical materialism was. There’s no trace of Bertolt Brecht in Celile’s “nude in the bath.”³¹

And yet, consider the portrait that she painted of her son, her most famous work, though some might say only because of its subject. This portrait—Nazım in profile, wearing a blue laborer’s shirt, looking sternly away from the viewer—has seen more repetition and replication over the past several decades than even Jerichau-Baumann’s mermaid. It appears on banners, T-shirts, at the top of blogs—it both implicates and inspires its viewers.

Why? Because it, like the nude in the bath, encourages its audience to retain their own, idiosyncratic agency in the face of overwhelming material as well as discursive conditions. Because it offers its audience an alternative to taking on the tainted, sickened, and sickening agency of some imagined, abstract oppressor, an oppressor impossible to evade because it is always invisible and omnipresent. And finally because it, too, takes seriously the life of the artist—a life as much political as it is aesthetic. A revolutionary life. And above all, as Celile taught her audiences, a life that has moved beyond the gaze into something resembling collective empathy.

Figure 20.2 Portrait of Nazım Hikmet by Celile Hikmet, 1944. Source: private collection.

Notes

Jacob M. Landau, The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 43.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 20.

Louis Mitler, “Nazım Hikmet: Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Memoirist,” Insight Turkey 4 (2) (April-June 2002): 139–141, 139–140.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), cover art.

“Celile Hanım,” www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/celile_hanim_ (accessed May 20, 2024); Rafis Abazov, Culture and Customs of Turkey (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2009), 126.

Berke Inel and Burçak Inel, “Discovering the Missing Heroines: The Role of Women Painters in Early Modernist Art in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2002): 205–212, 208.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 20–22.

Tomur Atagök, Contemporary Women Artists/Çağlarboyu Anadolu’da kadın (Istanbul: T.C. Kültür Bakanlığı Anıtlar ve Müzeler Genel Müdürlüğü, 1993), 84.

Syed Tanvir Wasti, “Eight Months in the Life of Yahya Kemal,” Middle Eastern Studies 47 (1) (January 2011): 137–149, 147 note 19.

According to some accounts, she “wandered the bridges and highways with a sign around her neck that read, ‘I want my son back alive.’” Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, trans. David Selim Sayers and Evrim Emir-Sayers, ed. Tia O’Brien (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 234.

As Derya Kutsal notes, Celile’s artistic reputation as a woman artist, like the reputations of many of her contemporaries, has been sidelined not only to highlight her role as Nazım Hikmet’s mother, but to dwell on her “social circle” or her emotional reactions to social situations, in which she might be described as “sensitive” or “elegant,” rather than evaluated on the merit of her work. Derya Kutsal, “Cam Tavanlara Sıkıştırılmış Kadınlar,” MSGSÜ Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 28 (2023): 38–46, 45.

“Celile – 1,” Dünyalılar (October 28, 2013), www.dunyalilar.org/celile.html (accessed May 20, 2024).

Berke Inel and Burçak Inel, “Discovering the Missing Heroines: The Role of Women Painters in Early Modernist Art in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2002), 208.

Taha Toros, First Lady Artists of Turkey, trans. Adair Mill (Istanbul: Akbank, 1988), 26.

For an analysis of this wide-ranging literature, see Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010): 331–341, passim.

Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 337. See also Norma Broude, “Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: ‘The Young Spartans,’ the Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited,” The Art Bulletin 70 (4) (December 1988): 640–659, 653.

Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 337.

For a discussion of this trend in the literature, see Pamela Garrish Nunn, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (London: Routledge, 1995), 139–144.

Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 335–336.

Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 336–337.

“İlk Kadın Ressamlarımızdan Nazım Hikmet’in Annesi Celile Hikmet Hanım ve Kırık Bir Aşk Hikayesi,” http://lebriz.com/pages/lsd.aspx?articleID=380&sectionID=2&lang=TR&bhcp=1 (January 8, 2012). Accessed October 22, 2024.

For example, “Nü Kadın,” www.turelart.com/celile-hikmet-nu-kadin-tablo-tuyb-36x60cm (accessed May 20, 2024).

“İlk Kadın Ressamlarımızdan Nazım Hikmet’in Annesi Celile Hikmet Hanım ve Kırık Bir Aşk Hikayesi,” http://lebriz.com/pages/lsd.aspx?articleID=380&sectionID=2&lang=TR&bhcp=1 (January 8, 2012). Accessed October 22, 2024.

“Hamamda nü,” www.artnet.com/artists/celile-hikmet/hamamda-nü-2y-mz-ucDp0IvQL3fLJNmA2 (accessed May 20, 2024).

“Hamamda nü,” www.artnet.com/artists/celile-hikmet/hamamda-nü-2y-mz-ucDp0IvQL3fLJNmA2 (accessed May 20, 2024).

For more on empathy, as opposed to voyeurism, in the modernist tradition and its inheritors, across varied media, see Jean Arnaud and Molly Stevens, “Touching to See,” October 114 (Autumn 2005): 5–16, 14.

Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 337.

As Brown puts it, referencing Gregory Currie, “the argument that viewers imagine seeing the fictional events of a film from the point of view of the camera is a distinctive feature of classical film theory that overlooks the role of ‘impersonal imagining’ or seeing things from no person’s point of view in particular. According to Currie, what the viewer imagines when watching a film are the fictional events of the film rather than any perceptual relations between the viewer and those events … [I] think it is equally important [however] to acknowledge that certain works are structured so as to invite a different form of imagining on the part of the viewer. Currie does admit that [this is the case] …” Kathryn Brown, “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010), 338–339.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, “Nazım Hikmet and Ezra Pound: ‘To Confess Wrong without Losing Rightness,’” Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2010): 1–23, 7–8.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, “Nazım Hikmet and Ezra Pound: ‘To Confess Wrong without Losing Rightness,’” Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2010), 8.

Ela Gezen, “Convergent Realisms: Aras Ören, Nazim Hikmet, and Bertolt Brecht,” Colloquia Germanica 45 (3/4) (2012): 369–385.

Selected Bibliography

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. “Nazım Hikmet and Ezra Pound: ‘To Confess Wrong without Losing Rightness,’” Journal of Modern Literature 33 (2010): 1–23.

Broude, Norma. “Edgar Degas and French Feminism, ca. 1880: ‘The Young Spartans,’ the Brothel Monotypes, and the Bathers Revisited,” The Art Bulletin 70 (4) (December 1988): 640–659.

Brown, Kathryn. “The Aesthetics of Presence: Looking at Degas’s ‘Bathers,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4) (Fall 2010): 331–341.

Gezen, Ela. “Convergent Realisms: Aras Ören, Nazım Hikmet, and Bertolt Brecht,” Colloquia Germanica 45 (2012): 369–385.

Inel, Berke and Burçak Inel. “Discovering the Missing Heroines: The Role of Women Painters in Early Modernist Art in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2002): 205–212.

Köksal, Duygu. “Domesticating the Avant-Garde in a Nationalist Era: Aesthetic Modernism in 1930 Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey 52 (2015): 29–53.

Kutsal, Derya. “Cam Tavanlara Sıkıştırılmış Kadınlar,” MSGSÜ Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 28 (2023): 38–46.

Landau, Jacob M. The Politics of Pan-Islam: Ideology and Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Meyer, James H. Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Mitler, Louis. “Nazım Hikmet: Poet, Playwright, Novelist, Memoirist,” Insight Turkey 4 (2) (April-June 2002): 139–141.

Nunn, Pamela Garrish. Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (London: Routledge, 1995).

Öner, Sema. “The Students of Sanayi-i Nefise School and the Position of Women in the Turkish Society at the Beginning of 20th Century in View of New Documents,” Kadın/Woman 2000: Journal for Women’s Studies 4 (2003): 37–42.

Roberts, Mary. Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

Sertel, Sabiha. The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, eds. Trans. Evrim Emir-Sayers and David Selim Sayers. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019).

Seyhan, Azade. “Enduring Grief: Autobiography as ‘Poetry of Witness’ in the Work of Assia Djebar and Nazım Hikmet,” Comparative Literature Studies 40 (2003): 159–172.

Shaw, Wendy M. K. Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011a).

Shaw, Wendy M. K. “Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An ‘Innocent’ Modernism?” History of Photography 33 (2009): 80–93.

Shaw, Wendy M. K. “Where Did the Women Go?: Female Artists from the Ottoman Empire to the Early Years of the Turkish Republic,” Journal of Women’s History 23 (2011b): 13–37.

Toros, Taha. First Lady Artists of Turkey. Trans. Adair Mill. (Istanbul: Akbank, 1988).

Wasti, Syed Tanvir. “Eight Months in the Life of Yahya Kemal,” Middle Eastern Studies 47 (1) (January 2011): 137–149.

21 Halide Edip (1884–1964) The Turkish Republic’s Foremost Feminist

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-26

Halide Edip’s life so overshadows the history of late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican feminism that it’s difficult to extract a self-contained piece of her story to represent her work. A novelist, a nationalist, an activist, briefly a soldier, an education reformer, a bureaucrat, a University professor, and after a period of exile a parliamentarian in the newly established Turkish Republic, her career was, to say the least, various.¹ Here, we’ll focus on the time she spent in exile between 1926 and 1939, having criticized the post-World War I hero and inaugural president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (“Father Turk”), for what she believed was his authoritarian patriarchy.² Her story in exile indeed usefully exemplifies the tensions between Empire and nation-state, as well as between liberal feminism and the state-sponsored, authoritarian feminism, with which so many early twentieth-century women, Turkish and otherwise, contended.³

But is it not perverse to select as an example of Halide Edip’s shaping of the Ottoman Empire a period ten years after the death of that Empire and thousands of miles from its borders? Perhaps. An argument can be made, however, that her time in exile epitomizes more than any other time in her life the staying power—years, decades, and now a century after their dissolution—of Ottoman borders and boundaries in the popular and political imagination, if not in cartographic or geopolitical reality. Furthermore, her time in exile throws into sharp relief the role played by women in shaping these borders and boundaries. Halide Edip’s contribution to the tenacious, ghostly shape of the Ottoman Empire indeed might be best evoked via a return to her exile years, where and when the Ottoman Empire no longer existed.⁴

Figure 21.1 Halide Edip as a young woman.

And so, Halide Edip was born to a wealthy family closely attached to the Sultan Abdülhamit II’s court and also closely attached to what was by the 1880s a thriving and cosmopolitan Ottoman literary and intellectual milieu. Privately educated before her enrollment in the missionary-run American Girl’s College, which left her like Huda Sha’arawi (Chapter 19), trilingual in Arabic, English, and Turkish, she married her first husband, her former tutor, before the age of 20. She gave birth to two sons and then sued for divorce in her mid-twenties, when her husband wanted to take a second wife.⁵ At the end of the First World War, in 1918, she married a second time to Adnan Adıvar, a professor of medicine and the future Health Minister of the Turkish Republic. She herself worked during these years primarily as a literature professor at Istanbul University, but it was before that time, and especially during the First World War, that she honed her political consciousness.⁶

In large part, this is because the Ottoman Empire fought on the losing side of the War, which meant that following the armistice of 1918–1919, a punitive peace treaty similar to Versailles for Germany, Saint-Germain for Austria, Trianon for Hungary, and Neuilly for Bulgaria was designed for the Ottoman Empire. That treaty, Sèvres, was signed in 1920 by what remained of the Sultan’s government, and was in turn prefigured in 1919 by the Entente occupation of Istanbul and a British-backed Greek occupation of western Anatolia. Additionally, the leaders of Kurdish communities in southeastern Anatolia and what would become northern Iraq were given vague promises by Entente officials, with no material support, of an autonomous Kurdistan that would operate under international protection.⁷

When the Sultan accepted the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, the remnants of the Ottoman army in Anatolia gathered under the leadership of the former Ottoman General, Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, and defied the Istanbul government’s orders to demobilize.⁸ Between 1920 and 1923, the Ottoman, or now, proto-Turkish Republican, military pushed back against the shrunken borders of the Ottoman Empire that had been delineated by the drafters of Sèvres. Eventually, they established the Republic of Turkey within its current territory. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne made that territory formal.⁹

In traditional Turkish historiography, this period between 1920 and 1923 is called the “War of Independence,” or the “National Struggle.” In the historiography of other nation-states, as well as still stateless or diaspora groups such as the Kurds and the Armenians, it is called other things. “The Asia Minor Catastrophe” is among the least hyperbolic.¹⁰ And given the particularly graphic failure on the part of the League of Nations to force what it understood to be ancient cultural boundaries into conformity with both post-Sèvres and post-Lausanne political borders—the so-called “Population Exchange” between Greece and Turkey is only the most infamous example of this process—this moniker is not unwarranted.¹¹

What was Halide Edip doing throughout this period? First, like Fatma Aliye (Chapter 17), she worked for the Red Crescent between 1918 and 1919, organizing refugee relief and attempting to popularize Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination, going so far, indeed, as to advocate an American mandate for what remained of the Ottoman Empire.¹² Following the British-Greek entry into Izmir/Smyrna in Western Anatolia, however, her tone changed. In one of the iconic moments of her life, as well as the life of the early Turkish Republic, she gave an anti-colonial speech in the Sultanahmet neighborhood of Istanbul, similar to Sha’arawi’s speech in Cairo a few months earlier, to an audience of thousands protesting the occupation.¹³

When the mostly British Entente soldiers secured the city, she and her husband were thus forced to flee to Anatolia, where they joined Mustafa Kemal’s forces on the western front. There, Halide Edip acquitted herself well, becoming one of the popular heroes of the war, while also being sentenced to death in absentia by the Sultan’s government along with Mustafa Kemal and a handful of his closest confederates.¹⁴ She became, in short, a charismatic national and feminist champion in much the same way that Sha’arawi had become a charismatic national and feminist champion over the same period.

More important for our purposes, however, is that Halide Edip and Mustafa Kemal were allies in the early years, fellow heroic actors upon the early Turkish Republican stage. And yet, upon the formal establishment of Turkey in 1923, relations between the two began to sour. Unimpressed by the cult of personality that Atatürk had begun to erect around himself, and horrified by what she believed was a betrayal of a late Ottoman parliamentary legacy that could potentially lend itself to egalitarian ideals more effectively than the authoritarian ethnonationalist trappings of the early Republic, she and her husband formed an opposition party to counterbalance Atatürk’s own Republican Party.¹⁵ When that party was banned in 1925, and when Halide Edip herself became more vocal about Atatürk’s personal failings—referring to him as, among other things, both “hysterical” and “histrionic”—she and her husband left the country.¹⁶

The exile of Halide Edip and her husband, however, which lasted until 1939, the year after Atatürk’s death, has been described by most early historians of the period as, nonetheless, “self-imposed”—a characterization of her years away from Turkey read by later historians as a strategic or rhetorical move meant to smooth out the rough edges of her relationship with the founder of the country.¹⁷ By understanding her departure from Turkey as a choice, these chroniclers of the nation’s early history allowed for a more graceful recuperation of her memory into official historiography upon her return. Indeed, if her decade and a half away from her homeland was a product of caprice rather than coercion, then her work could be inserted into the national canon as the writing of an early and specifically Turkish author, an author capable of inspiring Republican schoolchildren, without raising uncomfortable questions.¹⁸

Leaving aside its strategic or rhetorical value, though, what does it mean to live in exile by choice? And more to the point, how did Halide Edip’s years in exile shape the spectral memory of the Ottoman Empire and its borders? To begin to answer these questions, it is worth emphasizing that Halide Edip was never, even at her most abject moments, politically or intellectually inactive. Between 1926 and 1939, she and her husband lived in Britain, France, India, and the United States—she spent the 1928–1929 academic year as a visiting professor at Columbia University—always working, always writing, and always representing, in the tortured way of the banished intellectual, both the dead Ottoman Empire and the living Turkey.¹⁹

She understood herself, in other words, always to be from the state that no longer existed even as she spoke for the state that endured. In a manner similar to other early twentieth-century exiles and refugees such as Vladimir Nabokov, who was always representing, despite himself, a despised Soviet Union even as he wrote in a manner that evoked the Russia that no longer existed, Halide Edip inhabited two mutually inconsistent worlds.²⁰ And it is, moreover, if paradoxically, her lasting contribution to the shape of the Ottoman Empire as well as to the shape of Turkey that she stubbornly resisted leaving either.

The problem with this interpretation of her life and work, however, is that conventional Turkish histories of the Republic, even today, frequently demand a stark divide between the moribund Empire that died in 1918 and the energetic Republic that was born in 1923. The Turkish Republic, according to official history, emerged ex nihilo following the trauma of Sèvres. And any lingering attachment to the dead Ottoman thing was cut off in the first decade of Republican policy making, up to and including linguistic or literary ties. (The official replacement of the Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet in 1928 was merely the most visible of these amputations.²¹)

All of this means that Halide Edip’s deliberate straddling of the two worlds, especially in exile, was at best a provocation, and at worst an implicit act of treason. She was, in these years, Turkey’s phantom limb, haunting, horrific, impossible to use, but also impossible to ignore. Moreover, the most prominent of the projects that she undertook during the exile years, the novel The Clown and His Daughter, merely accentuated her role, in banishment, in blurring the boundaries between Ottoman and Turkish identity. Indeed, the novel emphasizes at length her ongoing efforts to resuscitate Ottoman cultural if not political boundaries notwithstanding the death of the Ottoman state.²² And it is thus an excellent entry point into a final, sustained examination of what Halide Edip believed she was doing as both an Ottoman and a Turkish feminist.

Published first in English in 1935, and then a year later in a shorter Turkish version as Sinekli Bakkal,²³ or The Grocer of Sinekli, the story that became The Clown and His Daughter follows the life of Rabia, a musician, whose grandfather is an imam and whose father is a disgraced shadow puppeteer, the “clown” of the title. Set, like Zabel Yesayan’s Gardens of Silihdar (Chapter 18), in the 1880s during the reign of the Sultan Abdülhamit II, a period conventionally depicted as an era of unrelenting tyranny, it tells the story of Rabia’s coming of age. Rabia is raised first by her grandfather, when her father, the performer, is forced into exile by the Sultan. Later, when her chastened father returns, Rabia works for him as a grocer, until she meets an expatriate Italian Catholic—a lapsed monk. This final male figure she marries once he’s agreed to convert to Islam, and the story ends when their daughter is born in 1908, the year that the revolutionary Young Turks deposed the Sultan Abdülhamit II and inaugurated the second Ottoman Constitutional period.²⁴

Halide Edip’s most famous work, in other words, links in a far from subtle manner, the tyrannical banishment of the “clown” under the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II to her own likewise tyrannical banishment, as a “clown,” under the new President of the Republic.²⁵ More than that, though, the novel is also a virtuoso celebration of ineffectively erased borders and boundaries writ large. It dwells lovingly and at length, for example, not only on the self-evident permeability of all boundaries, national or otherwise, but also on boundaries as palimpsests that can and should be re-read, crossed, mocked, or even obliterated.

