Nadir ¨Ozbek PHILANTHROPIC ACTIVITY, OTTOMAN PATRIOTISM

Transkript

Int. J. Middle East Stud. 37 (2005), 59–81. Printed in the United States of America
DOI: 10.1017.S0020743805050051
Nadir Özbek
P H IL A N T H R O P IC A C T IV IT Y, O T T O M A N
PA T R IO T IS M , A N D T H E H A M ID IA N R E G IM E ,
1876–1909
This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan
Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and
society—that is, various social groups’ voluntary activities, especially fund-raising
campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself.
These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and
the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities
and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this
context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political
groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was “the public domain
where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside
and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse.”1 Within the parameters of this
definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the
public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought
to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in
voluntary activities in the broader political arena.
Ottoman historiography, until recently, has produced neither empirically rich nor
theoretically informed studies on such issues as civic culture, voluntary initiative, or
the public sphere in the late Ottoman context. Nor has it explored the potential that
such concepts hold for meeting a political regime’s need for legitimation. One cannot
fully explain this negligence by citing the much lamented governmental origins of
most Ottoman sources. The problem is, rather, with the paradigms and conceptual
frameworks that have informed most scholarship. Even today, Ottoman historiography,
influenced mostly by a Eurocentric modernization paradigm, has operated within a
dualistic conception of the state–society relationship and an accompanying conceptual
East–West divide. In broad terms, this historiography has depicted the East, including
the Ottoman past, as a place where cultural or historical particularities, whether those
of a strong state in the form of “Oriental despotism” or the peculiarities of Islamic
culture, have simply prevented the emergence of civil society and the conditions for
a democratic politics based on popular consent.2 Such a Eurocentric modernization
Nadir Özbek is Assistant Professor in the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University,
Bebek, Istanbul 34342, Turkey; e-mail: [email protected].
© 2005 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/05 $12.00
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paradigm was perhaps not a necessary or inevitable idiosyncrasy of the Ottoman and
Middle East studies field, but it has continued as an epistemological bent informing the
historiographies of “Eastern societies” long after its most extensive deployments, and
even after its critique.
During the past two decades, the dichotomous conception of the state–society
relationship, with its accompanying East–West divide, has lost some ground while
new approaches have gained currency. Revisionist approaches in British, German,
Russian, Chinese, and Japanese historiography have drawn attention to the collaborations and loose boundaries between the state and civil society and, more important, have
acknowledged the possibility that the state can be an ally and instrument in the process
of the emergence of civil society. This new literature has demystified not only an image
of the East as a place where civic culture is inherently weak, state power is strong,
and politics is based primarily on coercion. It has also demystified the conception of
a West as characterized by a strong civil society and a weak state, a society in which
state power is based primarily on popular consent.3 Released from the constraints of
Weberian-modernizationist and Orientalist paradigms, which have implicitly advocated
the convergence toward modernity of all societies while simultaneously ruling out
most potential for this evolution among “non-Western societies,” revisionist historians
have welcomed the opportunity to engage in a search for indicators of civic culture,
intermediary groups, civil society, and the public sphere in these societies’ pasts.4
The major achievement of this revisionist historiography has been the redefinition of
modernization as a shared trajectory that can be analyzed through a set of shared
conceptual tools, an attempt that aims to avoid both Eurocentrism and particularistic
ethnocentrisms.
This paradigmatic reorientation, however, does not guarantee a resounding defeat for
modernizationist and Orientalist approaches to state–society relations. Indeed, historians
from various fields have recently begun to express discomfort with the more general
quest to locate in “non-Western” societies’ pasts any phenomenon identified with the
civil society of the Western discursive tradition and with the search for a single trajectory
of modernization.5 However, it is apparent that such theoretical concerns have produced
experiments with a concept of “multiple modernities” defined mainly in reference to
an essentialized conception of cultural difference, an approach that is currently gaining
wider academic currency.6 This concern, as part of a broader epistemological critique
of modernity, finds sophisticated articulations in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent depiction
of “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the
law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject,
democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality” as all bearing “the
burden of European thought and history.”7
Attempts to reconceptualize state–society relations have recently gained currency
in Ottoman historiography, as well. Especially in the past decade, Ottoman historians
have begun to experiment with concepts such as the public sphere, civil society, and
public opinion borrowed mainly from European historiography and to question the
dualistic understanding of state–society relations. For instance, viewing early-19thcentury Ottoman history through the lenses of the public sphere and public opinion has
already shown potential not only for new insights into the Ottoman history, but also
for a reconsideration of those concepts from a broader theoretical and world-historical
Philanthropic Activity and Ottoman Patriotism
61
perspective.8 Similarly, studies of the women’s press and other social domains that shed
light on gender relations in the late Ottoman public sphere enable us to critically rethink
late Ottoman history as well as our analytical tools.9
Another inclination in the field concerns redefining the public sphere in such a way as
to make the insights it yields relevant to broader Middle Eastern and Islamic historical
contexts.10 However, one may notice a culturalist tone in such approaches, which give
chief explanatory power to cultural and religious understandings—the Muslim context,
in particular—and conceive modernity as multiple insofar as it is defined mainly in
the context of cultural or civilizational referents.11 My approach here will be a more
politically oriented one that conceptualizes modernity as a common and shared larger
global process and contingent on the historical context of power relations.12 Following
Harry Harootunian, we can call it a “co-existing” or “co-eval” modernity—that is, “it
shared the same historical temporality of modernity found elsewhere in Europe” and in
other parts of the world.13 My approach also diverges from recent culturalist tendencies
in historiography that repudiate the validity of the public-sphere concept altogether either
because of its Eurocentric connotations or because it has been overused in ideological
and teleological perspectives.
Despite these recent attempts to formulate alternatives to dualistic understandings
of state–society relations and to Eurocentric versions of modernity, older paradigms
continue to inform historical writing on the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.14
Especially within contemporary Turkish historiography, the state–society dualism continues to maintain pride of place, and one can distinguish within this paradigm two
interpretative inclinations regarding the role of state. The first interpretation reifies
the modernizing central state as the major agent of historical change, applauding, for
example, centralization efforts carried out during the reign of Mahmud II (1808–39) and
the Tanzimat period (1839–76). Historians of this school do not raise civil society or
the public sphere as conceptual or historical problems. Rather, they consider the centralization and reform efforts of the 19th century as the major instruments responsible
for progression toward modernity. Thus, the modernizing state laid the foundations for a
Western-style social and political system, paving the way for the emergence of modern
citizenship. Another emphasis within this school, at the opposite pole of the reified
state as the agent of modernization and civic/political culture, is the masses, with their
traditional and Islamic culture, pictured as the main impediment to progression toward
modernity.15
A second approach, conversely, blames the strong centralized state for the obvious
weaknesses of Ottoman civil society. According to this approach, early-19th-century
reform initiatives, particularly those under Mahmud II, weakened popular institutions
such as the guilds, Sufi lodges, and artisan groups while, at the same time, recentralization
throughout the century left emerging civil society vulnerable to encroachments by the
state. As a result, the argument goes, “the patrimonial structure remained intact” until the
beginning of the 20th century.16 For example, Şerif Mardin recently argued that, during
the Tanzimat period, “the Ottoman bureaucratic elite, while promoting a government of
laws and facilitating economic enterprise, had not as yet given its own citizens the type
of liberty that one associates with the growth of civil society in the West.”17 Reşat Kasaba
offers a slightly different version of this paradigm.18 He locates all the elements of a civic
social formation in, for example, western Anatolia, a region with commercial ties to the
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expanding European economy and which experienced a geographical concentration of
commercial wealth during the late 18th and most of the 19th century. Kasaba’s argument
is innovative in locating the social and economic foundations of an Ottoman civil society
in a relatively early phase; in this he diverges from Mardin, who categorically denies the
existence of civil society in Muslim and Ottoman cultural domains. However, Kasaba
identifies separate “state” and “non-state” domains and pictures the relationship between
the two in a familiarly dualistic fashion.19 Thus for Kasaba, too, the centralizing state
appears as a major impediment to an expanding civil society—or, at the very least, he
sees the conflictual relationship between state and society as instrumental in narrowing
the scope and basis of consent in Ottoman and Turkish politics.20
The two approaches examined so far—one state-centered and the other societycentered—share a conception of a reified state defined as distinct and above society.
