Images of the Ottoman Empire: the Photograph Albums Presented by Sultan Abdulhamid Ii

IMAGES OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: THE PHOTOGRAPH ALBUMS PRESENTED BY SULTAN ABDULHAMID II MUHAMMAD ISA WALEY ONE of the treasures of the British Library's Turkish collections is the magnificent set of fifty-one ornately bound albums, containing in all over i,8oo photographs (albumen prints), which the Ottoman Sultan Abdlilhamid II presented to the British Museum in 1893 and were received in 1894. (An almost identical set was given to the United States Library of Congress in the same years.) The contents represent a carefully picked selection from the vast photographic collection amassed by the Sultan, whose complete archive of over 33,000 prints is preserved at the Istanbul University Library. The gift was designed to show the Sultan, sovereign of a still considerable territory with a great history, as a reforming and enlightened ruler. Abdlilhamid II was an extraordinary figure and can be seen from many different viewpoints. It is not always easy for the reader to believe that the comprehensive character assassination by Sir Edwin Pears,^ the slightly romantic, perhaps over-protective account by Joan Haslip,^ and the quasi-hagiography by the Turkish writer Necip Fazil Kisakurek^ all really concern the same man. In fact, there is abundant scope and material for further research on the Sultan and the events of his reign, which lasted from 1876 to 1909. His photographs will surely play a part in that process. The volumes of mounted photographs range in size from about 25 x 30 to 30 x 40 cm. They are beautifully bound in very dark green morocco adorned with the insignia of Sultan Abdtilhamid II inlaid in red, green and black edged with gold. The fore-edges are gilt and each volume is lettered in gold. The albumen prints are mounted with starch adhesive upon pages of thick card. These have warped, thus accelerating damage from airborne pollution, light, and other environmental factors. The deterioration of the photographs themselves is due partly to the acidic content of the mounts and partly to argentothiosulphate residues from the developing process, which have caused 'speckling' in many prints. Cuts in the British Library's conservation budget have halted work on the photographs, but the volumes have been wrapped to slow their deterioration pending full conservation measures. Some volumes are made up in Islamic style: to the Western reader they appear back to front, with photographs on the 'verso' sides. The subject matter of each photograph is indicated on its mount by a handwritten descriptive caption. Most have two captions: one in Ottoman Turkish and one in French (or, in a few cases, in English). Ill In May 1894 the Principal Librarian of the British Museum received from the Foreign Office a copy of a despatch to the Earl of Kimberley from Sir Philip Currie, H.M. Ambassador to the Porte. Currie had been asked to forward to the Museum twelve cases of books and photographs. These, he reported, had been 'presented by the Sultan to Her Majesty's Government for the use of the British public in order that it should be generally known in England what progress has been made in literature and science in Turkey since His Majesty came to the throne, and to show how greatly he is interested in the advancement of learning and education in his Empire'.^ The record of the meeting of the British Museum's Trustees held on 9 June 1894 gave prominence to the report submitted by the Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts, Robert Douglas, concerning the presentation by the Sultan of Turkey of a special collection, handsomely bound, of all the books, 255 in number, published in Constantinople during His Majesty's reign, together with 47 albums of photographs of objects of interest in and near Constantinople. Each volume is inscribed in Arabic and English as a gift from the Sultan to the British Museum, and the binding is in the Osmanli colours.^ The wording of this report suggests that in 1894, two years after the retirement of Charles Rieu, a great pioneering scholar of Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscript studies and literature, the Department lacked a specialist with any inkling of the number of books published at Istanbul since 1876. Can an annual average of fourteen publications have seemed a convincing figure? The report also implies insufficient linguistic expertise to distinguish Turkish from Arabic. In fairness, it should be mentioned that the first half of the inscription is entirely in (less than perfect) Arabic. The whole reads thus: el-Muslemd bi-tevfikdt [sic] ir-Rabbdmye, Melik ud-Devlet il-aliyet il-Osmaniye / [tugra] es-Sultan ihn us-Sullan is-Sultan [sic] el-Gazi / Abdulhamid / Han-i Sdni Hazretlenmn taraf-i e§ref-i miilukdnelermden / Londrada Ingiltere Muzehane Kutuphanesine ihda buyurulmu^tur / sene-i 1310.