Rabia’s lover and husband, for instance, a convert just as Doña Gracia Mendes (Chapter 6) was a convert, becomes Muslim only partway through the story. But Halide Edip makes clear in her narrative that his conversion remains a process rather than a completed act. He is, and deliberately so, never fully Muslim.²⁶ And in this way, the border—here, the line between Christian and Muslim—exists, yes, but so too does the identity the convert wore in the past as well as the identity he will wear in the future. The convert is the border.

Moreover, and importantly, these are all sources of pride to the characters in the story. The latter identity can never be obliterated by the former, and it also shouldn’t be. The incomplete convert in this scenario is not a hypocrite or a failure, no more so than Doña Gracia was, so much as he is an inhabitant, like Halide Edip herself, of multiple, multidimensional worlds.

Similarly, the crime committed by Rabia’s father in his original role as shadow puppeteer, the act that leads to his exile, is his public performance dressed as a woman, which offends public morality.²⁷ The “clown” figure, in other words, whose life in exile most clearly reflects Halide Edip’s own fate, is ruined as a result of inhabiting multiple, fluid gender roles. And these fluid gender roles are in turn reflected in the multiplicity of professional occupations taken up by both father and daughter throughout the book. Rabia’s father begins as a cross-dressing shadow puppeteer and ends as a grocer, while Rabia herself is, variously, a musician, a religious adept, and also, in the end, a grocer.²⁸

Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that whereas the English, or “international,” edition of the book privileges the clown (The Clown and His Daughter), the Turkish, or “domestic,” edition privileges the grocer (The Grocer of Sinekli), a character who, once again deliberately, could be either Rabia or her father—another set of collapsed boundaries. Like Nabokov as well as Fatma Aliye (Chapter 17), Halide Edip was thus clearly aware of the productively confused and overlapping spaces opened up by the act of translation; in fact, she deliberately played with them. The Turkish editions of the books she initially composed in English are always different from the original text, usually shorter, and often cloaked and allusive.²⁹

And while it’s certainly possible to write off these changes between the English and Turkish editions of her works as a product of Halide Edip’s fear of offending Turkish sensibilities, especially following her return to the Republic in 1939,³⁰ a second and equally satisfying explanation is that she recognized the impossibility of writing identical work in two different languages. Perhaps she relished the discrepancies between or among her compositions. Perhaps, in fact, she sought out places where, once more, boundaries could be blurred and new communities could be conjured into being.³¹

Rabia’s own daughter, after all, who represents the climax of the action, is herself an explicit and again deliberate product of several confused boundaries: confused religious identity, confused national identity, confused gender identity, and confused professional identity. And then, once born, she’s likewise made synonymous with the 1908 Ottoman Constitution, a moment, in hindsight, as confusing as it was inspiring to figures like Halide Edip.³² As a contrivance of Halide Edip’s exile, that is to say, Rabia’s daughter, especially, embodies the lingering afterlife of fluid Ottoman, rather than static Turkish, borders, those borders initially dreamt up and disintegrated in the thirteenth century by Osman (Chapter 1), whose name Rabia’s (or is it Malhun’s?) husband takes upon his conversion.

But then, it is also worth noting that very few of Halide Edip’s Turkish Republican readers were impressed by her deliberate, if literary, muddling up of these borders. Indeed, when she was welcomed back into the Turkish literary and feminist canon in the middle of the twentieth century, it was under the tacit assumption that she would play her progressive-nationalist-modernist-activist-Turkish role properly. And, post-exile, she did play this role. Nonetheless, the hint of disreputable nostalgia, of not-modern or possibly even post-modern fractured subjectivity, of constantly erased borders and boundaries, continued to dog her life, just as they continue to dog her death. She rubbed people, Turkish and otherwise, the wrong way.

And so, it is perhaps no surprise that the monumental sculpture to her memory that the Turkish Women’s Association erected in the 1970s in Sultanahmet square, where she gave that famous protest speech in 1919, was destroyed by a bomb three days after its construction, never to be replaced.³³ But perhaps it is also appropriate that her legacy should end in a shattered, rather than permanent, monument. For permanent public monuments, dominating and surveilling monolithic public space, are for dictators like Atatürk, for those who establish and police uncontested, unquestioned borders. And though she was without question coopted into that process in the later years of her life, Halide Edip was never a perfectly comfortable fit for it.

Or, to put this point differently, Halide Edip’s memory is both less substantial and more enduring than a monument, exploded or otherwise. It inheres not in the ever-more-violent redrawing of cartographic or political lines, but in the confused identity of all the great-grandchildren or great- great-grandchildren of every former Ottoman citizen, of all the adolescents in former Ottoman lands who, despite a century of nationalist education, still don’t quite know who or what they are. It inheres in the subject always in the process of conversion, in the subject always undergoing not an abrupt turning away so much as a twisting in on him- or herself. And finally, it inheres in the border that simply won’t go away even as it eludes satisfying delineation, the border that Malhun/Rabia Hatun evoked in Osman’s Dream.

Notes

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 150–151. See also Suraiya Faroqhi, Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023), 149, who writes that living abroad likewise enhanced her reputation.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 150.

Bernadette Andrea, “Dialogism Between East and West: Halide Edib’s ‘Masks or Souls,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006): 5–21, 11–12.

See Hülya Adak for a discussion of exile, “globalism,” and modern Turkish literary production broadly defined. “Hülya Adak, “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 123 (2008): 20–26, passim.

Kristin Dickinson, DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811–1946 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 143–144.

Kristin Dickinson, DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811–1946 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 144. See also Neslihan G. Albay, The Anti-Imperialist and Nationalist Struggle of Halide Edib Adıvar and Lady Augusta Gregory (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 9, 151.

For more on the trauma of the Treaty of Sèvres in the Turkish national imagination, see among others, Emine Yeşim Bedlek, Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 127.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 46.

On the memory of both the Treaty of Sèvres and the Treaty of Lausanne in Turkish national historiography and memory, especially in relation to Armenian and other minority communities, see Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zoryan Institute, 2004), 180–181.

Emine Yeşim Bedlek, Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 23.

Emine Yeşim Bedlek, Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), passim. See also Keith Watenpaugh’s discussion of Halide Edip’s complicated role as a “relief worker” in the midst of these humanitarian disasters. Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339, 1331–1332.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 151.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 46; Kristin Dickinson, DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811–1946 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 144.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 150.

Albay, 104.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 279 note 31.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 151.

On Halide Edip’s rehabilitation throughout the 1940s and 1950s, especially, as a hero of Turkish nationalist historiography, see Emel Sönmez, “The Novelist Halide Edib Adıvar and Turkish Feminism,” Die Welt des Islams 14 (1973): 81–115, 83–86.

Bernadette Andrea, “Dialogism Between East and West: Halide Edib’s ‘Masks or Souls,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006), 17 note 1.

Didem Havlıoğlu, “The Writing Subjects: Halide Edip and Assia Djebar,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12 (2) (July 2016): 291–295, 293.

Halide Edip herself was opposed to this nationalist linguistic engineering. Adak, 25 note 13.

Bernadette Andrea, “Dialogism Between East and West: Halide Edib’s ‘Masks or Souls,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006), 7–8.

Mehtap Özdemir, “Self-Translation as Testimony: Halide Edib Rewrites The Turkish Ordeal,” in Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds., Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 71–92, 89–90.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 154–155.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 153.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 157.

Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 127.

While remaining spiritually and ethically “more or less the same throughout the novel.” The changes that ordinarily characterize the coming-of-age novel, in other words, never quite stick. Never turning fully away from one’s point of origin is the ideal. Meltem Gürle, “Hermits, Stoics, and Hysterics: Turkish Democracy and the Female Bildungsroman,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47 (1) (Spring 2014): 90–107, 93.

Mehtap Özdemir, “Self-Translation as Testimony: Halide Edib Rewrites The Turkish Ordeal,” in Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds., Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 90.

Or, as Özdemir puts it, as an “act of strategic self-censorship.” Mehtap Özdemir, “Self-Translation as Testimony: Halide Edib Rewrites The Turkish Ordeal,” in Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds., Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 90.

As Özdemir continues with specific reference to The Turkish Ordeal, “Edib’s self-translation process proves that resistance is a metonymic process, just as translation is. As her English self-translation re-enacts history, albeit in a different language, the official facts become translated by reaching a wider audience. Edib’s self-censorship is in this sense exemplary … merging self-narration with national history.” Mehtap Özdemir, “Self-Translation as Testimony: Halide Edib Rewrites The Turkish Ordeal,” in Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds., Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 90.

Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013), 157.

Emel Sönmez, “The Novelist Halide Edib Adıvar and Turkish Feminism,” Die Welt des Islams 14 (1973), 87–88.

Selected Bibliography

Adak, Hülya. “Exiles at Home: Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 123 (2008): 20–26.

Adıvar, Halide Edip. The Clown and His Daughter (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935).

Akçam, Taner. From Empire to Republic: Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London: Zoryan Institute, 2004).

Andrea, Bernadette. “Dialogism Between East and West: Halide Edib’s ‘Masks or Souls,’” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6 (2006): 5–21.

Bedlek, Emine Yeşim. Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey: Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016).

Dickinson, Kristin. DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811–1946 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021).

Faroqhi, Suraiya. Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023).

Findley, Carter V. Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789–2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Göknar, Erdağ. Orhan Pamuk, Secularism, and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London: Routledge, 2013a).

Göknar, Erdağ, “Reading Occupied Istanbul: Turkish Subject-Formation from Historical Trauma to Literary Trope,” Culture, Theory, and Critique 55 (2014): 321–341.

Göknar, Erdağ. Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Göknar, Erdağ. “Turkish-Islamic Feminism Confronts National Patriarchy: Halide Edib’s Divided Self,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9 (2013b): 32–57.

Göknar, Erdağ and Kent Schull, “Yasak/Banned from Sultan Abdülhamid II to President Erdoğan: Reappropriating the Past and Subjectivities of Censorship,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5 (2018): 9–12.

Gürle, Meltem. “Hermits, Stoics, and Hysterics: Turkish Democracy and the Female Bildungsroman,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47 (1) (Spring 2014): 90–107.

Havlıoğlu, Didem. “The Writing Subjects: Halide Edip and Assia Djebar,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12 (2016): 291–295.

Meyer, James H. Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Niyazioğlu, Aslı. Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer’s Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Özdemir, Mehtap. “Self-Translation as Testimony: Halide Edib Rewrites The Turkish Ordeal,” in Olga Castro, Sergi Mainer, and Svetlana Page, eds., Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 71–92.

Radakoff, Judith, ed. Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Sönmez, Emel. “The Novelist Halide Edib Adıvar and Turkish Feminism,” Die Welt des Islams 14 (1973): 81–115.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339.

Wirtz, Phillipp. Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies: Images of a Past World (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Part V The End Making Things Fall Apart

22 Sarah Aaronsohn (1890–1917) A Spy in the Levant

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-28

Sarah Aaronsohn was a famous spy, which is a term that made sense in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. The daughter of Zionists from Hungary who had founded an agricultural settlement near Haifa, she was political from and by birth, the embodiment of a radical and embattled cause. A few years into the First World War, when she came of age, she translated the latent politics that were her birthright into overt and deadly action.

Frustrated by the Ottoman government’s lack of support for Zionism, and troubled by what she had witnessed of the Armenian Genocide (Chapter 18), Aaronsohn left a disappointing marriage to a Jewish Bulgarian merchant in Istanbul to return to her family in Haifa.¹ Once home, she joined her brother’s British-supported, anti-Ottoman and anti-Palestinian spy network, NILI, in 1915.² Her brother, a botanist in the employ of local Ottoman authorities, was at liberty to travel throughout the region for his work, which aided him in gathering information. By 1917, however, Aaronsohn herself was leading the day-to-day activities of the network, displaying strategic capabilities that astonished her colonial handlers.³

As an Ottoman citizen, Aaronsohn was nominally an enemy combatant by British standards, and so she was never paid for her work.⁴ But she nonetheless became a central figure in British intelligence gathering across the eastern Mediterranean, with British officials at the time describing her as a “plucky” and “daring” supporter of their own people on the ground.⁵ In the way of famous spies of the twentieth century, however, she was eventually captured by Ottoman counter-intelligence. Tortured and interrogated, she finally tricked her Ottoman jailors into allowing her access to a pistol, with which she killed herself.⁶

Aaronsohn’s story is of interest to us here because of how it fared—like Elizabeth Báthory’s (Chapter 9) and Laskarina Bouboulina’s (Chapter 13)—in later years, and also because of the way, also like Bouboulina and Báthory, she carried death around with her. Indeed, rather than emphasizing Aaronsohn’s interpretation of Zionism, her political contacts, her remarkable family, or her organizational capacities, later Zionist propaganda celebrating her heroism, whether this appeared in women’s magazines, films, novels, or short stories,⁷ dwells at length and in detail on, above all, her torture and suicide.⁸

This chapter will do the same. But our interest here is less how her death and the deaths she caused place her among the legendary heroes of the Zionist myth, and more how the gendered assumptions underlying the trope of the passionate female spy—never willing to break, but always willing to bring about her own death and the death of others—shaped an Ottoman Empire on the edge of dissolution. Most important of all, we will explore how Aaronsohn herself reconfigured this trope for future use just before her glamorous and inspiring demise.

By October of 1917, the month of Aaronsohn’s capture, the British had declared Egypt a formal protectorate (Chapter 19) and were running their North African and eastern Mediterranean espionage networks from Cairo.⁹ Both errant and destructive gentleman-archaeologists of the Leonard Woolley type¹⁰ and attention-seeking exhibitionists of the T.E. Lawrence type¹¹ thus frequented Cairo with some regularity as they passed along useful information to those who took an interest. Aaronsohn’s brother, wandering botanist rather than wandering archaeologist or litterateur,¹² was among this group of informal assets. Indeed, though nominally the head of NILI, he spent most of his time in Cairo, leaving the daily running of the spy ring to his sister.¹³

Aaronsohn had thus, at the time of her capture, amassed a great deal of experience organizing her more than one hundred associates as they gathered information that she herself then collated and handed over to her counterparts aboard a British naval vessel that monthly appeared offshore.¹⁴ This information included intelligence on Ottoman and Palestinian water and road networks gathered by laborers, information on troop movements accumulated by agents embedded in the Ottoman and German militaries, specifications about German airborne technology illegally lifted from wounded pilots who were treated by NILI spy-physicians, maps of urban fortifications, and lists of potential sympathizers with both Zionist and British political commitments who were scattered throughout Syria.¹⁵ She also channeled thousands of dollars of American Zionist contributions into support for the spy ring.¹⁶ When German submarines made travel across the water to pass along information too dangerous, Aaronsohn and her colleagues likewise began to rely on carrier pigeons.¹⁷

Figure 22.1 Sarah Aaronsohn and Avshalom Feinberg, leaders of the NILI spy network, 1916.

The pigeons, however, would prove to be her downfall. In October of 1917, a confused specimen from their flock landed among enemy Ottoman pigeons rather than among its compatriots. The pigeons’ handler recognized the NILI pigeon as an outsider, and when its message was taken from its cylinder, Ottoman and German suspicions were confirmed.¹⁸ The code, a combination of superficial Hebrew, Aramaic, French, and English, proved that a spy ring was operative in the region.¹⁹ Once the code had been broken, the Ottomans picked up a member of NILI, who in turn pointed them to Aaronsohn’s settlement.

When the Ottoman authorities arrested Aaronsohn and several of her colleagues for interrogation, they focused on her, rather than on her male associates, as the most likely to supply them with information.²⁰ As the legend that grew up around this moment makes clear, they chose unwisely. For Aaronsohn refused to break, even under the most brutal of methods.

But then, the interrogation didn’t, according to this same legend, begin with brutality toward Aaronsohn herself. Rather, Aaronsohn’s interrogators attempted at first to take advantage of what at the time was understood to be a feminine vulnerability: family sentiment. In place of torturing her, they tortured her father, for days, beating him unconscious in front of her, expecting her to yield to their demands when love overwhelmed patriotism.²¹

Despite her father’s agony, however, Aaronsohn refused to talk. (This is heroic, remember.) After that, realizing that Aaronsohn possessed more self-control and masculine grit than they’d believed, and understanding that she could watch loved ones in pain with what looked like equanimity, they began to work on her instead. Days later, she still refused to talk, except to say that she wouldn’t talk. Finally, as the interrogation was reaching a stalemate, she convinced her jailors to grant her sufficient time alone to recover a pistol that she had planted earlier. Making use of the pistol, she shot herself in the mouth.²²

But her pain didn’t end with the gunshot. Unable to talk, but still capable of writing, she lingered on for five days, bleeding and crippled, composing a farewell letter that has become the stuff of Zionist folklore. She then managed, despite the presence of her inattentive Ottoman jailors, to sneak this letter to colleagues who remained free on the outside.²³ And it is this letter—blood-soaked, the product of unimaginable suffering, saturated with patriotic sentiment—that has always served as the starting point, rather than the ending point, of her heroic narrative.²⁴

For in the letter, Aaronsohn describes herself as a martyr and a warrior, affirms that she never begged for mercy from her captors, and states that there is no greater end than death, everyone’s death, for “the Nation.”²⁵ Moreover, her brother, when he learned of the slaughter of his family, added to the rhetoric of interrogation, death, and patriotism that Aaronsohn had established in her last days by writing that he too was filled with pride for the “exalted” “sacrifices” of his sister and father.²⁶ Nothing was better than death, anyone’s death, for the Zionist cause.

So, Aaronsohn’s brother was heroic as well. They were all heroic. Everyone involved in the story was a hero. The question that remains, however, is how Aaronsohn’s death, and in particular the memory of her death, shaped not only that tale of heroism, but also a dying Empire.

One means of getting at this problem is to compare the narrative of interrogation and patriotism that Aaronsohn elaborated—unusually while she was actually in the process of being questioned—to the already well-established narrative of interrogation as it developed during and after the First World War. For the genre, split cleanly in two by gender, had already given rise to several works and tropes by the time Aaronsohn was captured. Indeed, even as her memory was coalescing into the unshakeable propaganda edifice that it is today, the genre had become almost hackneyed.