Operating within such a paradigm, most scholarship in the field fails to discern how
bureaucratization efforts and the accompanying social and political transformations of
the 19th century constituted state–society relations contingent on power relations. It
also happens that methodological problems engendered by this paradigm are apparent
particularly in the historiography of the Hamidian period (1876–1909). For the majority
of scholars who agree on the absolutist and despotic/autocratic character of the Hamidian
regime, the concepts of civil society and the public sphere are considered irrelevant to
the period. Moreover, historiography on the Hamidian period in Turkey is politicized,
with scholars divided in support for or opposition to the so-called Islamic policies of
the sultan.21 Historians with ideological motives for identifying with Hamidian policies
largely lack theoretical concerns and do not make an issue of civil society or the public
sphere. Historians in the other camp portray Hamidian policies, which encouraged a
patriarchal-type loyalty of the state’s subjects, as a force of regression from the set
trajectory of the construction of modernity and civic culture among Ottoman subjects.22
For historians who subscribe to this paradigm, the Hamidian period represents a perfect
match between the sultan’s search for popular approval from the masses and the paternalist and traditionalist Islamic culture of those masses. According to Niyazi Berkes, “[T]he
foundation of Hamidian rule was the great mass of the people—with all their beliefs
and superstitions, and also their sense of honor and decency.”23 To borrow a concept
from Jürgen Habermas, this “plebiscitary-acclamatory” form of autocratic politics, a fair
descriptor for the character of the Hamidian regime, was considered to be intrinsically
likely to engender conservative consequences, thus hindering a democratic politics—
that is, an expansion of civil society and the public sphere.24 Only after the overthrow
of Abdülhamid II, the argument continues, did the new constitutional regime establish a
political atmosphere appropriate for the expansion of the public sphere/civil society in
the Ottoman domains by improving civil rights and securing them through constitutional
amendments.25
Such interpretations of Ottoman history risk missing the dynamic character of social
and political life under Abdülhamid II, as well as that regime’s willingness to expand
the public sphere as part of its search for legitimization. Historians are hardly likely to
associate absolutist and autocratic regimes with a vibrant public sphere and an expanding
civil society, since the latter are mostly identified with democratic practices and participatory politics. This article will argue that serious consideration to the public sphere
under the Hamidian regime could contribute not only to a study of state–society relations
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during the late Ottoman Empire, but also to a rethinking of the concept of the public
sphere within a broader world-historical context, specifically within a late-imperial and
monarchical framework.
As mentioned earlier, this extending and reworking of Habermas’s ideas outside the
context in which he developed them has become possible only since the emergence of a
critical body of work on public-sphere concept itself and since the critique of Orientalist
epistemology enabled scholars to seek insight beyond the conventional frameworks.
There is no doubt that since the 1989 translation into English of Habermas’s early
work Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit, the public sphere as an analytical tool has had
an enormous influence on history writing. In its classical formulation of the early
1960s, Habermas’s concept dealt mainly with the democratic ideal embodied in the
early bourgeois public sphere, which emerged from his search for universal normative
principles to undergird a theory of deliberative democracy. For Habermas, the public
sphere is an opinion-shaping zone of rational–critical argumentation. However, social
historians have revised Habermas’s concept substantially and ascribed broader meanings
to it, emphasizing multiple and competing forms of public spheres, as well as their
gendered character.26 Such concepts may diverge considerably from the Habermasian
original in including the political activities of a variety of social groups, mostly of the
“plebian” classes. Geoff Eley’s attempt to merge the “public sphere” with a Gramscian
notion of “hegemony” was innovative in this regard and has inspired social historians
since its formulation.27 In addition, the cultural twist that historians have given to
Habermas’s thought during the past decade has drawn attention to new themes to be
considered as public-sphere activities, such as festivals, parades, rituals, and other forms
of public performance.28
While the public-sphere concept has been fruitful in lending visibility to the clearly
public and civic activities of previously unnoticed groups, one should not omit the public
and civic activities of ruling groups, as in the pursuit of organizing popular consent,
renewing and reproducing hegemony, and legitimizing themselves. It is the contention
of this study that defining the public sphere as a realm in which power is manifested in
symbolic and discursive forms, as when the ruling elite pursues hegemony through the
mediation of public performances, may assist historians in integrating the study of “high
politics” with the study of society and culture at the grass-roots level. Such an approach
would find no particular methodological conflict between an autocratic regime and a
dynamic public sphere. Rather, in the Ottoman context, a dynamic public sphere was, in
fact, one of the key elements of the Hamidian regime’s legitimation strategies.
V O L U N TA R Y A C T IV IT Y A N D T H E H A M ID IA N R E G IM E :
A P O L IC Y O F C O N T R O L A N D C O N TA IN M E N T
It is customary to describe the Hamidian regime as an autocratic and despotic one because
of, among other reasons, the sultan’s so-called arbitrary and oppressive policies toward
voluntary initiatives of all sorts. Historians who have examined this period retrospectively from the context of the post-1908 constitutional regime share the assumption that,
although Abdülhamid might have been a modernizing sultan in the Tanzimat fashion,
his despotic policies hindered the liberalization or democratization of Ottoman politics.
This surprisingly consistent and single-minded assessment of Abdülhamid and his rule
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is belied by the regime’s tolerance for—and, often, direct involvement in—a high level
of voluntary activity for various purposes, especially fund-raising campaigns.
Defined literally, the word “iane” means aid or assistance.29 Interestingly, iane in the
late Ottoman context encompasses a broad spectrum of social and political activities—
public assistance, indigence and disaster-relief efforts, and patriotic campaigns for public
projects—whose initiators may be the local government, the palace, any other social
agent, or a combination of these.30 In the governmental lexicon of the mid-19th century,
iane was mostly used for ad hoc taxes of various kinds.31 Although iane retained this
meaning until the end of the empire, as in the case of the educational contribution tax
(maarif ianesi), during the late 19th century its association with voluntary philanthropic activities at the grass-roots level became more widespread. The Hamidian regime
took a flexible approach toward this growing voluntary dynamism and preferred to
control and limit it rather than attempt to suppress it. Hamidian policy may thus be
summarized as one of tolerating and integrating such initiatives into the regime’s power
strategies while containing them through strict supervision. This approach demonstrates
the double-edged and contentious nature of the late Ottoman public sphere in that the
regime often attempted to mold those “bottom up” initiatives to serve its own political
concerns.
While empire-wide campaigns were mostly organized “from above”—that is, by the
sultan and his palace bureaucracy—iane campaigns of the late Ottoman period were
not solely the result of government initiatives. Ottoman subjects also organized such
campaigns: residents of a neighborhood or a provincial town, representatives of various
confessional communities, or voluntary societies of various sorts. A cursory examination
of the official documents of the Hamidian period reveals a remarkably high volume of
public activity with philanthropic aims, with lotteries, concerts, and balls being the major
forms of fund-raising activities among both Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans.32
One can observe incidences of lotteries for philanthropic purposes in Ottoman domains
as early as the mid-19th century. In this early period, the government did not intervene
in such activities as long as they retained a purely philanthropic goal. By 1857, as
for-profit lotteries began to multiply, along with disputes between lottery organizers
and their customers, the government attempted to prohibit all forms of lottery.33 To
what extent the government was successful in this attempt at this blanket prohibition is
open to question, especially as regards the small-scale lotteries organized for charity in
various parts of the empire. During the Hamidian period, activities of this sort increased
considerably, especially in non-Muslim communities; in response, governments of this
period employed various devices to keep such activities under control.
One strategy that Hamidian-period governments employed to control the number of
initiatives of this sort was the use of bureaucratic application procedures, as in the lottery
organized by the local Jewish community in Izmir to raise funds for a recently founded
community school. The government’s attitude toward this initiative was typical. The
˙
Izmir Chief Rabbinate (Izmir
Haham Başı Kaymakamlığı) presented a petition to the
governorship of Aydın requesting permission to organize the lottery in September 1890.
Instead of making an immediate decision, the governor passed the petition on to the
cabinet of ministers in Istanbul for consideration, showing his reluctance to shoulder the
decision alone. This was a widely used technique to indirectly show muted disapproval of
such activities and, perhaps, discourage a number of them through postponement. After
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brief deliberation, the cabinet gave the necessary permission but lowered considerably
the amount of money permitted to be raised and ordered close supervision of the activity
by the local governor.34 It appears that the government was concerned with the benevolent
activities of the Jewish community in the province of Aydın because local organizations
had been using such activities as a cover for various political goals.35 On another
occasion, a lottery was organized for a vocational school on one of the Aegean islands
(Sisam Beyliği) mainly populated by Greeks. The Ottoman government discovered
the activity only when the police detained three individuals in Malkara, a town in the
province of Edirne, with a large batch of lottery tickets that had been printed in Sisam.
However, since Sisam had an autonomous political status, the government did not have
the authority to intervene.36 One can find numerous examples throughout the empire of
fund-raising campaigns organized to benefit local community schools, such as that of
1897 when the governorship of Selanik granted permission for a lottery to be organized
by the local Greek community for the Greek School in Siroz, a subdistrict of Selanik.37
On 31 May 1905, the Ottoman cabinet used the Sisam Beyliği incident in a restatement
of its policy toward lotteries.38 The initial policy, enacted on 5 February 1883, delegated
full responsibility to the local governors, authorizing them to give permission for the
lotteries to be held but limiting the amount any lottery could raise to 50,000 Ottoman
piasters. Government permission was required for lotteries that involved amounts greater
than this.39 Although this moderate policy was reaffirmed in 1905, an imperial decree of
16 March 1906, just a year later, brought a greater restriction. This new decree clearly
illustrates the regime’s increasing concern about the popularity of such public activities
in Izmir and the surrounding regions where the Greek, and to some extent Jewish,
populations were concentrated.