^ The inscription in English on the rear covers is simpler: Gift / made by H.I.M. the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. / to the Library / of the / British Museum / London / 1893. At the time of the Keeper's report, not all of the books and albums had yet reached the Museum. There were four more albums to come, as well as more printed volumes. At least one book never reached its intended destination, and came to light some years ago, complete with its inscribed presentation binding, in a bookseller's catalogue. The Trustees instructed the British Museum's Principal Librarian to send the Sultan special thanks for his gift. No doubt the beauty of the photographs and the craftsmanship of the bindings spoke for themselves. Yet librarians and others have tended to underestimate the documentary and artistic importance of photographs, as is illustrated by the history of the Sultan Abdulhamid albums. For nearly a century they languished, uncared for and uncatalogued, before and after their transferral to the British Library in 1973. The present article is one of several means by which it is hoped to make amends 112 for past neglect. The albums have been arranged in a logical order and published in microfiche, with a preface and a summary list of the contents of each album. ^ Meanwhile, the staif of the Harvard Semitic Museum, under the guidance of the Curator, Carney Gavin, prepared a complete catalogue of the collection of photographs which the Sultan presented to the Library of Congress in 1894 through Congressman Abram Hewitt. Comparison revealed that the two libraries' collections are almost identical. The present writer contributed details of the differences, and other Turcological information, to the catalogue of the London and Washington albums, which appeared in Autumn 1988.^ Besides the photographs, as has been mentioned, the Sultan also sent to the British Museum about 280 similarly bound printed books, chiefly textbooks and reference works on scientific, technical, or literary and cultural subjects. They are fairly representative of published literary activity and book production during the period. In fact, the number of publications produced between the accession of Abdulhamid in 1876 and the year 1893 runs into thousands, although censorship and the political climate greatly limited the types of hterature that could be written or published on Ottoman soil. Numerous Ottoman intellectuals worked and published overseas. The published output of the era is documented in a bibliography entitled Devr-i Hatnidi dsdri, compiled by Mizanci Mehmed Murad, a one-time dissident, and published in A.H. 1308/A.D. 1891. Not surprisingly, it was among the books selected for presentation. It is hoped to produce a descriptive hst of the British Library's Sultan Abdulhamid book collection in the future. The remainder of the present article, however, will concentrate on the photographs. EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE NEAR EAST Among the Muslims of the Near and Middle East there was initially considerable opposition to photography, and to a much lesser extent this still persists in places today. Among the reasons for this is the Judaic and Islamic prohibition of'graven images'. It is not always understood that this is not only a matter of law or dogma. It is also a question of the genius and temperament of the peoples concerned, amongst whom sculptural and pictorial art was traditionally seen as entaihng spiritual dangers - not least the risk of making the things of this lower world appear more 'substantial' than they should in terms of metaphysical reality. Another factor in the early mistrust of photography was, and occasionally still is, a tendency to regard it as an intrusion on privacy. To return to the question of legality: photography was widely tolerated in practice by the ulema, but as late as August 1920 the official journal Ceride-i tlmiye, issued by the §eyh til-Islam, the supreme authority on the administration of Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire, pubhshed the text of ^fetva, or legal ruling, stating it to be a sin for a Muslim to paint or to photograph a human being or an animal.^ The first photographers active in the Near and Middle East, then, were all either Europeans or Christians. Several were Armenian, like Abdullah Freres who produced so much fine work for Sultan Abdulhamid. Following the invention of the daguerrotype process in 1839, and that of glass negatives in 1851, there arose a widespread demand for photography amongst both European travellers to the Middle East, the new * Grand Tour\ and armchair travellers. The i86os saw the arrival in Beirut of the Bonfils family,, whose firm produced 15,000 photographic prints of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Greece between 1863 and 1867 alone and continued to take large numbers of pictures until the first decade of this century. The negatives were prepared on the spot, using a collodion solution with silver nitrate, on glass plates.

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