In brief, Entente, and more particularly British (for Aaronsohn, despite her Ottoman citizenship, was an Entente, and more particularly a British, spy), propagandists divided male and female subjects of enemy interrogation into two fictive categories. The male subject was an eternally adolescent adventurer of the T.E. Lawrence or downed Royal Flying Corps sort, taken by the Ottomans or the Germans in a moment of dire bad luck, yet always retaining his good humor, even under the threat, and usually only under the threat, of an assortment of fates worse than death.²⁷ The most serious of these fates, unspoken but hanging in the air, was the potential shift from not-quite masculine adolescence to outright femininity.

Indeed, the homoeroticism of male-on-male First World War-era interrogation narratives has spawned a scholarly literature nearly as extensive as the original genre itself.²⁸ The large, sweating Ottoman officer leering at the disheveled public school boy, the equally large, leather-clad German slapping the face of the weakened and immobilized pilot who nonetheless retains his cheeky grin, these are images familiar to anyone with even a glancing exposure to early twentieth-century war- and espionage-literature. So well-worn have the themes become that nowadays they’re more often mobilized for the purposes of parody than as serious attempts to evoke a feeling of thrill or danger on the part of a consuming public.²⁹

The female subject of enemy interrogation was similarly eroticized, but in a different way. When they weren’t pure maidens of the Edith Cavell type (Chapter 19), female spies were encapsulated in the Mata Hari story. The classic First World War-era female subject of interrogation was thus a femme fatale, deploying her sexuality to corrupt the national identity of her targets and to confuse the loyalties of those around her. Indeed, the ultimate aim of her work, beyond spreading corruption and confusion, is rarely made clear. Often it isn’t even obvious which side is employing her.³⁰

And so, as a result, the interrogation of the female spy is personal and erotic in the same way that the interrogation of the male spy is. There is no coherent political objective to confess or to expose, only passionate personal connections. In the end, therefore, when the female spy is executed, unlike the male spy, who ordinarily makes a daring escape at the last moment, she is executed for her sexuality (or, again, as in the case of Edith Cavell, for her sexual purity) rather than for her politics. And this is because she has no politics.

Linking the two narratives, therefore, and important for understanding Aaronsohn’s contribution to the genre, is the emphasis on personal rather than political attachments. Both the male and the female subject of interrogation become heroic only via reference to the intense emotional relationships that develop between them and their interrogators.³¹ Their stories are stories of personal pain and of personal confession, or of the threat of personal pain and of the threat of personal confession—of, in short, narcissism and adventure. And as a result, the nation or state for which they are ostensibly working operates, at best, as a backdrop.

If there is love, it is love between people. If there is sex, it is also between people. If there is purity, that too is between people. And though the male British spy may make occasional references to King and Country, unlike the female spy, who has no country, only sexuality or purity, these references are abstract. Taking them seriously or insisting on them would be breach of good taste, a fate truly worse than death.

Aaronsohn, however, with her resistance, her refusal to break, her botched suicide, and her smuggled patriotic letter, undercut this well-worn genre. For key to the legend that grew up around her was its total rejection of personal eroticism of any sort, pure or impure.³² The props were there—Ottoman enforcers (presumably sweaty, it was October in the eastern Mediterranean), family connections, rumors that she had involved herself in relationships with at least two of her subordinates, meeting the British boat offshore under the absent light of a new moon. And yet, nothing came of them. The only personal moment is the torture of her father and, as Aaronsohn herself made clear, that was a non-starter. As a legendary subject of enemy interrogation, she was singularly bereft of personal sexuality.

Moreover, the oddly inert figure that Aaronsohn cut in the emergent Zionist myth was not the necessary outcome of the fact that she was more real than the cartoonishly sexualized figures who populated the already threadbare wartime spy genre. Not at all. In addition to Aaronsohn’s own story being almost comically unbelievable at several key moments, remember: Mata Hari was real; T.E. Lawrence was real; Edith Cavell was real. And they, or their memories, all adhered easily to the themes as they had already been established.

Aaronsohn, however, who was real or unreal in the same way that they were, and who is in fact more familiar to readers now as a hyperbolically intrepid character in the style of Bouboulina,³³ did not. And though there is no immediately obvious historical or narrative reason that her legend shouldn’t have followed the cues as they were given, it simply didn’t. On the contrary, Aaronsohn’s story took the eroticism and sexuality that framed the interrogation narrative in an entirely new, and as it turned out, influential direction.

The fact that the Aaronsohn-figure that was developed for national and international literary consumption was bereft of personal sexuality, after all, did not mean that she was bereft of sexuality altogether. Quite the opposite, there is an intense eroticism permeating her story, but this eroticism is always political rather than personal. Indeed, the Aaronsohn-figure as she lives on in Zionist propaganda makes this political eroticism overt in her replacement of the interrogator as the present, real, and physical participant in the potentially sexualized relationship, with the nation itself as the present, real, and physical participant in the now fully erotic relationship.³⁴

The love that Aaronsohn performed, that is to say, was a fanatical love solely for her future “nation.” It was a love so intense that she took explicit pleasure, as she explained in her letter, in the pain that it brought her.³⁵ She, indeed, took as much pleasure in losing herself to that pain as she and her brother did in annihilating their family as a “sacrifice” to it. Aaronsohn’s beloved, in short, could only be Zionism.

In this way, and importantly, Aaronsohn relegated her interrogators, alongside everything personal as well as political that they embodied, to the background. The Ottoman components of the story in fact became increasingly blurry and irrelevant as the Aaronsohn legend matured. And in the end, all the audience could see was Aaronsohn herself, alone, mobilizing a new kind of love appropriate to the genocidal twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the self-abnegating, sexual love of country, the erotic loss of the self within the nation.

Moreover, the repercussions of this inversion of the interrogation narrative echoed for years afterward, not only in the fate of Palestine and the formerly Ottoman Palestinians who were living there, but also in the twentieth-century development of the literary espionage genre. For first, and most obviously, Aaronsohn rescued the female spy from what had been her louche (or angelic) interwar literary prison. By eroticizing the relationship between tortured spy and nation, rather than between tortured spy and interrogator, or between tortured spy and likewise tortured lover (or father), she made the female subject of interrogation respectable. And this re-positioning of the female subject of interrogation would become important, politically as well as aesthetically, in later iterations of the genre during the Second World War as well as during post-war anti-colonial movements.

Neither a saint like Edith Cavell nor a demon like Mata Hari, Aaronsohn was an ordinary, courageous woman who was, nonetheless, passionately attached to her cause. Her love, safely contained within nationalist rhetoric, was thus a love to which all future citizens could aspire. Unlike the interesting women of the earlier espionage narratives who destroyed themselves to save another person, Aaronsohn and her legacy created a new category of admirable, rather than interesting, women who destroyed themselves to save their past, present, and future nation.

Additionally, though, and more important for our purposes, this erotic attachment to the nation that Aaronsohn made the centerpiece of her story, this relentless sidelining of anything Ottoman or Palestinian in the tale that she spun, set the groundwork for a Zionist myth of sui generis national birth that would have far-reaching consequences not only for the Ottman Empire, but over the ensuing post-Ottoman century. For unlike in, for example, the T.E. Lawrence-style colonial epic, where the “Turks” are always present, frequently excessively so, looming and leering over the hero’s prone body, in Aaronsohn’s narrative they’re always bizarrely absent. They don’t exist.

Where were they, for example, when she retrieved the gun? When she found herself writing tools and paper? When she was bleeding out and composing her letter? Smoking cigarettes outside? It’s difficult to know, but it’s also irrelevant to her self-narrative. Since there is no potential erotic relationship with the interrogators, they serve no purpose except to throw into relief her isolated love of country, her singular, self-contained, and narcissistic presence in the “land without a people.”³⁶

And it is here that Aaronsohn, like Bouboulina, shaped not only death, but a specific variation on Ottoman death. Whereas Bouboulina killed Ottoman sovereignty, however, Aaronsohn took the annihilation a step further by conjuring up a world in which the Ottoman Empire was so abstract and attenuated that, in the end, it had never existed to begin with. Bouboulina’s nationalism eradicated the conditions for Ottoman civilization; Aaronsohn’s nationalism eradicated the conditions for Ottoman history.

Or, put differently, the rhetoric surrounding Aaronsohn’s interrogation and suicide, in the way of Zionist rhetoric generally, posited the total non-existence of an Ottoman or Palestinian or even Arab past for the region. Its past could be only Zionist. Its future, likewise, could be only Zionist. Aaronsohn lived her life and died her death, even as she was spying on behalf of the British Empire against the very real Ottoman military in fanatically Zionist rather than Ottoman history. And according to this history, the Ottoman state, like the Ottoman interrogator, was nothing more than a distant, faded backdrop to the story. It was and always would be irrelevant.

This narrative turn, it needn’t be emphasized, is a relentlessly effective literary trick. For over the ensuing years, generations of Zionists then read a story of, in fact, a totally “empty” land. Aaronsohn was there. The nation, her lover, was there. The future state, its lover, was also there. But the Empire was gone. It had never existed. The Palestinians were gone. They had also never existed.

And all on account of one misguided pigeon.

Notes

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005): 451–466, 458.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 458.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005): 177–196, 187. See also Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 458.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 458.

Some suggest that the “S.A.” to whom T.E. Lawrence dedicated his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was Sarah Aaronsohn. Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 8.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005), 186.

For an analysis of this genre, see Rima Shikhmanter, “Heroes of Our Time: The Historical-Political Context of Devorah Omer’s Novels,” Israel Studies Review 32 (2) (Winter 2017): 110–125, 110–111.

Thereby, as Goldstone puts it, turning her into the “Jewish Joan of Arc.” Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 183. See also Rima Shikhmanter, “Heroes of Our Time: The Historical-Political Context of Devorah Omer’s Novels,” Israel Studies Review 32 (2) (Winter 2017), 111.

Gregory J. Wallace, The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and her NILI Spy Ring (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 103.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005), 180.

On methods of characterizing the “career” of T.E. Lawrence see, among many others, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 230, 245–247.

Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2008), 209.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 458–459.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 458–459.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005), 185–186.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 457; Gregory J. Wallace, The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and her NILI Spy Ring (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 13.

Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2008), 277.

Schmuel Katz, The Aaronsohn Saga (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007), 258.

Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Women Warriors in History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023), 304.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 459.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 459.

Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2008), 342; Gregory J. Wallace, The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and her NILI Spy Ring (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 231.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005), 186; Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 259.

Thereby, as Yael Feldman writes, shifting her into the “martyr” category over the ensuing decades of celebration. And yet, “to anyone familiar with Sarah Aaronsohn’s life nothing could be more ironic than the contrast between her self-perception as a modern national hero (m.!) and her being commemorated as a link in the chain of Jewish martyrdom.” Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 84.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 459.

Cecil Bloom, “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005), 186.

Within the narrower framework of the interrogation scene in the T.E. Lawrence story see Joseph A. Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2015), 456 note 97. For its cinematic representation, and in particular the “icy-feverish … Turkish bey who abuses the imprisoned Lawrence,” see Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (London: Routledge, 2002). On the homoerotic fantasy as “not simply bizarre variations on, but rather metonymic images of, the imperialist project,” see Elizabeth Gargano, “‘English Sheiks’ and Arab Stereotypes: E. M. Hull, T. E. Lawrence, and the Imperial Masquerade,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48 (2) (Summer 2006): 171–186, 185. And many more.

For an analysis of how this literature set the foundation for later variations on the spy genre, and especially James Bond’s overdetermined heterosexuality as a cipher for the ongoing “supreme test of will” that is “refusing homosexual desire,” see Matthew Bellamy, “Drone Masculinity: James Bond and the Cultural Discourse of Covert Action,” Studies in Popular Culture 41 (4) (Fall 2018): 128–161, 134–135.

Richard Barrios, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (London: Routledge, 2002).

See Tammy Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 126.

Sentimental attachments that were often cultivated by their handlers. Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 460.

Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 89.

And with the same heroically inspiring gender fluidity. Julie Grimmeisen, “Halutzah or Beauty Queen? National Images of Women in Early Israeli Society,” Israel Studies 20 (2) (Summer 2015): 27–52, 30.

Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 55.

Tammy M. Proctor, “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005), 459.

For more on the narcissism of the “land without a people” myth see, among many others, Ahmad Qabaha, “‘Owning one’s story is as important as the ownership of physical space’: An Interview with Susan Abulhawa,” Bethlehem University Journal 36 (2019): 133–139, 135.

Selected Bibliography

Ben-Bassat, Yuval and Dotan Halevy. “A Tale of Two Cities and One Telegram: The Ottoman Military Regime and the Population of Greater Syria During WWI,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2018): 212–230.

Bloom, Cecil. “Aaron Aaronsohn: Forgotten Man of History?” Jewish Historical Studies 40 (2005): 177–196.

Boone, Joseph A. The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2015).

Engle, Anita. The NILI Spies (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959).

Feldman, Yael. Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

Florence, Ronald. Lawrence and Aaronsohn: T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Gargano, Elizabeth. “‘English Sheiks’ and Arab Stereotypes: E. M. Hull, T. E. Lawrence, and the Imperial Masquerade,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 48 (2) (Summer 2006): 171–186.

Goldstone, Patricia. Aaronsohn’s Maps: The Man Who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East (New York: Harcourt, 2007).

Grimmeisen, Julie. “Halutzah or Beauty Queen? National Images of Women in Early Israeli Society,” Israel Studies 20 (2) (Summer 2015): 27–52.

Kaplan, Carola M. “Conquest as Literature, Literature as Conquest: T. E. Lawrence’s Artistic Campaign in Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37 (1995): 72–97.

Katz, Schmuel. The Aaronsohn Saga (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2007).

Owen, Roger. “British and French Military Intelligence in Syria and Palestine, 1914–1918: Myths and Reality,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38 (2011): 1–6.

Pile, Steve. “Spatialities of Skin: The Chafing of Skin, Ego and Second Skins in T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” Body & Society 17 (2011): 57–81.

Proctor, Tammy M. “Family Ties in the Making of Modern Intelligence,” Journal of Social History 39 (2005): 451–466.

Proctor, Tammy M. Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

Shikhmanter, Rima. “Heroes of Our Time: The Historical-Political Context of Devorah Omer’s Novels,” Israel Studies Review 32 (2) (Winter 2017): 110–125.

Shilo, Margalit. “The First World War: An Arena for the Empowerment of Women in the Jewish Community in Palestine,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 7 (2008): 1–15.

Srodes, James. Spies in Palestine: Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2016).

Tauber, Eliezer. “The Capture of the NILI Spies: The Turkish Version,” Intelligence and National Security 6 (1991): 701–710.

Verrier, Antony. Agents of Empire: Anglo-Zionist Intelligence Operations, 1915–1919 (London: Brassey’s, 1995).

Wallace, Gregory J. The Woman Who Fought an Empire: Sarah Aaronsohn and her NILI Spy Ring (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

23 Anastasia Golovina (1850–1933) and Safiye Ali (1894–1952) Medical Practitioners Across Borders

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-29

The inheritors of a long tradition of women medical practitioners and patrons in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, from midwives, healers, and abortionists to the wealthy founders of charitable hospitals, such as Hürrem Sultan (Chapter 5) and Nurbanu Sultan (Chapter 7), Anastasia Golovina and Safiye Ali are nonetheless distinctive in that they were among the first women in the Ottoman Empire formally trained as physicians.¹ And yet, neither is a central character in the field of Ottoman History per se. Golovina is instead a hero of Bulgarian national literature.² And Safiye Ali is a hero of Turkish national literature, closely tied to the authoritarian social engineering undertaken by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Chapter 21).³ Neither is thus an obvious candidate for inclusion in a collection framed by the geopolitical, cultural, legal, literary, or indeed scientific boundaries of the Ottoman state.

Our position in this chapter, however, is that a case can be made that despite the awkward fit across imperial and national narratives, each shaped the memory of Ottoman life as much as she shaped life within her respective nation state. Moreover, each understood the preservation of life to be an international, rather than national, aspiration, inseparable from international, rather than national, institutions. And each developed this influential attitude toward the preservation and protection of life across borders because of her Ottoman, rather than her Bulgarian or Turkish, background.

But even if the case can be made, is it appropriate to forge a connection between two such different women, from such different, often antagonistic, national traditions? And more to the point, what value can come of associating each with the confusion of her imperial past rather than with the freedom of her national future? One means of answering these questions is to return to the complex geopolitics out of which both of their celebrated stories were born.

Like A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya (Chapter 4), whose death coincided with a convenient moment of Ottoman territorial expansion, Golovina’s birth in 1850 overlapped with a convenient moment of Ottoman territorial contraction.⁴ Indeed, both her birth and death situate her, like A’isha al-Ba‘uniyya, squarely within both Ottoman and, in this case, Bulgarian geopolitical history. Golovina received her medical degree from the Sorbonne in 1878, the very year that Bulgaria became autonomous from Ottoman rule (complete independence wouldn’t come until 1908).⁵ And her professional development afterward as Bulgaria’s celebrated first modern female physician can in turn be read as a decades-long tale of crossing back and forth across imperial and national boundaries and mythologies. Her flourishing career of medical research and practice in fact becomes coherent only when situated within both Ottoman imperial and Bulgarian national history.

Safiye Ali’s navigation of Ottoman and post-Ottoman political myths and realities mirrored Golovina’s. After a childhood spent in Istanbul, she began her medical education in Germany in 1916, in the midst of the First World War.⁶ She then went on to treat wounded soldiers sent back from the Ottoman front before opening a clinic in Istanbul in 1922, in the midst of the city’s post-war Entente occupation.⁷ She eventually reached her apotheosis, like Halide Edip (Chapter 21), as an acclaimed feminist hero of Turkish national history, the Republic’s own first modern female physician, in the 1930s.⁸ Like Golovina’s, Safiye Ali’s professional identity was forged at the intersection of devastating imperial loss and questionable national belonging.

But Golovina and Safiye Ali were more than just passive receptacles of these conflicting imperial and national stories, shaped, whether they willed it or not, by political borders always on the move. On the contrary, both dedicated themselves self-consciously not only to their legacies, but also to safeguarding “life,” writ large, as an antidote to the geopolitical insecurity they had experienced. Having witnessed the pathology of life defined within a messy and dying imperial context, life loaded with seven centuries’ of ineradicable and damaging associations, they set out to redefine the concept as a cleanly biological object, divested of its political baggage, and thus open to flourishing within a new global environment.