One also notices in this decree evidence of the increasing use of a discourse of
morality. In writing that “the use of lotteries to raise money for philanthropic purposes
is in principle illegitimate, and since it is a way of cheating the people, the government
should find a way to prohibit Ottoman subjects from resorting to this avenue,” the
government labels the lottery a form of gambling and, as such, immoral.40 One can
find signs of a similar way of thinking among the Ottoman literati in earlier periods.
According to Ebüzziya Tevfik, for instance, the lottery was an open form of gambling,
a social disease that caused numerous harms to the social body.41 The centrality of this
morality or ethics-based argument in Hamidian policy suggests that the government did
not have the need or desire to employ direct means of repression. Yet this is not an issue
of incapacity in policing. Rather, as will grow clearer through the examples cited later,
it appears that the regime was aware of the effectiveness of more complex and nuanced
techniques of social control. This is apparent in the fact that these techniques were used
to mold the initiatives to serve the sultan’s ruling strategy.
While a disapproving tone continued to dominate the elite’s attitudes toward lotteries,
government policy remained flexible, especially regarding those activities organized by
non-Muslim community leaders on behalf of their communities.42 For example, the local
governors of Izmir continued to organize lotteries for the local vocational school. From
1887 until 1906, Hamidian governments granted permission for various such lotteries.43
It would appear that the Hamidian regime’s careful balance of cordiality and oversight
in its relations with these communities’ representatives contributed to making possible
the regime’s policy of tolerance toward their philanthropic activities. In this sense, the
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Armenian patriarchate’s fund-raising campaign for the community hospital at Yedikule
in Istanbul is revealing. Throughout the 1890s, the patriarchate organized annual public
fund-raising concerts at the Municipal Concert Hall at Beyoǧlu-Tepebaşı. While the
regime did not find this activity suspicious and usually granted permission, it did not
stop monitoring the concerts. Between 1904 and 1906, for instance, the sultan allowed
such concerts on the condition that the events be held under the supervision of the mayor
(şehremini); the mayor was even ordered to attend in person.44
Along with this close surveillance, the sultan was careful to portray himself as the
patron of this and similar philanthropic activities, enhancing this image with the customary practice of imperial gift giving to religious communities during their holidays. These
gifts were distributed as charity to indigent non-Muslim subjects of the empire.45 The
sultan appears to have been aware that the expansion of philanthropic activity among
non-Muslim Ottomans could weaken his authority in the field of social assistance. Yet
he was willing to take this risk while seeking to influence the expansion of the “philanthropic public sphere” in such a way as to fit his own power strategies, which included
portraying himself as the protector of Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans alike.46 At
the same time, the Ottoman government’s cautiousness in its policy toward voluntary
initiatives among non-Muslim communities was consistent with its anxiety about separatist political activities within those communities, since such humanitarianism, from
the government’s point of view, could easily turn into seedbeds of separatist nationalism.
Regardless of the role that this concern might have played in the shaping of the Ottoman
policy, what is important here is the Hamidian regime’s consistency in controlling and
containing voluntary activities among all sectors of Ottoman society.
The Hamidian government’s political discourse of proper moral conduct was characterized by both flexibility and extensiveness. The fact that one can observe moral
arguments directed also at Ottoman Muslims is indicative. In fact, the regime’s
approach to such fund-raising activities among Muslims sometimes seems more rigid
than that employed for non-Muslims. In 1893, the general director of the Tobacco Régie
arranged a fund-raising party for the poor residents of Büyük Ada, an island in the
Marmara Sea. Archival documents reveal that the prospect of this event was greeted
with great excitement among the Muslims of the capital, which aroused the sultan’s
concern. He sent strict orders to the cabinet to prohibit it, citing a cholera epidemic
in the capital as justification. However, another imperial decree shows that the sultan’s
main concern was the popularity of this and similar social activities among the Muslim
subjects of the empire.47 As this decree makes clear, the regime’s anxiety regarding its
Muslim subjects’ inclinations toward a Western lifestyle, as shown in their enthusiasm
for balls and similar social events, was in line with its policy of strengthening the
“moral character” of the empire’s Muslim subjects.48 The immediate intention of the
government was to check the influence of foreign missionaries and Western culture in
general among Muslim subjects.49 This and similar government actions functioned to
enhance the “moral regulatory capacity of the state,” especially in the field of voluntary
activities.50
Despite its restrictive, moralistic political discourse, the Hamidian regime was surprisingly tolerant of philanthropic activities organized by, or under the control of, the
educated sectors of Muslim society. Examples of this were numerous such activities
arranged by popular periodicals of the time, most of which were under the sultan’s
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patronage. In the pages of Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (Ladies’ Own Gazette) and
Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete (Children’s Own Gazette), for example, one could find examples of philanthropic voluntary activities, if modest in scope. In 1895, for example,
Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete initiated a fund-raising campaign for contributions to the
trousseau expenses of poor orphan girls.51 Donors’ names and donation amounts were
published in subsequent issues of the journal. These lists reveal that the campaign was
not simply an upper-class phenomenon; women from non-elite sectors of society and
low-ranking civil servants and their wives constituted a majority of the participants.
This fact is consistent with a general tendency of the women’s press during the late
1890s, when that sector was “taken over by hundreds of professional journalists and
school teachers drawn from non-elite sectors of society.”52 A certain Remziye Hanım,
for example, once vice-director of the Beşiktaş Girls’ School, then appointed as a
teacher to a school in Izmit, donated 100 Ottoman piasters in cash. Another donor was
Sadık Efendi, a doorman at the Ministry of Finance.53 In another initiative, Hanımlara
Mahsus Gazete called on its readers to fund journal subscriptions for girls’ schools in
various districts of the capital or for indigent girls in such schools. Since the journal’s
subscription fee was very low, even women of modest means were able to participate.
Another example of popular-journal–based philanthropy was the campaign of January
1897 to purchase clothing for poor orphans organized by Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete and
supported by Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete.54 The intended audience of the campaign was
obviously the youthful readers of the journal; subsequent issues show that nearly all the
participants were young readers.55
The sultan’s policy of flexibility toward grass-roots philanthropic activity, which
could be described as less repressive than selective, was also noticeable in the area
of voluntary organizations. In most cases, Abdülhamid II employed a lenient though
cautious approach while simultaneously seeking to establish his patronage over these
societies. Through this strategy, he aimed to turn the expanding philanthropic field
to good advantage by disseminating an image of himself as a caring monarch.56 As
long as the sultan was convinced that the societies’ leadership was in safe hands, he
tolerated them and even, at times, encouraged them by providing imperial gifts.57 The
Philanthropic Sisterhood Society (Beyne al-Nas Fukaraperver Uhuvveti), founded by
a group of Christian women some years before 1887, is a case in point. The society
apparently had a close relationship with the chief imperial physician, Mavroyani Pasha,
who convinced the sultan of the loyalty of the society’s founders and secured for them
a substantial quantity of imperial donations, totaling 50 liras.58 As we learn from one
of the society’s petitions to the sultan, dated 16 April 1887, its purpose was to provide
assistance to indigent Christian women; this included setting up a sewing atelier to
provide work relief.59 Among other societies established during the Hamidian period
was the Greek Women’s Philanthropic Society of Beyoǧlu (Beyoǧlu Rum Cemiyet-i
Hayriye-i Nisvaniyesi),60 and the Kadıköy Philanthropic Society (Kadıköyünde Müesses
Fukaraperver Cemiyet-i), established in 1886 by four Armenians.61 Most of these
societies were organized at the local or district level and often boasted surprisingly
high membership figures. A document from 1896 mentions a dispute between two such
societies—one in Hasköy, a neighborhood mostly populated by Jewish subjects, and the
other in neighboring Piripaşa—regarding encroachment on each-other’s territory.62 Their
claimed membership levels are indeed remarkable, with the Hasköy society claiming
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1,000 members and the Piripaşa society, 600. The document notes that the government
was expected to play the role of arbiter in their dispute. In addition, there were societies
founded by Muslim women. One of these was called Women’s Compassion (Şefkat-i
Nisvan), a society founded in Selanik in 1898 by Emine Semiye, daughter of the famous
historian and statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha.63
These modest but numerous fund-raising campaigns, along with the societies
established by both non-Muslim and Muslim Ottomans of the Hamidian period, are constituent elements of a stronger and more extensive public sphere, introducing a new dynamic of social and political transformation. While it would be unrealistic to attempt here
a summary of the dispositions of the Ottoman public sphere prior to the Hamidian period
to trace a larger historical context for this trend, the following example may offer a comparative insight into the general direction of these changes. In 1875, Ayine, a women’s
journal, organized an iane campaign whose purpose was to collect clothing for the
Ottoman Reserve Army in Selanik.64 Donors were the wives and daughters of high civil
officials or notables, demonstrating the largely upper-class composition of the Ottoman
public sphere at that time. The cases examined earlier, from the later Hamidian period, illustrate that the public sphere by then had expanded to include non-elite sectors of society.