To repeat, however, this interpretation of life as something discretely contained and manageable that nonetheless flourished both within and across borders was available to them only because of their respective experiences as Ottomans who were not-Ottomans, and then as Ottomans who became post-Ottomans. Moreover, this interpretation of how to preserve and nourish life also prefigured later global ideologies of medical care. Early adopters of the rhetoric of the physician as a figure who selflessly serves both national and international health, even when national and international health appear to conflict with one another, Golovina and Safiye Ali set the stage for a new sort of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of medicine. Having lived through the disheveled, overlapping, contradictory, and above all violent imperial and national histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were both in a good position to do so.

But how did they reach these similar conclusions despite their disparate backgrounds? It is useful, once again, to begin with Golovina. And so, Anastasia Golovina was born to Bulgarian parents and into a difficult childhood in Chişinău, in what is now Moldova.⁹ Her father died when she was eight years old, and she was forced to marry a Tsarist army officer at 16 when her family was unable to support her.¹⁰ Once married, she worked as a stenographer while preparing to apply to university. In 1872, at the age of 22, she enrolled in Medical School in Zurich, where, like Zabel Yesayan (Chapter 18), she gravitated toward the Russian expatriate community.¹¹

Also like Yesayan, Golovina became involved in Russian revolutionary student politics. Unlike Yesayan, however, she was unlucky. When compromising papers were found in her Zurich rooms, she was deported back to what was still nominally Ottoman Bulgaria.¹² After two further years of stenography, she was accepted to the Sorbonne’s Medical School in 1874. Four years later, in 1878, she defended her thesis, “A Histological Study of the Structure of the Arteries,” a provocatively unfeminine specialization. Her secondary field was psychology.¹³

Figure 23.1 Anastasia Golovina with fellow activists Zahari Stoyanov, Dimitar Rizov, and Aleksandar Golovin, 1885.

Upon completing her degree, Golovina returned to Bulgaria, where she worked in several state ministries and hospitals, at one point as head of psychiatry (“Chief of Staff of the Hospital for Mental Diseases”), taught, and continued to research and publish in the field of internal medicine.¹⁴ Her particular interest at this time was tuberculosis. And aside from a brief period in 1886–1887, when she was dismissed from a position in the city of Varna for ideological reasons, her career flourished uninterrupted.¹⁵ Indeed, so energetic did she remain in her pursuit of medical knowledge and in her devotion to medical practice, that in her early sixties, she served as a doctor on the front lines during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). In her late sixties she transitioned to working with soldiers and displaced people injured during the First World War.¹⁶

Throughout her life, Golovina thus acted as a self-aware model and mentor for other women aspiring to study medicine, especially in the face of a popular contempt for women physicians that was not only widespread, but frequently voiced officially in national newspapers.¹⁷ In the three decades following her initial foray into the field, her example in fact helped close to 600 Bulgarian women either complete medical degrees or formalize the training they had begun on their own.¹⁸ Moreover, the Bulgarian government, finally recognizing in the later years of her career the need to expand Bulgaria’s pool of well-educated citizen-physicians if it was going to meet the growing needs of an increasingly managed national population, began to support, rather than decry, the medical training of many of these women with state-sponsored scholarships.¹⁹ It was Golovina’s pioneering work in medicine that opened the field to the women who followed her.

Safiye Ali was born in 1894 to a wealthy and well-connected Istanbul family. She attended, like Halide Edip (Chapter 21), a girls’ school run by American missionaries, after which, in 1916, she enrolled in Medical School at Würzburg University in Germany.²⁰ Her studies there were, like Golovina’s, supported by a state-sponsored scholarship that in turn was part of an effort by Ottoman and German officials to encourage popular goodwill between the two countries. Safiye Ali represented her side of the exchange well, and she eventually completed a degree in gynecology and pediatrics with a thesis on “hemorrhagic meningitis in babies,”²¹ a useful but also more properly feminine course of study than Golovina’s.

Upon finishing her degree, Safiye Ali returned to Istanbul to put her expertise into practice. Four years after the armistice, in 1922, she opened a clinic along with her German husband in an Entente-occupied Istanbul that was neither fully Ottoman nor fully Turkish in order to care for women uprooted by war and genocide (Chapter 18), as well as weakened infants with no access to breast milk because their mothers were either dead or starving.²² This clinic, the “Milk Drop Branch of the Child Protection Agency,” was part of a worldwide effort to fight child mortality.²³ In 1923, the year of the founding of the Turkish Republic, she received her formal license to practice as a physician.²⁴ And at this point, history was made—indeed, one hundred years later, in 2023, a street in the German city of Dortmund was named after her.²⁵

Unlike Golovina, Safiye Ali didn’t pursue a research agenda, even as she delivered lectures at the Faculty of Medicine in the American College in Istanbul.²⁶ She did, though, make an effort as concerted and self-aware as Golovina’s to encourage other women to study medicine. A frequent attendant at the International Congress of Women Doctors from its inauguration in 1924,²⁷ she presented speeches to large audiences of women medical researchers and practitioners both about the ongoing fight against infant mortality²⁸ and, despite their obstacles, the progress enjoyed under Atatürk by Turkish women in the sciences.²⁹

Her emphasis in these speeches was, among other subjects, the duty of educated women to see to the health of children and their mothers in their respective nation states, and the importance of pressuring governments to reconfigure the societies they served to support children and women. Turkey, she argued further, was a model in this regard, and indeed Safiye Ali was vocal in her gratitude to the Gazi (that is, Atatürk), who was, she likewise stated, a monument to Eastern Women’s freedom, and whose personal sacrifices prevented the death of all of Turkey’s children.³⁰

So, Safiye Ali was something of a propagandist in addition to a physician. She carefully situated her medical practice within the authoritarian, state-sponsored feminism prefigured by women like Fatma Aliye (Chapter 17) and torturously negotiated by women like Halide Edip (Chapter 21). And in this way she does depart from Golovina’s less enthusiastic world of laboratories and scientific journals, despite suffering the same misogynists attacks on her practice from the male medical establishment that Golovina had.³¹ Indeed, while Golovina was painstakingly researching treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, Safiye Ali, if her speechifying is any indication, was dutifully parroting to international audiences the joys of living in newly Republican, if increasingly dictatorial, Turkey as a liberated, healthy young woman—even as she was gradually forced out of medical practice altogether.

Figure 23.2 Safiye Ali between the Balkan Wars and the First World War wearing a medal of the Ottoman Mecidiye Order.

Nonetheless, as much as Golovina and Safiye Ali differed in their ideological commitments, their national ties, their languages, their specialties, and even their generation (Golovina, remember, was in her forties when Safiye Ali was born), a thread does link the two. For in addition to the mythological role each played as their respective nations’ first female physician, each also interpreted the role of the physician to be a role both embedded in that national tradition and open to international influence. Each understood the preservation of life to be an activity that necessarily crossed borders even as it was ideally also protected by these borders. As much as they celebrated the cleanly delimited post-Ottoman nation state, the life that they served always exceeded in importance any single political act of delimiting.

Consider, for example, a passage in the British Medical Journal of February 1888, excerpted from the International Medical and Surgical Synopsis of September 1887 that was published in response to a note that Golovina had submitted on the use of picronitrate of ammonia in treating malaria:

In the Bulgarian Meditzinsko Spisanie, Nos. 31 and 33, 1887, Dr. A. Golovina, lady physician to the Varna Town Hospital, writes that, at the suggestion of Professor Fr. Goll. of Zurich, she tried picronitrate of ammonia, in 3-centigram pills, four times a day, in seven cases of malarial fever of quotidian type. In five the paroxysm ceased to recur (in one case from the second day of the picronitrate treatment, in three cases from the third day, and in one from the sixth). Three of the successful cases were of recent origin, and two fairly old. The quinine treatment had been previously tried in three of them (including the inveterate ones) without result. In a sixth patient, however—a lad with quotidian fever of two and a half months’ standing—a seven days’ course of the picronitrate utterly failed to arrest the paroxysms, the latter subsequently disappearing in two days under quinine (50 centigrams twice daily). The picronitrate apparently gave negative results also in Dr. Golovina’s seventh case. No unpleasant secondary effects were ever observed.³²

Setting aside the backhanded characterization of Golovina as a “lady physician” attached to the Varna Town Hospital, this is a remarkably cosmopolitan passage to appear in a nineteenth-century scientific publication, involving as it does a British journal citing a Bulgarian study written by a graduate of a French university who, in turn, is responding to the recommendations of a Swiss specialist. Moreover, the passage appeared in 1888, ten years after Bulgaria became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire, but twenty years before it became an independent nation state. Placing the passage into a coherent national or geopolitical context is an impossibility. Placing it temporally, even, is difficult, given the nature of the citations.

And yet, this is how Golovina’s identity as a physician developed. Her work, long before it sought to advance the content of the field of internal medicine, or even the health of the Bulgarian populous, was always prodding at the field’s national as well as international parameters. In addition to encouraging other women to become doctors, therefore, Golovina also helped to establish an international, rather than national, arena within which these women could flourish as doctors, whether Bulgarian or Ottoman, imperial, autonomous or independent. She imagined the life in which women-as-doctors intervened, that is to say, as an international process even as the multinational Ottoman Empire was giving way to hyperbolically unitary post-war nation states.

Safiye Ali, despite the euphoric language of early twentieth-century state building that characterized her writing and speeches, operated in much the same ideological world. Her presence at the many women’s conferences, after all, though she attended as a proud representative of the Republic, was fundamentally a gesture toward internationalism. She, too, believed that medicine, and the life that medicine preserved, could be properly discussed only across, not within, national borders. She, too, benefited from her discarded Ottoman past as much as she did from her national training, dragging along behind her, despite herself, the “chains” that she insisted her Gazi had broken. And she, too, understood a physician’s role to be as much international as it was national, even, or especially, when the international and the national failed to support or coincide with one another.

It is, indeed, for all of these reasons that both women together, idiosyncratic and conflicting though their life stories may be, represent in this chapter the classic feminist figure of the “first female physician.” For their story, made unitary, is itself an antidote to the overwrought wartime and post-war border drawing that produced the endless supply of injured, ruined, and starving bodies upon which they worked. Never have the lines separating nation states been as sharp and as uncompromising as they were between the 1880s and the 1920s. Rarely has the violence engendered by those lines been as vicious and gruesome as it was over these same years.

Yet Golovina and Safiye Ali, even as they themselves became national heroes, ignored those lines in their work. They focused instead, narrowly and relentlessly, on every individual’s discrete biological life as a discrete biological life with value. And they thus downplayed, sometimes despite themselves, the grandiose thing that was the manufactured, managed, and often racialized collective that increasingly extolled “life” as its reason for being no less than its reason for killing.³³ They preserved their international professionalism even as the national health policies that grew up around them became ever more enclosed, self-contained, and exclusionary.

But none of this, of course, suggests that either Golovina or Safiye Ali protested or questioned the borders as borders. Safiye Ali certainly never did. And even Golovina, despite her Marxist commitments, often celebrated Bulgaria as Bulgaria. Important to this chapter, however, is not the personal politics of either of these canonical first female physicians. Rather it is the attitude toward the preservation of life that they shaped. And this was, once again, an attitude toward preserving life far removed from their national preoccupations, developed directly out of the moribund imperial framework that they both had worked so hard to leave behind, and hugely influential to the self-fashioning of medical practitioners across the globe in the decades that followed.³⁴

This was an attitude toward preserving life as animated by Golovina’s citation in a British journal as a French-trained Bulgarian researcher with connections to a Swiss specialist as it was animated by Safiye Ali on her peripatetic journeys to conferences in London, Bologna, Paris, and elsewhere, always crossing borders even as she praised the fixed cartographic lines enclosing her new nation state. It was an attitude toward preserving life situated in international cooperation. And finally, it was an attitude toward preserving life that that exploded out of the collision of Ottoman history and post-Ottoman history, out of borders that never quite fit, out of managed biopolitics that never quite managed, and out of identities that might, in pinch, be subsumed under the rubric of “lady physician.”

Both Golovina and Safiye Ali created a prescient variation on the idealized profession of the physician in the contemporary rhetoric of global health. And this why there can never be a biography of any one first female physician. The archetype of the first female physician contributed to so many distinctive national traditions that limiting it to a single woman in a single nation-state’s story is impossible.

Notes

Nermin Abadan-Unat, “Social Change and Turkish Women,” in Nermin Abadan-Unat, Deniz Kandiyoti, and M.B. Kiray, eds., Women in Turkish Society (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 5–36, 9; Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008): 232–246, 234.

R.J. Crampton, Bulgaria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 52.

Faith J. Childress, “Creating the ‘New Woman’ in Early Republican Turkey: The Contributions of the American Collegiate Institute and the American College for Girls,” Middle Eastern Studies 44 (2008): 553–569, 565.

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008), 234.

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008), 234.

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009): 620–628, 625.

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 625.

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 625.

Ivan Duminica, “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018): 28–29, 29.

Ivan Duminica, “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018).

Ivan Duminica, “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018).

Ivan Duminica, “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018).

Ivan Duminica, “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018).

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008), 236–237.

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008).

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008).

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008), 237.

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008).

Georgeta Nazarska, “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008).

Faith J. Childress, “Creating the ‘New Woman’ in Early Republican Turkey: The Contributions of the American Collegiate Institute and the American College for Girls,” Middle Eastern Studies 44 (2008), 562.

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 625.

Ayşe Kardaş, “First Female Physician of Turkey: Safiye Ali,” Daily Sabah (December 9, 2014), www.dailysabah.com/feature/2014/12/09/first-female-physician-of-turkey-safiye-ali (accessed May 20, 2024).

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 625.

Ayşe Kardaş, “First Female Physician of Turkey: Safiye Ali,” Daily Sabah (December 9, 2014), www.dailysabah.com/feature/2014/12/09/first-female-physician-of-turkey-safiye-ali (accessed May 20, 2024).

“German Street Named After First Turkish Female Physician,” Hürriyet Daily News (August 18, 2023), www.hurriyetdailynews.com/german-street-named-after-first-turkish-female-physician-185569 (accessed May 20, 2024).

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 625.

Füsün Can, Özlem Kurt-Azap, “Two Pioneers of Women Medical Doctors,” Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology 6 (1) (March 2024): 1–3, 1.

Güldane Çolak, “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009), 627.

Armağan İncesulu, Hülya Eyigör, İlknur Haberal Can, Sema Başak, “From Past to Present: The Journey of Female Doctors in Medicine and Otorhinolaryngology in Turkey,” Turk Arch Otorhinolaryngol 59 (3) (September 2021): 166–171, 169.

Armağan İncesulu, Hülya Eyigör, İlknur Haberal Can, Sema Başak, “From Past to Present: The Journey of Female Doctors in Medicine and Otorhinolaryngology in Turkey,” Turk Arch Otorhinolaryngol 59 (3) (September 2021).

To the extent that she was eventually forced to resign from the clinic that she herself had founded. Ayşe Kardaş, “First Female Physician of Turkey: Safiye Ali,” Daily Sabah (December 9, 2014), www.dailysabah.com/feature/2014/12/09/first-female-physician-of-turkey-safiye-ali (accessed May 20, 2024).

“Excerpts,” The International Medical and Surgical Synopsis 1 (1) (September 1887): 189.

For an analysis of this alternative nation- or race-based movement from collective life to collective death, especially in the postcolonial context, see Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

See, for example, Renée C. Fox, Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins sans Frontières (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Selected Bibliography

Abadan-Unat, Nermin. “Social Change and Turkish Women,” in Nermin Abadan-Unat, Deniz Kandiyoti, and M.B. Kiray, eds., Women in Turkish Society (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 5–36.

Akçapar, Burak. People’s Mission to the Ottoman Empire: M.A. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission, 1912–13 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Can, Füsün and Özlem Kurt-Azap, “Two Pioneers of Women Medical Doctors,” Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology 6 (1) (March 2024): 1–3.

Childress, Faith J. “Creating the ‘New Woman’ in Early Republican Turkey: The Contributions of the American Collegiate Institute and the American College for Girls,” Middle Eastern Studies 44 (2008): 553–569.

Çolak, Güldane. “Turkish Female Students Studying in Germany: The Case of Safiye Ali,” Türk-Alman İlişkileri Sempozyonu (Konya, 2009): 620–628.

Crampton, R.J. Bulgaria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Daskalova, Krassimira. “Bulgarian Women in Movements, Laws, Discourses (1840s–1940s),” Bulgarian Historical Review/Revue Bulgare d'Histoire 1 (1999): 180–196.

Duminica, Ivan. “The Bessarabian Anastasia (Nicolau)—the First Woman Doctor in Bulgaria,” in Woman in Universal History. New Methodological Approaches (Chişinău: Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, 2018): 28–29.

Engel, Barbara Alpern. “Women Medical Students in Russia, 1872–1882: Reformers or Rebels?” Journal of Social History, 12 (1979): 394–414.

İncesulu, Armağan, Hülya Eyigör, İlknur Haberal Can, Sema Başak. “From Past to Present: The Journey of Female Doctors in Medicine and Otorhinolaryngology in Turkey,” Turk Arch Otorhinolaryngol 59 (3) (September 2021): 166–171.

Maksudyan, Nazan. Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Maksudyan, Nazan. “A Triangle of Regrets: Training of Ottoman Children in Germany During the First World War,” in Benjamin C. Fortna, ed., Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 141–172.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Metinsoy, Elif Mahir. “Writing the History of Ordinary Ottoman Women during World War I,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 18–39.

Nazarska, Georgeta. “Bulgarian Women Medical Doctors in the Social Modernization of the Bulgarian Nation State (1878–1944),” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 33 (2008): 232–246.

Reeves-Ellington, Barbara. “Constantinople Woman’s College: Constructing Gendered, Religious, and Political Identities in an American Institution in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Women’s History Review 24 (2015): 53–71.

Yıldız, Abdullah. “Transition to Civil and Turkish Medical Education in the Ottoman Empire,” Ankara Üniversitesi Tıp Fakültesi Mecmuası 70 (2017): 127–134.

Yıldız, Hülya. “Rethinking the Political: Ottoman Women as Feminist Subjects,” Journal of Gender Studies 27 (2018): 177–191.

24 Sabiha Sertel (1895–1968) Dissident Publishing Phenomenon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-30

Another exile, Sabiha Sertel lived her life as a near-personification of transgressed boundaries and traversed space. Born to a middle-class family in Salonica, Sabiha was a member of the Ottoman Dönme community.¹ Literally meaning “the turn(ed),”² the Ottoman-Turkish equivalent of converso (Chapter 6), the Dönmes were Sephardic Jews who had settled in the Empire following Spain’s 1492 Expulsion Edict, but who then, in the seventeenth century, converted to Islam. They nonetheless retained many of their Jewish practices, and according to some accounts, their Jewish identity.³ Sabiha attended a Dönme school, after which she founded a society to pay professors to educate women who were not, at the time, allowed to attend University.⁴

In 1913, during the Balkan Wars, Sabiha and her family fled to Istanbul, where she married a Sunni Muslim journalist from outside her community, Mehmet Zekeriya.⁵ In 1918, when the post-war Entente powers occupied the city and detained her husband, Sabiha began running his journal herself.⁶ Her ongoing clash with the occupying powers, however, led her, like Halide Edip (Chapter 21), to take refuge with her husband in New York City, where she studied at Columbia University’s New York School of Social Work.⁷

In 1923, Sabiha and her husband returned to what had become the independent, unoccupied Turkish Republic, where they built a successful publishing business. But between 1923 and 1950, when they fled Turkey permanently, Sabiha found herself, like Nazım Hikmet (Chapter 20), increasingly at odds with Turkey’s official ideology, on trial, imprisoned, and at times under police surveillance. She became over these years, indeed, another feminist first for the Republic: the first Turkish woman to be tried for her speech and writing.⁸ After leaving Turkey in 1950, she and her husband lived in France, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Hungary, where they continued to publish and work until her death in Baku in 1968.⁹

How, then, did Sabiha shape the Ottoman Empire or, at least, the memory of the Ottoman Empire? In this chapter, we’ll explore the possibility that she shaped it in part as a woman who was herself shaped, first, by her experience as a thrice-exiled Dönme, and second, by her years at the New York School of Social Work. Before turning in that direction, however, it ought to be noted immediately that foregrounding Sabiha’s Dönme identity as the catalyst to her story is a dubious rhetorical move. Sabiha left reams of biographical flotsam behind during her active and varied life, all of which speak to her accomplishments rather than to her ethnic or religious background. Why not build up a portrait from bits and pieces of that?

The answer to that second question, and the answer that animates this chapter, is that Sabiha was, despite her professional accomplishments, both implicitly and explicitly conscious of herself not only as a social worker, an activist, a writer, and a publisher, but also as a refugee and, more so, a Dönme refugee. Her work and writing throughout her life make that consciousness more than apparent. And so, though a biographical sketch of Sabiha’s exemplary life writ large might take any number of narrative moments as its touchstone, a biographical exploration of her agency as a woman who shaped a polity, and especially a polity that was dead before she’d reached full adulthood, demands a journey backward in time to the origins of her family’s community.

The Dönmes, therefore, and briefly, were the descendants of Sephardic Jews who had emigrated to the city of Salonica in the fifteenth century and who, in 1666, converted to Islam along with their leader, a charismatic rabbi called Shabbatai Tzevi.¹⁰ Shabbatai Tzevi’s embrace of Islam was a rare example of forced conversion outside the context of slavery in the early modern Ottoman world. Having claimed persuasively to be the messiah, however, and having instigated a vocal messianic movement in the city, he made the Ottoman authorities in Salonica sufficiently nervous that they offered him the classic, if once again unusual, choice between conversion or death. He chose conversion, as did his followers.¹¹

At that point, the Ottoman government was satisfied and left the community alone, uninterested, unlike their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts a century and a half earlier (Chapter 6), in whether the external markings of religious faith were matched by a metaphysical internal belief.¹² And the community itself, now neither conventionally Muslim nor conventionally Jewish, developed from that time as a people apart, intermarrying, avoiding relations with outsiders, and honing their identity over the years as something separate from their neighbors.¹³ Their practices were a syncretic combination of Judaism and Islam, they continued to honor Shabbatai Tzevi as the messiah, and though they occasionally drew the suspicions of their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, for the most part they remained unmolested until the modern period.¹⁴

All of this occurred, however, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. And it would indeed be irresponsible to pretend that thoroughly modern Sabiha’s twentieth-century agency had anything to do with the periods that had produced Doña Gracia Mendes (Chapter 6) or Gülnuş Sultan (Chapter 10). So what, then, were the Dönmes doing by the end of the nineteenth century? Mostly, they were living as a progressive minority community within a cosmopolitan city that was home to several other progressive, conservative, or otherwise minority communities.¹⁵ They were staffing the Ottoman bureaucracy.¹⁶ They were reading and writing books. Bourgeois Muslim families found it fashionable to send their children to Dönme schools.¹⁷ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself was a product of such schooling.¹⁸

But beneath the urban cosmopolitanism of Salonica, like so many other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities, a modern, biologically inflected racism was beginning to alter both local and international attitudes toward minorities generally, and toward the Dönmes in particular. Rather than an eccentric community among many eccentric communities, productive and embedded in the fabric of the Empire, the Dönmes were increasingly described in mainstream literature as a secretive, hypocritical, cabbalistic enemy within, out to annihilate not only the city, not only the state, but the world as a whole via their shadowy global networks of influence and subversion.¹⁹ Indeed, though classic antisemitism was nearly as attractive in the Ottoman Empire as it was in other early twentieth-century European states, more often than not the target of the Ottoman variation on this rhetoric was Dönmes rather than Jews.²⁰ Dönmes became, in the paranoiac imagination of early modern Ottoman conspiracy theorists, more Jewish than the Jews.²¹

Moreover, this rhetoric was not limited to conversations in Salonica or within Ottoman borders. The British Foreign Office, for example—by the same logic that led it to conclude that the Balfour Declaration would placate the Jewish Conspiracy a decade later²²—blamed Dönmes for everything from the deposition of the Sultan Abdülhamit II during the 1908 Ottoman Constitutional Revolution (many of its leaders were raised in Salonica)²³ to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s establishment of the Turkish Republic in Anatolia following the First World War.²⁴ The Dönme conspiracy threatened not just Ottomans, not just Turks, but the world as a whole.

When the trauma that was the loss of the historic European nucleus of the Ottoman Empire during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars embedded itself in the Ottoman, and then later the Turkish national, psyche therefore, it was a simple move for many observers and commentators to follow global trends and blame the Dönmes.²⁵ Moreover, when the city of Salonica likewise fell to the Greeks in late 1912, though many Dönmes fled along with other Muslims (the remainder were ejected in 1924 by the terms of the Greek-Turkish population exchange), their reception in Istanbul was cooler than the reception offered to other refugees.²⁶ The conditions had been set for a very ugly and modern racism.

It was into this cultural milieu that Sabiha and her family inserted themselves when they arrived in Istanbul in 1913. Again, Sabiha herself does not underscore or emphasize her Dönme background in her writing. But it is worth noting that throughout her tenure in Istanbul and particularly in the opening months of 1924, when she and her husband launched their first independent publishing venture, Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), and as the Turkish Republic was finding its feet, a debate was raging across the front pages of the city’s other major daily newspapers as to who the Dönmes “really” were, why they’d been allowed to immigrate to newly Republican Turkey despite their status as fake Muslims, and how damaging their shadowy network of influence could become.²⁷ The dysfunction of early Republican Turkish unity when faced with Dönme identity can’t have escaped Sabiha’s notice, even if it wasn’t the subject of her own editorials. At the very least, she would have been reading the competition’s publications.

Nonetheless, rather than speculate further as to Sabiha’s reaction to early twentieth-century anti-Dönme paranoia, let’s backtrack a few years to her period of exile and education in New York City. Upon the British entry into defeated Ottoman Istanbul in 1918, Sabiha’s husband was detained. When he was released, he and Sabiha realized that continuing their work in occupied Istanbul would open them up to further harassment, and so they moved to New York, with the assistance of Halide Edip (Chapter 21), where she studied sociology at The New York School of Social Work.²⁸

In the 1920s, this school was synonymous, in both the popular imagination and in its curriculum, with radical ideological experimentation,²⁹ which meant that Sabiha left it at the end of her year there not only equipped with the day’s fashionable tools of social inquiry (surveys, statistics, and data sets), but also with a healthy respect for Marxist activism.³⁰ Conventional biographies and histories of her life focus mostly on the latter of these intellectual acquisitions, describing her publications on her return to Turkey as overtly Communist undertakings and noting that her eventual permanent exile from the Republic was in large part the result of her Communist affiliations.³¹ And, once again, this focus makes sense.

The content that Sabiha published, for example, included variously articles promoting women’s suffrage at a time when suffrage globally was an uncertain affair,³² editorials promoting birth control in an era of near-hysterical racist pro-natalism,³³ essays describing prostitution as a social rather than a moral issue,³⁴ the poet Nazım Hikmet’s (Chapter 20) broad-ranging assault on officially sanctioned Republican literature,³⁵ and humorous columns lampooning virtuous religious belief as the opium of the masses.³⁶ Likewise, and like Halide Edip (Chapter 21), anything that she could throw at Atatürk’s Fatherhood cult, she threw.³⁷ In short, she did all that she could to scandalize the bourgeoisie, and biographies of her life reasonably emphasize the point that when she and her husband settled, like Nazım Hikmet, in the Soviet Union, they did so because the NATO-affiliated Cold War West couldn’t handle their intellectual and poetic provocations, and because they believed in its work.³⁸ As early as 1929, Sabiha had been arrested and her husband exiled; fifteen years later, in 1945, government agents incited a mob of ultranationalist university students to burn down their offices; the next year they were arrested once again and tried for setting fire to their own business.³⁹ Clearly something political was going on.

But what if Sabiha’s Communist affiliations weren’t the most relevant aspect of her biography? Indeed, what if the first of her fields of study, her acquisition of the tools of sociological data collection, was more important to her later activism, and also more threatening to Republican governance, than her ideological commitments? Over the remainder of this chapter, we’ll be exploring these questions. For if we do set aside the ideology, an alternative narrative of Sabiha’s agency begins to coalesce. Though it’s something of an artificial distinction, in fact, divorcing her publication process from the content of what she published can help to clarify how Sabiha shaped both Turkey and the memory of the Ottoman Empire.

Figure 24.1 Sabiha Sertel defending herself at her trial, 1946.

Sabiha’s primary formal rather than content-based contribution to Turkish journalism, therefore, was the popularization and dissemination of an accessible variation on the sociological survey.⁴⁰ Having failed to interest the Turkish government in supporting a nation-wide program of demographic data collection that would aid in mass-democratic biopolitical governance, she decided to use her own private publication as a means of collecting and collating the sociological information that fascinated her.⁴¹ And so, every edition of Illustrated Monthly included one or more surveys that readers were encouraged, or sometimes incentivized with cash rewards, to complete and submit to the magazine’s editors.⁴² The survey questions were both philosophical and quotidian, covering every aspect of readers’ lives, thoughts, desires, and interests. Eventually, the surveys were joined by agony aunt columns that likewise solicited reader participation.⁴³

The response on the part of the reading public to these popular surveys and invitations to comment was overwhelming. Sabiha’s magazine, unlike the carefully curated state-sponsored newspapers that continued to stoke artificial debates about issues such as Turkish and not-Turkish identity or the glories of Kemalism, thrived on the conversation. The surveys transformed Sabiha’s publishing venture into a wildly successful experiment in recursive feedback rather than yet another stale platform for assertion, avowal, declaration, and dictation.⁴⁴

And yet, inventing what was essentially an early variation on a dating quiz in a teen magazine for Turkish consumption, though a savvy marketing move, is hardly revolutionary. It also appears to have little to do with Sabiha’s ideological commitments. Before dismissing the influence of Sabiha’s intervention into Turkish media space, however, consider the direction that mass-market publishing has gone since the early twentieth century, as well as the revolutionary political implications of that shift.

That shy twentieth-century invitation for reader response that Sabiha prefigured, and that would appear at the margin of the final page of the print pamphlet, has given way now, in the early twenty-first century, to the universe of social media. It has created everything digital around us. Indeed, much of the online world has become little more than a global dating quiz of precisely the sort that Sabiha popularized. And, importantly, it has become a dating quiz that is anything but apolitical.⁴⁵

Publishing writ large, indeed, has become since Sabiha’s day what later generations of Columbia-trained Marxists have convincingly labeled “communication capitalism,” a regime in which a massive and growing population is encouraged via free platforms or a fleeting sense of self-importance to produce, post, and share ever increasing mountains of personal information with everyone and anyone. The by-product, or in many cases the primary product, of this feedback is, moreover, a mammoth hoard of data that would have sent a 1920s-era survey-obsessed sociologist into fits of ecstasy. And, of course, that hoard of data has self-evident monetary value beyond the sociological.⁴⁶

Today’s Marxists focus largely on its exploitative value as the centerpiece of consumer capitalism—on the extent to which the free platform is anything but. But to return to the problem of the shape of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic that emerged from it, this data hoard also has been useful as a framework for alternative modes of community formation. And this is a usefulness, to repeat, that Sabiha, like Maryana Marrash (Chapter 16), recognized a good century before it became impossible to ignore. Arguably, therefore, it is here, in her surveys, that her publishing, along with her membership in the Dönme community, come together in shaping Turkey as well as the memory of the Ottoman Empire.

For though histories of Sabiha’s later life persuasively attribute her final exile from Turkey to the content of her writing, to a lifetime of vocal dissent produced fearlessly in the face of both public and political opposition,⁴⁷ don’t forget her biography. As a Dönme refugee three times exiled, Sabiha had learned through hard experience that managed, authoritarian, identity-based community formation could, and usually did, end in dysfunction in the modern world. In Salonica, the breeding ground of her own life of flight, managed, authoritarian, identity-based community formation had indeed been responsible by the end of the First World War for the irreversible disfiguring of what had once been a flourishing multi-ethnic, multi-religious metropolis. By the Second World War, the city had become a metonym for Europe’s descent into the genocidal ethnic cleansing that had always been implied—and that throughout the later twentieth century was frequently expressed—by these same authoritarian gestures toward unity and purity.⁴⁸

And so, leaving aside both the content and the identity, or limiting the content and the identity to “what does a man look for in a marriage,” Sabiha proposed, via her publications, an alternative mode of community building. This was a mode of community building in which identity was fluid, in which relationships were formed via dynamic interaction rather than via static racial, ethnic, or religious ties, and in which everyone was free to contribute to a pool of data that became its own free-floating space of belonging. It was also a mode of community building that departed radically from the murderously formulated and murderously maintained racist nationalism of newly European post-war nation states like Greece or Turkey.

Yes, that is to say, Sabiha was persecuted for publishing her radical ideas. But her radical ideas were inseparable from, and sometimes published physically side-by-side with, her agony aunt columns and her surveys. And this is a situation that suggests, at the very least, that she was also persecuted for letting loose an alternative, unorthodox interpretation, empty of content and full of fluff, of what it means to be “Turkish”—and thus, implicitly, of how Ottoman Turkey differed from the Turkish Republic.

The Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, according to this alternative interpretation, differed not on the basis of identity or identity formation—not because a weak, ineffective, decrepit, and multiple Ottoman state gave way to a strong, committed, forceful, and unitary Turkish one—but on the basis of their differing approaches to what the multiple could do within their respective borders. They differed not because Turkey had finally thrown off the Ottoman Empire’s disintegrating variety in favor a Turkish unity. They differed, on the contrary, because modern Turkey allowed for the flourishing of dynamically multiple spaces of recursive feedback, whereas the Ottoman Empire had attempted to hold things together via nothing more than meaningless “unifying” declarations—via, in short, “Ottomanism.” Beneath the authoritarian trappings, after all, the Turkish Republic, unlike the Ottoman Empire, could be, or could have been, a framework for an ever-emergent community of mutable texts, contexts, and subtexts. Sabiha’s own career, before her exile, proves that such was the case.

Figure 24.2 A page from Tan (“Dawn”), a struggling newspaper purchased by the Sertels in 1936 and transformed into the second largest newspaper in Turkey before its offices were raided by ultra-nationalists in 1945—“Sabiha Zekeriya” in the cartoon is Sabiha Sertel, before 1945.

But then, Sabiha did die in exile. In 1968. The year that Gilles Deleuze published Difference and Repetition—a book very much about the possibly destructive revolutionary potential of endlessly dissolving identities.

Notes

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 222.

D. Sayers in Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), xvii.

On the complexity of unitary identity within a history of conversion and re-conversion, see Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), 4–6.

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 63. See also A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007): 1–30, 5.

D. Sayers in Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), xxx.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 5–6.

James H. Meyer, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 168–169.

D. Sayers in Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), xxii.

A. Holly Shissler, “Womanhood Is Not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel Against Prostitution and For Women’s Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4 (2008): 12–30, 13.

Cengiz Sisman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 78.

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–4.

As Baer continues, “the issue of interiority or sincerity of religious belief was not raised about the Dönme before the modern era.” Marc Baer, “The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 682–708, 683.

Cengiz Sisman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 160.

Cengiz Sisman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145–150.

Marc Baer, “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul,” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 141–170, 148–149.

Marc Baer, “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul,” Journal of World History 18 (2007), 146.

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 63.

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 63.

Marc Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013): 523–555, 542.

Marc Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013), 527.

Marc Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013), 527.

Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 152–153.

Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 153; Marc Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013), 530.

Marc Baer, “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013), 528.

Marc Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 161.

Cengiz Sisman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 258.

Marc Baer, “The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004), 692.

D. Sayers in Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), xviii.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 6.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 6.

John M. VanderLippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 124. See also Nergis Ertürk, Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 104.

Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 23–24.

Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 68.

Nergis Ertürk, Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 104. For an extended analysis of this trend in Sabiha’s work, see A. Holly Shissler, “Womanhood Is Not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel Against Prostitution and For Women’s Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4 (2008), passim.

Nergis Ertürk, Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024), 104.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 10–11.

Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 88.

D. Sayers in Sabiha Sertel, The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist, ed. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), xxiv, xxxiii.

Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 349.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 6.

A. Holly Shissler, “Womanhood Is Not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel Against Prostitution and For Women’s Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4 (2008), 26.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 8.

A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 8–9.

At its height, the Sertels’ newspaper had a circulation of over 30,000. A. Holly Shissler, “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel’s Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007), 8.

Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 193.

Sebastien Sevignani, Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (London: Routledge, 2016), 15–16, 101.

In particular as Turkish-Soviet relations soured throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. During this time, Sabiha and her husband both were “accused of being Russian agents and carriers of communist influence in Turkey.” John M. VanderLippe, The Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 124.

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Vintage, 2006), 190, 287.

Selected Bibliography

Baer, Marc. The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)

Baer, Marc. “The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme to Turkish Secular Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 682–708.

Baer, Marc. “An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013): 523–555.

Baer, Marc. “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul,” Journal of World History 18 (2007): 141–170.

Criss, Nur Bilge. Istanbul Under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 1999).