M O N A R C H Y A N D C O N S T R U C T IN G A P U B L IC S P H E R E
As seen so far, the Hamidian regime kept an eye on voluntary dynamism at the grassroots level and employed flexible policies to control and contain it in an expanding public
sphere. In addition to this reactive strategy, the Hamidian regime also engaged in more
pro-active attempts to encourage late Ottoman civic life and shape it to its own political
needs. A major instrument here was fund-raising campaigns organized on the initiative
of the sultan and his immediate palace bureaucracy. These empire-wide campaigns were
designed for a variety of purposes, such as poverty and disaster relief, projects in the
areas of public services and the military, and those fostering patriotism. Through such
activities the Hamidian regime provided Ottoman subjects with social-welfare services,
over time endowing the regime with some of the functions of a welfare state, but a
“surrogate” one in the sense that it fulfilled some of the functions of a welfare state with
almost no supportive institutional infrastructure.65 Most of these campaigns, planned
and executed in an ad hoc fashion, also clearly served as orchestrated manifestations of
monarchical power in the public sphere. Thus, while many understand the public sphere
in the sense proposed by Habermas in Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit—as a retreat of
the state from certain fields, as with the abolition of press and theater censorship—the
context examined here presents a strong argument, almost to the contrary, for admitting
the possibility that in-place power structures can facilitate the evolution of a public
sphere. Perhaps for now, at least, the somewhat paradoxical phrase “monarchical public
sphere” can suffice to identify this particular historical context.
The sultan’s fund-raising campaigns were of two major kinds: social-assistance–type,
to be discussed later, and support for the military and war-related relief efforts such as
caring for war orphans and disabled soldiers, and other public works. A well-known example of the second type was the Hejaz Railway Campaign (Hicaz Demiryolu Iānesi).66
This railroad had symbolic significance because it was to connect the Anatolian railway
system to the Muslim holy places in Hejaz Province. The campaign for it, which was
69
carried out throughout the Muslim world, aimed to build the Hejaz railway with only
domestic or Muslim financial sources—that is, without borrowing from the European
market. With this project, Abdülhamid also aimed to boost his public profile not only
domestically but throughout the Muslim world.67 The campaign thus served to promote
the sultan’s Pan-Islamic policy and to generate feelings of solidarity among Muslims
worldwide while emphasizing the sultan’s role as the spiritual leader of all Muslims.
With its political message, this particular campaign had a greater chance of success in
securing the loyalty of the masses to the monarchical regime, in addition to encouraging
a participatory public sphere.
Sultan-initiated fund-raising campaigns in the area of social assistance such as poor
and disaster relief were in most cases orchestrated as public performances of sultanic
generosity. Sultanic generosity toward indigent subjects was certainly not an invention
of the Hamidian period. What are new in the Hamidian period are the sultan’s efforts to
expand imperial philanthropy and integrate it with more modern and popular conceptions of rulership.68 As mentioned earlier, through these philanthropic performances the
sultan’s bureaucracy sought public loyalty by propagating the image of the sultan as a
benevolent monarch and familiar paternal figure. Throughout the sultan’s long reign, he
and his bureaucracy exercised various forms of munificence, both traditional and innovative, to create a rich repertoire of acts of imperial giving. While a detailed examination
of the complex system of Hamidian gift giving is beyond the scope of this study, the
following example of a disaster-relief effort may serve to illustrate how Abdülhamid II
dealt with the realm of social welfare in line with the objectives described earlier.69
Following the earthquake of 1898 in Balıkesir, a provincial town in the Marmara region,
the sultan immediately took the initiative. With an imperial decree, he first established
a special private commission headed by one of his personal advisers, Vehbi Pasha. This
commission immediately departed for the disaster area with 50,000 piasters provided
by the sultan.70 Simultaneously, another aid commission was established within the
Istanbul municipality to solicit donations throughout the capital.71 The sultan’s commission returned to Istanbul after about two months of relief work in the region and
presented the palace with its report and a special letter from the victims expressing their
gratitude to the sultan for his generosity.72 It is noteworthy that, rather than empowering
the local authorities to deal with the crisis, Abdülhamid preferred the more personally
aggrandizing method of taking the emergency-response planning and implementation
into his own hands. One can easily glean from newspapers of the period how skillfully
the sultan orchestrated the relief campaign as a demonstration of his direct, personal
concern with the problems of his needy subjects. His closest aides’ presence in the
earthquake region; his assuming personal command of the operation; and his immediate
cash donations all contributed to putting the sultan’s own signature on the relief effort,
thus linking the figure of the sultan to the well-being of his people.
In addition to their impressiveness as acts of a generous individual, the success
of sultanic benevolence also depended on the extent of public involvement, through
which this image of the sultan found a broader audience. To stimulate participation in
fund-raising campaigns, the Hamidian bureaucracy saw to it that the daily newspapers
published the list of donors and their donations on their front pages. Such lists published
after the Balıkesir earthquake show that this campaign, as with numerous other, similar
efforts, provided the opportunity for Ottomans from widely different sectors of society to
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Nadir Özbek
join the rest of the population in efforts for the public good. At the same time, it is fair to
assume that individuals participating in these campaigns also had motives rooted in their
local social and political settings, each “local public” incorporating various individual
or group interests. These “local publics” in the Ottoman Empire are, of course, vast and
various. Of interest for this article is the Hamidian bureaucracy’s attempt to integrate
them into an overarching imperial political realm, with the fatherly and compassionate
sultan as its unifying symbol.
Part of this venture has to do with creating the fantasy of a single public sphere
out of the fragmented, empire-style political and social landscape. The multiple local
public spheres and newspapers and periodicals of the time played a crucial role in this
endeavor. However, newspaper coverage of Abdülhamid II’s philanthropic performances
may be misleading in at least one respect: while they consistently represented the
sultan’s philanthropic performances as success stories, these strategies of power did not
always run smoothly, as dissatisfaction with the fund-raising campaigns was not lacking
among his subjects. However, to find evidence of this dissatisfaction—on which the
press remained silent—one must go to the archival sources. They show that discontent
emerged when Ottoman subjects with lower income levels—urban workers and artisans
and state employees with low salaries—were obliged to participate in campaigns with
cash donations.
The winter relief campaign of 1891 is one example. Assistance in the form of fuel
to the poorer residents of Istanbul during the winter months was a familiar element of
the Hamidian repertoire of imperial gift giving, repeated almost every year. In 1891,
the sultan’s chief staff at the palace established an aid commission (iane-i şiteviyye
komisyonu) to solicit donations. As usual, Abdülhamid was the first and largest donor.
However, participation in this particular campaign, archival sources show, was not always
voluntary. For example, a group of artisans petitioned the palace to complain about
the amount of the contributions the commission was asking of them. This complaint
resulted in a minor investigation to determine whether the commission had used excessive
coercion in its solicitations. In fact, one can find many examples in the archival sources
of popular discontent with various iane campaigns. Yet while even carefully planned
initiatives may have soured some of his subjects, as in this case, the sultan was often
prudent enough to take matters into his own hands and decree that the officials stop
pressuring the poorer artisans for donations.73
W A R , PAT R IO T IS M , A N D T H E H A M ID IA N P U B L IC S P H E R E
Constructing a public sphere with patriotic overtones, an important aspect of the sultan’s
strategy of power, manifested itself as an ambiguous venture at various moments of the
Hamidian period, such as that following the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897. The “Thirty
Days” war of 1897 had its cause in a long-simmering conflict between the Ottoman
Empire and the Greek state over Crete. Exploited by Greek irredentism, the conflict
ultimately turned into an open military clash between the Greek state and the Ottoman
Empire.74 This was the only major military encounter of the Hamidian period other than
the war with Russia in 1877–78, and it contributed to the need to refashion Ottoman
public opinion along patriotic and militarist lines.
71
While the press censorship of the period is well known, it appears that the newspapers
and periodicals showed a certain degree of initiative and played a crucial role in this
process. Even a quick survey gives the impression that writers and editors took their
roles very seriously, acting almost as if they were part of an organized public-relations
campaign. With the apparent intention of improving the self-esteem and dignity of
the Ottomans, who were felt to be in need of restoration after the disastrous RussoOttoman war of 1877–78, the newspapers emphasized Ottoman military prowess in
their detailed accounts of developments from the war front. Coverage of the home front,
however, was aimed at integrating it with the war, turning the two fronts into a single
“national” one. Servet-i Fünun, a major illustrated literary journal, featured reports on
the enthusiasm of Istanbul residents as they greeted the arrival of wounded soldiers
en route to hospitals in the city. According to one such report, thousands of Ottomans
gathered at the railroad station to welcome the soldiers with great excitement, shouting,
“Long live my padişah!”75 Thus, such coverage had the effect of representing the unity
of the military and the wider population with the sultan as its commander in chief.