Ertürk, Nergis. Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

Göçek, Fatma Müge. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Kandiyoti, Dalia. The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).

Köksal, Duygu. A Social History of Late Ottoman Women (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Libal, Kathryn. “Transatlantic Connections in the Making of a Socialist-Feminist Framework for Social Welfare in Turkey: The Legacy of Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 27 (2012): 328–337.

Maksudyan, Nazan. “Control Over Life, Control Over Body: Female Suicide in Early Republican Turkey,” Women’s History Review 24 (2015): 861–880.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York: Vintage, 2006).

Meyer, James H. Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Sertel, Sabiha. The Struggle for Modern Turkey: Justice, Activism, and a Revolutionary Female Journalist. Tia O’Brien, Nur Deris, Evrim Emir-Sayers, and David Selim Sayers, eds. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019).

Sevignani, Sebastien. Privacy and Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (London: Routledge, 2016).

Shissler, A. Holly. “‘If You Ask Me’: Sabiha Sertel's Advice Column, Gender Equity, and Social Engineering in the Early Turkish Republic,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 3 (2007): 1–30.

Shissler, A. Holly. “Womanhood Is Not for Sale: Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel Against Prostitution and For Women’s Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 4 (2008): 12–30.

Sisman, Cengiz. The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi and the Evolution of the Ottoman-Turkish Dönmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Thoburn, Nicholas. Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

VanderLippe, John M. The Politics of Turkish Democracy: İsmet İnönü and the Formation of the Multi-Party System, 1938–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

25 Sabiha Gökçen (1913–2001) The World’s First Female Fighter Pilot

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-31

The final figure in this compendium is the first female fighter pilot in Turkey and the world, Sabiha Gökçen.¹ A poster-child for early Turkish Republican state-sponsored feminism (literally a poster-child, she was a child on posters),² her story is a sensible place to end this volume less because of her immaculate early twentieth-century feminist credentials and more because of the death that continues to haunt those credentials. Her feminist legacy, indeed, was built not only on the death of the Empire but also, and more so, on the mass death of those deemed ethnically unworthy of inclusion in the Republic that replaced it.³ In this way, her life marked the abrupt full stop to what had become an increasingly beleaguered Ottoman ideology of cultural multiplicity.

Born the year before the First World War began, Gökçen is scarcely Ottoman. By the time she came of age, the Empire was gone. Nonetheless, her public image as an empowered, independent woman drew as much on the late Ottoman feminist rhetoric forged and disseminated by figures such as Fatma Aliye (Chapter 17), Halide Edip (Chapter 21), and Safiye Ali (Chapter 23), as it did on the early Turkish Republican rhetoric of strong women tempered into dutiful daughters of the nation.⁴ In this way, she does—if in an attenuated way—belong in this volume.

Gökçen’s initial fame in the Turkish imaginary, however, arose even before her feminist undertakings, as one of the thirteen adopted children of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or “Father Turk.”⁵ Even as a dutiful daughter, therefore, her story is more complex than it appears to be, more imbricated in the death that permeated the Republic’s birthright. Though she herself claimed a Bosnian background, for example, as did the official record of her adoption, rumors that she was of Armenian descent have always followed her.⁶ And if she was Armenian, then her fame, her feminism, and her career were the direct product not only of First World War-era death, not only of state-sponsored massacres, but of First World War-era and state-sponsored genocide.⁷

Moreover, and against this genocidal backdrop, Gökçen’s career, aerial bombing, was a career that likewise necessitated death. Among her most famous exploits was pacifying, to use the accepted euphemism at the time, the troublesome Kurdish regions of Anatolia from above. And so, as a daughter of the Father of her country, she rained down murder in the name of a coherent national form—which is certainly one variation on shaping.

It is helpful, however, to begin once more with the official records. According to these official accounts of her life, therefore, Gökçen was born in the Anatolian city of Bursa and raised by her brother upon the death of her parents who, again, may or may not have been Armenian. In 1925, at the age of twelve, she impressed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk so much with her high spirits when he was visiting the city that he adopted her.⁸ In 1934, the Turkish surname law, according to which all Turkish citizens would take family names, went into effect, and Atatürk selected the family name Gökçen (pretty or pleasant like the blue of the sky or simply “of the sky”) for her.⁹ Though there’s more than a hint of the clouds and the air and aviation in the name, she hadn’t, again according to official accounts, yet decided on a career in flight at that point. The fact that a year later, in 1935, Atatürk enrolled her in the Turkish Aviation School, however, suggests that he, at least, was thinking ahead, always acting the Pygmalion to his thirteen beloved avatars.¹⁰

Gökçen acquitted herself well at the Aviation school, and the next year she enrolled in the Military Air School. She graduated in 1937 with a military flight certificate, though officially women wouldn’t be allowed into Turkish military academies or armed services until 1955.¹¹ An exception was made for her, according to less official accounts, because the moment, which has been commemorated with great enthusiasm in Turkish national historiography, presented Atatürk with a key public relations opportunity.¹² Praising Gökçen’s still high spirits, he chose her graduation from the Air School as the ideal time to emphasize that it was a Turkish girl, rather than a girl from any other nation, who had become the first female fighter pilot in the world.¹³

But Gökçen didn’t stop there. On the contrary, she continued to preempt her global feminist competitors by, first, participating in maneuvers over Thrace and the Aegean, and then, second, vowing that she would fly alongside the men who had studied with her at the Military Air School wherever their duty might take them. As it happened, their duty took them to eastern Anatolia, where they commenced air support of the army in its quashing of the 1937 Dersim Rebellion.¹⁴

This rebellion, and the mass murder of the Kurdish civilian population of the region that followed it, became the backdrop for the most glorious moment in Gökçen’s life story. And what a backdrop it was: somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 inhabitants of the region, or at least ten percent of the population, were slaughtered, the vast majority unarmed non-combatants.¹⁵ Families were burnt to death in their homes, villages were gassed, and children were photographed in large groups before being executed.¹⁶ Gökçen herself was credited by journalists at the time with having dropped her 50 kilogram bombs on fleeing residents and “spewing fire at them from the barrel of her machine gun” to great effect.¹⁷ Several hundred of the girls orphaned in the massacre were forced later to work as servants or to marry low-ranking Turkish soldiers.¹⁸ In 2011, the Turkish Government issued a belated apology for the atrocities.¹⁹

Figure 25.1 Sabiha Gökçen and her fellow pilots posing with bombs in front of her Breguet 19, 1937. Source: Turkish Air Force.

Nonetheless, like Bouboulina’s (Chapter 13) ethically complicated high heroism, and Sarah Aaronsohn’s (Chapter 22) even more ethically complicated espionage, Gökçen’s story is most interesting to us today because at no point over the ensuing years have any of her hagiographers attempted to absolve her of involvement in the now widely condemned action. Quite the opposite, her presence in and over Dersim in 1937 remains the apex of her heroic record,²⁰ and the narrative of her soldier’s farewell to Atatürk on the eve of her deployment remains the linchpin of the tale.

In brief, the farewell scene went as follows: Atatürk took Gökçen aside to ask her whether she was certain she wanted to participate in the action, given what would happen to her as a sexually vulnerable female should she be captured. She responded that if the worst happened, and her plane crashed, she would never let them take her alive (in the vein of Sarah Aaronsohn alongside her similarly sexually vulnerable RAF schoolboy counterparts). Atatürk praised her resolution and offered her his own beloved sidearm, telling her that if she found herself in a situation in which her honor was endangered, she shouldn’t hesitate either to empty it into her attacker or, if necessary, to empty it into her own head. She took the weapon, kissed it, and replied that she would always keep her word.²¹

There is, obviously, a psychoanalytical interpretation of this story begging for elaboration. But psychoanalysis is not the subject of this chapter. Rather, returning to Gökçen’s broader life history, let’s catch up to her a month later, covered in glory in Ankara, the embodiment of what “our young girls [in Turkey] can do.”²² In 1938, the year of Atatürk’s death, Gökçen flew through the Balkans on a goodwill tour, propagandizing, like Safiye Ali, on behalf of Turkish state feminism. And then finally, between 1938 and her death in 2001 at the age of 88, she stayed away from the battlefields, flying instead in ceremonies and aviation demonstrations worldwide, always playing her role as a representative of Turkey’s strong, self-respecting womanhood.²³

Figure 25.2 Women and children displaced following the Dersim Campaign, 1938. Source: Turkish Army.

Having proved once “what our young girls can do,” in other words, her later career involved acting as a mascot. And a very good mascot she was. She received awards and honors from several nation states over the decades, and she remains, forever, at least in Turkish nationalist historiography, the world’s first female fighter pilot.

It goes without saying that Gökçen’s life, professional as well as personal, makes for a disturbing story. It also appears to be irrelevant to the aims of this compendium. When Gökçen was committing her atrocities in Dersim in 1937, the Ottoman Empire was nearly twenty years gone. There’s little in her heroic biography that lends itself to the shaping of the Empire, or even to the shaping of its death or memory. Why include her among the twenty-five women who populate these pages? If anything, Gökçen’s history seems more appropriate to an uncritical primary school textbook alongside the likes of Calamity Jane and other aggressively militant women whose lives are best left un-scrutinized.

Yet remember, like Elizabeth Báthory’s (Chapter 9) undead afterlife, the undead afterlife of the Ottoman Empire continued to haunt its territories and their populations, especially its Turkish territories and their Turkish (or not) populations, for decades after the polity itself had been laid to rest. And this Ottoman legacy presented Gökçen with what was, in fact, an ideal opportunity to encounter the Empire face to face, even though it no longer officially existed. Indeed, Gökçen’s role, evoked throughout the legend that grew up around her, was always, and very specifically, to continue killing the Empire by slaying the Empire’s persistent ghosts. Dersim, moreover, was one of the most appropriate settings for the initiating episode of this repetitive act of execution.

For Ottoman Dersim, like Ottoman Salonica (Chapters 6 and 24), had been a different place from the Dersim that Atatürk created for later Turkish Republican consumption. Mountainous, riddled with caves, fiercely heterogeneous ethnically, religiously, and linguistically, it had stymied for centuries the Ottoman government’s attempts to incorporate it into an early modern or a modern apparatus of imperial or quasi-national sovereignty.²⁴ In fact, the only distinct evidence of Ottoman rule in the region throughout the Empire’s centuries-long supposed governance of the territory were the periodic clashes between village leaders and Ottoman security forces (which, as the First World War geared up, looked increasingly like massacres of village leaders by Ottoman security forces), as the Empire’s government tried to draw borders around what had previously been its porous yet well-protected multiple domains (Chapter 1).²⁵

And at the beginning of the Turkish government’s post-Ottoman attempt to impose order on the area, the Republic’s fate looked to be identical to the Empire’s. There was no way that the region could be “pacified,” no matter what sort of violence was enacted upon it. Or, there was no way that it could be pacified until Gökçen and her colleagues arrived with their aircraft in 1937.

In 1937, however, as the planes flew overhead, the territory that was Dersim ceased to be opaque and unfathomable, and instead became a flat, open canvas, visible and open to interpretation from the sky.²⁶ Gökçen and her bomber transformed the territory of Dersim from a concrete human terrain of mountains, caves, and unpredictable populations into an abstract cartographic object measurable from the sky.²⁷ As a flat, measurable cartographic object, it also became a killing field.

And so, even as Gökçen was killing the inhabitants of the region, she was also killing the remaining ghosts of the Ottoman Empire. As her aircraft released its load, she was removing from the equation any memory at all that the historic, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-linguistic territory surveilled and obliterated by Turkey was the same as the territory that had been under the Ottoman Empire’s “protection.” Whereas Bouboulina had killed Ottoman sovereignty, and Sarah Aaronsohn had killed Ottoman history, Gökçen, the third of this feminist set, killed Ottoman terrain. She killed what was left of the Empire’s afterlife.

In its place, she established Republican cartography. And in the process, “what our young girls can do” became more than fighting and killing, more even than operating large (or small, consider Atatürk’s pistol) phallic machinery. It also became transforming the material spaces of violent encounter into the abstract spaces of mass extermination. No longer were the spaces of death subterranean or hidden or chthonic; women like Gökçen turned death into an open, clean, and hygienic act performed high up in the air. Her surname was thus unequivocally appropriate, more than sufficient to place her at the top of the pantheon of feminist heroes, just like Bouboulina and Aaronsohn.

Indeed, the only significant difference between Gökçen’s nationalist legacy and Bouboulina’s and Aaronsohn’s nationalist legacies is that whereas the latter two legends of mass death giving way to national birth grew up organically, at least in the beginning, Gökçen’s was manufactured from day one. From the time she was twelve years old and Atatürk named and breathed life into her, Gökçen was born to play the hero. She was born to flirt with death. And crucially, even if it was only the early twentieth century’s technological advances made this variation on death over Dersim possible, she was born to mobilize what became throughout the remainder of the twentieth century an influential gendered rhetoric of girls finding their power in the mass murder of a fantasized, indeed titillating, sexually threatening, and implicitly male enemy collective—even, or especially, when this enemy collective consisted in reality largely of women, children, and aging grandparents.²⁸

Gökçen’s feminist agency, in other words, made aerial bombing attractive, the hobby of sexy, self-respecting women. And thus Gökçen, like Malhun Hatun (Chapter 1), and like every other figure who has appeared over the past pages, embodies the complexity rather than the simplicity of that agency. She demonstrates the ongoing, indestructible embeddedness of women’s agency within messy, dirty history, whether in the thirteenth century or twentieth century, whether it makes twenty-first century readers comfortable or not.

Why, then, include an unrepentant mass murderer like Gökçen among the twenty-five women who populate these pages? The answer to that question is also the punchline to this volume: including Gökçen, indeed giving her pride of place, makes clear that neither feminist agency nor feminist empowerment are inspiring. But then, they’re not meant to be inspiring. They are, like every other historical process, up for grabs, subject to ongoing interpretation. What will fill people with a warm glow now, in 2024, as they read the life of, for example, Esma İbret (Chapter 14) will fill others with horrified disgust a few decades down the road. And at that point, who knows, perhaps Gökçen’s mode of engaging with the world will be making a comeback. Histories of agency and empowerment are supposed to make a reader think, and keep thinking, now, in the moment. They are not supposed to settle things once and for all.

And this is why Gökçen’s twisted variation agency, her ghastly shaping of death, though extreme, is the most effective place to end this collection. In quality, it is no different from the agency mobilized and sustained by every other inhabitant of the book. It is multiple and it is conditional. It is compromised and it is problematic. And, above all, it is one small data point within a boundless field of past, present, and future feminist engagement.

Notes

P. Yelsalı Parmaksız, “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 40–62, 50–51.

Özge Baykan Calafato, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 71.

Her crowning achievement in the nationalist historiography is the “pacification” of Dersim in 1937. See below for a discussion of that operation and also Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000), 80.

Paul Gordon Kramer, Queer Politics in Contemporary Turkey (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022), 40.

Şüle Toktaş, “Nationalism, Modernization and the Military in Turkey: Women Officers in the Turkish Armed Forces,” Oriente Moderno 23 (2004): 247–267, 253.

Esra Elmas, “Toward 2015: Media in Turkey on the Armenian Genocide,” in Alexis Demirdjian, ed., The Armenian Genocide Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 183–196, 191.

On the ethical and political complexity of Muslim Turks “adopting” children orphaned during the Genocide, see Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339, 1331–1332.

For more on the politics of Mustafa Kemal adopting “various ‘daughters’ who would serve as representatives of secular progress and modernity,” see Erdağ Göknar, “Turkish-Islamic Feminism Confronts National Patriarchy: Halide Edib’s Divided Self,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9 (2013): 32–57, 45.

On the use of new surnames to erase complicated ethnic pasts, especially as they might relate to the Armenian Genocide, see Meltem Türköz, Naming and Nation-building in Turkey: The 1934 Surname Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 180.

P. Yelsalı Parmaksız, “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016), 51–52.

Özge Baykan Calafato, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 71. P. Yelsalı Parmaksız, “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016), 51.

Along with, more generally, the gendered “Turkish Bird” airshow, which featured young girls skydiving and gliding. Béatrice Hendrich, “Fighting for Peace, Fighting for the Country?: The Inclusion of Women in Turkey’s National Defense in the Late 1930s,” in Béatrice Hendrich, ed., Female Fighters in Armed Conflict: Listening to their Own Stories (New York: Routledge, 2024): 39–59, 47–49. See also Özge Baykan Calafato, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 71–72.

Şüle Toktaş, “Nationalism, Modernization and the Military in Turkey: Women Officers in the Turkish Armed Forces,” Oriente Moderno 23 (2004), 253–254.

P. Yelsalı Parmaksız, “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016), 51.

Nermin Soyalp, Historical Traumas Among Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish People of Anatolia: A Transdisciplinary Perspective Toward Reconciliation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 89–90.

Mesut Yeğen, “State Violence in ‘Kurdistan,’” in Stephan H. Astourian and Raymond H. Kévorkian, eds., Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity in from Empire to Nation-State (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021): 303–346, 310–311.

Béatrice Hendrich, “Fighting for Peace, Fighting for the Country?: The Inclusion of Women in Turkey’s National Defense in the Late 1930s,” in Béatrice Hendrich, ed., Female Fighters in Armed Conflict: Listening to their Own Stories (New York: Routledge, 2024), 50.

Paul Gordon Kramer, Queer Politics in Contemporary Turkey (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022), 40.

On the politics of this apology, see Pinar Dınç, “Dersim 1937–1938: Shifts and continuities in state discourse and reasoning under Kemalism and Erdoğanism,” in Nikos Christofis, ed., The Kurds in Erdoğan’s ‘New’ Turkey: Domestic and International Implications (New York: Routledge, 2022): 159–180, 160, 166.

Béatrice Hendrich, “Fighting for Peace, Fighting for the Country?: The Inclusion of Women in Turkey’s National Defense in the Late 1930s,” in Béatrice Hendrich, ed., Female Fighters in Armed Conflict: Listening to their Own Stories (New York: Routledge, 2024), 50.

P. Yelsalı Parmaksız, “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016), 51–52; Emek Ergun, Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023), 32.

As Atatürk put it once the campaign had ended. Paul Gordon Kramer, Queer Politics in Contemporary Turkey (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022), 40.

Şüle Toktaş, “Nationalism, Modernization and the Military in Turkey: Women Officers in the Turkish Armed Forces,” Oriente Moderno 23 (2004), 254.

Despite ongoing Ottoman as well as Turkish attempts to “civilize” it as an “internal colony.” Murat Devres, Dersim as Internal Colony: The Turkish Civilizing Mission (1927–1952) (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024), 14 and passim.