War medals performed a similar function. The sultan awarded the “Greek War Medals”
(Yunan Harbi Madalyası) to 190,000 individuals, military and civilian, who had contributed to the war effort.76 Press coverage of the award ceremonies seems intent on
enhancing feelings of confidence in and familiarity toward the sultan, represented as
a combination of father figure and commander in chief. Abdülhamid is reported as
addressing the soldiers in the first person singular, just as a father would address his
children, during the ceremonies, and newspapers published full texts of speeches in
which the sultan described the Ottoman populace as a large family with himself as the
father.77 He went further to declare that his feelings for each Ottoman who had been
wounded or killed were no different from what he would feel toward his own sons. This
projection of a paternal bond between the sultan and his subjects, one of the central
themes of the Hamidian political discourse, encouraged the manifestation of this monarchical public sphere as an imagined familial community. Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi
identifies a similar process in late-19th-century Iran, where, as in the Ottoman Empire,
this “familialization” of political discourse should not be confused with patrimonialism
in the Weberian sense. In Tavakoli-Targhi’s words, “[T]he metaphoric refiguration of
the [sultan] as familial father was a corollary to the nineteenth-century centralization of
state and publicizing of royal authority.”78
One of the most important instruments used by the sultan’s bureaucracy to recruit
the masses for the war effort along the lines of a patriotic, participatory mobilization
was the fund-raising campaign for war orphans and the families of wounded soldiers
˙
(Evlad-ı Şüheda ve Malulin-i Güzzat-ı Şahane Inanesi).
The campaign was organized
as an exhibition for which Ottomans were encouraged to donate cash or items to be
displayed and then sold. To encourage donations, newspapers published the campaign
registers showing donors’ names and donation amounts. These registers, a public display of the generosity of the participants, also shed light on the social topography of
this evolving public sphere. The empire-wide campaign attracted participation from a
broad spectrum of Ottomans, providing opportunities for those from far-flung provinces,
administrators, high- or middle-ranking public servants, and influential local figures to
participate collectively in a patriotic action. The Hamidian bureaucracy used the occasion to promote Ottoman patriotism; the war had been won, and now it was time
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Nadir Özbek
for Ottomans to express their gratitude by honoring the war orphans and the families
of disabled soldiers who had made sacrifices for the fatherland (vatan). This campaign was thus of the kind to foster feelings of unity between the people and the state
and of belonging to an imagined imperial community. The Hamidian state used this
opportunity to promote the notions of a harmonious state–society relationship, of a
patriotic Ottoman identity, and of the sultan as symbolically embodying the unity of the
Ottomans.
It appears, then, that this fund-raising campaign simultaneously performed two
inter-related functions. First, by involving even the distant provinces of the empire,
it helped to expand the territorial boundaries of what I am calling the monarchical
public sphere. Second, while disseminating an image of a political community that
included the broad masses, it also served to demonstrate public approval and support
for the regime. Of course, how deep or extensive this support was is less important
than the virtual effect that such a staging appeared capable of creating within the wider
population. In reality, as mentioned earlier, what the sultan and his bureaucracy were
aiming at in constructing this paternalistic yet participatory public space around such
campaigns was a unification of the widely diverse local communities throughout the
empire.
The lists of thousands of Ottoman donors from all corners of the empire, together
with their donation amounts, published as part of the relief campaign for orphans and
families of the wounded, shed light on the characteristics of the public sphere that
the Hamidian regime was attempting to construct and consolidate. A significant aspect
of the campaign was that Abdülhamid II himself was the major contributor, almost 6
percent of all funds raised coming from the Privy Purse.79 After the sultan, the next
major contributors were his close associates, high-ranking ministers, and the Ottoman
consuls. Indeed, these lists provide a kind of profile of the political community or
monarchical public sphere that the Hamidian regime aimed to establish in an imperial
context, since they represent a new form of unity of Ottoman society in spite of its very
diverse socio-economic and ethnic-religious constituents. The twenty-sixth register, for
example, includes the names of high-ranking Ottoman military and civil officials and
consuls along with those of ordinary civil servants, together with their widely differing
donation amounts.80 Another list published in Sabah on 18 January 1898 reflects the
same diversity: Baǧdadi Samizade Mehmed Hamid Efendi, a student at the Military
Academy and apparently the son of a notable from Baghdad; Ekrem Beğ, the owner of
a philatelic journal in Istanbul; Ali Efendizade Halil Efendi and Haydar Efendi, son of
Hacı Ahmed Efendi, Ottoman merchants at Rustov; and the wife of the director of Saint
Joseph High School were among the participants listed.81
Another significant feature of the war-relief campaign was its administrative
geographical extent, with donation-collection committees located in all of the Ottoman
provinces. Moreover, local government offices played an important role in administering the campaigns in the provinces. Participation levels were noteworthy in the major
provinces of Edirne, Syria, and Mosul,82 while Kayseri, Maraş, Zeytun, and Sinop
are examples of smaller districts where the level and amount of donations were also
significant.83 Campaigns were even organized in a number of small villages.84 These
cases appear to show a correlation between the presence of an administrative infrastructure and the emergence of a public sphere in the provinces. Far from substantiating the
73
notion of the state–society relationship as an innately dichotomous one, a public sphere
appears to be capable of developing in the context of an extensive, robust, and even
centralized administration.
The campaign in Sinop, a small subdistrict on the Black Sea, provides a snapshot
of what we might call a typical Ottoman provincial public sphere at the end of the
19th century. The list of Sinop contributors published by Sabah on 15 February 1898
resembles a catalogue of the many departments and positions in local government
in the region and of civil professional sectors such as artisans, small retailers, bankbranch managers, merchants, and respected residents of every neighborhood.85 This
particular register lists 91 individuals, with donations ranging from 2 to 108 piasters,
for a total of 2,052 piasters, a remarkable figure for a provincial subdistrict such as
Sinop. Among those 91 individuals, 15 account for almost half the total (each giving
40 piasters or more). Ali Vehbi Efendi, the chief secretary at the office of the provincial
treasury; Hacı Hüseyin Efendi, a judge at the local court; and Süleyman Efendi, an
accountant at the treasurer’s office, were singled out for their contributions of about 100
piasters each, while Ekmekçi Salih Usta, a baker, could afford only 2 piasters. Among
individuals who gave 5 piasters, one can see the names of Rasim Efendi, an artisan;
Kadir Usta, another baker; Hacı Mustafa Usta, a locksmith; and Mustafa Efendi, the
mufti of Meydan, a neighborhood of Sinop. Most of the other contributors who were
listed with donations of 20 piasters were mid-ranking public servants or employees in
the private sector, such as Mithat Efendi, police lieutenant; Abdullah Efendi, police
officer; municipal physician Kamil Efendi; post-office director Abdülkadir Efendi; and
Burhaneddin Efendi, an employee at the local branch of the Public Debt Administration.
Thus, the provincial public sphere as manifested through this campaign was not limited
to a specific group or stratum. Instead, it reflected the social diversity of the local
populations.
Another feature of the campaign in Sinop is that it was carried out in several neighborhood of the town, with, for example, ten individuals representing Cami-i Kebir Mahallesi
and fifteen individuals from Meydankapı Mahallesi. Most of the donors from Cami-i
Kebir Mahallesi were small artisans who made relatively small contributions, while
donation amounts suggest that Meydankapı Mahallesi was a mixed neighborhood of
prosperous and humble residents. Most likely coordinated and promoted by the elected
neighborhood leaders (muhtar), the campaign brought rich and poor Ottomans together,
even at the neighborhood level, thus unifying them for a patriotic cause as loyal subjects
of the sultan.
The fund-raising campaign for war orphans and the families of wounded soldiers thus
appears to have made a major contribution to the Hamidian bureaucracy’s attempt to
lend a patriotic color to the sultan’s ruling strategies and political discourse. Moreover,
the masses were mobilized for a common goal of special significance: the soldiers
and their families who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the fatherland (vatan).
Vatan in the Hamidian context had definite territorial connotations and was imagined
as a political community with the paternal figure of the sultan as its symbolic center.
The Hamidian bureaucracy carefully merged this patriotic imagination with the current
patriarchal political discourse, creating an association between the patriotic duty of
each individual toward the homeland and his or her fellow citizens with loyalty to the
fatherly figure of the sultan. Hamidian political language was personalized to such an
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Nadir Özbek
extent that it can be characterized as expressing a “patriarchal patriotism.” Hasan Kayalı
makes a helpful distinction between the patriotism of this period, for which the focus of
loyalty was the Ottoman sultan, and what he calls the “state patriotism” of the Second
Constitutional Period (1908–18).86 Patriotism, as is true for any identity-based ideology,
is socially redefined on a continual basis, and the Hamidian regime appears to have
been remarkably successful in the design and implementation of the charitable activities
examined here, which gathered momentum for “war patriotism” while propagating and
enhancing the public profile of the sultan.
Hamidian patriotism, however, presented a certain number of uncertainties and
ambiguities. The sultan promoted a patriotism backed by dynastic and imperial motives,
advocating it as an alternative ideology to various sorts of particularist nationalisms then
in developing stages in the empire. This alternative basis for unity may indeed have
been critical especially during the war with Greece, when the Ottoman Empire included
a significant Greek Orthodox population, since it appears that in encouraging a larger
role for a unified public sphere, the Hamidian government sought in particular to not
antagonize its Orthodox subjects. A Sabah news item on the Greek Orthodox Patriarch
of Jerusalem’s contribution to the war-relief campaign, with its special symbolic significance, is a case in point. The Sabah article seeks to make the important distinction that,
while a war was being waged against the Greek state, all Ottoman subjects—regardless
of their ethnic and confessional identity—were united behind the sultan.87 There had
been earlier examples of the sultan’s concern with the sensibilities of Greek-speaking
Ottoman subjects, as shown, for instance, in his prohibition of celebrations of Istanbul’s
conquest in the early stages of his reign.88 Despite these thoughtful attempts, however,
the Hamidian regime was hesitant to take radical measures—for example, as regards
non-Muslim Ottomans in the military. Despite various legislative attempts starting in
1855, no serious effort appears to have been made to include non-Muslims in the armed
services before 1909.89 While the government drafted thousands of volunteers among
Muslims and non-Muslims to counter the Serbian uprisings in 1876 and to fight in the
Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78,90 no attempt appears to have been made to accept nonMuslim volunteers during the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897. And while Albanian notables
volunteered to support the Ottoman army with their own troops in the war of 1897,91
these troops were “organized more on the model of mercenaries than citizen-soldiers.”92
Although the imperial government might have benefited from a more inclusive patriotic policy, the war with Greece aroused public sentiment and made the Muslim masses
more vulnerable to political agitation with nationalist overtones.93 Thus, a redefinition
of patriotism with a more nationalist coloring and with Islamic content became a real
possibility. There are indications that the Ottoman literati of the time worked energetically toward reshaping public opinion and redefining patriotism along these lines.
Poems by well-known poets such as Tevfik Fikret, Nigar Hanım, Mehmet Emin, and
Ali Ekrem are illustrative in this regard.94 This body of poetry had great influence on the
Ottoman youth as well as on the public at large, and it doubtless strengthened nationalist
sentiments among the public, encouraging people to volunteer for military service or to
participate in patriotic campaigns at home. Mehmet Emin’s poetry is instructive in this
regard. He wrote in simplified Turkish and took the wider public as his audience. Most
of his poems have patriotic and nationalist tones. One of his best known is titled, “Ben
bir Türküm! (I am a Turk!).” In 1898, he collected these poems into a volume titled,
75
Türkçe Şiirler (Poems in Turkish).95 Such cases demonstrate the complexity and rapidly
changing contours of different political imaginations.
C O N C L U S IO N
New light on late Ottoman social and political dynamics shed by the philanthropic
activities examined here can open the way to qualitative rethinking of the conceptual
tools that historians have employed in their examination of politics in late-19th-century
imperial and monarchical contexts. This study has been undertaken in the hope of
contributing to the literature on the public sphere as a conceptual tool produced by social
and cultural historians of the past two decades, literature that has radically modified
Habermas’s original concept and broadened the scope of “the political” in definitions
of the public. The discussion here, however, diverges from tendencies among the social
and cultural historians in one major respect: the emphasis has not been put on the
democratic connotations of the public sphere in its multiplicity. Instead, the public
sphere is conceived as a site of contention among divergent and particularistic interests
that is subject to appropriation for powerful social and political interests. This becomes
apparent only when viewing the public sphere as a political realm that gave the ruling elite
new opportunities to show their power and hegemony through the mediation of public
performances. As these emphases indicate, the major concern here has been not simply to
signal the presence of an incipient but apparently dynamic public sphere or civil society
in the late Ottoman Empire, in particular, and the need to be alert to the possibility
of such formations in imperial and monarchical contexts more generally. Rather, the
concern has been to show how a monarchical and autocratic regime manifested and
legitimized itself in the public sphere.
It is true that the public sphere and civil society are concepts open to misuse when
they are weighted with various historiographical and epistemological preferences so
that the terms become “not merely descriptive but prescriptive: terms of a discourse that
[seeks] to produce its object in accordance with varying social interests and ideological
orientations.”96 In view of this, the public sphere, as defined here, allows us to repudiate
both state- and society-centered teleological narratives of Ottoman modernity and to
evaluate how authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular view in the
late Ottoman imperial and monarchical context. As a new perspective on the picture
provided by Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography, the domain of philanthropic
activities has revealed a lively field of voluntaristic behavior during the Hamidian period.
This example of Abdüldhamid II’s efforts in encouraging voluntary activity demonstrates
that the expansion of the late Ottoman public sphere was contingent not only on social
change in the so-called non-state arena, but also on the dynamics of high politics—that
is, the strategy of power and legitimation needs of the ruling elite and that elite’s vision of
the kinds of concepts that would most usefully unify and lend identity to the populations
within its jurisdiction.
One can argue that there are discrepancies on many levels between the analytical use
of the public-sphere concept and the actual socio-political configurations of imperial–
dynastic regimes such as that of the Hamidian-period Ottoman Empire. In his study on
nationalism and the public sphere, for example, Craig Calhoun dismisses the possibility
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that there can be a unified public sphere within an imperial context. Using the AustroHungarian and, to some extent, the Ottoman empires as historical examples, he describes
how the institutionalization of the public sphere can occur only within the context of
a national imagination. For Calhoun, only “parts of empires can be transformed into
nations by the creation of quasi-autonomous public spheres.”97 It is true that throughout
the 19th century both empires were overwhelmed with the problems posed by separatist
nationalist movements. The Ottoman government’s response to these challenges was
Ottomanism, which could be considered a variant of “official nationalism” in Benedict
Anderson’s sense, or “state-patriotism” in Eric Hobsbawm’s sense.98 Imperial visions
such as Ottomanism may not appear to be viable political projects in retrospect. Yet
regardless of its feasibility, the Ottoman Empire, like other imperial regimes of the late
19th century, was engaged in constant attempts to integrate and configure its dominions
into one all-encompassing modern national state. “Ottomanism”—which displayed,
among other inclinations, Islamic overtones during the Hamidian period—should be
considered as a corollary to this attempt.99 The failure of imperial “imaginations” as
alternatives to particular nationalisms was less a matter of lack of initiative in integrating
dominions than of the administrative capacities of the states and the relative power of
separatist nationalisms and interstate rivalries. Contrary to the implications of Calhoun’s
line of thought, I have argued here that constructing a public sphere with monarchical
backing, resulting in a monarchical public sphere and fulfilling some of its goals,
proved to be a viable project. Indeed, the public sphere described here was the only
possible domain in which imperial objectives—such as a Hamidian Ottomanism, with
its overtones of fatherly and imperial largesse together with Islamic values—could be
manifested. This is apparent especially in the voluntary philanthropic activities promoted
mainly by the sultan and his bureaucracy that followed the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897,
along with other philanthropic campaigns of the period. Yet given the reality of the
“quasi-autonomous public spheres” in which separatist nationalisms were imagined
and organized, constructing a public sphere at the imperial level with monarchical and
patriotic dispositions appears to be an ambiguous project. For one thing, the prospects
of such a project were obviously rapidly being undermined, both within and around
the empire, by the spread of the doctrine of the nation-state, with its constitutional and
plebiscitary form of government. In addition to the growing tension between nation
and empire-based politics, Abdülhamid’s ambitions to unify the empire’s diverse polity
through this unique combination of directed mobilization and paternalistic policy were
also weakened by other more general political dynamics, such as the “discrepancy
between a phantasy of a unified political subject and a reality of particular social
groups.”100
NOTES
Author’s note: I am indebted to Tracy Lord for her assistance in preparing this article. I also thank five
anonymous readers for IJMES for their useful comments.
1 Geoff Eley, “Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-Class
Public, 1780–1850,” in E. P. Thompson, Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith Mcclelland
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 12–49, 17.
2 For
77
a critique of the “Oriental despotism” concept, see Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, “Introduction: ‘Oriental Despotism’ in World-System Perspective,” in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri
İslamoğlu-İnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–24.