Zeynep Kezer, “Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (4) (December 2014): 507–527, 509. See also Nermin Soyalp, Historical Traumas Among Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish People of Anatolia: A Transdisciplinary Perspective Toward Reconciliation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 90.

Zeynep Kezer, “Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (4) (December 2014), 510, 516.

Zeynep Kezer, “Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (4) (December 2014), 509–510.

Béatrice Hendrich, “Fighting for Peace, Fighting for the Country?: The Inclusion of Women in Turkey’s National Defense in the Late 1930s,” in Béatrice Hendrich, ed., Female Fighters in Armed Conflict: Listening to their Own Stories (New York: Routledge, 2024), 52.

Selected Bibliography

Devres, Murat. Dersim as Internal Colony: The Turkish Civilizing Mission (1927–1952) (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2024).

Dınç, Pinar. “Dersim 1937–1938: Shifts and continuities in state discourse and reasoning under Kemalism and Erdoğanism,” in Nikos Christofis, ed., The Kurds in Erdoğan’s ‘New’ Turkey: Domestic and International Implications (New York: Routledge, 2022): 159–180.

Efe, Ibrahim and Bernhard Forchtner. “‘Saying Sorry’ in Turkey: The Dersim Massacre of the 1930s in 2011,” Journal of Language and Politics 14 (2015): 233–257.

Elmas, Esra. “Toward 2015: Media in Turkey on the Armenian Genocide,” in Alexis Demirdjian, ed., The Armenian Genocide Legacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 183–196.

Ergun, Emek. Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023).

Erisman, Fred. “‘Machinery Knows No Sex:’ Ruth Law, Women’s Abilities, and World War I Aviation,” Women’s Studies 47 (2018): 415–426.

Gingeras, Ryan. Eternal Dawn: Turkey in the Age of Atatürk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Göner, Özlem. Turkish National Identity and its Outsiders: Memories of State Violence in Dersim (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Göknar, Erdağ. “Turkish-Islamic Feminism Confronts National Patriarchy: Halide Edib’s Divided Self,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9 (2013): 32–57.

Gündüz, Mustafa. “Militarising School: Militarism in the Turkish Educational System (1926–1947),” Paedagogica Historica 54 (2018): 287–300.

Hendrich, Béatrice. “Fighting for Peace, Fighting for the Country?: The Inclusion of Women in Turkey’s National Defense in the Late 1930s,” in Béatrice Hendrich, ed., Female Fighters in Armed Conflict: Listening to their Own Stories (New York: Routledge, 2024): 39–59.

Höpfl, Heather J. “Becoming a (Virile) Member: Women and the Military Body,” Body & Society 9 (2003): 13–30.

Kezer, Zeynep. “Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (2014): 507–527.

Leiser, Gary. “The Turkish Air Force, 1939–45: the Rise of a Minor Power,” Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1990): 383–395.

Parmaksız, P. Yelsalı. “Paternalism, Modernization, and the Gender Regime in Turkey,” Aspasia 10 (2016): 40–62.

Soyalp, Nermin. Historical Traumas among Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish People of Anatolia: A Transdisciplinary Perspective Toward Reconciliation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021).

Toktaş, Şüle. “Nationalism, Modernization and the Military in Turkey: Women Officers in the Turkish Armed Forces,” Oriente Moderno 23 (2004): 247–267.

Türköz, Meltem. Naming and Nation-Building in Turkey: The 1934 Surname Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

Watenpaugh, Keith David. “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” The American Historical Review 115 (5) (December 2010): 1315–1339.

White, Paul J. Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers? The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000).

Yeğen, Mesut. “State Violence in ‘Kurdistan,’” in Stephan H. Astourian and Raymond H. Kévorkian, eds., Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity in from Empire to Nation-State (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021): 303–346.

Conclusion The Lingering Shadow of Osman’s Tree

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165866-32

An image associated with the Ottoman Empire, seared into the collective consciousness and rubbing metaphorical shoulders with canonical Ottoman tropes and themes like the shadows of minarets thrown into relief by the glowing Golden Horn, late medieval Venetian ships taking on mad Ottoman naval commanders, bubbling petroleum in Caspian cities visited by seventeenth-century wanderers, isolated nineteenth-century bureaucrats watching the world they knew disintegrate around them, and powerful royal slaves ruling over three continents, is the tuğra, the sultan’s cipher.¹ The earliest symbol of Ottoman sovereignty, its first iteration appeared during the reign of Orhan Gazi in the 1320s and then continued unabated until the end of the First World War. The tuğra was stamped onto coins, used as a seal, appended to official documents, carved into buildings, and branded onto the prows and masts of ships. By the eighteenth-century, it had been reconfigured into the Ottoman dynasty’s coat of arms, it appeared on stamps, and it served occasionally as a flag.² Readers will recognize it if they see it. It’s everywhere, though each sultan chose a personal variation on the theme to represent his own reign.

There’s also a tree growing up through the middle of it. Or, at least, there is the shape of a tree, the tree of life, taken from the form of a cypress.³ And this tree will help us, now that we’re nearing the end of this volume, to transform the accumulated bits and pieces of twenty five dissociated lives into something, if not coherent, then at least evocative, provocative, and potentially, if not immediately, suggestive of a message.

Figure 26.1 Tuğra of Mehmet IV, ca. 1662. Source: Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (TİEM), Istanbul 2266.

For among the fragments of the sometimes half-forgotten or frequently fully forgotten lives collected here, there runs a thin, connecting thread that stitches them together into a whole. And this thread takes the form of that same cypress tree.⁴ Consider: Malhun Hatun’s future line of sultans dreamed of cypress trees.⁵ Mihri Hatun’s poetic beloved took the form of a cypress tree.⁶ Süleyman’s son, executed under Hürrem Sultan’s influence, was, according to the poets, a fallen cypress tree.⁷ The royal gardens ruled by Nurbanu Sultan were planted with rows of cypress trees.⁸ The Tulip Period fountains inspired by Gülnuş Sultan were adorned and inscribed with poetry about cypress trees.⁹ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu immortalized a Thracian cypress tree in one of her many letters home (just after her fateful visit to the bath).¹⁰ Laskarina Bouboulina’s Nafplio is renowned for the antiquity of its cypress trees, appropriately evoking death rather than love or life.¹¹ Esma İbret’s hilye was framed by cypress trees.¹² Cypress wood has been prestigious and valuable in the regions surrounding Beirut, where Maryana Marrash first published her poetry, since antiquity.¹³ Zabel Yesayan expressed loss in her most famous novel by summoning up the ghosts of her family’s nightingales and cypress trees.¹⁴ Halide Edip found mock-inspiration in late-Ottoman literary cypress trees.¹⁵ And so on.

There’s no explicit message in that list, no lesson to be learned from these moments of intersection. But it is nonetheless singular that all of these figures, separated by time and space, were touched by the twigs and branches of that same Ottoman tree. And recognizing that they were all touched in this way might assist a reader in drawing conclusions about the value of these women’s lives that elude an easy moral or political order or injunction.

For, once again, this compendium is not a selection of models of good or exemplary behavior—any more than is a celebration of “what our young girls can do.” Nor is it a rogues’ gallery of evil-doers, not like us, to condemn. This volume is instead, like the tree, a place of entanglement. It is a place productive of an ambiguous feeling of connection conjured up out of unexpected points of contact among lives stretched out over centuries and across regions. It is a place for catching a sense, if fleeting, of recognition, of awareness that whatever drove Mihri Hatun to praise the graceful bending of the cypress tree or Gülnuş Sultan to adorn one of her many fountains with a pair of upright cypress trees or Laskarina Bouboulina to appreciate the scent of a cypress tree once the battle had been won is still alive and well.

But if a reader has instead discovered in these pages a galvanizing message, that’s satisfactory too. Never forget, however, the cypress tree also haunts graveyards. And that is, in the end, what we’ve created here: a graveyard, a quiet, dead space for the containment of lost lives, and a place where the flotsam of those lives might finally settle into silence.

Notes

M. Uğur Derman, Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 38.

Hakan T. Karateke, “Interpreting Monuments: Charitable Buildings, Monuments, and the Construction of Collective Memory in the Ottoman Empire,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 91 (2001): 183–199, 192–194.

Hüseyin Odabaş and Coşkun Polat, Manuscript and Ferman Ornamentation Art in the Ottoman Empire (Ankara: Türk Kütüphaneciler Dernegi, 2015), 140.

Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Rachel Milstein, “Sacred Space and the Royal Seat: Islamic Imagery of Kingship,” in Arlette David, Rachel Milstein, Tallay Ornan, eds., Picturing Royal Charisma: Kings and Rulers in the Near East from 3000 BCE to 1700 CE (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2023): 128–145, 141.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 192.

Didem Havlıoğlu, Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 22.

Gülru Necipoğlu, “The Suburban Landscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul as a Mirror of Classical Ottoman Garden Culture,” in Attilio Petruccioli, ed., Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 32–71, 34.

Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 230.

M.W. Montagu, The Letters of Lady M.W. Montagu During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718. Vol. 1 (Chiswick, London: C & C Whittingham, 1825), 121.

Nikolas Dimakis, “Ancient Greek Deathscapes,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 3 (1) (2015): 27–41, 36.

“Hilye in Free Form (18th Century), by Esma İbret Hanim, Wife and Student of Mauhmud Cellaleddin,” Demirören Collection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hilye_in_free_form_(18th_century),_by_Esma_Ibret_Hanim.jpg (accessed May 20, 2024).

Josette Elayi, The History of Phoenicia, trans. Andrew Plummer (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018), 33.

Zabel Yesayan, Gardens of Silihdar: A Memoir, trans. Jennifer Manoukian (Boston: AIWA Press, 2014), 31.

Halide Edip Adıvar, The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (London: John Murray, 1928), 164.

Selected Bibliography

Adıvar, Halide Edip. The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (London: John Murray, 1928).

Derman, M. Uğur. Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998).

Dimakis, Nikolas. “Ancient Greek Deathscapes,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 3 (1) (2015): 27–41.

Havlıoğlu, Didem. Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

Karateke, Hakan T. “Interpreting Monuments: Charitable Buildings, Monuments, and the Construction of Collective Memory in the Ottoman Empire,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 91 (2001): 183–199.

Mikhail, Alan. Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Milstein, Rachel. “Sacred Space and the Royal Seat: Islamic Imagery of Kingship,” in Arlette David, Rachel Milstein, Tallay Ornan, eds., Picturing Royal Charisma: Kings and Rulers in the Near East from 3000 BCE to 1700 CE (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2023): 128–145.

Montagu, M.W. The Letters of Lady M.W. Montagu During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718, Vol. 1 (Chiswick, London: C & C Whittingham, 1825).

Necipoğlu, Gülru. “The Suburban Landscape of Sixteenth-Century Istanbul as a Mirror of Classical Ottoman Garden Culture,” in Attilio Petruccioli, ed., Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires (Leiden: Brill, 1997): 32–71.

Rüstem, Ünver. Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Yesayan, Zabel. Gardens of Silihdar: A Memoir, trans. Jennifer Manoukian (Boston: AIWA Press, 2014).

Glossary

ahmediye

an embroidered velvet

akçe

a silver coin, the basic monetary unit of the early modern Ottoman empire

bey

a title of respect given to men

çelebi

a title given to educated men

converso

a convert from Judaism to Catholicism in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain

darüşşifa

a hospital

dervish

an ascetic, mystic, or spiritual leader

divan

a collection of poetry

dönme

Ottoman Jewish followers of Shabbatai Tzevi who converted in Islam in the seventeenth century

efendi

an informal title of respect given to elite men

evcara

a makam developed by Dilhayat Kalfa; specifically, a şed makam, in which she transposed existing modes to a new pitch without altering the intervals of their scales

fetva/fatwa

a non-binding legal opinion

gazi

a warrior for the faith

grand vizier

the highest-ranking minister in the Ottoman government

hamam

a bath

hanım

a title of respect given to women in the modern period

haseki sultan

the favorite consort of a sultan

hatun

a title of respect given to women in the early modern period

hijab

a covering; “the veil”

hilye

literally “ornament;” a description of the physical or spiritual attributes of the Prophet; a portrait of the Prophet in words

hoca

a teacher or professor

imaret

a soup kitchen

Ka’ba

a building at the center of the most important mosque in Mecca; the House of God

kadı

a judge or magistrate

kalfa

a title for craftsmen, supervisors, or persons of middling rank; “lady”

kaza

an Ottoman administrative unit

khedive

the title given to the viceroy of Egypt between 1805/1867 and 1914

makam

a set of rules for the composition of Ottoman classical music; a mode or a scale

Mecelle

the first comprehensive codification of Ottoman-Islamic civil law

meclis

a gathering; a literary salon

medrese

an educational institution

memalik-i mahruse

the well-protected domains, a name for the Ottoman Empire

millet

a non-Muslim confessional community (eventually “nation”) protected under Ottoman-Islamic law

mimar

an architect

mufti

a jurist qualified to issue legal opinions (fatwas)

obur

a vampire or witch in the northern Caucasus, as witnessed by the traveler, Evliya Çelebi

pasha

a title given to the most elite statesmen and military leaders

saz semai

the closing movement of a suite in Ottoman classical music

şeyh

a religious or spiritual authority

sipahi

the cavalry

Sufi

a mystic or spiritual leader, an adept who seeks oneness with God

sultan

a title given to those who possessed sovereign authority, including princes and high-ranking women

tekke

a dervish lodge

tezkire

a biographical dictionary

timar

the revenue from a parcel of land granted by the Sultan in exchange for military service, or the parcel of land itself

tuğra

the sultan’s cipher or seal

valide sultan

queen mother

vizier

a minister of the sultan

voivode

elected or appointed ruler of Transylvania

waqf

an Islamic charitable foundation

yeshiva

a Jewish educational institution

ziadi (cadı, cadu)

witch

Index

Abdülhamit II 263–4, 296, 323, 336, 340–1, 383

Adana 293; and massacres (1909) 291–2

aerial bombing 397–9, 402–3

agriculture 16, 138, 163, 365; and economy 108

Ahmet (son of Beyazıt II) 49

Ahmet Cevdet Pasha 273–6

Ahmet III 167, 169, 198

Alareer, Refaat 295

Albania 2, 4, 6, 305–6

Aleppo 259, 264, 266

Algeria 1, 4, 209

Alhambra Expulsion Edict 105, 108, 380

al-Jinan see Majallat al-Jinan

Amasya 39, 48, 62

Among the Ruins 291–3, 296

Anatolia 2, 42, 48; and court records 136; and the First World War 337–8, 383; and Kurds 397–8; and waqfs 121–2

Andersen, Hans Christian 241, 247–8

antisemitism 383; see also Dönmes; nationalism; racism

apprenticeship 49, 228; see also education

Arabian Peninsula 4

archives 11, 199

Armenia 295; and Armenian descent 397; see also Armenian Genocide; Armenian Patriarch; genocide; Yerevan

Armenian Genocide 289–90, 293, 295–7, 351; see also Adana massacres; atrocity; genocide

Armenian Patriarch 291

Aşıkpaşazade 33, 36, 39–42

astrology 201

Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 335, 337–8, 343, 365, 370, 382, 396–9, 401–2

Athens 215, 244

atrocity 212, 214–15, 291–2, 294, 296; see also genocide

Austria 4, 106, 108, 154, 337; see also Hapsburgs

authenticity 181, 183–4, 241–3, 245, 247–8, 263

authoritarianism 124–5, 264, 282, 322, 335, 338, 365, 370, 388–9

autobiography 48, 53–4

Baku 293, 381

balance of power 212–13

Balkans 1–2, 6, 39, 133, 365, 400; and Balkan Wars 369, 371, 380, 383

bandits 134

baroque 166–7, 171; see also Tulip Period

baths see hamams

Baudelaire, Charles 291

Beirut 261, 264, 278, 411

Belgium 310–11

Belgrade Forest 169

beloved 53, 61, 65, 68, 75, 77, 358, 411

Berlin 323

bestseller 266

Beyazıt I 2

Bint Fikr 264

biographical dictionaries of poets (tezkire-i şuara) 55, 62–5, 69, 73, 80

biology 18, 35, 122, 191, 367, 374, 382

birth control 384

birthday (of the Prophet) 74, 78

Black Sea 2, 4, 39; and slave trade 89

Boleyn, Anne 89, 91

borderlands 19, 73, 79, 147, 152; and frontiers 38–9

Bosnia 4, 6, 397

Britain 305, 309–11, 339; see also England

Bulgaria 2, 4, 293, 337, 351, 365–9, 372–4

Bursa 2, 63, 397

Byzantine Empire 2, 38, 40–2

Cairo 74–5, 234, 243–6, 261, 307–8, 310, 312–13, 338, 352

Caliphate 2, 4, 5; see also Selim I

cannibalism 148, 153

canon (literary) 8, 62, 64–5, 69, 79, 303, 339, 343; and music 204

capitalism 108–11, 125, 134, 241, 274; see also communication capitalism; finance

Carpathians 152, 155–6

carrier pigeons 353, 360

cartography 1–2, 14, 171, 335, 343, 374; and bombing 402

Catholicism 102–3, 105–9, 116, 147, 149, 259, 341

Caucasus 1–2, 153, 252, 293

cavalry see sipahis

Cavell, Edith 309–12, 314, 356–7, 359

celebrity 265–7, 310–11

censorship 264

Central Asia 228, 321

charisma 230, 303–4, 308–12, 314, 338, 381

charitable foundation see waqf

Chios 163, 216

Christianity 6, 40–1, 106–7, 109, 152, 155, 214–15, 305, 341; and mysticism 77; and timars 135; see also Catholicism; Protestantism

Cilicia 291; see also Adana

cinema 209–10, 308, 328, 352

Clown and His Daughter, The (Sinekli Bakkal, The Grocer of Sinekli) 340–2

clothing 7, 103, 107–8, 110, 185, 199, 211; and fashion 151–2, 182, 186; and painting 245, 150, 324, 326; see also cross dressing

codification (legal) 273–5, 280

Cold War 321, 385

colonialism 1, 109, 181, 184, 191–2, 212–13, 217, 242–3, 245–7, 252, 279, 304–8, 312–14, 338, 351, 359