3 Articles in the following study are helpful in this context: Frank Trentmann, ed., Paradoxes of Civil
Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
4 For a summary of such literature on China, see Frederic J. R. Wakeman, “The Civil Society and Public
Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture,” Modern China 19 (1993): 108–38. On
Russia, see the articles in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, ed., Between Tsar
and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society,
and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107 (2003): 1094–1123; Adele Lindenmeyr,
Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1996).
5 See the 1993 special issue of Modern China (vol. 19, no. 2 [April 1993]), which includes a paper presented
at the “Public Sphere”/“Civil Society” in China? Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, 9 May
1992. For a critique of this scholarship on China, see Arif Dirlik, “Civil Society/Public Sphere in Modern
China: As Critical Concepts Versus Heralds of Bourgeois Modernity,” Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly
(Zhongguo She Hui Ke Xue Ji Kan) 3 (1993): 10–22.
6 For a recent articulation of the concept, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). The special issue of Daedalus (vol. 129, no. 1, 2000) on “multiple modernities” can also be consulted. For an extensive critique of the multiple-modernities paradigm, see
Arif Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity,”
Social History 27 (2002): 16–39. Harry Harootunian provides another critique of the concept of alternative
modernities and considers it “an outrageous classification”: Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity:
History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), xvi.
7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton
Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
8 See, for example, Cengiz Kırlı, “Coffeehouses: Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman
Empire,” in Public Islam, ed. Dale Eickelman and Armando Salvatore (Leiden: E. J. BriIl, 2004),
75–97.
9 See, for example, Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Unimagined Communities: Women and Education in the Late
Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909,” Critical Matrix 9, 2 (1995): 55–90.
10 Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, “The Public Sphere and Muslim Identities,” European
Journal of Sociology 43 (2002): 92–115.
11 See, for example, Dale F. Eickelman, “Islam and the Languages of Modernity,” Daedalus 129 (2000):
119–35; Nilüfer Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 91–117.
12 For such a concept of modernity as a shared process, see Huri İslamoğlu, “Modernities Compared: State
Transformations and Constitutions of Property in the Qing and Ottoman Empires,” Journal of Early Modern
History 5 (2001): 353–86.
13 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xvi.
14 For a recent critique of the dichotomous conception of state–society relations and “nationalist and statist
historiography” as dominant paradigms within modern Ottoman Turkish history, see Engin Deniz Akarlı,
“Stately Narratives on Turkey’s Ottoman Past,” paper presented at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American
Historical Association, Boston, 4–7 January 2001.
15 One could name Niyazi Berkes’s The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University
Press, 1964); and Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press,
1968) as the best examples to this type of scholarship, which continues to retrace these traditional parameters
of Ottoman Turkish historiography even today.
16 Nader Sohrabi, “Historicizing Revolutions: Constitutional Revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and
Russia, 1905–1908,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995): 1383–447, 1391–92.
17 Şerif Mardin, “Civil Society and Islam,” in Civil Society, Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John A.
Hall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 278–300, 292. See also idem, “Power, Civil Society and Culture in the
Ottoman Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969): 258–81.
18 Reşat Kasaba, “A Time and a Place for the Nonstate: Social Change in the Ottoman Empire During the
‘Long Nineteenth Century’,” in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third
78
Nadir Özbek
World, ed. Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
207–30. See also idem, “Economic Foundations of a Civil Society: Greeks in the Trade of Western Anatolia,
1840–1876,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth
Century, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1999): 77–87.
19 Kasaba’s conceptualization of the “non-state arena” in terms of mainly ethnic and confessional
communities—the Greek community of the Izmir region, the Armenians, and the Kurds—needs further
consideration: Kasaba, “A Time and a Place for the Nonstate,” 227.
20 Ibid., 226.
21 For an overview of scholarship on the Hamidian period, see Selim Deringil, “New Approaches to the
˙ Yazılar, ed. Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu and
Study of the Ottoman Nineteenth Century,” in Abdullah Kuran Için
Luciene Thys-Şenocak (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 345–48. See also Gökhan Çetinsaya, “Çıban
Başı Koparmamak: II. Abdülhamid Rejimine Yeniden Bakış,” Türkiye Günlüğü 58 (1999): 54–64.
22 It is not surprising that the title Berkes uses for the section covering the Hamidian period is “The
Reaction, 1878–1908”: Niyazi Berkes, Development of Secularism, 253–322. As an article title from the late
1980s suggests, recent scholarship has modified this prejudiced approach to Abdülhamid II. Stanford Shaw,
“Sultan Abdülhamid II: Last Man of the Tanzimat,” in Tanzimat’ın 150. Yıldönümü Uluslarası Sempozyumu
(Bildiriler) (Ankara: Millı̂ Kütüphane, 1989), 179–97.
23 Berkes, Development of Secularism, 258.
24 For how Habermas employs the concept “plebiscitary-acclamatory form of regimented public sphere” for
both dictatorships in highly developed industrial societies and Bismarckian policy of inclusion of the universal
franchise in the newly founded German empire, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), xviii,
145. Habermas’s reasoning here resembles Berkes’s analysis of the popular aspect of Hamidian politics.
25 Viewing the Hamidian period and the Second Constitutional Era as presenting an absolute dichotomy
regarding the state and society relationship is still a persistent methodological habit of established scholarship.
See, as an extreme example, Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
26 Geoff Eley, in his now classic article, provides an assessment of a body of literature that has emerged
since the publication of Habermas’s work, which “sometimes confirms, sometimes extends, and sometimes
undermines” Habermas’s argument: Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas
in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1996), 289–339. Harold Mah’s recent article provides a critical examination of how historians have
applied Habermas’s theory in their work: Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the
Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–82.
27 Eley, “Edward Thompson.” See also Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Why Does Social History Ignore
Politics?” Social History 5 (1980): 249–71.
28 The following review article is most helpful in delineating the contributions of cultural historians to the
application of Habermas’s theory in historical studies: John L. Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public
Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998): 43–67.
29 See Sir James W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Constantinople: H. Matteosian, 1921).
30 A brief survey of the Ottoman newspapers of the 1890s, for instance, yields the following: Hicaz
˙
˙
˙
˙
Demiryolu Ianesi,
Tesisat-ı Askeriye Ianesi,
Girid Muhtacini Ianesi,
Mecruhin-i Askeriyeye Iane
Serqisi,
˙
˙
˙
Hindistan Ianesi,
Iane-i
Şiteviyye, Iane-i
Umumiye.
31 For example, through iane-i umumiye the Ottoman governments in the mid-19th century imposed an
extra tax on the population to overcome financial difficulties: see Ali Akyıldız, Para Pul Oldu: Osmanlı’da
Kağıt Para, Maliye ve Toplum (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003), 83–103. In 1834, Mahmud II issued iane-i
cihadiye as a compulsory contributory tax to finance the newly established reserve army in the provinces:
Musa Çadırcı, Tanzimat Döneminde Anadolu Kentleri’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapıları (Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu Basımevi, 1991), 144–45. For various iane cases as tax, see also Tevfik Güran, Tanzimat Döneminde
Osmanlı Maliyesi: Bütçeler ve Hâzine Hesapları (1841–1861) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1989).
32 The lottery (lotarya) was a widely used form of philanthropic activity during the Hamidian period. For
a detailed study of its origin and uses in different social and political contexts, see Mete Tunçay, Türkiye’de
˙
Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango Idaresi
(Ankara: Milli Piyango İdaresi Yayını, 1993).
33 Ibid., 29–50.
34 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi/Prime Ministry Archives (hereafter, BOA), Meclis-i Vükela Mazbataları
(hereafter, MV), 57/52, 1308.S.6 (21 September 1890).
35 BOA,
79
Yıldız Esas Evrakı, Sadrazam Kamil Paşa (hereafter, YEE), 86-6/590, 15.6.1314 (11 November
1897); 86-8/767, 2.7.1316 (18 October 1898); 86-8/785, 29.7.1316 (13 December 1898).
36 BOA, MV, 111/41, 1323.Ra.26 (31 May 1905).
37 Cüneyd Okay, Osmanlı Çocuk Hayatında Yenileşmeler, 1850–1900 (Istanbul: Kırkambar Yayınları,
1998), 38.
38 BOA, MV, 111/41, 1323.Ra.26 (31 May 1905).
39 Tunçay, Türkiye’de Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango Idaresi,
˙
51–52.
40 BOA, Irade Hususi, 70/1324.M.20 (16 March 1906).
41 Ebüzziya Tevfik’s article was published in Mecmua-i Ebüzziya in 1882. For the full text of this article,
˙
see Tunçay, Türkiye’de Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango Idaresi,
53–55.
42 Ibid., 81–82.
43 The Izmir Vocational School (Izmir Sanayi Mektebi), as was the case with most other vocational schools,
was in reality a reformatory. For more on these vocational schools, see Bayram Kodaman, “Tanzimat’tan
˙
II. Meşrutiyet’e Kadar Sanayi Mektepleri,” in Birinci Uluslarası Türkiye Sosyal ve Iktisat
Tarihi Kongresi
(Ankara: Meteksan Limited Şirketi, 1980), 287–96.