Columbia University 339, 380, 387

communication capitalism 387

communism 384–5; see also Marxism

constitutionalism 7, 19, 306, 341–2, 383

consumers 6, 18, 51, 199, 241, 243, 245, 247–8, 251–2, 261–3, 265–7, 280, 358, 386–7, 401

contagion 94, 146, 150, 155, 188, 191; see also smallpox

conversion 6, 41, 90, 92, 105–6, 108, 111, 133, 135–6, 150–2, 154, 200, 321, 341–3, 380–2

conversos 102–3, 105–6, 108, 380; see also conversion

correspondence see letters (epistolary)

cosmopolitanism 168, 259, 273, 280, 282, 291, 303, 323, 336, 372, 382

court records 136–8

courtesans 51–2

Crete 163, 165–6, 172

Crimea 2

cross-dressing (cultural) 150–2, 245; and gender 341; and Turquerie 152, 182; see also clothing

Csejte (castle) 147, 150, 153

cypress trees 96, 409–12

Damascus 73, 75, 78–80

Darüşşifa see hospitals

decline (imperial) 135, 166, 171

Degas, Edgar 324–5

democracy 6–7, 13–14, 16, 124–5, 264–7, 274, 386; see also constitutionalism

Denmark 241–4, 246, 251

Dersim 398–402; and rebellion 398; see also atrocity

dervishes see şeyhs

diasporas 291, 293–4, 337; see also genocide

diplomats 1, 88–9, 91, 107, 118, 168, 181, 189, 211–12, 246, 297, 323; and embassies 188, 308, 312

disability studies 188

divan (poetry) 49–50

divorce 136, 324, 336

Dönmes 380–4, 387; see also Jews; Judaism

dutiful daughters 275, 371, 396

Edebali 33, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 48, 80

Edirne 2, 167, 184–5

education 49, 62, 64, 74, 147, 165, 223, 227–9, 260, 303, 322, 335, 343, 384; and science 263, 366; and uplift 262–3, 267, 281

Egypt 4, 80, 226, 244, 273, 293, 303–15, 352

Egyptian Feminist Union 303

Egyptian Women’s March (1919) 303, 308–10, 312

elegy 264

empathy 328–30

England 89, 185, 188, 191–2; see also Britain

Enlightenment 137, 155, 181–2

Entente powers 310, 337–8, 355, 366, 370, 380

epigraphy 11, 40, 166

Eskişehir 37

espionage see spies

ethnicity 1, 7, 12, 14–15, 94, 134, 147, 183, 381, 388, 396, 401–2

ethnography 183, 191, 241, 244, 250

Evcara 201, 203–4; see also makam

Evliya Çelebi 153

exile 106, 167, 291, 293, 295, 329, 335–6, 339–42, 380–1, 384–5, 387–9; see also diaspora

exploitation 152, 184, 187, 242, 280, 325–6, 329, 387

extraterritoriality 1, 109, 305, 312

fashion see clothing

Fatih (Istanbul neighborhood) 88

fatwa (fetva) 48, 74, 80

favorite (as title) see haseki

feminism 9, 11, 16–17, 62, 80, 103, 110, 138, 149, 181–3, 191, 230, 259–62, 273–9, 282–3, 303, 314, 335, 338, 340, 343, 366, 370, 396–8, 400–4; state-sponsored 335, 370, 396–7

femme fatales 18, 356

figurative representation (in art) 224–5; and iconography 225

finance 108–9; see also capitalism

First World War 4–5, 139, 273, 289, 291, 306, 321, 335–7, 351, 355–6, 359, 366, 369, 371, 383, 388, 396–7, 401, 409

Flaubert, Gustave 8

forgetting (collective) 296; see also memory (collective)

fountains 163, 166–71, 185, 242, 248, 411

France 4–5, 89, 290–1, 294, 339, 381

French (language) 260, 264, 273–4, 276–7, 279–80, 282, 290, 292, 303

frontiers see borderlands

Galata 167–9

Gardens of Silihdar 295–6, 340

gazis 33–6, 40–1, 370, 373; and gaza 40–1

Genoa 89

genocide 14, 289–90, 293, 295–7, 351, 358, 370, 388, 397; see also Armenian Genocide; atrocity

genre (literary) 17, 48, 53, 62, 64, 75, 147, 155, 181, 246, 262, 280, 289–90, 295, 355–9

Germany 241, 310–11, 337, 353–6, 366, 369–70

gossip 61–4

Gothic (literature) 146, 155, 191, 280–1

guerilla warfare 133

gynecology 369

Habermas, Jürgen 263, 265

Hague Convention (1899) 311

hamams 121–2, 163, 169, 185–7, 192, 322, 324–30

Hamamda Nü 326–7

Hapsburgs 4, 147, 149–50, 153, 155, 167; see also Austria; Hungary

harem 15–16, 87, 89–91, 94, 118, 133, 163, 165–6, 199, 211, 242, 244, 246–7, 324

Hasan Enver Pasha 321–2

haseki (title) 90, 92, 116, 118–19, 163–5

Haseki Sultan Complex 88, 91–4, 118–19, 136, 169

Hayrettin Pasha 116–17

Henry VIII 89, 103

heroism 12, 102–3, 107, 209–11, 214–17, 335, 338, 352, 354–6, 365–6, 374, 399–400, 402–3

hijab (veiling) 181, 248, 304, 314

hilyes 230–4, 411

homoeroticism 187, 355

honor 216–17, 282–3, 399

hospitals 92–5, 116, 118, 122, 124–5, 170, 290, 303, 365, 369, 372; and darüşşifa 92

humanitarian intervention 4, 211–17, 305

Hungary 4, 146–7, 151–3, 167, 337, 351, 381; see also Hapsburgs

hunting 163, 165–6

Huysmans, Jan-Baptist 324

Illustrated Monthly 384, 386

imitatio see parallel

India 107, 110, 304, 339

infection see contagion

inheritance 107, 120, 135–9, 209

inoculation 181, 185, 187–9, 191–2; see also contagion; smallpox

Inquisition (Spanish and Portuguese) 102–3, 108–11

International Congress of Women Doctors 370

international law 14, 133, 211–13, 305, 310; and laws of warfare 133, 136, 139; see also humanitarian intervention

interpellation 309, 313

interrogation 352, 354–60; see also torture

Iran 4, 228, 293; see also Persian (language); Safavid Empire

Iraq 4, 293, 337

Ireland 304

irony 54, 74, 80, 192, 242, 252

Istanbul 2, 102–3, 105–9, 111, 121, 138, 165, 167, 181, 188, 226, 228, 243–6, 290–6, 305–6, 323, 337–8, 366, 370, 383–4; and Entente occupation 304, 308, 337–8, 366, 370, 380, 384; and urban landscape 88, 92, 116, 118, 121, 163, 168–9, 242

Istanbul University 337

Italy 4, 189, 244, 341

Janissary Corps 133–4

jazz 200

Jews 102–3, 105–9, 111, 214, 351, 380–3; Ashkenazi 106, 109; Sephardic 102, 106, 109, 111, 380–1; see also antisemitism; Dönmes; Judaism

jihad 40; see also gazis

journalism 294–6, 380, 386, 399

Judaism 102, 108, 382; see also Jews

khedive 261, 305–6

Kurds 337, 397–8

Latifi 54–5, 65

Lawrence, T.E. 352, 355, 357, 359

laws of warfare see International Law

lawsuits 8, 11–12, 132–3, 135–6, 138–9; see also court records

League of Nations 337

legitimacy (political) 211–12; see also sovereignty

letters (alphabetic) 118, 224–7, 229, 233; and alphabet reform 340

letters (epistolary) 11–13, 17, 107, 181, 183, 185, 187, 295, 354–5, 357–9, 411

Levant 292, 351

license (calligraphy) 228–9

license (fatwa) 74

license (publishing) 263

liminality 36–8, 91

Lisbon 102–3, 105

litigation see lawsuits

love see beloved

Mahidevran 89, 91, 95

Mahmut I 198

Majallat al-Jinan 261–4

makam (music) 200–1, 203–4

malaria 371–2

Mamluks 4, 73, 75–6, 79

mandates 5, 338

markets 92; and art 227, 242, 245, 250, 322; and newspapers 386–7; and slaves 90

Marrash, Abdallah 261

Marrash, Francis 261, 263–4

marriage 36, 47, 62, 64, 105, 137, 281, 367, 382, 388, 399; Egypt and the Ottoman Empire 314; and slaves 87, 89, 91; see also divorce

martyrdom 310, 355

Marxism 328, 374, 384, 387; see also communism

Mata Hari 356–7, 359

Mecca 4, 74, 78

Mecelle 273–4; see also codification (legal)

Mehmet Ali Pasha 304–6, 312

Mehmet II 2, 39

Mehmet III 50

Mehmet IV 163, 165–7, 410

Mehmet Zekeriya 380, 389

memalik-i mahruse (well-protected domains) 1, 38, 42, 164, 401

memoirs 296–7, 303, 307–10, 312–13

memory (collective) 297; see also forgetting (collective)

menstruation 79

mercenaries 133, 147, 152–6

merchants 105–7, 109–10, 137, 351

mermaids 247–51, 330; and The Little Mermaid 247–8; and sirens 248, 250

Milk Drop Branch of the Child Protection Agency 370

Mill, John Stuart 212

meclis see salons

millets 6–7, 13, 106, 108–9, 120

Minya, Egypt 303, 310

mirrors 324, 327

Modernism 321–3, 326, 343

Moldova 367

monsters 18, 148, 155–6

monuments 91–2, 95, 166–7, 170, 343; and monumental space 16, 343

moon (crescent) 33, 35

mosques 92, 94, 96, 122, 163, 167–70, 172

motherhood 33, 35, 90, 96, 118, 121–2, 167, 263, 277, 281, 321–2, 370; see also valide sultan

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 200

muftis 73, 80

Muhadarat (Disquisitions) 281–2

Muhammad (Prophet) 74–5, 77–9, 232, 264

Murat III 116, 119

murder 147, 149, 155, 214, 398, 403

Mustafa II 167

Mustafa III 199

mutiny 155, 165, 167

mysticism see Sufism

Nabokov, Vladimir 339, 342

Nadiri 50

Nafplio 214–16, 411

narcissism 183, 191, 357, 359

Nasi, Joseph 105–8, 110, 116

national health policies 367, 374

nationalism 13, 80, 134, 212–13, 259, 262, 267, 273, 296–7, 303, 305, 307–9, 312, 314, 322, 335, 343, 359–60, 365–6, 383, 397; ethnonationalism 12, 338, 385, 388–9, 400, 402; see also racism

Naxos 106

Nazım Hikmet 321–3, 328–30, 380, 384–5

Netherlands 108–9, 310

New Valide Sultan Mosque 168

New Womanhood 273–4, 280, 283

New York 380–1, 384

newspapers 183, 261, 369, 384–6, 389

NILI spy network 351–4

Nisayi 95–6

nomads 2, 37

nostalgia 38, 297, 343

novels 11–13, 17, 273–7, 279–82, 289, 293, 335, 340–1, 352; Arabic novel 261–2; and novelists 273, 275–6, 289, 335; serialized 261–2, 277–8

nudity 250, 322, 324–30

odalisques 244–5, 248–51, 326

Ohnet, Georges 273, 277–80

Orhan I 2, 33, 36, 40–1, 135, 409

Orientalism 8, 13, 16, 47, 181, 184–5, 187, 191–2, 211, 224–6, 241, 242, 244–50, 281, 324, 326, 329

Osman I 2, 33–6, 38, 40–2, 164, 314, 342–3, 409

Osman’s tree 33, 35–6, 38, 41, 409–12

Ottomanism 276, 389

pain 77, 148, 154, 291, 356, 358

Palestine 351, 353, 358–60

panegyrics 78, 264–5

Pápa 153–4

Papas, Irene 210, 216

parallel (poetic) 51–3

Paris 16, 246, 261, 278, 290, 293–5, 323, 374

Paris Peace Conference 294, 307, 312

patriarchy 8, 18, 274–7, 335

patriotism 241, 263, 354–5, 357; see also nationalism

patronage 8, 11, 49–52, 62, 78, 88, 91, 95, 122, 124, 163–7, 169, 228, 233–4, 246, 251–2, 264–7, 323

peasants 19, 132, 147, 152, 181, 214, 244–5, 248, 307, 310, 314

pediatrics 369

Persian (language) 48, 53–4, 61–2, 67–8, 228

piety 38, 73–5, 103

piracy 36, 116, 209

pitch (musical) 200, 203

plunder 39–41, 171, 214

Poe, Edgar Allen 291

Poland 147, 150, 241, 200, 321

Pope, Alexander 189–90, 280

pornography 148, 211, 241, 324, 326

Portugal 102, 105–11, 382

postcolonialism 8

primogeniture 90

printing press 264

prison 16, 66, 148, 150, 167, 189, 295, 321, 323, 352, 354, 381

pronouns 53, 61

propaganda 119, 155, 241, 275, 310–11, 352, 355, 358, 370, 400

prophecy 1, 36–7

prostitution 384

Protestantism 108–9, 147, 149, 248

pseudonyms 52, 274

psychiatry 368–9

public opinion 211–12

public space 15–16, 163, 181, 343

public sphere 183, 262–3, 265–7, 277

Quran 38, 66, 199, 226, 229, 234

racism 187, 242–3, 247, 251, 382–4, 388; see also antisemitism; nationalism

Radcliffe, Ann 281

Red Crescent 273, 277, 283, 338

refugees 105–6, 110–11, 147, 289, 293, 338–9, 381, 383, 388

Renaissance (European) 51, 89, 102, 111

representation 17, 51, 200, 224–5, 244, 326

reproduction 18–19

Resimli Ay see Illustrated Monthly

respectability 51–2, 62, 78, 275–6, 282

Romania 4

Rome 241, 323

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 263

Russia 4, 95, 212, 290, 305, 321, 339, 367, 381; see also Soviet Union

Safavid Empire 4

Salonica 16, 102, 105–6, 323, 380–3, 388, 401

salons 51–3, 62, 259, 266–7; and meclis 51, 62

Sappho 47, 189

saz semai 203

self-annihilation 75, 77, 103, 230, 232–3; see also Sufism

Selim I 4, 73, 76

Selim II 106, 116, 119

Selim III 203–4, 230

Seljuks 38, 40–1

Serbia 2, 4, 212–13

servants 122, 147–8, 150, 281–2, 399

şeyhs 33, 35, 38–9, 42, 48, 122, 223

Shabbatai Tzevi 381–2; see also Dönmes

sheikh see şeyhs

silence 17, 62, 64–5, 68–9, 183, 204–5, 245, 296–7

Sinan (mimar) 92

Sinekli Bakkal see Clown and His Daughter

sipahis 134–5

sirens see mermaids

slave trade 89

slavery 63, 65, 87, 89–90, 92, 94–5, 133, 211, 215, 276, 281, 381; and conversion 89–90, 92, 133, 381

smallpox 181, 185, 187–89, 191, 280; see also contagion; inoculation

soap operas 35, 103

social media 266, 387

Sokollu Mehmet Pasha 106, 116

Sorbonne 290, 366, 368

sovereignty (political) 4, 14–15, 110, 118, 164–6, 170–1, 212–13, 217, 242, 273, 306, 359, 401–2, 409

Soviet Union 295, 321, 339, 385

speculative fiction 291

spies 19, 105–7, 110, 351–9, 399

staff notation (music) 200

states of emergency 4, 305–6

Stoker, Bram 146, 191; see also vampires; Vlad Drakul

Suez Canal 116

Sufism 33, 38–9, 42, 48–9, 65, 68–9, 73, 75, 77, 79–80, 200, 223, 225, 227

suicide 1–2, 13, 18–19, 352, 357, 360

Süleyman I 87, 89, 91–2, 95–6, 117–18

Süleymaniye Complex 92, 118

Sultanahmet (Istanbul neighborhood) 338, 343

Sultanate of Women 108, 119, 135

surnames 397, 402

surveys 384, 386–8

Switzerland 367, 372, 374

synagogues 102, 107

Syria 4, 78, 80, 259, 264, 267, 273, 307, 353

Tan (Dawn) newspaper 389

taxes 6, 19, 36, 39, 41, 132–4; and tax farming 133–4

tekke (dervish lodge) 38, 122, 223

terrain 133, 402; see also cartography

territory 2, 15, 36, 79, 111, 150, 163–4, 171, 184, 337, 401–2

testimony 289, 291, 293, 295–7; and witnessing 66, 148, 291–7

tezkire-i şuara see biographical dictionaries

Tiberias 106

timars 120, 132–40; and revenue 120, 132–3, 135–6

Timur 2–3

tolerance (religious) 6–7, 147

Topkapı Palace 234

torture 148, 154–5, 214–15, 352, 354, 357–9; see also interrogation

translation 68, 80, 273–7, 279–80, 282, 340–2; translation studies 279–80

Transylvania 147, 150, 152, 213

Treaty of Lausanne 5, 337

Treaty of Sèvres 5, 337, 340

Tripolitsa 214–16

tuberculosis 369, 371

tuğras 409–10

Tulip Period 163–5, 167, 184, 192, 198, 411; see also baroque

Turkish (language) 48, 53, 61–2, 68, 273, 275–7, 279–80, 282, 340

Turkish Aviation School 397

Turkish Embassy Letters 185

Turkish Republic 5, 226, 296, 322, 324, 326, 329, 335, 337–43, 366, 370–1, 373, 380–1, 383–9, 396–7, 401–2

Turkish Women’s Association 243

Ukraine 87, 89, 95

Urabi Movement 306

Üsküdar 118, 168

vaccination see inoculation

valide sultan (title) 90, 96, 118–19, 140, 163–4, 167–8

Valide Sultan Complex 119, 124, 136

vampires 18, 88, 146, 152–3

Varna 369, 372

veiling see hijab

Venice 89, 102, 105, 107, 116–17, 165–6, 409

Victorian era 148

Vienna 4, 166, 204

virginity 47, 52, 65, 171

virtue 52, 61, 65, 187, 263

Vlad Drakul 146, 149, 155, 191

voivodes 147, 150

Volonté 273, 277, 279–80, 282

voyeurism 187, 242, 251–2, 326–8

Walloons 153–4, 156

waqfs 118, 120–2, 124–5, 138, 199

waterworks 121, 166–72, 185, 242, 353; and sweet and bitter water 169, 172

Westphalian systems 14–15, 111, 212

witchcraft 42, 87–9, 91, 95, 119, 152, 191, 247

witnessing see testimony

Wollstonecraft, Mary 182

Woman Question, The 261–3

Würzburg University 369

Yahya Kemal 323

Yemen 1, 110

Yerevan 295

Young Turks 341

Zaghlul, Sa’ad 307–8, 310

Zionism 351–5, 357–60

Züleyha (and Yusuf) 65–8

Zurich 367, 372