44 BOA, İrade Dahiliye, 16/2.Z.1322 (7 February 1905); BOA, Yıldız-Sadaret, Resmi Maruzat (hereafter,
YARES), 134/103, 1323.12.7 (2 February 1906); BOA, YARES, 135/18, 1324.1.8 (4 March 1906); BOA,
İrade Hususi, 87/25.M.1324 (21 March 1906).
45 Official documents on this issue are available in print format in Vahdettin Engin, Sultan Abdülhamid ve
˙
Istanbul’u
(Istanbul: Simurg, 2001), 74–80.
46 I borrowed the term “philanthropic public sphere” from Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic
Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2001).
47 BOA, Yıldız Mütenevvi Maruzat (hereafter, YMTV), 82/117, 28.2.1311 (10 September 1893); BOA,
İrade Hususi, 43/1311.Ra.8 (19 September 1893); BOA, İrade Hususi, 47/9.Ra.1311 (20 September 1893).
48 Benjamin Fortna, “Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman ‘Secular’ Schools,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies 32 (2000): 369–93, 379.
49 For an evaluation of the Hamidian regime’s concern with the missionary activities in the Ottoman
domains, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the
Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 112–34.
50 I borrowed the concept “moral regulatory capacities of the state” from Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism:
The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
51 Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 31, 4 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311/16 December 1895.
52 Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Mirrors Out, Mirrors In: Domestication and Rejection of the Foreign in LateOttoman Women’s Magazines (1875–1908),” in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 177–204, 181.
53 Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 31, 4 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311/16 December 1895. For the remaining part of
the list, see also Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 55, 14 Mart 1312/26 March 1896.
54 Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete, no. 46, 6 Ramazan 1314/8 February 1897.
55 Ibid., no. 47, 9 Ramazan 1314/11 February 1897; no. 48, 13 Ramazan 1314/15 February 1897; no. 49,
16 Ramazan 1314/18 February 1897; no. 50, 20 Ramazan 1314/22 February 1897.
56 Nadir Özbek, Osmanlı Imparatorluğu’nda
˙
˙
Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, Iktidar
ve Meşruiyet (Istanbul: İletişim
Yayınları, 2002).
57 According to one estimate, more than forty philanthropic societies were established between the years
1876 and 1908: see Mehmet Ö. Alkan, “Ölçülebilir Verilerle Tanzimat Sonrası Osmanlı Modernleşmesi”
(Ph.D. diss, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 1996).
58 BOA, YMTV, 26/25, 22.7.1304 (16 April 1887).
59 Ibid.
60 Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1994), 45.
61 1886 Senesinde Kadıköyünde Müesses Fukaraperver Cemiyetinin Ana Nizamnamesi (Istanbul: Fazilet
Basımevi, 1940).
62 BOA, Irade Hususi, 5/1314.B.1 (7 December 1896).
63 Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi, 43–46.
64 Ayine, no. 5, 30 Teşrin-i Sani 1291/12 December 1875; and Ayine, no. 6, 7 Kanun-ı Evvel 1291/19
December 1875.
80
Nadir Özbek
65 For a detailed study of social-welfare practices during the Hamidian period and the concept of “monarchi-
cal forms of Ottoman welfare system,” see Nadir Özbek, “The Politics of Welfare: Philanthropy, Voluntarism
and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton,
2001).
66 William Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980). Ufuk
Gülsoy, Hicaz Demiryolu (Istanbul: Eren Yayınları, 1994), 57–105. Murat Özyüksel, Hicaz Demiryolu (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2000), 81–111.
67 There is an extensive body of literature and debate on the Pan-Islamic policies of the sultan. I will note only
two: Selim Deringil, “Osmanli İmparatorluğu’nda Geleneğin İcadi ve ‘Muhayyel Cemaat’ ve Panislamizm,”
˙
Toplum ve Bilim, no. 54–55 (1991): 47–64; and Cezmi Eraslan, II. Abdülhamid ve Islâm
Birliği (Istanbul:
Otuken Yayınları, 1992).
68 See Özbek, “The Politics of Welfare.”
69 Idem, “Imperial Gifts and Sultanic Legitimation During the Reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, 1876–1909,”
in Poverty and Charity in the Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Mine Ener, Amy Singer, and Michael Bonner
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 203–20.
70 Sabah, no. 3009, 7 April 1898.
71 From 4 February to 8 March 1898, the newspaper Sabah published, on its front page, a long list of
contributions by civil servants and the Istanbul public.
72 Sabah, no. 3009, 7 April 1898.
73 BOA, YMTV, 47/177, 23.6.1308 (3 February 1891).
74 For the history of this particular conflict, see Ayşe Nükhet Adıyeke, Osmanlı Imparatorluğu
˙
ve Girit
Bunalımı (1896–1908) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000). See also Bayram Kodaman, ed., 1897 Türk-Yunan
˙
Savaşı (Teselya Tarihi) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1993); and M. Metin Hülagü, Türk-Yunan Ilişkileri
Çerçevesinde 1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2001); Colmar Freiherr
Von Der Goltz, Osmanlı-Yunan Harbi (Osmanlı-Yunan Seferi 1313/1897), ed. İbrahim Yilmazçelik and Ahmet
Aksin (Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 2001). See also Theodore G. Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek Turkish
War of 1897 (Chicago: East European Monographs, 1984).
75 Servet-i Fünun, no. 322, 1 Mayis 1313/13 May 1897. On the enthusiasm of the population and the mass
˙
demonstrations cheering the Ottoman army, see Sadri-Sema, Eski Istanbul
Hatıraları, ed. Ali Şükrü Çoruk
(Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 193.
76 Hülagü, Türk-Yunan İlişkileri Çerçevesinde 1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı, 123.
77 The sultan was not present at the ceremony. His first secretary, Tahsin Paşa, read the speech. For the full
text of the speech, see Servet-i Fünun, no. 336, 24 Temmuz 1313/5 August 1897.
78 Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 217–38, 223.
79 BOA, YMTV, 194/100, 24.CA.1317 (30 September 1899).
80 Sabah, no. 2973, 2 March 1898.
81 Ibid., no. 2930, 18 January 1898.
82 Ibid., no. 2982, 11 March 1898; no. 3014, 12 April 1898.
83 Ibid., no. 2979, 8 March 1898; no. 2982, 11 March 1898.
84 On 11 March 1898, Sabah featured the amount of contributions for the villages of Elbistan and Pazarcık,
two subdistricts of Maraş Province: see ibid., no. 2982. Similar examples are available in issues of this and
other newspapers.
85 Ibid., no. 2958, 15 February 1898. Although it is only a partial list, it includes the names of ninty
individuals from the town.
86 Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire,
1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13. With this distinction Kayalı aimed to emphasize both continuities and changes between the two periods separated by the revolution of 1908.
87 Sabah, no. 3103, 10 July 1898.
88 Engin Deniz Akarlı, “The Problems of External Pressures, Power Struggles, and Budgetary Deficits in
Ottoman Politics under Abdülhamid II (1876–1909): Origins and Solutions” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University,
Princeton, N.J., 1976), 39.
89 Carter Findley, “The Acid Test of Ottomanism: The Acceptance of Non-Muslims in the Late Ottoman
Bureaucracy,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume 1:
81
The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.,
1982): 339–68.
90 Ufuk Gülsoy, Osmanlı Gayri Müslimlerinin Askerlik Serüveni (Istanbul: Simurg, 2000), 115–24.
91 Goltz, Osmanlı-Yunan Harbi, 25–29.
92 Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice:
Perspectives on a Grand Dichtotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Kumar Krisha (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 75–105, 96.
93 For a detailed study of Selanik during the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897, and particularly the Jewish
community, see Noémi Lévy, “Salonique et la guerre gréco-turque de 1897: le fragile équilibre d’une ville
ottomane” (Memoire maitrise, Universite Paris 1, 2002). Lévy demonstrated how the elite of the Jewish
community exploited the sultan’s fund-raising campaign for the war orphans. The local Jewish elite stimulated
Ottoman patriotism in Selanik to improve its relationship with the Ottoman center while ensuring its authority
in the city.
94 Sadri Sema, Eski Istanbul
˙
Hatıraları, 196–99.
95 Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, Mehmed Emin Yurdakul’un Eserleri-ı, Şiirler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu,
1989), 3–42.
96 Dirlik, “Civil Society/Public Sphere,” 14.
97 Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” 96.
98 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983). E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality,
2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80–100.
99 In his latest book, Karpat broadly articulates such a view: Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam:
Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 323.
100 Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 155.

Nadir ¨Ozbek PHILANTHROPIC ACTIVITY, OTTOMAN PATRIOTISM

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